Month: July 2012

The Non-Obvious Value of Self-Tracking

Seth Roberts5 Comments

A New York doctor named Jay Parkinson is skeptical about the appeal of self-measurement:

There is a very, very small subset of people who want to document their life according to their health— the quantified selfers. But this group is tiny because it’s just data geeks who are obsessed with data. They are people who truly believe data changes behavior.

As caricatures go, this is fair. The audience and speakers at Quantified Self meetups do appear to be “data geeks who are obsessed with data” and, yes, this is a tiny subset of people. I don’t put myself in that category. I have zero interest in “documenting” my life. I record a tiny amount of stuff and only stuff I think will make a difference. For example, I stopped measuring my blood pressure after it became clear it was low enough.

Parkinson continues:

Data gets old after a while. After about a month, for those who are not obsessed, it becomes meaningless. That is, unless you have an obsession with data. . . . Good luck trying to build a viable business around that group.

Yes, and “there is a world market for about five computers”, as the president of IBM supposedly said in the 1940s. I have measured myself for so long (decades) not because I am obsessed with data but because I reaped huge benefits. In the beginning, self-measurement showed me how to reduce my acne considerably more than my dermatologist’s advice alone. Later it led to all sorts of improvements: better sleep, better mood, lower weight, fewer colds, healthier gums, better balance, better brain function. Life-changing benefits. The fraction of adults who would like to sleep better, be in a better mood, lose weight, get fewer colds, and so on is very large — perhaps 99%. Is Starbucks a “viable business”? It is built around people needing stimulants (caffeine). An enormous number of products and services are about losing weight. One of the world’s most “viable business” is illicit drugs. I believe a large fraction of illicit drug use is self-medication for depression. (More: The day I posted this, I came across this: “She said heroin helped her fight depression.”)

There is nothing obvious about how I managed to improve my sleep, mood, weight and so on. The solutions I discovered via self-measurement were exceedingly surprising, at least to me. So there is nothing obvious about how to use self-measurement to improve one’s sleep, etc. Self-measurement is needed, yes, but it’s not the only thing that’s needed. I needed: 1. Wise choice of what to measure (e.g., measure the problem, not the solution — I don’t have a FitBit for example.) 2. Wise choice of what to change. (To improve my sleep, for example, I needed a good understanding of sleep research. “Common sense” was not enough.) 3. Experimental design skill. 4. Data analysis skill. To say data is boring (to most people) is like saying tires are boring (to most people). By themselves, tires have little use, just as data alone has little use. But they are part of something very useful.

Consider literacy. For a long time, the notion that “everyone would benefit from literacy” seemed ridiculous. Books were too expensive! There were so few of them. Only a tiny fraction of people (e.g., monks) knew how to read. It was hard to learn to read. Good luck basing a business on literacy! But eventually everything changed. Right now, few quantified selfers, as far as I can tell, seem to know how to learn something useful from their measurements. (When I had been doing it for a short time, I didn’t know either.) For example, Stephen Wolfram appears to have learned nothing of use from a huge amount of self-measurement. New measurement devices, like FitBit and so on, are like books — it is as if few people know how to read. But that can change.

Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday

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When Clinton was President, Ryan Holiday writes in Trust Me I’m Lying (copy sent me by publisher, Ryan is a friend),

[Matt] Drudge accused prominent journalist and Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenhthal of a shocking history of spousal abuse — and one covered up by the White House, no less. Except that none of it was true. . . . An anonymous Republican source had whispered into Drudge’s ear to settle a political score against Blumenthal. . . . [Drudge] refused to apologize for the pain caused by his recklessness.

In spite of knowing this, I still read Matt Drudge. I don’t have to. There are a zillion other things to read. That may or may not make me a horrible person but it illustrates the depth of the problem that Ryan writes about: Spreading lies pays.

A more mundane example is press releases. Bloggers love press releases, Ryan says (speaking from experience working at American Apparel). All the work is done for them. So what if press releases are profoundly dishonest in the way they present a half truth (positive stuff about the product) as if it is a whole truth? It’s an easy way to get a few thousand clicks. “I recall sending e-mails to Gawker and Jezebel on several occasions over matters of factual errors and not receiving a response,” writes Ryan. “My anonymous tips seem to arrive in their inboxes just fine — it’s the signed corrections that run into issues.” A car site published a rumor that turned out to be false. A friend of Ryan’s complained that the headline wasn’t fixed:

[Ryan’s friend:] Why keep the headline up since we now know it’s not true?
[Car site:] You guys are so funny.

