Book review: Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink.
This well-written book might help a few people lose a significant amount of weight, and many to lose a tiny bit.
Some of his advice seems to demand as much willpower for me as a typical diet (e.g. eat slowly), but he gives many small suggestions and advises us to pick and choose the most appropriate ones. There’s enough variety and novelty among his suggestions that most people are likely to find at least one feasible method to lose a few pounds.
A large fraction of his suggestions require none of the willpower that a typical diet requires, but will be rejected by most people because their ego will cause them to insist that only people less rational than them are making the kind of mistakes that the book’s suggestions will fix.
Most of the book’s claims seem to be backed up by careful research. But I couldn’t find any research to back up the claim that approaches which cause people to eat 100 calories per day less for days will cause people to lose 10 pounds in ten months. He presents evidence that such a diet doesn’t need to make people feel deprived over the short time periods they’ve been studied. But there’s been speculation among critics of diet books that our bodies have a natural “set point” weight, and diets which work for a while have no long-term effect because lower body weights cause increased desire to return to the set point. This book offers only weak anecdotal evidence against that possibility.
But even if it fails as a diet book, it may help you understand how the taste of your food is affected by factors other than the food itself.
Archives
All posts by Peter
I had been skeptical of reports that low sodium diets produce health benefits (suspecting they were fighting the symptoms of high blood pressure rather than an underlying cause), but a new study has provided strong enough evidence to change my diet.
It’s time to switch from regular to low sodium soy sauce, and I’m going to reduce my seafood consumption (since I’ve started taking Omega-3 fish oil capsules and am eating more walnuts, my reasons for eating seafood have diminished).
Jeff Hummel recently gave an interesting talk on the subject of how the law should treat a contract that involves one person becoming enslaved to another. The title made the talk sound like a quaint subject of little importance to present day politics, and I attended because Hummel has a reputation for being interesting, not due to the title of the talk. But his arguments were designed to apply not just to the status that was outlawed by the 13th amendment, but also to military service (not just the draft, but any type where the soldier can’t quit at will) and marriage.
Hummel argues that instead of asking whether slavery ought to be illegal, we should ask what a legal system ought to do when presented with a dispute between two people over enforcement of a contract requiring slavery.
Some simplistic notions of contracts assume that valid contracts should always be honored and enforced at all costs, but the term efficient breach describes exceptions to that rule (if you’re unfamiliar with this subject, I recommend David Friedman’s book Law’s Order as valuable background to this post).
In the distant past, people who failed to fulfill contracts and had insufficient assets to compensate were often put in debtors prisons. That was generally abolished around the time that traditional slavery was abolished, and replaced with a more forgiving bankruptcy procedure. Hummel suggests that this wasn’t a random coincidence, and that a slave breaching his promise to his master ought to be treated like most other breaches of contracts. If bankruptcy is the appropriate worst case result of a breach of contract, then the same reasoning ought to imply that bankruptcy is the worst result a legal system should impose on a person who reneges on a promise to be a slave.
Hummel noted that the change from debtors prisons to bankruptcy happened around the time that the industrial revolution took off, and suggested that we should wonder whether the timing implies that we became wealthy enough that we could afford to abolish debtors prisons, and/or whether the change helped to cause the industrial revolution. Neither he nor I have a good argument for or against those possibilities.
If this rule were applied to military service, unpopular wars would become harder to fight, as many more soldiers would quit the military. As far as I can tell, peer pressure kept soldiers fighting in any war I think they ought to have fought, so I think this would be a clear improvement.
The talk ended with some disagreement between Hummel and some audience members about what should happen if people want to have a legal system that provides harsher penalties for breach of contract (assume for simplicity that they’re forming a new country in order to do this). Hummel disapproved of this, but it wasn’t clear whether he was doing more than just predicting nobody would want this. I think he should have once again rephrased the question in terms of what existing legal systems should do about such a new legal system. Military/police action to stop the new legal system seems excessive. Social pressure for it to change seems desirable. It was unclear whether anyone there had an opinion about intermediate responses such as economic boycotts, or whether the apparent disagreement was just posturing.
