The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I don't think the problem is just decades-old bureaucracy, I think there is also a problem with the nutritional sciences themselves. There are actually several contradictory studies regarding for example if red meat is carcinogenic or not, so you could say that "all of these scientific studies" show that red meat is good for me, while another guy could say, yeah, but "all these scientific studies" show that red meat increases the risk of getting certain types of cancer. The same is true for saturated fats and cardiovascular diseases. Regarding salt, I think there actually is a broad scientific consensus that you shouldn't eat too much salt (NaCl), especially large amounts of sodium ions are linked to high blood pressure and cardiovascular diseases.

Nutrition science is just weak across the board, because it's hard to study nutrition in humans. This is the full extent of what we know:

1. Sugar is bad for you.
2. We need to get enough of various nutrients. We have a rough idea of how much for many of them.
3. Some people respond badly to some kinds of foods. We don't really know why.

Regarding salt, research is more in support of too little salt being bad for you than too much. Only certain people appear to be affected at all by having too much salt, and it is consistently shown that too little salt is worse for everyone. That "too little" amount? Higher than what all the various health agencies are suggesting is too much. Healthcare Triage did a couple episodes on this (on YouTube).

Salt is an essential nutrient, and keeping a proper water/salt balance is so essential that our bodies are highly effective at controlling it even though they are completely incapable of managing any other nutrient. So the idea that we need to ignore our instincts in this department is frankly absurd.

For everything else, we just have to eat a variety of foods, hope we get the nutrients we need, and figure out what works best for us individually.

As in table sugar, or sucrose? Yeah, probably. I almost never drink liquids with added sucrose, but mostly because of the high amount calories. I do eat dark chocolate with some added sucrose, because there are lots of health benefits associated with cacao. The best would of course be to eat cacao without any sugar, but that tastes very bitter. Or maybe mix it with chili peppers like the Aztec and Maya did.

As for more complex carbohydrates, with a low glycemic index, there is again a lot of conflicting research regarding how much you should eat. I know there are several scientific articles that support the Atkins diet, but I also know that there are several scientific articles that support a much higher intake of carbohydrates.


Really? Never heard about salt poisoning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_poisoning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_poisoning)). Everybody will die from having too much salt in their bodies, and not just humans. Other animals too. Try eating a few spoons of NaCl (don't worry, you are not going to die, you will just feel horrible and vomit).


You will die both from having too much salt in your body, and from having too little salt in your body.


Okay, so why do you trust Healthcare Triage more than the various of health agencies? You don't think they might also have tons of scientific articles supporting their dietary recommendations?

Also, the average salt intake in the United States is probably way higher than their dietary recommendations, because NaCl (just like sucrose), is added to lots of different foods today.

Mainly fructose (note: sucrose is 50% fructose), but to a lesser extent other simple sugars as well.


That's a much higher dose than anyone gets. Anything will kill you at a ridiculous dose.


I don't trust him, but if he's reporting on his sources accurately, he's doing better already.


Maybe, but I haven't ever seen any research supporting the levels of salt they recommend. I have seen research which suggests the levels they recommend are dangerously low, however. It's not much, but I'm not going to accept a conclusion that has no backing I am aware of in the scientific literature over a conclusion that has some backing I am aware of in the scientific literature.

In order to know if a certain type of food is causing a health condition, or if it is just correlated with a health condition, we need to gather a lot of information from each person that is in the study. Today, lots of information about each individual is available somewhere on the Internet, but it is often protected by privacy laws. Still, if we could gather information like this from the Internet, and use a Bayesian computer algorithm to correlate health conditions with different types of food, we would probably become much more aware of how different types of food affect our health.

(https://image.ibb.co/gVd4f5/correlations.png)

Some of you might object that I might be purchasing food that I am not eating. I might for example have kids, and some of the groceries I buy might be for them. It is therefore necessary to mainly look at single individuals living alone, because they will usually consume all the groceries they buy.

One can also look upon families as units. If we analyze large amounts of families as units, we can also get a better idea about how groceries typically consumed by children are affecting their health.

You can't just solve the problems with correlative studies by getting all the data, even if that were a reasonable endeavor. We will always have to treat correlation with caution. Always. You could probably fill a textbook with the possible ways you could be misinterpreting a given correlation.

Bayesians can never be 100% sure of anything, but we can use this technique to at least exclude foods that only correlate with other foods that correlate with a health condition (I just translated this text from my native language to English, so the language is probably far from perfect):

http://archania.org/groceries_and_health.html (http://archania.org/groceries_and_health.html)

We can also collect data from millions of people in this way, which is far more than in the older nutritional studies. If North Korea decided to implement this system, they would probably become world leaders in nutritional science, almost instantaneously.  Almost all the old nutritional studies would become obsolete, since they are based on so few individuals and haven't analyzed everything the individuals in the studies are consuming.

Kim Jong-un could probably without too much trouble, analyze what the entire North Korean population is consuming, and correlate it with information about their health. Those studies would be based on 25 million people, since it lives approximately 25 million people in North Korea.

You can't just say Bayes and become immune to sample bias etc. Coming up with correct hypotheses is the hard part.

Ehhhh? Why would you need to come up with any hypothesis? This is all just about using the right methodology for nutritional research.

Sample bias is reduced by using a large sample (for example the entire North Korean population), and by analyzing as many variables as possible from the samples, and using the exclusion principle I wrote about here: http://archania.org/groceries_and_health.html (http://archania.org/groceries_and_health.html)

N... North Korea doesn't have 100% complete records of everything everyone eats. The NK government doesn't even have any influence on the poor there, only the (compared to other North Koreans) well-off Party members in Pyongyang. Outside there, most of the poorer NK population lives in ghettos which are essentially cut off from the government, and they have to buy illegal food on the black market to survive, food that even includes human flesh labeled as pork, according to some rumors.

Plus, there's no way the NK government would be honest about this. They would just pretend that all of its people are in perfect health and spout propaganda about how the DPRK is doing such a perfect job with its citizens' nutrition, or some crap like that.

The only way North Korea, one of the poorest countries in the world, I might add, is in a situation to advance nutrition science is that it is so authoritarian and free of ethics concerns that the NK government could imprison a large segment of the population for a randomized controlled nutrition study. But they probably wouldn't do that, either. What benefit would that be to NK leaders? Certainly not enough to justify the cost.

If you want 1984 to happen please send all your data to the federal statistics bureau. It will be used to refuse health insurance and to tax the fat people, like is currently happening in japan already.

People shouldn't need to pay for health insurance at all. It should be a public service funded by tax money.

But I agree with you that this is very dangerous indeed. So if the federal statistics bureau started to gather information like this, we would need a high level of transparency and oversight. There shouldn't be any way for them to figure out who the ID-numbers really belong to. And when I say ID number, I really mean a string of data that is also difficult for people to remember. Something like this: "#uc9Pds9%8x8Q%u#ZCd@a6^7H89E*Xw2$ev+*5!CqnGA*-@JHPSeWtmp%!kA"

 We should of course also make it optional for people to participate in this, so they can choose themselves if they want to contribute to this type of research or not.

You must mean hashing. that could work.
But then again, what's a federal statistics bureau? Is that an american concept?
Imho you're better off having a worldwide controlled neural net figure this out than some bureaucrats in an american govt office.

They also have something like this in:

Germany: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Homepage.html (https://www.destatis.de/EN/Homepage.html)
France: http://www.gouvernement.fr/en/statistics (http://www.gouvernement.fr/en/statistics)
Netherlands: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb (https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb)
Switzerland: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home.html (https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home.html)
Sweden: http://www.scb.se/en/ (http://www.scb.se/en/)
China: http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/ (http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/)
Russia: http://www.gks.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosstat_main/rosstat/en/main/ (http://www.gks.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosstat_main/rosstat/en/main/)

And probably several other countries. Anyhow, it would be easiest to implement this in the countries that already are most digitized:

(https://assets.weforum.org/editor/VRrnqgwmsauMf02RJZQCCWWn9rvmAnhaieRpfjLYBQ8.png)

But this ranking is from 2016, when Obama still was president in the United States.... Now, they are probably more interested in investing in coal power and a wall towards Mexico than in digitalization and things like this.

So why do it on a federal level instead of worldwide? If you do it on a national level every nation will have different results.

But you could start here to compare to the US data:
http://statline.cbs.nl/Statweb/publication/?DM=SLEN&PA=60029eng&D1=0-4&D2=0-2&D3=a&LA=EN&VW=T
http://statline.cbs.nl/Statweb/publication/?DM=SLEN&PA=81177eng&D1=39-43&D2=0-12,26-38&D3=0&D4=l&LA=EN&VW=T

The thing is, we need to know exactly which individual has which health condition, and what the individual is eating.  We can probably get information about what individuals are eating from grocery shops that store information about what each individual is buying. But health information is highly confidential, and it is unlikely that we can get access to such information for each individual. Only federal statistics bureaus are likely to get access to such information about the citizens in a country. And even they shouldn't be allowed to know which individual each ID belongs to.

(https://image.ibb.co/fME6tQ/people.png)

Please let that idea pass, it's way too dangerous to be misused, you could open a box of pandora with it.

