Author: Seth Roberts

My Theory of Human Evolution (autism )

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In the journal In Character, Simon Baron-Cohen, the autism expert, writes:

Clinicians describe the deep, narrow interests in autism as “obsessions,” but a more positive description might be “areas of expertise.” Sometimes the area of expertise a person with autism focuses on appears not to be very useful (e.g., geometric shapes, or the texture of different woods). Sometimes the area of expertise is slightly more useful, though of limited interest to others (e.g., train timetables, or flags of the world). But sometimes the area of expertise can make a real social contribution (such as fixing machines, or solving mathematical problems, or debugging computer software).

My guess is that in autism, something is turned off that should be turned on. This allows the rest — in particular, the rest of what motivates us — to be seen more clearly. Everyone has a tendency toward expertise, says my theory of human evolution. Why everyone? Because everyone suffers from procrastination and the tendency toward expertise is the tendency that causes procrastination: It’s harder to do something new than to do what you did yesterday. Back in the Stone Age, this tendency toward expertise caused different people to do different hobbies, and become good at them. This was the beginning of occupational specialization.

More Acne Self-Experimentation

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This post from the self-experimentation forums deserves to be reprinted in full:

After being plagued with acne for years, I took a job which caused me to work in remote bush camps for short periods in the far north. My acne would invariably disappear within a few days of exposure to this. When I returned to the city, the acne would return with a vengeance. Did not know why.

My theory: Soap residue left after washing my face with hardwater was the true acne culprit. Washing my face with ultrasoft lake water in bush camps leaves little or no soap residue, so no acne. Soap residue stimulates excessive skin oil secretions which leads to increased acne. A rich diet aggravates the problem by feeding the oil secretions.

My self-experiment: I experimented with different types of soap and different concentrations of soap in hard and soft water.

Conclusion: Soft and slightly soapy water only (a very mild soap) produced the least amount of acne. Never apply soap lather directly to your face! If you have only hard water to work with, then no soap at all is the best choice by far. Compensate for the lack of soap with hotter water.

Added benefit: Washing your face with no soap causes acne lesions to heal much faster – a couple of days compared to a week or more with soap.

Great work!

The same technique applied to cold sores.

Jane Jacobs and Chinese Restaurants

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Why did Chinese immigrants to America start so many restaurants? Because Chinese cuisine is glorious, right? Well, no. Chinese immigrants started a lot of laundries, too, and there is nothing wonderful about Chinese ways of washing clothes. As Jennifer Lee explains in this excellent talk, the first Chinese immigrants were laborers. They were taking jobs away from American men, and this caused problems. Restaurants and laundries were much safer immigrant jobs because cooking and cleaning were women’s work.

A character in Jane Jacobs’s The Nature of Economies says this:

This is why societies that are oppressive to women and contemptuous of their work are so backward economically. Half of their population, doing economically important kinds of work, such cooking and food processing, cleaning and laundering, making garments, and concocting home remedies, are excluded from taking initiatives to develop all that work [that is, start businesses] — and nobody else does it, either.

My grandparents, Jewish immigrants, were in the garment industry. Now I can guess why.

Middle School Visit

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On Monday I visited a cooking/gardening class at Willard Middle School in Berkeley. One student told me it was his favorite class. “Why?” I asked. “Because you can talk,” he said. He and two friends were standing by a stove. They were making grits and waiting for the water to boil. Out in the vegetable garden — the students are divided into three groups, and one groups spends the class period in the garden — another student told me it was his favorite class, too. “Why?” I asked. “Because you can move around,” he said. I was very impressed. Two different students say the class is their favorite — for two different simple non-obvious reasons. The cooking and gardening program at Willard is run by Matt Tsang, who has been at Willard ten years.

Later that day I saw a slide show of architecture theses. One slide showed a page of a thesis that said: “Work with nature, not against it.”

Maybe middle school students have strong desires to talk and move around. Maybe “work with nature” means, in that context, teaching in such a way that students can talk and move around. Maybe classes can be set up so that the existence of those desires makes learning easier rather than more difficult. Like swimming with the current rather than against it. In the typical Willard class students can’t talk and move around. And teaching at Willard is hard; the average teacher lasts only five years.

The existence of the slide in the slide show showed that work with nature, not against it needs to be learned; it wasn’t obvious. Nothing like that is taught in schools of education, I’m pretty sure.

The Twilight of Expertise (fugu liver removal)

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Fugu is a puffer fish prized by Japanese fish connoisseurs. Its liver is poisonous, thus only specially-trained chefs can serve it. A episode of The Simpsons featured Homer poisoned by fugu.

Recently, however, researchers determined that fugu liver is poisonous because fugu eat poisonous food. When fugu is farmed, and given non-poisonous food, its liver is harmless, and the fish tastes almost as good. No more need for special processing. Unsurprisingly, the National Fugu Association wants to preserve the status quo. But you can now buy fugu liver in the town of Useki.

Masataka Kinashi, the head of the tourism association in Usuki and a fugu dealer himself, suddenly stared down at his desk when asked about the widespread sale of fugu liver.

“Officially, you can never eat it here,” Mr. Kinashi said. “Well, it’s not that you can’t eat it, but, no, you can’t eat it. That’s the only answer I can give you.”

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

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Recently I visited some friends whom I hadn’t seen for a while. You’re more talkative, they said. I attribute this to flaxseed oil.

