Month: January 2007

From the SLD Forums

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Today paulkimelman posted this:

I reached my target weight and have easily held it for >4 months now. I dropped the amount of oil to 1 Tbs from 2, but otherwise it is the same. Many people have been shocked more by the fact that I have effortlessly held the weight than that I lost it (23 pounds in 4-1/2 months). I do note that it is now effortless, as I do not worry about food at all (I eat what I want and when I want, except in the 2 hour window). Sometimes when I am snacking on almonds, I think I really should cut back, but it does not affect my weight, so I am learning to stop worrying. One interesting thing I have found in maintenance is about a 3 pound variance. What is nice, is that when it jumps up 2 pounds, I do not do anything different, as I know it will be down the next day. The other is that I know that if I have a few drinks of alcohol, my weight will be up 1 to 2 pounds the next day (1 if I drink enough water, 2 if I do not). But, again, it just drops off by the next day. I think it is simply retention of water. The calmness of not worrying about what the scale says has been a great feeling. At some point, I may shoot for losing another 6-7 pounds (I am at the top end of normal BMI, and this would take me to the low end). As you can guess, I have got a lot of people started on this diet, most have been successful (so far). So, for anyone who is not sure, I can report that I have been fully successful on this.

I now return to regular blogging…

Near-Celebrity Near-Endorsement

Seth Roberts3 Comments

People have often told me that what the Shangri-La Diet needs is endorsement from a celebrity. I agree. From the current (2007-01-15) issue of Star magazine, here is a step in that direction. Not quite an endorsement but close; and on the same page as two celebrities.

Shangri-La Diet in Star magazine

I am giving a talk tonight (Tuesday, January 9, 7:30 pm) at PARC (Palo Alto) about self-experimentation that is open to the public. Audio and PowerPoint will be posted.

Methodological Lessons from Self-Experimentation (part 4 of 4)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

6. Curiosity helps — because it provides a wide range of knowledge. Pasteur made a similar point when he said luck favors “the prepared mind” by which he meant the well-stocked mind. To come up with my theory of weight control you needed to know both obesity research and animal learning because the theory is based on basic facts about weight control and basic facts about Pavlovian conditioning. I knew the weight control facts because I had taught introductory psychology and lectured on weight control. I knew the basic facts about Pavlovian conditioning because my graduate training was in animal learning. It was unusual to know both sets of facts. Few obesity researchers knew much about animal learning; few animal-learning researchers knew much about weight control. The same thing happened with my mood research: Facts that I had learned from teaching introductory psychology showed me that my findings made sense and were important. I had taught introductory psychology because I was curious about psychology.

These two examples (weight control, mood) surprised me. I may have heard this point made a few times but I didn’t know any examples. Since then, however, I have come across examples not involving me that make the same point. Luca Turin is a biophysicist who has come up with a far better explanation of how the nose works than any previous theory. His recent book The Secret of Scent tells the story. “In order to solve the structure/odor problem,” he wrote, “you need to know at least three things: (a) biology, (b) structure and (c) odor. Each of these three things taken individually is not difficult” (p. 166). The problem had gone unsolved because no one before Turin knew all three.

7. Publish in open-access journals. Because my long self-experimentation paper was published in an open-access journal, anybody could read it within minutes. My friend Andrew Gelman blogged about it, which caused Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution to mention it. This brought it to the attention of Stephen Dubner, who with Steven Levitt wrote about it in their Freakonomics column in the New York Times. That led to a contract to write two books — one about weight loss, the other about self-experimentation in general. That anyone could download my paper made it spread much faster. In the old days, with photocopies and libraries and mailed reprints . . . no talk tonight.

A summing-up, if you want to figure something out via data collection: 1. Do something. Don’t give up before starting. 2. Keep doing something. Science is more drudgery than scientists usually say. 3. Be minimal. 4. Use scientific tools (e.g., graphs), but don’t listen to scientists who say don’t do X or Y. 5. Post your results.

Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. You no longer need to register to comment. My talk Tuesday night (tomorrow Jan 9) 7:30 pm at PARC (Palo Alto) is open to the public.

A Curious Academic Career

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From Wikipedia:

He had no talent for teaching. He was dismissed by [Johns Hopkins University] after one semester. . . . On leaving JHU, he took a position . . . at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where it became clear that he was no better at teaching advanced students than freshmen. . . . He was let go by Brown, being hired after a trip to Europe by Yale University . . . He quickly showed at Yale the same traits he had at JHU and Brown: he . . . was incapable of giving a lecture at a level that a student (even a graduate student) could comprehend. He was also unable to direct the research of graduate students . . . At age 70, [he] was involuntarily retired.

