Category: astonishment

What Was Mark Bittman Thinking?

Seth Roberts13 Comments

Stephen Dubner has drawn my attention to a recent comment by Mark Bittman, the main food writer at the New York Times (the most prestigious and influential newspaper in the world), on his NY Times blog:

Sysco is the latest food giant . . . to come out against gestation crate confinement of pigs. . . .

Speaking of pigs, the VP of PR for Chick-fil-A dropped dead of a heart attack the week after the chain’s latest homophobia/anti-gay marriage scandal.

As Dubner says, my first reaction is: Was the Times website hacked? Apparently not. My second reaction: Is Bittman in good health? If so, I hope he will explain why he thought it was a good idea to call a person a pig. That the person in question recently died and his family is grieving makes this even stranger. Dubner emailed Bittman about it but got an automated reply.

More. Bittman removed the comparison and apologized.

Can Vitamin D Replace Sunlight? A Stunning Discovery

Seth Roberts44 Comments

Primal Girl is a stay-at-home mom. I met her at the Ancestral Health Symposium. Her sleep was bad. I made recommendations. One of them was to get an hour of sunlight soon after you wake up. She can’t do that — too busy being a mom. So she decided to take Vitamin D early in the morning. After all, sunlight exposure produces Vitamin D. Here’s what happened:

One day as I was taking my supplements, I was thinking about how many units of Vitamin D your skin produces in 30 minutes of sun (20,000 I believe). I looked aghast at the 10,000 units of Vitamin D I was taking. It was 7 o’clock at night! I was essentially giving my body 15 minutes worth of bright sunlight energy. No wonder I was waking up in the middle of the night! I was telling my body that it wasn’t really time for bed, it was still the middle of the day. I wondered what would happen if I only took my Vitamin D first thing in the morning. It wouldn’t be an hour naked in the sun, but 15 minutes is better than nothing. That night I slept like shit. Worse than normal.

I usually took my supplements mid-afternoon. I vowed to take them first thing every morning. If I forgot, I would not take the Vitamin D at all that day. I tried it the next day and that night I slept like a rock. And the next night. And the next. Days I forgot and skipped the D3, I still slept great. That was the only change I made to my lifestyle and my sleep issues completely resolved. [emphasis added]

OMG! Double OMG! Like Primal Girl, I have never heard anything like this. Even I am stunned that such a simple safe easy change could have such a positive effect. (Taking Vitamin D at sunrise is a lot easier than standing on one leg four times!) I’ve read lots about circadian rhythms. Many studies showed that a drug would be much more powerful at certain times of day. Most of these studies were with rats. It never occurred to me that the time you take a vitamin could matter so much.

The Curious Case of Richard Muller

Seth Roberts26 Comments

About fifteen years ago I had lunch with Richard Muller, a Berkeley professor of physics, at the Berkeley Faculty Club. He told me his theory that the “miracles” that the Bible says Jesus performed, such as changing water into wine, were magic tricks. He was writing a novel about it, he said. He also said he had submitted to Science a new theory of climate change based on Milankovitch cycles (cycles of changes in the Earth’s distance and tilt relative to the sun). The editor liked it; the problem was getting it past the reviewers. This press release shows the editor succeeded. So Muller was nice enough or curious enough to have lunch with a stranger (me) who could not possibly help him and was/is creative about big questions. He is now retired. He’s had great career success, including a MacArthur Fellowship (in 1982). He’s won a teaching award. A talented and decent person. (Steve McIntyre, whose comment I read after I wrote this, also says good things about Muller: “one of the few people in this field I regard as a friend.”)

Two years ago he started the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, devoted to improving the climate record. Fine. In March I liked a talk he gave about climate change. Fine. Now he has done something astonishing. In a recent Wall Street Journal article titled “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism” he took “skepticism about global warming” to be skepticism that the Earth has warmed recently. In it, he describes several problems with surface temperature measurements. Then he says:

Without good answers to all these complaints, global-warming skepticism seems sensible. But now let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.

The vast majority of skeptics, including me, believe the Earth has warmed substantially since the Little Ice Age. That’s not the issue. Here’s the issue: We are skeptical that we understand why it has warmed and in particular skeptical that humans have caused recent warming. A big difference. Muller has ignored the obvious: what skeptics actually think.

