Speaking of giving students more power over what they learn, as I did recently, this article says it is working well at Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts.
Will It Last?
The graph below shows the daily number of hits to the Shangri-La Diet forums since they began. “Adjusted for weekday” means I estimated the effects of day of the week (e.g., 10% more hits on Tuesday) and then subtracted those estimates. This makes other effects easier to see.
Each point is a different day. The two sharp increases (May and October) were caused by publicity — the first (May) by an interview on the Dennis Prager Show, the second (October) by a Woman’s World article.
The latest (current) increase looks different. It is much slower and not caused by any specific publicity. Apparently it is due to word of mouth.
Will it continue? Well, what’s
infinity TIMES 1/infinity?
The number of potential users of an easy and effective method of weight loss is very large. That’s the first infinity. However, the Shangri-La Diet sounds more than a little crazy. Many successful users don’t want to tell anyone they’re doing it. That’s the 1/infinity (the probability of transmission). Theory aside, the very mild increase last July did not continue. The current increase, however, looks much stronger than the July increase.
My Holocaust
I don’t read many novels but I think I’m going to read this one, which says that Holocaust denial is “the new heresy.” Exactly.
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For 70-431, there are a number of routes. You can either clear 70-297 first and then go for 70-294 or you can directly jump to 70-292 as well.
For Whom Do Colleges Exist? (continued)
Yesterday on BART I saw someone reading The And of Poverty. It was an illegal Chinese edition of The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. I asked the person reading it what she thought of it. “Very ethnocentric,” she said. “Very Jeffrey-Sachs-centric,” I said. (For a good critique, see The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly.) America is not the only ethnocentric country, she said, so are other countries who give foreign aid, such as Japan. “What gives me hope is the growth of micro-finance,” she said. “People have a great capacity for figuring out what they need.” I agreed.
In the comments on my “ For Whom Do Colleges Exist?” post someone asked what I would suggest. In my opinion, almost all attempts to improve colleges have had the same core problem as almost all foreign aid: The helpers think they know better what to do than the people they wish to help.
My prescription for higher education is simple: Give students more control of what they learn. When I did this in spades — more by accident than design — my students blossomed. I had never seen anything like it. It happened again and again. When I helped my students learn what they wanted to learn, as opposed to what I thought they should learn, they learned much more. Funny, huh?
Giving students more control of what they learn can be done in many ways, of course. At UC Berkeley, where I teach, here are two possible baby steps in that direction:
1. There exists a system of student-organized-and-run classes called DeCal. Allow one DeCal class to go toward satisfying the Letters and Science college-wide breadth requirement (seven classes, one from each of several areas). The DeCal class would replace any of the seven classes.
2. Allow — or, even better, encourage — admitted students to take a gap year, as they do in England. A gap year is a year away from school between high school and college. (I proposed such a thing a few years ago to the previous UC Berkeley chancellor. My suggestion was given to an administrator who dismissed it. Too hard to administer, she said.)
Professors should like these suggestions. The DeCal proposal will reduce the number of students who take a class because they are forced to. The gap-year proposal will reduce the immaturity of freshmen. When I gave my students much more power to learn what they wanted to learn, my job got much easier. Funny, huh?
How Bad is The Secret?
Not as bad as you think. The Secret, of course, is the huge best-seller (now #2 on Amazon) that claims you can get what you want by applying “ The Law of Attraction” — namely, that if you think about something it will come to you. According to Wikipedia, “there have been no widely recognized studies demonstrating that the [Law of Attraction] actually works.” The book has been — not to put too fine a point on it — ridiculed, for example by the author Barbara Ehrenreich.
I learned about The Secret last July from my friend Sarah Kapoor, who made a CBC segment about the Shangri-La Diet. She told me about nine YouTube spots (Parts 1-9), each 10 minutes long, that together made a movie. I watched only Part 1 (now unavailable). It wasn’t enjoyable. It seemed like a parody of a film about science, and not a funny one. Sarah said it was growing like wildfire but at the time the segments had received only a few thousand views so I wondered what she was talking about. Time has proven her correct.
