On Incomprehensible Mystery

Everything is Connected to Everything Else

So people keep telling me that the Obesity Crisis is an incomprehensible mystery.

Hundreds of factors, they say. Experiments on human beings very hard, they say. Beyond the power of mere human science to work out in less than a century, despite all the very hard trying that has been going on.

All the studies, and so on and so forth.

A certain interlocutor (oh alright it was u/exfatloss) went as far as to say:

The problem is that nutrition science (even more than medical science, I'd say) is almost entirely resistant to real science of the "drop a feather and ball of lead off a tower" kind.

No!!

That "drop two balls of lead off a tower" thing, if it ever happened, happened after something like two thousand years of people being hopelessly confused about how things move.

And those people shot arrows at each other, and they had worked out that the world was round and measured its diameter. And they seem to have worked out calculus and geometry and clockwork and the atomic theory and evolution and the vast age of the earth. They were not fools.

And they were very very interested.

Their almost completely false answer to the question of the motion of the lights in the sky involved inventing Fourier Analysis, for God’s sake.

Motion was completely mysterious until someone asked the right questions.

If you'd asked a mediaeval philosopher about why the planets moved in weird circles-on-circles while everything on earth moved in straight lines he'd have talked for hours and at the end you'd have been much more confused than you were to begin with.

Everything, he would wisely have said, is connected to everything else, and who can know the Mind of God?

At least I am pretty sure that he would have said something like that. Something wise. You can get fools to pay your bills if you sound wise and wear the right clothes.

And indeed everything is connected to everything else! More than he knew!

And yet the answer to all those mysteries was very simple, and I understood it well enough to run computer simulations of the solar system on my little ZX81 when I was eleven years old. As does any remotely competent English schoolboy.

Not until we have achieved sexual maturity are we even allowed to think about Fourier Analysis, in my culture. It is too difficult. Too upsetting for young minds. Girls in particular are in danger of overheating their fluffy little brains if they contemplate such things, the wise do not these days assert quite as often, or quite as loudly, as they used to.

People forget just how mysterious and inscrutable things are, before you work out how simple they are, and forget that children aren't born knowing how things work.

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Once you have the right questions, tracing out all the details and doing the necessary experiments is the easy bit. All the laws of motion were worked out in a few years after that question about falling objects first got asked.

You can do all the experiments you like and never find out a damned thing if you don’t know what the question is. If you don’t insist that everything fits together and makes sense. If you reject every question on the basis that everything is connected to everything else and so the answer must be incomprehensible.

u/exfatloss has himself personally asked a very good question:

Is there a diet that I can do to lose all this weight without starving myself? What do I have to do so that my body goes back to normal as if by magic?

It looked like a good question to me when I first read his blog six months ago:

And it looked (mirabile dictu) like he'd also managed to answer it, through what, twenty years of trying random crap on himself?

That's science.

Dressing up in white coats and doing studies and working in universities and publishing in journals is not science. Some of it is probably necessary but it is not even nearly sufficient.

French Philosophers do most of these things, and they not only know nothing, they know that they know nothing. In fact they know that nothing can ever be truly known. How wise is that?

I do not think that the situation in French Philosophy would improve if they bought a load of white coats. They are French. They will already have tried all sorts of coats.

You can tell that Medical "Science" is not a science because it's got the word "science" in the name. (Apologies to Brick Science, which is a science. But there aren't many other exceptions.)

and that's why I tried ex150 in the first place.

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And I think on the basis of personal experience that he probably has found an answer to his excellent question.

And now we need to work out:

(1) whether it works

and

(2) why it works

But these are not the hard part of the problem. These are the easy parts.

(1) is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

Reliable techniques for designing studies are known and I trust the results once they're replicated a few times by people who hate the answers and are trying to disprove them.

I even trust medical "science" to do this bit, if they can be bothered to worry their pretty little heads about it.

Given (1), (2) looks like the sort of thing that can be tidied up without too much intellectual effort. Maybe ask some grown ups?

Step (0) was the hard part. u/exfatloss might have found the crucial fact. I think he has.

The problem is probably very easy from now on. Only further research is needed.