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Comment by beerpls | Hacker News Reader

“He is not educated as a scientist though so I usually take most of his stuff with a grain of salt.”

As someone who was educated as a scientist, you should reevaluate this opinion.

There are plenty of brilliant professional scientists. There are also a lot of idiots in science.

There are also a lot of brilliant people who decided that the scientific path was too restrictive or outright false, so they (brilliantly) invested their own scientific life force externally

Having a science degree doesn’t make one less fallible to mistakes. If anything it makes people more likely to fudge to get ahead.

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> As someone who was educated as a scientist, you should reevaluate this opinion.

I would take a lot of science with a grain of salt too. Looking at the recent peanut butter allergy studies for example. Original 2016 study used 10 jewish children in Britain vs. 10 jewish Children in Israel. This study caused policy change around the world. Australia went from under 25% to over 80% of people feeding their children peanut butter under the age of 1. It had no discernible effect on allergies to peanut butter at all. They've followed it up with a larger study, 100 jewish kids in Britain vs. 100 jewish kids in Israel to prove out their original theory.

Huh? I thought very recently that link was established as being real?

Please post a link to the study.

https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2017/01/10/peanut-allergy-earl...

“That trial, involving hundreds of babies under a year old at high risk for developing peanut allergy, established that kids could be protected by regularly eating a popular peanut butter-flavored Israeli snack called Bamba. A follow-up study later showed those kids remained allergy-free even after avoiding peanuts for a year.

Under the new recommendations, published simultaneously in six journals including the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, all infants who don’t already test positive for a peanut allergy are encouraged to eat peanut-enriched foods soon after they’ve tried a few other solid foods.”

Early exposure seems to be the recommended path.

I get that it's the recommended path, it's been recommended since that first study in Australia and has had zero effect on peanut allergy rates even though # of people feeding peanut butter to their children under 1 has increased significantly.

Honest Q, Is that true? I mean, A) that since this study in 2015 or so, there’s been no decline in the prevalence of peanut allergies in the relevant populations? B) people are in fact submitting their children to disciplined exposure in a significant (enough) quantity?

May I ask why you've included the study participants religion even though it doesn't appear in the studies you've cited? (afaik)

From the study[1]: "Several years ago, we found that the risk of the development of peanut allergy was 10 times as high among Jewish children in the United Kingdom as it was in Israeli children of similar ancestry. This observation correlated with a striking difference in the time at which peanuts are introduced in the diet in these countries: in the United Kingdom infants typically do not consume peanut-based foods in the first year of life, whereas in Israel, peanut-based foods are usually introduced in the diet when infants are approximately 7 months of age"

So, the difference in real-world outcomes amongst Jewish populations in different countries inspired this study.

[1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa1414850?url_ver=Z39.8...

The person in question is definitely a good example of someone you SHOULD take with more than a grain of salt. From what I could gather (mainly from /r/mycology) he's not really well respected in his field, and seems to be rather a salesman who draws premature conclusions and evangelises them. The Netflix documentary with him also had my "this sounds too good to be true" sensors going off more or less constantly.

In the documentary (I'm assuming Fantastic Fungi), he came off as one of those types that are first and foremost making money off it, but also believes some of what he's saying. I honestly just wanted that documentary to just be a Planet Earth style thing with mushroom footage, and less talking heads.

stamets strikes me as a well-intentioned enthusiast who is more scientific than most. He did a ton of work on the actual techniques used today in a lot of commercial production and is a really interesting guy. It's also evident that he has sampled a little too much of his own more 'exotic' product.

We've bought an oyster mushroom kit from him, as well as some soil inoculum. From an ecological standpoint I wonder how genetically diverse his inoculum strains are, and whether they can crowd out native strains of fungi.

I've read most of his books/publications, his work is good (and generally reproducable), but he is somewhat prone to grand statements.

Thing is, a lot of labs will largely ignore fungi because they are fucking awkward to work with

Do you have any logical reason to not trust him or is it simply “I have a feeling”

I don’t know I can’t say. But scientists in academia and in national labs are salesmen for themselves and their research too, so I think you’re possibly giving him too hard a time compared to them

I am open to the idea that someone from a background outside of academia could come up with some really brilliant scientific work. I just know that I am not capable of discerning what is solid science in fields different from my own so I typically rely on signals like an academic background (although not exclusively) to help me gauge the trustworthiness of a claim.

Stamets makes some extraordinary health claims about mushrooms that afaik have never been clinically tested (ex. anticancer and antiviral applications). I think a grain of salt is appropriate in this case - but he could be entirely right!

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