This page and a companion page were both begun in late October 2024, but not completed. (Likely, as a result of the many other things that I was working on at the time and the additional attention that the 2024 POTUS elections required.)
Work was resumed in August 2025. While the less ambitious companion page was close to completion and mostly received a polishing, this page was not even a quarter done, and many of the ideas/examples/whatnot that I had originally had for it were gone from memory. While some new (or old and re-discovered) material was added during completion, based on what occurred to me during work, chances are that the result falls short of the original intent (especially, as just getting the page off the to-do list was a priority).
At a minimum, the text is different from what it would have been with a more timely completion. A particular weakness might be some unintentional drift from advice that is, in some sense, “official” to advice in general.
Future improvements might or might not compensate for this.
In as far as references to own experiences and ages are made, a year of birth of 1975 is the baseline.
A recurring observation is that “official” advice from the government, from organizations closely affiliated with or financed by the government, propagated with the government’s blessing, propagated in and by government-run schools, or similar, turns out to be poor. Ditto e.g. that calls for action lead to poor action (be it because of implementation issues, because the action as such was flawed as a solution to a given problem, or because the problem was no true problem).
The reasons are manifold, and include reliance on (a) bad science, outdated science, science that (while neither bad nor outdated) has yet to find a sufficient approximation of the truth, and outright incorrect claims about what science does say, (b) claims by partisan lobbyists and special interest groups, (c) a failure to consider individual and/or group variation (advice might be good for some and not so for others), (d) ideological bias, (e) a faulty assumption of shared priorities, and other factors. (The listing is very unlikely to be complete. Several issues can apply to a single piece of advice.) At an extreme, we might have bad-faith actors publishing advice for their own benefit in the knowledge that it goes contrary to the interests of the those who receive the advice. (Accusations of the last have very often been raised against various “Big X”, but I have not attempted to verify such accusations.)
Below, I will give some illustrative examples. These examples come with the major reservation that the “accepted knowledge” might change again in the future—but, if so, it will only prove the general point the more strongly.
A central observation in science is that the state of knowledge is a moving target and that what is considered correct today need not be so tomorrow. Often, the knowledge is stable enough to be used with little caution (especially, in the harder sciences); often, it is not (especially, in the softer sciences). Medicine, including what habits/foods/whatnot are how beneficial/detrimental, is a particularly tricky area, simply because the human body is so very complex—and made the more so, because the medical research/publications/whatnot of today are too strongly influenced by industry interests.
While the below focuses on “official advice”, even better example of dangerous “accepted wisdom” might be found elsewhere, say, an insufficient early insight into the dangers of freon and thalidomide.
Bad faith is by no means far fetched. Specific examples are tricky to give, because it can be near impossible to tell what is bad faith and what incompetence. (Note Hanlon’s Razor.) However, recurring and clear examples are common around warfare, as with calls to enlist or to buy war bonds that are extremely one-sided. (Such actions might be good for the government, but it is not a given that they are good for the individual called to act—and the government is usually very well aware of this. Examples like war bonds can also illustrate other complications, e.g. the assumption that the man on the street considers the war effort as worthwhile as the government, which is not a given even when fighting is defensive and might be horrendously wrong when fighting is offensive.)
Another interesting example family includes call to spy on or denunciate other citizens for spurious reasons (e.g. relating to political dissent), which might be good for the government but not for the victims and not for society as a whole—and often not for the followers of the calls either. If in doubt, today’s tattle-tale might be tomorrow’s victim as the bars for “correct” behavior/thought/whatnot shift—or when the system is abused to raise unjustified accusations to gain some personal benefit at the cost of the accused.
Dietary advice is a moving target (cf. above), which has seen great variation over time and from country to country. (Variations between countries is often an indication that something is amiss, even should the “what” not be obvious. Exceptions include when local circumstance lead to legitimate differences.)
