Noted self-experimenter Seth Roberts passed away on April 26th, 2014.
November 14, 2014 2:34 AM   Subscribe

Seth Roberts passed away on April 26th, 2014, after suffering a heart attack while hiking near his home in Berkeley, California. A self-experimenter and author of The Shangri-La Diet, Roberts described his attempts to combat his own insomnia in Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight, writing that "Before science was a profession, it was a hobby, which means some people enjoy it for its own sake . . . If a hobby has tangible benefits, such as lower blood pressure or reduced risk of relapse, so much stronger the motivation to do it." He was brilliant, obsessive and always challenging assumptions. His extensive blog is still online.
posted by mecran01 (16 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 


Breaking Broken News.
posted by fairmettle at 5:14 AM on November 14, 2014


melatonic: The first report showed his coronary artery occlusion to be about average for a man his age, with an accompanying risk of heart attack, but no cardiomegaly. The second report, following his conclusion that butter was beneficial for him, and his heavy ingestion of it, showed an improvement in his score: “Most people get about 25% worse each year. My second scan showed regression (= improvement). It was 40% better (less) than expected (a 25% increase).”
posted by leotrotsky at 5:42 AM on November 14, 2014


Yeah, I was just reading that. I'm just a simple country layperson, but a quick search reveals recent research which suggests that coronary artery calcium analysis (Agaston score, which is what he's referencing) is lacking, and that greater density can actually reduce CHD risk. So even if the butter was somehow reducing his score, ironicially it may have been putting him at higher risk.

More on the heart scan.

The high mercury levels are weird. Better watch what you eat in Beijing, I guess. (and perhaps what you breathe)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:02 AM on November 14, 2014


Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight

I have a high opinion of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, but I'm pretty much a lay reader. What do people working in these areas think of the journal?
posted by grobstein at 6:46 AM on November 14, 2014


The statistician Andrew Gelman wrote a very nice appreciation back in April.
posted by grobstein at 6:52 AM on November 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


From grobstein's link:
Seth’s academic career was unusual. He shot through college and graduate school to a tenure-track job at a top university, then continued to do publication-quality research for several years until receiving tenure. At that point he was not a superstar but I think he was still considered a respected member of the mainstream academic community. But during the years that followed, Seth lost interest in that thread of research (you can see this by looking at the dates of most of his highly-cited papers). He told me once that his shift was motivated by teaching introductory undergraduate psychology: the students, he said, were interested in things that would affect their lives, and, compared to that, the kind of research that leads to a productive academic career did not seem so appealing.

[. . .]

I described Seth’s diet to one of my psychologist colleagues at Columbia and asked what he thought of it. My colleague said he thought it was ridiculous. And, as with the depression treatment, Seth never had an interest in running a controlled trial, even for the purpose of convincing the skeptics.
posted by mistersquid at 7:31 AM on November 14, 2014


if you look for it, Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight has a nice auto-correct typo featuring the word helicopter
posted by compound eye at 8:12 AM on November 14, 2014


The effect of butter on the rest of my body I didn’t know. However, I thought it was highly unlikely that a food that greatly improves brain function is going to damage the rest of the body.
This is a common fallacy. The body is not a perfect machine, it's even a very flawed one. Evolution cares about only 1 thing: procreation fitness.
posted by stbalbach at 8:13 AM on November 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


However, I thought it was highly unlikely that a food that greatly improves brain function is going to damage the rest of the body

Antagonistic pleiotropy - a trait may improve survival in the short term, but at cost of longer term survival. It's everywhere. You may greatly strengthen your performance in one area, but shorten your overall lifespan. You may feel fantastic and perform brilliantly, but die early. And so on. It makes great evolutionary sense. An animal that is very successful at survival early on, able to physically outcompete rivals for reproduction, needs to just survive long enough for the offspring to carry on the genes. Once that function has been accomplished, the animal is no longer needed - it can age and die. Meanwhile an individual animal that has put its energy into survival rather than expending it in reproduction, can live quite a bit longer - not as good for the group, but great for the individual. Being able to outcompete rivals for reproduction is not necessarily a sign of fitness as applied to length of survival. A peacock that is able to grow a huge tail, might need great fitness to accomplish a tail greater than a rival, but it takes a lot out of him too - the rival does not bother to put energies into the tail may not win the gene passing contest, but may use that energy to selfishly survive longer itself, even without passing on its genes.

Nothing against self-experimentation, but Seth Roberts operated on intuition and what he thought was common sense, but unless you account for all possibilities - which is hard to do when self-experimenting - you can be lead astray very, very easily.

Eating butter may have improved some measure of brain function, but so what? It's like when they shot old people with growth hormone - yeah, it improved muscle strength, but gave them cancer and overall they died earlier.

This is when I preach my old sermon, repeated in the blue and green every opportunity, when some medical or nutritional study or another is discussed: biomarkers and short term outcomes are a very imperfect measure. The golden measure is always all-cause mortality outcomes. I don't want to be told that "X" is good for the heart, improves brain function, and so on - because that may be true... at the cost of killing me with liver cancer or whatnot. Tell me how "X" compares at the end of the day - who survived the longest. And that is hard to do, when you only have one subject - yourself. Self-experimentation can only take you so far.
posted by VikingSword at 9:04 AM on November 14, 2014 [14 favorites]


I knew Seth and I'm torn because he was really a nice person and had an interesting blog, but he was often very eager to embrace pseudoscience (he was a climate change denier among other things), I think just because he found it more interesting. And I think some of his "self experiments" were very harmful to his health. Seeing what it did to him, even before he died, was one reason I've effectively banned myself from doing any kind of diet for any reason besides enjoying food and fueling myself reasonably, because I saw what it could do to someone who, like me, was a bit neurotic.
posted by melissam at 9:32 AM on November 14, 2014 [4 favorites]


Everyone is self-experimenting, it's just that most people never record the data.
posted by the jam at 11:02 AM on November 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


melissam: your comment is very interesting. But what did it do to him? Are you talking about physical or psychological effects?
posted by beniamino at 11:02 AM on November 14, 2014


You may feel fantastic and perform brilliantly, but die early.

I think, for the more reasonable values of "fantastic" and "early", I'd take that deal.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 12:19 PM on November 14, 2014


Seth Roberts was a big influence on me. I've been following his Shangri La diet for over five years, and I successfully lost about 24 pounds on it. I was also fascinated by his reaction-time experiments (Seth believed that your reaction time was an indicator of your overall brain function).

Seth was a smart guy and a unique individual. I'm reminded of the Grateful Dead t-shirt which says (on the front), "They're not the best at what they do". The back of the shirt reads, "They're the only ones who do it."
posted by alex1965 at 7:46 PM on November 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


I think it boils down to becoming obsessive over things that prevent you from seeing the forest for the trees. Sure, eating plain old butter might improve your reaction time or drinking a lot of flax seed oil might improve balance, but what else is it doing to you? Is this really a good reason to consume it? Are there other ways to improve it that might not also requiring consumption abnormal amounts of a refined substance and that might improve your health in more well-rounded ways? Are these really the most important health markers?

I learned a lot from him, but in many ways the subculture of "self hacking" we were part of was a physically and mentally unhealthy lifestyle.
posted by melissam at 10:19 AM on November 15, 2014


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