Author: Seth Roberts

Dangerous Noise and “Doctors Hurt You”

Seth Roberts18 Comments

I have a friend with life-altering hyperacusis, a hearing problem where ordinary sounds can cause pain. It started after she worked in a noisy workplace for three years.

“People are always told about things they should do for good health: eat right, exercise, wear sunscreen, don’t smoke,” said my friend. “But they are almost never warned about loud noise, and if they are, it’s only about hearing loss far off in the future.” Her healthcare philosophy is doctors hurt you, which she finds so self-evident that she can barely explain why she believes it.

Her husband has hyperacusis, too, even worse than hers. His came from too many rock concerts. He sought medical treatment for a disorder that even Google has barely heard of, and now takes a staggering amount of pain medicine. His philosophy, at least historically, has been doctors help you. She has done her best to keep him away from doctors, but there is no doubt that, through a combination of bad advice and bad treatment, doctors have made his health much worse. (The pain medicines do reduce pain — but much of his pain was caused by doctors.) Judging by his and her experience, doctors hurt you is more accurate.

I am writing this in the loudest Starbucks I have ever been in, in New York City. (I have been in hundreds of Starbucks.) Three employees have told me they cannot control the volume of the music. Even with my Bose noise-cancelling headphones, it is too loud. I must find somewhere else. A friend who used to work at Starbucks disputes their claim that they cannot control the volume. She says the content of the music is set by corporate but the volume is controllable at individual stores. A customer at the loud Starbucks told me he thought the employees made the music so loud to drive customers away.

Exhibit 1 in the argument that doctors hurt you is tonsillectomies, probably the most common operation ever. Your tonsils are part of your immune system — removing them makes as much sense as removing part of your brain. Tonsillectomies remained common long after it was clear that tonsils were part of the immune system. Perhaps doctors didn’t understand high school biology? Or they didn’t care? Either answer suggests that doctors should be avoided.

 

 

Deirdre McCloskey and Me

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In an appreciation of Ronald Coase, I came across an article by Deirdre McCloskey, the economist. It reminded me of our back and forth emails in 2007 about her and Lynn Conway’s treatment of Michael Bailey, who had written a book they hated. I reread the emails and found them still interesting, especially McCloskey’s claim that she and Conway have/had no special power. Is there a variant of sophistry that refers to self-deception? You can read the whole correspondence, McCloskey’s version, which omits my final email, or my version (“McCloskey and Me: A Back-and-Forth”, plus plenty of context — my article starts on p. 117 of the 139 pp).

Thank god she and Conway failed to end Bailey’s career. The Man Who Would Be Queen (pdf) — about male homosexuals and cross-dressers — remains the best psychology book I have ever read. Last year I assigned my Tsinghua students to read a third of it (any third they wanted). One student said it was so good she read the whole thing.

A Little-Noticed Male/Female Difference: Pressure to Conform

Seth Roberts24 Comments

In Americanah, Chimamanda Adichie’s new novel, she writes (p. 240):

Ojiugo wore orange lipstick and ripped jeans, spoke bluntly, and smoked in public, provoking vicious gossip and dislike from other girls, not because she did those things but because she dared to without having lived abroad, or having a foreign parent, those qualities that would have made them forgive her lack of conformity.

Here is another example, from a profile of Claire Danes:

She changed schools twice, “fleeing one mean girl only to find another incarnation of that same girl in the next school.” She was targeted for her looks, her nerdy curiosity, her refusal to conform.

My impression is that these examples illustrate a large male/female difference: Women will commonly criticize another woman for lack of conformity (unless somehow “earned”); men are much less likely to criticize another man this way. When women do it, it is called being catty. There is no equivalent term when men do it — presumably because no one invents a term for something that doesn’t happen.

I have never seen this mentioned in the literature on male/female differences (nor in Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In). It isn’t easy to explain. Could it be learned? Well, in my experience girls are under more pressure to “act a certain way” than boys (Japan is an example), but I can’t explain that, either, nor can I see why that would translate to women putting pressure on other women to conform.

One reason this tendency is hard to explain is its effect on leadership. Putting pressure on other women to conform makes it harder for women to become leaders — leadership is the opposite of conformity. Making it harder for women to be leaders makes it easier for men to be leaders. It is hard to see how this particular effect (there are many others) benefits women.

