The Swedes Look Beyond Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s NYT Obituary, to The Science He Ignored
Back a bit, Duck Dodgers and I got into a kerfuffle with Dr. Mike Eades on Twitarded, of all places. It was in response to this post: One Thousand Nails in the Coffin of Arctic Explorer Vilhjálmur Stefansson, and His Spawn.
It resulted in Mike posting this: Beware the confirmation bias. Resoundingly, in at least my own comments, those who have a lot of respect for Eades, as do I, considered the post very…ironic.
I shot back: When Confirmation Bias is the Landscape, Dialectics is Your Path to Better Truth. Fans of Hegelian Dialectics ought like that post. …Trust me: it always pays to be somewhat of a lay philosopher and actually read the seemingly incomprehensible classics of weird-ass thinkers. It’s like reading medical studies. Just keep reading them; eventually, you integrate the language and thus, the understanding. There are advantages to folks having had too much time on their hands.
It has been a long road and I have been cautioned on a number of fronts about tangling with those possessing automatic stature, like Eades has in spades. He can put up a post per year and still get rabid adulation for it. That’s OK. But it also ought make one wonder: is he keeping up with stuff, or is he of the mind that there’s nothing new to be wrong about? For my style of blogging, being wrong is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I adore having certainty over being wrong about something. It’s the only time I know I’m right. It’s my iconoclastic fuel spring for an exciting, ever changing life.
After all, wasn’t he, Eades, in formative years, wrong about saturated fat, cholesterol…perhaps even statins, before he clashed with that idol and did something about it, tirelessly pumping out information in his practice and books: that it was wrong?
…But, did he then make the mistake of thinking that because he was right about others being wrong, for good reasons, that’s he’s forever right about any periphery that touches upon their wrongness? ….And about anything related, henceforth? …Is a valid falsification right, on the grounds that it falsifies? Or, does it merely falsify, and becomes the new synthesis?
…Once one is right about showing others being wrong, are those who engage in the same iconoclasm over their newly supposed “right” merely, now, confirming bias—even though they have come from the same position and are now challenging it?
…Per Wikholm is a Swedish guy. Vilhjalmur Stefansson has one of those Swedish sounding names. He’s written here on this blog: Sweden Update: Resistant Starch On The Rise, LCHF Steffanson Myths On The Ropes. He has a popular LCHF blog in Sweden.
…He’s a fucking honest man. Of course, in 2014, that’s a big problem; but some people have courage, conviction, assholiness: really old-fashioned stupid shit, completely unlike in quotidian 2014 where the primary aim is to socialize and get along no matter the cost, to promote faux popularity amongst an entire earth of hypersocializing fucktards.
He manages, like me. That’s why I like him. America is not where you go to find honest people, anymore. Needle. Haystack. America is still illusioned, not disillusioned, by doG. That will perhaps persist for a while. Europeans are fucking heathens. In large part commies, too. But I prefer commie to deluded by Sky doGs. …It has the singular virtue of a terrestrial element.
…A couple of months ago, Per gave me a heads up about his own critique of Stefansson, submitted for publication in Sweden’s popular LCHF publication. In case you don’t know the history, Dr. Annika Dahlqvist became somewhat of an LC revolution there, and as a small country, it attained critical mass very fast. In retrospect, is it possible that the Swedish-esque Stefansson, helped solidify things?
Not any more. Now, it’s going to be the fodder of only others outside of his ancestral ethnicity, I predict.
I’ll reference a comment I got on this post, earlier today.
Nürnberg says:
October 2, 2014 at 00:10Man I love your heresy. Looking forward to “safe sugar” being the next. One year ago when still LC I tried having some oatmeal porridge for breakfast just for kicks and I got massive confirmation it was The Poison by feeling like crap and of course ridiculously hungry again half an hour later. Now enjoying that same porridge with butter, eggs and some OJ every morning and barely hungry for lunch. Not to mention taters. Lots of taters. HA!
Btw Duck, your Stefansson bashing has made it into the LCHF Magasinet in Sweden, the main publication on LC, thanks to Per Wikholm who’s been featured on this blog earlier this year.
It was also endorsed by the high priest of LCHF in Sweden, DietDoctor Andreas Eenfeldt. Nice to see he’s still open to science as opposed to Mr Eades.
http://www.kostdoktorn.se/lchf-magasinet-slaktar-lchf-myter
Have fun with the swedish 😛
Well, I love any opportunity to highlight the entrenched, confirming-bias, Fucktardedness of Americans in general, so this is just fucking delicious. In contrast, during that dustup with Mike Eades, he Tweeted me the link to the New York Times obituary for Stefansson. When I winced at such poor argumentative tactics, he told me that NYT is renowned for digging up dirt and publishing that badness in an obituary. But they published no dirt on Stefansson. Ergo… This was perhaps my biggest face palm in all of my life.