Muller’s view of “global warming skepticism” is so strange let me state what might be obvious. For me, and many others, there are three issues: 1. Can we trust climate models? I say no: They have never been shown to be good predictors of what they are being used to predict. The physics of clouds isn’t simple or well-understood. 2. Is it unusually hot now? I say no: The Medieval Warm Period was roughly as hot or hotter. 3. Has recent warming been unusually fast? (Which is what Michael Mann’s discredited Hockey Stick seemed to show.) I say no. Over the past 200 years, the temperature has increased as fast or faster at least twice. Muller’s new data doesn’t address any of these concerns. Whether surface temperatures are higher now than in 1950 (which is what Muller’s new data shows more conclusively than before) is not a big issue.

Why did Muller misrepresent so badly what skeptics say? I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to make his results seem more important than they are. Maybe he has never met a skeptic. I truly don’t know. Lots of famous scientists (e.g., James Watson) have said what I consider wacky things about unverifiable stuff. But there is nothing vague or unverifiable about this. It is as if Muller had said Shanghai is the capital of China.

James Fallows, whose work I like, has taken Muller seriously. Paul Krugman has taken Muller seriously. Marc Morano, who runs Climate Depot, has responded at length and created a special Muller page. In March, Morano points out, he (Morano) complained about exactly the same thing from Muller: “Who denies that warming has taken place?” Yes. Morano links to many scientists who are displeased by what Muller has done. One says, “It is not true that the Berkeley group has found relevant evidence for the core questions in the AGW debate.” Yes. “Doubts about the validity of the surface temperature record constitute something like 1% of the issues that climate skeptics as a community have ever raised.” Yes.

Muller’s error interests me because I can’t explain it. Perhaps it illustrates how unwittingly we shape reality, as shown in a famous split-brain anecdote:

The split-brain patient had to point with his two hands at pictures of two objects corresponding to two images that he had seen on the divided screen (one with each of his two separated hemispheres). The patient’s left hand [pointed] at the card with a picture of a snow shovel, because the right hemisphere, which controls this hand, [had] seen the projected image of a winter scene. [The left hemisphere had seen a picture of a chicken. When asked why he chose a shovel, the patient said (via the left hemisphere, which controls speech):] you use a shovel to clean out the chicken house.

Split-brain patients do not have more mental tricks than the rest of us. Surely we all do this. My question is: When?

Thanks to Tim Beneke.

Walking and Learning Update

Seth Roberts16 Comments

I discovered a year ago that walking makes it pleasant to study boring stuff — as I put it then, boring + boring = pleasant. I am still a little amazed.

Like any scientific discovery, I suppose, I had to do serious engineering to make good use of it. In particular:

1. Make walking easier. I use a treadmill in my apartment, which eliminates travel time (to where I do it), eliminates distractions, provides climate control, and allows me to walk barefoot.

2. Steady stream of study materials. Now I am using an Anki deck of Chinese characters put together by someone else. This saves a lot of time. (Anki is an open-source version of SuperMemo, a flashcard program that tries to optimize repetition.)

3. Figure out how much new stuff to study each day. Without plenty of repetition, you are wasting your time — you will forget what you’ve learned. Most of a study session is repetition. This means it’s not obvious how much new material to introduce each day. I found that 10 new Chinese characters is about right.

4. Put laptop on treadmill. To use Anki while on my treadmill, I need to use my laptop on my treadmill. At the Beijing Wal-mart, I found a piece of Sunor metal shelving that works perfectly. I put the shelf (about 90 cm long) across the arms of the treadmill, put the laptop on the shelf.

5. Minimize complications. I first noticed the effect using Anki. But Anki had several features I disliked, so I switched to ordinary flashcards. But they were too complicated — hard to schedule appropriately (you need to slowly expand the time between tests), time-consuming to keep track of progress. I had to keep stopping to make marks on the cards. So I am back to using Anki. Anki lacks a graph of progress — a graph that shows amount of learning versus date. But it is better than flashcards.

Each improvement made things better. With all of them, I lose track of time. Study, study, study, walk, walk, walk. Then it’s over. Not just painless, pleasant — different than any pleasure I have felt before. It feels a little like a new energy source (I imagine it can be used to learn many things), a little like teleportation.

