Month: October 2010

30 Rock: East versus West Live Shows

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I suppose I’m one of the few people who know there are many differences between the audiobook version of On Beauty and the printed version. Maybe two per page. The audiobook version was prepared before the printed version was finalized. The printed version is better, of course. Long before that comparison, I was fond of comparing books drawn from New Yorker articles with the articles themselves. The New Yorker versions were better-written (= better-edited). It was a painless way to learn how to write.

Last week the TV show 30 Rock did two live shows: one for the East Coast, one for the West. I noticed many differences. The writing was better in the West version (jokes were improved) but the acting was better in the East version (the comic timing was better, for example). New York magazine has listed the biggest differences. For example:

East Coast: In a flashback, Julia Louis-Dreyfus calls to Jonathan, “Yeah, Chai Boy, get in here. You’ll never be a millionaire … Slumdog Millionaire ref. Blammo!”
West Coast: Instead, Louis-Dreyfus says, “Hurry up, Aladdin, before Jasmine is forced to marry Jafar! Similarities … Lemon out.” It gets way more applause.

East Coast: In the final scene, Liz is happy with how her birthday went. After all, she even “got to eat the cake off the floor.”
West Coast: This time, she “ate the Fonz’s face.”

I wish there was a whole website about this: Differences between Things that are Supposed to Be The Same. I wrote a Spy article about Similarities Between Things that are Supposed to Be Different. I noticed similar jokes in Jay Leno’s and David Letterman’s monologues.

Learning Chinese Characters

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I have 80 Chinese characters (flashcards for children) taped to a wall of my Beijing apartment. I add about five per day. I wrote about this earlier, before starting. So far it’s working. With almost no effort, no discipline, I know what almost all of them mean. I test myself a little whenever I’m in that room. This is a vast improvement over several previous attempts to learn the characters, such as studying flashcards the usual way or using Anki, a flashcard program.

I ruefully realize this is an application of something I thought of many years ago: the forces we can turn on and off are much weaker than pre-existing forces we can only take advantage of. Burning coal is a force we can turn on and off. Solar power is a pre-existing force we can take advantage of (and which almost everyone in Beijing uses to dry clothes). The sun shines no matter what we do. Deliberate studying we can turn on and off. We can study or not. In contrast, I am inevitably going to be in that room. Taping characters to the wall takes advantage of that.

Health Care As Seen by a Psychiatrist

Seth Roberts10 Comments

A reader of this blog named Laura Fisher left a comment about “doctors as bureaucrats” — meaning they care more what their employer thinks of them than what their patients do. A scary and plausible idea. I asked for details. She replied:

I live [and practice psychiatry] in a small [Utah] college town that is 80% Mormon. Almost all the docs in town are employed by an outfit called Intermountain Healthcare which owns most of the hospital beds in this and a few surrounding states. Once you get the doctors on the payroll, they really must take instruction from the employer–and they sure as hell do. The doctors who refuse to take instruction that is ethically or morally conflicted or repugnant are typically subjected to “peer review” as a means of punishment, either by hospital medical staffs or by state licensing boards. If you want  details on the abuses of “peer review”, you should find plenty of information on the website of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

The typical patient I see has been jollied along for years [by IHC doctors], sometimes decades, without any of his physicians taking the time to review his/her medications effectively. There isn’t a billing code for actually taking the time required to deliver good care, so the patients do not get good care. Some of them get good surgeries. Some get bad surgeries. Often a patient has had a surgery or procedure that he or she did not need. Often the surgery creates new needs for expensive pharmaceuticals. Most often he or she is on a pharmaceutical which is causing psychiatric effects. Either no one has thought of this, including psychiatrists, or no one other than the patient has thought of this and the patient is afraid to discontinue medications for fear of alienating the doctors he needs to stay on good terms with and for fear of unanticipated withdrawal syndromes. The docs who are seeing these salt of the earth working-class patients are young physicians who are not familiar with the old-fashioned notion of the doctor-patient alliance as being somewhat sacred, private and full to the brim of ethical obligations on the part of the physician. These docs check out at quitting time. I have seen them fail to save a sick person at risk of death when one of their colleagues is responsible for putting the patient in that predicament. They refuse to answer questions from patients about whether or not a given treatment change would help that patient, apparently because that doctors employers’ treatment guidelines don’t include answering such questions or choosing different treatment and because that doctor’s professional society leaders are reading from the same page where treatment is conveniently canned such that even nurses can dole it out pretty successfully.

