Thank you, I appreciate that.
To give some context:
The mod team[1] and many authors believe that no one is owed a response,. Some people disagree (mostly people who comment much more than they post, but not exclusively). I think the latter is a minority, although it’s hard to tell without a proper poll and I don’t know how to weight answers.
Beyond that: because I write about medical stuff means I get a lot of demands for answers I don’t have and don’t owe people. On one hand, this is kind of inevitable so I don’t get mad at people for the first request. On the other hand, people sometimes get really aggressive about getting a definitive answer from me, which I neither owe them nor have the ability to give. One of the biggest predictors of this is how specific the question is. Someone coming in with a lot of gears in their model is usually fun to talk to. I’ll learn things, and I can trust that they’re treating me as one source of information among many, rather than trying to outsource their judgement. The vaguer a question the more likely it is being asked by someone who is desperate but not doing their own work on the subject, and answering is likely to be costly with benefit to anyone.
Your question patternmatched to the second type.As you note, I not only had left many comments unresponded-to, but specifically the comments above and below the comment you were referring to (but making me do the work to find). As far as I’m concerned, telling you I couldn’t find the comment and giving an overall opinion was going above and beyond.
Which I do because sometimes on LW it pays off, and it looks like it did here, which is heartwarming.
You say that you find omnivores to be worse at epistemics and discourse. My experience is strongly the opposite. These aren’t incompatible- the loudest people on every side of every issue are usually the dumbest. But keep in mind that the critics of my work on vegan advocacy are drawn from that crowd.
You came in suspicious of me on a post where I gave vegans and vegetarians useful tests, with grant money I acquired for this purpose, and helped them find vegan supplements. One of my big frustrations with my vegan critics is that they’re treating me like a meat industry shill, when my major actions have been to help vegans stay healthily vegan. I don’t think means anyone has to agree with me, but I’ve barely been able to get critics to acknowledge this and explain why it doesn’t change anything for them.
one person did give a satisfying answer to this. It was educational and I appreciate his response a lot, although it did not ultimately change my mind. You can see our dialogue here.
I’ve gotten 10-30 emails and comments from vegans telling me I drove them to get tested and if merited go on supplements, and one comment from one vegan saying I was one factor among many in them restarting small amounts of fish. And in the course of getting his statistics help on this post, I talked my dad into a more ameliatarian diet. So from my perspective I have done considerably more for animals than many vegan advocates.
You might think that people who start eating meat are less likely to tell me, but like you said, I’m detectably not likely to yell at them for it.
I think your implication is that I don’t care about animal suffering or don’t like vegans, and this drives me to attack them through any convenient vector. Neither is true. I care about nutrition because I care about nutrition and have for many years, as my blog will attest to. I also care about epistemics and truthseeking in full generality (and my blog will provide a paper trail for that as well). So from my perspective the story that is some people caused a lot of harm (to animals, human health, and truthseeking within EA) by being not only incorrect, but loudly using dishonest tricks to get their way, on an issue I already cared about.
AFAIK none of my vegan critics have acknowledged either of those points, which is also quite frustrating.
I find leaving a reply about comment A on comment B, which has nothing to do with comment A, to be bizarre at best and hostile at worst. Even if you didn’t know how to link to comments, just giving me the author’s name would have cut down on the effort demanded from me.
Telling Alex “naw man, that’s not meaningful evidence” seems like it will lead to less high quality disagreement with my posts, not more.
A detailed refutation is a lot of work.
- ^
which technically I’m on, but in practice it means I occasionally give an opinion in private or curate something. I have 0 power on a policy level
To answer your object level question:
I could generate evidence at least this good for every claim in human health, including mutually contradictory ones.
The book title “mindspan” pattern matches to “shitty science book”
the paragraphs quoted pattern match to jumping around between facts, without giving straightforward numbers you can hold in your own mind. Why give percentage of childbearing women below a threshold, but averages for the ultraold?
“adding tea to the diet reduces body iron and increases lifespan” really? this is what he thinks of as evidence?
“a study of people who ate a Mediterranean-style diet (characterized mainly by less meat and more fish) had larger brains and key brain structures and less atrophy than frequent meat eaters.” lots of potential reasons for this, many of which are areas of deep research
Data on the ultraold is useless because there’s a good chance most of them are lying about their age.
He didn’t cite the most relevant information I know of, that regular blood donation improves health in men. Which probably means Alex wasn’t done any investigation into this, he just read a few claims some time.