[zorbo]

Forgive me, but I'm having trouble understanding why his death is significant for a crowd such as Hacker news? I didn't know about him, and I don't mean to talk ill of the dead, but from a quick google it would seem he's mostly just a dietary quack? Even if he wasn't a quack, I still don't really get his relevance.

[facepalm]

Self experimentation is very much in spirit with Hacker News. I think he was a great inspiration.

[001sky]

There are some odd comments on his blog. See, eg:

I know this is a rough time, but I’d like to ask: if you don’t already know for certain, please preserve any evidence, digital and physical, that might indicate why he died. If it was the result of one of his self-experiments, then I think he would want us to know.

[EpicEng]

Not really that odd considering his line of work. I'm sure a number of people have replicated his experiments on themselves and are now understandably concerned.

[whiddershins]

I down voted your comment because it is my understanding the only requirement for a post on hacker news is that it is deeply interesting. The idea that the poster child for quantified self, a movement intent on maximizing the application of current scientific knowledge for health and self improvement, died at 60, is deeply interesting to me.

[pbreit]

It sounds to me like he was a bit of a food hacker. Probably a slight stretch but I can see the relevance.

[zorbo]

That could be it. His blog is also full of all kinds of harmful medical advice not backed by any kind of knowledge of the subjects much less any kind of science. Generally not the kind of of crowd hacker news "associates" with.

[VLM]

"advice not backed by"

There is a well known separation between the theorist and the experimentalist mindset. He was one of the best of the experimentalists. A "soft science" guy with the math and computing skills to teach the "hard science" guys a lesson or two, despite the poor reputation of soft science guys in that area. My possibly mistaken observation is you're trying to apply theoretician morality (consensus building, rabid conformity, name dropping) to a guy who was nearly the cultural archetype of the ideal ultimate experimentalist.

Not surprisingly all his posts began with "So I temporarily doubled my daily butter intake while taking standardized psych intelligence tests before, during, and after the dietary change and the results were ..." and practically none of his blog posts began with "Like everyone else, I agree with Dr Phil's strategies for weight loss and anyone who doesn't agree with everyone else, all of the time, is inherently wrong ..."

Your judgment of his work is accurate and correct if you use theoretician criteria on his work. But he was focused on the near exact opposite, in experimentalism. And if you use the more appropriate experimentalist criteria on his experiments, he was Awesome for a soft sciences guy and could teach the supposedly elite math/CS skilled hard science guys, a thing or two about data analysis and presentation.

[gwern]

> There is a well known separation between the theorist and the experimentalist mindset. He was one of the best of the experimentalists.

He was a terrible experimentalist. He never used randomization or blinding; he never took into account any covariates like travel or smog (he lived in China and flew back and forth! and would still report A/B/A comparisons); he didn't even try to correct for time trends; and all of this was deliberate since he knew why you need good methodology and how abandoning all this stuff leads to systematically false results, and he went and did it all anyway. Roberts as critic was very different (and much superior to) Roberts as experimentalist.

[windexh8er]

I think "harmful" is subjective here. A diet recommended by "experts" and governments that suggests >50% "good" carbs is healthy is also subjective to me and the data backing it could also be described as "not back by any kind of knowledge...".

Harmful? No - you can't state that with any quantitative facts, what you've stated is pure postulation. The first thing I thought when I read this is that Seth's work and studies will be used as a scape goat to discredit the high cholesterol / high fat intake perspective on diet unfortunately.

"Generally not the kind of of crowd hacker news "associates" with." - It seems you haven't been here long.

[zorbo]

I wasn't really talking about his dietary recommendations, although those are probably harmful as well. I was talking more about his nonsense about the stuff he says about, for instance, pregnancy gingivitis. It's obvious he has absolutely no knowledge about the subject and he makes up his theories on the fly based on hunches. That alone makes me reasonably sure he's not very trustworthy. He routinely dismisses scientific findings and replaces them with his "n=1" nonsense. For someone who seemed to have at least somewhat of an influence, that's a very dangerous position to take.

> "Generally not the kind of of crowd hacker news "associates" with." - It seems you haven't been here long.

