Author: Seth Roberts

Ditto Food: Microwave Popcorn

Seth Roberts1 Comment

In The Shangri-La Diet I argue that the obesity epidemic is due to what I call ditto food: Food that tastes exactly the same each time. Just as you will make a very deep hole with a gun if you hit exactly the same spot each time you fire it, you will produce a very strong flavor-calorie association if you eat a food that tastes exactly the same each time.

The experience of a Colorado man supports this idea. He went to a doctor because of shortness of breath. He didn’t smoke. His test results resembled those of workers in microwave popcorn factories, who often have lung damage because of exposure to a flavoring chemical. The doctor asked the man if he was around a lot of popcorn. “How could you possibly know that about me?” the man said. “I am Mr. Popcorn.” He had eaten microwave popcorn twice a day or more for at least 10 years. When he stopped, he lost 50 pounds in six months. Apparently he made no other changes.

Can Professors Say the Truth? (Michael Bailey and Alice Dreger respond to Joan Roughgarden)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Michael Bailey and Alice Dreger have responded to Joan Roughgarden’s KQED appearance and her blog post. The NY Times article. Dreger’s paper. Bailey’s book.

In her KQED appearance, Roughgarden said that Bailey’s book was “fraudulent” because it used the word science in its title. Here’s how she said it:

The bottom headline to the cover of Bailey’s book says “The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism.” But in point of fact, there is no science in the book, as they’re apparently now agreeing. And on the whole, the book, as a work of science, is fraudulent.

Dreger notes “by this logic, the publishers of Science Times of the New York Times, the magazine Science News, and thousands of popularizations of science are also guilty of fraud.”

In Pale Fire, the narrator quotes Erich Fromm’s claim that in Little Red Riding Hood, the red hat is a symbol of menstruation. Does Fromm actually believe this? the narrator wonders. Dreger raises a similar question: Does Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford, believe that Science News and the Science Times section are “fraudulent”?

Bailey links to a page with the abstracts of twenty articles by Blanchard related to his typology of transsexuals, which I found very interesting.

Marion Nestle on Omega-3s

Seth Roberts6 Comments

In a January 2007 New York Times article about adding omega-3s to food, Marion Nestle, the NYU nutrition professor, said this:

My experience in nutrition is that single nutrients rarely produce miracles. But it’s also been my experience that companies will put anything in their food if they think the extra marketing hype will help them sell more of it.

I was critical. The single nutrients called vitamins produce miraculous improvements in vitamin-deficiency diseases. In the current issue of Scientific American, Nestle is more accurate:

In the early 1970s Danish investigators observed surprisingly low frequencies of heart disease among indigenous populations in Greenland that typically ate fatty fish, seals and whales. The re­searchers attributed the protective effect to the foods’ content of omega-3 fatty acids. Some subsequent studies—but by no means all—confirm this idea.

Because large, fatty fish are likely to have accumulated methylmercury and other toxins through predation, however, eating them raises questions about the balance between benefits and risks. Understandably, the fish industry is eager to prove that the health benefits of omega-3s outweigh any risks from eating fish. [A mysterious sentence. Perhaps something was lost in the editing.]

Even independent studies on omega-3 fats can be interpreted differently. In 2004 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—for fish, the agency equivalent to the USDA—asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to review studies of the benefits and risks of consuming seafood. The ensuing review of the research on heart disease risk illustrates the challenge such work poses for interpretation.

The IOM’s October 2006 report concluded that eating seafood reduces the risk of heart disease but judged the studies too inconsistent to decide if omega-3 fats were responsible. In contrast, investigators from the Harvard School of Public Health published a much more positive report in the Journal of the American Medical Association that same month. Even modest consumption of fish omega-3s, they stated, would cut coronary deaths by 36 percent and total mortality by 17 percent, meaning that not eating fish would constitute a health risk.

Differences in interpretation explain how distinguished scientists could arrive at such different conclusions after considering the same studies. The two groups, for example, had conflicting views of earlier work published in March 2006 in the British Medical Journal. That study found no overall effect of omega-3s on heart disease risk or mortality, although a subset of the original studies displayed a 14 percent reduction in total mortality that did not reach statistical significance. The IOM team interpreted the “nonsignificant” result as evidence for the need for caution, whereas the Harvard group saw the data as consistent with studies reporting the benefits of omega-3s.

