Seth’s blog

My exercise research suggests our brains work better when we walk. Here’s one way to combine walking and writing:

While working on a paper, which was most of the time, [Niels] Bohr would select an assistant from among the young physicists in Copenhagen. The assistant, affectionately dubbed the victim, was supposed to sit in place while Bohr paced around the room, constantly puffing away at his pip, working and reworking his ideas, talking aloud as the idea took shape, trying and retrying to dictate his sentences to the victim.

From Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics by Gino Segre.

The modern version may be use of word recognition software with the computer screen on a wall or large TV. You walk back and forth in front of it. I have spent a lot of time writing while walking on a treadmill but it was noisy and tiring. Moreover, it was hard to start and stop and it was monotonous.

Marc Andreessen is starting a series of posts of what I am sure will be excellent career advice. This is from the first:

I believe a huge part of what people would like to refer to as “career planning” is being continuously alert to opportunities that present themselves to you spontaneously, when you happen to be in the right place at the right time. . . . [for example:]

* Your former manager has jumped ship to a hot growth company and calls you three months later and says, come join me.

I am continually amazed at the number of people who are presented with an opportunity like one of the above, and pass. There’s your basic dividing line between the people who shoot up in their careers like a rocket ship, and those who don’t — right there.

A friend of mine worked at UC Berkeley with Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. One day he got a call from Joy: Want to join me at Sun? My friend would have been employee #5 — something like that. He said no. It was a huge mistake, just as Andreessen says.

While introducing Justin Wolfers as guest blogger at Marginal Revolution — which I am greatly looking forward to, since Wolfers is an excellent data analyst — Alex Tabbarok wrote:

An open secret and an open sin in economics is that many empirical studies are difficult to replicate, even when journals supposedly require authors to make their data publicly available.

Which reminds me. Several months ago, I read an article in a psychology journal about a topic I care a lot about. The conclusions of the article were the opposite of what I think is the case. Was I wrong? Possibly — but the data analysis done in the article was unquestionably “wrong” in the sense that (a) it assumed something that was unlikely to be true and (b) it was possible to do a data analysis that didn’t make that unlikely assumption. I don’t think my opinion here is controversial; I think a blunt but fair summing up of the situation is that the authors made a big mistake.

I was in New Orleans a few weeks after the article appeared. Someone in an art gallery told me the conclusion of the paper! Which is only to say it is a really interesting conclusion. Anyway, I wrote to the first author of the paper (a graduate student) to explain my concern about their conclusions and to ask for the data, so I could do a better analysis. Two weeks went by, no answer. I sent a reminder email, and got this answer:

We typically do not give out our original data, but when I get a chance, I will run the analyses in HLM and get the results back to you. Thanks for your interest in the study,

Wow! It is the policy of the journal in which the paper was published that the data be made available. A month passed. When do you expect to run these analyses? I wrote. A month passed with no answer. I wrote to the faculty member who was a co-author on the paper. Finally I got an answer from the student:

I have been meaning to respond to your email & I apologize for not getting back to you sooner. I am a graduate student and am traveling for the summer. I understand the difficulty with the [blank] situation and am assuming that HLM would be a good way to work through that. However, I am not familiar with the procedure, so it will not be until late August/ early September when I can get a statistician here at [blank] to teach me the procedure. If you have specific suggestions about the analyses, please let me know and I will keep that in mind when I get a chance to work with it. We should have some follow-up data coming in as well so it will be good to learn the procedures for future research. Thanks for your interest in the study.

The story so far is uncomfortably close to what happened when Saul Sternberg and I questioned Ranjit Chandra’s data. Similarity 1: He never provided the data. Similarity 2: It took a remarkably long time and several emails to get any response. Similarity 3: The response, when it finally came, was only vaguely reassuring. However, in this case, I predict the better analysis will actually be done. Which is good — I would rather someone else do them.

From an email to science-fiction author Bruce Sterling:

The main thing [most book] authors experience is THE VOID. We never get any feedback or at least never enough. I have a friend called Ruth who is 80 years old and reads voraciously: novels, biographies, poetry. She writes to the authors she likes and gets back extraordinary responses: four pages hand written, invitations to dinner. She says, ‘I would have thought they were too important to read my letters’ and I say ‘Ruth, you are the only one who writes’.

It’s the same with teaching. We get to know so little of what effects we have on our students. But the internet offers a small measure of salvation. Sometimes a former student writes, ‘You don’t know me but I sat in your class in 1991 and…” It makes all the difference to get just one of those every few years, but it doesn’t add up to an objectification of the audience for our work.

I’ve had thousands of students and written one book. (In Chinese you are a “writer” if you’ve written one book and an “author” if you’ve written more than one — so I am a writer.) I don’t hear from my students very often but every day I get feedback from the SLD forums. To say I get “enough” feedback would be to understate the effect of comments like this:

I started a new job this past August . . . It’s so strange to be in a new place with people who’ve never known me as Fat Del. . . . That insidious “I wonder if there’s something wrong with her” has never crossed their minds. I’m just the normal girl in the next office. Men flirt with me and seem to think it’s cute when I’m not sure how to flirt back. . . . No one ever thinks I used to be fat and no one ever judges me in that light. Hell, my boss calls me by my full name and says it’s because Del is too short and casual for a pretty girl.

It’s so odd to be normal. I never thought I’d know what that was like.

Thanks for letting me know, Del.

From addiction and self-experimentation:

I am coming to believe that [my] addiction may be caused by a specific kind of autism-related syndrome. I don’t crave order in everything that I do but I do crave order and structure in order for me to relate to others. I need to figure out some ways to get that structured social interaction that my brain requires. . . A 12-step meeting could be [seen] as just a highly structured social event.

A friend of mine became an Orthodox Jew in college; his parents were not very religious. Now and then I went to his house for Shabbat. As I got to know him better — outside the religious rituals — I was astonished at the difficulty he had carrying on a conversation. The many structures (rituals) of Orthodox Judaism made it much easier for him to spend time with other people.