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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread, April 27-May 4, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Agreed.
Not sure about that, for example if he had died at the age of 81 in a car accident. Although I appreciate your effort, I am not sure that you have the reference class of events correct. The evidence suggest that Roberts died (1) suddenly; (2) due to failure of some bodily system; (3) at an age which is well under his life expectancy. The prior probability of this happening has got to be far less than the prior probability of him simply dying from any cause before his actuarial life expectancy.
At the same time, he was apparently consuming large amounts of butter, omega fatty acids from flax seeds, and other esoteric things. Of course it's difficult to even being estimating the risk inherent in doing such things.
Ironically, Seth Roberts was a big believer in "n=1 experiments."
Do you have an estimate of the probability that Robert's death is related to his supplement regime?
Seth Roberts' last article
Some ambiguity about the Agatston score
Agatston's overview of his test
Thank you for your post, which raises some interesting questions. Of course at this point it is not known if Roberts died of a heart attack, although the smart money is on a cardio-vascular problem - heart attack, stroke, aneurism, etc.
The first question is whether the Agatston score is as good as it's made out to be by Doctor Agatston. Another question is whether it is skillful in the case of Roberts himself. Probably none of the people who were studied were eating half a stick of butter a day, along with lots of flax seeds, extra light olive oil, and who knows what else.
I'm not a doctor, but a quick search on Wikipedia turns up that the most common cause of sudden death in people over 30 is coronary artery atheroma (arteriosclerosis), but other common causes are genetically determined or at least have a significant genetic component. I suppose some of these are easier to detect (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy perhaps?), so we can probably rule them out for somebody like Roberts who constantly monitored his health and bragged about how healthy he was. Other conditions are probably more difficult to detect with standard tests.
The puzzle has a lot of pieces missing, to be sure. Another question is whether Roberts was telling the whole truth about his health. Or about his diet for that matter. It's even not out of the question that he has gained a lot of weight.