Month: November 2008

What Makes A Good Student?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

One of my Chinese teachers — the one who sold me my cell phone — said I was a good student.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

She didn’t quite understand the question. “Number 1: You work hard. Number 2: You work hard. Number 3: You work hard,” she said.

She had never heard the joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall (“practice, practice, practice”). The joke is one of those convenient and reassuring lies. The real way to get to Carnegie Hall is 1. Ability to play well (based on practice, no doubt). 2. Charisma. 3. Money. See Judith Kogan’s brilliant Nothing But the Best: The Struggle For Perfection at the Julliard School for more about this. A few years ago I went to the Julliard bookstore and asked them about this book. They hadn’t heard of it!

Gary Taubes Answers Questions

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Michael Eades has posted Gary Taubes’s answers to questions sent in by readers. The first one, curiously enough, concerns China: “How do Asians and others living a seemingly high-carb existence manage to escape the consequences?” Taubes’s answer:

There are several variables we have to consider with any diet/health interaction. Not just the fat content and carb content, but the refinement of the carbs, the fructose content (in HFCS and sucrose primarily) and how long they’ve had to adapt to the refined carbs and sugars in the diet. In the case of Japan, for instance, the bulk of the population consumed brown rice rather than white until only recently, say the last 50 years. White rice is labor intensive and if you’re poor, you’re eating the unrefined rice, at least until machine refining became widely available. The more important issue, though, is the fructose. China, Japan, Korea, until very recently consumed exceedingly little sugar (sucrose). In the 1960s, when Keys was doing the Seven Countries Study and blaming the absence of heart disease in the Japanese on low-fat diets, their sugar consumption, on average, was around 40 pounds a year, or what the Americans and British were eating a century earlier. In the China Study, which is often evoked as refutation of the carb/insulin hypothesis, the Chinese ate virtually no sugar. In fact, sugar consumption wasn’t even measured in the study because it was so low. The full report of the study runs to 800 pages and there are only a couple of mentions of sugar. If I remember correctly (I don’t have my files with me at the moment) it was a few pounds per year. The point is that when researchers look at traditional populations eating their traditional diets — whether in rural China, Japan, the Kitava study in the South Pacific, Africa, etc — and find relatively low levels of heart disease, obesity and diabetes compared to urban/westernized societies, they’re inevitably looking at populations that eat relatively little or no refined carbs and sugar compared to populations that eat a lot. Some of these traditional populations ate high-fat diets (the Inuit, plains Indians, pastoralists like the Masai, the Tokelauans); some ate relatively low-fat diets (agriculturalists like the Hunza, the Japanese, etc.), but the common denominator was the relative absence of sugar and/or refined carbs. So the simplest possible hypothesis to explain the health of these populations is that they don’t eat these particularly poor quality carbohydrates, not that they did or did not eat high fat diets. Now the fact that some of these populations do have relatively high carb diets suggests that it’s the sugar that is the fundamental problem.

Tsinghua students are almost all thin, although they eat a lot of white rice (a refined carb). My explanation is that they eat a diet with great variation in flavor. Almost everything they eat is made by hand from scratch — including noodles! — and the choice is staggering (hundreds of dishes easily available at lunch and dinner). They don’t eat a lot of sweets, as Taubes says, but because you can lose weight by drinking sugar water, sugar alone cannot cause obesity.

The Filipino graduate student I mentioned in a recent post told me she lost a lot of weight (too much!) when she came here; I attribute it to the novelty and variety of the food. This may be the only time a young woman has told me she lost too much weight without trying. Because Beijing is the capital of China it has lots and lots of Chinese regional food (and the Tsinghua cafeterias do as well). The variety of cheap food available here may be unmatched anywhere else in the world.
Thanks to Dave Lull.

