In a graduation speech, Richard Feynman called certain intellectual endeavors “cargo cult science,” meaning they had the trappings of science but not the substance. One thing he criticized was rat psychology. He was wrong about that. Sure, as Feynman complained, lots of rat psychology experiments have led nowhere, just as lots of books aren’t good. But you need to publish lots of bad books to support the infrastructure necessary to publish a few good ones. The same is true of rat psychology experiments. A few are very good. The bad make possible the good. Rat psychology experiments, especially those by Israel Ramirez and Anthony Sclafani, led me to a new theory of weight control, which led me to the Shangri-La Diet.

Cargo cult science does exist. The most important modern example is evidence-based medicine. Notice how ritualistic it is and how little progress medicine has made since it became popular. An evidence-based medicine review of tonsillectomies failed to realize they were worse than voodoo. Voodoo, unlike a tonsillectomy, does not damage your immune system. The evidence-based medicine reviewers appeared not to know that tonsils are part of the immune system. Year after year, the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology tells the world, between the lines of the press release, that once again medical researchers have failed to make progress on any major disease, as the prize is always given for work with little or no practical value. In the 1950s, the polio vaccine was progress; so was figuring out that smoking causes lung cancer (which didn’t get a Nobel Prize). There have been no comparable advances since then. Researchers at top medical schools remain profoundly unaware of what causes heart disease, most cancers, depression, bipolar disorder, obesity, diabetes and so on.

I came across cargo-cult thinking recently in a talk by Neil Gaiman:

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

It’s simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

I know about Chinese engineers at Microsoft and Google in Beijing. They want to leave the country. An American friend, who worked at Microsoft, was surprised by the unanimity of their desire to leave. I wasn’t surprised. Why innovate or invent if the government might seize your company? Which is the main point of Why Nations Fail. Allowing science fiction in China doesn’t change that.

Thanks to Claire Hsu.

• The promise of Bitcoin (the platform). “Bitcoin encapsulates four fundamental technologies . . . “
• Bacteria and our behavior
• Alternate-day fasting by normal-weight subjects. ”These findings suggest that ADF is effective for weight loss and cardio-protection in normal weight and overweight adults.” The experiment lasted 12 weeks.
• Small interesting psychology experiments. “Whenever I go to a conference, I hate to wear those silly stickers that say “HELLO! MY NAME IS.” I just write “SATAN” in the blank space.”
• Pomona College dean of students sneers at a more reality-based college. She said: “Discovery, empathy, adaptability is goal of broad-based education, prepares students for life, learning & jobs known & unknown.” As the author, John Tierney, says, “What makes some people at liberal-arts colleges so dismissive of, and condescending toward, institutions that actually train people for careers?” I encountered a similar attitude at Berkeley. At a faculty meeting, I praised someone’s research. Another professor complained that the research was “applied”.

Thanks to Donna Warnock.

A woman named Sara Lake has a condition called Idiopathic Thrombocytopenia Purpura (ITP), an autoimmune condition in which your body makes antibodies to your own platelets. She wrote:

I’m having some success keeping my platelet levels on the ”high side of very low” using diet and lifestyle, but there is so little research into this rare disorder that I’m just trying anything my education suggests might help. I would love to connect with other self-experimenters with this condition. I believe that most, if not all, autoimmune conditions can be cured if the triggers are identified (for example, as has been done in the case of celiac disease), but it’s a long process. If you know of any other people with this disease please pass on my email address, which is sara.lake (at) gmail.com.

A Korean artist named Jihyun Ryou has invented modules to keep food fresh without refrigeration. This connects with the themes of this blog in several ways: using science to find cheap safe low-tech solutions, minimal solutions (Ryou’s designs use no electricity, I try to find solutions that require no willpower), and increasing (rather than reducing) the microbial content of food. Food stored at room temperature will have more microbes than food stored cold. Ryou says:

I’ve learned that we hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology, the refrigerator. We don’t observe the food any more and we don’t understand how to treat it.

That there could be something wrong with division of labor — handing over tasks to specialists, including specialist machines — is a subtle point. Division of labor works fine for inanimate things, such cloth and furniture and pencils. No economist has realized that animate things (such as our bodies) might be different.

