Seth's Blog

One hundred years ago (January, 1912), at the annual meeting of the Geological Association in Frankfurt, Germany, Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist, presented his theory of continental drift for the first time. It was almost uniformly dismissed by geologists. One of them called it “mere geopoetry”. Much later, he was proved right.

To me, this is a classic example of the power of what I call insider/outsiders. Wegener had a great deal of scientific training, including a Ph.D. in astronomy. Unlike professional geologists, however, (a) he had the freedom to say whatever he wanted about geology without endangering his job (as a meteorologist) or prospects for advancement and (b) was under no pressure to publish. He could spend as much time on his theory as he wanted.

Darwin was an insider/outsider; so was Mendel. Insider/outsiders are close enough to their subject to have a good understanding and skills yet far enough away to have freedom. In the case of Chinese history, a journalist named Yang Jisheng has filled that role. He wrote a book called Tombstone (Mubei) about the Great Famine (1958-61). He was able to write what professional historians could not:

Why are you the first Chinese historian to tackle this subject seriously?

Traditional historians [i.e., college professors] face restrictions. First of all, they censor themselves. Their thoughts limit them. They don’t even dare to write the facts, don’t dare to speak up about it, don’t dare to touch it. And even if they wrote it, they can’t publish it. And if they publish, they will face censure. So mainstream scholars face those restrictions.

But there are many unofficial historians like me. Many people are writing their own memoirs about being labeled “Rightists” or “counter-revolutionaries.” There is an author in Anhui province who has described how his family starved to death. There are many authors who have written about how their families starved.

“If they publish, they will face censure.” With respect to weight control, I am an insider/outsider. When I published The Shangri-La Diet, I did not expect censure. My colleagues (other psychology department faculty)  wouldn’t care what I wrote about a different subject. To my surprise, I was censured — maybe a better word is denounced — by a nutrition education lecturer in the UC Berkeley Nutrition Department.  The woman who denounced me had not seen my book. Based on what a reporter told her, she expressed her opinion of it in an email she sent to twenty people in her department and the chairman of my department. It said, in part:

I did give the SF Chronicle reporter my opinion of the diet making these points:
- one cannot possibly meet nutrient needs on 1200 kcals per day
- sugar and oils are not nutrient dense; they are calorically dense and thus dilute the nutrient density of the total kcal intake.
- 1200 kcals per day is less than the semi-starvation diet used in the only published formal study ever conducted in this country on human starvation (Ancel Keys, 1950)
- human semi-starvation is not a path to health whether one is discussing physical, psychological, or social well-being
- the results of single subject research are applicable only to that subject; they cannot be generalized to others.
- I cannot recommend this diet, in fact, I recommend against it.

In other words: Ridiculous. Her many misconceptions (e.g., she is unaware of many examples of path-breaking self-experimentation in the field of nutrition)  aren’t terribly interesting. What’s fascinating is her decision to trash a book she hasn’t read to a large number of her colleagues.

Thanks to Steve Hansen.

Lots of scientists say science is self-correcting. In a way this is surely true: a non-scientist wouldn’t understand the issues. If anyone corrects scientific fraud, it will be a scientist. In another way, this is preventive stupidity: it reassures and reduces the intelligence of those who say it, helping them ignore the fact that they have no idea how much fraud goes undetected. If only 1% of fraud is corrected, it is misleading to say science is self-correcting. A realistic view of scientific self-correction is that there is no reward for discovering fraud and plenty of grief involved: the possibility of retaliation, the loss of time (it won’t help you get another grant), and the dislike of bearing bad news. So whenever fraud is uncovered it’s a bit surprising and bears examination.

