...when cult predictions don't come true. If the end of the world is predicted, and it doesn't end, we realize, once again, that the zealots were just being zealots.
So the fact that arctic ice has not completely disappeared by the summer of 2013 as per Professor Wieslaw Maslowski back in 2007 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm) really shouldn't surprise us at all. His prediction was simply apocalyptic cult thinking, nothing more.
Additional apocalyptic cult thinking about sea level rise, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, pestilence, etc, are left for the dear reader to identify on their own.
Well, let's be specific - climate change *always* happens. Interesting thing about changes in CO2 - they tend to *lag* behind temperature changes...our contribution is probably completely dwarfed by natural variation.
It's not that you don't think we can have an impact, it's that you don't care.
No, I definitely care. It's just because I care, I have little patience for witch doctors and voodoo - if you're going to learn the truth about something, you use science, not consensus.
The problem you have is that you've built an edifice that you believe is scientific, but one that lacks the most basic cornerstone of the scientific method - the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. Want to show that you're really doing science? Then make a statement that is more than "heads I win, tails you lose".
Funny, forest cover has been dramatically expanding with the increased atmospheric CO2:)
As for the fate of the passenger pigeon, color me unimpressed - I still see flying rats all over the city. The fact that Darwin's principle of natural selection eliminated the passenger pigeon doesn't bother me one whit, given the huge scope of other closely related pigeon everywhere else.
But hey, let's just keep blaming our immoral behavior for every drought, flood, or other natural disaster - it worked for the witch doctors of the past, no reason to stop doing it now, right?:)
I don't like living in a world where fights end with the victim grievously wounded or dead - I'd much rather have the unprovoked aggressor shot and killed to serve as a deterrent to other aggressors.
But you already clearly understand where the *real* problem is - the aggressor who decides to start a fight with a stranger for no reason. We may differ on the best way to deter aggressors, but understanding what the root cause is always the first step to coming to a real answer.
Of course you're right - the fallacy here is that it is assumed that climate change action is a rational activity because human psychology opposes it. Since human psychology can oppose irrational activity (as well as rational activity), the assertion doesn't follow.
Rather than the implication that human psychology holds back climate change action because human psychology is irrational, and climate change action is rational, it's rather the case that human psychology holds back climate change action because in this case, human psychology is rational, and climate change action is irrational.
...the burning of witches in the modern world;...basing economic activity on astrological predictions;...basing economic activity on predictions of apocalypse.
Then I've failed to communicate that effectively to you:)
"huh, I thought vegetarians were usually thin, but I guess they must not be because he's done the research and they apparently weigh more."
That sounds fair enough, but again, hardly resonating with an actual vegetarian (unless they happened to be one of those fat ones that tried to become vegetarian for health reasons, and weren't seeing success).
My take would be slightly different: "huh, I thought vegetarians were usually healthy, but I guess they must not be because he's done the research and they apparently aren't healthier" - and this, is arguably true.
you've left out one of the primary drivers of appetite
I guess that's the argument in a nutshell - I'm arguing that psychological processes in the brain aren't primary drivers of appetite, they're secondary or tertiary. To quantify that, I think we're looking at metabolic ward studies, with various controls for macronutrients and a search for quantitative data on biomechanisms rather than subjective surveys.
So you're throwing it out entirely?
Yes. You can't rely on getting good results out of bad data.
Tastiness is be determined by signals in the brain
I disagree. The conscious acknowledgement of "tastiness" may occur in some part of the frontal cortex, say, but when it comes to "tastiness as having an effect on actual biomarkers rather than a survey", that's something that is determined by a complex set of tissues and organs, including but not limited to parts of the brain that are not conscious.