Moreover, dietary advice usually fails to consider individual circumstances and priorities, e.g. that someone older might need a different diet than someone younger. Someone sportier might need more energy or, even, different proportions of this-and-that. At an extreme, advice on how much of this-or-that to consume per day often fails to consider such a basic thing as the size of the consumer. I have even seen recommendations for water intake that do not only fail to consider said size, but also whether someone spends the day playing basketball during a Florida summer or sitting around in an office during an Alaskan winter.
A notable example from my own life is eggs: When I was a kid, the near-by adults (I cannot speak for medical science) viewed eggs as a superfood. Breakfast often began with two boiled eggs. A piece of bread for a snack was often served with a sliced boiled egg in lieu of cheese or a more typical topping. Many dishes came with a fried egg. Etc. (Not to mention the many edibles that contained egg without “being obvious”, as with many baked goods. Also note that the quantities at hand are relatively larger for a child than for an adult.)
Time passed and eggs were increasingly viewed with scepticism in e.g. media and dietary guidelines—to the point that eggs were ultimately presented as something to avoid.
But with the seeming paradox that egg whites were considered healthy and/or recommendable for heart patients. This demonstrates another issue with advice, health advice in particular: over-simplifications that can be outright misleading. Here the advice likely should have targeted the egg yolk; typically, it targeted eggs.
This remained the state of “accepted wisdom” for quite some time, but then a turn began and an “eggs are not that bad after all” attitude gradually took over. In recent years, I have seen repeated claims of “an egg a day” or “an egg every two days” being perfectly acceptable—well short of my childhood diet, but far more tolerant than during some of the intervening time.
This might demonstrate two other, overlapping, problems with advice, namely:
Firstly, what I think of as the “salt in the soup” fallacy: that if a little bit of something is good, more of the same is better. (With negative analogs, e.g. in that if cutting down on eggs a bit is good, cutting down more is better—and cutting eggs out altogether is the best.)
Secondly, the failure to consider baselines: What is healthy and unhealthy is often a matter of intake, and that a reduction of consumption (vice versa, an increase in consumption) for the one is beneficial does not automatically make it so for the other—nor a further reduction (increase) for the original one. If, for the sake of argument, my childhood intake was “too much” and I would have benefited from eating less eggs, it does not follow that someone who eats an egg a week should cut down. Indeed, there might well be some for whom an increase would have been beneficial, even if I benefited from a reduction. Water is a good example of this: too much or too little can both be harmful. (Also note the toxicology maxim that whether something is a poison is a matter of dosage, while what is considered a poison by a layman is so because even a comparatively small dose is needed to kill or otherwise do great harm.)
Such issues can be particularly harmful when combined with research that uses very high doses to, say, investigate whether something is carcinogenic. (The more so when also combined with incompetent or sensationalist journalism.)
Or consider how there have been waves of “accepted wisdom” that fat is bad and that we should prefer to get energy from carbohydrates instead resp. that carbohydrates are bad and that we should get energy from fats instead. (With sub-complications like what types of fat resp. carbohydrates might be “good” or “bad”—and, of course, that over-simplification of message that glosses over such differentiations in favor of condemning the one or the other wholesale.)
Energy intake is another interesting issue. Somewhat recently, I saw a 1950s or 1960s claim about what was considered a healthy/normal/average/whatnot energy consumption—at around 3 thousand “dietary calories” per day. When I was a teen, I saw similar claims around 2.5 thousand. In 2025, around 2 thousand might be more likely. Maybe, this is explainable by something as simple as the average human moving less than back then (maybe, supplemented by other factors, like spending less time in the cold); however, at a minimum, we have to recognize that there are those who work hard physically even today and for whom, say, an attempt to stick to a daily intake of 2 thousand might be a bad idea—just as if the aforementioned Florida baseball player tried to get by with the water intake of an Alaskan office worker. For that matter, if average energy consumption has dropped, is “eat less” better advice than “exercise more”?
To which other known complications must be added, e.g. that physical size plays in. It is not reasonable that, all other factors equal, a 6-foot man eats the same quantities as a 5-foot woman.
