Seth's Blog

• “As reprehensible as many [drug] industry practices are, I [Marcia Angell] believe the behavior of much of the medical profession is even more culpable.”
• Richard Posner, judge and erstwhile economist, reveals he is unfamiliar with Thorstein Veblen.
• Notes on nonviolence by Gene Sharp. “They struggled against slavery, achieved voting rights for the disenfranchised, seceded from empires,
  undermined dictatorships, broke down racial segregation, strengthened exploited workers with the tools of the strike and economic boycott, restored independence to colonized nations, freed intended victims of the Holocaust, spread and defended civil liberties, achieved higher standards of living, ended discrimination, paralyzed an empire, and even defeated totalitarian systems.”
• Careerism in the military. Many similarities with careerism in health science. Careerism in health science is one reason many health problems, such as obesity and autism, are getting worse.

A friend of mine majored in design at Tsinghua and is now working as a designer. Her opinion of her education has gone down. Designers from other schools are better trained than she is, she sees.

At Tsinghua, her teachers denigrated learning to use this or that software program. To design something using a computer program was to be a design farmer, they said. They preferred to talk about big ideas. “I hate big ideas,” said my friend.

Her comments reminded me of law professors who would rather teach philosophy than how to be a lawyer (and are surprised when students play solitaire during class) and education professors who don’t teach their students how to teach.

From an excellent Atlantic article about John Ioannidis, who has published several papers saying that medical research is far less reliable than you might think:

A different oak tree at the site provides visitors with a chance to try their own hands at extracting a prophecy. “I [bring] all the researchers who visit me here, and almost every single one of them asks the tree the same question,” Ioannidis tells me . . . “‘Will my research grant be approved?’”

A good point. I’d say his main contribution, based on this article, is pointing out the low rate of repeatability of major medical findings. Until someone actually calculated that rate, it was hard to know what it was, unless you had inside experience. The rate turned out to be lower than a naive person might think. It was not lower than an insider might think, which explains lack of disagreement:

David Gorski . . . noted in his prominent medical blog that when he presented Ioannidis’s paper on [lack of repeatability of] highly cited research at a professional meeting, “not a single one of my surgical colleagues was the least bit surprised or disturbed by its findings.”

I also like the way Ioannidis has emphasized the funding pressure that researchers face, as in that story about the oak tree.  Obviously it translates into pressure to get positive results, which translates into overstatement.

I also think his critique of medical research has room for improvement:

1. Black/white thinking. He talks in terms of right and wrong. (“We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine.”) This is misleading. There is signal in all that medical research he criticizes; it’s just not as strong a signal as the researchers claimed. In other words the research he says is “wrong” has value. He’s doing the same thing as all those meta-analyses that ignore all research that isn’t of “high quality”.

2. Nihilism (which is a type of black/white thinking). For example,

How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.

I’ve paid a lot of attention to health-related research and benefited greatly.  Many of the treatments I’ve studied through self-experimentation were based on health-related research. An example is omega-3. There is plenty of research suggesting its value and this encouraged me to try it. Likewise, there is plenty of evidence supporting the value of fermented foods. That evidence and many other studies (e.g., of hormesis) paint a large consistent picture.

3. Bias isn’t the only problem, but, in this article, he talks as if it is. Bias is a relatively minor problem: you can allow for it. Other problems you can’t allow for. One is the Veblenian tendency to show off. Thus big labs are better than small ones, regardless of which would make more progress. Big studies better than small, expensive equipment better than cheap, etc. And, above all, useless is better than useful. The other is a fundamental misunderstanding about what causes disease and how to fix it. A large fraction of health research money goes to researchers who think that studying this or that biochemical pathway or genetic mechanism will make a difference — for a disease that has an environmental cause. They are simply looking in the wrong place. I think the reason is at least partly Veblenian: To study genes is more “scientific” (= high-tech = expensive) than studying environments.

Thanks to Gary Wolf.

Nassim Taleb recently criticized the Nobel Prize in Economics:

According to Taleb, there are a number of mistaken ideas about forecasting and measuring risk, which all contribute to events like the 2008 global crisis. The Nobel prize, he says, has given them a stamp of approval, allowing them to propagate.

It isn’t just economics. As I’ve said before, the Nobel Prize in medicine was not given for the discovery that smoking causes lung cancer. It was not given for the discovery that lack of folate causes birth defects. Both enormously useful. It has been given for several discoveries, such as the connection between teleomeres and aging, with (so far) little or no practical value.

This is no mystery. The Nobel Prize must be prestigious, therefore must honor high-prestige research. Veblen argued long ago that in academia high prestige correlates with low practical value. Just today I told a friend Veblen’s idea that professors use jargon for the same reason men wear ties — to show off how useless they are. The economics research (“Harry Markowitz, William Sharpe, Robert Merton, Myron Scholes, Robert Engle, Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller”) that Taleb is criticizing was high prestige. The so-far-useless biology that has received a Nobel Prize was high prestige; the highly-useful epidemiology that didn’t receive the prize was low prestige.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

After posting about Doug Lemov, I ordered Teach Like a Champion. It arrived yesterday. Leafing through it, I came across a section titled “The Irony of What Works,” which begins:

One of the biggest ironies I hope you will take away from reading this book is that many of the tools likely to yield the strongest classroom results remain essentially beneath the notice of our theories and theorists of education.

Lemov continues with an example: Teaching students how to distribute classroom materials, such as handouts. This can save a lot of time. Then he adds:

Unfortunately this dizzyingly efficient technique — so efficient it is all but a moral imperative for teachers to use it — remains beneath the notice of our avatars of educational theory. There isn’t a school of education that would stoop to teach its aspiring teachers how to train their students to pass out papers.

The last chapter of Veblen’s  Theory of the Leisure Class is about just this — the importance that professors (like everyone else) place on status display and how this interferes with their effectiveness. The connection with self-experimentation is that no matter how effective it is, no psychology department would stoop to teach it. Or, at least, that’s the current state of affairs.

The book’s index doesn’t include Veblen, although it does include Richard Thaler.