I am a big fan of pork belly. Whenever I see it on a menu I order it. The mayor of Chongqing (population 32 million) recently made headlines with a speech whose main point was
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Which means: Better living standards is not just eating hong shao rou wearing beautiful clothes. Hong shao rou is pork belly braised in a red sauce. Maybe my favorite Chinese dish. Supposedly Chairman Mao’s favorite dish. I’m glad he said “not just” rather than “not”.
At my Quantified Self talk I described data that suggested butter improved my mental function. During the question period, a cardiologist in the audience said something about me killing myself — butter is unhealthy. The usual view.
I said I thought the evidence for the usual view was weak. He said, “The Framingham studies.” That was epidemiology, I said. It is notoriously hard to understand. My data was from something like an experiment. Much easier to understand. (And the Framingham study is a terrible example of the supposed evidence. To quote from it: “In the period between the taking of the diet interviews and the end of the 16-year follow-up, 47 cases of de novo CHD developed in the Diet Study group. The means for all the diet variables measured were practically the same for these cases as for the original cohort at risk.”) He replied that the reduction in heart disease in recent years was more support for the usual view. I said the recent decline in heart disease could have many explanations other than a reduction in animal fat intake. Many things have changed over the last 20 years.
There is epidemiological evidence that saturated fat is bad, yes, but it is not the Framingham study nor the recent decline in heart disease. And it really is difficult to interpret. The butter-is-bad interpretation could easily be wrong. The obvious problem is that, after people are told butter is bad, people who try hard to be healthy avoid butter. And they do a lot of other things, too, to be healthy. So butter consumption ends up confounded with a dozen other variables believed to affect your health. When I was growing up, my parents avoided butter because margarine was much cheaper. So butter consumption is confounded with income, another problem.
My tiny experiment, whatever its problems, was much easier to interpret.
On Tuesday I gave a talk called “Arithmetic and Butter” at the Quantified Self meeting in Sunnyvale. I had about 10 slides but this one mattered most:
It shows how fast I did simple arithmetic problems (e.g., 2*0, 9-6, 7*9) before and after I started eating 1/2 stick (60 g) of butter every day. The x axis covers about a year. The butter produced a long-lasting improvement of about 30 msec.
I think the hill shape of the butter function is due to running out of omega-3 in Beijing — my several-months-old flaxseed oil had gone bad, even though it had been frozen. When I returned to Berkeley and got fresh flaxseed oil, my scores improved.
This isn’t animal fat versus no animal fat. Before I was eating lots of butter, I was eating lots of pork fat. It’s one type of animal fat versus another type. Nor is it another example of modern processing = unhealthy. Compared to pork fat, butter is recent.
Most scientists think philosophy of science is irrelevant. Yet this line of research (measuring my arithmetic speed day after day, in hopes of accidental discovery) derived from a philosophy of science, which has two parts. First, scientific progress has a power-law distribution. Each time we collect data, we sample from a power-law-like distribution. Almost all samples produce tiny progress; a very tiny fraction produce great progress. Each time you collect data, in other words, it’s like buying a lottery ticket. I realized that a short easy brain-function test allowed me to buy a large number of lottery tickets at low cost. Second, we underestimate the likelihood of extreme events. Nassim Taleb has argued this about the likelihood of extreme negative events (which presumably have a power-law distribution); I’m assuming the same thing about extreme positive events (with a power-law distribution). We undervalue these lottery tickets, in other words. Perhaps all scientists hope for accidental discoveries. I seem to be the first to use a research strategy that relies on accidental discoveries.
In the graph, note that one point (actually, two) is down at 560 msec. This suggests there’s room for improvement.
This BMJ research asked how well authors responded to criticism in emailed letters to the editor. A highly original subject, but the researchers, one of whom (Fiona Godlee) is the top BMJ editor, appear lost. They summarize the results but appear to have no idea what to learn from them, ending their paper with this:
Editors should ensure that authors take relevant criticism seriously and respond adequately to it.
Which was perfectly reasonable before any data was collected. So that’s not a good conclusion.
The real conclusion is this: The letters to the editor were far better than nothing because authors responded to their criticisms about half the time.
This excellent post by Alex Tabarrok about the effect of removing traffic lights — traffic improves — reminds me of how I discovered the work of Jane Jacobs. Browsing in the Transportation Library at UC Berkeley, I came across The Economy of Cities.
That order arising from below (from individual drivers and pedestrians) can be much better than order imposed from above (by traffic engineers) was a point Jacobs made often. The details in Alex’s post and the video he embeds don’t just suggest that traffic lights in thousands of places could be profitably removed, they also support more radical thinking:
- Traffic engineers were completely wrong in all these cases. Trying to improve something, they made it worse. How did we get to a world where this is possible? Surely it isn’t just traffic engineers.
- What would happen if students were given more power to control their own education? Perhaps we would need far few professors. I gave my students much more control and found (a) my job got easier and (b) my students learned much more.
- What would happen if all of us were given more power to control our own health, rather than rely on gatekeepers, such as doctors? Perhaps we would need far fewer doctors.
The essence of my self-experimentation is that I took control of my health. Rather than seeing a doctor about my early awakening, or waiting for sleep researchers to find a solution, I found a solution.
A paper in Cognition by Harvard professor Marc Hauser and others has been retracted:
The paper tested cotton-top tamarin monkeys’ ability to learn generalized patterns, an ability that human infants had been found to have, and that may be critical for learning language. The paper found that the monkeys were able to learn patterns, suggesting that this was not the critical cognitive building block that explains humans’ ability to learn language.
