axiomaticdoubts (u/axiomaticdoubts)

axiomaticdoubts commented on Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol slimemoldtimemold.com/202... · Posted by u/MaurizioPz

ajmurmann · 2 years ago

I don't think SMTM is proposing the potato diet as a permanent weight loss dilution, but think that there is something weird going on here that might result in a permanent dietary recommendation if understood. For example, we might find that the potassium is causing the weight loss and supplementing high doses of potassium could be something you do permanently.

axiomaticdoubts · 2 years ago

There've been multiple studies that gave people potassium supplements and measured their body weight. (Primarily because potassium helps lower blood pressure). They haven't found that potassium causes weight loss. See my meta-analysis here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sR1T2Kb1X1fCLYeEE-U3Rwei...

axiomaticdoubts commented on Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol slimemoldtimemold.com/202... · Posted by u/MaurizioPz

WorldMaker · 2 years ago

> But their own numbers show

This is part that keeps this potato diet stuff interesting to me is that they've been extremely open with the numbers, from the very beginning. Most fad diets you have no idea how many people participated or the particulars of their habits during the participation period and there was no follow-up at all beyond the participation period.

I don't think SMTM has "cracked" anything with the potato diet yet and I don't expect to see useful "answers" from SMTM, but they've been good so far at some of the raw bits of science: finding ways to ask interesting questions and recording as much data as possible about it, publishing that data, and then finding interesting new questions from that.

Sometimes I feel rather cynical that we'll not see any answers in my lifetime, but I appreciate a blog asking interesting questions and then trying to data science what they can around them to find more useful questions.

axiomaticdoubts · 2 years ago

I think it's worth pointing out that they've also said multiple false things in their blog posts, and have refused to address or fix them despite repeated requests over a period of more than one year. I think people should be careful before believing in things they read in SMTM's blog. See e.g. https://manifold.markets/Natalia/how-many-of-these-falsemisl...

axiomaticdoubts commented on Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol slimemoldtimemold.com/202... · Posted by u/MaurizioPz

beanjuice · 2 years ago

Beautiful. We are in a golden era of citizen science, where access to knowledge, tools to connect, tools to process data, and the ability to communicate this is at an all time high. The kind of stuff you see on Youtube is amazing: people like AppliedScience achieving incredibly things in the garage, or recently NileRed took a nature paper [0] 1 step further and published it on youtube [1]).

From a chemist/material scientist perspective: Whether the results of the Riff trial may ever have a p value suitable for nature/science, likely not. When it comes to the human body and our biology, a mass trial like this may even be more useful than traditional studies, where pre-existing biases in data collection may weed out the most useful 'Riff'. Better than that, the information collected by mold_time is regularly released and discussed, in the open, on twitter/x [2].

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CglNRNrMFGM

[2] https://twitter.com/mold_time

axiomaticdoubts · 2 years ago

I don't think mold_time is a good example of citizen science done right. They have said multiple false things and refused to address or correct their statements when other people pointed them out. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get... and https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba...

It's been more than a year since I alerted them of the multiple falsehoods in A Chemical Hunger, repeatedly, and they haven't done anything about them.

axiomaticdoubts commented on Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol slimemoldtimemold.com/202... · Posted by u/MaurizioPz

scottrogowski · 2 years ago

I think this is a more compelling idea than people in the comments are giving it credit for

> The problem is that you can easily come up with 100 different hypotheses for what’s going on. Ok, so you run 100 different studies to test each one. But studies take a long time to run — let’s say 6 months per study. Congratulations, you’ve just locked yourself into 50 years

This is a major problem with science whenever you have less of a theoretical foundation. Compared to physics or chemistry, we know very little about nutrition or sports science. Because of this, the search space is very large. One could argue that given the number of surprising results (and difficulty reproducing those results), medicine and psychology also fall into this category.

> A riff trial takes advantage of the power of parallel search. Some riffs will work better than others (or at least differently), and parallel search helps you find these differences faster, especially if the differences are big.

What if we did more to encourage people to track and report their personal experiments? If even 10% of everyone on a diet (any diet) just tracked what they ate, what exercise they did, and how much weight they lost, and reported it to a centralized database, scientists could then look for patterns in that data and do formal studies based on suspected patterns.

