Seth Roberts has died

http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/04/27/seth/

by martharotter • 12 years ago

168 130 12 years ago

blog.sethroberts.net

geuis2• 12 years ago

For those of us who don't know who Seth Roberts is, who is Seth Roberts?

influx• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Roberts

He was well known for self experimentation and writing the book, "The Shangri-La Diet".

geuis2• 12 years ago

Thanks. I have heard of that in passing.

Sovietaced• 12 years ago

Sounds like a broscientist.

zorbo3• 12 years ago

Forgive me, but I'm having trouble understanding why his death is significant for a crowd such as Hacker news? I didn't know about him, and I don't mean to talk ill of the dead, but from a quick google it would seem he's mostly just a dietary quack? Even if he wasn't a quack, I still don't really get his relevance.

abruzzi• 12 years ago

Inventor of the "Shanghai-la" diet, among other things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Roberts

thebooktocome• 12 years ago

Shanghai is a different place than Shangri-La. For starters, the former exists.

xiaoma• 12 years ago

He was basically "the quantified self guy". He's done all kinds of crazy experiments on himself that he called "n=1 studies". In fact, the first thing I wondered when I saw this headline is whether or not it was related to some new experiment he was doing on himself.

Like the other commenters here, I will miss Seth's writing. He shared so much and influenced so many others. He had both the curiosity and the courage to try crazy things and shared what he learned with the world. RIP, Seth.

brohee2• 12 years ago

In fact, the first thing I wondered when I saw this headline is whether or not it was related to some new experiment he was doing on himself.

Well, there are "rumors" of links between eating too much fat and cardiovascular diseases, and he was abusing butter as of late...

hudibras• 12 years ago

This is a good but short summary of some of Seth's projects, from an old blog post of his.

http://blog.sethroberts.net/2012/08/22/why-self-track-the-po...

moonfern2• 12 years ago

If you're interested in the link between ADHD and food. There's evidence ( sofar all research confirms this and most experiments included double blind tests) that food triggers ADHD. http://peer.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/47/80/60/PDF/PEER_stage2_10...

All those experiments start with a very restricted diet and then they start adding apples, pork.... The restricted diet consists of what is considered safe food. ( A pear for example) Double blind means that nor the participants nor the observers know which of the two groups follows the highly restricted diet. The participants are young children.

gus_massa• 12 years ago

The article you cite has not a double blind experiment:

The parents and teachers who filled in the questionnaires could not be blinded as they had to supervise the food intake of the child and knew whether the child was following an elimination diet.

Do you have a reference of a similar article with a double blind test?

Another question: Pears, apples and quinces are very related plants. Why pears are safe and apple not? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinae

judk3• 12 years ago

And you won't tell us which foods are evil?

colechristensen• 12 years ago

One can't help but wonder if a man so dedicated to self-experimentation was a victim of his own studies. Beware extremes.

jpgvm• 12 years ago

This is incredibly sad. Such a curious and bright mind.

qwerty_asdf• 12 years ago

According to a Scientific American article [1], he was aged 54 in early 2008, so that puts him at roughly 60 years old, depending on his precise date of birth...

[1] http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=self-experimenter-free-f...

ekianjo• 12 years ago

Any idea why his year of birth does not seem to be publicly known ?

judk3• 12 years ago

Because no one posted that trivial detail, and he didn't share it on Facebook?

dm2• 12 years ago

According to the link below he was 52 in 2005.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/11FREAK.html?page...

kayoone2• 12 years ago

Tragic and shows that no matter how healthy your lifestyle, life can still end in unexpected ways much too early.

greenmountin• 12 years ago

I can't tell if you're being serious or not, so I will note for other readers that there is a lot of irony in saying this about Seth. His most public experiments were the ingestion of large quantities of olive oil for appetite control and daily butter consumption to aid sleep. A more appropriate sentiment might be to salute Seth for his radical health experiments, and the great risks he assumed in performing them on himself.

kayoone2• 12 years ago

my bad, i just glanced over his page and info and figured he was a proponent of a healthy lifestyle.

msandford4• 12 years ago

The science is not overwhelming that fat is what kills you. The lipid hypothesis may not be correct. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18615352

bby• 12 years ago

For a second I thought this was someone affiliated with Soylent...

pella2• 12 years ago

Seth Roberts: "The unreasonable effectiveness of my self-experimentation"

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964443/

Seth Roberts: "The Growth of Personal Science: Implications for Statistics" (pdf)

http://media.sethroberts.net/blog/pdf/2012-09-24-The-Growth-...

