It’s very sad news and I still ask myself what to make of it. Seth influenced my own QS journey a lot. In the end the it seems like extrapolating health from the kind of data he gathered wasn’t possible.
His approach would be expected to optimize for common situations, which may not be the same as optimizing for rare situations. I’ve been working on a theory that health is not a single thing.
For all I know, he had some intrinsic cardio-vascular problems, and his self-experimentation led to him living longer than he otherwise would have.
I’ve been working on a theory that health is not a single thing.
That an interesting way of phrasing the sentence.
The issue is that Seth himself based his behavior on the idea that health is a bit like intelligence and it’s possible to generalize from a few factors most of the useful information.
Intuitively, it seems likely to me that his death is related to one or more of his self-experiments with supplements. This is based on the observation that it’s pretty unusual for 60 year old men to collapse and die, particularly if they have no serious self-reported health problems. Calculating an actual probability seems like it would be pretty hard.
Edit: I suppose there is also an outside chance that this is a hoax. Has the death been reported in any newspapers?
60-yo men die all the time; anytime someone who writes on diet dies, someone is going to say ‘I wonder if this proves/disproves his diet claims’, no matter what the claims were or their truth. They don’t, of course, since even if you had 1000 Seth Roberts, you wouldn’t have a particularly strong piece of evidence on correlation of ‘being Roberts’ and all-cause mortality, and his diet choices were not randomized, so you don’t even get causal inference. More importantly, if Roberts had died at any time before his actuarial life expectancy (in the low 80s, I’d eyeball it, given his education, ethnicity, and having survived so long already), people would make this claim.
OK, so let’s be a little more precise and play with some numbers.
Roberts published The Shangri-la Diet in 2006. If he’s 60 now in 2014 (8 years later), then he was 52 then. Let’s say people would only consider his death negatively if he died before his actuarial life expectancy, and I’m going to handwave that as 80; then he has 28 years to survive before his death stops looking bad.
What’s his risk of dying if his diet makes zero difference to his health one way or another? Looking at http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/table4c6.html from 52-80, the per-year risk of death goes from 0.006337 to 0.061620. What’s the cumulative risk? We can, I think, calculate it as (1 − 0.06337) … (1 − 0.061620). A little copy-paste, a little Haskell, and:
So roughly speaking, Roberts had maybe a 50% chance of surviving from publishing his diet book to a ripe old age. (Suppose Roberts’s ideas had halved his risk of death in each time period, which we can implement with a call to map (/2). It’s not quite as simple as dividing 50% by 2, but when you rerun the probability, then he’d have a 71% chance of survival, or more relevantly, he still has a 29% chance of dying in that timespan.)
In summary: Life sucks, and diet gurus can be expected to die all the time no matter whether their ideas are great or horrible, so their deaths tell us so little that discussing it at all is probably biasing our beliefs through an anchoring or salience effect.
60-yo men die all the time; anytime someone who writes on diet dies, someone is going to say ‘I wonder if this proves/disproves his diet claims’, no matter what the claims were or their truth.
Agreed.
More importantly, if Roberts had died at any time before his actuarial life expectancy (in the low 80s, I’d eyeball it, given his education, ethnicity, and having survived so long already), people would make this claim.
Not sure about that, for example if he had died at the age of 81 in a car accident. Although I appreciate your effort, I am not sure that you have the reference class of events correct. The evidence suggest that Roberts died (1) suddenly; (2) due to failure of some bodily system; (3) at an age which is well under his life expectancy. The prior probability of this happening has got to be far less than the prior probability of him simply dying from any cause before his actuarial life expectancy.
At the same time, he was apparently consuming large amounts of butter, omega fatty acids from flax seeds, and other esoteric things. Of course it’s difficult to even being estimating the risk inherent in doing such things.
Ironically, Seth Roberts was a big believer in “n=1 experiments.”
Do you have an estimate of the probability that Robert’s death is related to his supplement regime?
Not sure about that, for example if he had died at the age of 81 in a car accident. Although I appreciate your effort, I am not sure that you have the reference class of events correct.