Taking the headline down would generate fewer clicks than leaving it up. Shameless.

“That way lies madness,” I told a friend who worried about how much traffic his blog attracted. Bloggers who will do anything for a click do so, of course, because their salary depends on it, whereas my friend did not get significant income from his blog. Sure, paying bloggers by the click pushes them to write stuff that people want to read — which sounds good, aren’t snobs bad? — except what if people don’t care that much about the truth?

I think of science. Who do professional scientists more closely resemble? 1. Bloggers who will do anything for a click. 2. Disinterested seekers of truth. Well, it’s a job, not a hobby. Science and job are not a good fit (as I’ve written), just as factory food and health are not a good fit. We can see the consequences of the bad fit between factory food and health in the obesity epidemic (which I believe is caused by eating calorie-dense quickly-digested food that tastes exactly the same each time — factory food is much more standardized than food you make yourself) and the epidemic of digestive problems (caused by too-sterile food — factory food is more sterile than food you make yourself). We can see the consequences of the bad fit between science and job in the failure to find solutions to one growing problem after another (obesity, Crohn’s disease, autism, depression, poor sleep, etc.). Trust Me I’m Lying is about the consequences of the poor fit between being paid by the click and caring about the truth of what you write.

 

 

Is Crohn’s Disease Really “Incurable”? (continued)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

The official line on Crohn’s disease is that there is “no known cure.” In my previous post I described how easily I found contrary evidence — in that case, a girl who with the help of her mom made dietary changes that got rid of her Crohn’s symptoms in weeks. She has been symptom-free for more than seven years. An existence proof.

There are many other examples. I asked Reid Kimball for links. Here they are:

A website that collects success stories: https://scdlifestyle.com/category/specific-carbohydrate-diet-success-stories/page/4/

Facebook groups: SCD – https://www.facebook.com/groups/2215406763/ GAPS – https://www.facebook.com/groups/thegapsdiet/

Reid’s website https://crohnsend.com, Jay “CrohnsBoy” Baluk https://crohnsboy.com/ and Jini Patel Thompson https://listentoyourgut.com/ are more examples.

The official website of the SCD has a testimonials section: https://btvc.webfactional.com/book-reviews/listing/

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts1 Comment
  • grading and identifying cocoa beans
  • benefits of Vitamin K2 (short)
  • In 1971, Babette Rosmond, a journalist, failed to take her doctor’s advice. “When the tumor turned out to be cancerous, [the surgeon] told her she needed an urgent radical mastectomy. Ms. Rosmond demurred, asking for three weeks to consider her options. The surgeon, who had never before encountered such resistance, called her a “very silly and stubborn woman.” Then he played his trump card. “In three weeks,” he said, “you may be dead.” “
  • blood passports

Thanks to John Shonder and Alex Blackwood.

Is Crohn’s Disease Really “Incurable”?

Seth Roberts8 Comments

I recently came across two different people who, diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, repeated the standard line that it “has no known cure”. Really? Never? The people who said this were just repeating what they had been told. Unlike twenty or thirty years ago, however, it is easy to do one’s own research. The people who said this gave no indication they had done any research. Because Crohn’s is so unpleasant, their passivity was curious.

I knew that calling Crohn’s disease “incurable” was an overstatement because I had written about Reid Kimball, who had found a way to eliminate via diet essentially all the symptoms. For practical purposes, he was cured. (Reid objects to the word “cure”.) I knew he was hardly the only one. But what if I started from ignorance? How hard would it be to challenge the conventional “incurable” line?

