The Dominique Strauss-Kahn Victory Dance

Seth Roberts7 Comments

In May, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), as everyone knows, was accused of raping a maid. The story received huge worldwide coverage, reaching billions of people within days. Strauss-Kahn was greatly damaged. A week ago Edward Jay Epstein, whose work I’ve praised, published an article in The New York Review of Books with many new details that implied what happened was not as simple as the first reports suggested. Was DSK set up (a possibility not mentioned in the initial media reports)? New facts in Epstein’s article — which I called “great journalism” — made this a lot more plausible.

One such fact is that soon after the assault was reported to 911 (after a long delay), two men involved in the call performed what Epstein called a “victory dance”. A plausible explanation of the celebration (which Epstein doesn’t state, it’s obvious) is that they were celebrating because they had succeeded in entrapping DSK and would get a huge payoff from his enemies. Epstein’s article said the dance lasted three minutes. Critics of his article said the dance lasted eight seconds. Amy Davidson of The New Yorker had the poor taste to joke about it.”But maybe it’s all true, and the BlackBerry is not a red herring but the key, and another cell phone was passed in the soccer match box, with news of a character assassination, whereupon Sarkozy did his own dance of celebration,” she wrote. Yesterday The New York Review of Books issued a correction: The dance lasted thirteen seconds (a correction with which Epstein agrees). Davidson continued her dismissiveness. “The victim of some sort of insidious conspiracy.” The victory dance, she wrote, “doesn’t seem outlandish, given the sorts of things men do in New York, particularly when talking about sport.”

Missing from criticism of Epstein’s article, which does suggest conspiracy, was a plausible alternative explanation. Why were the men celebrating? They can’t remember. Both of them. In spite of all the attention. Which began within hours. Perhaps a sport event, they said, but no such event has been identified. Excitement usually improves memory. The men are clearly excited. Failure to come up with a plausible alternative explanation supports Epstein’s point that there is something very important about this we don’t know.

What makes this especially interesting, at least to me, is that you can judge for yourself. (This blog is all about that.) Epstein has posted on his website three items: (a) a recording of the 911 call that led to DSK’s arrest (“she doesn’t have any sustained injuries,” says the caller), (b) CCTV video showing the security area at the time of the phone call, and (c) CCTV video showing the victory dance, which includes one man picking up the other man and swinging him around.

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts9 Comments
  • Tale of two workers. “Worker A is in the bottom quintile of income. . . .Worker B is in the upper quintile of income. . . .Worker A is a college drop-out. . . . .Worker B has a Bachelor of Arts, a Masters, and a doctorate.”
  • Citizen scientists. “More than a decade ago, in hopes of advancing research on the rare genetic disease that afflicts her children, Sharon Terry let two different researchers draw their blood for study. But when she asked for the results of the investigations, the scientists gave her a startling response. Information generated from her own children’s DNA, they said, didn’t belong to her.”
  • Ten academic frauds.

Thanks to Tucker Max, Dave Lull and Chuck Currie.

Vitamin D3 Reduces Mortality

Seth Roberts17 Comments

A recent Cochrane Review summarizes several experiments that measured the effect of Vitamin D on mortality. Here is a summary:

This systematic review analysed the influence of different forms of vitamin D on mortality. In the 50 trials that provided data for our analyses a total of 94,148 participants were randomly assigned to either vitamin D or no treatment or a placebo. All trials came from high-income countries. The mean age of participants was 74 years. The mean proportion of women was 79%. The median duration of vitamin D administration was two years. Our analyses suggested that vitamin D3 reduces mortality by about 6%,

Vitamin D3 helped; Vitamin D2 and other forms of Vitamin D did not. The doses of Vitamin D3 were usually low: less than 800 IU/day.

Stimulated by Primal Girl’s discovery, I have been taking Vitamin D3 at about 7 am in the morning, slowly increasing the dose to see if there are any clear effects on my sleep (or anything else). I am up to 4000 IU/day.

 

Taobao Cashes In on Singles Day

Seth Roberts2 Comments

All cultures, as far as I know, have festivals and special celebratory days. At least they are extremely widespread — harvest festivals, for example. I believe they have a genetic basis. The underlying genes evolved because they increased sales of high-end “useless” stuff. This helped skilled artisans — a big source of technological innovation — make a living. Economists speak of the “deadweight loss” of Christmas because people buy stuff that would otherwise not be bought.

