michaelkeenan

[michaelkeenan]

i arrive at the Tumtum tree

toves: slithy borogoves: mimsy dick: vorpal i am forcibly escorted from the tulgey wood

[michaelkeenan]

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat in under 1500 words

Here's my under-1500-word summary of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, a book about the skill of cooking by Samin Nosrat.

There are four basic factors that determine how good your food will taste: salt, which enhances flavor; fat, which amplifies flavor and makes appealing textures possible; acid, which brightens and balances; and heat, which ultimately determines the texture of food.

Salt

Salt amplifies other flavors, except bitterness; it reduces bitterness.

Fine salts can be up to twice as dense as course salts, so measure salt by weight, rather than by volume. Better yet, measure by taste.

It's usually best for food to be salted from within, rather than sprinkled with salt at the end.

In many cases, salt is best added before cooking so it has time to diffuse through the food. For meat (but not fish), salt hours (or days) before cooking. For vegetables (but not mushrooms), salt 15 minutes before cooking.

Taste often while cooking, and add more salt if needed.

Fat

Fat plays three distinct roles in cooking: as a main ingredient (e.g. butter in a pastry or olive oil in pesto), as a cooking medium (butter to sauté vegetables), and as a seasoning (e.g. sour cream in soup, mayonnaise in a sandwich). Knowing which role fat will play will guide you to choose which fat to use for your purpose.

Fat carries flavor. It coats the tongue, allowing aromatic compounds to stay in contact with taste buds for longer periods of time. Take advantage of this by adding aromatics (e.g. garlic) directly into the cooking fat. When baking, add vanilla extract and other flavorings directly into the butter or egg yolks for the same result.

Fat also enhances flavor another way. Cooking fats can withstand temperatures well above the boiling point of water (212°), so they can do what water can't: facilitate browning (which begins around 230°). Browning can introduce entirely new flavors.

An important factor, when choosing a fat, is to match it with the culture of the food you're creating, otherwise it won't taste right. e.g. don't use olive oil in Vietnamese food, or smoky bacon fat in Indian food.

Which fats we use primarily affect flavor, but how we use them determines texture. Depending on how we use fats, we can achieve one of five textures: Crisp (e.g. fried food), Creamy (e.g. chocolate, ice cream), Flaky (pastries), Tender (shortbread), and Light (whipped cream).

Foods that are too dry, or need just a bump of richness, can be corrected with a little olive oil (or other oil), or another creamy ingredient such as sour cream, crème, fraîche, egg yolk, or goat cheese. Use vinaigrette, mayonnaise, a spreadable cheese, or creamy avocado to balance out dryness in a sandwich or atop thick, crusty bread.

Acid

Like salt, acid heightens other flavors. But while the salt threshold is absolute, acid balance is relative. If you add too much salt to a broth, it's unsalvageable, except through dilution. But if you add too much acid to something, you can add sugar, salt, fat, bitterness or starch to change it from unpalatably sour to pleasant. (For example, if you make lemonade from lemon juice, water, and sugar, try tasting it before and after you add sugar, and what was unpleasantly sour becomes good.)

Let geographic tradition guide your choice of acid to use: wine vinegars in Italian, French, Germany, and Spanish cuisine; rice vinegars in Asian cuisine; apple cider vinegar for British and southern American food; lemon and tomatoes in Mediterranean food, lime in tropical climates like Mexico, Cuba, India, Vietnam, and Thailand; dairy can fit in most cuisines.

Acid dulls vibrant greens, so wait until the last possible moment to dress salads or squeeze lemon on cooked green vegetables.

Acid keeps reds and purples vivid, so add acid before cooking purple cabbage, red chard stems, and beets.

Raw fruits and vegetables vulnerable to oxidation, like apples, avocados, and bananas, will retain their natural color if coated with acid or kept in water mixed with a few drops of lemon juice.

Acid keeps vegetables and legumes tougher, longer. Anything containing cellulose or pectin will cook much more slowly in the presence of acid. Fifteen minutes of simmering in water can soften carrots to baby food, but they'll still be somewhat firm after an hour stewing in red wine. If you've ever cooked something with onions and been perplexed at the onions not cooking, it could be that an acidic ingredient - perhaps tomatoes, wine, or vinegar - is interfering.

As in general with cooking, the best way to optimize acidity is to taste during cooking and adjust.

Heat

To determine whether the heat level is correct, the best cooks look at the *food*, not the the heat source. They listen for the changing sounds of a sizzling sausage, watch the way a simmer becomes a boil, and taste a noodle to determine whether it's al dente. Is the food browning, firming, shrinking, crisping, burning, falling apart, swelling, or cooking unevenly?

Food is primarily made up of: water, fat, carbohydrates, and protein.

Water can be a medium in which we cook other foods. At low temperatures, water is particularly gentle. Simmering, braising and poaching provide foods with the sustained low heat they need to develop tenderness. Heat water to 212° at sea level and it boils, giving us one of the quickest and most efficient ways to cook food.

