Yesterday I was in Seoul, at Casa Pepe Guest House. Sensationally good at a very low price. It really is a guest house — attached to a house — with a separate entrance. There are four rooms, with shared kitchen and bathroom. The owner is an renowned chef. The first evening he brought salad and wine from his (Japanese) restaurant. The first morning, he invited me to come with him to buy fish at the Seoul fish market. Every morning, he made breakfast — something different each time.

I found it through hotels.com. On their map, it was off by itself. I thought that meant bad location, but the opposite was true. It is the sort of good location you cannot normally get. It is near the Blue House (Korea’s White House) and many foreign embassies and is very safe. Dozens of interesting restaurants and cafes are nearby. (Even more than the rest of Seoul.) The neighborhood is the Beverly Hills of Korea, with better (and cheaper) restaurants and less pretentious architecture. Casa Pepe started about a year ago, with a remodelling. Everything is new and clean. The floor is heated. The building is up a steep path and has a nice view of streets, hills and houses. Free laundry. All for less than $50/day.

During my stay I briefly overlapped with a Tsinghua student (how could that possibly happen?) but otherwise I was the only person.

Why is it so nice? The owner said, “It’s my hobby.” I think that explains it.

I’ve said that doing a job and doing science are fundamentally incompatible. Any job requires steady and repeated output. You do the same thing over and over. The goal of science is discovery — and a discovery is inherently unpredictable and unrepeatable. (Art is a job with science-like elements — and artists were the first scientists.) Casa Pepe Guest House illustrates another side of the job/science conflict: A job is inherently conformist. You give people, especially customers and your boss, what they expect. Science is inherently nonconformist. The more a discovery challenges “what everyone knows”, the better. Hobbies make this point because they can vary more than jobs. If you make tables as a hobby, for example, your tables can vary more than if you make tables for a living. Casa Pepe is way outside (better) what one expects from a rented room.

Another way Casa Pepe is unusual is that it is very hard to find, even if you study the directions. I found it by knocking on a neighbor’s door. The neighbor called Casa Pepe. Someone from Casa Pepe came to meet the neighbor and me on the street — it was too hard to tell the neighbor where it was. Here are better directions. From Incheon Airport, take airport bus 6112 to the Hangsun University stop. Go to Exit 6 of the nearby subway station (Hangsun University Station on Line 4). Walk up the street (Seongbuk-ro) indicated by Exit 6 — toward the hills. After walking about 13 minutes, where the road veers right, you will see a sign that says Seongbuk-ro 19-gil (gil = side street), which points almost exactly to a steep concrete path on the left perpendicular to the street. It is the width of a driveway. Go up about 40 meters. Casa Pepe is on the right — a white house with a red door, with a sign that says “casa pepe”. Don’t be misled by the fact that the listed address is not on Seongbuk-ro 19-gil.

• how to self-experiment with resistant starch. See comments.
• A list of health benefits of honey says nothing about sleep
• Someone says “I told you so” about the demise of Better Place, the Israeli car-battery-swap company. Better Place raised an insane amount of money, something like $1 billion.
• Behind the New York Times series on health care costs. “The social media team analyzed the remarks and discovered that there were deep frustrations about the cost of inhalers and medications for asthma, the most common chronic condition affecting people of all ages.” There should be deep frustration that anyone still has asthma. The notion that figuring out what causes asthma is possible — and will cost about a million times less than continuing to buy inhalers and medicine — has not occurred to enough people.

Thanks to Tuck.

• Kimchi in crisis. “Interest is waning among younger people. Yet despite struggles at home, kimchi is becoming more popular around the globe.”
• Timing of light and sleep — association with body weight. Thin people wake up earlier than fat people. The reason may be that thin people sleep less than fat people. The paper references two studies that increased morning light and asked if weight changed. One found no effect, the other a significant reduction in body fat.
• I don’t have chronic fatigue syndrome, I have Lyme disease
• Go to the bottom of this entry (Ignored Expert) and click on Real Life for real-life examples of ignored experts.
• Success using probiotic to cure eczema

Thanks to Casey Manion, Phil Alexander, Viorel Tulica, Melody McLaren, Christian Pekeler, Donna Warnock and Tom Passin.

