Author: Seth Roberts

The SLD Way

Seth Roberts1 Comment

From Tayster, below a poll that asks “do you sing in the car?”:

It’s been a week since I started the Shangri La Diet and I have lost eight pounds. More importantly, I have lost the cravings that I used to have. I don’t feel like eating as much food as I did before. And when I do eat food, I feel like I need to make it something besides a bag of chips and a chocolate cherry Coke. Since I eat less meals, I prefer to make the meals count.

I still can’t explain it, but it works.

One comment: “CHOCOLATE CHERRY COKE?!!! How did I not know about this assuredly sublime creation?!”

Anastasia Goodstein on Blogging

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Anastasia Goodstein, a San Francisco writer, blogs at Ypulse — Y as in youth, meaning teenagers. She came to blogging from the “other side” — from journalism rather than subject-matter expertise — and blogging is one way she makes a living. She has written a book called Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens are Really Doing Online.

What did you slowly learn about blogging from doing it?

I learned when you are running a professional blog that has to be updated every day (or five days a week), you just can’t be brilliant every day. You have days where you have no clue what to blog about or when you’re just not inspired, but still you have to post. I also learned that posts I think might be amazing may get no response while other posts that I didn’t think were that great generate lots of comments. I have found ways to produce content that don’t rely on me having to write full blown posts all the time. I do a lot of Q&As (like this), repost some of the more interesting comments and have easy features like Ypulse Quote (where I find a relevant and interesting quote) or From The Ypulse WTF files (a short post about something that just makes you scratch your head).

I think blogging is a great way to work your writing muscles and develop/strengthen your writing voice — it takes focus and discipline and it’s public so you get feedback on what you do. I love blogs where you find great info and get to know the blogger — For example, USA Today’s Pop Candy, written by Whitney Matheson is one of my favorites.

What do non-bloggers fail to realize about blogging?

I think non-bloggers don’t realize how much work it is (see number one) — to build a decent readership, you have to update your blog pretty regularly. They may not realize that blogging can be financially lucrative — there are many writers now being hired as professional bloggers, individual bloggers like myself who have build media brands from their blogs and consultants and agencies who have used their blogs to generate lots of business.

You write: “Since May 2004 Ypulse has been updated five days a week . . . [in] September 2006 . . I decided to try to make Ypulse my full-time gig.” Was it a hard decision? What was behind it, besides the obvious advantages of working for oneself?

The decision to leave Current TV was agonizing — I love the mission of the network and very much enjoyed the people I worked with. I left partly to be able to promote my book, Totally Wired, which came out in March of 2007, and because Ypulse was becoming more than just a side project. The scariest part of leaving a job is leaving the security of a regular paycheck and benefits. I also wasn’t sure where I wanted to focus. I was going to try consulting, maybe launch a paid subscription product — I wasn’t sure. It has been a year since I left my job, and it was the best decision I’ve made. I now have a business partner helping me grow, a successful conference business and am still promoting my book on the road, which I never could have done working full time.

What Is Intelligence? by James Flynn

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James Flynn’s conclusion that IQ scores all over the world had gone up by one standard deviation over 50 years or so (the Flynn effect) was one of the great psychological discoveries of the 20th century. It showed more clearly than anything else that everyday life can have a big effect on IQ, contrary to what many claimed.

In a new book called What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect Flynn takes this discovery as a starting point. After reading it, I could see there are three broad classes of explanation:

1. Events fed on themselves to promote certain abilities. To illustrate the dynamics, Flynn gives the example of basketball. As basketball became more popular, more people watched basketball, more people played basketball, and the rewards possible from basketball went up. All this increased the average level of play.

2. The trend of the last 50 years is a continuation of very long-term trends affecting those of high and low IQ roughly equally.

3. During the last 50 years, some environmental features were “fixed” — not everyone was reaching full potential. Better nutrition is the obvious example — nutritional deficiencies were corrected. This explanation is discussed briefly.