Assorted Links (China edition)

Seth Roberts3 Comments
  1. Chinesepod.com. Podcasts for learning Chinese.
  2. Popup Chinese. More podcasts
  3. Pinyin.info. “Most of what most people think they know about Chinese — especially when it comes to Chinese characters — is wrong.”
  4. Laowai Chinese. “I’ve been busy not losing my job (teaching) and not ignoring my publisher. What I mean is: I’ve been working on the editing and layout of my book Chinese 24/7. I’m glad to announce there are now over ten people outside my family who have expressed interest in my book.”
  5. Sinosplice. “There are some seriously rank odors out there on the street. Rotting organic matter, urine, feces, stinky tofu…. But don’t worry, soon you’ll be gleefully playing “name that odor” with your Chinese friends!”
  6. Imagethief. “Chinese netizens were outraged when Gong Li played a Japanese woman in “Memoirs of Geisha”, alongside fellow crypto-Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi.”
  7. Beijing Sounds. A linguist blogs. “The final indignity comes when you utter a phrase that incites peals of laughter. Ignoring your request for explication, your [Chinese] spouse goes over to tell the in-laws (did I mention you’re living with them?) and the lesson comes to an ignominious close with the stern father-in-law, who rarely chuckles, doubled up on the couch, tears rolling down his cheeks.”
  8. Danwei “Today’s New Culture View reports that the People’s Supreme Court approved the death sentence of Yang Jia, the man who murdered six policemen and wounded three others and a security guard on July 1 this year.”
  9. Scientific and academic fraud in China. One popular post printed a letter from a Yale professor teaching at Beijing University upset about plagiarism among his Chinese students: “When plagiarism is detected in America, it can end the career of the person doing it,” he writes. Such as Harvard professors Laurence Tribe, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Charles Ogletree, and Alan Dershowitz?

Happy Thanksgiving! A Chinese friend texted me this. I replied I was surprised she was aware of it. “The majority of Chinese know this day,” she replied, “and say thanks to their friends and families.”

Reciprocity in China

Seth Roberts21 Comments

A few years ago, I asked a woman I know why she decided to go to graduate school to study cultural psychology. She told me she had been in the Peace Corps in Africa, I forget where. Maybe Kenya. Early in her stay a native had been a big help to her. To thank him, she baked him a cake. This angered him. “You think you can pay me back with a cake?” he said. To pay me back, give me something I want, he told her.

A more subtle version of the same thing happens in China. About a month ago, the friend of mine who had invited me to come here told me I had been invited to visit a university near Shanghai by a professor of psychology there who was a dean at the university. I wrote to the person who invited me:

I look forward to visiting you in —-. I don’t have a lot of plans; I could come almost any weekend. When would be a good time for me to visit?

Her assistant replied:

Professor —- will not be free on 6-9 Nov 2008. And she will not be free on 15 Nov 2008.  For other days, that’s OK.  I will come back when I get more message from Professor —-.

I replied:

Thanks. A weekend later than those will be fine.

Her assistant replied:

This evening, I talked with Professor —- about your visit to —-. Professor —- is expecting to explore any possibility of research collaboration with you. Professor —- mentioned the best time will be the last several days of November or early December for your visit to —-.

I replied:

Late November or early December is fine with me. I do not have any other plans.

Then I got this:

Professor —- is wondering whether you are interested in some collaboration, such as psychology research design guidance, psychology paper modification (the papers is written in English, but may not as good as expected), and some other research project collaboration.

I was surprised — just the Peace Corp volunteer was surprised. I replied:

I would be happy to talk about research design guidance with Professor —-. I cannot say more than that because I don’t know anything about her research. So I don’t know if our research interests overlap. About paper modification — improving the English — I am less sure. I am busy helping students and colleagues here at Tsinghua with their English.

The reply:

Professor —- will only ask you to improve the English for only one paper, which she expect to have that paper be published in USA.

I was puzzled what to say to this. Before I could reply, I got another email:

Professor —- talked with me this afternoon. She mentioned that the paper is related to ERP. She needs your help with the English language improvement with the paper, after her graduates’ [students’] translation from Chinese to English.

I replied:

I just finished spending many hours fixing the English of a paper written by a non-Tsinghua researcher whom I will never meet. I am not eager to repeat the experience. However, I am happy to help Professor —- with the English of her paper if she will help me with my Chinese.

The reply:

Professor —- said that that’s OK.

But it wasn’t okay. I heard nothing for a week and wrote again:

When should we figure out the details of my visit?

The reply:

This afternoon, we discussed how we can benefit to each other, when you are here. Would you please list out what you can offer us, and what you expect us offer you, when you are in Suzhou?

I replied:

During my trip to —-, I hoped to learn about —-, the university, and the research being done there. I haven’t traveled much in China so I thought the trip would be fun.

As for what I might offer you, I wrote The Shangri-La Diet, a New York Times bestseller that describes an entirely new approach to weight control; I am a statistics expert; and I have done innovative work in experimental design as well. Thousands of people read my blog because they think I have interesting views about the world. You can learn more about my work at www.sethroberts.net. My blog is at blog.sethroberts.net.