China retail giant Taobao (like Ebay, except better) has shown a shrewd understanding of the festival/shopping link. On Chinese campuses since the 1970s there has been a joke holiday called Singles Day (11-11). For people who are not in a relationship. In 2010 Taobao started having a sitewide sale on that day. This year total sales were $500 million. One retailer, one day. (For comparison, all US online retail sales for the 2010 holiday season were $33 billion.) No crowds, no difficulty parking, no long lines. Still stressful, yes, but in a good way: “This is so exciting – a war and a carnival at the same time,” said one shopper.

 

Butter and Eggs: What They Share

Seth Roberts24 Comments

To many dieticians and much of the general public, the similarity between butter and eggs is that both are bad for you. Butter: Fattening! Clogs arteries! Eggs: High in cholesterol! To me, it’s the opposite: both seem to be unusually good for us. Butter seems to make my brain work better and may have reduced my risk of heart attack. Eggs — at least, scrambled eggs — are especially well-liked by Mr. T, a rat. There are many similarities between rats and humans. Humans also like eggs. The foods we like are a guide (imperfect) to what foods are good for us.

Here’s another similarity between butter and eggs: Both must be complete — contain all necessary nutrients — much more than any other food. Butter is large part of milk. When mammalian offspring are very young, mother’s milk is their only food. Eggs, of course, must contain everything needed to become a baby chick (as a commenter named Rashad pointed out). No other foods — not fruits, not vegetables, not whatever other foods your great grandmother or other ancestors ate — have been under this sort of evolutionary pressure.

The evolution of lactose tolerance and my butter discoveries.

 

 

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments
  • Top ten excuses for climate scientists behaving badly. For example, “the emails are old” and “the timing is suspicious”.
  • Scientific retractions are increasing. My guess is that retractions are increasing because scientific work has become easier to check. Tools are cheaper, for example.
  • More Dutch scientific misconduct. “Professor Poldermans published more than 600 scientific papers in a wide range of journals, including JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine.”
  • The next time someone praises “evidence-based medicine”, ask them: What about Accutane? It illustrates how evidence-based medicine encourages dangerous drugs. You can’t make lots of money from cheap, time-tested things that we know to be safe (such as dietary changes) so the drug industry revolves around things that are not time-tested and therefore dangerous — far more dangerous than dietary changes. Evidence-based medicine, which says that certain tests (expensive) are much better than other tests (cheap), provides cover for this. Because the required tests are so expensive, they are allowed to be short.

Thanks to Allan Jackson.

Flaxseed Oil Alleviates Psoriasis and Lichen Planus

Seth Roberts17 Comments

Two months ago I wrote that camelina oil might be a good source of omega-3. A few days ago, a reader named Evelyn Majidi commented as follows:

Based on this suggestion, I ordered camelina oil from the good farmers in Saskatchewan and began taking it using the same dose (3T/day) that I had been taking of flaxseed oil for relief of psoriasis and lichen planus. Unfortunately, the slow but sure improvement I had been experiencing over the past year with flaxseed oil stopped immediately and after a week my skin and mouth began to deteriorate. After using about 1/4 of a bottle of the new oil I went back to flaxseed and am delighted to report that I am [again] having good results with it. Since both of my conditions wax and wane without any reason identified by medical science I cannot state that it was simply the flaxseed oil that has led to this success. Based on my experience, however, I intend to continue taking the oil regularly and I recommend that others with psoriasis or lichen planus try it. For me, two tablespoons a day were not enough, I needed three tablespoons of the oil to see a change. I don’t think it advisable to take capsules, you’d need to take too many to equal 3T of oil.[emphasis added]

Psoriasis is a skin disease that usually involves “thick, red skin with flaky, silver-white patches called scales”. Lichen planus is “an itchy rash on the skin or in the mouth”. To give some idea of how common they are, psoriasis has 36 million Google hits; lichen planus 1-2 million. (“Heart disease” has 64 million.)