ElmerPaldritch2• 12 years ago

Seth Roberts wasn't a hacker, but he was friends with Aaron Swartz:

http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/07/22/google-yes-wikipedia-...

Swartz also wrote about Roberts' Shangri-La Diet on his blog, claiming that through it "losing weight has to be one of the easiest things I’ve ever done":

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/losingweight

hackaflocka7• 12 years ago

So that's at least N=2, the number of people on the Shangri La diet who have died prematurely.

I think Seth Roberts was the very definition of a hacker. Not computer hacker. Hacker.

I started the diet about 5 weeks ago. The oil drinking helped to make my cravings tolerable. I quit after 2 weeks because I didn't seem to need the oil any more. My cravings have been under control since without the oil. (I've lost about 3 inches of waist. I've not measured my weight because I don't care about that. I'm feeling lighter and better than I have in about 4 years.)

I think there's value to his theory of set-points, and to the use of unflavored oil as something that breaks the brain's flavor-calorie connection. Nevertheless, I'd be severely concerned by this news if I were still on the diet, or if I were on the diet long-term.

atom-morgan2• 12 years ago

So that's at least N=2, the number of people on the Shangri La diet who have died prematurely.

I won't say that diet can't lead to suicide but...it was suicide for Swartz, right?

userbinator• 12 years ago

I'd be really interested in knowing his cause of death. He has had extremely high fat intake due to all his experimentation:

http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/11/25/butter-and-arithmetic...

GigabyteCoin2• 12 years ago

Collapsing during strenuous activity is typically heart failure in my experience.

It happens all the time up here in Canada when people shovel snow.

maj0rhn10• 12 years ago

Almost. I think you're confusing "heart failure" with "myocardial infarction." They are two different diseases. Collapse during exertion can happen in either one, but in Seth's case myocardial infarction is more likely, because people with heart failure generally don't go hiking (their exercise tolerance is too limited).

gadders3• 12 years ago

From his last column, linked to above:

"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."

gadders3• 12 years ago

Slightly offtopic - The logic around weight "set-points" seems plausible. Has anyone ever had any luck with the Shangri La Diet?

kbutler• 12 years ago

I lost about 20 lbs in 6 months doing it a few years ago. I did find that I had less inclination to snack or eat large meals.

Then I increased cardio, stopped the diet (why? I don't recall), and proceeded to gain it back (while doing 3+ hours/week of cardio). I've tried various things with limited success and been meaning to try Shangri La again.

Personal anecdote, post hoc ergo propter hoc, etc.

gadders3• 12 years ago

Thanks. Always good to hear a first hand account.

jedberg• 12 years ago

I lost maybe 20 pounds on the diet, but I wasn't religious about following it. I only did it on workdays because it was hard to carry the oil with me, so I just kept the bottle at work.

It did however make me not hungry at all, I would barely eat throughout the day.

It caused social problems though, because at night I still wouldn't be hungry, so I would just sit there at dinner while the family ate, and they would constantly be asking if I was ok.

I stopped losing weight when I hit the set point, and stopped the diet a while after that. Eventually I gained the weight back.

Interestingly, a few years later I started exercising regularly as a way to loose weight, and now I'm once again stuck at the same set point, which is about 15 pounds more than I'd like to be. Still trying to figure out how to lower that set point.

chadgeidel2• 12 years ago

Another anecdote - I tried it for a few weeks in 2007 and didn't have any of the suggested results. No appetite loss, and no weight loss.

Tried both oil and sugar water.

hackaflocka7• 12 years ago

Did you ensure you took the oil / water at least one hour away from ingesting anything with a flavor?

abecedarius3• 12 years ago

Yes. I lost ~30 pounds, down to roughly my ideal weight, kept steady for 2 or 3 years now. It slowly drifts back up during times I'm not doing Shangri La because I'm traveling or whatever, then falls again after.

(I'm going to cut my flaxseed oil consumption on the theory that it might have contributed to his death, as long as I don't hear otherwise, but there are other ways to hack the flavor-calorie association, like wearing a noseclip sometimes when you eat.)

glenra2• 12 years ago

I had a some luck with it for a while. The appetite suppression effect was noticeable at first, but eventually wore off - I was still taking the sugar water or oil but not losing weight. The diet is BILLED as "follow these steps and then eat whatever you want whenever you want and you'll still lose weight" - that was not my experience. I still had to diet quite deliberately to lose weight on SLD.

