Author: Seth Roberts

Independent Discovery That Walking Catalyzes Learning

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Two years ago I discovered that if I walked while studying Chinese flashcards (using Anki), both activities — walking and studying — became easier. I could walk much longer on my treadmill and I could study much longer. Walking made studying more pleasant and vice-versa. Around the same time, Jeremy Howard, the president of Kaggle, made the same discovery independently. In an email to me, he writes:

I came up with the idea accidentally a couple of years ago – I needed to go to the gym every day, and that included 30 minutes on a cross-trainer (but I only managed to do 15 min most days). I needed something to do to keep me amused, so I brought along my PC and started doing my Anki whilst on the cross-trainer. I discovered I could do my cross-trainer for at least twice as long, and my Anki results were better too. Later I added treadmill walking to my Anki study too.

He says more about it, including how much it helped him, in a QS talk.

As Nabokov says in Pale Fire,

If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt
Sees a new animal and captures it,
And if, a little later, Captain Smith
Brings back a skin, that island is no myth.

Learning methods that use this effect are going to have a big advantage over learning methods that don’t.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda and Alex Chernavsky.

Marginal Revolution University: A Hidden Advantage

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Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have started Marginal Revolution University, intended to be a set of online classes that will “communicate [their] personal vision of economics”. One selling point is the content will be designed for online delivery, rather than being recordings of lectures.

They don’t mention another advantage. Before I was hired at Berkeley, I went there for a series of interviews. One was with a group of graduate students. One of them asked, “Which do you like better, teaching or research?” “I like research better,” I said. The graduate students smiled. You’re supposed to say you like them equally.

At Berkeley I met plenty of professors who liked teaching small classes. I never met a single professor who liked teaching large classes. (That included me — I didn’t like teaching them.) Berkeley has recently joined Harvard and MIT to form EdX, a nonprofit company that will offer online classes. “We are deeply committed to public education,” said Berkeley’s chancellor. Well, that might sound good or it might sound pro forma, but either way few of Berkeley’s professors want to teach the classes that EdX would offer, such as Introductory Psychology. Unless a class with 100,000 students is more personal than a class with 500 students. Whereas Tyler and Alex must want to do what they’re doing. No one is pushing them to do it.

 

 

 

Bic For Her and Personal Science

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Bic’s new line of pens (Bic for Her) was greeted with scorn by Amazon reviewers. David Vinjamuri, experienced in brand marketing, guessed that the reason for the debacle was that the persons who approved the product were quite different than the persons expected to buy it.

Brand companies are not good at assigning authentic consumers [= consumers of their brands] to work on their brands. They [wrongly] assume that [their] lack of personal experience with the product can be made up [for] by lots of analysis. It is very, very hard to imagine that the people who made the decision to launch “Bic for Her” were the same [people] expected to buy them. And that’s why the huge majority of consumer brand launches fail. There are lots of ways to make an awful mistake, but some of the worst could be avoided if consumer companies were staffed by actual consumers.

Health care has the same problem. In health care, the persons who devise a new treatment (a new treatment for acne, asthma, arthritis, diabetes, whatever) are usually 100% distinct from the persons expected to use that treatment. For example, roughly 0% of acne researchers have acne.

If Vinjamuri is right — and I think he is — this explains a lot about the awfulness of modern health care — the terrible side effects of Accutane, for example. And it explains why personal science works so much better. When personal scientists search for a solution to a health problem (e.g. acne), they are 100% the same as the people who will use the solution. No wonder the solutions they find are so much better than what a doctor would prescribe.

New Walking-Catalyzes-Learning Results

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Two years ago, I discovered that if I walked on a treadmill while studying Chinese flash cards, it became much easier. Without walking, I could barely study 10 minutes without getting exhausted and stopping. If I walked at the same time, however, I could study much longer — say, 60 minutes. Huge difference. Walking on a treadmill made studying Chinese pleasant. This was stunning because walking on a treadmill by itself was boring and studying Chinese (or any other dry knowledge) is supposed to be boring. I concluded that walking created a thirst for dry knowledge, which studying Chinese satisfied. My evolutionary explanation was that this linkage evolved to push us to explore our surroundings. My posts about this.

In an April 2012 QS talk, Jeremy Howard reported the same thing.

I discovered that if I am walking on a treadmill at 1.2 miles per hour at a 1 degree incline I have an error rate of about 5%. Whereas if I don’t [walk on a treadmill] it’s about 8%. I also know that I can do that for an hour. Whereas normally if I’m just sitting down I can just do it 20 minutes. . . . And at the end of that hour I was ready to do something else. Whereas at the end of 20 minutes, normally I’d [audience member: “Take a nap”] Yeah, I’d be totally ready for a rest . . I also discovered I was 40% faster [at learning].

