Coming across this sentence
The more intensive the agricultural system, the more work required for a unit of food.
in Charles Maisel’s The Emergence of Civilization (1990, p. 35) made me think for a while and make a list:
- Hunting: Easy.
- Agriculture: Hard. In agriculture you have to start from scratch in a way you don’t when hunting.
- Self-Experimentation: Easy.
- Ordinary Science: Hard. It is much harder to discover something useful via ordinary science than via self-experimentation.
- Fermentation: Easy. It is easy to make yogurt or kombucha, for example.
- Medical Drugs: Hard. Hard to invent, hard to make, hard to sell, hard to get, hard to afford, not to mention dangerous. It is much easier to cure/prevent problems by eating fermented foods, such as yogurt.
What’s interesting is the starkness of the differences. Hunting and agriculture are two answers to the same question. I suppose we backed into agriculture because we over-hunted. In the other two pairs, I think the basic Veblenian dynamic was/is at work: The more useless, the more high status. Scientists must be elaborately theoretical and high-techy and wasteful to be high-status. Likewise with home remedies (such as fermented food) versus medical drugs: To be high-status, doctors had to promote elaborate, obscure, hard-to-get remedies.
If all of the “easy” things are really that easy, nobody would bother with the “hard”. They never would have been invented.
The problem with all of the easy things is the same thing. They are inconsistent.
Hunting works great, until you starve to death. Agriculture, once working gives much more predictable results.
Self experimentation works great, until you poison yourself. Self experimentation also has quite a few issues with repeatability, and objectiveness of results. Science gets rid of “I think this worked for me.” More importantly it gets rid of “I guess arsinic is a poison. Too bad i’m dead or I would tell someone else not to try it.”
Fermentation is easy. But one batch can be highly different from the next, and there are only so many problems yogurt will solve. Medicine lets you solve other problems, and have consistant results.
In your effort to say that science occasionally misses obvious answers (which it does), you have somehow morphed into science is worthless.
Let me correct a few misunderstandings:
1. I’m not complaining about “medicine” in general. It’s the way doctors and medical researchers dismiss home remedies, such as yogurt, that’s the problem. The way dermatologists dismissed the idea that acne was due to diet.
2. Nor am I saying “science is worthless”. I am saying that most scientists find it enormously difficult to do useful work. (Among other problems, many of them find it degrading.) In spite of that, useful work gets done. I used a lot of it in developing the Shangri-La Diet, for example. I’ve used a lot of it to support the umami hypothesis.
3. Nor am I saying “science misses obvious answers”. I’m saying conventional science, such as conventional weight control research, misses easy solutions. These easy solutions aren’t obvious.
What’s an example of the problems of “repeatability” and “objectiveness of results” that self-experimentation has? All experiments are n=1 in various ways: one classroom, one school district, one lab.
I think there is quite a bit of possibility for a placebo issue with something like the shangrila diet. People are thinking their appetite will be reduced, and therefore it is.
Repeatability : Are people using the same quality of oils/sugars/whatever? Same doses? Same timing? What were their diets before, what was their weight before, what is their history with dieting, etc. Thats a lot of variables in play, that could completely skew results.
Objectiveness : You have no control group with n=1. Changes could be placebo, could be enviromental, could be many things.
This does not mean self experimentation is worthless. I think self experimentation is a great way to develop a hypothesis. My issue is that you seem to have jumped to “This works, its a fact.”, and to get that level of confidence I think you need to go back to a more scientific process.
I was not expecting the Shangri-La Diet to work.
Nothing else ever worked, so my expectations were not high at all.
Yet I have lost nearly 100 lbs on it and kept it off for 2 years now.
The problem with studies seems to be the expense and also motivation. Who’s going to fund a study to test the SLD if they have no chance of making any money due to the results of the research? I suppose if enough people lose weight using the SLD, then someone selling a competing diet would have incentive to do a study in hopes of finding some problem with it.
Jason, I think you’re comparing real world self experimentation with idealised scientific experimentation. Real world “scientific” experiments made by the medical community are often (perhaps more often than not) unscientific:
Most results are found for a small focused group (one ethnicity; limited age group; limited geographical spread; no control for diet factors, etc.) and then assumed to be true for the population at large; Often, that’s not the case.
Drugs are often taken off the market for being harmful. Sometimes, it turns out that a drug has seriously unwanted side effects (e.g. Vioxx, antidepressents for young kids).
Experiment size is _never_ taken into account in medical research — e.g., if you try 1000 different substances, 50 of then will have a p
Jason, there are several reasons that weight loss via the Shangri-La Diet is unlikely to be due to a placebo effect. 1. I don’t know of any weight loss studies that have shown a placebo effect. 2. The underlying science is heavily based on rat research. No placebo effect with rats. 3. Almost everyone who tries SLD has tried other ways — often many other ways — of losing weight without success. If the placebo effect was powerful in weight loss, then this wouldn’t happen. Before I stumbled on SLD, I too had tried several ways of losing weight that failed. And even the ones that worked didn’t work nearly as well. 4. Pets have lost weight via SLD.
The “control group” with self-experimentation is previous and/or later observation — observations before or after the treatment of interest. As someone else commented after another comment, you’re doing self-experimentation and you rely on it all the time; you just don’t call it that.
Seth:
It remains a mystery, but I believe some have hypothesized Veblenian dynamics in the development of agriculture as well. In hunter-gatherer societies it was difficult to display status via wastefulness and idleness–everyone had to work and most of what they worked for was consumed immediately. Agriculture promoted private property (this piece of land is mine, not yours; this stored harvest is mine, not yours) the division of labor, and the emergence of classes separated by the amount of manual labor performed–field workers as separate from supervisors and later kings, as separate from priesthoods to pray for rain, etc. All of this enabled Veblenian dynamics to take hold.
My point was not that SLD is a placebo effect. I think it actually works. My point is that things LIKE SLD are often subject to a placebo effect, due to the issues described above. These issues make it very difficult to separate the legitimate discoveries via self experimentation from the junk science. That distinction problem is why more formal science has taken over the “market” in invention and discovery.
Yes, it misses some things (even many things). But by doing systematic searches etc, it can find things that self experimentation is unlikely to stumble upon.
Jason, without actual examples (not hypothetical ones) of what you’re talking about, it is hard to even know what you mean, much less figure out if there is anything to it. What’s an example of a “thing LIKE SLD” that is “subject to a placebo effect”?