These three classes of explanation correspond to different expectations about how the distribution of IQ scores has changed. The first suggests that the high end (e.g., 75th %ile) increased more than the low end (e.g., 25th %ile). This is surely the case with basketball ability. The second means that that whole distribution has shifted. The third suggests that there will have been more improvement at the low end of the distribution than at the high end. Flynn does not make clear what the data show.

To the question, “were our (lower-IQ) ancestors sort of stupid?” Flynn answers yes. He quotes interviews with Russian peasants. Asked what dogs and chickens have in common, the answer was nothing. Asked what fish and crows have in common, again the answer was nothing. “Sort of stupid” is a harsh way to put it — and obviously they had many skills we have lost — but with the New York Times archives online, you can judge for yourself. Here is the opening of a 1937 review of Eleanor Roosevelt’s autobiography:

You pick up this book in the acute–and of course inevitable–consciousness that it is the autobiography of the wife of the President of the United States.

That sounds to me like a Spy parody.

I am less interested than Flynn in the question of the title. Intelligence is an everyday word with a meaning most of us know well; and it has also been used by psychologists to label what IQ tests measure (which is reasonable; it’s just an abbreviation). I find it hard to get interested in questions about definitions. Asking how to define this or that word is like asking how much cumin or cinnamon or whatever to put into a dish. It matters, but not very much. Definitions, like recipes, are man-made tools. Questions about cause and effect — such as what caused the Flynn effect — interest me more.

The dust jacket calls Flynn “a psychologist” but he’s a philosopher by training. “I am too much in love with philosophy to collect data or do field studies,” he writes. As a non-nutritionist who has written about nutrition (Chandra, the Shangri-La Diet, omega-3), his out-of-field success pleases me.

The Anti-Veblen

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It is curious that both Thorstein Veblen and Tyler Cowen were/are economists. Judged by their interests, they might have been psychologists, sociologists, or anthropologists, especially the last. The Theory of the Leisure Class was pure anthropology. Tyler’s new book Discover Your Inner Economist is a blend of psychology and anthropology. Veblen wrote a whole book arguing what Tyler (rightly) takes as needing little support. “Cookbooks by famous chefs . . . seek to impress rather than respect our limits,” writes Tyler. Straight out of Theory of the Leisure Class except better written.

In book after book, Veblen criticized mainstream economics. The mainstream economists of his time liked to assume that everyone “maximized utility”; the point of Theory of the Leisure Class was how wrong this was — all that conspicuous waste and consumption and impracticality done to signal one’s wealth. Whereas Tyler’s theme is essentially the opposite: mainstream economic ideas, which now include Veblen’s, explain a lot about everyday life, such as which countries have the best restaurants. U. N. troops were “very good for the people who sell lobster,” a Haitian taxi driver told him.

Whereas Veblen expressed his dissatisfaction in the usual academic way — he wrote a book saying this is bad, that is bad (very creatively and thematically) — Tyler did something far less predictable and probably far more powerful: With Alex Tabarrok, he started a blog. The main theme of Marginal Revolution, as far as I can tell, is to praise stuff (usually academic economic stuff) that Tyler believes is or is likely to be under-appreciated. Greg Clark’s new book is an example. Stories teach values, and MR is a long-running serial with “recurring characters” (to quote Tyler). To criticize by creating is as old as Michaelangelo but requires a willingness to start small and deal with small things (such as a tiny restaurant) that doesn’t come easily to academics in prestigious positions.

My Theory of Human Evolution (the pleasure of crafts)

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On the Meet the Pros episode of This American Life, David Rakoff said

I make stuff: boxes, lamps, mirrors, small folding screens, painted jackets for kids, that sort of thing. It’s what I do in my spare time. Some people exercise; my salvation lies in time spent alone with an Xacto knife and commercial-grade adhesive. During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of self and a loss of time. I almost cannot get this feeling any other way. . . . I once spent 16 hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instant of that day tempted to check the time.

He gives the stuff he makes as gifts to his friends. A Martha Stewart Living staffer tells Rakoff it is harder to do this sort of thing for a living than as a hobby.

