Category: self-experimentation

30 Rock: East versus West Live Shows

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I suppose I’m one of the few people who know there are many differences between the audiobook version of On Beauty and the printed version. Maybe two per page. The audiobook version was prepared before the printed version was finalized. The printed version is better, of course. Long before that comparison, I was fond of comparing books drawn from New Yorker articles with the articles themselves. The New Yorker versions were better-written (= better-edited). It was a painless way to learn how to write.

Last week the TV show 30 Rock did two live shows: one for the East Coast, one for the West. I noticed many differences. The writing was better in the West version (jokes were improved) but the acting was better in the East version (the comic timing was better, for example). New York magazine has listed the biggest differences. For example:

East Coast: In a flashback, Julia Louis-Dreyfus calls to Jonathan, “Yeah, Chai Boy, get in here. You’ll never be a millionaire … Slumdog Millionaire ref. Blammo!”
West Coast: Instead, Louis-Dreyfus says, “Hurry up, Aladdin, before Jasmine is forced to marry Jafar! Similarities … Lemon out.” It gets way more applause.

East Coast: In the final scene, Liz is happy with how her birthday went. After all, she even “got to eat the cake off the floor.”
West Coast: This time, she “ate the Fonz’s face.”

I wish there was a whole website about this: Differences between Things that are Supposed to Be The Same. I wrote a Spy article about Similarities Between Things that are Supposed to Be Different. I noticed similar jokes in Jay Leno’s and David Letterman’s monologues.

Why Small Change = Big Deal

Seth Roberts14 Comments

Eating a half-stick of butter (60 g) every day apparently improved how fast I can do simple arithmetic problems (e.g., 7-5, 3+1). I improved about 5% — from 630 to 600 msec per problem. My scores had been at 630 msec for months. They suddenly dropped.

A reporter said to me that a 5% improvement isn’t much. You couldn’t notice it. Why did this matter?

I did not reply “ what good is a newborn baby?” I said it mattered for three reasons:

1. You cannot easily produce such an improvement. I was already doing very well. For example, I had already lowered my scores a lot via omega-3. Imagine the world record for the 100 meter dash suddenly dropping 5% due to eating something you can find in a supermarket.

2. A 5% improvement is just the beginning. There is room for optimization — better dosage, better timing of taking the butter, and so on.

3. The brain is a mirror of the rest of the body. Learning the best diet for the brain, at least in terms of fat, will help us learn the best diet for the rest of the body, just as learning what house current is best for one electrical appliance is a guide to what other electrical appliances are designed for. They’re all designed to work with the same house current.

Alas, this is not just a poor answer, it’s what I actually said. I give myself a C+. Reason 1 is almost gibberish. Reason 2 is technocratic. A good answer is more emotional. Reason 3 is okay, if not very clear.

At Berkeley I knew a student who had transferred from a junior college. He is/was black. He had probably gotten into Berkeley because Berkeley administrators wanted to admit more black students. He complained one day that he got C’s on his essays even though “all the words were spelled correctly.” It was frustrating, he said. I am in a similar situation here. My answer is poor but I cannot easily do better.

Learning Chinese Characters

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I have 80 Chinese characters (flashcards for children) taped to a wall of my Beijing apartment. I add about five per day. I wrote about this earlier, before starting. So far it’s working. With almost no effort, no discipline, I know what almost all of them mean. I test myself a little whenever I’m in that room. This is a vast improvement over several previous attempts to learn the characters, such as studying flashcards the usual way or using Anki, a flashcard program.

I ruefully realize this is an application of something I thought of many years ago: the forces we can turn on and off are much weaker than pre-existing forces we can only take advantage of. Burning coal is a force we can turn on and off. Solar power is a pre-existing force we can take advantage of (and which almost everyone in Beijing uses to dry clothes). The sun shines no matter what we do. Deliberate studying we can turn on and off. We can study or not. In contrast, I am inevitably going to be in that room. Taping characters to the wall takes advantage of that.

