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Comment by Dumblydorr | Hacker News Reader

Been diving deep into lawn care recently. There's a TON, literally hundreds, of products you can spread on your lawn. There's 250 days of the growing season to apply those hundreds of products on. And does it work? Well, this internet comment written by so and so says it does, and their lawn is beautiful, but which of the 15 things they're doing are most pivotal? Or is it multivariate and all the parameters matter and affect and interact with each other?

Unfortunately, I believe it's the latter complex case. pH matters a lot, that affects fertilization uptake, but so does soil bacteria and organic matter, lack of bugs and diseases, proper moisture, and the physical act of cutting the grass is an art and skill, not a mere chore.

Oof, plants need a lot of variables to be in the right ranges, and with soil and watering and weather, it's a lot of fluctuation on top of it all.

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This is a problem all over, from health advice to cooking to skincare, lawn care, etc. etc. etc.

A complex system with many variables and optimum points trying to be solved with anecdotes, magical cures, and "good for you" products.

Atleast with cooking I've collected a few sources that are consistently good. For new recipes I follow them exactly the first time and disregard any source that has had more than a couple not great recipes, specifically any recipe on all recipes that not a sponsored professional chef.

(for cooking, but also others) There usually are good sources and they fall under two categories (or both): very precise procedure which was actually tested or technique and feedback focused information. The latter being far more important. How to adjust, signs to look for (sound, smell, taste, sight), the proper uses of tools, etc.

"This is how I do it!" blog kinds of recipes usually suffer from hidden techniques or undocumented variables where you try it yourself and it's just awful.

In other words, good advice involves science and art, not just one-off reports of success.

The problem, of course, is that advice focusing on technique and feedback is a lot harder to pass on, and a lot harder to absorb. It's the difference between a 30 second tik tok clip and a one hour in-depth on par-baking pie crusts.

The parent comment's point is not that there is no good cooking advice out there, but instead that there are enough variables that it can't be taken at face value.

I've used a recipe that have worked very well for me but then gave radically different results when I used a different casserole dish. I managed to fix it by taking the lid off later in the process and adjusting the oven temperature by 30°C. Not many recipes mention that amount of temperature variation depending on what cooking equipment you're using.

When cooking, we often optimize for flavor and texture. But what about digestion and nutrition and how each person has different preferences and a different body? It starts getting very complicated quite fast, so many variables...

For a lot of these things, the steps to finding something that works should start with seeing someone who is a specialist of some sort, and, if at all possible, getting them to actually look at whatever you need help for.

For skincare, see a dermatologist. Anyone with skincare issues or concerns, PLEASE just see a dermatologist. They might not tell you what you want to hear, but they can usually give you a good baseline description and diagnosis of what to work on. That's 99% of the battle.

For lawn care, try to talk to a lawn care specialist, hopefully someone who is not trying to sell you something. Golf courses usually have 1 or 2 people that know a lot about grass. Even someone that you think has a really good lawn, ask them to come over and take a look at yours.

Getting advice off the internet is helpful, but I've usually found it to not beat getting someone in person who can actually look at what ever the thing is you're looking for advice for.

This is funny because when I saw a dermatologist they just prescribed retinol cream (the textbook solution), didn't look at my skin, and didn't much care for my thoughts or concerns about how to better care for it.

"Just take the cream damnit" - a couple years later I found that the cream was just adjusting the texture of my skin, and likely overly sensitizing it. The doc didn't care and was happy to continue prescribing it.

When doctors abscond their responsibility to know what they're talking about, folks have no choice but to seek it out. Many people have this experience with physicians of all stripes.

I just had a doctor completely mis-prescribe Azithromycin to me. They prescribed 5x the correct dose. I even asked them three times about it before leaving the appointment and they looked at me like I was crazy. Luckily my parents worked for Pfizer for a combined 80 years and confirmed my suspicions before I started taking it.

I had this happen too, with a topical steroid. Went to another dermo a few years later and they gasped out loud when I showed them my old prescription. Overdose of topical steroids can cause permanent damage to the skin.

I had hallucinations and a manic episode due to a doctor prescribing the wrong amount of Adderall.

While terrifying, some kids would also recognize that as a terrific financial windfall if you're crooked enough to sell the excess.

