They’re looking for byproducts, but it indeed didn’t work very well and that’s why I’ve refocused on blood testing.
Elizabeth
Karma: 10,748
A different observation of Vavilov Day
There was one very high up guy who ran around vegan ea for years yelling at anyone who suggested veganism required the slight bit more effort, thought, or money. He left in 2018 or 2019 for unrelated reasons but I think he may have done serious long term damage to ea vegan culture in particular.
It sounds like you’re really passionate about vegan nutrition. Can I suggest channeling that into sharing resources that help naive vegans? Even if you don’t think they’re representative they clearly exist, and if the problem can be solved by linking to existing resources that seems incredibly high return.
thank you. I had only glanced at non-animal B12 and was trying to be fair to vegans, if my sources were bad that’s extremely useful to know. And if VeganHealth.org is being rigorous about this that increases my respect for them.
I say that because (and sorry for maybe being blunt) the sample size is so small compared to the rich existing literature on this topic
I agree 100% that the sample size is too low to compete with existing literature, and the error bars are too wide to make it very useful on prevalence. Luckily...
My goal for the pilot was to work out practical issues in testing, narrow the confidence interval on potential impact, and improve the nutrition of the handful of people.
As a bonus, the results let me make an informed guess on which part of the existing literature to engage with, which I published last week.
I do take issue with calling the existing literature “rich”. It’s scarce and mostly extremely low quality. The 5 person study doesn’t fix that and the upcoming 20 person one won’t either, but nutrition literature is bad even by medical standards.
Vegan Nutrition Testing Project: Interim Report
I’m surprised to see you quoting that literally? I don’t see how we can take their word for that and there’s no other evidence source.
The Red Cross tests hemoglobin but not ferritin, which is insufficient.
I haven’t quantified these, but the classic vegan deficiencies are Vitamin D and B12. Examine.com has a decent guide to veganism, although I find them less than totally thorough.
What’s your opinion on reference ranges? My understanding is that they’re often too wide, that the minimum is what you need to avoid deficiency diseases but won’t get the average person to optimal function (although there exist outliers for whom it’s exactly the right amount). So the RDI is set too high for most people but the reference range too low for most people. But I’ve never dug into this besides my research on iron not turning up anything on optimal functioning, just deficiencies. Which is maybe fine because knowing the average optimal amount isn’t that informative about your personal optimal amount, that requires self experimentation?
This seems like a pretty good article for its goals (plus it immediately confirms my claim that existing infrastructure handles IDWA poorly “IDWA is poorly recognised by clinicians despite its high prevalence, probably because of suboptimal screening recommendations”, which is nice). I think it is borderline useless for my goal of getting readers, especially ethical vegans, to go from not caring about iron deficiency to taking action.
I did a fair amount of ~market research with the target audience; people are very lazy and there is a lot of competition for their attention. I spent an immense amount of time generating hard numbers and figuring out how to present them in a way as accessible and motivating as possible without misleading people or catching the wrong audience. This is extremely hard, and AFAICT the Al-Naseem paper isn’t even trying, because it is aimed at a different goal.
I only skimmed the article, and maybe I missed the part where it quantified the costs of IDWA or provided an algorithm for treatment (as opposed to diagnoses, which I do see). But since the entire point of this post was surviving skimming, I consider that a fair criticism of it for the purpose of motivating lay-readers.
It sounds like you and your doctor friend are treating the counterfactual to this post as “competent, thorough medical care”. I think this is incorrect; the counterfactual is nothing. I informally polled Lightcone vegans, and there was a variety of interactions with the medical system and nutrition, including “absolutely nothing”, “testing recommended but not done”, and “got tested but was missing tests that obviously should have been done”. This includes people who had obvious symptoms that could plausibly be caused by their vegan diet. Obviously, some people had seen doctors and gotten proper treatment, which is great and I wish happened more often. But this post is aimed at the people who hadn’t and weren’t going to.
If the effort I spent writing this post could instead have gotten everyone reading it competent medical care, I would have done that.* And I will say for the record that no one should treat this as a substitute for medical treatment. But as an alternative to nothing, I think it holds up quite well.
*In fact I toyed with “find excellent doctors in the bay area” as a project, and decided against it because it would have been pretty costly for me, and I didn’t find enough people I expected to act on the information even if I succeeded. I think it’s plausible people underestimated their own demand once someone really great was found, but the most likely funder was FTXFF so I’m pretty happy I didn’t go through with it.
Most of the writing on simulacrum levels have left me feeling less able to reason about them, that they are too evil to contemplate. This post engaged with them as one fact in the world among many, which was already an improvement. I’ve found myself referring to this idea several times over the last two years, and it left me more alert to looking for other explanations in this class.
I think that’s an improvement. Also I missed that the info had come up on lw before, which I think changes things a lot. Sometimes the punishment for something is people knowing you did it.
On a practical level: every time I’ve included a controversial attention-grabbing aside in a post, I’ve regretted it. The discussion and I assume people’s attention always focuses on that aside, at the cost of my primary point. If you’re trying to stir up anti-this-person sentiment in general that might be a plus, but if you want your actual argument to be considered on its merits it’s a severe impairment. If you think the accusation is important I’d strongly encourage you to split the posts.
Iron deficiencies are very bad and you should treat them
When a person says “we don’t trade with ants”, I think the implicit explanation is that humans are so big, powerful and smart compared to ants that we don’t need to trade with them because they have nothing of value and if they did we could just take it; anything they can do we can do better, and we can just walk all over them. Why negotiate when you can steal?
I think this is an overly narrow definition of trading for this context. If an AGI wants something from humans it needs to leave us alive and happy enough to produce it. It might be nonconsensual, but dead people can’t produce anything to steal, so the problem has become “avoid being tortured” rather than “avoid being killed altogether.”
A lot of people do trade spiders warmth and shelter in exchange for keeping the insect population low. The spider does not know that this is happening, and it can’t negotiate, but my impression is this is working out pretty well for them. Locally at least- maybe sufficiently intelligent house spiders would regret evolving to only live in houses and die outside, or would resent our reworking of the ecostructure- but they are alive, and selection to live in houses probably doesn’t make them miserable in houses, even if it does limit their options.
This would be great if it works. Could you say more about why you think it does? The website says it measures at the finger, and my understanding is the signal is fuzzy by that point.
I read a similar thing on Reddit repeating something the author’s trainer said once. I have almost zero confidence in this explanation and it’s also the best I’ve found