Warned by relatives that knuckle cracking causes arthritis, Donald Unger decided to crack only the knuckles of his left hand. For 50 years he frequently cracked his left hand, never his right. Finally he wrote a letter to a scientific journal (in which he calls himself “the author”) pointing out that he did not have arthritis in either hand, supporting the conclusion of another study which studied a much smaller amount of knuckle cracking.
Thanks to Bryan Castañeda via Now I Know.
I am looking for people who want to try a mental test I have developed to track brain function. You do it on your laptop, once or more per day. One test session takes three minutes. For five years, I’ve been using various tests to track my brain function — first, balance, then, for a long time, arithmetic speed. The new test is better than these earlier tests, at least for me, because I find it enjoyable, which makes it easy to do several times/day. Via brain tracking, I have found that flaxseed oil and butter make my brain work considerably better. I was also able to find the best dosages. I believe that learning what foods (and dosages) make your brain work best is a good way to figure out what foods (and dosages) are best for the rest of your body. For example, after I figured out what amount of flaxseed oil was best for my brain, my gums became much healthier (less inflammation). The new test, which I do more often than the older tests, has made clear that there are all sorts of reliable yet mysterious ups and down in my brain function. I was unaware of this.
I want to find out what happens when other people use the new test. I am looking for a small number of people to do the test at least daily and send me their data at least weekly for at least 3 months. The test requires a computer running Windows 7. The test is written in R (free), but you don’t need to know R to use it. The installation requires details that I will need to handle by talking with you.
To find people to do this, I will use a bidding system. (Giving a program to those who ask for it is a waste of time, I have found.) The questions below ask for two bids: non-refundable and refundable. If you use it as promised — you set the details of how much you will use it — you get back the refundable amount.
If this interests you, please apply by sending an email to try.brain.tracking (at) gmail.com with answers to the following questions (as email text, not attachment):
You will get an automated reply. After that, I will contact you only if I want more information or if yours is one of the winning bids.
Thanks to Dave Lull.
Thanks to Adam Clemens.
My personal science introduced me to a research method I have never seen used in research articles or described in discussions of scientific method. It might be called wait and see. You measure something repeatedly, day after day, with the hope that at some point it will change dramatically and you will be able to determine why. In other words: 1. Measure something repeatedly, day after day. 2. When you notice an outlier, test possible explanations. In most science, random (= unplanned) variation is bad. In an experiment, for example, it makes the effects of the treatment harder to see. Here it is good.
Here are examples where wait and see paid off for me:
1. Acne and benzoyl peroxide. When I was a graduate student, I started counting the number of pimples on my face every morning. One day the count improved. It was two days after I started using benzoyl peroxide more regularly. Until then, I did not think benzoyl peroxide worked well — I started using it more regularly because I had run out of tetracycline (which turned out not to work).
2. Sleep and breakfast. I changed my breakfast from oatmeal to fruit because a student told me he had lost weight eating foods with high water content (such as fruit). I did not lose weight but my sleep suddenly got worse. I started waking up early every morning instead of half the time. From this I figured out that any breakfast, if eaten early, disturbed my sleep.
3. Sleep and standing (twice). I started to stand a lot to see if it would cause weight loss. It didn’t, but I started to sleep better. Later, I discovered by accident that standing on one leg to exhaustion made me sleep better.
4. Brain function and butter. For years I measured how fast I did arithmetic. One day I was a lot faster than usual. It turned out to be due to butter.
5. Brain function and dental amalgam. My brain function, measured by an arithmetic test, improved over several months. I eventually decided that removal of two mercury-containing fillings was the likely cause.
6. Blood sugar and walking. My fasting blood sugar used to be higher than I would like — in the 90s. (Optimal is low 80s.) Even worse, it seemed to be increasing. (Above 100 is “pre-diabetic.”) One day I discovered it was much lower than expected (in the 80s). The previous day I had walked for an hour, which was unusual. I determined it was indeed cause and effect. If I walked an hour per day, my fasting blood sugar was much better.