Molecular nanotechnology is likely to be heavily regulated when it first reaches the stage where it can make a wide variety of products without requiring unusual expertise and laboratories. The main justification for the regulation will be the risk of dangerous products (e.g. weapons). That justification will provide a cover for people who get money from existing manufacturing techniques to use the regulation to prevent typical manufacturing from becoming as cheap as software.
One way to minimize the harm of this special-interest would be to create an industry now that will have incentives to lobby in favor of making most benefits of cheap manufacturing available to the public. I have in mind a variation on a company like Kinko’s that uses ideas from the book Fab and the rapid prototyping industry to provide general purpose 3-D copying and printing services in stores that could be as widespread as photocopying/printing stores. It would then be a modest, natural, and not overly scary step for these stores to start using molecular assemblers to perform services similar to what they’re already doing.
The custom fabrication services of TAP Plastics sound like they might be a small step in this direction.
One example of a potentially lucrative service that such a store could provide in the not-too-distant future would be cheap custom-fit footwear. Trying to fit a nonstandard foot into one of a small number of standard shoes/boots that a store stocks can be time consuming and doesn’t always produce satisfying results. Why not replace that process with one that does a 3-D scan of each foot and prints out footwear that fits that specific shape (or at least a liner that customizes the inside of a standard shoe/boot)? Once that process is done for a large volume of footwear, the costs should drop below that of existing footwear, due to reduced inventory costs and reduced time for salespeople to search the inventory multiple times per customer.
I am often when people who produce bad results via poorly thought out policies are said to have good intentions.
Too many people divide intentions into two binary categories – good and bad. I prefer to see intentions as ranging along a continuum, with one extreme for plans that involve meticulous research to ensure that the results that the wisest people would expect are consistent with altruism, and the other extreme for plans where anyone can see that the expected results will be unnecessary harm. Most intentions fall in the middle of this spectrum, with people not intending any harm but allowing their expectations to be biased by their self-interest (often their self-interest in appearing altruistic).
It’s unrealistic to expect people to change the way they describe intentions so that it fully reflects such a continuum, so I’ll encourage people to take a smaller step and replace the current Manichean dualism with three categories of intentions – good (resulting from unusual effort to ensure desirable results), normal (i.e. most intentions), and bad (where we expect that the person was aware that the results involve unnecessary harm).
Book review: The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin
This book makes a plausible argument that string theorists are following a fad that has little scientific promise. But much of the book leaves me with the impression that the disputes he’s describing can only be fully understood by people who devote years to studying the math, and that the book has necessarily simplified things for laymen in ways that leave out many important insights.
The argument I found most impressive was his claim that relativity shows that background independence is important enough that any theory which unites relativity with quantum mechanics will preserve relativity’s background independence (a result which string theorists don’t pursue). Still, this seems to be little more than an intuition, and until someone creates the revolutionary theory that unites relativity and quantum mechanics, there ought to be plenty of doubt about which approach is best.
His sociological analysis of the problems with physics is less impressive. His endorsement of Feyeraband’s belief that there’s no such thing as a scientific method seems implausible (although it seems plausible for some stages of scientific thought, such as decisions about what questions to ask; maybe I ought to read Feyeraband’s writings on this subject).
I’m unimpressed by his lengthy gripes about the large fraction of funding that goes to routine science rather than revolutionary science. He implies this is making revolutionary science harder than it used to be, but I still see signs that a revolutionary scientist today would follow a path similar to Einstein’s and encounter no greater obstacles.
He wonders why those who fund scientific research don’t fund some research the way the best venture capitalists do – taking risks of 90% of their choices failing in order to get a few really big successes. He seems to think risk aversion is the main reason. What I see missing from his analysis is the absence of large rewards to the funder who picks the next Einstein. I think that to get VC-like attitudes in funding agencies, we would need systems where part of the money and prestige of a Nobel prize went to a few people who made the key decisions to fund the prize-winning research. I expect it would be hard to alter existing institutions to replace committee-based funding decisions with the kind of individual authority needed for these incentives to work.