Magnesium and Rectum Healing

Seth Roberts6 Comments

After I posted a link to an article about magnesium deficiency (“50 studies suggest that magnesium deficiency is killing us”), a reader who wishes to be anonymous looked into it.

After reading your post about magnesium oil, I read up on it, and thought I’d try it. I didn’t notice any difference, but I have a report. In my reading, I came across stories of people who sprayed the oil on wounds.

I have a recurring minor irritation that, when it occurs, usually takes weeks to heal. Passing a large stool can cause small tears in the rectum, so small they don’t even bleed but nonetheless can be felt. If another stool, even a regular-sized one, passes before the tears heal, they are painfully re-opened, though not re-opened fully. The pain is not severe but is, frankly, a pain in the ***. In my case it usually takes weeks for the tears to completely heal.

I was a couple weeks into this cycle when my bottle of magnesium oil arrived. I had read that it promotes healing and some people spray it on wounds. So I sprayed it on my irritated area once a day for three days, and on the third day when I passed a stool there was no pain! Never before had it healed so quickly, and I’ve had this problem at least once a year for over ten years.

I’m impressed. This resembles a theory making an unlikely prediction that turns out to be true. Other examples of magnesium benefits are here and here. Maybe magnesium will improve my sleep. That should be easy to test.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts13 Comments
  • fruit and diabetes. Blueberries good, cantaloupe bad.
  • R most popular language for “analytics/data mining/data science work” among survey respondents. I wish I could describe the respondents, but I can only say they are people who might call what they do “data mining” or “data science”. In addition, the use of R is growing. Most psychology departments teach SPSS or Matlab.
  • Thomas Frank criticizes universities, undergraduate education in particular. “An educational publisher wrote to me [asking] to reprint an essay of mine [that is freely available]. . . . The low, low price that students were to pay for this textbook: $75.95.”

What is College For?

Seth Roberts13 Comments

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, tries to answer this question:

Are universities [he means undergraduate education] mostly sorting devices to separate smart and hard-working high school students from their less-able fellows so that employers can more easily identify them? Are universities factories for the dissemination of job skills? Are universities mostly boot camps for adulthood, where young people learn how to drink moderately, fornicate meaningfully and hand things in on time? My own stab at an answer would be that universities are places where young people acquire two sorts of knowledge, what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott called technical knowledge and practical knowledge.

My answer: Almost all college students want to figure out what job to choose. The answer will depend on what they do well, what they enjoy, and will have a big effect on the rest of their life. The better the answer, the more successful and happy they will be. For them, that is above all what college is for.

This doesn’t even occur to Brooks as a possibility. I suppose professors like this state of affairs (a smart person — Brooks — can’t even think of this). If no one mentions it, they are that much further from having to consider it. Trying to help students reach this goal means giving up power. The more a college helps students learn what they enjoy and what they are good at, the less professors can do exactly what they want.

There is nothing terrible about college classes. I don’t say that this or that humanities course is “useless”. The trouble is lack of balance: too many normal classes, too few “classes” that explicitly help students to learn about the world of work and how they might fit into it. Only a few colleges — often low-prestige “trade schools” — do much to help students learn about possible jobs, what they enjoy, and what they are good at.

Judging by how Berkeley courses are taught — they do little to help students decide what job to do, unless they are seriously considering being a professor — most professors have little or no interest in helping students this way. I suspect, however, they don’t know what they might gain from doing so. At Berkeley I taught a class called Psychology and the Real World whose goal was exactly that: help students find their way (a particular problem for psychology majors, few of whom go to graduate school in psychology). They could do almost anything, so long as it was off-campus. It was little work for me and the students learned a lot. I enjoyed seeing them begin to find their way. This is what I think isn’t obvious to professors: the more you help students learn what they want to learn, the easier and more satisfying it is for you.

The Irrelevance of Grass-Fed Beef (Ancestral Health Symposium 2013)

Seth Roberts15 Comments

Grass-fed beef is better than ordinary (grain-fed) beef because it has a better omega-3/omega-6 ratio. I’ve heard this a thousand times. It’s true. Grass has more omega-3 than grain, which is high in omega-6. But it is misleading. For practical purposes, grass-fed and grain-fed beef are the same in terms of omega-3 and omega-6.

