Author: Seth Roberts

Gatekeeper Syndrome

Seth Roberts9 Comments

If the original Milgram obedience experiment weren’t scary enough, in the 1960s a researcher named Hofling did a variant in which nurses were ordered to give twice the maximum dose of a certain drug. The drug was not on the hospital’s approved list, the order was given by phone, and the nurse didn’t know the doctor giving the order. Yet 21 out of 22 nurses obeyed. (They were stopped just before giving the drug.) Hofling concluded that of the several intelligences that might have been involved in the situation, one was absent.

I thought of this research when I learned about a remarkable case of anaesthesia dolorosa. Anaesthesia dolorosa is a condition where you lose sensation in part of your face and have great pain in that area. It’s rare; it’s usually caused by surgery. In 1999, Beth Taylor-Schott’s husband had an operation for trigeminal neuralgia that left him with this condition. In the ensuing years, all sorts of pain medications failed to solve the problem. Then he had another operation:

In January of 2008, David underwent a gamma knife procedure to ablate the sphenopalentine nerve bundle. Before the procedure, we were told that 16 other patients had had the procedure, and that all of them had experienced either complete recovery without drugs or an 80% reduction in pain. So we were optimistic going in. It was only after they had done the surgery that the doctors admitted that they had never done it on someone with AD before and that all those other patients had had atypical facial pain. The surgery had no effect as far as we could tell.

Shades of my surgeon claiming the existence of studies that didn’t exist. But that’s not the point. The point is this: After reading Atul Gawande’s article about mirror therapy for phantom limb pain, she and her husband tried it. “Within 2-3 days, his pain was down to zero.” It stayed there so long as they continued the mirror therapy. Soon after this they were able to eliminate his pain medication.

I asked Taylor-Schott what the reaction of her husband’s doctor was. She replied:

David’s actual pain doctor wrote back a single word, if I remember correctly, which was “fantastic.”

Wow. An incurable debilitating pain condition quickly and completely eliminated without drugs or danger or significant cost and . . . a pain doctor isn’t interested. Let’s call it gatekeeper syndrome: lack of interest in anything, no matter how important to your work, that doesn’t involve you being a gatekeeper.

I said that showed remarkably little curiosity. Taylor-Schott said that was typical. I agree. After I lost 30 pounds on the Shangri-La Diet, my doctor expressed no curiosity how I had done so. A friend of mine showed his doctor some data he had collected highly relevant to how to treat his condition; his doctor wasn’t interested.

Curiosity is part of intelligence. Not measured on IQ tests — a serious problem with those tests. To lack curiosity is to be just as brain-dead, in a different part of the brain, as those too-obedient nurses. Taylor-Schott speculated that curiosity was beaten out of doctors in medical school. Or perhaps much earlier. Curiosity doesn’t help you get good grades in college.

In my experience, college professors have their own problems along these lines. UC Berkeley has a fantastic selection of talks, year after year. I almost never saw a professor at a talk in a department different from his own — no psychology professor (other than me) would attend a talk in nutrition, for example. At statistics talks, I almost never saw a professor from another department. Curiosity had been beaten out of them too, perhaps. Professors who lack curiosity produce students who lack curiosity . . . it makes sense. It sort of explains why Berkeley professors had/have a such a narrow view of intelligence; to them being smart means being good at what college professors do. It also explains why the lack of measurement of curiosity on IQ tests is so rarely pointed out.

And it explains why Taylor-Schott and her husband learned about mirror therapy from a magazine article rather than from one of the many pain doctors they consulted.

A Chinese Joke

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In a Shanghai apartment, the phone rings. A friend of the occupant answers the phone. “It’s someone from a rural area,” he shouts to the occupant. (Shanghai and other dialects are quite different.) “I’m from Beijing,” says the person on the line. “It’s someone from Rural Beijing,” the friend shouts.

This joke is told by people who are from neither Shanghai nor Beijing.

Leonard Mlodinow on Wine Experts

Seth Roberts4 Comments

They’re just like us!

In France, a decade ago a wine researcher named Fréderic Brochet served 57 French wine experts two identical midrange Bordeaux wines, one in an expensive Grand Cru bottle, the other accommodated in the bottle of a cheap table wine. The gurus showed a significant preference for the Grand Cru bottle, employing adjectives like “excellent” more often for the Grand Cru, and “unbalanced,” and “flat” more often for the table wine.

