4 ms·

I'm always amused/horrified by Hacker News comments on anything health-related. Herein lie a group of incredibly smart individuals sharing anecdotal evidence an

by cal5k 9y ago

I'm always amused/horrified by Hacker News comments on anything health-related. Herein lie a group of incredibly smart individuals sharing anecdotal evidence and folk remedies without a lick of irony.

zaptheimpaler 9y ago
Its not anecdotes, its a multi year study of 1200 people. Also people often forget that there are many things science doesn't know, many health problems we have no good answers for, and that anecdotes & intuition are the only way we can generate hypotheses to validate scientifically in the first place.
- JshWright 9y ago
  I suspect the parent comment is referring to the comment section (which is indeed full of anecdotes).
- brucephillips 9y ago
  There have been many, many studies discrediting the folk remedies proferred in this thread.
flatline 9y ago
This can be partly explained by different subsets of the overall user base. I have the same reaction to some of the posts on longevity research.
wolco 9y ago
I'm actually horrified at the opposite. The lack of knowledge around health issues scares me. When users comment they did not know tumeric is anti inflammatory it makes me wonder.
- nickpeterson 9y ago
  You're frightened by people not knowing turmeric is anti inflammory?
  - flatline 9y ago
    Since the error is being propagated- it’s turmeric.
- tomrod 9y ago
  Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
IntronExon 9y ago
I get the same feeling listening to physicists talk about neurology, which is just to say that intelligence and expertise don’t imply anything beyond the limits of one’s speciality. Besides, the quest for improved health leads to a desperate mindset, which is easily exploited.
kirrent 9y ago
It's a useful reminder that incredibly smart people with amazing technical literacy don't necessarily have the same scientific literacy.
throwaway9980 9y ago
Imagine that you could aggregate all the anecdotes shared on the internet. It would be fascinating to compare the statistical conclusions you could draw against accepted science.
- buckthundaz 9y ago
  https://nequalsmany.com/ https://nequalsmany.com/ Check it out, this is happening. They are doing many crowdsourced analysis, the most prominent being a 30-day carnivore diet protocol: eat meat, drink water.
  - throwaway9980 9y ago
    I’d be lying if I said I didn’t expect HN to tell me that it’s already being done. I am impressed and amused that it happened this fast and it’s pretty much exactly what I posited. Slow clap.
- cal5k 9y ago
  It would be damn near impossible to conclude anything from such research without a control. “Randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled trial” is the critical sentence - at best you’d get a correlation which probably has been influenced by the availability of research. Finding truth is freaking hard.
  - buckthundaz 9y ago
    Do you think that qualitative data is useless? 'It would be damn near impossible to conclude anything from such research without a control. “Randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled trial” is the critical sentence' Since the advent of randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled trial has our public health improved or declined?
    - cal5k 9y ago
      I'm resisting the urge to respond flippantly, since I think that's a question that could be answered rigorously and is certainly worth asking. With that said, since the advent of the RCT, life expectancy has gone up dramatically in the Western world. It would be hard to imagine testing the efficacy of, say, antibiotics or vaccines without testing them against a control in a placebo-controlled, double-blinded way. Same goes for simple things like washing your hands and administering prophylactic antibiotics during a C-Section, which dramatically improves the odds that a mother will live through complications during child birth. There would be no way to actually know that these were important without studying them vs. the status quo at the time.
lj3 9y ago
> Herein lie a group of incredibly smart individuals Citation needed.
- craftyguy 9y ago
  GP said it, so it must be true.
scarecrowbob 9y ago
The idea of "hey, this strange thing worked for me, and I don't wholly understand all parts of the system but it seems to have some results" is pretty much the core of what "hacking" is, right?
- Niksko 9y ago
  Your analogy is close but flawed in a major way. The underlying assumption when hacking is that if you don't understand the internals of something that's ok, but you can rely on understanding the interface, and your manipulation of the interface is skilled enough that you can get the results you need. In this case, we don't even remotely understand the interface or manipulating it.
  - scarecrowbob 9y ago
    Consider the case of two kinds of users operating on some kind of interface that is unfamiliar, say, MS Word. One class of user will consult a manual and try to find the right answer, or perhaps will call an expert. Another class of user will just start pushing buttons to see what happens, because they have a rough familiarity with the system even if the specific interface is not well understood. It's that second class that I am thinking about when I think about how "hackers" operate. In that case, I get that it's dangerous to mess around with a system whose internals you don't know about... but at the same time, there is a kind of fantasy that somehow other folks have a privileged knowledge of what our bodies do. Personally, I quit wheat and dairy (and reduced my alcohol consumption) because it's a specific tree allergy season here. I have a couple possible accounts of why this is working (because I believe that it is) but I don't really understand the interface or even what I am manipulating when I alter my diet like that... I just know that I can breath, whereas historically I have terrible allergies at this time of year. Feel kind of like a hacky solutions... it's not an engineered solution, that's for sure.
- paulcole 9y ago
  Do you say that people who take spoonfuls of cinnamon to cure their diabetes are hackers?
spelunker 9y ago
I think this happens often around here on anything non-tech related. Surprise, being smart doesn't mean you know everything ;-)
- comstock 9y ago
  It doesn’t of course, but it seems reasonable to hope that people (particularly “smart” people) would try and support arguments/suggestions with data.
- RobertRoberts 9y ago
  But I appreciate the high quality of discussion that intelligence can bring to a topic many of us don't understand. Who really understands how meltdown and spectre work without asking? Smart people ask questions, and like answers. Add wisdom, and you can appreciate answers that challenge your own biases. [edit: clarification]
InclinedPlane 9y ago
Also anything science related.
RobertRoberts 9y ago
I find the opposite to be true. I think it's terrible that really smart people will often times blindly trust a certain sect of society on health issues, even when there's evidence that says they shouldn't. And then publicly shame others for finding ways to heal themselves.
ekianjo 9y ago
> group of incredibly smart individuals It's not because you are smart that you can't be ignorant of certain things at the same time. Even smart people can be fooled about stuff they are not familiar with. It's like trusting blindly the stories on your newspaper.
dawhizkid 9y ago
Nutrition science is, in general, a massive joke. It's more frustrating that the scientific/medical community will stand by the status quo because proving something to be true of humans is so incredibly difficult. Edit: IMO, "hacking" is simply recognizing that the scientific community moves at a glacial pace and not waiting around for "experts" to arrive at a consensus 30 years from now to change something about your lifestyle/diet today that has been shown to be true of animals/smaller scale human studies many times over.
refurb 9y ago
Smart people often fall prey to "I'm smart and an expert in 'X', how hard could 'Y' be?"
oliwarner 9y ago
Yeah, me too. It's more than just the comments in this case though. > Here's a 15yo uncontrolled epidemiological study of acne, that blames everything on diet, go forth and treat your own skin conditions! The paper is more restrained than that, but that's not how people interpret it. Problem solved. Eat like a Bantu. Science would use this as bearing for a hypothesis to do an single-factor studies.

