Author: Seth Roberts

Edward Jay Epstein

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Edward Jay Epstein, who was a media critic for The New Yorker in the 1970s, is a great journalist. For example, Diamonds aren’t forever? and Did Madoff act alone? Here’s something he said about the Warren Commission (to look into the assassination of JFK):

Part of the job of the Warren Commission was restoring confidence in the American government. And for this he had to pick seven very respectable men, men who would lend their name and probity to the report. The problem was, any seven men he picked of this sort, they would have very little time for the investigation.

Much later, still fresh. His personal website is the best personal website I’ve encountered. The financial crisis has given him a lot to write about. He has a new book on the movie industry (The Hollywood Economist) coming out next year.

A Complaint About College

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Kent Pitman argues that college is overpriced. Perhaps the way out — freedom from needing to go to college to get a decent job — will look like this:

1. American colleges adopt gap years. (I proposed this to the Chancellor of UC Berkeley. My suggestion was brushed aside — impractical, I was told.)

2. A larger and larger fraction of students realize that they can profitably continue to do what they do during the gap year. So they don’t go to college.

3. Given a substantial number in both categories, businesses notice that students who haven’t gone to college (who have, equating for age, more useful skills) do better than those that have. I’ve heard complaints about Ivy League graduates not knowing basic stuff.

4. With less demand for college, there is less demand for college teachers. This causes research universities to shrink because, with less use for a Ph.D, they won’t be able to attract as many graduate students. Harvard is out in front here.

Just as the Pentagon is a tax on women (because the military is almost all men), so are colleges a tax on everyone who isn’t a professor. (It’s an arms race because if your competitor for a job has gone to college, so must you.) As the American economy implodes — in In The Jaws of the Dragon, Eamonn Fingleton says the rate of American decline has no historical precedent — non-professors and non-professors-to-be will become less willing to pay this tax.

Gamesinwelt.com Scam

Seth Roberts84 Comments

I finally decided to get a Wii Dance Dance Revolution. This required getting a Wii, and gamesinwelt.com had the lowest prices. Curiously they shipped from China, where Wii’s are not for sale. I searched for “gamesinwelt.com complaints” and “gamesinwelt.com sucks” and found nothing. Okay, I thought. As it turned out my credit-card payment did not go through so I haven’t lost any money but here is what should have made me suspicious:

1. The site didn’t work very well. One of the error messages I kept getting made no sense.

2. It didn’t take direct credit card payments. The credit-card payments were made through Paypal.

3. Delivery was not only free, it was really fast — 2-5 days.

4. The site listed FedEx as a delivery choice in one place but not on the home page.

5. Although there were about 9,000 Google hits for gamesinwelt.com, when I went to the pages the ads weren’t there. They were brief ads. And only ads.

When I searched “gamesinwelt.com scam” — after the purchase — I did find useful information that confirmed my fears. One persuasive point was that the site was registered only a week ago. This is why there was so little negative information available. Foolish me.

More “My credit-card payment did not go through” — that’s what I was told when I called Paypay. But then I got an email saying it had gone through. Ugh! So I called Paypal again and complained. And was told I needed to call back in a week when I hadn’t gotten the stuff. Then I waited a week and called Paypal for the third time. And then I was told a dispute had already been filed and — when it was resolved in my favor — I would get an email saying the money had been refunded. So I had to call Paypal three times (so far) to deal with this and one of those times was given wrong information.

The story continues.

Andrew Gelman on Writing

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Andrew gives excellent advice about how to write a scientific paper. This is his best point:

Consider Table 2. Do you want the reader to know that in line 3, Min Obs is 894? I doubt it. If so, you should make a case for this. If not, don’t put it down. When an article is filled with numbers and words that you neither expect or want people to read, this distracts them from the content.

In other words, most tables should be figures or omitted. I would add a broader point: Don’t try to impress anyone. It gets in the way of helping them — helping them understand what you’re saying. (The classic example is B. F. Skinner, apparently insecure Harvard professor, calling one of his books The Behavior of Organisms instead of The Behavior of Animals. The book said nothing about plants.) Many tables seem more meant to impress than communicate but it isn’t just tables. That section at the end where epidemiologists talk about the “limitations” of their study: The content is so predictable, so fact-free and unhelpful that I think they are just trying to impress readers with how careful they are. So I would add to Andrew’s advice: Don’t tell people what they already know.

