Author: Seth Roberts

A Revolution in Growing Rice

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Surely you have heard of Norman Borlaug, “Father of the Green Revolution”. He won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for

the introduction of these high-yielding [wheat] varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India.

He had a Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics. He learned how to develop better strains in graduate school. He worked as an agricultural researcher in Mexico.

You have probably not heard of Henri de Laulanié, a French Jesuit priest who worked in Madagascar starting in the 1960s. He tried to help local farmers grow more rice. He had only an undergraduate degree in agriculture. In contrast to Borlaug, he tested simple variations that any farmer could afford. He found that four changes in traditional practices had a big effect:

• Instead of planting seedlings 30-60 days old, tiny seedlings less than 15 days old were planted.
• Instead of planting 3-5 or more seedlings in clumps, single seedlings were planted.
• Instead of close, dense planting, with seed [densities] of 50-100 kg/ha, plants were set out carefully and gently in a square pattern, 25 x 25 cm or wider if the soil was very good; the seed [density] was reduced by 80-90% . . .
• Instead of keeping rice paddies continuously flooded, only a minimum of water was applied daily to keep the soil moist, not always saturated; fields were allowed to dry out several times to the cracking point during the growing period, with much less total use of water.

The effect of these changes was considerably more than Borlaug’s doubling of yield:

The farmers around Ranomafana who used [these methods] in 1994-95 averaged over 8 t/ha, more than four times their previous yield, and some farmers reached 12 t/ha and one even got 14 t/ha. The next year and the following year, the average remained over 8 t/ha, and a few farmers even reached
16 t/ha.

The possibility of such enormous improvements had been overlooked by both farmers and researchers. They were achieved without damaging the environment with heavy fertilizer use, unlike Borlaug’s methods.

Henri de Laulanié was not a personal scientist but he resembled one. Like a personal scientist, he cared about only one thing (improving yield). Professional scientists have many goals (publication, promotion, respect of colleagues, grants, prizes, and so on) in addition to making the world a better place. Like a personal scientist, de Laulanié did small cheap experiments. Professional scientists rarely do small cheap experiments. (Many of them worship at the altar of large randomized trials.) Like a personal scientist, de Laulanié tested treatments available to everyone (e.g., butter). Professional scientists rarely do this. Like a personal scientist, he tried to find the optimal environment. In the area of health, professional scientists almost never do this, unless they are in a nutrition department or school of public health. Almost all research funding goes to the study of other things, such as molecular mechanisms and drugs.

Personal science matters because personal scientists can do things professional scientists can’t or won’t do. de Laulanié’s work shows what a big difference this can make.

A recent newspaper article. The results are so good they have been questioned by mainstream researchers.

Thanks to Steve Hansen.

Butter = Antidepressant?

Seth Roberts9 Comments

On the Shangri-La Diet forums, babyhopes wrote:

At 10 am, I NCd [nose-clipped] a cup of milk, coffee and 2 small spoons of butter (I really like the anti-depressant effects of butter so I am making it part of my breakfast every day)

I noticed something similar the first time I ate a lot of butter (about 60 g). It was at lunch. A few hours later I felt a pleasant warm feeling in my head. The butter was the only unusual thing I had eaten.

When I googled “butter antidepressant” the first result was this blog — I wrote about this three years ago. Well, here is new evidence.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

How to Encourage Personal Science?

Seth Roberts10 Comments

I wonder how to encourage personal science (= science done to help yourself or a loved one, usually for health reasons). Please respond in the comments or by emailing me.

An obvious example of personal science is self-measurement (blood tests, acne, sleep, mood, whatever) done to improve what you’re measuring. Science is more than data collection and the data need not come from you. You might study blogs and forums or the scientific literature to get ideas. Self-measurement and data analysis by non-professionals is much easier than ever before. Other people’s experience and the scientific literature are much more available than ever before. This makes personal science is far more promising than ever before.

