Author: Seth Roberts

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments
  • Does Robert Greenwald have a subtle sense of humor? See for yourself. Ted Sorenson, one of the interviewees, is widely thought to have ghostwritten Profiles in Courage. He denied it, but later told American Experience: “The author is the man who stands behind what is there on the printed page.”
  • Researchers fail to grasp that a spoof is a spoof. For instance, a case report involving a cartoon character was taken seriously. A Science News writer made this sort of mistake several years ago. I wrote to the magazine pointing it out. The editor who replied didn’t agree with me but said that the person who had written that piece was no longer working there.
  • “The mature product”. The truth about expiration dates.
  • Participatory science: “He drew the line at eating stewed mole.”

Thanks to Tyler Cowen and Ben CasnochaÂ

Boring + Boring = Pleasant!?

Seth Roberts23 Comments

Fact 1: For the last few weeks, I’ve been studying Chinese using a flashcard program called Anki. It’s an excellent program but boring. I’ve never liked studying — maybe no one does. Fact 2: I’ve had a treadmill for a very long time. Walking on a treadmill is boring so I always combine it with something pleasant — like watching American Idol. That makes it bearable. I don’t think listening to music would be enough.

Two days ago I discovered something that stunned me: Using Anki WHILE walking on my treadmill was enjoyable. I easily did it for an hour and the next day (yesterday) did it for an hour again. The time goes by quickly. Two boring activities, done together, became pleasant. Anki alone I can do maybe ten minutes. Treadmill alone I can do only a few minutes before I want to stop. In both cases I’d have to be pushed to do it at all. Yet the combination I want to do; 60 minutes feels like a good length of time.

I’ve noticed several related things: 1. I could easily study flashcards while walking. This was less mysterious because I coded walking as pleasant. 2. I can’ t bear to watch TV sitting down. Walking on a treadmill makes it bearable. This didn’t puzzle me because I coded TV watching as pleasant and sitting as unpleasant (although I sit by choice while doing many other things). 3. I have Pimsler Chinese lessons (audio). I can painlessly listen to them while walking. While stationary (sitting or standing), it’s hard to listen to them. 4. When writing (during which I sit), it’s very effective to work for 40 minutes and then walk on my treadmill watching something enjoyable for 20 minutes. I can repeat that cycle many times. 5. Allen Neuringer found he was better at memorization while moving than while stationary. 6. There’s some sort of movement/thinking connection — we move our arms when we talk, we may like to walk while we talk, maybe walking makes it easier to think, and so on.

You could say that walking causes a “thirst” for learning or learning causes a “thirst” for walking. Except that the “thirst” is so hidden I discovered it only by accident. Whereas actual thirst is obvious. The usual idea is that what’s pleasant shows what’s good for us — e.g., water is pleasant when we are thirsty. Yet if walking is good for us — a common idea — why isn’t it pleasant all by itself? And if Anki is good for us, why isn’t it pleasant all by itself? The Anki/treadmill symmetry is odd because lots of people think we need exercise to be healthy but I’ve never heard someone say we need to study to be healthy.

The evolutionary reason for this might be to push people to walk in new places (which provide something to learn) rather than old places (which don’t). To push them to explore. David Owen noticed it was much more fun for both him and his small daughter to walk in the city than in the country. He was surprised. When I drive somewhere, and am not listening to a book or something, I prefer a new route over a familiar one. If I am listening to a book I prefer the familiar route because it makes it easier to understand the book.

Maybe the practical lesson is that we enjoy learning dry stuff when walking but not when stationary. Pity the 99.9% of students who study stationary. Ideally you’d listen to a lecture while walking somewhere, perhaps around a track. Now and then I’ve interviewed people while walking; it worked much better than the usual interview format (seated). The old reason was I disliked sitting. Now I have a better reason.

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Thanks to Dave Lull.