Incidentally, because of the simplistic communications, I cannot rule out that such concerns have also affected what is communicated as healthy. What, e.g., if some communication in 1955 was male-centric, one in 1990 was averaged over both sexes, and one in 2025 is female-centric? Or what if the standards have remained the same, but a demographic shift has altered what is reasonable? (Say that the shift towards a greater proportion of the elderly has changed the population average of some measure.)
Or consider various “food pyramids”, “food circles”, and similar attempts to be “pedagogical” in making official recommendations. These have given inconsistent advice over time and in different countries, and have been accused of supporting hidden agendas, e.g. in that some food industry is to be favored or that consumers be moved away from meat products “because global warming”. (I merely note the presence of such accusations without judging their correctness. I do note a natural risk, however—up to and including such simple issues as a government official asking representatives of the X industry for recommendations, these lauding X without reservations, and the government official failing to do independent research out of sheer naivety.)
(2026-01-10)
A very telling case is the release of a new pyramid and related advice in the U.S. in early 2026. Some describe it as turning the previous pyramid on its head. (In terms of contents—not orientation.) This is an exaggeration but it does show how drastically advice can change over time, and one or both of the “before” and “after” must have quite a few problems for such a change to be possible.
Speaking of different countries, we might also have to consider the possibility of actual genetic differences between population groups that make too blanket advice harmful. For instance, milk is another product that has at times had “superfood” status in various parts of the Western world. In some other parts of the world, lactose intolerance is quite common and far less milk is drunk (and might have a very different average net effect on health if it is drunk). Indeed, chances are that lactose intolerance is the default state of humanity (post-infancy), with tolerance being something acquired by population groups that have historically had an unusually large need or opportunity to drink milk.
This is another area with much contradictory and/or changing advice—beginning with the old claim that “the solution to pollution is dilution”, which almost tautologically holds as long as pollution is sufficiently limited, but which can fail disastrously when pollution moves beyond some limit.
The subfield of energy contains many twists. For instance, in the 1990s much ado was made about natural gas, how it was much more environmentally friendly than e.g. gasoline and heating oil, and how we should all try to move to natural gas. Today, however, it is viewed as part of the problem and something that should be avoided in favor of solar panels, heat pumps, and whatnots—likely, because the standards have continually shifted. (And/or through the more religious than scientific take of the climate-change movement, where anything that results in “greenhouse gases” is irredeemably evil and to be avoided at all costs.)
Here, there are unfortunate terminology issues, beginning with the common, highly misleading, shortening of “gasoline” to “gas”. Another is the vagueness of “natural gas”, which amounts to something mostly methane. (And, of course, methane is no more and no less natural than, say, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen, the “natural” having arisen through historical accident.)
Or consider nuclear power: Early on, nuclear power was hailed as a great breakthrough and a potential solution to all energy problems. (While the optimism might have been too far-going, it was closer to the mark than the era of idiocy that followed.) By no later than the 1970s, it was subject to enormous hate campaigns and disinformation, driven by panic mongering and a lack of perspective, which made nuclear power intolerable to many. During my own early school years, my teacher repeatedly made statements to the class in the “we should be proud that we Swedes are the first to abolish nuclear power” family. The German “Greens”, and large portions of the rest of the German Left, have long had a hatred of nuclear power that is ridiculous. Over recent years, however, the (potentially more justified) hatred of “greenhouse gases” has reached such proportions that nuclear power seems to be in the process of redemption even among groups previously fanatically opposed to nuclear power.
Nuclear power is also interesting through the enormous gap between, on the one hand, public opinion, opinions pushed by many politicians, and similar, and, on the other, what science, engineering, etc., tells us about the true advantages and disadvantages of various energy forms. This includes that truly notable events have been extremely rare (Chernobyl was roughly four decades ago and occurred in a design that was outdated and viewed as flawed even back then; Fukushima was caused by an enormous natural disaster—and one that did far more damage than the nuclear accident) and that use of fossil fuels does more damage to the environment every year, year in and year out, than the sum of all nuclear accidents in the history of nuclear power.
