There were many funny things about Leah Goodman’s claim in Newsweek that a California engineer invented bitcoin. One was her observation that he put two spaces after a period — just like the inventor of bitcoin. Another was her observation that his relatives said he was “brilliant”, without giving any examples. His brilliance had remained perfectly hidden – until now. A third was her conclusion that he was obsessed with secrecy and distrusted government – just like the inventor of bitcoin (according to her). Felix Salmon was quite wrong when he said there are some very strange coincidences and the pieces of her argument “fit elegantly together”. Actually, her argument is worthless from top to bottom. Salmon was right, however, when he said that the engineer’s English shows he couldn’t possibly have invented bitcoin. As Salmon says, Goodman ignored this itty-bitty problem.

Who is the inventor of bitcoin? I’m sure it’s Nick Szabo, a former law professor at George Washington University. This idea first surfaced a few months ago in an anonymous blog post based on textual analysis. Szabo used certain phrases in the original bitcoin description far more than a bunch of other possible candidates. That is real evidence. The hypothesis that Szabo is the inventor passes several other tests as well:

1. Right time zone. The original bitcoin postings appeared to come from the Eastern (United States) time zone. Szabo lives near Washington, D. C.

2. Prior to bitcoin, he had similar ideas. As far as I can tell, his previous ideas were the closest of anyone’s.

3. Yet the original bitcoin proposal didn’t reference his work. The usual reason for not mentioning a predecessor’s work is that you want more credit. Yet the creator of bitcoin didn’t want credit. Failure to mention Szabo’s work is so strange it may have been Szabo’s way of telling insiders he’s the inventor. In other words, this fact makes sense if Szabo is the inventor. It remains unexplained if anyone else is.

4. Szabo failed to get excited when bitcoin emerged. It was based on his work (more or less). Like everyone, including me, Szabo had been told countless times that his ideas were worthless, crazy, stupid and so on. (“Money just doesn’t work like that, I was told fervently and often.”) Because of that treatment, I greatly enjoy pointing out confirmation of my ideas. It’s such a fundamental pleasure there’s a word for it: glee. If he wasn’t the inventor of bitcoin, Szabo should have gleefully followed its progress, pointing out over and over how this showed his original ideas were right. He didn’t do this. Again, this makes sense if he was the inventor — he didn’t want to draw attention to how close bitcoin is to his published ideas. It remains unexplained if anyone else is.

5. The clincher, for me, is that he wrote an article about the emergence of money that is compatible with my theory of human evolution. His article says money emerged from collectibles. Collectibles are an important part of my theory. I say they emerged because they helped skilled artisans, who were innovators, make a living. For most people, collectibles are trivial, whereas I’ve written often about the Willat Effect, which I believe is the psychological rule that created them. It isn’t easy to be consistent with my theory. I’ve read dozens of theories about human evolution. Whenever they explain the same things as mine (e.g., evolution of language), they have been inconsistent with my theory. Two examples are Jared Diamond’s ideas and Daniel Dennett’s ideas. Szabo’s essay is the only the second example I have seen of ideas that fit mine. The aquatic ape theory, which is about what happened before the events of my theory, also fits; Szabo’s ideas are about what happened after the events of my theory. Szabo’s ideas about the emergence of money are very non-obvious (especially because you have to realize the centrality of collectibles) and are compatible with a theory he cannot have heard of. I doubt anyone agrees with me that compatibility with my theory is a great plus but it is obvious that if you understand how money began, you are in a much better position to invent a new form of money than if you don’t. The difficulty of mining bitcoins corresponds to the difficulty of making collectibles. You could randomly pick anyone, including cryptographic experts, and the probability would be extremely low they have a good theory of how money began. Yet Szabo does.

I ignore the coincidence of initials: NS and SN (or NS).

Szabo’s achievement is good news for me because we have a similarity. He was a law professor. They are not supposed to invent new and useful things. No law professor before Szabo invented anything remotely as new and potentially important as bitcoin. I am a psychology professor. They are not supposed to make useful discoveries about health. I have made discoveries/inventions about health that are certainly new and might some day be important, such as the Shangri-La Diet and the underlying theory, the effect of morning faces on mood and daily brain testing.