Eveyln’s experience provides four pieces of evidence that suggest flaxseed oil (FSO) improved her psoriasis and lichen planus:

  1. When she started taking FSO at 3 T/day, they started improving. They did not improve with 2 T/day.
  2. Over the first year of FSO, she saw steady improvement in both in place of the usual up and down.
  3. When she replaced FSO with another oil, which she hoped would be better, the results were the opposite of what she wanted: The improvement stopped and the two conditions got worse.
  4. When she switched back to FSO, the improvement resumed.

I can think of no plausible alternative to the conclusion that FSO helped. There is plenty of other evidence that supports this conclusion: the evidence that omega-3 is anti-inflammatory, FSO is high in omega-3, most of us don’t get enough omega-3, and so on, including my own experience. You could write a book about the evidence that supports it. (Evelyn tried flaxseed oil because of reports on this blog that it improved/cured bad gums.)

In any case, the conclusion that FSO reduces psoriasis and lichen planus is new, in the sense that FSO (or another source of omega-3) is not a popular treatment for either condition. Here are about 16 treatments for psoriasis, including topical corticosteroids. None includes omega-3. Here are eight “lifestyle and home remedies” for psoriasis, including “take daily baths” (seriously, Mayo Clinic Staff?). None includes omega-3. After going through about forty-odd treatments, I found a reference to fish oil: “Other research has suggested that taking oral fish oil supplements containing 1.8 to 3.6 grams of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) a day may bring improvement.”

Same thing for lichen planus. FSO is not a popular treatment.

If you take flaxseed oil or other omega-3 source to treat psoriasis or lichen planus, I hope you will let me know what happens.

Bryan Caplan Disses College

Seth Roberts28 Comments

In this post, Bryan Caplan says (again) that college is vastly overrated. Like me, he says that the only thing college professors know how to do is be professors and that is all they can actually teach. Graduate school, where professors teach students who want to be professors, makes sense. Undergraduate school, where almost no students will become professors, does not. Like me, he ridicules the idea that professors teach students “how to think”.

He omits half of my criticism. It isn’t just teaching (“how to think” — please!), it’s also evaluation. Professors are terrible at evaluation. Their method of judging student work is very simple: How close is it to what I would have done? The better you can imitate the professor, no matter what the class, the higher your grade. This is one size fits all with a vengeance because there is no opting out. Sure, you can choose your major. But every class is taught by a professor. What if your strengths lie elsewhere — in something that your professors aren’t good at? Tough luck. Your strengths will never be noticed or encouraged or developed.

At Berkeley (where Bryan went and I taught) and universities generally, the highest praise is brilliant. Professor X is brilliant. Or: Brilliant piece of work. People can do great things in dozens of ways, but somehow student work is almost never judged by how beautiful, courageous, practical, good-tasting, astonishing, vivid, funny, moving, comfortable, and so on it is. Because that’s not what professors are good at. (Except in the less-academic departments, such as art and engineering.) To fail to grasp that students can excel in dozens of ways is to seriously shortchange them. To value them at much less than they are worth — and, above all, to fail to help them grow and find their place in the world after college.

At Berkeley, I figured this out in a way that a libertarian should appreciate: I gave my students much more choice. For a term project, I said they could do almost anything so long as it was off-campus and didn’t involve library work. What they chose to do revealed a lot. I began to see not just how different they were from me but how different they were from each other. One of my students chose to give a talk to a high-school class. This was astonishing because she has severe stage fright. Every step was hard. But she did it. “I learned that if I really wanted to, I could conquer my fear,” she wrote.

One of my Tsinghua students recently asked me: “Are you a brave man?” (She wanted to give me a gift of stinky tofu.) I said no. She said she thought I was brave for coming to China. Perhaps. I have never done anything as brave as what my student with stage fright did. I have never done something that terrified me — much less chosen to do such a thing. Her homework hadn’t been very good. When I read about her term project — conquering stage fright — I realized how badly I had misjudged her. How badly I had failed to appreciate her strengths. I saw that it wasn’t just her and it wasn’t just me. By imposing just one narrow way to excel, the whole system badly undervalued almost everyone. Almost everyone had strengths the system ignored. And it’s a system almost everyone must go through to reach a position of power!