I had doctors give teenage me antibiotics for acne. Later on prednisone I believe. Jesus christ dermatologists are fucking awful. Never told me I needed to start washing my towels, bedsheets, pillowcases more often or suggested using a moisturizer.

Haha, yeah, doctors are pretty terrible. I had neck and jaw pain, and my Chinese-born dentist said “Well, I know how much you Americans like drugs and surgery, and there are some of those that will help, but really you’ll probably be fine if you just get neck and shoulder massages occasionally”

Sure enough, it worked. I was just hurting my neck by using my PDA too much with my neck craned downward, and getting massages/exercise or just not using a mobile device fixed the problem completely

I really lucked out with that guy

> I had neck and jaw pain, and my Chinese-born dentist said “Well, I know how much you Americans like drugs and surgery, and there are some of those that will help, but really you’ll probably be fine if you just get neck and shoulder massages occasionally”

To be totally fair, I did recently seek help for recurring pain in the back of my head (also the top of the neck, but I described it as the head) and the urgent care nurse did some simple nerve damage tests, asked me about my sleeping posture, and told me the problem was likely that I was sleeping wrong and I should take a different position. He was right.

Of course, he wasn't a doctor either. :/

If you want to turn the tables on your Chinese-born dentist, ask him about the Chinese habit of stopping by the hospital for intravenous saline solution whenever you're feeling like you might have a cold.

I have had a hard time getting any doctor to take a complex issue seriously.

If it can't be "solved" with the standard antidepressant, antibiotic, skin cream, or "diet and exercise"; good luck getting anybody to even try to solve an issue that isn't obvious. (your leg is broken, you have a tumor, etc.)

Medical expertise has a problem with only doing one dimensional solutions for one dimensional issues.

I have had similar experiences. I end up having to do my own research if I want a problem actually solved.

Another thing that bothers me is that they never seem to do any sort of testing. They just throw solutions at the problem until one of them works. It is 2021 we have had the technology to grow something in a culture for over 160 years now, but no just take these antibiotics and if they don't work come back and I'll take another random shot in the dark.

While nominally true for many bacteria, there’s still overwhelmingly many we can’t culture, and those we can take many different media to cultivate.

“Bacterial culture is frequently more difficult and often requires more training than molecular techniques”[1]

There’s a good chance that many doctors are stuck in a mindset that culturing is too difficult, costly, and time consuming to be effective for all but the most resistant infections, but I’m not sure they’re wrong.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4284306/

I think that apply to most professions/professionals unfortunately.

That matches my experience. If you see a doctor, they'll try doing whatever their flowchart says to do, and if it doesn't work, they tell you to go away. You'd get results at least as good from just looking at the flowchart yourself.

I did see a dermatologist when the skin on one of my fingertips started peeling uncontrollably. He told me 'We call this "desquamation", which just means "it's peeling". We don't know why it happens or what might make it stop.'

It was a less than ringing endorsement of the idea that if you have a skin problem, you should see a dermatologist.

Couldn’t you go to a medical library and look up ‘desquamation’?

Yes, and it will say "we don't know why it happens or what might make it stop".

You’ve already done so? Can you point to which texts say that?

Realistically, this isn't good advice - you probably just want to see your regular doctor. The waiting list for a dermatologist can be long, but that GP will probably get you in quickly. They will recognize worrysome skin patches that might be cancer, and can generally do basic things to help common skin conditions (athletes foot, cysts, poison ivy and other common rashes, and so on).

Besides, a lot of folks can't just see a dermatologist - not without a referral, anyway.

A good place to study human confirmation bias.

In general I think the size of the controversy tends to be inversely proportional to the size of the effect.

This seems to apply to a lot of things, from how many reps you do in the gym to how you apply thermal paste to a CPU to how best to cook a steak. It's not that you can't mess these things up, but there does seem to be a rather large number of methods that work pretty well, and the difference in effect between "pretty well" and "optimal" seems overall to be small enough to allow for controversy.

This is especially true in cooking. There is like one method for macron because if you mess it up it won't work. But there are loads of debates about 'real Carbonara' because spaghetti with fatty pork (e.g. guanciale, bacon), egg, and cheese (and maybe cream depending on who you ask), maybe black pepper - you can't fail.