This method and examples emphasize the point that different scientific methods are good at different things and we need all of them (in contrast to evidence-based medicine advocates who say some types of evidence are “better” than other types — implying one-dimensional evaluation). One thing we want to do is test cause-effect ideas (X causes Y). This method doesn’t do that at all. Experiments do that well, surveys are better than nothing. Another thing we want to do is assess the generality of our cause-effect ideas. This method doesn’t do that at all. Surveys do that well (it is much easier to survey a wide range of people than do an experiment with a wide range of people), multi-person experiments are better than nothing. A third thing we want to do is come up with cause-effect ideas worth testing. Most experiments are a poor way to do this, surveys are better than nothing. This method is especially good for that.
The possibility of such discoveries is a good reason to self-track. Professional scientists almost never use this method. But you can.
Passage of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) seemed inevitable. It was introduced with 40 Senate co-sponsors, including plenty of both Republicans and Democrats. (At the time it was called PIPA — Protect IP Act.) Senate passage requires 51 votes; to override a filibuster you need more. The entertainment industry (Hollywood) had spent hundreds of millions of dollars per year to pass such a bill; the people behind the lobbying felt the survival of their industry was at stake. Senator Patrick Leahy, whose office wrote the bill, is in the new Batman movie.
Yet SOPA was defeated.
The story, as I was told it, begins on a Sunday. The bill was scheduled for a vote on Wednesday, three days later. Peter Eckersley, who works at the Electronic Freedom Foundation in San Francisco, called Aaron Swartz, who lives in New York, to ask, “How are we going to defeat this?” At that point, Aaron hadn’t heard of it. Aaron’s talk about this.
It is a stunning example of David defeating Goliath. I asked Aaron what he learned from it. He told me three lessons:
1. Popular support matters. It can overcome large amounts of money. The anti-SOPA forces spent little money but got many people to tell their Congressman or Senator that they opposed the bill. The domain registrar GoDaddy reversed its position on the bill. Aaron worked with lobbyists for Google. The lobbyists believed, at least at first, that the bill could not be stopped, only weakened.
2. A little-known issue can be made a well-known issue. When SOPA was introduced, shortly before the scheduled vote, no one had heard of it. At MSNBC, and presumably other news organizations, employees were told not to cover it. When people at Google were approached to support the opposition, at first they said the bill couldn’t possibly be that bad or they would have heard of it. Without coverage by MSNBC etc., eventually everyone heard of it.
3. People will act if they can be convinced they are responsible. People at Wikipedia and Google, not to mention the originator of the GoDaddy boycott, were convinced to act, says Aaron, because they were convinced that they bore responsibility for the outcome, whatever it was. (I would put it differently. I would say they were convinced they could help determine the outcome.)
What interests me most about this story is how wrong the lobbyists were. They’re the experts in how to change/defeat legislation. They were utterly wrong. They understood the forces within their system but had no understanding of what was possible outside their system. I think healthcare experts will turn out to be equally wrong.
I found that butter made me faster at arithmetic. This contradicted the usual view that butter is unhealthy. However, there is plenty of evidence that the usual view is wrong. The latest issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition contains another example. An epidemiological article titled “Dietary intake of saturated fat by food source and incident cardiovascular disease: the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis” found a negative correlation between dairy fat and heart disease:
Although dietary recommendations have focused on restricting saturated fat (SF) consumption to reduce cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk, evidence from prospective studies has not supported a strong link between total SF intake and CVD events. . . . After adjustment for demographics, lifestyle, and dietary confounders, a higher intake of dairy SF was associated with lower CVD risk [HR (95% CI) for +5 g/d and +5% of energy from dairy SF: 0.79 (0.68, 0.92) and 0.62 (0.47, 0.82), respectively].
However, saturated fat from meat was associated with more heart disease:
In contrast, a higher intake of meat SF was associated with greater CVD risk [HR (95% CI) for +5 g/d and a +5% of energy from meat SF: 1.26 (1.02, 1.54) and 1.48 (0.98, 2.23), respectively].
It isn’t obvious how to explain the interaction (the direction of association of saturated fat depends on whether it is in dairy or meat). The authors conclude:
Associations of SF with health may depend on food-specific fatty acids or other nutrient constituents in foods that contain SF, in addition to SF
This recent article also questions the idea that dairy fat causes heart disease. One more reason to question conventional nutritional advice.