Beyond 212°, water transforms to steam, a valuable visual cue: as long as food is wet and giving off steam, its surface temperature probably isn't hot enough to allow browning to begin. Caramelization and the Maillard reaction don't begin until food reaches higher temperatures.

Make decisions in relationship to steam. Encourage steam to escape if you want temperatures to rise and food to brown. Contain steam with a lid to allow food to cook in a moist environment if you want to prevent or delay browning.

Food piled in a pan can affect steam levels by acting like a makeshift lid; both entrap steam. Trapped steam condenses and drips back down, keeping food moist and maintaining a temperature around 212°.

Control steam in the oven when roasting or toasting food similarly. Spread out zucchini and peppers so steam escapes and browning begins sooner. Protect denser vegetables that take longer to cook, like artichokes, from browning too much before they can cook through by packing them tightly to entrap steam.

At high temperatures, sugar melts. At very high temperatures (340°), sugar darkens and caramelizes, producing hundreds of new compounds with abundant new flavors: acidic, bitter, fruity, caramel, nutty, sherry, and butterscotch.

Cooking fruits, vegetables, dairy, and some grains releases their sugars. As heat penetrates a boiling carrot, for example, its starches break down into simple sugars, and the cell walls enclosing the sugars disintegrate, making a cooked carrot taste sweeter than a raw one.

Heat proteins in the presence of carbohydrates, and the Maillard reaction occurs, heat's most significant contribution to flavor, with notes like floral, onion, meaty, vegetal, chocolatey, starchy, and earthy. It's often accompanied by dehydration and crispness, so the texture is also often improved.

Browning begins around 230°. The temperatures required to achieve this tasty browning will dry out proteins, so beware. Use intense heat to brown the surface of meats and quickly cook tender cuts through. After browning a tougher cut such as brisket, on the other hand, use gentle heat to keep its interior from drying out. Or cook it through with gentle heat first, and brown the surface at the end.

Brown with care; it's easy to burn.

Cooking sometimes continues after removing the food from the heat source, as the residual heat continues cooking. Proteins in particular are susceptible to carryover.

The primary decision is whether to cook slowly over gentle heat, or quickly over intense heat. For some foods, the goal is *creating* tenderness; for others, it's *preserving* tenderness. In general, foods that are already tender (some meats, eggs, delicate vegetables) should be cooked as little as possible to maintain their tenderness. Foods that start out tough or dry and need to be hydrated or transformed to become tender (grains and starches, tough meats, dense vegetables) will benefit from longer, more gentle cooking. Browning, whether for tender or tough foods, will often involve intense heat, so you'll combine cooking methods. For example, brown and then simmer meats in a stew, or simmer and then brown potatoes for hash to ensure browning *and* tenderness in both cases.

Gentle cooking methods (for creating or preserving tenderness)

Simmering, Coddling, and Poaching

Steaming

Stewing and Braising

Confit (poaching in fat)

Sweating

Bain-marie

Low-heat Baking and Dehydrating

Slow-roasting, Grilling, and Smoking

Intense cooking Methods (often for browning)

Blanching, Boiling, and Reducing (an exception to this list - these, of course, don't brown foods)

Sautéing, Pan-frying, and Shallow and Deep-frying

Searing

Grilling and Broiling

High-heat Baking

Toasting

Roasting

[michaelkeenan]

Comfort Languages

You've heard of Love Languages, now learn about Comfort Languages:

1) Being heard/validation - “That's rough, buddy.”

2) Optimism/pep talks - “You got this!”

3) Problem-solving - “Let’s figure this out.”

4) Distraction - “Let’s watch a movie.”

5) Physical - hugs, a blanket, ice cream

6) Space - leave them alone

Just as there are different ways that people express love and feel loved, people prefer different comfort languages.

A love language mismatch is unfortunate, but at least it's usually neutral. A comfort language mismatch is often actively unpleasant. The most famous mismatch is when someone wants validation, but their partner problem-solves. But there are other mismatches; people who don't like feeling heard will deflect questions and find that style invasive. Some find optimism to be invalidating or minimizing, and they might focus more on their unhappiness as they marshal arguments against the pep talk. Some find distractions to be unwelcome, some people don't like hugs, some people want to be left alone, and for others that's the last thing they want.

Also unlike love languages, people tend to want different comfort languages at different times. For example, after a stressful incident, someone might want validation and hugs, followed by optimism, followed by problem-solving. It's important to use the right comfort language at the right time. You can usually just ask.

These Comfort Language categories were invented by Kat Woods.

[michaelkeenan]

this is good

[michaelkeenan]

Notes on persuasion from the deconversion of a Flat Earther

A former Flat Earther describes how he changed his mind (h/t Astral Codex Ten). STST had made videos claiming that features of how the moon is perceived from Earth prove that the Earth is flat[1]. Youtuber Baldy Catz made a video debunking his videos[2], and STST realized that Catz was correct.

