Seth's Blog

A 1997 epidemiological study, which I just learned about, found that increases in saturated fat intake were associated with a lower risk of stroke. Sampling from among the papers that cited it, this study found a non-significant change in the same direction. This study found a significant change in the same direction in Japanese, who eat a low amount of saturated fat. This is especially interesting because many people assumed that the high rate of stroke among Japanese was due to high salt intake. This finding suggests it is due to low saturated fat intake.

As I said in a recent post, this sort of consistency across studies on a question of enormous interest argues against the severest critics of epidemiology, such as John Ioannidis.

Now that Gmail is out of beta, here are two suggestions for improvement:

1. Oldest first. I want to be able to sort my email so that the oldest is first on the list. That will make it harder to ignore or forget about. I can use the reward of seeing my latest email as inducement to deal with the oldest email. (I often bundle unpleasant and pleasant tasks: taking vitamins and drinking kombucha, doing pushups and listening to music, standing on one foot and watching Survivor.)

2. Delayed send (also called second thoughts). I want to be able to send email after a delay — say, one day. This has two advantages: it slows down the correspondence, and it gives me a chance to reconsider. An earlier email program I used had something like this and I was often glad I could revise what I’d written before it was sent.

More The Gmail Undo Send feature (available in Labs) gives you about 20 seconds to change your mind. Better than nothing but not nearly long enough.

Treatment of acne with isotretinoin is associated with suicide attempts, according to a new study. A puzzle is that suicide attempts started to rise before the treatment started. They sharply declined to baseline after treatment stopped.

Acne is an good target for self-experimentation because it is easy to measure and is surely related to diet. My discovery of the value of self-experimentation happened with acne: I discovered that of the two drugs my dermatologist had prescribed, one (benzoyl peroxide) worked, the other (tetracycline) didn’t. I had believed the opposite, that tetracycline worked and benzoyl peroxide didn’t work.

How many climate change scientists does it take to change a light bulb? None. They all agree it will change.

Judging by these nine comments, a large fraction of Mother Jones readers think they’ve been had.

Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School, is best-known for a study she did in graduate school. When shoppers in a Menlo Park food store were offered much more choice of jams (24 rather than 6), they were less likely to buy one. In The Art of Choosing (2010), Iyengar wrote (p. 190):

Since publication of the jam study, I and other researchers have conducted more experiments on the effect of assortment size. These studies, many of which were designed to replicate real-world choosing contexts, have found fairly consistently that when people are given a moderate number of options (4 to 6) rather than a large number (20 to 30), they are more likely to make a choice, are more confident in their decisions, and are happier in what they choose.

In contrast, Benjamin Scheibehenne, a research scientist at the University of Basel, and two co-authors, who surveyed the literature, found the effect was hard to replicate:

The choice overload hypothesis states that an increase in the number of options to choose from may lead to adverse consequences such as a decrease in the motivation to choose or the satisfaction with the finally chosen option. A number of studies found strong instances of choice overload in the lab and in the field, but others found no such effects or found that more choices may instead facilitate choice and increase satisfaction. In a meta-analysis of 63 conditions from 50 published and unpublished experiments (N = 5,036), we found a mean effect size of virtually zero but considerable variance between studies

This reminds me of the learned-helplessness effect. When Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at Penn and recent president of the American Psychological Association, was a graduate student, he and his advisor reported that when you give dogs inescapable shock, they stop trying to escape or avoid the shock: learned helplessness. The effect turned out to be extremely hard to replicate, but this did not stop Seligman from having a brilliant career.