Category: Jane Jacobs

More about Pollan and Processed Food

Seth Roberts4 Comments

A reader named Shawn made an interesting comment on Michael Pollan vs. Processed Food:

I’d like to point out that your example of fortifying flour (white flour, actually) is not really that great, since in this case they are simply adding back some (but not all) of the nutrients that were destroyed in processing. Whole wheat flour does not have to be fortified because it has those nutrients to begin with — which actually supports Pollan’s arguments against food processing.

That’s true, it does support Pollan’s argument against food processing. More detail will help make my underlying logic clearer. Flour is milled for several reasons, the details of which don’t matter; let me just say that white flour is more profitable than whole wheat flour, thus can be sold at a lower price. In terms of price, milling is win-win: the supplier makes more profit and the customer gets cheaper flour. But when you consider nutrition — milled flour less nutritious than unmilled — it is not clear at all that milling is win-win. B vitamin supplementation, by cheaply replacing what the milling took out, moves us back to win-win. Not milling is not win-win: It is nothing-nothing.

When you process food based on a correct theory — an accurate understanding of how our bodies work — the result is often win-win. When you process food based on a wrong theory, it is much harder to reach that result. This is what Pollan didn’t understand. As usual, Jane Jacobs said it best. In response to people who said that Problem X or Problem Y was due to overpopulation — just as Pollan is anti-food-processing — Jacobs said the problem is not too many people, the problem is the undone work. In the case of food, the problem is not too much processing, the problem is the undone work — the undone work of coming up with good theories to guide the processing.

Self-Experimentation = Old Buildings

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In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote, “Old ideas can use new buildings, but new ideas need old buildings.” New ideas need old buildings because old buildings are cheap. New ideas cannot be expected to be especially profitable, or profitable at all, at first. This is why self-experimentation should have a permanent place in the ecology of science: It provides a cheap way to develop new ideas.

How Important is IQ?

Seth Roberts12 Comments

I teach at UC Berkeley. A few years ago I had an eye-opening experience about college teaching and evaluation. I was teaching an undergraduate seminar on depression. For the term project, I allowed/required students to do anything they wanted related to depression, so long as it was off campus and not library research. One student chose to give a talk to a high school class about depression. This would be unremarkable except that she had severe stage fright. The thought of speaking in front of any group terrified her. Every step of planning and doing the talk was very hard. But she managed to do it. In her term-project paper she wrote, “I learned that if I really wanted to, I could conquer my fear, and do what I needed to do” — among the most stirring words I have ever read.

Her work until then — class participation, writing assignments — had put her in the bottom half of the class. Yet her term project showed her to be resourceful (using the term project assignment in a useful way) and courageous (making herself do something that scared her). She chose the assignment that revealed these qualities. Ved Mehta, the writer, who is blind, spent his early years almost entirely within a small school compound. One day he was taken to the beach. He was astonished how freely he could run around. “The school compound . . . suddenly shrank in my mind, like a woollen sock . . . which became so small after [the housekeeper] washed it that I could scarcely get my hand in it,” he wrote in Vedi. As I read my student’s description of what she had done, I saw how narrow and restricted my usual assignments and my usual way of evaluating students had been.

I am sorry that Charles Murray, Bell Curve coauthor, has apparently never had a similar experience. In an op-ed (“Aztecs vs Greeks”) in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, alas, he made clear his belief that persons with a high IQ are more important economically and culturally than persons with a lower IQ. “We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted,” he wrote — “gifted” meaning “high IQ.” He used the phrase the gifted. The gifted? If there are thirty or fifty or a thousand different useful sets of abilities, to single out one of them — the one that produces a high score on an IQ test — makes no sense. It’s like referring to the sentence. That makes no sense. There are many useful sentences. We need all of them.

Persons with a high IQ do better at certain jobs, no doubt; but Murray fails to realize that such jobs are a tiny fraction of our economy and that discrimination against any group — failure to help any group develop their skills — is economically damaging because it reduces economic diversity (Jane Jacobs’ point). Murray thinks we should treat high-IQ kids better. He fails to see that it is not people with high IQs who are under-served by the present system; it is everyone else — everyone with other gifts. Plenty of jobs demand resourcefulness and courage, for example, qualities that are probably uncorrelated with IQ, as my student emphasized to me. Both resourcefulness and courage are required to start a new business, which is the most economically important job of all.

