As a tool of data collection to inform expectations around EA vegans as a whole: probably not, the format doesn’t deliver that kind of data.
As a tool to get more people tested and well supplemented: I expect that or something like it could be quite helpful. Even though my follow-up rate was bad, the buzz around it motivated many non-participants to get tested and treated. The fewer people currently testing themselves, the more useful I think it is.
I’m happy to provide advising to get this off the ground.
I mean if say 20 EA vegans in Sydney got blood tests and for some reason, none of them has any iron, Vit B12, Vit D deficiency [by some metric] it would be significant evidence contradicting your belief isn’t it?
It would help me if you can outline a short sketch [don’t spend much time on it] on what you think I am going to do [both to prevent the double illusion of transparency and a type of pre-registration].
I want to say “take all the time you need”, but then I remembered I go almost off the grid for July and August, so there’s a discontinuity there. I may be able to connect you with funders, although I don’t know what the situation is in Australia, and EA money is harder to come by than it was when I started.
I mean if say 20 EA vegans in Sydney got blood tests and for some reason, none of them has any iron, Vit B12, Vit D deficiency [by some metric] it would be significant evidence contradicting your belief isn’t it?
I feel like this skips over the part where I said my protocol isn’t good for establishing base rates, so I’m confused about your plan.
What sample size I’d consider convincing depends a lot on the protocol. 20 people randomly selected from a pool of completely naive, no-effort vegans? yes, definitely. 20 people recruited by saying “let’s prove her wrong” on a vegan athlete forum? of course not. That would demonstrate veganism can be done healthily by some people, but I already believe that.
Simultaneously I think you’re making things too hard on yourself, vitamin deficiencies aren’t that rare in omnivores so it doesn’t seem fair to expect 0 in vegans.
I would love to do a real study to establish base rates in both groups of EAs, with proper quantification of effort, supplementation, etc, but it’s a lot of money and effort. I only felt able to tackle that with a co-founder, but after being rebuffed on some direct inquiries I lost a lot of hope for that.
RE timeline: no problem, I am happy to wait until September or after, giving me even more time to look into it.
I am going to put a feeler out to see if there is any interest in the Lesswrong/EA community in Sydney, I would not go ahead unless 30 people plan to participate.
RE base rate: I can run blood tests on [say 10+] omnivores in the community, assuming Lesswrong/EA community to be homogenous in other aspects aside from the tested diet, [we do have 10-20x the autism/neurodivergent rate compared to general population]. That should establish Lesswrong/EA community-specific base rate [hopefully].
RE protocol: the pool should be anyone from Sydney Lesswrong/EA community I can talk into participating, divided by diet.
The result of [how many self-described vegans in the Lesswrong/EA community in Sydney are deficient in iron, Vit B12, Vit D as found in blood tests [according to so and so metric]? and would supplementation help?] should speak for itself.
RE “Real study”: yeah, it’s nice for me to talk a big game but personally, I am very pessimistic [<30%] that any test is going to be done at all. If nothing else, at least it should raise the problem to the local community consciousness.
Personally, I am a big fan [did I say big? I mean huge, humongous] of your past works and found them to be enlightening. I believe your numbers and my only complaint of your in-office test adventure was that you did not manage to establish the benefit of supplements. Which, if the stars aligned, I hope to remedy this round.
I am an omnivore, although I greatly admire those who go on vegan diets for animal suffering. I am only in this to find out what is true and if there’s anything we can do about it. My stake is that I care deeply about the community, many of them vegans. If doing vegan causes easily fixable deficiency I would really want to know.
I don’t think there’s a way to get a representative sample of healthy people (vegan or omnivore) without paying them. People just don’t care about the information enough.
One thing I have toyed with is comparing [% of omnivores with fatigue who have nutritional issues] with [% of vegans with fatigue who have nutritional issues]. My theory is if all other sources of fatigue strike each group equally often, and vegans are more prone to nutrition-caused fatigue, vegans with fatigue should have a higher % of nutritional issues than omnivores with fatigue. And both groups are more motivated to get tested than unfatigued people.
And then you try to control for effort and supplements, but I found getting that information from people to be a real uphill struggle and am probably not willing to run another project myself unless I have enough money to pay participants. I worry I’m being too discouraging, I want you to run this, I think it would be valuable even in a limited form and if you can get the data I couldn’t that’s fantastic. But I also don’t want to set you up for failure by being unrealistic about the amount of effort required.
Let’s not jump the gun, I’ll look deeper into it once I am certain there is huge interest.
tbh the main thing I care about is whether those who self-designated as vegans are significantly more likely to be deficient compared to baseline and whether supplement help. Everything else is extra.
Lightspeed grants were just announced, with a July 6th deadline. They are unusually promising as a source of funding, so it might be worth your while to meet that deadline.
jinx, I have applied already, not sure if I did a good job selling it though. Thanks for reminding me though.
still waiting on whether my hospital would be interested in the study.
so far community members I have spoken to said “others” should be interested, but few actually gave me a commitment, I am not pushing very hard though.
so update, after consultation with a research doctor turn out I am not qualified to do it. I need to be either a doctor, a higher ranking nurse or a nurse on research track at least. since I am a nurse on the clinical track so I am not qualified to do the research, bummer.
people could still go to their doctor, get their blood check and give the result to me to tabulate, but it does not require me in particular.
