Month: September 2010

Jane Jacobs and Food Trucks

Seth Roberts10 Comments

In this article about food trucks, Ed Glaeser doesn’t mention their educational value: They allow people with a new idea to test it relatively cheaply. If it works they can expand. I saw this happen in Berkeley. A food truck that sold stuffed potatoes eventually became a store that sold the same thing. Food trucks don’t merely create jobs, they can create the best kind of jobs: Those that provide new goods and services. Unlike jobs created by building dams or highways.

Any advanced economy needs a constant stream of new goods and services to replace the ones that are inevitably lost. It goes against the survival instincts of people in power (government officials) to help those at the bottom (e.g., potential food truck owners) because they seem so much less powerful than those at the top (e.g., restaurant owners) who are threatened by those at the bottom.

All this should be utterly obvious — as it is to anyone who has read Jane Jacobs on economics. But it isn’t. In science, too, every field needs a constant stream of new empirical effects (in experimental psychology, new cause-effect relationships) to replace the ones that have been studied to death. So every field needs a cheap way of searching for those effects, but no field, as far as I know, has such a way. In science, editors and reviewers are like government officials. They can discourage new ideas (food trucks) by enforcing “high standards” (regulations) whose costs they fail to understand.

Via Marginal Revolution. “[David] Westin’s biggest weakness [as head of ABC News] was that he lacked the entrepreneurial spirit to launch innovative and creative ventures.”

Dry Eye and Fish Consumption

Seth Roberts17 Comments

Let’s say that dry eye is caused by lack of omega-3. If you eat enough omega-3, you’ll never get it. Here is a recently-discovered association with tuna consumption:

Tuna consumption [1 serving was 113 g (4 oz)] was inversely associated with DES [Dry Eye Syndrome] (OR: 0.81; 95% CI: 0.66, 0.99 for 2—4 servings/wk; OR: 0.32; 95% CI: 0.13, 0.79 for 5—6 servings/wk versus =< 1/wk P for trend = 0.005).

If tuna were a good source of omega-3, eating 5-6 servings per week would completely prevent dry eye. But it doesn’t. Which supports what I have come to believe for other reasons: oily fish, in the quantities most people eat it, is a mediocre source of omega-3. Even if you eat tuna almost once/day, you don’t get enough. To get enough omega-3, look elsewhere.

Thanks to Brent Pottenger.

A Unified Theory of Japanese Food

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I used to like Japanese food because it was less fattening than other foods — I lost weight eating sushi. Now I like it because the Japanese eat so much fermented food: miso, pickles, yogurt, Yakult, umeboshi (pickled plums), natto, vinegar drinks, and alcoholic beverages. A Tokyo food court might have 20 types of pickles, 15 types of miso, and 10 types of umeboshi.

Abundance of fermented food isn’t the only way Japanese food is unusual. I see Japanese food as an outlier on three dimensions:

  • Use of fish. More fish-centered than any other major cuisine.
  • Beauty. More beautiful than any other cuisine.
  • Fermented food. More fermented food than any other cuisine.

As I’ve said, lightning doesn’t strike twice in one place for different reasons. If two rare events could have a common explanation, they probably do. I’ve discussed before why a fish-centered cuisine could lead to better visual design: Because cooks can’t use complex flavorings to show how much they care (it would make all fish taste the same), they take pains with appearance to convey this.

What about fermented foods? Here’s an idea: In the development of Japanese cooking, lack of complex flavoring of main dishes increased desire that other parts of the meal provide complexity, which is what fermented foods do so well. For example, Japanese meals often include pickles. We want a certain amount of complexity in our food, in other words. Most cuisines provide complexity via complex spice mixtures (mole sauce, harissa, curry powder); Japanese cuisine provides it with fermented foods. (I love Japanese curry, but it isn’t common.)

This explanation predicts that desire for complexity is like thirst: It grows over time and can be satisfied. Prediction 1: Eating one complex food will make a second one will taste less pleasant, just as drinking one bottle of water will make a second bottle of water taste less pleasant. Prediction 2: Over time, the pleasure provided by complexity grows. The same complex-flavored food will taste better at Time 2 than Time 1 if you haven’t eaten anything with a complex flavor between the two times.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Thanks to Casey Manion and Anne Weiss

Is Science Self-Correcting?

Seth Roberts12 Comments

Lots of scientists say science is self-correcting. In a way this is surely true: a non-scientist wouldn’t understand the issues. If anyone corrects scientific fraud, it will be a scientist. In another way, this is preventive stupidity: it reassures and reduces the intelligence of those who say it, helping them ignore the fact that they have no idea how much fraud goes undetected. If only 1% of fraud is corrected, it is misleading to say science is self-correcting. A realistic view of scientific self-correction is that there is no reward for discovering fraud and plenty of grief involved: the possibility of retaliation, the loss of time (it won’t help you get another grant), and the dislike of bearing bad news. So whenever fraud is uncovered it’s a bit surprising and bears examination.

