The Irony of What Works

Seth Roberts5 Comments

After posting about Doug Lemov, I ordered Teach Like a Champion. It arrived yesterday. Leafing through it, I came across a section titled “The Irony of What Works,” which begins:

One of the biggest ironies I hope you will take away from reading this book is that many of the tools likely to yield the strongest classroom results remain essentially beneath the notice of our theories and theorists of education.

Lemov continues with an example: Teaching students how to distribute classroom materials, such as handouts. This can save a lot of time. Then he adds:

Unfortunately this dizzyingly efficient technique — so efficient it is all but a moral imperative for teachers to use it — remains beneath the notice of our avatars of educational theory. There isn’t a school of education that would stoop to teach its aspiring teachers how to train their students to pass out papers.

The last chapter of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class is about just this — the importance that professors (like everyone else) place on status display and how this interferes with their effectiveness. The connection with self-experimentation is that no matter how effective it is, no psychology department would stoop to teach it. Or, at least, that’s the current state of affairs.

The book’s index doesn’t include Veblen, although it does include Richard Thaler.

Beijing Students at Berkeley

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In downtown Berkeley I met a group of Chinese students from Beijing. They were entering freshmen at UC Berkeley.

They said there were 40 students like them — from Beijing, entering UC Berkeley. (At Tsinghua, there will be 400 entering freshmen from Beijing.) In all of China, 13 students were admitted to Harvard, about the same number to Yale and Princeton. One of them said she’d wanted to go to Northwestern but hadn’t gotten in. Had she gone to college in China, she might have gone to Renmin University, perhaps the #3 university in China.

Surely their parents were wealthy, yes. But they preferred an American college to a Chinese one for two main reasons: 1. They can choose whatever major they want. At Chinese universities students are often forced into a major they don’t want if their scores are high enough to get into a prestigious university but not high enough to get into the major they want at that university. 2. They believe that if they graduate from an American university they will have more opportunities. Where did they get the idea of coming to Berkeley? I asked. Online, they said. Their English was really good.

The “more opportunities” may not be as simple as they think. In Beijing I know a Chinese businesswoman who hired a recent college graduate. She’d gone to college in England, indicating that her parents were wealthy. The new worker turned out to be irresponsible and had to be fired. Perhaps her parents had spoiled her. In this businesswoman’s eyes, an overseas education may now be a negative.

“That’s Why You’re So Easy to Hate”

Seth Roberts6 Comments

This is what one bloggingheads commentator said to the other. Was the speaker-listener combo (a) man to man, (b) man to woman, (c) woman to man, or (d) woman to woman?

As you can guess, woman to woman. After I wrote this post, I listened to the rest of the dialog. The phrase was repeated several times.

It’s a standard compliment, yes. Sure, women compliment each other like this and men don’t. But I think it is an example of another underlying rule that I can’t figure out.

More I hadn’t noticed that the title of the conversation is “We’re All So Easy to Hate”.

Drug Company Corruption

Seth Roberts9 Comments

This Al Jazeera documentary, called “Drug Money”, emphasizes three things.

1. Doctors get vast amounts of money from drug companies, which influences which drugs they prescribe. One influential doctor, Tom Stossel of Harvard, who has received “millions” from drug companies, sees no problem with that!

2. Drug companies encourage the prescription of drugs for unapproved uses. For this and other crimes, more than half of the major drug companies have been found guilty and fined billions of dollars. Several of the not-yet-guilty ones are under investigation. The problem is industry-wide, not due to a “bad apple”.

3. The harm done by deceptive practices isn’t trivial. One example is Risperdal. It isn’t approved to treat ADHD in children, but it is prescribed for that. Given to boys, it can cause them to grow breasts, which is extremely embarrassing. When the boys were given the drugs, their parents were unaware of this possibility. Joseph Biederman, another Harvard professor who has received millions from drug companies and an advocate of giving Risperdal to children, told a Congressional committee he had no idea that a large fraction of all Risperdal is given to children (“I have no idea how much Risperdal is used in children”).

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

Pork Belly News

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I am a big fan of pork belly. Whenever I see it on a menu I order it. The mayor of Chongqing (population 32 million) recently made headlines with a speech whose main point was

改善民生ä¸åªæ˜¯åƒçº¢çƒ§è‚‰ç©¿æ¼‚亮衣æœ

Which means: Better living standards is not just eating hong shao rou wearing beautiful clothes. Hong shao rou is pork belly braised in a red sauce. Maybe my favorite Chinese dish. Supposedly Chairman Mao’s favorite dish. I’m glad he said “not just” rather than “not”.

Arithmetic and Butter (continued)

Seth Roberts12 Comments

At my Quantified Self talk I described data that suggested butter improved my mental function. During the question period, a cardiologist in the audience said something about me killing myself — butter is unhealthy. The usual view.

I said I thought the evidence for the usual view was weak. He said, “The Framingham studies.” That was epidemiology, I said. It is notoriously hard to understand. My data was from something like an experiment. Much easier to understand. (And the Framingham study is a terrible example of the supposed evidence. To quote from it: “In the period between the taking of the diet interviews and the end of the 16-year follow-up, 47 cases of de novo CHD developed in the Diet Study group. The means for all the diet variables measured were practically the same for these cases as for the original cohort at risk.”) He replied that the reduction in heart disease in recent years was more support for the usual view. I said the recent decline in heart disease could have many explanations other than a reduction in animal fat intake. Many things have changed over the last 20 years.

