Month: July 2007

My Theory of Human Evolution (blogs and fan clubs edition); or Why We Blog

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Marc Andreessen, in a fascinating post about lessons learned from blogging, started me thinking about fan clubs. After reading his post, I wondered what had I learned from blogging. Well, nothing very interesting: 1. Easier than expected. 2. More fun than expected. 3. Pleasantly surprised to see audience grow for the esoteric topics I blog about, such as scientific method and human evolution. These are quite different than Marc’s lessons.

But maybe not. I think Marc gets to the heart of the matter with this:

one of the best things about blogs is how they enable a conversation among people with shared interests.

Which is exactly what fan clubs and fan conventions do.

Every blog I read revolves around someone’s specialized knowledge. HuntGrunt, for example, is based on Joyce Cohen’s journalism: In her blog, she writes what few others could. Bloggers enjoy writing them, I enjoy reading them. I think blogs have done grown so quickly and become so powerful because they tap into something very fundamental and important inside of all of us: We enjoy talking about our area of specialization, of expertise; and we enjoy listening to others with similar interests. Fan clubs and interest groups were old expressions of this; blogs are a new expression.

Why are people like this? My theory of human evolution says that the human brain changed in all sorts of ways to promote occupation specialization, the big way we differ from our closest ancestors. The fan-club tendency evolved because it caused specialists to share their knowledge. This pushed forward technology just as scientific journals and conferences do. People who made shoes talked to others who made shoes and shared what they had learned. The result was not only better shoes but also better use of research effort: No one had to reinvent the wheel.

Blog posts are easy and pleasant to write because they allow me to do something I enjoy doing: talk about my area of expertise. Their esoteric subject matter is crucial: I wouldn’t enjoy talking about other stuff. Maybe this tendency has other uses. People with specialized interests who chat every morning via webcam — now there’s an idea…

My Theory of Human Evolution (omiyage edition)

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The Japanese have a tradition of omiyage, little gifts that you bring back from vacation and give to your friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers. A large number of people. According to Wikipedia, “Japanese are often very close-lipped about their travel plans, hoping to minimize their omiyage responsibilities.” That is one solution, here is another:

Choosing omiyage is so difficult and takes time out of sightseeing! It makes the luggage so heavy, when it was already heavy to begin with! You are so tired and beaten down when you return home! Just leisurely choose omiyage from this catalog, go on your trip, and we’ll deliver it to your door when you return home to Japan!

And wrapping matters:

When presenting omiyage remember that the wrapping is VERY IMPORTANT. Put your omiyage in the suitcase or bag that will be sent directly to Morioka from Narita Airport and you can wrap your gifts here to avoid the “well traveled” look.

Like Christmas presents, omiyage (especially the wrapping) is something neither the giver nor the recipient would otherwise buy. Gift traditions increase the market for high-end finely-made things. The genes that pushed us toward these traditions evolved because they helped artists and artisans — the first material scientists — make a living.

Irritability and Coca-Cola

Seth Roberts9 Comments

The following is from a friend of mine. He is in the middle of a self-experiment to measure the effect of various forms of Coca-Cola (regular, diet, diet w/o caffeine) on his mood.

TODAY’S EVENT

Today ~20 oz of coca cola (w/ caffeine and w/ sugar) dramatically eliminated (in about a minute) a very real, strong feeling of irritability.

BACKGROUND

I am on day 17/30 of the experiment and I am still blinded to the results of the first 16 days. I do know that none of my previous mood experiences in the past 16 days were like the one today.

I had a significant bought of irritability (6/10) today. This irritability has been brewing last 48 hours but was palpable all morning after I woke up this AM. This irritability was the REAL DEAL that I have been seeking the past few weeks – my family was well aware of my irritability yesterday and this AM. Since this irritability was so palpable, I decided to break my experimental protocol and drink a known real coke. Quite remarkably, within a minute or so of consuming the whole coke (~20 oz – large) my irritability was gone (really gone). [He drank the coke in 2 or 3 minutes. The effect lasted about an hour.] Be clear, this was not some psychological maybe I feel this maybe I don’t, this was real psychiatric, can’t miss it, need some drugs, psychotropic bad/irritable feeling.

The past 16 days of this experiment has made me very familiar with hunger, bad moods, hunger irritability, assessing my feelings around hunger, assessing feelings around soda pop, assessing feelings around a good meal. Therefore, today I was well prepared to focus on the minute to minute dynamics around drinking this coke – the coke abruptly ended hours of feeling irritable (no better word to describe the mood than irritable).

