Category: self-experimentation

Carl Willat on the Democratization of Magic

Seth Roberts3 Comments

My friend Carl Willat (of the Willat Effect) is an amateur magician. I sent him this link (“Is the Internet Destroying — or Transforming — the Magic of Magic?”). He replied:

I hadn’t seen that article, but I follow this debate and read both sides of it almost daily. He raises some good points and others I disagree with, but in the end it doesn’t matter because the trend of revealing magic secrets is unstoppable, regardless of what I think. But calling it a good thing doesn’t really make sense. Steinmeyer says people overestimate the value of secrets in magic by a factor of ten, and this is true in the sense that the secret is not the effect. I can enjoy magic performances even if I know the secret, but if I’m fooled I enjoy it more by a factor of ten, let’s say. The engine isn’t the only important thing in my car but it won’t go without it.

I don’t think it makes sense to compare a few people copying Vernon’s $20 manuscript with people giving away secrets on YouTube, because the distribution is so much bigger and it takes almost no effort or even serious interest to learn the secrets. The author also lost me by coming down on one side of the books vs. videos debate. They’re each good for different reasons. A book can’t always illustrate what something is supposed to look like in action. A video can never have all the detail you can get out of a good book. If all you want is to perform a trick exactly like someone else does, videos are particularly good. I actually think the main value of videos is to see a trick performed so you can see if you want to learn it or not. As time goes on I feel more and more reluctant to perform someone else’s material, and when I do I change it around and add my own variations. Otherwise I don’t feel like I’m contributing anything. One of the reasons Lennart Green’s stuff knocked me out was that his material is mostly fairly original and not obviously related to standard techniques, so his whole performance seems magical.
It would have been interesting in this article to have included information about Armando Lucero, a magician who not only doesn’t have any teaching books or videos, but tries to keep even his performances off the internet. I took a fairly expensive workshop from him, and we had to sign a non-disclosure agreement promising not to reveal any of his techniques. This seems to have worked, as his secrets haven’t really leaked out, and there is still a kind of mystique around him and his magic. In my opinion that’s what magic is supposed to be like. I’ve obviously benefited by the general availability of DVDs and books about magic, but I didn’t just want to learn secrets, I wanted to perform. I think as soon as you have to put out some kind of effort to learn you’re already separated from the merely curious, whether it be by getting a magic book out of the library or shelling out some money for a video at the magic store. It shows you want to perform, not just learn the secrets. But I think for most people looking at these internet videos it’s just a break from Facebook and pornography.
Is there a relationship between your interest in the democratization of magic and your philosophy of self-experimentation? Because I can see how you might feel we should get out from under the tyranny of Big Magic and its oppressive secrets. (this is where I would put in a smiling emoticon if I knew how to make them)
This trend in magic seems related to the diminishing “specialness” in everything. For example everyone has cameras on their cell phones now and takes pictures all the time, so to be a “photographer” is nothing. My film students at the Academy refuse to think of film as art. Everybody makes films, there are a billion of them on YouTube, so why should we put any special effort into them? Their films all feature their roommates in the dorms. On YouTube everyone can be a magician. Ironically, a recorded video is about the worst way to experience a magic performance.
I replied:

Yeah, I agree, the democratization of science and the democratization of magic (not to mention photography and film-making) are related. Perhaps I should have a blanket opinion about this stuff but you are the first person to raise the issue.

In the 16th century or thereabouts, mathematicians had contests about solving equations. It wasn’t known how to solve a 3rd degree equation (e.g., x^3 – x = 5). Finally one guy figured it out. It gave him a huge advantage. Of course he kept it a secret. When mathematical knowledge became better known, because of books, they stopped having those contests. Mathematicians could no longer make money and impress women by winning them. Math stopped being a kind of sideshow similar to magic and eventually became the foundation of engineering and science. This couldn’t have happened if it was still a bunch of secrets.

