Seth's Blog

Gary Wolf’s article about self-measurement in the New York Times Magazine is here. I am quoted in it. The story I identified with most is Bo Adler’s. He has sleep apnea:

“Here’s what they told me was the normal surgical course of treatment,” Adler explained. “First they were going to cut out my tonsils, and if that didn’t work, they would break my jaw and reset it to reposition my tongue, and finally they would cut out the roof of my mouth. I had one question: What if my case is different? They said, ‘Let’s try the standard course of treatment first, and if that doesn’t work, then we’ll know your case is different.’ ”

I started long-term self-experimentation because I woke up too early in the morning. The notion of taking drugs for it — what a doctor would prescribe — was too horrible to take seriously, just as Adler resists the idea of surgery before less harmful solutions have been ruled out. Adler hopes he can learn something about sleep apnea his doctors don’t know, just as I hoped I could learn something about early awakening nobody knew. Eventually — ten years later — I managed to.

I was pleased that Matt Ridley quoted me in his blog about the Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy and out of curiosity I read his previous post (“Chiefs, priests and thieves“). Strangely enough it’s closely related to the post of mine that followed The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy: about Jane Jacobs’s view of two moral systems, guardian and commercial.

In “Chiefs, priests and thieves”, Ridley wrote about what he’d learned from what sounds like a truly fascinating book: Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley.

As always, ordinary people wanted to carry on with commerce, but chiefs, priests and thieves — sultans, emperors, popes, pashas, holy knights and corsairs — just kept plundering the fruits of that commerce for their own enrichment and their own glory. Little wonder that, as the historian Meir Kohn concludes, preindustrial government was predominantly predatory in nature. Not that it is entirely free of that suspicion today.

This is exactly what Jacobs was talking about — the close connection between government and predation, in contrast to trading (commerce). And it’s what Russ Roberts is talking about in his terrific essay about the cause of the financial crisis. When large financial firms become close to government (“In the week before the AIG bailout that put $14.9 billion into the coffers of Goldman Sachs, Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson called Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein at least 24 times“), they become predatory rather than commercial. Was Goldman Sachs providing useful innovation when it provided and sold the bonds that the SEC is now complaining about? No, it was basically predatory, under the guise of being commercial.

I think the rest of us let this sort of predation happen because of apocalyptic stories spun (always in future tense) by leaders: The infidels will . . . The terrorists will . . . The financial system will . . . Under cover of these stories, leaders do stuff that strengthens them and weakens the rest of us. But recently a countervailing story has gathered strength:  Guardians as idiots. These stories are past tense: Harry Markopolos went to the SEC five times with incredibly persuasive evidence of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and the SEC did nothing. I think the hearings about this were incredibly embarrassing to SEC officials and a big reason they’re now doing something about Goldman. Another example of the genre is …First Do No Harm, wherein doctors nearly prevented an epileptic child from getting life-saving therapy. And, of course, Al Gore is looking more and more foolish as it becomes clear he trusted research (that hockey-stick graph) he had no clue about.

More More future tense: “To the Indios they said, “If you don’t work, this God will kill you.”

What do the following have in common?

1. Doctors who view patients as “profit centers”.
2. Chinese universities that open art departments because art students pay much higher tuition than other students. The classes in these departments have high student/teacher ratios and are taught by inexperienced teachers.
3. Corrupt government officials.
4. Katherine Weymouth, publisher of the Washington Post, organizing salons where, for a hefty price, important people would meet Post reporters.

All can be seen as cases where guardians abuse the trust they’ve been given by trying to profit from it. Jane Jacobs wrote about guardian/commercial ethical differences in Systems of Survival. Jacobs’s answer to why two ethical systems? why not twenty? was that there are two different ways to make a living: taking and trading.

Jacobs wasn’t trying to tell people how to act. She was trying to describe and explain differences in behavior she’d seen. As a one-pass view of how people make a living, taking and trading is a good division. Looked at more closely, teaching (education) and learning (science) are also central. They underlie both taking and trading. Following Jacobs’s logic, maybe they need different ethical codes to function well. Yesterday I spoke to a Tsinghua professor who complained that other Tsinghua professors simply taught what they wanted to teach, as opposed to what would help their students. I said, yeah, I’d blogged about it (“For whom do colleges exist?“, “For whom do law schools exist?“).

• LA Times article about omega-3 health effects
• Sanity about CO2 emissions. “When and where did the climate alarmists tell you about CO2 levels that were up to 20 times current levels when dinosaurs roamed the earth? When and where did alarmists tell you that the conditions they openly worry about have repeatedly happened without turning the earth into an oven?”

Thanks to Dave Lull.

In The Emperor’s New Clothes, the king is naked but only a little girl says so. The king’s advisers don’t tell him. I suppose the intended lesson was that powerful people have trouble getting frank answers. That’s pretty obvious. For a CEO, it’s said, the scarcest commodity is truth. Bosses learn this all the time. I learned it the first time I asked one of my students what he thought of the class.

Andersen’s story can be taken differently, partly conveyed by the phrase elephant in the room: Something big and important is overlooked by the supposed experts (in the story, the king’s advisers). It should be obvious — but it isn’t. Or at least no one says anything. This is how Harry Markopolos used the term emperor’s new clothes in No One Would Listen: Madoff was a gigantic fraud, his returns were (to Markopolos) clearly too good to be true, he was enormously visible (in certain circles), but no one said anything. It was as astonishing as a king parading naked. How come no one sees this? Markopolos thought. If you looked at Madoff the right way, he was naked.

That this sort of thing happens isn’t obvious at all. Yet three books — which I’ve just blogged about — have recently appeared with examples. One is the Markopolos book. Another is The Hockey Stick Illusion. Surely there’s overwhelming evidence that humans are causing global warming, right? Well, no. The only clear evidence was that hockey stick — and that’s a statistical artifact. (It looks like an artifact.) The third is The Big Short. It wasn’t easy to find the right sight line from which it was clear that Goldman Sachs et al. were taking on far more risk than they realized but such views existed. I call these books The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy. Their broad lesson: Sometimes the “best people” aren’t right. Sometimes there’s a point of view from which they’re glaringly wrong. The Hockey Stick Illusion is about how Stephen McIntyre found this point of view. In No One Would Listen Markopolos found this point of view. In The Big Short several people found this point of view.

This relates to my self-experimentation in two ways. First, the “best people” say self-experimentation is bad. No weight-control researcher does self-experimentation. No sleep researcher does self-experimentation. Surely they know how to do research. It’s their job. Whereas to me it’s glaringly obvious that self-experimentation is an excellent research tool, not just because of my results but also because it makes it so much easier to try new things. The best way to learn is to do, I  believe; self-experimentation makes doing much easier. Second, my self-experimentation uncovered all sorts of results that implied that the expert consensus on this or that was glaringly wrong. The Shangri-La Diet is just one example. Breakfast is good, right? Well, no, breakfast may wake you up too early. And so on. At first, I didn’t grasp the broad lesson I stated earlier (“Sometimes the “best people” aren’t right. . . “) and was amazed by what I was finding. To me, The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy is support.