I became interested in the effects of flaxseed oil partly because of the aquatic ape hypothesis, the idea that living near water had a big effect on human evolution. During a long period of human prehistory, the theory says, we swam a lot, presumably to catch fish. If we ate lots of fish (high in omega-3) at the same time our brains grew large, it was quite possible that our brains need large amounts of omega-3 to function properly. Flaxseed oil is high in omega-3.

Elaine Morgan, the theory’s main proponent, has written several books about it, “each more po-faced [= academically correct] than the last,” she has said. I have finally read two of them and was pleased to find more scrutiny made the theory more plausible.

Background to the idea that humans were once aquatic is that several mammals have obviously become aquatic — starting on land they shifted to water. Sea lions, whales, and so on. Birds have become aquatic — for example, ducks. Insects have become aquatic. Elephants appear to have become aquatic and then terrestrial again — note how well they can swim. There is ample precedent, in other words.

Humans differ in all sorts of anatomical and physiological ways from other primates and the aquatic ape theory has straightforward explanations for many of them:

1. Humans have subcutaneous fat, other primates don’t. Other aquatic mammals do. Explanation: The fat serves as insulation.

2. Humans have almost no fur, other primates do. Other aquatic mammals don’t. Explanation: Fur creates drag in the water. In the air, fur insulates.

3. Humans are bipedal. Explanation: Walking upright keeps the head out of the water, allowing breathing.

Happy Birthday, SLD!

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The Shangri-La Diet (the book) is two years old. What’s happened during the last year?

The nerd in me is enormously concerned with numerical measures of popularity. Is the diet spreading? If so, how fast? This can be measured dozens of ways; the number I trust most is number of visitors to the SLD forums. This number has been steadily increasing. Plotted on a log scale, the visitors-vs-time function is roughly linear ( = same percentage increase each month). The number has doubled in a year. It was about 7,000 a year ago; it is about 14,000 now. The increase has happened/is happening without much effort from me. During the first year, I posted on the forums several times per day; now I post less than once/day.

Which brings up Topic 2: Improvements by users — which the populist in me cares about. I like to think that allowing anyone to contribute ideas and experience, which they can do via the SLD forums, will be a good thing. (Not only here: the Weston Price Foundation website should have forums.) I also like to think the ideas behind SLD have a life of their own. More than other weight-loss methods, the Shangri-La Diet is based on a theory. Most weight-loss methods are based on good/bad classifications: Food A is good, Food B is bad. Not much room for improvement. A theory, on the other hand, can be used in many ways. Mixing a new theory with lots of user experimentation should be really powerful — especially when the user-experimenters can trade ideas and experience. It should produce a different kind of growth: growth of efficacy. Over the last year I was especially impressed with comments on the SLD forums about nose-clipping. This thread in particular. Heidi555 wrote:

I think it’s much easier to nose clip a higher percentage of food. The AS is noticeable and you don’t have to exert any will power. I don’t worry about a two hour window. . . . The weirdest thing is that I always feel like I’m eating a lot. Maybe eating as much as you want, of whatever you want, always feels like a lot.

By “much easier” she meant much easier than other ways of applying the theory (“taking oil, sugar water, or a smaller amount of nose clipped food). Wearing nose-clips in public isn’t easy, but that could change. Isn’t wearing nose-clips a lot like wearing glasses?

Another part of me likes a good story — e.g., American Idol. If I wanted to tell a story about SLD during the last year, I would stress the omega-3 storyline, especially 1. Tyler Cowen no longer needs gum surgery after he starts taking flaxseed oil (FSO). 2. Anonymous finds himself healing more quickly after martial arts practice when he starts taking FSO. Stops taking FSO, returns to baseline, restarts FSO, improves again. I like the unexpectedness of it: Why would a new diet lead to this? Speaking of fights, in New York, I met a woman who works on reality TV shows. “That’s what my job is about,” she said. “Getting people to fight.” Yes, fight = good TV. Over the last year, the SLD forums remained bad TV: exceptionally well-behaved and conflict-free. I’m not sure what this means, but I really like it.

Stephen Marsh’s 2.5 yrs on SLD.

Assorted Links

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  1. Why Word has an animated paperclip. For more on this, see the excellent Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Prestige, and Success by Art Kleiner.
  2. Does sugar make it harder to fight off microbes?
  3. Practical memory training.
  4. Interview with Leonard Mlodinow, author of Feynman’s Rainbow and the soon-to-be-published The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.

Thanks to Dave Lull and Peter Spero.

The Scientific Method, Half-Finished but Wholly-Accepted

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In a science classroom at a middle school I saw a poster about “the scientific method.” There were seven steps; one was “analyze your data.” According to the poster, you use the data you’ve collected to say if your hypothesis was right or wrong. Nothing was said about using data to generate new hypotheses. Yet coming up with ideas worth testing is just as important as testing them.

It’s like teaching the alphabet and omitting half of the letters. Or teaching French and omitting half the common words. While no one actually teaches only half the alphabet or only half of common French words, this is how science is actually taught. Not just in middle school, everywhere. The poster correctly reflects the usual understanding. I have seen dozens of books about scientific method. They usually say almost nothing about how to come up with a new idea worth testing. An example is Statistics For Experimenters, a well-respected book by Box, Hunter, and Hunter. One of the authors (George Box) is a famous statistician.

The curious part of this omission is how unnecessary it is. Every scientific idea we now take for granted started somewhere. It would be no great effort to find where a bunch of them came from.