It is early in the democratization of magic, but I think a similar story is plausible — not likely, just plausible. One possibility is that democratization “cheapens” everything or at least makes it harder to make a living at magic. The whole enterprise withers and dies. Another possibility is that, as the Masked Magician said, the revelation of techniques pushes people to invent new ones. They can no longer keep doing the old ones. I think he is perfectly correct. I think the reason that fashion evolved (a feature of our brains) is to push artisans to keep inventing. You really do need to give people a push, otherwise they will stagnate. A third possibility is that the democratization of magic will push the ideas out into a much wider range of people and these people will see the ideas in a new way. They won’t merely invent new tricks; they will begin to grasp how the underlying ideas can be applied in other places.

As a professor of psychology I think I can say this: academic psychologists such as myself have almost no interest in using the ideas we discover and study to help people. (That I used them to lose weight is unprecedented.) It is all about publishing papers, getting tenure, getting promoted, perhaps even winning prizes. That’s neither bad nor good, it’s human nature. The magic you do, on the other hand, is applied psychology. It is entirely useful. So magicians have (a) figured out psychology that works and (b) use it all the time to get something they want (attention, money). That is no small achievement. But they have zero interest in systematizing it (asking: what are the general principles?) and applying those principles in other domains. Other people, however, could easily want to do this. The ideas have to reach those other people for the systematization and application to happen. Nowadays the ideas behind magic tricks are reaching a wider audience so this is becoming more likely to happen.

So I’m like someone in the 15th century who tells the mathematician who has discovered how to solve cubic equations: hey, tell other people your secrets, it will be great! It would sound crazy. But if you want my overall opinion, I think that magic has stagnated, like many other areas of life. I think the democratization has been a powerful force for innovation, just as the Masked Magician claimed, although you would know better than me. I also think, unlike anything the Masked Magician said, that the ideas behind magic are far more important than what present-day professional magicians are using them for. Professional magicians are too busy doing what they have done for the last 20 years and too busy trying to make a living to take advantage of this (which will have zero monetary payoff, at first). But other younger people are more flexible.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Thanks to Robin Barooah and Mike Bowerman.

Sleep, Mood, Restless Legs and ADHD Improved By Internet Research

Seth Roberts7 Comments

At the SLD forums, Anima describes using several safe cheap treatments to improve his mood and sleep. First, he tried wearing blue blocker (amber) glasses in the evening. They made him fall asleep more easily and reduced or eliminated hypomania. However, he was still depressed. Second, he tried getting twenty minutes of sunlight early in the morning. His mood improved. But he still had trouble synchronizing his sleep/wake cycle with the sun — that is, being awake during the day and asleep at night. He would stay up an hour later every night and wake up an hour later every day, meaning that half the time he was asleep during the day and awake at night. Finally, he tried adjusting when he ate:

I recently found the missing key to this: meal timing. I saw a talk that Seth gave where he talked about curing his problem with waking too early by skipping breakfast. My problem was difficulty waking. I read an article that suggested that our circadian rhythms are not just tied to light, but to food times as well. I used to eat late at night and never eat breakfast. I started eating breakfast immediately upon waking (ick) and stopping all food at least 12 hours before I wanted to wake. Basically, I did what Seth did only opposite. It worked. . . . I was even able to adjust my cat’s circadian rhythm — he used to wake me up too early for his breakfast — by gradually moving his supper time.

In another post he describes using B vitamins to treat his restless legs syndrome and ADHD:

I have been taking a supplement with all the B vitamins in amounts much higher than typically recommended. I have also been taking Epsom salt baths for magnesium. I have not experienced restless legs AT ALL since starting. This is quite remarkable to me, because it was such a problem. My ADHD is also much improved.

The idea of treating restless legs syndrome with niacin (a B vitamin) came from Dennis Mangan. Anima had noticed that ADHD and restless legs syndrome often occur together.

