Seth's Blog

Today was my first day of class at Tsinghua. I am teaching a seminar called Frontiers of Psychology. There was only time for about half of the 40-odd students to identify themselves, which included saying their favorite book. Three girls said their favorite book is Pride and Prejudice. Two said The Little Prince. One said Harry Potter. One said Rebecca by Daphne Du Marier (published 1938). One boy said he didn’t have a favorite book — reading books was a waste of time. One boy said his favorite book is Ulysses.

Most of them, perhaps 80%, chose a non-Chinese book as their favorite. One French, two German, the rest English (which they may have read in Chinese translation). At first I was surprised but then I realized it made sense. Chinese civilization was more advanced than European civilization for a long time but when Gutenberg invented the Western version of the printing press everything changed. In Europe, unlike China, books became cheap and literacy spread. With literacy came a book industry. A large number of Europeans have been reading books for 500 years. In contrast, the Chinese language, with thousands of characters (in contrast to 26 lower-case and 26 upper-case letters) made printing difficult. With reading material rare, so was literacy.

The Treatment Trap, a new book by Rosemary Gibson, is about the overuse of medical care — too much medicine. In this talk, Gibson tells how a woman getting a heart check-up overheard a conversation: “We’re only doing 9 bypasses a day, we need 14 a day to keep this place running.” The result of her check-up: She needed a bypass!

My encounter with too much surgery (and here). The Safe Patient Project is gathering stories of overtreatment, although it is unclear what they will do with them.

Home schooling has a new name, or at least a new variety: unschooling, notable for the absence of textbooks.

When the conference [about unschooling] is over, Ms. Laricchia will return to collaborating on building an online business with her son, Michael, 13. Her daughter, Lissy, 16, is a photographer who was recently invited to participate in a show in New York. The oldest child, Joseph, has turned 18 and is no longer being actively unschooled. His mom happily admits that the change has had almost no effect on his day-to-day life.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

• is college worth it?
• pooling data to help find migraine triggers. If you have migraines this site is for you. Created by my friend Hal Pashler and Ed Vul. The underlying statistics.

Thanks to Marian Lizzi.

reCAPTCHA is the use of CAPTCHA security to read words that optical character recognition has failed to read. You see two words rather than one. The second word is the hard one. This 2008 article by its inventors (computer-science professors) says reCAPTCHA is a way that

“wasted” human processing power can be used to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve.

Self-experimentation like mine is similar. I did it in my spare (“wasted”) time. I was going to sleep anyway, I just recorded my sleep. And I found new answers to old questions, such as how to sleep better, that professional scientists had not yet found. You could say I solved problems that professional scientists aren’t yet capable of solving.

I believe that reCAPTCHA and self-experimentation like mine are two ends of what will be a power-law distribution of the use of “spare” human processing power. reCAPTCHA: many people, tiny amount of time per contribution. Self-experimentation like mine: Tiny number of people, large amount of time per contribution. Halfway (in log units) between reCAPTCHA and self-experimentation like mine is Wikipedia: middling number of people, middling time per contribution. Writing open-source software, to the extent that it’s unpaid, lies somewhere between Wikipedia and my self-experimentation.

Volunteer work is nothing new. Intellectual volunteer work is nothing new — most books are written essentially for free.  What is new is cheap distribution of intellectual volunteer work. Which greatly increases the diversity of what can be done and the extent to which it can be cooperative.