Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments
  • Interview with Royce White, the basketball player. I agree with him that addictions should be considered mental disorders. I think they are usually self-medication for a mood disorder, such as depression. His view that more than half of Americans have a mental disorder is consistent with my view that you need to see faces in the morning to have your mood control system work properly. Hardly anyone sees enough faces in the morning.
  • Racial quotas at Harvard by Ron Unz. “Top officials at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton today strenuously deny the existence of Asian-American quotas, but their predecessors had similarly denied the existence of Jewish quotas in the 1920s, now universally acknowledged to have existed.”
  • Traditional Filipino fermented foods (scientific paper)
  • Omega-6 supplementation (with concurrent decrease in saturated fat) increases heart disease
  • How not to globalize Korean food. For one thing, don’t assume all foreigners are alike.

Thanks to dearime.

If a Chinese Person Says You Are “A Good Student” What Does It Mean?

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An American writer named James McGregor (in One Billion Customers) called China “a nation of bookworms”. In China, entry into college is heavily controlled by a nationwide test called the gao kao taken near the end of high school. For hundreds of years, China had the most sophisticated civil service entrance exams in the world. Chinese students study much harder than American students. Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (in which a mother puts a huge amount of pressure on her daughters to succeed in conventional ways) was presented by Chua as reflecting Chinese parenting values. It’s true that Chinese parents push their children much harder to do well in school than American parents.

All of which might lead unsuspecting Americans to believe that Chinese people value being a good student. Not at all. A Chinese friend explained to me that being called “a good student” is essentially an insult. “You are a good student” is what you say to someone when you can’t think of anything nice to say. It means

1. You are not interesting.

2. You have no sense of humor.

3. You have no interests outside of school.

Drone might be the closest English equivalent to the Chinese “good student”, except that no one would ever say to someone “you are a drone” and the meaning of the term has recently changed (to mean mini-planes flown remotely).

 

A Little-Known Problem With Being a Doctor

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When she was a little girl, a Korean friend of mine, when asked, said she wanted to be a doctor. She got the idea from her mother — it is what her mother wanted. When she was older, she had a friend whose father was a doctor. The friend told her that when her father was sick, he had to pretend that he wasn’t sick, and that this made her sad. After my friend heard that, she decided she no longer wanted to be a doctor.

What I Learned From My Writing Class

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Last semester I taught Academic Writing to Tsinghua undergraduates (psychology majors). Two earlier posts (here and here) summarized what they learned. This post is about what I learned.

When I was an undergraduate, I hated the writing assignments I was given, most of them in English classes. I would have to become nauseous with fear before beginning them. I had nothing to say. When I became a professor and had something to say, everything changed. Writing was easy. This is why — in spite of believing the best way to learn is to do — I gave my students only one actual writing assignment: write a personal statement, which they had to do for graduate school applications. On the last day of class, I asked them: If I had assigned you to write something, what would you have written? Answers varied from diary entries to a literature review about nuclear panic. Then I asked them if they would have preferred a class like that. Half said yes, half said no. If I teach the class again, I would make it an option: do the regular homework assignments, or write and revise something you want to write.

Value of Self-Experimentation With Chronic Conditions

Seth Roberts7 Comments

A reader with an autistic son sent me a link to a story in the New York Times Magazine by Susannah Meadows about a boy with arthritis who was cured by dietary changes, including omega-3 and probiotics. Conventional doctors and the boy’s father had resisted trying the dietary solution; Meadows is the boy’s mother. An expert in the boy’s problem, Dr. Lisa Imundo, director of pediatric rheumatology at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, told Meadows that “she [Imundo] had treated thousands of kids with arthritis . . . and diet changes did not work.” It took only six weeks of the dietary change to discover it did work. Eventually the boy’s arthritis was completely gone. It may have been caused by antibiotics he’d been given for pneumonia. The antibiotics may have killed his gut flora making his intestines too permeable.

Had Meadows accepted what mainstream doctors told her, her son would have taken medicine for the rest of his life — medicine that wasn’t working well. Dr. Imundo wanted to double the dose.

The reader with an autistic son explained how it related to this blog:

It particularly supports the value of self-experimentation in these chronic conditions, especially when there is heterogeneity. The heterogeneity of autism was obvious to me from early on, although I’ve come to realize it’s not obvious to everyone else. Autisms of known genetic causes have different tracks (Fragile X is the best-studied). Broad studies of autism start with a huge disadvantage: they are studying different disorders of similar presentation, and what helps in one case may harm in another. After the steady drip drip of your talking about n=1 experiments, it dawned on me that this applied to our situation. You didn’t need to do a massive, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of acne medication any more than I needed to enroll a thousand families in a study of diet and autism. I could start with dinner.