The note to be published about the retraction says almost nothing about why: “An internal examination at Harvard University . . . found that the data do not support the reported findings.”
Several other papers from Hauser’s lab have also been questioned.
The usual explanation would be that someone in Hauser’s lab made the results better than they actually were. A co-author of the paper said Hauser had told him “there were problems with the videotape record of the study”. That’s consistent with the usual explanation: Someone edited the tapes (via deletions) to make the results appear better than they were. But it’s also possible that many tapes are missing, which might be an accident. When The New Yorker archives were moved from Building A to Building B several years ago, much of the archives was lost.
Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell.
In this interviewer Craig Venter says that sequencing the human genome has had “close to zero” medical benefits so far. I thought this comment was even more interesting:
The human genome project was . . . supposed to be the biggest thing in the history of biological sciences. Billions in government funding for a single project — we had never seen anything like that before in biology. And then a single person comes along and beats scientists who have been working on it for years.
The government-funded people used inferior methods, said Venter:
Initially, Francis Collins and the other people on the Human Genome Project claimed that my methods would never work. When they started to realize that they were wrong, they began personal attacks against me.
The government-funded research was high in quantity (“billions”) but low in quality.
A similar story emerged from the Netflix Prize competition. Netflix had in-house researchers who had tried to do the same thing as the competitors for the prize: predict ratings. The algorithm they’d developed took two weeks to run. According to my friend David Purdy, one of the competitors for the prize managed to compute the same thing in an hour, the same sort of speed-up that Venter is talking about. The in-house research was high in quantity (it had been going on for years) but low in quality.
From my point of view, a similar story comes from my self-experimentation. Working alone, with no funding, I found several ways to improve my sleep — avoiding breakfast, standing a lot, standing on one foot, eating pork fat, etc. In contrast, professional sleep researchers have found nothing that has helped me improve my sleep. There are hundreds of sleep researchers and they’ve received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
Why such big differences in outcome? I think it has to do with the price of failure. When the government-funded genome researchers used inferior methods, nothing happened. They’d already gotten the grant. In contrast, Venter’s group got nothing until they succeeded. In the case of the Netflix in-house researchers, use of inferior methods cost them nothing; they still got paid. Whereas the prize competitors didn’t get paid unless they won. Use of inferior methods would cause them to lose. In the case of the sleep researchers, lack of practical results cost them nothing. They could still have a successful career. Whereas to me, without practical results I had nothing.
Thanks to Paul Sas.
I discovered via self-tracking that I could get my fasting blood sugar much closer to optimal by walking an hour per day. This took me a year to figure out and I discovered it by accident. Phil commented that I could have learned the same thing more quickly by searching websites or asking my doctor.
Whether I was rediscovering the fairly obvious is important to me. This website by Janet Ruhl, who has diabetes, is named “How to get your blood sugar under control”. Its advice says nothing about exercise, much less walking. Here’s one reason why:
I [Ruhl] currently control my own diabetes using a fairly low carbohydrate diet and very low doses of fast acting insulin at meal time. . . . At one point I exercised daily for a year and got my body fat down to 24%, which put me into the “Fitness” category for a woman my age. Despite what my doctors had told me, weight loss and intense fitness didn’t do a thing for my blood sugars, which got worse.
Emphasis added. I too did recommended amounts of aerobic exercise. I too found my blood sugar was nevertheless unpleasantly high. The usual recommendation of aerobic exercise may make it less likely you will do the long low-intensity exercise (ordinary walking) that my results suggest works. You may think: I’ve already exercised. I’m tired.
I could watch these video clips (also here) all day. You may have learned about Doug Lemov from this NY Times Magazine article. The quote “without great teachers, nothing else matters” is from the website of the organization (Uncommon Schools) that Lemov founded. The clips show techniques he has isolated that great teachers use in elementary school.
My research is fundamentally about deficiency diseases. I find things present in Stone Age life but absent now whose absence causes problems. Sometimes I work backwards (from present to past): why am I not sleeping well? This turned out to have a Stone-Age-related answer. Sometimes I work forwards: I study something present in Stone-Age life but not now and learn it makes things better: standing (better sleep), morning faces (better mood).
So I know a lot about deficiency diseases. One curious thing about them is the opportunity they present. Without scurvy, we wouldn’t have discovered Vitamin C. Once we’ve discovered Vitamin C, we can figure out the optimal amount, possibly leaving us better off than before scurvy became a problem.
This is what I thought as I watched these clips. Formal education is unnatural. No wonder it’s so hard. These clips, however, show that with considerable understanding of psychology you can solve the problems it presents. And perhaps leave us better off than before formal schooling began.
Susan Allport, having written The Queen of Fats, unsurprisingly eats a diet high in omega-3 and low in omega-6. For one month, however, she ate a diet with more omega-6 and less omega-3 and wrote about it– like Supersize Me, except far more realistic.
O magazine commissioned a story about it but didn’t run it. “My weight gain was only 0.5 pounds and they thought their readers wouldn’t see the importance of that,” says Allport. Her draft is here. There were three striking changes over the month: the omega-6/omega-3 ratio in her blood doubled (implying that this ratio is controlled by diet rather than by stored fat); her belly fat noticeably increased; and the elasticity of her arteries decreased by 20%. This supports Allport’s belief (and mine) that omega-6 is dangerous when consumed in large amounts, as it is if you eat a lot of food cooked in vegetable oil.
The American Heart Association recommends that Americans eat more omega-6. The justification of this recommendation says nothing about the Israeli Paradox, which to me is the best reason to avoid a diet high in omega-6. Allport’s experience is another reason.
Allport is also the author of Explorers of the Black Box, about neuroscience research.