Breakfast Not All Bad

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I stopped eating breakfast when I discovered it made me wake up too early. My Tsinghua students are reading the paper in which I describe my breakfast research. One of them, a freshman, wrote:

When we [entered] Tsinghua University, the first task we should finish was the military training. [New students have a few weeks of military training.] We were asked to be gathered at 8 o’clock, and then we would do a lot of trainings. As the training was hard and tiring, we all had to eat breakfast in the morning. And I remembered in those days, we all slept well and were early-awakening. When the trainings were over, we began our classes. The time was also 8 o’clock, but many times we didn’t have breakfast in order to save time. Gradually, our awakening time become later and later. Even we set an alarm clock, we felt really reluctant to get up. For a long time, we wondered about that but no idea appeared. Now I got the answer, it has something to do with the breakfast. When I told my roommates, they were indeed surprise. Everyone was curious about why, and I was also interested in that. Maybe if the last day you had breakfast, the next morning your body will still have the motivation to call you up to eat breakfast.

Yes, if you eat at a certain time of day, you will tend to be awake that time of day. The effect has been heavily studied in animals, where it is called anticipatory activity.

Will Eating Half a Stick of Butter a Day Make You Smarter?

Seth Roberts20 Comments

To my pleasant surprise, Mark Frauenfelder posted this call for volunteers. Will eating half a stick of butter per day or a similar amount of coconut fat improve your performance on arithmetic problems? Eri Gentry is organizing a simple trial to find out. The trial is inspired by my recent Quantified Self talk. Study details.

During the question period of my talk, I responded to a question about a trial with 100 volunteers by saying I would suggest starting with 2 volunteers. A reader has written to ask why.

What’s your reasoning behind suggesting only 2 volunteers to test the eating more butter results? You seem highly convinced earlier in the video, but if you were so convinced why not have a larger trial?

Because the trial will be harder than the people running it expect. If you’re going to make mistakes, make small ones.

This is my first rule of science: Do less. A grad student in English once told me that a little Derrida goes a long way and a lot of Derrida goes a little way. Same with data collection. A little goes a long way and a lot goes a little way. A tiny amount of data collection will teach you more than you expect. A large amount will teach you less.

My entire history of self-experimentation started with a small amount of data collection: An experiment about the effectiveness of an acne medicine. It was far more informative than I expected. My doctor was wrong, I was wrong — and it had been so easy to find out.

This may sound like I am criticizing Eri’s study. I’m not. What’s important is to do something, however flawed, that can tell you something you didn’t know. Maybe that should be the first rule, or the zeroth rule. It has the pleasant and unusual property of being easier than you might think.

Thanks to Carl Willat.

Research Fraud in China

Seth Roberts9 Comments

From the New York Times:

Last December, a British journal that specializes in crystal formations announced that it was withdrawing more than 70 papers by Chinese authors whose research was of questionable originality or rigor. . . . “Even fake papers count because nobody actually reads them,” said Mr. Fang, who is more widely known by his pen name, Fang Zhouzi, and whose Web site, New Threads, has exposed more than 900 instances of fakery, some involving university presidents and nationally lionized researchers.

Recently a Tsinghua colleague asked me to fix the English in his paper. Most paragraphs required a few changes every sentence but here and there were whole paragraphs with no mistakes. Presumably he copied them from somewhere else. The material in them was boring — it was like copying from the phone book — so it was hard to care (he wasn’t taking credit for anyone else’s ideas) but I wonder if he realized how obvious it was. I don’t mean this is typical. I have looked at several other papers by Chinese authors and found no patches of perfect English.

The article begins with a false claim by a Chinese doctor — and of course these are truly damaging. In my experience, false claims by American doctors are common. An example is my surgeon recommending an operation that, she said, evidence showed would benefit me. There was no such evidence. One value of self-experimentation is that you can find out if a medicine works, rather than take your doctor’s word for it. I became impressed with self-experimentation when it showed me that an acne medicine (tetracycline, an antibiotic) my dermatologist had prescribed didn’t work. Not at all. He didn’t express any doubts when he prescribed it. Call it forensic DNA testing (e.g., The Innocence Project) for the rest of us.

Perhaps the Chinese people, faced with even more false claims than Americans, can benefit even more from self-experimentation.

Thanks to Tim Beneke.

How to Eat a Lot of Butter

Seth Roberts25 Comments

Since I discovered that butter makes my brain work better, I have been eating half a stick (60 g) per day. Usually half in the morning and half in the evening. It is hard to eat by itself but easy to eat with other foods. I’ve tried a dozen ways of doing this. My top three additions:

1. Pu’er tea. The most convenient. As convenient as drinking tea. Put the butter in hot tea, wait till it melts. I can eat at least 20 g of butter in one cup of tea. Butter tea is common in Tibet. Thanks again to Robin Barooah.

