Author: Seth Roberts

James Michener Anticipates Me

Seth Roberts9 Comments

In James Michener’s Poland (1983), a Polish peasant in a concentration camp tries to survive by thinking about food (p. 532 of the paperback):

He then transferred his imagination to a supper served at the wedding of a well-to-do farmer, where huge platters of sauerkraut, sausage, boiled pork and pickles had been provided, one to each of six tables, and he had helped himself piggishly, moving from one to the other so as not to reveal his gluttony. Â He recalled this particular feast for two reasons: as a peasant, he knew that the acid bite of the pickled kraut was good for him, all peasants knew that and it was one reason why they survived so long; and he could see in the rich fat of the meats the strength that came from them.

Later he thinks about animal fat:

He imagined himself luxuriating with platters of butter, or grease, or pork drippings, or oil that rich people bought from Spain, or the golden globules at the edge of a roast, or plain lard.

According to Wikipedia, Poland was based on “extensive study of Poland’s history and culture.” Thanks to Nadav Manham.

MSG and Nightmares (continued)

Seth Roberts9 Comments

I am staying in a nice hotel near Shanghai. Last night I dreamed that my stuff (suitcase, etc.) had been put in the hallway outside my room. As — in the dream — I was walking to the front desk to complain, I realized I must be dreaming. This couldn’t possibly have happened, I thought. It was that realistic. Later that night I had another mild realistic nightmare — about missing the bus.

I rarely have dreams like that. During the day I’d had a lot more Chinese food than usual. Two big meals. (Lunch, at a restaurant, had included yogurt, incidentally.) Without my friend’s experience I would have never connected the Chinese food and the nightmares.

Stupid Noodle Restaurant

Seth Roberts3 Comments

On Christmas, I had lunch in a factory town near Shanghai at a restaurant whose Chinese name means Stupid Noodle Restaurant. It’s not a joke. Nor a mystery, if you’re Chinese. The reason a restaurant would call itself stupid is because a stupid owner won’t cheat you. Next to the restaurant are a small store that sells cables and a small store that sells car batteries. At the restaurant, the knife-cut noodles were very good.

Sometimes Black Really Is White

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Jenny Holzer, the artist, says, “ I get up about four times a night and go back to sleep, or not.” I suspect she’s not eating enough animal fat. At my local Beijing supermarket yesterday, I asked a butcher to cut the meat off a piece of pork fat. Reverse trimming. At the moment, I think about 180 g of animal fat/day is a good dose. I’m much less concerned about amount of meat. Another instance, I thought to myself, where I want the opposite of everyone else. But that’s far more true in America than here. In China but not America, I can buy pork belly at any supermarket; in China but not America, there is vast selection of pickles and yogurt at any supermarket.

William Penn Accidentally Signs Away Pennsylvania

Seth Roberts8 Comments

From Wikipedia:

A more serious problem arose when fellow Quaker Philip Ford, his business manager, embezzled from Penn. He capitalized on Penn’s habit of signing papers without reading them by including a deed transferring Pennsylvania to himself, and then demanded more rent than Penn could pay.

Why am I reading about William Penn? Because Penn was an insider/outsider. Born to wealthy parents and educated at Oxford, he became a marginal religious leader, at one point imprisoned for eight months for writing a “blasphemous” pamphlet. Just as self-experimentation empowered me, cheap travel across the Atlantic empowered Penn. He took his followers to what became Pennsylvania.

I believe that cheap new ways of doing things empower insider/outsiders. A modern example is Stephen McIntyre, empowered by blogs. (His blog is Climate Audit.) The classic example is Martin Luther, empowered by the printing press. In contrast, expensive new ways of doing things empower insiders (the already powerful) because only they can afford them. I suppose the classic example is agriculture. Agriculture is expensive because it requires land. Lots of things start off expensive and become cheap, but many do not. The classic example is agriculture (land never becomes cheap); the big modern example is health care. It is very expensive to develop a new drug or new medical technology. This is at the heart of why the health care industry is extracting more and more money from the rest of us, just as government officials in rural China regularly ripoff farmers. I am unsurprised that doctors resist cheap new improvements, the only way out of a terrible situation. In China, people in rural areas migrate to cities; that’s how they escape. In Croatia, some friends of mine lived downhill from neighbors who were in the Communist Party. My friends were not Communists. One day they woke up to find that the property line between them and their uphill neighbors had shifted downhill about 10 feet. Unlike William Penn and rural Chinese, my friends could not move — and thus the powerful became more powerful.