I wonder if you would put the brain in a place of primacy if we were talking about say, vertical growth rather than horizontal growth. Would it be possible for the brain to psychologically retard (or accelerate) growth in height? Could it somehow reduce the amount of human growth hormone circulated by the pituitary? More importantly, since vertical growth requires a caloric imbalance (need more calories in than calories out), would the mechanisms you imagine for hunger and appetite be suppressible when trying to avoid vertical growth? Could a teenager reduce their appetite enough to limit their calories enough to stop their vertical growth from happening?
My guess is that you'd admit to the primacy of HGH in determining vertical growth, but that begs the question as to why you wouldn't admit the primacy of insulin in determining horizontal growth.
Other variables can kick in to compensate, the brain responds to the situation, and the factor you're measuring never has a total function as simple as your hypothesis.
Again, you bring in the messy brain in the example as a point of pride - eventually, every brain response has to culminate in some biomechanism for accumulating fat. You can do a more rigorous and profitable analysis by understanding the basic biomechanisms *first*, and then discovering how the brain might influence those levers. But you can't have a brain doing something magical and unobservable - it eventually needs to get down to the level of accumulating fat in a fat cell.
Therefore to show a particular biochemical process is active you first need to measure the influence of the brain which we know is there.
Okay, so let's get the test where we measure the biochemical process by which the brain influences say, tastiness. Let's throw away the subjective questionnaires, and measure the actual biochemical signals. Again, first principles, we need to go to the moment of action.
explain Cuba
Easy. Bad data. They even admit to it: "These numbers are probably not particularly accurate"
No, let's be specific - his failure was that he did not speak clearly enough to have his audience understand. That's a failing for someone who is trying to convey a point.
For the status quo nutritionists, given their terrible track record at improving health with their advice for the past 40 years, they're failure was that they *were* understood, and people abided by their bad advice.
I mean, honestly, do you think that Taubes' statement in that radio interview convinced a single vegetarian to start on an unhealthy, high glycemic carnivorous diet, as opposed to a healthy low-glycemic carnivorous diet?
Surely - he failed to caveat appropriately, and because of that, was misinterpreted by folk, such as you. His attempt at rhetoric could have been sharper, and he's probably better off either in prepared lectures or in written form than on a radio show.
As to being seriously misinformed, that's a particular brand of tar that status quo, "calories in/calories out" nutritionists are neck deep in:) At worst Taubes glossed, but government advice on diet and exercise has been substantially harmful for the past 40 years.
I agree, but that doesn't mean the system is designed to be easily analyzed via falisifiability.
I'm not sure if I quite understand your researcher/other person example.
It is quite possible that there are some things that are beyond the realm of science - things for which no falsifiable hypothesis is possible. It's even quite possible that there are some *deterministic* things that are beyond the realm of science (odd to think of, but wolfram makes a fairly strong case with cellular automata that there is no way to discern which simple rules may have created certain complex observations).
The idea that we can *scientifically* analyze something without falsifiability is a fallacy.
Hunger is a neurological effect so it (probably) all has to end up in the brain at some point
You're giving the brain too much credit. Hunger is a *whole body* effect, and arguably a cellular effect. Heck, consciousness is arguably a *whole body* effect, with incredibly tightly coupled influences on the cellular level (as demonstrated by say, phantom limb effects).
The brain is simply one portion of the complex system, and certainly isn't the only place that intelligent and complex behavior occurs.
And maybe that's the problem I have with your frame - you're asserting that the brain is some massively omnipotent organ that dictates to the rest of the body, and that we can ignore all other factors and concentrate on it as the first order term.
I'm arguing a different frame based on our observations of cellular intelligence (http://www.brianjford.com/w-intelcell.htm, for example). Given the biochemical processes on the *cellular* level is the only way to rationally attack this problem, as far as that frame goes.
That's why I'm very leery of anyone who stands up and says "I solved the obesity epidemic and it's due to X!"
So, are you leery of those who say "it's due to eating more calories than those burned!"?
Taubes does the same, except when he took the correlation he just reversed it.