I would have described benefits of omega-3 for which the evidence is clearer, as is done in the cover story about omega-3 in the current issue of Ode. Nabokov called Salvador Dali “Norman Rockwell’s twin brother, kidnapped by gypsies in babyhood.” I think of Ode, which put a Dali lookalike on its July/August 2005 cover, and Spy as linked like that.

Science in Action: Methodology surprise and improvement

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I’ve been using a letter-counting test to keep hour-by-hour track of how well my brain is working. The test consists of 200 trials that ask how many of four displayed letters (e.g., YCAW) are from the set {ABCD}. for YCAW, the answer is 2. Faster answers = better brain function.

For the first several hundred tests, I kept the location of the four letters constant: the center of the window. As soon as I answered, the next display appeared in the same position as the last one. The display never repeated immediately; for example UXRA was never followed by UXRA. But UXRA could be followed by UXAR. This was too easy because it looked like the A and R had switched places. This was a big difference from the usual appearance and it signalled that the answer had not changed. Overlap between one display and the next was probably important but was hard to measure.

To make the test more uniform across trials, I had the display move up and down, which eliminated overlap between one display and the next. Successive displays appeared above center, below center, above center, below center, etc.

To my great surprise, this made the task a lot easier. Here are accuracy scores before and after the change:

accuracy before and after the change

Before the change, mean accuracy was 94.9% (standard error 0.2); after the change, 97.4 (standard error 0.3). The error rate was cut in half, in other words. I had no idea this would happen.

Reaction times were slightly more after the change. A treatment that changes reaction time and accuracy in conceptually opposite directions — makes the task harder in terms of reaction times (= longer reaction times) but easier in terms of accuracy (= great accuracy) — is very unusual. I don’t know of any other examples.

The displays have always been big black letters on a white background — very easy to read. But this change made them seem more visible somehow. At some high level of my visual system, it was if the contrast had been improved. It’s a funny feeling because I thought I was seeing them perfectly clearly with the old procedure.

Because accuracy is better it is now closer to constant, which is what you want in a reaction-time experiment. You want as much variation in reaction time as possible and as little variation in accuracy as possible.

Science in Action: A Puzzle

Seth Roberts7 Comments

To learn how omega-3 affects brain function, I’ve been doing a letter-counting test several times per day. I’ve posted some results. Several times after exercise (treadmill and street walking) my reaction times were faster than expected — meaning my brain was working better than expected.

Does exercise improve brain function? In a chapter on self-experimentation that he and I wrote, Allen Neuringer described several experiments in which other measures of brain function improved after exercise. I wanted to learn more about this for two reasons: 1. Reduce “noise”. If I know how much exercise is needed to get the effect, I can be careful to stay below level that while doing omega-3 experiments. 2. Practical value. You might call it nature’s caffeine.

So I did a little experiment. I walked on a flat treadmill for 30 minutes and did the letter-counting test several times. Here are the results:

exercise effect?

The line shows the middle of the exercise; the exercise ended a few minutes before the first post-exercise test. To my surprise, the first post-exercise test showed no effect. I was wrong, I thought. But to my further and greater surprise later tests showed an effect in the predicted direction.

Between the first post-exercise test and the second, I took a shower. I will need to see if showers have an effect. If not, then apparently exercise has a delayed effect. No one has ever proposed this, I’m pretty sure.

Most of my self-experimentation has studied elements of ancient life. Omega-3, for example — I believe our ancestors ate lots of seafood (the Aquatic Ape Theory). They surely walked a lot.

My Theory of Human Evolution (quasi-reinforcement edition)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

My theory of human evolution assumes that art evolved because it acted like a ramp. It helped bridge the technical gap between one useful tool and the next. Tools have the property that almost all the necessary knowledge is no help. If you have 90% of the technical knowledge you need to build a gun, you can’t build a gun that works 90% as well as an actual gun; in fact, you won’t be able to build a useful gun at all. The point is even clearer with computers: Until you have a vast amount of technical knowledge, you can’t build even the crudest possible computer. When you finally get enough knowledge to build a very crude but working version, then increases in technical knowledge will help you improve it. But eventually you will reach a ceiling where more technical knowledge has little payoff. This state of affairs is shown by the “without art” function of this graph:

the function of art

Art is different. Because we value novelty in art, and improvements in technology have obvious effects (e.g., new colors, brighter colors, sharper lines), each little improvement in technology — in the “state of the art” — is rewarded, long before that increase in knowledge helps build something more conventionally useful. Artists were the first material scientists.

