Don't succumb to the naturalistic fallacy. The body doesn't care where it gets its chemicals from.
> If testosterone is the culprit for increased risk of coronary artery disease, prostate cancer and sleep apnea, then doing things that naturally increase testosterone will increase risk also.
states that the result of higher T through natural processes is increased risk. It discounts the possibility that there is a net decreased risk due to the processes themselves decreasing risk to the point that it offsets the increased risk due to increased T.
The above needs to be repeated more often, particularly on HN.
Tech culture is overdue for an epistemological yin to its empiricist yang.
What a wonderful sentence. I grew glasses reading this.
Epistemology is the study of how things can be known, what can be known, or what the limits to knowability are. How can we justify a belief based on a collection of observations?
davak began with the assertion that testosterone is linked to a number of health problems.
mironathetin notes that studies of the negative health implications of testosterone were often performed on professional athletes, who are going to have high baseline levels of testosterone naturally, and who have in all likelihood supplemented with large doses of testosterone at various points in their career/training. But, mironathetin notes that positive lifestyle changes can increase your body's natural production of testosterone without the need for supplementation.
golemotron is skeptical that naturally increasing testosterone will lead to different health implications than the studies indicated. They posit that there is a direct relationship between testosterone levels and health risks.
vannevar responds that because the body is a system, non-linear and feedback effects are much more likely to control the health effects of testosterone than a simple linear relationship between testosterone and health risk.
kingmanaz agrees and calls golemotron's position reductionist, which means that golemotron implicitly believes that one can understand a phenomenon by understanding and measuring each of its component parts (empiricism). An epistemological critique of golemotron's position would begin with an assertion that the whole is different from the sum of the parts, because the parts interact with each other, producing non-linear effects. One must understand the gestalt, not just the parts. Induction straight from data will often miss things that holism might not.
For an accessible critique of data and inductivism, you might pick up a copy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness. If you are interested in systemic non-linearity in political science, check out Robert Jervis's System Effects.
Testosterone fluctuates on a regular daily cycle, the reason for which is not known. Therefore it is not reproduced in treatment. The assumption is "we don't know why, so it mustn't be important".
Also the typical cycle of quarterly shots of T undecanoate or other similar regimes produce unphysiological fluctations from one injection to the next of over 110%. The patient goes from very high levels of test (close to 1000ug/dl) to very marginal levels (around 350).
Perhaps because of this, side effects from taking T supplements, such as hematocrit (excess red blood cell volume) are far greater with supplements than with those experiencing the same level of T from endogenous sources.
Sometimes it does, or maybe the supplements are not formulated quite right. E.g. I saw this at LessWrong: "turns out that fish oil pills suck, and you’d need to take approximately 9 times as much to have the same effect as eating fish, at which point they’d have dangerous blood thinning effects." Link to the study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12848287
Thanks.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jrt/lifestyle_interventions_to_incre...
Mental and physical performance are strongly correlated, meaning maintaining your body will help maintain your mind.
Of course, the conclusion is not supported by (only) the correlation.
Which means everyone out there taking supplements would likely be less healthy than people eating food in a balanced manner.
Even if that's true, our bodies are also great at offloading tasks. If you train your body to think that Testosterone (or anything else, for that matter) will come from external sources, it will stop producing it naturally, and will become worse at regulating it's own T levels.
True- BUT many of those things mentioned to be thought to improve Testosterone above are also known to reduce risks that are associated with Testosterone itself (heart disease, etc). So there may be some net balancing at play here?
>Don't succumb to the naturalistic fallacy. The body doesn't care where it gets its chemicals from.
This is true in the immediate, but consuming things your body synthesizes (ex. testosterone, cholesterol) will often reduce the rate at which your body synthesizes it... Your body is a complex system with many feedback loops.
The by far dominant cause of sleep apnea is obesity. In marginal cases or in high doses T can exacerbate it, but it is not the main cause.