Indeed, the German “Greens”, for all their pro-environment bluster, have likely done the environment more harm than good in the net, exactly through hampering the use and development of nuclear power.
More generally, “argumentation” in areas relating to energy, the environment, or (often) Leftist agendas, is often artificially one-sided, with a clear intent not of letting others form their own opinions and make informed own decisions—but of force-feeding them a pre-determined opinion, even at the cost of distortions or outright lies.
Non-energy issues include repeated discoveries that this-or-that was bad, e.g. when freon and DDT went from scientific marvels to being banned from their main uses.
While finding out the exact truth on various COVID-related issues is hard, because there are so many conflicting claims and because so many have staked their reputations and whatnot on a certain message, it does appear that most of the advice given by official sources were at best poorly scientifically supported—and that much of it was outright flawed. Consider e.g. masking, social distancing, and a blanket push for vaccination without considering the extremely varying risk profiles of the potential vaccinees. For more on COVID, I refer to a great number of older texts and links, including a discussion of the report by the U.S. House of Representatives.
To which much misguided public policy of a non-advisory type might be added, e.g. school closures to protect virtually COVID-impervious children, and a great many efforts too focused just on COVID, without considering e.g. the economic effects of various measures—or even the over-all health effects on the people, beyond specifically COVID. Ditto other disinformation of a non-advisory character, as with the “COVID absolutely came from a wet-market, while the lab-leak hypothesis is a ridiculous conspiracy theory and absolutely wrong” message pushed by Fauci and the group around him, in light of later revelations that they had a personal interest in defeating the lab-leak hypothesis through their own direct and indirect involvement with the Wuhan lab and research. (While the origin of COVID is not, to my last knowledge, entirely settled, the current majority and/or “balance of probabilities” view seems to be that it was a leak of something artificial from the Wuhan lab—exactly what Fauci et al. denied at all costs. At a minimum, it is clear that Fauci et al. acted in bad faith and contrary to scientific principles. See e.g. the aforementioned report.)
A particular sub-issue, extending far beyond COVID, is modeling and the danger of basing advice, public policy, whatnot, on modeling that has not been sufficiently “reality tested”. All too often, modeling simply amounts to making assumptions and seeing what happens—and often over-simplified assumptions and/or assumptions that amount to begging the question, at that. In careless or incompetent hands, the revised saying “there are lies, damned lies, and modeling” might be warranted. (Which is not in anyway to deny the often great benefits of modeling in competent hands, with an understanding of the limitations of modeling, and with the aforementioned “reality testing”.)
In the case of COVID, some modelers (likely, including Ferguson, but my memory is imperfect) are on record as saying that they only presented modeling with disaster outcomes, because non-disaster outcomes would be uninteresting and/or bring no informative value. While there is some truth to this argument, e.g. in that a politician can easily imagine a scenario in which nothing happens on his own, without the aid of a model, it is very dangerous, because those exposed to the filtered or otherwise skewed modeling results can all too easily develop a correspondingly skewed view of the possible outcomes and their likelihood. Imagine being a national leader and seeing modeling scenarios of “minor disaster”, “major disaster”, and “end of the world”, but not of “nothing happens”, “something slight happens”, “something bad-but-still-tolerable happens”. What impression would you likely develop? Where would the psychological pressure be?
Even now, it appears, the success of the vaccines is “proved” by comparing estimated actual deaths with modeling numbers attempting to tell what deaths absent vaccines would have been—and modeling based on assumptions that are still weak or (according to some critics) might be deliberately chosen exactly to paint the vaccines as a success. At a minimum, these numbers must be viewed with very great scepticism.
A related issue is that advice is often misunderstood or misapplied. (This can be on topic or off topic, depending on whether the propagators of the advice fail in this regard or only those who apply the advice.)