As a tool of data collection to inform expectations around EA vegans as a whole: probably not, the format doesn’t deliver that kind of data.
As a tool to get more people tested and well supplemented: I expect that or something like it could be quite helpful. Even though my follow-up rate was bad, the buzz around it motivated many non-participants to get tested and treated. The fewer people currently testing themselves, the more useful I think it is.
I’m happy to provide advising to get this off the ground.
I’ll look into the actual feasibility of this.
May I get back to you in one week?
I mean if say 20 EA vegans in Sydney got blood tests and for some reason, none of them has any iron, Vit B12, Vit D deficiency [by some metric] it would be significant evidence contradicting your belief isn’t it?
It would help me if you can outline a short sketch [don’t spend much time on it] on what you think I am going to do [both to prevent the double illusion of transparency and a type of pre-registration].
I want to say “take all the time you need”, but then I remembered I go almost off the grid for July and August, so there’s a discontinuity there. I may be able to connect you with funders, although I don’t know what the situation is in Australia, and EA money is harder to come by than it was when I started.
I feel like this skips over the part where I said my protocol isn’t good for establishing base rates, so I’m confused about your plan.
What sample size I’d consider convincing depends a lot on the protocol. 20 people randomly selected from a pool of completely naive, no-effort vegans? yes, definitely. 20 people recruited by saying “let’s prove her wrong” on a vegan athlete forum? of course not. That would demonstrate veganism can be done healthily by some people, but I already believe that.
Simultaneously I think you’re making things too hard on yourself, vitamin deficiencies aren’t that rare in omnivores so it doesn’t seem fair to expect 0 in vegans.
I would love to do a real study to establish base rates in both groups of EAs, with proper quantification of effort, supplementation, etc, but it’s a lot of money and effort. I only felt able to tackle that with a co-founder, but after being rebuffed on some direct inquiries I lost a lot of hope for that.
RE timeline: no problem, I am happy to wait until September or after, giving me even more time to look into it.
I am going to put a feeler out to see if there is any interest in the Lesswrong/EA community in Sydney, I would not go ahead unless 30 people plan to participate.
RE base rate: I can run blood tests on [say 10+] omnivores in the community, assuming Lesswrong/EA community to be homogenous in other aspects aside from the tested diet, [we do have 10-20x the autism/neurodivergent rate compared to general population]. That should establish Lesswrong/EA community-specific base rate [hopefully].
RE protocol: the pool should be anyone from Sydney Lesswrong/EA community I can talk into participating, divided by diet.
The result of [how many self-described vegans in the Lesswrong/EA community in Sydney are deficient in iron, Vit B12, Vit D as found in blood tests [according to so and so metric]? and would supplementation help?] should speak for itself.
RE “Real study”: yeah, it’s nice for me to talk a big game but personally, I am very pessimistic [<30%] that any test is going to be done at all. If nothing else, at least it should raise the problem to the local community consciousness.
Personally, I am a big fan [did I say big? I mean huge, humongous] of your past works and found them to be enlightening. I believe your numbers and my only complaint of your in-office test adventure was that you did not manage to establish the benefit of supplements. Which, if the stars aligned, I hope to remedy this round.
I am an omnivore, although I greatly admire those who go on vegan diets for animal suffering. I am only in this to find out what is true and if there’s anything we can do about it. My stake is that I care deeply about the community, many of them vegans. If doing vegan causes easily fixable deficiency I would really want to know.
I don’t think there’s a way to get a representative sample of healthy people (vegan or omnivore) without paying them. People just don’t care about the information enough.
One thing I have toyed with is comparing [% of omnivores with fatigue who have nutritional issues] with [% of vegans with fatigue who have nutritional issues]. My theory is if all other sources of fatigue strike each group equally often, and vegans are more prone to nutrition-caused fatigue, vegans with fatigue should have a higher % of nutritional issues than omnivores with fatigue. And both groups are more motivated to get tested than unfatigued people.
And then you try to control for effort and supplements, but I found getting that information from people to be a real uphill struggle and am probably not willing to run another project myself unless I have enough money to pay participants. I worry I’m being too discouraging, I want you to run this, I think it would be valuable even in a limited form and if you can get the data I couldn’t that’s fantastic. But I also don’t want to set you up for failure by being unrealistic about the amount of effort required.
Let’s not jump the gun, I’ll look deeper into it once I am certain there is huge interest.
tbh the main thing I care about is whether those who self-designated as vegans are significantly more likely to be deficient compared to baseline and whether supplement help. Everything else is extra.
Lightspeed grants were just announced, with a July 6th deadline. They are unusually promising as a source of funding, so it might be worth your while to meet that deadline.
jinx, I have applied already, not sure if I did a good job selling it though. Thanks for reminding me though.
still waiting on whether my hospital would be interested in the study.
so far community members I have spoken to said “others” should be interested, but few actually gave me a commitment, I am not pushing very hard though.
Try iollo blood tests too, they’re new and can test hidden deficiencies
Looking at the list, I don’t see any vitamins or minerals listed. It tests a variety of markers, but not raw micronutrients.
so update, after consultation with a research doctor turn out I am not qualified to do it.
I need to be either a doctor, a higher ranking nurse or a nurse on research track at least.
since I am a nurse on the clinical track so I am not qualified to do the research, bummer.
people could still go to their doctor, get their blood check and give the result to me to tabulate, but it does not require me in particular.