According to this persuasive non-embeddable video — from a BBC series called The Truth About Food — the answer is don’t worry about it.
They compare two twins. One drinks 2 liters water/day, the other doesn’t drink any water. Not self-experimentation, but close.
I did an experiment in which I drank 5 liters of water/day. I lost a few pounds, not nearly worth the trouble. There was one surprise: Flavors intensified. Every strawberry was the best-tasting strawberry I’d ever had.
On issues I care about, college presidents have a terrible record. After Margot O’Toole accused Imanishi-Kari of scientific misconduct, David Baltimore — later president of Rockefeller University and Caltech — stood by as O’Toole’s career was ruined. Both O’Toole and Imanishi-Kari were in Baltimore’s lab. I’m sure O’Toole was right; ink and digit analyses made it clear that Imanishi-Kari’s data was fake. The current Chancellor of UC Berkeley, Robert Birgeneau, when he was head of the University of Toronto, stood by as a job offer to the psychiatrist David Healy was withdrawn because Healy had criticized drug companies. President of Reed College Colin Diver failed to grasp that what he strongly objected being done to him was what Reed professors did to their students every day. Axel Meisen, President of Memorial University, has allowed his university’s lawyers to defend the indefensible: Memorial failed to protect the nurse who tried to stop Ranjit Chandra. Henry Bienen, President of Northwestern University, allowed Lynn Conway and Deidre McCloskey to use the power of his university to punish Michael Bailey for saying something that Conway and McCloskey didn’t like.
I might have given Columbia University President Lee Bollinger credit for supporting free speech when the President of Iran spoke there a few days ago. But I won’t, because here is how Bollinger introduced him:
[long self-congratulation] . . . Let me now turn to Mr. Ahmadinejad. . . [long no-stone-unturned condemnation] . . . Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. . . . Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change? . . . You held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers. For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda. . . . When you have come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated. . . . Because of this, and for many other reasons, your absurd comments . . . I close with this comment frankly and in all candor, Mr. President. I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. . . . your preposterous and belligerent statements . . . so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens . . . I am only a professor, who is also a university president.
Ugh. Ahmadinejad objected:
In Iran, tradition requires that when we demand a person . . . to be a speaker, we actually respect [the audience] by allowing them to make their own judgment, and we don’t think it’s necessary before the speech is even given . . . to provide vaccination.
Bollinger did not understand that freedom of speech means nothing unless you listen to those allowed to speak.
Addendum: Bollinger, a former Law School professor, teaches a class on freedom of speech. At the next meeting of this class, shortly after the remarks I quote above, “ the students erupted in cheers.”
Jane Jacobs tells a story about a handed-down meatloaf recipe: After the loaf is made, the end is cut off. “Why?” she asked. “We’ve always done it that way,” she was told. The original recipe was for a smaller oven, it turned out; the end was cut off to make the loaf fit in the oven.
I thought of this story when I read a recent study in the Annals of Internal Medicine that compared three treatments for back pain: acupuncture, “sham acupuncture,” and “conventional therapy.” Sham acupuncture was like acupuncture except that the needles were put in “wrong” places, inserted less deeply, and not rotated after insertion. Conventional therapy was drugs, physical therapy, and exercise. The study found that acupuncture and sham acupuncture were equally effective. Both were much better than conventional therapy. The results imply that acupuncture works, but the surrounding theory (meridians, etc.) is wrong. Which I find reassuring.
Psychotherapy is essentially the same. Lots of studies show that psychotherapy helps — but many studies also imply that the surrounding theory is wrong. Untrained therapists are as effective as trained therapists. Keeping a journal has similar effects. The active ingredient may be telling your problems, just as the active ingredient of acupuncture is apparently needle insertion.
Ritual — doing something just because — can be found in meatloaf recipes, acupuncture, psychotherapy, and clinical trials. In the discussion section of the acupuncture paper, the authors wrote:
Potential limitations of this study [include] inability to blind acupuncturists to the form of acupuncture.
Just as the meatloaf cooks did not understand their recipe, the acupuncture researchers did not understand their research design. The original reason for blinding was to equate expectations. That the two forms of acupuncture came out equal in spite of unequal expectations among the therapists is better evidence that expectations were not important. The authors failed to grasp that lack of blinding worked in their favor.
Thanks to Hal Pashler.