His proposal to avoid having one unproven paradigm such as string theory dominate the funding in its area by limiting the funding to any one research program to one third of the total seems naive. The most direct effects of such a rule would be that researchers get around the rule by redefining the relevant categories (e.g. claiming that string theory research is diverse enough to qualify as several independent programs, or altering whatever category is used to define the total funding).
He wants academics who have authority to influence hiring decisions to have the kind of training in avoiding prejudice and promoting diversity that their commercial equivalents get. I suspect he is way too optimistic about what that training accomplishes – my impression is that it’s designed mostly to minimize the risk of lawsuits, and does more to hide biases than it does to prevent them.
Book review: Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea by George Lakoff.
This book makes a few good points about what cognitive science tells us about differing concepts associated with the word freedom. But most of the book consists of attempts to explain his opponents’ world view that amount to defending his world view by stereotyping his opponents as simplistic.
Even when I agree that the people he’s criticizing are making mistakes due to framing errors, I find his analysis very implausible. E.g. he explains Bush’s rationalization of Iraqi deaths as “Those killed and maimed don’t count, since they are outside the war frame. Moreover, Bush has done nothing via direct causation to harm any Iraqis and so has not imposed on their freedom”. Anyone who bothers to listen to Bush can see a much less stupid rationalization – Bush imagines we’re in a rerun of World War II, where the Forces of Evil have made it inevitable that some innocent people will die, and keeping U.S. hands clean will allow Evil to spread.
Lakoff’s insistence that his opponents are unable to understand indirect, systematic causation is ironic, since he shows no familiarity with most of the relevant science of complex effects of human action (e.g. economics, especially public choice economics).
He devotes only one sentence to what I regard as the biggest single difference between his worldview and his opponents’: his opponents believe in “Behavior as naturally governed by rewards and punishments.”
His use of the phrase “idea theft” to describe uses of the word freedom that differ from his use of that word is objectionable both due to the problems with treating ideas as property and with his false implication that his concept of freedom resembles the traditional U.S. concept of freedom (here’s an example of how he rejects important parts of the founders’ worldview: “One of the biggest mistakes of the Enlightenment was to counter this claim with the assumption that morality comes from reason. In fact, morality is grounded in empathy”).
If his claims of empathy are more than simply calling his opponents uncaring, then it may help explain his bias toward helping people who are most effective at communicating their emotions. For example, a minimum wage is part of his concept of freedom. People who have their wages increased by a minimum wage law tend to know who they are and often have labor unions to help spread their opinions. Whereas a person whom the minimum wage prevents from getting a job is less likely to see the cause or have a way to tell Lakoff about the resulting harm. (If you doubt the minimum wage causes unemployment, see http://www.nber.org/papers/w12663 for a recent survey of the evidence.)
This is symptomatic of the biggest problem with the book – he assumes political disagreements are the result of framing errors, not differences in understanding of how the world works, and wants to persuade people to frame issues his way rather than to use scientific methods when possible to better measure effects that people disagree about.
The book also contains a number of strange claims where it’s hard to tell whether Lakoff means what he says or is writing carelessly. E.g. “Whenever a case reaches a high court, it is because it does not clearly fit within the established categories of the law.” – I doubt he would deny that Hamdi v. Rumsfeld fit clearly within established habeas corpus law.
This is a book which will tempt people to believe that anyone who agrees with Lakoff’s policy advice is ignorant. But people who want to combat Lakoff’s ideology should resist that temptation to stereotype opponents. There are well-educated people (e.g. some behavioral economists) who have more serious arguments for many of the policies Lakoff recommends.
A story (not online) in a recent issue of Liberty Magazine reports that research by Arthur C. Brooks shows that people who favor government spending on poverty programs give less to charity than those who don’t support such spending.
If that were only true for monetary donations, there would be a number of plausible questions that could be raised. But Brooks gets around those by showing that it is also true of blood donations.