Whether a wine wins a medal in a competition appears to be pure chance:

Mr. Hodgson restricted his attention to wines entering a certain number of competitions, say five. Then he made a bar graph of the number of wines winning 0, 1, 2, etc. gold medals in those competitions. The graph was nearly identical to the one you’d get if you simply made five flips of a coin weighted to land on heads with a probability of 9%. The distribution of medals, he wrote, “mirrors what might be expected should a gold medal be awarded by chance alone.”

Thanks to Dave Lull.

More Black-and-White Thinking

Seth Roberts15 Comments

Here’s part of a speech that Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician, gave in New York in February:

There might be moderate Muslims, but there is no moderate Islam. Islam will never change, because it is built on two rocks that are forever, two fundamental beliefs that will never change, and will never alter. First, there is the Quran, Allah’s personal word, uncreated, forever, with orders that need to be fulfilled regardless of place or time. And second, there is al-insal al-kamil, the perfect man, Muhammad the role model, whose deeds are to be imitated by all Muslims. And since Muhammad was a warlord and a conqueror we know what to expect. Islam means submission, so there cannot be any mistake about its goal. That’s a given. It’s fact.

Whereas here’s what a friend of mine living in Amsterdam sees:

Disenfranchised immigrants who were summoned here to do low skilled jobs, aspire to integrate into Dutch society, but are often systematically excluded by Dutch people. Â A lot of them don’t have much formal education. That doesn’t help.
Even 2nd and 3rd generation Moroccan immigrants, many of whom are nice people and speak perfect Dutch, get treated like underclass by native Dutch people. Â It angers and depresses the parents, who feel shut out, and their kids suffer also.
I find it terribly sad to think that the kids I fix bikes with have such a disadvantage due to their origin. Many of them are quite smart. It strikes me as such a waste of human potential.

There are some nice Dutch people who get along fine with the immigrants, but not very many.

They’re describing the same thing!

The Parable of the Wii

Seth Roberts5 Comments

For exercise (Dance Dance Revolution) and self-tracking, I decided to buy a Wii. My first attempt, I was scammed. It arrived in August. With difficulty, I took it and accessories unopened to China. That was hard. It was even harder — for no obvious reason — to install it in China. The box sat unopened next to my TV, easily visible, for two months.

Finally I opened the box, took out the parts, put them together, added batteries, plugged it into the TV in my apartment. And nothing happened! Was my TV at fault? Or the Wii? Wii’s aren’t sold in China. I imagined bringing it back to America to get the problem fixed. After a few days, I tested my TV using video output from a neighbor’s Apple computer. My TV worked. After the test, my Wii also worked. When I replaced the Apple input with the Wii input I saw the Wii input for the first time. I don’t understand it, but that’s what happened.

In my experience, this is how science works. It is much harder than expected, then it pays off in ways that defy understanding. The concept of self-experimentation is simple: I will measure X (sleep, productivity) about myself. I will test different ways to improve X, learn what works, and thereby improve X. The reality is different. For years I measured my sleep and tried to improve it. It was hard to deal with the data. Even worse, every idea I had was wrong. That seemed like a huge obstacle — like my Wii needing repair. But I kept plugging away, because it was better than doing nothing, and . . . got somewhere. Out of nowhere and nothing. Not only did I improve my sleep, I arrived at a broader idea about health that turned out to be very helpful (that our bodies are designed for Stone-Age conditions and self-experimentation can help determine those conditions, which aren’t obvious). Just as we overvalue big steps (e.g., well-funded prestigious research), we undervalue small ones (e.g., cheap research with no prestige).

Science is basically a bunch of little steps. Many little experiments that explore cause-effect space. If you find a new example of cause and effect, the payoff is unpredictably large. Scientists don’t like thinking of themselves as wandering ants. But that’s how they are most effective. This goes against human psychology because wandering (Nassim Taleb calls it “tinkering”) is low status and lonely. The payoff is too rare and too unclear. It isn’t supported by powerful institutions, such as research universities and medical schools. Imagine an ant who says “I know where food is!” This is a way to get many ants to follow him, to feel important, to have high status, to get support from his employer. That’s why he does it. But he doesn’t know. The effect on the rest of us, the potential beneficiaries of progress, is that instead of having a thousand ants wandering everywhere, we have a thousand ants following one ant who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Mistaken Consensus in Physics?

Seth Roberts18 Comments

Steven Sheets writes:

I can’t really think of an area in physics where a consensus has been achieved only to be shown to be completely wrong.

