Month: December 2009

The Unwisdom of John Mackey

Seth Roberts12 Comments

John Mackey is the founder of Whole Foods, a business I greatly respect. But he’s not always right.

“You only love animal fat because you’re used to it,” he said. “You’re addicted.”

(From a profile of Mackey in The New Yorker.) I discovered that animal fat improved my sleep when I overcame my (learned) repulsion and ate a lot more than usual.I think it’s obvious that fat tastes good for unlearned reasons. For reasons not based on experience. (Babies like fat. Animals similar to us, who have never eaten fast food, like fat.) Mackey’s comment is an example of a larger disregard of this. Professional nutritionists, including nutrition professors, have ignored the general point that our food preferences must somehow be good for us. I’m not saying all fat must be good for us — just the fat we ate when our liking of fat evolved. The idea that evolution would shape us to like and eat a food component that’s bad for us makes no sense.

Why I Love the Internet

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Because it allows me to read stuff like the following, an anonymous comment on a post by Washington Post reporter Andrew Freedman. Freedman complained that 2009 saw “erosion of clarity about climate”:

Mr. Freedman, the expression you’re struggling to avoid with regard to your propaganda in support of “mainstream climate scientists” is one devised by Nobel laureate Richard Feynman in 1974.

The words are “ Cargo Cult Science,” the advancement of scientific seeming without scientific integrity. Not just error but flagrant dishonesty. Fraud. Criminal conspiracy, too.

That’s your “mainstream climate scientists” in a neat little bundle of filth.

The Climategate revelations – the obvious work of an insider, a whistle-blower, not an outside hacker – show how the CRU correspondents cooked their data, manipulated their crooked computer models, and generally schemed to defy the UK and US laws covering Freedom of Information, including indications that Prof. Jones of the University of East Anglia suborned not only the compliance officers of his University but also one or more officers of Her Majesty’s government in the ICO.

Thirty wonderful years of duplicity, mendacity, “cork-screwing, back-stabbing, and dirty dealing.”

And you, Mr. Freedman, are defending this. Tsk. But what the hell have we any right to expect – other than this act of accessory after the fact in a multiple-count felony investigation – from anyone associated with The Washington Post?

Courtesy of Climategate, we now have stunning “clarity on climate.”

This isn’t exactly brilliant but it is better (better-written, better-argued, more heartfelt) than 99% of mainstream journalism, such as the Washington Post or New York Times. One big function of journalism is “to afflict the comfortable.” That includes science journalism. When a journalist, such as Elizabeth Kolbert, cannot form her own opinion but must accept what powerful people tell her, she cannot “afflict” them.

I think there is a psychological principle at work. It has different names. One is belief in a just world. The rich and powerful think they deserve their good fortune. Another is cognitive dissonance. If I did this crummy job for low pay, I must enjoy it. Yet another is Stockholm Syndrome. The science journalist thinks: If I trust this scientist, he must be trustworthy. But he isn’t. Outsiders, such as the anonymous commenter, are not subject to this effect and see things more clearly.

Science of Everyday Life: Why “Boys and Girls”? Why Not “Girls and Boys”?

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I try to connect my self-experimentation to other intellectual activity. One broader category is the stunning single case — the single example that makes you think new thoughts. Another is superhobbies (activities done with the freedom of hobbyists but the skills of professionals). Superhobbies lie between hobbies and skilled jobs. A third is my position as an insider/outsider. I was close enough to sleep research to understand it but far enough away to ignore all their rules about what you can and cannot do. I had the knowledge of an insider but the freedom of an outsider.

A fourth broader category is the science of everyday life — meaning science that involves everyday life and can be done by most of us. My experiments cost almost nothing, required no special equipment or circumstances. They involved common concerns (e.g., how to sleep better) and tested treatments available to everyone (e.g., standing more, eating more animal fat). A post by Mark Liberman at Language Log has a nice non-experimental example of this category. The question is about word order in gender pairs. Why do we say “boys and girls” more often than “girls and boys”? Or “husbands and wives” more often than “wives and husbands”? There are plenty of such pairs, not all with male first (e.g., “ladies and gentlemen”). The several possible explanations can be tested in lots of ways that require no fancy equipment or data. As Liberman says,

A smart high-school student could do a neat science-fair project along these general lines.

A great feature of what Liberman is proposing is that the answer isn’t obvious. There isn’t a “correct” answer as there is in so much of the way that science is taught (e.g., physics labs, demonstrations). If I searched for examples of “science of everyday life” i would merely find canned demos, which have little in common with the practice of science. Whereas Liberman’s idea gets to the heart of it, at least the hypothesis-testing part.

Thanks to Stephen Marsh.

Chimamanda Adichie on Academia

Seth Roberts12 Comments

After a few years of being a writer, Chimamanda Adichie — author of my Short Story of the Year — wondered if she should be a professor. (Her father is a statistics professor.) And she wanted to learn more about Africa. So she enrolled in an African Studies program at Yale. In an interview, she said:

I met very lovely people at Yale, so it wasn’t an entire waste of time. . . . After two years of the program . . . academia I discovered — particularly political science as it is done in the US — is not about the real world. It’s about academia. I would joke and say that what they do is they create straw men, and they beat them down. While all this is going on, the real world is going on in a parallel universe. It is completely disconnected from what happens in academia. I didn’t understand most of what I read. It wasn’t written in English, it was written in political-science jargonese.

