Author: Seth Roberts

Practical Philosophy and American Idol

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You’ve probably heard of the unexpected hanging paradox in which a man is ordered to be hanged during a certain week but must not know in advance the day of his hanging. The last possible day is Saturday. He must be hanged before Saturday because if he’s not hanged by then he will know that he is going to be hanged on Saturday. By the same logic he can’t be hanged on Friday . . . and so on. Yet he is hung on Wednesday.

American Idol producers have a similar problem during recent eliminations: There must be suspense. From six guys and six girls one guy, one girl, and one runner-up will be selected. This week, the first person selected, out of two girls and a guy, was a girl. This meant that at the next step — one person chosen from one girl and one guy — the guy would be selected because if the girl was selected, the remaining girls would have no chance. Making the remaining portion of the program much less interesting. As an EW.com commenter put it:

There was no suspense in the Kris Allen/Megan Corkey stand-off last nite. Allison had already gone through & if Megan had it would automatically eliminate the rest of the females. Wasn’t going to happen halfway through the show. That’s what they call a ‘gimme’.

The Wikipedia article on the paradox gives no practical applications.

“I Started Eating More Fermented Food…”

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Tucker Max, who got great results from flaxseed oil, wondered what would happen if he ate more fermented food. He emailed me:

I have been reading your posts about bacteria in food, so I decided to try it on my own. I HATE Roquefort and other stinky cheeses, and I am not about to eat fermented meat, so the best thing I could find in Whole Foods was Kombucha tea. It is basically normal tea, with bacteria cultures growing in it. Sounds weird I know, but it actually tastes pretty good, especially the ones with natural fruit juices added. It has a sparkly, almost champagne-like taste feel in your mouth. It takes a little getting used to, but I really like it now. I like GT’s brand the best, but I think there are others.

Anyway, after a week of drinking two bottles a day, I have noticed
these changes:

  1. My stool is…well, better. In every way. More regular, more solid, and something else very unusual–I only have to wipe once. For most of my life, I have to wipe twice, or sometimes three times, which I assumed was normal. But this week, the stool comes out and leaves virtually nothing behind. At least nothing that is showing up on the toilet paper. I am not sure what this means as I am not a poop expert, but I think it means my stool is “healthier” for lack of a better word.
  2. I have more energy. Aside from subjectively feeling it, I can see the difference in my workout logs, just in this past week I’ve gone up more weight on exercises than I normally do.
  3. I am feeling overall better. This could very well be placebo effect/confirmation bias as it is a very subjective measurement, but I just feel better. I feel generally healthier, if that makes sense.
  4. But, I am having trouble sleeping. I feel like I am getting less sleep, not much, maybe 30 minutes less. I don’t know if this is due to increased energy because it might be anxiety –we are about to sell my movie, and it’s an anxious time in my life, so the cause may have nothing to do with the tea.

Right now, I think kombucha tea greatly improves my health and I am
going to keep taking it to see if there are anymore changes or if this
persists. This stuff I buy is not cheap, like $4 a bottle [$3/bottle in one Berkeley store], but I am going to keep drinking at least two a day, I like it that much. Plus, once you get used to the taste and texture, it’s really delicious.

The brand he bought is GT’S. I’ll comment on this in a later post — but I’ll say now that eating much more fermented food didn’t have any noticeable effect on my sleep.

Interview with Leonard Mlodinow (part 14)

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MLODINOW As I start talking about events in the world around us and looking at the psychological components–and I dealt with that, I greatly expanded that part–they were fascinating studies and I was just so interested I just kept putting more and more into the book.

ROBERTS Yes, that’s when you decided to ask me for help. “Oh, I wasn’t planning on this.” How did you learn about the lottery winner who won twice–the Canadian?

MLODINOW It was in a book somewhere, an academic book. A lot of those interesting stories came from academic papers or books.

ROBERTS That’s interesting.

MLODINOW Sometimes I’ll find something in the newspaper that was really interesting and I would track it down but a lot of it was in academic research. I don’t know why they found it.

ROBERTS Yes, who knows where they got it, but that’s where you got it. How did you learn about the Girl Named Florida stuff? Some professor told you?

MLODINOW My friend Mark Hillery that I mentioned from Berkeley.

ROBERTS A physics professor.

MLODINOW He heard it somewhere… It wasn’t quite this problem but then I kind of tweaked it and made it the Girl Named Florida Problem. That’s a great problem for the book.

ROBERTS Yes, I loved that. So he got it from some physicist . . .

MLODINOW I’m not sure; probably. I took a few days to figure out how to make it into this problem; I don’t remember exactly the problem he told me but I tweaked it into this problem. Just to show you how much work goes into the book, I even spent a whole afternoon deciding on the name Florida. I went back into the records–I needed a rare name–and I looked up different names and tried to find one that would be colorful, interesting, but that was rarely used, and I wanted to know the percentage that it was used; I dug up percentages of names. Everything in the book . . . if you read it, it might just sound like, ’Oh, you know’ . . .