The Twilight of Expertise (by-the-book professors)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Imagine if, to get the news, you had to go somewhere and have it read to you! What a joke. From an article in the Washington Monthly about on-line education:

If Solvig needed any further proof that her online education was the real deal, she found it when her daughter came home from a local community college one day, complaining about her math course. When Solvig looked at the course materials, she realized that her daughter was using exactly the same learning modules that she was using at StraighterLine . . . The only difference was that her daughter was paying a lot more for them, and could only take them on the college’s schedule. And while she had a professor, he wasn’t doing much teaching. “He just stands there,” Solvig’s daughter said.

The excellent article misses something big, however:

A lot of silly, too-expensive things “vainglorious building projects, money-sucking sports programs, tenured professors who contribute little in the way of teaching or research” will fade from memory, and won’t be missed.

Via Aretae.

The Hollywood Economist

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Edward Jay Epstein, a wonderful journalist, has just published The Hollywood Economist. I asked the publisher for a free copy. About two-thirds I’d already seen, mostly in Slate. The back cover says “ Freakonomics meets Hollywood saga” but I’d say “ Spy meets The New Yorker” — not that many people would understand “Spy”. It has a Spy- ish “here’s how things really are” aspect but with fewer embarrassing stories. And it has a New-Yorker-ish broad and deep view. (Epstein has often written for The New Yorker.) Like both Spy and The New Yorker it is very well-written. Although I’ve visited his website many times, I didn’t know about The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend ( three books combined) nor Who Owns the Corporation: Management vs. Shareholders (69 pages). He’s currently writing a book about the 9-11 commission. From his profile: “I taught political science at MIT and UCLA for three years but then decided that researching and writing books was a far more educational enterprise.”

Widespread Loneliness

Seth Roberts19 Comments

I’m fond of arguing that the Ten Commandments was a very political document. Notice it’s aimed at men? Notice that women aren’t protected, much less children? That’s because men had all the power. No one has said they already knew this or that I was wrong.

I thought of the Ten Commandments when a friend from Amsterdam wrote me about a recent experience of hers:

A very old man asked me to come to his apartment, and he would donate a bike to the project. I went over to get it, and it was half a bike, and it was locked to a pole…had obviously been there for years. The temperature was well below zero.  It became clear that he was in fact super-lonely, and torn between usual Dutch suspicion of strangers… and desperation for human contact.  He finally pleaded with me to come up to his apartment (where he obviously lived alone) but not before we spent 15 minutes trying to saw that rusty old bike loose, with his World War II-vintage hacksaw with missing teeth.

You may know that Dutch people are the tallest in the world, reflecting a very high standard of living. But — if this old man is not unusual — alleviating the loneliness of old people isn’t part of the Dutch social contract, admirable as it may be.

I recently watched the Frontline program Sick Around the World. It suggested that that old man isn’t unusual. In England, where doctor visits are free, a doctor said he has several patients who come weekly, purely because they’re lonely. In Japan, some patients have their blood pressure measured very often — presumably for the same reason. In Taiwan, if you see a doctor 20 times in one month someone from the government will come to talk to you. Not about loneliness — about overuse of medical care. The Frontline program made nothing of any of these facts, which were included to show that access was easy. That’s not all they show. What if the British doctor had said that several patients visit him often because they need water? Then we’d be shocked. Yet the idea that everyone needs human contact isn’t mysterious or controversial.

My explanation is there’s a double whammy: Not only do lonely old people have little power, it’s also clear that their problem (loneliness) isn’t caused by a “chemical imbalance”. So no drugs can be sold to treat it. And there’s no diagnostic category. It’s another example of gatekeeper syndrome. When these lonely old people exert what little power they have by visiting their doctor, the doctor — I’m assuming — doesn’t do anything to get rid of the loneliness. Even if you visit 20 times in a month.

Dealing With Referee Reports: What I’ve Learned

Seth Roberts12 Comments

Alex Tabarrok discusses a proposal to make referee reports and associated material publicly available. I think it would be a good thing because it would make writing a self-serving review (e.g., a retaliatory review) more dangerous. If Reviewer X writes an unreasonable review, the author is likely to complain to the editor. If the paper gets published, the unreasonableness will be highlighted — and nominal anonymity may not be enough to hide who wrote it. On the other side, as a reader, it would be extremely educational. You could learn a lot from studying these reports and the replies they generated, especially if you’re a grad student. I would like to know why some papers got accepted. For example, my Tsinghua students pointed out serious flaws in published papers. Were the problems noted by reviewers and ignored, or what?

