Month: September 2011

Two More Shangri-La Diet Success Stories

Seth Roberts2 Comments

From the Shangri-La Diet forums:

I started this process on or around the 3rd week of July. Not sure of the exact date lets say 7-23-11. Weight was 228 lbs, blood pressure maxing out at 160/100. Today (9-30-11) my weight is 195 lbs and the bp is below 120/80.

So in 10 weeks I have dropped 33 lbs about 3.3 pounds a week or half a pound a day. My goal weight is 175. I have done the canola oil twice a day. No breakfast and mixing in salad and fruit for lunch and dinner with 6 ounces of meat, seafood or chicken. Some carbs but not a lot. I have not had any cravings to overeat or to snack on junk food and I just stopped drinking sodas for no reason that I can explain and I don’t feel hungry after meals.

People at the gym must think I am sick because I am losing weight and don’t do very much. I lift 20 minutes to maintain what I have and ran twice in the past 10 weeks for a total of maybe 3 miles. I have started doing more abs now that you might be able to see them when all the fat is gone.

In 30 years of dieting this is the easiest thing I have ever done. I don’t understand why this isn’t the number one diet in the world.

Let it not be because I don’t blog about it. Someone else, who started at 321 pounds, has lost 67 pounds in 8 months. Graph here.

Spycraft, Personal Science, and Overconfidence in What We Know

Seth Roberts14 Comments

Edward Jay Epstein‘s newest Kindle book is James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right?. Angleton worked at the CIA most of his career, which spanned the Cold War. He struck some of his colleagues as paranoid: He believed that the CIA could easily contain Russian spies. Colleagues said Oh, no, that couldn’t happen. After his death, it turned out he was right (e.g., Aldrich Ames). At one point he warned the CIA director, “an intelligence [agency] is most vulnerable to deception when it considers itself invulnerable to deception.”

What interests me is the asymmetry of the mistakes. When it really matters, we overestimate far more than underestimate our understanding. CIA employees’ overestimation of their ability to detect deception is a big example. There are innumerable small examples. When people are asked to guess everyday facts (e.g., height of the Empire State Building) and provide 95% confidence intervals for their guesses, their intervals are too short, usually much too short (e.g., the correct answer is outside the intervals 20% of the time). People arrive at destinations more often later than expected than earlier than expected. Projects large and small take longer than expected far more often than shorter than expected. For any one example, there are many possible explanations. But the diversity of examples suggests the common thread is true: We are too sure of what we know.

There are several plausible explanations. One is that it helps groups work together. If people work together toward a single goal, they are more likely to reach that goal and at least learn what happens than if they squabble. Another is the same idea at an individual level. Overconfidence in our beliefs helps us act on them. By acting on them, we learn. Doing nothing teaches less. A third is a mismatch idea: We are overconfident because modern life is more complicated than the Stone-Age world to which evolution adjusted our brains. No one asked Stone-Age people How tall is the Empire State Building? A fourth is that we assume what physicists assume: the distant world follows the same rules as the world close to us. This is a natural assumption, but it’s wrong.

Early in Angleton’s career, he had a very unpleasant shock: He realized he had been fooled by the Russians in a big way for a long time. This led him to try to understand why he’d been fooled. Early in my scientific career, I too was shocked: Rats in Skinner boxes did not act as expected far more often than I would have thought. I overestimated my understanding of them. In a heavily-controlled heavily-studied situation! I generalized from this. If I couldn’t predict the behavior of rats in a Skinner box, I couldn’t predict human behavior in ordinary life. My conclusion was data is more precious than we think. In other words, data is underpriced. If a stock is underpriced, you buy as much of it as possible. I tried to collect as much data as possible. Personal science — studying my sleep, my weight, and so on — was a way to gather data at essentially zero cost. And, indeed, the results surprised me far more than I expected. I could act based on the overconfidence effect but I could not remove it from my expectations.

The Beginning of the End of AGW

Seth Roberts13 Comments

A month ago at a conference I met a journalist who wanted to increase public understanding of science. I said, yeah, it would be good if the public understood science, then they could see how weak the case that humans are seriously warming the planet (anthropogenic global warming, AGW). After I said that, my questions received short answers, haha.

Then there’s Gary Trudeau. According to a recent Doonesbury cartoon, I’m not just a moron, I’m a moron:

The scientific case for global warming is overwhelming — and it grows daily. Only a moron would deny it.

But I think the dissent is getting louder. Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston Globe, recently wrote:

You don’t have to look far to see that impeccable scientific standards can go hand-in-hand with skepticism about global warming. Ivar Giaever, a 1973 Nobel laureate in physics, resigned this month as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) to protest the organization’s official position that evidence of manmade climate change is “incontrovertible” and cause for alarm.

Giaever, unlike Jacoby, voted for Obama. And there’s this, from ScottishSkeptic:

This weekend I was sitting with a group of (unrelated) people I’d known since a child, and the subject of wheat farming and weather forecasts came up and almost without prompting someone else mentioned their dislike of the politicisation at the Met Office, the way the forecasts were always wrong and their suspicion about what we are being told about global warming. And then the rest of the company agreed with them.