2. Cherry tomatoes. The healthiest and fastest. Slice the tomatoes in half lengthwise, eat each half with a similar-sized piece of butter. It is like that classic Italian combination, mozzarella and tomatoes.

3. Thin-sliced roast beef. The most delicious. Wrap a piece of butter with the roast beef. However, I already eat plenty of meat, it is hard to get thin-sliced roast beef in Beijing, and it is so delicious I end up buying a lot of thin-sliced roast beef.

None of these additions affects brain function (measured by arithmetic score), as far as I can tell, although I suppose the tea wakes me up.

Quantified Self in National Post

Seth Roberts7 Comments

The National Post, a large Canadian newspaper, has a long article about quantitative self-tracking. Overall I like it. It looks at the subject in five or six ways, it focuses on examples of self-tracking rather than people generalizing about it, and, best of all, it includes actual data.

I wasn’t so pleased with the treatment of my work. First, the graph showing my butter data was wrongly labeled and the dividing line between before butter and during butter put in the wrong place. (These mistakes have been fixed.)Â Second, the description of my acne experiments — my dermatologist prescribed Medicines A and B, I found that only B worked — misses the point. True, I found that B worked better than A but far more interesting is that Medicine A (an antibiotic) didn’t work at all. Contrary to what I believed. Antibiotics are dangerous. How many people are taking dangerous drugs with no benefit? Third, the written description of my butter research doesn’t say the main point: butter improved my brain function in the sense that I did arithmetic faster. Instead it says I found butter was better than “standing on something painful”. A billion people would like better-functioning brains. None of them care whether butter is better than standing on something painful.

I pointed out the last two problems to Kathryn Carlson, the author of the article. She replied that in the future she would call me to go over the accuracy of the relevant parts of the article. I had considered asking the people who made the graph to show it to me but had thought because they had my graph of the same data in front of them, they couldn’t go wrong.

A good lesson for me.

Gelatin and Sleep

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I found that pork belly improved my sleep. Pork belly is mainly fat, but is it as simple as that (pork fat improves sleep)? Thomas Seay brought to my attention claims about gelatin by Ray Peat. One was that it improved his sleep:

For years I hadn’t slept through a whole night without waking, and I was in the habit of having some juice or a little thyroid to help me go back to sleep. The first time I had several grams of [commercial] gelatin just before bedtime, I slept without interruption for about 9 hours.

Seay tried gelatin himself and found it improved his sleep. I asked him about this.

What do you do?

I take Great Lakes Unflavored Gelatin. I take about 5 or 6 tablespoons a day (2 tablespoons per meal) usually in hot water. So, that amounts to about 35-42 grams/day. You can also put it in juice or make an aspic with it. Another person I know who takes it only needs to take two tablespoons a day, just prior to sleep.

What effect has it had?

It helps me to sleep more hours uninterrupted. This did not require a build-up over weeks. It happened the first time I took it.

You sound like you’ve stopped taking it. How long did you take it? Why did you stop?

I have taken it off and on. (Usually I would take it one week on, one week off). I have noticed that after a few days it causes constipation FOR ME. Another person I know who has tried it has not noticed this effect. Presently I am experimenting with segmented sleep (getting up for an hour or two in the night and then returning to sleep), so I have stopped taking any sort of supplement, including the gelatin. Prior to this, I had done the gelatin for about 4 months.

Punishment of Difference

Seth Roberts8 Comments

When I was a boy, my family didn’t have a TV. (Which I now make up for by watching a lot of TV.) The strangeness of this was made clear one day at school. It was second grade. The teacher wanted to talk about something on TV. “Who doesn’t have a TV?” she asked the class. I raised my hand and a girl raised her hand. She didn’t have a TV because it was being fixed.

So I was especially disturbed by this video in which a few schoolchildren who differ from the rest of their class are blown up. Their fatal mistake is not cutting carbon emissions. The organization that made it took it down and issued a lukewarm apology (“live and learn”) that said nothing about ridiculing minorities. If I were teaching 10-year-olds, I think I’d show them the video, tell them how disturbing I found it, and ask them about times in their lives that they felt different from everyone else. It is a curiously teachable moment.