Seth Roberts

> - meal GI can be lowered by simply consuming more protein/fat based foods, or high grain foods alongside the food. I'm not refuting your GI point but the combination of foods does have an impact on how they are digested. E.g. want to fatten a cow? Give it plenty of water with its food. Other combinations such as wholemeal bread & fats are better than fats without wholemeal. Denatured flour will re-absorb vitamins & minerals from the other foods on the plate. I'm not advocating the Shang-ri-la but http://www.sethroberts.net/ has some good reading on the subject, particularly "What Makes Food Fattening? A Pavlovian Theory of Weight Control" - http://www.sethroberts.net/about/whatmakesfoodfattening.pdf

Well, it was enough for a New York Times Bestseller: http://www.sethroberts.net/

The Shangri-La diet is the lifehack of the century (not a diet in the traditional sense): http://www.sethroberts.net/ Seriously. You simply won't want to eat, and if you think you want to eat, you'll be surprised at how untasty that delicious looking candy bar or pasta is once it hits your lips. It's almost as if your body conspires against your best efforts to gain weight, which is a nice reversal for once. In conjunction, take a high-quality multivitamin like SuperNutrition or Alive and you'll also find yourself with enough energy that you'll go crazy if you don't exercise. Yeah, it helps you want to exercise. That is key for me. It's so much easier to take your daily olive oil and find yourself automatically disgusted at the sight of heavy food than to rely on sheer discipline, which is probably why you're overweight to begin with. And besides, olive oil is good for preventing disease. It also helps that you'll feel the effects working on the same day you start, and you should see an encouraging difference on the scale a week later (I lost 5 pounds on the first week with no exercise - almost scary). You win, like, 3 times on Shangri-La + high-quality multivitamin, and you don't have to have much discipline to get started.

Seth Roberts would agree. http://blog.sethroberts.net/ Look for his postings on Omega3, Flaxseed oil etc.

Have you read http://blog.sethroberts.net/ ? It's not clear to me if that addresses your question, but Roberts criticizes professional science for too much focus on expensive testing of popular hypotheses and not enough on generating and cheap winnowing of ideas.

I can assure you Seth Roberts has heard of the placebo effect. http://blog.sethroberts.net/?s=placebo

Seth Roberts has a theory that foods that taste exactly the same every time (particularly those with a high glycemic index) increase appetite and that unfamiliar or flavorless foods decrease appetite. I recommend his paper on the subject: http://sethroberts.net/about/whatmakesfoodfattening.pdf.

I like EBM. I would love to live in a world in which it is practiced properly. One of the biggest problems with EBM, though, is that what often is advertised EBM, actually isn't. My ex was a medical doctor, and for fun I used to read NEMJ and BMJ articles through her subscription. If you trace through references, you often find a (reasonably rigorous) study with reasonable effect observed on a group 40 norwegian women aged 40-50; which in a later article referencing it is assumed to apply to all women in that age group; and through the years is assumed to apply to all women in all age groups. And that's the part that is "easy" to trace (except no one ever does, and it's not really easy) Additionally, the statistical evidence is inherently weaker than is presented (in a way which no one can actually evaluate) due to the lack of accounting for negative results and unreported trials. Also, accepted login in EBM is not acceptable from a math perspective. Seth Robert's recent blog post gives a striking example: http://blog.sethroberts.net/2012/10/11/jama-jumps-to-conclusions-about… ; Tell someone about YOUR (n=1, but better controlled than most medical tests!) experiment with Vitamin D, and they'll likely counter with "Oh, but that has been refuted. It's just placebo". That's a big percentage of how EBM is used in practice. And that's the part I don't like.

