CFTC Sues Intrade

Posted by Peter on November 26, 2012
Posted in: Idea Futures, Investing, U.S. Politics.

The CFTC is suing Intrade for apparently allowing U.S. residents to trade contracts on gold, unemployment rates and a few others that it had agreed to prevent U.S. residents from trading. The CFTC is apparently not commenting on whether Intrade’s political contracts violate any laws.

U.S. traders will need to close our accounts.

The email I got says

In the near future we’ll announce plans for a new exchange model that will allow legal participation from all jurisdictions – including the US.

(no statement about whether it will involve real money, which suggests that it won’t).

I had already been considering closing my account because of the hassle of figuring out my Intrade income for tax purposes.

Willpower

Posted by Peter on November 11, 2012
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , .

Book review: The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It, by Kelly McGonigal.

This book starts out seeming to belabor ideas that seem obvious to me, but before too long it offers counterintuitive approaches that I ought to try.

The approach that I find hardest to reconcile with my intuition is that self-forgiveness over giving into temptations helps increase willpower, while feeling guilt or shame about having failed reduces willpower, so what seems like an incentive to avoid temptation is likely to reduce our ability to resist the temptation.

Another important but counterintuitive claim is that trying to suppress thoughts about a temptation (e.g. candy) makes it harder to resist the temptation. Whereas accepting that part of my mind wants candy (while remembering that I ought to follow a rule of eating less candy) makes it easier for me to resist the candy.

A careless author could have failed to convince me this is plausible. But McGonigal points out the similarities to trying to follow an instruction to not think of white bears – how could I suppress thoughts of white bears of some part of my mind didn’t activate a concept of white bears to monitor my compliance with the instruction? Can I think of candy without attracting the attention of the candy-liking parts of my mind?

As a result of reading the book, I have started paying attention to whether the pleasure I feel when playing computer games lives up to the anticipation I feel when I’m tempted to start one. I haven’t been surprised to observe that I sometimes feel no pleasure after starting the game. But it now seems easier to remember those times of pleasureless playing, and I expect that is weakening my anticipation or rewards.

The Signal and the Noise

Posted by Peter on October 29, 2012
Posted in: Book Reviews, Idea Futures, Investing, U.S. Politics. Tagged: , , .

Book review: The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t by Nate Silver.

This is a well-written book about the challenges associated with making predictions. But nearly all the ideas in it were ones I was already familiar with.

I agree with nearly everything the book says. But I’ll mention two small disagreements.

He claims that 0 and 100 percent are probabilities. Many Bayesians dispute that. He has a logically consistent interpretation and doesn’t claim it’s ever sane to believe something with probability 0 or 100 percent, so I’m not sure the difference matters, but rejecting the idea that those can represent probabilities seems at least like a simpler way of avoiding mistakes.

When pointing out the weak correlation between calorie consumption and obesity, he says he doesn’t know of an “obesity skeptics” community that would be comparable to the global warming skeptics. In fact there are people (e.g. Dave Asprey) who deny that excess calories cause obesity (with better tests than the global warming skeptics).

It would make sense to read this book instead of alternatives such as Moneyball and Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment, but if you’ve been reading books in this area already this one won’t seem important.

Quantified Self Conference

Posted by Peter on October 10, 2012
Posted in: Health, Science and Technology. Tagged: , , .

The recent Quantified Self conference was my first QS event, and was one of the best conferences I’ve attended.

I had been hesitant to attend QS events because they seem to attract large crowds, where I usually find it harder to be social. But this conference was arranged so that there was no real center where crowds gathered, so people spread out into smaller groups where I found it easier to join a conversation.

Kevin Kelly called this “The Measured Century”. People still underestimate how much improved measurement contributed to the industrial revolution. If we’re seeing a much larger improvement in measurement, people will likely underestimate the importance of that for quite a while.

The conference had many more ideas than I had time to hear, and I still need to evaluate many of he ideas I did hear. Here are a few:

I finally got around to looking at DIYgenomics, and have signed up for their empathy study (not too impressive so far) and their microbiome study (probiotics) which is waiting for more people before starting.

LUMOback looks like it will be an easy way to improve my posture. The initial version will require a device I don’t have, but it sounds like they’ll have an Android version sometime next year.

Steve Fowkes’ talk about urine pH testing sounds worth trying out.

Cholesterol, Saturated Fat and ApoE4

Posted by Peter on September 22, 2012
Posted in: Health. Tagged: , .

