Seth’s blog

Here’s something I wrote a few days ago:

In graduate school, I studied experimental psychology. I wanted to learn how to do experiments. The best way to learn is to do, I thought, so I started doing self-experiments in addition to my regular research (with rats). One thing I studied was my acne. My dermatologist had prescribed tetracycline and benzoyl peroxide. In a few months, my self-experiments showed that tetracycline didn’t work and benzoyl peroxide did work — the opposite of what I originally believed.

Emphasis added. I wanted to write “the opposite of what I originally thought” but the earlier use of thought made me use believed instead. Avoidance of this sort of repetition is standard practice. It’s even important scientifically. The linguist David Stuart made a big advance in understanding ancient Mayan when he realized that different symbols mean the same thing. The different symbols appeared in the same block of text, like my thought and believed.

My question is: Why? What’s the evolutionary reason? Maybe it’s part of a push toward novelty, so that nobody says, “Today I went to the store. Today I went to the store.”  Or maybe it’s a way of pushing us to make distinctions, invent new words, and learn new words. It pushes us to make distinctions because it pushed me away from  lazily writing ” . . . thought . . . thought”.

One reason this interests me is my interpretation of why we like repeated decorative elements. Many sorts of decoration involved repeated elements — identical things or pictures placed side by side. I believe we like this sort of thing so that we will place similar things side by side. When we place them side by side it’s easy to notice small differences that would otherwise be hard to see. Noticing small differences makes us connoisseurs. Connoisseurs are important economically because they are willing to pay more for finely-made stuff. They support cutting-edge artisans.

The invent-new-words explanation strikes me as the most plausible. First we do what the Mayans did: invent new words that mean exactly the same thing as the old words, purely to avoid short-range repetition. As the words get older, their meanings drift independently and they start to mean slightly different things (such as job and profession). Thereby the language does a better job of keeping up with technical/economic progress, which keeps generating new things that need new names.

I am moving to an unfurnished apartment in Beijing so I went furniture shopping at a huge “furnishings plaza” with hundreds of furniture showrooms. (Not to mention showrooms for mattresses, doors, stairs, security systems, curtains, light fixtures, and interior decorators.) It was more like a trade show than anything I’ve seen in America or Europe. I think it had more furniture choices than the whole Bay Area. I loved wandering around it, partly because it kept reminding me of my theory of human evolution:

1. The huge choice included a big range of styles, including  European, Chinese Traditional, modern, and “flat-plate” (meaning flat pieces of wood). At least 90% of the stuff struck me as ugly. Garish, too ornate, too simple, clunky, chunky, bad colors, bad patterns, and so on. Of course there were buyers for all of it. That there is such diversity of taste (”no accounting for taste”) supports a diversity of technological development. Exactly what a healthy economy needs.

2. Almost all the furniture was decorated. (If you don’t want decoration, you shop at Ikea.) Decoration is unnecessary from a functional point of view — you can sleep on a bed whether it is decorated or not — but is obviously pleasant. (Which is why I wasn’t at Ikea.) Decoration is difficult, so the demand for it supports technological innovation.

3. I write a lot sitting up in bed. After I saw a bed with a cushioned headboard, I realized I wanted a bed with a built-in cushion for sitting up. I found something better than I knew existed — the headboard cushion is detachable and cleanable. Having chosen the bed, there was pressure to buy matching furniture — the side table, the wardrobe, and so on. The furniture that matched my chosen bed was not especially attractive by itself but would become more attractive when near my bed. Because we like seeing things match. Our preference for matching stuff at first glance is paradoxical since it seems to push for less diversity rather than more. Why do we like seeing things match? The evolutionary reason, I believe, is so we will put similar things side by side to get that effect. Notice how clothing stores and many other stores are decorated. Why is that good? Because when we put things side by side it is much easier to see little differences and thus little ways one of them can be improved. When you start to notice these little differences, you become a connoisseur. Connoisseurs pay more for hard-to-make stuff than the rest of us and thus support technology that produces hard-to-see improvements.

4. Few Chinese bedrooms have closets. Clothes are hung in wardrobes. The wardrobe that matched my chosen bed wasn’t the loveliest wardrobe I saw. But the loveliest wardrobe I saw didn’t match the bed I wanted. The loveliest wardrobe I saw had something unusual: decoration of several sizes. We like a combination of large-, medium-, and small-scale decorative detail more than one size alone. This creates further challenges for artisans: There is pressure to be skilled at a wide range of sizes. So you don’t just develop technology for making small decorative details, you also develop technology for making larger details. Again, human nature promoting diversity of technological development.

5. The more expensive stuff looked better than the cheaper stuff, yes. But a lot of the expensive stuff wasn’t so much beautiful as expensive-looking. You might or might not like it — but no one would disagree it was expensive. Presumably people buy such stuff to show off, the way we do so many things to show our status. That we use difficult-to-make possessions to display status (thus creating demand for such things) is yet another way that human nature promotes technological innovation.

Forty or fifty years ago, psychologists and other scientists talked about “genes” determining this or that. (James Watson still talks this way.) A certain percentage of the variation of this or that (e.g., intelligence) was attributed to “genes”. Hardly anyone outside genetics or behavior genetics knew what this meant, but many people thought they did. In reaction to the huge misunderstanding (e.g., those who said intelligence was “80% genetic” but did not know what this meant), psychologists began to talk about gene-environment interaction. “Is the area of a rectangle determined by its height or its width?” they like to say.

