Seth Roberts has died

For those of us who don't know who Seth Roberts is, who is Seth Roberts?

Seth Roberts: &quot;The unreasonable effectiveness of my self-experimentation&quot;<p><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964443/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC2964443&#x2F;</a><p>Seth Roberts: &quot;The Growth of Personal Science: Implications for Statistics&quot; (pdf)<p><a href="http://media.sethroberts.net/blog/pdf/2012-09-24-The-Growth-of-Personal-Science-Implications-For-Statistics.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;media.sethroberts.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;2012-09-24-The-Growth-...</a>

When I first met Seth he was an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. At the time he wrote all his code in APL, and couldn&#x27;t figure out why anyone would use anything else. More recently he used R. To everyone calling him &quot;not a hacker,&quot; he was hacking on code before a lot of you were born, though his code was mostly for his own purposes.

Looks like the blog is down now, the linked to post says simply &quot;Hello, this is Seth’s sister, Amy, with the sad news that Seth died on Saturday, April 26, 2014. He collapsed while hiking near his home in Berkeley, CA. He had asked that any memorial gifts be made to Amnesty International. Thank you to all for following and sharing Seth’s work.&quot;<p>-- <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/04/27/seth/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:http:&#x2F;&#x2F;...</a><p>I had the pleasure of knowing Seth personally and am deeply saddened to hear this news.

I was fortunate enough to publish Seth&#x27;s final column this morning.<p><a href="http://betabeat.com/2014/04/seth-roberts-final-column-butter-makes-me-smarter/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;betabeat.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;seth-roberts-final-column-butter...</a>

I&#x27;d be really interested in knowing his cause of death. He has had extremely high fat intake due to all his experimentation:<p><a href="http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/11/25/butter-and-arithmetic-how-much-butter/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.sethroberts.net&#x2F;2011&#x2F;11&#x2F;25&#x2F;butter-and-arithmetic...</a>

According to a Scientific American article [1], he was aged 54 in early 2008, so that puts him at roughly 60 years old, depending on his precise date of birth...<p>[1] <a href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=self-experimenter-free-from-insomnia" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciam.com&#x2F;article.cfm?id=self-experimenter-free-f...</a>

Seth Roberts was an innovator, a teacher, an original thinker -- and he was an inspiration to me. I&#x27;m reminded of the Grateful Dead t-shirt that says, &quot;They aren&#x27;t the best at what they do. They&#x27;re the only ones who do it&quot;.<p>I&#x27;ve been following his Shangri-La diet for over four years now. Here&#x27;s a page about my results, although it&#x27;s a bit out of date:<p><a href="http://www.astrocyte-design.com/shangri-la-diet/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astrocyte-design.com&#x2F;shangri-la-diet&#x2F;</a>

One can&#x27;t help but wonder if a man so dedicated to self-experimentation was a victim of his own studies. Beware extremes.

Slightly offtopic - The logic around weight &quot;set-points&quot; seems plausible. Has anyone ever had any luck with the Shangri La Diet?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: <i>&quot;We are considering a memorial a-la-Seth: A memorial one-day conference for all his friends and admirers, organized by his pals: John Durant, Tim Ferris, Tucker Max, Gary Taubes, and other members of that independent thinking clique who connected socially through Seth&quot;</i> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10152176803438375&amp;id=13012333374&amp;stream_ref=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;permalink.php?story_fbid=1015217680...</a>

RIP.<p>I am sad to see this. I only recently learned of the site. I have done my own personal health experiments and had hoped to make contact and what not, but did not get around to it. I imagine a lot of people will say his experiments killed him or believe it even if they don&#x27;t say it.<p>I increasingly think there is no point to trying to share such info. If you die under a doctor&#x27;s care, they say your condition did you in. If you die doing alternative stuff, they say the alternative stuff did you in. It seems pretty no win, in that regard.<p>I never knew him, yet it feels like a personal loss for me.

This is incredibly sad. Such a curious and bright mind.

Seth Roberts wasn&#x27;t a hacker, but he was friends with Aaron Swartz:<p><a href="http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/07/22/google-yes-wikipedia-yes-aaron-swartz-no/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.sethroberts.net&#x2F;2011&#x2F;07&#x2F;22&#x2F;google-yes-wikipedia-...</a><p>Swartz also wrote about Roberts&#x27; Shangri-La Diet on his blog, claiming that through it &quot;losing weight has to be one of the easiest things I’ve ever done&quot;:<p><a href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/losingweight" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&#x2F;weblog&#x2F;losingweight</a>

Andrew Gelman posts a eulogy: <a href="http://andrewgelman.com/2014/04/30/seth-roberts/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;andrewgelman.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;30&#x2F;seth-roberts&#x2F;</a>

What happens to our blogs when we die? I&#x27;ve always thought about this and would like to keep my blog running even in death.

He will be in a book by Mary Roach soon..

Forget the part about chugging olive oil, how about that entire sub-category of his blog dedicated to the belief that pre-natal ultrasounds somehow cause autism? Or the hand-waving away the multiple studies that show that GFCF diets have no proven positive effect on autism symptoms? Or using the word &quot;cure&quot; offhand, based on an n=1 self-report of another diet?<p><i>nope.gif</i><p>I don&#x27;t even care about the weight loss and cardiac shit, I think I&#x27;ve seen enough here.

Tragic and shows that no matter how healthy your lifestyle, life can still end in unexpected ways much too early.

For a second I thought this was someone affiliated with Soylent...

Collapsed while hiking. That is a cardiovascular death until proven otherwise. In a guy who ate a half a stick of butter every day ... quelle surprise.<p>Listen to a cardiologist trying to talk Seth out of his course, at around 11 minutes in this 2008 video:<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/14281896" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;14281896</a>