13 ms·

"Diseases are not a monolith and you cannot assume low risk of some diseases means low risk of others. That is wild guesswork passed off as logic..." Diseases

"Diseases are not a monolith and you cannot assume low risk of some diseases means low risk of others. That is wild guesswork passed off as logic..." Diseases are not a monolith, but they do tend to arise and fall in some specific clusters, and that is not "logic", good or bad (too many computer-minded people drag logic into the chaos that is biology), but rather a long-time empirical observation, albeit with some exceptions.

greygoo222 8mo ago
Your testicles, empirically, shrink when it gets cold. Do you think measuring their shadow is an acceptable substitute for a thermometer?
- inglor_cz 8mo ago
  You are really obsessed with my testicles. That is a weird comparison, but at least you know that you're not a bot. This would be too weird for a LLM to produce. In general, I don't think your irony is as strong as you think. Shrinkage of various materials in the cold is the original basis for a thermometer. Of course it is better to use something better-observable like mercury. But in absence of an industrial civilization, you don't have mercury to measure.
greygoo222 8mo ago
Sigh. Sure, if you had a gun to your head and you knew nothing else, it would be better to guess that a given population (hunter-gatherers) with low rates of some illnesses (T2D, HBP) also had low rates of another illness (CRC) than the reverse. Okay. That's a slightly better-than-chance guess, not anywhere near a solid basis for speculation. "Anyways, it makes sense that marathoners get CRC because hunter-gatherers probably don't run that much" is bongcloud lalaland tier guesswork.
- inglor_cz 8mo ago
  "makes sense that marathoners get CRC because hunter-gatherers probably don't run that much" That is a misinterpretation of what I wrote. Let me reformulate. "Marathons are so much more extreme than what we used to do in the Stone Age, that some pathologies resulting from such long-term physical overload are to be expected." I don't see anything lala about that. You do extreme things, you reap some consequences, sooner or later. I would say that marathons go beyond our design parameters, but my experience in HN is that the "design" metaphor always conjures some people who consider it a dog-whistle for intelligent design (as opposed to evolution), not just an imprecise metaphor, as metaphors usually are. So I avoid it in order not to attract a senseless fight.

greygoo222 8mo ago

Your testicles, empirically, shrink when it gets cold. Do you think measuring their shadow is an acceptable substitute for a thermometer?

inglor_cz 8mo ago
You are really obsessed with my testicles. That is a weird comparison, but at least you know that you're not a bot. This would be too weird for a LLM to produce. In general, I don't think your irony is as strong as you think. Shrinkage of various materials in the cold is the original basis for a thermometer. Of course it is better to use something better-observable like mercury. But in absence of an industrial civilization, you don't have mercury to measure.

greygoo222 8mo ago

Sigh. Sure, if you had a gun to your head and you knew nothing else, it would be better to guess that a given population (hunter-gatherers) with low rates of some illnesses (T2D, HBP) also had low rates of another illness (CRC) than the reverse. Okay. That's a slightly better-than-chance guess, not anywhere near a solid basis for speculation. "Anyways, it makes sense that marathoners get CRC because hunter-gatherers probably don't run that much" is bongcloud lalaland tier guesswork.

inglor_cz 8mo ago
"makes sense that marathoners get CRC because hunter-gatherers probably don't run that much" That is a misinterpretation of what I wrote. Let me reformulate. "Marathons are so much more extreme than what we used to do in the Stone Age, that some pathologies resulting from such long-term physical overload are to be expected." I don't see anything lala about that. You do extreme things, you reap some consequences, sooner or later. I would say that marathons go beyond our design parameters, but my experience in HN is that the "design" metaphor always conjures some people who consider it a dog-whistle for intelligent design (as opposed to evolution), not just an imprecise metaphor, as metaphors usually are. So I avoid it in order not to attract a senseless fight.