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gwern comments on The Four-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss - any LWers tried it? - Less Wrong
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Comments (60)
Overall judgement: I value each chapter of T4BBC as approximately equal to a well researched lukeprog post on the given subject matter. Tim's chapters tend to be well researched (relative to the genre of science popularization) and based on a mix of academic research, practices of prominent trainers and some findings from (systematic) self experimenters.
Personal experiences: I followed the diet and experienced significant improvements to cognition and mood as well as the obvious changes to body composition. Because carbs really do suck in the doses typically consumed.
The exercise routine (for mass gain) worked well for me. By which I mean about the same results as my typical gym experiences had been but in less time.
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.
We have a significant disagreement.
Both lukeprog and Tim Ferris make the occasional mistake when speaking about subjects about which I am familiar their positions seem to be approximately equal (and fairly high) value starting point.
(Neither are at the level where I would outright defer to their judgement.)
Also, one of them (I'll let folks guess who) has consistently shown inability to withstand cross-examination on the use of any of his references.
It would be nice to see a reference supporting this criticism of someone's use of references :).
Who was I criticizing? ;-)
Someone — I'll let folks guess who ;).
I don't believe you. I think you made that up. Weakening the claim to "anecdotally" would make it more credible and I would still want to see the context before I make evaluations of the appropriateness of the behavior given the circumstances.
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 in his book he would lose all sorts of credibility. But he didn't so he doesn't.
Also note: My objection to the wikipedia ECA page applies specifically to the state at the time when Gerard first appealed to the authority of his own wikipedia edit. Further edits by either him or another author may well have improved it since then.
I don't care about Gerard's contributions. Nor do I either know or care about the facts of the ECA stack. I read his post the first time it was mentioned on LW, and I've read it again - it still seems like a damning example of Ferriss's shoddy research practices. I'll quote it:
You do not point to an unreferenced - not just an unreferenced part, but one with active warning tags indicating low quality! - as your citation for a claim like 'dozens of studies supported the effects'. You point to a study, or a review, or hell, a popular media article like from the New York Times or something claiming to summarize the research.
A Pubmed search he did not link to (he could link to Wikipedia but not Pubmed?), and which I have no reason to believe he ever conducted. In 4HW, Ferriss advocates multiple forms of lying and deception, and more generally, laziness; he deserves no benefit of the doubt. If it looks like he stopped at a Wikipedia paragraph - he probably did just that, in full accordance with his little 'Pareto' principles.
(The contrast with lukeprog is obvious.)
These are not inferences I would make.