Seth's Blog

• In praise of Rush Limbaugh.
• Shangri-La Diet experience (“Bottom line: I lost three pounds in a week and a half”) of an artist named Elizabeth Periale.
• Long interview with Tucker Max. “His fridge . . . is in one way very different: where you’d expect the six-pack of cold ones waiting for the game, instead you’ll find rows and rows of kombucha, the fermented health beverage.”
• End of college campuses. Megan McArdle imagines a world in which college is replaced by distance learning. “95% of tenure-track jobs will be eliminated.” Jane Jacobs, in Systems of Survival, divided jobs into taking and trading. Teaching is trading if the student really wants to learn the subject. Teaching is taking if the student is forced to take (and pay for) the class. Scary thought: Every college student is asked about every class: would you take this class if you didn’t need to (and didn’t need to take other classes)?

First do no harm . . . As Robin Hanson has said, what does that mean? In contrast, the rule illustrated by this story, from Bryan Castañeda, who works for a Los Angeles law firm, is quite clear:

At the old firm I used to work at, I was talking to one of the senior attorneys and the topic of medical malpractice cases came up. He said he avoids them. Why, I asked. He said — I’m paraphrasing here — “Because you won’t find a doctor who will testify against another doctor in open court. They may advise you in private, ‘Oh yeah, so-and-so definitely screwed up,’ but you won’t get them to say that on the stand. They all protect each other.”

Judging by this story, if your doctor makes a mistake, the only person who will suffer consequences is you. Thank heavens the rest of us have more power than ever before.  A recent survey of doctors found that  “more than a 10th (11.3%) admitted to telling patients something that was not true.” The survey did not ask about lies of omission (when silence is misleading); unwillingness to testify that someone else made a mistake is that sort of lie. The survey also showed that doctors (at least, those who took the survey) have a self-serving interpretation of the term not true. Although only about 10% said they had said something “that was not true” — meaning something that they knew wasn’t true — “more than half had described a patient’s prognosis more optimistically than warranted.” Apparently they consider such descriptions not instances of “not true”.

In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs described two moral systems (lists of rules/values): The guardian syndrome and the commercial syndrome. In certain areas of life (e.g., military), the guardian syndrome prevailed; in other areas (e.g., small business), the commercial syndrome prevailed. Loyalty (e.g., “never testify against a fellow doctor”) is a guardian value — indeed, the main guardian value. In contrast, honesty is the main commercial value. Jacobs said that the two syndromes corresponded to two ways of making a living: taking and trading. Doctors do not represent themselves as predatory (= taking). But, according to Jacobs, this sort of rule (“never testify against a fellow doctor”) puts them squarely in that camp.

I asked Jim Jacobs, one of Jane Jacobs’s sons, for comment. He replied:

Exactly right. Jane experienced this herself, unfortunately. It’s really a major problem. I see the very same behavior among medical researchers too.

Because I am in China, I want my new credit card sent here. After 45 minutes arranging this, my credit-card company asked me one last security question: What were the last four digits of the bank account used to pay my most recent bill? I told them. They said my answer was wrong. Huh?

I pay my credit card bills through Fidelity Investments (which is not a bank). I contacted them. I was routed to their BillPay department. The person who helped me, whose name I wish I had written down, said that he was as puzzled as I was. It was not clear at all why my answer was wrong. He suggested a conference call. He started a conference call with my credit-card company. Within a few minutes, he and the credit-card company representative figured out that there was a mistake in the number listed by the credit-card company. Their software had lost the last digit of my account number, so that if my account number had ended in 12345, their records would have showed 1234. (Yet the payment still went through.)

I was greatly relieved. “At least the problem had a solution!” I told the credit-card-company representative. Imagine not being able to control one’s money because of a software error. I was/am grateful to the Fidelity representative for quickly solving a problem that had nothing to do with Fidelity.

You might think that such heavily-used software would by now be free of bugs. But it wasn’t.

