Bulbasaur

I would be prepared to argue not just from empirical statistics, but also from first principles. Outcome-oriented arguments can be difficult to sell, because it's really tough for most people to get beyond "well, I turned out alright." Accepting the position that spanking is damaging requires admitting that they themselves may be damaged, which will trigger all their subconscious defenses.

Quasicrystals are well accepted. All it takes is a trip to Wikipedia. I'm also not following how people would go about 'refusing to give others a chance to demonstrate' something like this. It's true that the original claim was controversial and initially met with opposition. Evidently, it was not demonstrated convincingly since it was an extraordinary claim. But eventually it came to be accepted, as additional groups were able to reproduce the original result. This is true of most big advances that upend existing ideas about what is or isn't possible, but that doesn't somehow add credibility to every other extraordinary claim. The claim is either supported by the arguments and evidence, or it isn't. In this case it just self-detonates, because it relies on a fallacious misrepresentation of quantum mechanics.

I believe we all agree that we have consciousness, but this is not inconsistent with atheism. Atheism says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of human consciousness. If I were a soul, I wouldn't necessarily know it. For example, if I were colorblind I wouldn't know it, until it was proved by taking one of those number tests.

Yes, insulin resistance basically means that your ability to process glucose (carbs) is impaired. High blood glucose is a damaging state which your body attempts to mitigate as quickly as possible, but insulin resistance interferes with this so your body produces more and more insulin to try to compensate. So you can end up with damage from high blood sugar and exhaustion of your pancreas' ability to produce insulin (type 2 diabetes). Once you're insulin resistant, any carbs will exacerbate this. This is why it's so insane that the ADA continues to recommend whole grains to diabetics. When I started paleo I basically cut out carbs almost completely, but I stuck with dairy and just switched to raw milk. I gradually started incorporating potatoes/yams and occasional other carbs like gluten free pasta. I don't really see much difference with or without the carbs, but then I never had a weight problem or insulin resistance to begin with. I just found the arguments against wheat and sugar convincing and the case against saturated fat to be unsupported. Gary Taubes has made this objection the focus of his case, his book is called "Good Calories, Bad Calories" for this reason. He addresses it in his online lectures as well. The error in this 'calories in, calories out' accounting is the assumed causality. In other words "it's not that we get fat because we eat too much; we eat too much because we're getting fat." Thermodynamics need not be violated to undermine the premise. The easy example is to look at a growing child. The child must consume a net positive calorie balance in order to grow, but it's clear that the driving force is the hormonal and metabolic processes which regulate human growth and appetite. It would be silly to say that children grow because they eat too much; clearly there are other important biological processes that are the determining factors, and the matter of calorie balance is incidental. There's good evidence that obesity is similarly related to metabolic disruption and hormone regulation issues, and that calorie imbalance is just a consequence of that.

So much quantum woo comes from abusing this 'observer effect' proved by the double slit experiment. The effect is real and admittedly unintuitive, but the interpretation is often misrepresented by nonphysicists and charlatans due to the language usually used to describe it. How does one "watch a particle?" How does one watch anything? Well, in the case of eyesight we collect photons which have bounced off or been emitted from the object. For a subatomic particle you need to rely on some kind of precision instrumentation to "watch" it, but the same principle applies. There is no such thing as passive detection. Something has to interact with it in order to detect it, whether by bouncing another particle off it or absorbing it or some similar process. One need not invoke the presence of consciousness to understand that this interaction itself influences the particle being measured. From John Gribbon's "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat," Emphases mine. It's easy to equivocate "observation" with the idea of 'looking at something' and then extrapolate from that into grand theories of biocentrism, but what's happening is much more mundane. Think of a blind man tapping around with a cane trying to find a tennis ball. When he hits the ball with the cane, he feels the impact and learns where the ball had been, but the impact itself moves the ball. Note that nothing above suggests that observing the system creates it; it only changes the outcome compared to what it would be if it had not been interfered with. So it's not that seeing something makes it any more real than if no one was there to look at it. Seeing just means you're collecting and processing the photons that have bounced off it, but the photons influence the object regardless of whether you collect them. Particles are always interacting with each other, and "observation" in the context of the double slit and similar experiments is just a particular type of facilitated interaction. This really makes no sense chronologically, but it also violates the foundational principle of gauge invariance from which practically all successful models of physics are derived. That is, the observed laws of physics essentially require objectivity to be true. I'd recommend reading Stenger's "The Comprehensible Cosmos" for more on this. Woah, what a leap! This is an interesting one, because it manages to take what's basically a correct framing and present it as something novel which leads to something totally nonsensical. Space and time are mental constructs; all models of physics are. The enterprise of physics is to create rigorous conceptual models to attempt to explain observations of existence. Space, time, mass, energy, and so forth are concepts defined specifically within the model frameworks. The models of physics are like maps which attempt to describe reality and make predictions, but whatever "space" and "time" actually are is distinct from our concepts of them. All we can say is whether or not the model makes successful predictions. This has absolutely nothing to do with death, immortality, or "a world without spatial or linear boundaries," which is just a word salad. Also, the comments under that article are just painful. Here's one Stefan would enjoy: And regarding quasicrystals, I believe he means that scientists didn't think they could exist until they were eventually demonstrated.

Broad dismissive statements like 'it's not as simple as you think it is' I find fairly counterproductive, unless you follow up with something more substantive. That said, I do think there's a strong case that fructose ought to be singled out from other carbohydrates. I would recommend looking for a lecture by Robert Lustig called "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" for more on this. Stefan actually has an interview with him as well. The main point is that fructose is metabolized like an ethanol analogue and causes similar systemic problems when consumed in excess. Lustig seems to think that fructose alone is responsible for metabolic syndrome, while others like Taubes blame excess carbohydrate more generally, and still others like William Davis single out wheat specifically and other carbs to a lesser extent. The replacement of saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats ("vegetable" oils) is also often blamed as a potential contributor. Considering all of their cases, I think it's likely that sugar and wheat proteins are the main drivers of metabolic syndrome and inflammatory problems (with tolerance for wheat varying much more widely from person to person), but other carbs become problematic once insulin resistance has developed.

Well said. It is not simply a matter of poor lifestyle choices. Like most other crises, the modern American diet and the constellation of chronic diseases surrounding metabolic syndrome are the result of counterproductive government propaganda about proper nutrition which has now become cemented into conventional wisdom. It's also another great example of how easily people are confused by language (i.e. I need to eat a 'low fat' diet to avoid becoming fat). In addition to the links above, I'd recommend the lectures and books of Gary Taubes for a review of the history of bad science behind conventional nutrition, and the documentary Fat Head for a humorous take on the government's role in promoting it.