Is The Secret complete nonsense? It sounds like complete nonsense, the writers of Wikipedia apparently think it’s complete nonsense (”no widely-recognized studies . . . “), Barbara Ehrenreich thinks it’s complete nonsense (she calls it “mass delusion”), but I don’t think it actually is complete nonsense. Around 1980, Robert Cialdini, a psychology professor at Arizona State, and Kathleen Carpenter, an undergraduate, did a remarkable study. They gave Tempe residents one of two paragraphs to read about the benefits of cable TV (a new thing at the time). One was a dry statement of the benefits; the other asked the reader to imagine partaking of the benefits (”take a moment and think of how . . . you will be able to spend your time at home, with your familly, alone, or with your friends”). A month later, these residents were offered the choice of whether to get cable TV or not. Of those given the dry information, about 20% subscribed; of those given the “take a moment” statement, about 50% subscribed. A huge difference, with nontrivial monetary consequences, from what seems like a tiny treatment. The title of the published article, which appeared in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1982, vol. 43, pp. 89-99) was “Self-relevant scenarios as mediators of likelihood estimates and compliance: Does imagining make it so?” Imagining did make it so, in a surprising way. The effect is much too large to be dismissed. I don’t think it has been repeated, although I’m not sure.
I learned about this study from the excellent new book Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
For Whom Do Colleges Exist?
On Book TV last weekend I saw a discussion of the terrific-sounding new book You Can Hear Me Now by Nicholas Sullivan, about how an ex-banker named Iqbal Quadir started GrameenPhone, which helps poor people in Bangladesh get cell phones. From the discussion:
Someone from the UN: I hear that the UN should spend $100 in a million places rather $100 million in one place. But what else?
Iqbal Quadir: The UN should empower the people, not empower their governments. And if they cannot empower the people they can just shut it off. My point is that helping the wrong side is harmful. So if they cannot help the right side they should at least not help the wrong side. I’m not trying to say anything radical here, frankly. The governments belong to their people. You must make sure you don’t disturb that relationship. If you change the incentive for the government, you are disturbing the emergence of democracy.
I had never heard it put so clearly. We can ask if governments exist: 1. To improve the lives of the governed. 2. To employ the governors. 3. To help other governments. Similarly, we can ask if colleges exist: 1. To teach the students. 2. To employ the teachers. 3. To help businesses who will eventually employ the students (the signalling function of college).
Suppose we believe that the main function of colleges is to teach the students. How, then, should we improve colleges? By giving mini-grants to teachers (as is done at UC Berkeley, where I teach)? By giving awards to the best teachers (as is done at UC Berkeley)? Or by doing something quite different?
Addendum: The growing disillusionment of a University of Michigan student.
37signals and SLD
37signals is a Chicago software company that specializes in quick development and has been very successful. According to Business Week, “the lesson [of their success]: Create a simple product as fast as you can, then get feedback from customers and make it better.”
Hey, that was my philosophy with the Shangri-La Diet! One of the first managing editors of The New Yorker had a slogan: “Don’t get it right, get it written”. My philosophy with regard to SLD was similar: “don’t get it exactly right, get it written, and get feedback.”
Here are some ways the Shangri-La Diet has been improved by feedback (almost all from the SLD forums):
1. It is much clearer what rate of weight loss to expect.
2. The idea of nose-clipping. Which makes any food a weight-loss food.
3. With nose-clipping, you can use flaxseed oil to lose weight. The benefits of omega-3 have become much clearer.
4. Putting the oil in water makes it much easier to drink.
Omega-3 and Dental Health (part 2 of 2)
I looked at my gums this morning. I had never seen them so pink (that is, non-red). They looked just like the picture of healthy gums at the dentist. As I explained yesterday, my gums are in good shape because I am drinking 4 tablespoons/day of flaxseed oil, which contains a lot of omega-3.
Meta-analyses of the effects of omega-3 have had trouble finding an effect. A meta-analysis about mood found a barely-reliable effect and concluded “the evidence available provides little support for the use of n–3 PUFAs to improve depressed mood.” (They should have said “ a little support.”) A meta-analysis about heart disease concluded “Long chain and shorter chain omega 3 fats do not have a clear effect on total mortality, combined cardiovascular events, or cancer.” The effect on total mortality was close to significant and there was evidence of heterogeneity (i.e., studies varied) so their results were not completely negative, as the authors noted in response to comments. The effect is just weak, apparently.