Catz's debunking was thorough, focused, and (by internet standards) very polite.

In STST's first video after being convinced of a spherical Earth, the version of him that could believe the Earth was flat is relatable and fresh in his mind. He doesn't think it reflects especially badly on him: “I got fooled. And I’m not a fool, and I know that 99% of people that believe in Flat Earth are not fools. You’re not unintelligent, it’s just a case of [being] misinformed.”

In that first video, changing his mind on the shape of the Earth hasn't caused sweeping update on his other unconventional beliefs: “NASA, space, all of this sort of stuff, the pictures of Earth - I still don’t believe. They are CGI, stitched together.” And: “I still love conspiracies, I’m still going to talk about them. Antarctica, there’s still something going on there - hidden land?” And “9/11 - definitely inside job.”

A year later, there are sweeping changes. He calls his former self an idiot, calls Flat Earthers brainwashed narcissistic cultists, and repudiates his former conspiratorial beliefs: “I used to believe in chemtrails, I was an anti-vaxxer”, “I've become really fascinated now with space flight now I know it's actually real"[3].

My takeaways are:

He initially changed his mind on just the Earth shape but not other conspiratorial thinking. It's easier to make smaller worldview updates than large ones. In persuasion, narrow focus is probably better than broad focus, and may be a bridgehead to wider subsequent changes.

It must have helped that Baldy Cat didn't insult him when debunking his videos. "The Earth is round" is an easier worldview update than "The Earth is round and also I'm an idiot". An acceptable self-image is "I used to be an idiot, but I've been smart and correct for a while now", but needs time to get to.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4K_FWIAZIs

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRz0qPREKho

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZN40zbUVxY

[michaelkeenan]

Criminal Georg skews recidivism statistics

Have you ever seen those concerning statistics about criminal recidivism? Like: 44% are re-arrested within a year, and 83% within nine years (source: this Department of Justice report).

I’d seen those statistics before, and been concerned. There’s a great case for shortening prison sentences for deterrence reasons, because likelihood of punishment is much more deterring than severity, but at least prison incapacitates criminals from plundering society while they’re imprisoned. Why hasten prison release if they’ll be back soon anyway? “Once a criminal, always a criminal?”, asks one headline about recidivism.

But today I learned that there’s a huge caveat to those statistics. The more often you go to prison, the more you’re counted in recidivism statistics.

Consider five people who go to prison. Four of them never commit another crime, but one of them was Criminal Georg, who is imprisoned ten times. Out of the fourteen prison sentences (ten for Georg, four for the others), nine of them are followed by recidivism (Georg’s first nine). The proportion of these people who are serial criminals is 20%, but the recidivism rate is 64%.

When considering people rather than prison releases, the recidivism rate is lower than I thought.

[michaelkeenan]

I always like the end-of-year essays about it being the best year in history. Nicholas Kristof has a series in the New York Times (2019 Has Been The Best Year Ever, Why 2018 Was the Best Year in Human History!, Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History) but it’s not just him - The Telegraph did one in 2016, Vox in 2015, and so on.

They make the important, under-appreciated point that bad news usually happens in discrete disasters—a hurricane, an earthquake, a war. Good news happens in slow, incremental change (batteries are 1% more efficient, literacy rates increased, child mortality decreased), so good news isn’t news.

No-one’s writing these essays in 2020!

(Though, Tyler Cowen made a valiant effort at a consolation essay with The Silver Lining of 2020, noting that mRNA vaccines are great, DeepMind cracked protein folding, there’s a prototype CRISPR cure for sickle-cell anemia, and GPT-3 is cool.)

[michaelkeenan]

One of the traits of allism that is most difficult to live with, as a family member of a person with allism, is their “stereotyped behavior”: meaningless, repetitive rituals that they not only insist on completing themselves but try to force others to engage in, as well.

Their obsessive need not only to perform these ritualistic behaviors themselves but for everyone around them to perform them as well can be a huge burden on family members.

For example, people with allism often have extremely complex compulsions surrounding eating, with which they will attempt to force everyone at the table to comply.  These may include such unusual and varied behaviors as only cutting one bite of food at once (vastly increasing the amount of time it takes to feed a meal to a person with allism), only using silverware in incredibly specific and often uncomfortable or time-consuming ways, resting a piece of fabric or paper on the lap whether it performs a function or not, and arranging all items at the table in a particular configuration.

A particularly common food-related obsession is a superstitious belief that some sort of harm will occur if people touch the eating table (for instance, if someone becomes tired and rests their arms on it).  This inexplicable superstition is so common that those in the allistic community have even made up childish rhymes about it, such as “Mabel, Mabel, strong and able, keep your elbows off the table”.