After I say that Nobel Prize in Medicine is usually given for research of little or no proven value, one counterexample I’ve heard is the 2008 prize for the discovery that cervical cancer is caused by the human papilloma virus (HPV). This should allow us to reduce cervical cancer via vaccination.

There are several things wrong with this example:

1. The predicted improvement has not been observed. The average age at which a woman is diagnosed with cervical cancer is 48 years old. To assess the effect of HPV vaccination — usually given to young girls — on cervical cancer you need to wait thirty years. Thirty years haven’t passed. The history of medicine is full of examples where treatments that supposedly worked — such as tonsillectomies, given to millions — when tested turned out to not work. The history of medicine is also full of examples where supposedly wonderful treatments (e.g., frontal lobotomies) turned out to have side effects so bad the treatment was stopped.

2. Cervical cancer is not a big source of death. In the United States, it kills perhaps five thousand women per year. Heart disease kills hundreds of thousands of people per year; so do all forms of cancer taken together. And pap smears, which cost little, actually work. “Cervical cancer is 100% curable if detected early,” says one website.

3. Because pap smears work well, it isn’t clear there is room for improvement. To find out you’d want to compare two groups: (a) pap smears plus HPV vaccination and (b) pap smears alone.

4. It isn’t clear the vaccine will work, even if HPV infection does cause cancer. There are at least 100 varieties of HPV; the vaccine protects against two. Does vaccination against two varieties increase infection by other varieties (because different viruses compete for the same niche)? Hard to rule this out. Again, there are many examples in medicine where actually helping people turned out to be far harder than experts had predicted, even when the initial idea wasn’t nonsense. An example is the oncogene theory of cancer, which also has a Nobel Prize associated with it.

In summary, not a counterexample.

A few years ago, a Korean friend of mine spent a college year abroad in Tanzania. In South Korea, access to information about North Korea on the Internet was blocked. In Tanzania, it wasn’t. Impressed by what she learned, she cut-and-pasted some of it into an email to her sister.

After she sent the email, she remembered that in South Korea it was illegal to cut-and-paste from a website. She called her mom to tell her sister not to read the email. The message was successfully conveyed and her sister deleted the email without reading it.

In the last year, however, the South Korean government has changed its policy and is now trying to educate citizens about life in North Korea. Information is no longer blocked. Now and then people escape. They are put on show and tell about North Korean life many times. The intention is to prepare for the coming reunification. Special committees have been formed to discuss how to solve the anticipated problems.

We are used to hearing about the advantages of dividing one country into two, but my friend had no trouble explaining why the South Korean government wanted reunification. One reason was that the war with North Korea was very expensive. Another was that families had been divided. A third was that since North Korea has nuclear weapons, reunification will mean that South Korea has them. (My friend had not read a certain newspaper article the day she said that.) This article suggests that the real reason cannot be said out loud. It is that reunification will allow South Korea to take advantage of the land and people freed by the collapse of North Korea.

“What have you learned from the reunification of Germany?” I asked.

“There will be chaos for a long time,” she said.

 

Starting in 2011, Carolyn Willingham, a tutor at the University of North Carolina, complained to the press about fake classes for athletes. In place of an education, she said, athletes, some of whom could barely read, were encouraged to take fake classes, such as classes that never met.

Jim Dean, executive vice chancellor and provost, responded to her charges like this:

Dean asked Willingham to provide raw test data supporting her analysis. She declined, explaining that she’d obtained the confidential information by promising the university’s Institutional Review Board not to share it with anyone. She told Dean he could obtain the data directly from the athletic department, which gathered it in the first place. He declined to do as she suggested. “If she had the proof,” Dean says, “why wouldn’t she share the proof?”

Later Dean handled Willingham’s charges like this:

Dean said of Willingham: “She’s said our students can’t read, our athletes can’t read, and that’s a lie.”