Good point. I know little about physics but I tend to agree. Work awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics is more trustworthy than work awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, for example. I think a big reason that a consensus presented to the public is wrong is because there is outside pressure to get it right — pressure to find a way to lose weight, pressure to find how to reduce heart disease, and so on. Whereas there is no public pressure to get this or that physics question right. Less is at stake and the physics community can take as long as it wants.

Still, physicists make mistakes and other physicists go along with those mistakes. I can think of three examples:

1. When calculating the charge on an electron, Millikan famously used the wrong value for the viscosity of air. This didn’t prevent those using other methods from getting the same answer.

2. It was a rather bold title: How Nature Works (1996) by Per Bak. Yet the sand avalanche models on which the whole thing was based turned out to be wrong. Actual sand didn’t behave as predicted. There wasn’t consensus in the physics community that Bak was right, but many physicists took him seriously. (As far I can tell from a distance.) I’ve worked on explaining power-law data (the subject of Bak’s book) and the ideas in that book weren’t helpful.

3. Long ago, lots of physicists – if astronomy is part of physics — believed that the sun revolved around the earth.

There’s plenty of pressure and a lot at stake to get climate predictions right. So I think climate models are in the territory where big consensus mistakes are made. As Patrik points out, the story of the Yamal tree-ring data — which I wasn’t thinking of when I wrote the Elizabeth Kolbert post, or I would have mentioned it — is a very good reason to think that what Kolbert writes about climate is less certain than Kolbert thinks.

Three Things Elizabeth Kolbert Doesn’t Know

Seth Roberts28 Comments

A staff position at The New Yorker is the best journalistic job in the world. Elizabeth Kolbert, a very good writer and reporter, has one of them. In the current issue, criticizing Superfreakonomics, she writes:

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction.

I cannot discuss engineering (“carbon-eating trees”, etc.) but I can discuss science (“climate models”). Here Kolbert shows the same limitation that practically every science journalist shows (the big exceptions are Gary Taubes and John Crewdson): They take the consensus view too seriously. In case after case — so many that it’s hard not to draw sweeping conclusions — the consensus view about difficult topics is more fragile than an outsider would ever guess. It’s not necessarily wrong, just less certain.

Kolbert places too much faith in those climate models. Here are three things Kolbert doesn’t know:

1. For years, as I’ve blogged, Leonard Syme, an epidemiology prof at Berkeley, taught his students to distrust one mainstream public-health conclusion after another. Maybe 12 examples in all. He showed them facts they didn’t know. All of a sudden the picture wasn’t so clear any more. That he could do this in so many cases, one case per week, is what’s telling.

2. If you believe mainstream ideas about weight control, the Shangri-La Diet is absurd. It can’t possibly work. Since it has actually worked in countless cases — more than half the time, as far as I can judge — the experts, it appears, got it utterly wrong. Long before me, Michel Cabanac, a professor of physiology at Laval University, was saying the same thing — that the consensus view about how to lose weight was wrong. No matter how many millions of times journalists repeated it. The Shangri-La Diet merely makes it vividly clear he was right.

3. Hal Pashler and I wrote a paper about how mental models based on fitting data were delusional. The data that supposedly supported them did not. To take seriously a model because it could fit data was a mistake, we pointed out; what matters is correct predictions. It isn’t easy to figure out the predictions of a model with many adjustable parameters; and the modelers in these cases never did. These models were accepted professionally for half a century; perhaps they still are.

It is possible that climate modelers have a different psychology than scientists in other areas — that the evidence for the consensus presented to outsiders is as strong as the scientists involved say it is — but it seems highly unlikely. For example, I doubt the climate models Kolbert places such faith in have been tested (their predictions, not just their fits, compared with reality).

There’s no doubt that carbon dioxide concentration and global temperature are correlated, but you may not know that carbon dioxide concentration lagged temperature for a long time. Because of this, I’m sure the temperature change caused the carbon-dioxide change. It isn’t mysterious; as water changes temperature, the amount of carbon dioxide it can dissolve changes. As water heats, carbon dioxide is released into the air.

This means that something powerful — not carbon dioxide — has been producing changes in global temperature so large they cause carbon dioxide to rise and fall in amounts as large as those we are now worried about. Until we know what this is there is no way to allow for it. To subtract it from observed carbon dioxide and temperature changes, see what remains, and try to draw conclusions from the residuals. And we don’t know what it is, no matter how closely this or that climate model fits data. (How closely they fit data depends on how many parameters they have, not merely how truthful they are. More adjustable parameters –> closer fit.) Until we know what it is, it is entirely possible that this force, not man-made emissions, is behind recent increases in global temperature and carbon dioxide. If man-made emissions are not causing the change in temperature, reducing them is unlikely to do much. (Sure, there are a hundred blog posts dismissing the inconvenient backward lag. I’ve been unable to find even one that addresses the point I’m making here.)

