2026-01-01 03:21:15
Why Everyone Loves Japan — “Even more astonishing than my interview with Kodansha is the fact that to this day, I have not met a single Japanese person who has heard of the word ‘weeb’.”
The Next Renaissance is Coming
Epicycles All The Way Down. Not really sure what this means but, food for thought.
We simply do not know what a human being who has read a billion books looks like, if it is even feasible, so an immortal who has read a billion books feels about as smart as a human who has read a few dozen.
How To Find Time To Do Science
Strategy means sticking to what matters the most. On the science front, that’s getting results and writing about them. And so I try to spend most of my science time on this. These are the only things that matter. And so if I’m not doing either, I question why. … To reiterate – doing science means learning about the world, then communicating the results. That’s the ultimate end point, so it’s the thing I try to spend the most time on.
Statistics is a Scientific Instrument
We don’t often think about statistics as being in the same category as a microscope. But if you think about it, it’s a tool (built with math rather than physical engineering) that enables us to observe phenomena in the world that are invisible with the naked eye. … Statistics is a powerful instrument, but like any instrument, it provides evidence that then needs interpretation to infer what’s going on with the underlying phenomena – it doesn’t generate truth directly. Look at the X-ray crystallography image of DNA: it’s nowhere near obvious that you’re looking at a double helix. Statistics is the same. The problem is that many people – both practitioners using the tool and people listening to them – treat it as some kind of oracle.
Book Week 2025, Day 6: The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, by John Muir Laws
Fix Your Gut Health Forever by Thinking About Ice Cream
The first time I had the sense that I really needed a green vegetable, it shocked me. It was a new feeling. I’d had cravings before—the standard kind, for carbs and sweets and salty crunchy junk—and this was similar, but it was also distinct. There was a subtlety to it, a strength without the familiar urgency of carb addiction. Make no mistake: I’d always enjoyed green vegetables. But even in the deepest depths of my finals week burrito marathons, I’d never once craved them.
On the same theme: Self Selection of Diet by Newly Weaned Infants: An Experimental Study
Blind Spot Light vs Rear View Camera
In a hostile information environment, you want surface, NOT solve.
…
If the blind spot light stops working, you might think it was safe to turn.
If your fact checker made an error, you might update your world model with the error.
Reliance on these kinds of signals I think is worse than not having a signal at all. If I know that I do not know (whether there is a car there), I am forced to manually turn my head, or be more careful as I turn.
Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost? “The admissions in private that Oliver Sacks’ stories were too good to be true were less equivocal than what he hinted at in the preface to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” (literalbanana)
2025-11-30 23:30:42
This month, there was Inkhaven. A total of 41 residents published one piece of writing of at least 500 words every single day for the 30 days of November. That’s a lot of essays, blog posts, poems, short stories, and long-ass tweets. As a result we cannot claim that the few entries below are the best, or even our favorites. We have not remotely read all of them, or even as many as we would like. So all we will claim is, this is a selection:
For the psychologists in the room, we’d like to first call your attention to croissanthology’s replication of psych classic Loftus & Palmer (1974), or the “do people say that cars were going faster when they hear they ‘smashed’ into each other as opposed to hit/bumped/etc.” study. The materials were put together in just a few hours, and with (special thanks to) Aella helping to recruit participants, croissanthology soon 10x’d the original sample size (446 vs 45 in the original), and did not find any evidence for the supposed effect — in fact, it trended in the opposite direction. This study isn’t perfect, but it sure is evidence against the original claim. And if people do think the original claims were right, we’d love to see other replications.
And then later: Takeaways from “doing science”
I ate bear fat, to prove a point
Robert Hooke’s “Cyberpunk” letter to Gottfried Leibniz
Some ballad meter poetry, to just amuse myself
The time Weird Al Yankovic went too far
after my dad died, we found the love letters
Things I learnt at replication club (read to the end for an image of “best practice” psychophysical input device)
A good software engineer interested in supporting better psychology research could probably do a lot of good work contributing features to these frameworks. PsychoPy for example seems to support all sorts of fancy things like eye tracking however you require custom code or hacks in order to set up a simple “rate this statement from 1-5” multiple choice scale
Ok that’s the fairly random Inkhaven selection. We return to regular links:
In case you missed it: THE LOOP Issue 2
There was a Renaissance natural historian named Ole Worm who had a pet great auk and proved that lemmings didn’t appear out of thin air. (h/t Georgia Ray)
David Chapman publishes an excellent self-experiment: Conquering chronic crud
Also in the vein of self-experiments: The One Simple Trick That Fixed My Relationship With the Space of Nameless Misery
2025-11-27 09:49:33
When the Tofurky research division is working on new alternative protein products, they tend to worry about taste. They tend to worry about appearance. And they tend to worry about texture.
