Month: July 2010

“Without Great Teachers, Nothing Else Matters”

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I could watch these video clips (also here) all day. You may have learned about Doug Lemov from this NY Times Magazine article. The quote “without great teachers, nothing else matters” is from the website of the organization (Uncommon Schools) that Lemov founded. The clips show techniques he has isolated that great teachers use in elementary school.

My research is fundamentally about deficiency diseases. I find things present in Stone Age life but absent now whose absence causes problems. Sometimes I work backwards (from present to past): why am I not sleeping well? This turned out to have a Stone-Age-related answer. Sometimes I work forwards: I study something present in Stone-Age life but not now and learn it makes things better: standing (better sleep), morning faces (better mood).
So I know a lot about deficiency diseases. One curious thing about them is the opportunity they present. Without scurvy, we wouldn’t have discovered Vitamin C. Once we’ve discovered Vitamin C, we can figure out the optimal amount, possibly leaving us better off than before scurvy became a problem.

This is what I thought as I watched these clips. Formal education is unnatural. No wonder it’s so hard. These clips, however, show that with considerable understanding of psychology you can solve the problems it presents. And perhaps leave us better off than before formal schooling began.

A Month of Omega-6

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Susan Allport, having written The Queen of Fats, unsurprisingly eats a diet high in omega-3 and low in omega-6. For one month, however, she ate a diet with more omega-6 and less omega-3 and wrote about it– like Supersize Me, except far more realistic.

O magazine commissioned a story about it but didn’t run it. “My weight gain was only 0.5 pounds and they thought their readers wouldn’t see the importance of that,” says Allport. Her draft is here. There were three striking changes over the month: the omega-6/omega-3 ratio in her blood doubled (implying that this ratio is controlled by diet rather than by stored fat); her belly fat noticeably increased; and the elasticity of her arteries decreased by 20%. This supports Allport’s belief (and mine) that omega-6 is dangerous when consumed in large amounts, as it is if you eat a lot of food cooked in vegetable oil.

The American Heart Association recommends that Americans eat more omega-6. The justification of this recommendation says nothing about the Israeli Paradox, which to me is the best reason to avoid a diet high in omega-6. Allport’s experience is another reason.
Allport is also the author of Explorers of the Black Box, about neuroscience research.

Premier of Canadian Province Gets Involved in MS Research

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How strange:

I n a striking departure from his political counterparts across the country, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall says his government will finance clinical trials of liberation therapy, a contentious experimental procedure for multiple sclerosis patients.

Of course, the heads of provinces don’t usually get involved in research at this level of detail. However, “Saskatchewan has the highest rate of MS in the country,” says the article.

In Part 5 of The Story of Science (BBC), Michael Mosley, the presenter, said that for hundreds of years medical students were shown a human liver and told it had three lobes. They were told that because that’s what Galen had said. However, human livers do not have three lobes. As the students could see. Mosely is a doctor. “When I was a medical student,” said Mosley, “there was tremendous pressure to conform.” MS researchers have said for a long time that MS is an autoimmune disease. Could this have been as misleading as Galen’s description of the liver?
Thanks to Anne Weiss.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Thanks to Peter Couvares and Casey Manion.

“No One’s Going to Care About You Like You Do”

Seth Roberts2 Comments

At the end of a BookTV interview of Harry Markopolos, the guy who discovered Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, Markopolos says

No one’s going to care about you like [= as much as] you do.

He meant this as financial advice: Make up your own mind about how to invest your money. Don’t assume someone else has done the necessary thinking.

My self-experimentation led me to the same conclusion, as I wrote here. My self-experimentation uncovered helpful treatments (e.g., how to sleep better) that the experts (in this case, sleep researchers) had missed. I theorized that this was partly because I cared more than they did about the quality of my sleep. I had “the motivation of a person with the problem”; they didn’t.

Omega-3 and Dental Health (revisited)

Seth Roberts22 Comments

A few years ago I learned that flaxseed oil improved my gums and other people’s — especially Tyler Cowen’s. A few months ago I went to Beijing for two months. Toward the end of the visit my gums would bleed when I’d use a toothpick. Yet I was drinking 3 tablespoons of flaxseed oil every day, just like in Berkeley.

Well, my Beijing flaxseed oil was old. Stored in a freezer, yes, but about 9 months old. When I returned to Berkeley, I bought fresh flaxseed oil. In a week, my gums were much better. The bleeding stopped.

