Today, on Tom Brokaw. An outdoor tragedy in Oregon (one of several posts). College students showing the way. Tolstoy and the New York Times. Relationship advice.
I loved his columns for the New York Observer but I think the more flexible and personal blog format allows better use of his talents.
Tonight (Wednesday) on Primetime (ABC), results from a recent repetition of Stanley Milgram’ s famous obedience experiment will be reported.
In high school, I learned a lot from Martin Gardner‘s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. I read it at the Chicago Public Library on my way home from school while transferring from one bus line to another — thank heavens transfers were good for two hours. In college, it was long fact articles in The New Yorker. Now it’s Marginal Revolution, where I recently learned:
Harvard has also declined as a revolutionary science university from being the top Nobel-prize-winning institution for 40 years, to currently joint sixth position.
The full paper is here.
What should we make of this? Clayton Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma (excellent) and a professor at the Harvard Business School, has been skeptical of Harvard’s ability to maintain its position as a top business school. He believes, based on his research and the facts of the matter, that it will gradually lose its position due to down-market competitors such as Motorola University and the University of Phoenix, just as Digital Equipment Corporation, once considered one of the best-run companies in the world, lost its position. A few years ago, in a talk, he described asking 100 of his MBA students if they agreed with his analysis. Only three did.
How would we know if Harvard was losing its luster? Christensen asked a student who strongly disagreed with him. Harvard business students (except Christensen’s) are taught to base their decisions on data. So Christensen put the question like this: If you were dean of the business school, what evidence would convince you that this was happening and it was time to take corrective action?
When the percentage of Harvard graduates among CEO’s of the top 1000 international companies goes down, said the student.
But by then it will be too late, said Christensen. His students agreed: By then it would be too late to reverse the decline.
Christensen’s research is related to mine, oddly enough — we both study innovation. For explicit connections, see the Discussion section of this article and the Reply to Commentators section of this one.
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According to this USA Today article, “omega-3 is in”. That is, in many new food products to be introduced in 2007, such as a new orange juice. Omega-3, says the article, is “the hot ingredient” and “the miracle food.” The article delicately calls omega-3 a “fatty acid” rather than a fat. My many posts about omega-3 include this and this. More to come.
In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs wrote about an isolated North Carolina hamlet that her aunt visited in 1923:
One of my aunt’s tasks there was to see to construction of a church. . . One of the farmers donated, as a site, a beautiful knoll beside the river and my aunt suggested the building be made of fine large stones which were already quarried, as it were, needing little dressing, there for the taking in the creek and river beds. No, said the community elders, it was a pretty idea but not possible. . . . Entire walls and buildings of stone would not be safe.
These people came of a parent culture that had not only reared stone parish churches from time immemorial, but great cathedrals.
Likewise, nutritional wisdom is forgotten. Drinking olive oil now seems absurd to some people. But it was practiced in at least one place in the not-so-distant past:
In a mountain village in Crete, [Ancel] Keys saw old farmers working in the field who drank only a glass of olive oil for breakfast; he later verified that one of them was 106 years old.
From Todd Tucker, The Great Starvation Experiment, p. 204. There is a whole organization (Oldways) devoted to preserving ancient foodways and using them for nutritional guidance. The best practitioner of this approach has been Dr. Weston Price, a dentist, whose work is nicely summarized here. Dr. Price traveled the world looking for economically-primitive societies (“native peoples”) with ancient eating habits and excellent health. Their diets, especially the common elements, would suggest what a healthy diet must have.
Two of Dr. Price’s conclusions are relevant to the Shangri-La Diet:
1. “All native peoples studied made great efforts to obtain seafood.” This supports my comments about the importance of omega-3 fats, found much more in seafood than in other foods.
2. “The last major feature of native diets that Price found was that they were rich in fat, especially animal fat.” The animal fat in native diets would be high in omega-3 because the animals were eating grasses and other plants, not corn.
When I wrote my long paper on self-experimentation I divided it into two parts: one titled “Stone-Age Life Suits Us” (the common thread of the five examples), the other about weight control (the research behind SLD). The two parts struck me as quite different. Drinking sugar water to lose weight was definitely not a return to a Stone-Age lifestyle. But the big improvements in SLD since I wrote that paper — from sugar water to ELOO, and from ELOO to oils high in omega-3 — brought SLD much closer to the Stone-Age-Life-Suits-Us theme, I now see.
A Chinese friend of mine wrote to me a few days ago:
In China, there are many people who do not believe in God, but commercial here is ….( I don’t know how to express), they launch beautiful ad and some discount for people to make them spend more money and feel more happy than the Christians.
