Month: June 2008

The Ketogenic Diet (continued)

Seth Roberts14 Comments

Thanks to Honest Medicine, I found some interesting videos about the ketogenic diet. The first two are from Dateline NBC: Part 1 and Part 2. In Part 1, Dr. Donald Shields, head of pediatric neurology at the UCLA Medical Center, says, in answer to a question about why he didn’t recommend the ketogenic diet to the Abramsons, who discovered it for themselves:

Because I don’t think we had exhausted all the medical approaches [to treating their son’s epilepsy] yet. There were actually still other medications that we hadn’t tried yet.

The last is a great talk (9 minutes) by Dr. Deborah Snyder. “To say the ketogenic diet has touched my heart would be a great understatement,” said Dr. Snyder.

More videos from The Charlie Foundation. The Ketogenic Diet and Evidence Snobs.

The Difference Between Being Fat and Not Fat

Seth Roberts21 Comments

I have never read a better description of the difference between being fat and not fat:

I had a gastric bypass and ate 750-1000 calories of liquid meal replacement a day. I had complications and couldn’t swallow food. I lost over a hundred pounds. I regained it over a number of years. Once I lost weight and was normal, my life did change for the better. It’s the only reason I had my child. For the first and only time in my life it was easy to have people in my life. People wanted to be around me. I had boyfriends who treated me well for the first and only time in my life. I got married. All this happened very quickly and easily with no effort on my part. Being fat is completely different. I think the way people treat a fat person is similar to being disfigured or in a wheelchair with your legs cut off. In many instances it is better to be dead than to be this fat.

From an anonymous blogger who weighs about 280 pounds. She isn’t trying to sell anything, make a journalistic or academic point, appear to be this or that. The post goes on:

My daughter had a fat friend over for a sleep over the other day. It’s the second fat friend she’s ever had over. The difference between these girls and the thinner girls is striking. The fat girls are obsessed with food. They are more driven to eat, more interested in food, more hungry than the thinner girls. The thin girls are interested in food far less. It’s not that they are better than the fat girls, they are simply less hungry. My daughter first fat friend got up all through the night to raid our refrigerator. This child acted as if she were starving. She ate until she was literally ill and threw up on the sleeping bags. Then later she peed on my daughter. My daughter is fastidious and she was completely revolted. That was the end of the friendship.

I came across this because she is trying the Shangri-La Diet.

Shangri-La By Another Name?

Seth Roberts1 Comment

There’s a new diet called something like Fat Loss For Idiots or The Idiot-Proof Diet in which you lose weight by constantly changing what you eat. Here‘s how the creators put it:

To lose weight your diet menu needs to be SHIFTED every few days –and this is something you’ve never tried before, and that’s why you’ve never been able to change your body when dieting.

Never tried before? When I go to a foreign country that’s close to what happens. And I do lose weight. According to the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet, this should work — because you are constantly eating flavors you haven’t yet associated with calories. Thanks to Tim Lundeen.

How Art School Reveals Human Nature

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Sure, we can learn about human nature by looking at art. I’ve done that. What’s less obvious, at least to me, is how much can be learned about human nature by observing art students. I got a glimpse of this from talking to a student at California College of the Arts. Three things I learned:

1. Every department looks down on every other department. Or, at least, there is a vast amount of “looking down on”. One example is that students in the illustration department look down on students in the fashion department. This is puzzling because the two subjects are unrelated (unlike, say, graphic design and illustration, which are closely related). Why does it happen? My informant thought it was because so many people looked down on illustrators that they were desperate to find a group they themselves could look down on; they chose fashion even though it made no sense.

2. Students in each major have distinct personalities. Photography majors tend to be self-centered and outspoken. In class, they talk more than they need to. Illustration majors are relatively childlike; they are wacky and playful and fun and less serious. In the illustration department, unlike other departments, critiques are always sugar-coated: “This is great, what a nice job you did, you might think about …” Graphic design majors are “urban” — more sophisticated, more interested in being cutting edge, more concerned about the job market. Fashion majors tend to be flighty.

3. Almost all students at CCA enter with their major already decided. They are intensely focused on their subject — think about it all the time. They have little interest in what can be learned from other disciplines. Somehow focus seems to get in the way of curiosity. You might think that art is about being creative and creativity is helped by curiosity. Somehow this doesn’t occur to them and isn’t taught.

Shown the above, my informant, wanting to give a more complete picture, added:

I also think that a lot of those students who help to create these perceptions are probably also the ones that feel the need to be labeled. The photography students who create the image of self-assuredness, the ones who talk about themselves and their work all the time, probably feel they need to do it because it’s the image of themselves and of photographers that they need to create. Same goes for fashion and illustration and all others. There are probably other students who feel the way that I do and just choose not to get into it and would rather leave those “personas” for someone else to convey.

I think it’s specific to art students, and [part of a] desire to be seen as artistic, since most artists i know outside of school don’t seem to perpetuate this. i don’t want to make it seem as if art students are superficial and uninspired. i’ve met my share of really great people.

More. Russ Roberts, interviewing Diane Coyle: “The culture among the graduate students [in economics at the University of Chicago in the late 1970s], and probably among the faculty, was to really look down on the other social sciences and to see them as a total waste of time.”

Science versus Engineering

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Varangy wonders what I think about this editorial by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired. Anderson says “faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete.” Anderson confuses statistical models (which are summaries of the data) with scientific ones (which are descriptions of the mechanism that produced the data). As far as the content goes, I’m completely unconvinced. Anderson gives no examples of this approach to science being replaced by something else.