Rather, Taubes ignored the correlation as spurious, and concentrated on the root cause and extrapolated from there. One can argue he should have left caveats in his statement, but by the same token, so should our status quo nutritionists.
The more and more I think about it, status quo nutritionists must come up with some pretty creative ad hoc special pleadings to excuse the terrible track record of their advice for the past 40 years. Either they must believe that humans have somehow become more slothful and gluttonous (increasing defects of character), or they must believe that there is some "Z" factor out there that is stymying their efforts (say, big bad food companies making food more tasty with evil scientists in lab coats with beakers).
Which, in essence, is the problem with the mental model status quo nutritionists have - any success is to their credit, but any failure is someone else's fault. I don't think they have a model that they're willing to see challenged, or can even imagine could possibly fail.
I'm not going to look but I'm certain if you looked for literature some study shows that people told to eat slower will spontaneously eat less.
The problem here is that even if you identify this effect, it's trivial.
FWIW, they've had a study of 30 healthy women (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18589027), and 17 healthy men (http://jcem.endojournals.org/content/95/1/333.abstract), neither of which addresses differentially insulin resistant folk, nor gives us much confidence due the small sample sizes. The 17 healthy men study (actually measuring gut response) is definitely more interesting, but the measured effect is tiny.
Run the same experiments against differential insulin resistant folk, and with a variety of macronutrient combinations, in a metabolic ward, and you've got some real data.
In a way I think us CS/Engineering types are particularly poorly equipped to understand complex system problems like biology and climate since we're used to being given a complex system and having it based on a simple elegant design, and when we want to perform an experiment it's trivial to tweak and repeat it through every variation we can imagine.
I'll agree to a point - certainly there's an assumption, particularly in the AI community, that you can build intelligence out of dumb parts, and model neurons like petri nets or simple gates - that's just hubris talking. Great set of lectures on that: https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/cognitive-ubiquity-evolution/id464839816
That being said, I'm not just talking about discrete simulations (as Wolfram has made particularly interesting finds in cellular automata), I'm talking about real world root cause failures in complex, integrated, man/logic/machine settings (which, do include a biological component of sorts). You cannot hope to find the truth in an analysis of a real-world system (again, not just some pre-programmed simulation, real computers doing real work with real people), without falsifiability.
The one thing that evolution would predict for hunger is that it wouldn't have a simple solution, it would be a complex one with many different inputs and factors, that's one of the reasons it's hard to manipulate.
Certainly hunger would be a complex one, but even in a complex system, you have first, second, third, etc order effects. Furthermore, as you noted, biology generally leads to extremely robust systems, and a system that ignored muscle starvation due to visual stimulation is distinctly *not* robust. The muscle cells can be considered as intelligent actors, just as intelligent as any bit of brain tissue, and they simply cannot be considered a lower order term.
And so in the end, I think you're making the same mistake you're pointing out here - you're treating a large, complex system, as dictated to by a single organ as a first order effect (i.e., it's all in your brain). In fact, biology is *filled* with intelligence, even down to the cellular level, and a robust system simply wouldn't make "tastiness" it's primary directive - that's not robust by any means. It *is* rational to think that cellular intelligence would be concerned with things like protecting from toxic levels of glucose in tissues and the blood stream, and sufficient energy to survive, and the complex failure of the system to maintain a healthy weight (in order to survive in the short term), is quite neatly explained by the insulin and differential insulin resistance mechanism as a *first order* term.
"Taubes is explicitly denying an easily verifiable fact."
My contention about the nutritionists disparaging red meat and saturated fat. They are taking a *correlation*, and pretending it's a *causality* - a mistake on their part that is easily verifiable by even the most casual of glances at the references they give.
That being said I've tried to keep the discussion narrowly focused on obesity because other health outcomes just make things harder to settle.
