Seth's Blog

I was curious how Tisano Tea began (yesterday’s post) because it was an unusual product (chocolate tea). There wasn’t any point I was trying to make. At a party last night, however, I found myself talking to the daughter of a diplomat (Tisano Tea was started by the son of a diplomat). I told her the story of Tisano Tea. And I couldn’t help pointing out two generalizations it supports:

1. I’ve blogged many times about the value of insider/outsiders — people who have the knowledge of insiders but the freedom of outsiders. Patrick Pineda, the founder of Tisano Tea, was not an insider/outsider but he connected two worlds — the United States and Venezuela (in particular poor Venezuelan farmers) — that are rarely connected.

2. When people from rich countries try to help people in poor countries, the usual approach is to bring something from the rich country to the poor country. Nutritional knowledge, medicine, dams, and so on. One Laptop Per Child is an extreme example. Microcredit is a deceptively attractive example. In recent years, the flaws in this approach have become more apparent and there has been a shift toward local solutions to problems (e.g., the best ideas to help Uganda will come from Ugandans and those who have lived there a long time). Tisano Tea illustrates something that people in rich countries have had an even harder time imagining: people in a poor country (Venezuela) knew something that improved life in a rich country (the United States) — namely, that you can make tea from cacao husks. A small thing, but not trivial (maybe chocolate tea supplies important nutrients). An American desire for Venezuelan cacao husks improves life in Venezuela. Ethnic food trucks are a more subtle example.  When immigrants from poor countries manage to make a living in a rich country — using knowledge of their own cuisine is a good way to do this — they often send money home. As far as I know, this possibility has been ignored in development studies.

My research, which shows how a non-expert can do research that teaches something to experts, is related to the second generalization. For example, my research on faces and mood has something to teach experts on depression and bipolar disorder. Although the term “home remedy” is standard, and lots of non-experts have improved their health in ways not approved by doctors, I have never heard a health expert show a realization that this could happen.

Tisano Tea, based in San Francisco, sells chocolate tea. It was started in 2010 by Patrick Pineda, Leonardo Zambrano, and Lucas Azpurua. I was curious about the company because I like two chocolate tea blends very much: Red Cloud Cacao (a black tea/chocolate tea blend from Peet’s, no longer available but they will bring it back) and CocoMate (from American Tea Room). (more…)

LightSail Energy is a Berkeley company that makes compressed-air energy storage devices. It was started in 2008 by Danielle Fong and Steve Crane. A year later, they got significant funding. When I think of energy storage, I think of batteries or flywheels or pumping water uphill. Use of a quite different technology intrigued me. Compressed-air energy storage is sometimes disparaged (“a lousy way of storing energy“). (more…)

In this essay, which I learned about from Alex Tabarrok, Paul Graham complains about email. Too easy for someone to send him email. Also slow. He thinks of email as a todo list. Here’s what he wants:

More restrictions on what someone can put on my todo list. And when someone can put something on my todo list, I want them to tell me more about what they want from me. Do they want me to do something beyond just reading some text? How important is it? (There obviously has to be some mechanism to prevent people from saying everything is important.) When does it have to be done?

Here’s what I want: A price per email. A service that charges people for each email they send me (e.g., $1/email). I get most of the price, the company providing the service gets a small percentage (1%?). With two additional features: 1. The initial charge is just for me to look at it. Then, after I read the email, there is a mechanism that allows me to easily charge more to do what they ask, such as give them Shangri-La Diet advice. 2. I can easily put people on a list that allows them to send me email for free.

Since Google already has Google Checkout, it might be relatively easy for them to add this to gmail.

At the recent Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, the most impressive product I encountered was a honey wine vinegar made by Slide Ridge Honey, a small family business in northern Utah. I interviewed the developer, Martin James, about how the business and product began.

How did your business begin? (more…)

Sue Halpern has written the first interesting assessment of Steve Jobs I’ve seen, in the form of a book review of Isaacson’s biography. It happens to be very negative. She says little about his now-well-known bad treatment of coworkers, friends and family (“a bully, a dissembler, a cheapskate, a deadbeat dad, a manipulator”) and focusses on the effects of Apple Computer, which are obviously much greater.

She makes one very bad point. He should not call himself an artist, she argues:

There is no doubt that the products Steve Jobs brilliantly conceived of and oversaw at Apple were elegant and beautiful, but they were, in the end, products. Artists, typically, aim to put something of enduring beauty into the world; consumer electronics companies aim to sell a lot of gadgets, manufacturing desire for this year’s model in the hope that people will discard last year’s.

