Author: Seth Roberts

If Weston Price Had Been a Dermatologist

Seth Roberts6 Comments

This review article — comparing several commonly-prescribed treatments for acne — ends up close to what I figured out as a graduate student via self-experimentation: that benzoyl peroxide works much better than antibiotics.

I like to think that in 100 years people will look back on current treatments for acne (and a hundred other things) as medieval, like leeches. If Weston Price had been a dermatologist, we would now have evidence, I’m sure, that certain traditional lifestyles produce very low rates of acne. Examination of those lifestyles would provide good clues about what aspects of our way of life cause acne. That would be a good starting point for experiments to zero in on what matters. Once we knew the environmental causes of acne, such as caffeine or soap, they could simply be avoided; no need for powerful dangerous expensive medicines. At the moment, however, determination of what aspects of modern life cause acne isn’t even close to being studied. You might think it is better to study safe cheap cures than dangerous expensive ones but you’d be wrong. At least now.

John Tukey and the Shangri-La Diet

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About ten years ago, John Tukey, the great statistician, gave a talk at Berkeley. After his talk, I went up to him.

“The tools you’ve invented have been really helpful to me,” I said.

“If they work just some of the time, we should be pleased,” he replied.

A curious answer, I thought. But I found myself thinking the same thing when a woman named Darkhorse on the SLD forums said something similar to what I said to Tukey:

As of today, I am one pound below my original arbitrarily chosen “goal weight,” and some 40 lbs. lighter than I was one year ago. No one is more surprised than I am . . . SLD is exquisite in its very simplicity, and I saw no need to complicate it. Best of all, it works!

If SLD works just some of the time . . . Thanks, Darkhorse.

For Whom Do Law Schools Exist?

Seth Roberts4 Comments

In the Freakonomics blog, Ian Ayres, a Yale law professor, described a Law Revue skit at his school:

A group of students [were] sitting at desks, facing the audience, listening to a professor drone on. All of the students were looking at laptops except for one, who had a deck of cards and was playing solitaire. The professor was outraged and demanded that the student explain why she was playing cards. . . . She answered, “My laptop is broken.”

Not bad. The professors in the audience were stunned.

The skit was “several years ago.” I wondered how Ayres would manage to connect revelation of a timeless truth about higher education (see For Whom Do Colleges Exist?) with something new. Here’s how:

Saul Levmore, the dean at the University of Chicago Law School, has recently announced an end to classroom surfing.

The big truth behind the little joke was . . . hard to see. Or at least hard for professors to see. The big truth is that law schools, like most institutions of higher education, are run in dozens of ways that benefit professors at the expense of students. Boring lectures are one example. In response to a small revelation of this big truth, Dean Levmore — presumably after consultation with many other law school professors — created another example of how law schools are run for professors rather than students.

Difficulty with basic concepts at Duke and UC Berkeley.

More. I suppose solitaire is still okay at the University of Chicago since it doesn’t involve surfing.

Calorie Learning: Better Design

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I finished a better-designed calorie-learning experiment. I mixed 5 randomly-chosen spice mixes into one chunk of butter (Mix A) and another 5 spice mixes into another chunk of butter (Mix B). Then I alternated two types of trials:

1. 2 saltines spread with Mix A followed by a piece of bread eaten nose-clipped.

2. 2 saltines spread with Mix B followed by nothing.

On each trial I rated how good the saltines tasted on scale where 50 = neutral, 60 = slightly good, and 70 = somewhat good. Here are the results:

results

When a new flavor was followed by a piece of bread, it tasted better than a similar flavor not followed by a piece of bread. After several flavor-bread pairings, the difference became large.

Should Those Who Are Part of the Problem Be Part of the Solution?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

At a press conference about endangered salmon, I met Heather Hardcastle, who works at Taku River Reds, a fishing company in Juneau, Alaska. She went to graduate school at Duke in 2002 where she studied marine conservation biology. “Everyone thought fishermen were bad,” she told me. “I’d grown up in a fishing family, so to them I was a bad person. Most of the students thought of themselves as environmentalists — as if I wasn’t.”

What a failure of education. Surely people who make their living fishing would suffer the most if fish runs out; and surely people who have spent a lifetime fishing might know something useful to fish preservationists. Somehow this escaped the majority of the Duke students and, apparently, their professors. At the end of The Shangri-La Diet, I mention this problem: the idea that business is the enemy. In the case of obesity, of course, lots of people think that big food companies are the enemy. Well, yes, it’s pretty clear that big food companies are responsible for the obesity epidemic — but maybe that means they should be more involved in the solution, not less?

Stephen Dubner interviewed me in my office to write about me in the Freakonomics column. I mentioned a discussion I’d had with a friend about the Enola Gay controversy at the Smithsonian; my friend and I thought it was unfortunate, I told Dubner, that neither of us knew someone on the other side of the argument. Dubner said that a lot of reporters at the New York Times wrote about military stuff, but hardly anyone at the Times that he knew had even visited West Point, which was less than 60 miles away.

The Greatness of Mondoweiss

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Day after day I read Mondoweiss, Philip Weiss’s blog, even though his main subject — Israeli treatment of Palestinians, how this is enabled by Jewish Americans, what a mistake that is — is not something I read about elsewhere or think about when I’m not reading Mondoweiss. It would be too self-congratulatory to say now I care more about it but it is undeniable that now I know a lot more about it. Without any effort at all.

It’s like a really great column in a newspaper or magazine except it’s much better than that: Weiss can write anything he wants at any length at any time, unlike any columnist. The whole thing has a raw and impassioned and narrow and personal aspect unlike any column I’ve ever read. And it’s so easy to read, even though it’s unfamiliar and complicated. Here’s an example why:

I heard a crushing story about Aaron David Miller. He’s from Cleveland and a big Jewish family. He went to a synagogue there recently and spoke from the pulpit and said, The problem’s simple, two peoples fighting for a disputed piece of land, there will have to be a compromise. There was dead silence in the synagogue and the rabbi came up and said, “ In Numbers 34, God promised the land of Israe l to Moses, from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean….”

What a chilling story.

Magazine Article of the Year

Seth Roberts5 Comments

The year isn’t half over, but this brilliant profile — by Lauren Collins in The New Yorker, about a photo-retoucher you’ve never heard of — gets my vote.

I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he [Dangin] asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Scaled-Up Self-Experimentation Proposed

Seth Roberts3 Comments

From an article in Nature Medicine:

A British biotech entrepreneur named William Bains is proposing that self-experimenters should form collectives, pooling resources to make their findings more acceptable to the mainstream scientific community. Bains, who also lectures on the business of biotechnology at the University of Cambridge, UK, believes that the high costs and red tape associated with clinical trials have forced pharmaceutical companies to become increasingly conservative in the treatments they will test—leaving radical but potentially effective therapies out in the cold. . . . A radical alternative to conventional clinical trials, which he proposed in a paper published in April, is to have people who are willing to experiment on themselves band together and form what he calls ‘biomedical mutual organizations’ (BMOs) (Med. Hypotheses 70, 719—723; 2008). These collectives would pool resources to provide their members with more test subjects (each other), greater analytic capacity and access to more novel therapies, Bains claims.