Seth's Blog

Rereading an old post, I found this:

Today I had my teeth cleaned and was told my gums were in excellent shape, better than ever before [due to flaxseed oil]. They were less inflamed than usual. “What causes inflammation?” I asked. “Tartar,” I was told.

I believe that reddish gums are a great sign (so easy to see) that overall your body has too much inflammation, putting you at higher risk for many common diseases. (Perhaps due to too little omega-3, which the body uses to make an anti-inflammation hormone.) Every day my dentist measured, or at least saw, a great correlate of health (the redness of his patients’ gums) and failed to notice. It’s like failing to notice an oil field under your property. If dentists became experts in measuring gum redness and helped their patients lower overall inflammation, the public health contribution would be great. (Writing this makes me wonder why I haven’t become skilled at measuring the redness of my gums.)
Experimental psychologists are in a similar position. I believe brain health is closely correlated with health of the rest of the body. In other words, the foods that make the brain work better make the rest of the body work better. I discovered the anti-inflammatory effects of flaxseed oil because it improved my balance. The brain is much easier to study (via behavior) than the rest of the body — it’s a model system for the rest of the body. Experimental psychologists are as unaware of their good fortune as dentists. By using their skills to figure out how to have the healthiest possible brain, they could make a great contribution to human welfare.

Nassim Taleb has honed his replies to common questions:

Why did economists get the crisis so wrong?
That’s like asking why fortune-tellers don’t get things right. Their tools don’t work, but they continue to use them. And the Nobel committee gives prizes to people who aren’t scientists.

Which is what I’m saying about geneticists — their tools don’t work (also here) and the Nobel committee fails to notice (e.g., the recent award for teleomere research, which hasn’t yet had practical value).

You have a great phrase in The Black Swan: “Don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.” Is that still happening?
Worse. I was talking about Bernanke – they’ve given him a bigger bus.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

• submarine tunnel and giant terrain model, discovered via Google Earth. More here.
• Nassim Taleb interview podcast.
• Shades of Jane Jacobs: How the cure for scurvy was lost. “From the fifteenth century on, it was the rare doctor who acknowledged ignorance about the cause and treatment of the disease.”

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Jonathan Cole used to be provost of Colombia University. He has written a book called The Great American University, in which, according to this review,

He lists their dazzling achievements, which in biology and medicine include findings on gene-splicing, recombinant DNA, retroviruses, cancer therapies, coch­lear implants, the fetal ultrasound scanner, the hepatitis B vaccine, prions, stem cells, organ transplantation and even a treatment for head lice. . . . In a chapter on the social sciences, he cites, among many others, such useful innovations as theories of human capital and social mobility, research in linguistics and even the use of prices to reduce traffic jams.

“Research in linguistics”? Yes, that sounds dazzling. I’m sure those “theories of human capital” have been v v “useful”. And who would have thought that if you raise the price of something (“use of prices to reduce traffic jams”) . . . people use less of it? Which was traffic engineering, not social science. Did the reviewer, an economics professor at Harvard named Claudia Goldin, write this with a straight face?

The “dazzling achievements” in biology and medicine are only slightly less unconvincing.”Gene splicing” and “recombinant DNA” research are different names for the same thing. Fetal ultrasound scanners may cause autism. Vaccines were not invented by an American university professor. The discovery of prions has had no obvious non-laboratory use — besides being questionable. Stem-cell research has yet to produce anything of use outside of labs. To be fair, gene splicing has been used to produce human insulin, which is better than the insulin previously available, but conspicuously absent from the list of accomplishments is prevention of diabetes — not to mention allergies, obesity, depression, arthritis, stroke, or any of the other lifestyle problems that a large fraction of Americans suffer from. Such achievements would be truly useful. Great American universities haven’t given us any of those . . but they have given us a treatment for head lice.

There’s a reason for the term ivory tower. Apparently Cole, conscious of the term, is trying to argue against it — but merely shows why it exists. (I’m assuming the review is accurate.) It reminds me of the time that top Chinese students, visiting top American colleges such as Harvard and Yale, found the American students ignorant and arrogant. The theme of Cole’s book is that American universities are in trouble and need more support. What useful stuff they’ve accomplished is central to his argument. When I was an undergrad, I read Thorstein Veblen’s bitter The Higher Learning in America, which said American universities were dysfunctional. He mentioned “committees for the sifting of sawdust.”

More “Graduate school in the humanities is a trap” (via Marginal Revolution).

In the current New Yorker, James Surowiecki writes:

The bailout of the auto industry, after all, was as unpopular as the bailout of the banks, even though it was much tougher on the companies (G.M. and Chrysler went bankrupt; shareholders were wiped out, and C.E.O.s pushed out), and even though the biggest beneficiaries of the deal were ordinary autoworkers. You might have expected a deal that helped workers keep their jobs to play well in a country spooked by ballooning unemployment. Yet most voters hated it.

Yes, rewarding failure doesn’t play well. The voters were right. The same money that was used to give a few giant companies a second (or third) chance could have been used to give many thousands of very small companies a first chance. It could have been used to help many thousands of people start new small businesses (often one-person businesses) or keep their new small business afloat. All those small businesses would have provided plenty of jobs. and they would have had a far more promising future, far more room for growth, than the Big Three, being both far more diverse and having not already failed. The many thousands of people who wanted to start small businesses were unable to get together and make themselves visible, so the failure of government to help them went unnoticed. Their diversity was economic strength but political weakness.

