= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
sixes_and_sevens comments on What supplements do you take, if any? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (72)
On the subject of supplements, has it struck anyone else how weird an alliance health stores are?
I don't know what it's like elsewhere, but the largest health retail chain in the UK is called Holland and Barrett. It caters to the alternative therapy and woo crowd. It caters to biohackers and allergy-sufferers and body-builders and hypochondriacs. It sells vegan cheese alongside giant cartons of whey protein.
These people are not natural allies. The one thing that unites them is their unconventional desire to either put a specific substance into their bodies, or keep a specific substance out of their bodies.
I've been amused by the GNC (America) practice of having supplements appealing to different markets in separate alcoves-- there were (at least) body builder, new age, bargain, science (sciency?),.... I didn't check to see how many of their supplements were the same things in different packages in various alcoves.
They had one additional clever bit-- the supplements had a life-sized silhouette of the capsule printed on the package so you could see whether they were a size you wanted to swallow.
I just stopped by a GNC, and it's changed quite a bit. I remember GNC (some 15 or 20 years ago) as having a roughly equal balance of sections. Now it's predominantly for athletes and body builders. There's an herb section, and that's the last faint echo of New Age.
There's a wonderfully ridiculous shop in Brighton that takes this one step further by selling a mixture of health food, supplements and 'Legal highs'. I'm not sure how anyone thought this was a good idea - perhaps some people think that the anti-oxidants from a blueberry smoothie can counteract the damage done by fly agaric mushrooms?
The funny thing is, they DO.
Study showing vitamin C reduces most problems with MDMA: Sharankar 2001
Graph of free radical levels in brain from MDMA + Vitamin C, MDMA alone, and controls from the study above (Sharankar 2001).
Funnily enough I've seen that study before, in fact I used to give my friends vitamin C + 5-htp when they did MDMA.
Which makes my previous comment rather weird now I look back on it. While fly agaric mushrooms are an exceptionally dangerous drug (but still legal, while the competitively safer psilocybin ones are illegal. Go figure.) it does seem somewhat plausible that vitamins could reduce the damage done. I think what I meant was that it won't completely eliminate the damage from a drug that dangerous.
Moreover, while some people are aware of studies like that, it seems a little odd that there are enough health freaks who aren't put off by the drugs the keep the shop in business.
It makes a bit more sense when you look at the rest of their behavior. People who take drugs (especially psychedelics) tend to look down on people who don't as being prudes, unenlightened, or just ignorant. When you look at it that way, drug-users and health nuts have something in common; they like to use their way of life to feel superior to other people.
(oh, and make sure to only give 5-htp after the high wears off. Otherwise, you increase the risk of serotonin syndrome.)
"it seems a little odd" should lead to noticing confusion and then updating your view of the world so that the world doesn't seem odd anymore.
Things being odd certainly should lead to updating models, however, unless the models are perfect, things may continue to be odd.
In cases like this your models likely aren't build on peer reviewed research about the behavior of health freaks. Humans are very often overconfident. There no good reason to assume that your model is perfect.
I've noticed this too. I feel vaguely uncomfortable going in there and try to avoid walking past the homeopathy etc aisles for no reason that really makes sense. (Not a very common occurrence, but sometimes they do have that one specific thing I'm looking for!)
I wouldn't be surprised if the LW population consumes more whey protein and more vegan cheese than the average person on the street.
When I hear about the exploits of other LessWrongers, I wonder if Less Wrong itself isn't also a very weird alliance we've simply gotten used to.
I've been toying with writing a post on unlikely alliances and tolerance of deviant behaviour, but I figure if I wait long enough, Scott will write exactly the same post on Slate Star Codex, only much better than I could.
I expect Will_Newsome's post on taking ideas seriously might give you most of an explanation for that.
My imaginary post would be about how Less Wrong celebrates deviant behaviour, ostensibly as a search process for useful life-enhancing interventions, but also because we just seem to like weird stuff and have complicated relationships with social norms.
Other communities also like weird stuff and have complicated relationships with social norms. It's often different weird stuff and different social norms, but I wonder if there isn't room for something interesting to happen here.
Well, of course. Off the top of my head, we have here a mix of the x-risk people, EAs, the polyamory tribe, and a set of logico-philosophical puzzles geeks.
Not to mention the bizarre political landscape.
Along with more grass-fed beef, more raw milk, more coconut oil...