The all-cause mortality figures were chosen for convenience. I’m sure one could dig up more appropriate figures that exclude accident, homicide, etc. But the reference class is still going to be pretty broad: if Roberts had committed suicide, had developed cancer, had a stroke rather than heart attack (or whatever), had a fall, people would be speculating on biological roots (‘perhaps he was going senile thanks to the oils’ or ‘he claimed the flax seed oil was helping balance, but he fell all the same!’). And I’m not sure that the better figures would be that much lower: this isn’t a young cohort—few elderly people are murdered or die in car accidents, AFAIK, and mortality is primarily from diseases and other health problems.
The prior probability of this happening has got to be far less than the prior probability of him simply dying from any cause before his actuarial life expectancy.
As I’ve pointed out, the prior is quite high that he would die in a ‘suspicious’ way.
Do you have an estimate of the probability that Robert’s death is related to his supplement regime?
No, and I refuse to give one on a problem which reflects motivated cognition on the part of many people based on heavily-selected evidence & post hoc reasoning. Any estimate would anchor me and bias my future thinking on diet matters. The story is far too salient, the evidence far too weak.
I’m sure one could dig up more appropriate figures that exclude accident, homicide, etc. But the reference class is still going to be pretty broad: if Roberts had committed suicide, had developed cancer, had a stroke rather than heart attack (or whatever), had a fall, people would be speculating on biological roots
I would have to agree with that, however some causes of death are more suspicious than others. In this case, he died apparently died suddenly, at an age where sudden death is rather unusual in people with no self-reported history of serious health problems. Also, this kind of sudden death is usually the result of cardiovascular problems, i.e. heart attack or stroke. Last, he was known to be regularly consuming a lot of concentrated fat on a regular basis (half a stick of butter a day; and perhaps olive oil and flax seed on top of it); fatty foods have long been suspected as playing a role in cardiovascular problems, that they cause lipids to build up in the blood stream and clog up the works.
It would be very tricky to do the equations, if it’s possible at all, but it seems reasonable to think it’s likely that his supplement regimen played a role in his demise.
As I’ve pointed out, the prior is quite high that he would die in a ‘suspicious’ way.
Well do you agree that what happened is more ‘suspicious’ than if he had died at the age of 75 from lung cancer?
No, and I refuse to give one on a problem which reflects motivated cognition on the part of many people based on heavily-selected evidence & post hoc reasoning.
Suit yourself, but it strikes me as confusing that I would make a claim and you would respond with a calculation which seems to address the claim but actually doesn’t. It makes me think you are trying to subtly change the subject. Which is fine, but I think you should be explicit about it. Otherwise it seems like you are attacking a strawman.
In this case, he died apparently died suddenly, at an age where sudden death is rather unusual in people with no self-reported history of serious health problems. Also, this kind of sudden death is usually the result of cardiovascular problems, i.e. heart attack or stroke. Last, he was known to be regularly consuming a lot of concentrated fat on a regular basis (half a stick of butter a day; and perhaps olive oil and flax seed on top of it); fatty foods have long been suspected as playing a role in cardiovascular problems, that they cause lipids to build up in the blood stream and clog up the works.
Again, this is post hoc reasoning conjured upon observing the exact particulars of his death, and so suspect even without considering additional questions like whether fat is all it’s cracked up to be, what his medical tests were saying, etc.
Well do you agree that what happened is more ‘suspicious’ than if he had died at the age of 75 from lung cancer?
Yes.
Suit yourself, but it strikes me as confusing that I would make a claim and you would respond with a calculation which seems to address the claim but actually doesn’t.
My calculation addresses a major part of the Bayesian calculation: the probability of an observed event (‘death’) conditional on the hypothesis (‘his diet is harmful’) being false. Since dying aged 52-80 is so common, that sharply limits how much could ever be inferred from observing dying.
Again, this is post hoc reasoning conjured upon observing the exact particulars of his death
Actually I don’t know the exact particulars of the death. But I do agree with what I think is your basic point here—it’s extremely easy to make these sorts of connections with the benefit of hindsight and that ease might be coloring my analysis. At the same time, I do think that—in fairness—the death is pretty high on the ‘suspicious’ scale so I stand by my earlier claim.
