Seth's Blog

Here is good summary:

The urban planning revolution began even as the Astodia road was first being scrutinised. If one were to mention a single event that kick-started the movement, it would be the publication in 1961 of Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which took on the policies of Robert Moses, the man who transformed New York City. Town planners like Moses believed in making cities more liveable by executing big-ticket public works projects: expressways and bridges, parks and promenades, dams and waterworks, and massive public housing schemes. Whatever came in the way of these efforts was bulldozed without much consideration of value. The new way pioneered by Jacobs rejected this rationlist, top-down approach in favour of decentralisation, preserving and empowering communities, consulting locals rather than depending solely on appointed experts, and working on a small rather than gargantuan scale. This movement is now seen as a shift from modernist to post-modernist thinking. A modernist would view Astodia as a traffic bottleneck ghetto of mostly impoverished citizens, living in uncomfortably tiny habitations without good public utilities. A post-modernist would see it as a close-knit community dwelling in old structures, some of them finely crafted, practising a lifestyle that had developed organically down generations.

I came across Laundry Tree while trying to figure out what soap nuts are. Soap nuts grow on trees and contain a soap. You can use them in place of laundry detergent. Something I read linked to the Laundry Tree site because it had a good picture.

I clicked around the site and was very impressed.

• Attractive web design. Easy to navigate.
• Neither hard nor soft sell. It’s plainly an e-tail site but it doesn’t hit you over the head with that nor does it hide it.
• Signs of life. Unlike, say, www.sethroberts.net, you can see that the home page has been updated recently.
• A friendly tone of voice.
• An interesting way to get visitors involved — a blogger’s contest (which this post will not enter me in).
• Persuasive.

And that’s just the website. None of the elements are rare yet the website itself stood way out from the zillions of websites I visit. I admire the whole business. It solves a real problem. It’s unusual. It’s very small. The owner puts little at risk, pays almost zero rent, and feels she’s making the world a better place in her own almost-unique way. Very few businesses manage to hit all of these marks.

I’m sure I would admire Laundry Tree no matter what I did with my life. Being a professor is very far from being a small business owner. But the self-experimentation I have done has a lot in common with Laundry Tree.

First, it began with trying to solve my own problems. I wanted to reduce acne, sleep better, lose weight. Laundry Tree began when the owner wanted a better way of doing laundry — no dyes, no harsh chemicals, not sudsy, and not expensive.

Second, it blends male and female tendencies. The data-analytic statistical-software number-crunching rigid-experiment side of self-experimentation is obviously male. The talk-about-my-problems side is obviously female. Likewise, Laundry Tree centers on a problem — choosing a good laundry detergent — that concerns women more than men. Yet constructing and maintaining a website is a kind of technical work that men seem to enjoy more than women. (Nowadays, I admit, it isn’t very technical.)

A journalist friend of mine was given an assignment to write about self-experimentation but eventually turned it down when he couldn’t find enough examples. I think the need to blend male and female tendencies is the main reason it is so rare. (At least publicly.) To get somewhere you really do have to make numerical measurements, enter the data, plot the data, and so on — stuff that, historically, men do far more than women. Yet to talk about your results you really do have to admit to everyone you have (or at least had) a problem, which men find much harder to do than women.

The Quantified Self Meetup group is having a meeting this Tuesday (Jan 27) — two days from now — at the UC Berkeley School of Information, 6 pm. The dozen or so projects I’ve heard about related to this group always invove quantification but rarely experimentation. In my experience quantification without experimentation doesn’t get very far but perhaps they will eventually learn this (or perhaps I’m wrong). Experimentation and quantification is more difficult than quantification alone but only a little more difficult. Perhaps the reason for lack of experimentation is that with quantification alone you stay safely on the male side of things but to add experimentation (to solve a personal problem) and talk about it you have to cross over to the female side.

In the latest Vanity Fair is a brilliant piece of journalism, Goodbye to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House by Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum. In a fun, easy-to-read format, it tells some basic truths I had never read before. Here are two examples:

Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: When Abu Ghraib happened, I was like, We’ve got to fire Rumsfeld. Like if we’re the “accountability president,” we haven’t really done this. We don’t veto any bills. We don’t fire anybody. I was like, Well, this is a disaster, and we’re going to hold some National Guard colonel responsible? This guy’s got to get fired.

