Hmmm. Having read it myself now, I am now very confused. I strongly recommend that everyone participating in this case study read this US military study before making up their mind. PM me (or RobinZ?) with your email address and I will email you a copy.
Elsewhere in this thread, Wei Dai took me to task for suggesting that epistemic rationality was a “solved problem”. He was right. It occurs to me that as I recently tried to slog my way through Pearl, I learned that there was still controversy as to the proper way to handle confounding variables. ERV’s criticisms definitely showed that the
Ad-36 proponents weren’t properly handling the confounding variable of age.
This US military study convinces me that they are not properly handling the confounding variables of sex and race/ethnicity. I’m almost tempted to conclude that all of the human subject evidence of the Ad-36/obesity link is practically worthless for this reason.
But there is another reason for looking at the military study. They find that past the age of 27 or so, the number of Ad-36 positives among their population falls. That suggests that it may be the case that widespread exposure of humans to Ad-36 may be a recent thing. Which is interesting because the worldwide “obesity epidemic” also seems to be a recent thing.
Hmmm. Having read it myself now, I am now very confused. I strongly recommend that everyone participating in this case study read this US military study before making up their mind. PM me (or RobinZ?) with your email address and I will email you a copy.
Elsewhere in this thread, Wei Dai took me to task for suggesting that epistemic rationality was a “solved problem”. He was right. It occurs to me that as I recently tried to slog my way through Pearl, I learned that there was still controversy as to the proper way to handle confounding variables. ERV’s criticisms definitely showed that the Ad-36 proponents weren’t properly handling the confounding variable of age. This US military study convinces me that they are not properly handling the confounding variables of sex and race/ethnicity. I’m almost tempted to conclude that all of the human subject evidence of the Ad-36/obesity link is practically worthless for this reason.
But there is another reason for looking at the military study. They find that past the age of 27 or so, the number of Ad-36 positives among their population falls. That suggests that it may be the case that widespread exposure of humans to Ad-36 may be a recent thing. Which is interesting because the worldwide “obesity epidemic” also seems to be a recent thing.