Thank you, j n kalhan, for your comment on a post of mine that speculated that Joyce Hatto and Ranjit Chandra might be twins separated at birth:
It is not true. I have personal knowledge. Dr. Chandra has no twin brother.
Author: Seth Roberts
Brian Wansink to the USDA!
Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating and an innovative methodologist, has been appointed executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion for 14 months. A surprising and most encouraging choice. Brian’s research is amazingly free of dogma. He does what you should do, rather than what people tell you to do.
About cool data.
The Truth About Advertising
At a recent party, I met a brand manager for a very large company. He explained how advertisements are designed. You do a focus group to find out the real reason people buy your product — what they really want from it — then you make your advertisements reflect that reason. For example, people do not buy [Product X] because it does [the stated function of Product X]. They buy it because they want to feel confident. So the ads for [Product X] show people appearing confident.
I had heard this before, but never so clearly. A NY Times article about Western Union provides another example:
Having once stressed efficiency (“the fastest way to send money”) [in its ads], Western Union now emphasizes the devotion the money represents. One poster pairs a Filipino nurse in London with her daughter back home in cap and gown, making Western Union an implicit partner in the family’s achievements. “Sending so much more than money” is a common tag line.
Please, Mr. Kirn, I Want a Summary
Years ago, Bill McKibben gave a reading at Black Oak Books, a Berkeley bookstore. After the reading he chatted with a friend. The grade of B his book had received from Entertainment Weekly came up. “It settled arguments around the house about who’s the better writer,” McKibben said. His wife’s most recent book had gotten a B+. McKibben and his friend then decried the EW practice of giving grades to books as if they were term papers. Perhaps they called it “simplistic”.
Whereas I think EW has exactly the right idea. I liked Ha Jin’s Waiting. I respect Walter Kirn. I was pleased to see that Kirn reviews Ha Jin’s latest book, A Free Life, in the current New York Times Book Review but I became a little dismayed as I read Kirn’s review: What exactly was he trying to say?
Volatility, after all, is a measure of health in a free market, and the elementary algebra of Jin’s narrative pace — as slow, implacable and steady as interest accumulating in a savings account — implicitly promises that his dimes and quarters of mundane description and petty conflict will result in a full piggy bank for all. Neither does Jin give his people flaws or problems grave enough to threaten their well-being. Pingping’s chronic fretting is not disabling, and Nan’s nascent ambitions as a poet aren’t the kind that lead to leaps off bridges if they go unattained.
Huh? Kirn seems to be saying the novel is too predictable but I’m not quite sure. I would really have liked a grade at the end so that I could have figured out what Kirn thought overall.
Kirn wrote for Spy; I met him there once and told him I loved his article about “The First 100 Lies” (of the Bush pere presidency). Where is Review of Reviewers, one of Spy’s best features, when we need it?
Perception vs. Reality: Nuclear Power
A fascinating post by Stephen Dubner — with help from Gwenyth Cravens — says that our perceptions of the danger of nuclear power have been warped, and not in a good way. Years ago I saw a scatterplot that showed perception of risk versus actual risk for many possible dangers: auto accident, being hit by lightning, and so on. Nuclear energy was a whopping outlier. Its perceived risk was much greater than you’d expect from its actual risk. From that outlier, a book with a great title: Power to Save the World.
At Thanksgiving Dinner…
…My sister said that — curious from reading this blog — she increased her daily dose of flaxseed oil from one capsule (10 calories) to 1 Tablespoon (110 calories) per day. She noticed three positive effects. One is that the skin around her fingernails improved. It cracked less often. (I’d say the same — hadn’t realized it until she mentioned it.) Another, first noticed by her dentist (”I didn’t say anything”), is that her gums were in better shape. The third, more subtle than the first two, is more energy. She has noticed no negative effects.
More On Humor
When I was an undergraduate, I came up with an idea about why people laugh: Laughter is triggered by sudden pleasure. Not pleasure alone, it must increase quickly. Sudden pleasure is the necessary and sufficient condition for laughter. The threshold goes up and down — easier to make someone laugh if they’re nervous or cold, for example — but the basic rule never changes. (Tickling is an exception, of course.) Two old friends unexpectedly encounter each other, they embrace, laughing.