This is related to what I call the hemineglect of economists — they fail to see that innovation should be half of economics. Diversity of talents and interests is central to innovation because new things are so often mixtures of old things. By rewarding only one kind of talent, colleges suppress diversity of talent and thereby reduce innovation. (It’s no coincidence that Steve Jobs, whom we associate with innovation, didn’t finish college. He saw his talents wouldn’t be valued.) Psychologists are also guilty of this. Many psychologists glorify IQ. Somehow having a high IQ is crucial to success . . . somehow a society that doesn’t encourage people with high IQs will do badly. And so on. In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray showed that high IQ scores correlated with other measures of desirable social outcomes (e.g., income — people with higher IQ scores made more money). Like many successful people, they failed to see the possibility that the whole world had been shaped to reward the things that the people in power (i.e., they themselves) are good at. Not because those talents work (= produce a better economy). But because they are easy to measure (by college grades). The glorification of IQ has had a solipsistic aspect and has ignored what should be obvious, that diversity of talents and skills promotes innovation. Without a diverse talent pool, any society will do a poor job of solving the problems that inevitably arise.

An Unbiassed View of What We Should Eat . . . From a Rat

Seth Roberts20 Comments

In nature animals must choose a healthy diet based on what tastes good. This doesn’t work for modern humans — lots of people eat poor diets — but why it fails is a mystery. There are many possible reasons. Are the wrong (“unnatural”) foods available (e.g., too much sugar, too little omega-3, not enough fermented food)? Is something besides food causing trouble (e.g., too little exercise, too little attention to food)? Are bad cultural beliefs too powerful (e.g., “low-fat”, desire for thinness)? Is advertising too powerful? Is convenience too powerful? Lab animals are intermediate between animals in nature and modern humans. They are not affected by cultural beliefs, advertising, and convenience (the foods they are offered are equally convenient). Their choice of food may be better than ours.

Nutrition researchers understand the value of studying what lab animals choose to eat. In 1915, the first research paper about “dietary self-selection” was published, followed by hundreds more. The general finding is that in laboratory or research settings, animals choose a relatively healthy diet. There are two variations:

[1.] Cafeteria experiments with chemically defined [= synthesized] diets showed that some of these animals, when offered the separate, purified nutrient components of their usual diet, eat the nutrients in a balance that more or less resynthesizes the original diet and that is often superior to it. [2.] Other animals eat two or more natural foods in proportions that yield a more favorable balance of nutrients than will any one of these foods alone.

Both findings imply that housing an animal in a lab does not destroy the mechanism that tells it what to eat.

Which is why I was fascinated to recently learn what Mr. T (pictured above), the pet rat of Alexandra Harney, the author of The China Price, and her husband, liked to eat. It wasn’t obvious. “We tried so many foods with him and always thought it made a powerful statement that even a wild rat turned his nose up at potato chips,” says Alexandra. “He hated most processed food. He also hated carrots, though.” Here are his top three foods:

  1. pate
  2. salmon sashimi
  3. scrambled eggs

Pate = protein, animal fat, complex flavors (which in nature would have been supplied by microbe-rich, i.e., fermented, food). Salmon sashimi = protein, omega=3. Scrambled eggs = ??

He liked beer in moderation, but not yogurt. “Owners of domestic rats say they love yogurt,” says Alexandra, “but Mr T only liked it briefly and then hated it, even lunging to bite a friend who brought him some. [Curious.] He loved cheese, stored bread for future consumption (but almost never ate it). Loved pesto sauce and coconut.” Note the absence of fruits and vegetables. Alexandra and her husband have no nutritional theories that I am aware of. They did not shape this list to make some point.

For me the message is: Why scrambled eggs? I too like eggs and eat them regularly and cannot explain why.

More Alex Tabarrok’s Thanksgiving post shows the connection between libertarian ideas (economies work better when more choice is allowed) and dietary self-selection.

iTunes For Windows is Horrible

Seth Roberts13 Comments

May I interrupt my usual posts to complain about something? Something minor?

It is that iTunes for Windows — from Apple, the maker of what are said to be brilliantly-designed products — is horribly designed. I have two examples.

1. Suppose I want to see what’s in the iTunes Store. I open a new window. I can’t close that window without closing iTunes! And if, after closing the whole program, I open it again, it still gives me the Stores window! Maybe the Stores window went away after a few weeks…I don’t want to even think about it.

2. I pressed the wrong button and started 181 downloads. There is no way to cancel them! If I stop the whole program, they will resume the next time I start it. This is software design from the 1960s.

And this is iTunes version 10.something, not version 0.3.