Gifted Adults

A friend, along with his "profoundly gifted" (incredibly intelligent) son recently attended a conference of the Davidson Institute, an organization that is doing God's work (figuratively speaking, of course) in lending a hand to gifted children and their parents. As we all know from various recent discussions of tracking in schools (e.g.), it can be said with little exaggeration that schools do not care about intelligent kids, leaving these kids and their parents struggling for solutions.

My friend told me that he talked with a lecturer at the conference, who apprised him of the existence of "gifted adults". Of course we know that very intelligent adults exist, but this is a different phenomenon - one heretofore unknown to me. (Here is one site dealing with the issue.)

If you're a Stanford professor or a successful physician, you're probably not a gifted adult, because just as the professor and the physician will see little need to join Mensa, they won't see any need to define themselves as gifted adults. They've already obtained their validation. Gifted adults are almost by definition, it seems to me, struggling to discover who they are, why they're so different, and why the world seems so off base.

This topic is new to me, I can't say much about it, but the notion of a gifted adult in the sense I described sparks immediate recognition for me. The intelligent person - interested in ideas, with piles of books waiting to be read, whose greatest joys come in attempting to learn and understand - will feel quite out of place in a world where water cooler conversation revolves around sports, celebrities, and TV shows about sports and celebrities. The world can become a lonely place, and one gets tired to the point of self-reproof at the constant realization that, not to put too fine a point on it, most people are pretty dumb and pretty ignorant, and have no desire to do anything about it. (That goes double for whites who are ignorant and apathetic about what's happening in this country.)

Curiosity is related to the one of the Big Five personality factors, openness to experience, which in turn is correlated with IQ. I used to wonder at the incurious nature of, well, most everyone, seeing it as a vice. But I now think that most people can't help it; they're not smart enough to be curious.

Gifted adults are those who are smart enough to do almost anything, but haven't found their place in the world, and besides are confused about why the world doesn't value the same things they do. They can't relate. Fortunately, the internet has been a godsend for them.

Update: I added the map from the Davidson Institute, which shows whether states are actually willing to spend money on gifted students. (Link.) States in green signify that "gifted programming is mandated and fully funded", those in red neither, the others in between. Interesting that the seven states with the highest rating are Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Alaska. Maybe it's because these states recognize that their school systems aren't the greatest and that the gifted need help. Among the lowest ranked states are Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Delaware, and South Dakota, states with overwhelming white majorities with, one imagines, good schools in which the gifted already get everything they need. California ranks in the second category from the bottom.

Paleo Diet and Ethnicity

Loren Cordain, one of the originators of the idea of "paleolithic eating", discusses here some possible objections to the idea that mankind has not evolved to eat grains. The objections usually are in the form of, "man has had 10,000 years to adapt evolutionarily to agriculture, and has adapted to other things in his environment, so in theory he could have adapted to agriculture." Cordain offers a long and involved response, but in essence his response is that 1)the gut and the digestive process are complex systems that need much more than a simple mutation to change radically, and 2)we see little evidence of such change.

Critics sometimes use the example of lactose tolerance as a change that occurred rapidly and that changed radically what humans can consume. Cordain:

Because humans normally maintain lactase activity in their guts until weaning (approximately 4 years of age in modern-day hunter-gatherers), the type of genetic change (neoteny) required for adult lactase maintenance can occur quite rapidly if there is sufficient selective pressure. Maintenance of childlike genetic characteristics (neoteny) is what occurred with the geologically rapid domestication of the dog during the late Pleistocene and Mesolithic [Budiansky 1992].

Whether humans can or did evolve in an adaptation to agriculture, specifically the eating of grains, there's a relatively easy comparison to make, whether different ethnic groups have differing nutritional requirements or physiology. Some groups have been exposed to agriculture for hundreds of generations, other for very few:

The complete re-arrangement of gut morphology or evolution of new enzyme systems capable of handling novel food types is quite unlikely to have occurred in humans in the short time period since the advent of agriculture. Some populations have had 500 generations to adapt to the new staple foods of agriculture (cereals, legumes, and dairy) whereas others have had only 1-3 (i.e., Inuit, Amerindians, etc). Because anatomical and physiological studies among and between various racial groups indicate few differences in the basic structure and function of the gut, it is reasonable to assume that there has been insufficient evolutionary experience (500 generations) since the advent of agriculture to create large genetic differences among human populations in their ability to digest and assimilate various foods.