Ah, so in fact, you do "care" in the emotional sense of the word, but have excluded them because you believe they add too much complexity to the picture. Fair enough, although I do think that in order to "do no harm", nutritionists are obligated to understand the *mortality* effects of their advice before giving it. It could be that the safest thing to say to anyone is "your individual body and response to dietary components may vary greatly from someone else's", rather than promote false tropes like "red meat and saturated fat will cause everyone health problems", or "vegetarianism is a healthy lifestyle for anyone"...it's like insisting that everyone should eat 5-6 servings of peanuts a day, even if they're allergic to peanuts.
While my hypotheses get to deal with generally discrete systems rather than analog biological ones, I can't possibly find root cause in a behavior in a complex system without using the scientific method and falsifiability.
1) The sight of food can trigger hunger, that the brain helps regulate hunger is incontrovertible.
Can the unsight of food untrigger hunger?
Surely, the brain can help regulate hunger, but the idea that slow eating will override starving muscle signals is dubious.
Most obese people can lose weight by eating slower and stopping slightly earlier without feeling more hungry in general.
Unless you deal with the differential insulin problem obese people have, eating slower and stopping slightly earlier isn't going to be a significant factor. I have personally experienced the duality of feeling completely overstuffed, yet starving - for a differentially insulin resistant obese person, slow eating and slightly smaller portions isn't going to make a significant difference, if any.
I still wonder - if the brain can trigger hunger on the sight of food, is there any visual that can suppress hunger? Maybe we just need to find the right combination of pictures, flash them to differentially insulin resistant people, we can suppress hunger......how many pounds do you think you could lose by suppressing hunger via visual stimuli?...how many pounds do you think you can gain by triggering hunger via visual stimuli?
Actually, I am a scientist. I, on a regular basis in my daily work, have to come up with falsifiable hypotheses in order to determine causality in complex systems. I can certainly decide to daydream beyond the realm of science, and the falsifiable, but it's not going to help me solve problems or learn truths.
Taubes statement on the other hand makes a specific claim about a specific group of people at it IS provably false.
Again, you're holding a double standard. Taubes speaks of vegans and vegetarians broadly, when he probably could be more specific. Status quo nutritionists speak broadly of red meat and saturated fat eaters, when in fact the studies they tout have shown *correlation* not *causation* - so if they were to be more accurate, they'd have to really point out the controlling factor of carbohydrates on insulin, which they quite nearly actively disparage.
Slashdot Mirror
...when cult predictions don't come true. If the end of the world is predicted, and it doesn't end, we realize, once again, that the zealots were just being zealots.
So the fact that arctic ice has not completely disappeared by the summer of 2013 as per Professor Wieslaw Maslowski back in 2007 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm) really shouldn't surprise us at all. His prediction was simply apocalyptic cult thinking, nothing more.
Additional apocalyptic cult thinking about sea level rise, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, pestilence, etc, are left for the dear reader to identify on their own.
Well, let's be specific - climate change *always* happens. Interesting thing about changes in CO2 - they tend to *lag* behind temperature changes...our contribution is probably completely dwarfed by natural variation.
No, I definitely care. It's just because I care, I have little patience for witch doctors and voodoo - if you're going to learn the truth about something, you use science, not consensus.
The problem you have is that you've built an edifice that you believe is scientific, but one that lacks the most basic cornerstone of the scientific method - the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. Want to show that you're really doing science? Then make a statement that is more than "heads I win, tails you lose".
Name a single improvement to the models that was made in the past year, that was considered by NOAA in their panicky press release.
Just one.
Funny, forest cover has been dramatically expanding with the increased atmospheric CO2 :)
As for the fate of the passenger pigeon, color me unimpressed - I still see flying rats all over the city. The fact that Darwin's principle of natural selection eliminated the passenger pigeon doesn't bother me one whit, given the huge scope of other closely related pigeon everywhere else.
But hey, let's just keep blaming our immoral behavior for every drought, flood, or other natural disaster - it worked for the witch doctors of the past, no reason to stop doing it now, right? :)
...human influence is *always* a contributing factor to weather. Heck, the influence of butterflies is *always* a contributing factor.
