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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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calories out has been shown to change in response to calories in, so you are in effect chasing a constantly moving target

Good news! The CICO folks that you dislike have entire articles on how this works, what the ranges are, how to understand it, etc. To steal a little bit of the plane analogy from below (not adopting it entirely), when a plane uses fuel, its dynamics change, too. That doesn't mean that physics don't work or that we can't understand how to use the system effectively.

What useful information are we left with? Pretty much, eat more or less until you get the desired change in weight, and that "more or less" refers specifically to calorie content.

Much more than that. Once you dial in where you are within the population-level variance, you get remarkably good predictions for how the noisy process works. I have a lot of background in stochastic systems, too, and I think this part trips a lot of people up. It's not easy to filter noisy data appropriately or to even understand the right timescales to pick for your filters. That's why the CICO people don't jump to an imaginary bailey and instead do things like creating an app that has a lot of filtering built-in.

Even though my degrees are actually in aerospace, I'm not sure the plane analogy is the best one for this part. Instead, maybe let's push things to a bit of an extreme with an analogy to semiconductor fabrication. In this case, someone could have some familiarity with the published literature in semiconductor physics, could go through a variety of published patents, but then when they try to make their own semiconductors, they fail. One response could be to claim that everyone in semiconductor physics is lying to them or just blaming them for doing it wrong; that those baddies are claiming that semiconductor physics "just works and must be perfect" or whatever. Another response could be that there are parts of the process that do require some specialized background knowledge to do precisely, perhaps some experience with tuning certain processes along the way that aren't always shouted to the rooftops in the public domain.

I think that careful filtering of CICO data also requires some mathematical experience if you want mathematical precision. I haven't actually used the particular app that I linked, nor am I privy to the tuning/filtering decisions they've made, but I'm familiar with the work of the guys who made it, so I have a reasonable amount of trust that they're doing a pretty good job at tuning it in a way that will work pretty well for most users. But the good news is that most people don't need mathematical precision here (unlike in semiconductor fabrication). I think @07mk goes a bit overboard in how wide of an error bar is needed, but for most people, you really can just hand-tune a bit with a little fudge factor, not needing to be super precise on your filtering, and see the results. But at the same time, if you do get into the details of tuning filters well (or offload that work to something like that app that probably does that ok enough for you), then you probably do get pretty precise predictions.

A lot of this comes down to error analysis and ranges for estimation. One group of CICO-haters say that it's just flatly impossible to filter in a way that gets you even remotely close to usable data without metabolic ward precision. Another group of CICO-haters say that any quantity of error violates their strawman that "CICO is perfect in every way". Most of the time, they don't put numbers to their error ranges. They don't put any numerical analysis tools to the question of how much data must be collected to achieve some O(epsilon) error or how different filtering schemes affect this. Frankly, many do fall into a small number of common 'traps', just like how undergrads in a numerical analysis course often fall into a small number of common 'traps'. I am lucky in that I have the toolset to get a lot more mathematical precision than most people, so I don't have to learn all of that from scratch or trust somebody else's filter. And when I did those things for an n=2 experiment, knowing all of the caveats about how noisy things are and how difficult the numerics is, my technical assessment was that I was shocked by how precise it turned out to be.

Well, what can I say - good for you. Personally, I find that calorie counting does not work very well for predicting weight gain, even after a year of trying it. And if it's true that label calories can be as little as half of the actual content, and it's not possible for a normal person to measure calories out, then perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. As they say, garbage in, garbage out. If you put in garbage data, and you get an impossible result like a TDEE of 4000, then is it actually reasonable to persist?

It seems like false precision to me. CICO advocates call for weighing every leaf of lettuce and drop of oil. When estimates of calorie content can be off by so much, how is that not false precision? Particularly in the context of weight gain, it's not even rational to refuse to eat food that can't be measured.

And if it's true that label calories can be as little as half of the actual content

That's not true.