Following the Shangri-la forums, I notice that a lot of people lost SOME weight using his diet but practically nobody reached their ideal weight or anything near it. At best it's one tool in the toolbox, but in no way a "cure" for being overweight. I think the effect is real, and really hope somebody does more rigorous testing to figure out when and how the effect works so the diet can be made more effective/reliable/convenient, to the degree that's possible.

me2i812• 12 years ago

When I first met Seth he was an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. At the time he wrote all his code in APL, and couldn't figure out why anyone would use anything else. More recently he used R. To everyone calling him "not a hacker," he was hacking on code before a lot of you were born, though his code was mostly for his own purposes.

gwern2• 12 years ago

I'm a decent R user, have done many self-experiments myself, and read & commented on Roberts's blog for years; I have no idea about APL, but I think you overestimate how much hacking on R code Roberts was able to do - he had a lot of trouble programming the reaction-time code for his Buttermind experiments and I don't recall him ever reporting more complex analyses than a linear model.

ryanholiday• 12 years ago

I was fortunate enough to publish Seth's final column this morning.

http://betabeat.com/2014/04/seth-roberts-final-column-butter...

maj0rhn10• 12 years ago

You owe it to your readers to say that Seth's death is a warning to those who would flaunt conventional medical wisdom, as he clearly did.

Anyone who stakes their life on a single published meta-analysis is unwise. Anyone who puts faith in a single assessor of cardiac risk, coronary CT, is unwise. It is ironic that the most apt assessment of Seth's life and death comes from a margarine commercial popular in the 1970s: "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

drewblaisdell2• 12 years ago

You owe it to your readers to say that Seth's death is a warning to those who would flaunt conventional medical wisdom, as he clearly did.

Your comments in this thread are inappropriate and untimely. We do not yet know what caused Seth's collapse, and to jump to blame his experiments because you disagree with his methods is shortsighted.

sethfan2• 12 years ago

Hey, I got an idea. Instead of engaging in virtually baseless speculation and jumping to conclusions, why don't you go fuck yourself?

You may be right about what killed him, asshole, but how about you let his body get cold first before you start tut-tutting and wagging your finger?

glenra2• 12 years ago

It's true that Seth tried all sorts of wacky self-experiments, but it's worth keeping in mind why. Most of them were inspired by the fact that he wasn't sleeping well. He tried all these odd magical remedies - standing on one leg, "morning faces" and nighttime honey are a few I recall offhand - because he had a medical symptom: the inability to sleep well, for which he could find no satisfactory conventional remedy. So he started collecting statistics while trying unconventional remedies, some of which seemed to help.

So perhaps what finally killed Seth relates not to his experimental treatments, but to whatever underlying preexisting conditions inspired him to invest such effort. Seems worth considering, anyway.

pretz• 12 years ago

Looks like the blog is down now, the linked to post says simply "Hello, this is Seth’s sister, Amy, with the sad news that Seth died on Saturday, April 26, 2014. He collapsed while hiking near his home in Berkeley, CA. He had asked that any memorial gifts be made to Amnesty International. Thank you to all for following and sharing Seth’s work."

-- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

I had the pleasure of knowing Seth personally and am deeply saddened to hear this news.

chernavsky• 12 years ago

Seth Roberts was an innovator, a teacher, an original thinker -- and he was an inspiration to me. I'm reminded of the Grateful Dead t-shirt that says, "They aren't the best at what they do. They're the only ones who do it".

I've been following his Shangri-La diet for over four years now. Here's a page about my results, although it's a bit out of date:

http://www.astrocyte-design.com/shangri-la-diet/

maj0rhn10• 12 years ago

Collapsed while hiking. That is a cardiovascular death until proven otherwise. In a guy who ate a half a stick of butter every day ... quelle surprise.

Listen to a cardiologist trying to talk Seth out of his course, at around 11 minutes in this 2008 video:

http://vimeo.com/14281896

ellyagg• 12 years ago

Dr. Mel Siff was a famous scholar in sport science. He hosted a mailing list for a decade that everyone in the field subscribed to. He wrote a comprehensive text on the subject of sport science, Supertraining:

http://www.amazon.com/Supertraining-Paperback-Yuri-Verkhosha...

A fitness buff throughout his life, so never straying far from a conventionally healthy diet in the first place, he famously doubled down on conventional wisdom and went on a low fat, vegetarian diet after suffering a heart attack at a young age. He did everything right, according to establishment wisdom. After a few years, at only 58, he died from a heart attack or stroke. Those of us who are skeptical of the diet-heart hypothesis were not surprised.

The point is, it's very easy to support a side with your favorite anecdote.

After decades of motivated science, the support for the diet-heart hypothesis is poor. Stephan Guyenet, a Ph.D. neurobiologist who studies obesity for a living, has a blog where he examines the evidence in detail. Here's a sample:

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/07/diet-heart-hyp...