My theory of human evolution, which explains how we became the only species whose members make their living in many diverse ways, says the sequence was: 1. Hobbies. 2. Part-time jobs. 3. Full-time jobs. The first hobbies obviously involved making things and were the beginnings of craftsmanship. That many of us, such as Rakoff, enjoy crafts indicates that those early genes are still there.

Before trading evolved, you gave the products of your specialized skill to your friends, which generated a vague obligation. This was the precursor of trading. In contrast to trading, of course, in this case the recipients may have only a little use for what they receive.

Leonard Syme on Teaching

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In a recent post I described an amazingly influential class on epidemiology taught by Leonard Syme, a professor in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Andrew Gelman (”inspiring”) and Matthew Henty (”THIS is how to learn”) were impressed. To find out more about the class, I asked Syme a few questions:

1. What gave you the idea of teaching the course this way?

I was struck by the fact that we can’t do classic experiments in epidemiology. We can’t assign one randomly selected group of babies to be smokers for the rest of their lives and another random group to refrain. Instead, we have to study people as we find them (in religious groups, in jobs, in various locations, marital statuses, etc) and then try to statistically adjust for the things we think might be confounders. In general, we end with evidence that is not very good and the burden on us is to assess the data very, very carefully. I have defined epidemiology as the the activity of evaluating lousy data as best we can. The class merely illustrated this issue. The theme of the class was how can so many bright and caring people come to such different conclusions looking at basically the same data. The lesson was that we really needed to be clear about our biases and expectations and that we needed to think about the data as carefully as possible. I thought the class should have been called “The Sociology of Knowledge”.

2. What were a few of the accepted ideas that you covered?

a. Everyone knew that high fat diets were related to serum lipids and coronary heart disease. The data then (and now) do not support that belief.

b. Everyone knew that the surgical treatment of breast cancer required radical surgery. There was a rumor that lumpectomy would do as good a job but few people believed that. The evidence showed that a more limited procedure was just as good.

c. Some people had been calling for research on the relationship between race and IQ. Majority scholars argued that no good could come from such research and they were refusing to fund such work. How do we decide what is worth studying? Because there might be harm?

d. A major national clinical trial on the treatment of diabetes showed no results but it turned out the randomization procedures were seriously flawed. People in the treated group consistently had higher risk factors to begin with and this doomed the trial. How do we take account of the fact that randomization is a method and not a result. Unbalanced randomization results will occur with a
predictable regularity. This study led to the idea of stratification in sampling.

e. Everyone knew that multiphasic screening was good to do. It detected disease early. The evidence did not support this. The evidence showed that early detection means you live longer with the disease but you still die on Thursday morning at 10 AM. You just knew about it longer.

There were 10 sessions like this. Three hours each! Students (n = 15-20) had to read hundreds of pages each week and had to present their case with great frequency – probably 3 or 4 times during the semester. The only rule for presentations was that people could not summarize the papers. Everyone had already read everything and they had to get on with the argument.

3. How long did you teach the course? Did the course change over the years? If so, how?

I taught the course for 12 years. It changed each year only because I updated the literature on particular issues and because I found a new issue that I thought might be more interesting than one of the older topics. But the way in which the course was organized did not change.

4. Apart from lots of epidemiology, what did you learn from teaching the course? For example, did you learn anything about teaching?

I’m not sure. As a teacher, my emphasis has always been on challenging people to think hard about issues. My favorite definition of a good book is one that forces you to do your own thinking. When I lecture, I get very nervous when I see people taking notes. What are they writing? What I’m saying? Not good. Unless they are writing things down so that they can refute my points later on.

Can Professors Say the Truth? (letter from Willow Arune)

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Willow Arune, a retired lawyer who has been one of Michael Bailey’s supporters, sent me this email:

Hi Seth,

I have found your exchanges with Deirdre McCloskey rather amusing.