Last week I went to the dentist. He measured my “pockets” — the distance a probe can be inserted between the gum and the tooth. The readings were almost all 2′s (mm), with a few 3′s and one 1. Years ago, before flaxseed oil, the rear teeth were 4s and 5s. Now I floss and brush my teeth less than back then. Because of living in China, I haven’t had my teeth cleaned in more than a year (unprecedented) so I have the most plaque ever in my life. Yet my gums are the healthiest they’ve been, after just a few weeks of good flaxseed oil. (“Your gums are in good shape,” said the dentist.) This suggests that plaque doesn’t matter, the opposite of what one dentist told me and what Wikipedia appears to say (“The focus of treatment for gingivitis is removal of the [usual] etiologic (causative) agent, plaque.”). Nothing is said about too-little omega-3.

All this suggests that gingivitis, a disease of inflammation, is due to too-little omega-3. This is even more plausible because omega-3 is a precursor of an anti-inflammation signaling molecule. Here’s the sequence of events that led to this conclusion: 1. Several people wondered if they could do the Shangri-La Diet with flaxseed oil, so I tried some. It seemed to improve my balance. 2. Careful measurements of my balance confirmed this. 3. Further measurements showed that more flaxseed oil continued to improve my balance until I reached 3 tablespoons/day, which is far more than any recommended dose I’ve seen. 4. Readers of this blog and friends tried taking flaxseed oil in similar amounts. Everyone who did so, as far as I know, found their gums greatly improved. 5. One person stopped taking the flaxseed oil. His gums got worse. He resumed. They got better again. 6. The story I tell here.

Notice how important blogs (this blog) are in this story. It’s a kind of microscience — I learn something via self-experimentation, I post it, people write in with their experience — that has turned out to be surprisingly informative, given the many ways it differs from professional science (no long training, no lab, no grants, no peer review).

The Economics of Medical Hypotheses and Its Successor (part 2 of 2)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A successor to Medical Hypotheses, called Hypotheses in the Life Sciences, will be edited by William Bains and published by Buckingham University Press (BUP).

ROBERTS Does BUP hope to eventually make money from the successor journal? Or do they merely hope the subsidy required will decrease with time?

WILLIAM BAINS BUP is a small operation, and does not have the resources to subsidize Hypotheses in the Life Sciences beyond its start-up stage, so we hope to make enough money to break even fairly soon. Ultimately the aim is to be profitable. I for one am determined to put scientific quality first, and I have emphasized to BUP that I only want the journal to grow (and hence generate more revenue) when the quality of submissions allows it.

ROBERTS What led BUP to decide to publish the new journal?

BAINS I think a combination of similarity in philosophy and being in the right place at the right time. They thought it was an exciting project which would both raise their profile (in a good way) and make them money. Buckingham University is the UK’s only private university, and as such takes a heterodox, even iconoclastic view towards what the academic establishment says is writ in stone. The Chancellor has a robust approach to academic and individual freedom. So a journal trying to do something rather new, enabling those with good ideas but little power to be heard, fitted with their approach.  For me, an added advantage is that I deal directly with the man at the top. There are no intermediate layers of management to take decisions about the journal, and we discuss everything from philosophy to web page design. This is the sort of immediacy you do not get with a big publisher.

Part 1 (Bruce Charlton). Bioscience Hypotheses, a similar journal founded by Bains.

Learning From “Pseudoscience”

Seth Roberts10 Comments

The second episode of BBC’s The Story of Science is about chemistry. It shows unusual sophistication by emphasizing that early chemists built on the alchemists. The alchemists invented techniques and equipment later used by “real” chemists such as Joseph Priestly — the ones who reached conclusions we still believe. Not everyone understands that some “pseudoscience”, such as alchemy, is valuable.

A few years after I became an assistant professor, I realized the key thing a scientist needs is an excuse. Not a prediction. Not a theory. Not a concept. Not a hunch. Not a method. Just an excuse — an excuse to do something, which in my case meant an excuse to do a rat experiment. If you do something, you are likely to learn something, even if your reason for action was silly. The alchemists wanted gold so they did something. Fine. Gold was their excuse. Their activities produced useful knowledge, even though those activities were motivated by beliefs we now think silly. I’d like to think none of my self-experimentation was based on silly ideas but, silly or not, it often paid off in unexpected ways. At one point I tested the idea that standing more would cause weight loss. Even as I was doing it I thought the premise highly unlikely. Yet this led me to discover that standing a lot improved my sleep.

Richard Feynman, in his famous “cargo-cult science” speech, failed to understand that “real” science can build on “pseudoscience”:

Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress–lots of theory, but no progress–in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals. Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience.

Absence of obvious progress (such as no decrease in crime) doesn’t mean something is worthless. Bizarre ideas or unsupported ideas (“lots of theory but no progress”) doesn’t mean something is worthless. What’s worthless, in terms of science, is not paying attention to reality. Not caring about how the world actually is. The cargo cults Feynman mentioned weren’t worthless. They tested their beliefs. They found out the planes didn’t land. Fine. It wasn’t pseudoscience, it was just early science, where the reasons for doing stuff now appear ridiculous. Of course the alchemists had beliefs we now think ridiculous. How could they not have?