You don't think society is going to progress in this direction anyhow? The only difference is that they will say they need access to all your personal data to stop terrorists. And it will be the police and/or the military that gets access to it, rather than a peaceful federal statistics bureau with a high level of transparency and oversight. The military can't be transparent, because that makes it vulnerable to its enemies. So if you are worried about your personal data being misused, I would be much more worried about the military.

If the entire system is made open source, don't you think you could trust it? Then you can even go and check that the system is secure enough yourself, before you decide to give your personal data to the research project.

Why not start that initiative yourself then instead of having it in the hands of trump-controlled agencies.

Maybe you haven't noticed, but I have quite a lot on my plate. And this isn't as important to me as reforming the educational system, although I would love to get more trustworthy information about what I should eat.

"Oppressive authoritarianism is inevitable. Let's become the oppressors!"

Ehh... only if you consider doing nutritional research on large amounts of people to be oppression... I am not exactly advocating for misuse of sensitive personal data.

it can't be misused if you hash it, but the insights could be used to only give healthcare to people who have handed over their fitbit details and proven that they are fit.

The most important information about how healthy you are comes from your doctor's health journal. In my country, we already have our health journals online in a computer system, where I can log in and see what my doctors have written about me.

If I for example get a heart attack, it will be registered in my health journal. If the federal statistics bureau also had information about all the groceries I have bought, they could correlate my heart attack with the food I am eating. If they did this for all the people in my country that have gotten a heart attack, they would see which types of food are overrepresented among people that get a heart attack.

What would be hashed? If you can generate the content that would be hashed (e.g. identifying information), then you can just find out what hash corresponds to that content. Can't go backwards, but can go forwards.

There is no way to prevent your doctor from knowing that you have gotten a heart attack. So he will know something about your health condition no matter what. But when he sends information about your health condition to the federal statistics bureau, he doesn't send them your name, but rather a random string of symbols, which is your user ID.

The same is true if you are using a grocery shop that collects information about what each customer is buying (most grocery shops will do it here, if you sign up for membership). The management of the grocery shop knows what you are buying then, but if it sends information about what you are buying to the federal statistics bureau, it shouldn't send your name, but rather a random string of symbols, which is your user ID.  That user ID, somehow needs to be correlated with the user ID sent to the federal statistics bureau with your health condition from your doctor.

(https://image.ibb.co/g4Sqnk/problem.png)

Anyhow, I am sure it must be possible for experts in cryptography to create a secure system for doing this. And they should make it open source, so that those that are skeptical can go in and check that everything is alright.

I understand what hashing is. I asked, what is the data that would be hashed? The problem with trapdoors is that you can go through them forwards. If your health monitoring hash is based on Name and SSN, then anyone with your name and SSN can get your hash-ID.

What about basing it on biometrics, for example iris recognition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_recognition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_recognition))? Something like this?

(https://image.ibb.co/jmxOOQ/correlations.png)

Who cares where this ID comes from? It still doesn't solve the problem. All the agencies that are collecting data about you know your ID. So all that has to be done to identify you is to corrupt one person from one of several organizations, an easy feat. I'm sorry, anonymity and collection of data about a particular person are mutually incohesive. If you want to collect all of the data, you have to accept that fact that someone knows everything about who you are, what you do, what you eat, etc. Welcome to Stalinist Russia, or North Korea.

And even then, this does nothing to address the problems with correlative studies. You still need randomized controlled trials. So if you want nutrition science to advance, and you are willing to advocate disgusting and unethical practices to achieve this, what you should advocate for is a return to the Nazi experiments performed on Jewish prisoners. I am not on your side, though.

Ehh.. Nonsense. You either didn't read this article (http://archania.org/groceries_and_health.html (http://archania.org/groceries_and_health.html)), or you didn't understand it. Analyzing the entire population of a country is of course much better than having one or multiple randomized trials.  If you think a randomized trial gives you more information than you can get from analyzing the entire population, maybe you should start basing your democracy on randomized trials (election polls).

That is actually a very good explanation of why we have such huge problems with the nutritional studies. They are just like election polls. And just like your elections polls were way off before your last presidential election, nutritional studies can be way off due to similar factors.

The problem is that it is practically impossible to get completely randomized trials. That is why we can't use election polls to decide who is going to be president, and that is why we have so much problems with the nutritional studies.

(https://image.ibb.co/jd0rA5/randomvstotal.png)


I am not an expert in cryptography, but I don't think it necessarily needs to be the same ID for all the agencies collecting data.  The hashing algorithm can also be updated all the time, so that if someone learns your ID at one moment, it doesn't necessarily work anymore after a short amount of time.


That sounds a lot like politics based on fear, something that Donald Trump is very good at: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-fear/498116/ (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-fear/498116/)

And similar arguments have been used against Bernie Sanders: http://nypost.com/2016/01/16/dont-be-fooled-by-bernie-sanders-hes-a-diehard-communist/ (http://nypost.com/2016/01/16/dont-be-fooled-by-bernie-sanders-hes-a-diehard-communist/)

Maybe I am not so scared, because I actually live in a functional socialist democracy, where we actually have a high level of trust in our fellow citizens.



https://ourworldindata.org/trust (https://ourworldindata.org/trust)

At work we also make a graphical model for every explanation. That's why people call us jokingly a model agency ;).

So what if the same argument has been used against Bernie? Even if it was invalid against him, that doesn't mean that it's unsound in general.

It's really hard to centrally aggregate information in such a fashion that individual trends can be extracted, without identifying the individual.

It would be really easy if we only needed the individual to be able to get their data, and it would be reasonably easy if only the individual needed to add their own information. But for lots of people to put in and get out information about that person, without being able to connect those two ideas? That seems… hard.

It seems like a destructive negative-sum activity to argue in that way, and reminds me of what she accused Hillary of doing during the election:


Pinpointing exactly what is wrong with a theory, seems much more constructive than name-calling.


Something like this maybe?

(https://image.ibb.co/dk7BdQ/correlations.png)

Regarding the hashing: I assume the only solution is to have the hash be salted with a password that the user supplies for itself.
That also means that no company will ever be able to send info on your behalf, but you have to send it from your devices yourself.

Also, if you perform the sending of the data itself via onion routing (Tor) then the data being sent will be absolutely not traceable to any one person.

Ie the grocery bills will not be sent to banks and to the evil government but directly from yourself to the researchers (why even bother with federal people involved).

also, to be honest, like with cancer and it being a disease unique to you, it's better to focus on individuals themselves and have a neural net analyse info based on just one person instead of the general populace. If you hookup a personal AI to all your personal data it could figure out for yourself how to live most healthy, taking into account your personal body composition and digestive tract.

Objection noted. I have renamed it from "Federal Statistics Bureau" to "Research Team" now, since I really don't care if it is federal or private, as long as it is anonymous.

I have put all of it together on this page now: http://archania.org/a_new_way_to_do_nutritional_research.html (http://archania.org/a_new_way_to_do_nutritional_research.html)

Thank you to all of you that have given me constructive negative feedback, which has helped me to develop this theory.

Since I am apparently not getting any more negative feedback, I am assuming that everything is alright.

no, i'm just tired of pointing out everything that I might dislike :)

I haven't written about it, but of course this research system could also give us much more information about medicines, and if they interact with different types of food.

And I wouldn't exactly be surprised if lots of the medicines work much less than they tell us, and have a lot more side effects that we aren't aware of.

There. I have added pharmacies. Then we can also learn more about how medicines are affecting us.

(https://image.ibb.co/hqLC2k/correlations.png)

Right, your "theory". Your armchair theory, that is. Just because there are a couple more people sitting in armchairs with you doesn't mean it's any more rigorous. People have been doing research for centuries, dedicating their entire lives to it. I don't think someone like you or I is qualified to tell them how to properly do research. They know better than we do.

Of course people have been doing research for centuries, but we haven't had Internet for centuries, and it is first now that we can collect information like this. Big data research also isn't my theory (https://www.journals.elsevier.com/big-data-research/ (https://www.journals.elsevier.com/big-data-research/)).

Or here. "Big data meets public health", published in Science in 2014: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/346/6213/1054.long (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/346/6213/1054.long)


Ehh... You don't know anything about me. I am actually a chemistry researcher, and part of my work involves researching how a type of molecules called anthocyanins affect humans.

I don't think most researchers think this is a bad idea. I think people that are overly concerned about their privacy tend to think this is a bad idea.

Also, I don't think you should believe in authorities, unless they can explain to you why you should do it like them. Many authorities do things just because everybody else does, and they don't necessarily even know why they are doing it like that. There are tons of people with PhD's that can't think "out-of-the-box", and just do things in the traditional way because that is what they were taught. The traditional educational system encourages conformity, and discourages divergent thinking (in some cases even independent thinking).

I have added this table, to show a few nutritional studies that are contradicting each other:

(https://image.ibb.co/mNio8Q/table_nutrition_science.png)

You can find references to all the studies in the bibliography on this page: http://archania.org/a_new_way_to_do_nutritional_research.html (http://archania.org/a_new_way_to_do_nutritional_research.html)

Zanthius, if you keep hooking up things to a neural net like you do you will essentially get a 360 degree recommendation engine ,totally tailored to your body and persona.
This will create the best way to fight cancer, generate a neural net teacher to teach you anything you want, etc etc. But it will also detect diseases for you. Any desease. It will predict your death, and that of your children, with great accuracy. You will know the future and you will know that for example your kid A has 3 years left to live, and your wife will never get past 60, while you get to live to 95. And that kid will know as well, because he has simply asked his recommender when he will die.

But what if you take this worldwide with world data aggregated from every country in the world (instead of like how it is now you only get news which has been thorougly americanized and are thusly an indoctrinated fool simply by turning on the internet, phone or tv in the USA).
You would get a universal truth engine. It can tell you very inconvenient truths, for example that the Bush administration planned 9/11, or it can tell your wife with 95% certainty that you are cheating on her. And the justice system will start using it to determine by statistics if you did a certain crime, and even predict certain crimes.

That's also the danger of hooking up all data to an algorithm. You get an universal truth engine, that doesn't know whether it reached that conclusion by statistics or by facts.

I applaud your efforts to connect the data already out there, basically AI = algorithm x computer power x data. If you increase data x2 your AI will be 2x stronger, same with an 2x more efficient algorithm or computer power being 2x more powerful.
So this will effectively make better AI a possibility.

Good for you. So you should understand that you can't assume a causation based on a correlation. A probable mechanism has to be predicted and tested.

This is hard in nutrition. Working with chemicals, all you need to do is perform experiments with chemicals. With nutrition, you can't do such a simple randomized controlled trial, because you can't possibly control everything everyone eats for the years or even decades it would take. Plus there are ethics concerns you don't need to worry about in your field.


That's great and all, but there's a difference between not thinking that something is a bad idea and thinking it can substitute for randomized controlled trials.

As for privacy, it's not my privacy. It's our privacy. I don't want the United States to be a surveillance state. I don't want people to be unable to keep secrets, unable to not be watched, unable to not be listened to.  In order to collect all this data you want to collect, we would need to establish draconian laws requiring everyone to use an ID card to purchase anything, eat anything, go anywhere, etc. We would also have to establish surveillance cameras everywhere, even in people's own homes. Sound familiar? All this for what you presume might result in an incremental improvement on our understanding of nutrition. Such a tiny benefit, or even any benefit at all, is not worth this cost.


I don't believe in authorities either. What matters is the claim, and what evidence backs up that claim.

But saying that you have, out of all the thousands before you actually working in the field you are criticizing, found out exactly what they are doing wrong and have a simple solution, you'll have to pardon me for being skeptical. If you think you can turn around the way nutrition research is done and find all these answers we've been struggling to find for decades, go for it. Write a paper and submit it for publication, just like you would a paper on chemistry. And if you believe that correlation can substitute for randomized controlled trials, show that being done.

In other words: less talking, more doing.

Scalare, I think the risk you describe is not exactly a proximate risk of the endeavor he's setting out on… you know?

The way I have proposed to research nutrition from big data (the entire population), doesn't say anything of a possible mechanism. That is a completely different field of study.  What you can find from "big data", are things that are NOT causes, but JUST correlations. If you have 50 different types of food correlating with a health condition, it would be rather cumbersome to investigate all of them for a possible mechanism. If however you find out that 45 of those correlations CANNOT be causes, since they ONLY correlate with the consumption of other types of food that correlate with the health condition, you are left with only 5 different foods. Trying to find a mechanism from those 5 different types of food, is much more easy than trying to find a mechanism from those 50 different types of food. Maybe for example there is a certain molecule that only is present in significant amounts in those 5 different types of food. But also, human biology is very complex, and thinking that you know something about if a molecule is healthy or not, just from knowing a possible mechanism, is also very dangerous. There can be cascade effects, and the "long term" effect on a biological system can be extremely difficult to predict. Also, since there are tons of different molecules in each type of food, one of them might be healthy while another one might be unhealthy. Coffee is a good example. A molecule called cafestol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cafestol) was found to increase serum cholesterol, but there are also lots of antioxidants in coffee, and molecules that we assume are beneficial to your health. Fortunately, most of the cafestol is removed in the filter of filtered coffee. Anyhow, it is the overall mixture of molecules in a type of food which determines if it is healthy or not.


Do you understand why the nutritional researchers are using randomized controlled trials? It seems to me like you only "think" using a random selection of people is a "good idea", since that is what people have been doing for a long time. Or like if they somehow discovered that using a random selection of people gave the most reliable results from doing lots of experiments. People didn't discover this empirically, they understood it from advances in basic probability (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_probability) and statistics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_statistics) during the 17th and 18th century. Mathematics is not an empirical discipline.

You should read this article by Eliezer Yudkowsky: http://lesswrong.com/lw/iq/guessing_the_teachers_password/ (http://lesswrong.com/lw/iq/guessing_the_teachers_password/)


I don't know how things are in your country, but here we almost never use cash anymore. When I use my debit card to pay in grocery stores, I am already giving my ID to the payment terminal. The only people that still are using cash in my country, are criminals and very old people. The politicians here are discussing to get completely rid of cash, since they believe it can reduce black market activity.


Ehhhh... where have I said anything about using surveillance cameras to collect data?

Pure speculation. You have no idea how much improvement there can actually be if all the data is collected, and this is not an acceptable experiment to perform.


I haven't the slightest idea what you're asking here. Randomized controlled trials are not just about "a random selection of people". They're about a methodology which controls the circumstances of experimental subjects, which is generally speaking impossible with nutrition in humans due both to the time it takes for real outcomes to occur and ethics concerns.

This just means that researchers in the field of nutrition have to do the best they can with what they have. It does not mean that we need to switch to a totalitarian dictatorship watching our every move in the hopes that more data will make their job easier.


That's horrible, and the only country I can think of which I've heard is so terrible (other than North Korea et al) is the Netherlands. No, we haven't abandoned cash in the U.S. No, we don't consider cash to be for "criminals and very old people". No, we don't require ID to use credit cards.

I'm a cashier, and in my experience, most people use credit cards, but several people use cash. I'm one of those people. I only use my debit card to make purchases online, and when I either forget or am unable to withdraw the cash beforehand. There are all kinds of reasons to use cash which have nothing to do with criminal activity: you can check how much you have without logging into your bank account/visiting an ATM, most vending machines require it, you don't need to wait for the waiter to process your card at a restaurant, you don't appreciate government surveillance, you don't appreciate spousal surveillance, etc.

The reason I know about the Netherlands as an example, by the way, is because of a Dutch documentary made sometime around the Snowden revelations called "Panopticon: A Documentary About Your Privacy".


You didn't, and the fact that you are disputing the necessity of it shows your naïvety, or possibly the totalitarian nature of your country. You need surveillance cameras to collect all the data for your proposal to even have a halfway decent chance of succeeding. Otherwise:

1. Once someone buys the food, you have no idea whether or not that's going to stay with that person.
2. Once food enters a household, you have no idea whether or not it's going to be consumed, or by whom.

You're calling for collecting all of the data, and consolidating it for researchers, so that researchers don't have to rely on things like voluntary self-reporting for their research and maybe that would improve their results a little. Nothing short of total surveillance can achieve that, especially if you're talking about using correlations to prove that a link is impossible.

That is not speculation, that is mathematics (and not very complex mathematics). If you had a PhD in statistics I would never have this discussion with you.


Well, I hate to use "dirty pieces of paper" which  tons of other people have put their bacteria on. I also find it much easier to use my debit card everywhere I go, than to carry "dirty pieces of paper" around.


It takes me about 5 seconds to check how much money I have in my account from my phone. We used to have lots of ATM's here 10-20 years ago. Nowadays you can barely find ATM's here. But if you want cash, any grocery store will let you withdraw cash there, if you also buy something.


I have already written about this:


In my country, the tax department already knows if you are living alone or with a partner/family. The postal service also has a register of which people are living at which address.


I am not living in Netherlands, but in my country, we focus upon such things as transparency of the government. The individuals in our government would for example never be allowed to not disclose their tax returns. In general, I also think we have much stricter privacy laws than you have in the United States. The Internet operators here are for example generally not allowed to give my identity to someone else, so very few people here have been caught for piracy.

There is no such thing as a person who lives alone, only ever buys food that he himself eats, eats every single thing he buys, and never eats anything else. The only way you could know everything about an individual's diet, rather than the same stuff they could just self-report, is if you perform totalitarian surveillance on them.


Are you saying that you have evidence that there are currently 50 possible causes for something (which you have not defined), and can prove that only five of those possible causes are true? I'd like to see your evidence and proof, please.

Or are you under the impression that I am disputing how subtraction works? Because I am obviously not.


That's your subjective opinion. Clearly you value the fantasy that your credit/debit card is cleaner than cash (which is probably not true) over your privacy. Let's just pretend you're not touching the same doorknob as everyone else, eh?

But I value my privacy more than whether or not there's bacteria on something. There's bacteria on everything. That's what our immune systems are for. It's not like you're eating your money.


That's nice and all, but I wasn't arguing that cash is more convenient than cards, only that there could be reasons for people preferring to use cash other than crime and "old people". I don't know how you check how much money you have in your account in just 5 seconds without completely compromising the security of your bank information, but I cannot do that, so it is still a valid example.

Sure, but that is the nice thing about "big data", it really doesn't matter if a few individuals are giving their food to someone else, as long as the large majority of people aren't. The "few individuals" that are giving away their food to someone else, can be neglected when you are basing your analysis upon a very large amount of data. Think about it as a 10000x10000 pixel photo. It doesn't matter if you lose a few pixels here and there, you will still see a clear image. In general, the higher the resolution is, the more you can "afford" to lose a few pixels.

(https://image.ibb.co/b6Cick/pixel_loss.png)


No, I am saying that you can figure out which foods only are correlated to other foods that are correlated to a specific health condition, by analyzing subgroups, like I have tried to make very easy for people to understand in my text (http://archania.org/a_new_way_to_do_nutritional_research.html (http://archania.org/a_new_way_to_do_nutritional_research.html)). If you disagree with something in my example, or if there is something you don't understand in my example, under "How we can distinguish correlations from causes", please be a bit more specific so that I can improve the example.

...are not just a "few individuals". No one I know behaves in the way you expect. We throw away food. We eat with others. Invite people over. Get invited over. Pay for a friend's meal because they forgot their wallet. That kind of stuff. These are all things that completely throw off the methodology you're suggesting, and you're just dismissing them as anomalies. This isn't even mentioning the actual anomolies, like farmers who grow their own food, wrong PLU codes at checkout, petty shoplifting, wrong barcodes, missing barcodes, varying portion sizes, free food (compensation etc), gift cards... it's beginning to look like an unworkable methodology, unless you establish total surveillance of the people involved. Nothing short of Orwell's nightmare is sufficient for your suggestion to be plausible.


Then, as I said, the idea that you can create such a drastic improvement is unfounded speculation, just like I said.


You can.

That does not mean that you can reduce uncertainty by 90%. It could very well be that uncertainty would only be reduced by 2%. These numbers are not of minor importance; if we are going to implement a totalitarian dictatorship to fulfill a particular goal, we had better be very confident in the effectiveness of that plan. You seem content to just throw your freedom and privacy away for the mere possibility that maybe nutrition science can advance a little faster. This tells me that the amount of value you ascribe to your freedom and privacy is zero. But I value freedom and privacy more than not at all, and I'm sure millions if not billions of people would agree.

> That is not speculation, that is mathematics (and not very complex mathematics). If you had a PhD in statistics I would never have this discussion with you.

Zanthius, please apply the principle of charity. I know statistics quite well and it is not at all obvious how to do what you are saying, in real life circumstances, even on large data sets. The possibility space explodes harder than population gets big.

I showed you an image with 100x75, and 1000x750, each of them had 50% pixel loss. Imagine the 100x75 image to be like a study based upon 7500 individuals, while the 1000x750 image to be like a study based upon 750000 individuals. You could can still see the 1000x750 image pretty well, even with 50% picture loss! That would be like 50% of the individuals living alone, buying food for someone else, shoplifting, missing barcodes, etc. In my country, I would estimate the amount of such anomalies to be less than 10%, but in your country maybe half of the people living alone survives on shoplifting and/or getting food from someone else.  And yeah, maybe this would be impossible in your country, if it is as disorganized as you are implying.


That depends entirely on how many individuals are included in the study, and on how many anomalies there are in the study.

Better organized societies -> less anomalies (less pixel loss)
Larger population size -> more individuals in study (higher resolution)

Fine, but I think you are a bit biased here, in teaming up with people from your own country. I don't think she always is applying the principle of charity herself, and I rarely see you commenting upon that.

The best would of course be, if all of us tried to see why a different country isn't necessarily better or worse, even if it is a bit different. And be less occupied with that "my country is the best!".

Do you have any evidence that the way human behavior works is reflected in what you did to that image?


Do you have any evidence for this estimate?

And again, do you have any evidence of the extent to which implementing the surveillance state you want to implement (tracking all people's purchases) would improve our scientific understanding of nutrition?


I never said that.

What I did say was that if what you said about your country is true (and I hasten to add that I haven't a clue what that country is), then that state of affairs is horrible. I never said that the United States is "the best", nor did I say that it is "better" than your country (which, again, you haven't identified). Every country has its strengths and faults, and based on what you have said, one of your country's faults is Orwellian surveillance, and widespread acceptance of such.

I certainly think it is a good analogy, except for that you are trying to extract a trend from lots of data when you are comparing what groceries people are buying to different health conditions.

But maybe Death999 could tell you if he thinks it is reflected in what I did to the images, since he is likely to be less biased about this than me.

Anyhow, I have added the images with 50% pixel loss to the main document: http://archania.org/a_new_way_to_do_nutritional_research.html (http://archania.org/a_new_way_to_do_nutritional_research.html)

You didn't answer any of my questions, all of which are straight yes/no questions:

The thing about the nutritional study I am proposing, which differs from other nutritional studies, is not that just it is based on a much more individuals, and avoids self-reporting. It also doesn't have a time limit. The longer it continues, the more certain we can be that the trends it recognizes are correct. Uncertainty will decrease more and more as we move into the future. Something like this:

(https://image.ibb.co/mYBqaF/trend.png)

But please, verify this assertion with Death 999, since he is likely to be much less biased than me about this.

Anyhow, I have now also added this graph to the main document: http://archania.org/a_new_way_to_do_nutritional_research.html (http://archania.org/a_new_way_to_do_nutritional_research.html)

I don't care what country Julie is from, or you.

The asymmetry here arises from the plan itself. This proposal would be a massive undertaking. So, it very well ought to be subject to intense scrutiny.

If you have a specific place you think that charity has not been properly extended to you, please show me.

Are you going to answer any of my questions? The answer to all of them is either "yes" or "no".

I want intense scrutiny, but not destructive negative-sum comments that aren't helping me, such as "this will turn our society into George Orwell's 1984", or "this will turn our society into the Soviet Union under Stalin". That would be like me saying that Donald Trump is just like Hitler, and therefore you are living in a society that is equivalent to Nazi Germany now. Such assertions are false equivalences (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence).

And consumption of unhealthy food also costs a lot:


http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3301e/i3301e.pdf (http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3301e/i3301e.pdf)

If we were more certain about which foods are healthy and unhealthy, it would be more justifiable to put taxes on unhealthy foods and to subsidize healthy foods. It is very risky business to put taxes on unhealthy food, unless you are really certain that it is unhealthy. It is also risky business to educate kids about healthy nourishment, unless you are somewhat certain that your ideas about healthy nourishment are correct. That could generate distrust in the government.

I have now also written a bit about this and how malnutrition influences the global economy in my main document: http://archania.org/a_new_way_to_do_nutritional_research.html (http://archania.org/a_new_way_to_do_nutritional_research.html)

We need to ban video games to stop people from being unproductive. Lack of productivity costs a lot.

You're still not answering my very simple yes/no questions:

Do you have any evidence that the way human behavior works is reflected in what you did to that image where you blotted out half the pixels?

Do you have any evidence for the 10% anomalies estimate?

And again, do you have any evidence of the extent to which implementing the surveillance state you want to implement (tracking all people's purchases) would improve our scientific understanding of nutrition?

This is a  false equivalence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence).


Reality is not always so simple that it fits into binary thinking patterns.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology))

You either have evidence or you don't. There is no other possibility. You can't both have evidence and not have evidence.

Nonsense. There are always degrees of certainty from evidences. According to Bayesian statistics, an evidence can never give you 100% certainty of anything.

http://www.archania.org/bayes_theorem_explained.html (http://www.archania.org/bayes_theorem_explained.html)

That isn't what I asked. I'll repeat it again.

Do you have any evidence of the extent to which implementing the surveillance state you want to implement (tracking all people's purchases) would improve our scientific understanding of nutrition?

The answer is either "yes" or "no".

Let me ask you then, how would you get such evidence, without first implementing such a system?

According to theory? Yeah, I have tons of evidence that such a system should improve our scientific understanding of nutrition.

That isn't an answer to my question.

Do you have any evidence of the extent to which implementing the surveillance state you want to implement (tracking all people's purchases) would improve our scientific understanding of nutrition?

If you are just having a hard time with English, "the extent to which" is synonymous in this context with "how much", "the degree to which", "how effectively", etc.

Tracking what each person is buying, could certainly in theory be used to improve our scientific understanding of nutrition.

Also, tracking all people's purchases, is only one form of surveillance. This type of surveillance might not be as common in your country as here, but other forms of surveillance might be much more common in your country than here (for example cellphone surveillance and Internet surveillance). So your country might still fit the definition of a "surveillance state" more than my country. I don't know about you, but I would certainly care less about somebody monitoring what groceries I am buying, than I would care about someone reading my private emails. Not all forms of surveillance are necessarily equally unacceptable.

According to this map for example, your country has much more surveillance than mine:

(https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/2007/12/31/surveillance_map.jpg)

https://www.wired.com/2007/12/worlds-top-surv/ (https://www.wired.com/2007/12/worlds-top-surv/)

Looks like USA, UK, China, and Russia are worst in the world. Not my country, Germany, France, or the Netherlands. Canada and Australia also seems to have less surveillance than your country.

Here is another map I found. Your country is also depicted as doing more surveillance here:

(https://namhenderson.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/surveillance-societies.jpg)

https://namhenderson.wordpress.com/2007/09/11/map-of-level-of-surveillance-across-globe/ (https://namhenderson.wordpress.com/2007/09/11/map-of-level-of-surveillance-across-globe/)

So it might at least be considered mildly hypocritical of you to criticize a west European country like the Netherlands for being a "surveillance state".

That still doesn't answer my question.

Do you have any evidence of the extent to which implementing the surveillance state you want to implement (tracking all people's purchases) would improve our scientific understanding of nutrition?


I disagree. The level of privacy a country has is far more complicated that what can be shown on a pretty map, and neither of those two maps come with detailed explanations for how whoever drew them up came to the conclusion they did. The second one seems to focus a lot on "protections", which is a nonsense measure, because it's the capability of the state and other powerful parties to perform surveillance that is dangerous. This is true regardless of what the law says, as the Snowden revelations made perfectly clear; governments can just ignore their own laws or sneak around them. Speaking of Snowden, these maps also predate his revelations by a few years, so they are woefully out of date.

But that's rather insubstantial to the point. Even if it is true that the U.S. is already worse than any other Western nation (a premise I do not accept), that wouldn't excuse even further surveillance. Quite the contrary, it would mean that the surveillance that already exists must be eliminated.

So let's get back to the actual point.

Do you have any evidence of the extent to which implementing the surveillance state you want to implement (tracking all people's purchases) would improve our scientific understanding of nutrition?

The type of surveillance your country is engaged in, which Edward Snowden showed us? Yeah, I think we should get rid of such surveillance.

The type of surveillance that my country is engaged in (grocery shops monitoring what people are buying)? No, I don't necessarily think we should get rid of it, and go back to a stone age cash based society. I think we should have very strict rules for what the grocery shops are allowed to do with that information. If it is just sent to my private account, so that I can have an overview of what groceries I am buying, I think it is acceptable.

Btw. If you don't want any surveillance, maybe you also don't want your doctor/hospital to keep a journal of your health? I think most people rather would let someone see their shopping history, than their health journal.

Anyhow, making the world into a zero-surveillance society, would be impossible at this stage, with Internet and all the cameras. If you really want to live in a zero-surveillance society, you should move to somewhere in Africa and live off the grid. Or maybe join one of your Amish settlements.

I am not going to have this conversation diverted until we have established, clearly, what it is that you are proposing we sacrifice our privacy for. So I ask again:

Do you have any evidence of the extent to which implementing the surveillance state you want to implement (tracking all people's purchases) would improve our scientific understanding of nutrition?

This is the seventh time I have asked this very simple yes/no question, and I have yet to get a straight answer from you.

You said yourself:


Consider that as an answer to your own question. It is much more complicated than what you are implying with your question.

In particular. The "extent to which" part, makes it sound like there is only one type of surveillance, and that we can measure the amount of surveillance 1-dimensionally. If we could do that, we could also make a pretty map with shades of gray, where your country wouldn't exactly have the lightest shade of gray. So, yeah, I think it could be implemented with much less surveillance than you have now, or with a much more benevolent form of surveillance than you have today.

Aha, I see the problem here. You did misunderstand the question, albeit not in the way that I thought you might.

For reference, this was the question:

"Do you have any evidence of the extent to which implementing the surveillance state you want to implement (tracking all people's purchases) would improve our scientific understanding of nutrition?"

Your mistake is in assuming that "the extent to which" is modifying the "implementing..." part, which is an impossible interpretation. Note the use of "to which", not "of". "The extent to which" is modifying the "would improve..." part. The "to which" pattern I used here can never be used to modify the cause in a sentence like this one, only the result.

Do you understand the question well enough to answer it now?

As I have already told you, yes it should work according to theory. You can make computer simulations and they will show you that it works, unless you add a lot of noise (which would be anomalies in reality). However, I cannot get empirical evidence before a society has experimented with it, as you ought to know. We don't know exactly how much noise (anomalies) there will be, but there has to be a lot of noise (anomalies) for it to not work at all.

In a very disorganized society (like Venezuela), I doubt it would work very well. In more organized societies; like Japan, Singapore and South Korea, there would probably be much less noise (anomalies), and it would work better.

Then you are still not understanding the question, because no, that is not an answer to it. Please read this very carefully. Every single word is in there for a reason:

Do you have any evidence of the extent to which implementing the surveillance state you want to implement (tracking all people's purchases) would improve our scientific understanding of nutrition?

What do you consider evidence?  Like I have told you a 100 times now.

Theoretical evidence? Yes

Empirical evidence? No

Do you understand the meaning of the word evidence?

What might be considered evidence is actually a quite complicated subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_proof (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_proof)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_evidence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_evidence)

Do I have any evidence that I will die from jumping down from the top of the Empire state building?

Theoretical evidence? Yes

Empirical evidence? No

I am not convinced that you are reading and comprehending my question. You're still talking about simple cause and effect, when my question is about the degree of improvement. Here it is again; please read carefully every word, and if there is anything that is unclear to you, please ask so that I can explain it:

Do you have any evidence of the extent to which implementing the surveillance state you want to implement (tracking all people's purchases) would improve our scientific understanding of nutrition?

How can you ask me if I have any evidence for anything, when you are not even willing to show me that you understand what the word evidence entails?

Zanthius, you aren't properly reading my question. You are answering a question I never asked, repeatedly. You need to carefully read the question and understand it. Once you understand it, you can answer it properly, and it is a very easy question. I am more than happy to help you understand it, but I need to know what part of the sentence is confusing you to help you. So the question, again, is:

Do you have any evidence of the extent to which implementing the surveillance state you want to implement (tracking all people's purchases) would improve our scientific understanding of nutrition?

Show me at least that you have a basic understanding of what the word evidence means. The part of the sentence that confuses me is just the word evidence.


Okay. You are not asking me if I have any evidence to prove that the spaceship is working? You are asking me if I have any evidence to prove that the spaceship goes faster than a car.

Yes. I have been arguing all the time, that if the spaceship works at all, it will definitely go faster than a car.  Cars are not moving very fast compared to spaceships.

No. If we were talking about a space ship, I would be asking you if you have any evidence of how fast the space ship is moving, or more aptly, how much faster it would be if an additional rocket were added to it.

"Evidence" means facts which supports an assertion. If I was asking for evidence of the speed of a space ship, an example of evidence might be a table of time since launch and corresponding displacement. For the speed difference of a new rocket, you would also need a table showing the same thing with the new rocket attached, or at the very least you would need to have some prior examples to extrapolate from where fitting an additional rocket made a ship faster.

Do you understand the question now?

Lets just say that for a space ship to work at all, it needs to get out of Earth's gravity field (the escape velocity from Earth is about 11.186 km/s).

There are no cars that move even close to 11.186 km/s.

Do you have any evidence of the extent to which implementing the surveillance state you want to implement (tracking all people's purchases) would improve our scientific understanding of nutrition?

You are wrong. That would be like doing another randomized controlled trial in the same fashion as the old studies. It is not like adding an additional rocket. It is a completely different vehicle.

Don't get caught up in an analogy. You should understand the question now.

Do you have any evidence of the extent to which implementing the surveillance state you want to implement (tracking all people's purchases) would improve our scientific understanding of nutrition?

The difficult part with your question is still the "evidence" part, and not evidence of how fast it moves. Evidence that it won't explode while trying to escape Earth's gravity field. Several space rockets have exploded.  So, if you went to a guy in NASA, and asked him he has any evidence that the next space launch is going to be a success, what do you think he would say? He might say no, but if NASA didn't believe they would succeed, they would never invest so much in their projects.

If something has never been tried before, you can't really ask for evidence that it is going to work. The next time you are going to fly, try to ask the aircraft pilot if he has any evidence that you are going to survive the flight. If he says yes, he is intellectually dishonest.

I'm trying to establish clearly on what grounds we are going to engage in this discussion. Please just answer the question.

Do you have any evidence of the extent to which implementing the surveillance state you want to implement (tracking all people's purchases) would improve our scientific understanding of nutrition?

No.

Do you have any evidence that you are going to survive your next flight? No.

Evidence is something we get after an occurrence, not something we have before an occurrence.

I can just imagine you refusing to fly with your parents when you were a kid, because they couldn't provide you with evidence that you would survive.

After a flight, you might very well say that you have evidence that you survived the flight, since the occurrence is in your past. But unfortunately, we can never have evidence that we are going to survive the next flight.

Thank you. With that established, I can give my argument.

Since you have no evidence of the extent what you are proposing will improve scientific understanding, we have no idea what benefit would result. It could be huge. It could be mediocre. It could be small. It could be incremental. So what we are weighing against erosion of essential civil liberties is the hope that science might advance forward, and we have no idea how much.

That is not an acceptable trade-off. Civil liberties are far more important than any scientific advancement, let alone the meager possibility of such. In the case of privacy, if the government or any entity is able to watch everything you buy, it can get to know far more about you than it is acceptable for it to know.

For example, with this information, a government could easily infer your nationalistic leanings or lack thereof. They could note that you are not buying enough state sponsored nationalistic merchanise, and have you sent to a gulag to prevent you from poisoning other citizens' minds, but officially they would accuse you of some sort of crime, perhaps found out about through mass surveillance, or (as in North Korea) you would just disappear and become an unperson.

In the more short-term, if the government can track every purchase you make, that makes it easy for them to track your movement, albeit not as easy as if you are carrying a cell phone.

That is not how I perceive it at all. If it works, I definitely perceive the benefits to be huge, since it analyzes tons of things and millions of people. It would be like millions of randomized controlled trials, and the results would converge towards one trend/correlation for each food-health correlation, not diverge and generate confusion like we have seen with the nutritional studies.


What do you think I am proposing? For a government agency to collect information about what you are buying? No, I am proposing that information that is already collected about what you are buying is sent to YOUR OWN account, not to a government agency.

Actually, there is no way to prevent grocery shops from collecting information about what we are buying now, unless we go back to a cash based society. The grocery shop just needs to store each receipt and correlate it to the bank account that was used to pay the bill. For example, at 09:45 03.07.2017, a receipt of 23.54 USD was registered in a grocery shop. They just correlate this to a bill they received of 23.54 USD from the same time/day from the payment terminal in the specific grocery shop. Grocery shops are doing this right now. They just aren't sending me information about what I am buying. My proposal is that they start to send this information to me, and that we make rules which makes it illegal for them to give this information to someone else.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/jun/08/supermarkets-get-your-data (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/jun/08/supermarkets-get-your-data)

Another thing, is that grocery shops increasingly are using cameras to avoid theft. They might very well also take a picture of each customer, while they are paying the bill. I don' think it is going to be possible to deny grocery shops from using cameras. They have very good reasons to have them, because of theft prevention.

What we need is not for all grocery shops to get rid of their cameras, and go back to a cash based society. We need to have laws and supervision of the companies and government institutions that collect information about us, since it is more or less impossible to stop them from collecting information about us.

I have now also written about why we cannot necessary trust pharmaceutical studies, even if they are not necessary contradictory like the nutritional studies:

(https://image.ibb.co/kgPKLF/pharmaceuticals_studies.png)

http://archania.org/a_new_way_to_study_nutrition_and_pharmaceuticals.html (http://archania.org/a_new_way_to_study_nutrition_and_pharmaceuticals.html)

Since you have been so good at telling me to read your sentence, maybe you should read this again:

There are so many things wrong with this I don't even know where to begin.

First of all, what you are describing now is just a form of self-reporting. We already do that.

So I presume what you're trying to do is prevent people from misremembering or misreporting data by forcing them to store it in a server somewhere -- you propose that only they can access it -- and then either helping or forcing them to then send their data to a research center.

For starters, your premise, that it is possible to force people to send data to a centralized server they don't control, using another computer they don't control, without anyone gaining access to your data, is simply untrue. Forget encryption or any other security measures. You're inputting this data into a store's POS system, which then encrypts it for you and sends it off to the government data server. If the government wants to track you, all they need to do is compel the store to steal your secret key as you type it in; the computer that handles your key entry can simply first store it in a text file somewhere and then use it to encrypt your data as normal.

This is of course assuming your key isn't laughably easy to guess, which if you know anything about people, you know is typically not the case. So many people choose obvious PINs like "1111", "1234", or "2468". In fact, if it's a 4-digit number, or even an 8 digit number, it's going to be easy to crack even if it's a "good" one. For any password to actually work against brute-force attacks, you need to incorporate both letters and numbers at least, and preferably special characters as well. That would mean you would have to install full-sized keyboards at every POS terminal for customers to use, or more realistically (since there's no way companies are going to go that far), use touchscreen keyboards that a decent camera can see very easily.

The only possible way I could imagine this problem being alleviated is if you never, ever identify yourself when using your key (which we have established you are not in favor of; you consider cash to be a relic of the "stone age", which is odd since cash didn't exist at that time), and you make it so that people set up their own account, again without identifying themselves, at their own discretion. Well, here's the problem with that: if anyone can set up a new account any time they like, people are going to be forgetting their keys, rebelling against the logging, etc. So a whole bunch of datasets are going to be put out of whack.

Plus, what ever happened to only collecting data about single people? You can't do that if you can't identify which data set corresponds with which person. And you have to know enough about each person to determine whether or not they are single. That sure sounds like a surveillance state to me in and of itself.

By the way, you seem to be really fond of laws preventing access. Those don't work. The government itself is your adversary in this case. Governments, as I said, can either weasel their way around laws, or pass new laws. You cannot depend on laws to stop your data from being looked at. That's why you need to stop your data from being collected in the first place.

I'm sorry, but you're trying to join two things that are diametrically opposed. There are two options:

1. Rely on self-reporting. This is what we currently do, and it works in any type of society, but it is often imperfect.
2. Use the power of a totalitarian dictatorship to collect the data of every citizen, but be more effective at doing so than North Korea. This would be perfect data as long as the government doesn't ever lie.

And a final point, even with option 2, it is not correct to say that this is equivalent to a randomized controlled trial. Research based on data from option 2 is still just a case-control study or other observational study.

Ehh.. No way. Even if it is your account, and only you have access to it, you should of course not be allowed to edit the data in any way. So, if you want to use this data for research, it is exactly the same data that already has been stored about you other places.


Yeah, but since this account is only going to store information that already is stored about you somewhere else on the Internet, a hacker or government agency could just as well go there to get it. Probably easier to have supervision of the security in this server, than all the sources it is collecting data from.

Also, the server can be based on Linux and use a open source security system, and if we find out that someone has stolen information from the server, the population will of course demand an even more secure system.


Ehhh.. the information about if the person is single or not, is stored in the anonymous data set....


Of course it is not equivalent to a randomized controlled trial. A randomized controlled trial is equivalent to one of your election polls. This is similar to a real election, since it is based on the entire population.

Then do you accept that what you are proposing would require all citizens to identify themselves, and for the government to be able to identify any particular person's purchase history?


If this information is already on the Internet, why don't researchers just use that? If they do use it, then why do you need to collect data in the first place?


Then you think observational studies are more reliable than randomized controlled trials? Do you have any evidence for this? It is, after all, the exact opposite of the current common understanding of scientific evidence, as you can see on the Wikipedia page for randomized controlled trials (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_controlled_trial).

Look. This is basic set theory (mathematics). You agree that both the control group, and the treatment group in a randomized controlled trial are subsets of the entire population?

(https://image.ibb.co/byDPnv/randomized_controlled_trial.png)

If you agree that both the control group and the treatment group are subsets of the entire population, do you also agree that all the information contained in those 2 subsets also is contained in the set of the entire population?

The reason why they are using a random selection of people in randomized controlled trials, is because they want to estimate the general population, since they don't have capacity to measure the entire population:

(https://image.ibb.co/i5FJfF/randomization.png)

Since I want to study the entire population, I will just use the entire population that isn't getting the treatment as a control group:

(https://image.ibb.co/jbGKnv/my_system.png)

Yes, but this isn't a question about how much information you have. It's a question of methodology. If you take two groups of 20 rats, control every variable about both groups so that they are as identical as possible, then inject one group with cyanide, when you observe that 19 out of the 20 rats from the cyanide group died while none in the control group died, you can be confident that it was the cyanide that caused them to die and not the food you were feeding them. But if you have a million rats and somehow figure out exactly what all of them are eating, then correlate a high consumption of grass with a high rate of testicular cancer, you cannot confidently conclude that grass causes testicular cancer. This is basic science.


You're not performing an experiment, you're observing the current state of things. An actual experiment (a randomized controlled trial) would be to divide rats into two groups, separate them, control all variables you can (that's the controlled part of "randomized controlled trial"), and specifically add grass to one of the rat groups' diet. Then you check to see if that group has a higher rate of testicular cancer than the other group, and if the difference is statistically significant. If so, then you can conclude that grass causes testicular cancer in rats. Of course, the more such experiments show such a result, the more confident you can be that grass causes testicular cancer.

I would still like to know the answers to the two questions I posed in that same post, by the way:

You would just use all the rats that didn't get cyanide as a control group, and you would still see that the death rate was much higher for the rats that got cyanide than for the general population of rats.

And btw, maybe you can control all the variables for a population of rats, but for ethical reasons they never do that in nutritional or medicinal studies on humans. You can just forget about controlling all the variables when studying humans. I try to control all the variables sometimes when I do chemical experiments, and even that is hard.

But yeah, I agree with you, that if we could control all the variables for a bunch of humans, that would also be a good way to study humans. But then you would need to treat those humans like research rats.


This is kinda what we discussed much earlier in the thread. It is better if data about me is sent to me, than if somebody collects data about me behind my back.


I don't understand your question.

The cyanide injection example was an example of an RCT. It was not an example of a case-control study. I don't know why you are suggesting using a different, less reliable control group (less reliable because you aren't controlling it for factors) in an example where a control group already exists.


That's exactly what I said at the very beginning. Don't you remember? You made the argument that nutrition could be properly understood if only we gathered all of the data. Then you used North Korea as an example of a country that could surely advance nutrition science so far just by observing what it knows about its population. I objected, saying that I am not okay with giving up fundamental liberties for what I suppose would be an incremental improvement in our understanding at best. You agreed that you have no evidence of the extent to which monitoring people's purchases would improve scientific understanding of nutrition. So what we are left with is that we are looking at trading essential liberties for possibly improving scientific understanding by an undetermined amount. I do not think that is a good deal.

Your current argument, as I understand it, is that:

1. The data is already out there, so you don't need to worry about a loss of privacy.
2. Really big case-control studies are more reliable than randomized controlled trials.

So on the first point, I asked why researchers don't use that, which you have answered. On the second point, you are expressing a view that is diametrically opposed to the common understanding of the weight of different kinds of research, so for that, I have another question:

Do you have any evidence that sufficiently large case control studies are more reliable than properly sized randomized controlled trials?


The question referred to is, "Do you accept that what you are proposing would require all citizens to identify themselves, and for the government to be able to identify any particular person's purchase history?"

What part of the question are you having trouble understanding?


Are you saying that researchers don't use this data because of privacy concerns?

Do you mean better than randomized controlled trials on humans, or on rats where you control all the variables? We never control all the variables in studies on humans.

Btw, I got this idea while doing chemistry experiments where I controlled all the variables, and only varied one variable. I imagined that if I just had billions of experiments, I could select experiments that only varied in one variable from chance, without necessarily setting up the experiment like that, and it would give me the same information.

You see... lets say there are 3 variables.

I could set up an experiment where I want to find the difference between:

[1][1][1] and [1][1][2]

But if I just had billions of experiments, I wouldn't need to set the first 2 variables to be equal, there would be some experiments like that from chance, and if I managed to find those experiments, it would be exactly the same.

Or to take another example. Lets say you wanted to study a vegetarian diet. You could set up an experiment where some people had to eat meat, while others had to eat vegetarian. But you could also just find carnivores and vegetarians in the general population, without setting up the experiment like that. When we have really big amounts of data, we can sometimes find examples that match the criteria we wanted to have for our controlled experiment. If you analyze the entire American population, there probably are a few individuals that eat almost exactly the same as you, except for differing in just one variable. Studying those individuals, and comparing them to people that eat more or less exactly the same as you, would be like a controlled experiment where you vary only one variable.


Of course, they would need to identify themselves to log into their accounts.


I am not sure how the government is supposed to be able to this? By hacking into the server?


Yes, and because it is illegal for researchers and government workers to hack into grocery shops and hospitals to steal data.

Comparing like with like. It's a generalized question. But if you need a specific example, then compare an RCT with rats with a hypothetical case control study on rats.


That's a meta-analysis. It's completely different from looking at correlations of populations.


There are several possible ways. The simplest way is for the government to simply compel the shop to store your key (e.g. password) in a text file before using it to encrypt the data, then give that key to them. Since you were required to identify yourself, the government (or the shop itself, for that matter) can then connect the two. And this only ever has to happen once, at which point your entire history of purchases anywhere is now visible to the government, as well as all future purchases.

You cannot forcibly collect data from someone and not have the means to learn it at the same time.


Do you think researchers are justified in their aversion to violating people's privacy in this way?

If so, why would it be any better for a government to force everyone to identify themselves any time they make a purchase?

If not, why not?

Why should we compare this to a study on rats? Yes, I agree with you that studies on rats can be at least as reliable as the system I am proposing for studying humans, since we can do whatever we want with rats. We can't do whatever we want with humans. We can't test for lethal dose on humans. Doing research on humans is DIFFERENT from doing research on rats, and the system I am proposing was never intended for studying rats. In fact, I don't necessarily even think we need a better method for studying rats. We need a better system for studying humans.


What is your proposal? To make all private companies and government institutions stop storing data about you? Good luck with that. There is always a possibility that someone might steal data about you if it is stored somewhere. Right now information about you is stored in hospitals, grocery shops, banks, several government institutions, and probably on lots of websites (like google and facebook). All of them can be hacked, just like your own email account can be hacked. I don't understand why it would be any worse if I got information stored about me by private companies and government institutions sent to my private account. It can just as well be stolen from their accounts as from my private account. Also, I kinda want to know what they have stored about me.


When have I ever proposed that we should force people to identify themselves when they are buying groceries? I have said that grocery shops already are storing information about what you are buying, without your knowledge, as long as you are paying with a bank card.

Actually, according to the article I posted here earlier, they even store information about you if you pay with cash. There are several ways they could do this. For example by facial recognition cameras.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/jun/08/supermarkets-get-your-data (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/jun/08/supermarkets-get-your-data)


Yeah!! That sounds right. What I am proposing is like meta-studies based upon thousands of case-control correlation studies.

You really need to work on your reading comprehension. You have been constantly misunderstanding things I have been saying, and none of what you have been misunderstanding has been unclear.

I did not say anything about comparing human studies to rat studies. I asked you if you have any evidence that large case control studies are more reliable than properly sized, but smaller randomized controlled trials. It has nothing to do with rats or humans or any other research topic for that matter. It's only about the scientific method.

The question came about because you implied the argument that more data equates to better research. I am under the impression that you believe that properly done case control studies are at least as reliable as randomized controlled trials. Correct me if I am wrong. Otherwise, I would like to know if you have any evidence to support this belief.


Actually, yes.

But in the meantime, it's important to not force companies to collect, because then at least they won't always collect. Today, it is possible to purchase things anonymously with cash and without identifying yourself. If the government were to force shops to identify you, or abolish anonymous forms of payment, it would not be possible.

In other words: keep the status quo for now, work toward improving it. I do not accept defeatism as an option.


Right here:


We previously established that you are proposing that it should be impossible for the citizens to "edit the data":


So that implies that you are required by law to access the account and send accurate information to it; to do otherwise would be to edit the data. This would in turn require implementing some mechanism to ensure that you are using your own key (I suppose by checking a cryptographic signature), and that would be impossible without identifying yourself. The shop would also have to verify that the information you sent is correct.

Therefore, what you are proposing necessarily requires everyone to identify themselves every time they make a purchase. The easiest way to do what you are proposing is to handle all of this encryption and verification in the shop's computer.

I can guarantee you that in the randomized controlled experiments on humans, they aren't controlling all the variables. Yes, this is about the scientific method. Unless you control all the variables in a randomized controlled experiment on humans, my system is better, since it can find individuals that match the criteria you need for an experiment where you control all the variables from an enormously large set of data. There are probably several individuals in the United States that eat almost exactly the same food as you, but you can't necessarily force a bunch of people to eat exactly the same as you in an experiment. That would be unethical.



Look, I am not proposing that it should be sent to my private computer, but more like a super secure gmail account which only I have access to. That server could very well be made so that individuals could log in and look at their own data, but they wouldn't have any possibility to edit their data. It could also be made so that in order to log into your account, you would need to verify your identity with a password and code sent to your phone. The company that made the server, should also make it open source, so that we can look into the source code and see that they themselves also don't have any possibility to look at our data.  That puts an even higher level of security on the server than what most countries have in their military. Because the military in many countries (like Iran), apparently use Windows, which made it open to attack by the Stuxnet virus. If I had a country, I would never let my military use Windows and/or macOS since it isn't open source.


Maybe you can get a bank card that is related to a bitcoin account, and I kinda agree with you that this should be a possibility, because I like that people should be free to choose. Look what I found:

(https://www.bitmart.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/How-Debit-Card-Bitcoin-Work.png) (https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-KfVLB7gcZzQ/U-IsFC9CY_I/AAAAAAAAADw/7ZmgfEIgfQo/w255-h165-p/bitcoin_inner.png)

But you should know that most people don't care nearly as much about their privacy as you might, and the vast majority of people are never going to start using bank cards related to anonymous bitcoin accounts. The vast majority of people are not going to start using VPN when they are connected to Internet. The vast majority of people are not even going to stop putting out their private stuff on Facebook, because the vast majority of people don't care a lot about their privacy.

I just realized now, that you might have been talking about the randomization between those that get the real pill and the fake pill. Such a randomization is of course not an option in most nutritional studies, since it is more or less impossible to give people fake food, like you give them a fake pill in pharmaceutical studies.

Well, anyhow, since you guys are so much into empirical evidence, here is something I found about that type of randomization:


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24782322 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24782322)


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17443633 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17443633)

What a sad, sad, state the sciences that study humans are in.... I can just imagine if I randomly assigned a "real" chemical and a "fake" chemical to my reactions, without having any control of all the other variables, and there would be thousands of other chemicals in these reactions, which I had no control over. I doubt it would be possible for me to figure out how that specific chemical influenced the reaction....

I know that.


Correct, it could be designed to allow the citizen to look at the existing data. Not add new data. If the citizen could add data, then they would be able to add incorrect data, thus changing the dataset. You could claim to be buying celery when you're actually buying ice cream, for example. Therefore, the data would have to be added by the store. For the store to do that, it would need to know what the account is. And since, as you said, the people would be required to identify themselves to "access" their account (and adding information is a type of access), there simply isn't a way to design this in a way that would prevent the store, and by extension the government, from being able to determine which account is yours.

At best, it would be possible to hide the secret key from the government if the citizen generates their own secret key and is responsible for decrypting it and sending it to researchers. It wouldn't work that way, though, because it would be too complicated. Even if it did, there would still be ways to loosely link your now unencrypted data to your identity.

The main point I'm getting at here is, for your system to work, it necessarily follows that the government, and probably several other individuals, can learn your entire life's purchase history. You simply cannot design a system to work the way you are imagining. This has very little to do with security and more to do with the contradictory goal you are trying to accomplish.


Bitcoin is not anonymous. If you want to make payments online anonymously, the best way is to pay cash for a prepaid debit card or VISA/Mastercard gift card, then use that.


Yes, and that is a tragedy. That's not really relevant to what we're talking about, however. The fact that most people don't care is not a justification for violating essential liberties. It could be that most people in the U.S. don't care about freedom of non-Christian religion. That does not justify turning the U.S. into a Christian theocracy.

The store knows for example which bank account is related to my purchases. They send this information encrypted to the server. The server then recognizes that this bank account belongs to me.

Lets imagine that they just sent this information to google, and google figured out that it belonged to me, since I was registered with that bank account. Now, how would the store figure out my google ID?

Secondly, if I want to use this information to participate in research, I don't give away my google ID then either. Then it is sent from another anonymous user ID, which has nothing to do with my google ID.

Even ignoring the fact that people buy things for other people all the time, all you've done here is re-route the problem to the bank. So now it's the bank the government compels to reveal your information.


So let me get this straight. You are saying now that this would be non-compulsory? You don't have to send your data to research centers, or anyone?

If that is the case, why is it necessary to compel people to save this information in the first place?

The bank would just send information about my bank account to the server, with my social security number for example. Then the server would know that it is my bank account, since I am registered there with that social security number. They still don't have any clue about  my user/login ID.

Now you are just going to say that I have re-routed the problem to the government, since they gave me my social security number. But here is the beauty of it. The government first opens an account with your social security number. But the first time you use the account, you need to change your user ID (either of your own choosing, or a randomly assigned user ID), and the government won't have any clue about what that new user ID is. Still,  your social security number will be assigned to your account.

It should also be possible for you to change your user/login ID, whenever you want.


I have said that all the time.


Because some people might want to know what information is stored about themselves, some might want to use it for their own endeavors, while others might want to participate in such a research project.

Then you're re-routing the problem to whomever runs the server. Now it's the server operators the government goes to. What's more, by using this method, you are ensuring that the server operators can see all the data on the server. That just makes it even easier for the government to track your purchases. No trickery needed.


That doesn't solve anything.


That's a terrible reason to mandate the collection of data. Unless they have a warrant to do so, the state should not be collecting data about you at all. And to use the data yourself, you can easily record it yourself and answer surveys.

Oh really. Then I am sure Linus Torvalds has access to all the Linux computers in the world, since he releases the Linux kernel. Or that whoever develops the different Linux distributions have access to all the Linux computers that use the different distributions. For example, the people developing Debian have access to all Debian computers in the world. The people developing Arch Linux have access to all the Arch Linux computers in the world, etc. It would be easy for them to make it like that, if it wasn't open source... That is why I don't trust Windows and MacOS, but I do trust in Linux and open source.  So no problem. Just make it into a Linux server, and make the system open source. The people developing the system don't need to have any more access to my account, than Linus Torvalds and the people developing Arch Linux has to my computer.

Please don't argue from ignorance. It's fine if you don't understand how servers or cryptography work. But when you say things like this, it just makes you look arrogant.

I said server operators. As in, the people who own the server. Owning the server being used is not the same as developing a program being used.

Since I know you know little about this topic, I should explain briefly what a server is. A server is a computer which is connected to the Internet and provides services. Whoever owns that computer (the server) can control what it does and access everything on it.

It's great for the server owner for the server to be running only libre software. That protects them from malware. But it means essentially nothing to people who only access the service provided by the server, because the server owner can do whatever they want.

It doesn't necessarily need to have any operators. Just people that develop and update the system.


You know, even at this computer, I can just create another user, and encrypt the folder of that user. Even though I have administrator access on this computer, I wont have any access to that encrypted folder unless I know the encryption passphrase. I can delete the user and his folder, but not access his folder. The assertion that a server owner can access everything they want is nonsense. I think you have a basic misunderstanding about what encryption is.

Yes, it does. All servers do. The operator would likely just be the owner, which yes, all servers have to have. It's just like any other equipment.


There's a big difference between not being able to access something and not being able to understand something.

But as I have been trying to explain to you, it is not possible for the owner of the server to be unable to know what something on the server is unless it never does the decryption or encryption. If the encryption and decryption is done at the bank, the bank can read it. If the encryption and decryption is done on the store's computer, the store can read it. If the encryption and decryption is done on the server itself, the server can read it. The only way you can use cryptography to protect the citizen is if the data is encrypted and decrypted only on their own computer, which as I explained is impossible if you're going to require I.D. checks or force the citizen to upload certain information.

Yeah, but the administrator doesn't need to be able to read it. You can make a Linux distribution where the administrator have much less rights.

Yes, they do. It necessarily follows from the fact that they can control what the computer does.


And the owner of the server can just not use that distribution, or replace it with one that doesn't put arbitrary restraints on what they're able to do like that. This idea of making the owner of a computer unable to do something that a computer can do (a.k.a. DRM) is a pure fantasy. The only way it can sort of work is with a proprietary software stack, in which case it's the proprietary software stack's developers who can put malware into the computer to allow them to record and/or transmit the information.

Sure, but then they won't necessarily be able to run the program to operate the user database anymore, and they won't have any access to the database since it is encrypted. And it would be completely illegal, and they would need to spend the rest of their lives in prison if they got caught.

Anyhow. 100% security is more or less impossible in the technological world we live in. If you don't want technology because it infringes on your civil liberties, then go and join an Amish settlement. Personally I prefer to live in a technological world with a little surveillance and a little insecurity, rather than in an Amish settlement without any technology and surveillance. I also really don't care so much if anybody learned what groceries I am buying. Do you want to see my grocery receipts?

Even if I was gay or smoked marijuana , I don't think the best solution would be to keep it secret (privacy). I think the best solution is for people to be less judgmental.

Yes they will. There isn't any possible way for a program to not work with a certain operating system, unless it's proprietary, in which case, again, the developer of the program can introduce malware.


No, because the government itself is your adversary. I don't know why you refuse to accept this simple fact. Just look at North Korea, Soviet Russia, even China. Malicious states do exist, and in wide numbers. You can't just expect your government to be benevolent in perpetuity. If you give your government too much power, and it goes rogue 50 years down the line, you will find yourself living in 1984.


Security is largely a moot point. It's a secondary concern, but more important is the fundamental nature of the collection of data.


Our choices aren't an Amish farmland and 1984. Technology doesn't necessitate totalitarianism or mass surveillance. Saying that you would rather have technology is not a valid argument for increasing surveillance.

I live in a society where around 80% of the population trusts our government. You live in a society where around 20% of the population trusts your government. You live in a country with tons of gun violence, because people feel like they need to have guns to protect themselves from the police/government. I live in a society where there is almost no gun violence, since we don't have crazy ideas about the necessity of having guns to protect ourselves from our democratically elected government. Your country has the highest incarceration rate in the world. We have one of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. In my country, the police officer is my friend. In your country, he is your enemy.

Yeah, and we also beat you on practically all country comparisons; like human development index, press freedom index, gender equality index, corruption index, etc.

No, I do not think we should aspire to become as distrustful of our democratically elected government as you are.

In a functional democracy, the government is respectful of the population, and the population trusts the government.

Everything you said about the U.S. is far more complicated than you claim (even the part about distrusting government), and even if it were all 100% true cut and dry, it would not be evidence that your country is going to stay benevolent forever. Power corrupts, leaders change, that sort of thing.

Ehh... yeah. You just elected a narcissistic demagogue (real estate mogul) to be your president. He is the ultimate symbol of power corruption. That wouldn't work here. Government officials go to prison here for doing things like what he is doing. In your country, maybe they can do whatever they want. Here, government officials need to abide to the law. Especially high ranking government officials, like presidents.

Why don't you start putting rich people that cheat on their taxes into prison, instead of poor marijuana smokers? Because as you said, power corrupts, and exactly therefore it is necessary to be extremely strict with the most rich/powerful individuals in a society. You know, ideally, your government should work for you, not against you.

GUYS.

I step out for a day and just zap spammers… put off reading the Nutrition thread… and I have 4 new pages which do not look at all friendly.

I think one of the big recurring issues is here:

Julie says "The main point I'm getting at here is, for your system to work, it necessarily follows that the government, and probably several other individuals, can learn your entire life's purchase history."

which is not quite the same thing as

"You are proposing to have a massive surveillance state which will inevitably be leaky."

The first claim implies his proposal would fail OR do that.