Not a thing is just tossed out there. Or very little; there’s an amazing amount of thought and work that goes behind every little detail.

ROBERTS That’s a very memorable detail I must say. I like it better than the Monty Hall Problem.

MLODINOW I do, too. I think it’s interesting; I found in the reactions to the book that the Monty Hall Problem has gotten more press and in some ways more reactions, which I found interesting given that it has been talked about before and this problem was completely new. I think this problem is in some ways even more striking than the Monty Hall Problem, more counterintuitive and more difficult to believe and certainly closer to something you might actually encounter. And yet I’ve gotten a lot more response based on the Monty Hall Problem and a few places have said that I gave the best explanation they’ve seen. I think the New York Times review said that, too. The New York Times did mention the Girl Named Florida Problem and said that they still find it hard to believe even though they followed the explanation.

ROBERTS I thought your explanation of the Girl Named Florida problem was very clear.

Interview directory.

A Yogurt Experiment: Effect of Preheating

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All yogurt recipes I’ve seen say you should preheat the milk before adding starter (= yogurt with live culture). Reasons vary. Some say it denatures the milk protein; others say it kills bacteria that might compete with the starter bacteria.

It was easy to measure the effect of preheating. I make yogurt using about a gallon of milk at a time, divided into four trays. I preheated two trays for 20 minutes and did not preheat the other two, leaving them at room temperature. After that I treated all four trays the same.

The photo above shows the results after incubation for 36 hours. The clumpy yogurt was preheated, the smooth yogurt was not. There was not a vast difference in taste. For most purposes clumpy is better so I will preheat in the future.

I was impressed that the experiment was fast, easy, safe, cheap, and conclusive, showing a large and lasting effect of a 20-minute treatment that had no visible effect. After the heated milk cooled, it looked the same as the unheated milk.

The value of homemade yogurt.

Good Advice From Tim Hartford

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In case you are not a long-time reader, I will repeat my advice as to how to enjoy the thrill of the lottery without the fool’s bet. Choose your numbers, but don’t buy a ticket. You’ll win almost every week — the fear that your number might actually come up is an adrenaline rush to beat them all.

From his Undercover Economist advice column. Another example of the same thing: If (first) I buy and use Product A and then (second) see a commercial for Product A it makes me happy. Whereas the conventional order — (first) see a commercial for Product A) and then (second) buy and use Product A — is generally disappointing, just like the lottery.

Both Hartford’s example and mine are cases where what we are told (implicitly) is exactly wrong. Does buying a lottery ticket make you happy? No, not buying one will make you happy.

In Hartford’s example and mine it is the average consumer who is gullible and makes the whole thing work — without people who play the lottery, you couldn’t take Hartford’s advice. Scientists are no less gullible. Self-experimentation, like Hartford’s advice, takes advantage of that gullibility. Because scientists essentially play the lottery in their research — devote considerable resources (their careers) to looking for discoveries in one specific way (scientists are hemmed in by many rules, which also slow them down) — this leaves a great deal to be discovered by research that doesn’t cost a lot and can be done quickly. All of my interesting self-experimental discoveries have involved treatments that conventional scientists couldn’t study because their research has to be expensive. Could a conventional scientist study the effect of seeing faces in the morning? No, because you couldn’t get funding. And all research must require funding. (Research without funding is low status.) In practice, this means you can’t take risks and you can’t do very much. Like the lottery, this is a poor bet.

Waltz With Bashir

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I loved Waltz With Bashir, Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, and was surprised to realize that Ari Folman, its director . . . I had met. In San Francisco, about four years ago, there was a conference for documentary filmmakers trying to get distribution of their film. I went with a friend of mine. I happened to meet Sarah Kapoor there; we both watched an hour of a five-hour series about love (The Material that Love is Made Of). I was blown away. A brilliant hour of TV. The particular hour we saw was about a 10-year-old boy in love with a girl. Each hour was about a different situation. Afterwards I met the filmmaker (Folman). Brilliant, I said. He said it got really dark. Later he was giving away DVDs of the series but somehow I missed getting one. I tried to contact him by email but his in-box was full.

I hope that the success of Waltz will renew interest in that old series. I would love to see the rest of it.

Shangri-La Diet Quote of the Day

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From the I Hate My Message Board forums:

I honestly couldn’t care less if it makes sense or not. The book is a good read [thanks!] and the science behind it seems sound. But, honestly, none of that matters to me. Whatever the reason, this plan works. Period. If it turned out that extra-light olive oil was made out of ground up kitty cats, I’d still follow the plan. If I wasn’t losing weight, I’d STILL do it, just because of the enormous positive impact it’s had on my life. I was addicted to food. Now I’m not. It’s extraordinary.

