Grading RFK Jr. on the Harvard College curve
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Andrew Gelman highlights the very many absurdities in this Emily Oster NYT op-ed, praising RFK Jr. for not advocating that Americans sprinkle plutonium on their cornflakes:
If you actually read the linked op-ed (I don’t recommend you do), you’ll see that it categorizes two of the items on the new dietary guidelines as “good,” one as “totally fine” (meaning that there’s no evidence for it one way or another, so she’s giving Kennedy credit for a recommendation that at least isn’t bad), two as “complex” (which is actually negative, given that she describes one of these as “this advice may be counterproductive” and the other as “unrealistic for nearly everyone”), and two as “weird” (which I guess is the author’s positive spin).
This is just pitiful. There’s an official government publication with 8 recommendations, 2 of which the op-ed writer characterizes as “good,” and her summary is “These guidelines are a very good start for telling people where to go; now the job should be helping them get there.”
This is what we’ve come to? Official guidelines are being praised for being “not crazy”? She doesn’t even make an argument that the advice is net positive.
Step back for a moment. The U.S. government has access to top nutritional experts (also to top economics professors, for that matter). If they’re giving 8 pieces of advice, these should be 8 pieces of good advice. This isn’t like baseball, where .300 is excellent and .500 is impossible.
Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m not naive here. I don’t think the government’s perfect. Experts can be wrong, also food and nutrition policy are notoriously subject to political influence: the milk lobby, the meat lobby, etc. Last I checked, we still have ethanol subsidies!
But that’s the point: if the government is giving bad advice, that’s bad! To praise them for not being uniformly crazy . . . ummmm, that’s like if your boss’s idiot nephew comes into the office to tell everyone how to do their jobs, and after he leaves, you loudly say, “Hey, this new advice is — dare I say it? — overall very sensible. Junior made a good point when he told the sales force to be more customer-focused. And when he told the engineering team to think outside the box, yeah, you have to admit he’s onto something there.”
My political take on this is that the author is a Democrat and suffers from something I’ve noticed in popular history writing, which is a form of reasoning that focuses on the mistakes on “our side” and assumes that whatever “their side” does is pre-ordained. It’s a sort of fundamental attribution error by which our decisions and mistakes are based on context and circumstance, whereas theirs are based on their unchangeable character.
That’s the soft bigotry of low expectations: setting the bar so low that being mostly “not crazy” is enough. We should be holding the government to a higher standard than that!
There are an enormous number of baroque neuroses and elaborate purity fetishes of various sorts shaping the discourse around nutrition in our culture. You can get a glimpse of this in the more than two thousand comments to the article, in which MAHA moms and the like argue furiously over their pre or post-scientific beliefs that this common food ingredient over here is literal poison, while that one is a magic elixir.
RFK Jr. himself is Exhibit A in regard to these tendencies — beef tallow cures cancer! A candy bar is as bad as cyanide! — which may reflect some sort of overcompensation for the fact that he spent years injecting himself with street heroin. Gelman’s description of Oster’s desperate desire to characterize the new dietary guidelines as good in the sense of not uniformly terrible as “pitiful” nails the essence of this dynamic, in which a putatively liberal writer tries and largely fails to find something good to say about some right wing monster like Kennedy, apparently to burnish her non-partisan bona fides.
The only good thing there will ever be to say about RFK Jr. is that one day it will be possible to report that he’s dead. Writing “balanced” op-eds about him or anybody else at the top of the Trump administration is a monument to the enduring cluelessness of people who should but very clearly still do not know better.