Month: September 2007

How to Answer Your Critics

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From Vanity Fair:

As for the thousand or so members of the online “Rachael Ray Sucks Community”—a pack who delight in obnoxious nicknames (Retchel, Raytard), mock her smile, hate her vocabulary (”yum-o” especially), criticize her over-reliance on canned chicken stock, and think she dresses like Greg on The Brady Bunch . . . Ray answers such critics by agreeing with them. “Most of what they say is absolutely true. I don’t know how to bake. I didn’t make my own pierogis in episode whatever. You can’t be all things to all people.”

Not bad.

Joyce Hatto and Ranjit Chandra: Separated at Birth?

Seth Roberts1 Comment

In the current New Yorker, Mark Singer, one of my favorite writers, describes the “incredible career” of the late Joyce Hatto, a British pianist. According to her husband, she had a stillborn twin brother. Could that brother have in fact lived, and become Ranjit Chandra, a Canadian immunologist?

Consider the similarities:

1. Accolades. Toward the end of her life, Hatto released dozens of recordings that elicited great praise. “One of the greatest pianists I have ever heard,” said one critic. Chandra was awarded the Order of Canada, the country’s highest honor.

2. Man of mystery. Hatto recorded several concertos with Rene Kohler and the National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra but “there was no mention of him or the orchestra in any reference book,” according to Singer. Saul Sternberg and I could not locate Amrit L. Jain, author of a study with the same results as one of Chandra’s studies. Nor could we locate his institution (”Medical Clinic and Nursing Home”).

3. One strange fact after another. Many of Hatto’s performances were identical or almost identical to performances by others. As Saul Sternberg, Ken Carpenter, and I examined Chandra’s papers, we discovered many unlikely or impossible details. Our letters to editors about this are here and here.

More about Chandra, who has sued the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) over its documentary about him. Part 1 of that documentary, for which Chris O’Neill-Yates won a journalism award.

Modern Veblen: The Less-Than-Obvious Value of Evolutionary Explanations

Seth Roberts2 Comments

An interesting Economist article about sex differences in a visual task calls an evolutionary explanation a “just-so story.” I don’t know if the late Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary theorist, Harvard professor, and “one of the most influential and widely-read writers of popular science of his generation” (Wikipedia), invented this form of dismissal, but certainly he was fond of it. Here, for example:

Evolutionary biology has been severely hampered by a speculative style of argument that . . . tries to construct historical or adaptive explanations for why this bone looked like that or why this creature lived here. These speculations have been charitably called “scenarios”; they are often more contemptuously, and rightly, labeled “stories” (or “just-so stories” if they rely on the fallacious assumption that everything exists for a purpose). Scientists know that these tales are stories; unfortunately, they are presented in the professional literature where they are taken too seriously and literally.

Well, this is seriously wrong. My work contains several just-so stories — evolutionary explanations of the morning-faces effect and of the mechanism behind the Shangri-La Diet, for example. My theory of human evolution might be called a just-so saga.

These explanations made me (at least) believe more strongly in the result or theory they explained — which turned out to be a good thing. My morning-faces result was at first exceedingly implausible. The evolutionary explanation encouraged me to study it more. After repeating it hundreds of times I no longer need the evolutionary explanation to believe it but the explanation may help convince others to take it seriously. The evolutionary explanation connected with the Shangri-La Diet had the same effect. My evolutionary explanation of the effect of breakfast on sleep led me to do the experiment that discovered the morning-faces effect. My theory of human evolution led me to try new ways of teaching, with good results.

Why did Gould make this mistake? Thorstein Veblen wrote about our fondness for “invidious comparisons.” We like to say our X is better than someone else’s X. Sure, evolutionary explanations may be hard to test. That doesn’t mean they’re worthless. Like many scientists, Gould failed to grasp that something is better than nothing.

Addendum: Perhaps the Economist writer had read a recent Bad Science column that began:

I want you to know that I love evolutionary psychologists, because the ideas, like “girls prefer pink because they need to be better at hunting berries” are so much fun. Sure there are problems, like, we don’t know a lot about life in the pleistocene period through which humans evolved; their claims sound a bit like “just so” stories, relying on their own internal, circular logic; the existing evidence for genetic influence on behaviour, emotion, and cognition, is coarse; they only pick the behaviours which they think they can explain while leaving the rest; and they get themselves in massive trouble as soon as they go beyond examining broad categories of human behaviors across societies and cultures, becoming crassly ethnocentric.

“They only pick the behaviours which they think they can explain” — how dare they!

Laboratory Confidential

Seth Roberts4 Comments

A friend of mine has started to wonder how to find scientists he will feel comfortable working with. For the past year, he has been working in a lab in a very prestigious institution. He wrote me about it:

The director of my lab is a very successful scientist. She is also director of the research facility. Our personalities blended well initially, but then we grew apart. She is very nice, very busy, and impressively ambitious. Despite her genuine desire to be nice, honest, and good teacher, her ambition is supreme — above honesty and integrity from my point of view.

My biggest issue has been her caring more about her own advancement than about the discovery of truth. She does not blatantly lie about her research results, but she profoundly modulates her research efforts based upon what she believes will give her the success she seeks. I realize that on the face of it there is not anything unethical about ambition directing the evolution of research. However, I am not comfortable with the degree to which the research in this group is shaped by its leader’s ambition.

What has had the biggest effect on me is realizing that it isn’t just her. The rest of my group has allowed her to pursue her strategies. I have realized that I don’t want to pursue research in a culture where ambition is above all, particularly the pursuit of truth.