The reader found dietary n=1 experimentation with her son to be very helpful.

Update. After I wrote this, Michelle Francl, a chemist who writes for for Slate’s Medical Examiner column, complained about the “alternative medicine” in Meadow’s piece. Francl fails to mention that dietary changes completely cured the problem, thus avoiding the need for dangerous drugs that weren’t working. Francl says that Meadows has “an irrational fear of chemicals”.

Impossible Things That Are True: The Shangri-La Diet and the Behavior of Goldman Sachs

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It simply cannot be that drinking sugar water causes weight loss. Sugar caused the obesity epidemic! It simply cannot be that eating fat will cause weight loss. Eating fat is why we’re fat! Everyone knows this. It simply cannot be that whether you smell a food while you eat it makes any difference. Weight loss is all about calories in, calories out. The Shangri-La Diet says all three things are true. I cannot think of an historical precedent. Science has uncovered all sorts of unlikely stuff but nothing so surprising that is also immediately useful.

I thought of the Shangri-La Diet when I read this description by Michael Lewis of what Goldman Sachs has recently done:

Stop and think once more about what has just happened on Wall Street: its most admired firm [Goldman Sachs] conspired to flood the financial system with worthless securities, then set itself up to profit from betting against those very same securities, and in the bargain helped to precipitate a world historic financial crisis that cost millions of people their jobs and convulsed our political system. In other places, or at other times, the firm would be put out of business, and its leaders shamed and jailed and strung from lampposts. (I am not advocating the latter.) Instead Goldman Sachs, like the other too-big-to-fail firms, has been handed tens of billions in government subsidies, on the theory that we cannot live without them. They were then permitted to pay politicians to prevent laws being passed to change their business, and bribe public officials (with the implicit promise of future employment) to neuter the laws that were passed—so that they might continue to behave in more or less the same way that brought ruin on us all.

“The theory that we cannot live without them” was advocated by some of the most prestigious economists in the country.

What Goldman Sachs did — impossible-seeming, but it happened — is a sin of commission. Visible, at least to Michael Lewis, and capable of being pointed out (as Lewis does here) and marveled at.

The Shangri-La Diet seems like a bizarre thing, the diet from outer space, the crazy diet, whatever. It can’t be true, but it is. Yet the Shangri-La Diet, strange as it sounds, is actually the only visible sign (at least, visible to many people) of a massive sin of omission: failure to do good research about health. Obesity has been a major health problem for a very long time, more than a hundred years, and an overwhelmingly large problem since about 1980, 30 years ago. Yet conventional thinking about it is so bad – because mainstream research is so impotent — that people still take seriously ideas that date back to the 1950s and before, such as calories in calories out. A weight loss method discovered more than a hundred years old (cutting carbs) is still a big deal. It is as if people were still marvelling at electricity.

The commonality of the two situations (Shangri-La Diet and Goldman Sachs) is that the people who are supposed to understand the world (health scientists in the case of SLD, economists in the case of Goldman Sachs) have in both cases so bungled their jobs that truly terrible things happened. In the case of SLD, the obesity epidemic happened. (Not to mention epidemics of depression, diabetes, auto-immune diseases, and so on. ) A slow-moving unmissable worldwide epidemic that has made hundreds of millions of people feel ashamed every time they look at themselves. In the case of Goldman Sachs, what happened was the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent poor recovery and the fact that the “solution” to the crisis left in place what had caused it.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Thanks to Dave Lull , Bryan Castañeda, Patrick Vlaskovits and Tucker Max.

Why Alicia Juarrero Got Mad at Terry Deacon

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In response to allegations that Terry Deacon, a Berkeley professor, plagiarized from Alicia Juarrero, a professor at a community college, UC Berkeley created a website that (among other things) tried to smear Michael Lissack, one of the accusers. Less obvious is that the committee that investigated the allegations ignored their core: The overlap with Juarrero is relentless. It goes on and on. Juarrero explained this to me when I asked her what she thought of the committee report:

I’m disappointed, but not surprised. Not sure what the difference is between “reckless” (which their definition of plagiarism includes) and “negligent” (which they critiqued as a “novel interpretation” of plagiarism). I’ll tell you how my cri de coeur spreadsheet came about: as I read Deacon [Incomplete Nature] I got angrier and angrier, so I decided to start the spreadsheet. The index in my own book [Dynamics in Action] is very bad (my fault, my inexperience) and so I was having a hard time finding the parallel material in my own work. I knew I had said something to that effect somewhere in the book but couldn’t remember where and couldn’t find the entry in my own index. But suddenly, a pattern emerged: All I had to do was read on a few pages or paragraphs further down from the previous “problem,” and there would be the next item. This happened over and over again in huge chunks of the work (which I highlighted to point out the big chunks of seriatim similarities) — it’s the seriatimness (!) that’s so damning and to me, clear evidence this wasn’t just someone who vaguely remembered what I had said in a talk and then reconstructed the ideas for himself. The sheer number and sequential nature of the similarities are just too improbable to be a coincidence, or two people working in the same field. He was quite clever about it. He hid it with neologisms, talking about whole-part instead of top-down causality, insisting that self-organization is not enough (and then turning around in advocating it), etc. And, of course, not discussing intentional action, which is the explicit subject of my book.

The spreadsheet for Dynamics in Action and Incomplete Nature is on my website, www.aliciajuarrero.com. It was the seriatim nature of the parallels that really got to me and made me complain to Norton and UC Berkeley — anyone can discuss two or three of the same authors; or two or three of the same themes, or use two or three of the same examples; but that many, in pretty much the same order? The examples UCB picks (Benard cells, whirlpools) are indeed standard ones and if these were the only ones there would be no case. It’s the cumulative impact that makes the case, in my opinion. The comments that I really object to in the report are “The idea that it is possible to reconceptualize teleology in terms of dynamical systems theory has been discussed and developed by many theorists” and “The connection between ideas about self-organization and ideas from thermodynamics and information theory has been made by many writers in this area…” The UCB report should have cited sources and dates. Simply to state, “is not in our view original to Juarrero…” and “we see no evidence that Deacon’s use… shows any influence of Juarrero’s” simply begs the question.

Re the Kant & Self-organization piece: it’s true that everyone seems to be mentioning Kant in this connection (as if folks commonly read the Third Critique where Kant discusses this stuff). I suspect Deacon got this reference from his buddy Stu Kauffman (I would bet the rent Deacon didn’t read the Third Critique!) — but at least Kauffman included me in his bibliography, if not in the footnotes. But I don’t think Deacon could have afforded to include DiA in the bibliography — there’s just too much of Dynamics in Action in Incomplete Nature – he just hoped no one would catch the parallels with a community college professor who published 10 years ago. As a philosopher I probably would never have read Incomplete Nature — but then I saw the Wall Street Journal review and the ideas sounded awfully familiar…

I’m happy to put the two works side by side and let readers judge for themselves.

How did Michael Lissack get involved?

First contact I had with him was in 2000, when he phoned my house to ask, “Is the phone ringing off the hook because of the book?” My answer: No, it isn’t, who are you? He invited me to give a talk at his ISCE [Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence] institute in Boston that year, and then invited me to be on the ISCE board. He also became a one-man publicity campaign for Dynamics in Action, including a long discussion about it with Kauffman, Deacon and Evan Thompson at Esalen in 2003. They spent hours discussing it. Which reminds me: Evan Thompson published a review in Nature in December 2011 in which he explicitly states that Deacon failed to cite him — and me. And Colin McGinn (whom I’ve never met), really lit into Deacon in the New York Review of Books in June 2012. None of this was mentioned in the UCB report, which makes it appear that Deacon’s just the victim of a witch hunt by Lissack, Rubino and me.

ISCE was the publisher for the Rubino-Juarrero anthology on Emergence that’s in question with the Deacon-Cashman article, so I think Michael feels ISCE organization is indirectly compromised by this mess — but it’s mostly that he has never seen a fight he’s run away from.

 

Assorted Links

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Thanks to Phil Alexander, Vic Sarjoo, and Navanit Arakeri.

The Clouded Crystal Ball: A Psychic and Her Employees

Seth Roberts7 Comments

The New Yorke r used to have a mini-department called The Clouded Crystal Ball: examples of bad predictions taken from “newsbreaks” — little bits of text used to fill a column. In an interview, a friend of mine named Margaret Meklin told of a different sort of clouded crystal ball:

My first job in the U.S. was passing out flyers for a fortune teller on Powell and Market in San Francisco. She did not trust her psychic powers enough to guess who was doing a truly good job (it was me!), so she would periodically hide in the tourist crowds to check if we were passing out flyers quickly and efficiently and to a sufficient number of passersby. She gave a higher pay rate to my co-worker, thinking that he was more productive, but she had no idea that he would simply toss a whole stack of flyers into a trash can when she wasn’t watching him.​