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There's a trend of funding & publishing research that yields completely obvious results and when you point it out you always get downvoted to hell on HN, don't

There's a trend of funding & publishing research that yields completely obvious results and when you point it out you always get downvoted to hell on HN, don't know why.

wutbrodo 7y ago
It's because occasionally "obvious" claims are wrong, and having research that confirms them gives us a firmer foundation of knowledge. The article mentions that this is one of the first studies to quantify energy expenditure in this way, which would mean it's bringing the "obvious" claims into the edifice of scientific knowledge. Non-novel research results are an important (and underrated/underincentivized) part of science. The article may be leaning too heavily on claims that the results are surprising, but that has little to do with the research.
- Pulcinella 7y ago
  I do wish we could just buckle down and figure out diet and exercise related health knowledge. So many diet and exercise related studies just have too small sample sizes and are too narrow. This makes sense because it’s expensive and time consuming to track a lot of people’s diet and exercise routines to get rigorous results. I think, however, we should just bite the bullet and pay $10 billion (or however much) to precisely track several thousand people’s diet, exercise, sleep, etc and figure this out. Basically pay people as a full time job to eat and do what you tell them (ethically of course. They aren’t slaves. We just need better data than sample sizes of twenty people trying to track their own health with self reported diaries).
  - jvagner 7y ago
    Most of what we need to know, for most of the population, we already know. Even if the effort you suggested were to be done, the noise would continue to distract in exactly the same way. I've worked as a tech exec, and I've worked as a personal trainer, and I've competed... we have the knowledge. We know how people can be healthy, we know how people can live long lives, and we know how people can have bodies that are a benefit to their lifetimes, not a burden. I remember a study, it graphed a demographic of people across a scale from "healthy" to "unhealthy". What they found was that people were heavily represented on either end of the scale, but to a significant degree, not at all in between. So, the choice is... people's (barring economics, to some degree, I'll concede -- though, being poor in other countries isn't the health catastrophe that it can be in some first world countries).
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      Yup, there's a lot of information that can seem to point in contradictory directions, but you get some very, very clear signal out of it in a couple of important directions. People still seem pretty resistant to simple interventions like this though. I think a big part of it is that most people have an incredibly powerful status quo bias, and get extremely uneasy with diverging from the norm of behavior they see around them (even if those norms are of generally far worse health than they're targeting). I've spent the last decade incrementally understanding more about nutrition and optimizing my diet, and I've reached the point where the divergence between mine and my friends' diets has become pretty insane. Not coincidentally, now that we're starting to enter the period where age catches up with our bodies, I'm by far the healthiest, by both appearance and symptoms. I've had friends ask me what I do, but it's far enough outside the norm that they assume it's impossible or that I have iron willpower (spoiler: I really don't. If you eat healthy, your tastes shift towards healthy food). This is a general problem with people; in the narrow case, it could be solved by changing their environment (ie blanketing the country with PSAs with simple messages, like we did for smoking). It would do infinitely more good to somehow grant people the intellectual confidence (or indeed, capability) to avoid blunt heuristics like the so-called "wisdom" of crowds, but I have no earthly idea how one would do that.
cercatrova 7y ago
Sometimes you may believe some things to be obvious, but they must be confirmed through the scientific method for further progress in that field to continue. It's like writing Hello World in a new language before doing more advanced things.
Scarblac 7y ago
But this is worse. The article doesn't focus on switching around your routine at all! It's not even about effectiveness of training, it's about total energy output. It's a HN comment that repeats a trope and then people on HN complain that it's obvious.

There's a trend of funding & publishing research that yields completely obvious results and when you point it out you always get downvoted to hell on HN, don't know why.

wutbrodo 7y ago

It's because occasionally "obvious" claims are wrong, and having research that confirms them gives us a firmer foundation of knowledge. The article mentions that this is one of the first studies to quantify energy expenditure in this way, which would mean it's bringing the "obvious" claims into the edifice of scientific knowledge. Non-novel research results are an important (and underrated/underincentivized) part of science. The article may be leaning too heavily on claims that the results are surprising, but that has little to do with the research.

Pulcinella 7y ago
I do wish we could just buckle down and figure out diet and exercise related health knowledge. So many diet and exercise related studies just have too small sample sizes and are too narrow. This makes sense because it’s expensive and time consuming to track a lot of people’s diet and exercise routines to get rigorous results. I think, however, we should just bite the bullet and pay $10 billion (or however much) to precisely track several thousand people’s diet, exercise, sleep, etc and figure this out. Basically pay people as a full time job to eat and do what you tell them (ethically of course. They aren’t slaves. We just need better data than sample sizes of twenty people trying to track their own health with self reported diaries).
- jvagner 7y ago
  Most of what we need to know, for most of the population, we already know. Even if the effort you suggested were to be done, the noise would continue to distract in exactly the same way. I've worked as a tech exec, and I've worked as a personal trainer, and I've competed... we have the knowledge. We know how people can be healthy, we know how people can live long lives, and we know how people can have bodies that are a benefit to their lifetimes, not a burden. I remember a study, it graphed a demographic of people across a scale from "healthy" to "unhealthy". What they found was that people were heavily represented on either end of the scale, but to a significant degree, not at all in between. So, the choice is... people's (barring economics, to some degree, I'll concede -- though, being poor in other countries isn't the health catastrophe that it can be in some first world countries).
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    Yup, there's a lot of information that can seem to point in contradictory directions, but you get some very, very clear signal out of it in a couple of important directions. People still seem pretty resistant to simple interventions like this though. I think a big part of it is that most people have an incredibly powerful status quo bias, and get extremely uneasy with diverging from the norm of behavior they see around them (even if those norms are of generally far worse health than they're targeting). I've spent the last decade incrementally understanding more about nutrition and optimizing my diet, and I've reached the point where the divergence between mine and my friends' diets has become pretty insane. Not coincidentally, now that we're starting to enter the period where age catches up with our bodies, I'm by far the healthiest, by both appearance and symptoms. I've had friends ask me what I do, but it's far enough outside the norm that they assume it's impossible or that I have iron willpower (spoiler: I really don't. If you eat healthy, your tastes shift towards healthy food). This is a general problem with people; in the narrow case, it could be solved by changing their environment (ie blanketing the country with PSAs with simple messages, like we did for smoking). It would do infinitely more good to somehow grant people the intellectual confidence (or indeed, capability) to avoid blunt heuristics like the so-called "wisdom" of crowds, but I have no earthly idea how one would do that.

cercatrova 7y ago

Sometimes you may believe some things to be obvious, but they must be confirmed through the scientific method for further progress in that field to continue. It's like writing Hello World in a new language before doing more advanced things.

Scarblac 7y ago

But this is worse. The article doesn't focus on switching around your routine at all! It's not even about effectiveness of training, it's about total energy output. It's a HN comment that repeats a trope and then people on HN complain that it's obvious.