Not long ago, Howard Wainer, a statistician I mentioned recently, learned that his blood sugar was too high. His doctor told him to lose weight or risk losing his sight. He quickly lost about 50 pounds, which put him below 200 pounds. He also started making frequent measurements of his blood sugar, on the order of 6 times per day, with the goal of keeping it low.

It was obvious to him that the conventional (meter-supplied) analysis of these measurements could be improved. The conventional analysis emphasized means. You could get the mean of your last n (20?) readings, for example. That told you how well you were doing, but didn’t help you do better.

Howard, who had written a book about graphical discovery, made a graph: blood sugar versus time. It showed that his measurements could be divided into three parts:

In a science classroom at a middle school I saw a poster about “the scientific method.” There were seven steps; one was “analyze your data.” According to the poster, you use the data you’ve collected to say if your hypothesis was right or wrong. Nothing was said about using data to generate new hypotheses.

Scientists are fond of placing great value on what they call skepticism: Not taking things on faith. Science versus religion, is the point. In practice this means wondering about the evidence behind this or that statement, rather than believing it because an authority figure said it. A better term for this attitude would be: Value data.

My observations:

1. The first task I used to measure my mental function at frequent intervals (e.g., every 30 minutes) resembled an typical cognitive psych task. It wasn’t fun and I had to push myself to do it.

2. I made another test to do the same thing based on the lessons I drew from bilboquet. It consisted of tracking circles around the screen. It was mildly fun.

3. Trying to improve the second test, I made a third test, which consisted of “tossing” the cursor from one point to another — like throwing darts. In spite of its simplicity, it was/is a lot of fun. Slightly addictive.

After I saw that flaxseed oil probably affected my circle-game performance, I wondered how to make its effect clearer. One possibility was to change the input device. I was using the trackpoint on my Thinkpad to move the cursor; what about the touchpad? Might be a more natural task. So I played the game several times using the touchpad. I was a lot slower, presumably because in ordinary usage I’ve used the trackpoint.

I wondered: Could I get better on the touchpad? I made a little game to practice. Here is the initial screen.

From an article in Rolling Stone about mercury and autism:

The CDC “wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe,” Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the [Institute of Medicine’s] Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. “We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect” of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee’s chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was “inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation” between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result “Walt wants” — a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.

I interviewed Gary Taubes by phone a few weeks ago, shortly after he gave a talk about the main ideas of his new book — Good Calories, Bad Calories — at UC Berkeley. The interview lasted about 2 hours. This is part 8.

SETH: Marc Hellerstein thought that the obesity epidemic was caused by people being sedentary?

I asked a friend of mine why she was a good boss. “I was nurturing,” she said. A big study of managers reached essentially the same conclusion: Good managers don’t try to make employees fit a pre-established box, the manager’s preconception about how to do the job. A good manager tries to encourage, to bring out, whatever strengths the employee already has. This wasn’t a philosophy or value judgment, it was what the data showed. The “good” managers were defined as the more productive ones — something like that. (My post about this.)

The reason for the study, as Veblen might say, was the need for it. Most managers failed to act this way. I posted a few days ago about a similar tendency among scientists: When faced with new data, a tendency to focus on what’s wrong with it and ignore what’s right about it. To pay far more attention to limitations than strengths. Here are two examples:

I interviewed Gary Taubes by phone a few weeks ago, shortly after he gave a talk about the main ideas of his new book — Good Calories, Bad Calories — at UC Berkeley. The interview lasted about 2 hours. This is part 7.

SETH ROBERTS: I was a member of the Center for Weight and Health. But the other members didn’t know what I was up to, and had no idea it could have anything to do with actual weight loss.

GARY TAUBES: That’s one of the things I’ve found most amusing about obesity research, that you have this disconnect from pre-World War Two, when the people doing it were clinicians who were treating obese patients, to post-World War Two, where first, it’s nutritionists, who do rat experiments. Then, by the 1960s, obesity is considered an eating disorder and it’s being treated by psychologists and psychiatrists. So today, if you looking at some of the major obesity centers in the country — at Yale, at University of Cincinnati, they’re all run by psychologists or psychiatrists. Here’s a physiological disorder of the body, and it’s being studied by psychologists and psychiatrists. They’re not interested in anecdotal evidence, unless it agrees with their preconceptions.

There are two mistakes you can make when you read a scientific paper: You can believe it (a) too much or (b) too little. The possibility of believing something too little does not occur to most professional scientists, at least if you judge them by their public statements, which are full of cautions against too much belief and literally never against too little belief.

Never.

If I’m wrong — if you have ever seen a scientist warn against too little belief — please let me know. Yet too little belief is just as costly as too much.

I interviewed Gary Taubes by phone a few weeks ago, shortly after he gave a talk about the main ideas of his new book — Good Calories, Bad Calories — at UC Berkeley. The interview lasted about 2 hours. This is part 6.

SETH: When I started your book, I already kind of believed all of your main points. Not all of them, but I was sympathetic. I knew where it was going. I thought “Oh, good. More evidence. This is interesting, and that’s an interesting way to tell that story”.

