Jesus christ the number of people that learned a list of fallacies but never understood them or their applications and now mindlessly accuse people online of them in ways that aren't at all applicable while thinking they're so much smarter than everyone else cause they memorized this list of gotchas that aren't actually gotchas regularly astounds me.
Please learn what the fallacies actually mean and maybe read actual organized debate rules. I promise you, in one of those "the researcher has years of experience in the field and you're a programmer, they are more likely to be correct" is valid support for an argument and not some how negated by "I cast 'appeal to authority' fallacy" without an actual argument that indicates why the authority does not have weight.
As Feynman once remarked, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Archaeology is a soft science at best and highly dependent on interpretation. Given the replication crises afflicting even hard sciences like medicine, we should be skeptical about the claims of any given researcher. And while a domain expert may be more likely to be correct than a layman, their overall probability of being correct may be less than chance, as in the case of pre-industrial doctors.
I assure you that there's no replication crisis in archaeology. Why? Because almost nothing in archaeology uses replication. You can't excavate the same sections twice, you can't test the same samples twice, and you can't replicate the same historical events to test theories of formation processes.
Archaeology is a historical science like evolutionary biology and geology.
Another thread posted an example where for over a hundred years a Swedish skeleton was thought to be male because it was buried with weapons, but then just a decade ago it was found by DNA evidence to be female.
Surely bone anatomy is much more reliable to interpret than a half million year old pile of sticks yet it was still gotten wrong. Anything that needs interpreted will invite incorrect interpretations and should be taken with a grain of salt.
This post is really confusing. The "Standard Calorie Model" is not a thing. Are you using the term as a shorthand? If so, other people aren't going to know what it means. Regardless, nothing related to the use of calories to quantify energy intake from food or energy burned from exercise comes from Nazi Germany or Dr Kellogg.
Despite other ridiculous beliefs Kellogg was a big fan of vegetables which were a big part of his diets. The only study semi-related to food and Germany in the 30s/40s I can think of is the Warsaw Ghetto Hunger Study, but that was on the physical and psychological effects of starvation not how calories are calculated and was done by Jewish doctors in Poland not Germany.
The use of calorie to refer to energy in food and the first method for measuring the amount came from Atwater in the late 1890s and the first studies on the amount of calories people burned were done in the 1910s resulting in the Harris-Benedict equation, a modified version of which is still in use today for calculating metabolic rates.
Like yes theres still a lot of challenges in how calories in food and calories burned are calculated and a lot of values can end up being wrong on both sides, but thats only a problem of the equation having incorrect numbers and doesn't disprove CICO itself.
I'm seriously confused where you got the ideas you're putting forward here.
Sorry, I suppose that I do have some things mixed up and have listened to too many conspiracy theories. In re-researching now I may have earlier confused a journal with an author and a few other things when researching where some specific exercise calorie numbers come from. I'll retract most of my statements about the "Standard Calorie Model" as bad syncretism and review again further later.
> how calories in food and calories burned
Right or wrong on the specifics of the history of such things, this phrasing continues to bother me that every discussion about calories is still entirely in the vocabulary of Phlogistion. Calories are treated as particles somehow "in" food, and all we care about is how well calories "burn". The metabolism doesn't work as a fire. This just seems to me like a fundamentally bad assumption for how energy works in the metabolism. How is heat energy in food or heat energy during exercise good measurements or metrics for food or for human activity?
It's too over-simplifying as a model. It favors a heat-centric view of energy that both chemistry and physics have since rejected as critically flawed (including all the many times they rejected Phlogiston Theory). Physics has an easy and direct formula for the energy density of mass (E=mc^2) but we'd all have a good laugh if someone proposed we model human food consumption as an ideal fusion or fission reaction. Why is it not equally laughable when we talk about the energy in food based solely on how much heat it creates when food is set on fire or the energy costs of exercise based mostly on how much people exercising raise the temperatures of the rooms around them?
I think that's a bit more strange than just "incorrect numbers". I know that's a rare opinion in general, and I offer my opinions not to "disprove CICO" but to encourage people to explore the controversies themselves more deeply whether they end up agreeing with me after the exploration or not.
I think CICO is somewhat fine first-order approximation. Over-simplifying models are useful sometimes, and a broken clock can be right at least twice a day, especially if your error sensitivity is only plus or minus 10 hours. There are too many anomalies in the current obesity crises that CICO doesn't explain well. I think far too many people assume the over-simplified CICO map is the entirety of the complex territory of human dieting, and have a near religious fervor that too many people in the world simply love eating Phlogiston particles too much and don't have the "willpower" to cut the Phlogiston in their diet nor to exercise their Phlogiston away.
Plus there's a lot of interesting Goodhart's Law controversy in modern food that when a metric becomes the target it ceases being a good metric: have you explored the "zero-calorie" sections of your local grocery store lately? What do you think is the macronutrient benefit of some of those beverages and snacks? Do they actually seem healthier to you than things with plenty of food calories? Those foods certainly seem free enough of Phlogiston, so far as I can tell. But they certainly don't seem free from interactions with the human digestive system to me.
Maybe these aren't controversies that are worth talking about? I'm feeling sorry I brought it up. I'm definitely sorry I mixed up some facts that distracted from the actual points I was making. The obsession with heat energy/fire output as the one metric to rule them all and that can explain "all of food and exercise" is fascinating to me. It seems bad organic chemistry and it seems bad physics to me. CICO is right just often enough (as a high error rate, first order approximation) that it probably isn't worth the effort disproving, but that doesn't mean it is free from controversy.
The problem is SMTM seems obsessed with finding some explanation for why the diet works other than it being an easy method to reduce calories and generally appears convinced theres a non-CICO explanation for obesity and weight loss/gain that these potato diet experiments will be able to discover.