If they’re making an alternative (i.e. no-animals-were-harmed) turk’y slice, they want to make it look, smell, and taste like the real thing, and they care about proper distribution of fat globules within the alt-slice.
But here’s a hot take, might even be true: people don’t mainly eat food for the appearance. After all, they would still eat most foods in the dark. They don’t mainly eat foods for the texture, the taste, or even for the distribution of fat globules. People eat food for the nutrition.
This is why people don’t eat bowls of sawdust mixed with artificial strawberry flavoring, even though we have invented perfectly good artificial strawberry flavoring. You could eat flavors straight up if you wanted to, but people don’t do that. You want ice cream, not cold dairy flavor #14, and you can tell the difference. This is a revealed preference: people don’t show up for the flavors.
A food has the same taste, smell, texture, retronasal olfaction, and general mouthfeel when you start eating it as when you finish. If you were eating for these features, you would never stop. But people do stop eating — just see how far you can get into a jar of frosting. The first bite may be heavenly, but you won’t get very deep. The gustation features of the frosting — taste, smell, etc. — don’t change. You stop eating because you are satisfied.
Assuming you buy this argument, that the real motivation behind eating food is nutrition, then why do people care about flavor (and appearance, and texture, etc.) at all? We’re so glad you asked:
People can detect some nutrients as soon as they hit the mouth: the obvious one is salt. It’s easy to figure out if a food is high in sodium; you just taste it. As a result, it’s easy to get enough salt. You just eat foods that are obviously salty until you’ve gotten enough.
But other nutrients can’t be detected immediately. If they’re bound up deep within the food and need to be both digested and absorbed, it might take minutes, maybe hours, maybe even longer, before the body registers their presence. To get enough of these nutrients, you need to be able to recognize foods that contain these nutrients, even when you can’t detect them from chewing alone.
This is where food qualities come in. Taste and texture are signs you learn that help you predict what nutrients are coming down the pipeline. Just like how you learn that thud of a candy bar at the bottom of a vending machine predicts incoming sugar. The sight of a halal van predicts greasy food imminently going down your drunk gullet. How you learn that the sight of the Lays bag means that there is something salty inside, even though you can’t detect salt just from looking at it. You also learn that the taste of lentils means that you will have more iron in your system soon, even if you can’t detect the iron from merely putting the lentils in your mouth.
To give context, this is coming from the model of psychology we described in our book, The Mind in the Wheel. In this model, motivation is the result of many different drives, each trying to maintain some kind of homeostasis, and the systems creating the drives are called governors. In eating behavior, different governors track different nutrients and try to make sure you maintain your levels, hit your micros, get enough of each.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about this, but to give one example we’re confident about, there’s probably one governor that makes sure you get enough sodium, which is why you add salt to your food. There’s also at least one governor that keeps track of your fat intake, at least one governor clamoring for sugar, probably a governor for potassium. Who knows.
Governors only care about hitting their goals. Taste and texture are just the signs they use to navigate. And this is where the problem comes in.
Consider that for all its flaws, turkey is really nutritious. Two slices or 84 grams of turkey contains 29% of the Daily Value (DV) for Vitamin B12, 46% of the DV for Selenium, 49% of the DV for Vitamin B6, and 61% of the DV for Niacin (vitamin B3).
Tofurkey is not. As far as we can tell, it doesn’t contain any selenium or B vitamins. Not clear if it contains zinc or phosphorus either. Maybe this is wrong, but at the very least, it doesn’t appear that Tofurkey are trying to nutrition-match. And that may be the key to why these products are still not very popular. If you try to compete with turkey on taste and texture, but people choose foods based on nutrition, you’re gonna have a problem.
This is just one anecdote, but: our favorite alternative protein is Morningstar Farms vegetarian sausage links. And guess what food product contains 25% DV of vitamin B6, 50% DV of niacin, and 130% DV of vitamin B12 per two links? Outstanding in its field.
We believe this has strategic implications. So please put on your five-star vegan general hat, as we lead you into your new imagined role as commander of the faithful.
General, as you may be aware, the main way our culture attempts to change behavior is by introducing conflict. We attempt to make people skinny by mocking them, which pits the shame governor against the hunger governors. We control children by keeping them inside at recess or making them stay after class, which pits the governors that make them act up in class against the governors that make them want to run around with their friends. Or we control them by saying, no dessert until you eat your brussel sprouts.