He makes some reasonable comments about psychiatrists:

Why are psychiatrists still acting like neurological problems exist in isolation, when clearly they are all related? [In the sense that you can use what is known about how to cure Problem X to help you cure Problem Y, if X and Y often occur together.] I used to take Lamictal, Depakote, Adderall and Ambien every day. That doesn’t include all the meds I tried that didn’t work. I’m currently wearing amber glasses at night and taking a B complex, flax oil (SLD-style) and bathing in epsom salts three times a week. My mood is more stable than it was on medication, and my ADHD is controlled about the same. My sleep is much better. My psychiatrist told me that I would be on medication for the rest of my life. When I told him that I was using dark therapy and light therapy and had stopped taking my medication, he told me that I was “playing with fire,” and that I would end up in a mental institution or commit suicide if I didn’t resume my medication, despite the fact that I had stopped taking it for longer than it would be effective. I asked him if he had read the research on dark therapy. He hadn’t, but he assured me that it is pseudoscience. I guess the definition of “pseudoscience” is any treatment that doesn’t make him money. I puckishly asked him if I seemed manic or depressed, and he was forced to admit that I did not.

The ability of this psychiatrist to ignore contradictory evidence in front of him resembles what happened to Reid Kimball. He told a UCSF gastroenterologist that he was successfully managing his Crohn’s with diet. In my experience, Crohn’s can’t be managed with diet, the doctor said at the end of the appointment.

Justification For Self-Experimentation and My Belief that N=1 Results Will Generalize

Seth Roberts7 Comments

At the Quantified Self blog, in response to a video of me talking about QS and the Ancestral Health Symposium (paleo), someone named Colin made the following comment:

Very interesting talk. I am just curious how someone can claim a study conducted with a sample size of one is “100 times better” than someone else’s study. I do not know anything about the other study mentioned, but I do know that a study based on n=1 cannot be considered scientific proof. And sure, he hears from people who have lost weight drinking the sugar water he prescribed, but it is quite possible there are 100 times as many people who didn’t email him because they didn’t see any positive results and decided to try something else. I think the QS stuff is very interesting and helpful on a personal level, but it seems like a stretch to generalize your results to others.

I responded:

I have two responses.

1. Sample size isn’t everything. Sure, a study with n=1 isn’t “scientific proof”. Nor is any other study, in my experience. “Scientific proof” has always required many studies. New scientific ideas have very often started with n = 1 experiments or observations. Later, larger experiments or observations were done. Both — the initial n=1 observation and the later n = many observations — were necessary for the new idea to be discovered and confirmed.

2. The history of biology teaches there are few exceptions to general rules. See any biology textbook. For example, a textbook might say “lymphocytes fight germs”. This means no serious exceptions have ever been found to that rule. So, as matter of biological history, the person who managed to figure out what one particular lymphocyte does turned out to have figured out what they all do. Biology textbooks have thousands of statements like “lymphocytes fight infection” meaning that this sequence of events (you can generalize from one to all, or nearly all) has happened thousands of times. There is no shadow hidden history of biology that teaches otherwise.

Vitamin D3 and Sleep Update

Seth Roberts28 Comments

A month ago I blogged about a “stunning discovery”: Primal Girl’s sleep got much better when she took Vitamin D3 in the early morning instead of much later (afternoon or evening). Others pointed out a similar observation: Taking Vitamin D3 in the evening caused insomnia. These observations suggest that Vitamin D3 resembles sunlight in its effect on sleep: morning exposure good, evening exposure bad. Sunlight, of course, is hard to control and sometimes hard to get (which is why Primal Girl tried Vitamin D3). Sunlight is also time-consuming: it takes an hour to get one hour of sunlight. The timing and dosage of Vitamin D3 is much easier to control.

Now I’ve tried it. This isn’t the first time. I’ve taken Vitamin D3 on and off several times through the years. Each time I didn’t notice any change so I stopped. But then I’d hear an interesting argument (never anything as clear as what Primal Girl found), and try again. And stop again. This time I took the Vitamin D3 around 8 am. (In previous attempts, I never controlled the timing and never took it early in the orning.) I started with 2000 IU/day. I did that for nine days. No clear effect. Then I increased the dose to 4000 IU/day. The change was unmistakeable: I started to wake up feeling somewhat more rested and, for the first time, with a pleasant warm feeling. So far it’s been eight days. Something is different and better.

