Month: September 2013

Teeth Clenching Can Release Too Much Mercury

Seth Roberts13 Comments

Recently the Berkeley City Council heard testimony about a proposed ban on mercury amalgam dental fillings. A young man named D— M—, shown in the video, told the Council that he had grown up in Berkeley and had gotten mercury amalgam fillings from local dentists. They did not tell him the fillings were dangerous. He attended Berkeley High, Harvard, and finally the clinical psychology program at UC Berkeley — which I know is extremely hard to get into, as he says. They accept about 1 in 500 applicants.

In 2007, three years into the program, he started clenching his teeth. He began to have problems resembling mercury poisoning, such as fatigue and poor concentration. He had to leave the psychology program. Hair tests showed large amounts of mercury. He did not eat unusual amounts of fish, so it’s likely that his fillings were the source of the mercury. By 2012, he could no longer work and pay rent.

I had no idea that teeth clenching and mercury fillings were so dangerous together. A few years ago, I found, to my surprise, that removal of mercury fillings improved my score on the reaction time test I use to measure brain function. At first, I had thought the improvement had other causes. Only when I tested these causes and found no supporting evidence did I look further and discover the improvement had started exactly when I got my fillings removed. After I discovered this, I looked around for other evidence that mercury fillings were dangerous. To my surprise (again), my evidence seemed more persuasive than anything I found. M—’s story is much scarier than mine and supports my conclusion that mercury fillings are dangerous.

Had M— been using my reaction-time test day after day, he might have discovered deterioration on that test before he noticed other problems. The test might have provided early warning. I hadn’t noticed problems with concentration or fatigue, yet when my fillings were removed I got better on my test. Had M— noticed the problem earlier, he might have figured out the cause earlier.

If you don’t monitor yourself as I do — and almost no one does — you are trusting your dentist, your doctor, your food providers, and so on, to be well-informed and truthful about the safety of their products. If the problems aren’t obvious, there is plenty of reason for them to put their hands over their eyes and say “I don’t want to know” about problems with their products. Drug companies have often hidden the dangers of their products and surgeons have hidden the dangers of their procedures. Few people grasp that “evidence-based medicine”, with its disregard of bad side effects, is biased in favor of doctors. (Ben “Bad Science” Goldacre is a prominent example of someone who fails to understand this.) If you monitor yourself you are less at the mercy of other people’s poor science, lies, and motivations that conflict with finding and telling the truth.

What Goes Unsaid: Self-Serving Health Research

Seth Roberts13 Comments

“The realization that the world is often quite different from what is presented in our leading newspapers and magazines is not an easy conclusion for most educated Americans to accept,” writes Ron Unz. He’s right. He provides several examples of the difference between reality and what we are told. In finance, there are Bernie Madoff and Enron. Huge frauds are supposed to be detected. In geopolitics, there is the Iraq War. Saddam Hussein’s Baathists and al-Quada were enemies. Invading Iraq because of 9/11 made as much sense as attacking “China in retaliation for Pearl Harbor” — a point rarely made before the war. In these cases, the national media wasn’t factually wrong. No one said Madoff wasn’t running a Ponzi scheme. The problem is that something important wasn’t said. No one said Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme.

This is how the best journalists (e.g., at The New Yorker and the New York Times) get it wrong — so wrong that “best” may be the wrong word. In the case of health, what is omitted from the usual coverage has great consequences. Health journalists fail to point out the self-serving nature of health research, the way it helps researchers at the expense of the rest of us.

The recent Health issue of the New York Times Magazine has an example. An article by Peggy Orenstein about breast cancer, meant to be critical of current practice, goes on and on about how screening has not had the promised payoff. As has been widely noted. What Orenstein fails to understand is that the total emphasis on screening was a terrible mistake to begin with. Before screening was tried, it was hard to know whether it would fail or succeed; it was worth trying, absolutely. But it was always entirely possible that it would fail — as it has. A better research program would have split the funds 50/50 between screening and lifestyle-focused prevention research.

The United States has the highest breast cancer incidence (age-adjusted) rates in the world — about 120 per 100,000 women, in contrast to 20-30 per 100,000 women in poor countries. This implies that lifestyle changes can produce big improvements. Orenstein doesn’t say this. She fails to ask why the Komen Foundation has totally emphasized cure (“race for the cure”) over prevention due to lifestyle change. In a long piece, here is all she says about lifestyle-focused prevention:

Many [scientists and advocates] brought up the meager funding for work on prevention. In February, for instance, a Congressional panel made up of advocates, scientists and government officials called for increasing the share of resources spent studying environmental links to breast cancer. They defined the term liberally to include behaviors like alcohol consumption, exposure to chemicals, radiation and socioeconomic disparities.

