Seth’s blog

I liked David Owen’s new book, Green Metropolis (free copy from publisher), as much as I thought I would. A large fraction of the environmental movement is criticized for missing the point that big cities like New York are the greenest communities in America. To make a community green you need two things: high density and great public transportation. They go together: high density makes great public transportation possible. In large chunks of New York, unlike most big American cities, it’s easy to not have a car.

The book has plenty of villains. Bill McKibben wrote one of the first books about global warming, wrote a book about cutting back on consumerism, wrote a book about having only one child (to save the earth from overpopulation), wrote a book called Hope, Human and Wild about environmentalism — yet Bill McKibben lives in a small town in upstate New York, which requires him to use a lot of energy — for heating and travel — that he wouldn’t have to use if he lived in New York City. (McKibben is my example, not Owen’s.) A great many environmentalists, Owen says, have causes or goals that have little to do with reducing energy use. They tend to see themselves as preserving the past rather than shaping the future — an excellent point. That’s something Jane Jacobs might have said and if the book has a hero, it’s her. “Jacobs’s focus was on the vibrancy of city life but the same urban qualities she identified as enhancing human interaction also greatly reduce energy consumption and waste,” Owen writes.

Owen sees himself almost as deluded as the average environmentalist. He and his family moved from Manhattan to rural New England when their daughter was one year old. How she will love the country, thought Owen. She didn’t. Walking through the country bored her far more than walking through the city. “And it [a country walk] usually has the same effect on me, although I hate to admit it,” he writes.

Why did my self-experimentation discover a lot? Because a lot remained to be discovered. The discoveries I made weren’t made by the experts who should have made them (e.g., sleep experts)  because they were too busy doing research whose main goal was to impress other people. Rather than do science that worked, they did science that looked good. It’s the same with environmentalists. Rather than do projects that work (save energy), they do projects that feel good. “Sitting indoors playing video games is easier on the environment than any number of (formerly) popular outdoor recreational activities, including most of the ones that the most committed environmentalists tend to favor for themselves,” says Owen, neatly summing up the problem.

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.

Apparently Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, the biggest drug company in the world, needs all the bad publicity it can get. One of the last things Jane Jacobs wrote was a friend-of-the-court letter in the Supreme Court case Kelo v. New London where eminent domain was used to take property from private landowners and give it to a private corporation (Pfizer). It was just as outrageous as that sounds. And Pfizer got away with it. Now Pfizer is abandoning the site. Leaving a large empty lot where houses used to be. The CEO of Pfizer is Jeff Kindler.

Several years ago, during a routine checkup, my primary-care doctor pointed to some white lines on my right foot. (Curiously only one foot had them.) Fungus, he said. I had a fungus infection. What should I do? I asked. He suggested over-the-counter anti-foot-fungus medications, sold in every drugstore.

I tried a few of them. They didn’t work. The problem persisted.

A month ago I noticed the problem had gotten much worse. Yikes. What had gone wrong? I realized that in the previous few weeks I had changed two things:

• Instead of putting my wash through an extra wash cycle without soap (to rinse it better), I had started doing my wash the way the rest of the world does it. I had stopped doing the extra cycle because I was no longer worried about becoming allergic to the soap.
• I had bought 5 new pairs of socks and had been cycling though 4 of the new pairs again and again (washing them between wearings, of course), ignoring the rest of my socks.

This suggested a theory: My skin infection was due to my socks. The infectious agents get on my socks and are not completely removed by the washing machine. They survive a few days on the shelf. To wear socks with the infectious agent already present gives the infection a boost. Maybe my new socks supported the infectious agent better than the socks they replaced.

Based on this theory, I did three things:

• Resumed putting my wash through an extra cycle without soap.
• Took off my socks earlier in the evening.
• Bought 12 new pairs of socks and made sure every sock went a long time (e.g., 3 weeks) between wearings.

I saw improvement right away. (The morning after I wore new socks.) A month later, the infection, present for at least several years, is entirely gone. It took about a month for it to clear up completely.

The essence of my discovery is that the infectious agent could survive my socks being washed conventionally (in a washing machine) and live for a few days without contact with my feet. Whereas a few weeks away from my skin killed it. I have been unable to find this info anywhere else. A very minor discovery, but unlike the work that won the most recent Nobel Prize in Medicine, useful right now. Cost: zero. I would have had to buy new socks anyway.

In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs tells about a reporter interviewing someone in an oil-rich Middle East country (Iran?). During the interview the interviewee tries to cut an apple with a knife. The knife breaks. We can’t even make knives, the interviewee says. That’s how backward our economy is. To develop economically, MIT professors had advised his country’s government to build a dam, at great expense. The MIT advisors thought that building a dam would be good for economic development. They were wrong, it turned out. Jacobs thought it was telling that after all that money invested, the local economy still couldn’t make something as basic as a good knife. Many industrial processes require cutting tools.

This is the same thing. Preventing and eliminating infection is at the core of medicine, just as cutting is at the core of manufacturing. My discovery reveals that my doctor — and by implication, the whole health care establishment — failed to know something basic and simple about this. If they understood what I figured out, there would be no need for anti-foot-fungus medicine. A gazillion dollars a year is spent on medical research, medical schools and research institutes around the world are full of faculty doing research — and they haven’t figured out something as basic and simple as this.
Gatekeeper Drugs. How to Avoid Infection: Something I Didn’t Know.

In an amusing comment on health care, Jonathan Rauch (via Marginal Revolution) imagines an airline system as archaic and inefficient as our health care system.

“Cynthia, I have filled out my travel history half a dozen times already this year. I’ve told six different airlines that I flew to Detroit twice and Houston once. Every time I fly, I answer the same battery of questions. At least a dozen airlines have my travel history. Why don’t you get it from them?”

“We have no way we could do that. We do not have access to other companies’ records, and our personnel have our own system for collecting travel history.”

The health care system, in other words, is full of problems that have built up unsolved. Solutions exist — the problems are not impossible — but haven’t been implemented. Jane Jacobs’s great point, in The Economy of Cities, is that this is what happens when those who benefit from the status quo have too much power relative to those who benefit from change. The stagnation in American health care is profound. It isn’t solved by universal health insurance. There would remain the horrible dependence on expensive dangerous drugs that don’t work very well (e.g., antidepressants, Accutane) and the complete lack of interest in prevention. The underlying problem, the source of many visible problems, is too little innovation.