Author: Seth Roberts

Self-Experimentation, Dogged and Useful

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Studying himself, Piotr Wozniak, a Polish computer programmer, learned some useful things:

In 1985, he divided his database into three equal sets and created schedules for studying each of them. One of the sets he studied every five days, another every 18 days, and the third at expanding intervals, increasing the period between study sessions each time he got the answers right. This experiment proved that Wozniak’s first hunch was too simple. On none of the tests did his recall show significant improvement over the naive methods of study he normally used. But he was not discouraged and continued making ever more elaborate investigations of study intervals, changing the second interval to two days, then four days, then six days, and so on. Then he changed the third interval, then the fourth, and continued to test and measure, measure and test, for nearly a decade.

Based on his results he created a popular program called SuperMemo.

Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and now he’s working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions. . . . Wozniak has also invented a way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured information from books and articles, winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning.

Thanks to John Kounios, Robert Simmons, and Navanit Arakeri.

Glimpse of the Future: Dim Sum?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

The most surprising finding of my self-experimentation was that we need to see faces in the morning — every morning for most of us — to be in a good mood during the day. Morning faces push an oscillator that controls our mood. During the Stone Age, this need was fulfilled by talking to your neighbors. The function of this oscillator was to synchronize the moods of people who live together. It greased the wheels of cooperation. It’s much easier to work with someone in a good mood than someone in a bad mood.

Since I discovered this, I’ve wondered: What will this mean for everyday life? Will people chat via videophones? Watch YouTube videos (“This is my response to . . . “)? Look in a mirror? Gather in cafes? Or what? You need a community to make this work, since you need to see one or more faces for a half hour or more.

Last night at Teance, at a Slow Food event, I learned of two modern communities where people manage to get the needed face time. One is in Chaozhou, a city in Guangdong Province, China. Every morning retired people get together and drink tea. Where do they meet? I asked. “Anywhere,” I was told. They may meet in a park, for example. In Guangdong they drink more tea than anywhere else in China and, I was told, have better health than the rest of China.

The other community are those Cantonese, both in Hong Kong and in Guangdong Province, who eat dim sum every day for breakfast. They gather in restaurants that serve dim sum. You can come whenever you like but the the restaurants open around 5 am and the whole thing may last four hours. (My results imply that the face-to-face conversation should happen during the first hours or so after you get up. Wait till 10 am and there won’t be any effect.) You might have three business meetings during that time. You can stretch out eating dim sum in a way you can’t easily stretch out eating breakfast that appears all on one plate at once. So it lends itself to longer meals. The longer everyone spends at the dim sum restaurant, the easier it becomes to meet there.

Never Enough by Joe McGinniss

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I am reading Never Enough, Joe McGinniss‘s latest book. I was browsing at the Berkeley Public Library and there it was! It was a little like discovering a painting by Jackson Pollack in a thrift store. The typical book I want to read at BPL has 15 holds on it.

I am trying to read it as slowly as possible so that it will last as long as possible. It is surely the best book I have read this year. It is one of the best books I have read since I read The Miracle of Castel di Sangro (1999) by McGinniss, which was also incredibly good. That was another book hard to stop reading. In both books, the characters are bathed in a golden authorial light. Events are described with a beautiful simplicity, as if in a story for children, except what happens is intricate, meandering, morally complex, and true. In Miracle, McGinniss falls in love with the soccer team of a little town only to have his heart broken when they throw their last game. In Never Enough, a man is murdered — and then his brother, half a world away, is also murdered. (Which happened while McGinniss was writing about the first murder.) Surely the murders are unconnected yet how could they not be connected?

What Do Jobs Need to Be Good?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I’ve always wondered what makes a job satisfying. Yeah, it varies from person to person. What about features that are true for everyone? What about this, for example?

