Some fields attract higher levels of intellect and employ more rigorous methodologies than others. This is mostly a consequence of the economic value to be gained from working in a field, rather than anything deep about the nature of the problems in that field.
There is plenty of low hanging fruit for smart people to pick by jumping over to a field that has less talent, and less sophisticated methodologies. For example many of the social sciences struggle to reproduce findings, and properly deploy the scientific method. There is no such crisis in experimental physics.
There is not much low hanging fruit in biochem / medicine in 2024. It’s a gargantuan mountain of knowledge you have to get through before you have any hope of seeing the big picture.
> There is no such crisis in experimental physics.
Then why do I keep hearing about superconductors on here?
This sort of thinking comes from ignorance and arrogance. When you do research at the frontier of any subject, you won't compete with the average university graduate in that subject, you'll compete with people with the highest "intellect" who also studied this subject for their entire lives, and you're incredibly unlikely to find a breakthrough without doing that too. The amount of Nobel Prize winners who went on to support compete bogus theories in other fields is endless.
> There is no such crisis in experimental physics.
... also seems to completely miss that there is a spectrum from "hard" science to "soft" science (contrary to what many might expect, "soft" sciences are arguably much more difficult to work with), and that physics is the "hardest" (ie.: in many ways "most straightforward", although by this I do not mean to trivialize it at all) natural science there is.
You need much more sophisticated statistical techniques & experimental design when you're dealing with complex systems (eg.: society, ecology, psychology, etc) than when you are dealing with simple systems (cue the joke about physicists assuming spherical cows).
One thing I appreciate with Taubes (having read his early books, not the more recent ones -- I really liked The case against sugar), is that he has an epistemologically correct approach to the problem. He looks at it through the eyes of a rigorous scientist, unlike most people in nutrition science.
For the most part, he was very cautious in his claim and spent most of his time discussing why claims accepted as correct are completely full of shit. It's likely that, through time, he built a corpus of knowledge and understanding that allow him to be a bit more assertive today (again, I've not read his recent work), but really, his early books are, in my opinion, remarkable for their thoroughness and intellectual honesty.
There is no shortage of studies whose conclusions were later found out to be false or overly-simplistic.
Nutrition science isn't bad because nutrition scientists are bad.
The truth is that nutrition is a very very young science, and it also happens to be one of the most difficult health sciences. It will take a very long time for the body of knowledge in that field to take form.