If you disagree, I'm sure Stephan would welcome you opening a dialogue with him in the comments on his blog. I'd be interested in that.

lena• 12 years ago

Mel Siff died in 2003. "Established wisdom" at that time did not recommend a low-fat diet at all. He apparently wrote in one of his books that "nutritional scientists" recommend a diet of 10% fat, but that was never the recommendation of major health organizations or "conventional wisdom". The IOM recommended in 2002 20-35% of calories from fat, for example. In 1990 the recommendation was 30% or less.

It seems that Mel Siff didn't follow a low fat vegetarian diet himself, based on his response to a critical article about him: (full response here: http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6558 )

Interestingly, I cannot recall anyone by the name of Glassman ever staying in the Siff household or studying me in the laboratory to examine my eating habits, so I am intrigued to know where he found this inside information. The abbreviated tale of my cardiac rehab programme (http://www.worldfitness.org/drmelsiff.html) certainly said nothing about my specific breakdown of macronutrients in my diet.

Had he read a little more carefully what I wrote, he would have noticed that my diet comprises something like 50-60% lipids (no fried foods, no transfats, no animal fat, plenty of fish) and under 30% carbohydrates (no refined carbs) and hasn't deviated much from that sort of balance for many years - I have never been a lover of high carb diets and have eaten little or no sugar (other than about 1-2 tablespoons of honey or a few servings of fruit a day). Where on earth does he obtain that nonsense from about my diet?

So, he says there he ate about 50-60% fat. It's strange though that he says "no animal fat" but plenty of fish, which is of course animal fat.

gress4• 12 years ago

Nice appeal to authority without a shred of evidence.

Edit: downvotes? Where is the evidence of what actually killed Seth? What makes a 'cardiologist' correct here, vs a scientist?

tsbardella2• 12 years ago

He will be in a book by Mary Roach soon..

systematical• 12 years ago

What happens to our blogs when we die? I've always thought about this and would like to keep my blog running even in death.

Asparagirl2• 12 years ago

Forget the part about chugging olive oil, how about that entire sub-category of his blog dedicated to the belief that pre-natal ultrasounds somehow cause autism? Or the hand-waving away the multiple studies that show that GFCF diets have no proven positive effect on autism symptoms? Or using the word "cure" offhand, based on an n=1 self-report of another diet?

nope.gif

I don't even care about the weight loss and cardiac shit, I think I've seen enough here.

hackaflocka7• 12 years ago

It's common for innovators to be mocked for their unconventional ideas.

Asparagirl2• 12 years ago

It's not "innovation" if it's just crap you spew on a blog.

Double-blind peer-reviewed replicable studies or GTFO.

davidgerard• 12 years ago

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Galileo_gambit

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan

jongraehl2• 12 years ago

The incidence of miscalibrated/misoperated ultrasound is high enough that people should hesitate to perform frivolous scans, even though it's probably safe enough when done properly. Cause autism? Doubtful. Cause damage? Sure. Why not be careful?

Seth did report a lot of N=very-small anecdotes uncritically. You might say he was encouraging people to do their own N=1.

pella2• 12 years ago

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: "We are considering a memorial a-la-Seth: A memorial one-day conference for all his friends and admirers, organized by his pals: John Durant, Tim Ferris, Tucker Max, Gary Taubes, and other members of that independent thinking clique who connected socially through Seth" https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1015217680...

Mz2• 12 years ago

RIP.

I am sad to see this. I only recently learned of the site. I have done my own personal health experiments and had hoped to make contact and what not, but did not get around to it. I imagine a lot of people will say his experiments killed him or believe it even if they don't say it.

I increasingly think there is no point to trying to share such info. If you die under a doctor's care, they say your condition did you in. If you die doing alternative stuff, they say the alternative stuff did you in. It seems pretty no win, in that regard.

I never knew him, yet it feels like a personal loss for me.

abecedarius3• 12 years ago

I regret not introducing you two. I didn't know either of you but I liked your webpages. His offered some ideas that helped with issues that had been impervious to doctors; yours didn't directly matter to me beyond the encouragement of seeing someone tackling their problems themselves, but that's something. Thanks for sharing them.

Mz2• 12 years ago

Thank you for replying. I am curious why you say mine didn't matter to you. I mean why think it was not relevant to you at all.

I get a lot of feedback from people about all kinds of projects that my work is "too niche" and only serves a tiny population. I don't think that's true at all and I am trying to figure out what I am doing wrong.

jongraehl2• 12 years ago

Andrew Gelman posts a eulogy: http://andrewgelman.com/2014/04/30/seth-roberts/

Seth Roberts has died

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