Month: June 2008

The Paradox of Advice

Seth Roberts9 Comments

A long post by Ben Casnocha tells how to give advice. The subject fascinates me because I’ve noticed what a strong tendency I have to give advice when told of this or that problem — yet I also realize that advice giving is usually obnoxious. I think this is why Ben’s post is long: It’s a difficult problem, like an addiction: The bad consequences are hard to avoid. Why do I have this tendency? No obvious reason. It certainly isn’t learned or copied or sustained by reward. Why is it obnoxious? Again, there’s no obvious reason. Giving advice has good and bad aspects: trying to be helpful (good) and acting superior and ignorant (bad). Why the bad seems to predominate I have no idea.

This is one reason I think Jane Jacobs’s you can only change what you love is usually true: because in your communication with someone you love (or at least respect) there will be enough positive in the whole message to overcome the negative of the advice itself — so that the advice doesn’t push the person away. (Another reason I think she’s right is that to give good advice you usually need to know a lot about the person you are advising.)

100 Pounds Lost on the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts3 Comments

WheatenDad, a 70-year-old man who lives in San Carlos, California, started the Shangri-La Diet two years ago and began posting his weight on the Shangri-La Diet forums. At the time, he weighed 300 pounds (BMI = 38). Now he weighs about 200 pounds (BMI = 26). He lost about 1 pound/week for 2 years:

He did SLD by taking 3 tablespoons/day of extra-light olive oil. In February 2008 he increased it to 4 tablespoons/day. In May 2007 he started walking 1-2 miles/day, eventually increasing this to 3-4 miles/day.

Trailer >> Movie

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The trailer for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves contained a shot in which the camera was mounted on an arrow. The shot, done especially for the trailer, was far more memorable than anything else in the movie. I’m afraid this line from an abstract of a New Yorker article by Andrea Lee about growing up in Pennsylvania–

Writer briefly describes a lunch with an Italian movie director who tells her about an affair he once had with a woman from Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

–is going to be more memorable than anything in the article.

You can see the arrow shot here.

Can You Change Something If You Don’t Love It?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

At a bookstore reading, I learned that Elizabeth Pisani wrote The Wisdom of Whores — about doing HIV epidemiology among sex workers — because she wanted to have more of an effect on HIV prevention programs. Scientific papers didn’t have much effect unless a journalist wrote about them. Journalists, she found, tended to focus on the exceptions rather than the rules. The exceptions — e.g., sex trafficing — were a poor basis for policy, of course. So she did what drug dealers call “jump the connection”: She wrote a book about the rules, illustrating them with good stories. Speaking directly to the public. It seems to be working, she said.

Jane Jacobs (whom Pisani hadn’t heard of) said something enormously relevant to her enterprise. I think it was in an interview. “It’s a funny thing,” Jacobs told the interviewer. “You can’t change something unless you love it.” What a broad statement, huh? Could it be true? HIV prevention programs, in Pisani’s experience, have mostly failed. She was hopeful that private foundations could do what governments could not. The Gates Foundation, for example — could they crush HIV the way Microsoft crushed Netscape? Jacobs would have been skeptical: Is the usual attitude at the Gates Foundation to love, or at least respect, sex workers? Well, probably not. Indeed, the closer Pisani got to private foundations, the more skeptical she became. They were getting advice from former CDC bureaucrats and the like, full of the same ideas that had already failed.

Pisani held up one country as an example of how to do it right: Brazil. Why Brazil? I asked. Funny thing: In Brazil, they respect sex workers. Unlike everywhere else. In this case, at least, Jacobs was right.

More: Here‘s one version of Jacobs saying this: “I think people [who] give prescriptions, who have ideas for improving things, ought to concentrate on the things that they love and that they want to nurture.”

Morning Light and Better Sleep

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Song Cato, a friend of mine in Taiwan, writes:

I was very surprised that the quality of my sleep greatly improved after I switched to waking up at 5:30 am and walking in the park soon after that. I started it about a month ago. The park is packed with people doing everything from tai chi to ballroom dancing. I used to go to bed at 1 or 2 am. and wake up between 7 and 8:30 am with a foggy head. Now sometimes I feel tired and go to sleep at 10 pm which has never happened in my life since I went to middle school.