What I notice is that science is often corrected by insider/outsiders — people with enough (insider) knowledge and (outsider) freedom to correct things.  As I’ve said before, Saul Sternberg and I were free to severely criticize Ranjit Chandra. Because we were psychologists and he was a nutritionist, he couldn’t retaliate against us. Leon Kamin, an outsider to personality psychology, was free to point out that Cyril Burt faked data. (To his credit, Arthur Jensen, an insider, also pointed in this direction, although not as clearly.) The Marc Hauser case provides another example: Undergraduates in Hauser’s lab uncovered the deception. They knew a lot about the research yet had nothing invested in it and little to lose from loss of Hauser’s support. This is another reason insider/outsiders are important.

One theme of this blog (I hope) is that it’s insider/outsiders — people with the knowledge of insiders but the freedom of outsiders — who can produce real progress. Ordinary insiders have the necessary knowledge but not the necessary freedom; ordinary outsiders have the freedom but not the knowledge. This article of mine makes this point in detail.

A similar point was made in a comment on a blog post by George Packer, the New Yorker writer. Packer had written an article about the U.S. Senate and his post was about how he’d written it. Someone commented:

I think Packer covered Washington with the refreshing take of a short-timer, one who didn’t have to make his living or sustain his career there. The disservice inherent in careerism connects with the Senate’s paralysis a la Tom Harkin’s quote about senators spending more than half their time fund-raising, one of the most troubling realities of the story. (Years ago, Bill Clinton said the House was ineffective because the members were “sleep deprived” from having to attend fundraisers every night. If a six-year term requires half-time fund-raising, imagine what a two-year term requires.)

I think the subtext is that journalistic long-timers, unlike short-timers like Packer, must spend a lot of time nurturing relationships, and this makes it harder to write unpleasant and unflattering truths.

Professional scientists spend a lot of time fund-raising, which in their case means applying for grants. A typical grant lasts three years. During those three years, because they need another grant when the current one runs out, they must publish several papers, recruit several grad students or post-docs (to do the heavy lifting), and avoid pissing off anyone in their field (because they might review your papers or grant proposals). Just as members of the House of Representatives never ever want to talk about how the constant need for money cripples them — it would make their job seem irrelevant and them appear impotent — neither do professional scientists.

The Big Short (sent to me by the publisher) is Michael Lewis’s best book, and that’s saying a lot. Moneyball was excellent. The Blind Side was excellent. All three are stories of underdog triumph but The Big Short is about a far more important subject, a far more complicated subject, and has a tremendously dark side. You know the saying: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Well, shame on Wall Street for creating the worst financial disaster ever. But then, as Nassim Taleb puts it, the school-bus driver who crashed a bus full of children were given a new bus. Those who created the disaster were put in charge of fixing it. As Steve Eisman, one of Lewis’s main characters, puts it, “I can understand why Goldman Sachs would want to be included in the conversation about what to do about Wall Street. What I can’t understand is why anyone would listen to them.” (Not just listen. They were allowed to dominate the conversation.) Showing that the foolishness of people at the top in American society has no clear limit.

I could hardly stop reading. Endless fascinating detail. Michael Burry, another main character, discovers he has Asperger’s after his son is turned down by several kindergartens and he tries to understand why. I’ve been talking and reading about data analysis my whole professional life, yet Lewis’s story about how means can be terribly misleading is the best I’ve heard. An average credit score of 600 can be due to two scores of 600 or to scores of 500 and 700, with vastly different consequences. (This escaped the averagers.) Sure, I knew about the conflict of interest of bond rating agencies, such as Moody’s, but Lewis describes it so well I loved reading about it again.

Long ago, I blogged about the importance of insider/outsiders — close enough to understand what’s going on yet far enough away to see the truth. Lewis’s heros, who saw that a tremendous crash was coming, are exactly that. Like Harry Markopolos, they were on the fringes of the financial industry. One of them (Eisman) had a gift for tactlessness, another (Burry) had Asperger’s, and a third group ran their fund from a Berkeley garage. Without them, the people at the top (e.g., the head of Goldman Sachs), who run and crashed our financial system, could plausibly say Nobody could have predicted this. Because of Lewis’s heros, they can’t.