Seth's Blog

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.”

Day after day I read Mondoweiss, Philip Weiss’s blog, even though his main subject — Israeli treatment of Palestinians, how this is enabled by Jewish Americans, what a mistake that is — is not something I read about elsewhere or think about when I’m not reading Mondoweiss. It would be too self-congratulatory to say now I care more about it but it is undeniable that now I know a lot more about it. Without any effort at all.

It’s like a really great column in a newspaper or magazine except it’s much better than that: Weiss can write anything he wants at any length at any time, unlike any columnist. The whole thing has a raw and impassioned and narrow and personal aspect unlike any column I’ve ever read. And it’s so easy to read, even though it’s unfamiliar and complicated. Here’s an example why:

I heard a crushing story about Aaron David Miller. He’s from Cleveland and a big Jewish family. He went to a synagogue there recently and spoke from the pulpit and said, The problem’s simple, two peoples fighting for a disputed piece of land, there will have to be a compromise. There was dead silence in the synagogue and the rabbi came up and said, “In Numbers 34, God promised the land of Israel to Moses, from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean….”

What a chilling story.

From an article in Nature Medicine:

A British biotech entrepreneur named William Bains is proposing that self-experimenters should form collectives, pooling resources to make their findings more acceptable to the mainstream scientific community. Bains, who also lectures on the business of biotechnology at the University of Cambridge, UK, believes that the high costs and red tape associated with clinical trials have forced pharmaceutical companies to become increasingly conservative in the treatments they will test—leaving radical but potentially effective therapies out in the cold. . . . A radical alternative to conventional clinical trials, which he proposed in a paper published in April, is to have people who are willing to experiment on themselves band together and form what he calls ‘biomedical mutual organizations’ (BMOs) (Med. Hypotheses 70, 719–723; 2008). These collectives would pool resources to provide their members with more test subjects (each other), greater analytic capacity and access to more novel therapies, Bains claims.

1. LSD, My Problem Child by Albert Hoffman (full book).

2. High-powered editing (scroll down to the Karp letter).

3. Plow the Deep: terrific but rejected title for William Bernstein‘s new history of trade. Excellent EconTalk podcast.

4. Speaking of editing, proofreading fiasco.

Why did Chinese immigrants to America start so many restaurants? Because Chinese cuisine is glorious, right? Well, no. Chinese immigrants started a lot of laundries, too, and there is nothing wonderful about Chinese ways of washing clothes. As Jennifer Lee explains in this excellent talk, the first Chinese immigrants were laborers. They were taking jobs away from American men, and this caused problems. Restaurants and laundries were much safer immigrant jobs because cooking and cleaning were women’s work.

A character in Jane Jacobs’s The Nature of Economies says this:

This is why societies that are oppressive to women and contemptuous of their work are so backward economically. Half of their population, doing economically important kinds of work, such cooking and food processing, cleaning and laundering, making garments, and concocting home remedies, are excluded from taking initiatives to develop all that work [that is, start businesses] — and nobody else does it, either.

My grandparents, Jewish immigrants, were in the garment industry. Now I can guess why.

This post from the self-experimentation forums deserves to be reprinted in full:

After being plagued with acne for years, I took a job which caused me to work in remote bush camps for short periods in the far north. My acne would invariably disappear within a few days of exposure to this. When I returned to the city, the acne would return with a vengeance. Did not know why.

My theory: Soap residue left after washing my face with hardwater was the true acne culprit. Washing my face with ultrasoft lake water in bush camps leaves little or no soap residue, so no acne. Soap residue stimulates excessive skin oil secretions which leads to increased acne. A rich diet aggravates the problem by feeding the oil secretions.

My self-experiment: I experimented with different types of soap and different concentrations of soap in hard and soft water.

Conclusion: Soft and slightly soapy water only (a very mild soap) produced the least amount of acne. Never apply soap lather directly to your face! If you have only hard water to work with, then no soap at all is the best choice by far. Compensate for the lack of soap with hotter water.

Added benefit: Washing your face with no soap causes acne lesions to heal much faster – a couple of days compared to a week or more with soap.

Great work!

The same technique applied to cold sores.

In the journal In Character, Simon Baron-Cohen, the autism expert, writes:

Clinicians describe the deep, narrow interests in autism as “obsessions,” but a more positive description might be “areas of expertise.” Sometimes the area of expertise a person with autism focuses on appears not to be very useful (e.g., geometric shapes, or the texture of different woods). Sometimes the area of expertise is slightly more useful, though of limited interest to others (e.g., train timetables, or flags of the world). But sometimes the area of expertise can make a real social contribution (such as fixing machines, or solving mathematical problems, or debugging computer software).

My guess is that in autism, something is turned off that should be turned on. This allows the rest — in particular, the rest of what motivates  us — to be seen more clearly.  Everyone has a tendency toward expertise, says my theory of human evolution. Why everyone? Because everyone suffers from procrastination and the tendency toward expertise is the tendency that causes procrastination: It’s harder to do something new than to do what you did yesterday. Back in the Stone Age, this tendency toward expertise caused different people to do different hobbies, and become good at them. This was the beginning of occupational specialization.