Andrew Gelman’s reaction to similar ideas. More about Charles Murray, IQ, and education. A paper of mine about encouraging diversity in learning.

Charles Murray vs. Charles Murray

Seth Roberts8 Comments

The Bell Curve (1994) by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which argued that IQ is destiny, was the most IQ-glorifying book since . . . well, ever. Now Mr. Murray has taken a big step away from his position in that book, yet he continues to glorify IQ.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Mr. Murray wrote an op-ed piece (“What’s wrong with vocational school?”) with which I mostly agree. His main point is that for most students, college is a waste of time. As a college teacher (at Berkeley), I have seen that all too clearly. Mr. Murray has an unfortunate way of stating his position. “A four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.” I’d put it differently: A four-year college education teaches analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the interest of most people. I am sure that if my students or anyone’s students were more interested in the material, they would learn it better. That most college students are not interested in the same things as most college professors is a good thing, economically speaking. A healthy economy is a diverse economy; a diverse economy requires a wide range of skills and knowledge, much wider than the narrow skills and knowledge possessed and taught by college teachers. But it is a bad thing for the students and teachers, who are trapped. They have to be there. I feel worse for the students, of course — they are paying to be there.

It isn’t complicated: IQ tests were designed to predict school performance. They do. People with higher IQs do better in school. To believe in the value of IQ is to believe in the school system it reflects. To glorify one is to glorify the other. Now Mr. Murray has taken a step away from one (the school system) but not the other (IQ). Well, nobody’s perfect.

Were I grading The Bell Curve, I would give it a B. The sad truth is that its basic conclusion, that a high IQ is really helpful, is entirely correct. A better book would have replaced the wacky genetic chapter with an attempt to understand why IQ matters so much. In a world where we place less weight on successful completion of college — the world that Murray now advocates — IQ will matter less.

In The Nature of Economies, Jane Jacobs pointed to the stultifying effects of discrimination. “Macho cultures typically have pitiful, weak economies,” she wrote. “Half their population, doing economically important types of work, such as cooking and food processing . . . are excluded from taking initiatives to develop all that work [e.g., open a restaurant] — and nobody else does it, either.” IQ discrimination is also stultifying. If our society did a better job of helping students who are not good at college — helping them find jobs where their abilities shine, instead of wasting four precious years of their lives — the entire economy would benefit.

Yet More about Omega-3

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Perhaps inspired by USA Today, the New York Times discusses DHA, an omega-3 fat sold as a food additive. “Magical or overrated?” is the question posed by the headline. According to Marion Nestle, overrated:

“My experience in nutrition is that single nutrients rarely produce miracles,” said Marion Nestle, a professor in the department of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and the author of “What to Eat,” published last year. “But it’s also been my experience that companies will put anything in their food if they think the extra marketing hype will help them sell more of it.”

Single nutrients rarely produce miracles? There is a long history in nutrition of just that: The story of the discovery of vitamins. One single-nutrient miracle after another. Given that history, the claims for omega-3 are plausible. If Nestle has an alternative explanation for the many results that point to the benefits of omega-3, that would be interesting to hear. It wasn’t provided in the article. “Companies will put anything in their food if they think the extra marketing hype will help them sell more of it”? Well, B vitamin supplementation of flour has cut the rate of neural tube birth defects roughly in half, a huge benefit, a huge amount of averted misery. Given that success, it is reasonable to think that other supplementation might also be helpful — to everyone. I discuss derogatory treatment of food companies (”will put anything in their food if . . . hype will help them sell more of it”) in the last chapter of The Shangri-La Diet. Curiously enough, Jane Jacobs once said, you can only change something if you love it.

I have done more self-experimentation about omega-3s and will describe the results in a week or two. Previous posts about omega-3 here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here

Methodological Lessons from Self-Experimentation (part 3 of 4)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

4. There are serious defects in the way science is usually done. I found a new and powerful way of losing weight — yet I’m an outsider to that area. Although obesity is a huge problem, and hundreds of millions of dollars go into obesity research every year, I was completely outside that group of people and resources. If science is being done properly, there should be a relation between input and output — the more input, the more output. That failed here. Professional obesity researchers, given vast input, failed to discover this; whereas I, given zero input, managed to do so. You might say this was a weird fluke except the same thing happened again with mood: I discovered a powerful way of changing mood, even though I was an outsider to the study of mood. Depression is a huge problem, vast resources go into trying to do something about it.