But notice how fact-free this view is. A tiny number of studies have observed gene-environment interactions but they are very difficult. I think this has made it hard to realize something basic and important. Years ago, I heard a talk about squirrel circadian rhythms by Patricia DeCoursey, the scientist who introduced the concept of phase-response curves. At her talk, she showed results from about 15 squirrels. She tested each one — with an emphasis on individual results that resembles self-experimentation — to determine how much light it needed to become entrained to a 24-hour light/dark cycle. One squirrel needed much stronger light than the others.

Here was an interesting finding that another scientist might have missed. What did it mean? Because the squirrels lived under very similar conditions (e.g., identical diets), it was almost surely a genetic difference. Let’s assume it was. In nature, sunlight is plenty strong. The lab light was weaker. In nature, the genetic difference wouldn’t make an observable difference. Only under artificial conditions did it become visible. It only became visible when the artificial conditions didn’t supply enough of something important (sunlight). In other words, the newly-visible genetic difference implied there was something lacking in the artificial conditions. The genetic difference implied the environment mattered. The opposite of the usual interpretation.

I don’t know any reason to think this is an unusual case. Aaron Blaisdell told me a story that shows its relevance to human health. Aaron is unusually sensitive to sunlight. Until recently, he could only spend 5 or 10 minutes in the sun before it became unpleasant. The condition is genetic. His mother has it; her father had it. It’s called Erythropoietic Protoporphyria. It is autosomal-dominant. Scientists even know where the gene is. That’s where the understanding of most scientists stops. A genetic condition. Recently, however, Aaron drastically changed his diet with great results, as noted earlier. At the same time as the dietary changes, his sun sensitivity got much better. He can now stay in the sun for an hour or more without discomfort. This is a gene-environment interaction, of course, but of a particular sort: The genetic effect showed there was something wrong with the environment, just as it did in DeCoursey’s experiment.

Sure, there’s always genetic variation — it’s just usually hard to see. The wrong environment makes it much easier to see. It reveals a range of genotypes, all of which would be harmless in the right environment. So when you come across a “genetic disorder” such as Erythropoetic Protoporphyria, it is likely to imply an environmental problem. No one had ever told Aaron or his mother or her father that their condition suggested that environmental changes would help them.

I’m sure that what we want to eat is a good guide to what we should eat, so long as you ask what our preferences would have led us to eat 100,000 years ago — before we killed off the woolly mammoths. (Curiously, I’ve never seen this obvious idea in any nutrition text.) A vast amount of trial and error is embodied in those preferences. Because we learn to like foods, our best guide to unlearned preferences may be what children want to eat.

The great essayist George Trow doesn’t quite get it, I’m afraid:

In the New History, the preferences of a child carried as much weight as the preferences of an adult, so the refining of preferences was subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do.

The Wisdom of the One-Year-Old Picky Eater. The Wisdom of the Five-Year-Old Picky Eater.

James Fallows wonders if the decline of newspapers is one effect of a much larger trend: the decline of advertising. He quotes a reader:

The real problem is, advertising is dying. It’s just pulling down newspapers along the way. Next up: TV, radio, and Google.

Advertising isn’t cost-effective, the reader says. This is becoming increasingly clear. Companies can no longer justify the expense.

I would bet a lot of money this is wrong. Advertising isn’t dying; it is moving to a more differentiated personalized form, as has happened in dozens of industries. Jane Jacobs wrote about this in The Economy of Cities: the historical flow is from artisanal production to mass production to differentiated production. An example is software. Long ago, programs were written by individuals: artisanal production. Then came software produced by large companies, such as Microsoft: mass production. Now we are entering the age of highly individualized software. The usual term is open source but open source software is enormously customizable. For example, some Tsinghua students made a version of Firefox specifically for Tsinghua students. Internet Explorer will never be as easily customized as Firefox. Which means, according to history, IE is doomed.

Fallows’s reader is wrong for another reason: The central role of advertising in human evolution. Language was the first advertising. Single words served to say (a) you had something to trade and (b) you wanted something. This is how and why language began — it facilitated trade. Language was so successful as advertising that lots of other uses evolved on top of that use, just as newspapers and magazines do a lot besides carry advertisements. Human evolution, in my view, is the story of how we became occupational specialists; by increasing trade, advertising was central to that. In the form of language, it’s been a huge force pushing evolution for the last 100,000-odd years. Given that longevity, the probability it will disappear in the next 100 years is very low.

The language evolution theory makes a prediction. Words can easily be used (a) to announce you have something (”toothpaste!”) and (b) to ask for something (”toothpaste?”). The first is push advertising; the second is pull advertising. We don’t hear much about pull advertising. But the current imbalance — huge amounts spent on one, almost nothing on the other — doesn’t make sense. Historically, both work. We use language both ways, including a lot of pull advertising. Surely most people say what they want (”I’m hungry”) more often than they say what they have to trade for it. (In China, some peddlers, such as the father of a friend of mine, do spend their day saying what they are selling.)

Based on history, I predict the imbalance will be corrected; pull advertising will become much more important. Not a brilliant prediction because it is already happening. Searching online for something you want, e.g. via Google, is a form of pull advertising. Guru.com, where you post a job you want done and wait for bids, is another example. An example that doesn’t yet exist is a free concierge-by-phone service. You call them, they help you buy something.