Seth’s blog

From the SLD forums:

I just had a great victory. My daughter is having her friends over so we are making friendship cookies. . . . I was feeling miserable for the first time since starting SLD [Shangri-La Diet] like I wanted to eat a whole bunch of them and totally binge out. I ate a few crumbs that fell off and couldn’t get them out of my mind (I haven’t had this problem in 6 wks.). I went ahead and decided to eat just one of the yummy delights. . . . After one I was so very full I actually didn’t want anymore! DO YOU REALIZE WHAT THIS MEANS? I mean, wow! I can actually have just one cookie. I never ever ever have been able to do that before.

I like to think the Internet is improving my writing by showing me many examples of how to do it. This quote is half of a well-written few paragraphs. The other half would be the general rule that Michel Cabanac discovered: If your set point is lower than usual you will feel full sooner than usual, as this quote illustrates. (The Shangri-La Diet had lowered her set point.) Interesting idea + emotion-charged example = good writing. Blogs are another example. As I’ve said before, they are full of good writing. You don’t blog about stuff you don’t care about.

Books — part of the great wide non-Internet — suffer by comparison. I recently started reading a book about Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. I was favorably disposed: Chez Panisse is a great achievement, I am very interested in food and changes in food, it took place near my house, I had attended a nice reading given by the author. In spite of all this, I stopped after a few chapters. The book is very well written in a nuts-and-bolts way. However, it lacks emotion — the author didn’t care passionately about his subject and it shows. The book had come about because Alice Waters’s assistant had approached him and asked him if he was interested in doing such a book. He took a long time, he did a careful and thorough job, but no amount of time or care or editing could fix the problem that he didn’t feel strongly enough.

From craigslist:

I have 2 dogs & I was buying a large bag of Pal at Big W and standing inline at the check out.

A woman behind me asked if I had a dog.

On impulse, I told her that no, I was starting The Pal Diet again . . . I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pants pockets with Pal nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry & that the food is nutritionally complete.

Not absurd. Sclafani and Springer (1976) compared two groups of rats: (a) rats given rat chow (which resembles Pal nuggets) and (b) rats given rat chow plus human food (e.g., salami, cheese). Both groups could eat as much as they wanted. The second group gained a lot more weight than the first. I suspect rat chow is less fattening than human food because it is more bland and digested more slowly. This is one of the experiments that led me to the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet.

On BART I met a graduate student in epidemiology. “What are the strengths and weaknesses of epidemiology?” I asked. Strengths:

1. It asks important questions. What causes cancer? for example.

2. The results are useful. They can guide public policy. If you learn that smoking causes cancer, you can start an anti-smoking campaign. Epidemiological results can also lead to informative experiments: Epidemiology suggests that X causes cancer, you do an experiment to test that conclusion.

Weaknesses:

1. Health is complicated, controlled by many things. Presumably this is why studies often have conflicting conclusions.

2. There is enough flexibility in data analysis that your original hypothesis may influence the way that you analyze your data.

I use epidemiology all the time — here, for example. It often makes an interesting idea more plausible. My ideas about depression, derived from studying the effects of seeing faces, became more plausible to me because of the epidemiology of depression.

The word is black-and-white-ism. For instance:

Berman’s chief problem as a thinker is black-and-white-ism, and this is a good example of his failure to make subtle distinctions.

Scientists are guilty of black-and-white-ism all the time: this statistic is wrong, that way of doing things is a mistake, and so on. John Tukey wrote about this tendency in a paper called “Analyzing data: Sanctification or detective work?” If you believe data analysis is sanctification, there are indeed right ways and wrong ways, as with any ritual. But if science is not a set of rituals, talking about right and wrong confuses graduate students — who begin to think science is a set of rituals — and restricts what you can do. After you say something is wrong, it is harder to do it.

In The Starfish and the Spider (2006), a book about decentralized organizations, one of the examples is Alcoholics Anonymous, started in 1935, in which local chapters are almost entirely autonomous from headquarters. Of course AA led to many similar programs: Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, and so on. All of these twelve-step programs offer therapy without therapists — for free. A little like the Protestant Reformation, which I mentioned earlier.

At a recent party I met a woman who runs an outpatient program for persons with mental disorders, including major depression. She asked me what I would suggest. Based on my faces research, I suggested early morning face-to-face meetings, especially for persons with depression. Very interesting, she said, AA folk wisdom is that morning meetings have the best success rates.

If you want to attend an early morning meeting (non-twelve-step), and you live in San Francisco, you may have a communal breakfast ($5 plus tax, served 8:30-9:30 am) at OneTaste (1074 Folsom at 7th St.), an “Urban Retreat Center”. If you can do this, I’m jealous. OneTaste is a group of 50 people who live and work together. They appear to support themselves by teaching yoga and giving other classes. They have been at their SF location for two years; before that they were at many different locations. The receptionist told me it was a “sensual community.” What’s that? I asked. “We try to activate our sensuality” etc., she said. I didn’t know what she meant. Is this on the website? I asked. Yes, she said, so I didn’t bother to take careful notes. I wish I had. The website puts it more bluntly: “Our purpose at OneTaste is to return to connection by researching our relationship to orgasm.” A recruitment video, to prepare for breakfast.