Seth’s blog

• During the Foxconn suicide epidemic, several media outlets said the suicide rate was lower than expected. “Members of the media have been killing off their own credibility at an alarming rate.”
• Fascinating blog about quality control in China. “Factory workers are paid by the number of pieces they make. Sometimes they see they are working on defective goods, but they keep working instead of sending the bad pieces back to the previous operation.”
• The unsustainability of higher education.
• the Dear Abby of math problems. “The next bubble to burst is higher education. . . . It’s too much one-size-fits-all.” And that one size fits the professor.
• BBC radio documentaries
  
• Raw food leaders no longer raw or vegan

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

• Fire Larry Summers Now — a blog by “Thorstein Veblen”. An especially good post. Greg Mankiw distances himself from reality when he calls Veblen “cowardly”. My view of Summers. Nassim Taleb says “short US Treasury bonds as long as Summers is in charge.”
• Chinese museums. I fondly remember the Tap Water Museum.
• The Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results is now accepting manuscripts. Better name: Journal of Unexpected Results.
• Philip Weiss on web journalism: “You see someone’s mind in action rather than through 100 corporate filters.”

Thanks to Oskar Pearson and Dave Lull.

Andrew Gelman’s blog has lasted longer than this blog (and was responsible for this blog.) Recently Andrew looked back. It seemed like a good idea so I will follow his lead.

The two big surprises have been how easy it is and how helpful it is. In the beginning it wasn’t easy to find interesting things to say. Somehow it got easier and easier. Partly because I had more ideas — about omega-3, the umami hypothesis and fermented foods, the effect of animal fat on sleep. Partly because readers sent me interesting stuff. Partly because I started teaching at Tsinghua and moved to Beijing part of the year. Partly because the Shangri-La Diet produced results that I wanted to brag about. And — a very big part of it — because there are enough comments here and elsewhere to make me think people are reading it. I think everyone has an innate desire to be listened to. As our concerns and knowledge become more and more specialized, it becomes harder and harder to find an audience. When Spy magazine was around I read every issue three times. I was dying to talk about it with other fans. I couldn’t. I couldn’t find them.

Some of the stuff people have sent me has been incredibly helpful. Most of the examples involve trying my ideas. Taking omega-3 (via flaxseed oil or fish oil). Tyler Cowen’s experience, for example. Tim Lundeen’s results. The effect on sports injuries. Or eating more fermented food. Tucker Max’s experience. Not only does it make the whole subject much easier to talk about, it convinces me I’m on the right track. Some of the examples involve telling me about other more conventional data related to my ideas. For example, I’m very glad to know about hormesis, which supports my ideas about fermented food. Knowing about radiation hormesis makes me stop worrying about the small dose of radiation I get from my cell phone. The recent comment about two morning faces being better than one might turn out to be really helpful and important.

I haven’t read She Stoops to Conquer, an 18th century play, but the title is brilliant. My self-experimenation, I now think, had a dose of that because I was willing to do something as humble as study myself whereas most scientists wouldn’t stoop to that. Too low-status. Blogging has a lot of that. How many Berkeley professors blog? Uh, Brad DeLong? And someone else, rarely. Blogging is beneath them. Whereas half of Tsinghua students have blogs. They aren’t worried about appearing undignified. The phrase keeping up with the Joneses means your car has to be at least as expensive as your neighbor’s car, and so on. A kind of arms race. Such an arms race goes on in science: What you must do to appear high status takes up more and more of your resources, leaving less and less to actually make progress. So less and less progress is made. Self-experimentation breaks out of that vicious cycle. Blogging is the same thing more generally. Supposedly professors, especially at a place like Berkeley, have interesting things to say. But the demands of status, as Veblen described in the last chapter of The Theory of the Leisure Class, make it harder and harder for them to say them. Blogging breaks out of that vicious cycle.

When I taught introductory psychology I found I could often weave whatever I’d been thinking about into my next lecture. It’s good to start a lecture by saying “Something interesting happened to me a few days ago . . . ” Now I can just blog about it.

Google “Climategate” you get 31 million hits. “Obama” returns 40 million. Yet mainstream media, such as the New York Times, have said little about it. The New Yorker has said nothing about it. Given so much interest, that will change.

Some of my prior beliefs — that empirical support for the view that man has caused global warming is weaker than we’re told, that bloggers are a powerful force for truth — are stronger. But here are a few things I didn’t think of until now:

1. The truth leaks out before it gushes out. Laurie David’s children’s book — its egregious mistake, her blithe dismissal of that mistake — is an example of the truth leaking out. In the Ranjit Chandra case, little facts implied he was a fraud long before this became utterly clear. An example is the claim in one of his papers (published in The Lancet!) that everyone asked agreed to be in his experiment.

2. Teaching is even better done via scandals than via stories. The number of hits for Climategate is an indication of how much people are learning from it. As I blogged earlier, they’re learning a lot about science. A mere story about science would never attract so much attention. I should think more about how to use scandals to teach stuff. When Nassim Taleb is scathing about this or that, he has the right idea. Spy was the perfect example. It taught me a lot about New York City.

3. Jane Jacobs was wrong. Or at least missed something very important. In Dark Age Ahead, her last book, she pointed to a number of disturbing signs. One was the rise of crappy science. She was quite right about that  — as scientists have become more professional they have become more status-oriented and less truth-oriented. She didn’t foresee that the Internet would be an enormously powerful corrective force, as is happening now. Climategate is a (relatively) small example of even bigger force: the rise of the power of sophisticated amateurs/hobbyists. Who, unlike professionals, with jobs and status to protect, have complete freedom. The first big example was printed non-fiction books, as I blogged earlier (which are written with great freedom, usually); but now the Internet provides another great outlet, much faster, cheaper, and more accessible than books, for independent thought.

Emily Nussbaum, the brains behind New York’s The Approval Matrix, which I read religiously, blogs about television here.

Other magazine journalists I wish would blog: David Owen, Lauren Collins, Mark Singer, Adam Sternbergh.

Interview with Nussbaum.