Interview with Leonard Mlodinow (part 13)

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ROBERTS Did the psychology stuff grow and grow? Did you add more and more than you expected?

MLODINOW Yes. As I was putting a lot of it in the end I would find other studies that really belonged earlier that I would discover, so I would go back and rewrite the earlier parts to incorporate those studies; that became a very fun part of the book, though. That was maybe the most fun, all the psychology studies that I dug out at the end.

ROBERTS How did it happen? You knew that you wanted to include some psychology and then it turned out to be more interesting than you expected?

MLODINOW In the second half of the book when I was talking more and more about viewing life as a random process that we’re going through and applying the concepts of randomness to what we’re seeing in life, I would just naturally come upon these psychology studies.

ROBERTS What fraction of the psychology you read was in the book? I was impressed that you talked about psychology studies that were really good, whereas most of them aren’t. You did a good job of selection and from teaching I know that you have to read a lot of stuff that isn’t good in order to find the good stuff.

MLODINOW What you see in the book is probably a quarter of the stuff that I read or that I thought of putting in the book. In the psychology studies maybe half of them made it into the book and I think I was good at filtering before I even read by following trails of one study leading to other studies and using either textbooks or compilation conference reports to figure out what would be good and what wouldn’t be so good.

I’m talking about half of the studies where I actually bothered to copy the papers; there are other ones, countless studies, where I would get to the abstract and dismiss it after reading the abstract or one page. That I have no way of counting, that’s just constant; maybe ten times as many. But the ones that I actually got to where I made copies . . . if I like something I will print it out because I just can’t read dozens of pages on the screen and plus I like to sit in cafés and carry it around. I guess I could bring my laptop but I tend to print them out. About half of the ones I bothered to print out I put in the book and then there were countless ones that I just dismissed.

ROBERTS Yes, I see what you mean. How did the book’s structure differ from your original proposal? Did the structure change very much?

MLODINOW Yes; I don’t remember exactly, but it did. The first chapter was not there in the proposal; the proposal started with chapter two. Then I realized that I needed an introductory chapter to really set the stage for why we’re interested in these things so for introductory chapter, which is applications to life, I start by analyzing certain situations in life that I think are surprising that people misinterpret; I thought that was a good lead-in as to why we care about this. Then I went into other chapters about developing the ideas of randomness and a lot of that was similar to the proposal although I put in less about Brownian motion and the actual drunkard’s walk itself than I think it had in there. The last several chapters, I extended the discussion about life; I think the middle part of the book is fairly similar to the proposal but the beginning and the end I expanded greatly on discussions of the everyday world and applications; the psychology was not in the original proposal nearly at the level that it was in the final book.

ROBERTS Yes, I see what you mean.

MLODINOW . . . again, as I start talking about events in the world around us and looking at the psychological components–and I dealt with that, I greatly expanded that part–they were fascinating studies and I was just so interested I just kept putting more and more into the book.

Interview directory.

Yay for Dambisa Moyo!

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Many years ago I wrote to the editors of Spy suggesting they do an article about what happened to the money raised by Live Aid. Dambisa Moyo, an African-born economist/author of a book called Dead Aid, has followed up my suggestion. In an interview, she said this:

MOYO Forty years ago, China was poorer than many African countries. Yes, they have money today, but where did that money come from? They built that, they worked very hard to create a situation where they are not dependent on aid.

SOLOMON What do you think has held back Africans?

MOYO I believe it’s largely aid. You get the corruption — historically, leaders have stolen the money without penalty — and you get the dependency, which kills entrepreneurship. You also disenfranchise African citizens, because the government is beholden to foreign donors and not accountable to its people.

Too bad she wasn’t asked what she thought of Jeffrey Sachs or Bill Gates. As Jane Jacobs once said, it’s a curious thing: you can’t help something unless you love it.

More In another interview, Moyo asks, relative to Bono and Africa, how would Americans feel “if Amy Winehouse started to give the US government advice about the credit crunch? And was listened to?”

Shades of Homeopathy! Peanut Allergy Cured . . . With Peanuts

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Doctors at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge gave four children tiny doses of peanut flour every day, gradually increasing the dose until now they can eat ten or more nuts a day.

Previously the children would have risked anaphylactic shock or even death if they accidentally ate even a trace amount of peanut.

The team say this is the first time that so-called desensitization treatment has been successful.

From the Telegraph. Notes: 1. No blinding. 2. No control group. 3. Started small (with 4 patients), now doing a larger study (18 patients). 4. Jewish kids in Israel have a 10-fold lower rate of peanut allergies than Jewish kids in the UK, according to a 2008 study. In Israel, peanuts are eaten at an earlier age.

Thanks to Oskar Pearson.