Month: April 2008

Interview with Kamran Nazeer (part 3)

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ROBERTS This is a big theme of your book, right, sort of a difference in attention. To my way of taking it, you didn’t have any lesson you were trying to teach the readers of your book. You were just trying to tell four stories, or five stories. But reading the stories, someone like me says “Oh my God, how can this be?” Not exactly that, but I felt like this wasn’t something that was supposed to be. There was a recent piece in the news about how kids who are disruptive in kindergarten grown up fine; they grow up without problems. One of the founding assumptions of our society is that things that we say are bad are harmful. They go together so well, right: harmful and bad? If your child has a problem, then presumably they’re going to grow up in some kind of bad way, and something bad is going to happen to them as an adult. But your book didn’t support that assumption, because these kids grow up to be unusual adults, but not terribly impaired, or anything. Is that a fair reading of your book?

NAZEER I think that’s a fair reading. The gloss that I think I would add to it is what happened to them in childhood was incredibly important. What was important about it was all the people in the book, what they have in common was that they all received the diagnosis very early on and received very early and very good intervention. That was fundamentally important to their success in later life. So autistic kids who don’t get the diagnosis early on, and don’t get the help that they need — and I’ll resist the word deficits, because I don’t think they are deficits — to understand the world better and to overcome the kind of differences that they have, then those kids actually do struggle. Whereas I think the kids in the book struggle less because they were lucky enough to get a diagnosis early on and get very good help early on.

ROBERTS I see. So this was unusual, the timing of the diagnosis.

NAZEER It’s usual now. It’s now thankfully becoming much more common for kids to be diagnosed at the age of three or four. It’s now becoming much more common for kids to actually get a decent level of education. It’s still not common enough, but it’s much more common than it was in the early 80s, when we were all at school.

ROBERTS What would have happened if the level of schooling had been worse, or less appropriate?

NAZEER I think it would have taken them a lot longer to overcome — and I don’t use this word in a perjorative way — overcome their disabilities. It would have taken than a lot longer to develop their language abilities, to develop useful hierarchies of sense data, and develop a sense of confidence about themselves, which I think is really fundamentally important as well. I think one of the big benefits of early intervention for autistic children is they begin to get a sense of things that they can do. And getting a sense of things that you can do then in turns builds a sense of confidence in yourself. So it means that even when you’re 13 and you’ve had a really really bad day, you can still remind yourself that you have had moments of progress, and there are things you can do at 13 that you weren’t able to do when you were 11.

ROBERTS What is an example of these things that you can do?

NAZEER Sometimes it can be very, very simple things. For Elizabeth, it was things as simple as teaching herself how to ride a bike. For somebody who perhaps was at the higher-functioning end of autism, somebody like Craig, that sense of confidence came from being able to write a good essay. So even though he might have still very profound social difficulties, because he knew that there was this thing that he was good at doing, that gave him a certain sense of confidence, even when it came to activities that he found much more challenging.

ROBERTS So you’re saying the way he was taught helped him to be confident, because somehow, his ability to write an essay was stressed, or something? Is that what you’re saying?

NAZEER Right. I think that’s what I’m saying. I think, in that sense, autisticyoung people aren’t any different from anybody else. I think, ultimately, nobody ever becomes brilliant at everything; we all become decent at some things, but being decent at some things gives us the confidence to try out things that we’re not so good at.

ROBERTS I think you’re right. I think that’s the incredibly important thing about education: to help people figure out that there are some things that they’re good at.

NAZEER People end up being good at different things. That is what I think — your deficit and difference opposition comes into play, which is that autistic people may well be different — may well be good at other things to other people. But as long as they get to the position where they feel comfortable, capable, and confident in doing some things, then that gives them confidence in functioning socially.

ROBERTS So they need schooling in which their abilities are recognized and developed and encouraged.

NAZEER That’s right.

ROBERTS That’s what you seem to be saying: that if autistic kids have different skills, then they have to have teachers who know how to develop and recognize those skills.

NAZEER That’s exactly it.

Interview directory.

My Theory of Human Evolution (the cellphone effect)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In poor countries, cellphones have a big anti-poverty effect:

Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone’s ability to increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached. There’s the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people’s loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are. . . . Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.

This is exactly the effect I propose that the very first words had: They helped two traders find each other. Having a word for knife made it much easier for the person who had a knife to trade to find someone who wanted a knife. I was in Guatemala when I ran out of contact-lens solution. Not knowing the Spanish term for it, it was extremely hard to find. Once I knew the Spanish term, it was very easy to find. In a Guatemalan market, I heard a man shout “toothpaste” (in Spanish) over and over. He was selling toothpaste.

I think the first words were also the first names; You became identified by the name of what you were good at making (and therefore had to trade, since you made many of them). This information spread, like a cellphone signal, from tower to tower: From one person to another. If you were Mr. X, and someone wanted X, and they said so (“X?”), someone would point them to you. All it took were single words.

Later in the article, Chipchase responds to the author, who wonders if more technology is always better. “People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either,” he says. I would go further: Not having cellphones is like not having language.

How Bad is Dairy?