For me, the larger lesson of the editorial is how different science is from engineering. Wired is mainly about engineering. I’m pretty sure Anderson has some grasp of the subject. Yet this editorial, which reads like something a humanities professor would write, shows that his understanding doesn’t extend to science. It reminds me why I didn’t want to be a doctor. (Which is like being an engineer.) It seemed to me that a doctor’s world is too constrained: You deal with similar problems over and over. I wanted more uncertainty, a bigger canvas. That larger canvas came along when I tried to figure out why I was waking up too early. Rather than being like engineering (applying what we already know), this was true science: I had no idea what the answer was. There was a very wide range of possibilities. Science and engineering are two ends of a dimension of problem-solving. The more you have an idea what the answer will be, the more it is like engineering. The wider the range of possible answers, the more it is like science. Making a living requires a steady income: much more compatible with engineering than science. I like to think my self-experimentation has a kind of wild flavor which is the flavor of “raw” science, whereas the science most people are familiar with is “pasteurized” science — science tamed, made more certain, more ritualistic, so as to make it more compatible with making a living. Sequencing genes, for example, is pasteurized science. Taking an MRI of the brain while subjects do this or that task is pasteurized science. Pasteurized science is full of rituals and overstatements (e.g., “correlation does not equal causation”, “the plural of anecdote is not data”) that reduce unpleasant uncertainty, just as pasteurization does. Pasteurized science is more confusable with engineering.

There’s one way in which Anderson is right about the effects of more data. It has nothing to do with the difference between petrabytes and gigabytes (which is what Anderson emphasizes), but it is something that having a lot more data enables: Making pictures. When you can make a picture with your data, it becomes a lot easier to see interesting patterns in it.

Andrew Gelman’s take.

More. Derek James, a graduate student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, agrees with me.

Lessons Learned about Book Writing

Seth Roberts3 Comments

1. At Writers With Drinks I met a woman who is writing a memoir. Since I had actually published a book, she wondered if I had any advice about finding a publisher. I said don’t get your hopes up. Practically no one makes anything resembling a living from writing books. (I meant books like memoirs — what a friend calls real books.) It’s a hobby. I asked her if she’d heard this before. No, she said. She said she’s around people who are “positive” whereas I was “realistic.”

2. My friend Phil Price is a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. A few years ago he wrote a chapter (“”Assessing uncertainties in the relationship between inhaled particle concentrations, internal deposition, and health effects”) for a handbook-like compendium. It was a big mistake, he said. There were three problems: 1. It was much harder to write than he expected. 2. The quality of the final product was lower than he expected. 3. The audience was tiny. Maybe 11 people would end up reading what he’d written.

The Cost of Demonization and How to Avoid It

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In response to my post Can You Change Something if You Don’t Love It? Patri Friedman wrote:

This seems like a good argument for social freedom and harm reduction rather than criminalization, for things like prostitution, gambling, and drugs. If they are illegal, we tend to demonize them, and the people who do them are people willing to do illegal things, who tend to be sleazier. You get a feedback cycle of sleaziness. And then when there are problems (drugs that are bad for you, STDS among sex workers), they are hard to fix.

If instead you acknowledge that these things are going to happen anyway, make them legal and regulated, when problems come up it will be much easier to find smart, competent people who respect drug users, prostitutes, and Johns, and can provide good suggestions for fixing the problems.

Besides being a great point all by itself, it is eerily similar to something Eduoard Servan-Schrieber told me at lunch when he was a grad student at Berkeley. He’d been a sailor in the French navy when he was about 21. Every day, everyone on the ship had lunch together, the officers at the same table as the privates. This was great, said Eduaord, because when a problem came up it was easy to speak with the officers about it. You weren’t scared of them, they weren’t mistrustful of you.

I’ve repeated this story many times. I think there is something basic and biological that makes us trust and work well with people we see regularly and makes us mistrust and work poorly with those we don’t see regularly. When you are in the same company or organization with people you don’t see regularly, great problems can arise, especially if you have power over them or they have power over you.

More. Elisabeth Pisani — the source of the post to which Friedman responded — wrote me, “I agree 100% with Patri, not just on principle but with the weight of the evidence of 15 years experience.”

to other

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I learned a new verb today: to other, meaning to treat someone else as “other,” as different. The person I learned it from had used it once before. She had learned it from a graduate student. Sample usage: “They were othering him and I didn’t like it.” I like to other because there’s room for a milder term than demonize.

Definition of othering, which isn’t in Merriam-Webster’s Online.

Scott Adams, Magnesium, and Knee Pain

Seth Roberts8 Comments

The creator of Dilbert blogs:

About two years ago I started taking magnesium supplements because I saw something on the Internet that indicated it might help my knees problems. (My knees always hurt after exercise.) The magnesium either worked, or it was a remarkable coincidence, that after 15 years of knee pain it suddenly went away and has stayed away.

Recently I realized I haven’t had any allergy or asthma symptoms for well over a year. For the first time in my life I went through the entire allergy season without so much as a sniffle or a wheeze. And I didn’t even use my allergy or asthma meds. On a hunch, I googled “magnesium allergy” and discovered that doctors sometimes use magnesium to treat asthma attacks. And a magnesium deficiency apparently does promote allergies.

One of the comments is curious: “There’s nothing wrong sharing what happens to you, Scott.”

Thanks to cp.