Author: Seth Roberts

The Story of Hyundai: A Lesson in Public Speaking

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Hyundai, rhymes with Sunday.

I loved this talk at MIT by John Krafcik, head of Hyundai’s American branch. It lasted an hour; I wished it was longer. It reminded me of Carl Willat‘s Trader Joe’s commercial: Full of emotion, in this case Krafcik’s pride in his company and what they’ve done. Toyota is the world’s number #1 car company; when a Toyota executive interviewed for a job at Hyundai, he told them that at Toyota, they are most afraid of Hyundai. So afraid that they bought five straight years of a certain Hyundai model, took them all apart, and studied how each system changed from year to year. (I used to compare New Yorker articles with their book versions, word by word, to see what the editors changed. John Updike compared two versions of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Conclusive Evidence and Speak, Memory, word by word. More recently I noticed that Zadie Smith’s On Beauty had significant differences between the audio and printed versions.)

Krafcik repeated an old Jay Leno joke: “How do you double the value of a Hyundai? Half-fill the gas tank.” So he had a great story to tell, the return from ignominy, but curiously he barely told it. Probably this was because he was working at Ford at the time. I have no great interest in cars, I’m not particularly interested in why one company does better than another, yet I was entranced. I came away thinking that most of what I’d heard about public speaking was wrong — most of the stuff in Made to Stick, for example. Sure, the advice to tell a story — and most speakers don’t even understand that — is right. Krafcik did tell a story. But that’s the easy part. I think everyone understands what a story is. The harder part is convey emotion. Carl Willat has said to me that in movies, that’s all that matters. Absolutely, and I think what’s he saying applies to talks as well. Of course an academic talk must have content. But the practical lesson for me is that when planning a talk I should pick something I care a lot about and in the talk do my best to convey how I feel. That’s all. Don’t worry about telling a joke, don’t worry about slick visuals, don’t try to impress them.
I plan to show Krafcik’s talk to graduate students (in psychology) because it makes a point I doubt they’ve heard: It’s fine if it’s other people’s work that you feel strongly about. Krafcik isn’t the head of Hyundai. He had nothing to do with their long comeback. But he’s proud of his company — and he conveyed that in spades, and that was enough. Suppose you do research on X. You’re giving a talk about it — perhaps a job talk. Maybe your research is mediocre. But you think research on X is incredibly important. Fine — just make that clear. Everyone in the audience will like you for being able to appreciate the work of others, that’s so rare. When you point them to other work that is great, you’re helping them. Suppose you’re teaching a class. Find the parts of the subject that you feel strongly about. Do your best to convey how strongly you feel. Better positive than negative but negative works. (Ask Nassim Taleb.) Avoid the parts you don’t feel strongly about.

In a sense all speaking (and all writing) is public speaking (unless we’re talking to ourselves, which is rare). The audience might be one person or a hundred people, it doesn’t matter, the principle is the same: We use the emotion in what we hear to judge how much attention we should pay to it. Zero emotion = zero attention. I once visited Alaska. While I was there I took a day trip to a glacier. Near the glacier was a building with a little slide show about the glacier, with a taped narration. It was all very dry — the glacier grows in winter, shrinks in summer, there are these animals nearby — but you could tell the speaker cared a lot about the glacier. I was terribly struck by that. How rare it is to hear someone talk about something they really care about, I thought. I’ve told that story dozens of times. But I didn’t manage to translate it into advice about how to give a talk.

A Perfect Storm of Airport Improvements

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I’m flying to Los Angeles today. Three new things — all of them new to me this flight — are making this trip distinctly more pleasant than earlier trips:

1. Southwest has special check-in if you’ve checked in online but have a bag to check. The line went very fast.

2. Crocs shoes. So easy to slip off and on at security.

3. Free Wi-Fi while waiting for flight.

I suppose after a while I’ll get used to this but right now it reminds me of how I felt the first few times I read the NY Times online.

Acne Self-Experimentation: Why It’s Promising

Seth Roberts10 Comments

This article reports that there was no acne whatsoever among the Kitava Islanders in Papua New Guinea and the Ache hunter-gatherers in Paraguay. Here is the abstract:

BACKGROUND: In westernized societies, acne vulgaris is a nearly universal skin disease afflicting 79% to 95% of the adolescent population. In men and women older than 25 years, 40% to 54% have some degree of facial acne, and clinical facial acne persists into middle age in 12% of women and 3% of men. Epidemiological evidence suggests that acne incidence rates are considerably lower in nonwesternized societies. Herein we report the prevalence of acne in 2 nonwesternized populations: the Kitavan Islanders of Papua New Guinea and the Aché hunter-gatherers of Paraguay. Additionally, we analyze how elements in nonwesternized environments may influence the development of acne. OBSERVATIONS: Of 1200 Kitavan subjects examined (including 300 aged 15-25 years), no case of acne (grade 1 with multiple comedones or grades 2-4) was observed. Of 115 Aché subjects examined (including 15 aged 15-25 years) over 843 days, no case of active acne (grades 1-4) was observed. CONCLUSIONS: The astonishing difference in acne incidence rates between nonwesternized and fully modernized societies cannot be solely attributed to genetic differences among populations but likely results from differing environmental factors. Identification of these factors may be useful in the treatment of acne in Western populations.

This implies that acne isn’t inevitable. It’s almost surely caused by something environmental — perhaps diet, perhaps something else (such as washing your face with soap). That’s why self-experimentation about acne is promising: By changing your environment in various ways, you may be able to figure out what’s causing your acne.