> Seth Robert's recent blog post gives a striking example: http://blog.sethroberts.net/2012/10/11/jama-jumps-to-conclus... ; Tell someone about YOUR (n=1, but better controlled than most medical tests!) experiment with Vitamin D, and they'll likely counter with "Oh, but that has been refuted. It's just placebo". That's a big percentage of how EBM is used in practice. Actually, it's funny that you bring that up. Yes, my own vitamin D self-experiments were more rigorous than Roberts's vitamin D experiments/anecdata, and both of my self-experiments used blinding precisely to avoid the placebo refutation, so anyone trying to refute them so simplistically would be engaged in poor reasoning; but Roberts is not innocent himself of poor reasoning himself! I pointed out in his previous post on that study that his criticism makes no sense since the injection happened once a month, which implies the following dilemma (if we believe his criticism): the effect from bad timing should either be undetectable due to contaminating only 1/31 of the data (1 day out of each month), or if the negative effect is persistent over many days, renders every single anecdote & self-experiment (including mine) completely unreliable trash since none of them were expecting an effect which contaminates so many days. So either his criticism is wrong or his entire collection of data is worthless. (Besides that, plenty of vitamin D studies have shown benefits while completely ignoring administration time.…

The original meaning of a steep learning curve was exactly as he says. It's been changed in popular use from "easy" to "hard". (Rummage rummage rummage...): "Early uses of the metaphor focused on the pattern's positive aspect, namely the potential for quick progress in learning ... Over time, however, the metaphor has become more commonly used to focus on the pattern's negative aspect, namely the difficulty of learning once one gets beyond the basics of a subject." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve "One natural interpretation of such a curve, which was the predominant early usage (according to Wikipedia) and still exists in some technical circles, is that the thing being learnt is easy — a great amount of learning happens in a small amount of time. This is the opposite of the popular usage." http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6209/steep-learning-curve "The phrase everyone gets wrong. Outside experimental psychology, where the term originated, I have never seen a correct usage. Learning curves show performance (e.g., percent correct) as a function of amount of training (e.g., number of trials). A steep learning curve means the organization, person, or animal quickly went from low to high performance — in other words, learning was fast." http://blog.sethroberts.net/2008/08/18/steep-learning-curve/ alt.english.usage: "The learning curve for bridge is not steep - on the contrary. But I have seen other examples of this confusing of "steep curve" with…

The best thing you can start with is to always have simple-to-prepare, healthy snacks on hand. See this excellent, free minimalist "cookbook" - http://thestonesoup.com/blog/2010/06/a-free-e-cookbook/ Eat lots of vegetables. If you don't like them, there are ways to teach your body to like them, with calorie signalling - if you persistently eat something, along with a high calorie load, your body will be conditioned to like it. (As a reward system.) Also, seriously, try the Shangri-La diet. Despite the redonkulous name, it's based on scientific research that really strongly suggests that the body's hunger/craving systems are controlled like a thermostat, that you can reset by giving the body the right kind of "food cue" as to the environment around it/food available. Research paper: http://www.sethroberts.net/science/ You're not craving chocolate, nachos & soda because your body needs something - you're craving them because sugar creates an addictive cycle in some people. (Not all - SOME.) You should also see a doctor and get your fasting blood sugar checked because it's entirely possible that you have a blood sugar-related disorder, aka Syndrome X, insulinimia/insulin resistance, glucose intolerance, and so on.

Seth Roberts wrote that he noticed a similar correlation in 1995 which he hypothesized came down to "morning faces". If he saw faces in the morning, he was happier the next day. He went on to test this therapy on himself for many years: https://sethroberts.net/morning-faces-therapy-resources/

I'm definitely not trying to be argumentative. But it's interesting to look at what seems like an opposing viewpoint on this. Here's a psychologist who said that the body reacts by developing an _increased tolerance_ to drugs like caffeine and heroin, based on the time of day and situation in which those drugs are taken: http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/02/04/philip-seymour-hoffmans-death-f… Again, I don't doubt what you're saying about the effects of caffeine on you. Not at all. I bring this up because it's an interesting counterpoint and I don't know how to resolve it. I don't know how to think about this. The original article focuses on specific immune suppressing drugs. Maybe the body behaves differently in the face of drugs like caffeine or heroin? Maybe the body reacts in one direction sometimes and the other at other times for some reason (?)

