Category: Modern Veblen

“Trying to Confuse You”: Pluses and Minuses of the Professorial Value System

Seth Roberts5 Comments

A Chinese friend of mine is a chemistry major. In one of her classes, the textbook was so hard to understand she said the authors are “trying to confuse you.” They use difficult words, for example. A Berkeley art history major told me much the same thing. In her reading assignments, she said, the writers couldn’t write a sentence without a few big words. They were trying to impress readers, she believed.

Yes, professors write badly — in these two cases, the writing seemed actively bad. Thorstein Veblen wrote a whole book about showing off (The Theory of the Leisure Class). One chapter was about professors. They show off, said Veblen, by doing research with no practical application and by writing obscurely. Obscure writing is showing off because, like useless research, it shows you don’t have to care what other people think (“it carries a pointed suggestion of the industrial exemption of the speaker”).

Veblen said little about the costs and benefits of the behavior he described, beyond calling it wasteful. I say the opposite — not wasteful at all. When, long ago, people bought “useless” (“deadweight loss”) gifts or “useless” hood ornaments or decorated buildings with “useless” ornamentation or performed “useless” rituals and ceremonies that require special products (e.g., special clothes), they subsidized skilled artisans. For a long time, that was incredibly important. Research by skilled artisans led to better tools, the creation of metals, and so on. Helping those artisans make a living supported (increased) research in material science. Pushing people toward “useless” research was valuable because it diversified the research being done — there are many ways to be useless, just as you can misspell a word more ways than you can spell it correctly. The most important discoveries, such as electricity, would not have been made if everyone tried to do research with obvious application. Allowing professors to use big words and write badly is a small price to pay for the valuable “useless” research they perform.

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There is an unrecognized problem with this, however. If you get one group of people to do “useless” research by turning things upside down so that useless is seen as better than useful (professors value “pure” research over “applied” research), it becomes very hard for them to do useful research. For a long time, practically all important research was material science research — how to control the material world. When something useful was discovered via “useless” research, the knowledge could be transferred to everyone else, who had normal values (useful is better than useless). Everyone else went on to use the knowledge in profitable ways — to make better knives, for example. This system (the results of “useless” research are used by other people to make a profit) gave us the world we live in, a world of wonderful products. The products on offer are staggering in their diversity, low cost, and general excellence. The hard drive on my laptop, the clothes I wear, for example.

Against this brilliant control of materials we can put our amazing lack of control of our bodies. A large fraction of Americans sleep poorly. Nothing (such as street noise) is making them sleep badly; they just don’t know how to sleep well. Depression is a huge problem, obesity is a huge problem (in America), and so on. It isn’t just ordinary people. Sleep experts don’t know how to improve sleep, weight control experts don’t know how to lose weight, psychiatrists don’t know how to prevent depression, and so on. Closely related to this is our health care system. It is dominated by doctors, who often use a peculiar and self-serving reasoning I call doctor logic. When I was a graduate student, my dermatologist was surprised when I measured my acne to see if the treatments he prescribed actually worked. It was a new idea to him. An influential Stanford psychiatrist named David Burns, whose famous book has sold millions of copies, has not yet figured out it would be a good idea to measure daily the mood of his patients. (Other psychiatrists are even worse.)

Why are we so smart about materials and so stupid about health — which is far more important? I think it is because the whole system evolved to push our economy forward via advances in material science. For hundreds of thousands of years, that is where improvement was possible: better stuff, such as better tools. The same “habits of mind” (as Veblen would say) and research system has managed to produce plenty of “useless” knowledge outside of material science. This knowledge can be translated into useful discoveries, as I have done (new ways to sleep better, lose weight, be in a better mood, and so on), but these discoveries don’t lead to products, at least not in obvious ways. Control of our bodies is quite different than making something physical. My first interesting self-experimental discovery was that eating breakfast made my sleep worse. That’s very useful, but not at all profitable — there is no obvious associated product. For professors, a problem with my discovery is that it’s useful. (Another problem is that it’s small.) For everyone else, a problem is that it isn’t profitable. The system that worked so well for material science breaks down when it comes to health science.

Yet the fact that you are reading this suggests, at least to me, that a big change is coming.

 

Oral Rehydration Therapy For Diarrhea

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Oral rehydration therapy (ORT) is given to people (usually children) suffering from diarrhea, which before ORT was often fatal. It is very simple: The sufferer drinks water with sugar and salt ad libitum (as much as they want). You probably haven’t heard of ORT — at least, I hadn’t. Everyone has heard of antibiotics. Yet “ in 10 years [ORT] saved more lives than penicillin had in 40.” Infant diarrhea was once (and may still be) the main cause of death in poor countries.

