Seth's Blog

• advocacy in the guise of journalism (climate science edition)
• what if you stopped using soap?
• climate change: model vs. reality
• some of Malcolm Gladwell’s best writing

John Mackey is the founder of Whole Foods, a business I greatly respect. But he’s not always right.

“You only love animal fat because you’re used to it,” he said. “You’re addicted.”

(From a profile of Mackey in The New Yorker.) I discovered that animal fat improved my sleep when I overcame my (learned) repulsion and ate a lot more than usual.I think it’s obvious that fat tastes good for unlearned reasons. For reasons not based on experience. (Babies like fat. Animals similar to us, who have never eaten fast food, like fat.) Mackey’s comment is an example of a larger disregard of this. Professional nutritionists, including nutrition professors, have ignored the general point that our food preferences must somehow be good for us. I’m not saying all fat must be good for us — just the fat we ate when our liking of fat evolved. The idea that evolution would shape us to like and eat a food component that’s bad for us makes no sense.

Because it allows me to read stuff like the following, an anonymous comment on a post by Washington Post reporter Andrew Freedman. Freedman complained that 2009 saw “erosion of clarity about climate”:

Mr. Freedman, the expression you’re struggling to avoid with regard to your propaganda in support of “mainstream climate scientists” is one devised by Nobel laureate Richard Feynman in 1974.

The words are “Cargo Cult Science,” the advancement of scientific seeming without scientific integrity. Not just error but flagrant dishonesty. Fraud. Criminal conspiracy, too.

That’s your “mainstream climate scientists” in a neat little bundle of filth.

The Climategate revelations – the obvious work of an insider, a whistle-blower, not an outside hacker – show how the CRU correspondents cooked their data, manipulated their crooked computer models, and generally schemed to defy the UK and US laws covering Freedom of Information, including indications that Prof. Jones of the University of East Anglia suborned not only the compliance officers of his University but also one or more officers of Her Majesty’s government in the ICO.

Thirty wonderful years of duplicity, mendacity, “cork-screwing, back-stabbing, and dirty dealing.”

And you, Mr. Freedman, are defending this. Tsk. But what the hell have we any right to expect – other than this act of accessory after the fact in a multiple-count felony investigation – from anyone associated with The Washington Post?

Courtesy of Climategate, we now have stunning “clarity on climate.”

This isn’t exactly brilliant but it is better (better-written, better-argued, more heartfelt) than 99% of mainstream journalism, such as the Washington Post or New York Times. One big function of journalism is “to afflict the comfortable.” That includes science journalism. When a journalist, such as Elizabeth Kolbert, cannot form her own opinion but must accept what powerful people tell her, she cannot “afflict” them.

I think there is a psychological principle at work. It has different names. One is belief in a just world. The rich and powerful think they deserve their good fortune. Another is cognitive dissonance. If I did this crummy job for low pay, I must enjoy it. Yet another is Stockholm Syndrome. The science journalist thinks: If I trust this scientist, he must be trustworthy. But he isn’t. Outsiders, such as the anonymous commenter, are not subject to this effect and see things more clearly.

I try to connect my self-experimentation to other intellectual activity. One broader category is the stunning single case — the single example that makes you think new thoughts. Another is superhobbies (activities done with the freedom of hobbyists but the skills of professionals). Superhobbies lie between hobbies and skilled jobs. A third is my position as an insider/outsider. I was close enough to sleep research to understand it but far enough away to ignore all their rules about what you can and cannot do. I had the knowledge of an insider but the freedom of an outsider.

A fourth broader category is the science of everyday life — meaning science that involves everyday life and can be done by most of us. My experiments cost almost nothing, required no special equipment or circumstances. They involved common concerns (e.g., how to sleep better) and tested treatments available to everyone (e.g., standing more, eating more animal fat). A post by Mark Liberman at Language Log has a nice non-experimental example of this category. The question is about word order in gender pairs. Why do we say “boys and girls” more often than “girls and boys”? Or “husbands and wives” more often than “wives and husbands”? There are plenty of such pairs, not all with male first (e.g., “ladies and gentlemen”). The several possible explanations can be tested in lots of ways that require no fancy equipment or data. As Liberman says,

A smart high-school student could do a neat science-fair project along these general lines.

A great feature of what Liberman is proposing is that the answer isn’t obvious. There isn’t a “correct” answer as there is in so much of the way that science is taught (e.g., physics labs, demonstrations). If I searched for examples of “science of everyday life” i would merely find canned demos, which have little in common with the practice of science. Whereas Liberman’s idea gets to the heart of it, at least the hypothesis-testing part.

Thanks to Stephen Marsh.

After a few years of being a writer, Chimamanda Adichie — author of my Short Story of the Year — wondered if she should be a professor. (Her father is a statistics professor.) And she wanted to learn more about Africa. So she enrolled in an African Studies program at Yale. In an interview, she said:

I met very lovely people at Yale, so it wasn’t an entire waste of time. . . . After two years of the program . . . academia I discovered — particularly political science as it is done in the US — is not about the real world. It’s about academia. I would joke and say that what they do is they create straw men, and they beat them down. While all this is going on, the real world is going on in a parallel universe. It is completely disconnected from what happens in academia. I didn’t understand most of what I read. It wasn’t written in English, it was written in political-science jargonese.

This is the usual critique, but it is well-put. If you spend enough time in academia, as I have, you can see it becoming that way, disciplines turning inward, becoming less and less interested in reality. Becoming more and more ivory-towerish. Statistics, for example, became less and less concerned with real-world problems; but I could say the same about every other area (engineering, English, etc.).

This is glaringly obvious, roughly as clear as the sun rising in the morning, but some Berkeley professors denied it. “English departments have really lost their way,” I would say. No they haven’t would be the reply.