Author: Seth Roberts

Interesting Idea about Addiction

Seth Roberts3 Comments

From addiction and self-experimentation:

I am coming to believe that [my] addiction may be caused by a specific kind of autism-related syndrome. I don’t crave order in everything that I do but I do crave order and structure in order for me to relate to others. I need to figure out some ways to get that structured social interaction that my brain requires. . . A 12-step meeting could be [seen] as just a highly structured social event.

A friend of mine became an Orthodox Jew in college; his parents were not very religious. Now and then I went to his house for Shabbat. As I got to know him better — outside the religious rituals — I was astonished at the difficulty he had carrying on a conversation. The many structures (rituals) of Orthodox Judaism made it much easier for him to spend time with other people.

Aaron Swartz on What’s Wrong with Wikipedia

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I recently asked Aaron Swartz, who has written about Wikipedia and run for its board of directors, what he thought was wrong with it. Three big things, he said:

1. Failure to value new contributors. A small number of insiders are dismissive of and treat poorly newcomers who contribute. For example, their contributions are deleted without explanation. The insiders see the newcomers as a source of trouble rather than strength.

2. Disorganized and underfunded. It took someone Aaron knows two years to make a deal with Wikipedia. The finances are in bad shape.

3. Lack of vision. Wikipedia could be improved in many ways but actual improvements are rare.

He used to see Wikipedia as just a wonderful thing, he said; now he sees it as a wonderful thing that is falling way short of what it could be.

You seem to be saying someone could come along and start a better open-source encyclopedia, I said. That’s unlikely, he said, Wikipedia is so big.

Who does it better? A similar but vastly better-run website is craigslist, he said. A chart of page view rank and number of employees shows Yahoo at #1 with 10,000 employees, TimeWarner at #2 with 90,000, Google at #3 with 10,000, and so on. Craigslist is #7 with 23 employees.

Addendum: Wikipedia, with very few employees, would of course also rank very high on such a chart; this is the magic of both Wikipedia and craigslist and why it makes sense to compare them. The craigslist link I gave, to a Wall Street Journal article, suggests that craigslist values contributors much more than Wikipedia. Here is what happened at a Wikipedia board of directors meeting that Aaron attended a few years ago:

One presentation was by a usability expert who told us about a study done on how hard people found it to add a photo to a Wikipedia page. The discussion after the presentation turned into a debate over whether Wikipedia should be easy to to use. Some suggested that confused users should just add their contributions in the wrong way and a more experienced users would come along to clean their contributions up. Others questioned whether confused users should be allowed to edit the site at all — were their contributions even valuable?

Support for the Theory Behind SLD

Seth Roberts2 Comments

On the SLD forums, a member named Del posted this:

Roughly a month ago, I got tired of the oil. I was fighting to take it and something about one of them was causing an allergic reaction (dermatitis), so I switched to noseclipped oatmeal with brown rice protein. I haven’t noticed any change in my appetite suppression (read, still ridiculously good) and my weight loss has maintained at the usual rate of 3lbs or so per week. I’m really enjoying it and I have that nice full feeling as well.

So in the interest of sharing, that’s:
1/2 c. quick cook oatmeal
2T. brown rice or egg white protein
1 c of water
Cook in microwave for 2 minutes, let sit for one minute. Consume noseclipped morning and night.

In conventional nutritional terms, oil and the oatmeal mixture are very different. One is all fat, the other has almost no fat. Yet they have had the same effect on her weight. The theory behind the Shangri-La Diet predicts this but few if any other theories do. For example, if you believe in low-carb diets, you would predict that the oil (no carbs) would cause weight loss more easily than the oatmeal mixture (which has plenty of carbs).

My Theory of Human Evolution (language)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

After reading Christine Kenneally’s The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (2007) I could see that most theorists agree with me that language must have started small: With single words. None of the theorists seem to use my other guiding principle: Lightning doesn’t strike twice in one place for different reasons. If two rare events — such as (a) a sound in the night that sounds like a burglar and (b) in the morning your wallet is gone — might be due to the same thing, they probably are. Use of this principle means that how language evolved should fit into a larger explanation.

Humans differ from our closest primate relatives — not to mention all other species — in many ways, of course. One big difference is language; but there are many others. Application of the lightning-strikes-twice principle means that language probably began for the same reason as the other differences.

