Month: November 2009

Nassim Taleb on Incompetent Experts

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Via Proinvests.com, Nassim Taleb said this:

I was in Korea last week with a collection of suit-wearing hotshots. On a panel sat Takatoshi Kato, IMF Deputy Managing Director. Before the discussion he gave us a powerpoint lecture showing the IMF projections for 2010, 2011, …, 2014. I could not control myself and got into a state of rage. I told the audience that the next time someone from the IMF shows you projections for some dates in the future, to show us what they PROJECTED for 2008 and 2009 in 2004, 2005, …, and 2007. They would then verify that Mr. Takatoshi and his colleagues provide a prime illustration to the “expert problem”: they serve as experts while offering the scientific reliability of astrologers. Anyone relying on them is a turkey.

This allowed me to show the urgency of my idea of robustness. We cannot get rid of charlatans. My point is that we need to build a society robust to charlatanism and expert-error [emphasis added], one in which Mr. Takatoshi and his staff can be as incompetent as they want without endangering the general public. We need less reliance on these people and the Obama administration has been making us more dependent on the “expert problem.”

I completely agree. This highlights two hidden strengths of self-experimentation.

First, the more you can rely on data about yourself, the less you need to rely on data from other people, which until recently — internet forums, CureTogether.org, PatientsLikeMe.com — almost always came to you through experts (usually doctors), who filtered it to suit their purposes. When I was a grad student, I had acne. My dermatologist prescribed tetracycline, a powerful and dangerous antibiotic. Studying myself, I quickly figured out tetracycline didn’t work. My dermatologist had failed to figure that out — that it didn’t work in at least some cases. In his practice, he must have encountered examples of this, but he ignored them. It served his purposes to think it worked. That’s one sort of filtering: Ignoring inconvenient data. Self-experimentation made me less reliant on my dermatologist.

Second, self-experimentation allows researchers such as myself to do innovative research in some area without getting permission from experts in that area. Self-experimentation is very cheap; no grant is required. A self-experimenter can be as heretical as he cares to be. My research on weight control has been breezily dismissed by nutrition professors, for example. Obviously they wouldn’t fund it. The Animal Care and Use Committee at UC Berkeley turned down my application to do rat research about it — my ideas couldn’t possibly be true, they said. My research on mood isn’t just utterly different than what clinical psychologists and psychiatrists say to each other in meetings and papers; it also, at first glance, sounds absurd. Self-experimentation allowed me to do it. That’s another sort of filtering: control of what research gets done.

I don’t think conventional research in nutrition, clinical psychology, or psychiatry is worthless — far from it. I think it is very valuable. (For one thing, it helped me see that my self-experimental conclusions, as unorthodox as they were, had plenty of empirical support.) What is hard for outsiders to grasp is how what they see — what they read in magazines and newspapers and even books — is heavily filtered to conform to a party line. Plenty of research supports the Shangri-La Diet, for example (such as research about the set point theory of weight control), but you are unlikely to read about it in, say, The New Yorker because it doesn’t fit conventional ideas. Plenty of conventional research supports my ideas about mood, but you are unlikely to read about that research because it doesn’t support the party line of “dopamine imbalance” causing depression or whatever. This is what Leonard Syme taught his public-health students — that the party line was a lot more questionable than an outsider would ever guess. They hadn’t heard that before. (And it was unpleasant: Uncertainty is unpleasant.) This is a third sort of filtering: What data reaches outsiders.

I never had a teacher like Leonard Syme — I’ve never even heard of someone else doing what he did — but self-experimentation taught me the same thing. I came to see the fragility of mainstream claims about all sorts of things related to health. As Taleb says, we are used to thinking the charlatans are on the fringes. But they’re not — there’s plenty of them at the centers of power.

Thanks to Dave Lull. Frontline’s recent show “The Warning” makes the same point as Taleb, that there is great incompetence at the highest levels of power.

Sickness After Starting to Eat Yogurt

Seth Roberts8 Comments

A friend writes:

As of today I’m getting over my fourth cold since I began eating lots of yogurt (maybe 1-2 cups a day, homemade), which was roughly in March of this year. So that would be a rate of about a cold every two months. On the one hand that sounds pretty terrible. On the other hand, a couple of things to think about:

1. I used to always get colds and other sicknesses as well. They just seem to be attracted to me. By my intuition, the current rate doesn’t seem particularly unusual, although I never kept track before. If anyone had a cold anywhere around me, invariably I got it. It’s been that way as long as I can remember, especially when I was traveling, as I have been during these last few months.

2. Each of the colds I have had in this last eight month period has been remarkably short. Really remarkable, so I will remark, by way of example, that this cold came out of the blue yesterday evening with a fit of sneezing. I hadn’t felt bad at all earlier in the day although in retrospect it’s possible I was a bit worn down (or maybe not: I took a half-hour swim in the late afternoon and felt pretty good). So I sneezed my way through an evening, nose dripping like a faucet. Before going to sleep I took some sort of medicine for cold symptoms (maybe something made by Bufferin maybe? Night/day something…), and in the morning I took the same thing (day version). During that whole time I was still pretty symptomatic: sneezing, nose dripping etc., but I guess the medicine might have been somewhat useful. Now here it is 2:30 in the afternoon and all of a sudden I realize my nose is dry and I haven’t sneezed for hours. I reckon this is about the end of the cold: less than 24 hours. The other three were like that as well: very quick onset, then disappearing almost before I could have time to realize I had a cold. For me this is particularly noteworthy because in years past I always seemed to get the worst of the colds, going on for days and often progressing into a hacking cough that would linger for weeks.