My experience is that about 80% of reviews are reasonable. Many of those are ignorant, but that’s no crime. (A lot of reviewers know more than me.) The remaining 20% seem to go off the rails somehow. For example, Hal Pashler and I wrote a paper criticizing the use of good fits to support quantitative models. The first two reviewers seemed to have been people who did just that. Their reviews were ridiculous. Apparently they thought the paper shouldn’t be published because it might call their work into question. A few reviews have appeared to be retaliation. In the 1990s, I complained to the Office of Research Integrity that a certain set of papers appeared to contain made-up data. (ORI sent the case to the institution where the research was done. A committee to investigate did the shallowest possible review and decided I was wrong. I learned my lesson — don’t trust ORI — which I applied to the Chandra case.) After that allegation, I got stunningly unfair reviews from time to time, presumably from the people I accused. A small fraction of reviews (5%?) are so lazy they’re worthless. One reviewer of my long self-experimentation paper said it shouldn’t be published because it wasn’t science. The author (me) should go do some real science.

The main things I’ve learned about how to respond are: 1. When resubmitting the paper (revised in light of the reviews), go over every objection and how it was dealt with or why it was ignored. Making such a list isn’t very hard, it makes ignoring a criticism much easier (because you are explicit about it), and editors like it. This has become common. 2. When a review is unreasonable, complain. The theory-testing paper I wrote with Hal is one of my favorite papers and it wouldn’t have been published where it was if we hadn’t complained. Another paper of mine said that some data failed a chi-square test many times — suggesting that something was wrong. One of the reviewers seemed to not understand what a chi-square test was. I complained and got a new reviewer.

I’m curious: What have you learned about responding to reviewers?

North Korea and Penn State

Seth Roberts27 Comments

In an excellent talk last week about North Korea — linked to his book The Cleanest Race — Brian Myers, a professor in South Korea, said that people don’t fear dying, they fear dying without significance. Without their life having meant something. Life in North Korea is far more attractive than Americans realize, he said. The border between North Korea and China is easy to cross, and about half of the North Koreans who go to China later return, in spite of North Korea’s poverty. How does the North Korean government do such a good job under such difficult circumstances? Partly by playing up external threats (U.S. troops in South Korea), the obvious way politicians win support, but also by telling the North Korean people they are special. Maybe it plays this card because it has to — they can’t afford a police state — but there is no denying how well it works. In contrast, Myers said, the South Korean government offers its citizens no more than consumerism. That doesn’t work well, and South Korea, in spite of high per capita income, has high rates of depression and suicide.

I think the attractiveness of North Korean life has a lot to do with why Penn State students like Penn State so much. This American Life did a show about Penn State a few months ago. Life at the nation’s top party school said the description. Sounds boring, I thought, so I waited to listen to it until I’d run out of stuff to listen to. It turned out to be one of their best shows ever. Mostly it’s about the large amount of drinking — this is why they did the show — but at the very end is a short segment about how much Penn State students love their school. Not much detail but I was convinced. The attractive school cheer (“We Are Penn State”) comes up in conversation! A few people reading this won’t know that Penn State has an extremely successful football team. A large fraction of the students attend its games. After graduation, a lot of them continue to attend the games.

Here is a powerful and neglected force in human life. The bland technical term is group identity. As the South Korea comparison indicates, governments don’t routinely use it to govern. As Penn State exceptionalism indicates, colleges don’t routinely use it either. Faculty routinely disparage football. Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Has Crippled Undergraduate Education was written by a professor — of course. The Penn State chancellor seemed mystified that his students were so proud and supportive of their school. (They’re just that way, he seemed to say.) A lot of my self-experimentation has been about discovering what we need to be healthy, such as morning faces. I can’t self-experiment about this but I would if I could. It’s yet another thing that people must have routinely gotten in Stone-Age life but don’t get any more — unless you happen to be a rabid sports fan or an alumnus of a college with a sufficiently successful football team. Or live in North Korea.