I have seen depressed patients whose depression completely resolved when he or she stopped taking the statin they were on. I have also been interested in the statin users apparently having a higher risk for infections and therefore cancers. Duayne Graveline wrote a very short book (Lipitor, Thief of Memory) on his personal experience with transient global amnesia. This short book is great introduction into the statin subject. The best book I have found on the statins is Fat and Cholesterol are Good For You by Uffe Ravnskov. There is an International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics and their website is marvelous. If you look at this material you are going to learn that it is a poor idea to interfere with cholesterol because we have to have it for brain function.

Don’t forget to read The Trouble With Medical Journals by Richard Smith and The Emperor’s New Drugs by Irving Kirsch.

Statins and memory loss. Thanks to JR Minkel.

Breakfast Not All Bad

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I stopped eating breakfast when I discovered it made me wake up too early. My Tsinghua students are reading the paper in which I describe my breakfast research. One of them, a freshman, wrote:

When we [entered] Tsinghua University, the first task we should finish was the military training. [New students have a few weeks of military training.] We were asked to be gathered at 8 o’clock, and then we would do a lot of trainings. As the training was hard and tiring, we all had to eat breakfast in the morning. And I remembered in those days, we all slept well and were early-awakening. When the trainings were over, we began our classes. The time was also 8 o’clock, but many times we didn’t have breakfast in order to save time. Gradually, our awakening time become later and later. Even we set an alarm clock, we felt really reluctant to get up. For a long time, we wondered about that but no idea appeared. Now I got the answer, it has something to do with the breakfast. When I told my roommates, they were indeed surprise. Everyone was curious about why, and I was also interested in that. Maybe if the last day you had breakfast, the next morning your body will still have the motivation to call you up to eat breakfast.

Yes, if you eat at a certain time of day, you will tend to be awake that time of day. The effect has been heavily studied in animals, where it is called anticipatory activity.

Fermentation Not Sexy

Seth Roberts6 Comments

From an NY Times article about the high price of kimchi (in Korea):

Michel Troisgros, the renowned French chef from Roanne, listened to a Korean official hold forth on the wonders of fermentation and an ambitious project to export Korean foods like kimchi.

“I think you have to stop talking about fermentation,” Mr. Troisgros told the man. “It’s not sexy.”

Via Marginal Revolution. I love that remark (“not sexy”). Good epigraph for book or article about fermented foods.

I considered making kimchi until I was in a Korean market buying some. The Korean woman next to me thought it was too hard.

Will Eating Half a Stick of Butter a Day Make You Smarter?

Seth Roberts20 Comments

To my pleasant surprise, Mark Frauenfelder posted this call for volunteers. Will eating half a stick of butter per day or a similar amount of coconut fat improve your performance on arithmetic problems? Eri Gentry is organizing a simple trial to find out. The trial is inspired by my recent Quantified Self talk. Study details.

During the question period of my talk, I responded to a question about a trial with 100 volunteers by saying I would suggest starting with 2 volunteers. A reader has written to ask why.

What’s your reasoning behind suggesting only 2 volunteers to test the eating more butter results? You seem highly convinced earlier in the video, but if you were so convinced why not have a larger trial?

Because the trial will be harder than the people running it expect. If you’re going to make mistakes, make small ones.

This is my first rule of science: Do less. A grad student in English once told me that a little Derrida goes a long way and a lot of Derrida goes a little way. Same with data collection. A little goes a long way and a lot goes a little way. A tiny amount of data collection will teach you more than you expect. A large amount will teach you less.

My entire history of self-experimentation started with a small amount of data collection: An experiment about the effectiveness of an acne medicine. It was far more informative than I expected. My doctor was wrong, I was wrong — and it had been so easy to find out.

This may sound like I am criticizing Eri’s study. I’m not. What’s important is to do something, however flawed, that can tell you something you didn’t know. Maybe that should be the first rule, or the zeroth rule. It has the pleasant and unusual property of being easier than you might think.

