A Crooked Science

Stanley Fish has an editorial today, Think Again-French Theory in America, which is a great reflection and historical contextualization of deconstructionism.  He builds much of the essay off the forthcoming book by Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States.

 

The reason I like this piece by Fish is his ability to at one hand show the strengths and limits of a deconstructionist stance and on the other to show the polarization into the relativist versus absolutist “Culture Wars” in the US.

 

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Experiments and Effort

Gina Kolata describes an experiment by Ethan Sims in her book Rethinking Thin, where Sims put thin people on a forced-eating diet. Sims wanted to know whether people “would have a hard time gaining weight.” Kolata’s description of Sims’ and other similar experiments (such as putting people on starvation diets) plays a central role in establishing one of her main points—obesity is a biological problem.

In his first experiment with college students, Sims found that “these subjects found it all but impossible to gain much weight; no matter how much they tried to eat, they just could not become obese.” Sims reasoned that perhaps the students raised their activity levels and were burning off more calories. “He thought of the perfect subjects, people who really have no chance to cheat and burn off calories: prisoners.”

The study volunteers in prison did indeed gain weight. “But producing obesity turned out to be much harder than Sims had anticipated. The men increased their weight by 20 to 25 percent, but it took four to six months for them to do this, eating as much as they could every day. Some ended up eating 10,000 calorie a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that the researcher study had attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.”

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The Decisions They Are-A-Changin’

Bob Dylan sang in his iconic The Times They Are-A-Changin’:

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.

The Waters Have Grown

We are on the verge of a sea-change in our thinking about decision making. Rather than the universal and utilitarian approach of rational choice and subjective rankings, we are coming to recognize that our every-day decisions, the ones that drench us to the bone, that sink or change us, come in the moment. Our choices are driven by often poorly articulated but deeply held values, linked to the meanings culture give us, and shaped by the unequal circumstances of our lives.

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Putting Two and Two Together

One headline this week: “Neglect, Abuse Seen in 90,000 Infants” which starts: “About 1 in 50 infants in the U.S. have been neglected or abused, according to the first national study of the problem in that age group.”

Another headline this week: “Childhood Mental Health Problems Blight Adult Working Life” whose first line repeats the mantra: “Mental health problems in childhood blight adult working life, suggests research published ahead of print in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.”

Putting them together? We can look to the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, based on information from more than 17,000 members of the Kaiser Permanente HMO in California. Here’s part from the CDC summary:

“As the number of Adverse Childhood Experiences increase, the risk for the following health problems increases in a strong and graded fashion:

-alcoholism and alcohol abuse
-chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
-depression
-fetal death
-health-related quality of life
-illicit drug use
-ischemic heart disease (IHD)
-liver disease
-risk for intimate partner violence
-multiple sexual partners
-sexually transmitted diseases (STDs)
-smoking
-suicide attempts
-unintended pregnancies

Successful Weight Loss

Is successful weight loss possible?  Beginning from the presumption of “will power,” no.  People who “diet” generally lose and gain weight in a yo-yo fashion, often with greater rebounds.  But some people do successfully lose weight and maintain that loss.  What makes them different, and what lessons does that hold for thinking about weight loss?

 

Let us start with this 2005 article by leading researcher Rena Wing and Suzanne Phelan.  Here’s the abstract:

There is a general perception that almost no one succeeds in long-term maintenance of weight loss. However, research has shown that 20% of overweight individuals are successful at long-term weight loss when defined as losing at least 10% of initial body weight and maintaining the loss for at least 1 y. The National Weight Control Registry provides information about the strategies used by successful weight loss maintainers to achieve and maintain long-term weight loss. National Weight Control Registry members have lost an average of 33 kg and maintained the loss for more than 5 y. To maintain their weight loss, members report engaging in high levels of physical activity (1 h/d), eating a low-calorie, low-fat diet, eating breakfast regularly, self-monitoring weight, and maintaining a consistent eating pattern across weekdays and weekends. Moreover, weight loss maintenance may get easier over time; after individuals have successfully maintained their weight loss for 2–5 y, the chance of longer-term success greatly increases. Continued adherence to diet and exercise strategies, low levels of depression and disinhibition, and medical triggers for weight loss are also associated with long-term success. National Weight Control Registry members provide evidence that long-term weight loss maintenance is possible and help identify the specific approaches associated with long-term success.

 

A 2001 review article by Rena Wing and James Hill makes their argument more explicit: “common behavioral strategies, including eating a diet low in fat, frequent self-monitoring of body weight and food intake, and high levels of regular physical activity.”

 

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Keep Communication Open: Net Neutrality

Sometimes it’s about the medium, not just the neuroanth message.  Damian Kulash has an editorial today, Beware the New New Thing, on net neutrality and how companies are trying to sell us something “good” (for those who can afford it) that replaces something better that we already have, an open Internet.  There’s just one problem, we might have that–but not legally.

Here’s one good excerpt: “For some parallel examples: there are only two guitar companies who make most of the guitars sold in America, but they don’t control what we play on those guitars. Whether we use a Mac or a PC doesn’t govern what we can make with our computers. The telephone company doesn’t get to decide what we discuss over our phone lines. It would be absurd to let the handful of companies who connect us to the Internet determine what we can do online. Congress needs to establish basic ground rules for an open Internet, just as common carriage laws did for the phone system.”

To support net neutrality, you can go to the website Save the Internet.