Seth's Blog

I am teaching a seminar-like class called something like New Topics in Psychology. Most of the students are freshmen because this is the first year the psychology department has accepted undergraduates. Some unusual things happened on the first day of class:

• A graduate student volunteered to be a teaching assistant. (She was the second person to do so. A grad student in automation had volunteered a week earlier.)
• A freshman had her picture taken with me.
• I mentioned Caltech, where I was a freshman. Someone asked if Randy Pausch was a Caltech professor. (He was at Carnegie-Mellon.)
• The students did brief introductions. Many students appeared to think that one student’s Chinese name was humorous. This was briefly explained to me but I still have trouble believing it. Maybe I misunderstood.
• There was uncertainty about the length of the class. It lasted only the first two-thirds of a longer period. (The basic unit is 45 minutes class plus 5 minutes break.)
• The students were seated in the usual rectangular way. Moving from front row to back row, the students’ English appeared to get worse.
• The (first) teaching assistant advised them to not say “My English is not good” but to say “My English is on the way”.

They are closely related. I’ve been reading James Stewart’s excellent blow-by-blow of the early days of the crisis. As Nassim Taleb has emphasized, the crisis happened because the people running the financial system didn’t understand how it works. They vastly overrated their understanding — their ability to predict. (As Taleb has also emphasized, they still fail to grasp their ignorance.)

Surely it isn’t just the financial system. Surely we don’t overrate our knowledge just here. Much more likely, we overrate our knowledge about everything. This creates a great opportunity. It goes like this: 1. We overrate our knowledge about a large thing (the financial system). 2. We probably overrate our knowledge about everything. 3. We probably overrate our knowledge about small things. 4. There is more to be learned from studying small things than we realize. 5. Small things can be studied experimentally — an especially effective learning method.
Self-experimentation is an example of studying small things experimentally. These experiments taught me far more than I ever expected. Because I knew less than I thought. (Without realizing this fact.) Here are three examples:

1. Acne. I discovered that my beliefs about the two medicines my dermatologist has prescribed were exactly wrong. The one I thought worked, didn’t work; the one I thought didn’t work, did work.

2. Sleep. My self-experimentation led to new ideas about the control of sleep that no one had thought of. I didn’t know experimentation could do that so often. (I thought that such discoveries were very rare.)

3. Mood. My conclusions about mood are really different than what researchers usually say. I never expected to learn anything so radical.

These examples cover three dimensions. In the acne example, I learned I was completely wrong very quickly — that’s speed of learning. The sleep example is about number of discoveries; the mood example is about the “size” of one discovery.

In the Shangri-La Diet forums, Maychi has posted about a new way of nose-clipping (eliminating the smell of food) that is socially-acceptable: Putting tiny pieces of pantyhose in your nose. They are invisible. Her husband and son wouldn’t eat with when she wore noseclips.

I started this on 1st August. After about five days I got AS [appetite suppression] I had never managed to achieve with sugar or oil or anything else.

She eats about 95% of her calories this way. It doesn’t entirely block smells but perhaps it changes them enough so that they aren’t recognized or are less recognized. Maychi started losing weight and so did someone else who tried it.

One little problem: You have to be careful what you say.

It’s not possible to produce certain sounds. So in order to not sound like you have a horribly blocked nose, you have to say “delicious!” instead of “yummm!” and and “super!” instead of “Nice!”

A friend asked me how to strike up conversations with strangers. I told her what I’ve said many times. Three things make it easier:

1. Recognition. If you recognize someone (and presumably they recognize you) it will be easier to start a conversation.

2. Real question. If you have a real question — a question to which you really want the answer — it will be easier to start a conversation.

3. Shared suffering. If the two of you (you and the person you wish to speak to) have suffered together — bad weather, stuck in a long line — it will be easier to start a conversation. Living in Beijing and not speaking Chinese is another example of what I mean by “suffering”; another name for this factor could be shared predicament.

Those are the main factors that matter. In everyday life, they vary a lot. Another factor is minor:

4. Forced proximity. If you are forced to be near each other — in an elevator, say — it will be easier to start a conversation.

If none of these factors are true, it will be very hard to start a conversation. If one is true, it will be somewhat hard. If two are true it will be easy. If three are true it will be inevitable.

In my experience, local culture makes a small difference, somewhere between zero to one on this scale. Most places are zero. A place where people are really friendly would be worth one.

In an earlier post I wrote, “Hypothyroidism is so common I suspect an environmental cause.” In fact, I suspect that all common diseases are caused (= made much more likely by) differences between modern life and Stone-Age life. Since then, thanks to comments and email, I have learned more about hypothyroidism. According to Dennis Mangan, it has become a lot more common during the last 100 years, which implies an environmental cause. The most common type of hypothroidism is called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. It is an autoimmune disorder where the immune system attacks the thyroid, damaging it. A reader with hypothyroidism wrote me:

When I was first tested for thyroid levels, part of the test (which I think is standard protocol) was to test the level of antibodies to thyroid. My levels were off the charts.

This supports what I said. I’m sure that autoimmune diseases are caused by one particular difference from Stone Age life: lack of bacteria in our food. The immune stimulation the harmless bacteria provided can be provided in other ways — bee stings, for example. But I don’t think Stone-Age people got a lot more bee stings than we do.