I am writing about this now because the results are already interesting. My experience so far “proves” nothing, of course. Let me make clear the limitations: 1. You might consider the effect small. I was already sleeping well. I fell asleep quickly, did not wake up during the night, and woke up feeling rested. Now I wake up feeling more rested. 2. Eight days isn’t much. Maybe the effect will go away. 3. Maybe the effect doesn’t depend on time of day. I haven’t yet tried taking Vitamin D3 at other times of day.

Why do I think this is so important?

1. Sleep is central to health. You fight off infection while you are asleep. When I improved my sleep, I stopped getting noticeable colds. I’m sure if people slept better, they would get sick less often. Heart attacks are more common in the winter. People sleep worse in winter.

2. Sleep is a huge problem. As far as I can tell, most adult Americans complain about their sleep.

3. No one expected this. Nutrition researchers, dieticians, and so on obviously didn’t expect it. Nor did circadian rhythm researchers. They (or we) think that everyone, including plants, has one or more internal circadian clocks that is/are synchronized (= set) by the environment. The general public thinks that sunlight affects the clock. Lots of research supports this, but circadian-rhythm researchers know something the public does not: that those rhythms are also affected by the time of food and social contact. All three (sunlight, food, social contact) are part of the environment. Their power over our sleep makes sense (e.g., we should be awake when food is available.) Vitamin D3 is not part of the environment. Its power doesn’t make sense. No one in the paleo community expected this. Stone-Agers got a lot of sunshine, yes. They did not take Vitamin D3 pills. Sure, many in the paleo community praise Vitamin D3 but I have never heard anyone say you should take it in the morning.

4. Vitamin D3 is safe, cheap, and widely available. It probably has many benefits, not just better sleep.

5. Taking pills is easy. There presently are no safe sleeping pills. Nor are there any cheap sleeping pills. Nor will drug companies ever invent them, if the past is any guide.

Butter and Eggs: What They Share

Seth Roberts24 Comments

To many dieticians and much of the general public, the similarity between butter and eggs is that both are bad for you. Butter: Fattening! Clogs arteries! Eggs: High in cholesterol! To me, it’s the opposite: both seem to be unusually good for us. Butter seems to make my brain work better and may have reduced my risk of heart attack. Eggs — at least, scrambled eggs — are especially well-liked by Mr. T, a rat. There are many similarities between rats and humans. Humans also like eggs. The foods we like are a guide (imperfect) to what foods are good for us.

Here’s another similarity between butter and eggs: Both must be complete — contain all necessary nutrients — much more than any other food. Butter is large part of milk. When mammalian offspring are very young, mother’s milk is their only food. Eggs, of course, must contain everything needed to become a baby chick (as a commenter named Rashad pointed out). No other foods — not fruits, not vegetables, not whatever other foods your great grandmother or other ancestors ate — have been under this sort of evolutionary pressure.

The evolution of lactose tolerance and my butter discoveries.

 

 

 

Flaxseed Oil Alleviates Psoriasis and Lichen Planus

Seth Roberts17 Comments

Two months ago I wrote that camelina oil might be a good source of omega-3. A few days ago, a reader named Evelyn Majidi commented as follows:

Based on this suggestion, I ordered camelina oil from the good farmers in Saskatchewan and began taking it using the same dose (3T/day) that I had been taking of flaxseed oil for relief of psoriasis and lichen planus. Unfortunately, the slow but sure improvement I had been experiencing over the past year with flaxseed oil stopped immediately and after a week my skin and mouth began to deteriorate. After using about 1/4 of a bottle of the new oil I went back to flaxseed and am delighted to report that I am [again] having good results with it. Since both of my conditions wax and wane without any reason identified by medical science I cannot state that it was simply the flaxseed oil that has led to this success. Based on my experience, however, I intend to continue taking the oil regularly and I recommend that others with psoriasis or lichen planus try it. For me, two tablespoons a day were not enough, I needed three tablespoons of the oil to see a change. I don’t think it advisable to take capsules, you’d need to take too many to equal 3T of oil.[emphasis added]

Psoriasis is a skin disease that usually involves “thick, red skin with flaky, silver-white patches called scales”. Lichen planus is “an itchy rash on the skin or in the mouth”. To give some idea of how common they are, psoriasis has 36 million Google hits; lichen planus 1-2 million. (“Heart disease” has 64 million.)

