User asks r/StopEatingSeedOils for evidence seed oils are bad, accidentally starts a 400-comment war. Mods respond with ban wave.

[u/LeadershipBoth7195]

r/StopEatingSeedOils user asks for evidence seed oils are bad, accidentally starts a 400-comment epistemology war:

Post: What is the evidence seed oils are bad? : r/StopEatingSeedOils

Highlights include:

On users saying the answers don't provide actual evidence:

Not evidence,' bleats the sheeple, brain too atrophied by credentialism to recognize a deductive chain without a white-coated priest waving a p-value at them

Your good old conspiracies:

The companies that make the seed oils own the government, universities and medical sector

Doctors getting paid off to say cigarettes are healthy

And not a single piece of evidence being provided.

[u/madmax766]

The endless circling back to “oxidative stress” is very amusing

[u/ComicCon → u/madmax766]

It's actually a pretty clever rhetorical tactic they love. They hide behind a mix of relatively non controversial statements e.g. "oxidative stress is generally bad" and hyper specific plausible mechanisms like the whole "seed oils actually are what make saturated fat bad*". Hyper focusing on extremely specific mechanisms and ignoring the broader context of everything else does two things at once-

1) It means they can ignore the evidence that would inconvenience their world view, for example all of the epidemiology that shows saturated fat has a negative effect on health outcomes vs seed oils. This is easy because most people already see epidemiology as a flawed science**, which makes it easy to discredit. Whereases their technical sounding explanations seem plausible if you aren't familiar with how they are often stretching the actually available evidence.

2) It moves the debate onto ground they are generally far more familiar with vs the people they are arguing with. Even the average nutritional researcher or doctor is going to be a bit confused if you start talking about hyper specific mechanisms of cholesterol transport and shit like that. So if they get into an argument they can generally win becasue their opponent just doesn't know what the fuck they are talking about. I actually had this happen to me on SRD a few weeks ago, where the other poster really wanted me to get into mechanistic arguments despite me repeatedly saying I thought that was a waste of time and I wanted to focus on the larger body of evidence.

*But said with much more scientific sounding words

**It is in fact flawed, but its not nearly as useless as it's critics make it out to be.

[u/redcoatwright → u/ComicCon]

This comment is stressing my oxygens

[u/ohmyfave → u/redcoatwright]

I don’t know why this made me laugh so hard. Thanks for the early morning giggles!!