In other words, after combining many experiments, each experiment with dozens or hundreds of subjects, meta-analyses can barely see an effect of omega-3. Yet I found a perfectly clear effect with one subject? An effect I wasn’t even looking for? That seems discrepant, and worth trying to explain.
My explanation is this: What I had in my favor and all those other studies did not were the benefits of self-experimentation. In particular,
1. The effect on balance was so clear that I used it to find the best dose. I found that 3 tablespoons/day was better than 2 tablespoons/day and even at 3 T/day there was an effect of time of day. So I went to 4 T/day. It seemed no better than 3/T day, so I stopped there. Conventional studies have not been able to do anything like this.
2. The effect on balance was so clear that I could use it for quality control. If I happened to buy a bad bottle of flaxseed oil I would have noticed — the results would not have been consistent, starting from when I started the new bottle. (I have gone through about six bottles.) Previous studies have had little or no quality control. If half their omega-3 went bad, they would have had no way of knowing.
3. I was strongly motivated to take the flaxseed oil. I know it is beneficial. This is not the case in any double-blind experiment when treatment is compared to placebo. In such experiments, every subject has reason to doubt that taking the pill will make a difference.
4. Dosage in nutrition, as in these mood and heart disease studies, has been built around avoiding failure — for example, what dose will avoid heart disease? Whereas I was looking for the optimum. My brain does not fail in any obvious way if I don’t have enough omega-3; it just functions worse. The amounts needed to avoid obvious failure are probably (a) different for different parts of the body and (b) less than optimal. For example, the amount of omega-3 needed to avoid dementia may be 1 T/day whereas the amount needed to avoid heart disease may be 2 T/day. The optimal amount, the amount needed for best performance, is likely to be greater than all of these failure thresholds. It is a better target.
Something else in my favor, not related to self-experimentation is that I studied the effect of omega-3 on my balance — how long before I lost my balance, a measure that can have many values. In contrast, most omega-3 research has involved binary measures like mortality or heart attacks. Someone either dies or does not die, for example. Binary measures tell you less than many-valued measures.
Given these advantages, it makes sense that I could find a much clearer effect.
The Most Valuable Truths
For a while it annoyed me to hear myself described as some kind of irresponsible pied piper, leading impressionable young hackers down the road to ruin [via Y-Combinator, which helps young hackers start companies]. But now I realize this kind of controversy is a sign of a good idea.
The most valuable truths are the ones most people don’t believe. They’re like undervalued stocks. If you start with them, you’ll have the whole field to yourself. So when you find an idea you know is good but most people disagree with, you should not merely ignore their objections, but push aggressively in that direction.
This applies to the Shangri-La Diet, of course: It proposes a way to lose weight that strikes most people as crazy. There’s a lesson for me here. I have disliked being called a “ snake-oil salesman” and SLD being called “ absurd” and a “ fad diet“. But now I realize Graham is right: These are good signs.
Omega-3 and Dental Health (part 1 of 2)
Today I had my teeth cleaned and was told my gums were in excellent shape, better than ever before. They were less inflamed than usual. “What causes inflammation?” I asked. “Tartar,” I was told. I haven’t changed my cleaning habits. The only thing I have deliberately changed since my last cleaning is how much flaxseed oil I drink. At the time of my previous cleaning I was drinking about 1 tablespoon/day; now I drink 4 tablespoons/day. The person who commented about my gums doesn’t know about my omega-3 intake.
Omega-3 is believed to be anti-inflammatory, so it is quite plausible that the change in my omega-3 intake is what improved my gums. There have been a few studies of omega-3 and gum inflammation but none found impressive results. Weston Price emphasized that dental health and overall health go together. Lots of research connects gum disease and heart disease. The importance of omega-3s was first realized because of their effect on heart disease.
This research means better gums is very good news — for which I thank SLD-forum posters, who sparked my interest in omega-3.