Cordain, like myself, also doesn't think too highly of the "blood type diet", it being far too simplistic to make much sense.

What's up with that Italian bond seizure?

You've probably read the story of how Italian police seized $134 billion (with a 'b') of U.S. Treasury bonds from two Japanese travelers. These were so-called "bearer bonds", which I thought until now only existed in the movies. Here's a Bloomberg article that will get you up to speed.

The situation is so bizarre and twisted that it makes no sense. Were the "Japanese" really North Koreans? Were the bonds real? Why would anyone be traveling with a suitcase full of bonds worth $134 billion?

Oh, guess what. The travelers are gone. Released. Nowhere to be found. The U.S. Treasury has apparently not seen the allegedly counterfeit bonds before pronouncing them fake.

This could spell big trouble. If banks have accepted these bonds in the past, counterfeit bonds in other words, they're in trouble. On the other hand, if the bonds are real, we're in trouble, because that means either that the U.S. government has off-balance sheet debt - in which case a number of government officials need to be in prison - or it means that the Japanese secretly want to dump most of their U.S. Treasury bond holdings. In that case. we're still screwed.

Karl Denninger says that his "BS detector is ringing off the hook".

Another Proponent of the Unified Disease Theory

Molecular biologist Art Ayers, Ph.D., writes the blog Cooling Inflammation (thanks to Cristian Stremiz), and he appears to be an exponent of something like the unified theory of disease, i.e. inflammation causes most of the degenerative "diseases of civilization". For example:

It is shocking to me that omega-3 fish oils (EPA/DHA) or even flax seed oil, have been found to be effective treatments for numerous diseases that range from allergies, arthritis, inflammatory bowel diseases, depression and even septic shock and multiple organ failure. Aspirin has been used to treat infertility and post partum depression, and at high levels to treat cancer.

That is, since omega-3 fatty acids have been found to be effective against a wide range of diseases, and since these fatty acids work by virtue of their anti-inflammatory properties, inflammation is behind these illnesses. The use of probiotics is another example where benefits exist over a wide range of illnesses, apparently by reducing inflammation arising from the gut.

Much, much more at Cooling Inflammation.

Self-Experimentation: Finding What Works

Seth Roberts is perhaps the best-known - to me anyway - exponent of self-experimentation. (His paper, Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight; a profile of Roberts in Scientific American.) A commenter at Seth's blog recently summarized the advantages of self-experiments as opposed to clinical trials:

I work in the investing industry, where return on investment, adjusted for risk taken, is the ultimate goal. Seth’s discoveries, and the “pathetically easy” other solutions he highlights on his blog, all have tremendously high returns on investment, with very little risk. A clinical trial, on the other hand, requires a huge investment of time and money, often with very little return in the form of new knowledge learned, and sometimes at significant risk to the patients enrolled. Furthermore, drugs that are discovered as a result of these clinical trials often themselves have low risk-adjusted returns for the patients who take them, when their costs, side effects, and the likelihood that down the road the establishment will revise its thinking about their efficacy are taken into account.

Just to take one example: compare the risk-adjusted return on investment for society of the Shangri-La Diet to that of Fen-Phen, both of which targeted the identical problem. There is no comparison, even if SLD turns out to work only for a minority of people.

An article attacking Roberts by John Ford, M.D., Trouble in Shangri-La, totally misses the point when he complains that Roberts hasn't rigorously proven his diet through clinical trials. Ford's true contention with Roberts is that the latter has invented (or discovered) a novel, safe, and effective weight-loss method and wrote a best-selling diet book, none of which he ran by the medical establishment first. Roberts doesn't claim "proof", he merely says that it works for many people, which is obviously true, and that he has a hypothesis as to its mechanism. Ford would rather have people struggle with obesity until "proof" arrives.

