Category: self-experimentation

New Idea About Learning Chinese

Seth Roberts12 Comments

 I never considered taking a class to learn Chinese. Too boring, too time-consuming. I’ve tried hiring tutors and going through a textbook. Better but too close to taking a class. That didn’t last.

For maybe half a year I’ve used Anki (a flashcard program) to learn characters. This is better — at least it’s lasted half a year — but I don’t study it often enough.

A friend suggested labeling things in my apartment — put a card with the character for chair on a chair, for example. Another friend pointed out that there are children’s books with big characters (one per page). That suggested my latest idea: Put these pages on the walls of my apartment. So whenever I look at the wall it will be a kind of test. If I don’t remember the character, I can look on the underside of the card for the answer.

I’m excited about this: it might actually work, I now think. It doesn’t require being still, which I think reduces learning. It spaces learning (you learn in little bits throughout the day), which is surely better than massing it. It allows great amounts of repetition. And it takes advantage of natural curiosity (whenever I see Chinese — in a sign, for example — I wonder what it means) rather than requiring discipline. As far as I can tell it requires no discipline at all. If it doesn’t work I’ll learn something about education.

The Nobel Prize: Not Helping

Seth Roberts14 Comments

Nassim Taleb recently criticized the Nobel Prize in Economics:

According to Taleb, there are a number of mistaken ideas about forecasting and measuring risk, which all contribute to events like the 2008 global crisis. The Nobel prize, he says, has given them a stamp of approval, allowing them to propagate.

It isn’t just economics. As I’ve said before, the Nobel Prize in medicine was not given for the discovery that smoking causes lung cancer. It was not given for the discovery that lack of folate causes birth defects. Both enormously useful. It has been given for several discoveries, such as the connection between teleomeres and aging, with (so far) little or no practical value.

This is no mystery. The Nobel Prize must be prestigious, therefore must honor high-prestige research. Veblen argued long ago that in academia high prestige correlates with low practical value. Just today I told a friend Veblen’s idea that professors use jargon for the same reason men wear ties — to show off how useless they are. The economics research (“Harry Markowitz, William Sharpe, Robert Merton, Myron Scholes, Robert Engle, Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller”) that Taleb is criticizing was high prestige. The so-far-useless biology that has received a Nobel Prize was high prestige; the highly-useful epidemiology that didn’t receive the prize was low prestige.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Thanks to Dave Lull and Anne Weiss.

Shamelessness in Chinese Academia

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Professor Wang Hiu, a Tsinghua faculty member in the Chinese Language Department, was accused of plagiarism several months ago. You can read about it here. Professor Wang is no stranger to controversy:

Wang Hui was involved in controversy following the results of the Cheung Kong Dushu Prize in 2000. The prize was set up by Sir Li Ka-shing, which awards one million RMB in total to be shared by the winners. The 3 recipients of the prize in 2000 were Wang Hui, who served as the coordinator of the academic selection committee of the prize, Fei Xiaotong, the Honorary Chairman of the committee, and Qian Liqun, another committee member. Wang Hui was then the editor-in-chief of Dushu magazine, which was the administrative body of the prize.

He awarded the prize to himself! And his fellow committee members. Wang was editor in chief of Dushu for ten years. During that time, he published many hard-to-understand articles by his friends. The influence of the magazine shrank considerably.

Avocado Raises Blood Sugar

Seth Roberts17 Comments

Tim Lundeen writes:

We [Tim and his partner, Alexandra] first noticed that eating avocados raised our blood glucose when we were on a low-protein/low-fat/high-fruit nutrition plan. After 1/4 avocado each, we would both have fasting glucose of 95-99 instead of 80-85, with the effect lasting for about 4 days. It was quite repeatable, so we stopped eating avocados. We speculated at the time that it was due to the omega-6 content of the avocado fat.

We just tried avocado again with more typical nutrition, with about 25% protein, 25% fat, 50% carbohydrate with very low fructose, thinking that because we were eating more fat the effect might not be so pronounced, but saw the same elevated fasting blood glucose as before.

After some more research, we found out it is because avocados contain a sugar called mannoheptulose, which causes temporary dysregulation of blood sugar.