The overwhelming difference between humans and other species is that humans specialize in terms of jobs. Two randomly-selected people almost surely make their living doing quite different things all day. No other species does this. Two randomly-selected members of any other species almost surely make their living doing the same thing all day. The story I am trying to tell in my human evolution posts is how humans came to specialize like this. (I believe the aquatic ape theory is right, but it’s about an earlier stage of human evolution, before job specialization.)

For me, the question of how language evolved becomes the question: How did single-word language promote job specialization? This has an obvious answer: It promoted trade, which job specialization obviously requires. The first words were nouns — in particular, the names of objects (chair, knife, bag, etc.). These words promoted trade because:

1. They served as advertising. It became much easier to tell others that you or someone else had something to trade. It’s weird that there is no word for the other side of the picture: Wanting something. Single words also made it much easier to broadcast that there was something you wanted.

2. They emphasized function. The words chair, knife, and bag describe the function of the objects they name. Objects have many other qualities, of course: color, location, ownership, age, materials, etc. Common words tend to hide those qualities and emphasize function. Trades based on function became easier to arrange than trades based on desires for other qualities. The first words helped people trade for stuff they could use, in other words.

Single words work perfectly as advertising. They are still used this way. In a Guatemalan market, I heard a man shout the Spanish word for “toothpaste” over and over. Lots of businesses use single words on their signs to indicate what they sell. Early names, moreover, reflected what a person would have to give in trade: Smith, for example.

People who criticize evolutionary explanations sometimes say it is impossible to have evidence. Not so. In the case of language, you can examine how single words are used today. Sure, new ways of using language have grown up; but they are unlikely to have made old uses impossible. There are dozens of things you can’t do with single words. But you certainly can advertise and request (”fork?”).

How Much Water Should You Drink?

Seth Roberts4 Comments

According to this persuasive non-embeddable video — from a BBC series called The Truth About Food — the answer is don’t worry about it.

They compare two twins. One drinks 2 liters water/day, the other doesn’t drink any water. Not self-experimentation, but close.

I did an experiment in which I drank 5 liters of water/day. I lost a few pounds, not nearly worth the trouble. There was one surprise: Flavors intensified. Every strawberry was the best-tasting strawberry I’d ever had.

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger’s Surprising View of Freedom of Speech

Seth Roberts5 Comments

On issues I care about, college presidents have a terrible record. After Margot O’Toole accused Imanishi-Kari of scientific misconduct, David Baltimore — later president of Rockefeller University and Caltech — stood by as O’Toole’s career was ruined. Both O’Toole and Imanishi-Kari were in Baltimore’s lab. I’m sure O’Toole was right; ink and digit analyses made it clear that Imanishi-Kari’s data was fake. The current Chancellor of UC Berkeley, Robert Birgeneau, when he was head of the University of Toronto, stood by as a job offer to the psychiatrist David Healy was withdrawn because Healy had criticized drug companies. President of Reed College Colin Diver failed to grasp that what he strongly objected being done to him was what Reed professors did to their students every day. Axel Meisen, President of Memorial University, has allowed his university’s lawyers to defend the indefensible: Memorial failed to protect the nurse who tried to stop Ranjit Chandra. Henry Bienen, President of Northwestern University, allowed Lynn Conway and Deidre McCloskey to use the power of his university to punish Michael Bailey for saying something that Conway and McCloskey didn’t like.

I might have given Columbia University President Lee Bollinger credit for supporting free speech when the President of Iran spoke there a few days ago. But I won’t, because here is how Bollinger introduced him:

[long self-congratulation] . . . Let me now turn to Mr. Ahmadinejad. . . [long no-stone-unturned condemnation] . . . Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. . . . Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change? . . . You held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers. For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda. . . . When you have come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated. . . . Because of this, and for many other reasons, your absurd comments . . . I close with this comment frankly and in all candor, Mr. President. I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. . . . your preposterous and belligerent statements . . . so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens . . . I am only a professor, who is also a university president.

Ugh. Ahmadinejad objected:

In Iran, tradition requires that when we demand a person . . . to be a speaker, we actually respect [the audience] by allowing them to make their own judgment, and we don’t think it’s necessary before the speech is even given . . . to provide vaccination.

Bollinger did not understand that freedom of speech means nothing unless you listen to those allowed to speak.

