Author: Seth Roberts

How to Be Wrong

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There are two mistakes you can make when you read a scientific paper: You can believe it (a) too much or (b) too little. The possibility of believing something too little does not occur to most professional scientists, at least if you judge them by their public statements, which are full of cautions against too much belief and literally never against too little belief. Never. If I’m wrong — if you have ever seen a scientist warn against too little belief — please let me know. Yet too little belief is just as costly as too much.

It’s a stunning imbalance which I have never seen pointed out. And it’s not just quantity, it’s quality. One of the foolish statements that intelligent people constantly make is “correlation does not imply causation.” There’s such a huge bias toward saying “don’t do that” and “that’s a bad thing to do” — I think because the people who say such things enjoy saying them — that the people who say this never realize the not-very-difficult concepts that (a) nothing unerringly implies causation, so don’t pick on correlations and (b) correlations increase the plausibility of causation. If your theory predicts Y and you observe Y, your theory gains credence. Causation predicts correlation.

This tendency is so common it seems unfair to give examples.

If you owned a car that could turn right but not left, you would drive off the road almost always. When I watch professional scientists react to this or that new bit of info, they constantly drive off the road: They are absurdly dismissive. The result is that, like the broken car, they fail to get anywhere: They fail to learn something they could have learned.

Addendum. By “too little belief” I meant too little belief in facts — that this or that new observation has something useful to tell us. Thanks to Varangy, who pointed out that there is plenty of criticism of too little belief in this or that favored theory. You could say it is a kind of conservatism.

Recent Reading

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Random paragraphs from two books I’ve recently read.

By 1853 Riemann was twenty-seven and on the last stretch of the long road to a lectureship at Gottingen. In Germany at that time, such an academic position did not pay the modest salary it does today. It did not pay any salary. To many of us, that would be a bit of a drawback. To Riemann, it was a coveted position, a stepping stone to a professorship. And students gave tips.

From Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace (2001) by Leonard Mlodinow.

“Tastes great, less filling!” could be the motto for most processed foods, which are far more energy dense than most whole foods: They contain much less water, fiber, and micronutrients, and generally much more sugar and fat, making them at the same time, to coin a marketing slogan, “More fattening, less nutritious!”

From In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008) by Michael Pollan.

Interview with a Connector

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One of Malcolm Gladwell’s best articles is “ Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg“, about a Chicago woman who seemed to know everyone and enjoyed introducing them. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell called such people Connectors. When I met a Connector, a Berkeley psychologist named Karine S., at a Los Angeles party, I wanted to know more.

You like to connect people? How do you do that?

I think the root of my desire to connect people stems from being from a collectivistic culture (Israeli). Also, friendship means a lot to me and I take it very seriously. So I like to bring friends together when I know that they will get along. I do have to say that I’m very selective about which friends I combine though. And often times people connect because they meet over and over at events/outings that I plan/initiate. But ultimately I have to say that I think that people in my life connect because of a common experience. For example, when I moved up north [the Bay Area] I spent a lot of time with friends in the time before at “going away” outings. So I think there was a common emotion experienced which led to them bonding. So now some of my friends back home and are now friends because they met through me. Of course when I come down we all get together again. I think it just comes down to making a plan and inviting a bunch of people that are my friends which leads them to connect and get along.

You say you’re selective about “which friends [you] combine”. Can you say more about this? Such as how you decide?

I guess it stems from being so sensitive and attuned to people’s feelings and experiences that I know who will hit it off and who won’t. It’s also somewhat selfish because I will end up “babysitting” people if they do not blend with others and engage. I’d like to say that most of my friends get along with each other, but there are some who have not hit it off. I think I combine those who are open to diversity and are not judgmental much more easily. Come to think of it, in big settings I combine mostly everyone. But let’s say it’s a Sunday on Melrose…window shopping, eating lunch…I invite those that I know like each other. It’s basically a personality assessment. Some people are very open to being around others and there are some people that are so uncomfortable in their own skin that they cannot be around others comfortably and it shows. And when you have known people for a long time, it doesn’t require much thought. I know I’m pretty good at doing this because there are people who share me as a friend, and now hang out because they met through me.

Can you think of a mistake you’ve made bringing people together?

One time I brought two people together who I thought would hit it off and didn’t! It was like a bad accident! I thought they would bond about things and enjoy each other and it turned out that the “philosophical” conversation turned into a battle of egos. They verbally attacked each other and it was so bad. This all happened at a restaurant and carried over to my house. One of them reassessed whether she wanted to be friends with me if I was to have this other friend in my life. I think now when someone has as strong a personality as this friend did, I make sure to talk to that person about how expressive they will be about their viewpoints. I think this issue only comes up with certain people in my life…meaning there are certain friends that I cannot bring around just anyone because they are fragile and/or not as mentally sophisticated/intelligent as the other people in my life.

