Author: Seth Roberts

Marxism Studies at Tsinghua University

Seth Roberts1 Comment

All Tsinghua undergraduates are required to take four Marxism-related classes to graduate; next year the requirement will be reduced to three classes. A friend told me about her Marxist philosophy class, which she thought was pretty interesting:

  • There is no homework. No reading, no papers.
  • If there will be a final, it hasn’t been mentioned.
  • The teacher doesn’t take attendance. Now and then he calls on students to answer questions and if the student isn’t present, this is noted.

My friend, who is a member of the Communist Party, couldn’t suppress a smile when she told me about the lack of homework.

Making a Living in China

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Several buildings are being built on the Tsinghua campus. At least one woman makes a living as a prostitute among the construction workers. She is known as Qikuaiban, which means seven and half yuan (about $1). The name came about when she offered her services to a worker, he said, “All I have is seven and a half yuan,” and she accepted that payment.

Happiness in China: Who wants to be a construction worker?

Unfortunate Obituaries: The Case of David Freedman

Seth Roberts24 Comments

One of my colleagues at Berkeley didn’t return library books. He kept them in his office, as if he owned them. He didn’t pay bills, either: He stuck them in his desk drawer. He was smart and interesting but after he failed to show up at a lunch date — no explanation, no apology — I stopped having lunch with him. He died several years ago. At his memorial service, at the Berkeley Faculty Club, one of the speakers mentioned his non-return of library books and non-payment of bills as if they were amusing eccentricities! I’m sure they were signs of a bigger problem. He did no research, no scholarly work of any sort. When talking about science with him — a Berkeley professor in a science department — it was like talking to a non-scientist.

David Freedman, a Berkeley statistics professor who died recently, was more influential. He is best known for a popular introductory textbook. The work of his I found most interesting was his comments on census adjustment: He was against adjusting the census to remove bias caused by undercount. This was only slightly less ridiculous than not returning library books — and far more harmful, because his arguments were used by Republicans to block census adjustment. The undercounted tended to vote Democrat. The similarity with my delinquent colleague is the very first line in Freedman’s obituary: He “fought for three decades to keep the United States census on a firm statistical foundation.” Please. A Berkeley statistics professor, I have no idea who, must have written or approved that statement!

The obituary elaborates on this supposed contribution:

“The census turns out to be remarkably good, despite the generally bad press reviews,” Freedman and Wachter wrote in a 2001 paper published in the journal Society. “Statistical adjustment is unlikely to improve the accuracy, because adjustment can easily put in more error than it takes out.”

There are two kinds of error: variance and bias. The adjustment would surely increase variance and almost surely decrease bias. The quoted comments ignore this. They are a modern Let Them Eat Cake.

Few people hoard library books, but Freedman’s misbehavior is common. I blogged earlier about a blue-ribbon nutrition committee that ignored evidence that didn’t come from a double-blind trial. Late in his career, Freedman spent a great deal of time criticizing other people’s work. Maybe his critiques did some good but I thought they were obvious (the assumptions of the statistical method weren’t clearly satisfied — who knew?) and that it was lazy the way he would merely show that the criticized work (e.g., earthquake prediction) fell short of perfection and fail to show how it related to other work in its field — whether it was an improvement or not. As they say, he could see the cost of everything and the value of nothing. That he felt comfortable spending most of his time doing this, and his obituary would praise it (“the skeptical conscience of statistics”), says something highly unflattering about modern scientific culture.

For reasonable comments about census adjustment, see Eriksen, Eugene P., Kadane, Joseph B., and Tukey, John W. (1989). Adjusting the 1980 census of population and housing. JASA, 84, 927-943.

How Safe is Melamine? Is This Funny or Horrifying?

Seth Roberts4 Comments

From Natural News:

Up to 90 percent of the infant formula sold in the United States may be contaminated with trace amounts of melamine, the toxic chemical linked to kidney damage, according to recent tests. The FDA’s test results, which the agency hid from the public and only released after the Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request, showed that Nestle, Mead Johnson and Enfamil infant formula products were all contaminated with melamine. . . .