This is an unfortunate holdover from the behaviorists, who once dominated the study of psychology. In behaviorism, you get more of what you reward, and less of what you punish. Naturally when they asked themselves “how to get less of a behavior?” the answer they came up with was “punish!” But this is a fundamentally incomplete picture of psychology. Reward and punishment don’t really exist — motivation is all about governors learning what will increase or decrease their errors. While you can decide to pit governors against each other, this approach has serious limitations. It just doesn’t work all that well.
First of all, conflict between governors is experienced as anxiety. So while you can change someone’s behaviour by causing conflict, you’ll also make them seriously anxious. This is fine, we guess, if you hate them and want them to feel terrible all the time. But it’s more than a little antisocial.
Anyone who’s the target of punishment will see what is happening. They don’t want to feel anxious all the time, and they especially don’t want to feel anxious about doing what to them are normal, everyday things. If you try to change their behavior in this way, they will find you annoying and do their best to avoid you, so you can’t create so much conflict inside them. Imagine how much less effective this strategy is, compared to finding a method of convincing that people don’t avoid, or that they might even actively seek out.
On top of this, conflict dies out without constant maintenance. In the short term you can convince people that they will be judged if they have premarital sex, but this lesson will quickly fade, especially if they see people getting busy without consequence. The only way to keep this in check is to run a constant humiliation campaign, where people are reminded that they will be shamed if they ever step out of line. This is expensive, neverending, and, for the obvious reasons, unpopular. Scolding can work in limited ways, but nobody likes a scold.
Many attempts to convince people to become vegan, or even to simply eat less meat, follow this strategy — they try to make people eat less meat by taking the governors that normally vote for meat-eating (several nutritional governors, and perhaps some other governors, like the one for status) and opposing them with some other drive.
You can tell people that they are bad people for eating meat, you can say that they will be judged, shamed, or ostracized. You can tell them that eating meat is bad for their health or bad for the environment. This might even be true. But just because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s motivating. This strategy won’t work all that well. It only causes conflict, because the drives that vote against eating meat will be strenuously opposed by the drives that have always been voting to eat meat to begin with.
But you don’t need to fight your drives. Better to provide a substitute.
No one takes a horse to their dentist appointments anymore. Cars are just vegan carriages; hence “horseless carriage”. We used to kill whales for oil. We don’t do that anymore, and it’s not because people became more compassionate. It’s because whale oil lamps got beat out by better alternatives, like electric lighting. People substitute one good for another when it is either strictly better at satisfying the same need(s), or better in some way — for example, not as good, but much cheaper, or much faster, or much more convenient.
Whale oil lamps burned bright, but with a disagreeable fishy smell. Imagine if in the early days of alternative lighting, they had tried to give whale oil substitutes like kerosene or electric lights the same fishy smell, imagining that this would make it easier to compete with whale oil. No! They just tried to address the need the whale oil was addressing, namely light, without trying to capture any of the incidental features of whale oil. They offered a superior product, or sometimes one that was inferior but cheaper, and that was enough to do the job. We don’t run whale ships off Nantucket any more.
So if you want people to eat less meat, if you want more people to become vegan, you shouldn’t roll out alternative turkey, salami, or anything else. You should provide substitutes, competing superior products, that satisfy the same drives without any reference to the original product. Ta-daaaa.
No one eats yogurt because they have an innate disposition for yogurt. Instead, they eat it because yogurt fulfills some of their needs. If they could get those needs met through a different product, they probably would, especially if the alternative is faster / easier / cheaper.
For the sake of illustration, let’s say that turkey contains just three nutrients, vitamins X, Y, and Z.
If you make an alternative turkey that matches the real thing in taste and texture, but provides none of the same nutrients, then despite the superficial similarity, you’re not even competing in the same product category. It’s like selling cardboard boxes that look like cars but that can’t actually get you to work — however impressive they might look, they don’t meet the need. People will not be inclined to replace their real turkey with your alternative one, at least not without considerable outside motivation. You will be working uphill.
Making a really close match can actually be counterproductive. If an alternative food looks/tastes/smells very similar to an original food, but it doesn’t contain the same nutrition, this is basically the same as gaslighting your governors. And the better the taste match, the more confusing this is.
