Month: December 2008

A Book About Scientific Failure

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Failure: the last taboo subject. I loved Selling Ben Cheever, a book about a series of low-level service jobs that Ben Cheever took after he left Reader’s Digest and couldn’t sell his third novel. In the introduction, Cheever noted that no one wanted to talk to him about what it was like to lose a job and have to start over. How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill is another excellent book along those lines. (Curious that both authors are the sons of well-iknown writers, John Cheever and Brendan Gill.)

Now comes a scientific third-person account of failure: Sun in a Bottle by Charles Seife, about attempts to produce nuclear fusion in the lab.

Seife’s message: fusion scientists should just cut bait. By analogy to your closet, if you haven’t worn it, throw it out. If you’ve been trying it for the last half-century and it hasn’t worked, then enough already.

According to its subtitle, the book covers “the science of wishful thinking.” Was it wishful thinking or avoidance of the f-word? I will have to read the book to find out, it sounds fascinating.

Assorted Links (mental health edition)

Seth Roberts2 Comments
  • many psychology-related blogs
  • a blog about how “we simply are not getting the kind of results that patients, myself included, were promised 20 years ago at the dawn of the psychopharmacological revolution”
  • confirmation of a correlation between autism and rainfall
  • the selling of Dr. Joseph Biederman, a Harvard child psychiatrist
  • trouble at “The Infinite Mind” (a radio show). “Dr. Fred Goodwin [the show’s host] accepted at least $1.3 million in pharmaceutical company speakers’ fees while he was hosting . . . Goodwin defended his actions by claiming this is what all doctors do, plus he took funding from all kinds of pharma companies so that canceled out his conflicts.” As if non-pharma therapies didn’t matter.

When is Science Helpful?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Last spring, fourteen Chinese students from elite universities — seven from Tsinghua — traveled to several elite American universities, including Stanford, Harvard, and Yale, under the auspices of a program called IMUSE to discuss sensitive Chinese social topics, such as Tibet or censorship. One of the main events was panel discussions. The American students struck the Chinese students as admirably pragmatic but also in some cases “ignorant and arrogant”. In response to American students’ criticism, one Chinese student said this: “I eat a lot of rice. My ancestors ate a lot of rice. If you tell me to eat a lot of bread, I don’t know what to eat. I don’t know how to get a healthy diet.”

When I heard that comment, I said it was exactly right. Nutrition is perhaps 75% science, 25% religion. (The discovery of vitamins = science. Thinking the obesity epidemic is due to lack of exercise = religion.) The science part is helpful, the religious part is useless or, if taken seriously, harmful. Nutrition science is too uncertain to choose over the tried and true. Physics is almost 100% science. The stuff in physics textbooks has been used to build lots of useful stuff: buildings, bridges, computers. Economics and political science are perhaps 25% science — too little to rely on their recommendations, which was the Chinese student’s point. Better to rely on tradition. No one tells the American students any of this, however, and they believe far too much of what their professors tell them. (So much for all that teaching how “ to think and to reason.”) The result is they give foolish advice.

At Edge, four American experts tried to answer the question “Can science help solve the economic crisis?” Here is a bit of what they said:

Two basic assumptions must guide any thinking as we undertake these tasks. First, economies, financial institutions and markets cannot function without a context of rules and laws, which regulate them. . . . Second, mathematics, physics and computers already play a major and necessary role in our economic affairs.

They believed such statements are helpful. Nassim Taleb responded:

I spent close to 21 years in finance facing “scientists” in some field who show up in finance and economics, realize that economists and practitioners are not as smart as they are (they are not as “rigorous” and did not score as high in math), then think they can figure it all out. Nice, commendable impulse, but I blame the banking crisis (and other blowups) on such “scientism”. . . . Meanwhile the most robust understanding is present among practitioners who do not have the instinct to reduce ambiguity and uncertainty that scientists have. . . . Please, please, enough of this “science”. We have enough problems without you.

The Chinese student and Taleb are both saying that Big Ideas from elite American universities do not automatically improve on what people elsewhere have done for a long time. Weston Price and Jane Jacobs said the same thing. Somehow elite universities fail to teach this important lesson — perhaps because their professors haven’t learned it.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Cornell President Says Ivy League Schools Teach Students “To Think”

Seth Roberts7 Comments

President Nixon made some anti-Ivy-League comments. Here is how one Ivy-League college president recently responded:

David Skorton, the president of Cornell, was apprised of Nixon’s comments over the phone. “My mouth is open,” Skorton said, after the line went quiet. “Gosh, what a negative thing to say. Ivy League schools, like all good universities, teach people to think and to reason, and why would anyone be against that?”

To think and to reason. Now and then I’d hear a Berkeley professor say he taught his students “to think”. When they’d say it to me I’d ask what they meant by thinking. It always turned out that they meant critical thinking, seeing what’s wrong with this or that. Never appreciative thinking. This was like a flight school teaching take-offs but not landings. It also always turned out that they were teaching their students how to be like professors–teaching professorial job skills, in other words. To call those job skills “thinking” was like saying the world ended at the nearest river. Sure, their job involved thinking but other jobs also involved thinking, of a much different sort — were they not aware of this?

What Happens When a Professor is Wrong?

