Month: August 2010

Power Makes You More Dismissive

Seth Roberts7 Comments

An excellent essay by Jonah Lehrer (Alternate link) describes a pair of studies I didn’t know about:

In a recent study led by Richard Petty, a psychologist at Ohio State, undergraduates role-played a scenario between a boss and an underling. Then the students were exposed to a fake advertisement for a mobile phone. Some of the ads featured strong arguments for buying the phone, such as its long-lasting battery, while other ads featured weak or nonsensical arguments. Interestingly, students that pretended to be the boss were far less sensitive to the quality of the argument. It’s as if it didn’t even matter what the ad said — their minds had already been made up.

 

. . . Instead of analyzing the strength of the argument, those with authority focus on whether or not the argument confirms what they already believe. If it doesn’t, then the facts are conveniently ignored.

Deborah Gruenfeld, a psychologist at the Stanford Business School, demonstrated a similar principle by analyzing more than 1,000 decisions handed down by the United States Supreme Court between 1953 and 1993. She found that, as justices gained power on the court, or became part of a majority coalition, their written opinions tended to become less complex and nuanced. They considered fewer perspectives and possible outcomes.

Scary. Thomas Paine wrote about this: “The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly.”

Arithmetic and Butter

Seth Roberts18 Comments

On Tuesday I gave a talk called “Arithmetic and Butter” at the Quantified Self meeting in Sunnyvale. I had about 10 slides but this one mattered most:

It shows how fast I did simple arithmetic problems (e.g., 2*0, 9-6, 7*9) before and after I started eating 1/2 stick (60 g) of butter every day. The x axis covers about a year. The butter produced a long-lasting improvement of about 30 msec.

I think the hill shape of the butter function is due to running out of omega-3 in Beijing — my several-months-old flaxseed oil had gone bad, even though it had been frozen. When I returned to Berkeley and got fresh flaxseed oil, my scores improved.

This isn’t animal fat versus no animal fat. Before I was eating lots of butter, I was eating lots of pork fat. It’s one type of animal fat versus another type. Nor is it another example of modern processing = unhealthy. Compared to pork fat, butter is recent.

Most scientists think philosophy of science is irrelevant. Yet this line of research (measuring my arithmetic speed day after day, in hopes of accidental discovery) derived from a philosophy of science, which has two parts. First, scientific progress has a power-law distribution. Each time we collect data, we sample from a power-law-like distribution. Almost all samples produce tiny progress; a very tiny fraction produce great progress. Each time you collect data, in other words, it’s like buying a lottery ticket. I realized that a short easy brain-function test allowed me to buy a large number of lottery tickets at low cost. Second, we underestimate the likelihood of extreme events. Nassim Taleb has argued this about the likelihood of extreme negative events (which presumably have a power-law distribution); I’m assuming the same thing about extreme positive events (with a power-law distribution). We undervalue these lottery tickets, in other words. Perhaps all scientists hope for accidental discoveries. I seem to be the first to use a research strategy that relies on accidental discoveries.

In the graph, note that one point (actually, two) is down at 560 msec. This suggests there’s room for improvement.

“A World Suppressing the Uniqueness Inside Each of Us”

Seth Roberts9 Comments

I liked Erica Goldson’s graduation speech very much partly because she says the same things I say here. To me, the core of her message is that her high school was

a world suppressing the uniqueness that lies inside each of us

That’s what I tried to say here. Goldson summed it up better than I did. One of the things that pushed me toward that conclusion happened in an undergraduate seminar about depression that I taught at Berkeley. For a final project, the students could do almost anything related to depression, so long as it was off campus and did not involve library research. One student chose to give a talk to a high school class. Not a rare choice — several other students did the same thing. But her final paper blew me away. She wrote about how hard it had been. She had/has severe stage fright. Every step of the project was very hard for her. But she did it. “I learned I can conquer my fears,” she wrote.

Her performance on the week-to-week assignments (writing comments on the reading) had been mediocre. But now I saw another side of her: She was courageous. My assignments, like practically all college assignments, required no courage. So I never noticed how courageous any of my students were. I remember sitting at my desk after reading her paper and thinking how badly I had undervalued her. I had noticed this only because I’d given a highly unusual assignment. I could see that there was a gigantic amount of undervaluing going on. And undervaluation leads to suppression. Students have unique or unusual strengths that fail to develop because their high school or college teachers don’t value them.

Thanks to Tucker Max.

How Well Do Authors of Scientific Papers Respond to Criticism?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

This BMJ research asked how well authors responded to criticism in emailed letters to the editor. A highly original subject, but the researchers, one of whom (Fiona Godlee) is the top BMJ editor, appear lost. They summarize the results but appear to have no idea what to learn from them, ending their paper with this:

Editors should ensure that authors take relevant criticism seriously and respond adequately to it.

Which was perfectly reasonable before any data was collected. So that’s not a good conclusion.

The real conclusion is this: The letters to the editor were far better than nothing because authors responded to their criticisms about half the time.

