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The island where people forget to die

nytimes.com

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Re: The island where people forget to die

#61

Post by pmelendez »

reasonattlm wrote: post #6

Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies. Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidant…

I would speculate that the main reason of his recovery was associated with life style. Sometimes we underestimate the effect of stress in our lives.

I just came back from the doctor today because a lesion on my foot and the doctor told "funny things happens on your skin because of stress"

Re: The island where people forget to die

#62

Post by pmelendez »

pg wrote: post #60
reasonattlm wrote: post #6

Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies. Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidant…

If there's one thing I wish I could do to improve HN, it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically. Unsophisticated people read an article like this and think: Gosh, I better eat honey for breakfast! People a little more sophisticated think: Hey, this is anecdotal evidence! Yeah, we know that. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article? Is it not at least a source…

> "If there is one thing I wish I could do to improve HN it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically."

Do you have some data that we could use to play with? That sounds like a nice problem to solve.

Re: The island where people forget to die

#63

Post by pg »

pmelendez wrote: post #62
pg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's one thing I wish I could do to improve HN, it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically. Unsophisticated people read an article like this and think: Gosh, I better eat honey for breakfast! People a little more sophisticated think: Hey, this is anecdotal evidence! Yeah, we know that. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article? Is it not at least a source…

> "If there is one thing I wish I could do to improve HN it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically." Do you have some data that we could use to play with? That sounds like a nice problem to solve.

You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments.

If anyone wants to try to train a filter to detect this sort of comment, I'd be very interested to see the result.

Re: The island where people forget to die

#64

Post by koko775 »

starpilot wrote: post #51
binxbolling wrote: post #24

TIL that even if you study longevity for 10+ years, you're never allowed to share anecdotes (or god forbid, close with a joke) ever again unless you're prepared to be crucified by twentysomething pseudo-experts in Silicon Valley.

I think this is how every expert in a non-CS/IT field feels about HN commentary on their field. 95% of what I read about aviation/aerospace here makes me cringe. It's like hearing my parents talk about computers, but with 10x more self-assurance.

Seconded. Any posts having to deal with entertainment media have proven to have armchair experts all over them, and few if any voices of reason.

Re: The island where people forget to die

#65

Post by Alex3917 »

pg wrote: post #60
reasonattlm wrote: post #6

Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies. Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidant…

If there's one thing I wish I could do to improve HN, it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically. Unsophisticated people read an article like this and think: Gosh, I better eat honey for breakfast! People a little more sophisticated think: Hey, this is anecdotal evidence! Yeah, we know that. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article? Is it not at least a source…

It's been a while since I've coined a new term on HN, but I think now is as appropriate a time as ever:

cargo cult skepticism.

edit: ~10 previous results on Google. :-/

Re: The island where people forget to die

#66

Post by Terretta »

reasonattlm wrote: post #6

Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies. Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidant…

> Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies.

You may have read a different article. As this article noted before even the first of so many page breaks:

"And in Loma Linda, Calif., we identified a population of Seventh-day Adventists in which most of the adherents’ life expectancy exceeded the American average by about a decade."

A full decade, within the same American safety net, is a tremendous difference. Born SDA myself, I can tell you that Loma Linda is not a hotbed of exercise and caloric restriction. (And the benefits are not localized to Loma Linda; the researchers hit upon SDAs there because the concentration in Loma Linda was high enough to show up on zip based data).

You say that anything other than these two makes a difference takes a mountain of evidence to overcome, well, we have that evidence. SDAs are generally just as sedentary and eat just as much as the average non SDA next door.

What SDAs in Loma Linda do differently: don't drink, don't smoke, take 24 hours away from stress each week, and to a large extent, avoid meat with an otherwise normal diet of grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, and dairy.

Re: The island where people forget to die

#67

Post by hntester123 »

pg wrote: post #63
pmelendez wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "If there is one thing I wish I could do to improve HN it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically." Do you have some data that we could use to play with? That sounds like a nice problem to solve.

You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments. If anyone wants to try to train a filter to detect this sort of comment, I'd be very interested to see the result.

>You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments.

Wouldn't that require real AI though? I thought for a minute that NLP (Natural Language Processing, not the other meaning(s) of the acronym) might help, but then thought that it may not work for cases where the comment is quoting another comment. Note: I'm not at all an expert in any of those fields, just interested.

Re: The island where people forget to die

#68

Post by hntester123 »

potatolicious wrote: post #54
relix wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously suggesting that as long as anyone has been working on something for years, that we should accept what he says without looking at it in a critical way? The enlightenment must have passed you by.

No, what he's saying is that if you're inexperienced and completely uninvolved in a field, you should think critically about what an experienced insider has to say, and reconsider snarky flippant dismissals. One thing that annoys me about software culture in general is how, by virtue of being a programmer, people are also political scientists, economists, biologists, chemists, astronomers, manufacturing experts, doct…

>One thing that annoys me about software culture in general is how, by virtue of being a programmer, people are also political scientists, economists, biologists, chemists, astronomers, manufacturing experts, doctors, nutritionists, sociologists, anthropologists, and the grand poobah of dismissing speech because of the way it's phrased.

+N.

Re: The island where people forget to die

#69

Post by reinhardt »

tambourine_man wrote: post #47
kolinko wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the fact, that the man could've been simply misdiagnosed. It was 60s after all...

It's always possible of course, but from the article: As he recalls, nine other doctors confirmed the diagnosis. So if true, chances of a misdiagnosis are pretty slim.

The verdicts of 10 doctors of the same field, in the same era about the same patient are not exactly independent variables.

Re: The island where people forget to die

#70

Post by sakai »

pg wrote: post #63
pmelendez wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "If there is one thing I wish I could do to improve HN it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically." Do you have some data that we could use to play with? That sounds like a nice problem to solve.

You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments. If anyone wants to try to train a filter to detect this sort of comment, I'd be very interested to see the result.

I'll consider that a challenge...

To any that have experience getting comments data from HN -- what's the fastest, most polite way to do this? And am I correct in remembering that there's some aggressive rate-limiting for crawling the site?

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