one of my very favourite papers to use as an example of the perils of being too "evidence based" is a recent one which takes a bit of a look at the "blue zone" clusters of supercentenarians and concludes (this is my interpretation rather than their actual conclusion) that the true secret of long life is to be born in a place with poor birth certificates issuance policies and retire living with family members in a place with a high rate of pension fraud.
I really need to read that one to make sure their analysis is legit. Sounds almost too good to be true as a debunking.
To fairly characterize the evidence-based crowd, they all probably thought the blue zone stuff was BS. Evidence-based disciplines seem to argue that you can't use any treatment or trust any fact that hasn't been validated by an RCT. A noble goal if you don't stare too closely, but one that is absurd if you try to apply it literally.
My mother, a demographer, told me long ago of a region in Georgia (then part of the Soviet Union) where men took their fathers' identities to dodge conscription. Similar outcome.
The basic argument is that our organs (and biological systems in general) anticipate needs in addition to reacting to errors.
E.g. even though blood pressure seems homeostatic in isolation, our blood pressure to certain muscles rise before there has been any error signal to react to.
Curious how you might think about this as a control theorist.
Yes! Allostasis has been on my radar for a while now, and I've been trying to collect my thoughts on this topic. I've been reading through a lot of the literature, and the allostatic model is surprisingly more qualitative than I had imagined. But the phenomenon is no doubt real. I really like the way Peter Sterling thinks about it.
Allostasis motivates some of the theoretical work I've been doing on adaptation with Paula Gradu, but I don't think our work so far tells the whole story of how to reconcile allostasis and controls. I hope to write something on this topic here soon.
one of my very favourite papers to use as an example of the perils of being too "evidence based" is a recent one which takes a bit of a look at the "blue zone" clusters of supercentenarians and concludes (this is my interpretation rather than their actual conclusion) that the true secret of long life is to be born in a place with poor birth certificates issuance policies and retire living with family members in a place with a high rate of pension fraud.
I really need to read that one to make sure their analysis is legit. Sounds almost too good to be true as a debunking.
To fairly characterize the evidence-based crowd, they all probably thought the blue zone stuff was BS. Evidence-based disciplines seem to argue that you can't use any treatment or trust any fact that hasn't been validated by an RCT. A noble goal if you don't stare too closely, but one that is absurd if you try to apply it literally.
here's the link! https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/2024/sep/ucl-demographers-work-debunking-blue-zone-regions-exceptional-lifespans-wins-ig-nobel-prize
My mother, a demographer, told me long ago of a region in Georgia (then part of the Soviet Union) where men took their fathers' identities to dodge conscription. Similar outcome.
Have really appreciated your recent articles on medicine.
Have you come across Sterling's model of allostasis (https://folk.uib.no/nfijg/biopages/theme2basalmon/papers/Sterling2012.pdf) as a complement to homeostasis?
The basic argument is that our organs (and biological systems in general) anticipate needs in addition to reacting to errors.
E.g. even though blood pressure seems homeostatic in isolation, our blood pressure to certain muscles rise before there has been any error signal to react to.
Curious how you might think about this as a control theorist.
Yes! Allostasis has been on my radar for a while now, and I've been trying to collect my thoughts on this topic. I've been reading through a lot of the literature, and the allostatic model is surprisingly more qualitative than I had imagined. But the phenomenon is no doubt real. I really like the way Peter Sterling thinks about it.
Allostasis motivates some of the theoretical work I've been doing on adaptation with Paula Gradu, but I don't think our work so far tells the whole story of how to reconcile allostasis and controls. I hope to write something on this topic here soon.