This past spring I adopted a diet resembling Dave Asprey’s. After about 5 weeks on it, I took a fancy blood test (trying to optimize things such as my vitamin D levels, Omega-6/Omega-3 ratio, etc). When I finally got the results back, I was shocked to find that the most important results involved my cholesterol levels.

Six years earlier my cholesterol had been good enough that I hadn’t had any reason to pay attention to it. But this May it was 369, with an LDL of 208, and an amazingly good HDL of 108.

If I’d been unlucky enough to get those results from Kaiser, I’d have felt helpless for quite a while. But the WellnessFX report also mentioned that my ApoE Genotype is 3/4. When I got around to researching the implications of that, I figured out that the ApoE4 gene can contribute to some unusual reactions to fat, and that a few people with a copy of it had reported skyrocketing cholesterol in response to a diet of paleo foods plus much coconut and grass-fed butter.

So I cut back on my fat intake, and figured out how to test how my diet affects my cholesterol. I’ve been using CardioChek about once a week. It’s unreliable (about 50 mg/dL too low, judging by my two comparisons with Kaiser). And I’ve only been getting total cholesterol numbers. I could get better info by also measuring HDL with it and subtracting that from the total to get the number that I really want to reduce. But that would require getting a second blood sample, and I barely have enough patience to take one good sample (I often end up with too little blood and need to start over).

With all the uncertainty about the accuracy of those numbers and the time delay between altering my fat intake and when my cholesterol levels showed my response, I wasn’t too optimistic about getting clear results. But the first ways I quantified the evidence gave correlations of 0.540 or 0.418 using 12 or 13 data points (the first of those excludes an implausibly low reading the first time I used it). That’s using an exponential moving average of my saturated fat intake that roughly corresponds to the past week. Other averages of my saturated fat intake have produced somewhat similar results.

My saturated fat consumption ranged 23.5 to 53 grams per day for that data, and the cholesterol levels at the high end of the range are something like 30-50 mg/dL higher than the low end.

So I see a clear and moderately strong connection.

My limited attempts to analyze subclasses of saturated fat have been inconclusive.

Now, how good or bad is the combination of very healthy HDL and disturbingly high LDL?

There are a variety of algorithms to estimate my risk based on my cholesterol levels. Some weight LDL heavily and say I ought to be concerned about the higher readings. Others weight HDL more, and say I’m unusually healthy. The TC/HDL criterion says I have improved with each of the tests I’ve taken [excluding the home tests that only measured TC].

Without strong evidence about which algorithm is more reliable, I’m disposed to keep my cholesterol somewhat close to normal levels.

What about the evidence that societies with high coconut consumption are healthy? That could mean that high cholesterol with ApoE4 is a healthy sign – the body sees lots of rich food, and decides it devote more resources than normal to reducing inflammation. Or it might mean that ApoE4 genes got selected out of those populations.

It looks like coconuts have been eaten for the longest time in islands of the west Pacific, with the Philippines currently having the highest consumption for a sizable country, and high consumption extending west to India.

According to this study the ApoE4 prevalence in countries from the Philippines to India (including China, which presumably hasn’t had much dietary coconut in the north) ranges from 6 to 10 percent, as opposed to 17 percent in the US (which is about average). (This paper(paywalled) has some different-looking numbers on a not very readable map.)

So it looks like there has been enough selection against ApoE4 in those areas that I shouldn’t feel safe eating lots of coconut fat. But I suspect that there are other relevant genes which make it hard to generalize to everyone with an ApoE4 gene.

Eating Insects

Posted by Peter on September 5, 2012
Posted in: Health. Tagged: .

In my quest for a diet that more closely resembles what we evolved to eat, I tried eating some insects.

Fluker’s Gourmet Canned Mealworms are ok, but the taste isn’t memorable. The texture is interesting, but hardly a reason to eat them again. They’re sold as pet food, and labeled not for human consumption. That might mean too much bacteria, but cooking should kill those. Could they have pesticides? Maybe, but insects are usually what pesticides kill, so it would be odd to use pesticides to grow them.

I tried some insects from Hotflix, which markets them as candy. All seem to be coated with varying amounts of sugar. The “chocolate covered insects” are mostly packaging, and have an ingredient list that includes hydrogenated oil but no chocolate. The various flavors of Larvets are better – mostly insect with only a small amount of sugar, spices, and artificial flavor or color. The spices make them taste fairly good, but the price per gram makes them too expensive to be a reasonable source of significant nutrition, and the artificial additives make me consider them less safe to eat than the bugs sold as pet food.

It seems like there ought to be a way to get affordable healthy nutrition from insects, and I’ll keep looking occasionally, but we probably need more demand for economies of scale to make that practical.

