Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Seth Roberts has died

blog.sethroberts.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 134 posts

Re: Seth Roberts has died

#61

Post by msandford »

greenmountin wrote: post #28
kayoone wrote: post #18

Tragic and shows that no matter how healthy your lifestyle, life can still end in unexpected ways much too early.

I can't tell if you're being serious or not, so I will note for other readers that there is a lot of irony in saying this about Seth. His most public experiments were the ingestion of large quantities of olive oil for appetite control and daily butter consumption to aid sleep. A more appropriate sentiment might be to salute Seth for his radical health experiments, and the great risks he assumed in performing them on…

The science is not overwhelming that fat is what kills you. The lipid hypothesis may not be correct. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18615352

Re: Seth Roberts has died

#62

Post by msandford »

zorbo wrote: post #17
pbreit wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

Re: Seth Roberts has died

#63

Post by msandford »

brohee wrote: post #60
xiaoma wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was basically "the quantified self guy". He's done all kinds of crazy experiments on himself that he called "n=1 studies". In fact, the first thing I wondered when I saw this headline is whether or not it was related to some new experiment he was doing on himself. Like the other commenters here, I will miss Seth's writing. He shared so much and influenced so many others. He had both the curiosity and the courage t…

In fact, the first thing I wondered when I saw this headline is whether or not it was related to some new experiment he was doing on himself. Well, there are "rumors" of links between eating too much fat and cardiovascular diseases, and he was abusing butter as of late...

And there are also rumors of no links whatsoever: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18615352

Re: Seth Roberts has died

#64

Post by mertd »

msandford wrote: post #61
greenmountin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you're being serious or not, so I will note for other readers that there is a lot of irony in saying this about Seth. His most public experiments were the ingestion of large quantities of olive oil for appetite control and daily butter consumption to aid sleep. A more appropriate sentiment might be to salute Seth for his radical health experiments, and the great risks he assumed in performing them on…

The science is not overwhelming that fat is what kills you. The lipid hypothesis may not be correct. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18615352

On the other hand, there is little doubt that overwhelming ingestion of anything will kill you. I'm not sure if it is too much or how long he kept it up, but 60g of butter sounds a lot to me.

Re: Seth Roberts has died

#65

Post by gwern »

me2i81 wrote: post #39

When I first met Seth he was an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. At the time he wrote all his code in APL, and couldn't figure out why anyone would use anything else. More recently he used R. To everyone calling him "not a hacker," he was hacking on code before a lot of you were born, though his code was mostly for his own purposes.

I'm a decent R user, have done many self-experiments myself, and read & commented on Roberts's blog for years; I have no idea about APL, but I think you overestimate how much hacking on R code Roberts was able to do - he had a lot of trouble programming the reaction-time code for his Buttermind experiments and I don't recall him ever reporting more complex analyses than a linear model.

Re: Seth Roberts has died

#67

Post by brohee »

msandford wrote: post #63
brohee wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, the first thing I wondered when I saw this headline is whether or not it was related to some new experiment he was doing on himself. Well, there are "rumors" of links between eating too much fat and cardiovascular diseases, and he was abusing butter as of late...

And there are also rumors of no links whatsoever: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18615352

Well, the overwhelming majorities of publications see a link, the fact that some see none IMHO shows the limited usefulness of those epidemiological studies way too many parameters to be close to a controlled experience...

The author of that paper your linked, Uffe Ravnskov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uffe_Ravnskov) seems to be part of a small minority holding this belief.

Re: Seth Roberts has died

#68

Post by gwern »

VLM wrote: post #54
zorbo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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 b…

> 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.

Re: Seth Roberts has died

#69

Post by maj0rhn »

ryanholiday wrote: post #42

I was fortunate enough to publish Seth's final column this morning. http://betabeat.com/2014/04/seth-roberts-final-column-butter...

You owe it to your readers to say that Seth's death is a warning to those who would flaunt conventional medical wisdom, as he clearly did.

Anyone who stakes their life on a single published meta-analysis is unwise. Anyone who puts faith in a single assessor of cardiac risk, coronary CT, is unwise. It is ironic that the most apt assessment of Seth's life and death comes from a margarine commercial popular in the 1970s: "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

Re: Seth Roberts has died

#70

Post by maj0rhn »

GigabyteCoin wrote: post #58
userbinator wrote: post #35

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...

Collapsing during strenuous activity is typically heart failure in my experience. It happens all the time up here in Canada when people shovel snow.

Almost. I think you're confusing "heart failure" with "myocardial infarction." They are two different diseases. Collapse during exertion can happen in either one, but in Seth's case myocardial infarction is more likely, because people with heart failure generally don't go hiking (their exercise tolerance is too limited).
Post reply on HN