Important special cases include a failure to consider individual variation that invalidates an otherwise sound piece of advice in the case of the individual at hand, and the application of advice in a new context without sufficient verification that it remains appropriate in the new context. An example of the latter might be, cf. above, to have success with “Drink more milk!” in Germany and trying to export this advice to China.
As occurs to me during proof-reading, success with regard to slogans might point to yet another problem—that success might not be measured in health (or whatnot) outcomes, but merely in whether a certain piece of advice is followed. This might then lead to a (hypothetical) health advisory of “Drink more milk!” being deemed a health success because milk consumption increased, regardless of the actual health outcomes, in a manner similar to a commercial slogan with the same phrasing.
(In contrast, the aforementioned attempts to prove that the COVID vaccines were successful do appear to focus on outcomes.)
A particular danger in my experiences with colleagues and other in-person acquaintances is that advice is all too often just accepted, adopted, and/or regurgitated, without even a superficial understanding and, especially, with no understanding of the motivations behind a piece of advice and the trade-offs that might be involved. (And I strongly suspect that this issue generalizes to large parts of the rest of society, many or most politicians included—with the added danger that politicians, on the Left especially, might go more by ideology than evidence and reasoning.)
I have, e.g., repeatedly complained about how Scrum is handled in a cargo-cult manner. Another interesting case (also propagated by some naive authors) include a degeneration of agile software development into “cowboy coding”, say, by declining to write comments “because the code should speak for itself”. Well, when it comes to the implementation that is true, but there are other reasons to write comments, including to explain design decisions, to make interface commitments, and similar. To boot, the colleagues opposing comments usually are poor coders, whose code does not speak for itself even in terms of implementation. Yes, in such a situation, if time allows it, it is better to fix the code than to write a comment—often, much better. But if the code is not actually fixed, we have the worst of both worlds.
A complication is that code improvements can take many times longer than just writing a comment, which means that compromise might be necessary. This, especially and paradoxically, in professional software development, where the developers often see time constraints imposed by others. If so, failing to add that comment is negligence.
However, foregoing the improvement in the now does come with the risk that further costs are accumulated in the interim, through problems with undiscovered bugs, harder maintenance, etc., that, in turn, take many times longer (or otherwise cost more) than the improvement would have. Quality should not be taken lightly. In particular, a main lesson is to write quality code to begin with, as (a) writing poor code and later improving it usually takes much more time than just writing quality code, (b) the time between writing and improvement opens the door for those interim costs.
A common issue is that advice is too focused on some particular goal or aspect, without considering trade-offs and opportunity costs in other areas. (Note e.g. parts of the COVID issues.)
Consider advice like “ten thousand steps per day” (even discounting that this advice fails to consider factors like size, speed of movement, length of step vs. step frequency, etc.; and that others claim that e.g. seven thousand steps per day would be enough to see the purported benefits): Taking that many steps a day takes time and energy, requires accommodation in one’s schedule, etc., and it is not a given that any health effects outweigh the resulting costs—unless someone already has a life that includes a great number of steps in a natural manner, e.g. through work as a mailman. (In which case the advice might be pointless, because it might not change anything.) For instance, if we assume two steps per second and (for easy calculations) 10.800 steps, this is 5.400 seconds or 1.5 hours (!), even various types of prep time and other overhead aside. (Ditto, with 10.000 steps and 50/27 steps per second.) We are then on the order of 1/10th of all waking hours, and much more than that in terms of leisure time, leaving the question whether life is extended in a sufficient manner and/or quality of life improved sufficiently to justify the time investment. (And note that quality of life issues must consider the risk that rest and relaxation after work is insufficient, if too much time is spent walking. For that matter, what if the expectation value of benefits is ruined by an increased risk of being hit by a car?) A particular concern is diminishing returns, and that e.g. half the time might be a better investment, because it might still gain more than half of the benefits—and, likely, at less than half the opportunity cost, because accommodation is disproportionately easier, the benefits of more rest are the greater, and similar.
