Author: Seth Roberts

The Most Promising Solutions to the Allergy Epidemic

Seth Roberts7 Comments

At a charity dinner in New York City to benefit the Food Allergy Institute, the president of the Institute told the guests that

Several promising treatments [were] in the works, including a Chinese herbal therapy being developed by the prominent allergist Dr. Hugh Sampson of Mt. Sinai (ready as soon as 2011) and a parasite “similar to those found in the stomachs of most citizens in developing countries,” which could someday be introduced into imperiled Upper East Side intestines, the theory being that “in the developed world, we live in too clean of an environment, so our immune system has nothing familiar to attack.”

Gatekeeper syndrome. How dare they not read this blog!

Acidophilus Pearls versus Fermented Food

Seth Roberts8 Comments

I hear a voice: “Okay, you’ve convinced me, I need to eat more bacteria. How should I do it?” Well, Tim Beneke writes:

I want to revise my comments of a few months ago on probiotics and breathing through my nose. The probiotic pills by themselves do not enable me to breath better though my nose, even if I take 2x the dose they recommend. However, if I eat a lot of miso, yogurt, tempeh etc., I can breathe better through my nose within a day or 2. Previously, when I ate a lot of yogurt etc. for a couple of weeks, and then just went on the probiotic pills, it seemed as if the pills were enough, but after a week or so of just doing the probiotic pills, the stuffed nose came back. Then just doing yogurt and miso, my stuffed nose went away.

The probiotic pills are called Acidophilus Pearls, said to have one billion CFU [colony-forming units] of lactobacillus acidophilus and bifidobacterium longum per capsule; I got zero noticeable effect taking 2 of them a day while eating virtually no probiotic food.

Doing 16 oz of yogurt/day plus one 480 ml bottle/day of kombucha, while consuming none of the Pearls enabled me to breathe much better through my nose within a day or 2.

How the National Multiple Sclerosis Society Harms MS Patients

Seth Roberts15 Comments

I blogged earlier about how Paulo Zamboni, an Italian surgeon, discovered that almost all MS patients have impaired blood flow from the brain. Surgery to improve the blood flow usually reduced MS symptoms. A very important discovery.

At the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, in Denver, they are unconvinced. They want more studies. Yes, Zamboni’s single study shouldn’t be the final word but here is the astonishing part: They say patients shouldn’t get tested to see if they have impaired blood flow. Impaired blood flow is very rare. When an MS patient gets tested, this tests Zamboni’s theory. His theory predicts they are likely to have impaired blood flow. At the National MS Society, they are against gathering data that would help decide if Zamboni is right. And against individuals finding out if something is wrong with their blood flow. This isn’t conservative, it’s stupid. And harmful — if anyone listens to them.

I wrote them to ask about their astonishing recommendation. Here’s the answer (from Kris Graham):

Our greatest concern at this point is the risk involved with the possible treatment, and we would like to see more clinical testing done before making a recommendation to the general public.

I wrote again to say it was the recommendation against testing (not treatment) that I was asking about. I got this reply:

We are not recommending that people get tested because there is not yet a treatment that has undergone comprehensive clinical testing. In other words, we do not encourage people to go through testing that can not — yet — lead to treatment. If clinical trials show that treatments, such as Dr. Zamboni‘s, are clinically safe and effective, we will of course change our recommendations. Until we know from controlled trials that there is a treatment to offer, spending the money to get tested doesn’t seem very reasonable.

What nonsense. Dr. Zamboni did a clinical trial. Spending money to get tested is money spent in a way that helps every MS patient — not to mention yourself. It’s gatekeeper syndrome — they can’t fathom why a MS patient would want to gather useful health-care info without waiting for “controlled trials,” whatever those are. I wrote back to ask what “controlled trials” meant. No reply. Thank god for self-experimentation, PatientsLikeMe, and CureTogether.

My Theory of Japanese Aesthetics

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Japanese packages are beautiful. One after another. Old-fashioned Japanese buildings, Japanese posters, and so on, are also gorgeous. Even the Japanese flag is better-looking than other flags. The look of the IBM Thinkpad came from bento boxes. Why is Japanese visual design so great?

The usual answer is that Japan is an island, with scarce resources, therefore the Japanese learned to do much with little. This might explain a certain minimalism but there are plenty of island countries with undistinguished visual aesthetics.

