Author: Seth Roberts

Tsinghua Curiosities: First Day of Class

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I am teaching a seminar-like class called something like New Topics in Psychology. Most of the students are freshmen because this is the first year the psychology department has accepted undergraduates. Some unusual things happened on the first day of class:

  • A graduate student volunteered to be a teaching assistant. (She was the second person to do so. A grad student in automation had volunteered a week earlier.)
  • A freshman had her picture taken with me.
  • I mentioned Caltech, where I was a freshman. Someone asked if Randy Pausch was a Caltech professor. (He was at Carnegie-Mellon.)
  • The students did brief introductions. Many students appeared to think that one student’s Chinese name was humorous. This was briefly explained to me but I still have trouble believing it. Maybe I misunderstood.
  • There was uncertainty about the length of the class. It lasted only the first two-thirds of a longer period. (The basic unit is 45 minutes class plus 5 minutes break.)
  • The students were seated in the usual rectangular way. Moving from front row to back row, the students’ English appeared to get worse.
  • The (first) teaching assistant advised them to not say “My English is not good” but to say “My English is on the way”.

NYU Begins to Look Very Bad

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Nine months ago, the New York Times reported that Lila Nachtigall, a New York University professor of obstetrics and gynecology, put her name on an article ghost-written for her by a drug company. The article, when published, failed to disclose the ghost-writing. In response, New York University officials have done nothing, as far as I can tell.

In response to the same fact about one of their professors, McGill University opened an investigation. The same document that revealed what Nachtigall had done showed that Barbara Sherwin, a professor of psychology, obstetrics and gynecology, had done the same thing. Supporting my idea that medical school professors have different ethical standards than the rest of us, an article about the McGill case by Montreal Gazette reporter Peggy Curran used the word plagiarism. One comment was “plagiarism, pure and simple.” Does NYU president John Sexton find plagiarism completely acceptable? Apparently.

Thanks to Anne Weiss

Advances in Nose-Clipping: A New Use For Pantyhose

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In the Shangri-La Diet forums, Maychi has posted about a new way of nose-clipping (eliminating the smell of food) that is socially-acceptable: Putting tiny pieces of pantyhose in your nose. They are invisible. Her husband and son wouldn’t eat with when she wore noseclips.

I started this on 1st August. After about five days I got AS [appetite suppression] I had never managed to achieve with sugar or oil or anything else.

She eats about 95% of her calories this way. It doesn’t entirely block smells but perhaps it changes them enough so that they aren’t recognized or are less recognized. Maychi started losing weight and so did someone else who tried it.

One little problem: You have to be careful what you say.

It’s not possible to produce certain sounds. So in order to not sound like you have a horribly blocked nose, you have to say “delicious!” instead of “yummm!” and and “super!” instead of “Nice!”

The Financial Crisis and Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts5 Comments

They are closely related. I’ve been reading James Stewart’s excellent blow-by-blow of the early days of the crisis. As Nassim Taleb has emphasized, the crisis happened because the people running the financial system didn’t understand how it works. They vastly overrated their understanding — their ability to predict. (As Taleb has also emphasized, they still fail to grasp their ignorance.)

Surely it isn’t just the financial system. Surely we don’t overrate our knowledge just here. Much more likely, we overrate our knowledge about everything. This creates a great opportunity. It goes like this: 1. We overrate our knowledge about a large thing (the financial system). 2. We probably overrate our knowledge about everything. 3. We probably overrate our knowledge about small things. 4. There is more to be learned from studying small things than we realize. 5. Small things can be studied experimentally — an especially effective learning method.
Self-experimentation is an example of studying small things experimentally. These experiments taught me far more than I ever expected. Because I knew less than I thought. (Without realizing this fact.) Here are three examples:

1. Acne. I discovered that my beliefs about the two medicines my dermatologist has prescribed were exactly wrong. The one I thought worked, didn’t work; the one I thought didn’t work, did work.

2. Sleep. My self-experimentation led to new ideas about the control of sleep that no one had thought of. I didn’t know experimentation could do that so often. (I thought that such discoveries were very rare.)

3. Mood. My conclusions about mood are really different than what researchers usually say. I never expected to learn anything so radical.

These examples cover three dimensions. In the acne example, I learned I was completely wrong very quickly — that’s speed of learning. The sleep example is about number of discoveries; the mood example is about the “size” of one discovery.

How to Talk to Strangers

Seth Roberts3 Comments

A friend asked me how to strike up conversations with strangers. I told her what I’ve said many times. Three things make it easier:

1. Recognition. If you recognize someone (and presumably they recognize you) it will be easier to start a conversation.

2. Real question. If you have a real question — a question to which you really want the answer — it will be easier to start a conversation.

3. Shared suffering. If the two of you (you and the person you wish to speak to) have suffered together — bad weather, stuck in a long line — it will be easier to start a conversation. Living in Beijing and not speaking Chinese is another example of what I mean by “suffering”; another name for this factor could be shared predicament.

Those are the main factors that matter. In everyday life, they vary a lot. Another factor is minor:

4. Forced proximity. If you are forced to be near each other — in an elevator, say — it will be easier to start a conversation.

If none of these factors are true, it will be very hard to start a conversation. If one is true, it will be somewhat hard. If two are true it will be easy. If three are true it will be inevitable.

In my experience, local culture makes a small difference, somewhere between zero to one on this scale. Most places are zero. A place where people are really friendly would be worth one.

