Month: April 2007

Interview about Self-Experimentation (part 1 of 2)

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For a German magazine, I’ve been answering some questions about self-experimentation. Here are the first seven questions and my answers:

1. When and why did you came up with the idea of performing a self-experiment for the first time Mr. Roberts?

I started self-experimentation as a graduate student. My field of study was experimental psychology so it was important to learn how to do experiments. “The best way to learn is to do,” I had read. So the more experiments I did the more I would learn. Self-experiments were easy and fast. So I started doing them to increase how quickly I learned about experimentation.

2.Now, self-experimentation must be considered as an inherent part of your scientific work – or is it rather a bauble?

Self-experimentation has been the most influential work of mine by far. Lots of surprises and practical applications.

3. Your self-experiments always deal with very personal concerns like sleep disorders, depressions, procrastination or weight control. Has self-experimentation changed your life?

Yes. Sleep, weight, mood, general health, brain – all better. And it is very satisfying to help people. Thousands of people have used my ideas (described in The Shangri-La Diet) to lose weight.

4. What is the role of coincidence in your self-experimentation?

Most of my self-experimentation has started with an unexpected change. I changed my breakfast; my sleep got worse. I started taking flaxseed oil capsules; my balance improved. I started to stand a lot and my sleep got better. I started walking outside in the morning; my sleep improved. I watched TV in the morning; my mood improved the next day. I drank unfamiliar soft drinks; I lost my appetite. Each of these surprises led to lots of self-experimentation.

5. By coincidence for example you found a relation between watching TV in the morning and your mood the following day. What made you looking at this?

I was hoping to improve my sleep. When we sleep is affected by when we have contact with other people. If you have contact with other people late at night, you will be awake later the following night. I knew about research that suggested that watching TV has the same effect on sleep as human contact. I wondered if my sleep was bad because I didn’t have contact with other people in the morning. Maybe TV could substitute for that, I thought. So I watched TV early one morning.

6. When experimenting on yourself, aren’t you taking a big risk for your health? Have there been self-experiments you would now describe as risky?

Doctors have done risky self-experiments. I haven’t. I have studied the effects of very common things – watching TV, not eating breakfast, standing a lot. Millions of people have done these things without harm. They’re not dangerous.

7. Which of your experiments did you enjoy most?

Seeing faces in the morning. The effects are wonderful: I feel happy, serene, and energetic the next day. I’ve done several experiments about sleep. It feels great to wake up feeling very rested.

Omega-3 and Cognitive Decline

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It’s the golden age of omega-3 research. The February 2007 issue of the A merican Journal of Clinical Nutrition, perhaps the most prestigious nutrition journal, had two articles on the topic, the March issue seven (including four letters to the editor). The April issue has three (two research articles and an editorial), all on omega-3 and cognitive decline with age.

One was from Holland. Data were collected in 1990 and 1995 on 200-odd men, who were 70-89 in 1990. Those who ate fish had less cognitive decline from 1990 to 1995 than those who didn’t eat fish. A virtue of this paper is that the main results are shown graphically — a most basic point that AJCN papers usually get wrong.

The other study was done in Minneapolis. It looked at cognitive decline in about 2000 elderly men and women over a similar time period as the first study. Rather than asking subjects what they ate, this study measured blood levels of various fats. They did not find a reliable correlation between omega-3 levels and cognitive decline when considering all subjects but did find reliable (negative) correlations in subgroup analyses.

Both studies have selection problems. The first study looked at a small fraction of all the men in the study (total n = about 900) selected because of better health. I would have liked to see the results from the rest of the men. The second study did not correct for the vast number of significance tests done.

Both studies support — the second one quite weakly — the idea that omega-3s prevent cognitive decline. The main thing I notice is how difficult the research is. Data published 12 years after collection? Two thousand people studied twice, five years apart, with results barely different from noise?

The !Golden Rule and Reed College

Seth Roberts1 Comment

In the programming language R, ! is the negation function — !FALSE is TRUE, for example. The !Golden Rule, the opposite of the Golden Rule, is to treat others as you yourself do not wish to be treated.

An example comes from Colin Diver, the President of Reed College (my alma mater), who complains in an Atlantic Monthly piece about college rankings. Reed has opted out of the U.S. News and World Report rankings. President Diver explains why:

Trying to rank institutions of higher education is a little like trying to rank religions or philosophies.

That’s right: If different colleges have different goals, it is unfair and misleading to rank them on the same scale.

By far the most important consequence of sitting out the rankings game . . . is the freedom to pursue our own educational philosophy, not that of some newsmagazine.

Actually, you can pursue a singular educational philosophy in any case, rankings or no rankings. It’s just that the rankings punish you for doing so.

This is an example of the !Golden Rule because what President Diver complains about happens in every Reed classroom. All the students in a class are graded on the same scale with the same requirements. Perhaps different students have different goals, just as different colleges have different goals? Perhaps this system of grading punishes students with unusual goals, just as the U.S. News ranking system punishes colleges with unusual goals?

Made to Stick

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I went to a panel discussion last night. A professor — with vast public-speaking experience — gave a long boring introduction. “If only he had read Made to Stick!” I thought. The panelists were better but I wished they too had read Made to Stick.

MTS, by Chip Heath, a Stanford business professor, and Dan Heath, a corporate education consultant, tries to say what makes messages more or less memorable. They boil it down to six qualities. To be remembered, your message should be: 1. Simple. 2. Unexpected. 3. Concrete. 4. Credible. 5. Emotional. 6. Told with stories.