My answer is different. It starts with the fact that Japan has a very large coastline/area ratio. It isn’t just an island, it’s a skinny island. That’s why the Japanese eat so much seafood. Seafood has a mild flavor. To preserve variety, you cannot spice it much otherwise everything ends up tasting like the spice. The differences between different fish are lost. This is why Japanese cuisine is weakly-flavored.

This created a problem for cooks. If the main food is weakly-flavored, everything else must also be. You want to show you care but you cannot do it with time-consuming complex sauces (such as harisa or mole, which takes a whole afternoon to make) or complex spice mixtures (such as curries) or complex cooking methods (French, Chinese). You are basically serving raw or lightly-cooked food with almost no spices. The solution — the way to show you cared — was presentation. The emotional energy of Japanese cooks went into making their food beautiful. Japanese food isn’t just the least-flavored of all major cuisines, it is also by quite a bit the best-looking. That’s how it started. Japanese cooks figured out how to make food beautiful. The lessons they learned and taught (at every meal!) spread to other design. When you grow up surrounded by beautiful things, as Japanese designers do, it helps you make beautiful things.

A friend of mine is a Chinese design student. She has met Japanese design students. How do they explain it? I asked her. They didn’t talk about it, she said. “We communicated in English. Their English is even worse than mine.”

Aynsley Kellow on Climategate

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Anysley Kellow is a professor of political science at the University of Tasmania. In an interview five years ago, he said, about global warming, “we’ve got a much broader range of choice to respond to a problem that is much more uncertain than certain people who are pushing the issue would have us believe.”

As in a protection racket, the people trying to scare you benefit from you being scared:

I did a study of electricity planning, including here in Tasmania, the good old Hydro Electric Commission in the old days—and the logic was much the same; they would produce forecasts of [hard-to-meet] future demand which were then taken as immutable, and then they would try and justify particular policy responses to those. In the case here it was with hydro dam construction.

I learned about Professor Kellow’s work from a comment about status-trading among scientists. I wrote to him to ask what work of his was being referred to. He replied:

I think the reference is just to my 2007 book (Science and Public Policy: The Virtuous Corruption of Virtual Environmental Science), where I write about the shrinking size of groups which possess expertise, the effect of the communications revolution in establishing close networks of cooperation, and the effect of this on quality-assurance processes like peer review. The prevailing paradigm then becomes a ’club good’ from the defense of which all members benefit (in status, grant success and career advancement).

The problem is exacerbated by some of the circumstances revealed by Climategate: not just pressure on editors, and influence in being IPCC lead authors, but peer review in climate journals where submitting authors nominate reviewers, the identity of authors is known to those approached to referee papers, and so on. I am so accustomed to double-blind peer review that I found it hard to believe that this was a common practice.
When we add this to the lack of disclosure of raw data and code, we have serious reliability problems underlying science upon which we are basing very costly policy. We know in social science research the potential for subjective factors to obtrude into data manipulation even when researchers do not consciously mean for this to happen, so we often see data preparation and analysis performed by independent teams, and emphasise transparency, disclosure of methods, double-blind peer review, and so on.

That’s a good point about single-blind peer review. I agree, it should all be double-blind, no exceptions. In psychology authors don’t know the name of reviewers but reviewers know the names of authors. You can request double-blind review but then your paper enters the review process with a “paranoid” label attached.

Kellow interviewed about Climategate.

Associative Memory Studied by Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Joel Voss, a postdoc at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, studied himself to measure the capacity of associative memory:

No previous experiments on humans have investigated the capacity of associative memory. I describe the first relevant data, which I obtained by systematically probing my own capacity during 58,560 memory trials for picture—response associations (approximately 1 year of testing). Estimated capacity was on the order of several thousand associations.

A few thousand is the number of characters a well-educated Chinese person knows.

Three Chinese Jokes

Seth Roberts2 Comments

QUESTION: When the green bean jumped off a tall building, what did it become?

ANSWER: Red bean.

QUESTION: When the banana jumped off a tall building, what did it become?

ANSWER: Eggplant.

QUESTIONER: For Spring Festival, a farmer wanted to kill a donkey or a pig. Which did he choose?

LISTENER: I don’t know. The pig?

QUESTIONER: Congratulations, the donkey agrees with you.

What I’ve Learned From Climategate (So Far)

Seth Roberts11 Comments

Google “Climategate” you get 31 million hits. “Obama” returns 40 million. Yet mainstream media, such as the New York Times, have said little about it. The New Yorker has said nothing about it. Given so much interest, that will change.

