Month: April 2008

80% Empty or 20% Full?

Seth Roberts1 Comment

A study in the latest issue of Journal of Nutrition wondered if following dietary guidelines (“eating healthy”) is helpful. From the abstract:

Few studies have found that adherence to dietary guidelines reduces the incidence of chronic disease. In 2001, a National Nutrition and Health Program (Program National Nutrition Santé) was implemented in France and included 9 quantified priority nutritional goals involving fruit, vegetable, and nutrient intakes, nutritional status, and physical activity. We developed an index score that includes indicators of these public health objectives and examined the association between this score and the incidence of major chronic diseases in the Supplémentation en Vitamines et Minéraux AntioXydants cohort. . . . Men in the top tertile [ = most adherence] compared with those in the lowest one had a 36% lower risk of major chronic diseases . . . No association was found in women.

No association in women. Suppose the guidelines were half correct — half of the advice was useless, half was helpful. You’d still expect an association because the helpful advice would help and the useless advice would neither hurt nor help.

Did the authors of this highly-informative study face their results squarely? No. The abstract concludes: “Healthy diet and lifestyle were associated with a lower risk of chronic diseases, particularly in men, thereby underlying relevance of the French nutritional recommendations.” Particularly in men, huh? The study started with about 2000 men and 3000 women. It lasted eight years.

Before There Was News, There Was Gossip

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Did the professionalization of science — people could make a living doing science — cause harm because although more science was done scientists — the professional ones — were no longer free to pursue the truth in any direction? Because their jobs and status were at stake? It’s plausible. Recall that Mendel and Darwin were amateurs. A more recent example is Alister Hardy, the Oxford professor who conceived the aquatic ape theory of evolution. He didn’t pursue it because he feared loss of reputation. The more sophisticated conclusion, I suppose, isn’t that professionalization was bad but that loss of diversity was bad. We need both amateur and professional scientists because each can do stuff the other can’t. Right now we only have professional ones. No one encourages amateur science; there is no way they can publish their work. (Unless, like Elaine Morgan, who wrote several books about the aquatic ape theory, you’re a professional writer.)

These thoughts were prompted by this remarkable blog post, which has nothing to do with science. What an amazing piece of writing, I thought. I don’t even agree with it, and here I am staring at it. A work of genius? No, lots of blog posts are really good. This one was merely better than most. Would something this brazen and effective appear in any major magazine, newspaper, TV show, radio ad, etc.? No, not even. Do we realize that, all these years, stuff like this has been missing from our media consumption? No, we don’t. Before there was news, there was gossip, I realized; news (such as newspapers) was a kind of professionalization of gossip. The blog post I admired was a bit of riveting creative gossip. Blogs are just new-fangled gossip. Bloggers are endlessly scandalized, indignant, judgmental, just as gossips are. Just as gossip is usually “passed on,” most blog posts have links and many posts consist almost entirely of “passing on” something. Just as gossip can be anything, bloggers can say what they really think, as Tyler Cowen pointed out. That’s why they’re so successful, so easy to write and read. Gossip is good for our mental ecology, just as science is. Mark Liberman’s Language Log blog is a blend of (good) gossip and science; as you can see from my interview with him, it filled a gap. I hope blogs will provide a kind of support structure on which amateur science can grow.

Interview with Mark Liberman about Blogging

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, blogs at Language Log. Recently I asked him a few questions about blogging.

ROBERTS Why did you start Language Log?

LIBERMAN Several reasons. First, I had started reading blogs and enjoyed them. Second, I was spending quite a bit of time exchanging email with friends. They were like long-distance dinner-table conversations. Each email was a couple of paragraphs. I was spending quite a bit of time on that. It was interesting and fun, a way of keeping up with friends and former colleagues. I realized that many of these emails were close to blog entries that might be interesting to a wider audience. Some of them could have been blog entries. I thought to myself: If there was a weblog, instead of sending this to 1 or 2 people I could put it on the weblog and send a link to those people. Third, I had felt for a long time that linguistics, in our current culture, was in an historically atypical and irrational place. Almost nobody learned about linguistics, got any intellectual information about language. It was undertaught to the general public. It has been valued much more in the past. Now we’re in a situation where many English professors have never taken a course that teaches anything about the analysis of language. They don’t know how to do it. One small way to improve that situation would be to put stuff out there that people could read.

ROBERTS How has blogging affected you?