Good job on the passive aggressive attack there. Let me retort with "what are you, twelve?". Equally as convincing an argument I hope.

[bretpiatt]

I am unsure why you say, "not backed by any kind of knowledge of the subjects" -- is it because his PhD is in Psychology and not Biology/Medicine? Do you believe that he can't have an opinion and share his n=1 research just because he isn't part of the AgriPharma Industrial Complex? He's very clear about his methodology and results -- this is exactly the type of transparent experimentation and learning that I come to this site to hear about.

[prawn]

I don't know - there seem to be a fair number of people on HN very interested in these sorts of things going by the support for Soylent and so on.

[blueskin_]

As I understand it, it's as that is based on real research and not what someone feels it should be.

Haven't tried it myself, but open to it at some point.

Seth Roberts' 'diet' seems to be based on eating things with and without a flavour at different times; a bit of a WTF to say the least.

[VLM]

"a bit of a WTF to say the least."

Perhaps I can help clarify it a bit. Note that I liked the guy and his attitude (although I never met him) but have never embraced his research, may as well get biases out of the way.

As a psych prof he became very interested in WHY people get hungry. If you can control when and what you desire to eat, then you can eat whatever you desire whenever you want, yet you can trivially control your nutrition / weight.

Needless to say the hair shirt crowd and the neo puritan crowd see this as a direct attack against their core beliefs, no improvement should be possible, should be allowed, should even be non sin ful to think about, without agonizing suffering. Who is being rationally scientific and who is suffering from a mental illness impairing their day to day lifestyle is an interesting question where I have an intense bias.

Personally via experience I agree with most of his general theories although I disagree or have no opinion WRT some of his techniques and choices. For example I have a very low refined carb low grain low sugar diet, and the idea of eating a sickeningly sweet snickers bar now is kinda nauseous, so although I could trivially afford, obtain, and eat an entire box of snickers bars, there's no way I'd do it other than a survival situation, although as a young-ish adult I gobbled those things up with predictable results.

Seth's theories about how to get to that kind of ... mental state or whatever ... might sound a little weird. But they worked for him, and seem appropriate for a psych professor to professionally comment on, so he's probably completely correct, however weird it may sound. A psych prof commenting on psychological state (at least WRT appetite) probably has more wisdom than any CS/IT guy on HN commenting on a psych topic...

The controversy is all in the application. His theory seems sound, now its all people freaking out about how it can be (mis)applied. That's where all the screaming is happening, no one at a professional level seems to disparage his actual theoretical psych work.

Its like debating the morals and ethics of Maxwells equations in a debate about net neutrality. Maxwell's probably right; doesn't imply much one way or another about the morality of the position purchased for the FCC. Although both topics are certainly in the same field of human endeavor.

[msandford]

Harmful medical advice? It might be less proven, but the science of "fat is bad" is far from overwhelming. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18615352

[leoc]

I'm certainly not going to suggest that Seth Roberts' ideas are gospel, but given the evidently poorly-supported and indeed sometimes harmful nature of some of the advice we've been given, with great assurance, by the official experts on diet I'm not sure who it would be crazier to pay attention to.

[theorique]

He was a body hacker / life hacker.

[DanBC]

"Dietary quack" is a reasonably sizable chunk of HN audience.

[jordanb]

I guess a lot of people around here subscribe to various "life extension" diet regimes. There are many related posts in any case. I think the OP may be a critic of Mr. Robert's regime posting in a moment of schadenfreude.

[jnbiche]

I think it's very bad form to hypothesize on the OP's motives, when it's entirely possible s/he is just someone who lost a friend.

[yiedyie]

Not according to this tweet: https://twitter.com/martharotter/status/460658234307530752

[qeorge]

I flagged your comment because it contains an ad hominem attack on the submitter.

[marincounty]

If you spend a fair amount of time sitting in front of these computers; you should take a slight interest in nutrition. Or, I guess you strap your ipad to your mountian bike when coding? I myself don't feel sitting in front of a computer is healthy. I do try to limit my caloric intake.

[coldtea]

What does this has to do with cooky dietary ideas?