In fact, Willingham had said

18 out of the 183 special admit athletes whose records she assessed read at roughly a third-grade level. An additional 110 of the athletes, she said, read at between fourth- and eighth-grade levels. She never said that most, let alone all, of the 800 athletes at UNC are illiterate, and she said nothing at all about the other 18,000 undergraduates.

When challenged, Dean conceded he’d misspoken.

Even the reporter, apparently, finds Dean’s defense repugnant. An important detail is that Willingham, who is wealthy, did not need the job. She was free to say whatever she wanted.

In 1995, hoping to improve my sleep, I decided to watch TV early in the morning, for reasons explained here. One Monday morning I watched tapes of Jay Leno and David Letterman that I’d made. Nothing happened. On Tuesday, however, I woke up and felt great: cheerful, eager and yet somehow calm. I had never felt so good so early in the morning. Monday had been a normal day, I had slept a normal length of time. The good feeling was puzzling. Then I remembered the TV I had watched. It had seemed so innocuous. The notion that 20 minutes of ordinary TV Monday morning could make me feel better Tuesday but not Monday seemed preposterous. Absurd. Couldn’t possibly be true.

Except for one thing. I had done something to improve my sleep. Plenty of research connected sleep and depression. That research made it more plausible that something done to improve sleep would improve mood. I went on to confirm the morning faces/mood linkage in many ways. The research connecting sleep and depression had been the first signs of a hidden mechanism (we need to see morning faces for our mood regulatory system to work properly) I consider very important.

Two new studies further connect sleep and depression. One of them found that people who sleep normal amounts of time are less influenced by genes associated with depression than those who sleep longer or shorter lengths of time. The other found that teenagers who sleep less than usual are at greater risk of depression.

The theories that psychiatrists have used to justify anti-depressants (e.g., “chemical imbalance”) do not explain the many connections between sleep and depression. Depression is associated with lots of bad things, unsurprisingly, but the association with bad sleep is especially strong. It is not easily explained away. You might think that if you are depressed you are more tired than usual and therefore sleep more/better than usual. The opposite is true. All this might have generated, among psychiatric researchers, a search for a better theory — an explanation of depression that can explain the sleep/depression connections — but it hasn’t.

 

“We need only one Santa” is a line from a video by Icelandic’s Best Party, which won enough support that its leader, Jon Gnarr, became mayor.

“We need only one Santa” would have been a good response to any big health promise in the last 20 years. Not one has come true, just as there is no Santa Claus. “Beating cancer now is a realistic ambition because, at long last, we largely know its true genetic and chemical characteristics,” wrote James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, in 2009. We need only one Santa, Dr. Watson.

At the NIH, “one of our biggest projects is the BRAIN initiative . . . We are bringing together the best and the brightest people from a variety of disciplines to figure out, over the next 10 years, exactly how the brain works,” said Francis Collins, head of the NIH, a few days ago. We need only one Santa, Dr. Collins.

When friends complain about evil government (e.g., NSA surveillance), I tell them “never underestimate the stupidity of government employees” — by which I mean their stupidity outweighs their self-interest. The Obamacare website fiasco is a good illustration. Everyone has heard “power corrupts” but closer to the truth is power makes you stupid.

The Obama website fiasco had many precursors. One was in the 1950s — in the details of the introduction of the polio vaccine.

Rather than staging a long series of careful field trials with appropriate scientific evaluation, Salk darted ahead on his own in the remainder of 1953 and 1954. The trials were successful. The foundation released the results to the press, and such were the nation’s expectations that from that point there was no turning back. In August 1954 the foundation ordered five drug companies to begin producing mass lots of vaccine, on the basis of a formula for inactivating the virus with formaldehyde, according to a procedure Salk himself had devised. . . . James Shannon remembered very well what happened next. At this point he had become the associate director of the NIH. “I was working over the weekend and I got a telephone call from Los Angeles, and this is eight or nine o’clock on Friday night. It was the Health officer of the City of Los Angeles and he said they just had two reports of polio in some children who had been vaccinated nine days earlier. He wanted to know what should be done about it?”

