Seth's Blog

The notion that high cholesterol (more specifically, high “bad” — LDL — cholesterol)  causes heart disease may be as widely accepted as the notion that humans have caused dangerous global warming. It is much easier to test, however. An excellent study published in 2006 compared two groups of people at risk for heart disease: those given a high dose of statins and those given a low dose. The high dose reducd LDL cholesterol levels; as it was meant to; the low dose did not. But there was no effect on coronary heart disease progression. After a year of statins, persons in both groups had increased their coronary artery calcification score by the same amount — about 25%. Totally contradicting the cholesterol hypothesis.

Regular readers of this blog may remember that after a year of eating butter (half a stick per day), my coronary artery calcification score decreased 24%. Because increases of about 25% are the norm, my score was about 50% less than expected. Decreases are very rare, I was told.

Thanks to Hyperlipid. Statin side effects.

On the Shangri-La Diet forums I found a link to this:

A middle-aged man named Kainin has lost about 60 pounds since September (7 months) and described his experience in great detail. On Weight Watchers, he lost 40 pounds in 6 months before gaining it all back (plus 10 pounds more) — he started at 290, went down to 250, and back up to 300. On Nutrisystems, he lost 20 pounds in 6 weeks before gaining it all back. So the Shangri-La Diet has already helped him more than those two methods, not to mention being easier.

At the end of February, his BMI went below 35, the level indicating Morbid Obesity.

To celebrate I went to the local party store to look for a mylar balloon saying something like “Congratulations on being just Obese!” but found — NOTHING! The closest I found was a bereavement balloon that read “Sorry for your Loss”. Not exactly what I was looking for.

The roughly 100,000 posts on the SLD forums make the case for the diet far better than I ever could. Now, if I could just get rid of spammers …

A few months ago, inspired by talking to Matthew Cornell, I started tracking when I was working. After a while I added graphical feedback like this:

The graph shows efficiency (time spent working/time available to work) versus time of day. The line shows the current day (not today, the current day when I made this graph). The higher the line, the better. When I work it goes up; when I take a break it goes down. The points are previous days. When the line is higher than the points, I am doing better than previous days. As I said in my first post, this seemed to help a lot: compare the green points (after graphical feedback) to the blue points (before graphical feedback). I blogged about possible explanations.

Here is more analysis. This graph shows efficiency versus day. Each point is the final efficiency (the efficiency after my last bout of work that day) for one day (the black and red points on the previous graph). These results suggest that the graphical feedback caused a sudden improvement, supporting the impression given by the blue/green (before/after) comparison of the earlier graph.

Before graphical feedback, the graph shows, efficiency was slowly increasing. Perhaps that was due to measuring when I was working, but I suspect it was due to the text feedback I got. I often used my tracking system to find out how long my current bout of work had lasted and how much I had worked so far that day. (For example, right now the text feedback is “15 minutes of blog, 73 minutes today”, which means I’ve spent 15 minutes writing this blog and before that worked 58 minutes on something else.)

Let me repeat what I said in another post: This was a big surprise. I collected this data for other reasons, which had nothing to do with graphical feedback. Before this project, I had made many thousands measurements of work time, but they were (a) tied to writing, not all work and (b) recorded inside the program I use for writing (Action Outline). Using R would have been slightly harder — that’s why I used Action Outline. I never studied the data, but I had the impression it helped.

You may know about the brain-damage patient H.M. His brain damage caused loss of long-term memory formation. He could remember something for a few minutes but not longer. The researcher working with him had to keep introducing herself. A pleasant side effect was that he could read the same thing again and again — a magazine article, for example — and enjoy it each time. This is like that. I am stupid enough that the results of my self-experimentation continue to surprise me (which I enjoy). You might think after many surprises I would stop being surprised — I would adjust my expectations — but somehow that doesn’t happen.

After a casual article, a talk, and many blog posts about my theory of human evolution, I managed to write a book chapter about it. Blogging helped. You may remember the ideas that language began because it increased trade and art began because it increased innovation. However, the center of the theory isn’t language and art, but procrastination. Above all, humans are the animals that specialize and trade. That’s obvious. Not obvious is that specialization begins with repetition — doing something over and over makes you an expert. The tendency to repeat had to be attachable to all sorts of activities, so that our ancient ancestors become expert at a wide range of things and could trade with each other. The mechanism behind this arbitrary repetition made it easy to repeat what you did yesterday and hard to do something new. Nowadays it does the same thing and thereby causes procrastination — difficulty starting something new.

The arbitrary day-after-day repetition began before trade. I believe it began when our ancestors were still hunting and gathering, like chimps. At some point there was a long-lasting surplus of food. The surplus lasted so long that it became beneficial to specialize while foraging. I suspect the great surplus was the discovery and exploitation of seafood, just as Elaine Morgan says, but what caused the abundance doesn’t matter for my theory. Specialization during foraging led to specialization during free time (hobbies). Trade began, part-time jobs (trading your specialty for necessities) began, and, when the pile of knowledge grew big enough, full-time jobs began.

The notion that repetition is behind expertise is supported by the idea that people who are really good at something have practiced a lot — say, 10,000 hours. I am saying two new things here: 1. Repetition is increased by hedonic changes: We want to repeat what we did yesterday. Doing something today makes it more pleasant to do tomorrow. 2. It’s not just superstars, such as the Beatles and Wayne Gretzky (Malcolm Gladwell’s examples), it’s everybody. Arbitrary repetition is behind Adam Smith’s “division of labour”. Our whole economy grew from a tendency to repeat today what you did yesterday.

At the upcoming QS Conference (May 28-9, San Jose), Robin Barooah and I will run a session about self-experimentation. Alexandra Carmichael asked me to write a post about how to do self-experimentation as a kind of advertisement for the session. Robin and I will be giving examples of what we have done and what we learned from them. Here’s some of what I’ve learned. (more…)