Seth's Blog

• groupthink in academia
• what time is it?
• why you can’t trust medical journals
• how Antabuse (an anti-alcoholism drug) was discovered
• Allergy Planet (a documentary)

Thanks to Denshil Yu.

For the first time, the New Yorker website contains comments by all of their contributors about the best books they read last year. It’s a great idea. I’ll be studying it for a long time. I was most immediately persuaded to read The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly (recommended by Margaret Talbot) and The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser (recommended by Jeffrey Toobin). I’m interested in anything Lauren Collins has to say because she is a very talented writer. Her list was unusually long. Tad Friend misspelled the title of his own book.

Some of the writers didn’t write very well. Paul Muldoon, the poetry editor, used the royal we:

We’re very pleased to report that the title-poem first appeared here in The New Yorker.

It should be called “the pompous we“. He also wrote:

Among the poetry books that particularly recommended themselves this past year

Richard Brody wrote this:

The laser-like clarity and probity with which Lanzmann brings

I think he means “the laser-pointer-like clarity . . . “.

This comment by goblyn on the Shangri-La Diet forums made me laugh:

When you’re on Atkins it gets harder when you start wanting to sell your first born for a piece of bread.  On Weight Watchers you’d kill for a pizza.  On South Beach you’d sleep with Donald Trump for an order of buffalo wings.  On the cabbage soup diet, you’d willingly chop off your hands if you could eat something…anything…other than cabbage soup.  On SLD it gets harder when you are suddenly only losing 1 lb a week rather than 4.

So well written! The comment continues, in very gratifying way:

It’s harder when you effortlessly eat 1400 calories a day and don’t feel deprived.  It’s harder when you have to buy a whole new wardrobe.  It’s harder when you’re out with friends and they all think you’re anorexic because you get stuffed from the bread they served before the meal…  But there’s rarely a moment when it’s actually HARD.  SLD is easy.  Yes the weight loss slows down, yes the AS [appetite suppression] gets less noticeable, but at no point does it stop working.  You won’t suddenly find your weight skyrocketing from eating a piece of celery.

This semester at Tsinghua University — the most selective college in China — I taught a freshman seminar about recent psychology research. Three weeks ago I gave my students a choice of five articles from Psychological Science, all published in 2008. They were to read one of them and comment.

Mostly I try to teach appreciation but three weeks ago we focused on how articles could be improved. I have never tried to teach this, yet the students made some very good points. Here are some of their comments:

1. This article said that we believe women make better leaders when there is within-group conflict and that men make better leaders when there is between-group conflict. One student pointed out that Rwanda was a good example. After the genocide (within-group conflict), far more women were elected to office.

2. This article studied the effect of cleanliness on moral judgments. One experiment compared two groups: subjects in one group had recently washed their hands, subjects in the other group had not. Before the time when the handwashing happened, both groups saw unpleasant scenes from a movie. Students pointed out an important confounding not mentioned in the article: The two groups differed not only in handwashing but also in the time from movie to test (because handwashing took time). Perhaps subjects who washed their hands remembered the movie less well.

3. The name-letter effect is a tendency to favor outcomes (broadly defined) that involve the first letter of your name. This study involved Belgium workers. The authors found that workers were more likely to be employed by a company whose first letter matched the first letter of their name. The correlation was small but reliable. Two students pointed out that this might reflect the company’s choice of whom to hire rather than the employee’s choice of where to work. One student pointed out that the correlation might be due to name-place correlations across Belgium. Perhaps certain regions favor certain names for both people and companies. As you move closer to the French border, perhaps French names become more common among both people and companies.

In all of these cases, had I been the editor, I would have required the authors to change their article appropriately.

James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds described cases where averages of estimates made by non-experts did very well, sometimes out-performing experts. These three examples don’t involve numerical judgments nor averaging, but they do show non-experts (freshmen) doing better than experts (journal editors and reviewers) in certain ways. Each paper was read by about eight students.

More It isn’t easy to convey how impressed I was. The comments about Rwanda and about name localization certainly deserve a letter to the editor (if Psychological Science published them).  Both of them are sophisticated methodological comments. The Rwandan one says that after you write an experimental article, try to find out if  real-world events support your findings. That may be a helpful lesson in many cases. The name localization one suggests that psychologists who use survey data should be learning more about how to analyze survey data. Several other times my students surprised me with how good their comments were. One was during a discussion of possible reasons for the Holocaust, another was about why women in ancient China bound their feet, a third involved proposals for Mindless-Eating-type experiments.

As all professors know, it is letter-of-recommendation-writing season. I write them differently than anyone else I know. I meet with the student and write the letter during our meeting. I ask questions, type, ask questions, type, etc. The student inevitably remembers details of the class and how well they did better than I do. I ask questions that try to elicit the strengths of their case — about relevant experience, for example. Anything I find convincing I put in the letter. Sure, maybe they described the same stuff in their statement of purpose but I’m sure I can do a better job — professor to professor — than they can. (Statements of purpose are usually badly written.) I speak professorese, they don’t.

I like to think it’s win-win-win. It’s good for me because the letter is written quickly, easily, on time, and with good content. It’s the strongest possible truthful letter I could write — so I feel I’m doing my job. It’s good for the student because I make their case in the best possible way. It’s good for whoever reads the letter because it’s factual and well-argued. I don’t just say the student is this or that; I give examples. Most letters of recommendation do not give examples. Without examples, I ignore them.