Author: Seth Roberts

The Four Abundances

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Someday, if I am lucky, I would like to write a book called The Four Abundances. It would be about how four incredibly important things that were once impossibly scarce, became or will become, to everyone’s surprise, abundant:

  1. Water. Free and everywhere. So cheap my Berkeley landlady pays my water bill. This has been true for a long time.
  2. Knowledge. I mean general knowledge. Via the Web, reference book knowledge and news is instantly accessible for free. A recent development, although books and newspapers were a big step in this direction.
  3. Health. A future abundance. Health is far from abundant right now. On the other hand, health has improved dramatically during the last 200 years, as Robert Kugel has documented. It is clearly approaching abundance.
  4. Happiness. Another future abundance. I suppose it seems impossibly far off — but abundant water once seemed impossibly far off. Here it’s hard to find signs of improvement, much less approaching abundance. Depression has become more common, not less, during my lifetime.

My self-experimentation has convinced me that health and happiness depend on things that were common in Stone-Age life, just as there was enough water and knowledge during that time. (Now we have more than enough water and knowledge, which is fine.) We need to figure out what those elements are. Self-experimentation provides a way of doing so.

In my little corner of Beijing, transportation is becoming a fifth (or third) abundance. Mostly I ride a bike — my bike was free, costs pennies to maintain, doesn’t pollute, provides exercise, easy to park. For longer trips I take the subway (30 cents/ride) or a cab (a few dollars a ride). Many people take the bus (a few cents/ride). I might get an electric bike for a few hundred dollars. Doesn’t pollute, very cheap per mile, easy to park, little congestion.

I’ve thought about this for months; what made me finally decide to post this was noticing that two little tools I use every day — a penlight and a brush to clean my keyboard — were free, giveaways at trade shows.

Learning Chinese

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My cell phone has a service number that you call to get your account balance or to recharge your account. You press 1 for in Mandarin, 2 for English. Today for the first time I pressed 1. It reminded me of being 9 and going into the adult section of the library for the first time. I looked at a few books. They were full of words I didn’t know. Likewise, I didn’t understand a word of the Mandarin I heard. But I can listen to it again and again.

English-Speaking Contest

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    Last night on Chinese TV I watched the first day of an English-speaking contest. Contestants gave a short prepared speech, then gave an impromptu speech based on a randomly-chosen debate topic (e.g., should TV advertising aimed at children be banned?). After the impromptu speech they defended their position for a few minutes. It was a test of both English and public speaking. The contestants were college students.

    I really liked it. It’s a statement of, and promotion of, certain values; it says that society — at least the owners of the TV station and viewers — value something outside of themselves (English) and intellectual (learning a foreign language). China has been called a “nation of bookworms” (by James McGregor in One Billion Customers) so a show glorifying learning isn’t entirely surprising but it is a big improvement over American TV game shows, which glorify office politics (Survivor), strange tasks in foreign countries (The Amazing Race), and singing (American Idol). I supposed the closest thing in America is the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which glorifies a useless skill (spelling obscure words).
    What might American TV do like this? I can’t think of a contest revolving around learning from other cultures but I can think of some contests that would promote useful intellectual pursuits:

    • Green engineering contest. Give teams of high school students home-engineering tasks involving energy use: Insulate a window, boil water, light a room.
    • Joke-telling contest. Tests the ability to use jokes in everyday life — for example to defuse difficult situations. Americans have lost this ability so completely I suspect some of them don’t even realize it exists. I’m an example — I’m terrible at joke-telling.
    • Editing contest. Contestants take an everyday piece of writing and improve it.
    • Literature appreciation contest. Shown a passage from a famous novel, short story, or poem, contestants explain what is good about it. Bonus points for identifying the source.

