Month: April 2010

Jane Jacobs on Bad Behavior (continued)

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I was pleased that Matt Ridley quoted me in his blog about the Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy and out of curiosity I read his previous post (“ Chiefs, priests and thieves“). Strangely enough it’s closely related to the post of mine that followed The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy: about Jane Jacobs’s view of two moral systems, guardian and commercial.

In “Chiefs, priests and thieves”, Ridley wrote about what he’d learned from what sounds like a truly fascinating book: Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley.

As always, ordinary people wanted to carry on with commerce, but chiefs, priests and thieves — sultans, emperors, popes, pashas, holy knights and corsairs — just kept plundering the fruits of that commerce for their own enrichment and their own glory. Little wonder that, as the historian Meir Kohn concludes, preindustrial government was predominantly predatory in nature. Not that it is entirely free of that suspicion today.

This is exactly what Jacobs was talking about — the close connection between government and predation, in contrast to trading (commerce). And it’s what Russ Roberts is talking about in his terrific essay about the cause of the financial crisis. When large financial firms become close to government (“In the week before the AIG bailout that put $14.9 billion into the coffers of Goldman Sachs, Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson called Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein at least 24 times“), they become predatory rather than commercial. Was Goldman Sachs providing useful innovation when it provided and sold the bonds that the SEC is now complaining about? No, it was basically predatory, under the guise of being commercial.

I think the rest of us let this sort of predation happen because of apocalyptic stories spun (always in future tense) by leaders: The infidels will . . . The terrorists will . . . The financial system will . . . Under cover of these stories, leaders do stuff that strengthens them and weakens the rest of us. But recently a countervailing story has gathered strength:Â Guardians as idiots. These stories are past tense: Harry Markopolos went to the SEC five times with incredibly persuasive evidence of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and the SEC did nothing. I think the hearings about this were incredibly embarrassing to SEC officials and a big reason they’re now doing something about Goldman. Another example of the genre is …First Do No Harm, wherein doctors nearly prevented an epileptic child from getting life-saving therapy. And, of course, Al Gore is looking more and more foolish as it becomes clear he trusted research (that hockey-stick graph) he had no clue about.

More More future tense: “To the Indios they said, “If you don’t work, this God will kill you.”

The Data-Driven Life

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Gary Wolf’s article about self-measurement in the New York Times Magazine is here. I am quoted in it. The story I identified with most is Bo Adler’s. He has sleep apnea:

“Here’s what they told me was the normal surgical course of treatment,†Adler explained. “First they were going to cut out my tonsils, and if that didn’t work, they would break my jaw and reset it to reposition my tongue, and finally they would cut out the roof of my mouth. I had one question: What if my case is different? They said, ‘Let’s try the standard course of treatment first, and if that doesn’t work, then we’ll know your case is different.’ â€

I started long-term self-experimentation because I woke up too early in the morning. The notion of taking drugs for it — what a doctor would prescribe — was too horrible to take seriously, just as Adler resists the idea of surgery before less harmful solutions have been ruled out. Adler hopes he can learn something about sleep apnea his doctors don’t know, just as I hoped I could learn something about early awakening nobody knew. Eventually — ten years later — I managed to.

Jane Jacobs on Several Types of Bad Behavior

Seth Roberts1 Comment

What do the following have in common?

  1. Doctors who view patients as “profit centers”.
  2. Chinese universities that open art departments because art students pay much higher tuition than other students. The classes in these departments have high student/teacher ratios and are taught by inexperienced teachers.
  3. Corrupt government officials.
  4. Katherine Weymouth, publisher of the Washington Post, organizing salons where, for a hefty price, important people would meet Post reporters.

All can be seen as cases where guardians abuse the trust they’ve been given by trying to profit from it. Jane Jacobs wrote about guardian/commercial ethical differences in Systems of Survival. Jacobs’s answer to why two ethical systems? why not twenty? was that there are two different ways to make a living: taking and trading.