A nice article critical of Gladwell’s thesis.

Does Mercury Cause Autism? (continued)

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A 2006 paper reported that autism rates have started to decline, according to a California reporting system and a nationwide one. The declines, you will see if you look, are very clear. They started soon after mercury began to be removed from childhood vaccines. Richard Herrnstein, the psychologist, coined a useful phrase: to praise with faint damn. I thought of it when I read comments (here and here) criticizing this study because of the journal it is in.

According to the Sacramento Bee,

Experts said, however, that they don’t know what’s causing the numbers to fall off.

“Perhaps whatever caused (the number of cases) to go up … is no longer present,” said Dr. Robert Hendren, executive director of the University of California, Davis MIND Institute, which researches neurodevelopmental disorders.

No kidding.

Previous post.

Jane Jacobs and Self-Experimentation

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In answer to a question about what Pittsburgh should do to revive itself, Richard Florida answered:

I asked Jane Jacobs once, “What would you do — as a person who lived in New York in the Village — to rebuild the World Trade Center site? She said, “Well, Richard, you asked the wrong question. What would the people who used that site do? What would the people who used to work there do? What would the people who owned shops there do?”

The people who used the site know the most about the site. And they care the most about it.

This is one big reason self-experimentation is a good idea: The people with a problem know the most about the problem and care the most about it. People with acne know more and care more about acne than people without it. People with insomnia know more and care more about it. And so on. It’s a huge resource that conventional research almost completely ignores.

New York Times vs. Reality

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In a recent NY Times health blog by Tara Parker-Pope was the following:

Dr. Parikh says it is a lesson pediatricians have already learned. He notes that doctors weren’t paying attention in the late ’90s, when patients were just beginning to go online en masse and theories about vaccines and autism were first circulating.

“We weren’t paying much attention until parents started to refuse vaccines. When we looked, we realized that many parents were exposed to story after story on autism Web sites and in chat rooms about the dangers of vaccines. That echo chamber of opinion became a reality despite our best efforts to prove otherwise…. Would things have been different if we had engaged our patients from the get-go by providing them with alternative Web sites, scrutinizing and rebutting anti-vaccine “science,” or posting studies demonstrating vaccine safety in the public domain? I would answer, emphatically, yes.”

To Parker-Pope, in other words, everybody knows — or at least every sensible person knows — that “anti-vaccine ‘science’” wasn’t really science and that vaccines were safe. Not quite. Further examples: NYT vs. business reality. NYT vs. political reality.

Everything Old is New Again: Pick-Up Lines

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Long before Atkins, there was Banting. The first low-carb diet was the creation of William Banting’s doctor. A pamphlet about it titled Letter on Corpulence, published in 1864, was a huge best-seller. The verb to banting meant to diet.

And long before The Game — albeit less well-known for teaching pick-up lines — there was Jane Austen. The lessons of The Game were a subplot of a recent episode of Ugly Betty in which Betty interviews an author of a similar book that says the best way to get a woman’s interest to follow praise with criticism. Later in the episode, we see this advice in action: Henry tells a woman that she has a lovely face — “your doctor did an excellent job.”

Here’s Austen, from Northanger Abbey:

“I have sometimes thought,” said Catherine, doubtingly, “whether ladies do write so much better letters than gentlemen! That is — I should not think the superiority was always on our side.”

“As far as I have had opportunity of judging, it appears to me that the usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars.”

“And what are they?”

“A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.”

A little later:

“And pray, sir, what do you think of Miss Morland’s gown?”

“It is very pretty, madam,” said he, gravely examining it; “but I do not think it will wash well; I am afraid it will fray.”

More Blog Power

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From the London Telegraph a few days ago:

Peter Hain has made history: his is the first British ministerial scalp to have been claimed by a blogger. Kudos, as the Americans say, to Guido Fawkes [a blogger], who first sighted his tomahawk at the Hain campaign 12 months ago when he posted Hain’s campaign strategy.

Hain’s crime was failure to declare campaign donations. A downfall timeline. “Guido sees himself as a journalist, a campaigning journalist who publishes via a blog. He campaigns against political sleaze and hypocrisy,” says Guido. His comparison of food allowances.

Academic Horror Story (UC Berkeley)

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Two years ago, a University of California Berkeley undergraduate was a subject in an MRI experiment at the Henry H. Wheeler, Jr. Brain Imaging Center on the UC Berkeley campus. She did it for the money: It paid $200 for two two-hour sessions, during which you lie motionless inside a large loud machine. During the first session, the persons monitoring the experiment could see that something was seriously wrong: The subject had a large mass in her brain. Clearly her life was at risk. But they didn’t tell her immediately what they had seen. (Later they claimed they “couldn’t” have told her, for legal reasons. A friend of hers who was present at the experiment was threatened with serious legal action if he told her.) Instead, they sought outside opinion about what the mass was and what to do about it. A few weeks later, they told her about it. “Sometimes unusual things show up on these scans” she was told. This was incorrect: Nothing like this had happened before at UC Berkeley.