One of the companies that contracted to make the vaccine, the Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, California, had released several lots of vaccine that had been improperly inactivated. Live polio virus was being injected into children. The gratitude of the public turned to horror, as the cutter vaccine gave polio to almost 80 recipients; these children in turn went on to spread the disease to another 120 playmates and relatives; three quarters of the victims were paralysed and 11 died. . . . NIH’s Laboratory of Biologics Control, which had certified the Salk vaccine, had received advance warning of problems. . . .

In 1954 the rush was on. [Eddy’s] lab had gotten samples of the inactivated polio vaccine to certify on a “due-yesterday” basis. “This was a product that had never been made before and they were going to use it right away,” she recalled. She and her staff worked around the clock. “We had eighteen monkeys. We inoculated these eighteen monkeys with each vaccine that came in. And we started getting paralyzed monkeys.” She reported to her superiors that the lots were Cutter’s, and sent pictures of the paralyzed monkeys along as well. “They were going to be injecting this thing into children. . . .They went ahead and released the vaccine anyway, a lot of it. The monkeys they just disregarded.”

Shannon called the Surgeon General Satur­day morning. Additional cases of paralysis continued to occur. “It seemed obvious that we had a crisis on our hands, the magnitude of which was unknown.” Late Saturday afternoon a working group of senior virus specialists, whose advice the polio foundation had started to ignore a year earlier, began meeting in Shannon’s office. Note that Shannon had completely taken charge of the crisis. “Sebrell was not the man to manage this,” DeWitt Stetten recalled. ‘James Shannon was a man of quite different character.”

Shannon had brought in the Surgeon General, who called polio chief Basil O’Connor in New York. On Monday evening O’Connor and his advisers came down to Bethesda. Shannon wanted to withdraw the vaccine, “It was a very stormy meeting,” he said. “O’Connor and the polio group in general disallowed any possibility of induced infections [as a result of the vaccine]. … So Basil O’Connor stormed out with dire warning of what he was going to do to the NIH and the Public Health Service. Further vaccination was stopped. I had many sleepless nights.”

The basic problem had really not been the carelessness of the Cutter company, which rightly or wrongly was exonerated in a later report. It was the difficulty in jumping from Salk’s lab experiments with killing (formalinizing) the virus to large-scale industrial production.

. . . Ruth Kirschstein, the director today of an important NIH institute, added, “The Cutter incident resulted in everybody up the line who had anything to do with it—very few people know this story—being dismissed because of it.” All went out: the director of the microbiology institute lost his post, as did the equivalent of the assistant secretary for health. Oveta Culp Hobby, the secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (or Oveta “Culpable” Hobby, as she was known), stepped down. Dr. Sebrell, the director of the NIH, resigned.

Whereas I think the “basic problem” was overestimating the competence of powerful people, especially powerful experts.

A few days ago I read about Apple CEO Tim Cook’s response to a shareholder complaint about sustainability programs:

At a shareholders meeting on Friday, CEO Tim Cook angrily defended Apple’s environmentally-friendly practices against a request from the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) to drop those practices if they ever became unprofitable.

I support the practices Cook defended. But the incident was summarized by a headline writer like this: “Tim Cook tells off climate change deniers.” I am a climate change denier in the sense that I don’t believe that there is persuasive evidence that humans are dangerously warming the planet.

The headline — not what actually happened — reminded me of something surprising and puzzling I noticed soon after I became an assistant professor at Berkeley. I attended several colloquium talks — hour-long talks about research, usually by a visitor, a professor from somewhere else — every week. Now and then the speaker would omit essential information. Such as what the y axis was. Or what the points were. The missing information made it impossible to understand what the speaker was saying.

I didn’t expect graduate students to interrupt to ask for the missing info but surely, I thought, one of the five or eight professors in the room would. We all need to know this, I thought. Yet none of them spoke up. I cannot think of a single example of a professor speaking up when this happened (except me). Even now I am unsure why this happened (and no doubt still happens). Maybe it reflects insecurity.

