Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Thanks to Casey Manion and Anne Weiss

Is Science Self-Correcting?

Seth Roberts12 Comments

Lots of scientists say science is self-correcting. In a way this is surely true: a non-scientist wouldn’t understand the issues. If anyone corrects scientific fraud, it will be a scientist. In another way, this is preventive stupidity: it reassures and reduces the intelligence of those who say it, helping them ignore the fact that they have no idea how much fraud goes undetected. If only 1% of fraud is corrected, it is misleading to say science is self-correcting. A realistic view of scientific self-correction is that there is no reward for discovering fraud and plenty of grief involved: the possibility of retaliation, the loss of time (it won’t help you get another grant), and the dislike of bearing bad news. So whenever fraud is uncovered it’s a bit surprising and bears examination.

What I notice is that science is often corrected by insider/outsiders — people with enough (insider) knowledge and (outsider) freedom to correct things. As I’ve said before, Saul Sternberg and I were free to severely criticize Ranjit Chandra. Because we were psychologists and he was a nutritionist, he couldn’t retaliate against us. Leon Kamin, an outsider to personality psychology, was free to point out that Cyril Burt faked data. (To his credit, Arthur Jensen, an insider, also pointed in this direction, although not as clearly.) The Marc Hauser case provides another example: Undergraduates in Hauser’s lab uncovered the deception. They knew a lot about the research yet had nothing invested in it and little to lose from loss of Hauser’s support. This is another reason insider/outsiders are important.

Plastic Fantastic by E. S. Reich

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World by Eugenie Samuel Reich, a science writer, tells how a young physicist named Jan Hendrik Schoen, working at Bell Labs on making electronic devices from organic materials, managed to fool the physics community for several years, publishing many papers with made-up data in Science and Nature. This podcast summarizes the story, with the new detail that after his disgrace — even his Ph.D. was revoked — Schoen managed to get a job as an air-conditioning engineer in Germany.

I enjoyed the book, partly for the drama, partly for the physics, and partly for the light it sheds on the culture of physics and Bell Labs. When anyone says “science is self-correcting” I’m amused because, as the speaker must know, the amount of fraud that goes uncorrected is unknown. It may be far larger than the amount that is detected.

The author’s website.

Self-Experimentation and Infomercials

Seth Roberts2 Comments

When I was a grad student I was inspired to self-experiment by something I read about teaching math: The best way to learn is to do, said Paul Halmos, a math professor. A more recent version is fail early fail often fail cheap.

A maker of infomercials put it like this:

We were fortunate at American Telecast, in that most of our learning days were in our first 12 years, when we were in the 2-minute business. Learning was a lot cheaper. Failure was a lot cheaper than what failure is today in a 30-minute commercial. When you fail with a 30-minute commercial you can lose half a million or a million or a million and a half dollars. When we failed with a 2-minute commercial back then, we were failing with $15 or $20 thousand.

Self-experimentation made failure so cheap, so much cheaper than conventional research, that I was able to learn much more.

All this seems so obvious — yet self-experimentation by professional scientists is very rare. Psychology and nutrition professors, for example, could easily do self-experimentation, but don’t. And the infomercial maker describes himself as “fortunate” rather than as deliberately creating the situation.

A University President Defends Research Universities

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Steven Knapp is president of George Washington University in Washington, D. C. It was inevitable he wouldn’t like a book attacking the current structure of higher education but it wasn’t inevitable that he would write this:

A similar point could be made about the educational value of working at the frontier of discovery in one of the research centers that Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus [the book authors] decry. Have they spoken with undergraduates who have enjoyed the privilege of assisting a top investigator in an active, federally financed laboratory? In my own anecdotal experience, the best of those students, far from shutting themselves away in a narrow specialization, are very likely spending their time outside the lab in life-expanding service activities that, again, were quite beyond the ken of undergraduates in earlier generations.

At UC Berkeley, I spoke to many undergraduates like that. Most of them, perhaps 90%, were working in a lab because they thought it would help them get into medical school. Almost none were interested in a research career. All of them were being supervised by graduate students and had little or no contact with the “top investigator”. Because of the mismatch between what working in the lab could teach (what research was actually like) and what the students wanted to do (which wasn’t research) the “educational value” was slight. Knapp fails to understand this basic point about education: It matters what the student wants. Almost none of them, even at UC Berkeley, want to be scientists.