Humor is a subset of what causes laughter. Obviously we enjoy humor and jokes have punchlines — the necessary conditions are met. Maybe humor can tell us something about evolution: What is funny reveals what we enjoy, which may have a genetic basis.
I figured out that many jokes derive their pleasure from more than one source. These sources include:
1. Something forbidden. We have something we want to say or would enjoy saying; humor lets us say it.Insults, sexual stuff, scatological stuff (for children), swear words. Political jokes, a much bigger deal in the former Soviet Union than in America, tell forbidden truth about the government.
2. Something clever. Connecting two things that are quite different.
3. Something incongruous. Many New Yorker cartoons involve animals talking or children talking like adults.
Many jokes are clever insults, for example. Maybe the “did somebody say something” joke that I was puzzled about is an example. The speaker is saying “I don’t care about what you care about” (an insult of sorts) in a clever way.
I suspect this list is incomplete — but now that I’ve made it I can test it.
Drugs and Depression
The most gripping portions of Let Them Eat Prozac [by David Healy] narrate courtroom battles in which Big Pharma’s lawyers, parrying negligence suits by the bereaved, took this line of doubletalk to its limit by explaining SSRI-induced stabbings, shootings, and self-hangings by formerly peaceable individuals as manifestations of not-yet-subdued depression.
Yeah. From an excellent book review. The author of the review, an English professor, doesn’t understand methodology, but the facts are nicely presented. I assigned some of Healy’s book to my students. Healy did experiments that showed that Prozac caused suicidal thinking in a non-trivial fraction of ordinary people.
Blood Donation, Weight Loss, and Humor
At the Shangri-La Diet forums, karky, who has lost 75 pounds on SLD, wrote:
In July I experienced a plateau, and wrestled with the same 5 lbs all month. At the end of July, I donated a pint of blood. WooHoo! Weight loss is back! I think to myself, hmmm… coincidence. In November, another plateau, wrestling with 3 lbs. I donated a pint of blood Monday. Today is Wednesday, I have lost 5 lbs since Monday, 3 lbs Tuesday morning, 2 lbs this morning.
Chrianna replied:
you certainly make a good argument for donating blood!
Which made me chuckle.
I cannot come anywhere near explaining karky’s observation. But maybe I can explain — someday, not right now — why Chrianna’s reply amused me. I once wrote down about 50 laugh-inducing sentences I heard on the the sitcom Cheers, looking for patterns. Several were obvious. For example, many of the laugh-inducing sentences were insults. Maybe I should resume this quest.
It is a good way to pass the time. A few days ago, I heard the following on a Chevrolet radio ad:
Male voice: With Pilates, three kids, and a house full of laundry, Diana is too busy to think about fuel economy.
Female voice: I’m sorry. Did somebody say something?
Funny! I was driving. I turned off the radio and thought about it for the rest of the trip. What’s the rule? What general pattern is it an instance of? I couldn’t figure it out. I’m not the only one interested in this question. In an interview I can no longer find, Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker, said he wanted to write a scientific paper about the patterns he saw in New Yorker cartoon caption contest submissions. Which reminds me: I have written about patterns in New Yorker cartoon captions and talk-show monologue jokes.
Too Skeptical = ?
Paul Meehl, a famous clinical-psychology researcher, once said that when he was a student he was taught “the general scientific commitment not to be fooled and not to fool anyone else.” Yes, the. I’ve heard a dozen variations of this: “In graduate school I learned to think critically,” for example. How weirdly unbalanced. Isn’t it just as important — or more important — to figure out what can be learned from evidence? Not just what can’t?
The bias shows up in language. Skeptical is good, credulous is bad. There is no word that means too skeptical, no word that means under-credulous, no word that means the right amount of credulous.
When I hear comments like Meehl’s — when someone says “correlation does not equal causation,” for example, and does not stop to wonder what can be learned from the particular correlation being discussed — I think: You’re only using half your brain.