Seth’s blog

In the Freakonomics blog, Ian Ayres, a Yale law professor, described a Law Revue skit at his school:

A group of students [were] sitting at desks, facing the audience, listening to a professor drone on. All of the students were looking at laptops except for one, who had a deck of cards and was playing solitaire. The professor was outraged and demanded that the student explain why she was playing cards. . . . She answered, “My laptop is broken.”

Not bad. The professors in the audience were stunned.

The skit was “several years ago.” I wondered how Ayres would manage to connect revelation of a timeless truth about higher education (see For Whom Do Colleges Exist?) with something new. Here’s how:

Saul Levmore, the dean at the University of Chicago Law School, has recently announced an end to classroom surfing.

The big truth behind the little joke was . . . hard to see. Or at least hard for professors to see. The big truth is that law schools, like most institutions of higher education, are run in dozens of ways that benefit professors at the expense of students. Boring lectures are one example. In response to a small revelation of this big truth, Dean Levmore — presumably after consultation with many other law school professors — created another example of how law schools are run for professors rather than students.

Difficulty with basic concepts at Duke and UC Berkeley.

About ten years ago, John Tukey, the great statistician, gave a talk at Berkeley. After his talk, I went up to him.

“The tools you’ve invented have been really helpful to me,” I said.

“If they work just some of the time, we should be pleased,” he replied.

A curious answer, I thought. But I found myself thinking the same thing when a woman named Darkhorse on the SLD forums said something similar to what I said to Tukey:

As of today, I am one pound below my original arbitrarily chosen “goal weight”, and some 40 lbs. lighter than I was one year ago. No one is more surprised than I am . . . SLD is exquisite in its very simplicity, and I saw no need to complicate it. Best of all, it works!

If SLD works just some of the time . . . Thanks, Darkhorse.

I finished a better-designed calorie-learning experiment. I mixed 5 randomly-chosen spice mixes into one chunk of butter (Mix A) and another 5 spice mixes into another chunk of butter (Mix B). Then I alternated two types of trials:

1. 2 saltines spread with Mix A followed by a piece of bread eaten nose-clipped.

2. 2 saltines spread with Mix B followed by nothing.

On each trial I rated how good the saltines tasted on scale where 50 = neutral, 60 = slightly good, and 70 = somewhat good. Here are the results:

When a new flavor was followed by a piece of bread, it tasted better than a similar flavor not followed by a piece of bread. After several flavor-bread pairings, the difference became large.

At a press conference about endangered salmon, I met Heather Hardcastle, who works at Taku River Reds, a fishing company in Juneau, Alaska. She went to graduate school at Duke in 2002 where she studied marine conservation biology. “Everyone thought fishermen were bad,” she told me. “I’d grown up in a fishing family, so to them I was a bad person. Most of the students thought of themselves as environmentalists — as if I wasn’t.”

What a failure of education. Surely people who make their living fishing would suffer the most if fish runs out; and surely people who have spent a lifetime fishing might know something useful to fish preservationists. Somehow this escaped the majority of the Duke students and, apparently, their professors. At the end of The Shangri-La Diet, I mention this problem: the idea that business is the enemy. In the case of obesity, of course, lots of people think that big food companies are the enemy. Well, yes, it’s pretty clear that big food companies are responsible for the obesity epidemic — but maybe that means they should be more involved in the solution, not less?

Stephen Dubner interviewed me in my office to write about me in the Freakonomics column. I mentioned a discussion I’d had with a friend about the Enola Gay controversy at the Smithsonian; my friend and I thought it was unfortunate, I told Dubner, that neither of us knew someone on the other side of the argument. Dubner said that a lot of reporters at the New York Times wrote about military stuff, but hardly anyone at the Times that he knew had even visited West Point, which was less than 60 miles away.

The year isn’t half over, but this brilliant profile — by Lauren Collins in The New Yorker, about a photo-retoucher you’ve never heard of — gets my vote.

I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he [Dangin] asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”