Lohao City

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Today I visited the flagship store of the Lohao City chain here in Beijing. (Lohao stands for Lifestyle Of Healthy And Organic.) I needed more flaxseed oil. It was a straight line from the subway stop but I needed to call the store twice to convey this to the taxi driver. The store was a lot smaller than I expected for a chain with six locations. It was a little bigger than a 7-11. It had a baking area, a wine area, a produce area, and a wheatgrass growing area where you could get wheatgrass juice and other healthy juices. They were sampling some delicious organic wine made from a fruit the English-speaking clerk didn’t know the word for. I was a little surprised it only cost $6/bottle.

The chain is just a few years old. It specializes in organic food. The chain owns its own 22,000-acre farm where they grow the food they sell — a new type of farmer’s market. By growing the food they sell they can guarantee how it is grown. This really is an innovation in food selling. I hope the six stores (one in Shanghai) mean the concept is successful rather than they started with a lot of money.

I wanted to buy six bottles of flaxseed oil but the store only had one. The clerk went to another store to get five more but came back with only one more. One bottle (250 ml) might last me a week so I need to search for other sources.

I told the clerk the flaxseed oil was for my research. “Can you really tell the flaxseed oil improves your brain?” he asked. Yes, I said. He was studying English at a private school in Beijing. He’s in his second year of college, majoring in “commercial diplomacy” which means business diplomacy (e.g., negotiations). He predicted that even though Obama quit smoking for the campaign, he will start smoking again now that he’s President.
The chain puts out a biannual magazine now on its third issue. The magazine said something very true:”As people earn more money, they start caring whether they are healthy enough to enjoy their fortune.”

More about healthy food in China.

The Washing Machine Principle

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Suppose I want to improve performance of my washing machine. Ways I might do this fall into three categories:

1. Supply missing inputs. It needs water, soap, and electricity. If any one of them is missing, I can greatly improve performance by adding it — by plugging the machine in, for example. These changes are easy because water, soap, and electricity are easy to get.

2. Replace broken parts. This will also greatly improve performance. These changes are very difficult unless I am a washing machine repairman.

3. Everything else. To improve performance any other way will be difficult and any improvements will be small. These other methods of improvement — such as putting special disks into the wash — are also likely to be dangerous.

All complex machines are like this. What I call the Washing Machine Principle says that humans are also like this. This means that non-transplant attempts to improve human well-being fall into two clusters: 1. Easy, safe, and highly effective. 2. Difficult, dangerous, and only slightly effective.

Some simple examples:

  • Vitamins. If you have a deficiency disease, getting more of the right vitamin will cure you easily, safely, and rapidly. They supply a missing input.
  • Antidepressants. They are dangerous, difficult to make and obtain, and don’t work very well. In controlled studies, they do only slightly better than placebos. Patients typically must try several to find one that works. They don’t supply a missing input.
  • The mirror treatment for certain neurological conditions that Atul Gawande recently described:
    • [The patient’s] left hand felt cartoonishly large—at least twice its actual size. He developed a constant burning pain along an inch-wide ribbon extending from the left side of his neck all the way down his arm. And an itch crept up and down along the same band, which no amount of scratching would relieve. . . . [These symptoms had lasted 11 years. Gawande suggested trying the mirror treatment.] After a couple of weeks, his hand returned to feeling normal in size all day long. The mirror also provided the first effective treatment he has had for the flares of itch and pain.

    The mirror treatment is cheap, safe, and, in this case, highly effective. Clearly it supplies a missing input.

To be continued.

My Theory of Human Evolution (Chinese birthday gift)

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In 1952, following the Soviet model, Tsinghua University was stripped of its humanities and social science departments and became an MIT-like university entirely devoted to engineering and science. Eventually it became clear this was a mistake. Fifteen years ago a School of Humanities and Social Sciences was established to begin to restore things. Two weeks ago, because I am a faculty member in that School, I got a fancy tea set to mark the 15th anniversary of its founding. Here is what the tea set looks like:

I asked a Chinese friend of mine to explain it to me. She pointed to the tools in the box with the cups. “They’re useless,” she said. She pointed to the slatted bamboo box. “I think it’s useless,” she said.