A history of its discovery supports several things I’ve said on this blog. One is Thorstein Veblen’s point about the disdain among professional scientists for useful research:

ORT might also have been developed long before 1968 but for the attitudes of the dominant medical establishment toward practical experimentation, which the Cholera Research Laboratory and the National Institutes for Health shared. Nalin believes that “the people at the lab … got kudos for the extent to which [their] work was not practical. As soon as it became practical it was discarded like a soiled towel–it was too common, too hands-on… so the prestige went to people who measured trans-intestinal fluxes or electrical currents”.

No one who has attended an elite law school, medical school, or graduate program in education will be surprised by this.

Another is the great resistance among the medical establishment to cheap and effective solutions:

The formidable and persistent ignorance of the Western medical establishment, which continues over twenty-five years after the discovery of ORT, is phenomenal. While its refusal to advocate ORT may be due in part to the notion that ORT is only necessary for people in the developing world, its actions appear to be driven also by financial considerations. Most hospitals do not train physicians in the use of ORT since they have no financial reason to do so. [I think “since” overstates what is known — Seth] The use of intravenous therapy, which often involves keeping a dehydrated child overnight, assures [greater] insurance reimbursement. Sending children home with ORT would [reduce] profits. Furthermore, recent studies show that diarrhoeal illness among the elderly may incur even greater health care costs that could also be reduced by the use of ORT. At a time of heated discussion about cost-containment in health care, it seems all the more ironic and egregious that a superior, cheap, and proven therapy [fails to replace] a far more expensive one. Estimates based on the cost of hospitalizations and physician visits suggest that ORT could save billions of dollars annually.

As an example of the resistance of American doctors to a better therapy, an ORT researcher, who had used it on Apache reservations in America, told this story:

I had an anthropologist friend who adopted an Apache child from the [Arizona] reservation where we were working. He used to be the anthropologist on the reservation. And then he [left the reservation and] went to Arkansas to teach and the Apache child came down with severe diarrhea and he called me up and he said desperately, “Look, my son’s in the hospital and they’re giving him all sorts of intravenous fluids. The diarrhea’s not stopping, he’s losing weight, they’re not feeding him. I know that you did this work in Arizona [on the reservation] and it didn’t look like that. . . . Would you call this professor of pediatrics and just collegiately talk to him?” So I called up the professor and told him that in our experience with Apache children this is what we found and here’s the publication and so on. And he said to me, “Doctor, doctor, our [Arkansas] children are not the same as your [reservation] children”. He was treating an Apache child from the same reservation.

Shades of Downton Abbey (where Lady Sybil died because a London doctor was listened to instead of a rural doctor).

Why Quantified Self Matters

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Why Quantified Self Matters is the title of a talk I gave yesterday at a Quantified Self conference in Beijing. I gave six examples of things I’d discovered via self-tracking and self-experiment (self-centered moi?), such as how to lose weight (the Shangri-La Diet) and be in a better mood. I said that the Quantified Self movement matters because it supports that sort of thing, i.e., personal science, which has several advantages over professional science. The Quantified Self movement supports learning from data, in contrast to trusting experts.

If I’d had more time, I would have said that personal science and professional science have different strengths. Personal science is good at both the beginning of research (when a new idea has not yet been discovered) and the end of research (when a new idea, after having been confirmed, is applied in everyday life). It is a good way to come up with plausible new ideas and a good way to develop them (assess their plausibility when they are still not very plausible, figure out the best dose, the best treatment details). That’s the beginning of research. Personal science is also a good way to take accepted ideas and apply them in everyday life (e.g., a medical treatment, an idea about deficiency disease) because it fully allows for human diversity (e.g., a medicine that works for most people doesn’t work for you, you have an allergy, whatever). That’s the end of research.

Professional science works well, better than personal science, when an idea is in a middle range of plausibility — quite plausible but not yet fully accepted. At that point it fits a professional scientist’s budget. Their research must be expensive (Veblen might have coined the term conspicuous research, in addition to “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous leisure”) and only quite plausible ideas are worth expensive tests. It also fits their other needs, such as avoidance of “crazy” ideas and a steady stream of publishable results (because ideas that are quite plausible are likely to produce usable results when tested). Professional science is also better than personal science for studying all sorts of “useless” topics. They aren’t actually useless but the value is too obscure and perhaps the research too expensive for people to study them on their own (e.g., I did research on how rats measure time).

In other words, the Quantified Self movement matters because it gives all of us a new scientific tool. A way to easily see where the scientific tools we already have cannot easily see.

 

 

Genomics Confidential: Iceland Not So Wonderful

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Many people think that personal genomics will change medicine. Doctors will choose treatments based on your genome, learning your genome will tell you what diseases you are at high risk of so you can take precautions, and so on. One person who believes this is Eric Topol. In his new book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine, he writes:

The biggest leap came in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The six billion bases of the human genome were sequenced, and this led to the discovery of the underpinnings of over one hundred common diseases, including most cancers, heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, and neurologic conditions.