Some of my prior beliefs — that empirical support for the view that man has caused global warming is weaker than we’re told, that bloggers are a powerful force for truth — are stronger. But here are a few things I didn’t think of until now:

1. The truth leaks out before it gushes out. Laurie David’s children’s book — its egregious mistake, her blithe dismissal of that mistake — is an example of the truth leaking out. In the Ranjit Chandra case, little facts implied he was a fraud long before this became utterly clear. An example is the claim in one of his papers (published in The Lancet!) that everyone asked agreed to be in his experiment.

2. Teaching is even better done via scandals than via stories. The number of hits for Climategate is an indication of how much people are learning from it. As I blogged earlier, they’re learning a lot about science. A mere story about science would never attract so much attention. I should think more about how to use scandals to teach stuff. When Nassim Taleb is scathing about this or that, he has the right idea. Spy was the perfect example. It taught me a lot about New York City.

3. Jane Jacobs was wrong. Or at least missed something very important. In Dark Age Ahead, her last book, she pointed to a number of disturbing signs. One was the rise of crappy science. She was quite right about that — as scientists have become more professional they have become more status-oriented and less truth-oriented. She didn’t foresee that the Internet would be an enormously powerful corrective force, as is happening now. Climategate is a (relatively) small example of even bigger force: the rise of the power of sophisticated amateurs/hobbyists. Who, unlike professionals, with jobs and status to protect, have complete freedom. The first big example was printed non-fiction books, as I blogged earlier (which are written with great freedom, usually); but now the Internet provides another great outlet, much faster, cheaper, and more accessible than books, for independent thought.

Philip Greenspun on Universities

Seth Roberts9 Comments

This essay by Philip Greenspun, about the trouble with American college education, is most notable for its description of a class lecture by Robert Schiller at Yale:

  • 0-4:30: name of course, name of professor, names of TAs, pictures of TAs [all stuff that could easily have been on a handout or Web site]
  • 4:30-5:15: bragging about how many important people on Wall Street took his course, bragging about how great the course is even for people who aren’t going on to Wall Street
  • 5:15-6:20: talking about how every human endeavor involves finance, e.g., if you’re a poet it will help you get published to know how finance works [my haiku: AIG bankrupt; your taxes gone to Greenwich; no one hears your screams]
  • 6:20-7: talking about an unrelated course, Econ 251, and who taught it in previous years [big excitement at a university: some guy other than the usual lecturer taught it because Kahuna #1 was on leave]
  • 7-10: history of why two intro finance courses exist, glorious biography of teacher of the other course, [after several minutes, we learn that the other course has a bit more math]
  • 10-11:30: show of hands for who is interested in organic chemistry, discussion of how Robert Shiller is reading about this because he has such broad intellectual interests [implicit comparison to finance wizards, though Shiller is not able to cite an example of how organic chemists managed to bankrupt their shareholders and wreck the world economy]
  • 11:30-15:00: writes authors of textbook on blackboard, says it is “very detailed”, discusses reactions of previous classes of students to this book, talks about his vacation in the Bahamas with some other important guy, reading textbook by the pool unlike the other stupid tourists who were reading novels. Discussion of what number the current edition is. “I met a really prominent person on Wall Street” who told him that his son had dropped out of the course because the textbook was too hard. Apparently Yale students are too stupid/lazy to read this book intended for undergrads at schools with more motivated students.
  • 15-16: discussion of how library is obsolete in the Internet age, how Franco Modigliani is 2nd author of primary textbook, a Nobel Prize winner, and “my teacher at MIT”

Funny! Spy had a similar article about 24 hours of an all-sports-talk radio show. Okay, Robert Shiller is full of himself. The most telling criticism of the modern university is in a comment by Mike Lin:

The first day of Statistics 100 at the University of Michigan, the professor said our final grade was either the average score of our midterm and final, or the score of the final — whichever was greater. Our labs and homework assignments did not impact our course grade. My roommate, also enrolled in the same course, didn’t make the first class. I told him about the grading system. Neither of us attended another class, nor took the midterm.

Before the final, we spent two days straight, reading the material and doing problem sets. I got a B+. He got an A-. [Shades of Tucker Max.]

I am ashamed to admit that I wasted all those lectures and labs that my family paid for. But what does it say about inadequacy and inefficiency of the lecture system when we arguably learned the practical application of our course material with 24 hours of self-study spread over two days and a $100 textbook?

It says a lot.

Via Aaron Swartz.