When others do not conform to the complex and often extremely inconvenient demands required by the obsessions of the person with allism, the person with allism can become extremely upset, resulting in a variety of negative behaviors.  They often become aggressive, sometimes even dangerous.

While the stereotyped behaviors of people with allism can be very difficult and disturbing to manage, it’s important to understand that the meaningless behaviors don’t feel meaningless to them.  For whatever reason, they appear to find these rituals soothing, which is why they become so distressed when others do not follow them.  Remember, people with allism are not capable of healthy self-soothing behaviors, like stimming, and therefore may resort to problem behaviors to cope.

With understanding, compassion, and unending patience, we can find a way to live happy lives with our loved ones on the allistic spectrum.

[michaelkeenan]

Idea I came up with years ago but still think would be really good: "earth as post-WWII Japan", in contrast to the very cliche "evil aliens invade" and less cliche but still common "Benevolent aliens come to help us".

First season is the protagonists in the Earth Military fighting in a war against a race of evil aliens, their government is kind of militaristic but appears to be basically the good guys- somewhere in between a more subtle Starship Troopers and the sort of things that make people think the Federation from TNG on is a military oligarchy- and we see extensive depictions of the aliens committing atrocities. Also, the aliens' visual design, movement and voices are really strongly coded as "Evil Aliens". Season finale has the main characters racing to stop an alien attack that could end the war... instead of making it at the last minute they're a minute late and the war ends.

Start of second season: A year or two has passed, when the first episode opens we see mostly the same cast on a repaired ship, early on they talk to an alien diplomat whose appearance and voice has the exact same "obviously Evil Alien" coded style as the enemy soldiers from S1 but is reasonable and friendly, giving them some advice on a diplomatic or exploratory mission they're on. It's revealed that the human government in S1 was a militaristic dictatorship that had started numerous wars of aggression before the alien race stopped it and installed a democratic government. Some of the alien war crimes from S1 were government propaganda although some were real, just as both the US government and individual soldiers did some pretty horrible things in both Japan and Europe during WWII, although they pale in comparison to the war crimes the Earth Military had been committing which the heroes had seen hints of but ignored.

The rest of S2 is one of those space geopolitics settings in the vein of Star Trek, Babylon 5 or Mass Effect, with democratic Earth as a sort of junior partner and ally to the "evil aliens" from S1 and the protagonists doing various diplomatic, exploration, and occasional military missions while we explore the setting further.

[michaelkeenan]

Eliezer’s 2007 essay on hindsight bias is really good (and perhaps especially relevant now to certain judgments people might be tempted to make in 2020).

[michaelkeenan]

Epistemic status: I spent only a short time on this and might have missed important things; please let me know if so.

With electricity-sparked wildfires causing billions of dollars of damage, and scheduled power outages affecting hundreds of thousands of Californians, people blame the utility company PG&E. Governor Gavin Newsom said “As it relates to PG&E, it's about corporate greed meeting climate change. It's about decades of mismanagement.”

I looked into the way PG&E's regulation works, and came away thinking that this was less about choosing the cheapest option to enrich shareholders, and more about the regulator wanting to keep electricity rates low rather than pay for increased safety.

Every three years, PG&E asks its regulator (CPUC, the California Public Utilities Commission) to approve its expenditures, line by line. CPUC has an internal office called the Division of Ratepayer Advocates (DRA, or sometimes ORA for Office of Ratepayer Advocates), which reviews the proposed expenditures and objects to some of them, then PG&E responds to the objections, and then CPUC makes a final decision.

This is the 2014 expenditure document from the CPUC website. In it, we see that PG&E asks for approval for fire risk reduction expenditures, and the DRA advises that CPUC not approve this. Fortunately, CPUC did approve it:

4.8.2. Fire Risk Reduction

DRA claims that ratepayers should not pay the $11.113 million forecast by PG&E for additional Fire Risk Reduction. PG&E’s current work to reduce the risk of fires is recorded as Routine Tree Work. DRA claims it is inappropriate to require increased ratepayer funding for activities already embedded in historical expenses.

PG&E responds that its Fire Risk Reduction Work forecast is not embedded in historical amounts.

...

We conclude that PG&E has justified its forecast for Fire Risk Reduction Work and adopt it. As PG&E notes, the forecast increase is intended to cover more intensive inspections on the highest risk fire areas that is beyond the scope of work covered in embedded funds.

They obviously should have spent more money on fire risk reduction, but with the DRA opposing the amount they did ask for, it seems plausible that there was no reasonable prospect of getting approval to - as I’ve seen proposed - bury all the electricity lines. Not all safety improvements that PG&E asked for were approved; for example, PG&E wanted approval for a $10 million Distribution Integrity Management Program for its gas lines, but CPUC only approved $4.7 million, so it doesn't seem that they can expect blanket approval for safety measures.