Science is fundamentally on the side of the weak, since it offers hope of improvement. The powerful not only can afford to ignore reality they would like to, because it might be inconvenient. So they do so as much as possible. When I’ve heard “the debate is over” (= it’s now time to ignore reality) it’s always turned out that the person saying this (e.g., Al Gore, mainstream journalists) was powerful or credulous.

It’s not bad that some people ignore reality. We need people like that. I think of the body: parts of it (e.g., sensory systems) are very sensitive to reality, parts of it (e.g., bones) are not. We need both. When leaders ignore reality is when trouble begins.

What’s “Natural” Sleep? (more)

Seth Roberts14 Comments

This morning I woke up feeling very refreshed and in a good mood. I’d slept about six hours. I’d fallen asleep within seconds of turning off my bedside light. This is what usually happens. I almost always sleep this well. Yet I don’t avoid caffeine during the day (I drink a lot of tea) nor artificial light at night (I do avoid fluorescent light at night). For a large chunk of my life my sleep was much worse. I never woke up feeling well-rested. I often woke up quite tired but unable to fall back asleep. A few hours later I’d fall back asleep and sleep a few more hours, much like the biphasic sleep called segmented sleep. Which is more natural — my current sleep or segmented sleep? As I blogged, several scientists have said that segmented sleep is more natural.

I’m returning to this topic and sort of repeating myself because sleep is so important, “ almost everyone I [a NY Times writer] know complains about sleep,” and the common cold so common. (When I improved my sleep I stopped getting colds.) Here, in chronological order of discovery, is what I’ve learned improves my sleep:

1. Aerobic exercise. When I started swimming, I noticed that I fell asleep much faster — within a minute rather than within several minutes. Aerobic exercise didn’t solve the bigger problem of waking up tired, however.

2. Skipping breakfast. This reduced early awakening. If you have any doubts about this, read about anticipatory activity in lab animals.

3. Seeing faces in the morning. Perhaps this deepens my sleep. It certainly makes it easier to go to bed in the evening (I stop wanting to do anything) and makes me wake up optimistic and looking forward to the day. The difference in how I feel when I wake up is like the difference between black and white and color. These days I watch about an hour of bloggingheads on a 22″ monitor starting around 6 am.

4. Standing. I stand on one bent leg to exhaustion at least twice. Before that I got a similar effect by standing 8 hours or more, which was too hard to do every day.

5. Morning light. Every morning I go outside about 8 am. I try to stay outside at least 1 hour and ideally more.

6. Animal fat. I eat half a stick of butter (60 g) per day.

Maybe the 3 tablespoons of flaxseed oil I drink every day also helps.

Each one of these six factors probably reproduces Stone Age life, when people got a lot more exercise, didn’t eat breakfast, chatted with their neighbors in the morning, etc. Were all six factors set at Stone Age levels for the Western Europeans that Ekirch writes about or Thomas Wehr’s subjects (both of whom had segmented sleep)? Of course not. Had all six been at Stone Age levels, the segmented sleep seen by Ekirch and Wehr might have disappeared. As my segmented sleep disappeared.

My sleep still has room for improvement. When I stood for 9 or 10 hours I woke up astonishingly well-rested. I felt scrubbed free of tiredness. In the middle of the day, eight hours later, I would marvel how rested I felt. The problem with standing more now is that if I stand on one bent leg more than twice per day my legs get stronger and stronger and it starts to take a long time (e.g., 20 minutes) to reach exhaustion. I’m also unsure about the best amount of animal fat. More might be better.

Comments that the night is long and sleep is short ignore that we can see by moonlight and starlight and that people chat after dark. In contrast to this experiment with no artificial light, by J. D. Moyer, the things I do to improve my sleep produce no bad effects. And I sleep only six hours per night, which Moyer found isn’t nearly enough.

Thanks to Heidi for the Moyer and NY Times links.

Logarithmically Right

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In Kathryn Schulz’s new book about being wrong (Being Wrong), she makes an interesting mistake:

In the instant of uttering [“I told you so”], I become right squared, maybe even right factorial, logarithmically right — at any rate, really, extremely right.

Schulz doesn’t know that the logarithm of a number 1 or more is much less than the number itself. For example, log 100 = 4.6.

What’s interesting is that logarithmically right is a good way of describing how one’s beliefs should be transformed to be a fair approximation of the truth. When you think you are right, you probably are — but logarithmically. Much less than you think.

When faced with a scientific paper — the sort that press releases are written about, for example — the naive reader takes it at face value. The little-knowledge-is-a-dangerous-thing reader finds many shortcomings and dismisses it (“how did this get through peer review?”). The more likely interpretation, in my experience, is that the paper, in spite of its imperfection, moves us a little bit forward. Much less than appearances, but more than zero.