The question is, "how big is that factor"?
The answer? So small as to be immeasurable.
http://www.nature.com/news/extreme-weather-1.11428
"Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming."
I don't like living in a world where fights end with the victim grievously wounded or dead - I'd much rather have the unprovoked aggressor shot and killed to serve as a deterrent to other aggressors.
But you already clearly understand where the *real* problem is - the aggressor who decides to start a fight with a stranger for no reason. We may differ on the best way to deter aggressors, but understanding what the root cause is always the first step to coming to a real answer.
Your macho, thug tirade just convinced me to donate to zimmerman *again*.
If every thug who ever ambushes a stranger and does the "ground and pound" dance gets shot and killed, the world will be a better place.
God, I'd love to hear an audio book version of that refutation :)
Yes, he's crude, and over the top, but the roughness of his language doesn't detract from the crystal clarity of his points.
Of course you're right - the fallacy here is that it is assumed that climate change action is a rational activity because human psychology opposes it. Since human psychology can oppose irrational activity (as well as rational activity), the assertion doesn't follow.
Rather than the implication that human psychology holds back climate change action because human psychology is irrational, and climate change action is rational, it's rather the case that human psychology holds back climate change action because in this case, human psychology is rational, and climate change action is irrational.
...the burning of witches in the modern world; ...basing economic activity on astrological predictions; ...basing economic activity on predictions of apocalypse.
Maybe the problem isn't with human psychology...
Then I've failed to communicate that effectively to you :)
That sounds fair enough, but again, hardly resonating with an actual vegetarian (unless they happened to be one of those fat ones that tried to become vegetarian for health reasons, and weren't seeing success).
My take would be slightly different: "huh, I thought vegetarians were usually healthy, but I guess they must not be because he's done the research and they apparently aren't healthier" - and this, is arguably true.
I guess that's the argument in a nutshell - I'm arguing that psychological processes in the brain aren't primary drivers of appetite, they're secondary or tertiary. To quantify that, I think we're looking at metabolic ward studies, with various controls for macronutrients and a search for quantitative data on biomechanisms rather than subjective surveys.
Yes. You can't rely on getting good results out of bad data.
I disagree. The conscious acknowledgement of "tastiness" may occur in some part of the frontal cortex, say, but when it comes to "tastiness as having an effect on actual biomarkers rather than a survey", that's something that is determined by a complex set of tissues and organs, including but not limited to parts of the brain that are not conscious.
I wonder if you would put the brain in a place of primacy if we were talking about say, vertical growth rather than horizontal growth. Would it be possible for the brain to psychologically retard (or accelerate) growth in height? Could it somehow reduce the amount of human growth hormone circulated by the pituitary? More importantly, since vertical growth requires a caloric imbalance (need more calories in than calories out), would the mechanisms you imagine for hunger and appetite be suppressible when trying to avoid vertical growth? Could a teenager reduce their appetite enough to limit their calories enough to stop their vertical growth from happening?
My guess is that you'd admit to the primacy of HGH in determining vertical growth, but that begs the question as to why you wouldn't admit the primacy of insulin in determining horizontal growth.
Again, you bring in the messy brain in the example as a point of pride - eventually, every brain response has to culminate in some biomechanism for accumulating fat. You can do a more rigorous and profitable analysis by understanding the basic biomechanisms *first*, and then discovering how the brain might influence those levers. But you can't have a brain doing something magical and unobservable - it eventually needs to get down to the level of accumulating fat in a fat cell.
Okay, so let's get the test where we measure the biochemical process by which the brain influences say, tastiness. Let's throw away the subjective questionnaires, and measure the actual biochemical signals. Again, first principles, we need to go to the moment of action.
Easy. Bad data. They even admit to it: "These numbers are probably not particularly accurate"
No, let's be specific - his failure was that he did not speak clearly enough to have his audience understand. That's a failing for someone who is trying to convey a point.