I got started looking at this because of this Twitter thread by Chris Garnett. Garnett says:

The cynic in me says the system is working exactly as intended--PG&E is a quasi-public entity that looks private to laypeople, providing a layer of plausible deniability (and liability shielding) for the public officials with ultimate control

Having to choose between much higher rates, frequent blackouts, or massive fire losses is a unwinnable scenario for any elected to be in; obscuring responsibility is the only way to survive.

Some things I don’t know:

If PG&E spends less on safety, does it get higher profits? From what I can tell in the document, it appears not, but I’m not completely sure.

If PG&E spends more in general, do the executives get paid more? It looks like their compensation is approved in the expenditures process, but it’s probably easier to argue for larger executive pay if their overall budget is larger.

To what extent has PG&E captured its regulator and is therefore responsible for its mistakes?

What is the largest amount of fire risk mitigation spending PG&E could have gotten approval for?

Did PG&E have enough money to solve these problems, but mismanage it, or did it just not have enough money?

[michaelkeenan]

I just came across this passage in chapter 4 of Deep Work by Cal Newport:

As a popular speaker, Shankman spends much of his time flying. He eventually realized that thirty thousand feet was an ideal environment for him to focus. As he explained in a blog post, “Locked in a seat with nothing in front of me, nothing to distract me, nothing to set off my ‘Ooh! Shiny!’ DNA, I have nothing to do but be at one with my thoughts.” It was sometime after this realization that Shankman signed a book contract that gave him only two weeks to finish the entire manuscript. Meeting this deadline would require incredible concentration. To achieve this state, Shankman did something unconventional. He booked a round-trip business-class ticket to Tokyo. He wrote during the whole flight to Japan, drank an espresso in the business class lounge once he arrived in Japan, then turned around and flew back, once again writing the whole way—arriving back in the States only thirty hours after he first left with a completed manuscript now in hand. “The trip cost $4,000 and was worth every penny,” he explained.

In this section, Newport also describes J. K. Rowling booking a hotel room to write The Deathly Hallows, Williiam Shockley booking a hotel room to finish a better transistor design, Bill Gates retreating to a cabin for his twice-yearly Think Weeks, and writers building cabins on their property at significant expense.

Newport concludes the section:

In all of these examples, it’s not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources.

Plane travel makes me high. No pun intended. When I’m in an airport, or on a plane, I get into a weird hypomanic state where I start feeling great about myself, making grandiose plans, feeling like the world is my oyster. I’m more creative, more ambitious. Sometimes I leverage this to get stuff done (usually write blog posts I’ve been putting off) at the airport or on the plane. Other times I feel confident that I’ll still be able to do all this great stuff when I reach my destination, and am invariably disappointed; a few hours after landing, I go back to being as cautious and unambitious as usual.

I think this kind of thing is why I’m so interested in psychopharmacology. I don’t need some sort of deep transformative advice to turn my life around. I don’t need to reconcile with my true self. There are predictable times when I’m already exactly the person I want to be. If I could be the person I am at airports 100% of the time, I could change the world. I know being that kind of person is possible, because it happens. But I can’t control it. And I always think that surely there must be some minor tweak that I can do to replicate it. There’s nothing magical about airports, it just has to be unlocking some possible brainspace that’s already there. But I just. can’t. find. the. key.

[michaelkeenan]

The myth of the myth of the eight-hour sleep

You may have heard that people used to sleep in two four-hour blocks each night. As the BBC puts it in The Myth of the Eight-Hour Sleep in 2012, “We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.”

But I found this disputed in the 2017 book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.

Anthropological studies of pre-industrial hunter-gatherers have also dispelled a popular myth about how humans should sleep. Around the close of the early modern era (circa late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries), historical texts suggest that Western Europeans would take two long bouts of sleep at night, separated by several hours of wakefulness. Nestled in-between these twin slabs of sleep—sometimes called first sleep and second sleep, they would read, write, pray, make love, and even socialize.

This practice may very well have occurred during this moment in human history, in this geographical region. Yet the fact that no pre-industrial cultures studied to date demonstrate a similar nightly split-shift of sleep suggests that it is not the natural, evolutionarily programmed form of human sleep. Rather, it appears to have been a cultural phenomenon that appeared and was popularized with the western European migration. Furthermore, there is no biological rhythm—of brain activity, neurochemical activity, or metabolic activity—that would hint at a human desire to wake up for several hours in the middle of the night. Instead, the true pattern of biphasic sleep—for which there is anthropological, biological, and genetic evidence, and which remains measurable in all human beings to date—is one consisting of a longer bout of continuous sleep at night, followed by a shorter midafternoon nap.

[michaelkeenan]

He’s actually on to something with that last point:

The evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman at Harvard University conducted an elegant study in 2004 on hyraxes fed soft, cooked foods and tough, raw foods. Higher chewing strains resulted in more growth in the bone that anchors the teeth. He showed that the ultimate length of a jaw depends on the stress put on it during chewing.