There is epidemiological evidence that saturated fat is bad, yes, but it is not the Framingham study nor the recent decline in heart disease. And it really is difficult to interpret. The butter-is-bad interpretation could easily be wrong. The obvious problem is that, after people are told butter is bad, people who try hard to be healthy avoid butter. And they do a lot of other things, too, to be healthy. So butter consumption ends up confounded with a dozen other variables believed to affect your health. When I was growing up, my parents avoided butter because margarine was much cheaper. So butter consumption is confounded with income, another problem.

My tiny experiment, whatever its problems, was much easier to interpret.

Power Makes You More Dismissive

Seth Roberts7 Comments

An excellent essay by Jonah Lehrer (Alternate link) describes a pair of studies I didn’t know about:

In a recent study led by Richard Petty, a psychologist at Ohio State, undergraduates role-played a scenario between a boss and an underling. Then the students were exposed to a fake advertisement for a mobile phone. Some of the ads featured strong arguments for buying the phone, such as its long-lasting battery, while other ads featured weak or nonsensical arguments. Interestingly, students that pretended to be the boss were far less sensitive to the quality of the argument. It’s as if it didn’t even matter what the ad said — their minds had already been made up.

 

. . . Instead of analyzing the strength of the argument, those with authority focus on whether or not the argument confirms what they already believe. If it doesn’t, then the facts are conveniently ignored.

Deborah Gruenfeld, a psychologist at the Stanford Business School, demonstrated a similar principle by analyzing more than 1,000 decisions handed down by the United States Supreme Court between 1953 and 1993. She found that, as justices gained power on the court, or became part of a majority coalition, their written opinions tended to become less complex and nuanced. They considered fewer perspectives and possible outcomes.

Scary. Thomas Paine wrote about this: “The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly.”

Arithmetic and Butter

Seth Roberts18 Comments

On Tuesday I gave a talk called “Arithmetic and Butter” at the Quantified Self meeting in Sunnyvale. I had about 10 slides but this one mattered most:

It shows how fast I did simple arithmetic problems (e.g., 2*0, 9-6, 7*9) before and after I started eating 1/2 stick (60 g) of butter every day. The x axis covers about a year. The butter produced a long-lasting improvement of about 30 msec.

I think the hill shape of the butter function is due to running out of omega-3 in Beijing — my several-months-old flaxseed oil had gone bad, even though it had been frozen. When I returned to Berkeley and got fresh flaxseed oil, my scores improved.

This isn’t animal fat versus no animal fat. Before I was eating lots of butter, I was eating lots of pork fat. It’s one type of animal fat versus another type. Nor is it another example of modern processing = unhealthy. Compared to pork fat, butter is recent.

Most scientists think philosophy of science is irrelevant. Yet this line of research (measuring my arithmetic speed day after day, in hopes of accidental discovery) derived from a philosophy of science, which has two parts. First, scientific progress has a power-law distribution. Each time we collect data, we sample from a power-law-like distribution. Almost all samples produce tiny progress; a very tiny fraction produce great progress. Each time you collect data, in other words, it’s like buying a lottery ticket. I realized that a short easy brain-function test allowed me to buy a large number of lottery tickets at low cost. Second, we underestimate the likelihood of extreme events. Nassim Taleb has argued this about the likelihood of extreme negative events (which presumably have a power-law distribution); I’m assuming the same thing about extreme positive events (with a power-law distribution). We undervalue these lottery tickets, in other words. Perhaps all scientists hope for accidental discoveries. I seem to be the first to use a research strategy that relies on accidental discoveries.

In the graph, note that one point (actually, two) is down at 560 msec. This suggests there’s room for improvement.

“A World Suppressing the Uniqueness Inside Each of Us”

Seth Roberts9 Comments

I liked Erica Goldson’s graduation speech very much partly because she says the same things I say here. To me, the core of her message is that her high school was

a world suppressing the uniqueness that lies inside each of us

That’s what I tried to say here. Goldson summed it up better than I did. One of the things that pushed me toward that conclusion happened in an undergraduate seminar about depression that I taught at Berkeley. For a final project, the students could do almost anything related to depression, so long as it was off campus and did not involve library research. One student chose to give a talk to a high school class. Not a rare choice — several other students did the same thing. But her final paper blew me away. She wrote about how hard it had been. She had/has severe stage fright. Every step of the project was very hard for her. But she did it. “I learned I can conquer my fears,” she wrote.

Her performance on the week-to-week assignments (writing comments on the reading) had been mediocre. But now I saw another side of her: She was courageous. My assignments, like practically all college assignments, required no courage. So I never noticed how courageous any of my students were. I remember sitting at my desk after reading her paper and thinking how badly I had undervalued her. I had noticed this only because I’d given a highly unusual assignment. I could see that there was a gigantic amount of undervaluing going on. And undervaluation leads to suppression. Students have unique or unusual strengths that fail to develop because their high school or college teachers don’t value them.

Thanks to Tucker Max.

How Well Do Authors of Scientific Papers Respond to Criticism?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

This BMJ research asked how well authors responded to criticism in emailed letters to the editor. A highly original subject, but the researchers, one of whom (Fiona Godlee) is the top BMJ editor, appear lost. They summarize the results but appear to have no idea what to learn from them, ending their paper with this:

Editors should ensure that authors take relevant criticism seriously and respond adequately to it.

Which was perfectly reasonable before any data was collected. So that’s not a good conclusion.

The real conclusion is this: The letters to the editor were far better than nothing because authors responded to their criticisms about half the time.