None of these people had any financial interest in the subject, they were all educated in science at leading Universities, but they are not only questioning the assertions of global warming, they were actively sceptical.

To say I was shocked was an understatement. In many other ways this is a very pro-environment group.

So maybe there is hope for the ideas that butter is good and breakfast bad, that sugar can cause weight loss, that food is healthier after the expiration date, that faces Monday morning can make you happier on Tuesday, and so on.

Why Antidepressants Barely Work

Seth Roberts26 Comments

When antidepressants are compared to placebos, they do only slightly better. This is not a problem for psychiatrists. People get better, they can charge money for access — that’s what matters. The rest of us, who would benefit from a better understanding of depression, do not feel bad because we have no idea what we are missing. But the puzzle of weak effectiveness remains. If the theory used to justify the antidepressants is correct, shouldn’t they work better? If the theory is totally wrong, why do they work at all?

John Horgan, a science writer, commented about this recently:

I first took a close look at treatments for mental illness 15 years ago while researching an article for Scientific American. At the time, sales of a new class of antidepressants, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRI’s, were booming. The first SSRI, Prozac, had quickly become the most widely prescribed drug in the world. Many psychiatrists, notably Peter D. Kramer, author of the best seller Listening to Prozac, touted SSRI’s as a revolutionary advance in the treatment of mental illness. Prozac, Kramer said in a phrase that I hope now haunts him, could make patients “better than well.”

Clinical trials told a different story. SSRI’s are no more effective than two older classes of antidepressants, tricyclics and monoamine oxidase inhibitors. What was even more surprising to me—given the rave reviews Prozac had received from Kramer and others—was that antidepressants as a whole were not more effective than so-called talking cures, whether cognitive behavioral therapy or even old-fashioned Freudian psychoanalysis. . . . Psychiatry has made disturbingly little progress since the heyday of Freudian theory.

To psychiatrists, psychiatry has made great progress since Freud. First, it is much easier to prescribe a pill than listen to a patient talk for 50 minutes. Second, the new pseudoscience of serotonin deficiency is far more respectable (more “scientific”) than the old pseudoscience of psychoanalysis (ego, id, super-ego, repression, etc.). It is harder for other doctors to make fun of psychiatrists.

But Horgan was not thinking like a psychiatrist. He was thinking like the rest of us. From that point of view, he should not have been “disturbed” by “little progress”. Antidepressants will never work well. Poor effectiveness is inherent in the situation. Antidepressants must do two things: (a) people must get better and (b) psychiatrists must make a living. Those are different goals (“misaligned incentives”) and they conflict.

Suppose a repairman comes to fix your dryer. One part is broken. The repairman orders a replacement and installs it. Your dryer now works fine. Because you could not diagnose the problem nor fix it, the repairman continues to be necessary. Suppose, on the other hand, the repairman can not replace the broken part. He must do something else. Maybe use duct tape. In this situation, the repair cannot possibly work well. Whatever he does can be better than nothing, but it cannot be a good repair

That is the situation of psychiatrists. I’m sure depression is due to the wrong environment. My work suggests we need to see faces in the morning for our mood-controlling system to work properly. Jon Cousins’ work suggests we need to believe others care about us. Those are two possibilities. Psychiatrists cannot fix the environment. The pieces of the environment we need to be healthy must have been abundant during the Stone Age. This means they must be cheap. Psychiatrists cannot supply things that are cheap and abundant. If that’s what they did, they couldn’t make a living. This means they can only supply something that is not what is missing. Like a repairman who cannot replace a broken part, they are stuck with second-rate solutions. This is the fundamental reason that all mainstream treatments for depression, whether talk or drug, have roughly the same effectiveness — and none of them work very well.

Thanks to James Lucoff.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments
  • Lard chic. ““I might have a cold,” she says. “Eat this, then,” I say, proffering a piece of hot toast with a thin, transparent slice of cured pork fat.”
  • Skeptical Science is a blog devoted to rebutting every argument offered by AGW skeptics like me. Bishop Hill points out that after two comments were critical of a post about Antarctic ice, the post was rewritten. Rather than point out the rewriting, replies were added to the critical comments saying that the commenters hadn’t read the post (“read and reread the post above”).
  • Nobel Laureates Behaving Badly. “In his Nobel Prize Lecture of December 12, 1946, Hermann J. Muller argued that the dose–response for radiation-induced germ cell mutations was linear and that there was ‘‘no escape from the conclusion that there is no threshold [below which radiation is harmless]“. However, assessment of correspondence between Muller and Curt Stern 1 month prior to his Nobel Prize Lecture reveals that Muller knew the results and implications of a recently completed study at the University of Rochester under the direction of Stern, which directly contradicted his Nobel Prize Lecture.” This is related to radiation hormesis — the observation that low doses of radiation are beneficial. Airport screening may be making people healthier.
  • Harvard’s “Healthy Eating Plate”. No fermented food, nothing about omega-3 (beyond the recommendation of fish). “Limit butter”. “Stay active” but nothing about sleep.
  • Dangers of compact fluorescent lighting.

Thanks to Steve Hansen and Anne Weiss.