In his book Psychiatry and the Human Condition, Bruce Charlton also makes a case for self-experimentation and self-treatment:

Psychiatric signs and symptoms - such as anxiety, insomnia, malaise, fatigue - are part of life for most people, for much of the time. This is the human condition. [...] This book argues that obsolete categories of diseases and drugs should be scrapped. The new framework of understanding implies that clinical management should focus on the treatment of biologically-valid symptoms and signs, and include a much larger role for self-treatment.

Virtually everyone has some sort of health problem, whether physical or mental, and doctors are just not equipped to handle them all. Many of them also have the same standards of proof as Dr. Ford quoted above: if there hasn't been a double-blind clinical trial, then it's just something you read on the internet. Smart people who are willing to do a little digging can do much better than that.

Kanazawa: Asians can't do science

It's often said - even by occasional commenters at this blog - that the U.S. needs high IQ immigrants to stay competitive, we whites evidently not being either smart or creative enough to be competitive on our own. In that regard I found, via Steve Hsu, an exchange between the evolutionary psychologists Geoffrey Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa. Kanazawa seems to enjoy being provocative, and this (pdf) is what he said about Asians and their ability to do science:

Abstract: For cultural, social, and institutional reasons, Asians cannot make original contributions to basic science. I therefore doubt Miller's prediction for the Asian future of evolutionary psychology. I believe that its future will continue to be in the United States and Europe. [...]

1. Asians can't think
And they certainly cannot think outside the box. Miller is correct to point out that East Asians have slightly higher mean IQs than Europeans (Lynn and Vanhanen, 2002). However, East Asians have not been able to make creative use of their intelligence. While they are very good at absorbing existing knowledge via rote memory (hence their high standardized test scores in math and science) or adapt or modify existing technology (hence their engineering achievements), they have not been able to make original contributions to basic science. [...]

This problem has long been known to East Asian specialists as the "creativity problem" (Eberts and Eberts, 1995, pp. 123-127; Taylor, 1983, pp. 92-123; van Wolferen, 1989, pp. 89-90). Some argue that the ideographic Asian languages curb abstract thinking and creativity among Asians (Hannas, 2003). [...]

2. Asians can't write
Nor can they speak English. While Miller correctly points out that East Asians have slightly higher overall IQs, he neglects to mention the particular pattern of Asian intelligence. East Asians have much higher visualization IQ than verbal IQ (Lynn, 2006, pp. 121-148). For East Asians in Asia, in studies which assess both types of IQ, the mean visualization IQ is 108.6 while the mean verbal IQ is 101.4. Their high visualization IQs explain East Asians' relative success in mathematics and mathematics-based sciences such as physics and chemistry. Of the 27 Nobel prizes awarded to Asians in Table 1, 10 have been in physics, 5 in chemistry, and 3 in physiology or medicine; there have only been 5 Nobel literature prizes awarded to Asians, and 1 in economics (Amartya K. Sen).

Whoa! Kanazawa validates a few stereotypes too:

4. The conformist culture of Asia
Part of the reason why Asians cannot think for themselves and make original and creative contributions to science is because they are too conformist. One of the factors that Miller identifies as a possible obstacle to the Asian future of evolutionary psychology ("academic conservatism") is actually fatal. Scientific revolutions happen by challenging the established paradigms. No conformists have ever brought about a scientific revolution.
Once again, at LSE, we have an enormous problem of plagiarism among our Asian students. Despite the fact that each student, Asian or otherwise, must sign a declaration that their work is original and they have not plagiarized, many Asian students simply copy the work of established scholars. To them it is a venerable act of honoring their masters to "borrow" from them, by copying their words verbatim. No matter how much we tell them that it is wrong, Asian students simply cannot understand why it is wrong to honor their intellectual masters by faithfully reproducing their work. Needless to say, this is no recipe for scientific progress.

I merely pass this along.

Busting Blood Lipids Paleo-Style

William Davis, the cardiologist who writes The Heart Scan Blog, explains how a patient of his greatly improved his serum triglycerides. No drugs, either.

The method:

1. 3600 mg/d omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil. That's about 3 teaspoons daily.
2. Elimination from the diet of wheat, sugar, and cornstarch.