Omega-6 Revisited

Posted by Peter on August 18, 2012
Posted in: Health. Tagged: .

I’ve researched omega-6 some more and the evidence that it is harmful is much less clear than I previously thought.

There’s some evidence that omega-6/omega-3 ratios above some threshold (between 2.5 and 4?) are harmful, but also arguments against focusing on the ratio:

This paper reviews a variety of studies that, in the aggregate, suggest that the ratio is, both on theoretical and evidential grounds, of little value. Metrics that include the n-3 FAs alone, especially eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acids, appear to hold the greatest promise.

While omega-6 can be converted into proinflammatory molecules, it also has antiinflammatory properties.

in observational studies, higher omega-6 PUFA consumption was associated with unaltered or lower levels of inflammatory markers

in 1 study in Israel,39 where 25% of the population consumes >12% of energy as omega-6 PUFA, an inverse association was found between adipose LA [Linoleic acid] and acute myocardial infarction after controlling for other omega-6 PUFAs.

This meta-analysis seems to be the most rigorous analysis:

They looked for

all RCT that increased PUFA and reported relevant CHD outcomes

For non-fatal myocardial infarction (MI)+CHD death, the pooled risk reduction for mixed n-3/n-6 PUFA diets was 22 % (risk ratio (RR) 0·78; 95 % CI 0·65, 0·93) compared to an increased risk of 13 % for n-6 specific PUFA diets (RR 1·13; 95 % CI 0·84, 1·53).

They found 7 randomized trials that raised omega-6 levels and provided a tolerable amount of info about other fats. Three that had apparently low dietary omega-3 showed that higher omega-6 combined with lower trans-fats produced more heart disease/death (i.e. above some high omega-6/omega-3 ratio, omega-6 can cause more harm than trans-fats), while four where the higher omega-6 was combined with arguably adequate omega-3 and lower trans-fats had less heart disease/death with that combination (i.e. omega-6 might have helped or might have caused harm that was small compared to trans-fats).

From another paper:

High intakes of linoleic acid were not associated with excess risk of AMI [acute myocardial infarction]
…
arachidonic acid, the long chain n?6 derivative of linoleic acid, was positively associated with AMI

(Arachidonic acid is found mainly in eggs, meat, and seafood).

Other sources suggest arachidonic acid is safe, mentioning studies of biomarkers that show no harm from arachidonic acid, but biomarkers are less convincing than actual disease. There are some reports that ratio of arachidonic acid to eicosapentaenoic acid (AA:EPA) in blood plasma is a useful measure of cardiovascular problems.

In my previous post I expressed doubts about high omega-3 diets, but this paper on hunter-gatherer diets gives the following estimates for fat intake:

  • Omega-3 9.6g/day
  • Omega-6 14.2g/day
  • Saturated 18g/day
  • Monunsaturated 44.3g/day

I don’t know how typical this is of our ancestors, but at least it’s likely within the range of diets that we’re adapted to. This suggests it’s hard to get too much omega-3 or too much fat from seafood (I’d get too much protein if I ate much more than 2 pounds of salmon, but not too much of any type of fat). It also suggests that it’s reasonable to aim for high enough omega-3 that I can’t easily get an omega-6/omega-3 ratio that is high enough to be of much concern.

More from that paper:

Compiled ethnographic studies of 229 hunter-gatherer societies, as well as quantitative studies of hunter-gatherers have demonstrated that animal foods contributed slightly more than half (55-65%) of the daily energy, whereas plant foods would have made up the remainder (35-45%) of the average daily caloric intake. Of the energy obtained from animal foods, historically-studied hunter-gatherers typically derived half of their energy from aquatic animals and the other half from terrestrial animals. Animal food intake would have also been constrained by the physiologic protein ceiling, which has been shown to occur between 30 to 41% of total energy.

There is an increasing body of evidence that suggests high protein diets may improve blood lipid profiles and thereby lessen the risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD).

[I plan to check this evidence later.]

The Righteous Mind

Posted by Peter on July 27, 2012
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind, U.S. Politics. Tagged: , , , .

Book review: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt.

This book carefully describes the evolutionary origins of human moralizing, explains why tribal attitudes toward morality have both good and bad effects, and how people who want to avoid moral hostility can do so.

Parts of the book are arranged to describe the author’s transition from having standard delusions about morality being the result of the narratives we use to justify them and about why other people had alien-sounding ideologies. His description about how his study of psychology led him to overcome his delusions makes it hard for those who agree with him to feel very superior to those who disagree.

