Author: Seth Roberts

What Do Bulimia and Working for the U.N. Have in Common?

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Twice in my life — in Denmark and Hong Kong — I have started chatting with women who ended up telling me about their bulimia, which they kept secret from almost everyone, including their friends. A few days ago, in San Francisco, I met a woman who works on water engineering projects for the U.N. “What I do in my job is connect people,” she told me. For example, she went to Haiti and brought the people who needed help together with the people (in Haiti) who could help them. She never tells her bosses what she does. To her bosses, the focus is on some sort of technology. Were she to tell her bosses what she does, she said, the focus would shift away from the technology. There would be attempts to institutionalize what she does — and institutions would be terrible at it.

What other jobs are like this (where your boss doesn’t know what you do)?

Shirley Hazzard’s Defeat of an Ideal: A Study of the Self-destruction of the United Nations (1973) is excellent. It’s Devil Wears Prada about a whole institution.

The Twilight of Expertise (part 12: Super Crunchers)

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Ian Ayres’ interesting new book, Super Crunchers, has a chapter about expert prediction versus predictions from math models. Almost always, the math models do better than the experts. I learned about this in graduate school when I read stuff by Paul Meehl, a psychology professor who compared the predictions of clinicians and regression equations in the 1950s. The idea has gathered strength since then and now the persons in some jobs — such as loan officers — are required to follow an algorithm for making decisions. Their expertise is ignored. Obviously they no longer derive as much self-worth from their job, Ayres points out.

It’s like the beginning of agriculture. Lots has been written about the physical problems caused by the change to agriculture. Stature decreased, tooth decay increased, and so on. I’ve never read about the mental problems it must have caused. I can only speculate, of course, but here’s an possible example: Hunters derived self-worth from bringing meat to their families. Taking that away caused problems. (Watching Once Were Warriors, a terrific movie, should make this more plausible.)

I have never read anything about how to reintroduce into everyday jobs crucial mental elements that hunting had and farming lacked. Nutrition education, vitamin supplements, dietary fortification, and other nutrition programs push us toward a pre-agricultural diet, which was far more diverse and better balanced. There is no similar set of things that move us closer to pre-agricultural ways of making a living. My self-experimental research is all about the value stuff that ancient life had but modern life lacks — such as seeing lots of faces in the morning — but I have never figured out how to simulate elements of hunting, beyond being on one’s feet a lot.

SLD Nation (ghee)

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I drink 4 tablespoons of flaxseed oil per day. But perhaps I could go higher:

Anjum always cooks with safflower oil (similar to sunflower oil), but admits that “butter goes really well with lentils” and even, unfashionably, puts in a good word for ghee (clarified butter). “I think modern science has it wrong and soon they’re going to say ghee is healthy.” At an Ayurvedic spa in Malta last summer she was put on a ghee detox. “I was like: Are you crazy? I wanted to lose the baby weight.” Given increasing doses for breakfast, by the last day she could happily swallow nine tablespoons of pure fat. “I looked, like, six years younger.”

From here.

Thanks to Evelyn Mitchell.

What Causes Heart Attacks? (the Framingham Study)

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The Framingham Study is a famous long-term health survey. According to an NIH webpage, its goal was “to identify the common factors or characteristics that contribute to CVD by following its development over a long period of time in a large group of participants who had not yet developed overt symptoms of CVD or suffered a heart attack or stroke.”

That is not quite right. It was originally called the Framingham Diet Study. Now it is called the Framingham Heart Study. Why the change? Well, Michael Eades, the author of Protein Power, found an early report on the findings of this study and wrote a fascinating post about it. One of his excerpts from the report:

In undertaking the diet study at Framingham the primary interest was, of course, in the relation of diet to the development of coronary heart disease (CHD). It was felt, however, that any such relationship would be an indirect one, diet influencing serum cholesterol level and serum cholesterol level influencing the risk of CHD. However, no relationship could be discerned within the study cohort between food intake and serum cholesterol level.

In the period between the taking of the diet interviews and the end of the 16-year follow-up, 47 cases of de novo CHD developed in the Diet Study group. The means for all the diet variables measured were practically the same for these cases as for the original cohort at risk. There is, in short, no suggestion of any relation between diet and the subsequent development of CHD in the study group.