Eveyln’s experience provides four pieces of evidence that suggest flaxseed oil (FSO) improved her psoriasis and lichen planus:

  1. When she started taking FSO at 3 T/day, they started improving. They did not improve with 2 T/day.
  2. Over the first year of FSO, she saw steady improvement in both in place of the usual up and down.
  3. When she replaced FSO with another oil, which she hoped would be better, the results were the opposite of what she wanted: The improvement stopped and the two conditions got worse.
  4. When she switched back to FSO, the improvement resumed.

I can think of no plausible alternative to the conclusion that FSO helped. There is plenty of other evidence that supports this conclusion: the evidence that omega-3 is anti-inflammatory, FSO is high in omega-3, most of us don’t get enough omega-3, and so on, including my own experience. You could write a book about the evidence that supports it. (Evelyn tried flaxseed oil because of reports on this blog that it improved/cured bad gums.)

In any case, the conclusion that FSO reduces psoriasis and lichen planus is new, in the sense that FSO (or another source of omega-3) is not a popular treatment for either condition. Here are about 16 treatments for psoriasis, including topical corticosteroids. None includes omega-3. Here are eight “lifestyle and home remedies” for psoriasis, including “take daily baths” (seriously, Mayo Clinic Staff?). None includes omega-3. After going through about forty-odd treatments, I found a reference to fish oil: “Other research has suggested that taking oral fish oil supplements containing 1.8 to 3.6 grams of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) a day may bring improvement.”

Same thing for lichen planus. FSO is not a popular treatment.

If you take flaxseed oil or other omega-3 source to treat psoriasis or lichen planus, I hope you will let me know what happens.

Bryan Caplan Disses College

Seth Roberts28 Comments

In this post, Bryan Caplan says (again) that college is vastly overrated. Like me, he says that the only thing college professors know how to do is be professors and that is all they can actually teach. Graduate school, where professors teach students who want to be professors, makes sense. Undergraduate school, where almost no students will become professors, does not. Like me, he ridicules the idea that professors teach students “how to think”.

He omits half of my criticism. It isn’t just teaching (“how to think” — please!), it’s also evaluation. Professors are terrible at evaluation. Their method of judging student work is very simple: How close is it to what I would have done? The better you can imitate the professor, no matter what the class, the higher your grade. This is one size fits all with a vengeance because there is no opting out. Sure, you can choose your major. But every class is taught by a professor. What if your strengths lie elsewhere — in something that your professors aren’t good at? Tough luck. Your strengths will never be noticed or encouraged or developed.

At Berkeley (where Bryan went and I taught) and universities generally, the highest praise is brilliant. Professor X is brilliant. Or: Brilliant piece of work. People can do great things in dozens of ways, but somehow student work is almost never judged by how beautiful, courageous, practical, good-tasting, astonishing, vivid, funny, moving, comfortable, and so on it is. Because that’s not what professors are good at. (Except in the less-academic departments, such as art and engineering.) To fail to grasp that students can excel in dozens of ways is to seriously shortchange them. To value them at much less than they are worth — and, above all, to fail to help them grow and find their place in the world after college.

At Berkeley, I figured this out in a way that a libertarian should appreciate: I gave my students much more choice. For a term project, I said they could do almost anything so long as it was off-campus and didn’t involve library work. What they chose to do revealed a lot. I began to see not just how different they were from me but how different they were from each other. One of my students chose to give a talk to a high-school class. This was astonishing because she has severe stage fright. Every step was hard. But she did it. “I learned that if I really wanted to, I could conquer my fear,” she wrote.

One of my Tsinghua students recently asked me: “Are you a brave man?” (She wanted to give me a gift of stinky tofu.) I said no. She said she thought I was brave for coming to China. Perhaps. I have never done anything as brave as what my student with stage fright did. I have never done something that terrified me — much less chosen to do such a thing. Her homework hadn’t been very good. When I read about her term project — conquering stage fright — I realized how badly I had misjudged her. How badly I had failed to appreciate her strengths. I saw that it wasn’t just her and it wasn’t just me. By imposing just one narrow way to excel, the whole system badly undervalued almost everyone. Almost everyone had strengths the system ignored. And it’s a system almost everyone must go through to reach a position of power!