He hints at personal benefits from abandoning partisanship (“It felt good to be released from partisan anger.”), so he doesn’t rely on altruistic motives for people to accept his political advice.

One part of the book that surprised me was the comparison between human morality and human taste buds. Some ideologies are influenced a good deal by all 6 types of human moral intuitions. But the ideology that pervades most of academia only respect 3 types (care, liberty, and fairness). That creates a difficult communication gap between them and cultures that employ others such as sanctity in their moral system, much like people who only experience sweet and salty foods would have trouble imagining a desire for sourness in some foods.

He sometimes gives the impression of being more of a moral relativist than I’d like, but a careful reading of the book shows that there are a fair number of contexts in which he believes some moral tastes produce better results than others.

His advice could be interpreted as encouraging us to to replace our existing notions of “the enemy” with Manichaeans. Would his advice polarize societies into Manichaeans and non-Manichaeans? Maybe, but at least the non-Manichaeans would have a decent understanding of why Manichaeans disagreed with them.

The book also includes arguments that group selection played an important role in human evolution, and that an increase in cooperation (group-mindedness, somewhat like the cooperation among bees) had to evolve before language could become valuable enough to evolve. This is an interesting but speculative alternative to the common belief that language was the key development that differentiated humans from other apes.

Sleep Improvements

Posted by Peter on July 22, 2012
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: .

I’ve made several changes over the past few months that have improved my sleep.

A cool environment is important to my sleep, and Chili Pad has proven to be a better way to cool myself on warm nights than attempts at air conditioning. I have it pump water at 72 or 73 degrees through small tubes sitting between me and the mattress. I was careful to buy enough tubes to put the pump in the next room where its noise and light aren’t noticeable. One drawback is that the straps that should hold it in place no the mattress weren’t quite the right length, and broke immediately – that creates a minor problem where it slides around a bit.

The second change was to use only lighting with no blue light an hour before going to bed. I had tried this more than a year ago by placing a red filter in front of my computer monitor and turning off most of the regular lighting. That produced little change even though it cut out 90 to 95% of the blue light. Last week I bought a red light to replace the remaining regular lighting, and now I see a moderate improvement in how quickly I can fall asleep.

I’ve started occasionally using a sleep mask so that I can sleep a bit later than sunrise instead of letting the sun completely control when I wake up. But I don’t like the way it feels, so I won’t use it often.

I’ve also started using a Zeo, and intend to measure the effects of caffeine on my sleep. But I don’t like wearing the headband, so I won’t use the Zeo for long periods of time.

The Intelligence Paradox

Posted by Peter on July 3, 2012
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , .

Book review: The Intelligence Paradox: Why the Intelligent Choice Isn’t Always the Smart One, by Satoshi Kanazawa.

This book is entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking, but not very well thought out.

The main idea is that intelligence (what IQ tests measure) is an adaptation for evolutionarily novel situations, and shouldn’t be positively correlated with cognitive abilities that are specialized for evolutionarily familiar problems. He defines “smart” so that it’s very different from intelligence. His notion of smart includes a good deal of common sense that is unconnected with IQ.

He only provides one example of an evolutionarily familiar skill which I assumed would be correlated with IQ but which isn’t: finding your way in situations such as woods where there’s some risk of getting lost.

He does make and test many odd predictions about high IQ people being more likely to engage in evolutionarily novel behavior, such as high IQ people going to bed later than low IQ people. But I’m a bit concerned at the large number of factors he controls for before showing associations (e.g. 19 factors for alcohol use). How hard would it be to try many combinations and only report results when he got conclusions that fit his prediction? On the other hand, he can’t be trying too hard to reject all evidence that conflicts with his predictions, since he occasionally reports evidence that conflicts with his predictions (e.g. tobacco use).

He reports that fertility is heritable, and finds that puzzling. He gives a kin selection based argument saying that someone with many siblings ought to put more effort into the siblings reproductive success and less into personally reproducing. But I see no puzzle – I expect people to have varying intuitions about whether the current abundance of food will last, and pursue different strategies, some of which will be better if food remains abundant, and others better if overpopulation produces a famine.

He’s eager to sound controversial, and his chapter titles will certainly offend some people. Sometimes those are backed up by genuinely unpopular claims, sometimes the substance is less interesting. E.g. the chapter title “Why Homosexuals Are More Intelligent than Heterosexuals” says there’s probably no connection between intelligence and homosexual desires, but there’s a connection between intelligence and how willing people are to act on those desires (yawn).

Here is some evidence against his main hypothesis.