Which makes me want to learn more about the physical chemist Lars Onsager, who won a Nobel Prize in 1968.

Methodological Lessons from Self-Experimentation (part 3 of 4)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

4. There are serious defects in the way science is usually done. I found a new and powerful way of losing weight — yet I’m an outsider to that area. Although obesity is a huge problem, and hundreds of millions of dollars go into obesity research every year, I was completely outside that group of people and resources. If science is being done properly, there should be a relation between input and output — the more input, the more output. That failed here. Professional obesity researchers, given vast input, failed to discover this; whereas I, given zero input, managed to do so. You might say this was a weird fluke except the same thing happened again with mood: I discovered a powerful way of changing mood, even though I was an outsider to the study of mood. Depression is a huge problem, vast resources go into trying to do something about it.

What the serious defects are has no simple answer. After the next lesson learned I’ll try to explain what I think is wrong.

5. There are serious strengths in the way science is usually done. I relied heavily on conventional science and could never have gotten where I did without it. Ramirez and Cabanac did brilliant research. I say there are serious strengths in conventional science because I used conventional scientific methods and conclusions to find a new solution to a serious problem — obesity is a serious problem. I didn’t just use conventional scientific tools; I also used self-experimentation, which is unconventional. But self-experimentation alone wouldn’t have gotten very far, I’m sure. The turning point in my weight control research was reading a paper by Ramirez about rat experiments. Not only did I use a vast number of conclusions from conventional science, I also used conventional experimental designs and standard, common tools for data analysis, such as programs for plotting data.

To say that science is glorified common sense has a lot of truth to it. To say that science is a collection of methods to help us understand and control the world also has a lot of truth to it. But science is far more than a collection of tools; it is a whole community and culture, with beliefs as well as tools. Like any culture, many of its beliefs are based on faith.

Here is a story to illustrate what happens. It’s pure human nature. Suppose someone gave you a power saw. Your first thought is: Wow, I have a power saw. There are many things I can now do that I couldn’t do before. It seems like a pure benefit. No negatives. You learn how to use the power saw and you become better and better at using it. Eventually you start to make a living using the power saw — other people, who don’t have a power saw, pay you to saw stuff for them. You become a power-saw professional and, along with other professionals, you establish rules about how to use power saws. To save the public from bad power saw usage, you establish a licensing test to become a power-saw professional. Your view of yourself is: I know how to use a power saw. And if there is a problem to be solved, you try to solve it with your power saw — that’s what you know how to do best. All this makes perfect sense to you. Hundreds of professions have followed this path. What is hard for you to notice is that in certain ways you have become weaker — if a problem doesn’t call for power-saw usage, you are less likely to find the solution. Because you are too busy making a living using your power saw.

I hope my point is obvious. Budding scientists go to graduate school where they learn a bundle of specialized research methods that varies from one research area to the next. That is their power saw. After graduate school, they make a living using the techniques that they have learned. After graduate school, they are in better shape to make a living; but they are in worse shape to solve problems for which the techniques that they have learned are not appropriate. Conventional scientific methods could go part of the way toward finding the Shangri-La Diet; but they could not go all the way. Other techniques were needed — very simple ones, pre-power-saw. So conventional science never found it.

In Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs gives another example of this. During a recent heat wave in Chicago, two nearby neighborhoods, similar in many ways, had very different death rates. A good explanation of the difference was provided by a graduate student in sociology, who used very simple very low-cost methods. In contrast, a task force of scientists from the Centers For Disease Control, with vast resources and great methodological sophistication, failed to explain the difference. They were blinded by their expertise. They failed to see that their methods weren’t working.

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Methodological Lessons from Self-Experimentation (part 2 of 4)

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3. Be minimal. In other words, do the easiest, simplest thing that will that will tell you something important and new, that will provide significant progress. This I learned by failure. In the early days of my self-experimentation — and of my rat research, too — I constantly tried to do experiments that broke this rule, and again and again they failed to work. (Slow learner.) The more complex the design, the more untested assumptions it makes. And untested assumptions, at least mine, are often wrong. I’ve been good about following this rule in my own research in recent years so to give an example of how it is broken I will describe someone else’s research. I sat in on a planning session for an experiment about asthma at a highly-ranked school of public health. The experiment was expensive — the grant to pay for it was many hundreds of thousands of dollars. There were to be about 50 families in the treatment group and 50 families in the control group. They had done some pilot work involving three families. They proposed to begin the full experiment. I suggested that they do a larger pilot experiment — maybe four families in each group. There were several professors and several more people with Ph.D.’s at the meeting. No one agreed with me. Several people explicitly disagreed: “I don’t think we need to do any more pilot work.” As it turned out, I was right. They began the full experiment and it failed miserably because recruitment turned out to be far more difficult than expected.

