Month: December 2009

Modern Biology = Cargo-Cult Science (continued)

Seth Roberts31 Comments

In an earlier post I pointed out that modern molecular biology has one big feature in common with cargo-cult science (activities with the trappings but not the substance of science): relentless over-promising. David Horrobin, in a 2003 essay, agreed with me:

Those familiar with medical research funding know the disgraceful campaigns waged in the 70s and 80s by scientists hunting the genes for such diseases as cystic fibrosis. Give us the money, we’ll find the gene and then your problems will be solved was the message. The money was found, the genes were found – and then came nothing but a stunned contemplation of the complexity of the problem, which many clinicians had understood all along.

During the question period of a talk by Laurie Garrett about science writing at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, I said there was a kind of conspiracy between scientists and journalists to make research results (in biology/health) appear more important than they really were. Oh, no, said Garrett. If she’s right, then journalists are completely credulous. They have no idea they’re being scammed. If I wrote a book called The Real Scientific Method, there would be a whole chapter on better ways (cool data) and worse ways (over-promising) to promote your work.

The discovery of leptin, the hormone that tells the brain how much fat you have, was front-page news in 1994. Supposedly this discovery would help people lose weight. It is now abundantly clear that it hasn’t and won’t. The discoverer of leptin, Jeffrey Friedman, gave a talk at UC Berkeley several years ago and resembled a deer caught in the headlights. All he knew — following the party line — was that genetics was important. That genetics was so obviously not the reason for the obesity epidemic . . . he didn’t mention. This interview gives a sampling of his views. He really does believe in the primacy of genes:

Over the years, Dr. Friedman says, he has watched the scientific data accumulate to show that body weight, in animals and humans, is not under conscious control. Body weight, he says, is genetically determined, as tightly regulated as height.

Never mind animal and human experiments that show adult body weight is controlled by recent diet. Adult height is not controlled by recent diet. What about the obesity epidemic? Well,

“Before calling it an epidemic, people really need to understand what the numbers do and don’t say,” he said.

This is what one molecular biologist — a professor at Rockefeller University — is reduced to: telling us what data collected by other people “do and don’t say”. Not to mention qualifying the obvious (Americans are much fatter now than 50 years ago). I’m sure his lab has all the trappings of modern science. But the planes don’t land.

A journalist named David Freedman has figured this out.

Michael Perelman on the Purpose of College

Seth Roberts6 Comments

In a talk, Michael Perelman, a professor of economics at CSU Chico, said this:

Each semester, I tell my class that each of them has the potential to be the best in the world at something. The most important thing they can do in school [= college] is find out what that something is.

That is a sane view of college. At Berkeley, I told undergrads: “Take as few classes as possible and do as many internships as possible.”

Perelman’s talk, an intellectual autobiography, has all sorts of interesting details, such as “As the economy faltered, economists would express doubts about how the economy functioned but once the economy recovered, challenges to market fundamentalism would become rare.”

 

Tsinghua Student Life

Seth Roberts4 Comments

The Chinese government sets limits to the number of acceptable student suicides per year at every college. If the number is exceeded, the college is punished — perhaps by a reduction in administrator salaries. Although colleges conceal suicides from their own students, they dare not conceal them from the government. At Tsinghua (with about 12,000 students) the annual limit is six. (So far this year, there have apparently been none.) In the electrical engineering department recently, more than six students were thought to be considering suicide. Because of this, a psychology professor gave the EE majors a talk about looking at the bright side of things.

A newly-formed Tsinghua student club has a Chinese name that means Sing Your Heart. It is for students who want to volunteer to teach in poor rural areas. The club has a special song that they sing at every meeting. They are remarkably ambitious: They want to set up a training program to train students to teach in these areas.

The School of Humanities and Social Sciences has a debate competition every year. This year’s topic is: Should the Fuwa (the Beijing Olympic mascots) have genders?

