I'm genuinely surprised someone could read that whole blog post (I'm assuming here) and come away with that conclusion. Gelman addresses this so directly in the article:
"Recall the Javert paradox. It’s completely reasonable to write about scientific misconduct, and yes sometimes we have to scream a bit to get heard over all the chatter of the scientist-as-hero press."
...
"But we need real expertise, not fake expertise. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Gresham, baby, Gresham. If we don’t contest the fake expertise, I’m seriously worried it will be crowding out the real stuff."
There is good research and there is bad research. The latter should not be given a pass just because all research has some amount of bias.
Walker has clearly made a huge name for himself and sold a significant number of books by skewing the evidence to make his thesis sound more substantial than it is
What do you mean that stretching doesn't do anything? Any links to such evidence? It's a pretty simple experiment to stretch every day for a month and measure your flexibility gains, so that's quite a bold claim. Do you mean it has no direct impact on your health?
Except there are cases where Walker went so far as to remove portions of a graph to support his argument. This kind of manipulation shouldn't be allowed to stand and it's frustrating (though not surprising) to see a book that relies on this sort of dishonesty get so much uncritical attention and praise. I can't put it any better than Andrew Gelman:
"If the data didn’t matter, then why did you include them in your damn book in the first place? If the removal of the bar from the graph didn’t matter, then why did you remove the damn bar?"
"Recall the Javert paradox. It’s completely reasonable to write about scientific misconduct, and yes sometimes we have to scream a bit to get heard over all the chatter of the scientist-as-hero press." ... "But we need real expertise, not fake expertise. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Gresham, baby, Gresham. If we don’t contest the fake expertise, I’m seriously worried it will be crowding out the real stuff."
There is good research and there is bad research. The latter should not be given a pass just because all research has some amount of bias.