I also like his list of content-less words, such as very and nice. Allen Neuringer told me you should never use very and I was impressed.

Alex Tabarrok’s comments.

The Blue Sweater

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When Jacqueline Novogratz was a young girl, she had a favorite blue sweater. She continued to wear it after it became too small. One day a boy made fun of her for wearing it (“We can ski Mount Novogratz”). The next day she gave it away. A decade later, in Africa, she saw it being worn by a skinny young boy. Thus the title of her new book about trying to make the world, especially Africa, a better place: The Blue Sweater.

In contrast to so many books, usually by men, about helping others, which tend to be about how right the author is/was, this book stresses how wrong she was. An example is a job interview.

“Tell me why you want to be a banker,” he suggested. . . .

“I don’t want to be a banker,” I said. “I want to change the world. I’m hoping to take the next year off but my parents asked me to go through the interview process. I’m so sorry.”

“Well,” he said with a grin, shaking his head. “That’s too bad. Because if you got this job, you would be traveling to 40 countries in the next 3 years and learning a lot not only about banking, but the entire world.”

I gulped. “Is that really true?” I asked, my face completely red. “You know, part of my dream is to travel and learn about the world.”

“It is really true,” he sighed.

“Then do you think we might start this interview all over again?” I asked.

She got the job. It’s easy to see why. And stories like that made me want to read the book

Does Bad Medicine Drive Out Good? The Case of Eczema

Seth Roberts6 Comments

In an article on weight regulation I read this:

One subject . . . developed symptoms possible related to EFA [essential fatty acid] deficiency (ie, mild eczema relieved by the addition of fat to the diet).

In other words, the subject — in a metabolic ward at Rockefeller University where everything he ate was supplied by the researchers — developed eczema when fed a zero-fat diet. When fat was added, the eczema disappeared. The researchers understood that not enough fat in your food can cause eczema. This research was done around 1960. The conclusion is supported by dozens of reports from people doing the Shangri-La Diet who said that when they started drinking oil their skin improved. Dry areas disappeared. I found the same thing myself. (And judging by the large fraction of people who have dry skin, a lot of people aren’t eating enough fat.)

The notion that eczema can be cured by eating more fat — perhaps high in omega-3 — could hardly be simpler. Around 1960, at least some doctors understood this (in a situation, I admit, where it was easy to understand). Yet here is how eczema is treated today, according to Bottom Line/Women’s Health (April 2009, p. 9):

Eczema (dry, itchy, swollen skin) usually is treated with topical anti-inflammatory cream twice daily during flare-ups. Patients who applied tacrolimus (Protopic) twice weekly to lesion-prone areas even when no lesions were visible went 142 days between flare-ups, on average . . . versus 15 days for placebo users. Tacrolimus can cause nausea and muscle pain and may increase skin cancer risk — ask your doctor about the pros and cons of preventative eczema treatment.

The information comes from a study done by Sakari Reitamo, a professor of dermatology at University of Helsinki, and others published recently in Allergy.

The surface things — the things that impress many readers — appear good: large sample, big difference between groups, peer-reviewed journal, good university. Yet once you know that eczema can be cured by eating more fat, the whole thing sounds Orwellian.

The Mother of an Autistic Child Writes…

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Lisa Belkin, who blogs about parenting for the NY Times, prints an excellent letter from the mother of an autistic child about what it is like:

“Crying.” The study talks of the crying. [The mom wrote to Belkin to complain that a study Belkin described sugar-coated things.] The word pales in the face of our son’s dissolutions into tears. These days, if he hears a simple “no” or learns of some change in plans, he might launch into a 10-minute jag, where he argues fiercely with us in between the sobs. Then he can quickly escalate to ear-piercing screams lasting another 15 minutes or more. It’s a wonder none of our neighbors have misconstrued what they might have heard and called 911. The shrieking does subside, back into sobs, and that part is somehow harder to watch, reminding me how terrifying it must be to feel to be that out of control, especially when you’re a small, anxious child.