• Edward Jay Epstein on The Lessons of Le Carre (the spy novelist)
• Gary Taubes recommends five excellent books, including Weston Price.
• This article about the Marc Hauser case tells a brief story about a Harvard coverup in the 1960s. “In the late 1960s I was eating lunch in William James Hall with a few fellow assistant professors in the Harvard psychology department when a woman named Patricia Woolf sat down at our table. . . . She asked whether we had heard anything about the fabrication of data by one of our colleagues.”
• This sad and fascinating post tells how pediatricians encourage Vitamin D deficiency by warning parents to keep children out of the sun.  Then, making things even worse, children with broken bones due to Vitamin D deficiency are assumed by pediatricians to be victims of child abuse. “Dr. Carole Jenny, head of the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Child Abuse, implies such tragic miscarriages of justice simply don’t happen. She then claims, “We have been checking every child with multiple fractures for metabolic bone diseases for several years and have not identified a single child with vitamin D deficiency.” How can that statement be true if every other researcher is reporting infantile and early childhood vitamin D deficiency to be rampant in normal children? Furthermore, how can an infant beaten severely enough to cause multiple fractures not be bruised or in distress? Dr. Jenny cleverly avoids the question.”

In a recent post I said that Steve Jobs seemed to live in a very limited intellectual world. I gave his Stanford graduation speech as an example. Someone asked me to explain. Here is my explanation.

The speech shows no sign of having read a book. It shows no sign of any intellectual interest outside his job.

It makes the insanely self-centered point that “if I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.”

It shows no sign of learning from anyone else (except his calligraphy teacher, which hardly counts). It shows no sign of even having noticed anyone else — it is all Steve all the time. It mentions Stewart Brand, but only to comment about the Whole Earth Catalog.

It makes the banal point what seemed like bad news was actually good news (“it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me”).

It ends with a long string of banalities about death: “And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” A high school student could have said that — at a funeral, perhaps.

This is from someone at the center of an enormous on-going revolution. I tried to find praise for it but all I found was that someone in the Ukrainian government had plagiarized it.

A blog called Adventures in Nutritional Therapy (started March 2011) is about what the author learned while trying to solve her health problems via nutrition and a few other things. She usually assumed her health problems were due to too much or too little of some nutrient. She puts it like this: “using mostly non-prescription, over-the-counter (OTC) supplements and treatments to address depression, brain fog, insomnia, migraines, hypothyroidism, restless legs, carpal tunnel syndrome, and a bunch of other annoyances.” In contrast to what “the American medical establishment” advises. Mostly it is nutritional self-experimentation about a wide range of health problems.

Interesting things I learned from the archives:

1. Question: Did Lance Armstrong take performance-enhancing drugs? I learned that LiveStrong (Armstrong’s site) is a content farm. Now answer that question again.

2. “If you return repeatedly to a conventional doctor with a problem they can’t solve, they will eventually suggest you need antidepressants.”

3.  “When I mentioned [to Dr. CFS] the mild success I’d had with zinc, he said it was in my mind: I wanted it to work and it did. When I pointed out that 70% of the things I tried didn’t work, he changed the subject. Dr. CFS’ lack of basic reasoning skills did nothing to rebuild my confidence in the health care system.” Quite right. I have had the same experience. Most things I tried failed. When something finally worked, it could hardly be a placebo effect. This line of reasoning has been difficult for some supposedly smart people to grasp.

4. A list of things that helped her with depression. “Quit gluten” is number one.

5. Pepsi caused her to get acne. Same here.

6. 100 mg/day of iron caused terrible acne that persisted for weeks after she stopped taking the iron.

7. “In September 2008 I started a journey that serves as a good example of the limits of the American health care system, where you can go through three months, 15 doctor visits, $7,000 in medical tests, three prescriptions and five over-the-counter medications trying to treat your abdominal pain, and after you lose ten pounds due to said pain, you are asked by the “specialists” if you have an eating disorder.” I agree. Also an example of the inability of people within the American health care system to see those limits.  If they recognized that people outside their belief system might have something valuable to contribute, apparently something awful would happen.

8. Acupuncture relieved her sciatica, but not for long. “By the time I left [the acupuncturist's office] the pain was gone, but it crept back during my 30-minute drive home.”

9. Pointing out many wrongs does not equal a right. She praises a talk by Robert Lustig about evil fructose. I am quite sure that fructose (by itself) did not cause the obesity epidemic. For one thing, I lost a lot of weight by drinking it. (Here is an advanced discussion.) In other words, being a good critic of other people’s work (as Lustig may be) doesn’t get you very far. I think it is hard for non-scientists (and even some scientists) to understand that all scientific work has dozens of “flaws”. Pointing out the flaws in this or that is little help, unless those flaws haven’t been noticed. What usually helps isn’t seeing flaws, it is seeing what can be learned.

