At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok has an interesting post about black/white differences in what Thorstein Veblen called conspicuous consumption. It begins:
Several years ago Bill Cosby chided poor blacks for spending their limited incomes on high-priced shoes and other items of conspicuous consumption instead of investing in education.
The comments are fascinating, including this:
Merely being white is a way of signaling wealth. If you don’t believe it, visit Peru.
Could this have something to do with it?
The sign says: Will listen to your story for free. Outside a Tokyo train station.
From Pearl is Culturally Confused.
More about blogging and listening.
This piece of a discussion at the Google Group sci.med.cardiology fascinated me:
[My] HDL was always around 32, until I dropped the low fat nonsense about 7 years ago. Adding healthy fats and dropping carbs brings my HDL to about 70 while boosting my LDL almost none. And after the HDL shot up, the low-carbing continued to produce weight loss without difficulty. I’ve never felt better in my life and I am 63 now.
I would like to raise my HDL. The advice I’ve read (do a long list of things) hasn’t helped. For example, one bit of advice was to lose weight. I did lose weight and my HDL briefly got much better. I kept the weight off but my HDL did not stay high. Whereas whatever this guy did had lasting effects. I tried to find out more about what he did but, alas, he didn’t answer my email.
I have blogged many times about the problems with UC Berkeley’s undergraduate education (here, here, and here, for example). For all the conventional talk about “the value of diversity”, I never see recognition of diversity of interests and diversity of skills. Everyone in a class is taught the same material (and expected to be interested in the same stuff as the professor); and everyone is graded the same way (and expected to imitate the professor). Of course, UC Berkeley is hardly unique. Practically all higher education works this way, more or less. Berkeley is just the example I know. It is a particularly egregious example given the diversity of vocational interests among its students (much more diverse than Caltech, say), its status as a public institution (with a charter to serve the public rather than its professors), and the exceptionally high research focus of its professors (making them even less interested in what students want).
At a school like Caltech or MIT, the talents of the students are closer to the talents of the professors, but I heard David Brin, the novelist, complain that after he finished Caltech with a low GPA he felt like a worthless human being. Caltech and MIT, like Berkeley, also fail to teach their students about the outside world. From an MIT professor:
Most of the sweeping generalizations one hears about MIT undergraduates are too outrageous to be taken seriously. The claim that MIT students are naive, however, has struck me as being true, at least in a statistical sense. [Could the MIT faculty have anything to do with this?] Last year, for example, one of our mathematics majors, who had accepted a lucrative offer of employment from a Wall Street firm, telephoned to complain that the politics in his office was “like a soap opera.” More than a few MIT graduates are shocked by their first contact with the professional world after graduation. There is a wide gap between the realities of business, medicine, law, or applied engineering, for example, and the universe of scientific objectivity and theoretical constructs that is MIT.
It’s Veblen again: MIT professors would rather teach “scientific objectivity and theoretical constructs” than “the [dirty] realities” of the world in which their students will spend the rest of their lives. Law schools, especially elite ones, are notoriously like this: To teach how to practice law is beneath the dignity of their professors.
From Vanity Fair:
As for the thousand or so members of the online “Rachael Ray Sucks Community”—a pack who delight in obnoxious nicknames (Retchel, Raytard), mock her smile, hate her vocabulary (”yum-o” especially), criticize her over-reliance on canned chicken stock, and think she dresses like Greg on The Brady Bunch . . . Ray answers such critics by agreeing with them. “Most of what they say is absolutely true. I don’t know how to bake. I didn’t make my own pierogis in episode whatever. You can’t be all things to all people.”
Not bad.
Adding to earlier discussion of that question, here is an excellent article in the LA Times.
Addendum: A long article in the NY Times on exactly this question appeared minutes after I posted the above.
In the current New Yorker, Mark Singer, one of my favorite writers, describes the “incredible career” of the late Joyce Hatto, a British pianist. According to her husband, she had a stillborn twin brother. Could that brother have in fact lived, and become Ranjit Chandra, a Canadian immunologist?
Consider the similarities:
1. Accolades. Toward the end of her life, Hatto released dozens of recordings that elicited great praise. “One of the greatest pianists I have ever heard,” said one critic. Chandra was awarded the Order of Canada, the country’s highest honor.
2. Man of mystery. Hatto recorded several concertos with Rene Kohler and the National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra but “there was no mention of him or the orchestra in any reference book,” according to Singer. Saul Sternberg and I could not locate Amrit L. Jain, author of a study with the same results as one of Chandra’s studies. Nor could we locate his institution (”Medical Clinic and Nursing Home”).
3. One strange fact after another. Many of Hatto’s performances were identical or almost identical to performances by others. As Saul Sternberg, Ken Carpenter, and I examined Chandra’s papers, we discovered many unlikely or impossible details. Our letters to editors about this are here and here.