Think about it from the perspective of the selenium governor. You’re trying to encourage behaviors that keep you in the green zone on your selenium levels, mostly by predicting which foods will lead to more selenium later. But things have recently become really confusing. About half the time you taste turkey flavor and texture, you get more selenium a few hours later. The other half of the time, you encounter turkey flavor and texture, but the selenium never arrives.
By eating alternative proteins that taste like the “real thing”, you end up seriously confusing your governors, with basically no benefit.
We recently tried one of these new vegan boxed eggs. It did have the appearance of scrambled eggs, and it curdled much like scrambled eggs. It even tasted somewhat like scrambled eggs. But the experience of eating it was overall terrible. Not the flavor — the deep sense that this was not truly filling, not a food product. Despite simulating the experience of eggs quite closely, we did not want it. Maybe because it was not truly nutritious.
If you make an alternative turkey that contains vitamins X, Y, and Z, you will at least be providing a real substitute. People will have a natural motivation to eat your alternative turkey. But if you do this, you’re still in direct competition with the original turkey. You’re in its niche, it is an away game for you and a home game for turkey. You have to convince the consumer’s mind that your alt-turkey is worth switching to, and that takes a lot of convincing. People prefer the familiar. Unless the new product is much better in some way, they won’t switch.
If you are trying to replicate turkey, you need to make a matching blob that matches real turkey on all the dimensions people might care about. A product exactly like that is hard to make at all, and forget about doing it while also being cheap, available, and satisfying. This is why it’s an uphill battle, you’re trying to meet turkey exactly.
Those of us who have never tasted tukrey are in ignorance still, our subconscious has no idea that turkey slices would be a great source of vitamin X. We’re not tempted. But people who have tried turkey before have tasted the deli meat of knowledge, and there’s no losing that information once you have it. Vitamin X governor gets what vitamin X governor wants, so these people will always feel called to the best source of vitamin X they’re aware of. You’ll never convince the vitamin X governor that turkey is a bad source of vitamin X; you’ll get more mileage out of giving it a better way to get what it wants!
So instead of shaming, or offering mock meats, the winning strategy might be to just come up with new, original vegan foods that are very good sources of vitamins X, Y, and/or Z. Just make vitamin X drinks, vitamin Y candies, and vitamin Z spread. If you don’t try to mimic turkey, then you’re not in competition with turkey in any way. You don’t need to convince people that it’s better than turkey — you just need to convince them that it’s nutritious and delicious. Why try to copy turkey when you can beat it at its own game?
You don’t need alt-turkey to be all turkey things to all turkey people. As long as people get their needs covered in a way that satisfies, they’ll be happy.
It seems like it would be easier to make a good source of phosphorus, than to make a good source of phosphorus PLUS make it resemble yogurt as much as possible. Alternative proteins that try to mimic existing foods will always be at a disadvantage in terms of quality, taste, and cost, simply because trying to do two things is harder than doing one thing really well. You’ll lose out on a lot of tradeoffs.
If we created new food products that contain all the nutrients that people currently get from meat, except tastier, cheaper, or even just more convenient, people would slowly add these foods to their diet. Over time, these foods would displace turkey and other meats as superior substitutes, just like electric lights replaced gas lamps, or like cell phones eclipsed the telegraph. Without even thinking about it, people will soon be eating much less meat than they did before. And if these new foods are good enough sources of the nutrients we need, then in a generation or two people may not be eating meat at all. After all, meat is a bit of a hassle to produce and to cook. Not like my darling selenium drink.
We see this already in some natural examples. Tofu is much more popular in countries like China, Korea, Japan, where it is simply seen as a food, than it is in the US, where it is treated as a meat substitute. You don’t frame your substitute as being in the same category as your competitors unless you really have to. That’s just basic marketing.
We have a friend whose family is from Cuba. She tells a story about how her grandmother was bemused when avocado toast got really popular in the 2010s. When asked why she found this so strange, her grandmother explained that back in Cuba, the only reason you would put avocado on your toast was if you were so dirt poor you couldn’t afford butter. It was an extremely shameful thing to have to put avocado on your toast, avocados grew on trees in the back yard and were basically free. If you were so very poor as to end up in this situation, you would at least try to hide it.
In Cuba, where avocado was seen as a substitute for butter, it was automatically seen as inferior. But when it appeared in 2010s America in the context of a totally new dish, it was wildly popular. And in terms of food replacement, avocado is a stealth vegan smash hit, way more successful than nearly any other plant-based product. It wasn’t framed that way, but in a practical sense, what did avocado displace? Mostly dairy- and egg-based spreads like butter, cream cheese, and mayonnaise. There may be no other food that has led to such an intense increase in the effective amount of veganism, even if the people switching away from these spreads didn’t see it that way. They just wanted avocado on the merits.