No good deed goes uncriticized. An autistic adult named Sarah writes to Belkin to complain:

Please, consider that autistic people read blogs and have feelings as well. Your blog entry claims to show “the unvarnished reality of autism,” but the feelings and perceptions of actual autistic people are sadly missing from your account.

What an idea: that no blogger should write something that might hurt the feelings of someone with autism. As for the “sadly missing,” the passage I quoted from the mom describes the “feelings and perceptions” of an autistic person at length. Sarah blogs here.

Autism and Digestive Problems

Seth Roberts6 Comments

The latest issue of Pediatrics has a study that asks whether autism is associated with digestive problems. The authors compared the medical records of about 100 autistics with about 200 matched controls. The controls came from an area in Minnesota, near the Mayo Clinic, in which almost everyone has a health record on file that the researchers could look at. So the controls are a good sample of the non-autistic population.

The New York Times described the results like this:

The scientists found no differences [should be difference, singular] in the overall frequency of gastrointestinal problems reported by the two groups.

This isn’t quite right. The study found that the proportions of persons in each group to have had at least one digestive problem by age 20 weren’t reliably different. For the autistic kids, the proportion was 77%; for the controls, 72%.

The study design seems fine but the data analysis has a lot of room for improvement. You have an idea you want to test, good; try to test it with one test. The authors boiled down all their data into “at least one problem by age 20″ — that’s just what epidemiologists are told to do — but this was a poor choice. First, there is a ceiling problem. If both groups had percentages in the 90′s, this would be obvious. Better to avoid the ceiling problem. Second. to combine different symptoms with the “at least one” rule is likely to be less sensitive to differences than a combination rule that takes amount into account. The analysis in the article treats someone with 1 problem as equal to someone with 50 problems. No justification is given. Third, it isn’t obvious that it makes sense to combine symptoms this way. What if Symptom 1 and Symptom 2 are uncorrelated? In other words, what if whether you have Symptom 1 doesn’t affect your chances of having Symptom 2? Then to combine them (as the authors do) makes no sense. Factor analysis is how you condense several correlated measures into a few uncorrelated measures.

The study separated digestive problems into five categories (constipation, diarrhea, and three others). In each of the five categories, persons in the autistic group were more likely to report the problem than persons in the control group; in four of the five categories, the difference was significant (with one-tailed p values; the authors misleadingly use two-tailed p values — without making that clear). In one of the five categories the difference isn’t anywhere close to significant — which supports the idea that that there are at least two dimensions here: one on which the two groups differ, and one on which they don’t.

In the discussion, the authors, not realizing that four out of five of their problem categories differed significantly in the predicted direction, try to explain away the two differences that were significant with two-tailed p values: in constipation and picky eating. They note that autistic children get more medication that normal children. “Many children with autism are treated with resperidone, and this may result in increased appetite and weight gain,” they write. Why a drug that causes weight gain would cause picky eating isn’t explained and, without explanation, doesn’t make sense. Weight gain — they mean too much weight gain — involves eating too much; picky eating involves eating too little. Nor do the authors explain why their results differed from many previous studies. My take on the paper is that their results confirm previous studies, so that would have been interesting to read.

What I’m Looking Forward to Reading

Seth Roberts4 Comments

In September, David Owen, a staff writer at The New Yorker, will publish Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability. Or at least that’s what the print says; the picture has a different subtitle. The book expands on this New Yorker article. Owen criticizes Michael Pollan and Amory Lovins, among others. Maybe this is an example of the insider/outsider advantage I’ve blogged about. Owen is not the New Yorker‘s environmental reporter; that would be Elizabeth Kolbert. So he can say anything, criticize anybody, without worrying about his ability to write more on the same subject. He can always go back to golf. Kolbert is not so free. In any case, Owen’s book sounds better — less predictable — than Kolbert’s book on a similar subject.
A TV show on the subject. Owen on bridge.