Seth’s blog

In a kitchenware store a few years ago I came across the Rotary Nutcracker, a futuristic-looking device that cracks nuts in a new way. The girl at the cash register gave me a few walnuts to test it. It didn’t crack any of them. This was a curious product, I thought. Who would buy it? The salesperson told me that they’d stocked it for less than a year. I was the first person to test it. It had sold well during holiday season. Now I understood: people didn’t buy it for themselves, they bought it as a gift. As a gift, it mattered much less how well it worked — “it’s the thought that counts.” No wonder I was the first to test it.

Here, I saw, was my theory of human evolution in . . . well, a nutshell. At least part of it. Humans are the only animals with occupational specialization — we specialize, and trade. It started with hobbies. Hobbies became part-time jobs. Part-time jobs became full-time jobs. To support full-time jobs — to generate enough demand — there has to be enough expertise, which builds up slowly. To build up expertise, our brains changed so as to cause creation of special events like Christmas, Japanese New Year, Spring Festival (in China), and a thousand other examples around the world. Such events increase the demand for high-end craftsmanship, thus helping the most skilled craftsmen — the ones most likely to advance the state of their art — make a living. Christmas increases the demand for Christmas cards (fine printing) and Christmas-tree ornaments, for example. Traditional gift-giving has the same effect: It increases demand for “the better things in life.” Most gifts, if you follow the usual norms, are (a) not something you would buy for yourself and (b) not something the recipient would buy. (As Alex Tabarrok has noticed.) They are harder to make — and thus reward skilled craftsmen more — than the stuff we buy for ourselves, just as Christmas ornaments are harder to make than common household objects and Christmas-card printing is more difficult than most printing. Weddings, with the gifts, finery, invitations, etc., are another example. The Rotary Nutcracker didn’t work in my tests but it almost worked. If enough people bought it as a gift, that would finance the research needed to improve it.

Marginal Revolution and James Surowiecki have recently written about the “deadweight loss of Christmas” — about how gifts tend to be worth less than their cost. I think they see this as bad thing but I see it as a good thing — at least, in our evolutionary past it was a good thing. Likewise, the denizens of The Devil Wears Prada appear slightly defensive about the social value of fashion. They seem to believe that fashion is less useful than “curing cancer” (by which they mean doing research to learn how to cure cancer). Actually, high fashion, with its hard-to-make skirts, belts, and accessories, is the same as curing cancer — they’re two ways of increasing the human skill set. Art is the old Science.

Self-experimentation, like blogs, Wikipedia, and open-source software (and before them, books) gives outsiders far more power. This took me a long time to figure out. For years, I liked self-experimentation for five reasons:

1. It worked. It reduced my acne, improved my sleep, and enabled me to lose plenty of weight. This surprised me. I am a professional scientist. My professional experiments, about animal learning, generally worked, but never had practical value.

2. It had unexpected benefits. I discovered accidentally that seeing faces in the morning improved my mood the next day. Better sleep (from self-experimentation) improved my health.

3. It was easy. What I did never involved more than small changes in my life. Even standing 8 hours per day wasn’t hard, after a few days.

4. My conclusions fit what others had found — usually, facts that didn’t fit mainstream views. For example, the fact that depression is often worst in the morning and gets better throughout the day doesn’t fit the conventional view that depression is a biochemical disorder but does fit my idea that depression is often due to a malfunctioning circadian oscillator. Self-experimentation seemed to be pointing me in correct directions.

5. My conclusions were surprising. That breakfast is bad (for sleep), the effect of faces on mood, and the Shangri-La Diet are examples.

Recently, though, the rise of blogging, Wikipedia, and open-source software, showed me the power of a kind of multiplicative force: (pleasure of hobbies) multiplied by (professional skills). Blogging, for example: (people enjoy writing) multiplied by (professional expertise, which gives them something interesting and unusual to say). In other words, expertise and job skills used in a hobby-like way. My self-experimentation, I realized, was another example: I used my professional (scientific) skills to solve everyday problems. My self-experimentation was like a hobby in that I did it year after year without financial reward or recognition. It was its own reward. The hobby aspect — persistence, freedom to try anything, no need for recognition or payment — made it powerful. I could go in depth where professionals couldn’t go at all.