Personal science has great promise for reasons that aren’t obvious. It seems to be a balancing act: Personal science has strengths and weakness, professional science has strengths and weaknesses. I can say that personal scientists can do research much faster than professionals and are less burdened with conflicts of interest (personal scientists care only about finding a solution; professionals care about other things, including publication, grants, prizes, respect, and so on). A professional scientist might reply that professional scientists have more training and support. History overwhelming favors professional science — at least until you realize that Galileo, Darwin, Mendel, and Wegener (continental drift) were not professional scientists. (Galileo was a math professor.) There is very little personal science of any importance.

These arguments (balancing act, examination of history) miss something important. In a way, it isn’t a balancing act. Professional science and personal science do different things. In some ways history supports personal science. Let me give an example. I believe my most important discovery will turn out to be the effect of morning faces on mood. The basic idea that my findings support is that we have a mood control system that requires seeing faces in the morning to work properly. When the system is working properly, we have a circadian rhythm in mood (happy, eager, serene during the day, unhappy, reluctant, irritable at night). The strangest thing is that if you see faces in the morning (e.g, 7 am) they have no noticeable effect until 6 pm the same day. There is a kind of uncanny valley at work here. If you know little about mood research, this will seem unlikely but possible. If you are an average professional mood researcher, it will seem much worse: can’t possibly be true, total nonsense. If you know a lot about depression research, however, you will know that there is considerable supporting research (e.g., in many cases, depression gets better in the evening). It will still seem very unlikely, but not impossible. However, if you’re a professional scientist, it doesn’t matter what you think. You cannot study it. It is too strange to too many people, including your colleagues. You risk ridicule by studying it. If you’re a personal scientist, of course you can study it. You can study anything.

This illustrates a structural problem:

2013-02-28 personal & professional science in plausibility space

This graph shows what personal and professional scientists can do. Ideas vary in plausibility from low to high; data gathering (e.g., experiments) varies in cost from low to high. Personal scientists can study ideas of any plausibility, but they have a relatively small budget. Professional scientists can spend much more — in fact, must spend much more. I suppose publishing a cheap experiment would be like wearing cheap clothes. Another limitation of professional scientists is that they can only study ideas of medium plausibility. Ideas of low plausibility (such as my morning faces idea) are “crazy”. To take them seriously risks ridicule. Even if you don’t care what your colleagues think, there is the additional problem that a test of them is unlikely to pay off. You cannot publish results showing that a low-plausibility idea is wrong. Too obvious. In addition, professional scientists cannot study ideas of high plausibility. Again, the only publishable result would be that your test shows the idea is wrong. That is unlikely to happen. You cannot publish results that show that something that everybody already believes is true.

It is a bad idea for anyone — personal or professional scientist — to spend a lot of resources testing an idea of low or high plausibility. If the idea has low plausibility, the outcome is too likely to be “it’s wrong”. There are a vast number of low-plausibility ideas. No one can afford to spend a lot of money on one of them. Likewise, it’s a bad idea to spend a lot of resources testing an idea of high plausibility because the information value (information/dollar) of the test is likely to be low. If you’re going to spend a lot of money, you should do it only when both possible outcomes (true and false) are plausible.

This graph explains why health science has so badly stagnated — every year, the Nobel Prize in Medicine is given for something relatively trivial — and why personal science can make a big difference. Health science has stagnated because it is impossible for professionals to study ideas of low plausibility. Yet every new idea begins with low plausibility. The Shangri-La Diet is an example (Drink sugar water to lose weight? Are you crazy?). We need personal science to find plausible new ideas. We also need personal science at the other extreme (high plausibility) to customize what we know. Everyone has their quirks and differences. No matter how well-established a solution, it needs to be tailored to you in particular — to what you eat, when you work, where you live, and so on. Professional scientists won’t do that. My personal science started off with customization. I tested various acne drugs that my dermatologist prescribed. It turned out that one of them didn’t work. It worked in general, just not for me. As I did more and more personal science, I started to discover that certain low-plausibility ideas were true. I’d guess that 99.99% of professional scientists never discover that a low-plausibility idea is true. Whereas I’ve made several such discoveries.

