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Luke_A_Somers comments on August 2014 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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Podcasts Thread
Welcome to Night Vale - free to download, previously recommended here. The news is amusing, the weather segments are enjoyable if you have somewhat eclectic musical tastes and the hosts crush in Carlos the dreamy scientist is something to root for. I just finished episode 18.
Social Networks and Evolution: a great Oxford neuroscience talk. I will also shamelessly push this blog post that I wrote about the connection between the work in the lecture and Jared Diamond's thesis that agriculture was the worst mistake in human history.
A couple of minutes in, the podcast mentions the somewhat dubious idea that obesity spreads through social networks. Does this cast much doubt on the rest of the piece?
As far as I can tell from the evidence given in the talk, contagious spreading of obesity is a plausible but not directly proven idea. Its plausibility comes from the more direct tests that he gives later in the talk, namely the observed spread of cooperation or defection in iterated games.
However, I agree that it's probably important to not too quickly talk about contagious obesity because (a) they haven't done the more direct interventional studies that would show whether this is true, and (b) speculating about contentious social issues in public before you have a solid understanding of what's going on leads to bad things. He could have more explicitly gotten at the point that we're not sure what effects cause the correlations that we see- I caught it but I suspect people paying less attention would come away thinking that they had proved the causal model.