This is related to what I call the hemineglect of economists — they fail to see that innovation should be half of economics. Diversity of talents and interests is central to innovation because new things are so often mixtures of old things. By rewarding only one kind of talent, colleges suppress diversity of talent and thereby reduce innovation. (It’s no coincidence that Steve Jobs, whom we associate with innovation, didn’t finish college. He saw his talents wouldn’t be valued.) Psychologists are also guilty of this. Many psychologists glorify IQ. Somehow having a high IQ is crucial to success . . . somehow a society that doesn’t encourage people with high IQs will do badly. And so on. In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray showed that high IQ scores correlated with other measures of desirable social outcomes (e.g., income — people with higher IQ scores made more money). Like many successful people, they failed to see the possibility that the whole world had been shaped to reward the things that the people in power (i.e., they themselves) are good at. Not because those talents work (= produce a better economy). But because they are easy to measure (by college grades). The glorification of IQ has had a solipsistic aspect and has ignored what should be obvious, that diversity of talents and skills promotes innovation. Without a diverse talent pool, any society will do a poor job of solving the problems that inevitably arise.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments
  • Salem Comes to the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Herbert Needleman is harassed by the lead industry, with the help of two psychology professors.
  • Climate scientists “perpetuating rubbish”.
  • A humorous article in the BMJ that describes evidence-based medicine (EBM) as a religion. “Despite repeated denials by the high priests of EBM that they have founded a new religion, our report provides irrefutable proof that EBM is, indeed, a full-blown religious movement.” The article points out one unquestionable benefit of EBM — that some believers “demand that [the drug] industry divulge all of its secret evidence, instead of publishing only the evidence that favours its products.” Of course, you need not believe in EBM to want that. One of the responses to the article makes two of the criticisms of EBM I make: 1. Where is the evidence that EBM helps? 2. EBM stifles innovation.
  • What really happened to Dominique Strauss-Kahn? Great journalism by Edward Jay Epstein. This piece, like much of Epstein’s work, sheds a very harsh light on American mainstream media. They were made fools of by enemies of Strauss-Kahn. Epstein is a freelance journalist. He uncovered something enormously important that all major media outlets — NY Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, ABC, NBC, CBS (which includes 60 Minutes), the AP, not to mention French news organizations, all with great resources — missed.

Climategate 2.0: How To Tell When an Expert Exaggerates

Seth Roberts15 Comments

The newly-released climate scientist emails (called Climategate 2.0) from University of East Anglia (Phil Jones) and elsewhere (Michael Mann and others) show that top climate scientists agree with me. Like me (see my posts on global warming), they think the evidence that humans have caused dangerous global warming is weaker than claimed. Unfortunately for the rest of us, they kept their doubts to themselves: “I just refused to give an exclusive interview to SPIEGEL because I will not cause damage for climate science.”

This is a big reason I have found self-experimentation useful. It showed me that experts exaggerate, that they overstate their certainty. At first I was shocked. My first useful self-experimental results were about acne. I found that one of the two drugs my dermatologist had prescribed didn’t work. He hadn’t said This might not work. He didn’t try to find out if it worked. He appeared surprised (and said “why did you do that?”) when I told him it didn’t work. Another useful self-experimental result was breakfast caused me to wake up too early. Breakfast is widely praised by dieticians (“the most important meal of the day”). I have never heard a dietician say It could hurt your sleep or even a modest There’s a lot we don’t know. My discoveries about morning faces and mood are utterly different than what psychiatrists and psychotherapists say about depression.

As anyone paying attention has noticed, it isn’t just climate scientists, doctors, dieticians, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists. How can you tell when an expert is exaggerating? His lips move. There are two types of journalism: 1. Trusts experts. 2. Doesn’t trust experts. I suggest using colored headlines to make them easy to distinguish: red = trusts experts, green = doesn’t trust experts.