Here’s a post that’s suitable for the Thanksgiving season. I no longer believe in the Shangri-La diet. Here’s the story. Background I met Seth Roberts back in the early 1990s when we were both professors at the University of California. … Continue reading
I wonder where my friend Seth would be politically, if he were around today. On one hand, he was a left-wing Berkeley professor who supported universal health care, Amnesty International, and other liberal causes. On the other hand, his paleo-diet … Continue reading
Jonathan Tupper writes: My organization is running a group test of Seth Roberts’ old theory about appetite. We are running something like a “web trial” as discussed in your Chance article with Seth. And in fact our design was very … Continue reading
I met Seth back in the early 1990s when we were both professors at the University of California. He sometimes came to the statistics department seminar and we got to talking about various things; in particular we shared an interest … Continue reading
This is full of cool stuff. I’ll add it to the links on this blog once I figure out how to do so.
Seth wrote something here about Jane Jacobs and her relevance to experimental psychology. He mentions her book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, which I too enjoyed reading. I have one question, though, which perhaps the economists in the audience … Continue reading
Seth Roberts is guest-blogging at Freakanomics with lots of interesting hypotheses about low-budget science, or what might be called “distributed scientific investigation” (by analogy to “distributed computing”).
One of the paradoxes of Seth’s self-experimentation research is that it seems so easy, but it clearly isn’t, as one can readily see by realizing how few scientific findings have been obtained this way. Reading Seth’s article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences gave me a sense of how difficult these self-experiments were. They took a lot of time (lots of things were tried), required discipline (e.g., standing 8 hours a day and setting up elaborate lighting systems in the sleep experiments) and many many measurements, and were much helped by a foundation of a deep understanding of the literature in psychology, nutrition, etc.
Also, for those interested in further details of Seth’s diet, I’ll cut-and-paste something from his blog entry.
Seth writes: Continue reading
After reading Seth Roberts’s article on self-experimentation, I had a dialogue with him about when to move from individual experimentation to a full-scale controlled experiment with a large-enough n to obtain statistically significant results. My last comment said: But back … Continue reading
Seth Roberts did some self-experimentation several years ago and found that watching faces on TV in the morning improved his mood (see here for a link to his article on this research along with some of my thoughts). Several years ago, I email-interviewed Seth on this. The interview never appeared anywhere and we just dug it up, so I’m posting it here. (Seth will also post it on his blog, which has many of his thoughts on self-experimentation.)
Andrew Gelman: Why don’t you start by describing your method of using TV watching to cure depression?
Seth Roberts: To feel better, you watch faces on TV in the morning and avoid faces (televised and real) at night. TV faces are beneficial in the morning and harmful at night only if they resemble what you would see during an ordinary conversation. The TV faces must be looking at the camera (both eyes visible) and close to life-size. (My experiments usually use a 27-inch TV.) Your eyes should be about three feet from the screen. Time of day is critical–if you see the TV faces too early or late they will have no effect. The crucial time of day depends on when you are exposed to sunlight but figuring out the best time of day is mainly trial and error right now. I usually have subjects start watching around 7 a.m. They watch about 50 minutes of faces each morning, and so do I.
Most mornings I watch little snippets of TV shows with plenty of faces looking at the camera, such as The News Hour with Jim Lehrer (PBS), the Talking Points section of The O’Reilly Factor (Fox News), Washington Journal (C-SPAN), and Larry King Live (CNN), that I taped the day before. I usually fast-forward through the non-big-face portions. The best TV show for this research is Booknotes (C-SPAN), on Sunday, which I watch in pieces throughout the week. My subjects watch tapes of Booknotes.
AG: How did you come up with this idea? Continue reading
I wonder what Seth Roberts thinks about this:
Study links diet soda to weight gain
BY DON FINLEY
San Antonio Express-News
A review of 26 years of patient data found that people who drink diet soft drinks were more likely to become overweight.
Not only that, but the more diet sodas they drank, the higher their risk of later becoming overweight or obese — 65 percent more likely for each diet drink per day.
Speaking of political polarization . . . Around this time every year we get these news articles of the form, “I’m dreading going home to Thanksgiving this year because of my uncle, who used to be a normal guy who … Continue reading
One theme that’s come up often here over the years is what the late Seth Roberts called the insider-outsider perspective of “people who have the knowledge of insiders but the freedom of outsiders,” and here’s one of many examples. I … Continue reading
Chetan Chawla writes: This paper will interest you, in defense of data mining. Isn’t this similar to the exploration Wasnik was encouraging in his infamous blog post? The article, by Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher, is called, “A hypothesis is … Continue reading
I’m trying to figure out if Brian “Pizzagate” Wansink’s famous “bottomless soup bowl” experiment really happened. Way back when, everybody thought the experiment was real. After all, it was described in a peer-reviewed journal article. Here’s my friend Seth Roberts … Continue reading
While reading this post by Seth Frey on famous scientists who couldn’t let go of bad ideas, I followed a link to this post by David Gorski from 2010 entitled, “Luc Montagnier: The Nobel disease strikes again.” The quick story … Continue reading
[image of a cat reading a comic book] How did the outsiders upend social psychology? CATRON: We used basic reporting techniques. We’d call up somebody and ask them about thus-and-so, and they’d mention so-and-so, so we’d call so-and-so, and ask … Continue reading
Alex Chernavsky writes: I discovered your blog through a mutual friend – the late Seth Roberts. I’m not a statistician. I’m a cat-loving IT guy who works for an animal shelter in Upstate New York. I have a dataset that … Continue reading
Seven years ago I was contacted by Dawn Teele, who was then a graduate student and is now a professor of political science, and asked for my comments on an edited book she was preparing on social science experiments and … Continue reading
Richard Morey pointed out the other day that this blog is 10 years old! During this time, we’ve had 5688 posts, 48799 comments, and who knows how many readers. On this tenth anniversary, I’d like to thank my collaborators on … Continue reading
I encourage you to check out our linked blogs. Here’s what they’re all about: Cognitive and Behavioral Science BPS Research Digest: I haven’t been following this one recently, but it has lots of good links, I should probably check it … Continue reading