Seth's Blog

• the regulator franchise by Nassim Taleb
• lupus cured by diet and exercise
• librarian leads North American revolt

Thanks to Dave Lull, Dennis Mangan and Anne Weiss.

A paper in Cognition by Harvard professor Marc Hauser and others has been retracted:

The paper tested cotton-top tamarin monkeys’ ability to learn generalized patterns, an ability that human infants had been found to have, and that may be critical for learning language. The paper found that the monkeys were able to learn patterns, suggesting that this was not the critical cognitive building block that explains humans’ ability to learn language.

The note to be published about the retraction says almost nothing about why: “An internal examination at Harvard University . . . found that the data do not support the reported findings.”

Several other papers from Hauser’s lab have also been questioned.

The usual explanation would be that someone in Hauser’s lab made the results better than they actually were. A co-author of the paper said Hauser had told him “there were problems with the videotape record of the study”.  That’s consistent with the usual explanation: Someone edited the tapes (via deletions) to make the results appear better than they were. But it’s also possible that many tapes are missing, which might be an accident. When The New Yorker archives were moved from Building A to Building B several years ago, much of the archives was lost.

Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell.

The Chronicle of Higher Education website has a blog about “ideas, culture, and the arts [that] features some of the best minds in academic and policy circles”. One of the bloggers — Gina Barreca, a professor of English and Feminist Theory at the University of Connecticut and a humorist — wrote about being older than her students:

I think about the fact that my students and I no longer listen to same music or revere the same actors; I wonder about the implications of the fact that even some of the smart ones like I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

I pointed this out to Tucker Max (author of I Hope . . . ). He replied:

I like how she implies that some of her students are stupid. Great prof.

I thought that was a great point. I asked if I could use it on this blog. He agreed, and added:

The other thing about her statement is that she implicitly scoffs at the notion that someone smart could–gasp–DISAGREE with her. It doesn’t even occur to her that she might be wrong, that her worldview might be the one that needs examining. To her, nothing legitimate can exist outside of her prejudices and opinions. Even the idea that it could is rejected out of hand.

I replied:

Yeah, she hasn’t read your book but it must be ridiculous. Of course. I praised the film Gladiator (pre-Oscar) to someone I knew and she said, to a friend, that this made me an inferior person. Because Gladiator was popular, it must be bad. If I liked it, there was something wrong with me.

Tucker replied:

Exactly–the idea that THEY might be wrong doesn’t even occur to them. Like it’s not even in the realm of possibility.

These are the same people that Nassim Taleb rails against, and the same people who read Socrates, and completely miss the point, but still praise it because they think they’re supposed to. And these are the people that the internet/the age of connectivity is destroying. Because you can’t hide behind status anymore. Results are measurable, and everyone is on the playing field now.

I agree.

This pharmaceutical-company handout (thanks, Jen!) about their Vitamin K2 includes a description of an experiment where subjects took the tablets on an empty stomach or with a meal. The variation in stomach contents made a huge difference: absorption, measured by blood concentration, was 7 times higher when the K2 was taken with a meal.

This is going to change how I take supplements, such as selenium, for the rest of my life. I’ve often taken them on empty stomach. I never realized the effect of doing so could be so large.

One theme of this blog (I hope) is that it’s insider/outsiders — people with the knowledge of insiders but the freedom of outsiders — who can produce real progress. Ordinary insiders have the necessary knowledge but not the necessary freedom; ordinary outsiders have the freedom but not the knowledge. This article of mine makes this point in detail.

A similar point was made in a comment on a blog post by George Packer, the New Yorker writer. Packer had written an article about the U.S. Senate and his post was about how he’d written it. Someone commented:

I think Packer covered Washington with the refreshing take of a short-timer, one who didn’t have to make his living or sustain his career there. The disservice inherent in careerism connects with the Senate’s paralysis a la Tom Harkin’s quote about senators spending more than half their time fund-raising, one of the most troubling realities of the story. (Years ago, Bill Clinton said the House was ineffective because the members were “sleep deprived” from having to attend fundraisers every night. If a six-year term requires half-time fund-raising, imagine what a two-year term requires.)

I think the subtext is that journalistic long-timers, unlike short-timers like Packer, must spend a lot of time nurturing relationships, and this makes it harder to write unpleasant and unflattering truths.

Professional scientists spend a lot of time fund-raising, which in their case means applying for grants. A typical grant lasts three years. During those three years, because they need another grant when the current one runs out, they must publish several papers, recruit several grad students or post-docs (to do the heavy lifting), and avoid pissing off anyone in their field (because they might review your papers or grant proposals). Just as members of the House of Representatives never ever want to talk about how the constant need for money cripples them — it would make their job seem irrelevant and them appear impotent — neither do professional scientists.