Result: triglycerides went from a nearly-incompatible-with-life level of 3100 mg/dl to around 200, a better than 90% reduction.

If this patient had gone to a "regular" doctor, he probably would have been placed on an expensive diet of pharmaceuticals, perhaps for the rest of his life.

Elsewhere Dr. Davis says, "I have absolutely no remaining doubt that wheat products have no place in the human diet." (Emphasis in the original.)

And since great minds think alike, I should point out that Davis is, like me, a big fan of magnesium, iodine, and vitamin D.

Bonus health link: Eades on statins:

The mainstreamers such as those quoted above don’t question the effectiveness of statins even though at least $2.5 billion has been spent to test them and found them lacking, but readily discount alternative medicines simply because they don’t fit with their belief system. Based on the evidence at hand, I wouldn’t give people Echinacea, shark cartilage and all the rest because the studies show they don’t work better than placebo, but for all the same reasons, I wouldn’t give a patient a statin either. In fact, I would probably give the Echinacea before I gave the statin because, as far as I know, no one has died taking Echinacea, of which the same can’t be said of statins.

More on Unified Disease Theory

Seth Roberts has been pounding the table for several months now on the benefits to health of fermented foods, including things like yogurt, kimchi, and kombucha. (See here for Seth's complete postings on the topic. See here for a complete discussion of kombucha, the "healthy beverage and natural remedy", about which its proponents could scarcely be more enthusiastic.) Since Seth Roberts invented - or rather discovered - the Shangri-La Diet, and since he was certainly correct (and I wasn't) about the benefits and naturalness of a low-carb, high-fat diet, he's worth heeding.

Seth theorizes that fermented foods, because they contain abundant bacteria and other microbes, stimulate the immune system by a kind of let's-keep-this-interesting method. That is, if the immune system "sees" the same microorganisms time and time again, it grows fat and lazy, so to speak, and stimulation keeps it tuned. There is some evidence for this, such as that being exposed to more dirt in childhood leads to lower rates of asthma.

However, based on what I've learned from the ideas of Michael Maes, I propose that fermented foods are beneficial because they prevent the immune sytem from being stimulated. I posted the following comment at Seth's blog:

"Let me immodestly suggest a modification to your hypothesis that fermented food is healthy because it stimulates the immune system.

The immune system outside the gut does not want to see lipopolysaccharides (LPS), which are breakdown products of bacterial cell walls, nor does it like to see the bacteria themselves. When it does, bad things happen, basically a chain reaction of autoimmune activation, inflammation, and free radical generation. Normally the gut is highly selective in what it allows into the body, but in cases of leaky gut, LPS as well as gluten and casein enter the circulation, causing fatigue, lupus, autism, and maybe lots more. Leaky gut in turn is caused by dysbiosis in the intestines, whether by candida or gram negative bacterial overgrowth. Therefore fermented foods work by restoring proper microbial balance in the intestines, sealing the leaky gut and killing candida and gram negative overgrowth. It might be almost the opposite of stimulating the immune system (outside the gut); it actually *prevents* stimulation and activation. Secretory IgA is the type of immunoglobulin most important inside the gut, and dysbiosis, e.g. from candida, causes a radical decrease in its production by the immune cells lining the gut. The right fermented foods ought to restore IgA production.

By the way, I also think that this could be such a problem in the modern world because of the emphasis of low fat, high carb diets, which probably foster dysbiosis."

It's known for instance that liver damage in alcoholism is mediated through increased intestinal permeability. Autism, autoimmune diseases such as lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, heart disease, depression, some types of schizophrenia, and perhaps many more could be candidates for a major role for dysbiosis, leaky gut, and subsequent immune activation and inflammation. That this mechanism could be so general can also explain the notion that fermented foods like kombucha have wide, generalized benefits in many diverse medical conditions. Again, it's all about inflammation.