Almost all proposed research I hear about breaks this rule, which is fascinating in a train-wreck kind of way. I have never seen a book about research design that makes this point. As a result, I suspect that books about research design are often counter-productive: The student would have been better off if he or she hadn’t read them. The textbook teaches this or that complication to people who can barely do basic stuff. The poor student wastes time using complex designs that fail in cases where a simpler design would have succeeded.

Part 1 is here. Part 3 is here. You no longer need to register to comment.

Methodological Lessons from Self-Experimentation (part 1 of 4)

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On Tuesday (January 9) I am giving a talk about my self-experimentation to a group of interface designers who I hope will be interested in the broad methodological conclusions to be drawn from it. An audio file of the talk and the PowerPoint will be available but I think the most interesting stuff will be clearer and more accessible if I write it down. So here it is.

Usually we learn from our mistakes. This is the rare case where I learned from success — I expected my self-experimentation — to improve my sleep, to find effective ways to lose weight — to fail and was surprised and impressed when I was wrong. The seven lessons that follows (divided into four posts) are the broad conclusions I draw from what happened.

1. Do something. I started the long-term self-experimentation that led to my paper because I didn’t want to wake up too early for the rest of my life. I expected my little self-experiments to fail, and they did fail, but I didn’t realize that I would slowly learn from failure. I learned how to record my data, for instance, and how to analyze it. The effect of that learning was that my self-experimentation got better and better and after many years of failure I got somewhere. I think American culture teaches that success is good and failure bad, but the truth for scientists is that failure is good in the sense that you learn from your mistakes.

2. Keep doing something. I learned the value of drudgery. The research took many years. After my initial failures I continued not because I could see I was learning stuff — the learning was too slow to be perceptible — but for the same reason I started: I didn’t want to wake up early for the rest of my life. One of my students had been a classical musician. She said that her job had been athletic, not aesthetic. It involved great repetition of the same movements, like manual labor. Likewise, scientists often see science as something intellectually wonderful. I came to see it differently. Perhaps a question has one answer and there are 100 plausible alternatives. To find the answer you may just need to test each of the 100 possibilities. No way around it. That was roughly the position I was in trying to improve my sleep: There were many possibilities and no alternative to simply testing them one by one. (More complex experimental designs, such as factorial designs, were impractical.) There was nothing intellectually wonderful about it. “One thing nobody tells you about being a postdoc is that stuff that used to be fun for its own sake becomes tedious when you’ve done it hundreds or thousands of times,” blogged a postdoc.

Part 2 is here.

Note: You no longer need to register in order to comment.

Procrastination (cont.)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

A just-published review article (abstract only) on procrastination, which looks good, and an interesting talk by the author of the review, Piers Steel, a professor of business at the University of Calgary. No mention of an evolutionary explanation.

Update of my earlier post about procrastination: To keep my email In Box un-jammed and my kitchen table unembarrassing, I now realize I must play a few games of Sudoku every day.

Sudoku

Annals of Self-Experimentation: How to Fall Asleep Faster

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Evan Dumas, our self-experimenter, does IT support in Portland, Oregon. He is 26 years old. As far back as he can remember, he has had trouble falling asleep. After he went to bed and turned off the light, it take an hour or more to fall asleep.

About a year ago, he tried a new solution: exercise just before bedtime. He had noticed that he fell asleep more quickly when he was tired (and of course exercise was tiring); and it was hard to exercise earlier in the day. He wondered if the standard advice don’t exercise close to bedtime was true. (For example, “finish your exercise at least three hours before bedtime,” says the National Sleep Foundation.)

His exercise consisted of slow push-ups, crunch-style sit-ups, and some static yoga positions that use the side muscles and back muscles. He continued until he was tired. In the beginning this took about 10 minutes; now it takes about 20 minutes.

The very first night he tried this, he fell asleep within minutes. Same with later nights: After exercise, he fell asleep “instantaneously,” he says — by which he means within about 5 minutes. Any doubt it was cause and effect was removed by evenings when he omitted the exercise, just to see if it was necessary. Without exercise, it again took him more than an hour to fall asleep. He also noticed that the exercise caused him to sleep less and wake up feeling more rested.

A great discovery. Surely we need far fewer sleeping pills.

To repeat what I said earlier: If you are interested in doing any self-experimentation, feel free to contact me for help. Also, please let me know the results; I would like to publicize other people’s self-experiments in this blog.