Hobbies Trump Science

[Terma]

Again, besides the point. You're looking at institutions, medical, pharma, etcetc. I'm looking at well-written research done by intelligent individual scientists plus an accumulation of data points that slowly starts to make up for the problems in peer review/reproducibility. No, I'm not going to throw all that under the bus until someone gives me a good reason.

 

[yerrag]

Again, besides the point. You're looking at institutions, medical, pharma, etcetc. I'm looking at well-written research done by intelligent individual scientists plus an accumulation of data points that slowly starts to make up for the problems in peer review/reproducibility. No, I'm not going to throw all that under the bus until someone gives me a good reason.

If living in a cave helps advance science, as a lonely scientist soldiers on with his solitary research on a starving artist's funds, then I would agree with your silver lining hallelujah praising of the current state of affairs.

 

[Terma]

praising of the current state of affairs

Wow. That's because you love red herrings, and you interpret my appreciation of the tangibly helpful work of individual scientists as an endorsement of whatever medical/pharma/educational status quo you have in mind, which is nowhere near. This is your problem, not mine.

[Let's get real for a second: factually I've learned 10x more from formally published discussions than from any forum or other health/nutrition authority]

 

[yerrag]

Wow. That's because you love red herrings, and you interpret my appreciation of the tangibly helpful work of individual scientists as an endorsement of whatever medical/pharma/educational status quo you have in mind, which is nowhere near. This is your problem, not mine.

[Let's get real for a second: factually I've learned 10x more from formally published discussions than from any forum or other health/nutrition authority]

Then why are you still here?

 

[Terma]

Waiting for Travis. But no seriously, I enjoy a post or two from amazoniac per week. But no seriously, it's to bounce ideas off of people in the hopes someday they come back. Brainstorming and interaction, really. This isn't meant to be insulting but I don't hold my breath and make it a point not to post on forums too much anymore or it becomes a time sink. In case that wasn't rhetorical.

 

[yerrag]

Waiting for Travis. But no seriously, I enjoy a post or two from amazoniac per week. But no seriously, it's to bounce ideas off of people in the hopes someday they come back. Brainstorming and interaction, really. This isn't meant to be insulting but I don't hold my breath and make it a point not to post on forums too much anymore or it becomes a time sink. In case that wasn't rhetorical.

Yet you just couldn't resist.

 

[Collden]

Don't you think "scientific drought" is a bit strong? I don't agree with that bit in the least. Practically-speaking 70% of all my best insight into health matters comes from articles dated 2015 or newer, and it seems to get better every year (not to mention sheer volume of experimental data is important). There are some good quality old research but it's aging and slowly deprecating. Rant against the establishment and all that but there are still brilliant scientific minds writing those articles and science happening beyond the institutions. I have every reason to be pissed off at everything but objectively speaking there is no doubt in my mind things are getting significantly better from a pure research/knowledge perspective. (It's just highly specialized and) You can't count on the medical system to make use of the information.

Can you give some examples of papers from 2015 onwards that gave you the most valuable insight into health matters? I'm genuinly curious as I find it increasingly difficult to find interesting recent papers.

In my own field of obesity research, I dont think we've really made any substantial progress in either understanding or solving the problem for at least the past 70 years, which is pretty deplorable. Modern biotechnology has given us a vast number of sophisticated techniques to study life in ever greater detail and tease apart physiological processes at smaller and smaller levels, but at the same time we're getting more and more lost in the minuatie and completely losing sight of the bigger picture.

We can study the activity and actions of specific single neurons in a live animal and simultaneously measure how every single gene in your body changes expression in response to whatever stimulus, but as to what it all means who knows and who even cares? No one in the sciences seems to care about what is the actual basic question we're trying to answer and how do we solve that and use existing data to bring us closer to a solution, because as a scientist you cant make a career out of building theoretical frameworks, only by producing data or developing new methods to produce data.

 

[Terma]

It's a hell of a task to triage by importance, these might not be the best but make for decent examples of findings with major implications (e.g. some of these there's no way RP could have known in his time):

Comprehensive metabolome analyses reveal N-acetylcysteine-responsive accumulation of kynurenine in systemic lupus erythematosus: implications for activation of the mechanistic target of rapamycin
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)01046-6
An adipo-biliary-uridine axis that regulates energy homeostasis
Emerging Therapeutic Role of PPAR–α in Cognition and Emotions
Fatty Acid-binding Proteins (FABPs) Are Intracellular Carriers for Δ9-Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and Cannabidiol (CBD)

Gut research is the bottleneck for obesity and the like, but metabolic alterations beyond the gut are becoming well catalogued - there's plenty of recent ones in travis's and amazoniac's threads, a few posted by myself (guess you could search my post history because many of my links are to newer articles).

As for creative thinking I've found quite a few original ideas over time in published article Discussions and review articles. You inevitably get career specialization but the ability to conceptualize is quite personal to authors and extremely hit-or-miss, ranging from useless filler text to brilliant. We act like Ray Peats are one in a million but I wouldn't be so quick to place a bet between him and some of these authors.

 

[haidut]

Don't you think "scientific drought" is a bit strong?

I don't know, maybe for some fields it may be but for science in general seems pretty accurate. See my other thread below one exactly this topic.
Science Is Stagnant, No Real Progress Since Early 20th Century