Replication crisis, my arse

https://mander.xyz/post/49537490

It’s fun to watch people self-diagnose food allergies.
In this case it would be an intolerance, and those you really do have to find on your own, unfortunately. And figuring it out can be extremely difficult.

It’s one of them.

Flawed assumption. It could be both. You’ll need to eat there at least two more times to find out, assuming each trial yields 100% certainty.

Edit: I thought it should be obvious that we’re taking them absolutely at their word that they’ve properly isolated these two variables because this experiment exists inside a joke and never happened. The whole point of the joke is that the methodology is god awful and completely unrealistic, so questioning that they’ve truly isolated the variables is pointless.

Edit 2: Wait, I totally misread the experiment setup. @[email protected] is entirely correct that they’ve eliminated nothing if the experiment is totally defined by 8 bowls and 8 bouts of diarrhea. They’re still converging on at least one cause, but there could still be others. My career is ruined.

@TheYojimbo - Lemmy.World

Lemmy

Or neither.

We’ll take them at their word that they’ve truly narrowed the variables to tuna and house sauce (i.e. they’ve eaten a meal consisting of only tuna and house sauce and gotten sick, at least one of which has always been the underlying cause, but everything else they’ve eaten has been properly eliminated, and there are no ways outside of the food truck they could’ve gotten sick), and thus the only logical options are T, HS, or T+HS. The premise of the joke already relies on completely unrealistic simplifying assumptions, so we can too.

Edit: We will not do this because it’s logically impossible based on the described experiment thus far. I’m an utter dipshit.

They said they ate 8 times and got diarrhea 8 times, the only way to be sure it’s one of them is to eat at least once without those ingredients and not get diarrhea

They said they got diarrhea 8 times over 8 bowls, but they never said how many ingredients they used. (Edit: Fuck)

Assume nine ingredients exist: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i

  • Bowl 1: a + b + c + d + e + f + g + h + i: Diarrhea
  • Bowl 2: a: No diarrhea
  • Bowl 3: b: No diarrhea
  • Bowl 4: c: No diarrhea
  • Bowl 5: d: No diarrhea
  • Bowl 6: e: No diarrhea
  • Bowl 7: f: No diarrhea
  • Bowl 8: g: No diarrhea
  • Bowl 9: The one the OP is referring to “tomorrow”, which could have h, i, or h + i

That’s a perfectly feasible if disgusting way to have a bowl from a poke truck if you’re doing it solely for an experiment. And that’s just one setup; there are more convoluted ones you could do that have fewer ingredients but mixed together so your bowls aren’t just one combination. I just chose the counterexample that’s easiest to construct mathematically and which logically uses the fewest steps to eliminate each ingredient.

Edit: Wait, sorry, I misconstructed this because I misread it even while quoting it. Fuck, if they got diarrhea each time, then yeah, they’ve properly eliminated nothing.

Yeah that’s what I meant, 100% diarrhea means they eliminated nothing. Sorry I should have phrased that better.
Oh, no, you phrased it fine; I read 8 bowls and 8 bouts multiple times and somehow still misinterpreted the experiment. It was only after I wrote down and submitted an example setup that I snapped out of my own illiteracy. I realized every possible counterexample was assuming “no diarrhea” trials.
If we’re taking them at their word (and not the silly joke it is) technically they could have removed 7 ingredients so far, with only 2 left, while still having diarrhea each time. In that context, say next time they try the dish with only 1 ingredient and the don’t have diarrhea, then they have the likely suspect. They could then try the dish with every ingredient except the suspected allergen to confirm it

That’s the logic I was avoiding, because although it’s heuristically likely in real life that there’s only one culprit – and that you could get Bowl 9 with ingredients a, b, c, d, e, f, and g to show it’s definitely h or i if you don’t get sick – there’s also a chance you have diarrhea on that Bowl 9 and gain very little information. There’s no conclusiveness to the variable isolation, so it’s not sound from an information theoretic perspective.

Actually, if you assume a comically unlikely worst-case scenario where all of the ingredients cause diarrhea, that sort of recursive algorithm might be the most amount of diarrhea you can get while still gaining information on each bowl.

I love this thread
By neither, I meant the cause could be out of the scope of the variables being tested. Eg. It could be something the cook does, or a particular spice, or the subject may have an ongoing condition they’re unaware of, or be doing something before or after lunch which causes it.

100% diarrhea means they eliminated nothing.

I take exception to this phrasing, whenever i have 100% diarrhea I eliminate the the contents of my guts and a half roll of toilet paper at least.