Russ Roberts says:

Great teaching is more than passing on information. For that you can read a book or watch a video. A great teacher provokes and takes you on a journey of understanding. That requires grappling with the material and making it your own. Usually that means applying your knowledge to a problem you haven’t see before. At least that’s often the case in economics. I think Doug Lemov said it in his EconTalk episode — you haven’t taught it until they’ve learned it and learning is more than just hearing the facts or the answer to a problem.

This was the view I heard at UC Berkeley among faculty — when they weren’t complaining about teaching.

I disagree with this. The best teachers bring out what is inside their students. They provide the right environment so what is inside each student is expressed. How to do this will be different for each student, so you have to learn about them — not just generally, you have to learn about each one. (Or at least you have to grasp their diversity and allow for it.)

Learning is natural. Every student, in my experience, wants to learn something. What makes the situation much more difficult, is the false assumption that every student wants to learn the same thing or can be cajoled into learning the same thing. One of my Berkeley students said that in high school he had had a “great teacher” of philosophy, much like the teachers that Roberts praises. He had made philosophy so interesting that my student had originally majored in it. That had been a mistake, said my student.

I believe human nature has been shaped in many ways to make our economy work. Human economies center on trading. You make X, I make Y, we trade. If everyone made X, that would be bad economics. So we have been shaped to want to go in different occupational directions — you want to be an Xer, I want to be a Yer. This is deep inside us and impossible to change. When healthy students have trouble learning, I think the underlying problem is their teacher wants them to be an Xer (like the teacher) — but they want to be something else. A great teacher finds that something else.

Even the term great teacher is misleading, because it seems to imply that being a great teacher (= every student learns a lot) is difficult. I have found it’s easy, just as swimming with the current is easy. It requires a certain psychological ingenuity to fit this way of teaching into a system that doesn’t understand it. But after I figured out how to do it, it was so much easier than teaching the traditional way. I used to try to make all my students learn the same thing. That was really tiring — like swimming against the current. After class I’d be exhausted. Now I feel fine after class.

A friend writes:

The honey has been the biggest improvement in my life in several years. It’s not just the energy, I think I’m more motivated to do things.

I started the honey with 1 tablespoon, but like others who commented, I had some trouble getting to sleep, so I reduced the dose to about 2 teaspoons. I take the honey about 15 minutes before bedtime, and I have not missed a dose since starting.

The first morning after the honey I felt much more alert and rested. I had no trouble getting out of bed even on 5 hours sleep at around 6:30 – 7:00 AM PDT.

The motivation that has come since starting the honey doesn’t feel primarily psychological. It doesn’t wax and wane or change in response to events. It feels raw (no pun intended), more like a drive.

The motivation improvement (that might be due to honey) seemed to begin a few weeks after I started it. The main aspect of the motivation is that I feel impelled to do things. This feeling lasts all day. It’s not a manic feeling, because I still have priorities, and I can bail out of a task if I’m not making progress.

I noticed a similar change. After I started the bedtime honey, it became easier to do everything. Not a big change, but noticeable. When it started is hard to say.

• Website designed to measure drug side effects
• “Natural” wine. “Ambient yeast alone are capable of taking his fermentations to completion.”
• Sophisticated study of macronutrient composition in mice

Thanks to Tucker Max and Barnaby Kerbel.

by August Hurtel

I live in Shreveport, Louisiana and work in the interlibrary loans department at Shreve Memorial library. I am 39 years old.

I believe, due to experiences I will expand upon below, that excess sulfur compounds, especially sulfites, may contribute to and even cause irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). If you have IBS, you can try to verify this in a few ways.

1) Try molybdenum. I take Carlson Lab’s Moly-B 500 mcg tablets (one tablet/day).

2) Avoid foods and supplements high in sulfur.