Selection for jaw length is based on the growth expected, given a hard or tough diet. In this way, diet determines how well jaw length matches tooth size. It is a fine balancing act, and our species has had 200,000 years to get it right. The problem for us is that, for most of that time, our ancestors didn’t feed their children the kind of mush we feed ours today. Our teeth don’t fit because they evolved instead to match the longer jaw that would develop in a more challenging strain environment. Ours are too short because we don’t give them the workout nature expects us to.

What would you do if you were a brutal post-Soviet dictator of an oil-rich country?

Rename the months after yourself, your mother, and the concept of neutrality.

Require people taking the driving test to answer questions about your autobiography.

Ban lip syncing.

Discourage the use of gold teeth. Instead: “I watched young dogs when I was young. They were given bones to gnaw to strengthen their teeth. Those of you whose teeth have fallen out did not chew on bones. This is my advice.”

[michaelkeenan]

Why aren't there studies on whether hydration treats colds?

Everyone says hydration is important to treat colds:

“Drink plenty of water,” says the UK’s National Health Service

“Drink up” says WebMD

“Stay hydrated,” says Mayo Clinic

“Stay well hydrated,” says the New York Times

“Drink a Ton of Water,” says Fox News

So you’d think there would be some randomized controlled trials on this. But in 2004, the BMJ published an (attempted) review of the RCTs - “Drink plenty of fluids”: a systematic review of evidence for this recommendation in acute respiratory infections:

We found no randomised controlled trials comparing increased and restricted fluid regimens in patients with respiratory infections. 

I couldn’t find any studies since 2004. In 2018, the BMJ listed “Fluid Intake” under “No evidence of effect” in a publication about treating colds.

Why aren’t there any RCTs on this?

I get that water isn’t patentable and studies are expensive, so who will fund it? But people do occasionally study treatments that aren’t drugs. It seems like a reasonable enough thing for someone to want to study. Either you confirm the folk wisdom, and then you get mentioned whenever a serious (i.e. study-linking) publication wants to publish advice on colds, which happens every day. Or you disconfirm it, and maybe get some headlines, probably some controversy but more the makes-you-notable than ruins-your-life kind.

Are grant-makers are the limiting factor? Maybe hydration for colds is so obvious and well-known that they decide they’re better off funding something more useful.

[michaelkeenan]

My intention isn’t any overarching thesis about the hoax, not “yay” or “boo”. Like I said, the fat bodybuilding paper was bad and it reflects poorly on the journal for accepting it; but contrary to the coverage, Hypatia’s criticisms and rejection of the progressive stack paper make them look good to me. It’s complicated.

I considered looking into the accepted Mein Kampf paper (link here), but it’s 17 pages and I should be working. I had a brief look and it found it really boring and impenetrable to skim-reading. It sounds like you read it - can you excerpt some of the worst parts? I’d be curious to see how bad it is.

tl;dr: this latest academic journal hoax is over-hyped and the reporting on it is terrible A trio of academics submitted 20 ridiculous papers to various feminist/gender/related-studies journals in an effort to show the journals to be ridiculous. 7 papers were accepted. The coverage has been gloating and the Twitter response has been gleeful. But the more I look into it, the less there is to it. This is troubling, because smart people like Paul Graham and Patrick Collison have retweeted about it. WSJ article

The Chronicle of Higher Education article

Google Drive link with all the papers and the review comments

Here’s the trio’s essay on it. At times, I think they’re deliberately vague about which ridiculous papers were accepted and which weren’t. Here’s a paragraph of theirs:

We used other methods too, like, “I wonder if that ‘progressive stack’ in the news could be written into a paper that says white males in college shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can ‘experience reparations.’” That was our “Progressive Stack” paper. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it. Another tough one for us was, “I wonder if they’d publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The answer to that question also turns out to be “yes,” given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it.

The parallel structure of the paragraph, with ‘The answer to that question also turns out to be “yes”’ elides the very different fates of the two papers. Hypatia didn’t publish the Progressive Stack paper, and in fact they rejected it three times. But phrasing it this way, you can describe it in the same paragraph as an accepted paper, and many people won’t remember the difference. (Here’s a Harvard lecturer’s thread, with 10,000 Twitter Likes, describing the Progressive Stack paper as accepted.)

The coverage has been even worse. Here’s a Quillette piece on it, with a part that a Facebook friend quoted:

[Hypatia] invited resubmission of a paper arguing that “privileged students shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class at all and should just listen and learn in silence,” and that they would benefit from “experiential reparations” that include “sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or intentionally being spoken over.” The reviewers complained that this hoax paper took an overly compassionate stance toward the “privileged” students who would be subjected to this humiliation, and recommended that they be subjected to harsher treatment.