by cal5k 9y ago

zaptheimpaler 9y ago

Its not anecdotes, its a multi year study of 1200 people. Also people often forget that there are many things science doesn't know, many health problems we have no good answers for, and that anecdotes & intuition are the only way we can generate hypotheses to validate scientifically in the first place.

JshWright 9y ago
I suspect the parent comment is referring to the comment section (which is indeed full of anecdotes).
brucephillips 9y ago
There have been many, many studies discrediting the folk remedies proferred in this thread.

flatline 9y ago

This can be partly explained by different subsets of the overall user base. I have the same reaction to some of the posts on longevity research.

wolco 9y ago

I'm actually horrified at the opposite. The lack of knowledge around health issues scares me. When users comment they did not know tumeric is anti inflammatory it makes me wonder.

nickpeterson 9y ago
You're frightened by people not knowing turmeric is anti inflammory?
- flatline 9y ago
  Since the error is being propagated- it’s turmeric.
tomrod 9y ago
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/

IntronExon 9y ago

I get the same feeling listening to physicists talk about neurology, which is just to say that intelligence and expertise don’t imply anything beyond the limits of one’s speciality. Besides, the quest for improved health leads to a desperate mindset, which is easily exploited.

kirrent 9y ago

It's a useful reminder that incredibly smart people with amazing technical literacy don't necessarily have the same scientific literacy.

throwaway9980 9y ago

Imagine that you could aggregate all the anecdotes shared on the internet. It would be fascinating to compare the statistical conclusions you could draw against accepted science.