My calculation addresses a major part of the Bayesian calculation:
Perhaps, but it seems to me you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater a bit here by ignoring the facts which make this death quite a bit more ‘suspicious’ than other deaths of men in that age range. More importantly, you don’t seem to dispute that your calculation doesn’t really address my claim.
Look, I agree with your basic point—the premature death of a diet guru, per se, doesn’t say much about the efficacy or danger of the diet guru’s philosophy. No calculation is necessary to convince me.
More importantly, you don’t seem to dispute that your calculation doesn’t really address my claim.
I did dispute that:
My calculation addresses a major part of the Bayesian calculation...that sharply limits how much could ever be inferred from observing [Roberts] dying.
(A simple countermeasure to avoid biasing yourself with anecdotes: spend time reading in proportion to sample size. So you’re allowed to spend 10 minutes reading about Roberts’s 1 death if you then spend 17 hours repeatedly re-reading a study on how fat consumption did not predict increased mortality in a sample of 100 men.)
My calculation addresses a major part of the Bayesian calculation...that sharply limits how much could ever be inferred from observing [Roberts] dying.
I wouldn’t call it “major” because (1) you refuse to assign a probability to an event I stated I thought was likely; and (2) the main point of your calculation was pretty non-controversial and even without a calculation I doubt anyone would seriously dispute it.
Let’s do this: Is there anything I stated with which you disagree? If so, please quote it. TIA.
I wouldn’t call it “major” because (1) you refuse to assign a probability to an event I stated I thought was likely;
It puts an upper bound as I said. Plug the specific conditional I calculated into Bayes theorem and see what happens. Or look at a special case: suppose conditional on the diet not being harmful, Roberts had a 50% chance of dying before 80; now, what is the maximal amount in terms of odds or decibels or whatever that you could ever update your prior upon observing Roberts’s death assuming the worsened diet risk is >50%? Is this a large effect size? Or small?
(Now take into account everything you know about correlations, selection effects, the plausibility of the underlying claims about diet, what is known about Roberts’s health, how likely you are to hear about deaths of diet gurus, etc...)
(2) the main point of your calculation was pretty non-controversial and even without a calculation I doubt anyone would seriously dispute it.
So what? One can trivially put an upper and lower bound on any probability: No probability can exceed 1 or be lower than 0. But it ain’t “major” to say so. On the contrary, it’s trivial.
Anyway, please answer my question: Was there anything in my original post with which you disagreed? If so, please quote it. TIA.
It was nice to know all that but I did wonder: Was I killing myself? Fortunately I could find out. A few months before my butter discovery, I had gotten a “heart scan” – a tomographic x-ray of my circulatory system. These scans are summarized by an Agatston score, a measure of calcification. Your Agatston score is the best predictor of whether you will have a heart attack in the next few years. After a year of eating a half stick of butter every day, I got a second heart scan. Remarkably, my Agatston score had improved (= less calcification), which is rare. Apparently my risk of a heart attack had gone down.
Thank you for your post, which raises some interesting questions. Of course at this point it is not known if Roberts died of a heart attack, although the smart money is on a cardio-vascular problem—heart attack, stroke, aneurism, etc.
The first question is whether the Agatston score is as good as it’s made out to be by Doctor Agatston. Another question is whether it is skillful in the case of Roberts himself. Probably none of the people who were studied were eating half a stick of butter a day, along with lots of flax seeds, extra light olive oil, and who knows what else.
I’m not a doctor, but a quick search on Wikipedia turns up that the most common cause of sudden death in people over 30 is coronary artery atheroma (arteriosclerosis), but other common causes are genetically determined or at least have a significant genetic component. I suppose some of these are easier to detect (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy perhaps?), so we can probably rule them out for somebody like Roberts who constantly monitored his health and bragged about how healthy he was. Other conditions are probably more difficult to detect with standard tests.
