This display with regularly-rotating high-quality pencil art could be a neat business. The comparison to wall art makes the hardware price look more reasonable, and you could offer a subscription to curated pieces or a network of artists' output.
Agree that it's a poor headline and that the fructose/Alzheimer's hypothesis is quite speculative, but I don't think calling it a "junk study" or gesturing at evidence hierarchies is particularly helpful.
Theory (almost) always precedes evidence, and coming up with a novel, biologically-plausible explanation for a common ailment is absolutely a valid, useful scientific contribution.
Your general point, that drawing firm conclusions would be radically premature, is spot on. I just stiffen up a bit when I encounter "RCT or GTFO" type arguments; where in the world do you think the ideas for which RCT to run come from?
While I agree that these theory based papers are useful, and are often the precursor to experiments, I believe the general understanding of "study has found X" in pop culture is that there is "hard evidence" of the finding being tauted. Theories are risky to place too much credence in without being steeped in the field yourself (is this a theory that most people in the field agree with, or is the one suggesting it an outlier?).
As usual science communication is never done as well as we could all hope, but I personally like this "hierarchy of evidence" approach in understanding if something is ready to be consumed by the general public, rather than requiring further discussion with the scientific community.
Agreed. At this point I am also not willing to just let science off the hook and blame it all on the press: If our smartest people can not find ways to differentiate between ideating and good results in a way that a sensationalist press can't simply ignore, then just maybe they are not trying all that hard.
I wish sci comms practice would have a standard set of terms for stages of development/belief. Here the headline should be something like “theory proposed that …”
Theory (almost) always precedes evidence, and coming up with a novel, biologically-plausible explanation for a common ailment is absolutely a valid, useful scientific contribution.
This is the case in physics and astronomy. People make predictions that are not only untested, but we have to invent equipment to test them.
One of the great early accomplishments in science was when astronomers, observing our Sun, noted an unknown yellow spectral line signature. In 1868, Norman Lockyer predicted that it must be created by a hitherto unknown element, which he named “Helium” after the Greek Titan of the Sun, Helios.
In 1895, two Swedish chemists detected helium in ore samples here on Earth, and in the great tradition of the scientific method, we had a theory, a prediction, and a confirmation of the theory by test.
I'm not sure it's always the case that theory precedes evidence, even in physics. We still have loads of evidence that theory does not explain, dark matter, dark energy and superconductivity being the most well known. Theory is often devised to explain something weird or unexpected that experimentalists observe.
Upon reflection, you’re making an excellent point!
Einstein predicted things we’re still confirming empirically, but then again, he started by asking himself how the speed of light could be constant for every observer, which was the result of an experiment that failed to confirm a different theory.
There's nothing wrong with research like this per se. I think the way it's publicised is the main issue. Broadly I think there are two types of papers: those who are only relevant to other researchers, and those who are interesting to the public as a whole. This is very much in the former category.
YMMV, but I recommend more people try High Intensity Training (HIT). HIT explicitly contradicts several of the (well-supported) claims in the article, but I've personally found it effective, and I think there's a good case that it's a better fit for most adult lifestyles.
[ETA: Just to clarify, HIT is different from the more widely-known HIIT. This wikipedia article[1] is a good introduction, and the book "Body By Science" is an excellent deeper dive.]
I'm a 40-ish male with a long history of resistance training, and have tried many variations of sets/reps/volume/rest etc over the years.
For a few years now I've been doing a version of HIT, basically single sets (to failure), no (or little) rest between sets, full-body training once a week, supervised by a trainer. It sucks, but it's over quickly.
It's great. I'm significantly stronger than I've been in many years, have remained injury-free throughout (rare for me), and play competitive basketball several times a week without issue (beyond my inconsistent shooting).
The article cites its sources, has solid (for exercise science) evidence backing its claims, and is pretty convincing - if you're a college student with plenty of time, and you're seeking to maximize muscle growth, then yes there's a good case that you should do several workouts a week with more rest between sets.
However, if you're a working stiff who just wants to get it done efficiently, HIT is much easier to fit in a busy schedule. I think it's worth considering for the median person reading fitness articles on HN.
For most people, I suspect HIT is essentially just as effective as the type of protocol advocated in the article, but that's just a hunch and not a claim I could support with anything beyond personal experience.
I did HIT for a long time which made me stronger. But only since I do HIIT I also feel more healthy, my endurance increased and I lost some fat (in addition to getting stronger).
The HIIT I can especially recommend is https://www.12minuteathlete.com/ . And as a disclaimer I'm not in any way connected to that website.
I would add that while I agree HIIT is great, you're not just doing HIIT once/week, but also playing competitive basketball.
The other thing is it's been posited for awhile now, that gained muscle/strength requires less work to keep. You have a long history of resistance training, and presumably gained strength and muscle. Now you just need to be do maintenance to keep what you have while supporting your sport.
I say all this b/c I do something similar. I stopped power lifting once I got older and moved to more HIIT like workouts 3-4x/week. They take maybe 30 minutes each. But, I also train BJJ ~4x/week. Would my HIIT like workouts be so effective if I didn't start very strong and also do BJJ? IDK.
https://getpolarized.io/ seems like it's in the same space - it's a product I wanted to love, but was a bit clunky to use and didn't end up sticking in my workflow.
Woah. Didn't know about this. I'm honestly amazed at how many similar things I've discovered that I didn't know about when I started this. I did look for similar tools, but didn't really surface that many of them. Not sure I would have ever started had I known the space was actually not as empty as it seemed.
Would love to know what about the flow was clunky and why it didn't fit your workflow. Might be a lot that I can learn from that.
This was a while ago, but IIRC there were some fairly major software-reliability rough edges (frequent crashing/bugs/etc). Beyond that the major shortcoming was that it was constrained to pdf's only, and that's only one part of my reading workflow.
For a while I was trying to sync a Zotero library (since I need citation management when writing papers), and do all my academic reading (which is mostly pdf's) in Polar, but it was just a bit too much overhead to stick with.
Oh interesting. PDF's is what is hardest for me. I need a completely different approach to handling them than I have been using for web content and epubs.
Thanks for sharing your story, it helps to put things in perspective. I wonder how much they've improved since you used them though. The website looks very sleek.
You don't understand why I would challenge you to cite your sources in a thread discussing COVID-19 conspiracy theories and misinformation? Not to mention, I think it's pretty clear to both of us that this "well documented event" is not common knowledge to people who don't follow COVID conspiracy theories.
I think this event qualifies as “well documented” by any reasonable standard, there was official public disclosure and an open investigation.
As one quick example, here’s a news clip including an interview with the Taiwanese health minister discussing details of the (then) ongoing investigation:
