Q & A with Seth Roberts

This is a pretty weird situation. Over on Seth Roberts’ blog, he published a somewhat re-worked Q & A I did with him (with me being the Q and him being the A).

The story:

So I wrote a fairly long post about Seth Roberts – a psychology professor and famous self-experimenter best known (I think) for developing the Shangri-La diet – and his research, bringing up some things about his work that left me unsatisfied. The bottom line was that I think Seth’s work is brilliant and people should be paying attention to it, but I am not always eager to self-experiment nor to use his research to adjust my lifestyle because I am not sure the health benefits are always worth the trouble -- certain ones are essentially costless to implement like getting more sunlight in the morning, but others, like standing on one leg, are not.

I shared the draft with Seth in case he wanted to respond to any points or correct any factual errors. Well, it turned out there were a lot of factual errors. I made a lot of wrongful assumptions about Seth’s research and about his intentions for doing it. I thought it best to scrap the post and try again in the form of a Q & A. That way, I do not have to assume anything and can allow Seth to respond himself.

Through no fault of Seth’s, he did not like some of the questions. 4.5 out of 10, to be precise. And of the ones he did answer, a few were short responses. Seeing as my introduction to the Q & A would probably be about as long as the Q & A itself, I decided not to publish it, but encouraged Seth to explore the topics on his blog.

This morning he published a somewhat re-worked version of the Q & A, re-phrasing some of my questions and adding bulk to some of his answers, and even answering some questions that were not directly answered first time around. It looks much better now, so I recommend checking it out.

Weird situation but I am glad I had the opportunity to ask him some questions. Thanks again, Seth, and I hope there are no hard feelings.

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