Peter Ballerstedt made this point in his talk at the recent Ancestral Health Symposium. He showed this slide, based on research by Susan Burkett. omega3omega6

This shows the amount of omega-3 and omega-6 in one serving of various foods. The amounts in grass- and grain-fed beef are small relative to other foods most people eat. People who have said eat grass-fed beef, such as Michael Pollan, should have been saying eat less chicken. When I started eating grass-fed instead of grain-fed beef, I noticed no differences, which agrees with this analysis.

Criticism of My View of Education: My Answer

Seth Roberts2 Comments

My criticism of college education can be boiled down to this: It is too much one-size-fits-all. It takes too little account of differences between students. Those differences are no accident. They reflect the fact that a good economy needs to produce many different things. Human nature has been shaped to provide exactly that.

Bryan Caplan posted about this, and one reader (Tim of Angle) replied:

Roberts is criticizing colleges for not doing something that they aren’t really trying to do. . . . Our educational model is built around hiring teachers who are (supposedly) good at thing X and paying them to train other people to do thing X. Nobody claims that the way the teacher does thing X is the only way to do thing X, nor even the best way to do thing X; what colleges do claim is that the way the teacher does thing X is a successful way to do thing X, and it hopes that the teacher can train students to do thing X competently at least the way the teacher does thing X.

I was discussing undergraduate education at Berkeley. Berkeley professors are hired mainly based on their ability to do research. Undergraduate classes are not about training researchers (= the next generation of professors at research universities, such as Berkeley); that’s what graduate school is for.

In most Berkeley undergraduate classes, professors aren’t teaching students to “do” anything, at least anything that most of us would recognize as “doing”. (Engineering, art, architecture, foreign language and perhaps statistics classes are exceptions.) In most classes, students are introduced to an important fraction of an academic field. In a social psychology class, for example, they learn about social psychology research. The class is not about how to do social psychology. It is about what has been done and what has been learned. If the class consisted entirely of students who wanted to become psychology professors, that would be fine. In fact, only a small fraction of Berkeley psychology majors (5%?) go to graduate school in psychology. The students in most Berkeley classes (outside of the more vocational areas, such as engineering) will go on to do many different jobs. Few in any class will become professors.

I think one theory of higher education is close to what Tim of Angle says. The practice, at least at elite universities such as Berkeley, is quite different.

A different theory of higher education revolves around signalling. College performance provides a useful signal to future employers, that’s why it exists in present form. At Berkeley, I never heard this motivation (will this provide a good signal to employers?) brought up in discussions about grading or anything else. It’s utterly clear, on the other hand, that where you go to college (Harvard versus College of Marin) is indeed a powerful signal to employers and, yes, if you can go to Prestigious College X, you really should. How many “axes of excellence” there should be — how many separate categories or dimensions we should use to rank colleges — is a different discussion.

Rewarding Criticism Put Nicely Produced Long-Lasting Change

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Eliezer Yudkowsky, I’m told, used to be a not-nice critic. The problem was his delivery: “blunt, harsh, not sufficiently tempered by praise for praiseworthy things” (Alicorn Finley). However, this changed about a year ago, when Anna Salamon and Alicorn Finley decided to try to train him to be nicer. Alicorn describes it like this:

Me, Eliezer, Anna, and Michael Blume were all sitting in my and Michael’s room (where we lived two houses ago) working on, I think it was, a rationality kata [= way of doing things], and we were producing examples and critiquing each other. Eliezer sometimes critiqued in a motivation-draining way, so we started offering him M&Ms when he put things more nicely. (We also claimed M&Ms when we accomplished small increments of what we were working on.)

Eliezer added:

Some updates on that story. M&M’s didn’t work when I tried to reward myself with them later, and I suspect several key points:

1) The smiles/approval from the (highly respected) friends feeding me the M&Ms probably counted for more than the taste sensation.

2) Being overweight, M&Ms on their own would be associated with shame/guilt/horror/wishing I never had to eat again etc.

3) Others have also reported food rewards not working. One person says that food rewards worked for them after they ensured that they were hungry and could only eat via food rewards.

4) I suspect that the basic reinforcement pattern will only work for me if I reward above-average performance or improvement in performance (positive slope) rather than trying to reward constant performance, because only this makes me feel that the reward is really ‘deserved’.

Also:

  • Andrew Critch advises that ‘step zero’ in this process is to make sure that you have good internal agreement on wanting the change before rewarding movements in the direction of the change
  • The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) has some experience learning to teach this.
  • CFAR has excellent workshops but not much published/online material. A good mainstream book is Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor.

I like this example because the change was long-lasting and important.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.