Inside the Chinese Government

Seth Roberts30 Comments

A Chinese friend of mine said that if you are at a high level in the Chinese government, you have a great deal of freedom. Below that level, however, you have very little freedom: You spend all your time doing exactly what your bosses want. And you have no idea how long the slavery will last. American government is different, she said. High American officials have less freedom than those outside government. I agree.

My friend disliked Obama because he constantly spoke about big ideals (“liberty” and so on) that my friend thought were very difficult to achieve. In other words, he constantly made promises that he was not going to be able to keep. She noted Obama’s inexperience and said that people in other areas of government are very smart and would outmaneuver him. (Exhibit 1: Goldman Sachs.) This doesn’t happen in the Chinese government because the people at the top are very old and have come up through the ranks, all the way from the bottom. Because of that long experience, they better understand how to get the rest of the government to do what they want.

In China, rich people fear the government. They must do what the government wants or they will be squashed. In America, she said, rich people do not fear the government. If anything, they tell the government what to do. I agree. Many people, such as Hayek and Milton Friedman, want less government. But I have yet to hear one of them answer the point that if government becomes too weak, rich people will control it.

Preposterous Health Claims of 2010

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Katy Steinmetz, a writer for Time, made a list called “Nutty Health Claims of 2010″ and “2010: The Year in Preposterous Health Claims.” The list of 12 includes:

Preposterous!

Marion Nestle, the New York University nutrition expert, has often said she thinks the health claims made for yogurt are bogus — at least when big companies make them. She recently called Dannon’s claims “a case study of successful marketing”.

Does Shower Temperature Affect Brain Speed?

Seth Roberts21 Comments

In November I learned about benefits of cold showers. So I tried them. I took cold showers that lasted about 5 minutes. I liked the most obvious effect (less sensitivity to cold).

Maybe a bigger “dose” would produce a bigger effect. Maybe the mood improvement cold showers were said to cause would be clearer. So I increased the “dose” in two ways: (a) more water flow (I stopped holes in the shower head) and (b) lower water temperature. After a week or so with the stronger dose, I saw I was gaining weight. It could be the cold showers, I thought. Fat acts as insulation and I couldn’t think of another plausible explanation. So I went from cold showers back to warm showers (48 degrees C.) — this time with greater water flow. My warm showers were 5-10 minutes long.

I began to lose weight, suggesting that the cold water did cause weight gain. More surprising was that my arithmetic speed (time to do simple arithmetic, such as 7-3, 8*4) began to decrease. Here is a graph of the results.

Before the cold showers started my arithmetic speed was roughly constant. The mild cold showers had no clear effect. I had noticed the increase during the strong cold shower phase but hadn’t paid it much attention — I suppose because it seemed implausible. These results, however, are excellent evidence for cause and effect: cold showers made me slower, warm showers made me faster. The arithmetic tests weren’t done soon after the shower. There seems to be some sort of brain-speed adjustment that takes place over ten days or more.

I’ve never heard of anything like this, whereas I’ve heard many times is that cold showers are good. There is one complication, which is that December 3rd I stopped eating walnuts. I believe walnuts are bad for the brain, in contrast to the usual belief. I came to believe that because of results from two students of mine who had tried eating them. Improvement due to no longer eating walnuts would explain why line fitted to the strong cold data starts below where the weak cold line ends. The final days of the strong warm phase may be the same as the weak warm phase when adjusted for the walnut difference.

What explains this? Maybe the weight change. When gaining weight, maybe fat was taken from the blood to be deposited in fat cells, thus lowering the fat content of the blood reaching the brain and thus degrading brain performance. Losing weight, the opposite happens. Eventually the weight loss will stop; this explanation predicts when that happens the warm-water effect will go away.

In a previous post I wondered why I had gotten faster at arithmetic over the previous six months. These data suggest that warm showers may be at least part of the reason. In Berkeley I take baths, not showers.

I Paid A Bribe

Seth Roberts1 Comment

The website I Paid A Bribe is a great great idea. It is enormously promising as a way of reducing corruption. India and China, the two biggest countries in the world, both have immense corruption problems.

I Paid A Bribe is so promising because it takes small bits of anger (mental energy) and aggregates them. Anger causes people to take the time necessary to complain. The aggregated results can be used to: 1. Focus correction. Anti-corruption efforts can start with the biggest offenders. 2. Embarrass offenders. 3. Help measure the effect of anti-corruption measures. Without long term records, those initiatives have great difficulty measuring effectiveness.

It is hard for most people to grasp the corruption of medical science, which connects I Paid a Bribe to what I usually write about. The corruption isn’t exactly on the surface: Only medical school professors take something close to bribes. (The pervasiveness of the problem is shown by the fact that all med schools let them do this or don’t enforce rules against it) The corruption consists of this: Some lines of research are more profitable (e.g., more grant money, more prestige) than other lines of research. That is inevitable. What isn’t inevitable is that this is allowed to obscure honest investigation of which lines of research are the most beneficial. The most visible sign of the corruption is that the Nobel Prize in Medicine is usually given for research that hasn’t helped anyone. The 2009 award for telomere research was an egregious example. Even in China and India, you can find government officials who have helped people.