What’s an example? I asked. He replied:

We had an interesting result in a study we did. Accompanying this result was an unusual artifact. It is my impression that my director did not want to publish our good result because she was hesitant to admit that we observed this unusual artifact. I believe that the unusual artifact could negatively impact the use of fMRI to investigate pharmacological drugs that affect the brain — a big research market. It is not a lie to not publish a result. However, I don’t like not being able to speak frankly about the implications of a result.

This is an advantage of self-experimentation I hadn’t thought of.

Addendum: “It is not a lie to not publish a result.” In The Shangri-La Diet I use Vladimir Nabokov’s term doughnut truth — the whole truth, nothing but the truth, with a hole in the truth.

How Could We Be This Wrong about Medicine?

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Robin Hanson’s excellent essay in Cato Unbound is a proposal to cut medical spending in half. The evidence suggests that this would do little harm and it would help us focus on more helpful activities. I like the way this article summarizes the RAND experiment, searches for the right metaphor, and answers objections.

One question Robin answers is “How could we be this wrong about medicine?” My answer is different than Robin’s. I point to the way many scholarly and scientific disciplines start off useful and become useless. In the case of medicine, the lack of benefit is easier to measure. Try measuring the value of a class in 18th Century English Literature.

Science in Action: Exercise (15-minute walk)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Exercise reduces reaction time, I’ve found. What’s the threshold? I wondered — how little exercise do you need to get the effect? I wanted to know so that in my omega-3 experiments, I could be active — e.g., walk to a cafe — without distorting the results. Also, for practical reasons, I wanted to produce the effect as easily as possible.

To learn more about the threshold, I walked on my treadmill for 15 minutes at a comfortable speed (2.8 miles/hour). Here’s what happened:

effect of 15-minute walk

If anything, the short walk increased reaction time. Thirty minutes of walking produced a clear (and repeatable) decrease, so the the effect appears to require between 15 and 30 minutes of walking.

I did this experiment three days ago. Self-experimentation is many times easier than conventional science; blogging is many times easier than conventional publishing. A powerful combination, I hope.

Modern Veblen: Flight From Data

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I read The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen during college and was very impressed. One of the book’s main points is that wealthy people advertise their avoidance of “dirty” work. Long fingernails on women. Obscure and elaborate phrases in academic articles. “The advantage of the accredited locutions lies in their reputability; they are reputable because they are cumbrous and out of date, and therefore argue waste of time and exemption from the use and the need of direct and forcible speech,” wrote Veblen.

A friend of mine does research for an oil company. Several years ago, the oil company he worked for (Company X) was bought by another oil company (Company Y), which merged their research departments. Company X’s research group moved to the research campus of Company Y. Following the move, each Company X researcher was asked to give a talk about his recent work. My friend wrote an abstract for his talk. The seminar coordinator — from Company Y — came into my friend’s office with his abstract and said to him, “Could you deemphasize the parts involving real data? We don’t deal with real data here.”

This was true. The Company Y researchers included many theorists, heavily into abstruse mathematical models. Others were coding new algorithms and relied on model “data” for testing, but not actual data. In contrast, many of Company X’s researchers, including my friend, “got their hands dirty.” After my friend’s talk, several people told him how nice it was to hear about real data.

You can see this tendency everywhere at UC Berkeley, from English to Statistics to Engineering to Psychology. Disciplines that began closely connected with reality and everyday concerns moved farther and farther away. A few days ago someone complained to me about a class where students graded each other’s papers. That’s academia, I said.

Modern Veblen: Theory Testing.

Science in Action: Exercise (more confirmation)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

How little exercise will produce the reaction-time-lowering effect I’ve found (here and here)? I decided to measure the effect of a 10-minute walk from a BART stop to a cafe. (Nicely integrating work and work.) But I got off BART at the wrong stop and my 10-minute walk took 40 minutes.

Here is what happened:

effect of 40-minute walk

Just as with a 30-minute treadmill walk, the effect was delayed.

This is more support for the idea that exercise temporarily improves brain function. The novelty in this particular experiment is that the exercise was “real” rather than on an indoor treadmill.

For comparison, here are earlier results from much more strenuous exercise (30 minutes walking uphill on a treadmill):

effect of 30 minutes on steep treadmill

The effect of more strenuous exercise was larger and lasted longer. With the easier exercise (the stroll) there was a downward spike in reaction time; with the more difficult exercise (the climb) there was a more crater-like effect. The spike shape suggests the effect was sub-maximal; the crater shape suggests that the maximum effect was reached. Which makes sense because the climb was close to maximum effort, whereas the stroll was far below it.

A kind reader pointed to a NY Times article on the brain effects of exercise. “Exercise can, in fact, create a stronger, faster brain,” says the article. “Create” refers to neurogenesis. The effects I’ve observed are more temporary — more like adding better fuel to a car.

“The human brain is extremely difficult to study, especially when a person is still alive,” says the article. Not entirely true.

SLD on consumerist.com

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Here is a nice endorsement of the Shangri-La Diet by Ben Popken. A very interesting aspect of what he is doing is the use of photographs to fool himself — or not — that he is being watched.

The taking and uploading of photos helps keep me honest. I know that if I fall behind, I have to announce it. Not many people are watching it but just seeing a few views here and there helps reinforce the idea that I’m being monitored.

Photos of his weight, for example.

how much he weighed

All his photos.

Thanks to CalorieLab.