buckthundaz 9y ago
https://nequalsmany.com/ https://nequalsmany.com/ Check it out, this is happening. They are doing many crowdsourced analysis, the most prominent being a 30-day carnivore diet protocol: eat meat, drink water.
- throwaway9980 9y ago
  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t expect HN to tell me that it’s already being done. I am impressed and amused that it happened this fast and it’s pretty much exactly what I posited. Slow clap.
cal5k 9y ago
It would be damn near impossible to conclude anything from such research without a control. “Randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled trial” is the critical sentence - at best you’d get a correlation which probably has been influenced by the availability of research. Finding truth is freaking hard.
- buckthundaz 9y ago
  Do you think that qualitative data is useless? 'It would be damn near impossible to conclude anything from such research without a control. “Randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled trial” is the critical sentence' Since the advent of randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled trial has our public health improved or declined?
  - cal5k 9y ago
    I'm resisting the urge to respond flippantly, since I think that's a question that could be answered rigorously and is certainly worth asking. With that said, since the advent of the RCT, life expectancy has gone up dramatically in the Western world. It would be hard to imagine testing the efficacy of, say, antibiotics or vaccines without testing them against a control in a placebo-controlled, double-blinded way. Same goes for simple things like washing your hands and administering prophylactic antibiotics during a C-Section, which dramatically improves the odds that a mother will live through complications during child birth. There would be no way to actually know that these were important without studying them vs. the status quo at the time.

lj3 9y ago

> Herein lie a group of incredibly smart individuals Citation needed.

craftyguy 9y ago
GP said it, so it must be true.

scarecrowbob 9y ago

The idea of "hey, this strange thing worked for me, and I don't wholly understand all parts of the system but it seems to have some results" is pretty much the core of what "hacking" is, right?

Niksko 9y ago
Your analogy is close but flawed in a major way. The underlying assumption when hacking is that if you don't understand the internals of something that's ok, but you can rely on understanding the interface, and your manipulation of the interface is skilled enough that you can get the results you need. In this case, we don't even remotely understand the interface or manipulating it.
- scarecrowbob 9y ago
  Consider the case of two kinds of users operating on some kind of interface that is unfamiliar, say, MS Word. One class of user will consult a manual and try to find the right answer, or perhaps will call an expert. Another class of user will just start pushing buttons to see what happens, because they have a rough familiarity with the system even if the specific interface is not well understood. It's that second class that I am thinking about when I think about how "hackers" operate. In that case, I get that it's dangerous to mess around with a system whose internals you don't know about... but at the same time, there is a kind of fantasy that somehow other folks have a privileged knowledge of what our bodies do. Personally, I quit wheat and dairy (and reduced my alcohol consumption) because it's a specific tree allergy season here. I have a couple possible accounts of why this is working (because I believe that it is) but I don't really understand the interface or even what I am manipulating when I alter my diet like that... I just know that I can breath, whereas historically I have terrible allergies at this time of year. Feel kind of like a hacky solutions... it's not an engineered solution, that's for sure.
paulcole 9y ago
Do you say that people who take spoonfuls of cinnamon to cure their diabetes are hackers?

spelunker 9y ago

I think this happens often around here on anything non-tech related. Surprise, being smart doesn't mean you know everything ;-)

comstock 9y ago
It doesn’t of course, but it seems reasonable to hope that people (particularly “smart” people) would try and support arguments/suggestions with data.
RobertRoberts 9y ago
But I appreciate the high quality of discussion that intelligence can bring to a topic many of us don't understand. Who really understands how meltdown and spectre work without asking? Smart people ask questions, and like answers. Add wisdom, and you can appreciate answers that challenge your own biases. [edit: clarification]

InclinedPlane 9y ago

Also anything science related.

RobertRoberts 9y ago

I find the opposite to be true. I think it's terrible that really smart people will often times blindly trust a certain sect of society on health issues, even when there's evidence that says they shouldn't. And then publicly shame others for finding ways to heal themselves.

ekianjo 9y ago

> group of incredibly smart individuals It's not because you are smart that you can't be ignorant of certain things at the same time. Even smart people can be fooled about stuff they are not familiar with. It's like trusting blindly the stories on your newspaper.

dawhizkid 9y ago

Nutrition science is, in general, a massive joke. It's more frustrating that the scientific/medical community will stand by the status quo because proving something to be true of humans is so incredibly difficult. Edit: IMO, "hacking" is simply recognizing that the scientific community moves at a glacial pace and not waiting around for "experts" to arrive at a consensus 30 years from now to change something about your lifestyle/diet today that has been shown to be true of animals/smaller scale human studies many times over.

refurb 9y ago

Smart people often fall prey to "I'm smart and an expert in 'X', how hard could 'Y' be?"

oliwarner 9y ago

Yeah, me too. It's more than just the comments in this case though. > Here's a 15yo uncontrolled epidemiological study of acne, that blames everything on diet, go forth and treat your own skin conditions! The paper is more restrained than that, but that's not how people interpret it. Problem solved. Eat like a Bantu. Science would use this as bearing for a hypothesis to do an single-factor studies.