“An easy method to reduce calories” is fairly revolutionary in the academic diet world. Consistently losing weight is something that people find hard to stick to. A diet that is safe & makes it easy is in and of itself something very interesting.
HN types tend to take the “just eat less, lol” attitude, but in the real world that just doesn’t work very well for the majority of people. There’s no point arguing that people “should” be better at it: they aren’t, for sound biological reasons. Forcing them to behave otherwise & then blaming them when it doesn’t work is simply cruel. Hence the idea that a diet that lets obese people steadily lose weight without any other interventions is a bigger deal than you’d otherwise expect.
The thing that fully convinced me over a decade ago that all effective methods for weight loss are just "calories in, calories out" underneath was the dude that lost 27lbs in 2 and a half months on a diet of mostly twinkies with occasional other junk food for variety. https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor...
Yes, there are other variables like hormone levels (thyroid adjacent ones particularly), genetics (defines base metabolic rate), drugs/chemicals (some effect metabolism), and dietary macros (too much sugar causing diabetes) which factor in to weight loss or gain, but its pretty clear at the end of the day all they are doing is modifying the numbers each individual needs to use in the same old calorie calculations, and very often not to a high degree.
I get its fun to play with theories and edge cases, but I don't understand why so many people find this simple, well established explanation unsatisfying and hard to accept.
> I don't understand why so many people find this simple, well established explanation unsatisfying and hard to accept.
Because when people try to put it into practice in a form that's not dangerous they struggle, and when humans struggle at something they feel compelled to theorize the struggle. "There must be a reason this isn't working for me," they say, "one that doesn't ultimately reflect on my morally culpable lack of capacity to exert my will." [To be clear, I don't think people are to blame for lacking willpower, I'm just identifying the logic here.]
Looking around, they observe that some people have more success on a diet where they restrict some particular type of food X. This success comes from playing a trick on the brain, making it think that it is not in a position of deciding to eat less every day, but is being forced to eat less. Some restrictions manage to play this trick on the brain successfully for some people some of the time. People promoting diets that are not just "calories in, calories out" are hoping to take advantage of this effect. When these diets become popular, it's because the logic I identified allows people to say "it's not that I failed to force myself to eat less, it's that I didn't stop eating carbs" - or what have you.
One reason it's hard to eat less that you didn't bring up is that the body reacts to you eating less by reducing your metabolism. I don't mean this in a magical fashion where the body has a high efficiency mode or that you can somehow gain weight while eating fewer calories than you consume, but in the simple ordinary sense that people dieting tend to be tired and more lazy. Your body does not want to stay at the same level of activity while dieting, and so you lose less weight than you'd expect with a simple metabolic rate calculation. You can allow for this of course, but it means you have to cut even more.
So I don't know that many people reject the basic physics of calories in, calories out per se. Most reasonable people talking about this are more interested in why attempting a pure "eat less food" diet tends to fail, and what tricks can be employed to achieve appetite reduction. The various individualized factors can be overwhelming, especially when you consider that many people don't have access to adequate nutrition and healthcare.
How are there still people that believe this? I seriously thought the claims about Grayson were so widely discredited that even the people still saying gamergate is about "ethics in journalism" stopped making them because it was so embarrassing. Like its obviously not true, go look at the Kotaku website, he never wrote any reviews about Quinn's games, it takes like 30 seconds to check.
What, there are still people that believe this? That Nathan Grayson never wrote reviews on any game by Zoe Quinn is easily verifiable, like you can just go look at the webpage. The claim has had zero veracity for years, that its false is widely known and documented, theres multiple Wikipedia articles discussing how and why its wrong.
I don't think I've ever read an article on Kotaku, I never read any games news and barely even play them anymore other than occasional Doom Eternal to blow off steam. But I know Grayson and Quinn's names because of how widely and loudly this argument getting disproved was.
I'm honestly kind of amazed to see someone still claiming this. Like I'm back editing more stuff into this because my brain is so confused and still thinking about it.
I hate that I spent the time to check but this was posted a few months before Grayson and Quinn were together. Even if it weren't its really not much of a smoking gun.
While I def got more from therapy, I concur regarding ACT being the methodology that worked best for me and that it’s wild how much it overlaps with mindfulness and Buddhist practices.
You might not have a good fit with your therapist. It took me a few tries but once I found someone with a similar mode of thinking I got a lot more out of the discussions because she said things (often the same things as the prior shrinks) in a way that resonated with my brain better.
In that regard, therapy never fixed my problems, but it did help me recognize unhealthy thinking patterns and provide mechanisms for handling them, both of which have helped me avoid spirals and getting trapped in negative thought processes.
Almost 24 hours later so likely you won’t see this, but I’m interested what your setup is hardware (monitors) wise and workflow wise that works best on Windows?
I’m pretty platform agnostic. I own and relatively regularly use Windows, Linux, and MacOS machines and have spent time using each as my main work system in the last five years.
I currently use a single 49” monitor and I’ve found MacOS with Amethyst for tiling and window management plays the nicest on it but your comment about hand mangling (and never completely remembered) meta key combos definitely rings true.
I haven’t found anything on Windows or Linux that doesn’t have the same issues though. It’s possible I’m irrationally afraid of mistypes and overly avoid single meta key combos on any system.
Please learn what the fallacies actually mean and maybe read actual organized debate rules. I promise you, in one of those "the researcher has years of experience in the field and you're a programmer, they are more likely to be correct" is valid support for an argument and not some how negated by "I cast 'appeal to authority' fallacy" without an actual argument that indicates why the authority does not have weight.