I think it's pretty generally applicable. If you think about it, there couldn't be a controversy if one of the options was clearly and demonstrably better than the other.

Even manufactured controversies like 5G crackpots or snake oil cures seems to often revolve around these nebulous long term effects that hover like a mirage right on the precipice of what's testable, hinted at with a generous interpretation of the scientific literature, but never quite rigorously demonstrated.

> If you think about it, there couldn't be a controversy if one of the options was clearly and demonstrably better than the other.

Not that I disagree, but lots of people would argue otherwise, especially in politics.

Well political systems aren't true or false statements about the world. People can and do have different political visions.

Political debates often boil down to nonsense like

"The best way to apply thermal paste is with the dot method!"

"No, are you an idiot, look at the facts! The way you proper way to cook a steak is with a reverse sear!"

I think a lab soil test ($20 or so) and following the basics of weed control (Google “triangle weed control”) and soil amendments as guided by the test will get you a 90-95th percentile lawn without tons of agonizing effort or much expense.

Add irrigation and you’ll be at 97+%-ile.

The frustration I have with my lawn hobby is that it looks “great” to most visitors but I know all the flaws and where I’ve still got improvements to make.

You might enjoy this Guardian article on the ever-increasing efforts spent on improving grass pitches used for football: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jun/15/silicon-val....

While the methods described don't seem realistic for the average residential lawn (e.g. My own), this was still entertaining. Thanks for for sharing

Fascinating article, previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27521984

All our neighbors use lawn companies and apply fertilizer and pesticides constantly. They don't have soil anymore. It's mid to light brown dirt. At some point, we watched a video of a Gabe Brown presentation (author of From Dirt to Soil). Our new, hold-my-beer, "game" is to do as little as possible to our lawn - other than keeping it long - while still having it greener than everyone else. One factor that turns out to be critical is encouraging clover. Clover apparently fixes nitrogen, so a good grass/clover mix can be remarkably low maintenance.

…and when one isn’t working on one’s lawn, there are always cast iron pans that need seasoning.

> Or is it multivariate and all the parameters matter and affect and interact with each other?

I've been saying this a lot lately (in different forms):

Reality is not a single variable problem; it's a multivariate puzzle which is never as simple as a single cause -> effect scenario.

This applies to absolutely everything these days, from growing plants to politics. In many ways this is the failure of the internet/social media. Everything tends towards simple single variable explanations that are never, ever, in alignment with reality. And yet, entire populations become divided along these simple lines. Even when talking about how to grow a lawn.

Somewhere in your state may be a university that can give advice on what works well locally. e.g.

https://www.turffiles.ncsu.edu/

My main question is, how many of these products are actually safe to be using to grow food? How many contain heavy metals or dangerous particles that just haven't been tested for?

I was confused by all the products also, until a family that owned a landscaping company moved in next door to me.

Their yard was basically a dirt lot with no grass. A month or so later and it was a lush green landscape.

It seemed like all they did was cover the yard completely with manure. After seeing their success I did the same and my yard turned green too.

Was it the manure? Yes, but also no. I moved across country and manure doesn't work like it used to. It was really the expert knowledge that did it.

If you find some good resources can you post them/links. It’s so hard to find good informative websites that I can burn days scouring the internet for decent repositorys.

Followed a bunch of advise.

Ended up with a yard of mud for a month. Was the eye sore of the neighborhood. Then it exploded. Lush beautiful grass that would not stop.

Had to mow it 2-3 times a week until winter.

In my experience lawn care is mostly getting the amount of water/sun right and not beating it up too much.

Gotta have weed control or they overtake my lawn.

Weed control can come in many forms. Some plants do better in more acidic soil vs basic, and native grasses tend to have a range of optimal pH different from broadleaf plants. As well, cutting strategy can help via shading--if the grasses are taller than the weeds, they get more light and grow taller still and choke out the weeds from getting sun.

Part of the problem with lawns in general is the ideal lawn, like the magazine lawn, tends to be a monoculture. But a really healthy, low-maintenance pasture tends to be a polyculture of many grasses, a few legumes (e.g., clover), and the occasional broadleaf (dandelions are great for instance when it comes to improving soil structure--their roots can really help aerate compacted soil).

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