Nothing about how the “meager funding” was and is a huge mistake. Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing called Orenstein’s article “ a hell of a piece“. Fran Visco, the president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, praised Orenstein’s piece and wrote about preventing breast research via a vaccine. Jardin and Visco, like Orenstein, failed to see the elephant in the room.

Almost all breast-cancer research money has gone to medical school professors (most of whom are men). They don’t do lifestyle research, which is low-tech. They do high-tech cure research. Breast cancer screening, which is high-tech, agrees with their overall focus. High-tech research wins Nobel Prizes, low-tech research does not. For example, those who discovered that smoking causes lung cancer never got a Nobel Prize. Health journalists, most of whom are women, apparently fail to see and definitely fail to write how they (and all women) are harmed by this allocation of research effort. The allocation helps the careers of the researchers (medical school professors); it hurts anyone who might get breast cancer.

Foreign Language Learning Tips

Seth Roberts15 Comments

After I said that I was having trouble learning Chinese, my friend Carl Willat made several interesting suggestions:

My ideas are pretty simple, and I don’t know if they’ll work for you but I’m thinking back on what helped me the most when I was learning Italian. Maybe they will strike you as obvious, or what you’re already doing. I’ll spell them out here anyway, and please just ignore anything that seems useless. I apologize in advance.

The big one, reading out loud and having someone correct your pronunciation, probably won’t work as well when you’re dealing with those chinese Characters instead of words in a recognizable alphabet. But the underlying concept, leaning the way a child learns, might have other applications. This was Roberta Niccacci’s approach and it worked incredibly well for me. She said pronunciation comes before comprehension. I read books out loud to her and my pronunciation got to be very good, though I didn’t understand much of what I was reading. After three or four books I could read like an Italian newscaster. “Keep doing this and you will wake up speaking Italian,” she said, and that’s what it felt like. Read more “Foreign Language Learning Tips”

Teaching Academic Writing: My Plan (Part 2 of 2)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

To review, I am teaching Academic Writing this semester. I want to motivate learning using forces other than grades. Here is my plan.

On the first day of class, I’ll say: Don’t take this class unless there is some piece of writing you want to do. This class will be all about me helping you write whatever you want. Most of the students will want help writing a personal statement for graduate school applications. I’ll tell them there needs to be something else they want to write. Without that the class will be a waste of time.

For the first class — the course meets for 1.5 hours once/week — I’ll talk about writing a personal statement.

After that, the general plan will be:

1. I meet with students after class (in the same place) for however long they want, maybe 5-20 minutes. They choose the duration. During these meetings, they show me what they’ve written. I read it and tell them how they can improve it.

2. During the next class, each student who met with me will give a talk lasting the same length of time as our meeting. For example, if we met for 5 minutes, the talk will last 5 minutes. The talk will be about what I said. After each talk I’ll give feedback.

3. In addition, students who meet with me will add my advice to a shared document (e.g., Google Docs).

4. Each week, one student will be assigned to spend a certain length of time (30 minutes) improving the shared document. For example, making it clearer or better organized. The next class they will give a brief talk saying what they did. Again, I will give feedback.

This accomplishes several things: 1. Customization. Each student can write whatever they want. 2. Doing. They actually write “real” material (in contrast to writing assignments). What they choose to write will probably be stuff like a paper for another class but at least it isn’t a writing assignment. 3. Telling. They will tell other students what they have learned.

Attractive elements of the plan for me include the fact that I never lecture and never grade. I never need to guess what the students need help with. I learn what they need help with by looking at what they’ve written. Even though there are no grades or teacher-imposed deadlines, I give lots of feedback — it really is challenging. Attractive elements of the plan for students are that there is flexibility, they can write whatever they want, they never have to take notes (yet there is a written record to refer to), and they are pushed to understand the material in a non-competitive way.

If a student doesn’t pay attention in class — the presentations when other students tell what I told them — he risks having me make the same comment on his writing I made earlier on someone else’s. Then he would have to tell other students that I made that same comment. The other students wouldn’t like that; it wastes their time. So there is pressure to pay attention. If you miss it during class, you can study the shared document.

More English is not my students’ native language, although they are quite good at it. I think that they are more likely to understand another student say X (in English) than when I say X (in English) because the student’s English will be closer to their English ability. I might use words they don’t know. This is a problem in America, too (professor knows a lot more than his or her students) but it is especially clear here. My point is that this is a good feature of having students give class presentations about what I told them, rather than me telling the class directly, which might seem better. If a presenter makes a mistake, I will fix it.

 

Teaching Academic Writing: My Plan (Part 1 of 2)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

This semester at Tsinghua — which begins this week — I am going to teach Academic Writing in English. The class is in the Psychology Department. It hasn’t met yet; I suppose all of my students will be psychology majors. In this post I am describe my plan for teaching it; future posts will describe what actually happened.