What Causes Hypothyroidism?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In an earlier post I wrote, “Hypothyroidism is so common I suspect an environmental cause.” In fact, I suspect that all common diseases are caused (= made much more likely by) differences between modern life and Stone-Age life. Since then, thanks to comments and email, I have learned more about hypothyroidism. According to Dennis Mangan, it has become a lot more common during the last 100 years, which implies an environmental cause. The most common type of hypothroidism is called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. It is an autoimmune disorder where the immune system attacks the thyroid, damaging it. A reader with hypothyroidism wrote me:

When I was first tested for thyroid levels, part of the test (which I think is standard protocol) was to test the level of antibodies to thyroid. My levels were off the charts.

This supports what I said. I’m sure that autoimmune diseases are caused by one particular difference from Stone Age life: lack of bacteria in our food. The immune stimulation the harmless bacteria provided can be provided in other ways — bee stings, for example. But I don’t think Stone-Age people got a lot more bee stings than we do.

The Ethical Stupidity of Med School Professors: Plagiarism Very Very Bad, Ghostwriting Okay

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Do medical school professors live in a different ethical world than the rest of us? Apparently. A friend of mine just entered grad school at Tsinghua. She was required to attend four different lectures about how academic dishonesty is wrong. (The last one, she said, was good; the speaker told a lot of stories.) China has a huge plagiarism problem, sure, but at least they say that plagiarism is wrong.

Whereas medical school professors haven’t managed to grasp that ghostwriting is plagiarism (taking someone’s words and ideas as yours without acknowledgment). And it happens all the time. NYU med school Professor Lila Nachtigall, as I’ve noted, considered the deed so minor she forgot that she’d done it. Apparently using a different word confuses them. A recent article in Nature reveals the befuddlement of the entire medical establishment about this. We’re not sure what to do about it, journal editors say. As Tony Soprano’s mom would say: Poor you.

What’s so nauseating about this is that ghostwriting is certainly worse than the garden-variety plagiarism that American undergraduates and the odd Harvard professor engage in. (And at least they are embarrassed, unlike Nachtigall, when caught.) Garden-variety plagiarism is merely self-serving; you save time, get a higher grade. Whereas drug-company ghostwriting makes drugs appear better than they are. Which harms millions of sick people.

Although American universities publicly condemn plagiarism and other types of cheating, in practice they allow them. (Believe me, I know. When I tried to stop cheating in my Intro Psych class at Berkeley, the chairman of my department told me, “We’re not in that business.”) And the student cheaters — having been told by university blind-eye-turning that cheating is okay — grow up to be med school professors who do horrible things routinely. That’s my theory.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

How Dangerous Are Cell Phones?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

A new report has come out that says that cell phones probably do cause cancer, as several people, such as David Servan-Schreiber, have argued. But the news is not all bad:

The design of the study is fundamentally flawed, as well-documented by “Cell Phones and Brain Tumor.” For example, users of cordless phones only were treated as unexposed. But, two independent studies found users of cordless phones had an increased risk of brain tumors. So, excluding such users underestimates the risk of brain tumors. This flaw suggests either ignorance or dishonesty on the part of the researchers running the Interphone Study. Then, there’s the suspicious finding from some parts of the Interphone Study which concluded the use of a cell phone for less than ten years lowers your risk of brain tumors. This suggests the bias was so strong it eliminated enough tumor risk to show decreased incidence. The Interphone studies did find more brain tumor risk after more than ten years of cell phone use. The report notes that the risk was so great it could not be camouflaged even by the bias of the study.

Emphasis added. The person who wrote that hasn’t heard of hormesis.

Beijing Wal-Mart

Seth Roberts21 Comments

To buy a refrigerator, a friend suggested I try a store called Vollna, to which I found references online. When I got to the right subway station, however, no one had heard of it. She’d meant Wal-Mart. The Beijing Wal-Mart has many interesting features:

  1. They sell live turtles.
  2. A whole display case is devoted to sea cucumbers.
  3. Like any upscale American or Beijing supermarket, they have a sushi case. The prices are half what they’d be in America, but the pieces of fish are much thinner.
  4. They cut up meat in front of you. A whole pig was being butchered on a table. A roast duck was being sliced for packaging.
  5. They had pairs of escalators (actually sloped moving walkways) going in the same direction. For heavy traffic, I guess. I’ve never seen such a thing anywhere else.
  6. It’s extremely convenient, right next to a subway station. In America, as all Americans know, Wal-Marts are almost never convenient. Which is why I’ve been to an American Wal-Mart only twice, in spite of the large selection and low prices.
  7. The refrigerators were hidden behind large stacks of what looked like flour.
  8. After I bought a blood pressure monitor, the salesperson added batteries and showed me how to use it. Such product verification/education has happened before to me in Beijing, never in America.
  9. A staggering number of food samples. Maybe a hundred. Other Beijing supermarkets are like big-city American supermarkets; some have samples, some don’t. This was a full-court press. Every possible sample. The roast duck was the best, the yellow kiwi (sweeter than green kiwi) the most unusual. I got tired of sampling and stopped. I can’t remember that happening before.
  10. The prices were ordinary Chinese prices. Not unusually low. To bring flaxseed oil to China I’d bought a very large duffel bag from Land’s End, so large I had to drag it. (Which ruined it.) It cost $70 plus shipping. Wal-Mart had a more reasonably-sized large duffel bag, better-made and with wheels for $20. Ugh. It was the wheels, not available at Land’s End, rather than the $50 difference, that pissed me off. My too-heavy duffel bag was a pain in the butt because I had to drag it (at the same time carrying other luggage). This made me never want to shop in America again for anything I could get in China.
  11. Cigarettes are in a special booth off to the side. About 200 choices.

They can’t compete on price in China, of course. So my guess is that they are trying to compete on selection, convenience, and customer service (thus all the sampling). That you can return stuff was very clear.