Anyone with the medical knowledge to evaluate an extraordinary claim?
In a different forum I frequent ( The Ornery American ), a regular member there (LetterRip) has recently been making an extraordinary claim—a new theory of medicine he has devised that relates and can contribute in the cure of several neurological-related conditions.
I understand that the prior probabilities for him being a crank are much much higher than him being a new Louis Pasteur. Still I was wondering if there is anyone here with sufficient medical/medicinal knowledge that they can easily determine if there’s something obviously ludicrous in LetterRip’s theory, or even the opposite: if indeed there’s something there that makes sense and is worth investigating.
Here are some of the relevant threads he began:
- where he publishes portion of his theory as a Kindle book
Once again: I understand it’s highly unlikely there’s anything in his theory; still, I felt a cost-benefit analysis justified my making this post here.
So… anyone with enough understanding of biology/medicine to evaluate these claims of his?
I don’t know why this post is being downvoted, but in any case I have a better idea: use it as a rationality exercise to figure out whether he is a crackpot without acquiring any additional biological/medical knowledge or consulting any biological/medical experts. I bet you can convince yourself to a near-certainty (my feeling is something like a 10^-7 chance of being wrong) that he is a crackpot using only information already available to you and some good heuristics.
Of course you may wish to consult John Baez’s Crackpot Index, which is funny and insightful. But the best heuristics I can suggest are the three points of Sean Carroll’s Alternative Science Respectability Checklist:
See also Scott Aaronson’s extremely good Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong, which makes the point that you can usually confer crackpot status on the basis of superficial characteristics alone, and his Eight Signs A Claimed P≠NP Proof Is Wrong, which is some sense a specific instantiation of Carroll’s three points (especially the first two).
From these kinds of heuristics and some simple observations, the guy is too obviously a crackpot to even be worth asking an expert about.
I’ll point out just a couple of things:
On a superficial level (which often provides great Bayesian evidence!), the guy can barely type—his posts are littered with weird typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, and incoherent sentences.
He gives no account of why medical science has failed to figure out this stuff.
He emphasizes how exceptionally simple all his discoveries are, that biology boils down to just a few fundamental principles—that the same basic idea will “cure” literally all common diseases. Again, just think of how much seemingly settled biological science would have to be wrong for that to be possible.
It’s such a common cluster of traits (and failure mode among people on the internet and homeless people I’ve met), it might be a particular mental state. Hasn’t everyone had that feeling once that they suddenly understand everything and it’s All Connected? It’s a particular manic state, perhaps. When I find myself in it, I know not to trust anything I’m thinking but I write it down anyway just in case. Sometimes it’s OK and there are insights.
Here’s a MetaFilter thread discussing how manic states can lead to this kind of feeling. It’s pretty anecdotal though. Some actual research to what’s going on with stereotypical crackpots would be interesting.
Psychoceramics? … oh.
1e-7 seems too strong. That’s 1 in 10 million.
I don’t have a lot of experience at making judgments about orders of magnitude, so you are probably right. But my estimate was based not only on the seeming untrustworthiness of the source, but also on an estimate of how likely it is that anything like what this guy is claiming is true. If you multiply together the probabilities that:
literally all medical complaints, from autism to backache, have the same cause, which is deficiency of micronutrients available in ordinary foods if eaten in sufficient quantities;
the extremely vigorous biological/medical sciences have been fundamentally totally off the mark for at least a century and that probably something like hundreds of thousands of seemingly well-verified scientific findings are wrong (how this could have happened, the guy doesn’t say); and that
of all people, this clown[1] was the person who figured it out …
… I’m really not sure you get something much more likely than 1 in 10 million.
fn1. just an excuse to link to my favorite of his many hilarious comments (posted 8 1⁄2 hours after his previous announcement of a “breakthrough”):
Riiiiiiiiight.
What are you trying to find by taking the product of these probabilities? They are not independent, so I think you meant to use probabilities that are conditional upon each other. For example, to find the probability of their conjunction, we would need
instead. 10^-7 seems a bit low for this.
That quote is great. :D
Yeah, as I said to jsalvatier, it may well be that my estimate was too confident, and of course you’re quite right that I should have explicitly used conditional probabilities. We’re still dealing with someone who we can label a crackpot with only a trivial chance of being wrong.
Actually, raw order of magnitude it might not be.
There are currently 6 billion people on earth. In their lifetimes (presuming the singularity doesn’t extend that to infinity), I expect there will be significantly less than 600 fundamental theory changes to our systems. Sure, entirely new fields like computers and genetics have occurred in the last ~80ish years, but those occurred within the framework of existing theory. Few and far between are the refutations like Phlogiston, Impetus, or Spontaneous generation. The prior probability for anyone to overturn an established branch of science is therefore already much less than 1 in 10 million.
If our prior probability is already at 1 in 10 million, additional facts like him having no training in an area and incoherent sentences push it to being even less likely.
The relevant number to use in the calculation you’re making isn’t the 6 billion people inhabiting the world, but the people that actually claim to have made such a stunning breakthrough: since that’s what instigates us to want to evaluate the claim in the first place, the fact that he made it.
In short not:
P(X made a stunning breakthrough|X is an alive human being)
but rather:
P(X made a stunning breakthrough|X claims to have made a stunning breakthrough)
As a rough guess I’d say 1⁄100 (or atleast 1/1000) may be far closer in regards to prior probabilities than 1⁄10,000,000.