3) If you have already purchased the services of 23&me or want to, you can look at this thread in the forums — “Reactions to food containing sulfites, sulfur dioxide, bisulfite, metabisulfite. SUOX gene” — and see if you have the same polymorphisms, though if you just do the first two, you’ll be able to guess.

The woman who started that thread at 23&me goes by the name Red Ringlets. She asked if anyone with four polymorphisms involved in sulfur processing experience reactions to sulfur compounds commonly added to foods as preservatives and/or for antibacterial purposes. I have three of these polymorphisms. I knew I was allergic to certain medicines, but I had not thought about the effect of sulfur coming from my food and supplements largely because I associated reactions to sulfur with hives and headaches.

Several years ago once the appetite suppression the Shangri-La diet kicked in, I adopted what most would consider a paleo template for my diet. This means I generally avoid grains, legumes, and dairy with caveats (like rice, now that I work out, and butter because it is animal fat and therefore good according to evolutionary thinking). Additionally a substantial amount of the meat that I buy comes from conventional sources.

Despite not being technically paleo, I enjoyed coffee, chocolate, and red wine, which are all high in sulfur. Sulfur is also added to various coconut products, shrimp, fish, dried fruit — many products a person trying to eat paleo might eat. I ate them. And I would have gastrointestinal distress that I could not explain despite getting leaner.

In the summer of 2013 after a few social functions that served grilled hamburgers, grilled shrimp, and other summer party foods a paleo dieter might think would be okay, I went to the emergency room. I had a serious pain where my appendix should be. Sometimes the pain would get worse after eating, and I would often get diarrhea. I thought I had appendicitis, but the doctors found nothing wrong. They took regular X-rays and did blood tests, and came back and said they found nothing. I got really angry about that, so they ordered a CT scan. The CT scan also showed nothing. They told me I had IBS because they had gone through a list of other things it might be and eliminated all of them.

When I went to the emergency room, I also inadvertently took with me a large amount of sulfur. I had a couple of 90% Lindt bars with me. My chocolate intake had risen during that time, too. I had stuff to do, places to go — and an excuse to treat chocolate like a food group.

I was aware, from reading on the internet, of FODMAPs, which are osmotic carbohydrates that draw water into the gut, causing gas, bloating, cramping and diarrhea. They seemed a likely culprit because these were the symptoms I experienced. Following a low FODMAP diet seemed to help, but not perfectly so.

There is some overlap between the two lists of foods to avoid (high sulfur and high FODMAP), so avoiding FODMAPs might have helped because it made me avoid sulfur. It also made it possible for me to have days where I didn’t eat any FODMAP foods but I would eat something like shrimp and then I’d have symptoms despite not eating any FODMAPs. So, looking back on it, I think of attending a wedding, eating nothing but shrimp, and drinking a little bit of red wine, and then having IBS problems and not understanding why because it doesn’t fit in well with the FODMAP story. I think FODMAPs are problematic in a gut that has already been compromised, but FODMAPs are not evolutionarily novel, and thus are unlikely to be the original cause of the problem.

Since it was summer and I just gotten through that ER experience, I stopped eating a lot of fruits, chocolate, wine, etc. One of the things that figures largely for me as a source of sulfur during this time though is shrimp. I kept thinking it was a safe food to eat, and didn’t realize until later it was a source of sulfur. Additionally, I was taking several supplements that contained sulfur: gelatin, biotin, glutathione, NAC, ALA, MSM. I had gotten into the habit of trying different supplements since 2010 because of a neuralgia that neither doctors nor dentists could explain. Though I was not taking all of them at once, I did supplement enough to assume I kept my sulfur level high throughout this time period.

I noticed the thread Red Ringlets posted at 23&me in August of 2013. In October I asked whether or not sulfur could cause a dehydrating effect. I asked this because I’ve noticed wine can take more water out of me than other drinks containing alcohol do. I didn’t get an answer to that question, but I began to explore some of the links people had put into the thread. I read through this site: www.learningtarget.com. I found the following page particularly helpful because it mentioned that molybdenum is a vital part of the sulfite oxidase enzyme: Vitamins and Supplements for Sulfite Problems.

