Quantified Self in National Post

Seth Roberts7 Comments

The National Post, a large Canadian newspaper, has a long article about quantitative self-tracking. Overall I like it. It looks at the subject in five or six ways, it focuses on examples of self-tracking rather than people generalizing about it, and, best of all, it includes actual data.

I wasn’t so pleased with the treatment of my work. First, the graph showing my butter data was wrongly labeled and the dividing line between before butter and during butter put in the wrong place. (These mistakes have been fixed.)Â Second, the description of my acne experiments — my dermatologist prescribed Medicines A and B, I found that only B worked — misses the point. True, I found that B worked better than A but far more interesting is that Medicine A (an antibiotic) didn’t work at all. Contrary to what I believed. Antibiotics are dangerous. How many people are taking dangerous drugs with no benefit? Third, the written description of my butter research doesn’t say the main point: butter improved my brain function in the sense that I did arithmetic faster. Instead it says I found butter was better than “standing on something painful”. A billion people would like better-functioning brains. None of them care whether butter is better than standing on something painful.

I pointed out the last two problems to Kathryn Carlson, the author of the article. She replied that in the future she would call me to go over the accuracy of the relevant parts of the article. I had considered asking the people who made the graph to show it to me but had thought because they had my graph of the same data in front of them, they couldn’t go wrong.

A good lesson for me.

This Year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I applaud it. The winner developed in vitro fertilization, which has helped millions of parents. In contrast to last year’s prize for telomere research, which has helped no one. Notice what in vitro fertilization is not: It is not taking a powerful poorly-tested drug for the rest of your life — the drug industry’s preferred answer to all problems. It is not expensive (given the benefits). Unlike health care in general. It is not dangerous, unlike many drugs and surgeries. It is not molecular biology. It is barely science (uncovering cause and effect). If the prize were given for research like this year after year, many biologists who now dream of winning a Nobel Prize would stop dreaming. It is not a typical Nobel Prize. They waited so long to award it that the winner became demented. Above all, the prize-winning work was not mainstream medical research. The winner and his collaborator endured “an unremitting barrage of criticism”, unlike almost any other medical researcher.

The award is unflattering to medical ethicists, who did a lot to try to prevent the prize-winning work.

Out-of-Control Drug Companies and Their Consorts

Seth Roberts2 Comments

The increase in pediatric bipolar diagnosis, [Dr. Joseph Biederman’s] lawyer said, “cannot be attributed solely to Dr. Biederman’s work.”

This article is a long list of drug-company abuses, such as

Lilly produced a video called “The Myth of Diabetes” to sell Zyprexa, which became its all-time best-selling drug, even though evidence showed that Zyprexa could cause diabetes.

And

Pfizer paid more than 250 child psychiatrists to promote its antipsychotic, Geodon, at a time when it was approved only for adults, according to a government filing with the Pfizer settlement last year. High-prescribing doctors pocketed extra money in the form of research payments, speaking fees, gifts, meals and junkets.

Pharma Gossip. Thanks to Ken Feinstein.

Gelatin and Sleep

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I found that pork belly improved my sleep. Pork belly is mainly fat, but is it as simple as that (pork fat improves sleep)? Thomas Seay brought to my attention claims about gelatin by Ray Peat. One was that it improved his sleep:

For years I hadn’t slept through a whole night without waking, and I was in the habit of having some juice or a little thyroid to help me go back to sleep. The first time I had several grams of [commercial] gelatin just before bedtime, I slept without interruption for about 9 hours.

Seay tried gelatin himself and found it improved his sleep. I asked him about this.

What do you do?

I take Great Lakes Unflavored Gelatin. I take about 5 or 6 tablespoons a day (2 tablespoons per meal) usually in hot water. So, that amounts to about 35-42 grams/day. You can also put it in juice or make an aspic with it. Another person I know who takes it only needs to take two tablespoons a day, just prior to sleep.

What effect has it had?

It helps me to sleep more hours uninterrupted. This did not require a build-up over weeks. It happened the first time I took it.

You sound like you’ve stopped taking it. How long did you take it? Why did you stop?