Why did you invite me to visit?

The reply:

We discussed your response. And we need to mention the following two points: We need someone to improve our paper in English. But the paper has not finished yet. This is not a good season for sightseeing in —- because of the cold whether. For above the two points, we cannot fix the time when you come to —-. We may arrange your visit later. Keep posted.

My reply:

Do I understand you correctly? You invited me to —- “to improve [your] paper in English”?

No reply. In other words, the answer was yes.

Yesterday I met a graduate student from the Philippines. She’s studying architecture here on a scholarship from the Chinese government. How do you like it here? I asked. When she got here, she said, she was positive. “I was all ‘ ‘It’s an amazing place.’ ” Now, after more than a year, she isn’t positive. Whenever someone does something for you it turns out they want something in return, she said, but you don’t find out right away. She didn’t want to give details. “I should stop talking,” she said. I told her I’d had the same experience — the invitation I just described.

The whole thing reminded me of something I wrote about Robert Gallo, the AIDS researcher:

A researcher in Gallo’s lab once told the boss that Einstein was his favorite scientist; he especially admired Einstein’s magnanimity. Gallo replied, “You are naive. Einstein could afford to be magnanimous because he was a genius.” The other scientist asked, “You mean magnanimity is good only if you’re a genius?” Gallo said, “Yeah, because then you don’t have to worry about the competition.”

And the reciprocity norms of rich countries take the form they do because the countries are rich.

The Four Abundances

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Someday, if I am lucky, I would like to write a book called The Four Abundances. It would be about how four incredibly important things that were once impossibly scarce, became or will become, to everyone’s surprise, abundant:

  1. Water. Free and everywhere. So cheap my Berkeley landlady pays my water bill. This has been true for a long time.
  2. Knowledge. I mean general knowledge. Via the Web, reference book knowledge and news is instantly accessible for free. A recent development, although books and newspapers were a big step in this direction.
  3. Health. A future abundance. Health is far from abundant right now. On the other hand, health has improved dramatically during the last 200 years, as Robert Kugel has documented. It is clearly approaching abundance.
  4. Happiness. Another future abundance. I suppose it seems impossibly far off — but abundant water once seemed impossibly far off. Here it’s hard to find signs of improvement, much less approaching abundance. Depression has become more common, not less, during my lifetime.

My self-experimentation has convinced me that health and happiness depend on things that were common in Stone-Age life, just as there was enough water and knowledge during that time. (Now we have more than enough water and knowledge, which is fine.) We need to figure out what those elements are. Self-experimentation provides a way of doing so.

In my little corner of Beijing, transportation is becoming a fifth (or third) abundance. Mostly I ride a bike — my bike was free, costs pennies to maintain, doesn’t pollute, provides exercise, easy to park. For longer trips I take the subway (30 cents/ride) or a cab (a few dollars a ride). Many people take the bus (a few cents/ride). I might get an electric bike for a few hundred dollars. Doesn’t pollute, very cheap per mile, easy to park, little congestion.

I’ve thought about this for months; what made me finally decide to post this was noticing that two little tools I use every day — a penlight and a brush to clean my keyboard — were free, giveaways at trade shows.

Learning Chinese

Seth Roberts2 Comments

My cell phone has a service number that you call to get your account balance or to recharge your account. You press 1 for in Mandarin, 2 for English. Today for the first time I pressed 1. It reminded me of being 9 and going into the adult section of the library for the first time. I looked at a few books. They were full of words I didn’t know. Likewise, I didn’t understand a word of the Mandarin I heard. But I can listen to it again and again.

English-Speaking Contest

Seth RobertsLeave a comment
    Last night on Chinese TV I watched the first day of an English-speaking contest. Contestants gave a short prepared speech, then gave an impromptu speech based on a randomly-chosen debate topic (e.g., should TV advertising aimed at children be banned?). After the impromptu speech they defended their position for a few minutes. It was a test of both English and public speaking. The contestants were college students.