“In the end, products”? “Gadgets”? Are books gadgets? I cannot imagine a future without books. Nor one without cellphones and laptops. If they are lovely and work well, so much the better for all of us.  Moreover, cellphones and laptops, much more than other necessities (food, clothes, housing, transportation, medicine) help us express ourselves — our hidden inner selves — in so many ways. (Like art and books, but better.) Mark Fraunfelder made a similar point (obliquely).

“Products” and “gadgets” is Halpern’s conventional anti-consumerism. She goes on to make two equally conventional but much better points:

According to a study reported by Bloomberg News last January, Apple ranked at the very bottom of twenty-nine global tech firms “in terms of responsiveness and transparency to health and environmental concerns in China.” Yet walking into the Foxconn factory, where people routinely work six days a week, from early in the morning till late at night standing in enforced silence, Steve Jobs might have entered his biggest reality distortion field of all. “You go into this place and it’s a factory but, my gosh, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools,” he said after being queried by reporters about working conditions there shortly after a spate of suicides. “For a factory, it’s pretty nice.”

Apple had (and has) the power to improve working conditions at Foxconn. I completely agree: this was (and is) an enormous missed opportunity, for which Steve Jobs is completely responsible. No doubt he said that Apple products empower individuals (and they do) — well, how about empowering Foxconn workers?

Halpern’s final point is about recycling:

Next year will bring the iPhone 5, and a new MacBook, and more iPods and iMacs. What this means is that somewhere in the third world, poor people are picking through heaps of electronic waste in an effort to recover bits of gold and other metals and maybe make a dollar or two. Piled high and toxic, it is leaking poisons and carcinogens like lead, cadmium, and mercury that leach into their skin, the ground, the air, the water. Such may be the longest-lasting legacy of Steve Jobs’s art.

Yeah. Apple could (and can) lead the world in making their products easy to recycle. They haven’t. Entirely Steve Jobs’ fault. As Halpern says, this really matters.

Steve Jobs spent his working life (a) exploiting the commercial potential of new products (home computer, etc.) in large part by (b) caring obsessively, much more than others in his rarefied position, such as Bill Gates, about how they made him feel. Apple made products that Steve Jobs enjoyed. Fine. The problem is what Steve Jobs enjoyed. My take on him is a lot can be explained by (a) he cared little what others thought of him and (b) he lived in a tiny, uncomplicated intellectual world — as illustrated by his remarks about Foxconn and his Stanford graduation speech. Nabokov might say he had the emotional development of a child and the curiosity of an adult.

He left behind a company that reflects the shallowness of what he cared about. Those who take over Apple Computer are likely to be less shallow than he was — most people are. I predict the company will begin to care more about working conditions, ease of recycling, and other things beyond immediate user experience.

In this interview, a doctor who does research on biofilms named Randall Wolcott makes the same point I made about Testing Treatments — that evidence-based medicine, as now practiced, suppresses innovation:

I take it you [meaning the interviewer] are familiar with evidence-based medicine? It’s the increasingly accepted approach for making clinical decisions about how to treat a patient. Basically, doctors are trained to make a decision based on the most current evidence derived from research. But what such thinking boils down to [in practice -- theory is different] is that I am supposed to do the same thing that has always been done – to treat my patient in the conventional manner – just because it’s become the most popular approach. However, when it comes to chronic wound biofilms, we are in the midst of a crisis – what has been done and is accepted as the standard treatment doesn’t work and doesn’t meet the needs of the patient.

Thus, evidence-based medicine totally regulates against innovation. Essentially doctors suffer if they step away from mainstream thinking. Sure, there are charlatans out there who are trying to sell us treatments that don’t work, but there are many good therapies that are not used because they are unconventional. It is only by considering new treatment options that we can progress.

Right on. He goes on to say that he is unwilling to do a double-blind clinical trial in which some patients do not receive his new therapy because “we know we’ve got the methods to save most of their limbs” from amputation.

Almost all scientific and intellectual history (and much serious journalism) is about how things begin. How ideas began and spread, how inventions are invented. If you write about Steve Jobs, for example, that’s your real subject. How things fail to begin — how good ideas are killed off — is at least as important, but much harder to write about. This is why Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation is such an important book. It says nothing about the killing-off processes, but at least it describes the stagnation they have caused. Stagnation should scare us. As Jane Jacobs often said, if it lasts long enough, it causes collapse.

Thanks to Heidi.

