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Criticisms of “The Body Keeps the Score”

(josepheverettwil.substack.com)
249 points adityaathalye | 1 comments | 22 Oct 25 18:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.223s | source
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jamestimmins ◴[22 Oct 25 19:23 UTC] No.45673919[source]▶
I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.

The only way to convincingly make the case for new information is with pretty rigorous technical arguments, which is fundamentally at odds with a lay audience. If someone has those rigorous technical arguments, they'd be making them in journals to a technical audience, and the results would slowly become consensus.

Obvi there are counter-examples, but as a general rule I think this is far more true than not. Which is why if you learn from Forbes that someone is close to cracking AGI, you can almost outright assume this is untrue.

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walkabout ◴[22 Oct 25 19:27 UTC] No.45673977[source]▶
One of a couple varieties of books covered by the If Books Could Kill podcast is this category, the Surprising Truth That Explains Many Things type.

They do indeed seem to almost always be bullshit, including the very-popular ones (and including ones that get popular among crowds like HN)

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mm263 ◴[22 Oct 25 20:22 UTC] No.45674671[source]▶
Michael Hobbes, host of IBCK is guilty of those inaccuracies too. Here's him being fact checked regarding claims in the Maintenance Phase podcast: https://spurioussemicolon.substack.com/
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1. jccalhoun ◴[23 Oct 25 02:18 UTC] No.45677451[source]▶
I enjoy If Books Could Kill and I used to like You're Wrong About when Michael was on it. However, I have found on If Books Could Kill that they sometimes take the least charitable interpretation of something to ridicule it when a more charitable interpretation might find that there is more nuance than they are presenting.

I haven't listened to Maintenance Phase because it isn't really a topic that I'm all that interested in.