That's a bold claim. Calories as a concept can be derived from the principals of Thermodynamics, to which the human body adheres. The conception of calories does however ignore the body's natural response to calorie restriction, and is therefore incomplete.
Calories can't explain why I can't live off of drinking gasoline, despite the bomb calorimeter showing it to be highly caloric
Calories are an simplified approximation, where your body handles things in the same way as a fire does.
Calories are bunk in that there's a random function between the thermodynamics your body adheres to, and the thermodynamics the food adheres to. One with properties like the total calories your body has access to must be less than the total in, but for a specific food, or a specific meal, the total calories could be larger than the food in the meal, if it makes other calories easier to process, or even a negative, if it makes you puke.
I know this is a bit hyperbolic to prove a point but it brings to the surface a point which so far goes unaddressed: the modulation and variation of metabolic efficiency.
Between the consumption of glucose and gasoline, there exists a spectrum of efficiency in the conversion of thermodynamic calories to useful bodily energy.
Take glucose for example. It's thermodynamic and metabolic calorie values are nearly equal (15.5MJ/kg or 3.7kcal/g). On the opposite end is gasoline, thermodynamically it's 46 MJ/kg but it's 0kcal/g if one were to ingest it. There simply isn't a metabolic pathway to extract energy from gasoline in human physiology.
I have no reason to doubt that the ratio of thermodynamic to metabolic efficiency varies amongst individuals, over time, and in the presence or absence of other compounds. When 9-14kcal/day supports the maintenance of 1kg of body mass in equilibrium, it's clear that, ceteris paribus[1], minute changes in metabolic efficiency can explain rather large differences in human mass.
1. Truly. Even/especially in the absence of differences in consumption.
typically the mechanism by which thyroid hormones are understood to affect weight gain is through appetite (calories in) and metabolic level (calories out) so they probably aren't really an exception to the calories-in-calories-out model
i mean as far as we know they don't enable you to digest carboxymethylcellulose or anything like that (one of the many common additives on my suspect list)
it's not totally inconceivable; some commensal enteric bacteria can digest carboxymethylcellulose, and they generate heat when they do so, and at least when it's cold outside that's heat you don't have to generate by shivering or physical activity, and we have such a poor understanding of what affects the intestinal microbiome that it's actually possible that thyroid hormone levels are important, but there's no evidence suggesting that this is the case as far as i know
but even on industrially produced diets most people probably don't eat enough carboxymethylcellulose and xanthan gum and shit like that for their digestibility to make a significant difference in their caloric intake; as i understand it the reason industrial food engineers use gums like these is that very small amounts of them can greatly increase the viscosity or gelling ability of foods, so you don't have to spend as much money as you would with more traditional thickeners like gelatinized starch
like, three grams of this carboxymethylcellulose i have here can turn 100 grams of water into a thick slime, but i would need about 30 grams of cornstarch to do this (which i would then have to cook)
(i think this is typical but your results may vary depending on the degree of functionalization of your cmc)
so if newly popular gums like this do cause obesity, it's probably through some kind of inflammatory mechanism or something, not by directly supplying calories
Many people complain about how good individual producers, but few talk about effective front-line managers being moved to where they are less effective. In organizations it's often assumed that the best managers need to be near the top of the org chart to spread their effectiveness as far as possible, but I contend that these great managers might be better off near producers in critical areas.
Very competent people are pretty rare in large organizations, once you factor in their environment.
Do you put your one best performing manager at the top or at your most impactful project? (I'm not sure about the answer, but I'm not sure it a real option exists either.)
Vendor lock-in is just the price of using a vendor, and one which is often overwhelmingly worth paying. What you are saying is true, but it's not really enough of a detraction to justify building everything in-house.
No, I'm not talking about how best to set up the model. I'm saying that complicated neural network models have no track record of yielding reliable insights about social phenomena. They are untested. Any insights they supposedly provide must be verified by a human analyst checking the data to see if it really looks like the model says.
This isn't a new or surprising principle, and it also applies to much simpler models. Any scientist knows that, if you fit a line to data, you better plot the data with the line before you make any big claims about what that line tells you about the world, because the data underlying that fit could look lots of completely different ways with different implications [1]. These authors did the equivalent of fitting the line and telling us all about its formula and the big implications of the formula without ever plotting it with the data.
Low inflation, yes, but not stability. Many people in their 20s now watched a parent lose their job during the 2008 housing crisis. Just because they didn't see the 70s don't mean they haven't seen macroeconomic calamity affect their parents microeconomic reality.