I am one of those transsexual women who supported Bailey. I did so publicly and as a result was subjected to the lies, half-truths and innuendo of Andrea James and Lynn Conway. Even now, the slander is still on both of their web pages. Along the way, I noted that Dr. McCloskey had announced that she would sue Bailey if he dared to suggest that she was “one of those” so I did it for him. Frankly, her autobiography does that to her as well, although she does not use the term

I invited Dr. McCloskey to sue me. I even wrote her lawyer providing an address for service. For one week, I wrote her daily asking her to please, please sue me. Years later, she has still not done so. A shame really as I had lined up a wonderful cast of potential witnesses to provide expert testimony. Truth is always a defence to such silly actions.

Dr. McCloskey has hidden behind the more overt actions of Andrea James and Lynn Conway. Yet she was one with them, an equal participant in the vile and ugly attacks made not only on Bailey but also on other transsexual women who dared to support him. As Dr. Dreger points out, many would not allow their names to be used for fear of attracting attacks from McCloskey’s crew. I also received many letters of support from transsexual women who agreed with Bailey or, at the least, thought the actions of Conway, James and McCloskey were repugnant. None would dare have their comments public for fear of being subjected to the same attacks that had been made against other transsexual women and myself.

Let me give you one example of those actions that McCloskey supported, those actions she says do not cause her shame.

Firstly, I am a rape survivor. Andrea James was well aware or this as we had continued a “back channel” correspondence well after Bailey’s book was published. During 2003, on a public newsgroup, an anonymous writer posted a vile accusation that I was a “registered sex offender”. Not true then or now. Then, on December 24th of that year, I received a post from Andrea James asking me to “confirm or deny” that I was a registered sex offender. In the same post, she threatened to send out “investigators” to look into my past. She justified this action by the broad premise that her end justified any means and that those of us who supported Bailey must have ugly reasons to do so in our past. She would discover those and expose us.

Her web page on me followed, as did another screed from Lynn Conway. Lies, half-truths and innuendo.

This tactic – the no-name post to an e-group or newsgroup – was repeated in the case of the Transkids. It started with a further anonymous post, this one to an e-group on Calpernia Addam’s web site. I first heard of it on an e-group for UK transsexuals and complained to the moderator. In time, thanks to confirmation from other transgendered people, Christine Burns issued a formal apology for spreading the lies, the day after she was awarded an MBE. She had, she stated, relied upon a “usually reliable source” (Andrea James).

The tactic is straight from the McCarthy days. Spread an unfounded accusation and repeat it often so that some will believe it is true. As the writer Patricia Cornwell has recently shown, even one with many financial resources cannot control a slander on the Web.

Ms. James attacked several transsexual women who dared to either support Bailey or Blanchard, or even those who simply wanted to turn down the heat. Each was (and remains) subjected to a web page on Andrea’s site. No wonder few were willing to step out of the trenches. Most transsexual women simply wish to get on with life. They do not wish to be vilified – and outed – on a web page available to anyone with a computer.

If Dr. McCloskey is not ashamed of this type of tactic, as she states, she should be. Instead, she continues to attack you and anyone who dares to express even the slightest question about Blanchard’s theory or the means used by Conway and James to attack Bailey and anyone else who crosses their sights.

It is part of this nasty group to ignore the theory and go personal. In the years since Bailey’s book has been published, I have had few conversations or exchanges about “the theory”. The hate mail that arrives in my mailbox always quotes some of the accusations made by James or Conway about me as a person. James’ screed is copied and posted to some newsgroups on a regular basis by her supporters. Nor, after all this time, have I met any transsexual who has directly suffered as a result of Bailey’s book – and I have asked repeatedly for one to come forward.

The book was published several years ago; I have certainly moved on. I stood up for Dr. Bailey’s right to publish and against the vile and arrogant tactics of Conway, James and McCloskey. I am glad that Dr. Dreger had the courage to expose the facts concerning this matter. As both James and Conway see fit to retain their personal attacks on me on their respective web pages, I can now point to Dr. Dreger’s article as some vindication, certainly as an explanation. In these days when potential employers even check e-groups and such regarding potential employees, slander of the type employed by Conway, James and McCloskey against other transsexual women can have dramatic effect. A dispute over a theory is not a reason to slander a person in the manner employed by these zealots.