Professional scientists need personal scientists to come up with new ideas plausible enough to be worth testing. The rest of us need personal scientists for the sake of our health. We need them to find new solutions and customize existing ones.

 

 

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments
  • An Epidemic of Absence (book about allergies and autism)
  • Professor of medicine who studies medical error loses a leg due to medical error. “Despite calls to action by patient advocates and the adoption of safety programs, there is no sign that the numbers of errors, injuries and deaths [due to errors] have improved.” Nothing about consequences for the person who made the error that caused him to lose a leg.
  • Doubts about spending a huge amount of research money on a single project (brain mapping). Which has yet to produce even one useful result.
  • Cancer diagnosis innovation by somebody without a job (a 15-year-old)
  • Someone named Rob Rhinehart has greatly reduced the time and money he spends on food by drinking something he thinks contains all essential nutrients. Someone pointed out to him that he needs bacteria, which he doesn’t have. (No doubt several types of bacteria are best.) He doesn’t realize that Vitamin K has several forms. I suspect he’s getting too little omega-3. This reminds me of a man who greatly reduced how much he slept by sleeping 15 minutes every 3 hours. It didn’t work out well for him (his creativity vanished and he became bored and unhappy). In Rhinehart’s case, I can’t predict what will happen so it’s fascinating. When something goes wrong, however, I’ll be surprised if he can figure out what caused the problem.

Thanks to Amish Mukharji.

Teaching With or Against Human Diversity

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, defended traditional lectures in a New York Times op-ed titled “The trouble with online education”. He described how he teaches. When he teaches, he fails to

1. Pay attention to what students want to learn.

2. Treat different students differently (beyond giving them different grades).

A few weeks ago, I described how doing these two things made teaching much easier. It’s like swimming with or against the current. You can take advantage of human diversity (my approach) or you can ignore it (Edmundson’s approach), which means fighting against it.

 

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Consistent- versus Inconsistent-Handed Predicts Better than Right- versus Left-Handed

Seth Roberts9 Comments

At Berkeley, Andrew Gelman and I taught a freshman seminar about left-handedness. Half the students were left-handed. We did two fascinating studies with them that found that left-handers tend to have left-handed friends. I kick myself for not publishing those results, which I bring up in conversation again and again.

After the class ended I got a call from a journalist who was writing an article about ridiculous classes. I told him the left-handedness class had value as a way of introducing methodological issues but all I cared about was that his article be accurate. He decided not to include our class in his examples.

Stephen Christman, who got his Ph.D. from Berkeley (and did quirky interesting stuff even as a graduate student), and two colleagues have now published a paper that is a considerable step forward in the understanding of handedness. They argue that what really matters is not direction of handedness but the consistency of it. The terms left-handed and right-handed hide a confounding. Right-handers almost all have very consistent handedness (they do everything with the right hand). In contrast, left-handers much more often have inconsistent handedness: they do some things with the left hand, some with the right. I am a good example. I write with my right hand, bat and throw left-handed, play tennis left-handed, ping-pong right-handed. In fact, I am right-wristed and left-armed. When something involves wrist movement (writing, ping-pong) I use my right hand. When something involves arm movement (batting, throwing a ball, tennis), I use my left hand. Right-handers are much more similar to each other than left-handers.

Christman and his co-authors point to two things: 1. When you can get enough subjects to unconfound the two variables, it turns out that consistency of handedness is what makes the difference. Consistent left-handers resemble consistent right-handers. 2. Consistency of handedness predicts many things. Inconsistent-handers are less authoritarian than consistent-handers. They show more of a placebo effect. They have better memory for paragraphs. And on and on — about 20 differences. It isn’t easy to say what all these differences have in common but maybe inconsistent-handers are more flexible in their beliefs. (Which would explain the friendship findings in our handedness class.)

I think about these differences as another example of how every economy needs diversity and our brains have been shaped to provide it, one idea underlying my theory of human evolution. Presidents of the United States are left-handed much more than the general population. For example, Obama is left-handed. The difference between Presidents and everyone else is overwhelming and must mean something. Yet left-handers die younger. I would say that in any group of people you need a certain fraction, not necessarily large, to be open-minded and realistic. That describes inconsistent-handers (who are usually left-handed). These people make good leaders because they will respond to changing conditions. People who are not open-minded make good followers. Just as important as realism is cooperation, ability to work together toward a common goal.

