I've just read the Four-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss. It seems on the face of it like ridiculously valuable material, if true - like what the completed version of Michael Vassar's proposed reboot of dietary science would look like at the finish point if dieting turned out to be more susceptible to Munchkinism than in my wildest dreams. Ferriss also talks the rationalist talk quite well in this book, much more so than in Four-Hour Workweek; he cites the experiments and occasionally says things like "I spent a lot of money on this and I expected it to work and it didn't work at all" or "I tried this and it seemed to work and I have no idea why it worked and I think it was probably a placebo effect."
Does the LessWrong hivemind have an opinion about 4HB? Has anyone tried it and found that it doesn't work, or that it does work, or that it works but not as well as Ferriss thinks it should work?
I think comparing Feriss to lukeprog's posts does the latter a grave injustice.
In the matters I consider myself fairly knowledgeable, like spaced repetitions, the claims lukeprog makes are consistent with what I expect. In matters I consider myself fairly knowledgeable like polyphasic sleep, the claims Feriss makes are not consistent with what I expect, to the point where I wondered if Feriss had ever actually done it as he claims or whether he was just plagiarizing things others had written. (I'm not impressed with what he wrote about the Zeo either.) And Gerard above discusses the ECA stack.
This sentence in particular resolves to net evidence against your position, at least according to my publicly inferrable priors.
Gerard's contribution to the wikipedia ECA page consists of:
Note that taking ECA is basically a terrible idea and if Tim had actually recommended it... (read more)