First Day of Class 2011

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Yesterday was the first day of one of my Tsinghua classes. It has about 25 students. I asked each of them to say their favorite book in English. Several were mentioned twice: Pride and Prejudice (mentioned three times), Harry Potter, Catcher in the Rye, The Little Prince, and — this surprised me — The Secret. The last student to answer this question said her favorite book was Lolita. The class oohed. Last year a student said his favorite book was Ulysses. I said my favorite book was Cities and the Wealth of Nations. (A close second is Totto-Chan.)

I said the class would have three underlying principles: (a) Every student is different. (b) The best way to learn is to do. (c) Reading group. Two years ago, a Tsinghua engineering student started a reading group to read some famous Chinese book. He put a sign-up sheet in the library. The idea spread and now there are maybe ten reading groups, which meet weekly. It’s a alternative and successful educational system, they must be doing something right. To try to learn from their success, I am going to imitate their most obvious feature, which is a presentation about the week’s reading. For the coming week I asked for volunteers to give 5-minute presentations about the reading assignment. I said that if you gave a presentation, you wouldn’t have to do the regular homework assignment (commenting on the reading) for two weeks. Three students volunteered. After class, as I was leaving, one of the volunteers came up to me. She wanted to do the homework anyway, she said. She had volunteered to do a presentation “to exercise my bravery”.

Arthritis Relief From Flaxseed Oil

Seth Roberts3 Comments

From the Shangri-La Diet forums:

I have just been doing the flaxseed oil for a few days and I am experiencing a dramatic decrease of my arthritis pain! It is a wonderful benefit. . . . My doctor friend who told me about the SLD told me that the flaxseed oil would help my arthritis as well, but I never expected anything this dramatic or quick!

A friend of mine noticed something similar: his sore back stopped hurting shortly after he started taking flaxseed oil. If he skipped a day or so, the pain returned. Update: Reminded of this, he said, “I had forgotten all about that. When people ask me how my back is I tell them it never bothers me anymore since I stopped going to the gym.”

Update 2: At first the arthritis sufferer took 4 1200-mg capsules 3 times/day — that is, 12 capsules per day. Then she increased her dosage to 6 capsules 3 times/day (= 18 capsules/day).

Update 3. ” Yesterday, I was off to work and could not find my oil capsules. I didn’t have time to look for them, so I resigned myself to doing sugar water during the day. . . . I did notice a small but significant worsening of the pain in my knees. When I got home, I found the capsules, and began taking them again. By the time I woke up this morning, I noted that my knees are again feeling better.”

 

First, Let Them Get Sick

Seth Roberts18 Comments

In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs tells how, in the 1920s, one of her aunts moved to an isolated North Carolina village to, among other things, have a church built. The aunt suggested to the villagers that the church be built out of the large stones in a nearby river. The villagers scoffed: Impossible. They had not just forgotten how to build with stone, they had forgotten it was possible.

A similar forgetting has taken place among influential Western intellectuals — the people whose words you read every day. Recently I wrote about why health care is so expensive. One reason is that the central principle of our health care is not the meaningless advertising slogan promoted by doctors (“first, do no harm”) but rather the entirely nasty first, let them get sick. Let people get sick. Then we (doctors, etc.) can make money from them. This is actually how the system works.

It is no surprise that doctors and others within the health care system take the first, let them get sick approach. It is wholly in their self-interest. It is how they get paid. If nobody got Disease X, specialists in Disease X would go out of business. What is interesting is that outsiders take the first, let them get sick attitude for granted. It is not at all in their self-interest, just as it was not at all in the self-interest of the Carolina villagers to think building with stones impossible.

An example of an outsider taking first, let them get sick for granted is a recent article in the London Review of Books by John Meeks, an excellent writer (except for this blind spot). The article is about the commercialization of the National Health System. Much of it is about hip replacements. How modern hip replacements were invented. Their inventor, John Charnley. How a hospital that specialized in hip replacements (the Cheshire and Merseyside NHS Treatment Centre) went out of business. And so on. Nothing, not one word, is said about the possibility of prevention. About figuring out why people come to need hip replacements and how they might change their lives so that they don’t. Sure, a surgeon (John Charnley) is unlikely to think or say or do anything about prevention. That’s not his job. But John Meeks, the author of the article, is outside the system. He is perfectly capable of grasping the possibility of prevention and the parasitic nature of a system that ignores it. Long ago, people understood that prevention was possible. As Weston Price documents, for example, isolated Swiss villagers knew they needed small amounts of seafood to stay healthy. But Meeks — and those whom he listens to and reads — have forgotten.

How to Start a Talk

Seth Roberts1 Comment

A recent talk at the London School of Economics by Carne Ross, author of a book called The Leaderless Revolution: How ordinary people will take power and change politics in the 21st century, began with this:

I was preparing the talk this afternoon at my beloved cousin’s, where I’m staying. ’cause I don’t live in London anymore. She said, “How are you, Carne, how are you doing?” I said, “I’m a bit nervous, to be honest.” She said, “Don’t worry, Carne, I’ve heard lots of bad talks at the LSE.”