Category: Jane Jacobs

The Twilight of Expertise (part 6: psychotherapy, continued)

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Among the community of psychotherapists, according to Dr. Marion Arom, a psychotherapist friend of mine, “it is common knowledge that in many traditional therapies, if the therapy fails — if the desired change doesn’t occur — it’s due to client resistance or lack of motivation to change or unconscious motivation. The role or skill of the therapist is not examined, ever.”

Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs has a chapter about the failure of highly-respected professions to police themselves.

Directory of Twilight of Expertise posts.

The Twilight of Expertise (part 1)

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In a TED talk, Stewart Brand pointed out that all over the world, poor villages — the same villages that Jeffrey Sachs seems to want to preserve — are vanishing. The people who lived in them have moved to squatter cities, where, according to Brand, there is zero unemployment and a much better life. Because Jeffrey Sachs’ interest in poor African villages seems to be recent, I am not surprised that he may end up on the wrong side of the helped/didn’t help ledger.

This is the general pattern with experts today: Sometimes they help, but often they make things worse. In a comment on an earlier post, Dr. Erika Schwartz called modern medicine “a system that more often harms than helps.”

We are living in the twilight of expertise because we now have alternatives to experts — better alternatives. Squatter cities are a new thing. They solve a very difficult problem (poverty) because they combine three things: (a) People care about themselves and their children (far more than any expert will ever care). (b) The technological knowledge behind the many small businesses (e.g., hair dresser, copy center, pirated videos, cell phones) that allow squatter cities to exist. And (c) something that brings the first two things — caring and know-how — together, namely the cities themselves. Of course, squatter cities owe nothing to Sachs-type experts.

The self-help self-experimentation I have done is another new thing. I solved the difficult problems of how to control my weight, my mood, my sleep, and a few other things related to omega-3, such as my gums. None of which I am expert in — I am not a weight-control expert, a sleep expert, etc. I attribute my success to the combination of the same three elements that come together in squatter cities: (a) I cared. I care about myself far more than experts care about most of the people they try to help. (b) Scientific knowledge — both statistical methods (e.g., exploratory data analysis tools) and basic behavioral science (e.g., the rat experiments of Israel Ramirez). (c) The ability to combine (a) and (b). Self-experimentation was a big part of this, but not the whole thing. My job as a professor and the research library system allowed me the time and opportunity to learn the scientific stuff. The flexibility of my job helped a lot. For example, I almost never had to use an alarm clock to wake up, which allowed sleep self-experimentation. The solutions I discovered are quite different from conventional solutions, but no more different than squatter cities are from what Jeffrey Sachs has prescribed.

Addendum: More info about squatter cities here. A blog about them. More about foreign-aid experts doing more harm than good.

The Secret of My Success

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Jane Jacobs said dozens of things that impressed me, this most of all:

You can’t prescribe decently for something you hate. It will always come out wrong. You can’t prescribe decently for something you despair in. . . . I think people [who] give prescriptions, who have ideas for improving things, ought to concentrate on the things that they love and that they want to nurture.

She had noticed that people who hate cities or who despair of cities make bad prescriptions for them.

It was a long time before I realized this comment applied to me. I used self-experimentation to improve my sleep and mood and to lose weight. Unlike most health researchers, I wasn’t trying to solve other people’s problems — I was trying to solve my own. No wonder I persisted in spite of many failures.

Similar advice. Another example.

Jane Jacobs on Pay Per Click

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Jane Jacobs has said:

You can’t prescribe decently for something you hate. It will always come out wrong. . . . People [who] give prescriptions, who have ideas for improving things, ought to concentrate on the things that they love and that they want to nurture.

Emphasis added. This applies more widely than I might have thought. Here is an example:

Two gourmet chocolate companies. Two pay-per-click ad campaigns. Two very different results.

Charles Chocolates — a small artisanal chocolate manufacturer in Emeryville — spent $3,000 on pay-per-click ads over a three-month period last year and sold fewer than five boxes of chocolates. Meanwhile, Lake Champlain Chocolates — a rival chocolatier based in Vermont — sells about 30,000 pounds of chocolates each year from pay-per-click ads.

What accounts for that difference?

With 100 employees, Lake Champlain is far larger than 25-person Charles Chocolates. And with an annual pay-per-click budget of $100,000, it also spends far more on ads than Charles Chocolates did. But that doesn’t really explain the difference. When Lake Champlain started experimenting with pay per click in 2002, its budget for all forms of marketing was just $5,000.