I stress that I do not make any claims “that”—the more so as great individual variation is likely. The point is the importance of the question “whether” and of making a holistic and individual judgment that considers issues like opportunity costs and that is open to other choices.
Moving off topic, even concerns like psychology must be considered. What, e.g., if some individual can keep a long-term dedication to 5,000 steps, but finds 10,000 so daunting that he increasingly fails to go for a walk at all? Chances are that a dedication to those 5,000 steps is the better choice for such an individual. (While I have never made a step-commitment, myself, I have run into a similar trap in other cases, so I can vouch for the risk.)
The issue of different priorities has featured above to some degree, but I wish to emphasize separately that a presumption of shared priorities, an attitude of “my priorities should be your priorities”, or similar, is both common and potentially very harmful—especially, when decision-making, advice-giving, whatnot, is centralized or otherwise in a small number of hands, while intended to affect a large group.
Two particularly important sources of very legitimately differing priorities:
Firstly, when the, in some sense, natural preferences of two persons, two groups, two whatnots are different. To stick with the topic of food and advice, consider advice to cook more on one’s own, to use less “frozen meals”, to use more fresh produce (e.g. fresh carrots over carrots from a can), etc., and note how the one might prefer to arrange for food in a manner that saves time while the other might be willing to sacrifice that time in order to arrange for a healthier meal. This is not a matter of right or wrong but of preferences and priorities—and it would be wrong for e.g. the government to try to convince or force the people to follow such advice, instead of just presenting claims like “it can be healthier to cook on one’s own than to rely on frozen meals, because [x, y, and z]”.
Secondly, when the circumstances between two situations (and the affected persons/groups/whatnot) make different priorities natural and good. For instance, if someone has problems with getting sufficient food (rare as this might be in today’s Western world), questions like cholesterol content are very secondary. If in doubt, it does not matter that someone might have been at risk of a heart attack at sixty, if he starved to death at thirty.
Of course, the borders can be hard to draw and care should be taken to understand that seemingly different “natural preferences” might go back to a different situation. Such different situations make it particularly important not to judge others without knowing their motivations. For instance, someone who cooks for a four-person family has a much better “return on investment” when spending time on arranging for healthy food than does someone single. For instance, someone who has plenty of free time pays a relatively smaller price when investing time than someone who works long hours and has a commute on top of those hours.
A related issue is that advice is often too trivial or too repetitive. For instance, I have quite a few times encountered introductory advice for “entrepreneurs”, those looking to set up a small business, or similar. Without exception, the most important theme has been “You must advertise!!!!”—and often phrased as if this was some sort of great magic secret that: (a) The reader would never have considered on his own. (b) Would guarantee success, regardless of other factors. (c) Would be a pre-requisite for success, regardless of other factors. (Often complemented by similarly trite and over-generalized advice about writing a formal business plan and networking. The one-size-for-all theme is also common, with little thought for whether the size actually fits—despite the enormous variations in businesses, their needs, and their whatnots.)
However: (a) Anyone with even a high-school education and/or some common sense should know or realize that potential customers need to know about the business in order to become actual customers, which makes the advice trite and trivial. (b) There is much more needed for success than advertising, and this focus on advertising can lead to deficits elsewhere, e.g. if someone does believe in the alleged magic or if someone spends time on developing advertising materials before doing more urgent tasks (see side-note). (c) Advertising is not necessarily a pre-requisite at all. In many fields, and at least in the early stages, it can be crucial, so that the public knows that, say, a plumber with offices in some off-beat area is for hire. However, even then, a more general idea of “marketing” is more valuable than advertising. Moreover, the need is not universal. For instance, in many fields, networking and word-of-mouth are more beneficial than advertising. For instance, if someone runs a small convenience store on a corner, random passers-by and those living in the neighborhood (who already know about the store because they have seen it or a predecessor store on numerous occasions;) are likely to make up the brunt of customers, with advertising having no or, on the outside, little effect. (Beyond, maybe, some suitable signs at the store it self.) If in doubt, a Sunday-evening shopper who sets out to a particular store after having found a flyer in his mailbox might well stumble upon some other convenience store on the way—and few convenience stores have a “unique selling point” that would justify continuing to the original store.
