Seth’s blog

Varangy wonders what I think about this editorial by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired. Anderson says “faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete.” Anderson confuses statistical models (which are summaries of the data) with scientific ones (which are descriptions of the mechanism that produced the data). As far as the content goes, I’m completely unconvinced. Anderson gives no examples of this approach to science being replaced by something else.

For me, the larger lesson of the editorial is how different science is from engineering. Wired is mainly about engineering. I’m pretty sure Anderson has some grasp of the subject. Yet this editorial, which reads like something a humanities professor would write, shows that his understanding doesn’t extend to science. It reminds me why I didn’t want to be a doctor. (Which is like being an engineer.) It seemed to me that a doctor’s world is too constrained: You deal with similar problems over and over. I wanted more uncertainty, a bigger canvas. That larger canvas came along when I tried to figure out why I was waking up too early. Rather than being like engineering (applying what we already know), this was true science: I had no idea what the answer was. There was a very wide range of possibilities. Science and engineering are two ends of a dimension of problem-solving. The more you have an idea what the answer will be, the more it is like engineering. The wider the range of possible answers, the more it is like science. Making a living requires a steady income: much more compatible with engineering than science. I like to think my self-experimentation has a kind of wild flavor which is the flavor of “raw” science, whereas the science most people are familiar with is “pasteurized” science — science tamed, made more certain, more ritualistic, so as to make it more compatible with making a living. Sequencing genes, for example, is pasteurized science. Taking an MRI of the brain while subjects do this or that task is pasteurized science. Pasteurized science is full of rituals and overstatements (e.g., “correlation does not equal causation”, “the plural of anecdote is not data”) that reduce unpleasant uncertainty, just as pasteurization does. Pasteurized science is more confusable with engineering.

There’s one way in which Anderson is right about the effects of more data. It has nothing to do with the difference between petrabytes and gigabytes (which is what Anderson emphasizes), but it is something that having a lot more data enables: Making pictures. When you can make a picture with your data, it becomes a lot easier to see interesting patterns in it.

Andrew Gelman’s take.

More. Derek James, a graduate student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, agrees with me.

A long post by Ben Casnocha tells how to give advice. The subject fascinates me because I’ve noticed what a strong tendency I have to give advice when told of this or that problem — yet I also realize that advice giving is usually obnoxious. I think this is why Ben’s post is long: It’s a difficult problem, like an addiction: The bad consequences are hard to avoid. Why do I have this tendency? No obvious reason. It certainly isn’t learned or copied or sustained by reward. Why is it obnoxious? Again, there’s no obvious reason. Giving advice has good and bad aspects: trying to be helpful (good) and acting superior and ignorant (bad). Why the bad seems to predominate I have no idea.

This is one reason I think Jane Jacobs’s you can only change what you love is usually true: because in your communication with someone you love (or at least respect) there will be enough positive in the whole message to overcome the negative of the advice itself — so that the advice doesn’t push the person away. (Another reason I think she’s right is that to give good advice you usually need to know a lot about the person you are advising.)

The creator of Dilbert blogs:

About two years ago I started taking magnesium supplements because I saw something on the Internet that indicated it might help my knees problems. (My knees always hurt after exercise.) The magnesium either worked, or it was a remarkable coincidence, that after 15 years of knee pain it suddenly went away and has stayed away.

Recently I realized I haven’t had any allergy or asthma symptoms for well over a year. For the first time in my life I went through the entire allergy season without so much as a sniffle or a wheeze. And I didn’t even use my allergy or asthma meds. On a hunch, I googled “magnesium allergy” and discovered that doctors sometimes use magnesium to treat asthma attacks. And a magnesium deficiency apparently does promote allergies.

One of the comments is curious: “There’s nothing wrong sharing what happens to you, Scott.”

Thanks to cp.

Song Cato, a friend of mine in Taiwan, writes:

I was very surprised that the quality of my sleep greatly improved after I switched to waking up at 5:30 am and walking in the park soon after that. I started it about a month ago. The park is packed with people doing everything from tai chi to ballroom dancing. I used to go to bed at 1 or 2 am. and wake up between 7 and 8:30 am with a foggy head. Now sometimes I feel tired and go to sleep at 10 pm which has never happened in my life since I went to middle school.

She got the idea from me. I go outside around 7 am every morning and fall asleep between 11 pm and midnight.

More. She gets up at about 5:15 am and gets outside about 5:30. She stays outside for at least 2.5 hours, mostly in the park, where she walks, talks to vendors, shops a little, and does simple stretching exercises. Talking to vendors = very good!

This photo documents something anyone can notice: While we’re sitting, we touch our mouths a lot.

The photo shows the full faces of 22 men; 7 of them are touching their mouths. I have noticed something similar at many faculty meetings. I started to notice this after I read about its observation in a study designed to measure something else.

I’ve known about this for many years but have never read an explanation. Do we enjoy touching our mouths — or is the absence of touch for a  long time unpleasant? If so, why?