…Planet Earth is asleep. America is far from your friend. On many levels. America has been reduced to a good pimp who fills your pockets with cash. Nothing more. It doesn’t even have a shred of moral standing, anymore.
You have to go international, now, to get a breath of fresh air honesty.
Thanks Sweden, for taking the high ground and having no fear of how the debate of Stefansson’s legacy shakes out. People here, in America, on Eades’ piper, want to completely look away.
Thanks for showing the fucktards how things ought to be done.
Update: This will eventually be a blog post, but here’s about a dozen published studies Stefansson and his fans ignored because, In Mike Eade’s words, “he was such a good writer.”
https://freetheanimal.com/2014/10/physiological-resistance-carbohydrate.html#comment-659686
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“…He’s a fucking honest man. Of course, in 2014, that’s a big problem; but some people have courage, conviction, assholiness: really old-fashioned stupid shit, completely unlike in quotidian 2014 where the primary aim is to socialize and get along no matter the cost, to promote faux popularity amongst an entire earth of hypersocializing fucktards.” —-Richard, you are a genius. I can only hope to be worthy of having this line on my tombstone some day!
I reckon it is more elaborate and complex than that.
After he found others to be wrong, he conducted an experiment on himself and many of his patients. When he saw an improvement, he concluded the experiment was a success. Now his personal experience convinces him that this is “the right answer.”
We all do it to some extent. I am not likely to argue in favor of advice that has not worked for me, data or not. But be that as it may, as you pointed out, his arguments in this debate have not exactly been impressive:
How he managed to conclude that this reasoning constituted even 1/10th of a sufficient retort to the arguments made earlier fascinates me. It shows that even a well respected expert, no matter who, is still human, and still does stupid stuff from time to time.
Read Hegel all you like, but you’ll never understand it (nor gain anything worthwhile from it). It’s drivel. Read Kant.
Regardless, Eades was just using the ordinary word “dialectic” — not the wacky technical term GWFH was striving for.
“Read Hegel all you like, but you’ll never understand it (nor gain anything worthwhile from it). It’s drivel. Read Kant.”
Laf. You can’t understand it, so no one else ever will (talk about well poisoning). Instead, I am to take great pains to respect a guy who never travelled father than 40 miles from his place of birth in his entire life.
In terms of epistemology, Kant:
1. Analytic a priori
2. Synthetic a posteriori
3. Synthetic a priori.
I primarily focus on number 3, which is dialectics and I like Hegel for that.
So sorry.
(I also like Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, which gave me a far better grasp of concept formation that I had had previously. But you probably think that heretical, worthy of burning.)
You’re a fucking poseur.
Nah, there’s just nothing there to understand. Completely disjointed nonsense. Pages and pages for example, of sex-obsessed lists of supposed theses and antitheses which generally in fact are neither; and that was some of his most coherent work. That Hegel was, quite some time ago, taken seriously is considered an embarrassment to philosophy.
Ayn Rand, however, is not considered an embarrassment, because no legitimate philosopher will recognize her as one at all.
Each can be thanked for something, however: Hegel for indirectly inspiring Heidegger (who, while not much of a philosopher and less of a human being, had quite a way with a high-level abstract metaphor, viz his anecdotes about Herodotus warming his ass by the fire or Thales of Miletus embodying one definition of philosophy), and Ayn Rand for inspiring Robert Nozick’s essay about how she turned the remarkable trick of incorporating a fatal flaw in every one of the 23 steps he could –charitably speaking –trace in her logic (even though at the time he was broadly sympathetic to her worldview). Sadly out of print, alas.
Thank you for the intelligent and respectful response, however.
John Kirin
Go do your projection jerking off on your own time, man.
You are at the wrong place.
I don’t give a runny shit about what you feel about anything.
You entered by asserting than nobody could possible understand what you find incomprehensible. Look it up.
I was only toying with you. Someone like you is leprosy. The furthest thing away from and honest thinking human as possible.
Now go fuck off. Seriously, go fuck off, for life. I don’t need you and you’ll never have a single value to offer.
I leave you to your singular brilliance and your anger issues.
Seek help.
“I leave you.”
Be still, heart.
Brett said –
“We all do it to some extent. I am not likely to argue in favor of advice that has not worked for me, data or not. But be that as it may, as you pointed out, his arguments in this debate have not exactly been impressive”.
“…his arguments in this debate have not exactly been impressive”
And that’s what does it for me Brett.
I don’t have the knowledge of all the in’s and out’s of this diet stuff, but I can see when someone is being intellectually dishonest in a debate.
We can see the way someone comes across in a debate, and we can see that if they try to distract, go off on tangents, attack the man rather than the ball etc, then that big red flag pops up, an alarm bell rings, and it doesn’t become that hard to see who’s side is more likely to be on the right track – or, at the very least, more likely to be genuinely searching for what is true.