The puzzle has a lot of pieces missing, to be sure. Another question is whether Roberts was telling the whole truth about his health. Or about his diet for that matter. It’s even not out of the question that he has gained a lot of weight.
So roughly speaking, Roberts had maybe a 50% chance of surviving from publishing his diet book to a ripe old age.
If his actuarial life expectancy was 80 and he had died at 79 it wouldn’t have looked particularly suspicious. But according to your data, his probability of dying between 52 and 60 was only about 7.5%, which is not terribly low, but still enough to warrant reasonable doubt, especially considering the circumstances of his death.
But according to your data, his probability of dying between 52 and 60 was only about 7.5%, which is not terribly low, but still enough to warrant reasonable doubt, especially considering the circumstances of his death.
I think the more interesting question is the probability of a man in his age range (who is not obese; not a smoker; and has no serious self-reported history of health problems) suddenly collapsing and dying. I don’t know the answer to this question, but it’s a pretty unusual event.
By the way, here is a video of Seth Roberts speaking about his butter experiment a few years ago. Seth Roberts mentions that he eats a half a stick of butter a day on top of his Omega-3 regimen. (And probably this is on top of daily consumption of raw olive oil).
At around 11:00, an apparent cardiologist concedes that the butter regimen may very well improve brain function but he warns Roberts that he is risking clogging up the arteries in his brain and points out that Roberts brain function won’t be so great if he has a stroke. Roberts is pretty dismissive of the comment and points out that there is reason to believe the role of fat consumption in atherosclerosis over-emphasized or mistaken.
Still, if someone suddenly collapses and dies, from what I understand it’s usually a cardiovascular problem—a blood clot; stroke; aneurism; heart attack, internal bleeding, etc. And Roberts was consuming copious amounts of foods which are widely believed to have a big impact on the cardiovascular system.
It’s silly to ignore this information when assessing probabilities. Here’s an analogy: Suppose that Prince William has a newborn son and you are going to place a bet on what the child’s name will be. You might reason that the most common male given name in the world is “Mohamed” and therefore the smart money is on “Mohamed.” Of course you would lose your money.
The flaw in this type of reasoning is that when assessing probabilities, there is a requirement that you use all available information.
I imagine Gwern would respond that he is merely setting an upper bound. But that’s silly and pointless too. If 90% of male children in Saudi Arabia are named “Mohamed,” we can infer that the probability the Royal Baby will be named “Mohamed” does not exceed 90%. But so what? That’s trivial.
but still enough to warrant reasonable doubt, especially considering the circumstances of his death.
I disagree (reasonable doubt under what assumptions? in what model? can you translate this to p-values? would you take that p-value remotely seriously if you saw it in a study where n=1?), and I’ve already pointed out many systematic biases and problems with attempting to infer anything from Roberts’s death.
I’m not saying we can scientifically infer from his premature death that his diet was unhealthy.
I’m saying that his premature death is informal evidence that his diet at best didn’t have a significant positive impact on life expectancy, and at worst was actively harmful. I can’t quantify how much, but you were the one who attempted a quantitative argument and I’ve just criticized your argument, namely your strawman definition of “suspicious death”, using your own data and assumptions, hence it seems odd that you now ask me for assumptions and p-values.
Seth Roberts is dead .
I was considering the Shangri-La diet, but now I’m nervous.
According to information his family graciously posted to his blog, the cause of death was occlusive coronary artery disease with cardiomegaly.
http://blog.sethroberts.net/
Does that make it more likely or less likely that his death was related to his diet?
The commenters are more concerned about the possible effects of high doses of omega-3.
This is really sad. He definitely was something else when it came to self-experimentation.
The blog’s now disappeared. Archive copy.
His blog is back—it’s had occasional down time for a while. The archive copy was down, though.
Probably a good idea to save anything you think is especially important.
It’s very sad news and I still ask myself what to make of it. Seth influenced my own QS journey a lot. In the end the it seems like extrapolating health from the kind of data he gathered wasn’t possible.
His approach would be expected to optimize for common situations, which may not be the same as optimizing for rare situations. I’ve been working on a theory that health is not a single thing.