Here is the founder of a company that makes sequencers: ““I believe that the impact on the medical community of whole human genome sequencing at a cost comparable to a comprehensive blood test will be profound.”

I disagree. I have seen nothing that suggests genes make a big difference in any common disease and plenty that suggests environment makes a big difference. My self-experimentation led me to one powerful environmental factor after another, for example. Biologists have invested heavily in the study of genes for reasons that have nothing to do with practical applications, as Thorstein Veblen would be the first to point out.

In 1999, New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter wrote an admiring article about a neurology professor named Kari Stefansson. Stefansson had returned to his native Iceland to take advantage of Iceland’s genetic homogeneity to find genes for common diseases. “In the past, drugs were discovered almost by chance,” Specter wrote, as if this would soon change. The wishful thinking involved is indicated by passages like this:

[Stefansson] and Gulcher selected the five per cent of Icelanders among the hundreds of thousands in their genealogical database who had lived the longest— most of them over ninety. The database allowed the two scientists to seek an answer to a simple question: Are these people who live so long related to each other more often than the average in Iceland? The answer quickly became apparent. People over ninety are much more closely related to each other than people in the general population are, and their children are more likely to live longer than the children of others. That provides strong evidence that the trait is inherited.

“Strong” evidence? The “people over ninety” observation is strong evidence that longevity is inherited only if relatives share nothing but genes. The “their children are more likely” observation is strong evidence of genetic control only if parents pass on to their children only genes. Both assumptions are highly unlikely. For example, surely an Icelandic person lives closer to his relatives than to randomly selected Icelanders.

The article quotes no one with my view (geneticists are overstating the practical value of their work), but it does say that “Stefansson set out to raise capital at a time [1996] when investors had become skeptical about the many unfulfilled promises made by companies claiming that genetic research would solve the ills of humanity.”

Will reality overtake hype? Here is an indication this is happening:

Kari [Stefansson], a neurologist, was a Harvard professor when he co-founded deCODE in 1996. Two years later, Iceland’s parliament gave deCODE access to one of the country’s unique resources—health records of the genetically homogenous population. DeCODE debuted on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 2000, and it made dramatic discoveries of genetic factors associated with cancer, heart disease and other conditions. But the company never turned a profit and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009.

 

DIYization: The Word I Was Looking For

Seth Roberts1 Comment

In a recent post I wondered what’s a good word to describe the next step in economic progress after specialization — when making/doing X is done by the general public (not as a job) instead of just by paid specialists (as a job). For example, the introduction of cheap cameras allowed the general public, not just professional photographers, to take pictures. Personal science is an example of such a shift, of course. Thank you for your many suggestions, such as laitization, deguilding, promethization, and several more. The combination of Keimpe Wiersma’s suggestion (DIY) and wobbly’s suggestion (deguilding) led me to DIYing and DIYization.

DIYing, I learned, is an existing word with a different meaning (to do DIY). Although ordinary DIY (Home Depot) is associated with men, women appear to use DIYing far more than men and they use it to describe traditionally feminine activities (see this). For example, there is a blog DIYing To Be Domestic by a woman. This is irrelevant to whether I use it — it’s just interesting.

DIYization is much rarer. It appears in a 2005 essay called “Scandinavian Dreams: DIY, Democratisation and IKEA” where it refers not to a change in an activity but to a change in society — toward more DIY. IKEA, says the essayist, is an example of “the DIYization of society.”

DIYing is shorter. DIYization is more self-explanatory, less likely to be confused with dying, and makes clearer the connection with specialization. Not to mention it is more pompous — more Veblenesque. In the last chapter of The Theory of The Leisure Class, Veblen used long rare words to say that academics show off their uselessness using by using long rare words.

SOPA Strike

Seth Roberts6 Comments

SOPA is an example of what Thorstein Veblen called “the vested interests” trying to prevent change. In an essay called “ The Vested Interests and the Common Man” he pointed out “the existence of powerful vested interests which stand to gain from the persistence of the existing, but outdated system of law and custom.” Jane Jacobs said much the same thing. The most important conflict in any society, she wrote at the end of The Economy of Cities, isn’t between the rich and poor or management and labor; it is between those who benefit from the status quo and those who benefit from change. If those who benefit from the status quo usually win, problems stack up unsolved.

“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?

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Medicine

Seth Roberts3 Comments

To rehabilitate his reputation, Alfred Nobel, in his will, established the Nobel Prizes, the crucial element of which was that they honor the most useful research. Nobel wanted to be associated with good works. This has become a considerable problem for the committee that awards the Physiology and Medicine prize because, if you haven’t noticed, the most prestigious research — the stuff done at great expense in gleaming new laboratories — isn’t useful. The uselessness of high-prestige academic research was emphasized by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Unfortunately Nobel died shortly before it was published.

