(1) Indeed, I am commenting on this particular mode of understanding, where one keeps a journal, waits for a deviation of a test from normal, and then tries to correlate the journal with the deviations after the fact.
(2) "NO published result related to nutrition" is overbroad. Obesity for example is clearly related to nutrition and there are many published results where many variables which could affect obesity are quite well-isolated -- twin studies to isolate genetics, studies of how obesity rates vary based on physical location in various cities, and so forth.
(3) I aim to "discard the results" only insofar as they claim that they have measured an agentic relationship, which these results have indeed claimed to measure. Seth's official conclusion is that this was "data that suggested butter improved my mental function." If the variable is not isolated, then attributing the agency to butter is worthless. It might have been an otherwise random variation at around the same time as he switched to butter -- the data he's describing has a 40ms variance as well as certain long-term patterns and the effect that he's describing is a 30ms improvement, so it's quite possible that in an autoregressive model you would just see one substantial "step down" of 80ms which doesn't get compensated due to hysteresis. Or perhaps the correlation is indeed correct but wrongly attributed -- perhaps Seth has not noticed but he tends to use butter to fry peppers and pork fat to fry meats, and now that he is using butter his diet contains 2% more vegetables. Perhaps now that he uses more butter, he eats more toast and gets 2% more fiber in his diet, without having written that down in his journal.
The problem is precisely the word "makes" in your sentence "butter makes Seth faster at arithmetic." You have absolutely no evidence that it's the butter which is making Seth faster at it. And that is why the conclusion "butter makes Seth faster at arithmetic" is not a scientific conclusion.
> Obesity for example is clearly related to nutrition and there are many published results where many variables which could affect obesity are quite well-isolated -- twin studies to isolate genetics, studies of how obesity rates vary based on physical location in various cities, and so forth.
Care to show me, for example, a single nutrition study where "skin color of participant" was a variable controlled for? It is known that cholesterol metabolism (eventually into) Vitamin D is greatly dependent on skin color -- and yet, it does not appear in a single nutrition study, despite the greatly known significance of both serum cholesterol and serum vitamin D.
I'm taking this ad absurdum in an attempt to show you that if you apply this standard rigorously (as one should), then no result really holds up.
And by the way, "obesity is clearly related to nutrition" is only true in the sense that "everything is related to nutrition". There are no results of things that affect obesity that are "quite well isolated" in humans that I'm aware of.
> Or perhaps the correlation is indeed correct but wrongly attributed -- perhaps Seth has not noticed but he tends to use butter to fry peppers and pork fat to fry meats, and now that he is using butter his diet contains 2% more vegetables ...
If you actually followed him, you'd know that's not the case. He is very diligent about isolating variables as much as possible, and thoroughly documenting his day, including food intake, how much TV he watched, etc -- and the butter hypothesis was actually an attempt to strengthen a hypothesis having to deal with animal derived fats (which among other things, included bacon). It wasn't just observational - it was part of a variable isolation experiment, that (within limits) was comparably rigorous to any other non-blinded test (which are far more common than you'd think; in fact, many if not most supposedly double blinded tests aren't).
> You have absolutely no evidence that it's the butter which is making Seth faster at it.
He has much more evidence for than you'd expect from this short posting, if you care to look at it. This conclusion is indeed supported by data, and is scientifically valid.
> I'm taking this ad absurdum in an attempt to show you that if you apply this standard rigorously (as one should), then no result really holds up.
Then you should be willing to do what happens when a reductio ad absurdum fails: give up and admit you are wrong.
> And by the way, "obesity is clearly related to nutrition" is only true in the sense that "everything is related to nutrition".
Uh, no. Obesity is a nutritional disorder, as distinct from other things like having cats, which are neither caused nor hampered by good nutrition. What the hell are you smoking?
> He has much more evidence for than you'd expect from this short posting, if you care to look at it. This conclusion is indeed supported by data, and is scientifically valid.
I searched his website and all I could find was one particular crappy-looking graph with a bunch of discussion about his responses to vague questions, and an ad-hoc explanation (a competing omega-3 deficiency) when the data did not fit his expected pattern.
Thanks. For some reason, I was unable to find this when I last looked (might have been before this came out).
> Uh, no. Obesity is a nutritional disorder, as distinct from other things like having cats, which are neither caused nor hampered by good nutrition. What the hell are you smoking?
Are antibiotics with no nutritional value considered nutrition these days? There are hundreds of substances that seem to cause obesity independent of nutrition (that is, when isolated as a variable compared to nutrition), most prominently psychiatric drugs, but -- as is shown by this study -- also antibiotics, which are supposed to be "nutritionally inert".
> I searched his website and all I could find was one particular crappy-looking graph with a bunch of discussion about his responses to vague questions, and an ad-hoc explanation (a competing omega-3 deficiency) when the data did not fit his expected pattern.
He did not yet bother summarizing these results (the way he did for his weight loss theories, in http://media.sethroberts.net/about/whatmakesfoodfattening.pd... - but there's a lot more discussion of it through the years) , I suspect that it is because he does not believe he nailed anything yet. However, he asks people to "try at home", and several of his results (mostly regarding dietary fat, but also about mood and sleep) have been confirmed by other people as well.
He's under no "publish or perish" stress like most papers you see, so he isn't trying to get anything production quality. I've been following him for 7 years now, and while it isn't blinded or double blinded, it's otherwise as good as (and usually better) than observational studies I find in top rated journals.
(2) "NO published result related to nutrition" is overbroad. Obesity for example is clearly related to nutrition and there are many published results where many variables which could affect obesity are quite well-isolated -- twin studies to isolate genetics, studies of how obesity rates vary based on physical location in various cities, and so forth.
(3) I aim to "discard the results" only insofar as they claim that they have measured an agentic relationship, which these results have indeed claimed to measure. Seth's official conclusion is that this was "data that suggested butter improved my mental function." If the variable is not isolated, then attributing the agency to butter is worthless. It might have been an otherwise random variation at around the same time as he switched to butter -- the data he's describing has a 40ms variance as well as certain long-term patterns and the effect that he's describing is a 30ms improvement, so it's quite possible that in an autoregressive model you would just see one substantial "step down" of 80ms which doesn't get compensated due to hysteresis. Or perhaps the correlation is indeed correct but wrongly attributed -- perhaps Seth has not noticed but he tends to use butter to fry peppers and pork fat to fry meats, and now that he is using butter his diet contains 2% more vegetables. Perhaps now that he uses more butter, he eats more toast and gets 2% more fiber in his diet, without having written that down in his journal.
The problem is precisely the word "makes" in your sentence "butter makes Seth faster at arithmetic." You have absolutely no evidence that it's the butter which is making Seth faster at it. And that is why the conclusion "butter makes Seth faster at arithmetic" is not a scientific conclusion.