nd 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 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:
...So I sought out his references PDF (he doesn't put them in the actual book for space reasons) and looked up what he had ... no dozens of studies, just a long quote from an old version of the Wikipedia article. Except that that text was removed from the article because it was compl
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?