For the status quo nutritionists, given their terrible track record at improving health with their advice for the past 40 years, they're failure was that they *were* understood, and people abided by their bad advice.
I mean, honestly, do you think that Taubes' statement in that radio interview convinced a single vegetarian to start on an unhealthy, high glycemic carnivorous diet, as opposed to a healthy low-glycemic carnivorous diet?
Surely - he failed to caveat appropriately, and because of that, was misinterpreted by folk, such as you. His attempt at rhetoric could have been sharper, and he's probably better off either in prepared lectures or in written form than on a radio show.
As to being seriously misinformed, that's a particular brand of tar that status quo, "calories in/calories out" nutritionists are neck deep in :) At worst Taubes glossed, but government advice on diet and exercise has been substantially harmful for the past 40 years.
I'm not sure if I quite understand your researcher/other person example.
It is quite possible that there are some things that are beyond the realm of science - things for which no falsifiable hypothesis is possible. It's even quite possible that there are some *deterministic* things that are beyond the realm of science (odd to think of, but wolfram makes a fairly strong case with cellular automata that there is no way to discern which simple rules may have created certain complex observations).
The idea that we can *scientifically* analyze something without falsifiability is a fallacy.
You're giving the brain too much credit. Hunger is a *whole body* effect, and arguably a cellular effect. Heck, consciousness is arguably a *whole body* effect, with incredibly tightly coupled influences on the cellular level (as demonstrated by say, phantom limb effects).
The brain is simply one portion of the complex system, and certainly isn't the only place that intelligent and complex behavior occurs.
And maybe that's the problem I have with your frame - you're asserting that the brain is some massively omnipotent organ that dictates to the rest of the body, and that we can ignore all other factors and concentrate on it as the first order term.
I'm arguing a different frame based on our observations of cellular intelligence (http://www.brianjford.com/w-intelcell.htm, for example). Given the biochemical processes on the *cellular* level is the only way to rationally attack this problem, as far as that frame goes.
So, are you leery of those who say "it's due to eating more calories than those burned!"?
Rather, Taubes ignored the correlation as spurious, and concentrated on the root cause and extrapolated from there. One can argue he should have left caveats in his statement, but by the same token, so should our status quo nutritionists.
The more and more I think about it, status quo nutritionists must come up with some pretty creative ad hoc special pleadings to excuse the terrible track record of their advice for the past 40 years. Either they must believe that humans have somehow become more slothful and gluttonous (increasing defects of character), or they must believe that there is some "Z" factor out there that is stymying their efforts (say, big bad food companies making food more tasty with evil scientists in lab coats with beakers).
Which, in essence, is the problem with the mental model status quo nutritionists have - any success is to their credit, but any failure is someone else's fault. I don't think they have a model that they're willing to see challenged, or can even imagine could possibly fail.
The problem here is that even if you identify this effect, it's trivial.
FWIW, they've had a study of 30 healthy women (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18589027), and 17 healthy men (http://jcem.endojournals.org/content/95/1/333.abstract), neither of which addresses differentially insulin resistant folk, nor gives us much confidence due the small sample sizes. The 17 healthy men study (actually measuring gut response) is definitely more interesting, but the measured effect is tiny.
Run the same experiments against differential insulin resistant folk, and with a variety of macronutrient combinations, in a metabolic ward, and you've got some real data.
I'll agree to a point - certainly there's an assumption, particularly in the AI community, that you can build intelligence out of dumb parts, and model neurons like petri nets or simple gates - that's just hubris talking. Great set of lectures on that: https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/cognitive-ubiquity-evolution/id464839816
That being said, I'm not just talking about discrete simulations (as Wolfram has made particularly interesting finds in cellular automata), I'm talking about real world root cause failures in complex, integrated, man/logic/machine settings (which, do include a biological component of sorts). You cannot hope to find the truth in an analysis of a real-world system (again, not just some pre-programmed simulation, real computers doing real work with real people), without falsifiability.