RESULTS

-1) Now that I am half way through the experiment, I think I can break the blind by identifying the three different types of coke. I can taste the clean sweetness of real coke immediately, I can feel caffeine in my body from the diet coke in about 5 minutes.

0) I am currently blinded to the results of the experiment I am doing. However, I do have some anecdotal impressions that presumed diet w/o caffeine causes no mood affect, diet w/ caf does affect mood, coke w/ caffeine and w/ sugar does affect mood. My anecdotal impression is that these effects are mild to modest.

1) Today was the first time I felt psychiatric grade irritability confounded by hunger irritability. Today unblinded Coke abruptly eliminated the bad feelings associated with this irritability.

2) I have been rating my mood with full meals 20-40 minutes after my soda pop drink and my impression is that real satiation does have some positive mood effects.

DISCUSSION

The big target is understanding how 20 oz of sugar and caffeine totally eliminates the strong and persistent feeling of psychiatric grade irritability confounded by hunger irritability. Designing an experiment to go for this issue is challenged by the infrequentness of this psychiatric grade irritability.

Coke eliminating irritability appears to produce happiness by eliminating the presence of bad irritability feelings. In this setting, Coke did not produce any positive feelings, Coke simply eliminated some strong bad feelings. Coke is not producing a good mood, it removed a bad one. (There may have been some “psychological” grade good mood, but this was so tentative and hard to assess that I am happy saying Coke produced no positive affect. The removal of the psychiatric irritable mood was clear and absolute).

In contrast to the absence of irritability caused by coke (and no good mood effects), I think the satiation I have experienced these past 16 days from the big healthy meals following my soda pop does has some positive feelings associated with it. Satiation presumably feels good not just because of elimination of hunger, there seems to be some warm glow from eating a large, well-balanced, fatty, carbo, vegetable, sweet meal.

There appear to be different kinds of irritability. More than six hours without food brings on a form of irritability, but this hunger irritability appears to be different from “mood” irritability. Mood irritability lasts for days while hunger irritability lasts for hours. Hunger irritability produced in the setting of no mood irritability is not that profound. Hunger irritability on top of mood irritability appears to be the REAL DEAL of irritability. It is this REAL DEAL of irritability which today (and typically) creates the setting such that a large caffeine/sugar soft drink eliminates the persistent palpable bad feelings associated with REAL DEAL irritability.

I understand why it would be nice if the subject is blinded. However, I am not sure the subject needs to be blinded. I think one still gets meaningful results even if placebo/nocebo effects are folded into the results.

CONCLUSION

A couple of days of irritability compounded by hunger produces a strong form of irritability which was dramatically relieved by a large glass of caffeine/sugar coke today (unblinded N = 1 in experiment). Strategies for further behavioral characterization of this phenomenon are needed. A physiological hypothesis is needed. A future design for FMRI measurements of this quick irritability response to caffeine/sugar will be fun to design.

In the final analysis, I guess it is worth finishing the current experiment – even though I think I can determine the identity of each drink. Good data from an inadequate experimental design will be helpful in creating a better experimental design.

About the author: John Keltner has a Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley and an M.D. from Harvard. He is a research fellow at the University of Oxford. Given these results, I asked John if he was addicted to caffeine. He told me no, going without caffeine did not make him more irritable.

My Theory of Human Evolution (diet soda edition)

Seth Roberts11 Comments

I have been drinking diet cherry sodas for many years. Last week, for the first time, I decided to compare two different brands. I bought a four-pack of Jones sugar-free Black Cherry Soda and a six-pack of Hansen’s sugar-free Black Cherry Soda.

Jones Black Cherry Soda

I’m never so thirsty that I want to drink two cans of soda at one time so I resisted making a direct comparison (opening both brands at once). I happily drank three bottles of the Jones soda and four bottles of the Hansen’s soda at widely-spaced intervals (several hours at least). Both brands tasted fine.

Hansen's Diet Black Cherry Soda

When I had only three bottles left (one Jones, two Hansen’s) I finally drank a Jones and a Hansen’s side by side: sip of one, sip of the other. It was immediately clear that the Jones was much better. It had a strong clear flavor while the Hansen’s had something fuzzy and metallic about it. A difference I hadn’t noticed. I will never buy another Hansen’s — it was that bad.

The Jones soda cost more. I had never bought it because I saw nothing wrong with the cheap stuff. Now I do. The changes were not just negative: After I noticed the difference, I got more pleasure from the Jones. Now that I am aware of this difference it will be fun to buy other cherry sodas to see how they stack up. The side-by-side comparison greatly increased my hedonic reaction to cherry sodas. Not only will I get more pleasure from the better-made, I’ll get less pleasure from the worse-made.