As part of my digression into the effects of exercise, I tested the effect of a 15-minute walk (= on a treadmill at about 2.8 miles/hour) twice more. Here are the results:
Here is the result (posted earlier) of the first test:
Here is a test of a 40-minute walk:
What do I learn from all this? For my omega-3 experiments, which might cover 6 hours, I should keep the walking involved under 15 minutes. If I want to get some sort of mental benefit from walking, I should spend 40 minutes or more. Less obvious is this: I take these results to indicate the existence of a mechanism that “turns up” our brain when we are doing stuff and turns it “down” when we are inactive. This suggests what Stone-Age activity consisted of: more than 15 minutes of walking. This also suggests that whatever the benefits of exercise, they require more than 15 minutes of walking to obtain.
The practical question these results raise is how to use this effect to help me with what I do all day — most of which, such as writing, seems to be incompatible with walking. Walking breaks every few hours? What about running 10 minutes every few hours?
Gary Taubes’ new book on food and weight comes out today. Taubes agrees with what I say in The Shangri-La Diet: Exercise is a poor way to lose weight. The results above provide a different reason to exercise, of course. But the details should change. My impression is that most people focus on burning calories; whereas these results suggest choosing exercise that best produces this reaction-time-lowering effect.
Abu Ayyub Ibrahim is behind Behind the Approval Matrix — that is, New York magazine’s Approval Matrix, which is the first thing I read — if that’s the right word — in every issue. For example:
Ibrahim’s blog or whatever you call it explains the items in the Approval Matrix.
I wonder why Ibrahim and I like it so much. Perhaps 1. We enjoy praise and dispraise. 2. Cute little pictures. 3. Use of pictures as dots. 4. Draws our attention to stuff we may enjoy but otherwise wouldn’t know about (e.g., YouTube clips). 5. Unpompous. 6. Artistic in the Nabokovian sense (i.e., implies a better world — see Afterword to Lolita). 7. Mixes high and low. (My students laughed when I wrote “pimple” on the board.) 8. Sometimes witty.
The present system of working for examinations by students is one which is doing a great deal of harm in every way.
From a 1883 letter by J. S. Haldane to his mother.
From Tayster, below a poll that asks “do you sing in the car?”:
It’s been a week since I started the Shangri La Diet and I have lost eight pounds. More importantly, I have lost the cravings that I used to have. I don’t feel like eating as much food as I did before. And when I do eat food, I feel like I need to make it something besides a bag of chips and a chocolate cherry Coke. Since I eat less meals, I prefer to make the meals count.
I still can’t explain it, but it works.
One comment: “CHOCOLATE CHERRY COKE?!!! How did I not know about this assuredly sublime creation?!”
Anastasia Goodstein, a San Francisco writer, blogs at Ypulse — Y as in youth, meaning teenagers. She came to blogging from the “other side” — from journalism rather than subject-matter expertise — and blogging is one way she makes a living. She has written a book called Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens are Really Doing Online.
What did you slowly learn about blogging from doing it?
I learned when you are running a professional blog that has to be updated every day (or five days a week), you just can’t be brilliant every day. You have days where you have no clue what to blog about or when you’re just not inspired, but still you have to post. I also learned that posts I think might be amazing may get no response while other posts that I didn’t think were that great generate lots of comments. I have found ways to produce content that don’t rely on me having to write full blown posts all the time. I do a lot of Q&As (like this), repost some of the more interesting comments and have easy features like Ypulse Quote (where I find a relevant and interesting quote) or From The Ypulse WTF files (a short post about something that just makes you scratch your head).
I think blogging is a great way to work your writing muscles and develop/strengthen your writing voice — it takes focus and discipline and it’s public so you get feedback on what you do. I love blogs where you find great info and get to know the blogger — For example, USA Today’s Pop Candy, written by Whitney Matheson is one of my favorites.
What do non-bloggers fail to realize about blogging?
I think non-bloggers don’t realize how much work it is (see number one) — to build a decent readership, you have to update your blog pretty regularly. They may not realize that blogging can be financially lucrative — there are many writers now being hired as professional bloggers, individual bloggers like myself who have build media brands from their blogs and consultants and agencies who have used their blogs to generate lots of business.
You write: “Since May 2004 Ypulse has been updated five days a week . . . [in] September 2006 . . I decided to try to make Ypulse my full-time gig.” Was it a hard decision? What was behind it, besides the obvious advantages of working for oneself?
The decision to leave Current TV was agonizing — I love the mission of the network and very much enjoyed the people I worked with. I left partly to be able to promote my book, Totally Wired, which came out in March of 2007, and because Ypulse was becoming more than just a side project. The scariest part of leaving a job is leaving the security of a regular paycheck and benefits. I also wasn’t sure where I wanted to focus. I was going to try consulting, maybe launch a paid subscription product — I wasn’t sure. It has been a year since I left my job, and it was the best decision I’ve made. I now have a business partner helping me grow, a successful conference business and am still promoting my book on the road, which I never could have done working full time.