The value of Ryou’s designs partly rests on the variability of living things, as does the value of personal science. Well-educated Americans, in my experience, have little idea what they lose when they hand over care of their body to experts, such as doctors and drug companies. As Ryou says, they lose a kind of mental fitness (“we don’t observe the food any more,” we don’t observe ourselves as closely) and are forced to accept solutions in which what the experts want plays a big role. I discovered the power of self-experimentation when I decided to see for myself if the acne medicine my doctor had prescribed was working. I found it wasn’t, a possibility the doctor hadn’t mentioned.

Early exposure to refrigerated food is associated with Crohn’s disease.

Thanks to Steve Hansen.

Looking at traffic to this blog, I found a discussion on Reddit, in the Paleo subreddit, of my sleep-honey post. ”I’m too stupid to know who’s wrong,” said one person. Someone else, not the original poster, said:

I’m not on a paleo diet by any means, but I’ve been taking teaspoons of raw honey before I go to bed this past week strictly because I like the taste. What I have found is a noticeable change in my sleeping. I always wake up with more energy…. regardless if I wake up a couple of times in the night or if I get a full night’s sleep. I’m generally a poor sleeper in that I wake up several times in the night. After taking the honey this past week, I have found out that I wake up less or even get a full night’s sleep. For example, last night I got a teaspoon of honey before bed, and I got an uninterrupted 6 and a half hours of sleep. I woke up so refreshed this morning, I got up and exercised for the first time in so long. I generally exercise in the afternoons because it takes me a bit for me to actually wake up, but I just felt so rested this morning. I noticed these changes lately, but it took this article for me to realize it might be [due to] the honey.

Again, notice that one teaspoon of honey made a noticeable difference. His or her belated realization is like what happened to me. As I said in the original post, now and then I’d sleep really well. It seemed to be correlated with dinner at other people’s houses. I’d sleep better than usual after those dinners. It hadn’t occurred to me until Stuart King told me about his honey experience that those dinners were almost the only times I ate dessert.

Person 2 commented:

I tried it last night and noticed an immediate difference this morning.

Person 3 commented:

Tried the honey thing. While I usually wake up feeling like there is a mammoth sitting on top of me, today I woke up not totally refreshed, but without the mammoth, definitely a good feeling

In response to my post about wearing orange goggles at night, a reader of this blog writes:

Philips Hue: www.meethue.com

The starter pack includes three bulbs and a controller. One small drawback is that the bulb returns to white when you cut the power. It’s annoying to have to repeatedly reset a smart device. The bulbs are well-made, and the light quality is very good across the colors. It will be a great system when they get the price down and refine the controls.

Random LED multicolor bulbs on Amazon

These have varied in quality. One cycled rapidly through the colors (in demo mode) whenever you turned it on, rather than defaulting to white–great fun when your kid likes to flick the lights. One had poor color balance between the red, green, and blue LEDs, so the blended colors came out wrong. Some were great. Having the little remote control nearby was convenient, as long as a kid didn’t lose it. These don’t put out a lot of lumens, especially in single-LED colors, but that worked fine for us. The bulbs are much lower quality than the Philips Hue, but the low price makes them a good starting point.

At Tsinghua this semester I am teaching academic writing. Almost all the students are seniors and almost all of them are applying to graduate school, so I spent several weeks on how to write a personal statement. Each student wrote a draft. I read each draft and made suggestions in one-on-one meetings. The students wrote down my suggestion, and these summaries were compiled into the following guide.

Tips on writing sentences and paragraphs

Never use many big words! Especially don’t use two big words in a sentence.

Make the sentence shorter and clearer. e.g. ”I’ve set my career determination to…” is better replaced by ”My career determination is…”

Use less space (simple and short sentences) on things people know and more on things they don’t know. E.g. you might want to list the statistical courses taken to emphasize your data skill. However, it’s better idea that you write more about some experience when statistical method is successfully used.

Make it clear. Especially don’t begin with something complicated and confusing. Stand in the professors’ shoes and figure out a better way to get through.

Put the main interest in first paragraph. E.g. I’m interested in cognitive neuroscience, so I need put it at the first paragraph and make it obviously.

Put the topic sentence at the beginning of the paragraph. E.g. I should put the main ideas of every paragraph at the first sentence to make it clear. My first research experiment, I should point out I learned cognitive science by practical experiment.