“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”. ― Albert Einstein
If modern scientific methods could self-explain why they were wrong, they would be better scientific models. Moreover, scientific communities do not have access to perfect knowledge: any particular theory could have hundreds of supporting trials behind it if those trials weren’t popular enough to be well-known (out of millions of experiments).
OK, that’s a good point.
I chuckled when I saw this: Another of the forum members mentioned “the thing you were working on a few months ago” and LetterRip’s response included:
Going off this post of his, it sounds like people who take a daily multivitamin should have dramatically lower morbidity for at least some diseases that aren’t already typically associated with nutrient deficiency. Studies on that subject already exist, and I can predict what they’ll have to say, though I can’t look for them right now.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans die of medical malpractice every year. Anyone who holds medical science in such high regard that they can do-no-wrong has not studied its history. American medical practice especially, compared to European standards, is positively wretched to the average patient.
I would not assume that this man’s breakthrough is real, but it is ludicrous to assume its falsity without any expertise to make such a judgement. Moreover, if his methods are reasonable and his results happen to be incorrect, it does NOT make him a “crackpot”. Seriously, a scientist being wrong should be considered the norm: scietists are almost NEVER fully correct in their assertions. To call a scientist a “crackpot” is akin to calling a politician a “fascist”: sure, there are a few milling about, but overwhelmingly it’s just a cheap insult. Shame on yea who consider yourselves rationalists but use such emotionally-charged, biased terminology and make epistemology claims they have no qualifications to make.
...Additionally, there are the institutional criticisms to make of modern scientific practice. Of course, some “scientific” institutions are horribly corrupt, but even those which are run legitimately can fall victim to cognitive, publication, and funding biases. http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_know_about_the_drugs_they_prescribe.html (There’s plenty more to look up. Privately-funded studies far more likely to net positive results; positive results are far more likely to be published; negative results are more likely to be redacted after publication...)
I didn’t read through everything but if I understand this theory correctly it has a huge flaw:
Evolution would have countered it.
The proposed causes for diseases would be very easy for evolution to “cure”. Therefore these diseases wouldn’t exist if the theory was correct.
Evolutionary arguments about disease are difficult. Make sure your argument does not explain too much: vitamin deficiencies are real!
Yes, they are difficult. That is because there are many factors at play in reality. But if his theory was correct, the solution would be so simple that evolution could solve it easily.
In reality, vitmain deficiencies have strong negative consequences, but nothing as drastic as what he proposes.
If vitamin deficiencies really had such an incredibly huge impact there would be a much stronger evolutionary pressure. With such a strong pressure, evolution might have developed vitamin storage organs or even a way for creatures to exchange vitamins to prevent vitamin deficiencies at any cost.
In fact, vitamin deficiencies are rare, unless you do something outlandish like settle and live on crops. The reason humans need so many vitamins in the first place is that we could easily get them, so could easily drop synthetizing them to put more resources in growing brains to outsmart each other. Most animals need fewer vitamines.
I’m not aware of either a similar trade-off, much less a similar change in conditions (disease would have to become rare before agriculture, then common again), with disease.
Do you have a reference for any of that? It sounds reasonable that vitamin deficiencies are the result of farming, but the loss of synthesis to the specific demand of increasing brain size seems like a too specific hypothesis. In particular, almost no primates synthesize C, while almost all mammals do. Britannica lists six vitamins that no vertebrates synthesize (though it includes D, which all land animals synthesize by sunlight). Other than C, I was unable to track down claims about variation across species. Britannica claims that “more highly evolved” animals need more vitamins.
We don’t have much information about disease among hunter-gatherers. Intermediate pastoralists are more accessible. The book Diseases in Human Evolution seems relevant. Chapter 19 lists many historical accounts of vitamin deficiency. Many were not the result not of all farming, but of the wrong grain. Scurvy was seasonal.
I’ve also heard a plausible argument that agriculture results in much less mineral content in the soil. Note that organic agriculture as usually defined isn’t going to solve the problem—the manure from animals eating plants from lower mineral soil doesn’t get the mineral level back up.
Nothing but deliberately putting minerals back (which ones? how much?) or another glacial period is going to change the situation.
I don’t think evolution always compensates for changed conditions—sometimes the pathways aren’t available, sometimes the lucky chance doesn’t happen, and, after all, you don’t have to get back to the previous level of competence—your competitors are operating under the same constrained conditions you are.
It’s good to see skepticism in attributing everything to genetics...
Some legit anthropologists think pre-agricultural humans actually frequently lived into their 70s and 80s, contrary to popular assumptions
I would consider the possibility that changes in lifestyle and/or diet somewhere between 10,000 years ago and the present could have SERIOUSLY affected human health and social organization. Particular culprits I personally find likely are soil-nutrient depletion, the hyper-domestication and consolidation of monocropping corn & wheat, or confounding modern environmental factors introduced by not-fully-understood technologies.
Maybe decreasing infant mortality means more unhealthy babies are being born to become unhealthy adults
Douglas_Knight is essentially right. NancyLebovitz also makes a good point. The confounding factors are too complex to possibly deal with individually in the present, so we have to have massive experiments using the best available methods to establish correlation in present-day circumstances.