Seth's Blog

In this article about food trucks, Ed Glaeser doesn’t mention their educational value: They allow people with a new idea to test it relatively cheaply. If it works they can expand. I saw this happen in Berkeley. A food truck that sold stuffed potatoes eventually became a store that sold the same thing. Food trucks don’t merely create jobs, they can create the best kind of jobs: Those that provide new goods and services. Unlike jobs created by building dams or highways.

Any advanced economy needs a constant stream of new goods and services to replace the ones that are inevitably lost. It goes against the survival instincts of people in power (government officials) to help those at the bottom (e.g., potential food truck owners) because they seem so much less powerful than those at the top (e.g., restaurant owners) who are threatened by those at the bottom.

All this should be utterly obvious — as it is to anyone who has read Jane Jacobs on economics. But it isn’t. In science, too, every field needs a constant stream of new empirical effects (in experimental psychology, new cause-effect relationships) to replace the ones that have been studied to death. So every field needs a cheap way of searching for those effects, but no field, as far as I know, has such a way. In science, editors and reviewers are like government officials. They can discourage new ideas (food trucks) by enforcing “high standards” (regulations) whose costs they fail to understand.

Via Marginal Revolution. “[David] Westin’s biggest weakness [as head of ABC News] was that he lacked the entrepreneurial spirit to launch innovative and creative ventures.”

Let’s say that dry eye is caused by lack of omega-3. If you eat enough omega-3, you’ll never get it. Here is a recently-discovered association with tuna consumption:

Tuna consumption [1 serving was 113 g (4 oz)] was inversely associated with DES [Dry Eye Syndrome] (OR: 0.81; 95% CI: 0.66, 0.99 for 2–4 servings/wk; OR: 0.32; 95% CI: 0.13, 0.79 for 5–6 servings/wk versus =< 1/wk P for trend = 0.005).

If tuna were a good source of omega-3, eating 5-6 servings per week would completely prevent dry eye. But it doesn’t. Which supports what I have come to believe for other reasons: oily fish, in the quantities most people eat it, is a mediocre source of omega-3. Even if you eat tuna almost once/day, you don’t get enough. To get enough omega-3, look elsewhere.

Thanks to Brent Pottenger.

I used to like Japanese food because it was less fattening than other foods — I lost weight eating sushi. Now I like it because the Japanese eat so much fermented food: miso, pickles, yogurt, Yakult, umeboshi (pickled plums), natto, vinegar drinks, and alcoholic beverages. A Tokyo food court might have 20 types of pickles, 15 types of miso, and 10 types of umeboshi.

Abundance of fermented food isn’t the only way Japanese food is unusual. I see Japanese food as an outlier on three dimensions:

• Use of fish. More fish-centered than any other major cuisine.
• Beauty. More beautiful than any other cuisine.
• Fermented food. More fermented food than any other cuisine.

As I’ve said, lightning doesn’t strike twice in one place for different reasons. If two rare events could have a common explanation, they probably do. I’ve discussed before why a fish-centered cuisine could lead to better visual design: Because cooks can’t use complex flavorings to show how much they care (it would make all fish taste the same), they take pains with appearance to convey this.

What about fermented foods? Here’s an idea: In the development of Japanese cooking, lack of complex flavoring of main dishes increased desire that other parts of the meal provide complexity, which is what fermented foods do so well. For example, Japanese meals often include pickles. We want a certain amount of complexity in our food, in other words. Most cuisines provide complexity via complex spice mixtures (mole sauce, harissa, curry powder); Japanese cuisine provides it with fermented foods. (I love Japanese curry, but it isn’t common.)

This explanation predicts that desire for complexity is like thirst: It grows over time and can be satisfied. Prediction 1: Eating one complex food will make a second one will taste less pleasant, just as drinking one bottle of water will make a second bottle of water taste less pleasant. Prediction 2: Over time, the pleasure provided by complexity grows. The same complex-flavored food will taste better at Time 2 than Time 1 if you haven’t eaten anything with a complex flavor between the two times.

Lots of scientists say science is self-correcting. In a way this is surely true: a non-scientist wouldn’t understand the issues. If anyone corrects scientific fraud, it will be a scientist. In another way, this is preventive stupidity: it reassures and reduces the intelligence of those who say it, helping them ignore the fact that they have no idea how much fraud goes undetected. If only 1% of fraud is corrected, it is misleading to say science is self-correcting. A realistic view of scientific self-correction is that there is no reward for discovering fraud and plenty of grief involved: the possibility of retaliation, the loss of time (it won’t help you get another grant), and the dislike of bearing bad news. So whenever fraud is uncovered it’s a bit surprising and bears examination.

What I notice is that science is often corrected by insider/outsiders — people with enough (insider) knowledge and (outsider) freedom to correct things.  As I’ve said before, Saul Sternberg and I were free to severely criticize Ranjit Chandra. Because we were psychologists and he was a nutritionist, he couldn’t retaliate against us. Leon Kamin, an outsider to personality psychology, was free to point out that Cyril Burt faked data. (To his credit, Arthur Jensen, an insider, also pointed in this direction, although not as clearly.) The Marc Hauser case provides another example: Undergraduates in Hauser’s lab uncovered the deception. They knew a lot about the research yet had nothing invested in it and little to lose from loss of Hauser’s support. This is another reason insider/outsiders are important.

• “When you are good [at your work], you must apologize.” Italian academia.
• no effect of omega-3
• clinical trials of new MS therapy go ahead in spite of MS society disapproval. Canadian MS society leaders have managed to convince themselves it could be bad to learn more about a plausible and possibly revolutionary therapy for MS. “A true clinical trial must be conducted at more than one institution and in more than one province” with “well over 1000 participants,” said Yves Savoie, the president of the Canadian MS society. If a study had only 999 participants, he would disapprove of it!

Thanks to Casey Manion and Anne Weiss