Willow Arune

Her blog.

A Clinical Trial of Fish Oil

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A big study of the effects of fish oil is taking place at Ohio State University. From its website:

The beneficial effects of fish oil (or eating fish more frequently) include reductions in triglycerides, blood pressure, and heart rate, as well as increases in HDL cholesterol, the “good” type of cholesterol. In addition, certain aspects of immune function also appear to show favorable responses to fish oil supplementation, and some studies suggest that fish oil helps to improve mood and decrease depression. This study is designed to examine how supplementation with omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (key fish oil components) affects aspects of your immune response, and your mood; because some research suggests that people who eat more fish may do better during stressful times, the study will also examine how fish oil affects your immune response to stress, certain stress hormone responses, and your psychological response to stress.

I was especially curious how they are measuring brain function. Here’s how:

At Visit 1 and Visit 5 [16 weeks after Visit 1] only, you will be asked to perform various tasks for about 20 minutes; these will include making a short speech and computing arithmetic problems without pencil or paper in the presence of other research team members. You will be audiotaped while you complete these tasks. . . At Visit 1 and Visit 5 only, the researchers will administer short tests that measure aspects of memory and concentration to see if the fish oil supplements have positive effects on learning and memory. For example, you might be asked to memorize several words, and then you would be asked which of the words you remember several minutes later.

Each subject participates for 24 weeks. The study, which started in 2006, is supposed to end in 2010, with 138 subjects in two groups (69 per group).

Tyler Cowen’s experience with flaxseed oil implies that omega-3 supplementation can dramatically reduce inflammation within a few weeks. My research shows that omega-3 supplementation can improve brain function within a few hours. This study appears to be much larger than necessary.

Janet Malcolm on Email

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Janet Malcolm is the most divisive (within me) writer I have encountered. I loved The Journalist and the Murderer. A journalistic masterpiece (except for the opening sentence about all journalists being con artists). I wrote her a fan letter about it. I hated In the Freud Archives, her hit piece about Jeffrey Masson. This review of a book about how to write email is not very good, alas. Too obvious. How far the gifted have fallen.

Jeffrey Masson used to live in Berkeley. I visited him while writing an article for Spy about his lawsuit against Malcolm (it never ran). While I was there, he got a phone call from Joe McGinness, the “journalist” of The Journalist and the Murderer.

How Accurate is Epidemiology? (part 4)

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In Sunday’s NY Times Magazine, Gary Taubes argued that epidemiology does not provide a good basis for health decisions — it is often wrong, he claimed. By “wrong” he meant experiments were more pessimistic. Things that seemed to help based on surveys turned out not to help, or help much less, when experiments were done. A 2001 BMJ editorial disagrees:

Randomized controlled trials and observational studies are often seen as mutually exclusive, if not opposing, methods of clinical research. Two recent reports, however, identified clinical questions (19 in one report, five in the other) where both randomized trials and observational methods had been used to evaluate the same question, and performed a head to head comparison of them. In contrast to the belief that randomized controlled trials are more reliable estimators of how much a treatment works, both reports found that observational studies did not overestimate the size of the treatment effect compared with their randomized counterparts. . . . The combined results from the two reports indeed show a striking concordance between the estimates obtained with the two research designs. . . . The correlation coefficient between the odds ratio of randomized trials and the odds ratio of observational designs is 0.84 (P<0.001). This represents excellent concordance.

Here is the data:

experiment vs observation

The correlation coefficient is the wrong statistic. They should have reported the slope of a line through the points constrained to have intercept = 0. The graph above shows that the slope of such a line would be close to 1. Unlike the correlation, that is relevant to their main question — whether surveys tend to find larger risk ratios than experiments.

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.

Addendum: A later (2005) paper by John Ioannidis, one of the authors of the 2001 paper, claims to explain, in the words of its title, “why most published research findings are false.” The above data suggest that most published research findings in Ioannidis’s area are accurate. Alex Tabarrok on the 2005 paper.