Wouldn’t it be nice if good things just happened to you? And you hardly had to do anything — certainly not labor for years — to make them happen? Yes, that would be nice. I say this because the blog I Hate The New Yorker, which I like a lot, has linked to this blog. A good thing that just happened.
More on The Secret.
[Timothy Beneke, an Oakland, California writer, was one of the first to try Shangri-La Diet. — Seth]
First, let me say that just as Seth can list a remarkable number of positive effects — related to sleep, mood, weight, balance, and even gum health — from surprising methods of self experimentation, I can do something similar. Here are the two biggest examples:
Using this method, I went from 210 to 177 going about 70-80% tasteless for 4 months; in the last 20 months, my weight has oscillated between 177-190, perhaps a little higher — I don’t weigh myself often for strategic reasons.
Generalization #1: Everyone likes to be listened to. Being a professor is being paid to be listened to. It’s like being a restaurant reviewer or a professional athlete — your job is doing what others do for fun. Generalization #2: American colleges are run more for the benefit of professors than for the benefit of students, as I have intimated earlier.
That’s why this complaint is noteworthy:
This has been an excruciating term, because for the first time I had students who resented having to think, to work, to meet expectations, who seemed to really believe that showing up was all it took . . . As hard as I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to salvage any time for my own research, so I feel as though — in addition to wasting my efforts and care and concern on students who wouldn’t even grasp that I was doing them some favors (yes, I’ll teach extra evening sessions to help you understand the material that was a prerequisite for the course, but, um, yes, you need to do the reading) — I made absolutely no progress toward tenure. . . . This term has taken too much out of me, and right now, the thought of teaching again — ever — makes me want to sob. So here’s my secret: I don’t want to go back. I never want to see these people again — colleagues or students — and I think I made a terrible mistake.
A comment was “AMEN!”
I’m sure we’re genetically wired to teach and learn but that doesn’t mean the process can’t go badly wrong. We’re genetically wired to eat, too, and lots of ways people eat are very unhealthy. I have compared formal education to agriculture. Sure, agriculture is more efficient than hunting and gathering but agriculture caused nutrient deficiencies that reduced human health for a very long time. (My weight-control research and omega-3 research suggest it is still doing so.) We barely know how to eat. This complaint suggests we know even less how to teach.
The last three data sets I’ve posted — one from Tim Lundeen, two from me (here and here) — provide evidence that omega-3 affects the brain. The evidence has several good features:
1. Two people.
2. Three tasks.
3. Two ways of varying omega-3.
4. Strong effects (that is, large t values).
5. Easy to obtain.
Does omega-3 affect the brain? This is a good place to start a research project because there is a reasonable chance the answer to the question “does omega-3 affect the brain?” is yes.
The placebo/expectations explanation — which, based on the lack of effect of placebos in most studies, is implausible to begin with — has trouble with several facts: 1. The initial discovery was a surprise. 2. Tim’s results involved comparison of two plausible doses. 3. Tim had earlier found that dose increases had no effect. 4. Tim’s results had a pattern I have never seen (and thus Tim couldn’t have expected). 5. My results had two different time courses.
Even more interesting than the idea that how much omega-3 we eat might affect how well our brains work are two more subtle ideas that are also becoming plausible: (a) the average diet (very low in omega-3) is very suboptimal and (b) improvement can be noticed quickly and easily.
In the latest U.S. government nutrition guidelines, there is no omega-3 requirement.
Directory of my omega-3 posts.
Nice summaries of her ideas here (shorter) and here (longer).
Why is an experimental psychologist (me) so interested in Jacobs’ work — which on the face of it has nothing to do with experimental psychology? Four reasons. From big to little:
1. I enjoy her books and articles. They are very well-written, discuss the stuff of everyday life — what I see when I walk through any city — and have lots of ideas that I hadn’t previously encountered.
2. Jacobs is essentially an economist. Psychology and economics are very close. Economics is psychology writ large, psychology is economics writ small. I came up with a theory of human evolution based on economics learned from Jacobs.
3. Jacobs wrote about something that fascinates me — how things begin. My longest paper is about how scientific ideas begin.
4. Self-experimentation had led me to conclusions outside experimental psychology — for example, conclusions about weight control and sleep. Jacobs, with no Ph.D. in anything, was even more an outsider.