Certainly hunger would be a complex one, but even in a complex system, you have first, second, third, etc order effects. Furthermore, as you noted, biology generally leads to extremely robust systems, and a system that ignored muscle starvation due to visual stimulation is distinctly *not* robust. The muscle cells can be considered as intelligent actors, just as intelligent as any bit of brain tissue, and they simply cannot be considered a lower order term.
And so in the end, I think you're making the same mistake you're pointing out here - you're treating a large, complex system, as dictated to by a single organ as a first order effect (i.e., it's all in your brain). In fact, biology is *filled* with intelligence, even down to the cellular level, and a robust system simply wouldn't make "tastiness" it's primary directive - that's not robust by any means. It *is* rational to think that cellular intelligence would be concerned with things like protecting from toxic levels of glucose in tissues and the blood stream, and sufficient energy to survive, and the complex failure of the system to maintain a healthy weight (in order to survive in the short term), is quite neatly explained by the insulin and differential insulin resistance mechanism as a *first order* term.
My contention about the nutritionists disparaging red meat and saturated fat. They are taking a *correlation*, and pretending it's a *causality* - a mistake on their part that is easily verifiable by even the most casual of glances at the references they give.
Ah, so in fact, you do "care" in the emotional sense of the word, but have excluded them because you believe they add too much complexity to the picture. Fair enough, although I do think that in order to "do no harm", nutritionists are obligated to understand the *mortality* effects of their advice before giving it. It could be that the safest thing to say to anyone is "your individual body and response to dietary components may vary greatly from someone else's", rather than promote false tropes like "red meat and saturated fat will cause everyone health problems", or "vegetarianism is a healthy lifestyle for anyone"...it's like insisting that everyone should eat 5-6 servings of peanuts a day, even if they're allergic to peanuts.
Isn't that what you're saying about Taubes in a nutshell? "I think Taubes is wrong, therefore when he disagrees with me he's lying."
Ah, the hobgoblin of correlation again :)
That being said, you really don't care about the health outcomes?
Certainly, computer science.
While my hypotheses get to deal with generally discrete systems rather than analog biological ones, I can't possibly find root cause in a behavior in a complex system without using the scientific method and falsifiability.
Can the unsight of food untrigger hunger?
Surely, the brain can help regulate hunger, but the idea that slow eating will override starving muscle signals is dubious.
Unless you deal with the differential insulin problem obese people have, eating slower and stopping slightly earlier isn't going to be a significant factor. I have personally experienced the duality of feeling completely overstuffed, yet starving - for a differentially insulin resistant obese person, slow eating and slightly smaller portions isn't going to make a significant difference, if any.
I still wonder - if the brain can trigger hunger on the sight of food, is there any visual that can suppress hunger? Maybe we just need to find the right combination of pictures, flash them to differentially insulin resistant people, we can suppress hunger... ...how many pounds do you think you could lose by suppressing hunger via visual stimuli? ...how many pounds do you think you can gain by triggering hunger via visual stimuli?
Actually, I am a scientist. I, on a regular basis in my daily work, have to come up with falsifiable hypotheses in order to determine causality in complex systems. I can certainly decide to daydream beyond the realm of science, and the falsifiable, but it's not going to help me solve problems or learn truths.
Again, you're holding a double standard. Taubes speaks of vegans and vegetarians broadly, when he probably could be more specific. Status quo nutritionists speak broadly of red meat and saturated fat eaters, when in fact the studies they tout have shown *correlation* not *causation* - so if they were to be more accurate, they'd have to really point out the controlling factor of carbohydrates on insulin, which they quite nearly actively disparage.
Think about all the b.s. that came out of the China Study, that denise minger so thoroughly dissected - http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/07/31/one-year-later-the-china-study-revisited-and-re-bashed/