What Lake Champlain did have was an inquisitive employee who threw himself into learning everything about how pay per click works — mastering arcane details and strategies about keyword bidding . . . Middings was fascinated by a medium that seemed the reverse of conventional marketing. . . . Middings taught himself the tricks of the trade. He developed a list of 70,000 — seventy thousand — keywords to bid on.

Jane Jacobs on the food industry and scientific method.

Five Similar Words of Wisdom

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1. I have mentioned several times what Loren Berlin, a student at the University of North Carolina, told Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist: Stop writing about African failures, start writing about African successes.

2. At the recent New Yorker Conference, Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, NJ, told this story:

I moved into Newark around 1995. . . In my first month there I saw my first shooting ever. . . . I had my life threatened . . . That same month I met this woman who changed my life. She’s an ornery, tough as nails, just an amazing certifiably insane leader. She was the head of the Brick Tower Tenants Association. . . . I meet this woman . . . The first thing I say to her, in my Yale Law School arrogance, I say to her, “Ma’am, I’m Cory Booker, I live across the street, I’m here to help you.”

She looks at me and she says, “You want to help me, first tell me what you see around you.” . . .

“I see drug dealers.” Which I said in a very respectful tone, in case they overheard me. “I see a crack house.” I describe the neighborhood.

“Well, you could never ever help me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Boy, you need to understand something. The world you see outside of you is a reflection of what you have inside of you. If you only see problems and darkness and despair that’s all there’s ever going to be. But if you see hope and opportunity and even love, then you can be somebody that makes a change.”

3. As I mentioned earlier, in First, Break All the Rules, the authors summarize what they learned from thousands of interviews into one lesson for managers:

Don’t waste time trying to put in [your employees] what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in.

4. At the end of my long self-experimentation paper, I wrote:

[Jane] Jacobs (2000) argued that caste systems and other forms of discrimination retard economic development because they prevent certain jobs from becoming the seeds of new businesses. . . . Belief that something is bad makes it harder to learn what it is good for — including what it could become.

I was referring to the belief of many psychology professors that self-experimentation is bad.

5. In an interview with someone from Buffalo, NY, Jane Jacobs said how development of Buffalo should proceed:

You need to do something — I hate to keep repeating myself — that’s unique to Buffalo, that comes out of Buffalo itself. You don’t want to keep acting like a company town.

In other words, don’t try to make Buffalo more like other cities. Try to make it less like other cities.

Curious, huh?

Thanks to Tobian, who blogs about Ethiopia, for reminding me of the Loren Berlin letter.

Introductions to Jane Jacobs

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Nice summaries of her ideas here (shorter) and here (longer).

Why is an experimental psychologist (me) so interested in Jacobs’ work — which on the face of it has nothing to do with experimental psychology? Four reasons. From big to little:

1. I enjoy her books and articles. They are very well-written, discuss the stuff of everyday life — what I see when I walk through any city — and have lots of ideas that I hadn’t previously encountered.

2. Jacobs is essentially an economist. Psychology and economics are very close. Economics is psychology writ large, psychology is economics writ small. I came up with a theory of human evolution based on economics learned from Jacobs.

3. Jacobs wrote about something that fascinates me — how things begin. My longest paper is about how scientific ideas begin.

4. Self-experimentation had led me to conclusions outside experimental psychology — for example, conclusions about weight control and sleep. Jacobs, with no Ph.D. in anything, was even more an outsider.

Too Much Emphasis on Failure

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In his blog a few days ago, as I mentioned earlier, Nicholas Kristof printed a letter from a University of North Carolina graduate student about why she was not going to enter Kristof’s contest to go to Africa with him. Kristof wrote too much about failure, she said:

[Quoting Kristof:]“I’m hoping that you’ll be changed when you see a boy dying of malaria because his parents couldn’t afford a $5 mosquito net, or when you talk to a smart girl who is at the top of her class but is forced to drop out of school because she can’t afford a school uniform.” . . . The story of Africa in turmoil is the African narrative that many Americans – and certainly those who read The New York Times – already know. It is virtually the only type of reporting that Western news outlets broadcast about the continent. . . Americans don’t need any more stories of a dying Africa. Instead, we should learn of a living one. Kristof and his winners should investigate how it is that Botswana had the highest per-capita growth of any country in the world for the last 30 years of the twenty-first century.

I believe she is correct. The Times and — I’ll take her word for it — “Western news outlets” in general have made a serious mistake in their Africa coverage: Far too much coverage of failure relative to success. An especially curious misjudgment because generally journalists like feel-good stories.