Saying things more directly for people to get points. Example: I wanted to tell the readers why I had more interests in one specific field in psychology than others, but I did not mention this intention in the first place and only began with saying that some experience interested or not interested me, which might make the readers confused.

Things you should write about

Write things that have personal flavor, things that are unique. E.g. quoting from Einstein to illustrate love for cognitive science is not that unique, since everyone heard about them before.

Write about interesting experiences, rather than normal and boring things. Or write about experience that make you come up with some interesting thoughts.

Figure out what experience is important for your application. E.g. I want to apply to a Ph.D program in educational psychology, then my voluntary teaching experience is equally important as research experience. I should write more about it.

Add a good story or something original. Example: I mentioned my little brother in my PS and wanted to point out that it was him who made me get interested in education, yet it lacks some original experience in this part.

What really happened is more important than what supposed to happen. Better write on past achievement than babble about plans.

Explain the relationship between two events more clearly. E.g. explain the causal relationship: why something happened make you fall for psychology? Give specific reasons.

Usually use chronological order. Example: In the opening paragraph, I firstly said that I had studied psychology for three years blah blah, and then wrote what I once desired to be in high school, which is not in a chronological order.

Show important time. E.g. I did my second research in my first year, it was a early time. So, I need make it obvious.

Show the level of a prize. E.g. I won the Second Prize of the competition and I should show the difficulties of this prize.

Tell about yourself, rather than talk about the university.

Introduce yourself at first. E.g. I start with a sentence by a famous police officer but it has nothing to do with me.

Show your desire for the program. E.g. UCL’s program is the one I want to apply for most, so I could say “UCL program is my first choice because of … ”

In short, distinguish yourself from other applications by writing things interesting and convincing in a coherent way.

Things that better not appear

Don’t write something professors are familiar with, write something they don’t know but in a way they can understand.

Don’t write something sounds unlikely.

Don’t say negative things. E.g. do not say ‘I wasn’t interested in psychology at first’, for it is obviously negative and should be prevented.

Don’t write about anything irrelevant. e.g. Don’t write about your second major in economics if it’s irrelevant to your goal in application. (In this case, writing about economics may convey that you are good at math!)

“One of my more unusual” is not interesting. Go for “one of my best”

Tips on writing about researches

Explain why you are interested in your research topic.

If collaborate with someone in a research, refer to them.

When talking about a research, the results and achievements are important.

No use referring to what you didn’t do for a research! (E.g. I didn’t do the literature research in my first psychology experiment. Although I didn’t do the literature research, and I didn’t know if others do it, the research is still meaningful and I came up with the idea by myself.)

Tell story in a powerful and persuasive way. E.g., I wrote about the story of my first voluntary teaching in local elementary school in Beijing. To make the story more convincing, I should write about more details, like how often I went there, how many students there were, what subjects I was teaching, the reactions of the students. Etc.

One of the comments on my honey-improves-sleep post deserves emphasis:

I tried the honey last night for the first time – just 1 tsp. I’ve been eating very low-carb lately, so no sugar throughout the day at all. . . . When I woke up for the day . . . I felt an incredible sense of well-being. Normally, I wake up with aching hip joints and feeling pretty ugh, but not this morning. My sense is that the sleep was “richer” . . . in the way that heavy cream is different from skim milk.

I asked the commenter for an update. She replied:

I’m still seeing improved sleep. Last night, I think I slept for 8 hours straight, or darn near, which has only been possible with an Advil-PM over the past 6 months or so. One of the notable changes in my sleep is vivid dreams. I recalled them pretty clearly the first night, less so since then; I just know that I’ve been dreaming. I am using approximately 1 teaspoon of honey, taken on the way to bed. Since starting it, I have taken extra care to avoid sugar and starch during the day, as well. I plan to continue it indefinitely.

I too found that one teaspoon of honey made a clear difference, as did Stuart King, who described the effect. I’ve been taking one tablespoon to be sure to get the greatest possible benefit; eventually I will test smaller amounts.

I don’t know of another case where one teaspoon of an ordinary food produces a big improvement. One teaspoon (5 ml) of orange juice has about 2.5 mg of Vitamin C. The daily requirement of Vitamin C is about 80 mg/day. (Whether you should take much more, as some say, is quite unclear.) If you get less than 10 mg/day for a long time, you’ll get scurvy. According to this table, the common foods highest in Vitamin C, such as orange peel, have about 1 mg/g. One teaspoon of honey is 7 g, so from 7 g of a common food high in Vitamin C you’d get 7 mg of Vitamin C. And keep in mind that scurvy is very rare, but bad sleep is common. Which makes the effect of one teaspoon of honey even more striking.