For all I know, he had some intrinsic cardio-vascular problems, and his self-experimentation led to him living longer than he otherwise would have.
That an interesting way of phrasing the sentence.
The issue is that Seth himself based his behavior on the idea that health is a bit like intelligence and it’s possible to generalize from a few factors most of the useful information.
Intuitively, it seems likely to me that his death is related to one or more of his self-experiments with supplements. This is based on the observation that it’s pretty unusual for 60 year old men to collapse and die, particularly if they have no serious self-reported health problems. Calculating an actual probability seems like it would be pretty hard.
Edit: I suppose there is also an outside chance that this is a hoax. Has the death been reported in any newspapers?
60-yo men die all the time; anytime someone who writes on diet dies, someone is going to say ‘I wonder if this proves/disproves his diet claims’, no matter what the claims were or their truth. They don’t, of course, since even if you had 1000 Seth Roberts, you wouldn’t have a particularly strong piece of evidence on correlation of ‘being Roberts’ and all-cause mortality, and his diet choices were not randomized, so you don’t even get causal inference. More importantly, if Roberts had died at any time before his actuarial life expectancy (in the low 80s, I’d eyeball it, given his education, ethnicity, and having survived so long already), people would make this claim.
OK, so let’s be a little more precise and play with some numbers.
Roberts published The Shangri-la Diet in 2006. If he’s 60 now in 2014 (8 years later), then he was 52 then. Let’s say people would only consider his death negatively if he died before his actuarial life expectancy, and I’m going to handwave that as 80; then he has 28 years to survive before his death stops looking bad.
What’s his risk of dying if his diet makes zero difference to his health one way or another? Looking at http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/table4c6.html from 52-80, the per-year risk of death goes from 0.006337 to 0.061620. What’s the cumulative risk? We can, I think, calculate it as (1 − 0.06337) … (1 − 0.061620). A little copy-paste, a little Haskell, and:
So roughly speaking, Roberts had maybe a 50% chance of surviving from publishing his diet book to a ripe old age. (Suppose Roberts’s ideas had halved his risk of death in each time period, which we can implement with a call to
map (/2). It’s not quite as simple as dividing 50% by 2, but when you rerun the probability, then he’d have a 71% chance of survival, or more relevantly, he still has a 29% chance of dying in that timespan.)In summary: Life sucks, and diet gurus can be expected to die all the time no matter whether their ideas are great or horrible, so their deaths tell us so little that discussing it at all is probably biasing our beliefs through an anchoring or salience effect.
Agreed.
Not sure about that, for example if he had died at the age of 81 in a car accident. Although I appreciate your effort, I am not sure that you have the reference class of events correct. The evidence suggest that Roberts died (1) suddenly; (2) due to failure of some bodily system; (3) at an age which is well under his life expectancy. The prior probability of this happening has got to be far less than the prior probability of him simply dying from any cause before his actuarial life expectancy.
At the same time, he was apparently consuming large amounts of butter, omega fatty acids from flax seeds, and other esoteric things. Of course it’s difficult to even being estimating the risk inherent in doing such things.
Ironically, Seth Roberts was a big believer in “n=1 experiments.”
Do you have an estimate of the probability that Robert’s death is related to his supplement regime?
The all-cause mortality figures were chosen for convenience. I’m sure one could dig up more appropriate figures that exclude accident, homicide, etc. But the reference class is still going to be pretty broad: if Roberts had committed suicide, had developed cancer, had a stroke rather than heart attack (or whatever), had a fall, people would be speculating on biological roots (‘perhaps he was going senile thanks to the oils’ or ‘he claimed the flax seed oil was helping balance, but he fell all the same!’). And I’m not sure that the better figures would be that much lower: this isn’t a young cohort—few elderly people are murdered or die in car accidents, AFAIK, and mortality is primarily from diseases and other health problems.
As I’ve pointed out, the prior is quite high that he would die in a ‘suspicious’ way.