In fact, they could be allergic to some or all of the ingredients eliminated. Or to the delivery driver’s personal hygiene.
Or the bowls. Or something at that location…
Or it’s completely unrelated and just so happened to coincide with his visits.
Or OP isn’t real, and I’m hallucinating all of this.
1 poke bowl, hold the bowl
When I was an alcoholic I diagnosed myself with lactose intolerance. I’d have the Gatling Shits and wonder ‘Hmm was it the 14 tallboy cans of beer last night or the half liter of milk I had for lunch? Must have been the milk.’
So your lactose intolerant huh? That sucks. I used to wonder what food was causing my rectum to bleed so much, but I’ve diagnosed that it wasn’t something to worry about until my 40s.
Dealing with bleeding in my 40s after putting it off for a few years, don’t recommend.
Yeah it started for me around 18 or so. I’ve put it off for 18 years now. I’m sure it was a mixture of drinking, dehydration, excessive running, stress and poor diet. For a little while I couldn’t figure out if it was hemmroids from stress/riding a motorcycle and other strains but when I read more into the damages that can be done from long distance running all the time, I think that and diet caused most of it. Excessive alcohol use following that up didn’t help much. I’ve learned that bad choices are my Pokemon, I apparently just have to catch them all before I learn anything
Username checks out?
How…can you even long distance run without much real food, and I’ll assume both were a regular thing?
constipation can cause that, if shits are too hard too.
Bum bleeding is often resolved by reducing fibre. It happens because of too much traffic through your gut, fibre is nothing but extra traffic, it has no nutrient value
Same, buddy. It was the milk for sure.
It was ice cream for me

I didnt get lactose intolerance until I was in my 30s. So weird that my body just decided “Nah, Im good with dairy products” all on it’s own.

Really wish I would have discovered that earlier in life, before I developed my crippling cocoa pebbles addiction.

So weird that my body just decided “Nah, Im good with dairy products” all on it’s own.

That’s actually the normal way your body is supposed to be. Most mammals lose their tolerance a little after they are weaned. Only some portions of humans retained lactase in their guts, generally groups that were pastoralists retained lactase and other groups didn’t. It’s why most east asian don’t have lactose tolerance but Mongolians, some Sub-Saharan Africans, and Europeans do.

There’s no way our bodies are “supposed” to be. There’s the way they are and the way they were. Also some brave and dedicated individuals can apparently overcome lactose intolerance through exposure therapy. Basically they eat a bunch of dairy every day for weeks until their gut biome readjusts to digest lactose without all the discomfort. Apparently the gas and bloating are caused by the overgrowth of some bacteria and it just takes some time to find a new equilibrium so you don’t get big blooms every time you eat lactose.

I’ve read that before, but I guess what strikes me as odd is how it wasn’t until I hit my 30s that I suddenly started shitting my brains out whenever I consumed more than a small glass of milk. I drank a lot of milk growing up…it was pretty much that or water much of the time, and even after I went off to college and stuff I still went through a gallon by myself every 3 or 4 days.

Then, after three decades of no issues whatsoever, and zero change in my habits, suddenly my body decided “NYET! NO MORE!!!” and my ability to properly digest lactose evaporated basically overnight. I didn’t even make the connection until I was traveling and wasn’t drinking any milk on my trip and didn’t have any problems, but then got nearly crippled the next morning after I had a big ol bowl of Captain Crunch before bed the night I got home.

Guess you only got a little trial period of lactase persistence, as a treat, but it ran out too soon.
Lactase persistence - Wikipedia

Didn’t even get a reminder to renew my subscription, dirty bastards.
Funny you mention arse, because the chef is constantly scratching theirs.

Somebody needs to learn about a binary search.

(Assuming that there is exactly one ingredient causing the problem.)

How badly do I need to poop?

A novel application of Binary Space Partitioning

It’s like me trying to figure out which brand of the 12th beer courses me to be sick the day after.
Search Engine (podcast) had a 2 part episode on this that was interesting. They even did a DNA test on some samples of fish when trying to narrow down what it could be.
Pretty much every study I’ve seen where they DNA test fish shows that the fish was not even the type of fish it was labeled as.
Good thing about tinned sardines is you get enough of the each fish to see it’s the correct fish

Pretty sure he’s forgetting the constant variable, where x equals the times the cook uses the porta potty divided by the times he does not wash his hands.

(i.e division by zero = butthole undefined, or maybe infinite diarrhea).

dude I’ve def ate food I loved the taste of but knew it was gonna make me shit liquid fire.

so good. like, gas station greasy ramen in red hot water broth, but so good

then so bad, so very bad

You mean the tuna and the house sauce weren’t the two variables this guy tried isolating first?

He literally tried removing rice and all the vegetables before thinking “hmm, maybe it’s the tuna or the sauce.”

What a loon. He deserves every one of those awful shits.

Good science doesn’t start with biases friend.

Good science starts from the body of evidence we already know, creates a plausible hypothesis, and then tests that hypothesis to see whether it can be disproven.

We don’t say “hey, maybe gravity isn’t real so to be unbiased I need to assume it’s not and test every other possibility before determining what keeps making these bricks fall on my head every time I throw them up in the air”

No need to reinvent the wheel for every experiment.

Maybe not the greatest example since we don’t fully understand gravity. ”good" in the sense of being expedient, affordable and conventional. Sometimes approaching unsolved problems without the constraints of prior constructs can lead to better understanding.

Also, vegetables usually are the culprits anyways.

Okay, but they can focus on experiments designed to determine whether gravity is caused by quantum mechanics or relativity or something else. They don’t need to drop bricks on their heads just to prove newtonian physics…
Depends on how much tuna you want to eat in the process, shits be dammed. Optimize for quantity of fish consumed.
I’ll eat tuna from somewhere that doesn’t give me bad tuna…
Quite the sense of humor you’ve cultivated there.
I don’t need humor, I just need unspoiled tuna.
Gotta do it in random order.
Good science will use previous norms, findings and general trends to provide a more useful starting point tho.
probably the “inhouse sauce”
This is a strange thing to do, tell people you have a diarrhea fetish.