Wise observations. I think Christmas moves so easily to a country with few Christians because it derives from deep-seated features of human nature. I also agree that ads are often beautiful. These Hershey’s Kisses ads, by my friend Carl Willat, for example.
Gary Skaleski, the Wisconsin counselor who came up with nose-clipping (= eating food with your nose closed, especially with a swimmer’s nose clip), has tried eating all his food that way:
The last time I wrote to you I had started gaining again and not following the SLD as I should have been (off and on). However, since then I have been eating everything, all day long, without tasting anything (even coffee, diet soda)-avoiding [flavor] completely, but eating well. After a couple of days, the appetite suppression came back with a vengeance and am losing again.
What was the most interesting was the difficulty I had starting this, and the sense of loss/regret and avoidance I had to doing it, and not being able to [smell] anything. While I recommended this procedure for others, I avoided it myself. But now I am on day 3 of [flavorlessness] and am doing well. . . . Interesting new needs come up-need for something crunchy, something smooth tasting, etc. . . . does help one focus on the feeling of different foods while eating, as well as becoming more sensitive to real hunger feelings (amazed at how much taste runs one’s eating).
He believes, as do I, that this may be useful in extreme cases. Let’s compare gastric bypass surgery (GSB) and eating like this (NC, for nose-clipping) on several dimensions. Dangerous? GSB: very. NC: no. Reversible? GSB: no. NC: yes. Adjustable? GSB: no. NC: very. You can do it every other day, for example. You can nose-clip some foods but not others. Cost? GSB: $20,000 or more. NC: $5 (swimmer’s nose clips).
The clearing took about 40 minutes of work and three games of Sudoku. Now to test the broken-windows theory of neatness, which says that things stay decent (say, a few items on a table) so long as the disorder stays below a certain threshold. Below that threshold, a natural tendency keeps things neat. Above that threshold, it malfunctions.
A month ago I had lunch with Greg Niemeyer, a professor of art at UC Berkeley whose medium is games. His games have appeared in art galleries all over the world. He asked me if games had been studied by psychologists and pointed out some of their psychological properties — the power to make you concentrate for a long time, for example.
This was fascinating. He was so right — games are powerful in several ways. I wondered how that power could be (a) studied and (b) used. My first question was whether games could be a stimulant, like caffeine. I emailed Greg about this; he suggested I try Bejeweled and Sudoku. But I found them tiring — they require concentration. My next idea was that maybe I could use games as a reward. I used to enjoy Tetris and Freecell. If I do X (something I wouldn’t otherwise do), then I get to play a game. This contingency causes me to do X. There are dozens of rewards you could use this way (listening to music, eating a piece of chocolate, etc.); the advantages of games include their number and variety, the care put into them, the lack of satiation (you can play the game many times and it remains pleasant), their harmlessness (if I avoided getting addicted), their low cost, the ready supply (you can play a computer game whenever you have a computer), and the short duration of some of them. The reward for a 5-minute task should not last 4 hours.
I have wondered for a long time about procrastination — what causes it, what to do about it. I like to think I’ve figured out a few things but even so certain things I should do seem to go undone . . . well, forever.
For example, a month ago I had 40-odd emails in my inbox, some a few months old. I never got around to clearing it out. Bejeweled was no fun but Sudoku (Easy level) was okay. I never played Sudoku for fun but it was slightly enjoyable. Maybe I could play a game of Sudoku as reward for answering email. If I made the requirement — the amount of email that I needed to answer — small enough, it might work.
It worked. When I made the requirement tiny — deal with 3 email (which might take 10 minutes) — that was small enough. And I was able to do it again and again: handle 3 email, play Sudoku, handle 3 email, play Sudoku, etc. Progress was slow — I spent more time playing Sudoku than dealing with email — but slow progress was far better than no progress. I was a little stunned it was actually working. After about 10 cycles (which took 3 or 4 hours), my inbox was as empty as I could make it. It hadn’t been that empty in years. To gather some data about the whole process I wrote some R programs for recording what the task was, how long it took, etc.
Then I started spending all my time revising The Shangri-La Diet for the paperback edition. A few days ago I finished that. My inbox had gotten full again and again I used Sudoku to clear it out.
I want to learn more about this way of getting things done. Does it work with other chores besides email? Here is the kitchen table in my apartment:
It isn’t usually this messy but it hasn’t been completely clear for years. Can I use Sudoku to clear it off?
Veronica Brown is a hot fashion designer, making a living off the virtual lingerie and formalwear she sells inside the online fantasy world Second Life.
This Washington Post article about property rights in Second Life neatly combines the subjects of my last post (fashion, etc., as engines of economic growth) and my next post (harnessing the power of games).