This is the usual critique, but it is well-put. If you spend enough time in academia, as I have, you can see it becoming that way, disciplines turning inward, becoming less and less interested in reality. Becoming more and more ivory-towerish. Statistics, for example, became less and less concerned with real-world problems; but I could say the same about every other area (engineering, English, etc.).

This is glaringly obvious, roughly as clear as the sun rising in the morning, but some Berkeley professors denied it. “English departments have really lost their way,” I would say. No they haven’t would be the reply.

James Michener Anticipates Me

Seth Roberts9 Comments

In James Michener’s Poland (1983), a Polish peasant in a concentration camp tries to survive by thinking about food (p. 532 of the paperback):

He then transferred his imagination to a supper served at the wedding of a well-to-do farmer, where huge platters of sauerkraut, sausage, boiled pork and pickles had been provided, one to each of six tables, and he had helped himself piggishly, moving from one to the other so as not to reveal his gluttony. Â He recalled this particular feast for two reasons: as a peasant, he knew that the acid bite of the pickled kraut was good for him, all peasants knew that and it was one reason why they survived so long; and he could see in the rich fat of the meats the strength that came from them.

Later he thinks about animal fat:

He imagined himself luxuriating with platters of butter, or grease, or pork drippings, or oil that rich people bought from Spain, or the golden globules at the edge of a roast, or plain lard.

According to Wikipedia, Poland was based on “extensive study of Poland’s history and culture.” Thanks to Nadav Manham.

MSG and Nightmares (continued)

Seth Roberts9 Comments

I am staying in a nice hotel near Shanghai. Last night I dreamed that my stuff (suitcase, etc.) had been put in the hallway outside my room. As — in the dream — I was walking to the front desk to complain, I realized I must be dreaming. This couldn’t possibly have happened, I thought. It was that realistic. Later that night I had another mild realistic nightmare — about missing the bus.

I rarely have dreams like that. During the day I’d had a lot more Chinese food than usual. Two big meals. (Lunch, at a restaurant, had included yogurt, incidentally.) Without my friend’s experience I would have never connected the Chinese food and the nightmares.

Stupid Noodle Restaurant

Seth Roberts3 Comments

On Christmas, I had lunch in a factory town near Shanghai at a restaurant whose Chinese name means Stupid Noodle Restaurant. It’s not a joke. Nor a mystery, if you’re Chinese. The reason a restaurant would call itself stupid is because a stupid owner won’t cheat you. Next to the restaurant are a small store that sells cables and a small store that sells car batteries. At the restaurant, the knife-cut noodles were very good.

Sometimes Black Really Is White

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Jenny Holzer, the artist, says, “ I get up about four times a night and go back to sleep, or not.” I suspect she’s not eating enough animal fat. At my local Beijing supermarket yesterday, I asked a butcher to cut the meat off a piece of pork fat. Reverse trimming. At the moment, I think about 180 g of animal fat/day is a good dose. I’m much less concerned about amount of meat. Another instance, I thought to myself, where I want the opposite of everyone else. But that’s far more true in America than here. In China but not America, I can buy pork belly at any supermarket; in China but not America, there is vast selection of pickles and yogurt at any supermarket.

William Penn Accidentally Signs Away Pennsylvania

Seth Roberts8 Comments

From Wikipedia:

A more serious problem arose when fellow Quaker Philip Ford, his business manager, embezzled from Penn. He capitalized on Penn’s habit of signing papers without reading them by including a deed transferring Pennsylvania to himself, and then demanded more rent than Penn could pay.

Why am I reading about William Penn? Because Penn was an insider/outsider. Born to wealthy parents and educated at Oxford, he became a marginal religious leader, at one point imprisoned for eight months for writing a “blasphemous” pamphlet. Just as self-experimentation empowered me, cheap travel across the Atlantic empowered Penn. He took his followers to what became Pennsylvania.

I believe that cheap new ways of doing things empower insider/outsiders. A modern example is Stephen McIntyre, empowered by blogs. (His blog is Climate Audit.) The classic example is Martin Luther, empowered by the printing press. In contrast, expensive new ways of doing things empower insiders (the already powerful) because only they can afford them. I suppose the classic example is agriculture. Agriculture is expensive because it requires land. Lots of things start off expensive and become cheap, but many do not. The classic example is agriculture (land never becomes cheap); the big modern example is health care. It is very expensive to develop a new drug or new medical technology. This is at the heart of why the health care industry is extracting more and more money from the rest of us, just as government officials in rural China regularly ripoff farmers. I am unsurprised that doctors resist cheap new improvements, the only way out of a terrible situation. In China, people in rural areas migrate to cities; that’s how they escape. In Croatia, some friends of mine lived downhill from neighbors who were in the Communist Party. My friends were not Communists. One day they woke up to find that the property line between them and their uphill neighbors had shifted downhill about 10 feet. Unlike William Penn and rural Chinese, my friends could not move — and thus the powerful became more powerful.