Prior to these test results being made public, the FDA had published a document on its website that explained there was no safe level of melamine contamination in infant formula. Specifically, the FDA stated, “FDA is currently unable to establish any level of melamine and melamine-related compounds in infant formula that does not raise public health concerns.”

Once tests found melamine in U.S.-made formula products, however, the FDA changed its story. As of today, the FDA has now officially declared melamine to be safe in infant formula as long as the contamination level is less than one part per million (1 ppm).

Astonishingly: The FDA has no new science to justify its abrupt decision declaring melamine to be safe!

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when that decision was made.

Self-Experimentation on Someone Else: Alzheimer’s Disease

Seth Roberts4 Comments

From the St. Petersburg Times:

After two weeks of taking coconut oil, Steve Newport’s results in an early onset Alzheimer’s test gradually improved says his wife, Dr. Mary Newport. Before treatment, Steve could barely remember how to draw a clock. Two weeks after adding coconut oil to his diet, his drawing improved. After 37 days, Steve’s drawing gained even more clarity. [The three drawings are shown in a photo.] The oil seemed to “lift the fog,” his wife says.

. . .

He began taking coconut oil every day, and by the fifth day, there was a tremendous improvement.

The wife took her husband’s treatment into her own hands, just as I tried to improve my sleep myself — it was self-experimentation in that sense.

This is related to my omega-3 research in that it is another example of a fat having highly beneficial brain effects.

What Makes A Good Student?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

One of my Chinese teachers — the one who sold me my cell phone — said I was a good student.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

She didn’t quite understand the question. “Number 1: You work hard. Number 2: You work hard. Number 3: You work hard,” she said.

She had never heard the joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall (“practice, practice, practice”). The joke is one of those convenient and reassuring lies. The real way to get to Carnegie Hall is 1. Ability to play well (based on practice, no doubt). 2. Charisma. 3. Money. See Judith Kogan’s brilliant Nothing But the Best: The Struggle For Perfection at the Julliard School for more about this. A few years ago I went to the Julliard bookstore and asked them about this book. They hadn’t heard of it!

Gary Taubes Answers Questions

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Michael Eades has posted Gary Taubes’s answers to questions sent in by readers. The first one, curiously enough, concerns China: “How do Asians and others living a seemingly high-carb existence manage to escape the consequences?” Taubes’s answer:

There are several variables we have to consider with any diet/health interaction. Not just the fat content and carb content, but the refinement of the carbs, the fructose content (in HFCS and sucrose primarily) and how long they’ve had to adapt to the refined carbs and sugars in the diet. In the case of Japan, for instance, the bulk of the population consumed brown rice rather than white until only recently, say the last 50 years. White rice is labor intensive and if you’re poor, you’re eating the unrefined rice, at least until machine refining became widely available. The more important issue, though, is the fructose. China, Japan, Korea, until very recently consumed exceedingly little sugar (sucrose). In the 1960s, when Keys was doing the Seven Countries Study and blaming the absence of heart disease in the Japanese on low-fat diets, their sugar consumption, on average, was around 40 pounds a year, or what the Americans and British were eating a century earlier. In the China Study, which is often evoked as refutation of the carb/insulin hypothesis, the Chinese ate virtually no sugar. In fact, sugar consumption wasn’t even measured in the study because it was so low. The full report of the study runs to 800 pages and there are only a couple of mentions of sugar. If I remember correctly (I don’t have my files with me at the moment) it was a few pounds per year. The point is that when researchers look at traditional populations eating their traditional diets — whether in rural China, Japan, the Kitava study in the South Pacific, Africa, etc — and find relatively low levels of heart disease, obesity and diabetes compared to urban/westernized societies, they’re inevitably looking at populations that eat relatively little or no refined carbs and sugar compared to populations that eat a lot. Some of these traditional populations ate high-fat diets (the Inuit, plains Indians, pastoralists like the Masai, the Tokelauans); some ate relatively low-fat diets (agriculturalists like the Hunza, the Japanese, etc.), but the common denominator was the relative absence of sugar and/or refined carbs. So the simplest possible hypothesis to explain the health of these populations is that they don’t eat these particularly poor quality carbohydrates, not that they did or did not eat high fat diets. Now the fact that some of these populations do have relatively high carb diets suggests that it’s the sugar that is the fundamental problem.

