What is the ideal drug? The placebo. It doesn’t introduce any foreign substances into your body. It has wide-ranging power to cure all sorts of ills. No known side effects. But the whole edifice of clinical trials is built on identifying and ignoring the placebo effect, as if it’s somehow “fake.” It’s not fake at all.
A few other thoughts:
1. I love the simplicity of her approach. She defines mindfulness as “the simple process of actively noticing new things.” That’s easy for me to understand. There are lots of tasks that I do that are completely mindlessly — at work, at home, at play — and I definitely feel more engaged when I am in a mindful state, as she defines it.
2. She claims that you can do meditation mindlessly. And she defines the goal of meditation as “post-meditative mindfulness.”
3. An ongoing theme of this blog is the impossibility of knowing. So I really liked this quote: “Universal uncertainty is an awareness:’I don’t know, you don’t know, in some sense we really can’t know.’”
Krista Tippett and physicist Leonard Mlodinow tie themselves up in knots trying to bridge the gap between free will and physical determinism. This is a tired topic, but it’s useful to see just how muddled the thinking is, even for someone as smart and thoughtful as Mlodinow is:
1. Tippett refers to the “scientific observation that free will is an illusion.” And Mlodinow implies that Laplacian determinism is a scientific theory. But I think it’s more appropriate to think of determinism as a key assumption of the physical sciences. In fact, it may even be part of what makes a scientist a scientist. A scientist is one who tries to explain physical phenomena in terms of other physical phenomena. He/she observes something about the physical world, and then tries to explain it as a result of something else in the physical world. So it’s not really a theory or an observation.
2. Mlodinow seems to want to claim the mantle of Laplace. But he’s not really a Laplacian determinist. If he was, then how could he hold up his father as an example of a Holocaust hero. How is his father any better than Hitler, if both of them are just a bunch of subatomic particles bouncing around as they were predestined to do at the Big Bang? He knows that Laplacian determinism is really just a thought experiment, an assumption, and that it has no relevance to our lives. In the end, he admits this: “Yes, I definitely think that my decisions matter.” How could he not? How could any of us not?
3. In the end, he wants science to be spiritual. And he realizes – while he strives to be rational – it’s not entirely possible. “I had an insight that I have beliefs that are not scientifically-based, too, and I believe them. “
Scholarly Kitchen asks the question, focusing on the difficulty of figuring out who did what and who deserves credit for the work.
But I’m also concerned about a potential diffusion of responsibility. Who ensures that the paper is accurate and meaningful at the highest level, when dozens or even hundreds of “authors” are on board? Who will have the courage to pull the plug on an experiment that isn’t going well, if so many people have an investment in the publication of the results?
It’s similar, in some ways, to what happens when multiple screenwriters are hired to work on a movie script (“too many cooks in the kitchen”) or when law professors sign an amicus brief that they didn’t write and thereby “compromise their integrity.”
Piketty may indeed pose a devastating methodological critique of economics (I hope he does!), but I’m not sure if I’m inclined to take Auerbach at his word.
1. Auerbach starts with this reassurance: “As a software engineer trained to trust nothing and verify everything, I can give no greater compliment to Piketty’s book than that it is backed by actual evidence, and mountains of it.” How lucky we are to have a brilliant software engineer who’s willing to take us inside the completely unrelated field of economics and enlighten us about who is right and who should be treated as a “pinata.”
2. At least he doesn’t try to hide his own biases. Here he throws off a casual reference to “the monetarist theory that influenced Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, Margaret Thatcher, and Augusto Pinochet.” This is the equivalent of calling Keynsianism “the theory that influenced Paul Krugman, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Hitler’s economic guru.” Can we extend Godwin’s Law to include references to Pinochet?
3. And then he excerpts a conceptual graph (see below) from Gary Becker’s book Human Capital. According to Auerbach, the graph “purports to show that trained workers (T) make more money than untrained workers (U).” Graphs like these, Auerbach says, are “hot air”: “Any programmer who tried to sell me on the performance of a piece of code with charts like these would get thrown out of my office.” Has Auerbach never seen a conceptual graph before? Graphs like these aren’t meant to show “results” (as Auerbach claims they do). Instead, they’re meant to explain how a particular mathematical model might apply to the real world. They may be right, they may be wrong. But they expose the assumptions of the researcher. Becker may be wrong, but he’s certainly not presenting fake data as real. I wonder if Auerbach feels the same moral outrage at the use of the standard supply/demand chart…one of the most useful tools ever discovered.
I used to love Slate, but I’m increasingly embarrassed by their science and economics content.
In my 20’s I did a consulting project on cancer care for a major biotech firm. After reading all the literature from the American Cancer Society, I decided to start eating mounds of broccoli and cauliflower. Later I even went vegetarian. Though this last step also had something to do with a girl, I was convinced that I was extending my life.
But was any of it true? George Johnson at the NYT says that all of those potential links between diet and cancer have been debunked.
I have a tendency to jump on the latest dietary fad if the health connections sound reasonable to me. But this probably isn’t justified. I know I didn’t enjoy eating very much in my 20’s. It seemed like a simple case of delaying gratification – trading tasty food now for happy, healthy years in my 90’s. I’m still hoping for all those years, but I’ve become less of a health food Nazi. And I’m much more skeptical of groups like ACS that want to influence my behavior.
But I would take it even further. I don’t care about health insurance. I don’t care about health care. What I do care about is health.
Our public policies (and private actions) are often oriented around procuring insurance and care, rather than achieving and maintaining health itself. How would the world be different if we all pursued health first, and health insurance and health care were only a means to that end?