For a long time, the Nobel prize-winning research in Medicine hasn’t provided significant help with major health problems (depression, obesity, diabetes, cancer, stroke, heart disease, etc.). Sometimes it has been a tiny bit helpful. Most often the prize-winning research has been, at the time of the award, no clear help at all. This is one of those years. The press release announcing the 2011 prize tries to hide this important truth. Here is the “what use is it?” section of this year’s press release:

From fundamental research to medical use

The discoveries that are awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize have provided novel insights into the activation and regulation of our immune system. They have made possible the development of new methods for preventing and treating disease, for instance with improved vaccines against infections and in attempts to stimulate the immune system to attack tumors. These discoveries also help us understand why the immune system can attack our own tissues, thus providing clues for novel treatment of inflammatory diseases.

“They have made possible the development of new methods for preventing and treating disease.” False (and, uh, just a wee bit grandiose). Such development was already possible. Note what isn’t said: “They led to new methods for preventing and treating disease.”

“Improved vaccines against infections.” I have heard nothing about this, in spite of the plural (vaccines rather than vaccine). In any case, this is faint praise because the improvement might be a small percentage. If you know whether this claim is true, please leave a comment. Again note what isn’t said: “New vaccines”. According to this article, the work led to a vaccine against prostate cancer. (With no noticeable benefit so far.) Does the press release writer think prostate cancer is infectious?

“Attempts to stimulate the immune system to attack tumors.” Attempts? As in failed attempts? Apparently.

The final sentence (“These discoveries also help us understand . . . “) is out of place. The section is about actually helping people (“medical use”) not ivory-tower stuff like “providing clues”. Whoever wrote this is like a student with not enough to say trying to meet a teacher’s minimum word count.

There you have it. The practical value of the research awarded the most prestigious prize in the world — a prize that Alfred Nobel’s will said should be given to “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.”

To make your immune system work better, I am sure there are two simple, practical and powerful ways of doing so: deepen your sleep and eat fermented foods.

The Signaling of Economists

Seth Roberts19 Comments

I like this essay by Brad DeLong about the failure of economics professors. They didn’t just fail to predict the recent economics crisis but they have failed, as far as he can tell, to learn from it. If you are naive, of course this is astonishing — but DeLong is not naive. Yet he is “astonished”. That’s interesting.

It’s hard to imagine DeLong doesn’t know what I am about to say. I imagine anybody with any academic sophistication is aware of it — especially economists. As Thorstein Veblen (an economist) pointed out in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), a great deal of what professors do, including economics professors, is about signaling high status. In economics, this is done by being highly mathematical. (Same in statistics. In art history, it is done by using big words. In engineering it is done by being theoretical. In many areas of science, it is done by using expensive equipment and having a large lab. In many fields it is done by being useless — e.g., preferring “pure” research over “applied” research.) This is no mystery. Economists think a lot about signaling. Michael Spence wrote an influential paper (which included Veblen’s phrase “conspicuous consumption”) and book about it, for example, for which he won a Nobel Prize. (More examples from economics.) But DeLong ignores the signaling of economists. Let me propose why economists haven’t taken the steps DeLong is astonished they haven’t taken: Because it would make them more useful and less mathematical. Thereby signaling lower status.

Why is signaling so common? It is basic biology, yes. But it is also convenient. Here is what Veblen didn’t say: It is so much easier to signal than to make progress. Among animals, it is much easier to signal you will win a fight than to actually win one. Among professors, it is easier to use big words than to write clearly. DeLong wants economists to choose progress over signaling. Shouldn’t an economist not be astonished when the lower-priced option is chosen?

Is Medical Research a Veblen Good?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Felix Salomon argues that fancy restaurants often manage to make their food a Veblen good — something that becomes more desirable when the price goes up. Restaurant food is a way to show off your wealth, in other words.

Veblen and I differ on the long-term value of Veblen goods. Veblen saw them as sort of ridiculous — which is why he coined the amusing term conspicuous waste. Whereas I see them as a way of promoting innovation: Long ago, desire for luxury goods, goods with “wasteful” features, helped the most skilled artisans make a living. These artisans were the best source of innovation within a society.

Unfortunately everyone likes to show off, not just fancy-restaurant-goers. Throughout the medical research community, there is an obvious preference for expensive research over cheaper research. (I’m not saying experimental psychologists such as me are any better: We’re not.) Few medical researchers understand that expensive studies are a last resort and the larger your sample size, the less you understand what you are studying. (Experimental psychologists do understand this.) When people doing research related to health are too concerned with showing off (e.g., doing studies that require expensive equipment) to do effective research, the benefit-cost ratio of Veblenian behavior goes below one. Desire to show off gets in the way of solving health problems. This is why personal science — using science to solve your own problems — is so important: The personal scientist will do whatever works, regardless of how impressive it is.