Thanks to David Cramer and Arthur Niculitcheff.
I majored in psychology at Reed College. At the time, the whole major centered on Skinnerian psychology — the importance of reward in controlling behavior. The introductory course used a Skinnerian textbook (e.g., we learned the correct meaning of “negative reinforcement” — it does not mean punishment). Other courses also had a Skinnerian emphasis. They never convinced me. I always thought it was an exceedingly narrow way to study behavior.
When I was a graduate student, I visited Harvard and heard Skinner give a talk, titled “Why I am not a cognitive psychologist”. During the question period I asked if he was familiar with the work of Saul Sternberg — perhaps the most influential cognitive psychologist. No, said Skinner. I thought it was foolish to criticize an area of research you know little about.
After I became a professor, I went back to Reed to give a talk. After the talk, I went out to dinner with several psychology professors. I told them I thought Skinner was a brilliant engineer — the Skinner box is really useful — but a mediocre scientist. He was unable to discover anything, he just repeated the same result (rewarding something increases how often it is done) countless times. They had no reply.
In the last two days, strangely enough, Skinner has come up in two different conversations. In the first, a friend said that Skinner’s views about language were ridiculous. I agreed. Why write such nonsense? my friend asked/complained. I said maybe Skinner’s productivity system worked too well. It caused him to write when he had nothing to say. In the second, a different friend brought up David Freedman’s recent Atlantic article called “The Perfected Self”, which argues that Skinnerian techniques really work when you implement them as smartphone apps — techniques to lose weight, for example. “B. F. Skinner’s notorious theory of behavior modification was denounced by critics 50 years ago as a fascist, manipulative vehicle for government control,” writes Freedman (or an editor), but actually that theory is really good.
My area of academic psychology (animal learning) is the same as Skinner’s. Within this field, I have never heard anyone complain that Skinner’s work was “fascist” or “manipulative” or a “vehicle for government control.” It never became popular — it was always a minority point of view — probably because it was boring (the same thing over and over) and perhaps because it was anti-intellectual. Skinner wrote a well-known paper about why theories are unnecessary. He didn’t understand the role of theories in science and didn’t bother to find out. Sure, the psychology theories of the time (1950) were awful. Psychology theories are still mostly awful. But there are plenty of good theories in other areas of science.
For a long time, Skinnerian ideas, nearly dead in academia, lived on in the treatment of autism. The people applying these ideas called themselves “behavior analysts” and the whole field of applied Skinnerian psychology was called “behavior analysis”. What caused this persistence was that the techniques worked. Using the techniques (carefully rewarding this or that behavior) improved the lives of autistic children and their parents. Which was a real contribution. I could make a long list of famous psychologists who have done less to improve human well-being.
The success of Skinnerian ideas in improving the lives of autistic children should not be confused with figuring out what causes autism. To figure out the cause of autism is to figure out the environmental cause(s) — to which people with certain genes are more sensitive — and how autism can be avoided entirely, not meliorated. I have blogged about possible causes of autism many times, in particular the possibility that sonograms cause autism. I have no idea if behavior analysts understand the difference between melioration and figuring out the cause. Maybe Skinner would claim there is no difference — he was full of bizarre statements like that. If your child is autistic, you are in crisis. You have zero interest in questions about “cause” — you simply want help. In any form. Behavior analysts, while helping autistic children and their parents, contribute nothing that helps us find the cause of autism. Which, if you are planning on having children, you care about enormously. So you can avoid having autistic children.
So Skinner’s legacy is mixed. The Skinner box is terrific. I happily used them in my research for years, even though I hardly believed a single word Skinner said. As an engineer — an applier of stuff discovered by others — Skinner made a lasting contribution. As a self-promoter, he was incredibly successful — he was on the cover of Time, for example. As a scientist, he was a zero. He discovered nothing that matters. As a thinker (e.g., the book Beyond Freedom and Dignity) he was less than zero. He was a charlatan, claiming over and over that he understood puzzling things (e.g., language) that he did not understand. An unusual mix. Few great engineers are charlatans.