10. A list of what caused headaches and migraines. One was MSG. Another was Vitamin D3, because it made her Vitamin B1 level too low.

She is a good writer. Mostly I found support for my beliefs: 1. Of the two aspects of self-experimentation (measure, change),  change is more powerful. She does little or no self-tracking  (= keeping records) as far as I could tell, yet has made a lot of progress. She has done a huge amount of trying different things. 2. Nutritional deficiencies cause a lot of problems. 3. Fermented food is overlooked. She never tries it, in spite of major digestive problems. She does try probiotics. 4. American health care is exceedingly messed-up. As she puts it, “the American medical establishment has no interest in this approach [which often helped her] and, when they do deign to discuss it, don’t know what the #%@! they’re talking about.” 5. “Over the years I’ve found accounts of personal experiences to be very helpful.” I agree. Her blog and mine are full of them.

Thanks to Alexandra Carmichael.

More Her latest post mentions me (“The fella after my own heart is Seth Roberts, who after ten years of experimenting . . . “). I was unaware of that when I wrote the above.

In 1995, I visited my Swedish relatives. We argued about the Euro. They thought it was a good idea, I thought it had a serious weakness.

ME It ties together economies that are different.

MY AUNT It reduces the chance of war in Europe.

You could say we were both right. There have been no wars between Eurozone countries (supporting my aunt) and the Eurozone is now on the verge of breaking apart for exactly the reason I and many others pointed out (supporting me).

Last week a friend said to me that Europe was in worse shape than America. I was unconvinced. I said that I opposed Geithner’s “duct-tape solution”. It would have been better to let things fall apart and then put them back together in a safer way.

MY FRIEND Duct-tape works.

ME What Geithner did helped those who benefit from the status quo and hurt those who benefit from change. Just like duct tape.

This struck me as utterly banal until I read a one-sided editorial in The Economist:

The consequences of the euro’s destruction are so catastrophic that no sensible policymaker could stand by and let it happen. . . .  the threat of a disaster . . . can anything be done to avert disaster?

and similar remarks in The New Yorker (James Surowiecki):

The financial crisis in Europe . . . has now entered a potentially disastrous phase.. . . with dire consequences not just for Europe but also for the rest of us. . . . This is that rarest of problems—one that you really can solve just by throwing money at it [= duct tape]

Wait a sec. What if the Eurozone is a bad idea? Like I (and many others) said in 1995? Why perpetuate a bad idea? Why drive further in the wrong direction? Sure, the dissolution will bring temporary trouble (“disaster”, “dire consequences”), but that will be a small price to pay for getting rid of a bad idea. Of course the Euro had/has pluses and minuses. Anyone who claimed to know that the pluses outweighed the minuses (or vice-verse) was a fool or an expert. Now we know more. Given that what the nay-sayers said has come to pass, it is reasonable to think that they (or we) were right: The minuses outweigh the pluses.

You have seen the phrase Japan’s lost decade a thousand times. You have never seen the phrase Greece’s lost decade. But Greeks lost an enormous amount from being able to borrow money for stupid conventional projects at too low a rate. Had loans been less available, they would have been more original (the less debt involved, the easier it is to take risks) and started at a smaller scale. Which I believe would have been a better use of their time and led to more innovation. Both The Economist‘s editorial writer and Surowiecki have a status-quo “duct-tape” bias without realizing it.

What’s important here is not what two writers, however influential their magazines, think or fail to think. It is that they are so sure of themselves. They fail to take seriously an alternative (breakup of the Eurozone would in the long run be a good thing) that has at least as much to recommend it as what they are sure of (the breakup would be a “disaster”). I believe they are so sure of themselves because they have absorbed (and now imitate) the hemineglect of modern economics. The whole field, they haven’t noticed, has an enormous status-quo bias in its failure to study innovation. Innovation — how new goods and services are invented and prosper — should be half the field. Let me repeat: A few years ago I picked up an 800-page introductory economics textbook. It had one page (one worthless page) on innovation. In this staggering neglect, it reflected the entire field. The hemineglect of economics professors is just as bad as the hemineglect of epidemiologists (who ignore immune function, study of what makes us better or worse at fighting off microbes) and statisticians (who pay almost no attention to idea generation).