Last year I taught a class called Frontiers of Psychology. I discovered that I could teach the class without grading. I never gave grades (nor tests), yet the students did lots of work (the assignment completion rate was about 99.9%) and apparently learned a lot. Behind my removal of grading was my belief that long ago people learned everything without grading. Maybe I can use those ancient sources of motivation, rather than fear of a bad grade or desire for a good grade. The details of the course centered on three principles: 1. Customization. As much as possible, I tried to allow each student to learn what they wanted to learn. For example, they had a very wide choice of final project. 2. Doing. “The best way to learn is to do” (Paul Halmos) — so students did as much as possible. For example, they did experiments. 3. Telling. Students told the rest of the class about what they had read or done. I gave plenty of feedback but it was always spoken. For example, after each class presentation I pointed out something I liked and something that could have been better.

It was like the discovery of anesthesia. All of sudden, no pain. No difficult grading decisions. No written comments (explaining the grades), which I wondered if the recipient would understand. The class was a pure pleasure to teach. For the students, no longer did they need to worry about getting a bad (or less than perfect) grade.

Can I repeat this with a much different class? At the same time I taught Frontiers of Psychology, I also taught Academic Writing in English for the first time. It was pass/fail, so I didn’t grade there, either, but I wasn’t happy with how it went. (I didn’t want to teach it again . . . but, a month ago, I learned I am teaching it again.) This time I am going to take what I learned from my Frontiers of Psychology experience and try to create a better class.

In the next post I will describe my overall plan. Throughout the semester I will post about how well my plan is working. Supposedly “ no battle plan survives contact with the enemy” but my Frontiers of Psychology plan worked fine. I didn’t change it at all. Maybe my Academic Writing plan will work, maybe it won’t.

Movie directing and teaching.

 

 

 

Drawing a Line Where No Line Was Needed: GQ Editor Defends Hugo Boss

Seth Roberts12 Comments

The comedian Russell Brand, at a GQ awards show in London, “joked” — according to Brand, it was a joke — that the sponsor of the event, Hugo Boss, clothed the Nazis. Fine. More interesting to me was something that happened later. According to Brand, the following conversation took place:

GQ editor Dylan Jones What you did was very offensive to Hugo Boss.

Brand What Hugo Boss did was very offensive to the Jews.

Sure, Jones was upset. But nothing in his job description requires him to defend Hugo Boss. Especially in the least nuanced possible way. In contrast to Brand’s criticism of Boss, which makes Brand look good, Jones’s criticism of Brand, if it has any effect at all (probably not), makes Jones look foolish. He did not make his remark out of carefully-calibrated self-interest.

Jones’s comment interests me because now and then something in my head pushes me to do two things I know are unwise:

1. Tell someone else what to do when there is no reason to think they want my advice.

2. Simplify a complicated situation.

Jones did both things. I try to resist — try to say nothing — but am not always successful. Maybe Desire #1 is why professors are fond of teaching what they call “critical thinking” — it allows them to indulge Desire #1. On the face of it, appreciative thinking — especially nuanced appreciation — seems at least as important, but I have never heard a professor say he teaches that.

Eric Kandel Sheds Light On Who Wins Nobel Prizes

Seth Roberts8 Comments

The most interesting thing about the Nobel Prize in Medicine is its predictable irrelevance to major health problems. Year after year, the prize-winning work has failed to reduce heart disease, cancer, depression, stroke, diabetes, schizophrenia, and so on. Another interesting thing about the Nobel Prize in Medicine is that Eric Kandel, a Columbia Medical School professor, managed to win one. In 1986, a book called Explorers of the Black Box: The Search for the Cellular Basis of Memory by Susan Allport told how Kandel tried to take credit for other people’s discoveries. Not a pretty picture. Yet in 2000 he won a Nobel Prize for those or very similar discoveries. Did Allport exaggerate? Did her sources deceive her? Did Kandel — contrary to what Allport’s book seems to say — deserve a Nobel Prize?

I can’t answer these questions. However, a recent article by Kandel (“A New Science of Mind”) in the New York Times sheds light on how well he understands medicine and neuroscience. Not well, it turns out. He writes:

We are nowhere near understanding [psychiatric disorders] as well as we understand disorders of the liver or the heart.

Actually, our understanding of liver and heart disorders is close to zero, matching our understanding of psychiatric disorders. If we had some understanding of heart disease, for example, we would know why heart disease is much rarer in Japan than in the United States. Read more “Eric Kandel Sheds Light On Who Wins Nobel Prizes”

Hobbyist Science vs. Professional Science vs. Personal Science

Seth Roberts5 Comments

In a TED talk, Paula Scher, a graphic designer, told how a hobby of painting maps turned into something like a job.