Jane Jacobs and Traffic

Seth Roberts10 Comments

This excellent post by Alex Tabarrok about the effect of removing traffic lights — traffic improves — reminds me of how I discovered the work of Jane Jacobs. Browsing in the Transportation Library at UC Berkeley, I came across The Economy of Cities.

That order arising from below (from individual drivers and pedestrians) can be much better than order imposed from above (by traffic engineers) was a point Jacobs made often. The details in Alex’s post and the video he embeds don’t just suggest that traffic lights in thousands of places could be profitably removed, they also support more radical thinking:

  • Traffic engineers were completely wrong in all these cases. Trying to improve something, they made it worse. How did we get to a world where this is possible? Surely it isn’t just traffic engineers.
  • What would happen if students were given more power to control their own education? Perhaps we would need far few professors. I gave my students much more control and found (a) my job got easier and (b) my students learned much more.
  • What would happen if all of us were given more power to control our own health, rather than rely on gatekeepers, such as doctors? Perhaps we would need far fewer doctors.

The essence of my self-experimentation is that I took control of my health. Rather than seeing a doctor about my early awakening, or waiting for sleep researchers to find a solution, I found a solution.

Animal Cognition Paper Retracted

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A paper in Cognition by Harvard professor Marc Hauser and others has been retracted:

The paper tested cotton-top tamarin monkeys’ ability to learn generalized patterns, an ability that human infants had been found to have, and that may be critical for learning language. The paper found that the monkeys were able to learn patterns, suggesting that this was not the critical cognitive building block that explains humans’ ability to learn language.

The note to be published about the retraction says almost nothing about why: “An internal examination at Harvard University . . . found that the data do not support the reported findings.”

Several other papers from Hauser’s lab have also been questioned.

The usual explanation would be that someone in Hauser’s lab made the results better than they actually were. A co-author of the paper said Hauser had told him “there were problems with the videotape record of the study”. That’s consistent with the usual explanation: Someone edited the tapes (via deletions) to make the results appear better than they were. But it’s also possible that many tapes are missing, which might be an accident. When The New Yorker archives were moved from Building A to Building B several years ago, much of the archives was lost.

Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell.

Vitamin Absorption With and Without Accompanying Meal

Seth Roberts4 Comments

This pharmaceutical-company handout (thanks, Jen!) about their Vitamin K2 includes a description of an experiment where subjects took the tablets on an empty stomach or with a meal. The variation in stomach contents made a huge difference: absorption, measured by blood concentration, was 7 times higher when the K2 was taken with a meal.

This is going to change how I take supplements, such as selenium, for the rest of my life. I’ve often taken them on empty stomach. I never realized the effect of doing so could be so large.

A Smug Professor

Seth Roberts23 Comments

The Chronicle of Higher Education website has a blog about “ideas, culture, and the arts [that] features some of the best minds in academic and policy circles”. One of the bloggers — Gina Barreca, a professor of English and Feminist Theory at the University of Connecticut and a humorist — wrote about being older than her students:

I think about the fact that my students and I no longer listen to same music or revere the same actors; I wonder about the implications of the fact that even some of the smart ones like I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

I pointed this out to Tucker Max (author of I Hope . . . ). He replied:

I like how she implies that some of her students are stupid. Great prof.

I thought that was a great point. I asked if I could use it on this blog. He agreed, and added:

The other thing about her statement is that she implicitly scoffs at the notion that someone smart could–gasp–DISAGREE with her. It doesn’t even occur to her that she might be wrong, that her worldview might be the one that needs examining. To her, nothing legitimate can exist outside of her prejudices and opinions. Even the idea that it could is rejected out of hand.

I replied:

Yeah, she hasn’t read your book but it must be ridiculous. Of course. I praised the film Gladiator (pre-Oscar) to someone I knew and she said, to a friend, that this made me an inferior person. Because Gladiator was popular, it must be bad. If I liked it, there was something wrong with me.

Tucker replied:

Exactly–the idea that THEY might be wrong doesn’t even occur to them. Like it’s not even in the realm of possibility.

These are the same people that Nassim Taleb rails against, and the same people who read Socrates, and completely miss the point, but still praise it because they think they’re supposed to. And these are the people that the internet/the age of connectivity is destroying. Because you can’t hide behind status anymore. Results are measurable, and everyone is on the playing field now.

I agree.

Journal of Participatory Medicine

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The Journal of Participatory Medicine has released two issues (first, second). They help explain what participatory medicine means. The best article I have found among them is called “What It Will Take to Embrace Participatory Medicine: One Patient’s View” by Kate Lorig. Here is one bit:

In one of my regular clinics, I am met with a sign that tells me that if I am a half hour late, my appointment will have to be rescheduled. I once asked what would happen if I were not seen in a half hour and was told to sit down and wait. Last year while waiting for scheduled appointments I read five full-length books (five hours each).

But overall the articles, even this one, are long on generalizations and short on specifics.