I posted a few days ago about the different effects of flaxseed oil (high in omega-3) and olive oil (low in omega-3) on my balance. There was a big difference. If omega-3 affects one measure of brain function (balance), it should affect many other measures of brain function. The whole brain is made of the same stuff (neurons, etc.).
Which brain measures are most sensitive to omega-3? The more processing/time the better, I assumed; so I looked for tasks that, like balance, involve continuous processing for most of the test period. This led me to try a paper-and-pencil version of Saul Sternberg’s memory-scanning task. (Sternberg’s use of this procedure is described here.) On each trial I memorized a list of three digits (e.g., 2, 3, 7); then as fast as possible marked each of 100 digits (20 digits/row in 5 rows) according to whether they were in the list or not. I made a line under the digit if it was in the list, through the digit if it was not. I did five trials per day.
Here is an example of the test materials and my marks:
The other side of the page had two more sets of digits.
Here are the results from the same flaxseed/olive oil experiment I discussed a few days ago:
There was a huge difference between the flaxseed oil and olive oil condition: t > 7.
Curiously the time course is different from the balance results. In the case of balance, when I switched from flaxseed to olive oil my balance slowly got worse. Nothing like that is apparent here. This might reflect a different mechanism or it might be due to the vast difference in how much practice I had had with each task. When this experiment began, I had had far more practice with the balance task than with the memory-scanning task.
Last night, at a Vietnamese restaurant, I had an avocado shake for dessert. On the way home I stopped at a Chinese bakery and got garlic pork cookies. Had science, like cooking, been invented more than once, what would other scientific traditions — other ways of doing science — look like? My guess is they would not include:
1. Treating results with p = 0.04 quite differently than results with p = 0.06. Use of an arbitrary dividing line (p = 0.05) makes little sense.
2. Departments of Statistics. Departments of Scientific Tools, yes; but to put all one’s resources into figuring out how to analyze data and none into figuring out how to collect it is unwise. The misallocation is even worse because most of the effort in a statistics department goes into figuring out how to test ideas; little goes into figuring out how to generate ideas. In other words, almost all the resources go toward solving one-quarter of the problem.
3. Passive acceptance of a negative bias. The average scientist thinks it is better to be negative (”skeptical”) than positive when reacting to other people’s work. What is the positive equivalent of skeptical — a word that means appreciative in a “good” way? (Just as skeptical means disbelieving in a “good” way.) There isn’t one. However, there’s gullible, further showing the bias. Is there a word that means too skeptical, just as gullible means too accepting? Nope. The overall negative bias is (male) human nature, I believe; it’s the absence of attempts to overcome the bias that is cultural. I used to subscribe to the newsletter of the Center For Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). I stopped after I read an article about selenium that had been prompted by a new study showing that selenium supplements reduced the rate of some cancer (skin cancer?). In the newsletter article, someone at CSPI pointed out some flaws in the study. Other data supported the idea that selenium reduces cancer (and showed that the supposed flaws didn’t matter), but that was never mentioned; the new study was discussed as if it were the only one. Apparently the CSPI expert didn’t know about the other data and couldn’t be bothered to find out. And the CSPI writer saw nothing wrong with that. Yet that’s the essence of figuring out what’s good about a study: Figuring out what it adds to previous work.
My earlier post about another bit of scientific culture: the claim that “correlation does not equal causation.”
On the left-hand side of The New Yorker website is a series of sections: Goings-On, In This Issue, Cartoon Caption Contest, and so forth. Pretty standard stuff. Then comes a section called Awards:
AWARDS
Lawrence Wright has won a Pulitzer Prize for his book “The Looming Tower.” Read “The Master Plan”; watch an excerpt from “My Trip to Al-Qaeda.”
The New Yorker has been nominated for a Webby Award for Best Copy/Writing. Vote for us at webbyawards.com.
The New Yorker received nine nominations for the National Magazine Awards. View a list of finalists and read nominated articles.
I wouldn’t be so casual about such great accomplishments. Such things — at least for most of us — are more noteworthy and wonderful than what’s In This Issue.
Speaking of missteps, I mentioned a few days ago how New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof put in his blog a letter from a University of North Carolina student that was more interesting and insightful than anything in the NY Times in a long time. If someone wrote a letter like that to me, I would have begged her to allow me to use her full name so that she would get credit for her brilliant comment. I would have responded to it, not just printed it. I would have gotten other people’s reactions to it. I would have gone on and on about it.