Thanks to Carl Willat.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments
  • meaning-based computing
  • academic plagiarism. “One of my own students turned in a paper on “Great Expectations” which was an exact copy of Dorothy Van Ghent’s essay – an essay so celebrated that I recognized it right off and, at the first opportunity, raised the issue with my student. “Shit!” she said. “I paid seventy-five dollars for that.” “
  • The dark side of fermentation. I am very pleased to see that Edward Jay Epstein is writing a book about the 9-11 Commission.

The Contribution of John Ioannidis

Seth Roberts6 Comments

From an excellent Atlantic article about John Ioannidis, who has published several papers saying that medical research is far less reliable than you might think:

A different oak tree at the site provides visitors with a chance to try their own hands at extracting a prophecy. “I [bring] all the researchers who visit me here, and almost every single one of them asks the tree the same question,” Ioannidis tells me . . . “’Will my research grant be approved?'”

A good point. I’d say his main contribution, based on this article, is pointing out the low rate of repeatability of major medical findings. Until someone actually calculated that rate, it was hard to know what it was, unless you had inside experience. The rate turned out to be lower than a naive person might think. It was not lower than an insider might think, which explains lack of disagreement:

David Gorski . . . noted in his prominent medical blog that when he presented Ioannidis’s paper on [lack of repeatability of] highly cited research at a professional meeting, “not a single one of my surgical colleagues was the least bit surprised or disturbed by its findings.”

I also like the way Ioannidis has emphasized the funding pressure that researchers face, as in that story about the oak tree. Obviously it translates into pressure to get positive results, which translates into overstatement.

I also think his critique of medical research has room for improvement:

1. Black/white thinking. He talks in terms of right and wrong. (“We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine.”) This is misleading. There is signal in all that medical research he criticizes; it’s just not as strong a signal as the researchers claimed. In other words the research he says is “wrong” has value. He’s doing the same thing as all those meta-analyses that ignore all research that isn’t of “high quality”.

2. Nihilism (which is a type of black/white thinking). For example,

How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.

I’ve paid a lot of attention to health-related research and benefited greatly. Many of the treatments I’ve studied through self-experimentation were based on health-related research. An example is omega-3. There is plenty of research suggesting its value and this encouraged me to try it. Likewise, there is plenty of evidence supporting the value of fermented foods. That evidence and many other studies (e.g., of hormesis) paint a large consistent picture.

3. Bias isn’t the only problem, but, in this article, he talks as if it is. Bias is a relatively minor problem: you can allow for it. Other problems you can’t allow for. One is the Veblenian tendency to show off. Thus big labs are better than small ones, regardless of which would make more progress. Big studies better than small, expensive equipment better than cheap, etc. And, above all, useless is better than useful. The other is a fundamental misunderstanding about what causes disease and how to fix it. A large fraction of health research money goes to researchers who think that studying this or that biochemical pathway or genetic mechanism will make a difference — for a disease that has an environmental cause. They are simply looking in the wrong place. I think the reason is at least partly Veblenian: To study genes is more “scientific” (= high-tech = expensive) than studying environments.

Thanks to Gary Wolf.

How She Adjusted to Living in China

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I asked an American friend who’s been in China for a year how the year had changed her. She told a story:

I was in a restaurant in Inner Mongolia. This guy was going around smashing things, throwing glasses. He was drunk. I was shocked. I expected a strong reaction: Get out of my restaurant! That’s not what happened. There was no strong reaction. The guy finally left and the staff cleaned up the mess he made. I’ve learned not to react strongly to unusual behavior.

I love this story. That travel changes your assumptions is hardly a new idea but this says it vividly and briefly.

Chinese Reaction to Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I asked several Tsinghua students what they thought about Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese dissident, winning the Nobel Peace Prize. There was a wide range of answers:

1. “It’s a sensitive subject,” said one student. And said no more.

2. “The Nobel Prize always seems to involve China,” said another student. Maybe she meant the Peace Prize in 1989 to the Dalai Lama and the more recent Literature prize to Gao Xingjian, but I’m not sure. Politely changing the subject.

3. “I don’t know much about what he stands for,” said another student (a freshman).

4. “Now is not the right time for his ideas. They would interfere with economic progress,” said a student who is a member of the Communist Party.

5. “Many people say because the European economy is bad, they gave the prize to someone who will never collect the money [because he’s imprisoned],” said another student. She added that receiving the prize will be bad for Liu. Because it was “a great shame for China” (meaning the government), they will increase his prison sentence.