Month: October 2007

Rent-Seeking in Higher Education

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A nice essay by Paul Graham about the effects of making start-ups easier says that one effect will be changes in our education system:

Performance is always the ultimate test, but there are so many kinks in the plumbing now that most people are insulated from it most of the time. So you end up with a world in which high school students think they need to get good grades to get into elite colleges, and college students think [correctly] they need to get good grades to impress employers.

A world in which lawyers are forever judged by the law school they attended, which greatly surprised a lawyer friend of mine. If you can leave college to start a company, your professors have less power over you. One more way the Web is like the printing press, which led to a vast reduction in the power of the Catholic Church. The printing press made it much easier to start new religions.

For whom do colleges exist?

Insanity at MIT

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Predictably Irrational, a forthcoming book by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at MIT, tells about an experiment done to learn how sexual arousal influences decision making. The experiment involved showing pornography to male undergraduates while they masturbated.

Before allowing the research to begin, Dean Richard Schmalensee assigned a committee, consisting mostly of women [professors], to examine the project. This committee had several concerns. What if a participant uncovered repressed memories of sexual abuse? Suppose a participant found that he or she was a sex addict?

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov quotes a psychoanalytic textbook by Erich Fromm “used in American colleges, repeat, used in American colleges”:

The little cap of red velvet in the German edition of Little Red Riding Hood is a symbol of menstruation.

The narrator comments: “Do these clowns really believe what they teach?” Did the MIT professors really believe those outcomes were serious dangers?

For similar stories, see IRB Watch.

A Vivid Description of SLD

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Michael Blowhard has an especially vivid description of Life With SLD:

It took about a week for the appetite-suppression part of the Shangri-La experience to kick in. . . . It was a funny and bewildering moment when it did. I reached out for the usual additional forkful — and my hand stopped in midair. Nope, didn’t feel like it — and back my fork came, empty. My brain was thinking “What the hell?” but my body was saying “Had enough.” My instincts were speaking — only they were saying something different (”Enough”) than they usually do (”More! More!”).

Once Were Warriors

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In a recent post I mentioned Once Were Warriors, a movie about Maoris in New Zealand. Yesterday I met someone from Australia who said that the Maoris had/have an exceptionally war-like culture. They are not the same as other “native” groups, such as the American Indians or the Australian aborigines. They came to New Zealand relatively recently — from Samoa, maybe — and flourished by killing everyone who was already there. The Wikipedia entry for Maori doesn’t make this clear but doesn’t contradict it, either.

Why We Need Enough Cholesterol

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Another excellent post from Michael Eades discusses a new study that found elderly people with lower cholesterol had faster cognitive decline than those with higher cholesterol. Suggesting that cholesterol protects your brain.

There are several reasons to think this association reflects cause and effect. First, earlier studies found the same thing. Second, an earlier study found that people whose cholesterol was lowered had higher rates of violent death — an unexpected side effect that implies brain dysfunction. Third, as Eades points out, the brain contains lots of cholesterol.

Thanks to Tom.

What Do Bulimia and Working for the U.N. Have in Common?

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Twice in my life — in Denmark and Hong Kong — I have started chatting with women who ended up telling me about their bulimia, which they kept secret from almost everyone, including their friends. A few days ago, in San Francisco, I met a woman who works on water engineering projects for the U.N. “What I do in my job is connect people,” she told me. For example, she went to Haiti and brought the people who needed help together with the people (in Haiti) who could help them. She never tells her bosses what she does. To her bosses, the focus is on some sort of technology. Were she to tell her bosses what she does, she said, the focus would shift away from the technology. There would be attempts to institutionalize what she does — and institutions would be terrible at it.

What other jobs are like this (where your boss doesn’t know what you do)?

Shirley Hazzard’s Defeat of an Ideal: A Study of the Self-destruction of the United Nations (1973) is excellent. It’s Devil Wears Prada about a whole institution.

The Twilight of Expertise (part 12: Super Crunchers)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Ian Ayres’ interesting new book, Super Crunchers, has a chapter about expert prediction versus predictions from math models. Almost always, the math models do better than the experts. I learned about this in graduate school when I read stuff by Paul Meehl, a psychology professor who compared the predictions of clinicians and regression equations in the 1950s. The idea has gathered strength since then and now the persons in some jobs — such as loan officers — are required to follow an algorithm for making decisions. Their expertise is ignored. Obviously they no longer derive as much self-worth from their job, Ayres points out.

It’s like the beginning of agriculture. Lots has been written about the physical problems caused by the change to agriculture. Stature decreased, tooth decay increased, and so on. I’ve never read about the mental problems it must have caused. I can only speculate, of course, but here’s an possible example: Hunters derived self-worth from bringing meat to their families. Taking that away caused problems. (Watching Once Were Warriors, a terrific movie, should make this more plausible.)

I have never read anything about how to reintroduce into everyday jobs crucial mental elements that hunting had and farming lacked. Nutrition education, vitamin supplements, dietary fortification, and other nutrition programs push us toward a pre-agricultural diet, which was far more diverse and better balanced. There is no similar set of things that move us closer to pre-agricultural ways of making a living. My self-experimental research is all about the value stuff that ancient life had but modern life lacks — such as seeing lots of faces in the morning — but I have never figured out how to simulate elements of hunting, beyond being on one’s feet a lot.

SLD Nation (ghee)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I drink 4 tablespoons of flaxseed oil per day. But perhaps I could go higher:

Anjum always cooks with safflower oil (similar to sunflower oil), but admits that “butter goes really well with lentils” and even, unfashionably, puts in a good word for ghee (clarified butter). “I think modern science has it wrong and soon they’re going to say ghee is healthy.” At an Ayurvedic spa in Malta last summer she was put on a ghee detox. “I was like: Are you crazy? I wanted to lose the baby weight.” Given increasing doses for breakfast, by the last day she could happily swallow nine tablespoons of pure fat. “I looked, like, six years younger.”

From here.

Thanks to Evelyn Mitchell.

What Causes Heart Attacks? (the Framingham Study)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

The Framingham Study is a famous long-term health survey. According to an NIH webpage, its goal was “to identify the common factors or characteristics that contribute to CVD by following its development over a long period of time in a large group of participants who had not yet developed overt symptoms of CVD or suffered a heart attack or stroke.”

That is not quite right. It was originally called the Framingham Diet Study. Now it is called the Framingham Heart Study. Why the change? Well, Michael Eades, the author of Protein Power, found an early report on the findings of this study and wrote a fascinating post about it. One of his excerpts from the report:

In undertaking the diet study at Framingham the primary interest was, of course, in the relation of diet to the development of coronary heart disease (CHD). It was felt, however, that any such relationship would be an indirect one, diet influencing serum cholesterol level and serum cholesterol level influencing the risk of CHD. However, no relationship could be discerned within the study cohort between food intake and serum cholesterol level.

In the period between the taking of the diet interviews and the end of the 16-year follow-up, 47 cases of de novo CHD developed in the Diet Study group. The means for all the diet variables measured were practically the same for these cases as for the original cohort at risk. There is, in short, no suggestion of any relation between diet and the subsequent development of CHD in the study group.

That is, the findings of the study completely contradicted what the researchers believed (as indicated in the name Framingham Diet Study). This is what Leonard Syme taught his introductory epidemiology students on topic after topic: Well-known conclusions are far less certain than you think.

Thanks to Tom.