This isn’t just wrong; if anything, the reviewers opposed the shaming technique. Here are the full review comments for all three rejections of the paper. I don’t see any concern for an overly compassionate stance, or any recommendation of harsher treatment. When a reviewer does mention it, their concern is that it might be ineffective, and they’re uncomfortable with it. Here’s a quote from the second rejection:

What are experiential reparations? Say more about this. Also, some of your suggestions strike me as “shaming.” I’ve never had much success with shaming pedagogies, they seem to foment more resistance by members of dominant groups.

And from the same reviewer in the third rejection:

Find a place for the experiential reparations. This still makes me feel uncomfortable, because it’s shame-y and I’m not sure that student can see it otherwise.

After reading the reviewer comments, I’m very sympathetic to the reviewers, and I update toward thinking that their field is not a made-up illegible jargon-fest. They say things like:

“There are dozens of claims that are asserted and never argued for.”

“The author promises to explore key terms and explain why they are applicable to the classroom. They introduce: epistemic violence, epistemic oppression, epistemic violence, testimonial smothering, privilege-evasive epistemic pushback, epistemic exploitation, testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, willful ignorance, virtuous listening, and strategic ignorance. This is too much ground to cover!!”

“The scholarship is not as sound as it could be; that is, the basic structure of the argument is plausible and interesting, but the submission has far too many issues that get in the way of a clear and sound presentation of the author’s argument.”

“I think these are basically good insights, they need to be argued for more clearly and not just asserted as true. They are interesting claims, say more, say how, say why, and don’t just assert…Explain.”

These aren’t possible comments from a field full of fashionable nonsense that doesn’t mean anything. I’m sad to contemplate the reviewers trying to help someone fix the mistakes in their paper, while the authors’ intention is to slip through as many mistakes as possible. As the editor wrote in an encouraging cover letter:

At the same time ref #1 is encouraging about your revisions. You’ll note that ref #1 says, for example, that it’s your earlier improvements that have generated some of the new problems that need attention!

See also this Twitter thread by one of the reviewers for the Masturbation is Rape paper (which was rejected). It’s sad - he rejected the paper, but wrote some encouraging things, and the hoaxers quoted the positive parts in their essay.

I haven’t looked at all the papers in detail; this isn’t a thorough investigation of all of it. Maybe I happened across the least-bad papers and the most-misleading coverage first. I think the “fat bodybuilding” paper is just as bad as it sounds: “fat bodybuilding” would be unhealthy, unpopular, and no sport has ever been started by someone proposing it in a paper to an obscure journal.

But other accepted papers, I think, use a trick: invent some fake data of interest to the journal, and include a discussion section with some silly digressions. The journal accepts the paper because the core is the interesting data, and then the hoax coverage says that the paper is about the silly digressions. For example, the core of the dog park paper is a fake observational study showing that humans, especially males, are faster to stop male-on-male dog sexual encounters than male-on-female sexual encounters. I think that’s fine; it is actually indicative of heteronormativity or homophobia or whatever. The paper also has an angle about canine rape culture, and that is indeed silly, but the paper is not best described, as The Chronicle of Higher Education did, as being “about canine rape culture in dog parks in Portland”.

There are things to learn from this whole thing. I have a lower opinion of fat studies than I did before. But I have a higher opinion of the various fields that correctly objected to ideology-pleasing buzzword-filled digressions, and I wish the coverage noted that in equal measure. I get the impression you have to fake some interesting data to get much Sokal-style fashionable nonsense through, and even then, they’ll catch most of it.

(Maybe I’m minimizing the ridiculousness of what did get past the reviewers. I think a younger, more idealistic version of me would have been more shocked by it, like the commenters at Hacker News who think that peer review should be able to detect fabricated data. My mild reaction is partly due to not expecting Idealized Science-level rigor of these fields to start with.)

And no-one should be saying anything about the rejected papers, except for praising the journals for rejecting them. If you ask someone out, and they say they’re flattered but they only like you as a friend, don’t gloat that they said that they like you. It’s a rejection.

[michaelkeenan]

tl;dr: this latest academic journal hoax is over-hyped and the reporting on it is terrible A trio of academics submitted 20 ridiculous papers to various feminist/gender/related-studies journals in an effort to show the journals to be ridiculous. 7 papers were accepted. The coverage has been gloating and the Twitter response has been gleeful. But the more I look into it, the less there is to it. This is troubling, because smart people like Paul Graham and Patrick Collison have retweeted about it. WSJ article

The Chronicle of Higher Education article

Google Drive link with all the papers and the review comments

Here's the trio's essay on it. At times, I think they're deliberately vague about which ridiculous papers were accepted and which weren't. Here's a paragraph of theirs:

We used other methods too, like, “I wonder if that ‘progressive stack’ in the news could be written into a paper that says white males in college shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can ‘experience reparations.’” That was our “Progressive Stack” paper. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it. Another tough one for us was, “I wonder if they’d publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The answer to that question also turns out to be “yes,” given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it.