This is like what Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray failed to understand in The Bell Curve. They had a whole chapter on the Flynn Effect (the large increase in IQ over years) but they failed to grasp that until the Flynn Effect was correctly explained — until we knew what caused it — there was a big environmental contribution to IQ that they didn’t understand. Perhaps it was this powerful environmental factor that caused the between-race differences in IQ that they attributed to genes. They were unable to equate different races for this factor — to take its effect into account.

Herrnstein and Murray might have been smart enough to see the problem — but, in any case, they ignored it. Kolbert is smart enough to understand that the climate scientists she talks to have a vested interest in overstating their case — but, at least in her writing, she ignores this. If she stopped ignoring the vested-interest problem and tried to think for herself — to sort out for herself conflicting claims, to stop believing everything a mainstream thinker tells her — her job would be much harder. (It took Gary Taubes seven long years to write Good Calories Bad Calories.) Given Kolbert’s lack of scientific background (at The New Yorker she originally covered politics), perhaps her job would be impossible. Kolbert’s faith is not in science, as she pompously says, but in scientists.

FDA Hid Research Showing that Aspartame is Dangerous

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Here is a lot of information about this. The commercial name for aspartame is Nutrasweet. Because of worries about its neurotoxicity I switched to Splenda long ago. But if the FDA approval process is so deeply flawed they approved Nutrasweet, how safe is Splenda? In China, I’ve managed to pretty much avoid artificial sweeteners.

More Animal Fat, Better Sleep

Seth Roberts7 Comments

After I wrote about eating a lot of pork fat and sleeping better, David Shackelford commented that he had had a similar experience: After he started eating much more animal fat and meat, he too slept better. (He posted about this before he read my post.) I asked him for details. He answered:

About three weeks ago, I started a carnivorous diet. I did this primarily for its supposed benefit to insulin sensitivity, energy levels, and general health, and also because I wanted to see if it was really possible to thrive on nothing but meat.

Immediately after starting, I noticed that I was sleeping easier, longer, and deeper, and having more vivid dreams than usual. I’ve had a hard time falling asleep for my entire life, usually taking 45 minutes to two hours after going to bed, and occasionally not being able to sleep at all, so this was a very pleasant surprise.

At first I thought that this was due to standing on one foot, which I had started a few days prior, but I stopped one-foot-standing and the effect persisted. The all-meat diet has been pretty great all around-food is delicious, I’ve got a ton of energy, and I’m rarely hungry-but the sleep has been the best part.

Me
21 years old (senior in college)
130-ish lbs
5’4″
12-15% body fat
Moderately active, fairly good shape.

My diet
-Breakfast of 3-4 egg omelette, with 1-2 oz cheese and occasionally bacon.
-Lunch: chicken breast, sausage, or eggs.
-Dinner: 1lb+ steak.
-Snacks: nuts and/or cheese.

Approximate macronutrient composition
Before: 50% carbohydrate / 30% protein / 20% fat (at least half unsaturated olive oil)
After: 60-70% fat (all animal fat), 30-40% protein;10% carbohydrates (nuts and the occasional glass of wine, plus trace amounts in sauces and cheeses). Unsure of my caloric intake; I think it varies between 1500 and 2000 a day.

Other
-I cook chicken, beef, and eggs in butter.
-I drink coffee 1-2 times a day, and tea about once a day.
-I take a multivitamin (I don’t know why), 5,000 IU Vitamin D (I live in Oregon, which gets very little sunlight), and 2.5g fish oil (the grain-fed beef I eat has low 3:6 ratios; if I could afford grass-fed, I probably wouldn’t need the fish oil).
-I let the diet go on weekends, for the sake of social life. I probably have 3-5 drinks on Friday and Saturday night, as well as some junk food (pizza/chips/fries). I feel like I don’t sleep quite as well on these days, but there are so many confounding variables (alcohol, staying up later than usual, seeing faces later into the night, sex) that isolating a cause of the difference is tough.

Exercise
-I lift weights for about 30 minutes, twice a week.
-I go out social dancing for about four hours, once to twice a week.
-Sleep does not seem to vary with whether I exercise or not.

He blogs about this at meatsaur.us. His story is more evidence that the animal fat/sleep connection is cause and effect (animal fat –> better sleep), and suggests that the effect is not limited to me.

My self-experiment about this.