This product space is usually thought of as “alternative proteins”. Which is fine, protein is one thing that everyone needs. But a better perspective might be, “vegan ways to get where you’re going”. And just because some of these targets happen to be bundled together in old-fashioned flesh-and-blood meat, doesn’t mean they need to be bundled together in the same ways in the foods of the future.
2025-11-18 07:13:55
Scientific research today relies on one main protocol — experiments with control groups and random assignment. In medical contexts, these are usually called randomized controlled trials, or RCTs.
The RCT is a powerful invention for detecting population-level differences across treatments or conditions. If there’s a treatment and you want to know if it’s more effective than control or placebo, if you want to get an answer that’s totally dead to rights, the RCT is hard to beat. But there are some problems with RCTs that tend to get swept under the rug.
Today we aim to unsweep.
First, RCTs are seen as essential to science, but in fact they are historically unusual. RCTs were first invented in 1948, so most of science happened before they were even around. Galileo didn’t use RCTs, neither did Hooke, Lavoisier, Darwin, Kelvin, Maxwell, or Einstein. Newton didn’t use RCTs to come up with calculus or his laws of motion. He used observations and a mathematical model. So the idea that RCTs and other experiments are essential to science is ahistorical and totally wrong.
If you were to ask doctors what findings they are most sure of, they would almost certainly include “smoking causes cancer” in their list. But we didn’t discover this connection by randomly assigning some people to smoke a pack a day and other people to abstain, over the course of several years. No. We used epidemiologic evidence to infer a causal relationship between the presumed cause and observed effect.
Second, the RCT is only one tool, and like all tools, it has specific limitations. It’s great for studying population-level differences, or treatments where everyone has a similar response. But where there is substantial heterogeneity of treatment, the RCT is a poor tool and often gives incoherent answers. And if heterogeneity is the main question of interest, it’s borderline useless.
Put simply, if people respond to a treatment in very different ways, an RCT will give results that are confusing instead of clarifying. If some people have a strong positive response to treatment and some people have no response at all, the RCT will distill this into the conclusion that there is a mild positive response to treatment, even if no individual participant has a mild positive response!
Also, RCTs are like, way inefficient. To test for a moderate effect size, you need several dozen or several hundred participants, and you can test only one hypothesis at a time. Each time you compare condition A to condition B, you find out which group does better. Maybe you want to see if a dose of 2 mg is better than a dose of 4 mg. But if there are a dozen factors that might make a difference, you need a dozen studies. If you want to test two hypotheses, you need two groups several dozen or several hundred participants, for three you will need at least three groups, et cetera.
Third, RCTs don’t take advantage of modern cheap computation and search algorithms. For example, in the 1980s there was some interest in N=1 experiments for patients with rare cancers. This was difficult in the 1980s because of limited access to computers, even at research universities. But today you could run the same program on your cell phone a hundred times over. We’d be better off making use of these new insights and capabilities.
Statistics is young, barely two hundred years at the outside. And the most familiar parts are some of the youngest. Correlation was invented in the 1880s and refined in the 1890s. It’s not even as old as trains.
Turns out it is kinda easy to make new tools. The RCT is important, but it isn’t rocket science. A new century requires new scientific protocols. The 21st century is an era where communication is prolific and computation is cheap, and we should harness this power.
Since the early days, science has been based on doing experiments and sharing results. Researchers collect data, develop theories, and discuss them with other likeminded weirdos, freaks, and nerds.
New technology has made it easier to do experiments and share results. And by “new technology”, we of course mean the internet. Just imagine trying to share results without email, make your data and materials public without the OSF or Google Drive or Dropbox, or collaborate on a manuscript by mailing a stack of papers across the country. Seriously, we used to live like that. Everyone did.
People do like the internet, and we also hear that they sometimes use it. Presumably a sensible, moderate amount. But just like the printing press, which was invented in 1440 but didn’t lead to the Protestant Reformation until 1517, the internet (and related tech like the computer and pocket computer, or “call phone”) has not yet been fully leveraged.
This is all easy enough to say, but at some point you need to consider how to come up with totally new research methods.
We take three main angles, which are historical, analogical, and tinkering. Basically: Look at how people came up with new methods in the past. Look at successful ideas from other fields and try applying them to science. And look at the different ideas and see what happens when you expose them to nature.
We begin with close reads and analysis of the successful development of past protocols (for example, the scientific innovation around the cure for scurvy).