Exploratory Versus Confirmatory Data Analysis?

Seth Roberts33 Comments

In 1977, John Tukey published a book called Exploratory Data Analysis. It introduced many new ways of analyzing data, all relatively simple. Most of the new ways involved plotting your data. A few involved transforming your data. Tukey’s broad point was that statisticians (taught by statistics professors) were missing a lot: Conventional statistics focussed too much on confirmatory data analysis (testing hypotheses) to the omission of exploratory data analysis — data analysis that might show you something new. Here are some tools to help you explore your data, Tukey was saying.

No question the new tools are useful. I have found great benefits from plotting and transforming my data. No question that conventional statistics textbooks place far too little emphasis on graphs and transformations. But I no longer agree with Tukey’s exploratory versus confirmatory distinction. The distinction that matters — at least to historians, if not to data analysts — is between low-status and high-status. A more accurate title of Tukey’s book would have been Low-Status Data Analysis. Exploratory data analysis already had a derogatory name: Descriptive data analysis. As in mere description. Graphs and transformations are low-status. They are low-status because graphs are common and transformations are easy. Anyone can make a graph or transform their data. I believe they were neglected for that reason. To show their high status, statistics professors focused their research and teaching on more difficult and esoteric stuff — like complicated regression. That the new stuff wasn’t terribly useful (compared to graphs and transformations) mattered little. Like all academics — like everyone — they cared enormously about showing high status. It was far more important to be impressive than to be useful. As Veblen showed, it might have helped that the new stuff wasn’t very useful. “Applied” science is lower status than “pure” science.

That most of what statistics professors have developed (and taught) is less useful than graphs and transformations strikes me as utterly clear. My explanation is that in statistics, just as in every other academic area I know about, desire to display status led to a lot of useless highly-visible work. (What Veblen called conspicuous waste.) Less visibly, it led to the best tools being neglected. Tukey saw the neglect –Â underdevelopment and underteaching of graphs, for example — but perhaps misdiagnosed the cause. Here’s why Tukey’s exploratory versus confirmatory distinction was misleading: Because the tools that Tukey promoted for exploration also improve confirmation. They are neglected everywhere. For example:

1. Graphs improve confirmatory data analysis. If you do a t test (or compute a p value in any way) but don’t make an associated graph, there is room for improvement. A graph will show whether the assumptions of the computation are reasonable. Often they aren’t.

2. Transformations improve confirmatory data analysis. That a good transformation will make the assumptions of the test more reasonable many people know. What few people seem to know is that a good transformation will make the statistical test more sensitive. If a difference exists, the test will be more likely to detect it. This is like increasing your sample size at no extra cost.

3. Exploratory data analysis is sometimes thought of as going beyond the question you started with to find other structure in the data — to explore your data. (Tukey saw it this way.) But to answer the question you started with as well as possible you should find all the structure in the data. Suppose my question is whether X has an effect. I should care whether Y and Z have an effect in order to (a) make my test of X more sensitive (by removing the effects of Y and Z) and (b) assess the generality of the effect of X (does it interact with Y or Z?).

Most statistics professors and their textbooks have neglected all uses of graphs and transformations, not just their exploratory uses. I used to think exploratory data analysis (and exploratory science more generally) needed different tools than confirmatory data analysis and confirmatory science. Now I don’t. A big simplification.

Exploration (generating new ideas) and confirmation (testing old ideas) are outputs of data analysis, not inputs. To explore your data and to test ideas you already have you should do exactly the same analysis. What’s good for one is good for the other.

Likewise, Freakonomics could have been titled Low-status Economics. That’s essentially what it was, the common theme. Levitt studied all sorts of things other economists thought were beneath them to study. That was Levitt’s real innovation — showing that these questions were neglected. Unsurprisingly, the general public, uninterested in the status of economists, found the work more interesting than high-status economics. I’m sensitive to this because my self-experimentation was extremely low-status. It was useful (low-status), cheap (low-status), small (low-status), and anyone could do it (extremely low status).

More Andrew Gelman comments. Robin Hanson comments.