That is, the findings of the study completely contradicted what the researchers believed (as indicated in the name Framingham Diet Study). This is what Leonard Syme taught his introductory epidemiology students on topic after topic: Well-known conclusions are far less certain than you think.

Thanks to Tom.

Memorial University Continues to Destroy Its Reputation (continued)

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In 2003, Saul Sternberg and I published an article that claimed that some work by Ranjit Chandra, an Order-of-Canada-winning scientist, was unbelievable. You can learn more about the Chandra story here. In February, someone named Peter S. Morris made a long list of additions to the Ranjit Chandra entry in Wikipedia. The additions make Memorial University of Newfoundland, Chandra’s employer, look better. They include:

The vice-presidents [investigating a charge that Chandra had fabricated data] were unable to secure the data, and, as a consequence, were unable to verify research fraud conclusively.

What a statement. Not being able to “secure the data” is what you would expect if data were fabricated. Either the vice presidents were mentally retarded or this is false. The whistle blower who reported Chandra to Memorial, a nurse named Marilyn Harvey who had worked for Chandra, did so at considerable risk. That Memorial did a travesty of an investigation and failed to protect her is horrible — and now someone is lying about it.

A Peter Morris is Director of Public Affairs in the Division of Marketing and Communications at Memorial University.

My earlier post with this heading.

The Secret and Self-Experimentation

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The Secret, of course, is the huge best seller that makes a claim that on its face sounds delusional: You can get what you want by thinking about it. Years ago I stayed in a bed-and-breakfast room rented by a woman whose refrigerator had a collage with pictures and words showing money and prosperity. Clearly she believed that imagining these things would help achieve them.

Previously I described a cable-TV experiment that shows there is something to this. Here, in addition, is some self-experimentation:

Back in the 80′s when I first started work as a nurse, I decided to spend one week using only superlatives & compliments when dealing with my co-workers and patients. I 1st wanted to see if they would ‘call’ me on it & just tell me to stop the silliness. Then I wanted to see if it made a difference in my life, &/or theirs. . . . I freely complimented the docs, nurses, ancillary help, etc. At the end of the week, I had people telling me, ‘I don’t know what it is about you, but I just love spending time around you.’

My mom tells a similar story. In seventh grade she went to a new school where she didn’t know anyone. It was very bad year in terms of making friends. The night before the first day of eighth grade she had a dream. In the dream she was at school and it was just as terrible as seventh grade. She woke up and thought, “No, I can’t go through that again, it was too awful.” She wondered what she could possibly do to change things. Well, she thought, I could smile at everyone “like a damn fool” — whether she felt like smiling or not. In fact, this worked. Not much later a girl she admired said to her, “People say you’re a lot more friendly this year.” Eighth grade turned out a lot better than seventh grade.

What Causes Heart Attacks? (continued)

Seth Roberts16 Comments

Uffe Ravnskov, a Swedish doctor, wrote a paper titled “Is atherosclerosis caused by high cholesterol?” (An admirably clear title.) His answer was no. He submitted it to a medical journal. One of his empirical points was that there was no relationship between cholesterol level and atherosclerosis growth. One reviewer commented:

Lack of relationship can be explained by more factors that only absence of it: small numbers, incorrect or indirect measurements of variables of interest, imprecision in measurement, confounding factors, etc.

To which Ravnskov replied:

If it is impossible to find exposure-response between changes of blood cholesterol and atherosclerosis growth in 22 studies including almost 2500 individuals a relationship between the two, if any, must be trivial.

Which sounds reasonable. But an even larger number of clinical trials failed to find clear evidence that omega-3 supplementation reduces heart disease. Yet I am sure that, with a large enough dose, it does.

Most people believe clinical trials, which are usually double-blind when possible and placebo-controlled. “The gold standard,” they are called. Science writer Gary Taubes, for example, believes them: When the results of a clinical trial contradicted a survey result, he believed the clinical trial. His recent NY Times magazine article was based on the assumption that clinical trials are trustworthy. This is such an article of faith that he gave no evidence for it.