Jacobs wasn’t trying to tell people how to act. She was trying to describe and explain differences in behavior she’d seen. As a one-pass view of how people make a living, taking and trading is a good division. Looked at more closely, teaching (education) and learning (science) are also central. They underlie both taking and trading. Following Jacobs’s logic, maybe they need different ethical codes to function well. Yesterday I spoke to a Tsinghua professor who complained that other Tsinghua professors simply taught what they wanted to teach, as opposed to what would help their students. I said, yeah, I’d blogged about it (“ For whom do colleges exist?“, “ For whom do law schools exist?“).

The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy

Seth Roberts10 Comments

In The Emperor’s New Clothes, the king is naked but only a little girl says so. The king’s advisers don’t tell him. I suppose the intended lesson was that powerful people have trouble getting frank answers. That’s pretty obvious. For a CEO, it’s said, the scarcest commodity is truth. Bosses learn this all the time. I learned it the first time I asked one of my students what he thought of the class.

Andersen’s story can be taken differently, partly conveyed by the phrase elephant in the room: Something big and important is overlooked by the supposed experts (in the story, the king’s advisers). It should be obvious — but it isn’t. Or at least no one says anything. This is how Harry Markopolos used the term emperor’s new clothes in No One Would Listen: Madoff was a gigantic fraud, his returns were (to Markopolos) clearly too good to be true, he was enormously visible (in certain circles), but no one said anything. It was as astonishing as a king parading naked. How come no one sees this? Markopolos thought. If you looked at Madoff the right way, he was naked.

That this sort of thing happens isn’t obvious at all. Yet three books — which I’ve just blogged about — have recently appeared with examples. One is the Markopolos book. Another is The Hockey Stick Illusion. Surely there’s overwhelming evidence that humans are causing global warming, right? Well, no. The only clear evidence was that hockey stick — and that’s a statistical artifact. (It looks like an artifact.) The third is The Big Short. It wasn’t easy to find the right sight line from which it was clear that Goldman Sachs et al. were taking on far more risk than they realized but such views existed. I call these books The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy. Their broad lesson: Sometimes the “best people” aren’t right. Sometimes there’s a point of view from which they’re glaringly wrong. The Hockey Stick Illusion is about how Stephen McIntyre found this point of view. In No One Would Listen Markopolos found this point of view. In The Big Short several people found this point of view.

This relates to my self-experimentation in two ways. First, the “best people” say self-experimentation is bad. No weight-control researcher does self-experimentation. No sleep researcher does self-experimentation. Surely they know how to do research. It’s their job. Whereas to me it’s glaringly obvious that self-experimentation is an excellent research tool, not just because of my results but also because it makes it so much easier to try new things. The best way to learn is to do, IÂ believe; self-experimentation makes doing much easier. Second, my self-experimentation uncovered all sorts of results that implied that the expert consensus on this or that was glaringly wrong. The Shangri-La Diet is just one example. Breakfast is good, right? Well, no, breakfast may wake you up too early. And so on. At first, I didn’t grasp the broad lesson I stated earlier (“Sometimes the “best people” aren’t right. . . “) and was amazed by what I was finding. To me, The Emperor’s New Clothes Trilogy is support.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments
  • LA Times article about omega-3 health effects
  • Sanity about CO2 emissions. “When and where did the climate alarmists tell you about CO2 levels that were up to 20 times current levels when dinosaurs roamed the earth? When and where did alarmists tell you that the conditions they openly worry about have repeatedly happened without turning the earth into an oven?”

Thanks to Dave Lull.

The Big Short

Seth Roberts7 Comments

The Big Short (sent to me by the publisher) is Michael Lewis’s best book, and that’s saying a lot. Moneyball was excellent . The Blind Side was excellent. All three are stories of underdog triumph but The Big Short is about a far more important subject, a far more complicated subject, and has a tremendously dark side. You know the saying: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Well, shame on Wall Street for creating the worst financial disaster ever. But then, as Nassim Taleb puts it, the school-bus driver who crashed a bus full of children were given a new bus. Those who created the disaster were put in charge of fixing it. As Steve Eisman, one of Lewis’s main characters, puts it, “I can understand why Goldman Sachs would want to be included in the conversation about what to do about Wall Street. What I can’t understand is why anyone would listen to them.” (Not just listen. They were allowed to dominate the conversation.) Showing that the foolishness of people at the top in American society has no clear limit.

