I'm always amused/horrified by Hacker News comments on anything health-related. Herein lie a group of incredibly smart individuals sharing anecdotal evidence and folk remedies without a lick of irony.
I can also say that it's a good thing that I didn't apply that when I started working with computers or I would never have gotten to the point where I understood the systems well enough to bend them to my purposes regardless of the intended behavior.
And that doesn't even touch the question of what "intended behavior" might mean for a biological entity which isn't "designed" in a way that has an intended use.
The underlying assumption when hacking is that if you don't understand the internals of something that's ok, but you can rely on understanding the interface, and your manipulation of the interface is skilled enough that you can get the results you need.
In this case, we don't even remotely understand the interface or manipulating it.
One class of user will consult a manual and try to find the right answer, or perhaps will call an expert.
Another class of user will just start pushing buttons to see what happens, because they have a rough familiarity with the system even if the specific interface is not well understood.
It's that second class that I am thinking about when I think about how "hackers" operate.
In that case, I get that it's dangerous to mess around with a system whose internals you don't know about... but at the same time, there is a kind of fantasy that somehow other folks have a privileged knowledge of what our bodies do.
Personally, I quit wheat and dairy (and reduced my alcohol consumption) because it's a specific tree allergy season here. I have a couple possible accounts of why this is working (because I believe that it is) but I don't really understand the interface or even what I am manipulating when I alter my diet like that... I just know that I can breath, whereas historically I have terrible allergies at this time of year. Feel kind of like a hacky solutions... it's not an engineered solution, that's for sure.
Citation needed.
Who really understands how meltdown and spectre work without asking? Smart people ask questions, and like answers. Add wisdom, and you can appreciate answers that challenge your own biases.
[edit: clarification]
Edit: IMO, "hacking" is simply recognizing that the scientific community moves at a glacial pace and not waiting around for "experts" to arrive at a consensus 30 years from now to change something about your lifestyle/diet today that has been shown to be true of animals/smaller scale human studies many times over.
And then publicly shame others for finding ways to heal themselves.
> Here's a 15yo uncontrolled epidemiological study of acne, that blames everything on diet, go forth and treat your own skin conditions!
The paper is more restrained than that, but that's not how people interpret it. Problem solved. Eat like a Bantu.
Science would use this as bearing for a hypothesis to do an single-factor studies.
It's not because you are smart that you can't be ignorant of certain things at the same time. Even smart people can be fooled about stuff they are not familiar with. It's like trusting blindly the stories on your newspaper.
Check it out, this is happening. They are doing many crowdsourced analysis, the most prominent being a 30-day carnivore diet protocol: eat meat, drink water.
'It would be damn near impossible to conclude anything from such research without a control. “Randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled trial” is the critical sentence'
Since the advent of randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled trial has our public health improved or declined?
With that said, since the advent of the RCT, life expectancy has gone up dramatically in the Western world. It would be hard to imagine testing the efficacy of, say, antibiotics or vaccines without testing them against a control in a placebo-controlled, double-blinded way.
Same goes for simple things like washing your hands and administering prophylactic antibiotics during a C-Section, which dramatically improves the odds that a mother will live through complications during child birth. There would be no way to actually know that these were important without studying them vs. the status quo at the time.
I have the same reaction to some of the posts on longevity research.