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wedrifid comments on The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet - Less Wrong
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I disagree with respect to the Four Hour Body. While Ferriss is particularly good at presenting his content to a popular science audience, using enthusiasm and anecdotes to make the information salient, the scientific basis in the background isn't bad and definitely not in the same category as Shangri-La or Atkins. (I refer here to the presentation in his recent book, not the even more hypeish blog post from 2007 with the rather provocative and unrealistic link-bait title!)
What is particularly notable, and unusual for this kind of health and fitness book is the entire chapter on "Spotting Bad Science 101". It opens with a section on the difference between correlation and causation, a principle that is sprinkled throughout the rest of the book in notes and reminders. It would clearly be unfair to apply the criticism "people who assume correlation equals causation are often not the best at medical literature search and summary" in this case. Particularly if extended to the 'entire contents' of the book!
A criticism that I would level at Ferriss is that he takes weight loss principles that are fairly well known (in some circles) and repackages them under his own brand name, complete with the 'faddishness' that you mention. Plenty of blatant attention seeking all round.
I don't endorse everything in The Four Hour Body; it is not a textbook. It's just the best book that happens to be out there on the subject that is accessible to the intended audience. It models an instrumentally rational approach more so than a purely scientific one, balancing the use of established science with trying to incorporating other forms of legitimate but less rigorous forms of evidence from evidently successful professional advisors and simple experiment by hackers.
I'm afraid my faith in Tim Ferriss' grasp of science and indeed epistemology was fatally shaken by looking into his claim that the ECA stack was scientifically proven. I was extremely interested by this, as I have worked on the Wikipedia article and found not even a consistent claimed mechanism from ECA advocates - what I could find gave a different mechanism each time, and was mostly terribly low-quality stuff on people's random web pages or eHow articles or FAQs that misspelled "freqently"[sic]. That Ferriss said he had a scientifically-backed mechanism was potentially great news!
So I sought out his references PDF (he doesn't put them in the actual book) and looked up what he had ... it was a long quote from an old version of the Wikipedia article. Except that that text was removed from the article because it was completely uncited, overall or in detail. And Ferriss' quote from the article carefully removed all the "citation needed" tags.
So yeah, given that example I have no faith whatsoever in Ferriss' grasp of what constitutes evidence beyond "it worked for me", let alone science.
You don't think "consume a @#%load of stimulants and you're going to lose weight" is scientifically proven? It just isn't a claim that is worth justifying beyond reference to whatever wikipedia has to say.
What Tim said about ECA didn't extend much beyond offhand mentions of the blatantly obvious. Including the part about dependence, ending up requiring constant stimulant use to maintain even normal levels of function and in general suggesting it is a stupid thing to do. He just isn't an ECA advocate - not even one that knows how to spell 'frequently'.
There is no way I'm going to follow you on that one. You are totally misjudging the extent to which that constitutes evidence against Tim's epistemic capability.
Extending the criticism to "the entire contents of Four Hour Body by Tim Ferriss [emphasis in context]" is inexcusable. So is declaring an author incapable of understanding the difference between causation and correlation despite overwhelming evidence against your conclusion (a chapter explaining and constant emphasis where relevant) and basically no evidence for beyond 'fatal' disapproval.
That is indeed scientifically proven, as I already noted in the RW article.
However, what Ferriss actually says in the book is (to cut'n'paste from the PDF I have here):
This sentence has a footnote, the text of which is:
I noticed this was the explanation from the deleted Wikipedia text. "At last, something citable!" I thought. And when I went to the reference PDF, I found a link to the old Wikipedia version with no references in whole or in part for that section and covered in "[citation needed]".
I think quoting an old Wikipedia article version as your crowning moment of evidence and carefully removing the "citation needed" tags is pretty damning.
You have already misleadingly summarised what he says in the book in this case, as I note at the beginning of this comment, so aren't doing that well yourself.
Our disagreement here is substantial and unlikely to change due to further conversation.