Seth Roberts16 Comments

In an article in the Financial Times, Nassim Taleb and Pablo Triana write:

Risk methods that failed dramatically in the real world continue to be taught to students in business schools, where professors never lose tenure for the misapplications of those methods. As we are writing these lines, close to 100,000 MBAs are still learning portfolio theory — it is uniformly on the programme for next semester. An airline company would ground the aircraft and investigate after the crash — universities would put more aircraft in the skies, crash after crash.

Years ago, a cousin of mine was fond of saying something similar. He was majoring in English at UCLA. He didn’t think much of his professors. “What happens when a professor is wrong?” he would ask. “When an engineer is wrong, the bridge falls down. When a doctor is wrong, the patient dies. What happens when an English professor is wrong?” The answer, of course, was “nothing”. Now we will find out what happens when finance professors are wrong.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Self-Experimentation and Strength Training

Seth Roberts2 Comments

From Marilia Coutinho, a competitive powerlifter and researcher:

There are two distinct approaches to achieving the “special maximum strength” observed in certain meets: the extreme stress-driven performance, with a lot of screaming, hitting and other means of enhancing alertness and stress response, and the focused approach. The latter is less common.

With the help of a more experienced and accomplished lifter, I came to adopt the focused approach about a year and a half ago. We called it the “white chair thing.” Basically, I spent the moments preceding my turn to lift facing the back of an available white plastic chair, emptying my mind. It is hard to claim this is the one or chief reason why my performance leaped to another level, I broke a couple of national and continental records and visibly improved. There were other factors involved.

After this event, however, I started systematically searching for evidence in the literature. Besides a very old article from decades ago showing competent Olympic lifters performed [more] mental rehearsal of their lifts [than] less competent ones, there was very little published material. The search brought me to martial arts techniques. . . .

I spent one year . . . learning qigong in a tai-chi-chuan program. During this one year, I was frustrated. My performance was irregular, mediocre at competitions and my injuries were a real impediment.

About three weeks after I quit tai-chi-chuan, however, I started applying some qigong techniques in weight training. The results impressed me. I want to create a self-experiment on this and record my results. . . . This might be of great help to many athletes who still believe they need a lot of stress enhancing devices to achieve good marks.

Bike Culture in Beijing

Seth Roberts3 Comments

The Tsinghua campus is really big so everyone has a bike but bikes are very prevalent elsewhere as well. In several ways the surroundings have been shaped by this:

  • Bike mechanics scattered around campus. There are about seven of them. Fix your bike instantly. Also sell spare parts — locks, seats, baskets, and so on.
  • Huge bike lanes. On the road from the subway to where I live, the three lane road is divided into one shoulder lane, one lane for bikes, and one lane for cars. The appearance is that the bike lane is twice as wide as the car lane. The effect of these huge bike lanes isn’t trivial: I feel safe.
  • Bikes parked everywhere. At big stores, parking attendants charge 5 cents/bike. Payable when you leave.
  • Discarded bikes. Near the subway station is a pile of 20-odd bikes. About once a year discarded bikes are removed from the Tsinghua campus.

The Blog of a Girl Who Killed Herself

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In November, a Tsinghua undergraduate killed herself by jumping out of a building. She kept a blog. After her death, a friend of mine read her blog — as did a few thousand other people — and told me it was full of sadness. My friend, a Tsinghua student, was puzzled that the friends and family of the dead girl had read her blog and done nothing. Will you translate some of it for me? I asked my friend (who translates other things for me). She begged off. I was puzzled: Surely the girl had wanted others to read what she had written, I thought.
I found another translator. After a few minutes of translation I had to stop: It was unbearably sad, maybe the saddest writing I’ve ever come across. I could see why my friend didn’t want to translate it.

Here is one entry. It takes the form of a questionnaire:

Question 1: Which student phase [primary school, middle school, high school, college] do you miss the most?

Answer: High school. Get together with a lot of friends. I know where I should go, even if it turns out to be wrong.

Question 2: Talk about your current life.

Answer: Listless. Feel half asleep. Do not want to wake up. I want to kill the people who wake me up. I love this world. I live for my goal.

Question 3: Do you have dreams? What are they?

Answer: I have many dreams. Make a movie . . . performance art [she was an art major]. Her [she was ga y]. Forgive me. Dream this day will come. Believe.

Question 4: Which kind of friend do you like best?

Answer: Any kind is fine. Understanding me a prerequisite.

Question 5: Could you give up going back to your hometown to be with your parents, to be with your lover?

Answer: No.

Question 6: What do you most want to do right now?
Answer: Sleep, dream. Find her. Just dream, do not want to meet anyone.

Question 7: Up until now, what is your happiest event?

Answer: I didn’t lose my past.

p.s. I don’t want any blessing. [A custom/game among Chinese teenagers is that after you answer a few questions you are “blessed” by your questioner.] Wish everyone happiness. Don’t ask me these boring questions again.

News of the girl’s death was posted on the student forums. What was the response? I asked my friend. Most of the comments were “Bless,” she said. The English word bless. That’s a customary thing to say when you learn someone has died.

Marxism Studies at Tsinghua University

Seth Roberts1 Comment

All Tsinghua undergraduates are required to take four Marxism-related classes to graduate; next year the requirement will be reduced to three classes. A friend told me about her Marxist philosophy class, which she thought was pretty interesting:

  • There is no homework. No reading, no papers.
  • If there will be a final, it hasn’t been mentioned.
  • The teacher doesn’t take attendance. Now and then he calls on students to answer questions and if the student isn’t present, this is noted.

My friend, who is a member of the Communist Party, couldn’t suppress a smile when she told me about the lack of homework.