Category: health

“Allergic to the Practical”: Law Schools Imitating Academia

Seth Roberts14 Comments

Thorstein Veblen might have gloated that this 2011 article — about the uselessness of law schools and legal scholarship — so thoroughly supports what he wrote in a book published in 1899 (see the last chapter of The Theory of the Leisure Class). Why are law schools useless? Because law professors feel compelled to imitate the rest of academia, which glorifies uselessness:

“Law school has a kind of intellectual inferiority complex, and it’s built into the idea of law school itself,” says W. Bradley Wendel of the Cornell University Law School, a professor who has written about landing a law school teaching job. “People who teach at law school are part of a profession and part of a university. So we’re always worried that other parts of the academy are going to look down on us and say: ‘You’re just a trade school, like those schools that advertise on late-night TV. You don’t write dissertations. You don’t write articles that nobody reads.’ And the response of law school professors is to say: ‘That’s not true. We do all of that. We’re scholars [i.e., useless], just like you.’ ”

Yeah. As I’ve said, there’s a reason for the term ivory tower. And seemingly useless research has value. Glorifying useless research has the useful result of diversifying research, causing a wider range of research directions to be explored. Many of my highly-useful self-experimental findings started or received a big boost from apparently useless research.

The pendulum can swing too far, however, and it has. A large fraction of health researchers, especially medical school researchers, have spent their entire careers refusing to admit, at least in public, the uselessness of what they do. Biology professors have some justification for useless research; medical school professors have none, especially given all the public money they get. Like law professors, they prefer prestige and conformity. The rest of us pay an enormous price for their self-satisfaction (“I’m scientific!” they tell themselves) and peace of mind. The price we pay is stagnation in the understanding of health. Like clockwork, every year the Nobel Prize in Medicine is given to research that has done nothing or very close to nothing to improve our health. And every year, like clockwork, science journalists (all of them!) fail to notice this. If someone can write the article I just quoted about law schools, why can’t even one science journalist write the same thing about medical schools — where it matters far more? What’s their excuse?

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts12 Comments
  • Super-old Ashkenazi Jews. Did they live to be more than a hundred “in spite of” their “bad habits” (eating steak & pork chops, smoking, refusal of Lipitor) or because of those habits? Small amounts of smoking could easily be beneficial due to (or illustrating) hormesis.
  • Does Hollywood have a sense of humor? In the new movie about noted anti-Communist J. Edgar Hoover, Hoover’s love interest is played by Armie Hammer, grandson of Armand Hammer, who worked for the Soviet Union as a money launderer. Edward Jay Epstein writes about Hammer and the Soviet Union in this excellent Kindle book.
  • An advantage of ebooks, not yet realized, is easy updates. When the book is improved — for example, mistakes fixed — you get a new copy. In an even better Kindle book, Epstein writes about the diamond industry. The vast difference between the purchase price of a diamond and its resale value may be the advertising industry’s greatest achievement. Recent events caused Epstein to add a new chapter. The book was easy for Epstein to update but unfortunately earlier purchasers did not get the new version.
  • Michel Cabanac, who did some of the research behind the Shangri-La Diet, has written a book about his life’s work: how we self-regulate via pleasure. During a meal, for example, exactly the same food becomes less pleasant. When it becomes unpleasant, we stop eating. When we are hot, cold water is more pleasant than when we are cold. The secret to weight loss, Cabanac realized, is making exactly the same food less pleasant — an insight few weight-loss writers understand.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Thanks to Brent Pottenger, Phil Alexander, dearime, and Casey Manion.

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Seth Roberts2 Comments

  • Interview with me on Jimmy Moore’s Livin’ La Vida Locarb
  • This article about natto helped its author win a prize for best newspaper food column
  • great QS talk about self-measurement by John Sumser. “It all started when I quit smoking. Bad idea. Since I quit smoking in 2004, every quarter for 7 years it has rained shit on me.”
  • In a QS talk, I compare the Quantified Self movement and the paleo movement.
  • Chinese high-school students in America: Not what was promised. Lack of “rigor” has benefits, as I have blogged: “Dismayed by the school’s [poor] college placement record, Chen considered transferring. Instead, he began to enjoy himself. Because his courses were undemanding, he had time for friends and outside interests. He took four Advanced Placement tests on his own.“I’ve developed my personality a lot,” Chen said. “Everything turned out for the best.””
  • If you read The China Study by T. Colin Campbell, a pro-vegetarian book, you may remember the big role played by some casein experiments with rats. Rats that ate a low-casein (= low animal-protein) diet were supposedly in better health than rats that ate a high-casein (= high animal-protein) diet. In this article Chris Masterjohn shows how misleading that was. “One thing is certain: low-protein diets depressed normal growth, increased the susceptibility to many toxins, killed toxin-exposed animals earlier, induced fatty liver, and increased the development of pre-cancerous lesions when fed during the initiation period of chemical carcinogenesis.”

Thanks to Janet Chang.

More News about Liberation Therapy

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An Italian surgeon, Paolo Zamboni, claimed that he found low blood flow from the brain in 100% of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). He began by studying his wife.

A new study supports the connection:

The Canadian researchers analyzed eight studies from Italy, Germany, Jordan and the U.S. that involved 664 MS patients in total. The studies looked at how frequently CCSVI [chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency] was found in people with MS compared to healthy people or those with other neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.

One of the studies — Zamboni’s — found CCSVI in 100 per cent of people with MS, and zero per cent of people without the disease. Other studies found the vein abnormalities in people who didn’t have MS.

Overall, when the results were combined, people with MS were 13.5 times more likely to have CCSVI. Even when the study by Zamboni — which generated the excitement about CCSVI — was removed, the syndrome was 3.7 times more common in people with MS.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

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Seth Roberts1 Comment

Great Delusions: James Watson

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In an interview, James D. Watson, co-discovery of the structure of DNA, said

Some day a child is going to sue its parents for being born. They will say, My life is so awful with these terrible genetic defects.

(Quoted by Richard Bentall in Doctoring the Mind.) Watson is implying that genetic defects matter in the big picture of human impairment. They don’t. Changes over time in disease incidence, migration studies (in all instances I know of, the disease profile of the migrating group changes to match the place where they live), powerful nutritional effects (e.g., Weston Price) and other evidence of environmental potency show that all major diseases (heart disease, cancer, depression, obesity, plague, tuberculosis, smallpox, etc.) are mostly caused by the environment, in the sense that environmental changes could greatly reduce their incidence. Genes are a distraction. (To say that major diseases are also “caused” by genes in the sense that genes affect environmental potency is to miss the point that we want to reduce the diseases — want to reduce obesity for example — so it is the environmental lever that matters. If a child could eliminate its obesity by changing its environment, it would not sue its parents.) If Watson was unaware of that, okay. But for him to claim the opposite is a great — and I am afraid profoundly self-serving — delusion.

As I blogged, Aaron Blaisdell had a certifiably “genetic” disease. The chromosome involved had been identified. It turned out to be under nutritional control. When he improved his diet, it vanished. Calling it “genetic” seriously distracted from learning how to eliminate it, it turned out. Another example of how “genetic” problems are not what they seem — impossible to change — is provided by lactose intolerance. The rate of lactose intolerance varies greatly from group to group. (I thank Phil Price for the link.) It is rare in Sweden, common in Asia, including China. I assume these differences reflect genetic differences. Yet Beijing supermarkets have aisles full of milk products. How can that be? Because the aisles are full of yogurt. Yogurt bacteria digest the lactose. So lactose intolerance is not a big deal. You can still drink milk, after it has been predigested by bacteria.

The dreams of geneticists.