LIBERMAN Three things. First and most important, I’ve met — mostly digitally — a large number of people that I would never otherwise have met. They send me email. If I look over my email logs, there are probably 5 or 10 people that I correspond with frequently whom I’ve met that way. Most of them are not linguists; I wouldn’t have met them otherwise. Some of them are not even academics. Second, it has allowed me to influence the conversation inside linguistics and related fields in a way that I hadn’t really expected. It wasn’t my motivation. I’ve always thought of writing for people outside the field. Issues that I’ve raised within the field, including how the field ought to view itself, people respond to. I was invited to give a plenary talk at the Linguistics Society of America meeting about the status of the field in academia. I had blogged about such things. Third, I get a lot of calls from journalists asking me to comment about this or that. A lot of things they ask me to comment on I don’t know about. It made me someone that journalists call.

ROBERTS How have your views about blogging changed since you started Language Log?

LIBERMAN There is a spectrum of blogs; some are just sets of links — minimal comment and a link. When I started I thought that was what I was going to do, along with email-to-friends kind of pieces. Along the way I learned that a blog entry is a good way for me to learn things. If there’s something that I’m interested in, I may write a blog-like essay about it. I compose quite a few blog entries that I never publish. When I’m working through some ideas, I often organize my thoughts an awful lot like an blog entry. Like an annotated bibliography but with more structure. I don’t publish some of those things because I don’t think the general audience of Language Log would be interested in them. They’re too difficult. They take the form of an extended blog entry — links plus evaluation and discussion but more informal than a paper. Very helpful in organizing my thoughts. I read some things, put in some links, quotes, weave it all together into some structure. I produce an html document. It’s a way of taking notes. Something I do at the very beginning of an intellectual enterprise. A journal article is what you do at the end. For example, I’ve become interested in auditory texture. I’ve been composing a few things that are like weblog entries.

Once a month or so I try to do what I call a breakfast experiment. Some issue has come up in the world that I want to comment on. There’s an experiment that I wouldn’t want to submit to a journal. Better than an anecdote. For example, a few months ago somebody wrote that a journalist who had been living in Japan had been learning girl Japanese. Is it true that there is more gender difference in pitch in Japanese than in other languages? At the Linguistic Data Consortium we had conversations in many languages, including Japanese and English. I could select appropriate conversations, throw values into R, look at quantiles. (There were a few issues you’d want to clean up for a journal article.) I got up early, set up scripts, made coffee, had cereal, plotted quantiles. By 7:30 am I had some pictures. It was true that there was more gender polarization in pitch in Japanese than in English. The analysis involved 18 Japanese conversations and a similar number of English conversations.

I had been abstractly aware for a long time that there’s a lot of value in doing experiments on published data. One of the problems in doing empirical linguistics has been that gathering data takes a lot longer than anything else. For English we’ve now got about 10,000 extemporaneous telephone conversations, with demographic info about the speakers. I thought of experiments on that sort of data where someone had to spend a lot of time gathering the data, but once it’s gathered and published, there are a lot of ideas that you can try out very quickly.

The Secret Non-Shame of the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Before I wrote The Shangri-La Diet I anticipated the diet would reduce hunger and weight and increase peace of mind but this surprised me:

So far, I have told NO ONE what I am doing, not even [my husband]. A couple of my teens (I’m the mother of 3 teenage boys, ages 19,16 and 15) have walked into the kitchen as I was taking my oil and wondered what I was doing. I just told them it was to take care of some pooping problems I’ve been having.

SLD = more off-limits than poop.

Interview with Kamran Nazeer (part 5: the end)

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ROBERTS You enjoyed reading, I assume.

NAZEER Yes. That’s true.

ROBERTS So your language development was retarded, even though you enjoyed reading. That’s unusual, I would think.

NAZEER I certainly didn’t enjoy reading at that age. I didn’t read much at all when I was a kid. I started reading a lot more when I was older.

ROBERTS Reading was something that you discovered you enjoyed relatively late in life.

NAZEER Yes.

ROBERTS So, while the other second graders are reading their books, you were not.

NAZEER No, I wasn’t.

ROBERTS Huh. So, did you have any other abilities? I think it’s common enough for people to develop late. There’s a word for it: late bloomers. We don’t normally hear this word in reference to autism. But you know more about it than I do. Is this a common developmental trajectory in autism? The person starts out slow, but slowly and surely passes everyone else?

NAZEER I’m not sure about the passing everyone else, and I’m not sure that’s the case with me, either.

ROBERTS Well, you are an extremely good writer.

NAZEER I chose to focus on a particular skill. What you’re seeing is the result of me having chosen to focus on that. So I’m more uncomfortable with the surpassing idea, but on your idea of developing late, I think that probably is true. I think that autistic young people find it very, very difficult to develop certain skills, but with the right support, they can develop them; they just often develop them much later and much more slowly than other kids.