Modern Biology = Cargo-Cult Science (continued)

Seth Roberts31 Comments

In an earlier post I pointed out that modern molecular biology has one big feature in common with cargo-cult science (activities with the trappings but not the substance of science): relentless over-promising. David Horrobin, in a 2003 essay, agreed with me:

Those familiar with medical research funding know the disgraceful campaigns waged in the 70s and 80s by scientists hunting the genes for such diseases as cystic fibrosis. Give us the money, we’ll find the gene and then your problems will be solved was the message. The money was found, the genes were found – and then came nothing but a stunned contemplation of the complexity of the problem, which many clinicians had understood all along.

During the question period of a talk by Laurie Garrett about science writing at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, I said there was a kind of conspiracy between scientists and journalists to make research results (in biology/health) appear more important than they really were. Oh, no, said Garrett. If she’s right, then journalists are completely credulous. They have no idea they’re being scammed. If I wrote a book called The Real Scientific Method, there would be a whole chapter on better ways (cool data) and worse ways (over-promising) to promote your work.

The discovery of leptin, the hormone that tells the brain how much fat you have, was front-page news in 1994. Supposedly this discovery would help people lose weight. It is now abundantly clear that it hasn’t and won’t. The discoverer of leptin, Jeffrey Friedman, gave a talk at UC Berkeley several years ago and resembled a deer caught in the headlights. All he knew — following the party line — was that genetics was important. That genetics was so obviously not the reason for the obesity epidemic . . . he didn’t mention. This interview gives a sampling of his views. He really does believe in the primacy of genes:

Over the years, Dr. Friedman says, he has watched the scientific data accumulate to show that body weight, in animals and humans, is not under conscious control. Body weight, he says, is genetically determined, as tightly regulated as height.

Never mind animal and human experiments that show adult body weight is controlled by recent diet. Adult height is not controlled by recent diet. What about the obesity epidemic? Well,

“Before calling it an epidemic, people really need to understand what the numbers do and don’t say,” he said.

This is what one molecular biologist — a professor at Rockefeller University — is reduced to: telling us what data collected by other people “do and don’t say”. Not to mention qualifying the obvious (Americans are much fatter now than 50 years ago). I’m sure his lab has all the trappings of modern science. But the planes don’t land.

A journalist named David Freedman has figured this out.

Michael Perelman on the Purpose of College

Seth Roberts6 Comments

In a talk, Michael Perelman, a professor of economics at CSU Chico, said this:

Each semester, I tell my class that each of them has the potential to be the best in the world at something. The most important thing they can do in school [= college] is find out what that something is.

That is a sane view of college. At Berkeley, I told undergrads: “Take as few classes as possible and do as many internships as possible.”

Perelman’s talk, an intellectual autobiography, has all sorts of interesting details, such as “As the economy faltered, economists would express doubts about how the economy functioned but once the economy recovered, challenges to market fundamentalism would become rare.”

 

Tsinghua Student Life

Seth Roberts4 Comments

The Chinese government sets limits to the number of acceptable student suicides per year at every college. If the number is exceeded, the college is punished — perhaps by a reduction in administrator salaries. Although colleges conceal suicides from their own students, they dare not conceal them from the government. At Tsinghua (with about 12,000 students) the annual limit is six. (So far this year, there have apparently been none.) In the electrical engineering department recently, more than six students were thought to be considering suicide. Because of this, a psychology professor gave the EE majors a talk about looking at the bright side of things.

A newly-formed Tsinghua student club has a Chinese name that means Sing Your Heart. It is for students who want to volunteer to teach in poor rural areas. The club has a special song that they sing at every meeting. They are remarkably ambitious: They want to set up a training program to train students to teach in these areas.

The School of Humanities and Social Sciences has a debate competition every year. This year’s topic is: Should the Fuwa (the Beijing Olympic mascots) have genders?

Appreciative Thinking and Buddhism

Seth Roberts4 Comments

After I mentioned appreciative thinking in a recent post, my friend Carl Willat wrote me:

Part of Buddhism I think is that gratitude is the secret to happiness. Â It’s always possible to want more, so you won’t be happy by trying to get all the things you want. Instead, being grateful for what you have is where happiness lies.

That’s a good way to put it. Not matter what article you read, no matter what study you do, there are always ways it could be better (what others call flaws). Be grateful for what the article or study tells you. That’s how to learn something from it.