Seth Roberts14 Comments

A most intriguing comment on Tim Ferriss’s excellent post about how to sleep better:

To require less sleep and yet still feel awake, energetic and not sleep deprived in general:

The single biggest factor for me has been the elimination of all dairy products from my diet. I have experimented with this over 4 years now and it is clear the most benefit is achieved with the most radical approach to this. In other words, removing dairy products completely from my diet has the biggest benefit. Yes this means no chocolate, no products with whey in them, no milk, yoghurt etc etc. it’s also interesting to see how difficult this is to do, but the benefits are so astounding from an energetic lifestyle point of view that I do it for long periods of time at a stretch.

Huh. Cheese makes me sleepy, so much so that I use it to fall asleep on planes. I didn’t always understand this. Several years ago, I was in New York and bought expensive tickets to a Broadway show. Before the show I ate some cheese — samples at a store, maybe. During the show I fell asleep.

Brave New SLD World

Seth Roberts3 Comments

The blogger behind voluntaryXchange (nice name) has been on the Shangri-La Diet for two years.

I gave a positive report after one year. After a second year I’m supposed to give you a second report that I’ve gained all the weight back. Sorry about that – I’ve had only the smallest rebound. Maybe I’m wrong, but I attribute that to not having played a racquet sport on Saturdays in the last 9 months. I still have no confirmable side-effects. I had a couple of cavities – that might be something. I think I’m more inclined to doze off when I’m tired, but that could be middle age too.

Compare that to weight loss from conventional methods in the wildly-expensive study I mentioned recently. Two years after starting, subjects in the no-intervention group had regained about half of the weight they’d lost.

In the Google Cafeteria

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I recently had lunch at the Google New York cafeteria with Tom Ritchford, whom I met at a Toronto hostel while helping Sarah Kapoor make a CBC segment about the Shangri-La Diet. No company personifies the Internet more than Google. Eating the wonderful free food at their cafeteria was like reading The New Yorker online. A this-can’t-be-happening experience.

Most successful dish: Orange Marmalade Whipped Cream.

Least successful: Thyme Nectarine Water.

Tom works at home three days a week partly to avoid the cafeteria, which caused him to steadily gain weight.

Self-Experimentation and Murphy’s Law

Seth Roberts1 Comment

While studying Air Force records [in the 1940s], Dr John Stapp realized that simple, everyday car accidents — not plane crashes — were responsible for a huge proportion of pilots’ deaths. Dr Stapp decided to test the limits of humans’ ability to withstand an impact to demonstrate the need for proper restraints in airplanes and in cars. One of the tests, in 1954, in which Dr Stapp, “the fastest man on earth,” rode a rocket-powered sled from zero to 1,019 km/h in five seconds and then came to complete stop in 1.4 seconds, temporarily blinded him due to retinal hemorrhages, broke both of his wrists and caused other injuries. In an earlier test, an engineer named Edward Murphy managed to install both of the two sensors incorrectly, rendering the data useless. “If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way,” Captain Murphy declared after seeing Dr Stapp emerge from the sled bloodied and hurt, spawning his famous law.

From a very good article about self-experimentation.

My Theory of Human Evolution (frugal materials)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

What’s art? The 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art provides an answer — whatever the work of the eighty-odd artists has in common.

The exhibit included some videos, documentaries (Spike Lee), photographs, drawings, and paintings. Most of the work, however, was everyday stuff — what artist Adam Putnam called “frugal materials” — used in unusual ways. Here are some examples:

Collages (e.g., Rita Ackermann) are the school-art-project example of this sort of thing. The goals of the artists seemed to be about 20% beauty, 30% emotional impact, 50% novelty. The Biennial also included old technologies used in new ways: Matt Mullican made drawings while hypnotized and then did similar drawings while not hypnotized. An outpost of Neighborhood Public Radio allowed anyone to be on the air for an hour.

As I’ve said, I believe the tendencies behind art evolved because they generated material-science research. The tendency to make art caused some people to make new things that required control of materials but weren’t obviously useful; enjoyment of art meant that others would trade for what they’d made, allowing artists to spend more time making art. A premium for novelty kept artists on their toes; it pushed them to find new ways of making things. Wandering around the Whitney Biennial, these ideas seemed easy to believe.

Tools Not Rules

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I am fascinated by how human nature interferes with science. This article in the Wall Street Journal helped me understand one way this happens.

A civility campaign in Howard County, Maryland, centered on a book called Choosing Civility: The Twenty-five Rules of Considerate Conduct (2002) by P. M. Forni, a John Hopkins professor of romance languages. Rule 7, for example, is “don’t speak ill.” The book bothered Heather Kirk-Davidoff, a pastor. She visited Professor Forni. “Jesus didn’t say, ‘I am the rule,’ right?” she told him. Professor Forni agreed. “Yes, Jesus said, ‘I am the way.’ If I had met you before, probably I would have used way. The 25 Ways of Being Considerate and Kind,” he said.

Hmm. The way versus the rule: similar. The way versus a way: big difference. Neither the professor nor the pastor noted that a better title would omit the: 25 Ways of Being…

The writer of a book about civility — in that very book — fails to grasp a big point about civility. The pastor who points out the problem makes a similar omission. Our tendency to turn tools into rules must be strong.
If you invent a useful tool, you have made the world a better place. If you denigrate non-users, the improvement is less obvious. Randomization, for example, is a tool. Many scientists treat it like a rule. Were I to write a book on scientific method, it would contain a paragraph beginning: “A few years ago, the head librarian of the Howard County, Maryland, county library bought 2300 copies of a book called . . .”
Twisted skepticism.