The anger or fear felt by someone asked to pay a bribe is mental energy. In the case of medical science, the corresponding mental energy is much greater — it is the suffering caused by a condition for which medical science has no cure or a poor cure. Depression, acne, autism, poor sleep, diabetes, obesity . . . the daily suffering caused by these and other health problems is staggering. I believe that self-experimentation is a way of doing something useful with that suffering. When aggregated via the internet, it is a way around the failure of mainstream medicine to deal with these problems.

Via Aleks Jakulin.

Chinese Joke

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A few days ago I got the following message (in Chinese) on my cell phone (part of a service):

A monkey, goat, and tortoise were playing together. After a while they got thirsty. They sent the tortoise to get water. Half a day later, the tortoise still hadn’t returned. “That *)?!% idiot is too slow!” said the monkey. From outside came the voice of the tortoise: “If you call me more bad words I won’t get water for you.”

“Sour” in Chinese

Seth Roberts2 Comments

The Chinese character for sour (pinyin suan) contains a bottle-like element that is sometimes translated wine, sometimes whiskey bottle, and sometimes “the tenth of the twelve earthly branches,” whatever that means. The bottle-like element appears in the character for alcoholic beverage, the character for vinegar, and several other characters with no obvious connection to fermentation. But the connection between sour and fermentation is clear.

My belief that we need to eat lots of fermented food to be healthy began when I realized that would explain why we like sour foods, foods high in umami, and foods with complex flavors — preferences I’d never heard explained. We like those foods, I theorized, so that we will eat foods high in bacteria. Bacteria tend to make sugar-containing foods sour, protein-containing foods high in umami, and all foods high in flavor complexity. I had not previously connected sourness and bacteria — but the Chinese had. I don’t yet know the Chinese characters for umami or flavor complexity.

Shangri-La Diet Uptick

Seth Roberts12 Comments

During the last half of 2010, I noticed today, hits at the Shangri-La Diet forums steadily increased. The number of hits went from about 300,000 in July to about 500,000 in December.

Before that the number of hits had steadily declined from a high of about 900,000 in August 2009. The number of hits had tended to be higher in the summer so the recent increase is counter-seasonal.

Dissent Over DSM-5

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I liked this article by Gary Greenberg about one psychiatrist’s criticism of the upcoming DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) revision. The DSM is the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association.

This paragraph stood out for me:

This new disease reminded Frances of one of his keenest regrets about the DSM-IV: its role, as he perceives it, in the epidemic of bipolar diagnoses in children over the past decade. Shortly after the book came out, doctors began to declare children bipolar even if they had never had a manic episode and were too young to have shown the pattern of mood change associated with the disease. Within a dozen years, bipolar diagnoses among children had increased 40-fold. Many of these kids were put on antipsychotic drugs, whose effects on the developing brain are poorly understood but which are known to cause obesity and diabetes. In 2007, a series of investigative reports revealed that an influential advocate for diagnosing bipolar disorder in kids, the Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, failed to disclose money he’d received from Johnson & Johnson, makers of the bipolar drug Risperdal, or risperidone. (The New York Times reported that Biederman told the company his proposed trial of Risperdal in young children “will support the safety and effectiveness of risperidone in this age group.”) Frances believes this bipolar “fad” would not have occurred had the DSM-IV committee not rejected a move to limit the diagnosis to adults.

Emphasis added. Hundreds of thousands of children given brain-damaging drugs because . . . well, one big reason is that Harvard allows its faculty to do what Biederman did. Forced to choose between Harvard and drug company money, Biederman would choose Harvard. I am glad Professor Ross Anderson, a Cambridge computer science professor, turned down an industry request to censor a student, but I am sorry he said the person making the request had “a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work.”

American Psychiatric Association incompetence.

Via The Browser.

Which Should You Trust: Scientific Literature or Anecdote?

Seth Roberts16 Comments

In a comment on a BMJ paper critical of alternative medicine (the author submitted a fictional abstract to a conference then criticized the program committee for not rejecting it), a retired chemist named Joe Magrath said:

The scientific literature tells us that acupuncture, cupping and reflexology are all nonsense.

I haven’t looked into it but I’ll take his word for it.

Around the time Magrath said that, James Fallows said this:

During our years in Malaysia in the 1980s, and more recently in China, my wife and I became unlikely converts to a lot of Asian medical practices. I had serious back pain cured by an acupuncturist (who used needles the size of aluminum baseball bats) in Kuala Lumpur. In her book, my wife describes how the gruesome-seeming therapy of fire-cupping, applied in an all-night massage parlor in the city of Yueyang, snapped her out of a serious bout of the flu. Sure, she had big red welts on her back for the next ten days, but her fever was gone!

Which do you believe?