Could an entire well-respected profession do the wrong thing for a long time? Well, Jane Jacobs thinks so. In a 2000 interview, she said this about economists:

One place where past economic theory has gone wrong in a subtle way is that it has always been called upon for explanations of breakdowns and trouble. Look how foreign aid, even today, is all about poverty and where things are not working. There is no focus on trying to learn how things are working when they work. And if you are going to get a good theory about how things work, you have to focus on how they work, not on how they break down. You can look forever at a broken down wagon or airplane and not learn what it did when it was working.

Maybe you say Jacobs wasn’t a real economist (because she didn’t write mainstream academic papers). Well, consider this. In the 1960s, Saul Sternberg changed the face of experimental psychology when he showed what could be done with reaction-time experiments, which are set up so that the subject almost always gets the right answer. Before Sternberg, memory and perception were usually studied via percent-correct experiments, set up so that subjects were often wrong.

Sternberg’s reaction-time research was so much more revealing than the percent-correct research that preceded it that almost everyone switched to using reaction time. The profession of experimental psychologists had done the wrong thing for a long time.

You Can’t Change Something Unless You Love It — Jane Jacobs

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I think very highly of Philip Weiss and rarely disagree with him. But I certainly disagree with this:

My first feeling seeing the crapulous tape on the news last night was, Burn it. What more are we going to learn about this sick monster [the Virginia Tech shooter] from his first-person maunderings? O.K., archive it, let criminologists study it, but why give him the attention he so craved? Wipe his name from history. Did you notice he honored Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris of Columbine in his statement? Why not erase their names too.

I have not yet found the interview in which Jane Jacobs says something like “It’s a funny thing. You can’t change something unless you love it.” But I did find an interview in which she said:

You can’t prescribe decently for something you hate. It will always come out wrong.

The longer you hate the Virginia Tech shooter, as Mr. Weiss and many others do, the longer it will be till you understand what to do about him — how to prevent such things in the future. It was a fundamentally decent thing that the shooter did by sending that stuff to NBC. Like everyone, he wants to be listened to. As I blogged earlier, one of my students did a project that involved visiting homeless people in People’s Park. He was surprised by how much they wanted to talk to him. The solution to homelessness, he was pretty sure, would involve a lot of listening.

Addendum: A forensic psychiatrist named Michael Weiner argues the opposite (that showing the videos does no good and lots of bad) here. Jacobs’ view is supported by a wealth of evidence. I can’t tell if any evidence supports Weiner’s view.

Jane Jacobs on College

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Jane Jacobs, the urban and economic theorist, wrote:

Only in stagnant economies does work stay docilely within given categories. And wherever it is forced to stay within prearranged categories — whether by zoning, by economic planning, or by guilds, associations or unions — the process of adding new work to old can occur little if at all.

In the case of college, the “work” is post-high-school education. College students are not forced to join a union but the need for credentials forces them to attend college, where, as Jacobs correctly predicts, a narrow range of subjects is taught in a narrow range of ways. Take my department (psychology at UC Berkeley). As one of my students, a psychology major, asked, why isn’t there a course about relationships? That’s what’s really important, he said. Yes, why not? There has never been such a course at Berkeley nor, to my knowledge, at any other elite university. What a curious omission. And why do practically all classes involve lectures, reading assignments, and tests? Aren’t there a thousand ways to teach and learn? I think Jacobs has the answer: Work has been forced to stay within prearranged categories — categories that seem increasingly outdated. The pattern of chapters in almost all introductory psychology textbooks (which cost about $100) derives from the 1950s!

An earlier post by me about college. Other people’s comments. Jane Jacobs on the food industry and scientific method.

Jane Jacobs on the Food Industry

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According to Paul Goldberger in the NY Sun,

[Jane Jacobs] regretted the construction of more and bigger buildings, and the enormous power held by the real estate industry, Mr. Goldberger said. “But she was also a realist,” he said. “She was not Utopian, and I think that was the thing that distinguished her from many other intellectual and urban thinkers. She believed that the world we had was actually pretty good, if only we would learn to understand it, appreciate it, and handle it right.”

Exactly. That is what I was saying in my comments on Michael Pollan (here and here). Our food world — which is mainly a processed food world, very little food is unprocessed — is actually pretty good. Some food processing is done according to wrong theories — the wrong theory that fat per se is fattening, for example. The newest food processing gets the most attention because it is still noteworthy (e.g., low-fat foods) but it is new theories that are most likely to be wrong. This is why “processed food” gets a bad rap. Most food processing, which is no longer advertised and we no longer notice because it is so common, is done according to correct theories — the main examples being cooking, refrigeration, freezing, and other forms of germ reduction. The germ theory of disease is correct. The poor health of many Americans reveals plenty of room for better understanding; I think the theory behind the Shangri-La diet is an example of better understanding. That theory suggests new types of food processing, as I explain in the last chapter of the book.