GARY TAUBES: The way I see it is that the establishment has an immune system to protect itself from challenges. Every science needs that kind of immune system to protect itself from quacks and easy-to-swallow but erroneous ideas that might infect the good science in the field. My question is whether I can infect enough people, enough serious scientists, that I can pose a threat to this immune system, that I could compromise the immune system of the establishment and make them take this idea seriously. Because some times these immune systems work against challenges that are legitimate. I honestly don’t know if I can. It’s going to be an interesting year. I hope I don’t become one of those bitter old men who, when I fail to do so, who can’t let it go.

I interviewed Gary Taubes by phone a few weeks ago, shortly after he gave a talk about the main ideas of his new book — Good Calories, Bad Calories — at UC Berkeley. The interview lasted about 2 hours. This is part 5.

SETH: Well, I think your book is a great book, and I don’t think its effect is limited to how many reviews it gets. What books do you think your book resembles? I think of it as a book showing that authorities can be seriously wrong, but what do you think?

GARY TAUBES: You know, I don’t know, actually. I can’t answer that question without sounding like a crazed egomaniac, so I won’t. What the book does is try to explain why the paradigm of obesity and chronic disease has to change and then to offer the alternative paradigm. Although I don’t use the word “paradigm” in the second half of the book, that’s what it’s trying to do. I want people to stop thinking about obesity as a disorder of overeating, calories in over calories out, and think about it as a disorder of excess fat accumulation.

I interviewed Gary Taubes by phone a few weeks ago, shortly after he gave a talk about the main ideas of his new book — Good Calories, Bad Calories — at UC Berkeley. The interview lasted about 2 hours. This is part 4.

SETH: I was impressed with the discussion in your book and lecture about obesity coexisting with poverty in all these different cultures and the implications of that. I’d never seen that before.

GARY TAUBES: I have this feeling, and I guess that all writers (or all neurotic writers) have to some extent, that my work is being ignored. It’s my Rodney Dangerfield complex. Now that I’ve written the book, I occasionally get emails from friends saying that they had some discussion with some obesity researcher, and they said, “Are you going to read Taubes’s book?” and their response was “Well, we know what Taubes thinks, so why should I bother reading the book?”

I interviewed Gary Taubes by phone a few weeks ago, shortly after he gave a talk about the main ideas of his new book — Good Calories, Bad Calories — at UC Berkeley. The interview lasted about 2 hours. This is part 3.

SETH: You wrote that New York Times piece, and from my take on it, you had a bunch of evidence, and then you got a book contract. Is it fair to say that you found out that what you wrote in the piece was mostly right?

GARY TAUBES: It’s a difficult question. I had actually pitched the New York Times piece on fat as an attempt to determine the cause of the obesity epidemic. The proposal was very open ended. I had several ideas. I actually believed, going in to the story, that the answer was going to be that high-fructose corn syrup was responsible for Americans getting fatter over the last 30 years.

SETH: I’m glad to hear that.

I interviewed Gary Taubes by phone a few weeks ago, shortly after he gave a talk about the main ideas of his new book — Good Calories, Bad Calories — at UC Berkeley. The interview lasted about 2 hours. This is part 2.

SETH: What do you think about prions?

GARY TAUBES: Here’s the problem with prions: the claim is that here’s a radical discovery — an infectious agent that doesn’t have nucleic acid — and it’s based fundamentally on a negative result, which is that when researchers have gone looking for the nucleic acids they failed to find them. Therefore, so the logic goes, they must not be there.

I interviewed Gary Taubes by phone a few weeks ago, shortly after he gave a talk about the main ideas of his new book — Good Calories, Bad Calories — at UC Berkeley. The interview lasted about 2 hours.

SETH: I just spoke to someone who reduced the carbohydrate in his diet, for various reasons, including your book. He found that his performance on mental problems started improving again. It had stopped improving; it had been constant for a long time, and then it started getting better. So it may be that when you reduce the carbohydrate in your diet, your brain starts working better.

GARY TAUBES: Well, there is evidence that your brain works more efficiently on ketones, as does your heart. So if he reduced his carbohydrate consumption sufficiently, he probably increased the level of ketones in his blood. But I’m just speculating here.

SETH: The book seems to have had an unusual beginning. You’d been writing about salt, and you learned that a scientist you didn’t trust about salt was also talking about obesity?

In the New York Times, Abigail Zuger, an M.D., recently reviewed a book called Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine by R. Barker Bausell — the “truth” being, if I read Zuger correctly, that it’s all baloney. Zuger calls the book “immensely educational”. Not educational enough:

Dr. Bausell starts out with the story of his late mother-in-law, Sarah, a concert pianist who developed painful arthritis in her old age and found her doctors to be generally useless when it came to satisfactory pain control. “So, being an independent, take-charge sort of individual, she subscribed to Prevention magazine, in order to learn more about the multiple remedies suggested in each month’s issue” for symptoms like hers.

What ensued, according to Dr. Bausell, was a predictable pattern. Every couple of months Sarah would make a triumphant phone call and announce “with great enthusiasm and conviction” that a new food or supplement or capsule had practically cured her arthritis. Unfortunately, each miracle cure was regularly replaced by a different one, in a cycle her son-in-law ruefully breaks down for detailed analysis.