All of surfergirl's Comments + Replies
medical and drug trials routinely have severe p-hacking issues. And there have been a lot of reproducibility problems reported with, e.g. preclinical cancer research, often lacking slam dunk evidence.
Due to my medical problems I have been reading medical literature for 25 years, and indeed it is a catastrophe of p-hacking and the like, incompetent statistical analysis, ven very often there is a basic misunderstanding of what p-values mean. You routinely see researchers claiming "no effect" when the p value is slightly over 0.05.
Usually, medica...
John Ott, who popularized and maybe invented time lapse photography (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3Foz1ZJGlU ), wrote a book called "Health and Light". His observations of plant growth led him to an interest in the health effects of light.
He discusses many of the same issues in that book. His view was that while sunlight was much brighter than internal lights, you did not need very br...
Excellent points.
To add to this, we should also bear in mind that GDP growth is a bad metric for comparing countries with low population growth with countries with high population growth.
For one western country with high population growth, I calculated that 20-25% of GDP is devoted just to catering for the population growth. New roads, hospitals, houses, offices, power stations, phone lines, offices, factories etc etc. So for Japan with hardly any population growth, GDP overstates the goods available for consumption versus the US, with high population gr...
Having been on a "close to vegan" diet for many years with quite catastrophic results I would like to point out a couple of subtleties in this sphere.
The deficiencies associated with any diet can take years to appear. For example in a zero B12 diet it can take 6 years for a deficiency to appear. During this time the body is in effect "eating itself" i.e. sunstituting one form of animal food (oneself) for food eaten.
Often, as in my case, the initial switch in diet was associated with an improved sense of well-being due to not eating junk food any more... (read more)