Tsinghua students are almost all thin, although they eat a lot of white rice (a refined carb). My explanation is that they eat a diet with great variation in flavor. Almost everything they eat is made by hand from scratch — including noodles! — and the choice is staggering (hundreds of dishes easily available at lunch and dinner). They don’t eat a lot of sweets, as Taubes says, but because you can lose weight by drinking sugar water, sugar alone cannot cause obesity.

The Filipino graduate student I mentioned in a recent post told me she lost a lot of weight (too much!) when she came here; I attribute it to the novelty and variety of the food. This may be the only time a young woman has told me she lost too much weight without trying. Because Beijing is the capital of China it has lots and lots of Chinese regional food (and the Tsinghua cafeterias do as well). The variety of cheap food available here may be unmatched anywhere else in the world.
Thanks to Dave Lull.

Assorted Links (China edition)

Seth Roberts3 Comments
  1. Chinesepod.com. Podcasts for learning Chinese.
  2. Popup Chinese. More podcasts
  3. Pinyin.info. “Most of what most people think they know about Chinese — especially when it comes to Chinese characters — is wrong.”
  4. Laowai Chinese. “I’ve been busy not losing my job (teaching) and not ignoring my publisher. What I mean is: I’ve been working on the editing and layout of my book Chinese 24/7. I’m glad to announce there are now over ten people outside my family who have expressed interest in my book.”
  5. Sinosplice. “There are some seriously rank odors out there on the street. Rotting organic matter, urine, feces, stinky tofu…. But don’t worry, soon you’ll be gleefully playing “name that odor” with your Chinese friends!”
  6. Imagethief. “Chinese netizens were outraged when Gong Li played a Japanese woman in “Memoirs of Geisha”, alongside fellow crypto-Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi.”
  7. Beijing Sounds. A linguist blogs. “The final indignity comes when you utter a phrase that incites peals of laughter. Ignoring your request for explication, your [Chinese] spouse goes over to tell the in-laws (did I mention you’re living with them?) and the lesson comes to an ignominious close with the stern father-in-law, who rarely chuckles, doubled up on the couch, tears rolling down his cheeks.”
  8. Danwei “Today’s New Culture View reports that the People’s Supreme Court approved the death sentence of Yang Jia, the man who murdered six policemen and wounded three others and a security guard on July 1 this year.”
  9. Scientific and academic fraud in China. One popular post printed a letter from a Yale professor teaching at Beijing University upset about plagiarism among his Chinese students: “When plagiarism is detected in America, it can end the career of the person doing it,” he writes. Such as Harvard professors Laurence Tribe, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Charles Ogletree, and Alan Dershowitz?

Happy Thanksgiving! A Chinese friend texted me this. I replied I was surprised she was aware of it. “The majority of Chinese know this day,” she replied, “and say thanks to their friends and families.”

Reciprocity in China

Seth Roberts21 Comments

A few years ago, I asked a woman I know why she decided to go to graduate school to study cultural psychology. She told me she had been in the Peace Corps in Africa, I forget where. Maybe Kenya. Early in her stay a native had been a big help to her. To thank him, she baked him a cake. This angered him. “You think you can pay me back with a cake?” he said. To pay me back, give me something I want, he told her.

A more subtle version of the same thing happens in China. About a month ago, the friend of mine who had invited me to come here told me I had been invited to visit a university near Shanghai by a professor of psychology there who was a dean at the university. I wrote to the person who invited me:

I look forward to visiting you in —-. I don’t have a lot of plans; I could come almost any weekend. When would be a good time for me to visit?

