Month: February 2013

Impossible Things That Are True: The Shangri-La Diet and the Behavior of Goldman Sachs

Seth Roberts7 Comments

It simply cannot be that drinking sugar water causes weight loss. Sugar caused the obesity epidemic! It simply cannot be that eating fat will cause weight loss. Eating fat is why we’re fat! Everyone knows this. It simply cannot be that whether you smell a food while you eat it makes any difference. Weight loss is all about calories in, calories out. The Shangri-La Diet says all three things are true. I cannot think of an historical precedent. Science has uncovered all sorts of unlikely stuff but nothing so surprising that is also immediately useful.

I thought of the Shangri-La Diet when I read this description by Michael Lewis of what Goldman Sachs has recently done:

Stop and think once more about what has just happened on Wall Street: its most admired firm [Goldman Sachs] conspired to flood the financial system with worthless securities, then set itself up to profit from betting against those very same securities, and in the bargain helped to precipitate a world historic financial crisis that cost millions of people their jobs and convulsed our political system. In other places, or at other times, the firm would be put out of business, and its leaders shamed and jailed and strung from lampposts. (I am not advocating the latter.) Instead Goldman Sachs, like the other too-big-to-fail firms, has been handed tens of billions in government subsidies, on the theory that we cannot live without them. They were then permitted to pay politicians to prevent laws being passed to change their business, and bribe public officials (with the implicit promise of future employment) to neuter the laws that were passed—so that they might continue to behave in more or less the same way that brought ruin on us all.

“The theory that we cannot live without them” was advocated by some of the most prestigious economists in the country.

What Goldman Sachs did — impossible-seeming, but it happened — is a sin of commission. Visible, at least to Michael Lewis, and capable of being pointed out (as Lewis does here) and marveled at.

The Shangri-La Diet seems like a bizarre thing, the diet from outer space, the crazy diet, whatever. It can’t be true, but it is. Yet the Shangri-La Diet, strange as it sounds, is actually the only visible sign (at least, visible to many people) of a massive sin of omission: failure to do good research about health. Obesity has been a major health problem for a very long time, more than a hundred years, and an overwhelmingly large problem since about 1980, 30 years ago. Yet conventional thinking about it is so bad – because mainstream research is so impotent — that people still take seriously ideas that date back to the 1950s and before, such as calories in calories out. A weight loss method discovered more than a hundred years old (cutting carbs) is still a big deal. It is as if people were still marvelling at electricity.

The commonality of the two situations (Shangri-La Diet and Goldman Sachs) is that the people who are supposed to understand the world (health scientists in the case of SLD, economists in the case of Goldman Sachs) have in both cases so bungled their jobs that truly terrible things happened. In the case of SLD, the obesity epidemic happened. (Not to mention epidemics of depression, diabetes, auto-immune diseases, and so on. ) A slow-moving unmissable worldwide epidemic that has made hundreds of millions of people feel ashamed every time they look at themselves. In the case of Goldman Sachs, what happened was the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent poor recovery and the fact that the “solution” to the crisis left in place what had caused it.

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Seth Roberts6 Comments

Thanks to Dave Lull , Bryan Castañeda, Patrick Vlaskovits and Tucker Max.

Why Alicia Juarrero Got Mad at Terry Deacon

Seth Roberts9 Comments

In response to allegations that Terry Deacon, a Berkeley professor, plagiarized from Alicia Juarrero, a professor at a community college, UC Berkeley created a website that (among other things) tried to smear Michael Lissack, one of the accusers. Less obvious is that the committee that investigated the allegations ignored their core: The overlap with Juarrero is relentless. It goes on and on. Juarrero explained this to me when I asked her what she thought of the committee report:

I’m disappointed, but not surprised. Not sure what the difference is between “reckless” (which their definition of plagiarism includes) and “negligent” (which they critiqued as a “novel interpretation” of plagiarism). I’ll tell you how my cri de coeur spreadsheet came about: as I read Deacon [Incomplete Nature] I got angrier and angrier, so I decided to start the spreadsheet. The index in my own book [Dynamics in Action] is very bad (my fault, my inexperience) and so I was having a hard time finding the parallel material in my own work. I knew I had said something to that effect somewhere in the book but couldn’t remember where and couldn’t find the entry in my own index. But suddenly, a pattern emerged: All I had to do was read on a few pages or paragraphs further down from the previous “problem,” and there would be the next item. This happened over and over again in huge chunks of the work (which I highlighted to point out the big chunks of seriatim similarities) — it’s the seriatimness (!) that’s so damning and to me, clear evidence this wasn’t just someone who vaguely remembered what I had said in a talk and then reconstructed the ideas for himself. The sheer number and sequential nature of the similarities are just too improbable to be a coincidence, or two people working in the same field. He was quite clever about it. He hid it with neologisms, talking about whole-part instead of top-down causality, insisting that self-organization is not enough (and then turning around in advocating it), etc. And, of course, not discussing intentional action, which is the explicit subject of my book.