Appreciative Thinking and Buddhism

Seth Roberts4 Comments

After I mentioned appreciative thinking in a recent post, my friend Carl Willat wrote me:

Part of Buddhism I think is that gratitude is the secret to happiness. Â It’s always possible to want more, so you won’t be happy by trying to get all the things you want. Instead, being grateful for what you have is where happiness lies.

That’s a good way to put it. Not matter what article you read, no matter what study you do, there are always ways it could be better (what others call flaws). Be grateful for what the article or study tells you. That’s how to learn something from it.

MSG and Nightmares

Seth Roberts11 Comments

At a dinner for foreign teachers at Tsinghua, I met a Canadian woman who teaches English literature. Soon after she moved to China, she started having nightmares every night. For dreams, they were unusually linear and realistic. They were nightmares in the sense that they felt “sinister”. This hadn’t happened to her before. It was especially puzzling because she was having a good time.

On a forum for foreigners in Beijing, she asked what might be causing the problem. MSG, she was told. All Chinese restaurants use MSG. She started cooking her own food. The problem went away. Whenever she ate a restaurant meal, the problem returned. The time between meal and sleep made a difference. The dreams would be more vivid if she slept soon after the meal.

Here is a discussion of the MSG/nightmare link with many stories about it. I believe we like the taste of MSG because glutamate is created when proteins are digested by bacteria. We like glutamate because we need to eat bacteria to be healthy. Bacteria are too big and varied to detect directly; it’s much easier to evolve a glutamate detector. The problem is that now you can have glutamate in your food without bacteria. Apparently cooked tomatoes and garlic are other sources.

With PubMed I found two relevant articles. One reported an experiment where hyperactive boys got better when additives, including MSG, were removed from their food. The other is a review article about the effects of MSG that mentions sleep.

I’m sure from the personal stories that MSG causes nightmares — and therefore probably also causes other problems. (That glutamate is a neurotransmitter makes the MSG-nightmare link even more likely.) Here are researchers from the Scripps Clinic in San Diego saying MSG is safe:

Since the first description of the ‘Monosodium glutamate symptom complex’, originally described in 1968 as the ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome’, a number of anecdotal reports and small clinical studies of variable quality have attributed a variety of symptoms to the dietary ingestion of MSG. . . . Despite concerns raised by early reports, decades of research [this review was published in 2009] have failed to demonstrate a clear and consistent relationship between MSG ingestion and the development of these conditions..

What the woman I met did in a week or so (establish that MSG has bad effects), medical researchers — at least, judging by this review — have failed to do in 41 years (“decades of research”). Just as dermatologists have been unable to figure out that acne is caused by diet.

More about the dangers of MSG.

The Wisdom of Tsinghua Freshmen

Seth Roberts3 Comments

This semester at Tsinghua University — the most selective college in China — I taught a freshman seminar about recent psychology research. Three weeks ago I gave my students a choice of five articles from Psychological Science, all published in 2008. They were to read one of them and comment.

Mostly I try to teach appreciation but three weeks ago we focused on how articles could be improved. I have never tried to teach this, yet the students made some very good points. Here are some of their comments:

1. This article said that we believe women make better leaders when there is within-group conflict and that men make better leaders when there is between-group conflict. One student pointed out that Rwanda was a good example. After the genocide (within-group conflict), far more women were elected to office.

2. This article studied the effect of cleanliness on moral judgments. One experiment compared two groups: subjects in one group had recently washed their hands, subjects in the other group had not. Before the time when the handwashing happened, both groups saw unpleasant scenes from a movie. Students pointed out an important confounding not mentioned in the article: The two groups differed not only in handwashing but also in the time from movie to test (because handwashing took time). Perhaps subjects who washed their hands remembered the movie less well.

3. The name-letter effect is a tendency to favor outcomes (broadly defined) that involve the first letter of your name. This study involved Belgium workers. The authors found that workers were more likely to be employed by a company whose first letter matched the first letter of their name. The correlation was small but reliable. Two students pointed out that this might reflect the company’s choice of whom to hire rather than the employee’s choice of where to work. One student pointed out that the correlation might be due to name-place correlations across Belgium. Perhaps certain regions favor certain names for both people and companies. As you move closer to the French border, perhaps French names become more common among both people and companies.

