I value (high quality) personal notes, which I see as a informal “literature review”.
As with a normal literature review: If I’m already familiar with the topic, I’ll skim for aspects I’ve overlooked, for any new developments, and for any conclusions that differ from my own. If I’m not familiar with the topic, I use the overview to estimate the value of doing my own research, or just to glean the easiest information and call it good. These are valuable because I don’t want to spend time monitoring new updates to a field, I want to double check that I haven’t reached any weird conclusion without knowing that it’s weird, and I don’t want to bother making a gazillion queries and screening out all the crap if I trust someone else to do so. And a well constructed bibliography alone can be very valuable.
For this post, I thought most of the sections were good. Yes, the section on needing money wasn’t informative, but I treated it as a signpost saying “hey you, if you’ve never thought about it, maybe you should run some numbers on what that third liver is going to cost you”, in the same way that the sentence on sleep apnea was just there to point out that snoring might be taken seriously (which many people don’t know).
To be honest, I skipped the nutrition section because I was already know that the field is a mess outside of some relatively clear conclusions, (on things like trans fat, vegetables > candy). I like a good set of notes should communicate “this consensus is absolutely solid” vs “this is the mainstream consensus, but here are some credible detractors and everyone admits that we don’t understand it as well as we’d like” vs “there is no real consensus”.
a good set of notes should communicate “this consensus is absolutely solid” vs “this is the mainstream consensus, but here are some credible detractors and everyone admits that we don’t understand it as well as we’d like” vs “there is no real consensus”.
Yes, indications of (un)certainty around the offered advice would certainly be helpful.
I value (high quality) personal notes, which I see as a informal “literature review”.
As with a normal literature review: If I’m already familiar with the topic, I’ll skim for aspects I’ve overlooked, for any new developments, and for any conclusions that differ from my own. If I’m not familiar with the topic, I use the overview to estimate the value of doing my own research, or just to glean the easiest information and call it good. These are valuable because I don’t want to spend time monitoring new updates to a field, I want to double check that I haven’t reached any weird conclusion without knowing that it’s weird, and I don’t want to bother making a gazillion queries and screening out all the crap if I trust someone else to do so. And a well constructed bibliography alone can be very valuable.
For this post, I thought most of the sections were good. Yes, the section on needing money wasn’t informative, but I treated it as a signpost saying “hey you, if you’ve never thought about it, maybe you should run some numbers on what that third liver is going to cost you”, in the same way that the sentence on sleep apnea was just there to point out that snoring might be taken seriously (which many people don’t know).
To be honest, I skipped the nutrition section because I was already know that the field is a mess outside of some relatively clear conclusions, (on things like trans fat, vegetables > candy). I like a good set of notes should communicate “this consensus is absolutely solid” vs “this is the mainstream consensus, but here are some credible detractors and everyone admits that we don’t understand it as well as we’d like” vs “there is no real consensus”.
Yes, indications of (un)certainty around the offered advice would certainly be helpful.