The spreadsheet for Dynamics in Action and Incomplete Nature is on my website, www.aliciajuarrero.com. It was the seriatim nature of the parallels that really got to me and made me complain to Norton and UC Berkeley — anyone can discuss two or three of the same authors; or two or three of the same themes, or use two or three of the same examples; but that many, in pretty much the same order? The examples UCB picks (Benard cells, whirlpools) are indeed standard ones and if these were the only ones there would be no case. It’s the cumulative impact that makes the case, in my opinion. The comments that I really object to in the report are “The idea that it is possible to reconceptualize teleology in terms of dynamical systems theory has been discussed and developed by many theorists” and “The connection between ideas about self-organization and ideas from thermodynamics and information theory has been made by many writers in this area…” The UCB report should have cited sources and dates. Simply to state, “is not in our view original to Juarrero…” and “we see no evidence that Deacon’s use… shows any influence of Juarrero’s” simply begs the question.

Re the Kant & Self-organization piece: it’s true that everyone seems to be mentioning Kant in this connection (as if folks commonly read the Third Critique where Kant discusses this stuff). I suspect Deacon got this reference from his buddy Stu Kauffman (I would bet the rent Deacon didn’t read the Third Critique!) — but at least Kauffman included me in his bibliography, if not in the footnotes. But I don’t think Deacon could have afforded to include DiA in the bibliography — there’s just too much of Dynamics in Action in Incomplete Nature – he just hoped no one would catch the parallels with a community college professor who published 10 years ago. As a philosopher I probably would never have read Incomplete Nature — but then I saw the Wall Street Journal review and the ideas sounded awfully familiar…

I’m happy to put the two works side by side and let readers judge for themselves.

How did Michael Lissack get involved?

First contact I had with him was in 2000, when he phoned my house to ask, “Is the phone ringing off the hook because of the book?” My answer: No, it isn’t, who are you? He invited me to give a talk at his ISCE [Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence] institute in Boston that year, and then invited me to be on the ISCE board. He also became a one-man publicity campaign for Dynamics in Action, including a long discussion about it with Kauffman, Deacon and Evan Thompson at Esalen in 2003. They spent hours discussing it. Which reminds me: Evan Thompson published a review in Nature in December 2011 in which he explicitly states that Deacon failed to cite him — and me. And Colin McGinn (whom I’ve never met), really lit into Deacon in the New York Review of Books in June 2012. None of this was mentioned in the UCB report, which makes it appear that Deacon’s just the victim of a witch hunt by Lissack, Rubino and me.

ISCE was the publisher for the Rubino-Juarrero anthology on Emergence that’s in question with the Deacon-Cashman article, so I think Michael feels ISCE organization is indirectly compromised by this mess — but it’s mostly that he has never seen a fight he’s run away from.

 

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Thanks to Phil Alexander, Vic Sarjoo, and Navanit Arakeri.

The Clouded Crystal Ball: A Psychic and Her Employees

Seth Roberts7 Comments

The New Yorke r used to have a mini-department called The Clouded Crystal Ball: examples of bad predictions taken from “newsbreaks” — little bits of text used to fill a column. In an interview, a friend of mine named Margaret Meklin told of a different sort of clouded crystal ball:

My first job in the U.S. was passing out flyers for a fortune teller on Powell and Market in San Francisco. She did not trust her psychic powers enough to guess who was doing a truly good job (it was me!), so she would periodically hide in the tourist crowds to check if we were passing out flyers quickly and efficiently and to a sufficient number of passersby. She gave a higher pay rate to my co-worker, thinking that he was more productive, but she had no idea that he would simply toss a whole stack of flyers into a trash can when she wasn’t watching him.​

New Terry Deacon Website

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Terry Deacon is a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley. I have blogged about the accusation of plagiarism (using Alicia Juarrero’s ideas without citing her) against him. In addition to the website accusing him of plagiarism, there is now a website at berkeley.edu (UC Berkeley) meant to restore his reputation. It contains the report of a UC Berkeley committee that concluded there was not enough evidence to be sure Deacon had gotten certain ideas from Juarerro, whom he had heard talk about them. Except in one instance, they could also not conclude the opposite — that he did not get certain ideas from Juarrero. There wasn’t enough evidence to be sure of that, either.

The new website attempts to discredit Michael Lissack, one of Deacon’s accusers. Here, in its entirety, is how the website describes Lissack:

Michael Lissack was formerly a managing director of a Wall Street municipal bond department. In 1998, the SEC issued an order finding that “Lissack willfully violated” federal securities laws and “that he undertook such conduct with an intent to deceive.” According to the New York Times, later that year, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office charged Lissack “with using the Internet to harass executives at his old firm.” Media reports indicated that Lissack subsequently pled guilty to second-degree harassment. Lissack’s web site identifies him as the founder and executive director of the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence (ISCE), as well as “the ISCE Professor of Meaning in Organizations, and a serial entrepreneur.” His posted CV states that he received a BA from Williams College, an MBA from Yale School of Management, and a Doctorate of Business Administration from Henley Management College.