In a previous post I criticized the book Testing Treatments. Two of the authors, Paul Glasziou and Iain Chalmers, have responded. I have replied to their response. They did not respond to the main point of my post, which is that the preferences and values of their book — called evidence-based medicine — hinder innovation.

Sure, care about evidence. Of course. But don’t be an evidence snob.

From this comment (thanks, Elizabeth Molin) I learned of a British book called Testing Treatments (pdf), whose second edition has just come out. Its goal is to make readers more sophisticated consumers of medical research. To help them distinguish “good” science from “bad” science. Ben Goldacre, the Bad Science columnist, fulsomely praises it (“I genuinely, truly, cannot recommend this awesome book highly enough for its clarity, depth, and humanity”). He wrote a foreword. The main text is by Imogen Evans (medical journalist), Hazel Thornton (writer),  Iain Chalmers (medical researcher), and Paul Glaziou (medical researcher, editor of Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine).

To me, as I’ve said, medical research is almost entirely bad. Almost all medical researchers accept two remarkable rules: (a) first, let them get sick and (b) no cheap remedies. These rules severely limit what is studied. In terms of useful progress, the price of these limits has been enormous: near total enfeeblement. For many years the Nobel Prize in Medicine has documented the continuing failure of medical researchers all over the world to make significant progress on all major health problems, including depression, heart disease, obesity, cancer, diabetes, stroke, and so on. It is consistent with their level of understanding that some people associated with medicine would write a book about how to do something (good science) the whole field manifestly can’t do. Testing Treatments isn’t just a fat person writing a book about how to lose weight, it’s the author failing to notice he’s fat. (more…)

For the last four years or so I have daily measured how well my brain is working by means of balance measurements and mental tests. For three years  I have used a test of simple arithmetic (e.g, 7 * 8, 2 + 5). I try to answer as fast as possible. I take faster answers to indicate a better-functioning brain.

Yesterday my score was much better than usual. This shows what happened.

My usual average is about 550 msec or more; my score yesterday was 525 msec. An unexplained improvement of 25 msec.

What caused the improvement? I came up with a list of ways that yesterday was much different than usual, that is, was an outlier in other ways. These are possible causes. From more to less plausible:

1. I had 33 g extra flaxseed last night. (By mistake. I’m not sure about this.)

2. The test came at the perfect time after I had my afternoon yogurt with 33 g flaxseed. When I took flaxseed oil (now I eat ground flaxseed), it was clear that there was a short-term improvement for a few hours.

3. Many afternoons I eat 33 g ground flaxseed with yogurt. Yesterday I ground the afternoon flaxseed an unusually long time, making made the omega-3 more digestible.

4. I did kettlebells swings and a kettlebell walk about 2 hours before the test. These exercises are not new but usually I do them on different days. Yesterday was the first time I’ve done them on the same day. I’m sure ordinary walking improves performance for perhaps 30 minutes after I stop walking.

5. I had duck and miso soup a half-hour before the test. Almost never eat this.

6. I had a fermented egg (“thousand-year-old egg”) at noon. I rarely eat them.

7. I had peanuts with my yogurt and ground flaxseed. Peanuts alone seem to have no effect. Perhaps something in the peanuts improves digestion of the omega-3 in the flaxseed.

8. I started watching faces at 7 am that morning instead of 6:30 am or earlier.

Here are eight ideas to test. Perhaps one or two will turn out to be important. Perhaps none will.

After I made this list, I read student papers. The assignment was to comment on a research article. One of the articles was about the effect of holding a warm versus cold coffee cup. Holding a warm coffee cup makes you act “warmer,” said the article. Commenting on this, a student said she thought it was ridiculous until she remembered going to the barber. She sees the person who washes her hair (in warm water) as friendly, the barber as cold. Maybe this is due to the warm water used to wash her hair, she noted. This made me realize another unusual feature of yesterday: I had washed my hair in warm water longer than usual. I think I did it at least 30 minutes before the arithmetic test but I’m not sure. In any case, here is another idea to test. I found earlier that cold showers slowed down my arithmetic speed.

This illustrates a big advantage of personal science (science done for personal gain) over professional science (science done because it’s your job): The random variation in my life may suggest plausible new ideas. As far as I can tell, professional scientists have learned almost nothing about practical ways to make your brain work better. You can find many lists of “brain food” on the internet. Inevitably the evidence is weak. I’d be surprised if any of them helped more than a tiny amount (in my test, a few msec). The real brain foods, in my experience, are butter and omega-3. Perhaps my tests will merely confirm the value of omega-3 (Explanations 1-3). But perhaps not (Explanations 4-8 and head heating).