I still had not made a connection between sulfur and irritable bowel syndrome, but I decided to supplement with fucoidan, which is a sulfated polysaccharide found in some seaweeds. I thought it would help my gut, but it caused diarrhea. It was as if I had decided to supplement with cholera. The effect was large and obvious enough for me to realize it was probably the supplement I had just taken. Once I accepted that, I put together what I had learned from the 23&me thread.

Now, in retrospect, I think fucoidan may have caused diarrhea for completely different reasons. I learned in my 23&me health report that I am norovirus resistant, and I have subsequently read that this has something to do with my ability (or inability) to make fucose. I can’t remember where I read this, but it made me think fucoidan could have destabilized my gut flora for reasons unrelated to its sulfur content.

Whatever the reason for the extreme reaction to fucoidan, I decided the beneficial reaction to molybdenum meant that I had a genetically limited capacity to deal with all the extra sulfur in my food and supplements. I threw out my high sulfur supplements and tried to stick to low sulfur foods. Within about two weeks I started having normal bowel movements. This was better than what I was achieving before the entire fucoidan fiasco. I had migrated to a diet of rice and fish which helped me approximate normalcy, but any time I tried to have any variety in my diet, I would run into problems. By avoiding sulfur, I was able to eat a larger variety of foods without incident.

Eventually I found if I was very careful, I could eat small amounts of high sulfur foods, but this is hit or miss because I can’t reliably gauge what the potential dose is, nor is it always clear whether a food has sulfur in it. I still supplement with molybdenum but I think the long term strategy here is both molybdenum and at least avoiding high sulfite foods because my genetics suggest it is doubtful I am going to be able to process as many sulfites as other people do regardless of how much molybdenum I have.

As I mentioned before, I think once the gut is compromised, many things become irritants. Removing excess sulfur has increased my health a lot, but I suspect I need to improve gut flora, and possibly heal some tissue damage. The doctors may not be able to see it, but I still have residual pain in the region where my appendix is.

• Oncology researchers make too much of very little.
• deadly delays in newborn blood testing. Do hospital employees = government employees?
• University of Western Australia refuses request for data because requester “made inflammatory statements on [his] weblog . . . including attacks on the character and professionalism of University staff.”
• Benefits of fermented food. “Once all the grains in her diet were fermented, she began to feel normal — for the first time in years.”

I haven’t been interested in the work of John Ioannidis because it seems unrelated to discovery. Ioannidis says too many papers are “wrong”. I don’t know how the fraction of “wrong” papers is related to the rate of discovery. For example, what percentage of “wrong” papers produces the most discovery? Ioannidis doesn’t seem to think about this. Yet that is the goal of science — better understanding. Not “right” papers.

Almost all important health discoveries are discoveries of new cause-effect relationships. If you do X, Y happens. My view of the problem with modern health science is nothing like what Ioannidis and other critics (such as the “couldn’t replicate Finding X” critics) say. It is lack of progress on major health questions (e.g., what causes depression?), emphasized every year by awarding of the Nobel Prize in Medicine to research of little or no practical value. Almost every year, the Nobel Prize press office says the honored research will be useful in the future. The lack of progress shows no sign of ending.

The best that can be said about recent critics of science, such as Ioannidis and Danny Kahneman, my former colleague, is they see there’s a problem. The worst that can be said about them is they fail to understand the cause of the problem. This is why their proposed solutions could easily make the problem worse.

Whenever you do an experiment — psychology and the health sciences are almost all experimental — you “use up” the effect you are studying (X causes Y). You can do an experiment to learn if X causes Y only so many times. After that, you know the answer and a new experiment is pointless. Professional scientists are only able to test ideas (cause-effect statements) that are fairly plausible. With such ideas, a publishable outcome is likely enough to be worth the cost of testing. They are unable to test implausible ideas, because such experiments are not likely enough to produce a publishable outcome. With limited resources, they must generate a certain number of published papers per year, at least if they want a career.