Addendum: Bollinger, a former Law School professor, teaches a class on freedom of speech. At the next meeting of this class, shortly after the remarks I quote above, “ the students erupted in cheers.”

What Do Meatloaf, Acupuncture, Psychotherapy, and Clinical Trials Have in Common?

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Jane Jacobs tells a story about a handed-down meatloaf recipe: After the loaf is made, the end is cut off. “Why?” she asked. “We’ve always done it that way,” she was told. The original recipe was for a smaller oven, it turned out; the end was cut off to make the loaf fit in the oven.

I thought of this story when I read a recent study in the Annals of Internal Medicine that compared three treatments for back pain: acupuncture, “sham acupuncture,” and “conventional therapy.” Sham acupuncture was like acupuncture except that the needles were put in “wrong” places, inserted less deeply, and not rotated after insertion. Conventional therapy was drugs, physical therapy, and exercise. The study found that acupuncture and sham acupuncture were equally effective. Both were much better than conventional therapy. The results imply that acupuncture works, but the surrounding theory (meridians, etc.) is wrong. Which I find reassuring.

Psychotherapy is essentially the same. Lots of studies show that psychotherapy helps — but many studies also imply that the surrounding theory is wrong. Untrained therapists are as effective as trained therapists. Keeping a journal has similar effects. The active ingredient may be telling your problems, just as the active ingredient of acupuncture is apparently needle insertion.

Ritual — doing something just because — can be found in meatloaf recipes, acupuncture, psychotherapy, and clinical trials. In the discussion section of the acupuncture paper, the authors wrote:

Potential limitations of this study [include] inability to blind acupuncturists to the form of acupuncture.

Just as the meatloaf cooks did not understand their recipe, the acupuncture researchers did not understand their research design. The original reason for blinding was to equate expectations. That the two forms of acupuncture came out equal in spite of unequal expectations among the therapists is better evidence that expectations were not important. The authors failed to grasp that lack of blinding worked in their favor.

Thanks to Hal Pashler.

Science in Action: Exercise (15-minute walk twice more)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

As part of my digression into the effects of exercise, I tested the effect of a 15-minute walk (= on a treadmill at about 2.8 miles/hour) twice more. Here are the results:

effect of 15-minute walk (2nd test)
effect of 15-minute walk (3rd test)

Here is the result (posted earlier) of the first test:

effect of 15-minute walk (1st test)

Here is a test of a 40-minute walk:

effect of 40-minute walk

What do I learn from all this? For my omega-3 experiments, which might cover 6 hours, I should keep the walking involved under 15 minutes. If I want to get some sort of mental benefit from walking, I should spend 40 minutes or more. Less obvious is this: I take these results to indicate the existence of a mechanism that “turns up” our brain when we are doing stuff and turns it “down” when we are inactive. This suggests what Stone-Age activity consisted of: more than 15 minutes of walking. This also suggests that whatever the benefits of exercise, they require more than 15 minutes of walking to obtain.

The practical question these results raise is how to use this effect to help me with what I do all day — most of which, such as writing, seems to be incompatible with walking. Walking breaks every few hours? What about running 10 minutes every few hours?

Gary Taubes’ new book on food and weight comes out today. Taubes agrees with what I say in The Shangri-La Diet: Exercise is a poor way to lose weight. The results above provide a different reason to exercise, of course. But the details should change. My impression is that most people focus on burning calories; whereas these results suggest choosing exercise that best produces this reaction-time-lowering effect.

Thank You, Abu Ayyub Ibrahim

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Abu Ayyub Ibrahim is behind Behind the Approval Matrix — that is, New York magazine’s Approval Matrix, which is the first thing I read — if that’s the right word — in every issue. For example:

approval matrix

Ibrahim’s blog or whatever you call it explains the items in the Approval Matrix.

I wonder why Ibrahim and I like it so much. Perhaps 1. We enjoy praise and dispraise. 2. Cute little pictures. 3. Use of pictures as dots. 4. Draws our attention to stuff we may enjoy but otherwise wouldn’t know about (e.g., YouTube clips). 5. Unpompous. 6. Artistic in the Nabokovian sense (i.e., implies a better world — see Afterword to Lolita). 7. Mixes high and low. (My students laughed when I wrote “pimple” on the board.) 8. Sometimes witty.