For a while at Amazon, I was the Manager of Website Performance and Availability. . . . Whenever something went wrong, and some chunk of the site got slow, I tracked down why and got people to fix it. Each week I wrote a report summarizing everything that went wrong in excruciating detail, and presented it to a room of directors and VPs in a weekly metrics meeting. It was as sisyphean a task as any you can possibly imagine. In a software system as large, complex and constantly changing as amazon.com, something is always going wrong. . . . My job was to make a list of irritating things each week, and I was widely regarded as having done it as well as anyone ever had. . . .I found this job to be the most soul-crushing work I’ve ever done. I totally burned out in a year, as did the person who held the job before me.

I tell you this story as a cautionary tale. Try to find work that allows you to focus on positive things. Avoid like the plague any work that focuses on negative things.

Related research. The writing cure.

80% Empty or 20% Full?

Seth Roberts1 Comment

A study in the latest issue of Journal of Nutrition wondered if following dietary guidelines (“eating healthy”) is helpful. From the abstract:

Few studies have found that adherence to dietary guidelines reduces the incidence of chronic disease. In 2001, a National Nutrition and Health Program (Program National Nutrition Santé) was implemented in France and included 9 quantified priority nutritional goals involving fruit, vegetable, and nutrient intakes, nutritional status, and physical activity. We developed an index score that includes indicators of these public health objectives and examined the association between this score and the incidence of major chronic diseases in the Supplémentation en Vitamines et Minéraux AntioXydants cohort. . . . Men in the top tertile [ = most adherence] compared with those in the lowest one had a 36% lower risk of major chronic diseases . . . No association was found in women.

No association in women. Suppose the guidelines were half correct — half of the advice was useless, half was helpful. You’d still expect an association because the helpful advice would help and the useless advice would neither hurt nor help.

Did the authors of this highly-informative study face their results squarely? No. The abstract concludes: “Healthy diet and lifestyle were associated with a lower risk of chronic diseases, particularly in men, thereby underlying relevance of the French nutritional recommendations.” Particularly in men, huh? The study started with about 2000 men and 3000 women. It lasted eight years.

Before There Was News, There Was Gossip

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Did the professionalization of science — people could make a living doing science — cause harm because although more science was done scientists — the professional ones — were no longer free to pursue the truth in any direction? Because their jobs and status were at stake? It’s plausible. Recall that Mendel and Darwin were amateurs. A more recent example is Alister Hardy, the Oxford professor who conceived the aquatic ape theory of evolution. He didn’t pursue it because he feared loss of reputation. The more sophisticated conclusion, I suppose, isn’t that professionalization was bad but that loss of diversity was bad. We need both amateur and professional scientists because each can do stuff the other can’t. Right now we only have professional ones. No one encourages amateur science; there is no way they can publish their work. (Unless, like Elaine Morgan, who wrote several books about the aquatic ape theory, you’re a professional writer.)

These thoughts were prompted by this remarkable blog post, which has nothing to do with science. What an amazing piece of writing, I thought. I don’t even agree with it, and here I am staring at it. A work of genius? No, lots of blog posts are really good. This one was merely better than most. Would something this brazen and effective appear in any major magazine, newspaper, TV show, radio ad, etc.? No, not even. Do we realize that, all these years, stuff like this has been missing from our media consumption? No, we don’t. Before there was news, there was gossip, I realized; news (such as newspapers) was a kind of professionalization of gossip. The blog post I admired was a bit of riveting creative gossip. Blogs are just new-fangled gossip. Bloggers are endlessly scandalized, indignant, judgmental, just as gossips are. Just as gossip is usually “passed on,” most blog posts have links and many posts consist almost entirely of “passing on” something. Just as gossip can be anything, bloggers can say what they really think, as Tyler Cowen pointed out. That’s why they’re so successful, so easy to write and read. Gossip is good for our mental ecology, just as science is. Mark Liberman’s Language Log blog is a blend of (good) gossip and science; as you can see from my interview with him, it filled a gap. I hope blogs will provide a kind of support structure on which amateur science can grow.

Interview with Mark Liberman about Blogging

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Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, blogs at Language Log. Recently I asked him a few questions about blogging.

ROBERTS Why did you start Language Log?