What such “more urgent” tasks might be depends on many factors, including intended field and size of business, business model, and stage of progress. To give some few typical early examples, however: Ensuring that the business is plausible. Researching what one needs to know in the business at hand. Acquiring an appropriate business license/permit/whatnot. Ensuring financing.
To boot, those looking to start a business might broadly fall into three categories:
Those who do not need basic information (including those who already have experience running businesses). They might benefit from more advanced or specific advice, but not from such trite trivialities—and are unlikely to read it in the first place. (They might or might not have done so in the past, cf. the next item, but that is another matter.)
Those who need basic information and are aware of it. They are likely to look for information in several to many sources, and will soon grow tired of ever and ever again being told to advertise.
Those who need basic information and are not aware of it. These are about as unlikely to read such materials as the better informed in item 1.
What then is the point with yet another source shouting that “You must advertise!!!!”?
In cases like this, I suspect that the limited own horizons of the “advice” givers are a problem—unless they are paid under the table by the advertising industry... Limited horizons (and/or the projection of such horizons onto others) does indeed seem to be a common problem. At an extreme, a scene from season 4 of “Clarkson’s Farm” shows two self-declared experts lecturing Clarkson that it is a problem when an inn suffers interruptions in the water and electricity supply—who would have thought?!?
Other potential explanations include an advice-giver who is evangelizing, has convinced himself that he is the sole or main source of advice (only very rarely true), and/or has a very skewed idea of what advice is needed. A particularly interesting example is the “point burn myth” (reservations for the exact name), which I have seen explained on (much?) more than a dozen occasions, but have hardly ever actually encountered. Here, I suspect that a belief of roughly “I can lose fat in a specific area of my body by targeting that area with exercise” was popular some decades ago, that it has since fallen out of favor, and that some group of advice givers stubbornly believe or pretend to believe that it is still popular. At times, it seems that there is a “point burn myth” myth—a myth that a myth exists.
This possibly aided by misunderstandings and/or given a pseudo-justification by straw-manning.
For instance, it is common to see recommendations like “if you want a six-pack, you should do crunches [or whatnot]”—but there is not one iota of proof that this statement relates to the aforementioned belief. Chances are that it simply points to the benefits of building muscle in order to get that six-pack—no more, no less. (It could, however, reflect another error of over-emphasizing muscle growth relative fat loss: For those too chubby, losing weight is a virtual pre-requisite for a six-pack, while the size of the muscles is secondary; for those not chubby, but still lacking a six-pack, muscle growth is a reasonable main priority.)
For instance, looking at those very far from a six-pack, abdominal exercise might be a great helper in looking leaner simply through improving posture or through giving the strength and muscle endurance to not constantly having the stomach sticking out in an manner that is not just unaesthetic but also unergonomic. Recommending crunches to these is not proof of belief in the alleged myth.
For instance, gaining muscle mass on limbs will spread fat out and, all other factors equal, make it less obvious and unaesthetic. Recommending, say, “Work those arms!” is not proof of belief either (even in a fat-centric context—let alone a muscle-centric one).
To boot, doing crunches, working the arms, whatnot, does burn energy, which can reduce fat—even if not localized. To boot, a greater muscle mass, all other factors equal, also increases energy use. Even absent point burn, the combination of fat loss and muscle growth might well make crunches worthwhile even for a slightly chubby six-pack hunter. (While the more chubby might need to go for a run.)
A similar issue might apply to a casual statement, often derided as a myth, of “converting fat to muscle”: To do this in a literal sense of e.g. turning a fat cell into a muscle cell is not possible, true, but chances are that this is not what the speaker meant. Rather, he used a short-hand for “simultaneously burning fat and building muscle” or, to be quite pedantic, maybe “simultaneously burning fat and stimulating muscle growth”.
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Issues relating to education II
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