No, and I refuse to give one on a problem which reflects motivated cognition on the part of many people based on heavily-selected evidence & post hoc reasoning. Any estimate would anchor me and bias my future thinking on diet matters. The story is far too salient, the evidence far too weak.
I would have to agree with that, however some causes of death are more suspicious than others. In this case, he died apparently died suddenly, at an age where sudden death is rather unusual in people with no self-reported history of serious health problems. Also, this kind of sudden death is usually the result of cardiovascular problems, i.e. heart attack or stroke. Last, he was known to be regularly consuming a lot of concentrated fat on a regular basis (half a stick of butter a day; and perhaps olive oil and flax seed on top of it); fatty foods have long been suspected as playing a role in cardiovascular problems, that they cause lipids to build up in the blood stream and clog up the works.
It would be very tricky to do the equations, if it’s possible at all, but it seems reasonable to think it’s likely that his supplement regimen played a role in his demise.
Well do you agree that what happened is more ‘suspicious’ than if he had died at the age of 75 from lung cancer?
Suit yourself, but it strikes me as confusing that I would make a claim and you would respond with a calculation which seems to address the claim but actually doesn’t. It makes me think you are trying to subtly change the subject. Which is fine, but I think you should be explicit about it. Otherwise it seems like you are attacking a strawman.
Again, this is post hoc reasoning conjured upon observing the exact particulars of his death, and so suspect even without considering additional questions like whether fat is all it’s cracked up to be, what his medical tests were saying, etc.
Yes.
My calculation addresses a major part of the Bayesian calculation: the probability of an observed event (‘death’) conditional on the hypothesis (‘his diet is harmful’) being false. Since dying aged 52-80 is so common, that sharply limits how much could ever be inferred from observing dying.
Actually I don’t know the exact particulars of the death. But I do agree with what I think is your basic point here—it’s extremely easy to make these sorts of connections with the benefit of hindsight and that ease might be coloring my analysis. At the same time, I do think that—in fairness—the death is pretty high on the ‘suspicious’ scale so I stand by my earlier claim.
Perhaps, but it seems to me you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater a bit here by ignoring the facts which make this death quite a bit more ‘suspicious’ than other deaths of men in that age range. More importantly, you don’t seem to dispute that your calculation doesn’t really address my claim.
Look, I agree with your basic point—the premature death of a diet guru, per se, doesn’t say much about the efficacy or danger of the diet guru’s philosophy. No calculation is necessary to convince me.
I did dispute that:
(A simple countermeasure to avoid biasing yourself with anecdotes: spend time reading in proportion to sample size. So you’re allowed to spend 10 minutes reading about Roberts’s 1 death if you then spend 17 hours repeatedly re-reading a study on how fat consumption did not predict increased mortality in a sample of 100 men.)
I wouldn’t call it “major” because (1) you refuse to assign a probability to an event I stated I thought was likely; and (2) the main point of your calculation was pretty non-controversial and even without a calculation I doubt anyone would seriously dispute it.
Let’s do this: Is there anything I stated with which you disagree? If so, please quote it. TIA.
It puts an upper bound as I said. Plug the specific conditional I calculated into Bayes theorem and see what happens. Or look at a special case: suppose conditional on the diet not being harmful, Roberts had a 50% chance of dying before 80; now, what is the maximal amount in terms of odds or decibels or whatever that you could ever update your prior upon observing Roberts’s death assuming the worsened diet risk is >50%? Is this a large effect size? Or small?
(Now take into account everything you know about correlations, selection effects, the plausibility of the underlying claims about diet, what is known about Roberts’s health, how likely you are to hear about deaths of diet gurus, etc...)
One would think so.
So what? One can trivially put an upper and lower bound on any probability: No probability can exceed 1 or be lower than 0. But it ain’t “major” to say so. On the contrary, it’s trivial.
Anyway, please answer my question: Was there anything in my original post with which you disagreed? If so, please quote it. TIA.
Your countermeasure seems to recommend never reading fiction. Feature or bug?