What the serious defects are has no simple answer. After the next lesson learned I’ll try to explain what I think is wrong.

5. There are serious strengths in the way science is usually done. I relied heavily on conventional science and could never have gotten where I did without it. Ramirez and Cabanac did brilliant research. I say there are serious strengths in conventional science because I used conventional scientific methods and conclusions to find a new solution to a serious problem — obesity is a serious problem. I didn’t just use conventional scientific tools; I also used self-experimentation, which is unconventional. But self-experimentation alone wouldn’t have gotten very far, I’m sure. The turning point in my weight control research was reading a paper by Ramirez about rat experiments. Not only did I use a vast number of conclusions from conventional science, I also used conventional experimental designs and standard, common tools for data analysis, such as programs for plotting data.

To say that science is glorified common sense has a lot of truth to it. To say that science is a collection of methods to help us understand and control the world also has a lot of truth to it. But science is far more than a collection of tools; it is a whole community and culture, with beliefs as well as tools. Like any culture, many of its beliefs are based on faith.

Here is a story to illustrate what happens. It’s pure human nature. Suppose someone gave you a power saw. Your first thought is: Wow, I have a power saw. There are many things I can now do that I couldn’t do before. It seems like a pure benefit. No negatives. You learn how to use the power saw and you become better and better at using it. Eventually you start to make a living using the power saw — other people, who don’t have a power saw, pay you to saw stuff for them. You become a power-saw professional and, along with other professionals, you establish rules about how to use power saws. To save the public from bad power saw usage, you establish a licensing test to become a power-saw professional. Your view of yourself is: I know how to use a power saw. And if there is a problem to be solved, you try to solve it with your power saw — that’s what you know how to do best. All this makes perfect sense to you. Hundreds of professions have followed this path. What is hard for you to notice is that in certain ways you have become weaker — if a problem doesn’t call for power-saw usage, you are less likely to find the solution. Because you are too busy making a living using your power saw.

I hope my point is obvious. Budding scientists go to graduate school where they learn a bundle of specialized research methods that varies from one research area to the next. That is their power saw. After graduate school, they make a living using the techniques that they have learned. After graduate school, they are in better shape to make a living; but they are in worse shape to solve problems for which the techniques that they have learned are not appropriate. Conventional scientific methods could go part of the way toward finding the Shangri-La Diet; but they could not go all the way. Other techniques were needed — very simple ones, pre-power-saw. So conventional science never found it.

In Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs gives another example of this. During a recent heat wave in Chicago, two nearby neighborhoods, similar in many ways, had very different death rates. A good explanation of the difference was provided by a graduate student in sociology, who used very simple very low-cost methods. In contrast, a task force of scientists from the Centers For Disease Control, with vast resources and great methodological sophistication, failed to explain the difference. They were blinded by their expertise. They failed to see that their methods weren’t working.

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Is Drinking Olive Oil Healthy?

Seth Roberts46 Comments

In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs wrote about an isolated North Carolina hamlet that her aunt visited in 1923:

One of my aunt’s tasks there was to see to construction of a church. . . One of the farmers donated, as a site, a beautiful knoll beside the river and my aunt suggested the building be made of fine large stones which were already quarried, as it were, needing little dressing, there for the taking in the creek and river beds. No, said the community elders, it was a pretty idea but not possible. . . . Entire walls and buildings of stone would not be safe.

These people came of a parent culture that had not only reared stone parish churches from time immemorial, but great cathedrals.

Likewise, nutritional wisdom is forgotten. Drinking olive oil now seems absurd to some people. But it was practiced in at least one place in the not-so-distant past:

In a mountain village in Crete, [Ancel] Keys saw old farmers working in the field who drank only a glass of olive oil for breakfast; he later verified that one of them was 106 years old.

From Todd Tucker, The Great Starvation Experiment, p. 204. There is a whole organization (Oldways) devoted to preserving ancient foodways and using them for nutritional guidance. The best practitioner of this approach has been Dr. Weston Price, a dentist, whose work is nicely summarized here. Dr. Price traveled the world looking for economically-primitive societies (“native peoples”) with ancient eating habits and excellent health. Their diets, especially the common elements, would suggest what a healthy diet must have.