The science aspect of it also interests me. Learning is the core topic of experimental psychology. Thousands of experiments have been done about human learning, thousands more about animal learning. Experimental psychologists are good methodologists; the average experimental psychology experiment makes the average medical-school experiment look retarded. But the walking/learning effect (walking makes learning pleasant) is outside anything anyone has ever reported. Only Michel Cabanac (not an experimental psychologist) has studied how variation in pleasantness regulates action (e.g., eating). Experimental psychologists lack good ways to find new effects. By missing this effect, they are missing a bigger idea:Â learning is regulated, just as a thousand other things inside our bodies are regulated.

Law Schools Deceiving Students

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In an article about how law schools deceive prospective students, one way astonished me. Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego reported that 92% of their graduates are employed 9 months after graduation. That 92% included the 25% of the students they couldn’t locate. Which is in accord with the guidelines, said the associate dean of student affairs.

Walking Creates A Thirst For Dry Knowledge

Seth Roberts12 Comments

A few weeks ago I got a treadmill for my Beijing apartment. Two days ago I was walking on it (I try to walk 1 hr/day) while watching Leverage to make the activity more palatable. But Leverage bored me. It was too simple. So I took out some Chinese flashcards (character on one side, English and pinyin on the other) and started studying them. I was astonished how pleasant it was. An hour of walking and studying went by . . . uh, in a flash. In my entire life I have never had such a pleasant hour studying. The next day it happened again! The experience appears infinitely repeatable. I’ve previously mentioned the man who memorized Paradise Lost while walking on a treadmill.

I’ve noticed before that treadmill walking (by itself boring) and Chinese-character learning (by itself boring) become pleasant when combined. So why was I astonished? Because the increase in enjoyment was larger. The whole activity was really pleasant, like drinking water when thirsty. When an hour was up, I could have kept going. I wanted to do it again. When I noticed it earlier, I was using Anki to learn Chinese characters. Now I am using flashcards in blocks of ten (study 10 until learned, get a new set of 10, study them until learned . . . ). The flashcards provide much more sense of accomplishment and completion, which I thinks makes the activity more pleasant.

My progress with Chinese characters has been so slow that during the latest attempt (putting them on my wall) I didn’t even try to learn both the pinyin and the meaning at the same time; I had retreated to just trying to learn the meaning. That was hard enough. I have had about 100 character cards on the walls of my apartment for a month but I’ve only learned the meaning of about half of them. No pinyin at all. In contrast, in two one-hour treadmill sessions I’ve gotten through 60 cards . . . including pinyin. For me, learning pinyin is much harder than learning meaning.

It’s like drinking water when you’re thirsty versus when you’re not thirsty. The walking turns a kind of switch that makes it pleasant to learn dry knowledge, just as lack of water creates thirst. Not only did studying dry materials become much more pleasant I suspect I also became more efficient — more retentive. I was surprised how fast I managed to reach a criterion of zero mistakes.

I had previously studied flashcards while walking around Tsinghua. This did not produce an oh-my-god experience. I can think of three reasons why the effect is now much stronger: 1. Ordinary walking is distracting. You have to watch where you’re going, there are other people, cars, trees, and so on. Distraction reduces learning. If the distractions are boring — and they usually are –Â the experience becomes less pleasant. 2. Ordinary walking provides more information than treadmill walking (which provides no information at all — you’re staring at a wall). The non-flashcard info reduces desire to learn what’s on the flashcards. 3. On these Tsinghua walks I had about 100 flashcards which I cycled through. Using sets of 10, as I said, provides more sense of accomplishment. I’ve also had about 20 Chinese-speaking lessons while walking around. The walking made the lessons more pleasant, yes, but it wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as the treadmill/flashcard combination. And because lessons with a tutor are intrinsically more enjoyable than studying flashcards, the increase in enjoyment was less dramatic.

As I said earlier I think there’s an evolutionary reason for this effect: The thirst for knowledge (= novelty) created by walking pushed us to explore and learn about our surroundings. One interesting feature of my discovery about treadmill and flashcards is that it may take better advantage of this mechanism than did ordinary Stone-Age life — better in the sense that more pleasure/minute can be derived. In the Stone Age, novelty, new dry knowledge, was hard to come by. You could only walk so fast. After a while, it was hard to walk far enough away to be in a new place. Whereas I can easily switch from flashcards I’ve learned to new ones. An example of a supranormal stimulus.