To pour the tea you put the cups on the slats. The box is slatted so that if you spill some tea while pouring the surface will continue to look good. It’s not the total uselessness my friend saw but she is right that the added value of the slats and the tools, in practical terms, is very low.

My theory of human evolution says that the reason for gifts, ceremonies, and special days (such as Christmas) is to provide a demand for hard-to-make stuff. This allows artisans on the cutting edge to make a living and further develop their skills, advancing the start of the art. This is why gifts and ceremonial things are typically hard to make and, were it not for their value as gifts, not worth making. My friend’s reaction illustrates this. My theory predicts that this feature of gifts, ceremonies, and special days has a genetic basis and should be found in all cultures. This example shows it is found in a culture quite different from American culture.

Flaxseed Oil Used to Treat Cancer

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The Budwig protocol is the food treatment and cure for cancer and other major debilitating diseases created by Dr. Johanna Budwig. It was designed for use with extremely ill and wasted cancer patients who had been sent home by their doctors to die. These were patients so ill that many were unable to take any food at all in the beginning, and had to be initially treated with enemas. The protocol is so simple that it can be tailored to fit whatever situation is encountered, from use with someone at death’s door to use as a preventative and part of a healthy lifestyle.

There are only two essential foods in the protocol, flax oil and cottage cheese or some other sulphurated protein such as yogurt or kefir. The oil provides electron-rich fats, and the cottage cheese provides the sulphurated protein to bind with the oil and render it water soluble. In this state, the oil is able to carry immense amounts of oxygen straight into the cells. Cancer cells cannot thrive in an oxygen rich environment.

From Natural News. Yeah, the explanation (“electron-rich fats”) is absurd, but the general empirical idea (the use of flaxseed oil and cottage cheese to cure cancer) is of course very important. It isn’t complicated why flaxseed oil might be highly beneficial: Our diets used to provide much more omega-3 than they now do; flaxseed oil, high in omega-3, reduces the deficiency. The idea that cottage cheese makes flaxseed oil more digestible is also very interesting.

Thanks to Peter Spero.

Walking is to Driving as Idea Generation is to Idea Testing

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Mary Soderstrom, a Montreal writer, has written a recently-published book called The Walkable City. From a blurb:

The idea that a city might not be walkable would never occur to anyone who lived before 1800. Over the past 200 years there have been dramatic changes to our cities.

Over the same period there were also dramatic changes in the practice of science. Maybe the biggest change was the introduction of significance tests and associated logic. Just as cars took over cities, so did significance tests take over statistics textbooks. Cities built for cars made it hard to walk; statistics textbooks full of significance tests made it hard to teach how to generate ideas.

How to generate plausible new ideas — ideas worth testing — is pretty much a mystery to most scientists, as far as I can tell. The idea generation:idea testing :: walking:driving analogy provides a little guidance, and at least makes it clear that something is missing from today’s scientific education. Walking is slower than driving; idea generation is slower than idea testing. Walking is more exploratory than driving; idea generation is more exploratory than idea testing. Walking is much cheaper than driving but it may take a lot of walking to discover somewhere you want to drive; techniques for idea generation should be very cheap because it may take a lot of use of them to discover an idea worth testing. Walking is “softer” than driving; perhaps idea generation will never be as mathematical as idea testing. Walking is far more flexible than driving; idea generation methods must be far more flexible than idea testing methods. It is hard to drive somewhere that no one has ever driven before but it is easy or at least much easier to walk somewhere new. Which should suggest to a scientist that if all you know how to do is test ideas, it will be hard for you to innovate.

The way science is supported in America is horribly biassed against idea generation — grant proposals must be all about idea testing. I don’t know if the people who run that system have any idea how unbalanced and unhealthy it is.

Interview with William Rubel, Food Historian (part 2)

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William Rubel is the author of The Magic of Fire, about hearth cooking.

RUBEL I started to think, once I finished that book, I thought, ’well, this bread that I’ve been interested in for so long, I wonder if they ever wrote down how they made bread when they were still doing stone-ground flour and working the bread by hand at home or in the bakeries.’ And the answer is, really, that they had not written down with much precision. So my goal–another primary goal–is to find the lost part of the techniques that were not written down and revive them in a way that will provide inspiration for modern bakers.