MORE Even Joe Nocera, whom I like, has trouble grasping that the Euro might be a bad idea. “The only thing that should matter is what works,” he writes. Not managing to see that the Euro isn’t working.

I blogged earlier about what I called a “stunning discovery”: Primal Girl found her sleep got much better when she started taking Vitamin D first thing in the morning (= soon after she got up) rather than mid-afternoon. This suggested that Vitamin D acts on your circadian system similar to a blast of sunlight. (More evidence and discussion here.) In his blog, Joseph Buchignani reports another experience that supports the idea that you should take Vitamin D first thing in the morning:

I picked up a bottle of Vit-D and Calcium. Dosage of Vit-D per pill was 1.6ud. Per the instructions, I took 1 at morning and 1 at night. I began this regimin on the night of the 24th of November. It’s now the night of the 25th of November, and my circadian rhythm is completely fucked. . . .  I’m fully awake now (12:30 AM), and I probably took the last dose of Vit-D around 7-8 PM. . . . I woke up with dark eye rings on the morning of the 25th. My energy level did not rise as it should have, but sort of meandered in the middle, before finally tailing off. Stress levels and depression were both elevated. I got little productive done.

Yesterday I started taking Vitamin D first thing in the morning. I took 2000 IU of Vitamin D3 at 8 am. In the afternoon I felt more energetic than usual. The next morning (this morning) I woke up feeling more rested than usual. This also supports Primal Girl’s experience.

Let me repeat: first thing in morning. If you wake up before sunrise, take at sunrise (say, 7 am). Sunlight has a considerably different effect on your circadian system at 7 am than 10 am. (Look up circadian phase-response curve and especially the work of Patricia DeCoursey if you want to understand why three hours makes a big difference.) I have two bottles of Vitamin D. Neither mentions time of day. Both say take with meals.

The Nobel Prizes awarded each year resemble a kind of report card where each prize-worthy discipline (Physics, Chemistry, etc.) gets a grade that depends on the prize-winning research. If the prize-winning research is useful and surprising, the grade is high. If not the grade is low. More generally, at least to me, the intellectual history of the prize winners sheds light on the whole profession. Perhaps some biologists were unaware of the behavior of Eric Kandel described in Explorers of the Black Box when he was awarded the biology prize. Kandel, I hasten to add, is an unusual case.

Thomas Sargent is one of the winners of this year’s Economics prize. In 2007, he gave a graduation speech at Berkeley to economics majors (via Marginal Revolution). In the speech, Sargent called economics “organized common sense”. He went on to list 12 common-sense ideas, such as “Individuals and communities face trade-offs” and “governments and voters respond to incentives” that economists believe. The reasons for their belief weren’t stated.

When I started as a professor (at Berkeley) I did many experiments with rats and, to my annoyance, discovered an inconvenient truth: I understood rats less well than I thought. Even in a heavily-controlled heavily-studied situation (Skinner box), my rats often did not do what I expected. My common sense was often wrong, in other words. This experience made me considerably more skeptical of other people’s “common sense”.

To me, and I think to most scientists, science begins with common sense. Experimental psychology certainly does. I used common sense to design my experiments. Had I not done those experiments, I would not have learned that my common sense was wrong. So relying on common sense was helpful — as a place to start. As a way to begin to understand. You begin with common-sense ideas and you test them. That common sense is often wrong is a theme of Freakonomics, in agreement with my experience. Yet Sargent seemed content (he called economics “our beautiful subject”) to end with common sense, perhaps tidied up.

This is really unfortunate because economics, beautiful or not, is so important. If you ignore data, the answer to every hard question is the same: the most powerful people are right. That way lies stagnation (problems build up unsolved because powerful people prefer the status quo) and collapse (when the problems become overwhelming). Alan Greenspan’s faith-based belief in free markets and the 2008 financial crisis — after Sargent’s speech — is an example. In 2009, Sargent’s speech might have been less well-received.

A new series on Showtime called Homeland is about a CIA agent (played by Claire Danes) who believes that a newly-released American prisoner of war may have been “turned” during his years in Iraqi captivity. In the first episode, she tries to find evidence to support her belief. Judging by that episode, it is very good.

I told Edward Jay Epstein about it — his book on James Angleton centers on CIA infiltration by “moles”. He commented: (more…)