Her assistant replied:

Professor —- will not be free on 6-9 Nov 2008. And she will not be free on 15 Nov 2008.  For other days, that’s OK.  I will come back when I get more message from Professor —-.

I replied:

Thanks. A weekend later than those will be fine.

Her assistant replied:

This evening, I talked with Professor —- about your visit to —-. Professor —- is expecting to explore any possibility of research collaboration with you. Professor —- mentioned the best time will be the last several days of November or early December for your visit to —-.

I replied:

Late November or early December is fine with me. I do not have any other plans.

Then I got this:

Professor —- is wondering whether you are interested in some collaboration, such as psychology research design guidance, psychology paper modification (the papers is written in English, but may not as good as expected), and some other research project collaboration.

I was surprised — just the Peace Corp volunteer was surprised. I replied:

I would be happy to talk about research design guidance with Professor —-. I cannot say more than that because I don’t know anything about her research. So I don’t know if our research interests overlap. About paper modification — improving the English — I am less sure. I am busy helping students and colleagues here at Tsinghua with their English.

The reply:

Professor —- will only ask you to improve the English for only one paper, which she expect to have that paper be published in USA.

I was puzzled what to say to this. Before I could reply, I got another email:

Professor —- talked with me this afternoon. She mentioned that the paper is related to ERP. She needs your help with the English language improvement with the paper, after her graduates’ [students’] translation from Chinese to English.

I replied:

I just finished spending many hours fixing the English of a paper written by a non-Tsinghua researcher whom I will never meet. I am not eager to repeat the experience. However, I am happy to help Professor —- with the English of her paper if she will help me with my Chinese.

The reply:

Professor —- said that that’s OK.

But it wasn’t okay. I heard nothing for a week and wrote again:

When should we figure out the details of my visit?

The reply:

This afternoon, we discussed how we can benefit to each other, when you are here. Would you please list out what you can offer us, and what you expect us offer you, when you are in Suzhou?

I replied:

During my trip to —-, I hoped to learn about —-, the university, and the research being done there. I haven’t traveled much in China so I thought the trip would be fun.

As for what I might offer you, I wrote The Shangri-La Diet, a New York Times bestseller that describes an entirely new approach to weight control; I am a statistics expert; and I have done innovative work in experimental design as well. Thousands of people read my blog because they think I have interesting views about the world. You can learn more about my work at www.sethroberts.net. My blog is at blog.sethroberts.net.

Why did you invite me to visit?

The reply:

We discussed your response. And we need to mention the following two points: We need someone to improve our paper in English. But the paper has not finished yet. This is not a good season for sightseeing in —- because of the cold whether. For above the two points, we cannot fix the time when you come to —-. We may arrange your visit later. Keep posted.

My reply:

Do I understand you correctly? You invited me to —- “to improve [your] paper in English”?

No reply. In other words, the answer was yes.

Yesterday I met a graduate student from the Philippines. She’s studying architecture here on a scholarship from the Chinese government. How do you like it here? I asked. When she got here, she said, she was positive. “I was all ‘ ‘It’s an amazing place.’ ” Now, after more than a year, she isn’t positive. Whenever someone does something for you it turns out they want something in return, she said, but you don’t find out right away. She didn’t want to give details. “I should stop talking,” she said. I told her I’d had the same experience — the invitation I just described.

The whole thing reminded me of something I wrote about Robert Gallo, the AIDS researcher:

A researcher in Gallo’s lab once told the boss that Einstein was his favorite scientist; he especially admired Einstein’s magnanimity. Gallo replied, “You are naive. Einstein could afford to be magnanimous because he was a genius.” The other scientist asked, “You mean magnanimity is good only if you’re a genius?” Gallo said, “Yeah, because then you don’t have to worry about the competition.”

And the reciprocity norms of rich countries take the form they do because the countries are rich.