Please share your personal experiences with cold water plunges! Was it good? Or was it bad? Where did you do it? How did you do it? Do you have a setup at home?
Now, do you know anything new? No, because anecdotes don’t actually provide meaningful information, we don’t know why we did or didn’t improve. Or in my case if there was some minor benefit or minor harm because I didn’t pay close enough attention etc etc.
The scientific method is supposed to allow someone with no credibility to provide signal through >process< and then gain credibility.
Anecdotes from >a credible< person are very meaningful as they are often a high indicator of signal. A social heuristic outside of rigorous research.
Your results as an anon? Basically useless. On HN? Slightly better than on reddit or facebook. Provide your methodology? Better still, and now youre approaching a research proposal.
The meta discussion around anecdata being useful or not is silly.
How exactly does credibility matter here? Science is heavily reputation based because there’s so much at stake and so few experiments take place, but with anecdotal evidence I don’t see the credibility of individual datapoints mattering much.
I can’t tell if I minimally influenced my upper respiratory tract infection risk etc, all I can tell is the hassle wasn’t worth a benefit too small for me to notice. And that’s the issue, more than credibility if effect size was large enough to be noticeable to individuals you’d get extremely strong results from scientific studies. Conversely if it isn’t showing up as extremely effective in the literature that’s strong evidence individuals are misattributing their experiences.
what was your goal in the first place?
> you’d get extremely strong results from scientific studies
check population health data in countries where cold exposure is traditional.
science is cool, scientists are just regular ol' people and enough regular ol' people do a lot to look good, to not be unemployed and having to write applications again, to get their tap on the head and or a nice bonus. **regular in their little slices under the bell curve
Unless you are assuming there is some global conspiracy of scientists to have jobs the system it selfs manages it by it's transparency.
Simplifying it in a "check population health data in countries where cold exposure is traditional" way is exactly the wrong approach. How do you know what kind of diet, genome and culture they have? There are so many variables that the mere fact of whether one diverse group does something different than another doesn't really say anything. It's so difficult to try to isolate individual problems. That's why we have the scientists.
I think it’s just a bit more gray.
That tells you about those countries but very little about cold exposure specifically. One inherent difference is they lack a lot of tropical diseases because they aren’t in the tropics. You could still try and remove all those differences, but directly studying cold exposure itself is vastly more practical.
Language. Nothing is impossible.
The rigorous result is right in front of us we just don't like the answer
A specific restaurant is an actual place so if someone describes the decor and prices yesterday it’s not going to be wildly different when you show up tomorrow.
If I ask someone if this bar is good, and they say they went to a different unrelated bar and it sucked then I’m going to ignore that as a random anecdote.
One guy was saying you can replace sleep with LSD. He changed his mind, but would you believe it or just do what I did smile nod and move on?
It’s amazing just how bad that stuff turned out to be. You personally can try whatever you feel like but the odds are just terrible that your going to find anything beyond mild pain relief and the risks can be go significantly beyond wasting time.
I would argue that most things we use daily now started out as anecdotes rather than science experiments. Most of the food we eat, etc. The buildings we live in, being in the nature, exercise, sleep, etc.
They were all anecdotally described before we were able to run proper science on them.
Moving the goalposts a bit there, there’s no way in which wood’s utility depends on random peoples observations they can point to its actual use in a structure. We’re just talking about medicine here because we can’t see people’s past condition.
So the set includes all forms of historically practiced medicine from anywhere in the globe. From Chinese medicine to Voodoo, people did all kinds of things to dry to get better. Our ancestors didn’t use electronics, plastics, synthetic fibers, aluminum, etc which is a large fraction of what people interact with in a daily basis.
Western medicine kept a tiny fraction native from wound care via Honey to willow bark, the stuff that worked was either copied or refined when active ingredients were isolated. But when the actual useful techniques are under 1%, there’s hardly a reason for you to individually investigate people’s random claims.
Consider all of homeopathy is useless, for you to say test each individual treatment would be just as silly as individually testing each different prayer in faith healing.
Excellent for several things. Personally I recommend them at the end of a normal shower, before bed, to drop your core temperature.
Takes a couple weeks to acclimate, but much easier afterwards, same benefits.
Exercise wise, for me, it’s a solid pickleball session. Good intensity cardio, super fun, the competitive striving to win, as well as low stakes, meaningful social interaction, all combined together. Doing pickleball open play (pickup games) a few times a week has been huge for me.
You can point them to this: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC300808/
If it works, it would be within the resources of an ambitious high school class to prove it. If it doesn’t, "more research will be needed"
I work in clinical trials and it’s amazing at the list of side effects participants get when they are in the placebo arm.
And it’s not even small numbers. It’s not unusual for 20-40% to have side effects like drowsiness, tingling sensation, muscle pain, jitteriness, euphoria/dysphoria, feeling of being too hot/cold, headache, stuffy nose, tinnitus, frequent urination, diarrhea/constipation, etc.
Now layer that on top of cold plunges where people who do it already have an expectation based on others experiences and boom - you suddenly get tens od thousands of anecdotes about the effects that make it seem like it must be true.
(Note: I’m not making a judgement call on cold plunges, it’s just an example)
You used the scientific method and logic in the same sentence. You're aware that they are completely different right? Science can never prove anything.
anecdotally:
- the first 15 seconds are the worst, especially cold water on your back.
- it is invigorating. There is a feeling of "being present" that doesn't seem to happen with a hot shower.
- when you get out, the room and toweling off does not feel cold.
- the bathroom mirrors did not fog
I have no idea of the health benefits.
At some point I stopped doing it and then couldn't ever go back.
However, sometimes I do the "james bond shower", which is a hot shower that tapers to cold. mirrors fog, but still somewhat invigorating and easier to do.
I also once stayed in a hotel which had a dual shower stall. I put one to hot, one to cold and would go back and forth. That was very fun and invigorating.
45F with moving water feels WAY COLDER than 32F still water.
My immunity had been pretty good but am not sure if I can attribute that to cold showers. I moved to the bay area in August after nearly a 14 year stint in India. This winter the flu virus got me. I was able to fight it off without a lot of meds, I got sick after nearly 4 years.
So am not sure if my body has good immunity anymore. Overall, I have come to liking cold showers simply because of the post shower feeling.
A hot shower is great while in the shower, not so great afterwards. A cold shower is miserable the first 30 seconds, a pretty good feeling afterwards.
> Anecdotal stuff is also useful when there is a lack of science.
Yeah sure, but there is science, the link, and no one is arguing the opposite. The poster doth protest too much
There isn't...
https://www.google.com/search?q=science+direct+cold+water+im...
> e. I hate it when HN people completely dismiss anecdotes and want research papers for everything.
Then educate yourself on the scientific method, evidence, logic, and so on. Because "HN people" are right to dismiss anecdotes as being useful evidence of anything.
> Even research papers are dubious.
That some research papers are dubious does not make personal anecdotes more reliable.
The above is an extremely true and reliable paper. Everything it talks about is true and reliable. But it illustrates the weakness with science. Something you don't understand.