We develop new scientific protocols by analogy to successful protocols in other areas. For example, self-experiments are somewhat like debugging (programmers in the audience will be familiar with suspicion towards stories of “well, it worked on MY setup”). The riff trial was developed in analogy to evolution.
Finally, we deploy simple versions of these protocols as quickly as possible so that we can tinker with them and benefit from the imagination of nature. This is also somewhat by analogy to hacker development methods, and startup concepts like the minimum viable product. We try out new ideas as soon as they are ready, and all of our work is published for free online, so other people can see our ideas and tinker with them too.
Here are some protocols we’ve been dreaming about that show exceptional promise:
The idea of N = 1 experiments / self-experiments has been around for a while, and there are some famous case studies like Nobel Laureate Barry Marshall’s self-administration of H. Pylori to demonstrate its role in stomach ulcers and stomach cancer. But N = 1 protocols have yet to reach their full potential.
There’s a lot of room to improve this method, especially for individuals with chronic illnesses/conditions that bamboozle the doctors. N = 1 studies have particular considerations, like hidden variables. You can’t just slap on a traditional design, you need to think about things like latency and half-life. And many of the lessons of N = 1 generalize to N of small.
The Community Trial is a protocol that blurs the line between participant and researcher. In these trials, an organizer makes a post providing guidelines and a template for people to share their data. Participants then collect their own data and send it to the organizer, who compiles and analyzes the results, sharing the anonymized data in a public repository.
Data collection is self-driven, so unlike a traditional RCT, participants can choose to measure additional variables, participate in the study for longer than requested, and generally take an active role in the study design.
Unlike most RCTs, community trials allow for rolling signups, and could be developed into a new class of studies that run continuously, with permanently open signups and an ever-growing database of results with a public dashboard for analysis.
We first tested this with the Potato Diet Community Trial (announcement, results), where 209 people enrolled in a study of an all-potato diet, and the 64 people who completed 4 weeks lost an average of 10.6 lbs. Not bad.
There’s a possible extension of the community trial that you might call a “Reddit Trial”.
In this protocol, participants in an online community (like a subreddit) that all share a common interest, problem, or question (like a mystery chronic illness) come together and invent hypotheses, design studies, collect data, perform analysis, and share their results. As in a community trial, participants can take an active role in the research, measure additional variables, formulate new hypotheses as they go, etc.
People seem to think that a central authority makes things better, but we think for design and discovery that’s mostly wrong. You want the chaos of the marketplace, not the rigid stones of the cathedral. Every bug is shallow if one of your readers is an entomologist.
This could be more like a community trial, where one person, maybe even a person from outside the community, takes the lead. But it could also be very different from a community trial, if the design and leadership is heavily or enormously distributed. There’s no reason that rival factions within a community, splintering over design and analysis, might not actually make this process better.
We already wrote a bit about similar ideas in Job Posting: Reddit Research Czar. And none other than Patrick Collison has come to a closely-related conclusion in a very long tweet, saying:
Observing some people close to me with chronic health conditions, it’s striking how useful Reddit frequently ends up being. I think a core reason is because trials aren’t run for a lot of things, and Reddit provides a kind of emergent intelligence that sits between that which any single physician can marshal and the full rigor of clinical trials.
… Reddit — in a pretty unstructured way — makes a limited kind of “compounding knowledge” possible. Best practices can be noticed and can imperfectly start to accumulate. For people with chronic health problems, this is a big deal, and I’ve heard lots of stories between “I found something that made my condition much more manageable” all the way to “I found a permanent cure in a weird comment buried deep in a thread”.
… Seeing this paper and the Reddit experience makes me wonder whether the approach could somehow be scaled: is there a kind of observational, self-reported clinical trial that could sit between Reddit and these manual approaches? Should there be a platform that covers all major chronic conditions, administers ongoing surveys, and tracks longitudinal outcomes?
We think the answer is: obviously yes. It’s just up to people to start running these studies and learning from experience. We’re also reminded of Recommendations vs. Guidelines from old Slate Star Codex.
The Riff Trial takes a treatment or intervention which is already somewhat successful and recruits participants to self-assign to close variations on the original treatment. Each variation is then tested, and the results reported back to the organizers.
This uses the power of parallel search to quickly test possible boundary conditions, and discover variations that might improve upon the original. Since each variation is different, and future signups can make use of successful results, this can generate improvements based on the power of evolution.
We tested this protocol for the first time in the SMTM Potato Diet Riff Trial, with four rounds of results reported (Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Retrospective).