LIBERMAN Several reasons. First, I had started reading blogs and enjoyed them. Second, I was spending quite a bit of time exchanging email with friends. They were like long-distance dinner-table conversations. Each email was a couple of paragraphs. I was spending quite a bit of time on that. It was interesting and fun, a way of keeping up with friends and former colleagues. I realized that many of these emails were close to blog entries that might be interesting to a wider audience. Some of them could have been blog entries. I thought to myself: If there was a weblog, instead of sending this to 1 or 2 people I could put it on the weblog and send a link to those people. Third, I had felt for a long time that linguistics, in our current culture, was in an historically atypical and irrational place. Almost nobody learned about linguistics, got any intellectual information about language. It was undertaught to the general public. It has been valued much more in the past. Now we’re in a situation where many English professors have never taken a course that teaches anything about the analysis of language. They don’t know how to do it. One small way to improve that situation would be to put stuff out there that people could read.

ROBERTS How has blogging affected you?

LIBERMAN Three things. First and most important, I’ve met — mostly digitally — a large number of people that I would never otherwise have met. They send me email. If I look over my email logs, there are probably 5 or 10 people that I correspond with frequently whom I’ve met that way. Most of them are not linguists; I wouldn’t have met them otherwise. Some of them are not even academics. Second, it has allowed me to influence the conversation inside linguistics and related fields in a way that I hadn’t really expected. It wasn’t my motivation. I’ve always thought of writing for people outside the field. Issues that I’ve raised within the field, including how the field ought to view itself, people respond to. I was invited to give a plenary talk at the Linguistics Society of America meeting about the status of the field in academia. I had blogged about such things. Third, I get a lot of calls from journalists asking me to comment about this or that. A lot of things they ask me to comment on I don’t know about. It made me someone that journalists call.

ROBERTS How have your views about blogging changed since you started Language Log?

LIBERMAN There is a spectrum of blogs; some are just sets of links — minimal comment and a link. When I started I thought that was what I was going to do, along with email-to-friends kind of pieces. Along the way I learned that a blog entry is a good way for me to learn things. If there’s something that I’m interested in, I may write a blog-like essay about it. I compose quite a few blog entries that I never publish. When I’m working through some ideas, I often organize my thoughts an awful lot like an blog entry. Like an annotated bibliography but with more structure. I don’t publish some of those things because I don’t think the general audience of Language Log would be interested in them. They’re too difficult. They take the form of an extended blog entry — links plus evaluation and discussion but more informal than a paper. Very helpful in organizing my thoughts. I read some things, put in some links, quotes, weave it all together into some structure. I produce an html document. It’s a way of taking notes. Something I do at the very beginning of an intellectual enterprise. A journal article is what you do at the end. For example, I’ve become interested in auditory texture. I’ve been composing a few things that are like weblog entries.

Once a month or so I try to do what I call a breakfast experiment. Some issue has come up in the world that I want to comment on. There’s an experiment that I wouldn’t want to submit to a journal. Better than an anecdote. For example, a few months ago somebody wrote that a journalist who had been living in Japan had been learning girl Japanese. Is it true that there is more gender difference in pitch in Japanese than in other languages? At the Linguistic Data Consortium we had conversations in many languages, including Japanese and English. I could select appropriate conversations, throw values into R, look at quantiles. (There were a few issues you’d want to clean up for a journal article.) I got up early, set up scripts, made coffee, had cereal, plotted quantiles. By 7:30 am I had some pictures. It was true that there was more gender polarization in pitch in Japanese than in English. The analysis involved 18 Japanese conversations and a similar number of English conversations.

I had been abstractly aware for a long time that there’s a lot of value in doing experiments on published data. One of the problems in doing empirical linguistics has been that gathering data takes a lot longer than anything else. For English we’ve now got about 10,000 extemporaneous telephone conversations, with demographic info about the speakers. I thought of experiments on that sort of data where someone had to spend a lot of time gathering the data, but once it’s gathered and published, there are a lot of ideas that you can try out very quickly.