Seth's Blog

At my Quantified Self talk I described data that suggested butter improved my mental function. During the question period, a cardiologist in the audience said something about me killing myself — butter is unhealthy. The usual view.

I said I thought the evidence for the usual view was weak. He said, “The Framingham studies.” That was epidemiology, I said. It is notoriously hard to understand. My data was from something like an experiment. Much easier to understand. (And the Framingham study is a terrible example of the supposed evidence. To quote from it: “In the period between the taking of the diet interviews and the end of the 16-year follow-up, 47 cases of de novo CHD developed in the Diet Study group. The means for all the diet variables measured were practically the same for these cases as for the original cohort at risk.”) He replied that the reduction in heart disease in recent years was more support for the usual view. I said the recent decline in heart disease could have many explanations other than a reduction in animal fat intake. Many things have changed over the last 20 years.

There is epidemiological evidence that saturated fat is bad, yes, but it is not the Framingham study nor the recent decline in heart disease. And it really is difficult to interpret. The butter-is-bad interpretation could easily be wrong. The obvious problem is that, after people are told butter is bad, people who try hard to be healthy avoid butter. And they do a lot of other things, too, to be healthy. So butter consumption ends up confounded with a dozen other variables believed to affect your health. When I was growing up, my parents avoided butter because margarine was much cheaper. So butter consumption is confounded with income, another problem.

My tiny experiment, whatever its problems, was much easier to interpret.

On Tuesday I gave a talk called “Arithmetic and Butter” at the Quantified Self meeting in Sunnyvale. I had about 10 slides but this one mattered most:

It shows how fast I did simple arithmetic problems (e.g., 2*0, 9-6, 7*9) before and after I started eating 1/2 stick (60 g) of butter every day. The x axis covers about a year. The butter produced a long-lasting improvement of about 30 msec. (more…)

This BMJ research asked how well authors responded to criticism in emailed letters to the editor. A highly original subject, but the researchers, one of whom (Fiona Godlee) is the top BMJ editor, appear lost. They summarize the results but appear to have no idea what to learn from them, ending their paper with this:

Editors should ensure that authors take relevant criticism seriously and respond adequately to it.

Which was perfectly reasonable before any data was collected. So that’s not a good conclusion.

The real conclusion is this: The letters to the editor were far better than nothing because authors responded to their criticisms about half the time.

I liked Erica Goldson’s graduation speech very much partly because she says the same things I say here. To me, the core of her message is that her high school was

a world suppressing the uniqueness that lies inside each of us

That’s what I tried to say here. Goldson summed it up better than I did. One of the things that pushed me toward that conclusion happened in an undergraduate seminar about depression that I taught at Berkeley. For a final project, the students could do almost anything related to depression, so long as it was off campus and did not involve library research. One student chose to give a talk to a high school class. Not a rare choice — several other students did the same thing. But her final paper blew me away. She wrote about how hard it had been. She had/has severe stage fright. Every step of the project was very hard for her. But she did it. “I learned I can conquer my fears,” she wrote.

Her performance on the week-to-week assignments (writing comments on the reading) had been mediocre. But now I saw another side of her: She was courageous. My assignments, like practically all college assignments, required no courage. So I never noticed how courageous any of my students were. I remember sitting at my desk after reading her paper and thinking how badly I had undervalued her. I had noticed this only because I’d given a highly unusual assignment. I could see that there was a gigantic amount of undervaluing going on. And undervaluation leads to suppression. Students have unique or unusual strengths that fail to develop because their high school or college teachers don’t value them.

Thanks to Tucker Max.

This excellent post by Alex Tabarrok about the effect of removing traffic lights — traffic improves — reminds me of how I discovered the work of Jane Jacobs. Browsing in the Transportation Library at UC Berkeley, I came across The Economy of Cities.

That order arising from below (from individual drivers and pedestrians) can be much better than order imposed from above (by traffic engineers) was a point Jacobs made often. The details in Alex’s post and the video he embeds don’t just suggest that traffic lights in thousands of places could be profitably removed, they also support more radical thinking:

• Traffic engineers were completely wrong in all these cases. Trying to improve something, they made it worse. How did we get to a world where this is possible? Surely it isn’t just traffic engineers.
• What would happen if students were given more power to control their own education? Perhaps we would need far few professors. I gave my students much more control and found (a) my job got easier and (b) my students learned much more.
• What would happen if all of us were given more power to control our own health, rather than rely on gatekeepers, such as doctors? Perhaps we would need far fewer doctors.

The essence of my self-experimentation is that I took control of my health. Rather than seeing a doctor about my early awakening, or waiting for sleep researchers to find a solution, I found a solution.