More about Chandra, who has sued the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) over its documentary about him. Part 1 of that documentary, for which Chris O’Neill-Yates won a journalism award.
An interesting Economist article about sex differences in a visual task calls an evolutionary explanation a “just-so story.” I don’t know if the late Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary theorist, Harvard professor, and “one of the most influential and widely-read writers of popular science of his generation” (Wikipedia), invented this form of dismissal, but certainly he was fond of it. Here, for example:
Evolutionary biology has been severely hampered by a speculative style of argument that . . . tries to construct historical or adaptive explanations for why this bone looked like that or why this creature lived here. These speculations have been charitably called “scenarios”; they are often more contemptuously, and rightly, labeled “stories” (or “just-so stories” if they rely on the fallacious assumption that everything exists for a purpose). Scientists know that these tales are stories; unfortunately, they are presented in the professional literature where they are taken too seriously and literally.
Well, this is seriously wrong. My work contains several just-so stories — evolutionary explanations of the morning-faces effect and of the mechanism behind the Shangri-La Diet, for example. My theory of human evolution might be called a just-so saga.
These explanations made me (at least) believe more strongly in the result or theory they explained — which turned out to be a good thing. My morning-faces result was at first exceedingly implausible. The evolutionary explanation encouraged me to study it more. After repeating it hundreds of times I no longer need the evolutionary explanation to believe it but the explanation may help convince others to take it seriously. The evolutionary explanation connected with the Shangri-La Diet had the same effect. My evolutionary explanation of the effect of breakfast on sleep led me to do the experiment that discovered the morning-faces effect. My theory of human evolution led me to try new ways of teaching, with good results.
Why did Gould make this mistake? Thorstein Veblen wrote about our fondness for “invidious comparisons.” We like to say our X is better than someone else’s X. Sure, evolutionary explanations may be hard to test. That doesn’t mean they’re worthless. Like many scientists, Gould failed to grasp that something is better than nothing.
Addendum: Perhaps the Economist writer had read a recent Bad Science column that began:
I want you to know that I love evolutionary psychologists, because the ideas, like “girls prefer pink because they need to be better at hunting berries” are so much fun. Sure there are problems, like, we don’t know a lot about life in the pleistocene period through which humans evolved; their claims sound a bit like “just so” stories, relying on their own internal, circular logic; the existing evidence for genetic influence on behaviour, emotion, and cognition, is coarse; they only pick the behaviours which they think they can explain while leaving the rest; and they get themselves in massive trouble as soon as they go beyond examining broad categories of human behaviors across societies and cultures, becoming crassly ethnocentric.
“They only pick the behaviours which they think they can explain” — how dare they!
A friend of mine has started to wonder how to find scientists he will feel comfortable working with. For the past year, he has been working in a lab in a very prestigious institution. He wrote me about it:
The director of my lab is a very successful scientist. She is also director of the research facility. Our personalities blended well initially, but then we grew apart. She is very nice, very busy, and impressively ambitious. Despite her genuine desire to be nice, honest, and good teacher, her ambition is supreme — above honesty and integrity from my point of view.
My biggest issue has been her caring more about her own advancement than about the discovery of truth. She does not blatantly lie about her research results, but she profoundly modulates her research efforts based upon what she believes will give her the success she seeks. I realize that on the face of it there is not anything unethical about ambition directing the evolution of research. However, I am not comfortable with the degree to which the research in this group is shaped by its leader’s ambition.
What has had the biggest effect on me is realizing that it isn’t just her. The rest of my group has allowed her to pursue her strategies. I have realized that I don’t want to pursue research in a culture where ambition is above all, particularly the pursuit of truth.
What’s an example? I asked. He replied:
We had an interesting result in a study we did. Accompanying this result was an unusual artifact. It is my impression that my director did not want to publish our good result because she was hesitant to admit that we observed this unusual artifact. I believe that the unusual artifact could negatively impact the use of fMRI to investigate pharmacological drugs that affect the brain — a big research market. It is not a lie to not publish a result. However, I don’t like not being able to speak frankly about the implications of a result.
This is an advantage of self-experimentation I hadn’t thought of.
Addendum: “It is not a lie to not publish a result.” In The Shangri-La Diet I use Vladimir Nabokov’s term doughnut truth — the whole truth, nothing but the truth, with a hole in the truth.
Robin Hanson’s excellent essay in Cato Unbound is a proposal to cut medical spending in half. The evidence suggests that this would do little harm and it would help us focus on more helpful activities. I like the way this article summarizes the RAND experiment, searches for the right metaphor, and answers objections.
One question Robin answers is “How could we be this wrong about medicine?” My answer is different than Robin’s. I point to the way many scholarly and scientific disciplines start off useful and become useless. In the case of medicine, the lack of benefit is easier to measure. Try measuring the value of a class in 18th Century English Literature.