Seth's Blog

After posting about Doug Lemov, I ordered Teach Like a Champion. It arrived yesterday. Leafing through it, I came across a section titled “The Irony of What Works,” which begins:

One of the biggest ironies I hope you will take away from reading this book is that many of the tools likely to yield the strongest classroom results remain essentially beneath the notice of our theories and theorists of education.

Lemov continues with an example: Teaching students how to distribute classroom materials, such as handouts. This can save a lot of time. Then he adds:

Unfortunately this dizzyingly efficient technique — so efficient it is all but a moral imperative for teachers to use it — remains beneath the notice of our avatars of educational theory. There isn’t a school of education that would stoop to teach its aspiring teachers how to train their students to pass out papers.

The last chapter of Veblen’s  Theory of the Leisure Class is about just this — the importance that professors (like everyone else) place on status display and how this interferes with their effectiveness. The connection with self-experimentation is that no matter how effective it is, no psychology department would stoop to teach it. Or, at least, that’s the current state of affairs.

The book’s index doesn’t include Veblen, although it does include Richard Thaler.

This is what one bloggingheads commentator said to the other. Was the speaker-listener combo (a) man to man, (b) man to woman, (c) woman to man, or (d) woman to woman? (more…)

I am a big fan of pork belly. Whenever I see it on a menu I order it. The mayor of Chongqing (population 32 million) recently made headlines with a speech whose main point was

改善民生不只是吃红烧肉穿漂亮衣服

Which means: Better living standards is not just eating hong shao rou wearing beautiful clothes. Hong shao rou is pork belly braised in a red sauce. Maybe my favorite Chinese dish. Supposedly Chairman Mao’s favorite dish. I’m glad he said “not just” rather than “not”.

This Al Jazeera documentary, called “Drug Money”, emphasizes three things.

1. Doctors get vast amounts of money from drug companies, which influences which drugs they prescribe. One influential doctor, Tom Stossel of Harvard, who has received “millions” from drug companies, sees no problem with that!

2. Drug companies encourage the prescription of drugs for unapproved uses. For this and other crimes, more than half of the major drug companies have been found guilty and fined billions of dollars. Several of the not-yet-guilty ones are under investigation. The problem is industry-wide, not due to a “bad apple”.

3. The harm done by deceptive practices isn’t trivial. One example is Risperdal.  It isn’t approved to treat ADHD in children, but it is  prescribed for that. Given to boys, it can cause them to grow breasts, which is extremely embarrassing. When the boys were given the drugs, their parents were unaware of this possibility. Joseph Biederman, another Harvard professor who has received millions from drug companies and an advocate of giving Risperdal to children, told a Congressional committee he had no idea that a large fraction of all Risperdal is given to children (“I have no idea how much Risperdal is used in children”).

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

An excellent essay by Jonah Lehrer describes a pair of studies I didn’t know about:

In a recent study led by Richard Petty, a psychologist at Ohio State, undergraduates role-played a scenario between a boss and an underling. Then the students were exposed to a fake advertisement for a mobile phone. Some of the ads featured strong arguments for buying the phone, such as its long-lasting battery, while other ads featured weak or nonsensical arguments. Interestingly, students that pretended to be the boss were far less sensitive to the quality of the argument. It’s as if it didn’t even matter what the ad said—their minds had already been made up.

. . . Instead of analyzing the strength of the argument, those with authority focus on whether or not the argument confirms what they already believe. If it doesn’t, then the facts are conveniently ignored.

Deborah Gruenfeld, a psychologist at the Stanford Business School, demonstrated a similar principle by analyzing more than 1,000 decisions handed down by the United States Supreme Court between 1953 and 1993. She found that, as justices gained power on the court, or became part of a majority coalition, their written opinions tended to become less complex and nuanced. They considered fewer perspectives and possible outcomes.

Scary. Thomas Paine wrote about this: “The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly.”