Not hard at all. I googled “Crohn’s success” (without quotation marks in the search query). The top search result (titled “Crohn’s Disease: Success with Diet and Probiotics”) included this:

I learned of a pediatric gastroenterologist, Dr. J. Rainer Poley, who had conducted extensive studies on the effect of certain sugars and starches on people with intestinal diseases. My husband and I decided to take our daughter to see this doctor for another opinion. When we asked him if there was any other treatment she could try besides medications, he explained that at a recent medical conference in Europe, he had learned of success medical doctors were having with probiotics. He instructed our daughter to eat plain yogurt every day and to take a specific probiotic capsule called Culturelle® containing Lactobacillus GG [Gorbach and Goldin] twice daily. Based on Dr. Poley’s research, he wanted her to limit the consumption of concentrated sugars (specifically table sugar, technically known as sucrose). The intent of the sucrose-restricted diet was to starve the harmful bacteria by taking away their major food source. The yogurt and Lactobacillus GG would help replenish the “good” bacteria. Since it has been well documented that an overgrowth of bacteria is prevalently seen in people with Crohn’s disease, this treatment sounded like a plausible solution.

Our daughter, feeling drained from the effects of Crohn’s disease, felt motivated to try the doctor’s recommendations. . . . After about two weeks, she began to feel better in general. At the follow-up doctor’s appointment three months later, she had gained six pounds and her lab work was ALL NORMAL! . . . She continues to remain well [over 7 years later] with normal lab work and without clinical symptoms.

I asked Ms. Kalichman how others had fared with this treatment. She replied:

Periodically, I hear from others who have tried the treatment that my daughter does, and it seems that many have been helped a lot. Unfortunately they don’t always continue to keep in touch, so I don’t have any idea how many are totally well. Our daughter continues to be well as she has been for almost 9 years now…no meds and no clinical symptoms.

That took about 5 minutes, including emailing Kalichman. She referred me to a video about it.

More About Pork Fat and Sleep

Seth Roberts22 Comments

One day in 2009, I ate a large amount of pork belly (very high in fat — pork belly is the cut used to make bacon). That night I slept an unusually long time. The next day I had more energy than usual. This led me to do an experiment in which I ate a pork belly meal (with lots of pork belly, about 250 g) on some days but not others. I compared my sleep after the two sorts of days. I kept constant the number of one-legged stands I did each day because that has an effect. During the first half of the experiment I kept this constant at 4; during the second half, at 2. I originally posted the results only from the first half.

Now I’ve analyzed the results from both halves. Here are ratings of how rested I felt when I woke up, on a scale where 0 = 0% = not rested at all and 100 = 100% = completely rested.

The two halves were essentially the same: pork belly produced a big improvement. Here are the results for sleep duration.

No clear effect of pork belly in either half of the experiment.

The main thing I learned was that pork fat really helps. The effect is remarkably clear. With micronutrients, such as Vitamin C, the body has considerable storage. It may take months without the nutrient to become noticeably deficient. With omega-3, which is between a micronutrient and a macronutrient, my experiments found that it takes about two days to start to see deficiency. With pork fat there seems to be no storage at all. I needed to eat lots of pork fat every day to get the best sleep. That repletion and depletion are fast made this experiment easy. How curious we are so often told animal fat is bad when an easy experiment shows it is good, at least for me.

“I Hate Dreamhost!” Beware, Potential Dreamhost Customers

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I recently got the following email:

I googled “dreamhost sucks” and found your blog. I really hate this company. I have a small business and they somehow managed to create a second account for my company in spite of the fact that we never requested one. Then they emailed us that we owed more money on our account and shut off our access and emails due to the amount overdue. After months of various DH staffers replying to my emails (we hadn’t ever selected phone support so they would only correspond via email) the problems were finally passed to a “supervisor”. The supervisor promptly cancelled the duplicate account and reset our live and fully paid account so that we could use it again. This took months of frustration and provision of the same information to the different DH staffers. There is obviously no communications within their staff there. Very frustrating.
Today, they sent an email to me requesting an additional albeit minor sum of $9.95 for a temporary account that was created when nobody at my company could access our account. They insist we created it and pay for it or they’ll suspend our live account. I complained and asked for the same supervisor that resolved DH’s past errors, and the staffer, Jay H, promptly cancelled our fully paid, live account, and told me we still had to pay for this temporary account created by a DH staffer when we didn’t even have access to our site and emails due to DH’s original errors!!
So frustrating. I’m now looking for a new domain and web host company, with excellent customer service and professionalism. DH doesn’t take responsibility for their own errors and seems to dream up ways to charge clients extra money for stuff they never requested. Outside of the online world, this would be called extortion.
Feel free to post. I hate Dreamhost!
As do I. I wish I had left the second I discovered they hadn’t backed up my site, after saying they had. (They had backed up only a small fraction of it.) After that, my sites kept getting hacked. First, we moved this blog and www.sethroberts.net off Dreamhost. They stopped getting hacked. Then the Shangri-La Diet forums got hacked. We moved them off Dreamhost. No more hacking. The cost of even one incident of hacking is far more than you will ever save from their low rates.
Dreamhost hacked — and see the comments.