Two of Dr. Price’s conclusions are relevant to the Shangri-La Diet:

1. “All native peoples studied made great efforts to obtain seafood.” This supports my comments about the importance of omega-3 fats, found much more in seafood than in other foods.

2. “The last major feature of native diets that Price found was that they were rich in fat, especially animal fat.” The animal fat in native diets would be high in omega-3 because the animals were eating grasses and other plants, not corn.

When I wrote my long paper on self-experimentation I divided it into two parts: one titled “Stone-Age Life Suits Us” (the common thread of the five examples), the other about weight control (the research behind SLD). The two parts struck me as quite different. Drinking sugar water to lose weight was definitely not a return to a Stone-Age lifestyle. But the big improvements in SLD since I wrote that paper — from sugar water to ELOO, and from ELOO to oils high in omega-3 — brought SLD much closer to the Stone-Age-Life-Suits-Us theme, I now see.

Christmas: An Evolutionary Explanation

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In a kitchenware store a few years ago I came across the Rotary Nutcracker, a futuristic-looking device that cracks nuts in a new way. The girl at the cash register gave me a few walnuts to test it. It didn’t crack any of them. This was a curious product, I thought. Who would buy it? The salesperson told me that they’d stocked it for less than a year. I was the first person to test it. It had sold well during holiday season. Now I understood: people didn’t buy it for themselves, they bought it as a gift. As a gift, it mattered much less how well it worked — “it’s the thought that counts.” No wonder I was the first to test it.

Here, I saw, was my theory of human evolution in . . . well, a nutshell. At least part of it. Humans are the only animals with occupational specialization — we specialize, and trade. It started with hobbies. Hobbies became part-time jobs. Part-time jobs became full-time jobs. To support full-time jobs — to generate enough demand — there has to be enough expertise, which builds up slowly. To build up expertise, our brains changed so as to cause creation of special events like Christmas, Japanese New Year, Spring Festival (in China), and a thousand other examples around the world. Such events increase the demand for high-end craftsmanship, thus helping the most skilled craftsmen — the ones most likely to advance the state of their art — make a living. Christmas increases the demand for Christmas cards (fine printing) and Christmas-tree ornaments, for example. Traditional gift-giving has the same effect: It increases demand for “the better things in life.” Most gifts, if you follow the usual norms, are (a) not something you would buy for yourself and (b) not something the recipient would buy. (As Alex Tabarrok has noticed.) They are harder to make — and thus reward skilled craftsmen more — than the stuff we buy for ourselves, just as Christmas ornaments are harder to make than common household objects and Christmas-card printing is more difficult than most printing. Weddings, with the gifts, finery, invitations, etc., are another example. The Rotary Nutcracker didn’t work in my tests but it almost worked. If enough people bought it as a gift, that would finance the research needed to improve it.

Marginal Revolution and James Surowiecki have recently written about the “deadweight loss of Christmas” — about how gifts tend to be worth less than their cost. I think they see this as bad thing but I see it as a good thing — at least, in our evolutionary past it was a good thing. Likewise, the denizens of The Devil Wears Prada appear slightly defensive about the social value of fashion. They seem to believe that fashion is less useful than “curing cancer” (by which they mean doing research to learn how to cure cancer). Actually, high fashion, with its hard-to-make skirts, belts, and accessories, is the same as curing cancer — they’re two ways of increasing the human skill set. Art is the old Science.

Books Were the First Open-Source Software

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Here is Aaron Swartz on Wikipedia:

When you put it all together, the story becomes clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information [to a Wikipedia entry], then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

(Correcting Wikipedia’s founder, by the way.) When I visited my editor, Marian Lizzi, at Penguin, I realized that book publishing is exactly the same: Outsiders write the books, insiders edit them.

The curious thing about book publishing is similar to what Swartz noticed in a different realm: The content, the crucial stuff, is entirely from amateurs. No other industry, with the possible exception of craft shows, is like this. If I run a deli, I buy supplies and food from people who make their living selling supplies and food. If I make clothes, I buy my cloth from professional cloth makers. If I make cheese, my milk comes from professional farmers. Only book publishers endlessly deal with amateurs.

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