To me this sounds like admin trying to save money. I found some more discussion in a couple places: http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/02/17/cheating-at-caltech/ https://www.quora.com/Are-all-exams-at-Caltech-take-home-exams

You're one of the few people I've seen mention the usage of baby shampoo. I saw it mentioned as a treatment for chronic sinus infections. http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/01/19/journal-of-personal-science-how…

Seth Roberts wasn't a hacker, but he was friends with Aaron Swartz: http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/07/22/google-yes-wikipedia-yes-aaron-… Swartz also wrote about Roberts' Shangri-La Diet on his blog, claiming that through it "losing weight has to be one of the easiest things I’ve ever done": http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/losingweight

This is a good but short summary of some of Seth's projects, from an old blog post of his. http://blog.sethroberts.net/2012/08/22/why-self-track-the-possibility-…

I'd be really interested in knowing his cause of death. He has had extremely high fat intake due to all his experimentation: http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/11/25/butter-and-arithmetic-how-much-…

Link to full post: http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/03/11/nick-szabo-is-satoshi-nakamoto-…

Another very simple thing I use when procrastination strikes is Seth Roberts Magic Dots technique. ( http://blog.sethroberts.net/category/procrastination/magic-dots/ ) He came up with it based on reinforcement studies in pigeons. There are more details on the linked page, but basically whilst working you just put a dot on a piece of paper every 6 minutes in the shape of a square, then join all the dots with a line. Something about doing this essentially meaningless thing improves motivation and throughput for me.

Also: orange-tinted glasses. I have delayed sleep phase syndrome as well and am giving them a go. http://blog.sethroberts.net/2013/11/12/orange-glasses-at-night-improve…

Take home final exams are everywhere and they can easily be some of the most challenging. I like this story of one of Tyler Cowen's final exams[1]: "Tyler [Cowen] once walked into class the day of the final exam and said, “Here is the exam. Write your own questions. Write your own answers. Harder questions and better answers get more points.” Then he walked out. The funniest thing was when a student came in late and I had to explain to him what the exam was and he didn’t believe me!" [1] http://blog.sethroberts.net/2012/08/09/tyler-cowens-unusual-final-exam…

Potential silver lining: http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/02/25/the-baltimore-shipyard-study/

This guy (Berkeley professor) does some interesting self-experiments and body hacking http://blog.sethroberts.net/category/self-experimentation/

Seth Roberts has made his entire reputation on self-experimentation. (Partly on the strange things he claims to have learned by doing it, and also partly on his defense of it as a methodology.) He's written some papers that talk about the methodological concerns. Here are two that Google churned up: http://sethroberts.net/articles/2010%20The%20unreasonable%20effectiven… http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xc2h866 I can't honestly claim that he has successfully made n=1 experiments respectable, but I think it's safe to say he's very well aware of the criticism on these grounds and is not ignoring it.

Wanted to correct a mistake I noticed: Seth Roberts (as far as I know) has never documented trying a raw, whole foods diet. If you search his blog, you'll see that he has been tracking other things to see how they effect his sleep. Eating animal fat, standing on one leg, and sunlight are all examples. http://www.google.com/search?q=site:blog.sethroberts.net+sleep edit: Maybe he's referring to this post? http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2008/06/09/less-carbs-better-sleep/

Seth Roberts reported on this a long time ago, though he added a bit of fructose to his water http://www.sethroberts.net/about/whatmakesfoodfattening.pdf A farmers know, taking water with your meals increases calorie uptake too.

It's not directly related, but I just ran into an interesting article on data analysis. It includes pointers to some good texts on topic, but also has some tips which aren't covered in the standard texts. "Three Things Statistics Textbooks Don't Tell You" by Seth Roberts: http://sethroberts.net/about/2005_Three_Things_Statistics_Textbooks_Do…

Has anyone tried the Shangri-La Diet? Seems too simple not to try it. From wikipedia: "The diet itself consists of taking 100–400 calories in the form of extra-light (not extra-virgin) olive oil or sugar water per day, either all at once or spanned throughout the day. This must be consumed in a flavorless window, which is at least one hour after flavors have been consumed, and at least one hour before flavors will be consumed.[4] The consumption of these flavorless calories supposedly lowers the set point, and therefore, lowers weight." I just mention this because I've read the authors paper "Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight" and it seemed really interesting. Available here: http://sethroberts.net/science/

No that isn't "all you need to know" Have you read: http://www.sethroberts.net/about/whatmakesfoodfattening.pdf What about satiety of the food you eat? Eating fewer calories is easy if it's filling, less so if it isn't.