James Flynn’s conclusion that IQ scores all over the world had gone up by one standard deviation over 50 years or so (the Flynn effect) was one of the great psychological discoveries of the 20th century. It showed more clearly than anything else that everyday life can have a big effect on IQ, contrary to what many claimed.
In a new book called What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect Flynn takes this discovery as a starting point. After reading it, I could see there are three broad classes of explanation:
1. Events fed on themselves to promote certain abilities. To illustrate the dynamics, Flynn gives the example of basketball. As basketball became more popular, more people watched basketball, more people played basketball, and the rewards possible from basketball went up. All this increased the average level of play.
2. The trend of the last 50 years is a continuation of very long-term trends affecting those of high and low IQ roughly equally.
3. During the last 50 years, some environmental features were “fixed” — not everyone was reaching full potential. Better nutrition is the obvious example — nutritional deficiencies were corrected. This explanation is discussed briefly.
These three classes of explanation correspond to different expectations about how the distribution of IQ scores has changed. The first suggests that the high end (e.g., 75th %ile) increased more than the low end (e.g., 25th %ile). This is surely the case with basketball ability. The second means that that whole distribution has shifted. The third suggests that there will have been more improvement at the low end of the distribution than at the high end. Flynn does not make clear what the data show.
To the question, “were our (lower-IQ) ancestors sort of stupid?” Flynn answers yes. He quotes interviews with Russian peasants. Asked what dogs and chickens have in common, the answer was nothing. Asked what fish and crows have in common, again the answer was nothing. “Sort of stupid” is a harsh way to put it — and obviously they had many skills we have lost — but with the New York Times archives online, you can judge for yourself. Here is the opening of a 1937 review of Eleanor Roosevelt’s autobiography:
You pick up this book in the acute–and of course inevitable–consciousness that it is the autobiography of the wife of the President of the United States.
That sounds to me like a Spy parody.
I am less interested than Flynn in the question of the title. Intelligence is an everyday word with a meaning most of us know well; and it has also been used by psychologists to label what IQ tests measure (which is reasonable; it’s just an abbreviation). I find it hard to get interested in questions about definitions. Asking how to define this or that word is like asking how much cumin or cinnamon or whatever to put into a dish. It matters, but not very much. Definitions, like recipes, are man-made tools. Questions about cause and effect — such as what caused the Flynn effect — interest me more.
The dust jacket calls Flynn “a psychologist” but he’s a philosopher by training. “I am too much in love with philosophy to collect data or do field studies,” he writes. As a non-nutritionist who has written about nutrition (Chandra, the Shangri-La Diet, omega-3), his out-of-field success pleases me.
It is curious that both Thorstein Veblen and Tyler Cowen were/are economists. Judged by their interests, they might have been psychologists, sociologists, or anthropologists, especially the last. The Theory of the Leisure Class was pure anthropology. Tyler’s new book Discover Your Inner Economist is a blend of psychology and anthropology. Veblen wrote a whole book arguing what Tyler (rightly) takes as needing little support. “Cookbooks by famous chefs . . . seek to impress rather than respect our limits,” writes Tyler. Straight out of Theory of the Leisure Class except better written.
In book after book, Veblen criticized mainstream economics. The mainstream economists of his time liked to assume that everyone “maximized utility”; the point of Theory of the Leisure Class was how wrong this was — all that conspicuous waste and consumption and impracticality done to signal one’s wealth. Whereas Tyler’s theme is essentially the opposite: mainstream economic ideas, which now include Veblen’s, explain a lot about everyday life, such as which countries have the best restaurants. U. N. troops were “very good for the people who sell lobster,” a Haitian taxi driver told him.
Whereas Veblen expressed his dissatisfaction in the usual academic way — he wrote a book saying this is bad, that is bad (very creatively and thematically) — Tyler did something far less predictable and probably far more powerful: With Alex Tabarrok, he started a blog. The main theme of Marginal Revolution, as far as I can tell, is to praise stuff (usually academic economic stuff) that Tyler believes is or is likely to be under-appreciated. Greg Clark’s new book is an example. Stories teach values, and MR is a long-running serial with “recurring characters” (to quote Tyler). To criticize by creating is as old as Michaelangelo but requires a willingness to start small and deal with small things (such as a tiny restaurant) that doesn’t come easily to academics in prestigious positions.