Maybe I should have titled this post Too Little Emphasis on Success to go with Too Much Emphasis on Failure.
Addendum: Kristof has now posted the student’s full name: Loren Berlin.
I have mentioned this letter three times (here, here and here) and Jeremy Cherfas rightfully complains that he can’t read it. Here is most of it:
Friday marked the deadline to enter The New York Times columnist Nick Kristof’s second annual “Win a Trip with Nick Kristof” contest. Open to students currently enrolled at any American college or university, as well as middle and high school teachers, the contest offers one student and one teacher an all expenses-paid trip through Africa with the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to gather stories on the impoverished continent. . . The prize includes the chance – more accurately the expectation – to detail the experience on a blog on NYTimes.com.
Because I am currently a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I qualify to enter this competition, and have many reasons to do so. . . . .Yet, I refuse to apply. I think the way Kristof has cast this trip is a disservice to Africa. . . .
Kristof insists on telling the story of a failing Africa when instead he could report on its ability to overcome. On the competition’s webpage Kristof has posted a letter to potential applicants that provides this explanation: “Frankly, I’m hoping that you’ll be changed when you see a boy dying of malaria because his parents couldn’t afford a $5 mosquito net, or when you talk to a smart girl who is at the top of her class but is forced to drop out of school because she can’t afford a school uniform.” . . .
Last year’s student witnessed the death of a woman during childbirth despite the fact that both Kristof and his traveling companion donated blood in an attempt to save her. Though the doctor promised to help the young woman, he apparently ducked out the back door as she died. That was Kristof’s story of Cameroon, a West African nation with tremendous ecological diversity and a per-capita GDP higher than that of most other African countries. . . .
The story of Africa in turmoil is the African narrative that many Americans – and certainly those who read The New York Times – already know. It is virtually the only type of reporting that Western news outlets broadcast about the continent. Every American student who has to listen to National Public Radio in the car when Dad picks her up from soccer practice, or has had to read The Economist for a school assignment, or has read in a church newsletter about a local youth group’s spring break trip to a rural African village knows that people in Africa are hurting. Maybe we haven’t smelled an understaffed health clinic that cares for HIV-positive orphans, or walked through rows of coffee trees with a farmer whose young son was beaten into serving in a youth militia in a civil war between tribal groups whose names we can’t pronounce and whose agendas we can’t keep straight. But we know they are poor, and that Africa will break your American heart if its contaminated water doesn’t kill you first. . . .
Americans don’t need any more stories of a dying Africa. Instead, we should learn of a living one. Kristof and his winners should investigate how it is that Botswana had the highest per-capita growth of any country in the world for the last 30 years of the twenty-first century. Report on the recent completion of the West Africa Gas Pipeline that delivers cheaper, cleaner energy to parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Tell us about investment opportunities in Nigeria’s burgeoning capital markets.
Sadly, it’s impossible to report on Africa’s successes without relaying its tragedies. Virtually every African victory is somehow also a story of malnourishment and malaria, misogyny and malevolence. That’s important because Africa’s horrors are massive and crushing, and demand attention. I agree with Pope John Paul II, who said “a society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members.” Clearly Africa will be the [basis of] judgment of our global community.
Kristof knows this, of course, and I am certain he means well when he writes that his original purpose for the contest was because he thought that “plenty of young people [who] tune out a fuddy-duddy like myself might be more engaged by a fellow-student encountering African poverty for the first time.” But they would also be excited to encounter African hope, something equally unknown to most Americans, students or otherwise.
So I’m asking Kristof to refine his summer travel itinerary to include a tour of a thriving organic farm owned and operated by a local Ethiopian cooperative. And the Ugandan health clinics that are reducing the number of AIDS cases despite a continuing guerilla war. And the wonderful “PlayPumps” scattered throughout the continent that provide safe drinking water via a pump system powered by children as they play on a playground. Brilliant idea. And something many people don’t know about.
Africa needs a lot of things. It needs money and aid workers, vaccines and functioning governments. Some of those things can be provided by outside donors, and other can’t. But universally, Africa needs us to believe in it. And that is something we have to be taught.
The grandfather of Gillian Anderson, who starred in a wonderful Bleak House mini-series,
once bet someone in a bar in Kentucky that he’d marry the next girl who walked into the place; he did and they went on to have nine children together.
From this interview with Anderson.