This has already led to at least one discovery. While we originally thought that consuming dairy would stop the potato diet’s weight loss effects, multiple riff trials demonstrated that people keep losing weight just fine when they have milk, butter, even sour cream with their potatoes. Consuming dairy does not seem to be a boundary condition of the potato diet, as was originally suspected. This also seems to disprove the idea that the standard potato diet works because it is a mono-diet, boring, or low-fat. How can it work from being a mono-diet, boring, or low-fat if it still works when you add various dairy products, delicious dairy products, and high-fat dairy products?
There are hints of other discoveries in this riff trial too, like the fact that the diet kept working for one guy even when he added skittles. But that’s still to be seen.
In most studies, people have a problem and want the effect to work. If it’s a weight loss study, they want to lose weight, and don’t want the weight loss to stop. So participants are hesitant to “bite the bullet” and try variations that might stop the effect.
This creates a strong bias against testing which parts of the intervention are actually doing the work, which elements are genuinely necessary or sufficient. It makes it much harder to identify the intervention’s real boundary conditions. So while you may end up with an intervention that works, you will have very little idea of why it works, and you won’t know if there’s a simpler version of the intervention that would work just as well; or maybe better.
We find this concerning, so we have been thinking about a new protocol where testing these boundaries is the centerpiece of the approach. For now we call it a “bullet-biting trial”, in the sense that it guides researchers and participants to bite the bullet (“decide to do something difficult or unpleasant in order to proceed”) of trying things that might kill the effect.
In this protocol, participants first test an intervention over a baseline period, to confirm that the standard intervention works for them.
Then, they are randomized into conditions, each condition being a variation that tests a theoretical or suspected boundary condition for the effect (e.g. “The intervention works, but it wouldn’t work if we did X/didn’t do Y.”).
For example, people might suspect that the potato diet works because it is low fat, low sugar, or low seed oils. In this protocol, participants would first do two weeks of a standard potato diet, to confirm that they are potato diet responders. No reason to study the effect in people who don’t respond! Then, anyone who lost some minimum amount of weight over the baseline period would be randomized into a high-fat, high-sugar, or high-seed-oil variant of the potato diet for at least two weeks more. If any of these really are boundary conditions, and stop the weight loss dead, well, we’d soon find out.
By randomly introducing potential blockers, you can learn more about how robust an intervention truly is. Maybe the intervention you’ve been treating so preciously actually works just fine when you’re very lax about it! More importantly, you can test theories of why the intervention works, since different theories will usually make strong predictions about conditions under which an intervention will stop working. And this design might help us better understand differences between individuals — it may reveal that certain variations are a boundary condition for some people, but not for others.
2025-11-01 05:45:28
Testosterone Is Giving Women Back Their Sex Drive — Compare this to our predictions for 2050 (see the section labeled “Elective Chemistry”).
Goodbye, for now from Max Goodbird / Superb Owl. A SAD DAY FOR THE BLOGOSPHERE. Gladly this should be temporary.
But as always, there is also new life. A new blog from SMTM reader and occasional correspondent Neoncube, starting with a post on potato diet comparisons.
London’s Forgotten Banana Nuisance:
Nutritious, cheap and self-packaged, the banana was a practical foodstuff for the busy worker. Just one problem, though. Edwardian London did not have many bins. The inedible peel was usually thrown onto the floor. While it awaited the attention of the street sleeper, the peel became a hazard to pedestrians and horses.
“There is no escape from the banana pest for rich or poor,” agonised the Leominster News that year. “…there is hardly a family which has not a member who at some time has not suffered from the ‘banana fall’.“ Slips by this time were so common that ‘banana fall’ became a widely recognised colloquialism.
Minnesota Department of Health website claims that “drinking water with low levels of arsenic over a long time is associated with diabetes“. Who knew about this?
J.K. Rowling’s $150 million yacht is named Samsara. Yes, really.
Infrasound: What You Can’t Hear CAN Hurt You — A good research direction, especially for those of us who have ever experienced mystery illnesses, ever stayed in a house where you mysteriously couldn’t sleep or felt sick all the time, etc. The vibes might literally be bad.
Montaigne’s Self-Fashioning — Giving style to one’s character.
Consumer Reports: Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead. From the author on twitter:
For more than two-thirds of the products we analyzed, a single serving contained more lead than CR’s food safety experts say is safe to consume in a day—some by more than 10 times.