But I was still missing something — something obvious to many others. The power of blogging isn’t

(hobby) x (job skills).

That’s just one person. The total power of blogging is

(hobby) x (job skills) x (anyone can do it)

Which is very powerful. Finally I saw there was a sixth reason to like self-experimentation:

6. Anyone can do it.

As Aaron Swartz (more…)

Thanks to Rey Arbolay, at the Shangri-La Diet forums, the eternal question “will this help?” is being answered in a new way. The specific question is “will the Shangri-La Diet help me lose weight?” The new way of answering it is that people are posting their results with the diet in the Post Your Tracking Data Here section of the forums. What they post is standardized and numerical enough that ordinary statistical methods can be used to learn from them. I’ll call this sort of thing a web trial.

It’s a lot better than nothing or a series of individual cases studied separately. I learned a lot from my most recent analysis — for example, that people lose at a rate of about 1 pound per week after Week 5. I couldn’t have done a good job of predicting where any of the fitted lines on the scatterplots would be or the size of the male/female difference. Nor could I have done a good job predicting the variability — the scatter around the lines.

It’s a lot worse than perfection. It would be much better if a comparison treatment (in the case of SLD, a different way of losing weight) was being tested in the same way. Then results from the two treatments could be compared and you would be closer to answering the practical question “what should I do?” (That modern clinical trials — very difficult and expensive — still use placebo control groups although placebos are not serious treatment options is a sign of . . . something not good.)

I can imagine a future in which people with a health problem (acne, insomnia, etc.) go to a website and enroll in a web trial. They told about several plausible treatments: A, B, C, etc., all readily available. They are given a choice of (a) choosing among them or (b) being randomly assigned. They post their results in a standardized format for a few weeks or months. Then someone with data analysis skills analyzes the data and posts the results. As for the participants, if the problem hasn’t been solved they could enroll again. This would be a way that anyone with a problem could help everyone with that problem, including themselves. The people who set up the trials and analyze the results would be like the book industry or Wikipedia insiders — people with special skills who help everyone learn from everyone.

Aaron Swartz is an excellent software developer (co-founder of reddit), a creative and interesting writer, and a successful blogger, judging by number of comments. I asked him what makes a blog successful. Three things, he said:

1. Persistence. Readership builds over time.

2. Frequency. The more often, the better. It is pure operant conditioning (although Aaron, a fan of anti-behaviorist Alfie Kohn, did not use that term): When people check your blog and find new content they are rewarded, and keep checking. If they check and find nothing new, they stop checking. Although Aaron uses an aggregator (which does the checking), only about 15% of blog readers do so, he said. (I use Sage, a Firefox add-on.) Aaron posts every day or so.

3. A distinct voice. When people visit your blog they should know what to expect. When he started he blogged about all sorts of things but has become more consistent from one entry to the next.

Part 1 (Marginal Revolution co-author Tyler Cowan’s view) is here, with comments here.

When Catherine Johnson, co-author of Animals In Translation, saw The Shangri-La Diet in a bookstore, she remembered the Freakonomics column about me. Her 19-year-old son Jimmy Berenson is autistic. Because of his autism, he takes a drug that causes weight gain. Over the last few years, it made him obese. In July 2006, Catherine started him on SLD (first 1, then 2 tablespoons of ELOO/day). Here is what happened:

Seeing is believing: One of Catherine’s neighbors was skeptical about SLD, even when told of Jimmy’s results. Only when she saw Jimmy’s results, as graphed by Catherine, did she decide to try it. There is more information at Catherine’s blog.

Thanks to Andrew Gelman for his comments on this graph.