Comment by quatrefoil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quatrefoil | Hacker News Reader

A lot of dietary science is shaky, and I think we should accept that different people respond to various psychoactive substances differently. I don't have any reason to question the author's conclusions, nor doubt that others might have the same experience - even if it doesn't quite jibe with mine (I'm in this camp: https://twitter.com/danielcrosby/status/1534584565431296001).

What doesn't sit with me is that the article makes a lot of hyperbolic claims ("Caffeine is literally killing your dreams", etc) and says a lot of sciencey-sounding stuff, but then wraps it up with "no, you can't cricitize that":

> Q: Don't you care? Don't you think it's misleading?

> A: Nah. I'm not writing a philosophical treatise here. I'm not writing a lawsuit to take all coffee lovers to court. And I'm definitely not writing a scientific review.

I mean, OK, it's your blog - but you're trying to have it both ways. If you wanted to write about your subjective experience, fine. But you're making it seem as if you're presenting settled science.

Agreed. Also, like all drugs and food in general, we all respond very differently to them, have different habits, different associations and different relationships with them. I personally had to quit alcohol, coffee and weed when I was battling a year-long stomach issue. I'm now on the other side and can confidently say that not drinking coffee was a net negative for me. I didn't feel more alert, I didn't sleep better and I didn't feel less anxious. In fact, I was generally much less alert and productive. My coffee habit is more or less where it was before my health issues. Alcohol wise, I'm also back at the same frequency but much lower volume. I like it but found that my perfect amount is 2-3 drinks, not 5-6. Finally for weed I've not gone back to it. It made me anxious and I don't miss it.

If someone else had gone through my experience, they may have come back to a completely different distribution of usage. And in fact I know many people who do various combination of the 3 because of the way each affects them. We're all different.

It’s fine if you’re bugged by the writing or argument style, but there is plenty of solid science on the side-effects of caffeine. It’s interesting that you criticize the author for being unscientific and then share a hyperbolic twitter anecdote and cast unsupported FUD on the science. The good science that we have always acknowledges that people respond differently, and yet we usually clump into a normal-ish distribution where the vast majority of people have very similar experiences, and we can quantify how similar and how often, and sometimes why there are deviations. Failing to acknowledge the similarities is as bad as failing to acknowledge the differences, scientifically speaking.

https://medlineplus.gov/caffeine.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Adverse_effects

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