American Dietetics Association Tries to Outlaw Competition: More

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Michael Ellsberg has written another fascinating article about how the American Dietetics Association is trying to make it illegal to compete with their members — that is, make it illegal to give nutritional advice without board certification. (His earlier article.) State boards have threatened several bloggers with jail if they continue to provide nutritional advice.

Thanks to Dr. B G.

Prize Fight: The Race and Rivalry to be First in Science by Morton Meyers

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Prize Fight: The Race and Rivalry to be First in Science (2012) by Morton Meyers (copy sent me by publisher) is about battles/disagreements over credit, often within a lab. Jocelyn Bell noticed the first quasar — how much credit does she deserve relative to her advisor, Anthony Hewish, who built the structure within which she worked? (Not much, said Bell. “I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were given to research students.”) The structure and subtitle of the book make little sense — there is a chapter about how science resembles art and a chapter about data fabrication, for instance, and nothing about races or being first. The core of the book is two stories about credit: for the discovery of streptomycin, the first drug effective against tuberculosis, and for the invention of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). Meyers is a radiology professor and a colleague of one of the inventors of MRI.

I liked both stories. I find it hard to learn anything unless there is emotion involved. Both stories are emotional — people got angry — which made it easy to learn the science. Streptomycin was found by screening dirt. It was already known that dirt kills microbes. The graduate student who made the discovery was indeed a cog in a machine but later he was mistreated and got angry and sued. The first MRI-like machine was built by a doctor named Raymond Damadian, who was not one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize given out for its invention. He had good cause to be furious. The otherwise good science writer Horace Freeland Judson wrote an op-ed piece about it (“No Nobel Prize for Whining”) that ended “His behavior stands in stark and elegant contrast to the noisy complaining of Raymond Damadian”. To name-call (“whining”, “noisy”) in a New York Times op-ed is to suggest your case is weak.

I have had a related experience. When I was a graduate student, at Brown University, I did experiments about cross-model use of an internal clock. Do rats use the same clock to measure the duration of sound and the duration of light? (Yes.) I got the idea from human experiments about cross-modal transfer. By the time my paper (“Cross-Modal Use of an Internal Clock”) appeared, I was an assistant professor. A few months after it was published, I went back to Brown to visit my advisor, Russell Church. On the day of my visit, he had just received a new issue of the main journal in our field (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes — where my article appeared). It was in a brown wrapper on his desk. I opened it. The second article was “Abstraction of Temporal Attributes” by Warren Meck and Russell Church. (Meck was a graduate student with Church.) I didn’t know about it. It was based on my work. The first experiment was the same (except for trivial details) as the first experiment of my article. The introduction did not mention me. I leafed through it. Buried in the middle it said “This result replicates previous reports from our laboratory (Meck & Church, in press; Roberts, 1982).”

I was angry. Why did you do this? I asked Church. “To make it seem more important,” he said. I consoled myself by thinking how bad it looked (on Church’s record). I never visited him, and almost never spoke to him, again. Years later I was asked to speak at a conference session honoring him. I declined. What he did amounted to rich (well-established) stealing from poor (not established) and jeopardized my career. When my article appeared, I didn’t have tenure. It was far from certain I would get it. I hadn’t written many papers. If you read both papers (Meck and Church, and mine), you could easily be confused: Who copied who? This confusion reduced the credit I got for my work and reduced my chance of getting tenure. Church surely knew this. Failure to get tenure could have ended my career.