“It’s concerning that these results are even worse than the last time we tested,” said Tunde Akinleye, the CR food safety researcher who led the testing project. This time, in addition to the average level of lead being higher than what we found 15 years ago, there were also fewer products with undetectable amounts of it. The outliers also packed a heavier punch. Naked Nutrition’s Vegan Mass Gainer powder, the product with the highest lead levels, had nearly twice as much lead per serving as the worst product we analyzed in 2010.
That said, we’ve always been curious about these kinds of studies, so we were interested to see this pretty convincing counterpoint: Huel is Fine
Overcoming Our Politics of War
Reinvent Science: Science Vocational School — Cannot endorse this enough. In fact, we are ready to run it if we have students and/or funding.
Reinvent Science: Use Humor
Reinvent Science: Publish Incomplete Reports!
The moon’s biggest impact crater made a radioactive splash
MTV was the central node for music in culture for roughly three decades. Arguably, it popularized both reality television and adult animation. Indisputably, it popularized music videos as a cultural form. MTV was simultaneously an arbiter of cool, a gatekeeper of mainstream relevance, and it had enough money and power that it could afford to be experimental.
It’s the ability to be experimental that feels like it is missing in contemporary culture. Recently, I’ve been thinking about how we have not had a new cultural form in quite a while. Maybe that’s because the material of culture: sounds, screens, physical forms have been fully explored.
One person’s list of Famous Cognitive Psychology Experiments that Failed to Replicate. Some of the usual suspects, as well as a few surprises. Not an endorsement, but it’s good to compare notes.
Agentic Fragments. If you have even a little of this sense, then you are truly amazed at how little there is in the modern world:
They had both grown up on small farms, in the days before electricity, and began working as children. They farmed, slaughtered, built houses and roads, sewed the clothes for their four children, wired the electricity. Their way of appropriating the world was fundamentally different from mine: everything around them was something they could take apart and put back together. If they didn’t like how the light fell in their living room, they moved the windows. If they needed a lathe, they disassembled a hammer drill and turned it into a lathe. Their world was filled with affordances that I didn’t see. Where I saw a sweater, she saw a thread temporarily shaped as one—it could just as well be a scarf, a pair of socks, a hat, or six gloves. She saw more degrees of freedom than I did, and acted on it.
2025-10-23 02:43:17
Extreme corn allergies aren’t common, but over the course of our lives we’ve happened to meet two people who have them. “Extreme” means they couldn’t eat corn, couldn’t eat corn products, and couldn’t eat any product containing corn derivatives. One of them was so allergic, she couldn’t even eat apples unless she picked them from the tree herself — apples in the store have been sprayed with wax, and some of those waxes contain corn byproducts.
Both of these people were also extremely lean, we mean like rail thin. It’s easy to imagine alternative explanations for this — if you have to carefully avoid any food that has ever been within shouting distance of corn, it might be harder to get enough to eat. But there’s no rule saying you can’t grow fat on pork and rice, and it occurs to us that if corn were somehow in the causal chain that’s causing the obesity epidemic, this is exactly what you would see.
If corn were a direct cause of the obesity epidemic — maybe if it concentrates an obesogenic contaminant like lithium, maybe if obesity is caused by a pesticide massively applied to corn — then people with serious corn allergies should be almost universally thin, or should at least have an obesity rate much lower than the general population. Our sample size of two is far too small to draw this conclusion right now, but every sample of 100 or 10,000 passes through a sample size of 2 at some point.
Easy enough to test. So, if you or someone you know has a serious corn allergy, are you really lean? We would love to know! Do you have access to the talk.kernelpanic.zero mailing list? Is there a secret r/cornwatchers subreddit? Can we send them a survey?
Corn aside, we can generalize this argument. The obesity rate in the US is about 40%. If people with an allergy to soy, fish, sesame, etc. are less than 40% obese, that implicates the food they’re allergic to. And if their obesity rate is < 5%, that’s a smoking gun.
You could also say, maybe people with food allergies have a lower overall rate of obesity, on account of their food allergies. This is probably true. Let’s say that the general rate of obesity in people with serious food allergies is 25%, instead of the 40% of the general population. But if people with serious avocado, kiwi, and banana allergies are 27%, 23%, and 24% obese, and people with serious tomato allergies are 2% obese, that’s kind of a signal.
There are some complications, like the fact that people with one food allergy are more likely to have another food allergy. But let’s not worry about that until we have the data.
One of our most counterintuitive beliefs is that the obesity epidemic may not have much to do with what we eat. But if it does, there should be some signal in the allergy cohorts.