In a way, the story has a happy ending. The large mass turned out to be benign (but at the time of the experiment they had no way of knowing that). It was removed. A year and a half after the operation, there are no signs of reoccurrence.

The experimenters not only (a) withheld what might have been life-saving information, (b) they persisted in this behavior after having time to think about it; and (c) they threatened someone who wanted to do the right thing. This is no momentary lapse in judgment. The experimenters — including the professor in charge and who knows what other powerful people at UC Berkeley — actively did the wrong thing. They carefully decided not to tell her info that might have saved her life.

More. After I wrote this post, I learned that the person in charge of the Wheeler Brain Imaging Center at the time was Professor Mark D’Esposito. By email I asked him if he disputed any of the facts in this post and if the Center had done anything to keep such a thing from happening again. He didn’t reply.

The Mystery of Bibloquet (continued)

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Bibloquet appears impossibly difficult, I posted recently. Yet people become very good at it, no doubt through huge amounts of practice. Why?

Now and then I hear about somebody getting very good at a physical skill: A basketball player is very good at free-throw shooting, for example. No doubt the reason is lots of practice. I’m not surprised because explanation is easy: He played a lot of basketball (social, fun to move around), he wanted to be a pro (aspiration). Professional musicians have practiced a lot — sure, music sounds good, it’s their job. Most cases of extreme practice that I know of have plausible common-sense explanations.

Bibloquet skill does not. It leads nowhere, is completely useless (I suspect), isn’t social, and isn’t promoted by the environment (there are no bilboquet rooms, for example). Some people spend a huge amount of time playing video games (also useless, etc.), but video games are complicated. Bibloquet is simple. You can see this in the price. A video game might cost $40, not counting the price of the computer it runs on. My bibloquet probably cost about $1. No computer needed. For that $1 I am going to get a huge amount of enjoyment. Hard to think of something else for $1 that would provide so much pleasure.

As Michel Cabanac has argued many times, our brains use pleasure to guide our actions: What we should do is more pleasant than what we shouldn’t do. Sometimes this system misfires because something man-made resembles what we should be seeking. If your iron level is very low you may suffer from pagophagia — too much ice chewing. Ice chewing brings persons with pagophagia great pleasure. I’m sure that the evolutionary reason is that ice chewing is producing the same sensations as bone crunching. Bone crunching would be a good source of iron because bone marrow is iron-rich. The mechanism that causes pagophagia evolved because it promoted bone crunching. Chewing ice resembles bone crunching. What biologically-useful activity does playing bibloquet resemble?

My guess is that bilboquet is addictive because:

1. Success is sharply defined. You catch the ball (success) or not (failure). Other addictive games have this feature. Tetris: you fit the falling shape into the pile at the bottom. Sudoku: You fill in all the squares correctly.

2. Success is not easy. We like a challenge. Most video games, such as Tetris, get harder and harder.

3. Hand-eye coordination is involved.

At the core of human evolution is occupational specialization and diversification. It started with hobbies. To get diversity of hobbies you need diversity of reward; a wide range of skilled activities must be rewarding. Rather than evolve a separate mechanism for each hobby, this was accomplished with a mechanism that is quite flexible and can operate with lots of different activities. Thus the reward system can be transferred to something completely useless, such as bibloquet. The not-too-easy feature caused hobbyists to become more and more skilled because only by continually challenging themselves could they keep enjoying it. Hand-eye coordination was required because the goal was to get people to make things. Why success had to be sharply defined I’m not so sure. (In art, a similar human activity, success is not sharply defined.) Maybe it serves to focus effort.

The lesson for me is that if I want to produce a task that will measure how well my brain is working and be so much fun it’s addictive, it should involve hand-eye coordination. (It will be easier to make the many measurements my omega-3 research requires if I have such a task.) This is consistent with what I’ve observed so far: None of the tasks I’ve used have been addictively fun. The balance task had a fairly sharp and difficult measure of success (staying balanced for more than a few seconds) and was physical but didn’t involve hand-eye coordination. The digit-span task had a sharp measure of success (perfect recall) and could be made more and more difficult but didn’t involve hand-eye coordination. Three other tasks I’ve used had less sharply-defined success and didn’t involve hand-eye coordination.

Addendum. A Japanese website. In Japan bilboquet is kendama. Thanks to Pearl Alexander.