Seth's Blog

My friends know I like examples. My mother has complained I like them too much. Here, via Jonathan Schwarz, is a good example of why I like examples. From a long article by Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times:

I’m the first to admit that news organizations, including this one, sometimes get things wrong. We can be overly credulous (as in some of the prewar reporting about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction) or overly cynical about official claims and motives.

Emphasis added. The lack of an example of being “overly cynical about official claims and motives” speaks volumes about the New York Times’ relationship to those in power.

Katy Steinmetz, a writer for Time, made a list called “Nutty Health Claims of 2010″ and “2010: The Year in Preposterous Health Claims.” The list of 12 includes:

• omega-3 makes kids smarter
• probiotics that prevent colds and flu
• Dannon’s probiotics as wellness elixir

Preposterous!

Marion Nestle, the New York University nutrition expert, has often said she thinks the health claims made for yogurt are bogus — at least when big companies make them. She recently called Dannon’s claims “a case study of successful marketing”.

This story from the Globe and Mail describes what happened to ten Canadians who left the country to get liberation therapy for their multiple sclerosis (MS). The therapy consists of widening veins that drain blood from the brain. The therapy does not always work, but it usually does. The improvement is so fast and large — comparable to giving someone with scurvy Vitamin C — that the thing being changed must be the source of the problem.

Mainstream MS researchers missed this completely. The mainstream view is that MS is an auto-immune disease (e.g., according to Mayo Clinic staff). This view would never lead you to the liberation surgery. Doctors not only have the wrong idea, they are unwilling to defend it. A woman in the Globe and Mail story tried to get the anti-liberation argument from neurologists. She couldn’t:

Unfortunately the neurologists are all hysterical. You can’t talk to them.

Remember this the next time someone tells you that ulcers are not caused by stress but are actually caused by bacteria — as several contributors to this EDGE symposium claim.

The vast improvement in understanding of MS came about because someone with the necessary expertise (a professor of surgery) cared more than most MS researchers because his wife had MS. I think this is why my self-experimentation found such different solutions than mainstream science: because (a) I cared more than the professional researchers who studied the subject (e.g., sleep) and (b) I had the necessary expertise to do research. I discuss this here.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

… is the title of a New York Times Magazine article about the ketogenic diet, a treatment for childhood epilepsy, which I’ve blogged about several times (here, here, here, here, here). It’s a very-high-fat diet. It interests me for two reasons: (a) It connects a high-fat diet with proper brain function, as my self-experiments have done. A curious feature of the ketogenic diet is that it isn’t permanent. After several years the child can go off it. My self-experimentation suggests that Americans eat far too little of certain fats. Perhaps eating enough of these fats would prevent childhood epilepsy. (b) It shows how someone who cares enough — in this case, Jim Abrahams, whose son had epilepsy — can be more effective than professional researchers and doctors. Abrahams rediscovered the diet. He saw its value, the professionals didn’t. I’ve argued that this is part of why my self-experimentation found new solutions to common problems: because I had those problems. I cared more about finding a workable solution than researchers in those areas, who had several other concerns (publication, funding, acceptance, etc.).

The details of the article reminded me of something I learned in the BBC series The Story of Science. For hundreds of years, medical students were told, following Aristotle, that the liver has three lobes. It doesn’t. You might think that examination of thousands of actual livers would have dispelled the wrong idea, but it didn’t. The article contains many examples of doctors ignoring perfectly good evidence in favor of nonsense they read in a book or heard in a lecture. Epilepsy is easy to measure. If a child has 100 seizures per day, and has been having them at this rate for years, and this goes down to 5 shortly after he starts the ketogenic diet, and goes up again when the child goes off the diet, there is no doubt the diet works. As early as the 1930s, this had been observed hundreds of times. This was overwhelming evidence of effectiveness. Doctors ignored it, probably based on the modern equivalent of the three-lobed liver. They complained, according to the article, that there was “no evidence it worked” or that the evidence wasn’t “controlled” or “scientific” (whatever that means). A study published in 2008 “answered doubts about keto’s clinical effectiveness” — as if doctors needed the equivalent of a very-large-type book to be able to read what most of us can read with normal-sized type.

According to the article, “by 2000, more people were asking about keto, but most pediatric neurologists still would not prescribe it” — as if the parents needed the approval of their doctor to try it. You don’t need a prescription to buy food.

Thanks to Tim Beneke, Michael Bowerman, Alex Chernavsky, David Cramer, and Peter Couvares.