After I discovered that morning faces improved my mood, I tried to maximize the effect — determine the the best time, distance, size, and so on. One evening I went to a screening (Taxicab Confessions) at the UC Berkeley journalism school. It started about 7:30 pm and lasted about two hours. Over the next few days, I discovered that the morning-faces effect was gone. It took a few weeks to return.

The problem, I realized, was the room lighting. The auditorium, like almost all campus rooms, was lit with fluorescent lamps. Maybe they were off during the film (one hour?) but they were on before and after. Fluorescent light, in contrast to incandescent light, contains lots of blue. The faces effect, I knew, depended on a sunlight-sensitive oscillator, which determined a critical period during which faces made a difference. That oscillator was much more sensitive to blue light than red light. If that oscillator wasn’t working properly — e.g., its amplitude was too low — the faces effect disappeared. Normally I never experienced fluorescent light at night. There were no fluorescent lights in my apartment, including the bathroom. Cafes, restaurants, my friends’ living rooms, and so on — all incandescent light. Incandescent light has very little blue.

I hadn’t realized that ordinary fluorescent exposure could cause trouble, but now I did. After that realization, for many years I avoided fluorescent light at night (= after 8 pm). To get home from San Francisco in the evening, I took a cab to avoid fluorescent light on BART. No fluorescent-lit restaurants for dinner, no late-night supermarkets or drug stores. It was bearable, but not pleasant. Except for the Berkeley campus, where students were getting messed up by evenings in libraries, the city of Berkeley was innocuous, but big cities, such as New York with their late hours and heavy subway use, were terrible, exposing residents to lots of fluorescent light at night. Depression may be more common in urban areas than rural areas.

Eventually I realized I could solve the problem with “blue-blocker” glasses — i.e., orange-tinted glasses — that block blue light. (I use these, $7.) Now I could live normally, except for looking funny now and then. I wore the orange glasses a few minutes last night in a 7-11. Concerned about blue light from LED screens, I also wear them between 9 pm and 5 am when looking at a computer screen. Although compact fluorescents (replacing ordinary light bulbs) have come along, and incandescent lights may be outlawed, my apartment is still all incandescent. The light from compact fluorescents has a lot of blue. Because I had no doubt that fluorescent light at night was bad because of the blue light, I never bothered to measure the effect of the blue-blocker glasses. This might have been a mistake.

Last June, at an evening meeting in under fluorescent lights, an Oakland woman saw me wearing orange glasses. She’d read about them on my blog. Sixty years old, she’d had poor sleep for decades. “It was a quick and easy thing I could try,” she told me. “Not a supplement or med.” She already took many of these.

The first evening, she put on the glasses at 8 pm. She’d had a lot of energy when she put them on, but 15 minutes later she fell asleep. She only slept for 30 minutes, but the incident suggested great promise. She got into a routine where she put them on when she got home, usually between 8 and 10 pm. The results:

All summer long, I slept better than I have slept in my entire life with these glasses. I haven’t had sleep problems until the last couple of weeks. Most nights I sleep through the night. If I get up, it’s to go to the bathroom and I quickly go back to sleep. Completely unknown to me in the last couple of decades.

In other words, they helped a lot. It used to take her about an hour to fall asleep. She would take 3 tryptophan pills (= 2.5 g of tryptophan) at bedtime, and then 3 more every 20 minutes she was awake. She ended up taking 6-9 every night. After she started using the orange glasses, she continued the tryptophan but found almost never took 20 minutes or more to fall asleep.

Is she unusually sensitive to blue light? Does she get more blue light at night than the rest of us? Is it a placebo effect? Her house is full of compact fluorescents (she used to work on energy policy) and she spends a lot of time in front of a big (26-inch) computer monitor and a 46-inch TV. They may make things worse, but none of the three (compact fluorescents, big computer monitor, big TV) was around decades ago, when her sleep was also bad. The effects may go beyond blue-light elimination (“when I put them on my world is relaxed,” she said) but the notion that this is a placebo effect is contradicted by the many things she tried that didn’t help, not to mention the many experiments showing that blue light affects circadian rhythms.