Support for my assumption that evolution can build such ramps comes from a little-known psychological effect called quasi-reinforcement discovered by Allen Neuringer and Shin-Ho Chung. Suppose you require a pigeon to peck a key 300 times to get food. It will peck, but slowly. Now you change the situation so that every 20 pecks a light comes on for a few seconds. Although the pigeon will not peck a key simply to turn on a light, this change will roughly double the peck rate — a huge increase given that food per peck hasn’t changed. It’s like doubling the amount of work you get from an employee without a salary increase. I use this effect daily. Given any large task, I break it into much smaller tasks and mark the completion of each one. A friend of mine found it helped to make a mark on a piece of paper each time she read a textbook page. The quasi-reinforcement effect is essentially a ramp that helps us do long tasks that would otherwise pay off only when completed.

To me, blogging is a kind of ramp: It breaks a big task (e.g., writing about my omega-3 research) into much smaller parts with reward after each one.

Can Professors Say the Truth? (more from Deirdre McCloskey — and the email she doesn’t want you to see)

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Continuing our voluminous correspondence (here, here, here, here, and here), Deirdre McCloskey wrote again:

Dear Professor Roberts:

Yup. [In answer to my question “In your last letter, by ‘self-experimentation’ did you mean dress as a woman?”] That should be obvious to you. That it’s not, and that you sneer at the idea, is indicative. No one who has not actually tried to pass in the other gender has any idea what it is like not to pass, how dangerous and embarrassing it is. No one who has not tried the experiment can have any idea how important it is to have nose jobs and the like. It’s exactly out of such non-self-experimentation, and the lack of real empathy it implies, that the God-wants-you-to-be-thus, Clarke Institute torturing comes.

I don’t remember our discussion about Crossing.

You think Bailey’s book will be a powerful force for toleration? I suppose you’ve actually looked at the evidence, right? You’ve consulting the blogs, and you’ve read the hate mail? And your conclusion is. . . what? That a wave of transphobic filth stimulated by your blog and Carey’s article will lead, somehow, to the promised land? You have here a questionable social theory, but let’s hope you’re right.

Disagreement, as you should well know from your own self-experimentation, is not the same as “harassment.” Nor is holding people to ethical standards in their scientific behavior. We didn’t “do” anything to Bailey. We exercised our rights as free citizens and as ethical scientists. That you were “appalled” shows that you got fired up by Carey’s article (just as he wished) and didn’t bother inquire—as you easily could have done (you keep making a point of our previous e-mail relationship) but most assuredly did not before shooting off your ill-considered blog—with the principals. You wanted the story to be Bailey = Galileo, and were not going to let such silly things as evidence stand in the way. You’ve stoutly defended it ever since, with no heed to the evidence.

I’m not impressed that you praise Holocaust deniers, or that you give standing to naive creationism. It just shows what is evident in your defense of Bailey, that you are willing to encourage the worst in our society in aid of a simpleton’s version of “fairness.” You would have been “fair” to Goebbels and the Inquisition, the Ku Klux Klan and the first Chinese emperor. Your position of “Let them have uncriticized speech to advocate idiotic and harmful proposals” depends on people like Lynn and me exercising our free speech to criticize such people. You would be the first person the Nazis you defend would come for. No, actually, on second thought, you would be the second, after me.

Sincerely,

Deirdre

I replied:

Dear Professor McCloskey:

I don’t “sneer” at the self-experimentation you propose. It has a long and admirable history.

I did not get “fired up by Carey’s article.” My blog posts on this topic appeared before his article.

I mentioned our correspondence about Crossing in my blog posts about this.

I didn’t “praise Holocaust deniers” — I just think they shouldn’t be harassed or silenced.

I don’t mind criticism of Bailey — of course not. I mind attempts to ruin him — which is what your and Conway’s absurd complaints to authorities were.