It’ isn’t surprising things happened as they did — the Big Three (not to mention Wall Street) were bailed out, small businesses were ignored — but it is an indication of how poorly our economy is managed in the most basic ways. I’m not even an economist and I understand this simple point. Bernanke and Summers do not.

It’s easy for me to understand because the same thing happens in science. Government support of research is a good idea, but the money is misspent, in the same way. Grant support goes to a few large projects — generally to people who have already failed (to do anything useful) — rather than to a large number of small projects that haven’t yet failed. The way to support innovation is to place many small bets not a few big ones. That’s one thing I learned from self-experimentation, which allowed me to place many small bets.

You may have heard that Madonna’s attempt to adopt a Malawi child was rebuffed by the legal system. A judge ruled against the adoption:

Madonna was devastated by the ruling, said witnesses, and shouted at her attorney, “What went wrong? How could this have happened?” when the judge announced her decision.

Yet the ruling doesn’t appear mysterious. There are clear residency requirements, which Madonna didn’t come close to meeting.

Did her lawyer tell her the truth? The outburst suggests no, but in any case the perverse incentives are obvious: The lawyer benefits from being hired. Painting a rosy scenario — saying “I can definitely get you what you want” — increases the chances of that.

What about doctors? Dermatologists seem to claim, as a group at least, that acne is unrelated to diet. The fact that certain groups of people with unusual diets don’t have acne suggests that this is wrong. Again, the mistake is highly self-interested. If acne is due to diet, you need to try different diets to figure out the problem foods. You don’t need to see a dermatologist to do that.

A few days ago I needed to convert image files from one format to another. Searching for the software, I found IvanView, an apparently reputable company whose program once got 4 stars from CNET. I download and installed the converter. Right after that I started having trouble with my Firefox browser. After I did a Google Search, and tried to go to one of the results, I’d be directed elsewhere. Trying to use Avis.com in America put me on Avis’s Australian website — and many relocations were much worse. Internet Explorer still worked okay.

I searched “Firefox virus.” I found a post about a problem that was the same as mine, with the reassuring words that it will just mess with your web surfing. The outlined solution steps, however, were either very complicated or didn’t solve the problem.

Later I started to have trouble with Internet Explorer. I used Norton Antivirus to scan my hard drive. It found nothing of importance. But it did tell me I had some sort of incoming malware. Then it told me to restart my computer. I did so — and was unable to log on! No one had reported this problem in what I’d read.

At this point I did a full system recovery (from a few weeks earlier). It took a few hours but then everything was fine. It’s unfortunate, though, that Mozilla and Norton, not to mention Microsoft, haven’t managed to protect against a virus that has been around for almost a year, as far as I could tell. You should be able to fix this by downloading a free antivirus program.

After learning that animal fat improved my sleep, I happily ate much more of it. I wasn’t worried that it made something else worse (e.g., heart disease). I believe that all parts of our bodies have been shaped by evolution to work well on the same diet, just as all electric appliances are designed to work well on the same house current.

A to-be-published meta-analysis in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition supports my view that animal fat is nowhere as bad as we’ve been told a thousand times. It says:

During 5–23 y of follow-up of 347,747 subjects, . . . intake of [more] saturated fat was not associated with an increased risk of CHD [coronary heart disease], stroke, or CVD [cardiovascular disease]. The pooled relative risk estimates that compared extreme quantiles of saturated fat intake were 1.07 (95% CI: 0.96, 1.19; P = 0.22) for CHD, 0.81 (95% CI: 0.62, 1.05; P = 0.11) for stroke, and 1.00 (95% CI: 0.89, 1.11; P = 0.95) for CVD.

Emphasis added. One aspect of the results suggested that studies that found an positive association (more fat, more disease) were more likely to be published than those that didn’t find an association or found a negative association. Which means these numbers may underestimate the good effects.

Thanks to Steve Hansen and Michael Pope.

Today I flew from Tokyo to San Francisco. Just before boarding there was a level of security I hadn’t encountered before: Every passenger’s carry-on luggage was searched and every passenger was wand-scanned. Then my name was called. “Please come to the check-in desk.” I went to the check-in desk. “Are you Mr. Roberts?” Yes. The woman who had asked me that started typing. “Why did you call my name?” I asked. No answer. I asked again. No answer. Eventually I figured out I’d been summoned to the check-in desk to be offered a better seat, for which I hadn’t asked and for which I was very grateful. The airline was ANA.

In a widely-emailed article about depression, Judith Warner, a former columnist at the New York Times, writes:

This is the big picture of mental health care in America: not perfectly healthy people popping pills for no reason, but people with real illnesses lacking access to care; facing barriers like ignorance, stigma and high prices; or finding care that is ineffective.

When Atul Gawande fails to mention prevention in a discussion of how to improve American health care . . . well, he’s a surgeon. Of course he has gatekeeper syndrome. What’s Judith Warner’s excuse? Judging from this article, the notion that depression might be prevented has not occurred to her.