He added, “I love my Chinese every day.” More recently, someone named Adam posted on the QS forums that he’d had a similar experience:

As Jeremy Howard mentioned in his talk, SRSing (is that a word?) is exhausting. Like him, after a period of about 20 minutes, I often reach a level of fatigue that makes it difficult to continue studying. I first read about the “treadmill method” on Seth Roberts’s blog & found it highly effective. Like Mr. Howard, I could study for hours without become bored . . . The only problem here is that I don’t have easy access to a treadmill. My gym is quite far & it is impractical to go there every day, while I desire to SRS every day.

That two other people noticed such a big effect is good reason to think that it will be true for most people.

Two Recent Health Care Experiences

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A friend and his pregnant wife, who live in Los Angeles and are not poor, recently had an ultrasound. (Probability of the ultrasound machine not operating properly and producing more than the stated amounts of energy: unknown, but a recent Stockholm survey found one-third of the machines malfunctioned.) Part of the office visit was a post-ultrasound visit with a genetic counselor. The genetic counselor walked them through illnesses in their family tree and assessed their coming baby with very low risk for Trisomy 21 (Down syndrome), Trisomy 13 and Trisomy 18.

At the end of their session, they were offered other services they might opt to buy to better know their chances of knowing about any fetal problems: Chorionic villus sampling and amniocentesis as well as a maternal blood test. None were really necessary.

My friend was irked that the CVS and the amniocentesis were called “low risk”. Maybe you know that a large fraction of doctors claim to practice “evidence-based medicine”. You might think this means they pay attention to all evidence. In fact, evidence-based medicine practitioners subscribe to a method of ranking evidence and ignore evidence that is not highly ranked. Most evidence of harm is not highly ranked, so evidence-based medicine practitioners ignore it. This makes every treatment appear less dangerous — misleadingly so. When a doctor says “low risk,” the truth, because the practice of ignoring evidence of harm is widespread (and drug companies routinely underestimate risk), is closer to “unknown risk”. The combination of (a) understating risk, (b) selling unnecessary stuff of which you have understated the risk, and (c) doing this with pregnant women, whose fetuses are especially vulnerable, is highly unattractive.

Also recently, the friend’s toddler had some sort of infection. The toddler had a bit of a fever, but was generally in good spirits, and played with his toys (i.e., was not bed-ridden or in severe distress). After a few days, his wife took the child to their pediatrician to make sure everything was fine.

“Don’t just accept the antibiotics,” my friend told his wife. “Push back a little. See what happens.”

The pediatrician did prescribe antibiotics. When my friend’s wife said she preferred not to give the child antibiotics if it were not really necessary, the doctor (female) said, “You’re right. I actually don’t know if the infection is bacterial or viral.”

Both stories — which obviously reflect common practice — illustrate how the healthcare system is biased toward treatment, including treatments that are unnecessary and dangerous. The good news is that this bias is clearer than ever before.

Assorted Links

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  • Five quantified-self stories
  • False Alzheimer’s diagnosis. “Alzheimer’s symptoms such as confusion, memory loss and personality changes also can be side effects from medication—even commonly used drugs. For example, the entire class of anticholinergic drugs, which includes many antihistamines, antianxiety drugs, muscle relaxants and sleeping pills . . . Cholesterol-reducing statins have also been linked to brain fog in some people. In many cases, the cognitive symptoms vanish when medication is stopped. “I have had people referred to me with a clear history of dementia and when I started to peel back the medications, they were much better,” says Gary Kennedy, chief of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y.”
  • Ancestral Health Symposium 2012 (Boston) recaps. I thought Robb Wolf’s talk was excellent. Jay Stanton had original ideas about weight control. Most of the other talks, not so much.

Assorted Links

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  • the power of Marmite
  • problems in the Chinese economy
  • Edward Jay Epstein reviews A Wilderness of Error by Errol Morris. Janet Malcolm, among many others, assumed McDonald was guilty but new evidence suggests he was innocent.
  • Fermented food addiction. Several months ago I had a hard time not eating roasted peanuts. I kept buying them. Eventually the compulsion to eat them disappeared. Maybe they were supplying a nutrient I was deficient in.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

Benefits of Fermented Foods

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A simple story:

When Steven Kent did an internship at The Farm, a hippie commune in rural Tennessee, he had an epiphany. Eating a steady diet of sauerkraut, pickled vegetables, sourdough bread and other fermented foods, he found the digestive problems that had plagued him since college largely vanished.

There is more here about tempeh (fermented tofu) and a small Northern California company that Kent started called Alive and Healing that makes only tempeh.