The parallel structure of the paragraph, with 'The answer to that question also turns out to be "yes"' elides the very different fates of the two papers. Hypatia didn't publish the Progressive Stack paper, and in fact they rejected it three times. But phrasing it this way, you can describe it in the same paragraph as an accepted paper, and many people won't remember the difference. (Here's a Harvard lecturer's thread, with 10,000 Twitter Likes, describing the Progressive Stack paper as accepted.)

The coverage has been even worse. Here's a Quillette piece on it, with a part that a Facebook friend quoted:

[Hypatia] invited resubmission of a paper arguing that “privileged students shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class at all and should just listen and learn in silence,” and that they would benefit from “experiential reparations” that include “sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or intentionally being spoken over.” The reviewers complained that this hoax paper took an overly compassionate stance toward the “privileged” students who would be subjected to this humiliation, and recommended that they be subjected to harsher treatment.

This isn't just wrong; if anything, the reviewers opposed the shaming technique. Here are the full review comments for all three rejections of the paper. I don't see any concern for an overly compassionate stance, or any recommendation of harsher treatment. When a reviewer does mention it, their concern is that it might be ineffective, and they're uncomfortable with it. Here’s a quote from the second rejection:

What are experiential reparations? Say more about this. Also, some of your suggestions strike me as "shaming." I’ve never had much success with shaming pedagogies, they seem to foment more resistance by members of dominant groups.

And from the same reviewer in the third rejection:

Find a place for the experiential reparations. This still makes me feel uncomfortable, because it’s shame-y and I’m not sure that student can see it otherwise.

After reading the reviewer comments, I'm very sympathetic to the reviewers, and I update toward thinking that their field is not a made-up illegible jargon-fest. They say things like:

"There are dozens of claims that are asserted and never argued for."

"The author promises to explore key terms and explain why they are applicable to the classroom. They introduce: epistemic violence, epistemic oppression, epistemic violence, testimonial smothering, privilege-evasive epistemic pushback, epistemic exploitation, testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, willful ignorance, virtuous listening, and strategic ignorance. This is too much ground to cover!!"

"The scholarship is not as sound as it could be; that is, the basic structure of the argument is plausible and interesting, but the submission has far too many issues that get in the way of a clear and sound presentation of the author’s argument."

"I think these are basically good insights, they need to be argued for more clearly and not just asserted as true. They are interesting claims, say more, say how, say why, and don't just assert...Explain."

These aren’t possible comments from a field full of fashionable nonsense that doesn’t mean anything. I'm sad to contemplate the reviewers trying to help someone fix the mistakes in their paper, while the authors' intention is to slip through as many mistakes as possible. As the editor wrote in an encouraging cover letter:

At the same time ref #1 is encouraging about your revisions. You'll note that ref #1 says, for example, that it's your earlier improvements that have generated some of the new problems that need attention!

See also this Twitter thread by one of the reviewers for the Masturbation is Rape paper (which was rejected). It's sad - he rejected the paper, but wrote some encouraging things, and the hoaxers quoted the positive parts in their essay.

I haven't looked at all the papers in detail; this isn’t a thorough investigation of all of it. Maybe I happened across the least-bad papers and the most-misleading coverage first. I think the "fat bodybuilding" paper is just as bad as it sounds: "fat bodybuilding" would be unhealthy, unpopular, and no sport has ever been started by someone proposing it in a paper to an obscure journal.

But other accepted papers, I think, use a trick: invent some fake data of interest to the journal, and include a discussion section with some silly digressions. The journal accepts the paper because the core is the interesting data, and then the hoax coverage says that the paper is about the silly digressions. For example, the core of the dog park paper is a fake observational study showing that humans, especially males, are faster to stop male-on-male dog sexual encounters than male-on-female sexual encounters. I think that's fine; it is actually indicative of heteronormativity or homophobia or whatever. The paper also has an angle about canine rape culture, and that is indeed silly, but the paper is not best described, as The Chronicle of Higher Education did, as being "about canine rape culture in dog parks in Portland".

There are things to learn from this whole thing. I have a lower opinion of fat studies than I did before. But I have a higher opinion of the various fields that correctly objected to ideology-pleasing buzzword-filled digressions, and I wish the coverage noted that in equal measure. I get the impression you have to fake some interesting data to get much Sokal-style fashionable nonsense through, and even then, they'll catch most of it.

(Maybe I’m minimizing the ridiculousness of what did get past the reviewers. I think a younger, more idealistic version of me would have been more shocked by it, like the commenters at Hacker News who think that peer review should be able to detect fabricated data. My mild reaction is partly due to not expecting Idealized Science-level rigor of these fields to start with.)

And no-one should be saying anything about the rejected papers, except for praising the journals for rejecting them. If you ask someone out, and they say they're flattered but they only like you as a friend, don't gloat that they said that they like you. It's a rejection.