Personally, I think that’s hilarious. Enjoy your bacon and butter.
I repeatedly found that people who are thoughtful and not snarky — and often, nuanced — when discussing a topic I have no deep expertise on were much more correct on topics that I did have expertise on and could properly evaluate.
We're all on a time budget at the end of the day. And I do share the sentiment: the scientific literature in nutrition is known not to be very good. You don't have to be an expert, it suffices to notice that there are a lot of people coming to contradictory conclusions, and that the consensus seems to have changed drastically over the past decades, not being particularly driven by any groundbreaking changes in available scientific methods.
Teicholz is considerably snarkier than Willett so, even by that metric, you should lean in favour of Willett’s position that SFA is unhealthy, I guess?
As for my personal position, I remember looking into things a while back and just coming away with the conclusion that nobody really seemed to know. If there's a truth here, it's either considerably more complex than "SFA good" / "SFA bad" (all these interacting pathways, man), or it just makes little enough difference not to matter at all in a way that we can meaningfully measure above the noise.
It seemed clear SFA are clearly not that deadly. Whether you'd be more healthy or live slightly longer if you chose to consume less of them, I have absolutely no clue.
I’m not sure how you’re determining that it’s otherwise?
Tone is something that can be adopted intentionally or unintentionally. If you hear a pilot on a radio dryly say something in a calm and detached tone, it could be in the context of an emergency. Pilots are enculturated to adopt that tone (for various reasons). Meanwhile particular cultures have different levels of acceptability when it comes to tone: some cultures perceive other cultures as more angry, or detached, because of the norms of communication within those cultures.
In short, I think the tone of “calm, scientific detachment” is often weaponized to lend undeserved credibility to an argument, because people tend to believe people more when they adopt that tone.
Furthermore, tone does have a purpose if used alongside a well done argument. For example, in the article the OP linked to, there is a rather exhaustive refutation of the book in question. The tone of the author previews that their entire opinion on the book is negative, given all the arguments they put forth in their review. If the author of the review had adopted a calm and thoughtful tone, perhaps it would indeed have been more effective because the reader would decide. On the other hand, most people won’t read the entire review, so the tone of the author makes it clear what their opinion is.
That said I am not wholly disagreeing with you: would be interesting to do a study using some varying markers to identify tone, and identify, I don’t know, argumentative complexity, and see if snarkiness is associated with a lack of complexity. Assuming you can find markers with predictive power.
Even that attitude can be weaponized I suppose, if nuance convinced more people, than more people would learn to fake nuance to push their favorite outcome. Though I'd like to think that the process would change them a little bit for the better too.
Seems a waste of effort trying to attribute motive to such things. Just read what they have to say, verify what they say against their references and then make an inference based on that. Don’t see why tone has to come into it at all.
I'm much more likely to listen to a person who has a calm, neutral or positive tone than someone who is screaming the same words at me.
Words are only a part of human communication, and arguably not the most important part.
"Can I help you?" Has a vastly different meaning depending on the tone and body language of the speaker.
I claimed that Teicholz was a joke because she makes misleading and often false claims about nutrition science evidence. The response was that the critique I linked to was more of a joke, not because of its content but because of its tone.
So sure, tone matters in certain contexts. If it matters more to someone than the content of what is being said to someone in the context of assessing scientific research, then I think that person has a wild way of interpreting evidence.
Very true. This fact has been deeply exploited by con men across social media in the past decade. When someone knows they’re coming from an unfounded, misleading, or deliberately wrong position they make up for it by heaping on friendly tone. They present in a warm, welcoming, and empathetic tone that appears inviting and friendly, unlike the cold academic discussions where facts reign supreme and tone is an afterthought.
It’s a real problem right now. There are countless influencers and podcasters pushing bad science who get a free pass because they are all smiles, super nice, and present themselves as helping you (while pitching you products and trying to get you to buy their book)
The other kind is heavier on snark than it is on evidence. It uses the snark to persuade, rather than the evidence. That's "I can't be bothered to actually make a real case here (whether or not the data is actually on my side), so I'm just going to make the other side look stupid, and hope that you decide to agree with me so that you don't feel stupid too".
The first kind can be persuasive. (In fact, it can be more persuasive than the dry kind of refutation.) The second kind is a huge red flag - if they're right, it's only by accident, because they can't be bothered to really deal with the evidence.
I suspect that, when different people are reacting to snark in such an article, they're reacting to different versions of it.