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Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

8h time-restricted eating might well be bad for you, but this study doesn't show it, as far as I can tell. They make no effort to control for, say, how obese the average cohort is that's doing an 8h time-restricted eating plan, or how fit the non-time-restricted eaters are. Future research, apparently.

The study does seem to show that 8h time-restricted eating doesn't radically lower the risk of death, at least not enough to dominate any selection bias by dieters.

Also, note that it's a self-reported study, so we are really talking about people who claim to be following a time-restricted eating plan.

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By Hacker News standards, no research is good enough. Where do you find information that you find credible?

>By Hacker News standards, no research is good enough

First, "hacker news" isn't a hive mind, so the idea of "Hacker News standards" is non-nonsensical. From an academic/epidemiological perspective though, I think it's fairly uncontroversial that randomized controlled trials are the gold standard.

> I think it's fairly uncontroversial that randomized controlled trials are the gold standard.

Software with 99.999999% uptime [0] may be the gold standard, but that's not always practical, and we can benefit from other software too.

If everything with a flaw in the world is useless, then everything in the world is useless, including all these HN comments and whatever you and I do for our livings.

[0] I'm too lazy to actually imagine what the gold standard for software development is, sorry.

>Software with 99.999999% uptime [0] may be the gold standard

No one seriously has that many nines as their "gold standard", because that's almost always too safe, which has costs:

>We strive to make a service reliable enough, but no more reliable than it needs to be. That is, when we set an availability target of 99.99%,we want to exceed it, but not by much: that would waste opportunities to add features to the system, clean up technical debt, or reduce its operational costs. In a sense, we view the availability target as both a minimum and a maximum. The key advantage of this framing is that it unlocks explicit, thoughtful risktaking.

https://sre.google/sre-book/embracing-risk/

see also: The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

In this case though, other commenters have pointed out plausible reasons for why the cohort studies can't be trusted. There's also lack of evidence for the casual mechanism behind the effect, so on the whole it seems fairly reasonable to demand better evidence.

Use HN as a bs detector: a more critical analysis to minimize bias (though not error prone)

You are perhaps arbitrarily choosing what is BS, based on the old primate behavior (I'm subject to it too) of choosing a 'team'. If my team is HN, I look for ways it can be winning; I root for it.

IOW, how do you know where the BS is, HN or the OP? Another way of framing it: Which is the BS, a quick take by a random commenter on an Internet bulletin board or a scientifically researched, written, reviewed, and published document, often done over years, by an expert in the field with a PhD?

I've said before: If the OP author posted on HN and said 'PhD who does research in this field here, and I think ...', they'd be upvoted. But if they do 1000x the work and 'post' to a scientific journal, it's almost always rejected by many on HN.

You’ve now posted 4 meta comments about comments. If you have something substantive to say about the study, say it.

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