The correlative effect is quite clear, i.e people who have high omega 3 levels (eat a lot of fish) have health benefits.
But in random controlled trials Omega 3 supplements have not had convincing effects.
It might be because the supplements aren't very good, or because there's actually something completely different going on, like fish displaces less healthy foods from the diet.
'the supplements aren't very good' would be believable - a quick glance at the market shows a whole lot of fish oil supplements that provide low amounts of Omega 3s in large amounts of fish oil. Look closer, and you realize a bunch of them are rancid too.
Fatty fish (salmon, mackerel, herring) has quite large amounts.
Some people aim for huge amounts of EPA/DHA but I don't think there's really much evidence that you need 3g/day or whatever the latest broscience is.
Mackerel is particularly high although it doesn't taste great to me compared to salmon, 100g of mackerel has ~4g of EPA/DHA so eating that a couple of times a week is probably more than enough.
Also there is some (although much less) in white fish, there can be significant amounts in shellfish, and tinned tuna has a surprisingly high amount. So all of that adds up if you eat those as well
Sardines, too, which are also fishier than salmon but tend not to be salted the way mackerel is.
Unless you’re also consuming all the oil from the can, prefer fish canned in water to canned in oil — because apparently the omega-3s can leach out into oil, but they’re not water-soluble.
Btw, trout is also up there (though not as high as salmon) and is a lovely mild-flavored fish.
Not sure what you can find in your country but we have tinned mackerel (with tomato typically) in Norway. I can highly recommend.
It's not thaaat fishy, I didn't grow up eating it. After having it a few times it really grew on me.
Super cheap and an easy way to get it into my diet. I have 2-3 tins per week. I eat it for breakfast mashed on bread (our bread is like a hard cracker), sometimes with a bit of mustard, or butter spread first.
Nothing in this space “smells right” at the moment.
Half the “ai” vendors outside of frontier labs are trying to sell shovels to each other, every other bubbly new post is about this-weeks-new-ai-workflow, but very few instances of “shutting up and delivering”. Even the Anthropic C compiler was torn to pieces in the comments the other day.
At the moment everything feels a lot like the people meticulously organising desks and calendars and writing pretty titles on blank pages and booking lots of important sounding meetings, but not actually…doing any work?
This was my reaction as well, a lot of hand-waving and invented jargon reminiscent of the web3 era - which is a shame, because I'd really like to understand what they've actually done in more detail.
Everything's on a spectrum, but there's a point where you're so far along on the spectrum that it makes sense to call it something else.
See, "quantity has a quality of its own".
Sometimes you have to leave the theoretical view aside and just look out the window. How are people using this? Is it hurting them? What can we do about it?
I don't like blanket bans, but putting TikTok and, say, a publishing company marketing novels, in the same category because they strive for an audience, doesn't clarify anything. It just confuses the discussion.
> (...) you get these two camps 'for and against' whereas the best way forward is to insist on data rather than anecdotes.
I think that's an issue with online discussions. It barely happens to me in the real world, but it's huge on HN.
I'm overall very positive about AI, but I also try to be measured and balanced and learn how to use it properly. Yet here on HN, I always get the feeling people responding to me have decided I am a "true believer" and respond to the true believer persona in their head.
That's one way to look at it, as just the next iteration of subredditsimulator.
The qualitatively new step leading to emergent behavior will be when the agents start being able to interact with the real world through some interface and update their behavior based on real world feedback.
Think of an autonomous, distributed worm that updates its knowledge base of exploit techniques based on trial and error and based on information it discovers as it propagates.
It might start doing things that no human security researcher had foreseen, and that doesn't require great leaps of the imagination based on today's tech.
That's when you close the evolutionary loop.
I think this isn't quite that yet, but it points in that direction.
It does not require more explanation: publication bias means null results aren't in the literature; do enough small low quality trials and you'll find a big effect sooner or later.
Then the supposed big effect attracts attention and ultimately properly designed studies which show no effect.
> They're from a major peer-reviewed study published in Nature, the highest-impact journal.
No, the domain name is nature.com because it's in a Nature Publishing Group journal, Scientific Reports, which is their least prestigious journal.
It's a common mistake, and they do that on purpose, of course, to leverage the Nature brand.
It's also a mistake that implies a complete lack of familiarity with scientific publishing, unfortunately, which makes it a bit difficult to take your judgements regarding plausibility very seriously.
> It's also a mistake that implies a complete lack of familiarity with scientific publishing, unfortunately, which makes it a bit difficult to take your judgements regarding plausibility very seriously.
It's still peer reviewed, and as the sibling comment said, more applicable to this type of research. Also you now went from raising understandable objections to refusing the argument because it comes from a specific journal, which doesn't sound very scientific to me
You're right it isn't fair to reject someone's scientific argument just because they seem unfamiliar with how professional science works.
We shouldn't have believed the study more if it actually had been in Nature.
I don't think that's what I was saying, though.
The issue in this thread was about taking a step back and looking at the overall plausibility of the conclusions, taking together multiple studies.
I agree with the GP that the argument doesn't really pass the smell test.
That's still the main issue, and it is something that people who don't understand scientific publishing struggle understanding/doing, because they lack the intuition for how certain results came about.
It’s less prestigious because it doesn’t judge papers on novelty, only on technical accuracy. For incremental research like this, it is an appropriate choice. The lower prestige has no bearing on the accuracy of their findings.
This is proven. You can prove it yourself easily. Take a novel from your bookshelf, type in any sentence from the novel and ask it what book it's from. Ask it for the next sentence.
This works with every novel I've tried so far in Gemini 3.
My actual prompt was a bit more convoluted than this (involving translation) so you may need to experiment a bit.
> IDEs/agent swarms/fallability. Both the "no need for IDE anymore" hype and the "agent swarm" hype is imo too much for right now. The models definitely still make mistakes and if you have any code you actually care about I would watch them like a hawk, in a nice large IDE on the side.
... here on HN [0] you get a bunch of people telling you to get with the times, grandpa.
Really makes me wonder: Who are these people and why are they doing that?
The correlative effect is quite clear, i.e people who have high omega 3 levels (eat a lot of fish) have health benefits.
But in random controlled trials Omega 3 supplements have not had convincing effects.
It might be because the supplements aren't very good, or because there's actually something completely different going on, like fish displaces less healthy foods from the diet.
reply