At Tsinghua I am teaching a class called Frontiers of Psychology. The students are reading The Man Who Would Be Queen by Michael Bailey. At one point Bailey mentions what is sometimes called the older brother effect: If a man has one older brother, he is more likely to be gay than if he has no older brothers, controlling for several things. This has been seen many times. In 1962 it was reported that gay men have more older siblings than other men but not until 1996 was it determined that this was due to more older brothers.

Bailey doesn’t mention the strength of the effect. The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki is about research that found that non-experts can do an excellent job of estimating this or that number (such as the weight of a particular cow) even when they know little about it. Their answers are excellent in the sense that the average of their answers is very accurate. Perhaps my students, who had read two-thirds of Bailey’s book, could accurately estimate the strength of the effect.

I posed the question like this. Suppose that when a man has no older brothers, his chance of being gay is 2.0%. What is his chance of being gay if he has one older brother? I gathered an estimate from every student. The median of their estimates was 8%. The correct answer is 2.7%.

Tim Lundeen writes:

We [Tim and his partner, Alexandra] first noticed that eating avocados raised our blood glucose when we were on a low-protein/low-fat/high-fruit nutrition plan. After 1/4 avocado each, we would both have fasting glucose of 95-99 instead of 80-85, with the effect lasting for about 4 days. It was quite repeatable, so we stopped eating avocados. We speculated at the time that it was due to the omega-6 content of the avocado fat.

We just tried avocado again with more typical nutrition, with about 25% protein, 25% fat, 50% carbohydrate with very low fructose, thinking that because we were eating more fat the effect might not be so pronounced, but saw the same elevated fasting blood glucose as before.

After some more research, we found out it is because avocados contain a sugar called mannoheptulose, which causes temporary dysregulation of blood sugar.

Mannoheptulose was first isolated in 1917. Mannoheptulose has been proven to be present in many foods, but is found most abundantly in the avocado (La Forge 1916-1917). In 1957, the first research was published in the Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics (Volume 69, page 592), suggesting that avocado extract blocked normal insulin secretion. In 1963, it was demonstrated that avocado extract blocks glucose-stimulated release of insulin (Nature, Volume 197, page 1264). By 1967, low doses of avocado extract were found to inhibit both pancreatic secretion and synthesis of insulin without eliciting measurable hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) (Nature, Volume 214, page 276). This finding was significant because it demonstrated that a controlled dose of avocado extract could suppress pancreatic production of insulin without inducing a diabetic state. [http://www.health-marketplace.com/p-Obesity-3.htm]
The problem with this is that your cells don’t absorb nutrition because insulin is reduced, so we have strong cravings for food, feel extra hungry all the time, and have been eating about 50% more calories to feel full. The net effect is not a good feeling…

This makes sense. And it is methodologically interesting. Spending zero research dollars, Tim and Alexandra learned something important about blood sugar control that the rest of the world seems not to know. (Except perhaps the researchers who did the avocado extract research.) None of the research articles they mention make clear the practical significance of the effect. To say that avocado extract does X doesn’t tell you how much avocado you need to get the effect.

When I google “avocado” and “blood sugar” (together), the first page of links all claim, at least at first glance, that avocado lowers blood sugar. But that’s just the internet. (Although Google is supposed to put the most reliable links at the top.) Then I went to the most authoritative possible source on what we should eat: the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. I found only three articles that mention avocados in their title or abstract. None was about this effect. I also looked in Eat Drink and Be Healthy by Walter Willett and the Harvard School of Public Health. Nothing about this effect of avocado.

The Chronicle of Higher Education website has a blog about “ideas, culture, and the arts [that] features some of the best minds in academic and policy circles”. One of the bloggers — Gina Barreca, a professor of English and Feminist Theory at the University of Connecticut and a humorist — wrote about being older than her students:

I think about the fact that my students and I no longer listen to same music or revere the same actors; I wonder about the implications of the fact that even some of the smart ones like I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

I pointed this out to Tucker Max (author of I Hope . . . ). He replied:

I like how she implies that some of her students are stupid. Great prof.

I thought that was a great point. I asked if I could use it on this blog. He agreed, and added:

The other thing about her statement is that she implicitly scoffs at the notion that someone smart could–gasp–DISAGREE with her. It doesn’t even occur to her that she might be wrong, that her worldview might be the one that needs examining. To her, nothing legitimate can exist outside of her prejudices and opinions. Even the idea that it could is rejected out of hand.