Mannoheptulose was first isolated in 1917. Mannoheptulose has been proven to be present in many foods, but is found most abundantly in the avocado (La Forge 1916-1917). In 1957, the first research was published in the Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics (Volume 69, page 592), suggesting that avocado extract blocked normal insulin secretion. In 1963, it was demonstrated that avocado extract blocks glucose-stimulated release of insulin (Nature, Volume 197, page 1264). By 1967, low doses of avocado extract were found to inhibit both pancreatic secretion and synthesis of insulin without eliciting measurable hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) (Nature, Volume 214, page 276). This finding was significant because it demonstrated that a controlled dose of avocado extract could suppress pancreatic production of insulin without inducing a diabetic state. [https://www.health-marketplace.com/p-Obesity-3.htm]The problem with this is that your cells don’t absorb nutrition because insulin is reduced, so we have strong cravings for food, feel extra hungry all the time, and have been eating about 50% more calories to feel full. The net effect is not a good feeling…

This makes sense. And it is methodologically interesting. Spending zero research dollars, Tim and Alexandra learned something important about blood sugar control that the rest of the world seems not to know. (Except perhaps the researchers who did the avocado extract research.) None of the research articles they mention make clear the practical significance of the effect. To say that avocado extract does X doesn’t tell you how much avocado you need to get the effect.

When I google “avocado” and “blood sugar” (together), the first page of links all claim, at least at first glance, that avocado lowers blood sugar. But that’s just the internet. (Although Google is supposed to put the most reliable links at the top.) Then I went to the most authoritative possible source on what we should eat: the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. I found only three articles that mention avocados in their title or abstract. None was about this effect. I also looked in Eat Drink and Be Healthy by Walter Willett and the Harvard School of Public Health. Nothing about this effect of avocado.

How Things Begin (Time Out)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Time Out magazine was started in 1968 in London by Tony Elliot, who was 22 at the time. The original title was Where It’s At. There were all sorts of new cultural stuff, such as a concert by the Who, that the mainstream media didn’t notice. The fringe-y alternative media weren’t interested in the attention to detail required to put out a list of events. That was the gap Time Out filled. Elliot borrowed a small amount of money (70 pounds) to start it. He and his co-workers worked without pay for the first three or four months. It was hard to get distribution, so they went around to parks passing it out. At a Beijing talk, Elliot said he didn’t remember the first paid advertiser (maybe a music store) but he did remember when he got an unsolicited advertising order from the prestigious London Film Museum. They understand what we’re trying to do, he thought.

I asked what some of his biggest mistakes had been. Both involved not saying no when he should have said no.

reCAPTCHA and Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts3 Comments

reCAPTCHA is the use of CAPTCHA security to read words that optical character recognition has failed to read. You see two words rather than one. The second word is the hard one. This 2008 article by its inventors (computer-science professors) says reCAPTCHA is a way that

“wasted” human processing power can be used to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve.

Self-experimentation like mine is similar. I did it in my spare (“wasted”) time. I was going to sleep anyway, I just recorded my sleep. And I found new answers to old questions, such as how to sleep better, that professional scientists had not yet found. You could say I solved problems that professional scientists aren’t yet capable of solving.

I believe that reCAPTCHA and self-experimentation like mine are two ends of what will be a power-law distribution of the use of “spare” human processing power. reCAPTCHA: many people, tiny amount of time per contribution. Self-experimentation like mine: Tiny number of people, large amount of time per contribution. Halfway (in log units) between reCAPTCHA and self-experimentation like mine is Wikipedia: middling number of people, middling time per contribution. Writing open-source software, to the extent that it’s unpaid, lies somewhere between Wikipedia and my self-experimentation.

Volunteer work is nothing new. Intellectual volunteer work is nothing new — most books are written essentially for free. What is new is cheap distribution of intellectual volunteer work. Which greatly increases the diversity of what can be done and the extent to which it can be cooperative.

Self-Experimentation and Infomercials

Seth Roberts2 Comments

When I was a grad student I was inspired to self-experiment by something I read about teaching math: The best way to learn is to do, said Paul Halmos, a math professor. A more recent version is fail early fail often fail cheap.

A maker of infomercials put it like this:

We were fortunate at American Telecast, in that most of our learning days were in our first 12 years, when we were in the 2-minute business. Learning was a lot cheaper. Failure was a lot cheaper than what failure is today in a 30-minute commercial. When you fail with a 30-minute commercial you can lose half a million or a million or a million and a half dollars. When we failed with a 2-minute commercial back then, we were failing with $15 or $20 thousand.

Self-experimentation made failure so cheap, so much cheaper than conventional research, that I was able to learn much more.

All this seems so obvious — yet self-experimentation by professional scientists is very rare. Psychology and nutrition professors, for example, could easily do self-experimentation, but don’t. And the infomercial maker describes himself as “fortunate” rather than as deliberately creating the situation.

New Heart Scan Results: Good News (raw data)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Here are the details of my two heart scan scores, one recent, the other one and a half years ago.

February 2009:

August 2010:

To give some context, this group of patients given a whole bunch of treatments (“statin therapy, niacin, the American Heart Association Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes (TLC) diet, omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D-3 supplementation”) meant to improve these scores managed, on average, about a 0% change in scores after 1-2 years of the treatments. Which is better than the usual 25%/year increase, but not as good as what happened to me.