ROBERTS Well, it helps to have many different kinds of people in the world, with many different kinds of brains, because we need many different skills to have a well-functioning economy. So from that point of view, the fact that autistic kids have different skills, or different abilities, let’s put it that way, makes a lot of sense, because then they’ll grow up to be adults who can do things the result of us can’t. But that’s really different from the idea that they’ve got a handicap that they’ve got to spend the rest of their life trying to overcome. Your story, in your book, suggests there are certain things that autistic kids can do as adults that other people can’t.

NAZEER I don’t think I am suggesting that.

ROBERTS You probably didn’t write the book with that in mind, obviously, but do you think that’s fair?

NAZEER No, I think, on the whole, it’s not fair because most autistic adults, even as adults, even though they might have developed the confidence to do certain things well, experience often quite profound difficulties. Everybody who’s in the book still has quite profound difficulties of one sort or another. So I don’t think it’s at all the case that all autistic adults, or even most, completely overcome the difficulties that they have. But that said, I think there is particular aspects of the condition of autism which might mean you have a particularly good focus on detail, which might suit you very well for certain types of jobs. It may mean that you think in a very structured way, which again, may suit you for particular jobs. I think another thing that comes about for autistic people is because they know that they have to work harder at things than other people, that kind of leads to a certain determination and resourcefulness and kind of reliance on being logical, which again, suits you for certain kinds of jobs.

ROBERTS Thanks very much for your time.

NAZEER Thanks, it was an interesting discussion.

Kamran Nazeer is the pen name of Emran Mian. He is the author of Send In the Idiots: Stories From the Other Side of Autism. Interview directory.Â

Interview with Kamran Nazeer (part 4)

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ROBERTS What about your case? Did that happen in your case? Your special skill seems to be language, but — what do I know?

NAZEER Yes, maybe that’s it. It’s a certain kind of precision of expression. Or not even a precision of expression, but an agility of expression, which for me, in the first place, came about because of learning how to write well. Then, from learning how to write well, it turned into being able being able to speak well about particular topics. Whereas I’m not so good at being in a meeting with 12 people and trying to get what I want out of that meeting, I’m better at writing a very persuasive email to 12 people.

ROBERTS A less-useful skill. So your teachers recognized your language ability, your early teachers?

NAZEER No, because at that stage I didn’t have it.

ROBERTS You didn’t have it?

NAZEER What my early teachers helped me to do was to develop it, was to put me on the first steps of the ladder towards having it.

ROBERTS What did they do?

NAZEER Well, to begin with, it was very simple things, like giving, kind of forcing me to say particular words, showing me flash cards again and again until I would use particular words, beginning by kind of letting me be able to point to things when I wanted them and then actually withholding them until I would actually say the name of the thing. So there were techniques of that sort. There were also techniques of encouraging me to talk to other kids in the school who were at a similar position in their language development to me, so that we weren’t being over-awed in talking to much more linguistically agile kids, or fully linguistically developed adults, but in fact we were talking to people who were in a similar linguistic position to ourselves. That helps linguistic development.

ROBERTS So you’re saying that, by certain measures, you were linguistically behind. Your language development was retarded relative to other kids.

NAZEER It certainly was. I didn’t start speaking until I was about 6 years old.

ROBERTS It wasn’t because you thought it was boring, or anything.

NAZEER No, not at all, no, no.

ROBERTS So somehow, at some point, you caught up. Is that true?

NAZEER Yes.

ROBERTS So at some point, you caught up. You started off more slowly, and then you caught up, and then you surpassed.

NAZEER I’m not sure I surpassed, but yeah, I’ll agree with the “caught up” bit.

ROBERTS Well, you wrote a book. Very few people write a book, and not only that, your book is very well written, which is much rarer.

NAZEER But I chose to focus on writing as a skill that I wanted to develop and I worked hard at it in the same way that somebody else might focus on becoming an electrician, and work very hard at it, and they’d become much better at wiring than I’d ever be, possibly. But for me, writing is very much that thing; it’s a craft. It’s something I decided I wanted to be good at, and then I spent a lot of time learning to be good at it.

Interview directory.

Jane Jacobs and Collapse

Seth Roberts11 Comments

Soon after it was published, I listened to an audiobook (abridged) version of Collapse (2005) by Jared Diamond. It is about how several societies destroyed their ecosystem and died. One example was Easter Island; the islanders cut down all the trees, and disappeared. The whole book was meant as a warning, of course: This can happen to us. At first I liked it — interesting stories. Then I heard that Jane Jacobs didn’t like it. I was unable to find out why. I began to wonder what I’d missed.

Now I can guess what she’d say: “ Collapse doesn’t make clear that overexploitation has been avoided countless times. That is the usual outcome. Even before cities, humans were constantly creating new ways to make a living, which decreased reliance on the old ways.”

I could make a video that shows Michael Jordan missing 20 free throws in a row. Every moment would be true but the whole thing would be false. That’s not far from what Collapse does — at least the audiobook version.