Yes, outside the lab they did do “life-expanding service activities” — volunteer for the Red Cross, work on a suicide hotline, and so on. By making them take lots of classes in which they were assigned lots of homework, the university made such outside activities more difficult.

Before he became university president, Knapp was an English professor — where he no doubt claimed he taught his students how to think. His thinking, in this review, consists of banalities that don’t bear examination. At least this is merely an unwittingly revealing book review instead of an entire delusional book.

My Theory of Human Evolution (baseball park collector)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Waiting in line at Tokyo immigration control, I met a woman from North Carolina who’d come to Japan for an organized tour of Japanese baseball parks (17 of them). She learned about the tour from a friend. In America, she’s visited 117.

I told her I was a psychology professor and had a theory of evolution in which connoisseurship played a big role. She was a baseball-park connoisseur, I said.

The evolutionary role of connoisseurs and collectors was to provide demand for finely-made stuff — things made by state-of-their-art artisans. Connoisseurs and collectors would pay more for features that had no clear value otherwise. By trading for these things, the connoisseurs and collectors helped the artisans make a living and thereby push their technology further.

New Heart Scan Results: Good News (lipid scores)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

My recent heart scan results were 50% lower (= better) than predicted. Apparently I am doing something right.
You might think that my lipid values would reflect that. Not quite. They were measured twice in the last two weeks, first with a Cholestech LDX machine (instant results); second, ordinary lab tests.
Here are the scores (first test, second test). Total Cholesterol: 210, 214, which is “borderline high” (borderline bad) according to the Cholestech LDX quick reference sheet. HDL = 17, 36, which is “low” (bad). TRG = 62, 75, which is “normal”. LDL = 180, 163, which is “high” (bad).

There is no hint in these numbers that I am doing the right thing! If anything, they imply the opposite, that I’m doing the wrong thing. This supports all those people, such as Uffe Ravnskov, who say the connection between cholesterol and heart disease is badly overstated.

In Tokyo — Wanna Meet?

Seth Roberts1 Comment

From Thursday Sept 2 through Sunday Sept 6 I will be in Tokyo. If you’d like to meet, let me know.

One Tokyo restaurant:

Please enjoy the dinner of the chef recommendation adhering to a “place of production”, “freshness”, a “season”, “health”, and “beauty” as a menu of a season.

Exactly. Words such as freshness, season, and so on in restaurant descriptions are indeed quotations but usually the quotation marks are missing.

New Heart Scan Results: Good News (raw data)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Here are the details of my two heart scan scores, one recent, the other one and a half years ago.

February 2009:

August 2010:

To give some context, this group of patients given a whole bunch of treatments (“statin therapy, niacin, the American Heart Association Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes (TLC) diet, omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D-3 supplementation”) meant to improve these scores managed, on average, about a 0% change in scores after 1-2 years of the treatments. Which is better than the usual 25%/year increase, but not as good as what happened to me.

New Heart Scan Results: Good News (explanation)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

My recent heart scan score was about 50% less than you’d expect from an earlier score. Why the improvement?

During the year between the two tests, I’d made one big change: eat much more animal fat. That’s the obvious explanation. Three things support it:

1. Mozaffarian et al., as I blogged, found a similar result.

2. The animal fat (pork fat and butter) had both produced large immediate improvements when I began to eat them. The pork fat had improved my sleep; the butter, my arithmetic scores. This sort of large immediate effect we associate with the supply of a missing necessary nutrient — giving Vitamin C to someone with scurvy, for example. My brain, at least, needed much more animal fat than I’d been eating. Different parts of the body need different nutrients, sure, but they all must work well with the same set of nutrients. If Nutrient X helps one part of the body, it is more likely to help another part.

3. My initial score put me at the 50th percentile for my age. I’d had an unusual diet for a long time. I stopped eating bread, potatoes, rice, pasta, and dessert 13 years ago. I’d started consuming lots of omega-3 and fermented foods a few years earlier. It was possible that those other changes produced improvement but if so it was a strange coincidence that, as my score got better and better over the years, I happened to measure it for the first time just when it crossed the 50th percentile.

This explanation makes a prediction: If you greatly increase your animal-fat intake, your heart scan score should improve. A commenter said what he’d read on paleo-diet forums supported this prediction: “If you hang out in the paleo/low carb forums, you see this kind of thing a lot.”