Seth's Blog

The next meeting of the Make Yourself Healthy Meetup group is tomorrow (May 23, Thursday) at the Telegraph Ministry Center (5316 Telegraph, Oakland). Social time will start 6:30 pm, the meeting proper at 7:00 pm. It will last about 2 hours. Admission is $3, payable at the door, to cover the cost of renting the space.

The first speaker will be Robin Barooah, who will tell how he cured his RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury). What his doctors told him to do didn’t work.

A few years ago, I discovered that walking made studying Chinese more pleasant and studying Chinese made walking more pleasant. It’s a big effect. While walking on a treadmill I could easily study Chinese for 40 minutes; while sitting or standing still, 5-10 minutes. The general idea seems to be that walking creates a thirst for novelty, for dry information. An evolutionary explanation is that this effect caused us to  better explore our surroundings. Such exploration paid off too rarely and/or with too-long delays to be supported by the usual reward-action mechanism.

Jeremy Howard, the president of Kaggle, discovered the same effect independently while studying Chinese. A few days ago, I heard from Patrick Roach, a medical student in the Midwest, who also discovered the same effect independently — in his case, studying anatomy rather than Chinese. He blogged about the Anki/treadmill combination. I asked him if walking on a treadmill made it easier to study Anki? He replied:

Absolutely.  I originally tried this with a 3100 card deck I created while studying anatomy in med school.  The format (Image/Name) was perfect for reviewing while walking, as there wasn’t too much text to read.  I imagine your experience with learning a new language was similar.  Anyways, Treadmill + Anki (+Music) along with my Tablet / Wiimote combo was much more productive than either task alone.  I could easily spend 1-2 hours and not notice the time passing in the same way it dragged on when trying to study endless flashcards sitting in a quiet room.  Getting tired or losing focus was less of an issue as well – I noticed I had less distractions/extra attention to spare while walking.

Thanks for getting in touch, Patrick. As Lewis Carroll said, “What I tell you three times is true.”

Yesterday I commented about Give and Take by Adam Grant, a professor at Wharton who teaches organizational psychology.

When Grant was a graduate student (at the University of Michigan), he was asked to help people at the university’s fund-raising call center raise more money. They call alumni, asking for money. The person who ran the center had tried the usual motivational tactics, such as offering bonuses. They hadn’t worked.

Grant noticed that most of the money being raised went for scholarships. He tried various ways of making the call center employees aware that the money they raised helped students directly. The most effective way turned out to be a 5-minute meeting with a scholarship recipient. This had a staggering effect:

The average caller doubled in calls per hour and minutes on the phone per week . . . Revenue quintipled: callers averaged $412 [per week] before meeting the scholarship recipient and more than $2000 afterward.

A huge effect — and a useful huge effect. And one that is not even hinted at in countless introductory psychology books. Notice that physical conditions of the job and the “physical” payoff (the salary) didn’t change. All that changed was employees’s mental models of their job.

I conclude that people are far more motivated by a desire to help others than you would ever guess from reading psychology textbooks — and, even more, from reading economics textbooks. Grant says nothing about this, at least in the book, but I’d guess that the employees were considerably happier at their jobs as well. You might think that there has been so much research on job design that there were no big effects left to be discovered. You’d be wrong.

The publisher sent me a copy of Give and Take by Adam Grant after I sent several emails asking for a review copy. I expected it to be the best book about psychology in many years and it is.

The book’s main theme is the non-obvious advantages of being a “giver” (someone who helps others without concern about payback). Grant teaches at Wharton, whose students apparently enter Wharton believing (or are taught there?) that this is a poor strategy. With dozens of studies and stories, Grant argues that the truth is more complicated — that a giver, properly focussed, does better than others. Whether this reflects cause and effect (Grant seems to say it does) I have no idea. Perhaps “givers” are psychologically unusually sophisticated in many ways, not just a relaxed attitude toward payback, and that is why some of them do very well. Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s a funny thing,” Jane Jacobs told an interviewer in an interview I cannot find, “you can’t change something unless you love it.” (By “change” she meant improve.) She had seen that people who disliked cities gave poor advice about improving them and understood that it wasn’t just cities. To improve something, it isn’t enough to have a good idea. You also need to (a) pay close attention and (b) overcome obstacles. (a) and (b) aren’t easy. You are unlikely to do them without strong motivation, such as love. Read the rest of this entry »

• Rating prisons on Yelp. Quantified Institutions.
• Widespread fraud at Indian drug company that makes generic drugs widely sold in the United States. Maybe this article will cause people to stop buying their products. It isn’t obvious to me what to do about this problem, although apparently the fine was too small. Jail for the owners?
• Poisoning at Tsinghua University
• Association of Restless Leg Syndrome with glutamate