I mention climate change on this blog because it is interesting that so many intelligent supposedly independent-thinking people actually believe, or claim to believe, that humans are dangerously warming the planet. The evidence for the supposedly undeniable claim (“97% of scientists agree!”) is indistinguishable from zero. Of course journalists, such as Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker and Bill McKibben (a former journalist), are often English majors and intimidated by scientists. I don’t expect them to question what scientists say, although questioning authority is half their job. Of course actual climate scientists do not dissent, for fear of career damage. It is when smart people who are not journalists or climate scientists take this stuff seriously that I am impressed. Just as I was impressed by Berkeley professors who did nothing when they didn’t understand what they were being told.

It seems to me that the smarter you are the more easily you can see that climate change fear-mongering is nonsense. There must be some other important human quality (conformity? religiosity? diffidence? status-seeking? fear of failure?) that interferes with intelligence in non-trivial ways. To try to figure out what the quality is, I ask: who is the smartest person you know who believes global warming fear-mongering? Does that person do other extreme or unusual things? These might shed light on what the intelligence-opposing personality trait is.

People talk about intelligence quite often (“you’re so smart!” “she’s very bright”). Many people, including me, think it matters. There are tests for it. But this other trait, which can negate intelligence and therefore is just as important…not so much. In my experience, not at all. My fellow Berkeley professors were very smart. But they were also something else, much less apparent.

• more about cheating at Caltech
• omega-3 supplementation reduces acne. Impressive results. Will dermatologists stop saying food doesn’t cause acne?
• Is it possible that vaccines are not perfect?. More about vaccines.
• Excerpt of The Question of Separatism by Jane Jacobs. Interesting critique.
• Why did non-polio paralysis increase from 2,000 cases to 60,000 cases? See Minute 6 of this video.

After I discovered the Shangri-La Diet (2000), I started drinking lots of tea. Tea has smell without calories, which complemented the calories without smell of the diet. Mostly I drink black tea — more complexity than green or oolong tea. Until recently, I made it the usual (Western) way. 1. Add hot water to tea. 2. Wait 3-4 minutes. 3. Add cream and sweetener. 4. Drink. 5. Throw away tea.

Now I do this: 1. Rinse tea with hot water, discard rinse water. 2. Add hot water. 3. Wait short time (e.g., 30 seconds). 4. Taste the results in a certain way. 5. Drink. 6. Reinfuse tea for longer time (e.g., 45 seconds). And so on. From 2.5 g of tea leaves I make 3 cups of tea (200 ml each), with infusion times of 35, 55 and 90 seconds. I drink the first two cups straight (no additions), then add sweetener (xylitol), salt and cream to the third cup. It’s like three different sorts of tea. The first cup is a little sweet, the second cup is slightly bitter with more complexity, the third cup has bitterness, complexity, fat (cream) and sweetness. I use a Polder timer that, at the end of the interval, resets to the length of the interval. For example, if you time 30 seconds, it ends up reset to 30 seconds. This makes it easy to remember the length of the last infusion.

What interests me is Step #4: “Taste the results in a certain way.” After brewing the tea, I pour a little of it into a small glass. I have four of them. I pour the tea from #1 to #2 to #3 to #4. This greatly cools it, making it much easier to assess the taste. If you drink the tea before cooling, the heat is distracting. As soon as I started doing this, it was easy to see that short infusion times (e.g., 30 seconds) gave better results than long infusion times (e.g., 3 minutes) and that the tea could be used several times. I could easily distinguish between a brewing time of 30 seconds and 40 seconds.

Without Step #4, you (or at least me) are in very bad shape. Soon after brewing, the tea is too hot to taste clearly. The heat is distracting. Within a few sips, however, taste adaptation is so strong you cannot taste it clearly either. This is why I drank tea for 13 years without understanding what is going on.

With the particular black tea I am drinking now, the first 30 seconds or so of infusion releases a slightly-sweet tasting chemical. If I cold-brew tea, this is what it will taste like. After that comes more complexity but also more bitterness. All in all, I like more bitterness (not too much) and complexity, so I reduced the amount of tea from 2.5 g to 2.0 g and increased the first infusion time to 60 seconds. That produced better results.

For many years, in other words, (a) I brewed it wrong then added cream and sweetener to fix my mistake and (b) due to poor feedback I had no idea what I was doing. Does that remind you of anything?