She got the idea from me. I go outside around 7 am every morning and fall asleep between 11 pm and midnight.

More. She gets up at about 5:15 am and gets outside about 5:30. She stays outside for at least 2.5 hours, mostly in the park, where she walks, talks to vendors, shops a little, and does simple stretching exercises. Talking to vendors = very good!

Why Do We Touch Our Mouths So Much? (continued)

Seth Roberts15 Comments

I asked this question in a recent post. If you look at people sitting in an audience, about one-third of them will be touching their mouth.

I had wondered about this for years. Somehow blogging about it helped. A few days ago I was on the subway. Of the persons sitting, the usual fraction were touching their mouth. Nobody standing was touching their mouth with their hands but now and then I noticed them purse or lick their lips.

Which suggested an answer to my question: We get a small amount of pleasure from touching our mouths. The pleasure declines after it is “harvested” and takes several minutes to become available again. This mechanism evolved because it kept our lips moist. At the time it evolved, people spent little time sitting. The pleasure was obtained by pursing or licking your lips, which moistened them. Predictions: 1. if you watch people whose hands are busy, they will purse or lick their lips roughly as often as people in an audience touch their mouths. 2. The more you lick or purse your lips, the less you will touch them with your hands. 3. The more you touch your lips with your hands, the less you will purse or lick them.

Pagophagia (compulsive ice eating) is similar. It is caused by anemia (too little iron). In the Stone Age, there was no ice. An intense desire to crunch something in your mouth would have led you to crunch bones. Bone marrow is high in iron. It’s another mechanism that worked well in the Stone Age but now malfunctions (not that there’s anything wrong with touching your mouth with your hand). My self-experimentation is all about this sort of thing. It’s easy to sit, so we don’t sleep well. It’s easy to be inside in the morning, so we don’t sleep well. It’s easy to eat breakfast, so we don’t sleep well. it’s easy to avoid faces in the morning, so we get depressed. And so on.

More. Andrew Sullivan‘s readers have other ideas: here and here. Thanks to Tyler Cowen.

Bloggers Can Say the Truth

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As I blogged earlier, Tyler Cowen said that on his blog he can say what he really thinks, unlike other economists, who are often unable to say what they really think. Here is another example of the same thing from a blogger who writes about stuttering:

At least four [researchers] have told me that they try not to provoke or openly criticize work by a big name [researcher], because they are scared of having a paper rejected or getting no funding. Actually, they like me because I say what they do not [dare]Â to say [for] political reasons! So view my blog also as the voices of some in the research community!

This blogger isn’t a researcher so his situation isn’t the same as Tyler’s. But my point is the same: Blogs allow uncomfortable truths to be said that otherwise would not be said.

In the past this was much harder. To say some uncomfortable truth about this or that field of expertise (such as stuttering research or economics), the truth-speaker had to be (a) close enough to the field to understand it (which usually omitted journalists, with a few exceptions, such as Gary Taubes and John Crewdson) and yet (b) outside the field, so as to not suffer professional damage. There was also the problem of publicizing the uncomfortable truth. These requirements were hard to meet. Richard Feynman’s O-ring demonstration was a rare example where they were. Feynman knew what he was talking about yet was outside the industry, so he could say what insiders could not. (His criticism came from insiders.) Saul Sternberg’s and my criticism of Ranjit Chandra is another example. We knew enough about the sort of data Chandra had collected to criticize the work but were outside nutrition so we could say what we wanted to without risking professional harm.

A Philip Weiss example.

SLD in Indonesian

Seth Roberts3 Comments

There is a long discussion of the Shangri-La Diet here on an Indonesian forum. I like the locations some posters give: “the hottest city in Java,” “space,” “a quiet little house,” “above the earth,” “nowhere to be found.”

Thanks to Mark Schrimsher of CalorieLab. The 2005 CalorieLab post on SLD — now an historical artifact. Why Japanese People in Japan Don’t Get that Fat.