I suspect if my friend improved his sleep he would get see further improvement of these measures of illness. In this study, the frequency of sickness episodes went down for workers given a probiotic but their duration, when they happened, didn’t change — perhaps because it was nice to be away from work.

After I copy-and-pasted that, I got sick. It wasn’t sickness as most people know it. After an afternoon walk (1 hour) I felt tired; that was the first sign. After dinner, I felt really tired. That was an unmistakable sign. I went to bed early, slept about 8 hours (1-2 hours more than usual) and woke up rested. But an hour later I fell back asleep for 15 minutes. At that point I was sure something was wrong. I had a class that morning starting at 10 am. Should I cancel it? I got much more tired and, about two hours before class, was too tired to get out of bed to turn off the beeping yogurt maker. Okay, I’ll cancel class. I phoned the TA to cancel the class but he couldn’t — he had a bad cold. I phoned a student and she phoned the other students.

An hour later, however, I felt much better. By class time I felt well enough to go to class, although I walked rather than ride my bike. (The student did her best to uncancel the class.) In the afternoon I took a long nap (1.5 hours). The next day I was just barely more tired than usual. Today I feel completely well.

I was sick, yes, but without chills, runny nose, sneezing, sore throat — without any discomfort at all unless feeling tired counts as discomfort. And I felt distinctly more tired than usual for only about a day. I think this is what happens when your immune system works properly. You fight stuff off much faster than the five days or so many people take to get better. Before I figured out how to improve my sleep, I got the usual 4-6 colds per year. After I started to sleep much better, I never got sick in the usual runny-nose way so long as my sleep was good. The current episode is striking to me because I was more sick — that is, more tired — than usual. I do only two things to make my immune system work better: (a) improve my sleep in several ways (eat animal fat, get plenty of morning light, stand on one foot); and (b) eat plenty of fermented foods (mostly yogurt, but also miso, kimchi, natto, and kombucha).

UCLA: Livers For Sale

Seth Roberts14 Comments

According to 60 Minutes,the UCLA Medical Center moved a notorious Japanese mobster to the head of the liver transplant line after he donated $1 million to the program. Thus imitating Mother Teresa, who became friends with the worst dictators in the world if they gave her enough money.

More UCLA receives a large amount of taxpayer money, both state and federal. None of those taxpayers appreciates losing a life-saving liver to a gangster who paid none of those taxes. It’s an extreme abuse of public trust.

Dietary Fat and the Brain

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Over the last six months I’ve come to believe that animal fat improves my sleep. Because sleep is controlled by the brain, this suggests animal fat may also improve other measures of brain function, just as omega-3 turned out to improve brain function in a wide range of ways. I didn’t know about a recent experiment done with airplane pilots that supports that idea. This was the design:

A total of 45 pilots (mean age, 20.8 years; 87% male) from the [University of North Dakota] commercial-aviation program were enrolled in this 14-week repeated-measures crossover trial.

During the first week, participants were randomized to receive 1 of 4 diets (3 full meals and 2 snacks) for 4 days: a diet high in carbohydrates, a diet high in fat, a diet high in protein, or a control diet. After a 2-week “phase-out” period, all pilots then randomly received a different study diet. This process was repeated until all pilots had received all 4 diets.

I haven’t been able to find out much about the high-fat diet. Here are some of the results:

The response time on the Sternberg test of short-term memory was significantly faster for participants who ate the high-fat diet (PÂ < .05) than for those who ate the protein and control diets, especially at higher memory loads.

With sleep, however, the high-carb diet produced the best sleep.

Here is the abstract.

Thanks to Paul Sas.

Ben Casnocha on China

Seth Roberts12 Comments

After a three-week trip to China, Ben Casnocha wrote a long post about it. His main point I very much agree with:

Flush toilets and clean water matter more than abstract rights such as a free press.

Sure, the Chinese government censors all sorts of stuff. I find it hard to read anything on blogspot.com, for example (because the free blogs on that site could be used by Chinese bloggers). But, as Ben emphasizes, freedom in China — the freedom to do all sorts of things, including travel and make a living — has vastly increased over the last 10 years. Simply because of the economic growth. How much has American freedom increased over the last 10 years?

I fail to see any substantial America-specific increase. Due to the Internet, free speech has certainly increased but that has almost nothing to do with how America is governed. Free speech has increased everywhere with Internet access. Due to the increased cost of health care in America (an increased percentage of per capita income), worsening health (e.g., the obesity epidemic), and stagnation in the development of better treatments (e.g., for bipolar disorder) and better prevention, I’d say freedom in America has declined because poor health is imprisoning. Obesity, for example, is profoundly imprisoning. Cross-national comparisons show that America has a uniquely poor health-care system given American wealth. Given the concentration in America of support for health research (money and prestige), America is especially responsible for the lack of progress. And when people as smart as Atul Gawande fail to see the great stagnation in health care, it’s hard to imagine those in power doing something about it. So which country is better governed?

Black-and-White Thinking: An Example

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I’ve complained many times on this blog about scientists who engage in black-and-white thinking. Here is an example of such thinking outside of science:

At the mosque, Haniyeh addressed the campers on the importance of reciting the Koran. “There are two kinds of people,” he advised them. “Those who know the Koran is right and who follow it, and those who turn their backs on the Koran.”