I’ve been writing a series of posts about nutrition, trying to consistently produce one post per day. The post I had in mind for today grew in scope by enough that I can’t finish it in time, so this seems like an opportune day for a meta-post about the series.
My goal, in thinking and writing about nutrition, is to get the field unstuck. This means I’m interested in solving the central mysteries, and in calling attention to blind spots. I’m primarily writing for a sophisticated audience, and I’m making little to no attempt to cover the basics. I’m not going to do the sort of literature review that goes through all the vitamins and minerals in order, saying approximately the same things Wikipedia says about each of them. There are enough of those out there already. If you’re just trying to figure out how to lose weight, then these posts will be interesting, they will probably give you a perspective that makes evaluating other sources a lot easier, but my posts will not be optimized for solving your problem directly.
I have the reliability-vs-generativity-tradeoff slider set all the way to “generativity”. It would be very surprising if I finished this post series without saying anything untrue. I will not repeat this epistemic status on every post, but this epistemic status does apply to all of them.
Obesity and weight loss will come up a lot in my writing, because the obesity epidemic is this big conspicuous mystery that a lot of people have studied a lot about, and it’s somewhat central and connected to other subtics within nutrition. But it’s not really what I care about, except insofar as it affects productivity and general health.
I haven’t been putting content warnings at the top of my posts. I’m going to start.
There’s the obvious content warning, which is that some people with certain classes of eating disorders don’t want to read about food or nutrition in general, or only want to read about it when they’re at their best, because thinking about the topic makes them stress about the topic which makes them do dumb things. I think that the particular ideas I have to present are probably net-good for most such people, but they probably want to make a conscious choice about whether and when to read my posts, and I don’t want them to have to unfollow me.
The second warning is that I’m making little to no effort to cover the basics, and by that I mean I’m not going to reliably provide the warnings-away-from-spectacular-failures that mainstream nutrition advice focuses on. If I imagine my posts in a grocery-store checkout aisle magazine, being read by average people, I think some of those people might die. So, watch out. If you manage to give yourself scurvy, this will be your own fault, and I will call you a scallywag.
Last piece of meta: I’m posting these as I go with minimal editing, but there will probably be a more polished second-pass version of some sort in the future. If you’re curious about my nutrition thoughts but feel no urgency, then it might be worth waiting for it.
I’ve been writing a series of posts about nutrition, trying to consistently produce one post per day. The post I had in mind for today grew in scope by enough that I can’t finish it in time, so this seems like an opportune day for a meta-post about the series.
My goal, in thinking and writing about nutrition, is to get the field unstuck. This means I’m interested in solving the central mysteries, and in calling attention to blind spots. I’m primarily writing for a sophisticated audience, and I’m making little to no attempt to cover the basics. I’m not going to do the sort of literature review that goes through all the vitamins and minerals in order, saying approximately the same things Wikipedia says about each of them. There are enough of those out there already. If you’re just trying to figure out how to lose weight, then these posts will be interesting, they will probably give you a perspective that makes evaluating other sources a lot easier, but my posts will not be optimized for solving your problem directly.
I have the reliability-vs-generativity-tradeoff slider set all the way to “generativity”. It would be very surprising if I finished this post series without saying anything untrue. I will not repeat this epistemic status on every post, but this epistemic status does apply to all of them.
Obesity and weight loss will come up a lot in my writing, because the obesity epidemic is this big conspicuous mystery that a lot of people have studied a lot about, and it’s somewhat central and connected to other subtics within nutrition. But it’s not really what I care about, except insofar as it affects productivity and general health.
I haven’t been putting content warnings at the top of my posts. I’m going to start.
There’s the obvious content warning, which is that some people with certain classes of eating disorders don’t want to read about food or nutrition in general, or only want to read about it when they’re at their best, because thinking about the topic makes them stress about the topic which makes them do dumb things. I think that the particular ideas I have to present are probably net-good for most such people, but they probably want to make a conscious choice about whether and when to read my posts, and I don’t want them to have to unfollow me.
The second warning is that I’m making little to no effort to cover the basics, and by that I mean I’m not going to reliably provide the warnings-away-from-spectacular-failures that mainstream nutrition advice focuses on. If I imagine my posts in a grocery-store checkout aisle magazine, being read by average people, I think some of those people might die. So, watch out. If you manage to give yourself scurvy, this will be your own fault, and I will call you a scallywag.
Last piece of meta: I’m posting these as I go with minimal editing, but there will probably be a more polished second-pass version of some sort in the future. If you’re curious about my nutrition thoughts but feel no urgency, then it might be worth waiting for it.
(Crossposted on Facebook)