Where does the truth come from? Imagine you observed a Nobel | Professor M

Where does the truth come from?

Imagine you observed a Nobel Prize Winner abstain from dinner to enhance the mental sharpness needed to deliver an after-dinner lecture. Is this behavior worth emulating?

Two thoughts. First, be cautious when using a sample of size one to guide your decision-making. Billions of samples of that size collectively point in all possible directions. Collect more observations; don’t just settle on one data point.

Second, if your one data point has the Nobel Prize, it doesn’t matter. Nobel Laureates aren’t immune to mistakes even when it comes to their areas of expertise, let alone when they comment on topics outside of their realm. It’s flawed to insist that something must be true just because an eminent person said so. An appeal to authority is a cheap ruse often deployed amid failure to understand why a person of eminence said so.

So how do we make progress in discovering the truth? Two paths: Empirics and Theory.

Empiricists would ideally conduct a randomized controlled trial to investigate the causal impact of food input on intellectual output. In the absence of that, they would collect data from gazillion people on their eating habits and life outcomes. Afterward, they would use a clever identification trick to circumvent the issue of correlation not implying causation.

Theorists would be satisfied with why an eminent person said so. The Nobel Prize Winner did explain that digestion results in the outflow of blood from the brain, impeding one’s ability to be at their intellectual best. Everyone is familiar with this feeling: We have all been drowsy after a heavy meal. And behind this feeling is a solid theory, confirmed in countless physiological studies showing how the human body works.

When empirical work overwhelmingly confirms a theory’s predictions, it becomes a good theory. You may even choose to trust the not-directly-tested predictions of that theory. Not because you respect the person who made that suggestion, but because you understand the idea behind it.

Aristotle’s theory was that the heart was the seat of intelligence, and the brain was a cooling mechanism for the blood. His other theories have stood better against the test of empirical times.