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Comment by walnutclosefarm | Hacker News Reader

So many comments here claiming to understand the effect of fasting on humans generally through personal experience. Come on, people - your experience is a datum, it's not data, and your entirely subjective conclusions drawn from that datum are not analysis. People's response to fasting varies widely. Hunger is both a physiological and a psychological phenomenon - and like any phenomenon with a psychological component, is highly variable. And our individual ability to release stored glycogen in order to maintain metabolic function without eating also varies widely. There is no single experience of fasting.

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Data is also overrated. Data is often highly convoluted, with multiple causes in one correlation.

We want to understand the way things work, and correlation can give us hints. But so can individual experience. But "data" is often used as the truth.

So yeah individual experience here is valid. Hunger is not as simple as every hour you eat you get more hungry, and that's valid to deduct from personal experience.

Data is indeed often opaque, but it's the only way you can make a rigorous argument that something is characteristic of the natural world. To borrow a phrase, data driven conclusion on a hypothesis are the worst form of conclusion, except for all the other methods you can name.

No its not, thats exactly my point. You cant make a conclusion like that at all. It just points you that there might be recurring charateristic but not that there actually is one or what it is.

I don't know who is labeling their observations as "analysis" other than you. It's reasonable to question a study's methodology, especially when the judges in question were fasting as a part of Ramadan. And including one's own experience as an addendum is completely reasonable too.

Everything is anecdotal before it can become science.

all anecdotes are equal

but some anecdotes are more equal /s

I don't even know what point you're trying to make, but regardless, I think the point the poster you're responding to is making is that there are two places in the scientific method where anecdotes comes into the play: observation and hypothesis. These are the seeds for follow-up inquiry and the basis for the scientific method.

Moreover, it's completely reasonable to be skeptical of the methodology of a study, especially when one of the subject groups is as specific as a religious group doing a fast as part of a religious observance.

In that case, I would avoid commenting on something you don't understand.

'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others' - George Orwell

I got the reference just fine.

There’s no single experience of thinking yet I can say everyone has thoughts. Thoughts about what? _That_ is what varies. The body is similar, it speaks through signals to the brain. The only way to know your body’s voice is by doing. Dismiss your notion that individual experience has no value.

Bodies are quite different, different metabolic rate, different fitness, different in many ways.

I can go an entire day without eating to little ill effect. I knows people who must eat three times a day and if they miss one meal get super cranky.

It’s not dismissing it to point out data vs datum or that people’s bodies vary wildly.

What I’m saying is that perhaps the “cranky” eater doesn’t even know their body’s voice. Or is angry by simply hearing it.

Another way of putting it: you say you have tried but are you even sure that others have tried? People will say they have experienced but in reality have not.

Or perhaps they have a much faster metabolism and are hypo-glycemic?

I accidentally go all day without food. They must carry snacks.

Or perhaps you’re just a better listener. Do you _know_ they _must_ carry snacks or are you imagining that’s how they must be?

The real trick of this is realizing people do the same “imagining” with their own body and their own selves. They do not know.

They have been diagnosed with hypoglycaemia so yes I’m pretty sure they are listening to their own body.

Tbh it’s me who’s ignoring mine by not eating

Yes, it took me a long time to realize that pain, and pangs, and feelings aren't minor inconveniences that I must live with, but my body telling me something was wrong or needed adjustment. I've found that fasting helps us stop ignoring what the body is telling us.

Exactly right. I can go 24 hours without eating with no ill effects, and while I am hungry, I'm not ravenous, and I can certainly keep going just fine. I have a neighbor and friend who can't get through a morning of moderate labor without a snack - not because he can't stand the hunger, but because he simply runs out of energy. He is genuinely ravenous after a 12 hour fast.

I’m here before he responds with “what about people in a coma? Therefore we don’t know!”

We do know, and individual experience is underrated. If it weren’t for individual experiences we would have no science.

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