The Pashler-Roberts Law: Expense versus Honesty

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In this post Andrew Gelman comments on my recent post about acne self-experimentation. He makes an excellent point about drug-company studies:

How would you want to evaluate the risks and effectiveness of a new drug that was developed by a pharmaceutical company at the cost of millions of dollars? I’d be suspicious of an observational study: even if conducted by professionals, there just seem to be too many ways for things to be biased.

Right. And it’s not just observational studies. The data from any big study can be analyzed many ways. The more at stake, the greater the chance of what Andrew calls bias and I call making choices that favor the result you prefer. Independently of Andrew, Hal Pashler and I came up with what I call the Pashler-Roberts Law: The more expensive the research, the less likely the researchers will be honest about it.

You may remember that Robert Gallo, the AIDS researcher, did very expensive research. The deception (possibly self-deception) that accompanied very expensive fusion research is described in Charles Seife’s Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking (2008).

As Andrew says, this is a big virtue of self-experimentation. Because it’s free, it’s easy to be honest, especially about failure. The cheaper the better is a broad truth about science that’s hard to learn from books or classes or even talking to scientists.

One Woman’s Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts8 Comments

From the SLD forums:

It has been two years since I started [SLD], and I just couldn’t think about changing this simple, natural way of life that has given me such peace and freedom. I often think of a comedy skit I saw on t.v. some time ago where this guy was given a new electric sander as a gift, but kept using it without plugging it in.

To try to lose weight without SLD is like not plugging in an electric sander. Other weight-loss methods work; they’re just much harder, like a sander versus an electric sander.

In her sig file she describes her method and results:

48 years old, 5 feet 4 inches
March 7 160
May 8 119
May 9 116
1-2T OIL/day AND/OR N.CLIP 300-500 calories food.
CFF daily.
To sustain weight loss: Eat fewer calories; enjoy the food you eat; low G.I.; only highest quality.
Don’t assault your precious body with empty calories.

N.CLIP = noseclip. CFF = calorie-free flavor. See the SLD forums for more about them.

To lose 25% of your weight and go a year without regain is a huge accomplishment.

Scorpion Stings, Bee Stings, and the Umami Hypothesis

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Someone who lives in the southwestern US posted this on a helmenthic therapy forum:

One [scorpion keeper] reported how a pain in his leg from a motorcycle accident that had been with him for years spontaneously resolved after getting stung by some fairly nasty [scorpion] . . . . It’s fairly well-known that beekeepers don’t face the same risk from arthritis as the general public.

I haven’t managed to find support for this “fairly well-known” idea. But it’s quite plausible because bee stings are used to treat arthritis and multiple sclerosis. In this video, an Indonesian therapist says that 85 out of 100 sufferers are “cured” by the treatment.

“A therapy most of us would find taboo,” says the narrator of this video. I wonder. Here’s what Wikipedia says:

There is no known cure for [multiple sclerosis]. . . MS medications can have adverse effects or be poorly tolerated, and many patients pursue alternative treatments, despite the lack of supporting scientific study.

Multiple sclerosis and some forms of arthritis are autoimmune disorders. My “ umami hypothesis” says that autoimmune disorders and other immune disorders, such as allergies, are deficiency diseases. They are caused by not enough immune-system stimulation — stimulation that long ago we got from bacteria-laden food. This suggests a new interpretation of what’s going on with bee-sting therapy. Their healing properties have been attributed, at least in these videos, to special properties of the venom. The umami hypothesis suggests that the foreign proteins in venom calm the immune system and that quite different foreign substances would do just as well. I don’t know of anyone treating arthritis or MS with fermented food — but before the Shangri-La Diet, I didn’t know of anyone drinking sugar water to lose weight. The fact that such hugely different agents as hookworms, bee stings, and fermented foods have similar effects is considerable support for the hypothesis. Without the hypothesis, no one would have grouped them together.

Now I wonder about acupuncture: Could it work, at least some of the time, because it injects foreign substances? Surely acupuncture needles put plenty of bacteria into the body. This line of thought explains why stabbing a knee with a scapel apparently helps arthritis (and involves a lot less hand-waving than calling that result a placebo effect). Keep in mind that this is the hallmark of deficiency diseases: They get a lot better, almost miraculously and without side effects, if you supply even a little of what’s missing. The cure rate can be very high.

Ray Bradbury is Unclear on the Concept

Seth Roberts8 Comments

I completely agree with Ray Bradbury about libraries:

“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury said. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

Here’s what he says about a similar source of free knowledge:

“The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked . . . “Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ’To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

When I was in college (at Caltech), I didn’t find classes or books very helpful. I liked reading old New Yorker articles. Which then I got from the library but now I’d get online.

Wise Government: San Francisco Subsidizes Solar Power

Seth Roberts12 Comments

People in power, by and large, are terrible problem-solvers. They like the status quo — it brought them where they are. They have a hard time seeing the benefits of change. The bigger the change, the less they like it. Thus self-experimentation, a new way of solving health problems, offends med school professors.

But sometimes people in power make a wise choice — possibly by accident. An example is how the City of San Francisco is encouraging solar power. They are giving huge subsidies to homeowners and renters who install electric power. The program is about a year old. If your income is low, the subsidy is so large that your power becomes almost free. This is a use of government money that encourages change and new solutions. It will help the local solar power industry grow. It might create a solar power hub near San Francisco the way defense department subsidies helped create Silicon Valley.

Why is this happening? Because the responsible department in San Francisco government gets $100 million/year by selling electricity from hydropower. (Which they don’t like to talk about, for obvious reasons.) The money can’t be transferred to other departments; it has to be spent in energy-related ways. On its face, the restriction seems cruel — why not use the money to help social services? But more money for social services is unlikely to improve the local economy. Whereas this use of the money helps poor people and the local economy. It does so in the basic way Jane Jacobs recommends: It empowers those who benefit from change — in this case, the solar power industry.