neq1 comments on Even if you have a nail, not all hammers are the same - Less Wrong

95 Post author: PhilGoetz 29 March 2010 06:09PM

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Comment author: wedrifid 28 October 2010 06:02:15AM 12 points [-]

Wow, I just read Robin's writeup on this and it caused me to significantly lower the amount of credence I place on his other positions (but very slightly lower my opinion of supplements). It just struck me as overwhelmingly sloppy and rhetorical. Particularly his justification attempt in response to this thread. (But I suppose Robin's responses to criticism have never impressed me anyway.)

Comment author: neq1 28 October 2010 02:17:16PM 2 points [-]

If you look at Table 2 in the paper, it shows doses of each vitamin for every study that is considered low risk for bias. I count 9 studies that have vitamin A <10,000 IU and vitamin E <300 IU, which is what PhilGoetz said are good dosage levels.

The point estimates from those 9 studies (see figure 2) are: 2.88, 0.18, 3.3, 2.11, 1.05, 1.02, 0.78, 0.87, 1.99. (<1 favors supplements, >1 favors control)

Based on this quick look at the studies, I don't see any reason to believe that a "hockey stick" model will show a benefit of supplements at lower dose levels.

Comment author: wedrifid 28 October 2010 03:54:53PM 0 points [-]

Based on this quick look at the studies, I don't see any reason to believe that a "hockey stick" model will show a benefit of supplements at lower dose levels.

The titular contention used the word 'kill'. That's what hockey sticks tend to do.

Comment author: gwern 14 September 2013 06:07:53PM *  0 points [-]

But Goetz implies that the vitamins may have benefits in the right regime:

This is not how vitamins work. Vitamin A is toxic in doses over 15,000 IU/day, and vitamin E is toxic in doses over 400 IU/day (Miller et al. 2004, Meta-Analysis: High-Dosage Vitamin E Supplementation May Increase All-Cause Mortality; Berson et al. 1993, Randomized trial of vitamin A and vitamin E supplementation for retinitis pigmentosa.). The RDA for vitamin A is 2500 IU/day for adults. Good dosage levels for vitamin A appear to be under 10,000 IU/day, and for E, less than 300 IU/day. (Sadly, studies rarely discriminate in their conclusions between dosage levels for men and women. Doing so would give more useful results, but make it harder to reach the coveted P < .05 or P < .01.)

...Vitamins, like any medicine, have an inverted-J-shaped response curve. If you graph their health effects, with dosage on the horizontal access, and some measure of their effects - say, change to average lifespan - on the vertical axis, you would get an upside-down J. (If you graph the death rate on the vertical axis, as in this study, you would get a rightside-up J.) That is, taking a moderate amount has some good effect; taking a huge a mount has a large bad effect.

It would be a strange usage of 'good' if all Goetz meant by it was 'increases fatalities by too small an amount to easily detect' rather than 'increases some desirable outcome'.

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