For an M.B.A. president, he got the M.B.A. 101 stuff down, which is, you know, you don’t have to do everything. Let other people do it. But M.B.A. 201 is: Hold people accountable.

David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: There’s this idea that the Bush White House was dominated by religious conservatives and catered to the needs of religious conservatives. But what people miss is that religious conservatives and the Republican Party have always had a very uneasy relationship. The reality in the White House is if you look at the most senior staff you’re seeing people who aren’t personally religious and have no particular affection for people who are religious-right leaders. Now, at the end of the day, that’s easy to understand, because most of the people who are religious-right leaders are not easy to like. It’s that old Gandhi thing, right? I might actually be a Christian myself, except for the action of Christians.

And so in the political-affairs shop in particular, you saw a lot of people who just rolled their eyes at everyone from Rich Cizik, who is one of the heads of the National Association of Evangelicals, to James Dobson, to basically every religious-right leader that was out there, because they just found them annoying and insufferable. These guys were pains in the butt who had to be accommodated.

This is related to the Shangri-La Diet. In these two excerpts, the speakers were (a) close to the events they describe but (b) not so close they are in any danger from the people they tell the truth about.

In science the same thing happens. Saul Sternberg and I could tell the truth about Ranjit Chandra’s research not only because (a) we were fairly close to that research (which involved psychology, even though Chandra was a nutritionist) but also because (b) not being nutrition professors, Chandra couldn’t harm us. Those closer to Chandra, professional nutritionists, had plenty of doubts as far as I could tell but were afraid to say them. Hal Pashler and I could criticize a widely-accepted practice among cognitive modelers because (a) we were in the same general field, cognitive psychology, but (b) far enough away so that the people we criticized would never review our grants or our papers. (Except the critique itself, which they hated. After the first round of reviews, Hal and I requested new reviewers, saying it was inevitable that the people we criticized wouldn’t like what we said.) Likewise, in the case of voodoo correlations, Hal is (a) close enough to social neuroscience to understand the details of the research but (b) far enough away to criticize it without fear.

In the case of the Shangri-La Diet, I was (a) close enough to the field of nutrition that I could understand the research but (b) far enough away so that I could say what I thought without fear of reprisal. Nassim Taleb is in the same relation to the field he criticizes. Just as Saul Sternberg and I knew a lot about the outcome measure (psychological tests) but were not nutritionists, Weston Price, a dentist, knew a lot about his outcome measure (dental health) but was not a nutritionist.

It’s curious how rarely this need for insider/outsiders (inside in terms of knowledge, outside in terms of career) is pointed out. It’s a big part of how science progresses, in small ways and large. Mendel and Darwin were well-educated amateurs, for example. Thorstein Veblen wrote about it but I haven’t read it anywhere else.

At the Fancy Food Show, I heard someone say that the better a food tastes the worse it is for you. “What’s an example?” I asked. “Butter,” he said. “It goes straight to your arteries.”

What a choice. I have three pounds of very expensive butter in my freezer, purchased from an Amish farmer who raises grass-fed cows. I eat it as often as possible. I believe butter may have fat-soluble nutrients we need to be healthy, nutrients that are found in high concentration in growing plants (such as grass) but not in ordinary animal feed. In the Swiss Alps, in the 1930s, Weston Price found small communities that produced almost all the food they ate. Because of the altitude, they couldn’t produce much. They did have grass-fed cows and prized the butter from those cows. They were in much better health, especially dental health, than their neighbors who ate mostly industrial food.

There was a time, long ago, when exactly the opposite of the overheard statement was true: The better a food tasted the better it was for you. Now it is complicated.

Zume Life will help you keep a record of many things:

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• Food. Keep a food journal, and track calories, carbs, and/or points
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• Symptoms. Anything from anxiety and mood, to sleep disturbance and wheezing
• Biometrics. All common measures such as weight, glucose, etc.
• Life journal. To jot down anything else (“saw my dietician today”, “just had a great day”, etc.)

Monitor your progress through charts and journals. Use the system directly on the Web, or with an optional “Zuri” iPhone application. Sign up at www.zumelife.com.