Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
- Rumi
The debate raging about what constitutes a healthy diet can be confusing for
those of us in the dangerous position of having only a little bit of
knowledge.
Professor Tim Noakes, a top rated scientist who has a lifetime achievement
award from the National Research Foundation for his pioneering work in sports
science, has in the past year weighed in against the establishment by
challenging the so called "balanced diet" or "food pyramid" as is popular in
the United States.
At the December 2012 University of Cape Town centenary debate entitled
"Cholesterol is not an important risk factor for heart disease and current
dietary recommendations do more harm than good", a lively and sometimes
confusing battle of the scientists raged between Dr Jacques E Rossouw and Prof
Noakes.
I was struck by the shrugs and sighs and comments passed under people's breath
throughout the debate. Clearly many of the audience were colleagues from the
medical fraternity and while it seemed only a few were supportive of Noakes'
views, the overriding feeling coming out of the debate was frustration and
exasperation. When the moderator of the debate, Prof Jimmy Volmink, the Dean
of the medical school concluded the evening by insinuating that Noakes was
essentially a "bullshitter", I wondered whether there was a more creative way
to move beyond bitter and sometime acrimonious disputes of science.
The answer may lie in an approach from Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel
Kahneman.
One of the most influential scientists in his field, he has had his fair share
of conflict with people who disagree with the work he is doing. In his book
Thinking Fast and Slow he says, "On a few occasions I have responded to
criticisms that I thought were grossly misleading, because a failure to
respond can be interpreted as conceding error, but I have never found the
hostile exchanges instructive. In search of another way to deal with
disagreements, I have engaged in a few “adversarial collaborations,” in which
scholars who disagree on the science agree to write a jointly authored paper
on their differences, and sometimes conduct research together. In especially
tense situations, the research is moderated by an arbiter."
He goes on to say, "My most satisfying and productive adversarial
collaboration was with Gary Klein, the intellectual leader of an association
of scholars and practitioners who do not like the kind of work I do. They call
themselves students of Naturalistic Decision Making, or NDM, and mostly work
in organisations where they often study how experts work." The NDMers
adamantly reject the approach that Kahneman's takes to the area of intuition
accusing him of being too focused on failure and influenced by artificial
experiments rather than the NDMers approach of studying actual people.
With the battle lines similarily drawn, adversarial collaboration would seem
to me to be a constructive and creative way to move the debate on diet
forward.
In the case of Kahneman and Klein above, their joint paper in American
Psychologist (Sep 2009) is entitled, "Conditions for intuitive expertise: a
failure to disagree". Exploring the field of intuition (the type covered by
Malcolm Gladwell in Blink) the abstract lays out their approach.
This article reports on an effort to explore the differences between two
approaches to intuition and expertise that are often viewed as conflicting:
heuristics and biases (HB) and naturalistic decision making (NDM). Starting
from the obvious fact that professional intuition is sometimes marvelous and
sometimes flawed, the authors attempt to map the boundary conditions that
separate true intuitive skill from overconfident and biased impressions.
They conclude that evaluating the likely quality of an intuitive judgment
requires an assessment of the predictability of the environment in which the
judgment is made and of the individual's opportunity to learn the
regularities of that environment. Subjective experience is not a reliable
indicator of judgment accuracy.
Could Professor Noakes jointly write a paper on the subject with one of his
adversaries. I believe this would offer an opportunity for much learning both
by those involved and by the rest of us interested in the debate. It would
also confirm my hunch that while there are differences, there are also many
areas of agreement.
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