What I notice is that science is often corrected by insider/outsiders — people with enough (insider) knowledge and (outsider) freedom to correct things. As I’ve said before, Saul Sternberg and I were free to severely criticize Ranjit Chandra. Because we were psychologists and he was a nutritionist, he couldn’t retaliate against us. Leon Kamin, an outsider to personality psychology, was free to point out that Cyril Burt faked data. (To his credit, Arthur Jensen, an insider, also pointed in this direction, although not as clearly.) The Marc Hauser case provides another example: Undergraduates in Hauser’s lab uncovered the deception. They knew a lot about the research yet had nothing invested in it and little to lose from loss of Hauser’s support. This is another reason insider/outsiders are important.

Plastic Fantastic by E. S. Reich

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World by Eugenie Samuel Reich, a science writer, tells how a young physicist named Jan Hendrik Schoen, working at Bell Labs on making electronic devices from organic materials, managed to fool the physics community for several years, publishing many papers with made-up data in Science and Nature. This podcast summarizes the story, with the new detail that after his disgrace — even his Ph.D. was revoked — Schoen managed to get a job as an air-conditioning engineer in Germany.

I enjoyed the book, partly for the drama, partly for the physics, and partly for the light it sheds on the culture of physics and Bell Labs. When anyone says “science is self-correcting” I’m amused because, as the speaker must know, the amount of fraud that goes uncorrected is unknown. It may be far larger than the amount that is detected.

The author’s website.

Self-Experimentation and Infomercials

Seth Roberts2 Comments

When I was a grad student I was inspired to self-experiment by something I read about teaching math: The best way to learn is to do, said Paul Halmos, a math professor. A more recent version is fail early fail often fail cheap.

A maker of infomercials put it like this:

We were fortunate at American Telecast, in that most of our learning days were in our first 12 years, when we were in the 2-minute business. Learning was a lot cheaper. Failure was a lot cheaper than what failure is today in a 30-minute commercial. When you fail with a 30-minute commercial you can lose half a million or a million or a million and a half dollars. When we failed with a 2-minute commercial back then, we were failing with $15 or $20 thousand.

Self-experimentation made failure so cheap, so much cheaper than conventional research, that I was able to learn much more.

All this seems so obvious — yet self-experimentation by professional scientists is very rare. Psychology and nutrition professors, for example, could easily do self-experimentation, but don’t. And the infomercial maker describes himself as “fortunate” rather than as deliberately creating the situation.

A University President Defends Research Universities

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Steven Knapp is president of George Washington University in Washington, D. C. It was inevitable he wouldn’t like a book attacking the current structure of higher education but it wasn’t inevitable that he would write this:

A similar point could be made about the educational value of working at the frontier of discovery in one of the research centers that Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus [the book authors] decry. Have they spoken with undergraduates who have enjoyed the privilege of assisting a top investigator in an active, federally financed laboratory? In my own anecdotal experience, the best of those students, far from shutting themselves away in a narrow specialization, are very likely spending their time outside the lab in life-expanding service activities that, again, were quite beyond the ken of undergraduates in earlier generations.

At UC Berkeley, I spoke to many undergraduates like that. Most of them, perhaps 90%, were working in a lab because they thought it would help them get into medical school. Almost none were interested in a research career. All of them were being supervised by graduate students and had little or no contact with the “top investigator”. Because of the mismatch between what working in the lab could teach (what research was actually like) and what the students wanted to do (which wasn’t research) the “educational value” was slight. Knapp fails to understand this basic point about education: It matters what the student wants. Almost none of them, even at UC Berkeley, want to be scientists.

Yes, outside the lab they did do “life-expanding service activities” — volunteer for the Red Cross, work on a suicide hotline, and so on. By making them take lots of classes in which they were assigned lots of homework, the university made such outside activities more difficult.

Before he became university president, Knapp was an English professor — where he no doubt claimed he taught his students how to think. His thinking, in this review, consists of banalities that don’t bear examination. At least this is merely an unwittingly revealing book review instead of an entire delusional book.

My Theory of Human Evolution (baseball park collector)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Waiting in line at Tokyo immigration control, I met a woman from North Carolina who’d come to Japan for an organized tour of Japanese baseball parks (17 of them). She learned about the tour from a friend. In America, she’s visited 117.

I told her I was a psychology professor and had a theory of evolution in which connoisseurship played a big role. She was a baseball-park connoisseur, I said.

The evolutionary role of connoisseurs and collectors was to provide demand for finely-made stuff — things made by state-of-their-art artisans. Connoisseurs and collectors would pay more for features that had no clear value otherwise. By trading for these things, the connoisseurs and collectors helped the artisans make a living and thereby push their technology further.