 

Bitter Pill: Why Medical Costs Are Killing Us by Steven Brill

Seth Roberts23 Comments

Steven Brill has a great article in Time called Bitter Pill: Why Medical Costs are Killing Us. I found it nauseating and terrifying — and I have health insurance. It is nauseating that helpless sick people are billed huge amounts of money that bear little relation to costs. It is terrifying that our government has failed to protect us from this.

Brill’s article is about the details of health care costs in America, especially hospital costs. Markups are huge. One example is a test strip for measuring blood sugar. The patient was charged $18 for each strip. On Amazon, the strips cost $0.50 each. The patient had no choice and was not told the wildly-inflated price. Brill gives many examples of similar markups. Hospitals, including nonprofit hospitals, are large prosperous businesses with very well paid CEO’s (e.g., $1 million/year). Yet Americans pay far more for health care than people in any other country and, judged by life expectancy, get worse results than people in about 40 countries. Brill’s article begins to explain the discrepancy.

Asked to explain their prices, many hospitals refused. One of them, MD Andersen in Houston, gave a statement that Brill quotes in part:

The issues related to health care finance are complex for patients, health care providers, payers and government entities alike . . . MD Anderson’s clinical billing and collection practices are similar to those of other major hospitals and academic medical centers.

Judging from the widespread refusals to explain and answers like this (“everyone does it”), the prices are indefensible.

The term stagnation — America is in the grip of profound stagnation — may be misleading because it makes it sound like things are staying the same. People point to a lack of increase in the median income over the last 30 years as indicating “stagnation”. Beneath stagnation is problems stacking up unsolved. (When they are solved, spread of the solutions produces an increase in income.) The problems aren’t staying the same: They’re getting worse. Health care costs are a good example. Health care costs have gone up faster than inflation for a long time, with plenty of signs that the American excess (the difference between what Americans pay and what everyone else pays) is completely wasted. (Or worse, given the many bad effects of drugs, surgery, and other high-tech medicine.) The American excess isn’t trivial, so median income, adjusted for it, has been going down for a long time, over the same period of time that median income in almost every other country has gone up. Quite a comment on the quality of our government.

As Brill says, the health care debate has been about who will pay? The question are prices too high? has been ignored. Jon Stewart said, “This should be a Silent Spring moment.”

Progress in Reducing Acne

Seth Roberts8 Comments

A new study has found that persons with Laron Syndrome (a kind of dwarfism) get almost no acne. Persons with this syndrome, because of a mutation, are insensitive to growth hormone. As a result, they produce much less IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor) than normal. When given synthetic IGF, they may develop acne; when the dose is reduced, the acne goes away. The authors say: “The findings suggest that an interaction between IGF-1 and androgens is necessary for the development of acne.” This is great progress because people with Laron Syndrome are different from everyone else in just one tiny way (albeit a tiny way with many consequences).

The first important step in understanding the cause of acne was finding two (“primitive”) groups of people with no acne. This suggested that acne has an environmental cause. There were thousands of differences between the lifestyle of those people and “modern” people, so this was just a start. It was hard to know which differences mattered. The Laron Syndrome finding is consistent with the earlier result (no acne in two groups of “primitive” people) because a “Western diet with [its] high intake of hyperglycemic carbohydrates and insulinotropic dairy over-stimulates IIS” (insulin-like/insulin signaling).

This view predicts that if you replace hyperglycemic foods with foods lower in glycemic index acne should be reduced. This study did that and, indeed, acne decreased (compared to a control group) after ten weeks. The study ended after ten weeks. The patient who reduced his/her glycemic index the most saw the greatest decrease in acne. A second study found the same thing: a low-glycemic-index diet reduced acne. It lasted twelve weeks. With longer follow-up, there might have been even more improvement.

Thanks to Paul Nash.