katydee comments on Quantified Health Prize Deadline Extended - Less Wrong

3 Post author: alyssavance 05 January 2012 09:28AM

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Comment author: katydee 16 January 2012 08:12:43AM 3 points [-]

Downvote the original away! My perfectionism and desire to avoid looking silly in front of smart people overrode my desire to jump at (perceived) low-hanging fruit with a short entry.

On a related note, I predict with 80% probability that there will be greater than five and fewer than ten entries. If there are fewer than five, I'm going to look awfully silly having not submitted anything.

Here's to future contests! :)

Comment author: Kevin 16 January 2012 02:24:52PM *  4 points [-]

I wonder if the general thing that kept Less Wrongers away here is not just perfectionism but perfectionism mixed with Bayesianism and unwillingness to try frequentism when forced to by frequentist studies. There's no way to do nutrition with a Bayesian approach unless you have a lot of funding and a willingness to expose large groups of people to harmful controls or nutrient deficiency or overdose studies. There is probably a fair amount of low hanging fruit in large cohort groups for those willing to try new things with the data.

My paper was basically a thesis length frequentist failure to reject the null hypothesis that answered a question slightly different from the one being asked and might have accidentally proved that Nature is fundamental via what I call the nutrient ratio combinatorial explosion hypothesis.

(though you might be able to play around with some interesting results with enough funding to have people submit to regular blood and urine testing for between a week and two months... I think I could probably prove that some vitamins and some minerals are absorbed differently sublingually versus orally).

Comment author: katydee 16 January 2012 05:57:56PM 0 points [-]

Yeah, my paper was essentially going the same way before I bailed out.