They complain that speakers and writers often “bury the lede” — fail to start with the most important compelling stuff. Well, their best story is buried in the middle of the book. Early in his class, Chip Heath has several students give brief talks. The class grades them. Ten minutes later everyone is asked what they remember from the talks. Hardly anything is remembered. The graded quality of the talk doesn’t matter: The “better” talks are remembered just as poorly as the “worse” talks. What is remembered are stories. But hardly anyone tells a story.

In other words, Stanford business students — and by extension the rest of us — don’t know how to give a good talk and don’t recognize a good talk when we hear one. We don’t know — and don’t know we don’t know. I agree. Our collective ignorance is enshrined in bad advice: Start your talk with a joke, for instance. MTS never says anything like that. It says: Start with a story.

Addendum: Seth Godin demonstrates.

Will It Last?

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The graph below shows the daily number of hits to the Shangri-La Diet forums since they began. “Adjusted for weekday” means I estimated the effects of day of the week (e.g., 10% more hits on Tuesday) and then subtracted those estimates. This makes other effects easier to see.

Forum hits vs day

Each point is a different day. The two sharp increases (May and October) were caused by publicity — the first (May) by an interview on the Dennis Prager Show, the second (October) by a Woman’s World article.

The latest (current) increase looks different. It is much slower and not caused by any specific publicity. Apparently it is due to word of mouth.

Will it continue? Well, what’s

infinity TIMES 1/infinity?

The number of potential users of an easy and effective method of weight loss is very large. That’s the first infinity. However, the Shangri-La Diet sounds more than a little crazy. Many successful users don’t want to tell anyone they’re doing it. That’s the 1/infinity (the probability of transmission). Theory aside, the very mild increase last July did not continue. The current increase, however, looks much stronger than the July increase.

For Whom Do Colleges Exist? (continued)

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Yesterday on BART I saw someone reading The And of Poverty. It was an illegal Chinese edition of The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. I asked the person reading it what she thought of it. “Very ethnocentric,” she said. “Very Jeffrey-Sachs-centric,” I said. (For a good critique, see The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly.) America is not the only ethnocentric country, she said, so are other countries who give foreign aid, such as Japan. “What gives me hope is the growth of micro-finance,” she said. “People have a great capacity for figuring out what they need.” I agreed.

In the comments on my “ For Whom Do Colleges Exist?” post someone asked what I would suggest. In my opinion, almost all attempts to improve colleges have had the same core problem as almost all foreign aid: The helpers think they know better what to do than the people they wish to help.

My prescription for higher education is simple: Give students more control of what they learn. When I did this in spades — more by accident than design — my students blossomed. I had never seen anything like it. It happened again and again. When I helped my students learn what they wanted to learn, as opposed to what I thought they should learn, they learned much more. Funny, huh?

Giving students more control of what they learn can be done in many ways, of course. At UC Berkeley, where I teach, here are two possible baby steps in that direction:

1. There exists a system of student-organized-and-run classes called DeCal. Allow one DeCal class to go toward satisfying the Letters and Science college-wide breadth requirement (seven classes, one from each of several areas). The DeCal class would replace any of the seven classes.

2. Allow — or, even better, encourage — admitted students to take a gap year, as they do in England. A gap year is a year away from school between high school and college. (I proposed such a thing a few years ago to the previous UC Berkeley chancellor. My suggestion was given to an administrator who dismissed it. Too hard to administer, she said.)

Professors should like these suggestions. The DeCal proposal will reduce the number of students who take a class because they are forced to. The gap-year proposal will reduce the immaturity of freshmen. When I gave my students much more power to learn what they wanted to learn, my job got much easier. Funny, huh?

How Bad is The Secret?

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Not as bad as you think. The Secret, of course, is the huge best-seller (now #2 on Amazon) that claims you can get what you want by applying “ The Law of Attraction” — namely, that if you think about something it will come to you. According to Wikipedia, “there have been no widely recognized studies demonstrating that the [Law of Attraction] actually works.” The book has been — not to put too fine a point on it — ridiculed, for example by the author Barbara Ehrenreich.

I learned about The Secret last July from my friend Sarah Kapoor, who made a CBC segment about the Shangri-La Diet. She told me about nine YouTube spots (Parts 1-9), each 10 minutes long, that together made a movie. I watched only Part 1 (now unavailable). It wasn’t enjoyable. It seemed like a parody of a film about science, and not a funny one. Sarah said it was growing like wildfire but at the time the segments had received only a few thousand views so I wondered what she was talking about. Time has proven her correct.

Is The Secret complete nonsense? It sounds like complete nonsense, the writers of Wikipedia apparently think it’s complete nonsense (”no widely-recognized studies . . . “), Barbara Ehrenreich thinks it’s complete nonsense (she calls it “mass delusion”), but I don’t think it actually is complete nonsense. Around 1980, Robert Cialdini, a psychology professor at Arizona State, and Kathleen Carpenter, an undergraduate, did a remarkable study. They gave Tempe residents one of two paragraphs to read about the benefits of cable TV (a new thing at the time). One was a dry statement of the benefits; the other asked the reader to imagine partaking of the benefits (”take a moment and think of how . . . you will be able to spend your time at home, with your familly, alone, or with your friends”). A month later, these residents were offered the choice of whether to get cable TV or not. Of those given the dry information, about 20% subscribed; of those given the “take a moment” statement, about 50% subscribed. A huge difference, with nontrivial monetary consequences, from what seems like a tiny treatment. The title of the published article, which appeared in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1982, vol. 43, pp. 89-99) was “Self-relevant scenarios as mediators of likelihood estimates and compliance: Does imagining make it so?” Imagining did make it so, in a surprising way. The effect is much too large to be dismissed. I don’t think it has been repeated, although I’m not sure.

I learned about this study from the excellent new book Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.