A third idea is that I’ve certainly noticed that our current bread culture is exceedingly narrow. In other words, the artisan culture–the slow food breads that we all like–tend to be French breads that trace their lineage to France and the primary ingredient is flour, water, and salt and either yeast or leaven, which is a sourdough starter. And in this bread culture, the leaven starter is preferred. There’s also a preference for an irregular crumb–big holes on the inside of the bread but not a regular shape; some of them are big, some are small. We like the color to be little bit off-white, to be cream. We tend to like a crusty crust. It’s very specific. We tend to badmouth other breads like Wonder Bread as a garbage bread and fast-risen yeast breads or breads with soft crusts and soft interiors, we tend to feel that those are bad breads, that there’s a good bread which is that French-inspired one and these other ones are bad. But as an historian, I say that bread is an invention of human culture. There is no bread–farmers don’t farm breads, they farm grain. You could say that this is a perfect apple, an apple at peak ripeness, and you can measure the sugar content in the apple to know that it is at peak ripeness. But there is no ideal bread because bread is just an expression of human culture; it’s simply an invention. So once you start saying that something is good and bad, really you’re saying that this culture that produces that bread that you don’t like is bad. You are demeaning the people who like that bread.

In one way I’m thinking of using history books to comment on the present, much the way that historians in totalitarian states–like in Stalin’s Soviet Union–would write about Medieval Period and they could talk about problems there (and political problems in the Medieval Period), whereas they could not directly address similar problems in the modern state. I’m also using this work to critique our own values and value system when it comes to bread and hopefully help readers to see themselves in the story of bread and in the historical continuum of bread culture.

ROBERTS That’s what fascinates me the most. I think that everything about your history of bread is fascinating, but the last thing that you said is what fascinates me the most. Why don’t we turn to that now? When I’ve talked with you about the book, when you’ve been talking about the book, one point you made that I especially liked was about white bread and how white bread was seen and how we came to have white bread. Can you say a little about that?

RUBEL White bread is the starchy part; the white flour is the starchy part of the grain called the endosperm. The way you got that historically, before the invention of modern roller mills (steel mills with steel rollers in the 19th century), was that you ground the grain between stones and then you sift it. Before agriculture was invented, the hunters and gatherers who had settled in the Fertile Crescent around the big fields of grain had stone scythes and they had grindstones. The archaeological sites are littered, when you look at drawings of archaeological sites of the hunter-gatherers–we’re talking 13,000-15,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent–these sites are just littered with grindstones. Metates: we think of Mexican women grinding the corn to make the tortillas, grinding the boiled corn they mixed _____ to make Tamasa.

It was certainly possible for people to have ground grain–we don’t know that they did–it was certainly possible that grain was being ground a very, very long time ago. Once you have ground grain, separating out the white part–the powdered part–is fairly easy. Whether people did it, we don’t know, but certainly if you can make a sieve and if they could make a basket, if they could make cloth, then they could make sieves. You can go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in their Egyptian room they have a storehouse of linen cloths–bolts and bolts of the finest linen cloths you can imagine. Anyone with fine linen cloth can make the very, very fine white flour.

ROBERTS Because you can use the linen as a filter?

RUBEL You’d sift it; that’s what they’d use. They would use linen or they would use silk. Until nylon bolting cloths were developed, silk was the highest grade bolting cloth. But anything you can weave–horsehair (they had horses in Mesopotamia), a horsehair sieve–you can sift. Remember, you’re talking about a high status product, so you’ve got lots of slaves. You also could just shake and blow; you don’t even need to sift. You can certainly make a whiter flour than a whole wheat flour just by shaking a bowl of it and the finer particles will fall and the courser particles will rise to the top. If you take fine sand and course sand and just shake, the fine will go one direction and the course sand will go another.

Part 1.