I’d heard vaguely of sleep improvements. For example, Chris Kresser wrote “I’ve had many patients swear by these goggles”. Chris himself, however, rarely used them unless he was looking at electronic devices (like me). “If I notice that my sleep is starting to get funky, I’ll wear them,” he wrote, but otherwise not. I knew that I got the faces effect — which was huge — without needing to wear them at night, so I had assumed that ordinary (incandescent) evening light was harmless. However, this story, because the effect is so large, makes me question that assumption. I will try wearing them in the evening even when I am not looking at a computer screen.

Orange glasses improve sleep in a naturalistic experiment compared to other glasses. Subjects put on the glasses three hours before going to sleep.

A Lifehacker post by Leo Widrich said you should tell a story instead of giving a Powerpoint presentation with bullet points. Widrich did not make his point using stories. He made the written equivalent of a Powerpoint presentation. He wasn’t trying to be funny — at least, not that I could tell.

This semester I’m teaching a class on Academic Writing. Yesterday’s class marked the switch from personal statements to other sorts of writing. I decided to mark the transition with a lecture. I had just one piece of advice for my students: tell a story. For fun, and to avoid the oddity of Widrich’s presentation, I decided to make my point two ways: without and with stories.

The without-stories presentation was obvious. I wrote “Tell a Story” on the board and gave several reasons why it was a good idea.

The with-stories presentation was not obvious. I told several stories:

1. The morning of the class, I was listening to a C-SPAN podcast – an interview of S. Lochlann Jain, a Stanford professor of anthropology who had written a book about cancer. She herself had had cancer. The interviewer asked: When you got the diagnosis, what did you need? It was a good question. But Jain did not answer it. Instead, she pontificated for a few minutes. It was unfortunate. That answer was like the rest of the interview (she pontificated a lot) and I soon turned it off. She could have told a story, I told my students, but she didn’t. And she lost me.

2. I came to understand the power of stories while teaching introductory psychology. My classes were large, hundreds of students. I discovered that to get their attention all I needed to do was tell a story. Within seconds, they would start to pay attention. The lecture hall would become quiet. If I stopped telling a story, I would start to lose them. I could see their eyes wander. That’s how I came to teach all my classes: tell one story after another. One of my students told me I was “the professor who tells stories”.

3. One day I was in the biology building on the Berkeley campus. It contains many small classrooms. From the outside, you can hear what the instructor is saying. I listened to five classes. In none of them was the teacher telling a story. Apparently most Berkeley professors hadn’t figured out this basic principle.

4. I attended a high school graduation in Los Angeles. Very expensive private school. There were six speakers, four students, a teacher, and the headmaster. No one told any stories. I was astonished. It’s really hard to be a graduation speaker. This simple rule (tell stories) makes it much easier. None of them knew it. I was especially surprised that the headmaster, who speaks at graduation every year, failed to understand this. Failing to tell stories in this situation is like choosing to crawl when you could walk.

5. A remarkable thing about stories is that anyone can tell one — or not tell one. The weakest person can tell a story, the most powerful person can fail to tell one. When President Obama was elected, it was very uncertain whether he would be a good President. He had so little experience. I used his inauguration speech to guess how good he would be. If he understood politics, he would tell stories; if he didn’t, he wouldn’t. In fact, he didn’t. Five years later, my low expectations have been borne out. Chinese politicians, as far as I can tell, are not clearly better than President Obama. At the beginning of a student talent show at Tsinghua, a Tsinghua administrator gave a short and boring speech. He too failed to tell stories.

I said it made sense that we pay attention to stories much more than to other things. Stories are fundamentally honest. They contain evidence. If you draw a conclusion, fine — your evidence for that conclusion is clear. You are not overstating your case. Without evidence, anyone can say anything. I also said it is to your benefit to tell a story rather than argue or reason or pontificate. You will appear modest and considerate.

I asked my students to compare the two ways (without and with stories) I had made the same point. There were three possible answers: 1. without stories better. 2. equal. 3. with stories better. Their votes:

without stories better: 1 vote

equal: 2 votes

with stories better: 6 votes.

My students said they had not been taught this. Their teachers — in high school and at Tsinghua — did/do not teach this way nor had they made the general point I was making.

Thanks to Dave Lull.