I could hardly stop reading. Endless fascinating detail. Michael Burry, another main character, discovers he has Asperger’s after his son is turned down by several kindergartens and he tries to understand why. I’ve been talking and reading about data analysis my whole professional life, yet Lewis’s story about how means can be terribly misleading is the best I’ve heard. An average credit score of 600 can be due to two scores of 600 or to scores of 500 and 700, with vastly different consequences. (This escaped the averagers.) Sure, I knew about the conflict of interest of bond rating agencies, such as Moody’s, but Lewis describes it so well I loved reading about it again.

Long ago, I blogged about the importance of insider/outsiders — close enough to understand what’s going on yet far enough away to see the truth. Lewis’s heros, who saw that a tremendous crash was coming, are exactly that. Like Harry Markopolos, they were on the fringes of the financial industry. One of them (Eisman) had a gift for tactlessness, another (Burry) had Asperger’s, and a third group ran their fund from a Berkeley garage. Without them, the people at the top (e.g., the head of Goldman Sachs), who run and crashed our financial system, could plausibly say Nobody could have predicted this. Because of Lewis’s heros, they can’t.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments
  • Vision therapy
  • Omega-3 and brain health. “Participants were 280 community volunteers between 35 and 54 y of age, free of major neuropsychiatric disorders, and not taking fish oil supplements. . . Five major dimensions of cognitive functioning were assessed . . . Among the 3 key (n-3) [poly-unsaturated fatty acids], only DHA [was] associated with major aspects of cognitive performance.”
  • The rise and fall of Beijing restaurants

Thanks to Steve Hansen, Tim Lundeen, and Eric Meltzer.

Harry Markopolos, Meet Stephen McIntyre

Seth Roberts6 Comments

After The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford (about Stephen McIntyre’s criticisms of Michael Mann’s hockey-stick graph), I read No One Would Listen by Harry Markopolos (sent to me by the publisher), about the Madoff case. They have plenty in common.

Size. According to Elizabeth Kolbert and New Yorker fact checkers, “thousands of scientists at hundreds of universities in dozens of countries” are sure that humans are disastrously warming the Earth. Madoff stole about $60 billion from thousands of investors. Helped by dozens of hedge-fund managers.

Hans Christian Andersen. The lesson of The Hockey Stick Illusion was that of The Emperor’s New Clothes, as I said. Markopolos mentions that story at least twice.

Failure at the top. In The Hockey Stick Illusion, Nature magazine and the National Academy of Sciences dismiss McIntyre’s criticisms. In No One Would Listen, the Wall Street Journal was given the story and, for three years, failed to do anything with it. They covered it only after Madoff confessed.

Regulatory failure. Science is said to be “self-regulating,” meaning that mistakes will be noticed and fixed by other scientists. Unfortunately for that homily, McIntyre wasn’t a scientist. In No One Would Listen, the no one of the title means no one at the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). After hearing Markopolos’s story, a congressman says the SEC “couldn’t find steak at an Outback”.

“It cannot be”. Just as Kolbert believes that a “hoax” of such size isn’t possible, many people told Markopolos that what he was claiming wasn’t possible. One of the best stories in No One Would Listen is about a colleague of Markopolos’s named Frank Casey, who helped Markopolos investigate Madoff. Casey’s job is selling financial products. After a sales call at an insurance company, the prospective customer, after declining to buy anything, asks Casey about Madoff. Casey is stunned. It felt like a random sales call. Casey tells him what he knows. It takes a half hour. Then the insurance executive explains his question. He recently married into “an extremely wealth Jewish family.” Madoff was at his wedding. After the wedding, Madoff took him aside and said he’d get him “set up” (meaning invested in Madoff). The insurance executive, after studying Madoff’s claimed returns, thought something was fishy and refused to invest. This got him in trouble with his father-in-law. “It’s your job as my son-in-law to take care of my daughter, and you should be putting your money with Bernie,” the father-in-law said over and over. His refusal to invest with Madoff is causing serious friction, he tells Casey, and begs Casey to put what he said in writing so that he can convince his father-in-law to withdraw his money. Casey writes a long email. The insurance exec brings it to his father-in-law and reads it out loud. “It can’t be,” says his father-in-law. “Bernie wouldn’t do this to me.” The father-in-law does nothing. They lose everything.

