Nassim Nicholas Taleb: "We are considering a memorial a-la-Seth: A memorial one-day conference for all his friends and admirers, organized by his pals: John Durant, Tim Ferris, Tucker Max, Gary Taubes, and other members of that independent thinking clique who connected socially through Seth"
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1015217680...
Seth Roberts has died
111–120 of 134 posts
Re: Seth Roberts has died
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
From his last column, linked to above: "It was nice to know all that but I did wonder: Was I killing myself? Fortunately I could find out. A few months before my butter discovery, I had gotten a “heart scan” – a tomographic x-ray of my circulatory system. These scans are summarized by an Agatston score, a measure of calcification. Your Agatston score is the best predictor of whether you will have a heart attack in th…
No. Coronary calcification is but one stage in the process of atherosclerosis. So he could have had severe atherosclerosis without extensive calcification. This is why coronary CT is not a perfect test for prediction heart attacks. Furthermore, coronary CT cannot assess the tendency of the blood to clot, which is a function of both local and systemic factors. A useful guideline is that physiology is never as simple a…
In case you're still checking this thread, I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciated your efforts to educate and correct the record. I know a little about this area, and know enough to see you know more than I do. It's a sad, recent phenomenon of software engineers projecting the epistemic structure they deal with day-to-day onto the medical world.
(quick edit) It's profoundly sad to watch http://quantifiedself.com/2010/09/seth-roberts-on-arithmetic... all the way through as a result of this story. It's complicated... maybe it's a failure of medicine, of medical care delivery, education, etc but a room full of educated people laughing off the comments by that person warning of artherosclerosis/stroke and Robert's responses... it's just not a good sign.
Re: Seth Roberts has died
#113Slightly offtopic - The logic around weight "set-points" seems plausible. Has anyone ever had any luck with the Shangri La Diet?
Another anecdote - I tried it for a few weeks in 2007 and didn't have any of the suggested results. No appetite loss, and no weight loss. Tried both oil and sugar water.
Did you ensure you took the oil / water at least one hour away from ingesting anything with a flavor?
Re: Seth Roberts has died
#114RIP.
I am sad to see this. I only recently learned of the site. I have done my own personal health experiments and had hoped to make contact and what not, but did not get around to it. I imagine a lot of people will say his experiments killed him or believe it even if they don't say it.
I increasingly think there is no point to trying to share such info. If you die under a doctor's care, they say your condition did you in. If you die doing alternative stuff, they say the alternative stuff did you in. It seems pretty no win, in that regard.
I never knew him, yet it feels like a personal loss for me.
Re: Seth Roberts has died
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
You appear to be confused as to the difference between science and engineering.
You seem to be confused about the point I'm making, about innovation through self-experimentation.
No, you're still not grasping the difference between those situations. Double-blind trials are required in situations where the results are subtle enough to be colored by personal expectations and biases. Large-scale trials are required when reasonably different conditions (e.g., different human test subjects) could produce radically different results, when it's impossible to tell whether a single test subject is an average or an outlier.
Neither of these conditions apply to the question "Can this airplane fly or not?" There is no subtlety there, no biochemical variations. The plane either flies or it doesn't, and either result is perfectly clear to even the most ignorant layman.
As for peer review, the Wright Brothers had plenty of it: their peers showed up, looked at the plane in flight, and said "Yep, uh-huh, that's flying all right."
Re: Seth Roberts has died
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seth had high quality health cover provided by UC Berkeley, and availed himself of routine checkups, including cholesterol counts. He reported that his numbers had been going down since he started this regime. His unusual diet may have been connected to his death, and it's certainly reason for concern, but you don't know anything about the causality.
We know for certain that Seth had coronary artery disease. How? Because he had a non-zero score on his coronary CT scan. It is not normal to have calcified coronary arteries -- at any age. It may be so common as to be the statistical norm, but coronary calcification is never physiologically normal. Coronary artery disease is responsible for about half of all deaths in the United States. Seth may have had "quality hea…
If his condition was the statistical norm, how can you attribute it to his unusual diet?
Re: Seth Roberts has died
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, I got an idea. Instead of engaging in virtually baseless speculation and jumping to conclusions, why don't you go fuck yourself? You may be right about what killed him, asshole, but how about you let his body get cold first before you start tut-tutting and wagging your finger?
Dude, I am trying to save lives here. The more people that think his methods were safe, the more people who are going to die. I would even like to save your life, despite your propensity for name-calling. Now is the teachable moment.
That troll was over the top, but your comments in this thread are also borderline trolling. We don't know why Seth Roberts died, and your repeated insistence about it is derailing the thread. Please stop.
Re: Seth Roberts has died
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
We know for certain that Seth had coronary artery disease. How? Because he had a non-zero score on his coronary CT scan. It is not normal to have calcified coronary arteries -- at any age. It may be so common as to be the statistical norm, but coronary calcification is never physiologically normal. Coronary artery disease is responsible for about half of all deaths in the United States. Seth may have had "quality hea…
If his condition was the statistical norm, how can you attribute it to his unusual diet?
Death is not the statistical norm at age 60 in the United States among the upper middle class.
Re: Seth Roberts has died
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Coronary calcification is but one stage in the process of atherosclerosis. So he could have had severe atherosclerosis without extensive calcification. This is why coronary CT is not a perfect test for prediction heart attacks. Furthermore, coronary CT cannot assess the tendency of the blood to clot, which is a function of both local and systemic factors. A useful guideline is that physiology is never as simple a…
In case you're still checking this thread, I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciated your efforts to educate and correct the record. I know a little about this area, and know enough to see you know more than I do. It's a sad, recent phenomenon of software engineers projecting the epistemic structure they deal with day-to-day onto the medical world. (quick edit) It's profoundly sad to watch http://quantifie…
This is what I love about HN. The knowledgeable community. Thank you.
Re: Seth Roberts has died
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are completely appropriate and very timely. "Collapsed while hiking." The only way that can happen is with an interruption in blood flow, which means a clot or a bleed. If you want, I can go into details, but with his butter and his omega habits, he was putting himself at risk for both, contradictory as that may sound.
> "Collapsed while hiking." The only way that can happen is with an interruption in blood flow, which means a clot or a bleed. or just due to plain old heatstroke and/or going beyond your physical limit (on that given day and for you given overall condition for that day). You should at least have mentioned whether you know this hills. I hike a lot in the East Bay, and if i remember the Sat was pretty sunny.
I met Seth a few times and I remember one time he asked to go hiking in a fairly unsafe area when it was getting dark.