Thus side-by-side comparisons (which we enjoy) make connoisseurs of us. Connoisseurs, of course, pay more for and create a market for finely-made things, helping artists and artisans make a living. In human prehistory, artists and artisans were material scientists. Their trial-and-error research about how to control materials eventually led to better tools.

More about side-by-side comparisons. The evolutionary function of art.

More Self-Congratulation (probably erroneous)

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July 2, 2007. Online issue of The New Yorker appears. Editorial by Hertzberg is based on a series of articles in the Washington Post, but does not link to them.

July 2, 2007. I write to the New Yorker webmaster: If an article refers to something Web-available, why not link to it?

July 9, 2007. New Financial Page appears. Number of links: 7. Number of links in previous three Financial Pages: 0.

Earlier self-congratulation.

A Student Advisor’s Unlovely View of UC Berkeley

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I started talking with Catherine Pauling, who has worked at UC Berkeley more than 20 years, because I confused her with someone else. While she was head student advisor in the Math Department, she increased the number of majors from 170 to 600 in 5 years. “Some math professors were afraid this was too many — it could only occur because we were bringing in inadequate students, they believed,” she said. “But the percentage of students having trouble and excelling remained the same.”

When advising math majors, she told me, “sometimes I felt there should have been a Red Cross on my door.” She learned to preach compassion — compassion for the professors. She said over and over to the students,

You have to realize it’s not you. The professors will say terrible things like ‘You know nothing.’ But that’s because in the process of becoming the best in what they do, they’ve neglected certain social and communication skills. So we have to appreciate and learn from their gifts and have compassion for their lack of development in these other areas.

Over the years, she was repeatedly shocked by how undergraduates were treated. “If someone has achieved so much, I would have thought it would be easy to be generous. Instead of an interest in mentoring the next generation, I often found impatience and dismissal,” she said. “One student explained to me the difference between Stanford and Berkeley. At Stanford, if a student has a problem, they [faculty and administrators] assume that they’re approaching it wrong and they try a new approach; at Berkeley, if a student has a problem, the assumption is that we made a mistake in admitting the student.”

One recent Dean of the College of Letters and Science (also a professor) began his tenure as dean, she told me, by giving a talk in which he emphasized his belief that students were “gaming the system.” He acted on this belief by rigidly enforcing the rules, with few exceptions. (Many Berkeley students suffer serious hardships, including homelessness and major mental disorders.) When he stopped being dean several years later, it was to take a better position at another university. The next dean was less strict.

For whom do colleges exist?

Blogs and Street Food

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In The New Yorker, Orhan Pamuk writes:

The best thing about Istanbul street food now is not that each purveyor is different from all the others, offering his own specialties; it is that these different street venders sell only the things that they themselves know and love.

This is what I was saying about blogs: They are so well-written, so easy to read, because bloggers only write about what they care about.

An SLD Marketing Puzzle

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I have done 40-odd radio interviews about The Shangri-La Diet. A few of them noticeably increased the number of visitors to the SLD forums. The forums software measures number of visitors with a statistic called most online: the maximum number of simultaneous visitors to the forums, computing the maximum over one day. Until recently, the interview with the most impact was with Dennis Prager (May 2006). For the five days before the interview, most online = 54 40 43 53 48. On the day of the interview, most online = 231. For the five following days, most online = 72 82 44 52 74. This was the general pattern: An increase caused by an interview lasted one day or a little more.

On June 28, I was a guest on The David Lawrence Show. This one was different. For the 10 days before the show, most online =

52 38 35 44 47 44 48 40 42 44

On the day of the show (live), most online = 148. On the following days,

137 119 164 281 88 95 207 89 130 128 164 96

A much longer increase than usual. And the maximum value so far (281) happened days after the show. To make it clear how unusual this is, here is a graph of most online for the whole history of the forums.

most online

Why was the David Lawrence interview so different? I can think of four possibilities: 1. The SLD forums have become more persuasive. Because they are more persuasive, new visitors come more than once. 2. David Lawrence listeners were more likely to be persuaded by the forums. 3. The David Lawrence Show gets lots of listeners via the website, where the interview can be downloaded. These downloads happened over many days, so the effect of the interview was spread out. 4. Something was different about the interview itself.

Another measure of forums activity is provided by the hosting service: unique visitors per day. This is more interesting, of course, but harder for me to record. Only recently did I start recording it. Here is a graph of visitors per day:

visitors

These data support the idea that the David Lawrence interview had a long-lasting effect, yes — but why the decrease in variability?

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