We could do similar things with longevity/happiness. Look at the "Harvard Study of Adult Development" but imagine it was spread out over 10s of thousands of diverse people instead of just 300 upper-class American men? The data quality wouldn't matter much if all you are doing is searching for patterns to do follow-up studies.

axiomaticdoubts · 2 years ago

The main issue with this riff trial is that it doesn't test the most likely reason the potato diet works: that it's a very restrictive diet. Testing several different hypotheses barely helps at all if you don't test the overwhelmingly most likely one.

axiomaticdoubts commented on Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol slimemoldtimemold.com/202... · Posted by u/MaurizioPz

pja · 2 years ago

The difference is that people report that the potato diet is /easy/. No cravings, no endless hunger & having to force yourself to calorie count and stop eating when you hit your target. Eat as much as you like, when you like.

That’s radically different from other diets.

axiomaticdoubts · 2 years ago

The attrition rate was very high. The claim that it's easy was based on a few anecdotes, which aren't representative of the trial participants.

axiomaticdoubts commented on Potato Diet Riff Trial: Sign Up Now, Lol slimemoldtimemold.com/202... · Posted by u/MaurizioPz

Taikonerd · 2 years ago

I really enjoyed SMTM's "A Chemical Hunger" series[1]. But recently they've gone into weird fad-diet territory with their potato obsession.

Like, they crow that the potato mono-diet "works," in that the people who successfully followed it lost weight. Well, sure -- all of those 70s fad diets "worked" in that sense! Grapefruit and popcorn? Sure, you can lose weight on that!

But their own numbers show that people regain the weight after they start eating other foods again: "On average, people gained back most of the weight they lost."[2]

People who successfully follow very restrictive diets will lose weight... as long as they follow it. And these "riffs" in the OP where it's potatoes and bacon, or potatoes and gummi worms, or whatever, won't change that basic observation.

[1]: http://achemicalhunger.com/

[2]: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/01/26/smtm-potato-diet-co...

axiomaticdoubts · 2 years ago

"A Chemical Hunger" has multiple inaccuracies that have never been addressed or corrected. For example, they made up the "fact" that wild animals have been getting fatter out of thin air. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get...

axiomaticdoubts commented on Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be science.org/content/blog-... · Posted by u/etiam

elihu · 3 years ago

That's a good idea. Honestly, I find it pretty amazing that modern CPUs don't just instantly turn into a puddle of molten metal as soon as you turn them on.

The critical temperature is 127 C, as the other commenter mentioned. That seems like it's high enough to be useful in a computer CPU.

I suppose there might also be applications for power distribution in a data center. You might use a few large, high-efficiency low voltage DC power supplies to supply the whole site instead of hundreds or thousands of individual power supplies if electrical resistance in cables was less of an issue. (I think this sort of thing is done now, but more at the rack level, since long cable runs cause losses.) You might even use 1V power instead of 5V or 12V.

(Granted, superconducting materials don't have unlimited current capacity, and bad things happen if you exceed the limit.)

axiomaticdoubts · 3 years ago

The critical temperature is not 127 C. They did not actually measure the critical temperature. They just said it's at least 400 K (~127 C), probably because that was the maximum temperature the equipment they used could measure.

axiomaticdoubts commented on Have attention spans been declining? slimemoldtimemold.com/202... · Posted by u/janandonly

Zetice · 3 years ago

Then the question you should be asking is why choose to post on LW when the value of publishing a paper is substantially higher.

Perhaps because what they post doesn’t hold up to scrutiny from their peers, so they prefer to play in the mud with the folks who won’t notice the issues with their ideas.

axiomaticdoubts · 3 years ago

People publish blog posts for several reasons. Many see it as a fun, social activity.

axiomaticdoubts commented on Have attention spans been declining? slimemoldtimemold.com/202... · Posted by u/janandonly

axiomaticdoubts · 3 years ago

It's not just bloggers. There are computer scientists with publications in top CS conferences that post on LW. For example, Alexander Turner, Dan Hendrycks, Paul Christiano, and Jacob Steinhardt all post there.

axiomaticdoubts commented on Have attention spans been declining? slimemoldtimemold.com/202... · Posted by u/janandonly

Zetice · 3 years ago

So? That means nothing as to the quality or even topic of their blog content.

Unless blogs started receiving peer review while I wasn't paying attention, there's likely a reason any given content lives there and not in an academic paper.

axiomaticdoubts · 3 years ago

Well, yeah, blogs are not academic journals. And if a blog post disagrees with academic consensus, the academic consensus will be right the vast majority of the time. But this applies to all blogs on the internet, not only those on LessWrong.