Books I’m Looking Forward to Reading

Seth Roberts4 Comments
  • Made by Hand: Searching For Meaning in a Throwaway World by Mark Frauenfelder
  • The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
  • Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes by Jennifer McLagan. By fat she means animal fat.
  • No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller by Harry Markopolos
  • Wide Awake: A Memoir of Insomnia by Patricia Morrisroe
  • Malignant Medical Myths: Why Medical Treatment Causes 200,000 Deaths in the USA Each Year, and How to Protect Yourself by Joel Kauffman
  • The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac by Graham Farmelo
  • Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler
  • China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society by John & Doris Naisbitt. Just a teensy bit more persuasive than The Coming Collapse of China (2001) by Gordon Chang.
  • The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimanda Adichie

The Hockey Stick Illusion

Seth Roberts42 Comments

Recently a WSJ columnist told this story:

I was chatting with a friend who, over the years, has helped her kids slog through the obligatory science-fair projects.

“The experiments never turned out the way they were supposed to, and so we were always having to fudge the results so that the projects wouldn’t be screwy. I always felt guilty about that dishonesty,” she said, “but now I feel like we were doing real science.”

Yes, science with a human touch. The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford (sent to me by the publisher) is a great book because it tells a great story. That story has a hero (Stephen McIntryre) and a villain (Michael Mann) and illustrates a basic truth about the world: A consensus of the “best people” can be wrong. This point was first made, as far as I know, by The Emperor’s New Clothes. It was later made by the Asch experiment (about line-length judgments). It’s not obvious; Elizabeth Kolbert and her editors at The New Yorker, not to mention Bill McKibben, have yet to understand it. (“No one has ever offered a plausible account of why thousands of scientists at hundreds of universities in dozens of countries would bother to engineer a climate hoax,” Kolbert recently wrote, with the permission of her editors.)Â It’s a sad comment on our education system that I first learned it via self-experimentation. My results showed that an acne medicine that my dermatologist prescribed didn’t work — a possibility for which my dermatologist (in consensus with other dermatologists) hadn’t allowed. As truths go, this one is scary: It means you have to think for yourself. But it is also the most liberating truth I know.

The Hockey Stick Illusion tells how McIntyre, skeptical of Mann’s hockey-stick result (a sharp increase in global temperature to unprecedented levels during the 20th century), tried to get the data and computer code that Mann used. Mann put him off. He still hasn’t released the computer code he used. Mann found a hockey stick where none existed because (a) he used principal-components analysis to summarize a lot of temperature series (bad idea), (b) he used that method in an unusual way, making a bad idea worse, and (c) one of his time series had a serious problem. After McIntyre noticed this problem and pointed it out, the story really begins: How did everyone react? Much as a reader of The Emperor’s New Clothes would expect. Nature denied it. The Washington Post denied it. Most climate scientists denied it (and continue to). Montford started writing the book before Climategate, whose overall message was the same — that climate scientists have been distorting the truth, that the case for man-made global warming is far weaker than they say, that a consensus of experts can be wrong. As Montford puts it,

None of the corruption and bias and flouting of rules we have seen in this story [and in the Climategate emails] would have been necessary if there is, as we are led to believe, a watertight case that mankind is having a potentially catastrophic effect on the climate.

Climategate and the story within The Hockey Stick Illusion are bad news for some very powerful people, such as Al Gore and those who gave him a Nobel Prize, but are helpful to the rest of us. When Big Shot X says “This is incredibly clear, everyone knows this” . . . maybe they’re wrong.