Brooks’ findings should not be used to justify any particular ideology, since a willingness to act charitably doesn’t necessarily correlate with an understanding of the effects of political policies. It might be interesting to know if a willingness to act charitably correlates with more careful education concerning the effects of political policies, but that would be hard to objectively measure. Brooks’ findings should be used only to discredit people who claim that there’s a simple way to determine that advocates of a welfare state are more compassionate than advocates of smaller government.
Here is an excerpt from Brooks’ book, and other reports on his research are here and here.
Book review: Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert Pape
This book presents carefully researched evidence that suicide bombers are motivated primarily by a desire to force democracies to withdraw troops from the territories claimed by the bombers, that they use rational strategies to achieve their goals, and that suicide bombers are acting mainly out of a sense of duty (like kamikazes) rather than the insanity of ordinary suicides or a desire for rewards in the afterlife.
The book’s style is fairly dry and slow to read.
He sounds like one of the most objective voices on this subject, although his objectivity is hard to verify. He is so careful to minimize partisan comments that his index only lists one entry for George Bush and none for Clinton. One place where this disappoints me is when he reports that no al-Qaeda suicide attackers came from any country described by the U.S. State Department as sponsoring terrorism. Since this covers a period including nearly 4 years of Clinton’s term, it suggests that the problem of falsely connecting governments such as Saddam’s with al-Qaeda is a more pervasive problem than just one dishonest president (although the State Department used a broader definition of terrorism than the suicide terrorism that the book deals with). I’m disappointed that Pape doesn’t analyze this enough to determine how much of this problem preceded Bush.
His use of the word nationalism to describe al-Qaeda’s aims doesn’t sound quite right, but it is close to the territorial, tribalistic motives that his evidence points to.
It’s only in the last few pages when he departs from reporting research and recommends strategies that he becomes unconvincing. His support for a fence over all of the U.S. – Mexican border seems unrelated to the rest of the book. Does he think stopping people from carrying bombs across the border will help (i.e. that it would be hard for a terrorist to make or buy a weapon after crossing the border)? Or does he hope to stop terrorists from crossing the border (which his book implies would require turning away nearly everyone from Islamic countries with U.S.-backed governments)?
He says “the idea that Islamic fundamentalism is on the verge of world domination … is pure fantasy”. His book provides some evidence for that conclusion, but it involves extrapolating from a small sample of terrorist campaigns to conclude al-Qaeda will stop at achievable goals. I’m uncomfortable with the way he dismissed such an important source of disagreement with excessive confidence and with limited analysis. (I’m also annoyed that he exaggerates the degree of alarmism of his opponents).
The Virgin Earth Challenge would be a great idea if we could count on it being awarded for a solution that resembles the headlines it’s been getting (e.g. $25M Bounty Offered for Global Warming Fix).
But the history of such prizes suggests that even for simple goals, describing the terms of a prize so that inventors can predict what will qualify for the award is nontrivial (e.g. see the longitude prize, where the winner appeared to have clearly met the conditions specified, yet wasn’t awarded the prize for 12 years because the solution didn’t meet the preconceptions of the board that judged it).
Anyone who looks past the media coverage and finds the terms of the challenge will see that the criteria are intended to be a good deal more complex than those of the longitude prize, that there’s plenty of ambiguity in them (although it’s possible they plan to make them clearer later), and that the panel of judges could be considered to be less impartial than the ideal one might hope for.
The criterion of “commercial viability” tends to suggest that a solution that required additional charitable donations to implement might be rejected even if there were donors who thought it worthy of funding, yet I doubt that’s consistent with the intent behind the prize. This ambiguity looks like simple carelessness.
The criterion of “harmful effects and/or other incidental consequences of the solution” represents a more disturbing ambiguity. Suppose I create nanobots which spread throughout the biosphere and sequester CO2 in a manner that offends some environmentalists’ feelings that the biosphere ought to be left in its natural state, but otherwise does no harm. How would these feelings be factored into the decision about whether to award the prize? Not to mention minor ambiguities such as whether making a coal worker’s job obsolete or reducing crop yields due to reduced atmospheric CO2 counts as a harmful effect.
I invite everyone who thinks Branson and Gore are serious about paying out the prize to contact them and ask that they clarify their criteria.