Seth's Blog

Alcohol is bad for your liver, we’re told. However, moderate amounts may be good for your liver. A recent meta-analysis found that men who drank moderate amounts of alcohol had considerably less risk (a risk ratio of 0.3) of liver cirrhosis than men who drank no alcohol.  It wasn’t clear if some forms of alcohol (e.g., wine) were more protective than others. I came across this study because another article called the association “biologically implausible”, whereas I think it is highly plausible due to vast experimental literature on hormesis (animals given small amounts of poisons are healthier than animals given none).

The findings about cirrhosis join a much large body of evidence that moderate drinking is associated with less heart disease.  A recent meta-analysis reached this conclusion once again and found, in addition, that moderate drinking is associated with less all-cause mortality.

These are more examples of the health benefits of fermented foods, one of my favorite subjects. It is unfortunate the liquor industry does not run long-term human experiments on the effects of moderate amounts of beer, wine, and so on.

A New York lawyer named Greg reports remarkably clear evidence about the effect of butter on blood lipid levels: It improved them. For a few years he measured his HDL and LDL regularly with a home cholesterol device. For unrelated reasons, he started eating more butter. He ate a half stick (about 60 g)/day, like me. Here’s what happened. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard to get scurvy. If you eat anything resembling an ordinary diet you won’t get it. The existence of scurvy, produced by extreme conditions, led to the discovery of Vitamin C.  From the case of scurvy and Vitamin C we learned — well, most people learned — that some diseases are clues to what we need to eat to be healthy. Read the rest of this entry »

• All about kefir
• Fraud and waste at a New York hospital. From the comments you can see that the problems have lasted decades.  If someone is always sick, year after year, it means there is something about their sickness (about health in general, actually) we do not understand. Likewise, the decades-long persistence of huge problems at this hospital suggests there is something fundamental about regulation (and perhaps health care) we do not understand.
• This paper about how well blood uric acid level predicts mortality, which appeared in 2004, did not get nearly the attention it deserves. I was shocked by its existence — American medical school professors are almost incapable of good research. Well, it’s from Finland.
• David Healy’s new blog.

Thanks to Bruce Charlton, Jazi Zilber, Melissa McEwen and Alex Chernavsky.

I have posted several times about using what I call percentile feedback to boost productivity. Percentile feedback means comparing your current performance to your previous performance using a percentile. If the current performance is in the middle of your previous performances, the percentile is 50, for example. Percentile feedback is easy to understand (scores above 50 are better than average) and is sensitive to small improvements — so even small improvements are rewarded. My implementation had three other helpful features: 1. It adjusted for the time I woke up to make different days more comparable. 2. It measured efficiency (time working/time available) to further improve comparability across days. 3. It was graphical. I made a graph of efficiency throughout the current day versus previous days. It greatly increased how much I worked every day.

I love it and wish I had it for everything I measure. Unlike so many feedback systems, it is realistic and encouraging. I found it worked extremely well — to my surprise, actually. It’s not so surprising I would think of it because it vaguely resembles an animal-learning procedure. (Animal learning is my area of expertise within psychology.)

Nick Winter, one of the developers of Skritter (which I use), recently started to use it. He gave a much-too-short QS talk about it in Pittsburgh a month ago. I asked him about his experience. He is as enthusiastic as I am. He wrote:

The percentile feedback has been a huge success–I’m getting way more done than I ever did, and I’m much better at prioritizing toward my main project. Seeing the graph going in real time has been much better at making me aware of what I need to do to hit high targets each day. I will do a full writeup on this, and on my self experiments, when I finish this iOS app and stop focusing so much on work. The short teaser goes something like this:

Phase 0: just tracking normal work at end of day in a Google Doc, average 2 hours a day on iOS development

Phase 1: tracking normal work and iOS dev separately in the Google Doc, average 4 hours a day on iOS development

Phase 2: using Beeminder to have better graphing and goal incentive for iOS dev, average 5 hours a day

Phase 3: first three weeks of using percentile feedback, average 6.4 hours a day

Phase 4: second three weeks of using percentile feedback, deciding to really push it based on the positive feedback from my metrics (more productivity, more happiness), average 9.4 hours a day

So now I’m getting close to averaging 70 hours of focused iOS dev a week and it feels great. In a normal work place, “time spent working” != “productivity”, but for me they’re very similar as long as my energy is good, which it almost always is now.

The surprising insight is that changing the way that I measured my work performance–from spreadsheet, to better spreadsheet, to graph, to better graph–has had such a huge impact. I have been working on maximizing work productivity for four years, ever since starting the startup, but in the last six months I’ve become radically more effective. I love the percentile feedback graph design!

You can see his implementation on his homepage.

In this essay, which I learned about from Alex Tabarrok, Paul Graham complains about email. Too easy for someone to send him email. Also slow. He thinks of email as a todo list. Here’s what he wants:

More restrictions on what someone can put on my todo list. And when someone can put something on my todo list, I want them to tell me more about what they want from me. Do they want me to do something beyond just reading some text? How important is it? (There obviously has to be some mechanism to prevent people from saying everything is important.) When does it have to be done?