In all of these cases, had I been the editor, I would have required the authors to change their article appropriately.

James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds described cases where averages of estimates made by non-experts did very well, sometimes out-performing experts. These three examples don’t involve numerical judgments nor averaging, but they do show non-experts (freshmen) doing better than experts (journal editors and reviewers) in certain ways. Each paper was read by about eight students.

More It isn’t easy to convey how impressed I was. The comments about Rwanda and about name localization certainly deserve a letter to the editor (if Psychological Science published them). Both of them are sophisticated methodological comments. The Rwandan one says that after you write an experimental article, try to find out if real-world events support your findings. That may be a helpful lesson in many cases. The name localization one suggests that psychologists who use survey data should be learning more about how to analyze survey data. Several other times my students surprised me with how good their comments were. One was during a discussion of possible reasons for the Holocaust, another was about why women in ancient China bound their feet, a third involved proposals for Mindless-Eating-type experiments.

Review of Other Diets

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This comment by goblyn on the Shangri-La Diet forums made me laugh:

When you’re on Atkins it gets harder when you start wanting to sell your first born for a piece of bread. On Weight Watchers you’d kill for a pizza. On South Beach you’d sleep with Donald Trump for an order of buffalo wings. On the cabbage soup diet, you’d willingly chop off your hands if you could eat something…anything…other than cabbage soup. On SLD it gets harder when you are suddenly only losing 1 lb a week rather than 4.

So well written! The comment continues, in very gratifying way:

It’s harder when you effortlessly eat 1400 calories a day and don’t feel deprived. It’s harder when you have to buy a whole new wardrobe. It’s harder when you’re out with friends and they all think you’re anorexic because you get stuffed from the bread they served before the meal… But there’s rarely a moment when it’s actually HARD. SLD is easy. Yes the weight loss slows down, yes the AS [appetite suppression] gets less noticeable, but at no point does it stop working. You won’t suddenly find your weight skyrocketing from eating a piece of celery.

The New Yorker Reading List

Seth Roberts5 Comments

For the first time, the New Yorker website contains comments by all of their contributors about the best books they read last year. It’s a great idea. I’ll be studying it for a long time. I was most immediately persuaded to read The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly (recommended by Margaret Talbot) and The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser (recommended by Jeffrey Toobin). I’m interested in anything Lauren Collins has to say because she is a very talented writer. Her list was unusually long. Tad Friend misspelled the title of his own book.

Some of the writers didn’t write very well. Paul Muldoon, the poetry editor, used the royal we:

We’re very pleased to report that the title-poem first appeared here in The New Yorker.

It should be called “the pompous we“. He also wrote:

Among the poetry books that particularly recommended themselves this past year

Richard Brody wrote this:

The laser-like clarity and probity with which Lanzmann brings

I think he means “the laser-pointer-like clarity . . . “.

How I Write Letters of Recommendation

Seth Roberts5 Comments

As all professors know, it is letter-of-recommendation-writing season. I write them differently than anyone else I know. I meet with the student and write the letter during our meeting. I ask questions, type, ask questions, type, etc. The student inevitably remembers details of the class and how well they did better than I do. I ask questions that try to elicit the strengths of their case — about relevant experience, for example. Anything I find convincing I put in the letter. Sure, maybe they described the same stuff in their statement of purpose but I’m sure I can do a better job — professor to professor — than they can. (Statements of purpose are usually badly written.) I speak professorese, they don’t.

I like to think it’s win-win-win. It’s good for me because the letter is written quickly, easily, on time, and with good content. It’s the strongest possible truthful letter I could write — so I feel I’m doing my job. It’s good for the student because I make their case in the best possible way. It’s good for whoever reads the letter because it’s factual and well-argued. I don’t just say the student is this or that; I give examples. Most letters of recommendation do not give examples. Without examples, I ignore them.