I have taken it off and on. (Usually I would take it one week on, one week off). I have noticed that after a few days it causes constipation FOR ME. Another person I know who has tried it has not noticed this effect. Presently I am experimenting with segmented sleep (getting up for an hour or two in the night and then returning to sleep), so I have stopped taking any sort of supplement, including the gelatin. Prior to this, I had done the gelatin for about 4 months.

Punishment of Difference

Seth Roberts8 Comments

When I was a boy, my family didn’t have a TV. (Which I now make up for by watching a lot of TV.) The strangeness of this was made clear one day at school. It was second grade. The teacher wanted to talk about something on TV. “Who doesn’t have a TV?” she asked the class. I raised my hand and a girl raised her hand. She didn’t have a TV because it was being fixed.

So I was especially disturbed by this video in which a few schoolchildren who differ from the rest of their class are blown up. Their fatal mistake is not cutting carbon emissions. The organization that made it took it down and issued a lukewarm apology (“live and learn”) that said nothing about ridiculing minorities. If I were teaching 10-year-olds, I think I’d show them the video, tell them how disturbing I found it, and ask them about times in their lives that they felt different from everyone else. It is a curiously teachable moment.

Science Journalism Cliches

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I enjoyed this funny article about science-journalism cliches. Via Andrew Gelman. At the moment it has 643 comments. The five posts that preceded it (none of which Andrew linked to) have 19, 7, 6, 11, and 20 comments. Correlation or causation?

Last night someone asked me if it was hard to write scientific articles. I said no. As a friend said to me about her copy-editing job at The New Yorker, a trained monkey could do it. My articles are just as formulaic as everyone else’s. I hope the content isn’t formulaic, but the structure is.

New Idea About Learning Chinese

Seth Roberts12 Comments

 I never considered taking a class to learn Chinese. Too boring, too time-consuming. I’ve tried hiring tutors and going through a textbook. Better but too close to taking a class. That didn’t last.

For maybe half a year I’ve used Anki (a flashcard program) to learn characters. This is better — at least it’s lasted half a year — but I don’t study it often enough.

A friend suggested labeling things in my apartment — put a card with the character for chair on a chair, for example. Another friend pointed out that there are children’s books with big characters (one per page). That suggested my latest idea: Put these pages on the walls of my apartment. So whenever I look at the wall it will be a kind of test. If I don’t remember the character, I can look on the underside of the card for the answer.

I’m excited about this: it might actually work, I now think. It doesn’t require being still, which I think reduces learning. It spaces learning (you learn in little bits throughout the day), which is surely better than massing it. It allows great amounts of repetition. And it takes advantage of natural curiosity (whenever I see Chinese — in a sign, for example — I wonder what it means) rather than requiring discipline. As far as I can tell it requires no discipline at all. If it doesn’t work I’ll learn something about education.

Malcolm Gladwell on Twitter

Seth Roberts6 Comments

In the latest New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell says Twitter and the like are less revolutionary than claimed.

A month ago a friend and I discussed Gladwell. The friend said that after Steven Pinker’s review of What the Dog Saw, he couldn’t look at Gladwell the same way.

I said that was a silly review. Sure, Gladwell has faults, but he also has strengths. He chooses interesting research to write about and writes about it in an accessible attractive way. An example is the Korean Airlines chapter in Outliers. It had little to do with the rest of the book but it was excellent journalism. Pinker barely mentioned these strengths but did point out spelling mistakes. It is silly to judge something by dwelling on what’s wrong with it. (Exhibit A: correlation does not equal causation.)

Gladwell’s latest piece is one of his best. It makes four points:

1. The strong-tie/weak-tie distinction in social networks. An old idea, but worth being reminded of.

2. Strong ties were behind the civil-rights lunch counter sit-ins. The movement they helped start was long and dangerous. Strong ties helped.

3. Twitter and other social media create weak ties. It isn’t clear they create strong ties. Donations based on weak ties were in several cases a few cents/person. Much less than the cost of participation in the civil-rights movement.

4. If you’re going to claim something is “revolutionary”, as Clay Shirky did about Twitter and the like, you should start your book with a better example than a rich guy getting his Sidekick back.

Perfectly good points, especially the last.

Tyler Cowen’s reaction.