“Give Us Our Dammed Data”

Seth Roberts1 Comment

A large painting by Regina Holliday called “Give Us Our Dammed Data” shows 17 book authors, each holding the book they’d written about struggle with the health care system. For example, Lisa Lindell, who wrote 108 Days, which describes

her successful campaign to keep her husband alive. She was astounded when she read her husband’s medical record. The nurse’s notes specified that she had an “unreasonable” belief that her husband should live.

The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy

Seth Roberts10 Comments

In The Emperor’s New Clothes, the king is naked but only a little girl says so. The king’s advisers don’t tell him. I suppose the intended lesson was that powerful people have trouble getting frank answers. That’s pretty obvious. For a CEO, it’s said, the scarcest commodity is truth. Bosses learn this all the time. I learned it the first time I asked one of my students what he thought of the class.

Andersen’s story can be taken differently, partly conveyed by the phrase elephant in the room: Something big and important is overlooked by the supposed experts (in the story, the king’s advisers). It should be obvious — but it isn’t. Or at least no one says anything. This is how Harry Markopolos used the term emperor’s new clothes in No One Would Listen: Madoff was a gigantic fraud, his returns were (to Markopolos) clearly too good to be true, he was enormously visible (in certain circles), but no one said anything. It was as astonishing as a king parading naked. How come no one sees this? Markopolos thought. If you looked at Madoff the right way, he was naked.

That this sort of thing happens isn’t obvious at all. Yet three books — which I’ve just blogged about — have recently appeared with examples. One is the Markopolos book. Another is The Hockey Stick Illusion. Surely there’s overwhelming evidence that humans are causing global warming, right? Well, no. The only clear evidence was that hockey stick — and that’s a statistical artifact. (It looks like an artifact.) The third is The Big Short. It wasn’t easy to find the right sight line from which it was clear that Goldman Sachs et al. were taking on far more risk than they realized but such views existed. I call these books The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy. Their broad lesson: Sometimes the “best people” aren’t right. Sometimes there’s a point of view from which they’re glaringly wrong. The Hockey Stick Illusion is about how Stephen McIntyre found this point of view. In No One Would Listen Markopolos found this point of view. In The Big Short several people found this point of view.

This relates to my self-experimentation in two ways. First, the “best people” say self-experimentation is bad. No weight-control researcher does self-experimentation. No sleep researcher does self-experimentation. Surely they know how to do research. It’s their job. Whereas to me it’s glaringly obvious that self-experimentation is an excellent research tool, not just because of my results but also because it makes it so much easier to try new things. The best way to learn is to do, IÂ believe; self-experimentation makes doing much easier. Second, my self-experimentation uncovered all sorts of results that implied that the expert consensus on this or that was glaringly wrong. The Shangri-La Diet is just one example. Breakfast is good, right? Well, no, breakfast may wake you up too early. And so on. At first, I didn’t grasp the broad lesson I stated earlier (“Sometimes the “best people” aren’t right. . . “) and was amazed by what I was finding. To me, The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy is support.

Is English My Native Language?

Seth Roberts18 Comments

Here’s the last paragraph of a New York Times book review by Janet Maslin:

“The Publisher” [a biography of Henry Luce] has its parched passages, most notably when it ventures into the thickets of Luce’s “big” ideas. It works best when the man is well within sight. But Mr. Brinkley is dauntless in assessing Luce’s most important accomplishments, like his “American Century” essay and other efforts to tell Americans what American life was like. Life magazine had no temerity about devoting a major series in the 1950s to “Man’s New World: How He Lives in It.” Now that Man’s New World is so different from anything Henry Luce could imagine, his life and times are more poignant than they once seemed.

As I read this, I wondered if English was my native language. It was so hard to understand. Then I wondered if New York Times writers are paid by the big word. “Parched”? “Thickets? At least I know what that sentence means. I don’t know what she means by “Mr. Brinkley is dauntless in assessing…” — dauntless means fearless. Nor do I understand what “Life magazine had no temerity about” means. Temerity means recklessness or boldness. The logic of the last sentence (“Now that . . . “) with its big word poignant also escapes me.

Perhaps Maslin has found that if she writes like this her editors will edit her less, not being quite sure what those words mean. I attended many talks at UC Berkeley in which the speaker left out crucial information, such as the meaning of the y axis of a graph. And, virtually every time, no one asked about it – not even the four or five professors present. Gradually I realized why: They were insecure.