Here’s what I want: A price per email. A service that charges people for each email they send me (e.g., $1/email). I get most of the price, the company providing the service gets a small percentage (1%?). With two additional features: 1. The initial charge is just for me to look at it. Then, after I read the email, there is a mechanism that allows me to easily charge more to do what they ask, such as give them Shangri-La Diet advice. 2. I can easily put people on a list that allows them to send me email for free.

Since Google already has Google Checkout, it might be relatively easy for them to add this to gmail.

• more health, less profit?
• Long interesting review of Michael Mann’s new book. “The controversy is actually very simple. Mann’s papers give undue focus to a small amount of data.”
• excellent article in The Smithsonian about fermentation. “We’re trying to see if there’s a way to get more of that umami richness and less fishiness.”
• Flaxseed in Human Nutrition (1995 book).
• Spy magazine highlights.

Thanks to Tom George and Mark Griffith.

• White rice associated with Type 2 diabetes.
• Whistleblower says drug company failed to report bad side effects. “She also claims that the company failed to report 28 of 100 cases of bladder cancers to the FDA, which she called a “serious discrepancy,” and that Takeda told her to change her notation that the cancers were “related” to “unrelated.” The suit says that she was fired after she complained to her supervisors about the company’s failure to report all serious adverse events.”
• Natto speed eating contest. Why do some foods (hot dogs, natto) get a speed-eating contest, but not others?
• Drinking olive oil with your nose held shut (short video).
• Is self-experimentation n=1? or is that misleading?

I recently came across a 2005 survey, done in Texas, that found people with poor sleep were far more likely to be depressed or anxious than people with better sleep. Huge risk ratios:

People with insomnia . . . were 9.82 and 17.35 times as likely to have clinically significant depression and anxiety [than persons without insomnia.]

Other studies have found similar results. For example, a 1979 survey interviewed the same people twice, one year apart. People who had insomnia both times were 40 times more likely to be newly diagnosed with major depression during the intervening year than those who did not have insomnia at either time.

A simple thing to say about the sleep/mood correlation is that it supports my theory of depression, which says depression is often due to malfunction of two circadian oscillators (one controlled by light, the other by faces). If they are working properly (in sync, with large amplitude) you sleep well and are in a good mood when you are awake. If they are not working properly (e.g., not in sync) then you do not sleep well and are in a bad mood at least part of the time while you are awake. What is called depression (e.g., not wanting to do anything) is actually a good thing in the middle of the night. Not wanting to do anything — being still — is necessary to fall asleep.

A sad and more complicated thing about this correlation is that it is ignored. It is not explained by any theory of depression popular among psychotherapists, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, not to mention a dozen other explanations of depression (psychoanalytic, etc.) that psychotherapists favor. Nor is it explained by any pharmacological theory of depression. In other words, if you seek treatment for depression within our healthcare system the treatment you will receive will derive from a theory that cannot explain this result. Yet the correlation is so strong it must be telling us something important.

You can read endlessly about the high cost of health care. What if the high cost is not the core problem? What if it is only a symptom of something less obvious? What if health care costs a lot because we have a poor understanding of health and disease (as the failure of popular theories of depression to explain the sleep/mood correlation suggests)? What if we have a poor understanding of health and disease because health research is too concerned with allowing healthcare providers to make money?

I recently read The Hunger Games and liked it a lot. I finished it in a few hours — couldn’t stop reading. In contrast, I read a few pages of the first Harry Potter and stopped. When I was ten years old, I read The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring (the first book of The Lord of the Rings trilogy), and stopped halfway through the second book. I never went back and have not seen the movies. I have never read a book by Stephen King, John Grisham, Robert Patterson, Anne Rice, Stephanie Meyer, and so on. None of them appealed to me. The Hunger Games is different than other books that have sold huge numbers of copies. When it came out, Stephen King reviewed it in Entertainment Weekly and gave it it a B. The second book in the trilogy, reviewed by someone else, got a C.

Sentence by sentence, even scene by scene, The Hunger Games is mediocre. It is not quotable. There is no vivid writing. The characters are barely interesting. It is not Jonathan Franzen, much less Vladimir Nabokov. But it does a wonderful job of supplying the four basic elements of a good story: a hero, a villain, making you care about the hero, and putting the hero in jeopardy.

Beneath the surface, also, is something I rarely find in novels: the author feels strongly about her subject matter. Collins, the author of The Hunger Games, has said she is writing for teenagers about war. Her father, who was in the Army, cared deeply about this and taught his children about it. “A family trip to a castle, which [the 13-year-old Collins] imagined would be “fairy-tale magical,” turned into a lesson on fortresses [given by her father],” says an article about Collins. Did Vladimir Nabokov know this much about child molesters (Lolita)? No, it was a literary device. Did Tolstoy or Flaubert have the events of Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary drilled into them in childhood? Unlikely. Both novels are built on basic novelistic subjects (actually, the same subject — infidelity). Somehow Collins’s deep connection comes through. I have no idea if you can write a good book simply because you love something. But you can definitely write a good book if you hate something: The Devil Wears Prada.