    I really liked it. It’s a statement of, and promotion of, certain values; it says that society — at least the owners of the TV station and viewers — value something outside of themselves (English) and intellectual (learning a foreign language). China has been called a “nation of bookworms” (by James McGregor in One Billion Customers) so a show glorifying learning isn’t entirely surprising but it is a big improvement over American TV game shows, which glorify office politics (Survivor), strange tasks in foreign countries (The Amazing Race), and singing (American Idol). I supposed the closest thing in America is the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which glorifies a useless skill (spelling obscure words).
    What might American TV do like this? I can’t think of a contest revolving around learning from other cultures but I can think of some contests that would promote useful intellectual pursuits:

    • Green engineering contest. Give teams of high school students home-engineering tasks involving energy use: Insulate a window, boil water, light a room.
    • Joke-telling contest. Tests the ability to use jokes in everyday life — for example to defuse difficult situations. Americans have lost this ability so completely I suspect some of them don’t even realize it exists. I’m an example — I’m terrible at joke-telling.
    • Editing contest. Contestants take an everyday piece of writing and improve it.
    • Literature appreciation contest. Shown a passage from a famous novel, short story, or poem, contestants explain what is good about it. Bonus points for identifying the source.

Lohao City

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Today I visited the flagship store of the Lohao City chain here in Beijing. (Lohao stands for Lifestyle Of Healthy And Organic.) I needed more flaxseed oil. It was a straight line from the subway stop but I needed to call the store twice to convey this to the taxi driver. The store was a lot smaller than I expected for a chain with six locations. It was a little bigger than a 7-11. It had a baking area, a wine area, a produce area, and a wheatgrass growing area where you could get wheatgrass juice and other healthy juices. They were sampling some delicious organic wine made from a fruit the English-speaking clerk didn’t know the word for. I was a little surprised it only cost $6/bottle.

The chain is just a few years old. It specializes in organic food. The chain owns its own 22,000-acre farm where they grow the food they sell — a new type of farmer’s market. By growing the food they sell they can guarantee how it is grown. This really is an innovation in food selling. I hope the six stores (one in Shanghai) mean the concept is successful rather than they started with a lot of money.

I wanted to buy six bottles of flaxseed oil but the store only had one. The clerk went to another store to get five more but came back with only one more. One bottle (250 ml) might last me a week so I need to search for other sources.

I told the clerk the flaxseed oil was for my research. “Can you really tell the flaxseed oil improves your brain?” he asked. Yes, I said. He was studying English at a private school in Beijing. He’s in his second year of college, majoring in “commercial diplomacy” which means business diplomacy (e.g., negotiations). He predicted that even though Obama quit smoking for the campaign, he will start smoking again now that he’s President.
The chain puts out a biannual magazine now on its third issue. The magazine said something very true:”As people earn more money, they start caring whether they are healthy enough to enjoy their fortune.”

More about healthy food in China.

The Washing Machine Principle

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Suppose I want to improve performance of my washing machine. Ways I might do this fall into three categories:

1. Supply missing inputs. It needs water, soap, and electricity. If any one of them is missing, I can greatly improve performance by adding it — by plugging the machine in, for example. These changes are easy because water, soap, and electricity are easy to get.

2. Replace broken parts. This will also greatly improve performance. These changes are very difficult unless I am a washing machine repairman.

3. Everything else. To improve performance any other way will be difficult and any improvements will be small. These other methods of improvement — such as putting special disks into the wash — are also likely to be dangerous.

All complex machines are like this. What I call the Washing Machine Principle says that humans are also like this. This means that non-transplant attempts to improve human well-being fall into two clusters: 1. Easy, safe, and highly effective. 2. Difficult, dangerous, and only slightly effective.

Some simple examples:

  • Vitamins. If you have a deficiency disease, getting more of the right vitamin will cure you easily, safely, and rapidly. They supply a missing input.
  • Antidepressants. They are dangerous, difficult to make and obtain, and don’t work very well. In controlled studies, they do only slightly better than placebos. Patients typically must try several to find one that works. They don’t supply a missing input.
  • The mirror treatment for certain neurological conditions that Atul Gawande recently described:
    • [The patient’s] left hand felt cartoonishly large—at least twice its actual size. He developed a constant burning pain along an inch-wide ribbon extending from the left side of his neck all the way down his arm. And an itch crept up and down along the same band, which no amount of scratching would relieve. . . . [These symptoms had lasted 11 years. Gawande suggested trying the mirror treatment.] After a couple of weeks, his hand returned to feeling normal in size all day long. The mirror also provided the first effective treatment he has had for the flares of itch and pain.

    The mirror treatment is cheap, safe, and, in this case, highly effective. Clearly it supplies a missing input.

To be continued.