My 16-month theanine self-experiment

> This hacker news thread is full of positive reports,

Hacker news always has the most insane takes when it comes to medical/biological things.

Gell-Mann says: "yes, but just medicine"

Most of this stuff is just takes from random people, not medical research. For example, the article links to 5-month old HN thread where the first comment says:

> And you do not want to mess with the 5-HTP and alcohol at the same time

so I googled it

> Internet forums are full of horror stories of people vomiting, blacking out or having seizures after drinking while on 5-HTP. It’s impossible to know if the stories are reliable, but there is little other evidence of known interactions between 5-HTP and alcohol.

https://www.drugrehab.com/addiction/alcohol/risks-of-mixing-...

Most of social media and most of real life have absolutely insane takes on health-related stuff. Ask someone at random about, say, keto, and you're pretty much guaranteed to get an opinion without any data behind it.

I think that part of this is because the effect sizes are so small. Grabbing some arbitrary sources, if you look at the average disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost to colorectal cancer as a result of red meat consumption in France[0] and put them into per-person terms, it averages out to a grand total of...less than 2 hours per person (presumably other causes also contribute). Meanwhile, for alcohol consumption and everything it causes, the average Australian is losing a little under 20 hours (and I assume most of HN lives in a country where this is similar).

These are pretty small numbers! I'm honestly not sure whether it's even worth worrying about them. No wonder people have trouble telling what's true in a field where many of the papers and most of the personal experience is just noise in the data.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02786...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/alcohol-consumption

It's what you get when you have a forum entirely made up of people who have never been told that they are actually wrong trying to apply knowledge to something that doesn't give clear, immediate, and universal results

The whole site should have this as a tagline.

I don't disagree with your main point, but the plural of anecdote is data. Phenomena exists before the related studies do.

The link you provided goes on to say:

> Antidepressants also affect the balance of neurotransmitters such as serotonin. Popular antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors increase levels of serotonin in the brain. The labels of SSRIs such as Celexa and Prozac warn patients not to drink alcohol while on the drugs. If you shouldn’t drink with antidepressants, you probably shouldn’t drink with 5-HTP.

> The effects of mixing 5-HTP and alcohol on serotonin levels are not fully understood. However, both substances alter serotonin levels, which may increase the risk of developing serotonin syndrome. This life-threatening condition is caused by the accumulation of too much serotonin in the body. Serotonin syndrome can cause confusion, agitation, sweating, coordination loss, fever and seizure.

Nah, the plural of anecdote is confirmation bias. Why do people keep trotting out this "plural of anecdote is data" line, is it a quote from some high-profile idiot?

Of course data can also give you confirmation bias, maybe that's the point, maybe that's why people defend anecdotes. What you have to do to find out if something is really happening is reason about it, then test your theories by doing your best to knock them over. Often though we just end up testing for statistical correlation without any better theory than "these two things go together". In that case, the plural of anecdote is bad methodology. The best thing I can say about anecdotes is that they might give you ideas.

Edit: found it, it's due to one Ray Wolfinger, behavioral political scientist: When a student once categorized one of Wolfinger’s claims as “just anecdotal,” he paused for an expectant second, dropping a copy of Robert Dahl’s “Who Governs” onto his seminar table as he replied, “The plural of anecdote is data.” His quip, emphasizing that statistics represent human stories, would become a well-known aphorism throughout the field. Well this probably shouldn't be taken literally and I suspect the criticism of his claim was fair.

> Nah, the plural of anecdote is confirmation bias. Why do people keep trotting out this "plural of anecdote is data" line, is it a quote from some high-profile idiot?

It is standard Bayesian reasoning[1]. But it requires independence between observations, which many people forget!

[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/bayes-rule-odds-form

The things people say aren't truly independent, even when they are. Like when Charles Sheffield and Arthur C. Clarke wrote novels with the same plots at the same time, they were working independently, but they weren't culturally independent.

Besides, even if several people independently assert "tying a ribbon to a wishing tree cured my warts", that's not an explanation of what actually took place. If repeated observations with unbiased instruments confirm this, then there's something wrong with the instruments (or something), until you have an explanation.

(But saying things like that usually prompts people to bring up cosmology or particle physics or other fields where we really do have to resort to saying "the measurements say it's happening, we'll have to assume it's happening" without understanding much.)

You might be missing the forest for the trees. Anecdotal evidence does not make a proper study, but, to quote myself "phenomena exists before the related studies do."

Oftentimes we (humans) use imperfect, but well-known, figures of speech to convey common ideas.