Sincerely,

Seth Roberts

She wrote again:

Dear Professor Roberts:

Let’s make this a convergent series, by undertaking to answer in half the space as the last one. Your only–only–argument against our complaints about Bailey’s behavior is to assert repeatedly, unadorned by evidence, that they were “absurd.” Northwestern University did not think them absurd. They fired Bailey from the chairmanship; they investigated him for a year. The lawyer we consulted did not think them absurd; nor did the state licensing bureau. Alas, the statute of limitation had run out.

We did nothing to “silence” anyone. Get this: we are not the government. We argued with Bailey. We complained about his behavior. None of that constitutes “silencing,” unless indeed poor, dear Bailey is too feeble for this world.

Regards,

Deirdre

I replied:

Dear Professor McCloskey:

Please see my earlier letter for a detailed explanation, including evidence, of why your complaints were absurd. No one has ever gone to a mugger and asked to be mugged. That’s my evidence for your State of Illinois complaint. And no one has ever been considered a research subject because they were in a story in a trade book. That’s my evidence for your Northwestern complaint.

When you say that Bailey left the chairmanship because of your complaints, you are wrong.

“We did nothing to ‘silence’ anyone.” If you don’t understand the term chilling effect, we are again at a curious point in intellectual history.

Sincerely,

Seth Roberts

She wrote again:

Dear Professor Roberts:

Anyone who is chilled by being challenged intellectually, I suppose you agree, doesn’t belong in intellectual life.

Anyone who is chilled by being investigated for wrongdoing when he’s done wrong is just a moral coward, as I reckon Bailey to be. You don’t understand The Letter if you don’t think the women were mugged. You’ve not walked in those shoes, or bothered to find out. You haven’t read Bailey’s book if you think the women were not “research subjects.” He called them that, and bragged about it. After the book came out he said, oh, it was “only a trade book. Not science.”

Regards,

Deirdre

I replied:

Dear Professor McCloskey,

If you believe that Bailey should be punished for helping those who came to him for help, you have a most unusual and unfortunate view of how people should treat each other.

If you can’t tell the difference between a trade book and a research monograph, we are again at a curious place in intellectual history.

Sincerely,

Seth Roberts

On her website, McCloskey includes almost all our correspondence. The omissions are trivial, with one exception: She doesn’t include this email from me, in spite of including her reply to it. Curious!

I wrote to her about the omission:

Dear Deirdre:

Thanks for posting our correspondence on your website. I too am glad we had it. A tiny flaw: You omit my email below (“If you believe…”).

Seth

No answer. One of the few letters from me she didn’t answer. She continued writing to me. I believe she omitted that email from her website because it makes things too clear.

My Theory of Human Evolution (guitar edition)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

In this podcast, New Yorker writer Burkhard Bilger talks about the guitars of Ken Parker. A lot of research goes into them. I propose that we enjoy music because enjoyment of music creates demand for musical instruments, which leads to material-science research. My previous earlier posts about human evolution have said something like this — art generates research — several times. Previous examples were visual.

Josh McDermott, a psychologist at MIT, has compared human and animal responses to music. From an in-press paper:
When presented with a choice between slow tempo musical stimuli, including lullabies, and silence, tamarins and marmosets preferred silence whereas humans, when similarly tested, preferred music. . . .There appear to be motivational ties to music that are uniquely human.

Can Professors Say the Truth? (Roughgarden replies)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Joan Roughgarden has responded to my comment about her recent KQED radio appearance. Her response includes this:

Today, in 2007 only a few, like Roberts, still take Bailey’s work seriously.

In 2006, Bailey’s work was featured on 60 Minutes in a piece titled “The Science of Sexual Orientation.” After the piece aired, a blogger criticized Bailey. Shari Finkelstein, the producer, responded:

His work is highly regarded by all of the researchers in the field who we spoke with.

What a difference a year makes, if Roughgarden is correct.

Avoiding Overeating

Seth Roberts2 Comments

On the Shangri-La Diet forums, Timothy Beneke has posted about a creative method of avoiding compulsive eating.

Tim has been an excellent weight-loss engineer. His discovery, after losing 80 pounds, that he could lose even more by eating taste-free nutritionally-balanced mush is one reason I believe the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet. The theory predicts this will work, yet the mush is quite different nutritionally than flavorless oil or sugar water.