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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3119 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 19, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Would a survey of the dietary habits of top-performing students at top institutions be the most conclusive answer to “what / how should we eat to maximize / optimize cognitive performance”?

It dawned on me that (1) cognitive performance tests in a lab may be too dissimilar to the “continuous” mental stress of an intense pre-med or engineering course load, and (2) there may be longterm benefits and detriments to diets that do not come out for many months. Also, (3) as academic performance in top departments are society’s largest competition, it’s likely that if there are students with a noteworthy performance benefit from nutrition that they will find their way to the top.

You'd just pick up on whatever contingent cultural ways of eating they had culturally absorbed. Because the biggest causes of intelligence or performance in the population aren't eating, and those causes are highly correlated with all sorts of behaviors, like what kind of food you eat. "Detailed study of New York's 1900s cognitive elite finds lox, bagels, and deli meat key for intellect"

I’m thinking that the competition for selection to eg Columbia, and then Columbia engineering / pre-med, would be so competitive that everyone already has 130iq. The small difference that diet makes would then be more significant than otherwise, because everyone already has intelligence and good habits.

If there is a signal, it'll still be swamped by correlations. The affirmative action students and asians will have different diets. The richer students will eat higher class food, and do better. And there are so many different ways diets can vary, and so many ways to group different foods into potential groups with effects (meat? red meat? lean meat? beef? processed meat? grass fed? organic? non-gmo? all-natural? free-range?) - and all of those groups and foods will ahve their own idiosyncratic correlations with all sorts of other factors - that it'll be impossible to sort signal from noise.

It's not that it's impossible to figure this kind of thing out. There's a lot in econometrics on causal inference with limited kinds of data, and that sometimes works, even if it works less often than economists think imo. But I can't think of anything that'd really work here.

also, the really-effective diets might just not be present in the dataset. let's say you find that vegetarian diets are better than meat diets because the vegetarians are mostly health nuts. but nobody was eating biodynamic pasture-raised bison, goat cheese, sunchokes, and mangos, which is actually the optimal IQ diet, or anything close to that.

Would a survey of the dietary habits of top-performing students at top institutions be the most conclusive answer to “what / how should we eat to maximize / optimize cognitive performance”?

No, it will mostly reveal what's fashionable among top performers. A preference for macarons over macaroons probably isn't performance enhancing, but you can safely bet that it will show up in the dietary choices of the upper class.

I’m going to guess no, because students are completely unhinged. You don’t have the same sleep habits or sex drive or social life ten years later; I’d expect the optimal diet to change, too.

There’s also the selection effect of getting into such schools in the first place. Integrating 18 years of top-1-percent behaviors, either from parents or from the students, is going to dominate the habits from a couple rapidly changing years on their own.

because students are completely unhinged. You don’t have the same sleep habits or sex drive or social life ten years later

College was actually almost exactly ten years later for me and ain't that the truth.

I used to think I was "nocturnal" due to how I could function with a horrible and insufficient sleep schedule. No, turns out I was just young. Horrible set of habits to take into adult life.

It's possible but I think dietary habits would have too small an impact over the short term to be measurable over a small sample size like that. I expect a 135 IQ student on a diet of pizza pockets to outperform a 130 IQ student on fresh Italian pizza with the best ingredients, all else equal. In some ways it might even be inversely correlated, if the student who has pizza pockets spends the hour they save browsing the grocery for good ingredients, cooking the food, and cleaning up on studying instead.

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