[if] it's not possible for a normal person to measure calories out

I mean, it is possible. Lots of people do manage it well enough. Just like lots of people manage to pass their numerical analysis class, even if there is some number of common 'traps'. It's only a few people who get bitter enough after falling into a common trap to decide that the professor is full of bullshit and the material is impossible, then dropping out of the class. Even apps do it pretty darn well these days.

CICO advocates call for weighing every leaf of lettuce and drop of oil.

We get it; you're a very accomplished strawmanner. You don't need to keep making bigger and bigger strawmen to try to prove some point. We didn't count almost any vegetables (some exceptions).

This is what people are telling me right here in this thread! I agree that it's silly to count vegetables. I never counted vegetables - I was told I was doing it wrong!

Look, call them weakmen if you like, but I was told, when I was not getting anywhere counting calories, that it was because I was lying, or crazy, or had a tapeworm, or that it was scientifically impossible to eat 4 thousand calories a day and not gain weight, or that the labels on my food were probably wrong. Who knows? As a non-scientist, I don't have the ability or authority to evaluate or challenge these claims. And if that takes the form of personal criticism, you definitely can't ignore it or defend against it. Maybe they are strawmen - how am I supposed to know?

Do you believe the person online who says that it's scientifically impossible to not be racist? (This one definitely personally criticizes you.) The one who says that lizardmen secretly rule the government? The one who has "119 scientific proofs" for why the earth is flat?

How are you supposed to know? Basic epistemic hygiene will get you a long way. Or, ya know, you can throw your hands up and decide that it's impossible to know anything.

Why not? Racism is a human category - if scientists, with their authority, deem it to include me, I am certainly in no position to stop them. Words mean just what we want them to mean, no more and no less.

I don't really mind who runs the government. It seems unlikely that it would be lizardmen.

But consider weight gain and weight loss. It becomes obvious that this is a much more important topic than racism, the government, or the shape of the earth. After all, being fat or small and weak are moral issues, as has been discussed in this thread. Not having a great physique makes you an inferior person, whereas living on a flat or round earth, having a lizard for President, or having a scientist deem you racist (water off my back, really).

Epistemic hygiene is a community practice, not an individual practice - nor do I think it includes ignoring criticism. But in my case, I think epistemic hygiene might include not treating with maximum charity a group of people who seem to be strongly epistemically closed, resistant to criticism, prone to lashing out with personal attacks or retreating to the Laws of Thermodynamics as a defense.

Epistemic hygiene is a community practice, not an individual practice

It's an individual practice with community effects, like any other hygiene. You seem to have been inoculated against actually engaging with the research by focusing on some random people that you think are stupid. Reversed stupidity (if it does exist out there somewhere) is not intelligence. If you're finding such people, engaging with them, and responding by becoming strongly epistemically closed, resistant to criticism, prone to lashing out with personal attacks or retreating to saying that you can't possibly know anything about how the world works, you're descending to the lowest of the lows that you imagine your enemies to be.

Part of epistemic hygiene is keeping away from people who themselves, don't argue in good faith. You yourself suggested that I not take everything written online seriously!

You can figure out how the world works. But the best way to do that is through direct experience. You yourself were forced to resort to Ultima Ratio - your own personal experience. That's also what I'm doing. What I was told did not correspond to my lying eyes. What should I do? Check myself into an insane asylum?

Again, you fall back on the research. But it's not obvious to me what guidance the research gives. If you perform calorie tracking and get an incorrect result, like a TDEE estimate that is too high, there's no study that can tell you why you got an incorrect result or what to do about it.

What I was told did not correspond to my lying eyes. What should I do? Check myself into an insane asylum?

Check your hyperbole. Think seriously about whether this is a remotely reasonable thing to suggest. Perhaps think about the example of someone trying to make their own semiconductors. If their project fails, and they decide that being told that semiconductor physics works and that semiconductor technology is possible disagrees with their lying eyes, would you suggest that they check into an insane asylum? If not, what might you suggest instead?

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