That the heart disease clinical trials failed to clearly show benefits of omega-3 supplementation had large and unfortunate consequences. Not only because heart disease is the leading cause of death in many places, including America, but also because I am sure proper omega-3 supplementation would reduce many other problems, including falls, memory loss, gum disease, and other diseases of too much inflammation.

I don’t know why the big clinical trials failed to point clearly in the right direction. I can think of several possibilities:

1. Too large. Hard to control quality — verify data, for example. People near the bottom doing the work have little stake in accuracy of the outcome.

2. Poor compliance. If you are taking the placebo, why bother? And the odds are fifty-fifty you are. Lots of people have trouble following SLD, which obviously works.

3. Degradation. My belief that omega-3 is powerful comes from experiments (mine) and examples involving flaxseed oil. Flax grows at room temperature. The heart disease studies used fish oil; fish live in cold water. The omega-3 fats in fish oil may degrade at room temperature. The omega-3 fat in flaxseed oil may be far more stable at room temperature.

4. Wrong dose. Self-experimentation made it easy for me to figure out the correct dosage. People studying heart disease had no similar data to guide them. They could not realistically expect people to consume as much fish oil as the Eskimos whose rate of heart disease was so low.

5. Too sure. Self-experimentation encourages skepticism about one’s results because new experiments are easy to do. If I can think of reasons to doubt my results so far, that’s a good excuse for a new experiment. The more experiments the better. Each one is easy; I just need a good story line, a good reason for each one. Whereas if you are doing an experiment that cannot be repeated, any skepticism about it — e.g., about accuracy of measurements — is discouraged: It would cast doubt on the whole enterprise.

Fuzzy Logic and Self-Experimentation (part 1)

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Fuzzy logic, which started with a 1965 paper by Lotfi Zadeh, a professor of computer science, is an advanced form of engineering; self-experimentation is a kind of primitive science. They seem to be at opposite ends of a continuum. As science advances — as knowledge becomes wider and more accurate — it becomes more and more useful, gradually becoming engineering. Fuzzy logic is an especially useful form of engineering.

A few years ago I attended a talk by Zadeh in the Berkeley Physics Department colloquium series. He showed a little movie of a platform moving back and forth to balance three linked poles. It was staggering that this was possible. It is a classic problem in control theory. Here is an example with two linked poles:

Fuzzy logic has proved especially useful in building control systems. An early example was furnace control; one of the first real-life examples was a Japanese subway system. Many consumer electronic products, especially those from Japan, use fuzzy logic. One of my Omron blood pressure meters uses fuzzy logic, says the box. (Omron now uses the term IntelliSense instead.)

When an engineer builds a control system, he doesn’t start from scratch, choosing from among all possibilities. Rather, he tries to embody in a computer program what a person would do. The program embodies a series of rules. Fuzzy logic provided a new and better language for describing those rules. It “bring[s] the reasoning used by computers closer to that used by people,” Zadeh has said. People use “vague” rules: If you are near a corner, slow down. Now it was easy to add such rules to control systems.

Jane Jacobs Updated

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Chris Matthews’ latest book is Life’s A Campaign. “A recipe for sadness,” Jon Stewart called it in an interview that Matthews called the worst of his life:

In Systems of Survival (1992), Jane Jacobs described two ethical systems: guardian (= government) and commercial. Each system consists of rules of conduct (e.g., “be honest” is a commercial value but not a guardian one). Matthews’s book says you should use guardian principles in everyday life; Stewart said that’s a mistake — commercial principles work better. Jacobs said there is a tendency to think that the principles that work well in your system work everywhere. Maybe this is why Matthews seemed stunned by Stewart’s objections.

To Jacobs’ two systems, Chris Phoenix, a nanotechnology expert, has added a third: the “ information system“. It is about appropriate behavior — what is seen as appropriate behavior — in the world of open source software and similar goods. Phoenix argues persuasively that a different set of values applies. This is why I asked Aaron Swartz what’s wrong with Wikipedia: It’s not so obvious what the appropriate values are.

Long before open source software there were books: books share expertise. Long before books — at the dawn of humanity, I believe — there were hobbies: hobbyists share their expertise. The ethical system that Phoenix describes is much older and more important than he says. Phoenix acted within that system when he posted his essay on the Web; Jacobs did, too, when she wrote a book. Just as I do by blogging.