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda and Andy.

by Katie Reid

I am a mother of five children. I live in Fremont, California. In 2009, my youngest child, who was three, was diagnosed with autism. The diagnosis came from her social and communication impairment and highly repetitive behavior. She did not play with other children. She had no imaginary play. She made no eye contact with anyone. She had no spontaneous language. She did not understand questions. Her language was restricted to repeating what she heard (echolalia). In other words, she didn’t use language to communicate. She could stack blocks for hours. She would line up toys and have a meltdown if you moved a toy out of line. Everything had to be according to her rules or she was in chaos. She had highly repetitive routines that would escalate into unrest or panic. For example, she would go to wash her hands, turn the water on, turn the water off, turn the water on, and so on. Each time through the routine she would get more upset that she couldn’t stop. These loop-like routines might last hours, typically ending because of exhaustion from crying. She also had episodes of absence (blank stares) that lasted 15-30 seconds.

My husband and I tried a number of popular therapies. We tried Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) for 3 months. She got worse; her loop-like routines occurred more frequently. We tried speech therapy for 6 months. It increased her vocabulary, but did not improve her communication in other ways. The third therapy we tried was auditory integration training. We did the full series twice, which took a total of 3 months. There was no improvement. Then she started going to a special-needs school, where each student is given an individualized program. At this point, she was 3.5 years old. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, based on the good experiences of friends, I bought a sous vide cooker. As promised, food cooked sous vide (at very low temperatures, such as 135 degrees F., for long periods of time, such as 48 hours) was excellent, clearly better than other cooking methods. For example, I made short ribs. They came out a perfect texture (slightly chewy), very moist and full of flavor. I also made eggs. At the right temperature, they turned a wonderful custard-like texture.

Sous vide isn’t new. Professional chefs have been using it for many years. The equipment has been too expensive (such as $1000). What’s new is lower prices. A friend paid about $350 for a sous vide cooker and vacuum sealer.

My brief experience suggests two conclusions I haven’t read anywhere else: Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I interviewed two job candidates for an assistant professor position at Tsinghua. I asked both of them: “Why did you decide to study this?” (this = their field of research). One had no answer at all. The other had an answer that didn’t make sense. I didn’t mean it as a tough question. If they had said “because that’s what they were doing where I got a postdoc” I would have been perfectly happy. If that were the answer, I might have asked “why does your advisor study it?” — to which “I don’t know” would have been perfectly acceptable. Of course, there are better answers.

When I was a graduate student, I read Adventures of a Mathematician by Stanislaw Ulam (a very good well-written book). One of the book’s comments impressed me: That John Von Neumann was able to distinguish the main lines of growth of the tree of mathematics from the branches. My research was about how rats measure time. The relevance to big questions in the psychology of learning wasn’t obvious. I wondered: Am I studying something important? Or something that will be irrelevant in twenty years? My advisor didn’t seem to have thought about this. 

When I interviewed for jobs at various universities, no one asked me why do you study this? But it was still a question worth answering. As a grad student I had no choice. But eventually I would have a choice: I could continue to study how rats measure time. Or I could study something else. (Eventually I did change — to studying what controls variation in behavior.)

Here’s what I would say now about how to choose a research topic.

What’s best is a new method. If you can use a new method to answer questions in your field, do that. The cheaper, easier and more available the method, the better. As a graduate student, I developed a new way to study how rats measure time, which I called the peak procedure. It made it easier to determine if an experimental treatment affected an animal’s internal clock.

What’s second best is a new experimental effect. Discovering a new way to change something of interest. The bigger, cheaper, newer, and more surprising the effect, the better. Using the peak procedure, my colleagues and I discovered a large and surprising effect (at a certain time during the peak procedure, the variability of bar-press duration — how long a rat holds down the bar when pressing it — became much larger). When I first saw the result, I assumed it was due to a software mistake. It turned out to be a window in what controls the variability of behavior — an easy way of studying that. In that sense it was also a new method.

I don’t know if the two job candidates I interviewed were doing either of these two things. Maybe not. My broader point is that if you don’t have a good understanding of how to choose a research topic you will have to retreat to studying something simply because others are studying it. Which is exactly the wrong thing to do if you want to be an innovator and a leader.

• Top diving coach has degree from diploma mill. Should anyone care?
• butter grater from Japan
• “I love bacon. I eat it every day,” says 105-year-old woman
• Babies whose parents “clean” their pacifier by sucking on it have much less asthma and eczema than babies whose parents don’t do that

Thanks to Casey Manion and Bryan Castañeda.