Seth Roberts’ last article
Some ambiguity about the Agatston score
Agatston’s overview of his test
Thank you for your post, which raises some interesting questions. Of course at this point it is not known if Roberts died of a heart attack, although the smart money is on a cardio-vascular problem—heart attack, stroke, aneurism, etc.
The first question is whether the Agatston score is as good as it’s made out to be by Doctor Agatston. Another question is whether it is skillful in the case of Roberts himself. Probably none of the people who were studied were eating half a stick of butter a day, along with lots of flax seeds, extra light olive oil, and who knows what else.
I’m not a doctor, but a quick search on Wikipedia turns up that the most common cause of sudden death in people over 30 is coronary artery atheroma (arteriosclerosis), but other common causes are genetically determined or at least have a significant genetic component. I suppose some of these are easier to detect (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy perhaps?), so we can probably rule them out for somebody like Roberts who constantly monitored his health and bragged about how healthy he was. Other conditions are probably more difficult to detect with standard tests.
The puzzle has a lot of pieces missing, to be sure. Another question is whether Roberts was telling the whole truth about his health. Or about his diet for that matter. It’s even not out of the question that he has gained a lot of weight.
If his actuarial life expectancy was 80 and he had died at 79 it wouldn’t have looked particularly suspicious. But according to your data, his probability of dying between 52 and 60 was only about 7.5%, which is not terribly low, but still enough to warrant reasonable doubt, especially considering the circumstances of his death.
I think the more interesting question is the probability of a man in his age range (who is not obese; not a smoker; and has no serious self-reported history of health problems) suddenly collapsing and dying. I don’t know the answer to this question, but it’s a pretty unusual event.
By the way, here is a video of Seth Roberts speaking about his butter experiment a few years ago. Seth Roberts mentions that he eats a half a stick of butter a day on top of his Omega-3 regimen. (And probably this is on top of daily consumption of raw olive oil).
http://vimeo.com/14281896
At around 11:00, an apparent cardiologist concedes that the butter regimen may very well improve brain function but he warns Roberts that he is risking clogging up the arteries in his brain and points out that Roberts brain function won’t be so great if he has a stroke. Roberts is pretty dismissive of the comment and points out that there is reason to believe the role of fat consumption in atherosclerosis over-emphasized or mistaken.
Still, if someone suddenly collapses and dies, from what I understand it’s usually a cardiovascular problem—a blood clot; stroke; aneurism; heart attack, internal bleeding, etc. And Roberts was consuming copious amounts of foods which are widely believed to have a big impact on the cardiovascular system.
It’s silly to ignore this information when assessing probabilities. Here’s an analogy: Suppose that Prince William has a newborn son and you are going to place a bet on what the child’s name will be. You might reason that the most common male given name in the world is “Mohamed” and therefore the smart money is on “Mohamed.” Of course you would lose your money.
The flaw in this type of reasoning is that when assessing probabilities, there is a requirement that you use all available information.
I imagine Gwern would respond that he is merely setting an upper bound. But that’s silly and pointless too. If 90% of male children in Saudi Arabia are named “Mohamed,” we can infer that the probability the Royal Baby will be named “Mohamed” does not exceed 90%. But so what? That’s trivial.
I disagree (reasonable doubt under what assumptions? in what model? can you translate this to p-values? would you take that p-value remotely seriously if you saw it in a study where n=1?), and I’ve already pointed out many systematic biases and problems with attempting to infer anything from Roberts’s death.
I’m not saying we can scientifically infer from his premature death that his diet was unhealthy.
I’m saying that his premature death is informal evidence that his diet at best didn’t have a significant positive impact on life expectancy, and at worst was actively harmful. I can’t quantify how much, but you were the one who attempted a quantitative argument and I’ve just criticized your argument, namely your strawman definition of “suspicious death”, using your own data and assumptions, hence it seems odd that you now ask me for assumptions and p-values.
Isn’t the p-value simply 100%-7.5%?
Yes fittingly from Ryan Holiday: http://betabeat.com/2014/04/personal-science-pioneer-seth-roberts-passes-away/
But I don’t think a normal newspaper would do more fact checking then the people who read Seth’s blog and comment on it.