I replied:

Yeah, she hasn’t read your book but it must be ridiculous. Of course. I praised the film Gladiator (pre-Oscar) to someone I knew and she said, to a friend, that this made me an inferior person. Because Gladiator was popular, it must be bad. If I liked it, there was something wrong with me.

Tucker replied:

Exactly–the idea that THEY might be wrong doesn’t even occur to them. Like it’s not even in the realm of possibility.

These are the same people that Nassim Taleb rails against, and the same people who read Socrates, and completely miss the point, but still praise it because they think they’re supposed to. And these are the people that the internet/the age of connectivity is destroying. Because you can’t hide behind status anymore. Results are measurable, and everyone is on the playing field now.

I agree.

Gary Taubes pointed to this PNAS paper about climate change and noted that one of the authors, Stephen Schneider, had a big non-financial conflict of interest: If it turns out the whole argument is wrong, he looks like a fool. The accompanying statement (“The authors declare no conflict of interest”) is, if taken to mean the authors have no conflict of interest, wildly inaccurate. Readers unaware of Schneider’s history wouldn’t know this.

I came across a similar example today. A reader of this blog wrote extensive criticisms (here and here) of the idea that prenatal ultrasound may cause autism. He believed Caroline Rodgers, my source for that idea, misrepresented the evidence. In particular, Rodgers pointed to a study that found ultrasound disturbed neuronal migration in mouse fetuses. She said it supported her idea. The reader disagreed, saying,

The bottom line for me is that Dr. Rakic (from the mouse study) clarified, “Our study in mice does not mean that use of ultrasound on human fetuses for appropriate diagnostic and medical purposes should be abandoned. Instead, our study warns against its non-medical use.” Yes. Okay. No more boutiquey, keepsake ultrasounds. Great. But for Rodgers to skew this data (along with the FDA’s and others’) into claiming that ultrasounds under the care of an Obstetrics professional (and for medical use) are causing autism is disingenuous at best, unethical propaganda for the Midwifery Way at worst.

The reader is a professor who teaches composition. Maybe an English professor.  He or she takes Rakic seriously, where I completely ignore his statement because of a conflict of interest. If Rakic questions “appropriate” ultrasound, he will be attacked in many ways, making his life unpleasant. I have no idea whether this swayed Rakic, but he would be only human if it did.

Of course developing neurons are unable to distinguish appropriate and inappropriate ultrasound. Rakic’s statement is ridiculous as Rakic and all insiders (neuroscientists) know, I believe. All insiders know that there are dozens of examples where findings from mouse brains have turned out to be true for human brains, in spite of the many differences between them, and that there are thousands of grant proposals in which mouse brains are claimed to be a worthwhile model for human brains. All insiders know this, realize the pressure on Rakic to say what he said, and, like me, just ignore it. As far as I can tell, Rakic pays no price for misleading outsiders because the outsiders don’t know they are being misled. (Just as with political lobbying: the public doesn’t understand what’s happening.) The composition professor doesn’t know this, as far as I can tell.

Rodgers is not claiming that ultrasounds “are causing autism”. She is saying they might cause autism, that there are several reasons to think so, and therefore (a) the ultrasound-autism idea deserves further scrutiny and (b) ultrasounds should be avoided as much as possible until more is known.

The FBI recently sent a letter to the Wikipedia Foundation saying it should take down an image of the FBI shield — that is, a picture of an FBI badge — and threatened legal action. Supposedly the Wikipedia Foundation was breaking a law by posting it.

The Wikipedia Foundation responded that

The law cited in the F.B.I.’s letter is largely about keeping people from flashing fake badges or profiting from the use of the seal

If nobody knows what an authentic badge looks like it becomes easier to fool people with a fake badge.

How strange:

In a striking departure from his political counterparts across the country, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall says his government will finance clinical trials of liberation therapy, a contentious experimental procedure for multiple sclerosis patients.

Of course, the heads of provinces don’t usually get involved in research at this level of detail. However, “Saskatchewan has the highest rate of MS in the country,” says the article.

In Part 5 of The Story of Science (BBC), Michael Mosley, the presenter, said that for hundreds of years medical students were shown a human liver and told it had three lobes. They were told that because that’s what Galen had said. However, human livers do not have three lobes. As the students could see. Mosely is a doctor. “When I was a medical student,” said Mosley, “there was tremendous pressure to conform.” MS researchers have said for a long time that MS is an autoimmune disease. Could this have been as misleading as Galen’s description of the liver?
Thanks to Anne Weiss.