Okay, maybe that’s relevant. Here’s what’s also true:

[Michael Lissack] is notable as the whistleblower who exposed a yield burning scandal in the 1990s, whereby financial firms made illegal profits from the structuring of U.S. Government investment portfolios associated with municipal bonds. . . . In 1994 Lissack exposed a major yield burning scandal on Wall Street. The issue was eventually settled by a number of firms for over $200 million, to which Lissack was entitled to at least 15% per federal whistleblower laws. Lissack used some of these funds for charitable purposes including endowing a professorship in Social Responsibility and Personal Ethics at his alma mater Williams College.

I asked Lissack for comment on the committee report. He said, “By publishing the report the way they did and building a permanent web site they have ensured that anyone who attempts to treat Deacon seriously will read Juarrero and that was in many respects the goal.”

My expertise is too far from Juarrero’s and Deacon’s work for me to judge if the many similarities might be a coincidence, as Deacon claims. [Update: Juarrero has explained the reason for alleging plagiarism to me and I now agree, the similarities are no coincidence. I will post about this again.] I am sure, however, that Juarrero was right to be very upset that her work wasn’t cited.

I know the feeling. When I was a graduate student, at Brown University, I did several experiments with rats on the cross-modal transfer of time discrimination — the first such experiments in animals. They showed that rats had something like a concept of time. After I left graduate school and became a professor, my graduate school advisor, Russell Church, and a new graduate student, Warren Meck, essentially copied one of my experiments and the underlying theoretical idea. Needless to say it was not a case of independent invention. I had told Church about my experiments, which were done in his lab. I published my results before they published theirs. In spite of this, Meck and Church gave me as little credit as possible consistent with citing my work. Their introduction doesn’t mention my work — as if they had thought of their experiments without my help.

Strangely enough, I happened to be in Church’s office, visiting him, when the issue of the journal containing the Meck and Church paper arrived. I took the journal out of its brown paper cover. I looked at the table of contents. I saw their article, which I had not known about. (I wonder why.) I started to read it. I saw that, in the introduction, it didn’t mention my work. “Why did you do that?” I angrily asked Church. To get more credit, he said.

In my experience of academia, powerful people often take credit for what less powerful people have done. The discovery of streptomycin, for which the powerful person received a Nobel Prize and the less powerful person did not, is an example. In the Terry Deacon case, Lissack has helped outsiders decide who deserves credit for what.

Why Alicia Juarrero Got Mad at Terry Deacon.

End-of-Life Medicine: Enormous Lack of Informed Consent

Seth Roberts16 Comments

A few weeks ago I blogged about undisclosed risks of medical treatments. Undisclosed risks are common. They might be the norm. The situation would be even worse — in some sense, much worse — if doctors knew of these risks and failed to tell their patients. It was unclear if doctors knew of the undisclosed risks I wrote about.

Recently Tyler Cowen quoted a newspaper story about Israeli doctors giving birth control injections to Ethiopian women immigrants ”without their knowledge or consent.” Every commenter thought this was repugnant.

The latest RadioLab podcast (“The Bitter End”) is about the dramatic difference between how doctors want to be treated when they are near death (they want no CPR, no ventilator, no dialysis, no surgery, no chemotherapy, no feeding tube, no antibiotics, nothing except pain medicine) and how the general public wants to be treated (most people want CPR, ventilator, dialysis, surgery, chemotherapy, feeding tube, antibiotics, and so on).

The RadioLab guys were puzzled by the difference. Upon investigation, they learned that the big differences exist because all those medical procedures (except pain medicine) have much worse outcomes than the public is told. The doctors know about the bad outcomes. It is better to die, the doctors decide. Unless doctors have less tolerance for being in a vegetative state, having ribs broken, and so on than the rest of us, it is clear that most people agree to these procedures because of ignorance. They fail to know what actually happens because the people who know — doctors — fail to tell them.

In other words, a huge number of sick people are being treated without having given informed consent. Doctors are doing many things to the sick people that benefit the doctors without telling the sick people how bad those things are. If end-of-life doctors told the truth, they would have a lot less work.

The RadioLab podcast hints at the moral retardedness implied by this practice in an interview with a medical student, whom I assume was randomly chosen. Why aren’t people told the truth? the interviewer asks. “I don’t know how to communicate that effectively,” says the student. Then he communicates the truth quite effectively. Why don’t you say that? says the interviewer. People don’t want to hear that, says the student (changing his answer). They don’t want to, but they need to, says the interviewer. The student says it would be “presumptuous” to tell them the truth. Presumptuous. What universe is he in? The absurdities and pathetic justifications given by the medical student to rationalize his behavior suggest that the whole medical profession doesn’t understand there is a big problem.

The comments on the RadioLab podcast at the website also suggest that doctors fail to grasp there is a big problem. Many commenters are doctors. Some agree with the facts in the program. None expresses even discomfort with the situation. One commenter is Joseph Gallo, the Johns Hopkins medical school professor who runs the study that revealed the enormous difference between what doctors want and what the general public wants. “I second the sentiments about nurses being great,” wrote Gallo. “I would add that studies that have asked nurses about their end-of-life preferences have found similar desire to limit care.” The two sentences contradict each other. There is nothing “great” about anyone who sees this happening and does nothing.