To have a viable system, you need to generate new plausible ideas at at least the same rate you are using them up. Otherwise you will run out. You must design your experiments so that they accomplish this. Not necessarily every experiment, but your experiments in aggregate. It isn’t easy to find new plausible ideas. If you think I’ll just get on with my career, generating papers as fast as possible and leave it to someone else to come up with new ideas worth testing, then your field will run downhill as plausible ideas are used up and not replaced. This is what has happened in several fields, including mine (animal learning). In psychology much greater concern about both fraud and lack of replicability have started at about the same time. I believe both (more fraud, more lack of replicability) stem from the increasing difficulty of honest (or more honest) research.

A friend who is a psychology professor agreed with me that psychologists — at least him — didn’t know how to generate new ideas worth testing. “Do you?” he asked. I said I did:

1. They [= psychologists] should modify their data collection. In my experience, new ideas almost always come from carefully collected data. They don’t come from introspection, talking to friends, reading the newspaper, watching TV, going to talks, etc.

2. Finding new ideas worth testing means finding new ideas that are plausible enough to be worth the cost of testing. To find new ideas with sufficient plausibility to test you need to test implausible ideas. A small fraction will pass the test, gaining plausibility. They will become sufficiently plausible to be worth testing.

3. To test implausible ideas in a career-consistent manner, you need to be able to test them very cheaply. Few if any psychologists have thought about this. They don’t realize how important it is.

 

When you have very cheap tests, you can test far more ideas than you can if you only have expensive tests. You need a “test set”: very cheap tests, cheap tests, almost-cheap tests, and so on. Ideas that pass a very cheap test become worth testing with a cheap test, those that pass a cheap test become worth testing with an almost cheap test, and so on. With current methods (all tests are expensive), perhaps social psychology professors who want to publish have a set of 50 ideas that are plausible enough to be worth the cost of testing. Those ideas get tested over and over, using them up. Were cheap tests available, perhaps the same professors could choose from a set of 1000 ideas those they want to test. Of those 1000 ideas, 950 were too implausible to test with expensive tests. Among those 950, I believe, would be some ideas that when tested seemed to be true.

I came to these beliefs trying to understand why my self-experimentation did a good job of finding new ideas worth testing. I concluded that the secret was this: I was able to test implausible ideas very cheaply — thousands of times more cheaply than professional scientists. Self-tracking — keeping track of my sleep, for example, and looking for outliers — was a very cheap way of getting new ideas about what controls sleep. Self-experimentation was a slightly more expensive (but still very cheap) way to test ideas that self-tracking came up with.

Many people have complained about a lack of replicability problem in psychology, including my friend and co-author Hal Pashler. An obvious solution is to raise the bar for publication: require better (= stronger) evidence. Sure, this will improve the quality of testing, but how will it affect the rate of production of plausible new ideas? My cost-of-test proposal suggests it will reduce that rate of production. I am saying that cheap tests are all important. Raising the publication bar will make the only test you have more expensive. What if the replication problem is a response to lack of plausible new ideas? Then this solution to the problem would make the problem worse.

 

On Econtalk, Russ Roberts recently interviewed Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty and head of the Millennium Village Project (MVP). I enjoyed it but thought Roberts was too easy on Sachs. Here’s what I wished he had asked:

Your book, The End of Poverty — did you get anything wrong?

What mistakes have you made with MVP?

You say Nina Munk [author of The Idealist] chose a non-representative village. [Sachs said that Munk spent her time in the only village in “a war zone.”] Did you tell her that? If not, why not?

Munk was on your side when she began reporting, but changed her mind. Why is that?

Why was the project set up in such a way that evaluation is difficult? Why not pick ten villages and randomly select five for treatment?

You say the MVP project is successful because people are copying it — but those people are government officials. Is it plausible they are copying it because they see it as a good way to make money for themselves or improve their career? You must know many worthless medical treatments have been widely copied. Is this your best evidence of success?

No doubt your employees have often told you what you wanted to hear rather than the truth. What’s an example? What have you done to get honest assessments of how things are going?

What did you learn from Nina Munk’s book?

Roberts says he didn’t ask Sachs certain questions because there wasn’t enough time.