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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2152 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for March 27, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

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They couldn't point to any of his content that was really harmful. Either they didn't do any research, or he really is that whistle-clean.

There was also the complaint that he demonized alcohol, like this advice is so absurd that it's prima facie wrong and requires no further discussion. Even still, this is unfair as Huberman says in that same podcast he continues to enjoy drinking.

I think his claim that there's a scientific consensus that the best option is zero alcohol is pretty close to prima facie wrong, but it actually merits a fair bit of a discussion on how a bunch of smart people could wind up with a position that seems pretty silly when looking at the breadth of human history and performance. For me, it raises both safetyism and the overemphasis on low-quality empiricism as issues that color quite a bit of the optimization-minded landscape.

I thought the update (from more than the Huberman camp) is

  • studies that show any benefits to even moderate alcohol consumption were p-hacked
  • there aren't any health benefits at any amount
  • but there probably isn't significant harm from a small amount, like a drink a week

Is it even p-hacking, when it's so tricky to control for confounders here? IIRC if you just graph mortality vs outcome you get a robust "J shaped relationship", where moderate drinkers are healthier than either heavy drinkers or non-drinkers, but there are so many possible confounding variables (from the obvious "people with other reasons to worry about their health stop drinking" to "people with higher socioeconomic status are more likely to be moderate drinkers" to who knows what else) that any attempt to get a more causal result is going to necessarily end up with a bunch of arguments. It's also not entirely crazy that the effects of moderate alcohol could vary from subpopulation to subpopulation; e.g. if moderate red wine is bad for cancer risk but actually is good for heart disease risk then it might be a net mortality increase for some age/sex/athleticism levels and decrease for others.

Clearly we need an RCT where we find a few thousand moderate drinkers who aren't overly attached to the habit and have the ones who flip "heads" go cold-turkey. That's surely not going to trigger enough anti-experimentation bias to upset people, right?

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