I was up in my country house, and for some reason, I began painting these very big, very involved, laborious, complicated maps . . . They would take me about six months initially, but then I started getting faster at it. Here’s the United States. Every single city of the United States is on here. . . . One of my favorites was this painting I did of Florida after the 2000 election that has the election results rolling around in the water. . . . Somebody . . . saw the paintings and recommended them to a gallery, and I had a first show about two-and-a-half years ago, and I showed these paintings that I’m showing you now. . . . They sold quickly, and became rather popular. . . . The gallery wanted me to have another show in two years, which meant that I really had to paint these paintings much faster than I had ever done them. . . . I was no longer at play. I was actually in this solemn landscape of fulfilling an expectation for a show, which is not where I started.

A hobby turned into a job. This has happened countless times — I believe all jobs started as hobbies.

One hobby that turned into a job is science. The first scientists were hobbyists — for example, Darwin and Mendel. The success of hobbyist scientists led to the creation of full-time jobs that included doing science — professors of science at universities. When science became a job, something was gained (professionals had more time per day, money, training, institutional support, collegial support, and prestige than hobbyists) and something was lost (professionals had less freedom than hobbyists). Professionals could do many things hobbyists could not, but the reverse was also true: hobbyists could do many things professionals could not. For example, they could work on a question for ten years without publishing anything (Mendel, Darwin) and entertain highly heretical ideas (Darwin). Professionals needed steady output and dared not offend, for fear of losing their job.

My personal science (personal science = using science to help yourself) is another step in this history. I combined the freedom of hobbyists with the knowledge, skills and resources of professionals. I can do whatever self-experiments I want and test whatever ideas I want. Yet I also have professional levels of training, knowledge, skill, and (to some extent) equipment provided by my job as a psychology professor, Berkeley library access, the Internet, free software, and cheap computers. To these two elements — the freedom of hobbyists, the resources of professionals — my personal science added a third element not found in hobbyist or professional science: the motivation of a person with a problem. I wanted better health. My personal science helped me get it. In the beginning, I wanted to sleep better, lose weight, have less acne, and be in a better mood. Later, I discovered new ways to improve my brain function and blood sugar. Just combining the freedom of hobbyists with the resources of professionals, personal science would probably be a big improvement. Adding better motivation suggests that personal science is even more likely to improve our lives by learning what professional scientists haven’t learned. The combination of professional science and personal science will be far more powerful (= more useful) than professional science alone.

I’ve seen this in my own life, over and over, and I predict it will eventually be true for everyone. Learning how to control one’s own health — how to sleep well, for example — is non-trivial knowledge.

Dragon vs. Dragon: Same Name, Different Genus?

Seth Roberts12 Comments

In a discussion of dragonfruit (common in China), a Chinese friend pointed out that Chinese dragons and Western dragons are quite different. I was surprised, I hadn’t noticed this. My friend was right:

There are two distinct cultural traditions of dragons: the European dragon, derived from European folk traditions and ultimately related to Greek and Middle Eastern mythologies, and the Chinese dragon, with counterparts in Japan, Korea and other East Asian countries.

says Wikipedia. Why two different imaginary animals would be quite similar isn’t obvious.

 

“The Cause of Ulcers is Bacteria” Makes as Much Sense as “The Cause of Car Accidents is Cars”

Seth Roberts10 Comments

If I were to look at you, and say, in a serious tone of voice, “The cause of car accidents is cars”, you’d think I’m nuts. It’s not a useful statement. Yet many medical and science experts — including the people who award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — believe it is helpful to say “the cause of ulcers is bacteria”. The two statements are similar because only a small percentage of cars get in accidents and only a small percentage of people infected with H. pylori, the bacterium that supposedly “causes ulcers”, get ulcers. A helpful investigation of what causes ulcers would figure out the crucial difference(s) between those infected with H. pylori who don’t get ulcers (almost all) and those who do (very few).

I recently encountered the “the cause of ulcers is bacteria” twice in one day. Once in a book review by John Timpane:

Barry Marshall, who discovered what causes stomach ulcers, played fast, loose, and messy with his methods and data. He was right, and got the right answer, and now we know.

(Timpane is right about the “fast, loose, and messy” part. Marshall ingested a large number of H. pylori. He failed get an ulcer — and claimed the outcome supported his view that H. pylori causes ulcers.) And once in The New Yorker, in a long article about the benefits of microbes, especially H. pylori, by Michael Specter:

In 1982, to the astonishment of the medical world, two scientists, Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren, discovered that H. pylori is the principal cause of gastritis and peptic ulcers.

Should I expect science journalists to understand causality? Maybe not. But it is interesting that the people who award the Nobel Prize in Medicine and “the medical world” do not understand it.