Imagine a potential future: You’re at a new years party, and as tradition demands you’ve been asked about your new years resolutions. You list a dozen things you’d like to do - build a ship in a bottle, see more of your native land, that sort of thing - and, almost as an afterthought, mention that you’d like to lose a few pounds. This last, it turns out, was a mistake of the highest order.
Found a typo at " Lean participants so no effect at any point".
Overall good article. I think the takeaway is that (a) it is really hard to prove that X does Y and (b) Leptin and other hormones are probably more complicated than we think.
Nice post! Minor point - I think that dark matter is on sounder epistemic footing than your passing reference to it seems to suggest. I'd propose dark energy as an alternative physics concept whose epistemic status is more like that which people tend to ascribe to dark matter.
Follow-up thought #1: I'd be interested in reading what you have to say about dark matter/dark energy if you'd be interested in writing about it.
Follow-up thought #2: Dark matter is often used as an example to gesture at the idea of 'a scientific hypothesis which we don't have direct evidence for, but accept because it explains certain observations for which we don't have better alternatives.' Putting aside questions about the strength of the evidence for dark matter in particular, this distinction strikes me as a bit fuzzy - after all, isn't all evidence indirect in some sense? Is 'inference to the best explanation' really so different from however we reason in most cases? There are other modes of reasoning of course, such as theoretical coherence or simplicity, but I'm not sure that's what the dark matter example is usually intended to get at (nor does it seem that dark matter does atypically poorly on those metrics).
Found a typo at " Lean participants so no effect at any point".
Overall good article. I think the takeaway is that (a) it is really hard to prove that X does Y and (b) Leptin and other hormones are probably more complicated than we think.
Nice post! Minor point - I think that dark matter is on sounder epistemic footing than your passing reference to it seems to suggest. I'd propose dark energy as an alternative physics concept whose epistemic status is more like that which people tend to ascribe to dark matter.
Follow-up thought #1: I'd be interested in reading what you have to say about dark matter/dark energy if you'd be interested in writing about it.
Follow-up thought #2: Dark matter is often used as an example to gesture at the idea of 'a scientific hypothesis which we don't have direct evidence for, but accept because it explains certain observations for which we don't have better alternatives.' Putting aside questions about the strength of the evidence for dark matter in particular, this distinction strikes me as a bit fuzzy - after all, isn't all evidence indirect in some sense? Is 'inference to the best explanation' really so different from however we reason in most cases? There are other modes of reasoning of course, such as theoretical coherence or simplicity, but I'm not sure that's what the dark matter example is usually intended to get at (nor does it seem that dark matter does atypically poorly on those metrics).