A Unified Theory of Disease

A recent paper (pdf) by the Belgian scientist and physician Michael Maes (previous Michael Maes discussions) puts forth the idea that "inflammatory and oxidative and nitrosative stress" are the main processes that underlie chronic fatigue, somatization, and psychosomatic symptoms. Maes argues, first of all that, while all of these syndromes have been dismissed as "mere" psychiatric systems and the patients shuffled off to "nonsense treatment", they are in fact real illnesses with physical causes. Another recent paper, The inflammatory & neurodegenerative (I&ND) hypothesis of depression, summarizes Maes's thinking as to why current theories of depression are mistaken, and what the true underlying factors of depression are, namely the same things already mentioned, inflammation and oxidative stress.

I'll try to keep this brief, so you may be asking, what's this got to do with a unified theory of disease?

People with depression have up to four times the risk of suffering heart disease than others; likewise (same link), up to 50% of heart disease patients suffer from depression. People with major depression have a more than four-fold greater risk of death from all causes than others.

According to Maes: "Most if not all antidepressants have specific anti-inflammatory effects, while restoration of decreased neurogenesis, which may be induced by inflammatory processes, may be related to the therapeutic efficacy of antidepressant treatments." In other words, if this idea is correct, the theory that antidepressants work by modulating serotonin uptake or some other method is bunk. Antidepressants are anti-inflammatory drugs, full stop.

Statins are used to treat atherosclerosis, allegedly by lowering cholesterol. Once again, this theory appears to be wrong, as the decrease in cardiac deaths (but increase or no change in all-cause mortality) is independent of the degree of cholesterol lowering. Rather, statins appear to do what they do because they act as anti-inflammatory drugs. Aspirin, also used by coronary patients, is also an anti-inflammatory.

Diabetics have much higher rates of cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, blindness, impotence, and so on. The high glucose and insulin levels of diabetics cause inflammation, leading to all of these complications.

Much attention has recently been given to omega 6/3 fatty acid ratios in the diet, which are a large, maybe the largest, factor in the development of heart disease and many other ilnesses, including cancer. Overabundant omega 6 fatty acids cause their mischief by mediating an increase in pro-inflammatory cytokines and processes.

A key, perhaps the key, behind the aging process is increased inflammation.

Common to all of these is inflammation and oxidative stress. Even infectious illnesses cause much of their damage through inflammation and the generation of free radicals. The swine flu that has recently hit wreaks its damage through a so-called "cytokine storm", i.e. the body, in trying to mount a defense, causes inflammation on such a scale that it kills the patient. Pharmacological agents that fight many of these illnesses do so through an anti-inflammatory effect.

That's my unified theory of disease: it's inflammation all the way down.

Fear and Loathing in Luton

From The Sunday Times, David James Smith writes:

Later that day, after the soldiers’ parade had dispersed, Kier was walking across St George’s Square in his England shirt — “Eng-er-land! Eng-er-land! Eng-er-land!” the crowd had been chanting at the protesters. Kier was still feeling wound up by what he had just witnessed back by the Arndale. He had a cousin in the army, a family friend who had been killed in action. Bloody Muslim extremists, Kier was thinking to himself. How dare they!

Then he saw the mayor crossing the square, walking high and proud in his robe and chains. He was Asian. So far as Kier was concerned, he was a Muslim too, and it was all his fault. He was the head of the council; the council had given permission for the extremists to make their protest. F*** it, Kier thought. Kier ran up to him and fly-kicked him in the back. Councillor Lakhbir Singh, the mayor of Luton, a Sikh by faith, not in fact a Muslim at all, stumbled and fell forward, putting out his hands to stop himself falling. Kier turned around and, before the police could do anything, he ran through them and was away.

It would be farcical if it were not so sad and unpleasant, that brief moment in the life of modern, multicultural Britain. A Sikh in a turban had been mistaken for a Muslim by a white youth too ignorant to know any better, and apparently too angry to express himself other than with a kick.

In a very long article, it looks like the aforementioned Kier is the only one who gets called "ignorant", because he couldn't apparently distinguish between a Sikh and a Muslim. It would be interesting to discover how many Muslims in Britain could distinguish a Welshman from an Englishman, say, or a Catholic from a Protestant. Not too many, one would imagine.

The larger point: does it matter? Sikhs, Muslims, they are all cultural aliens who, at best, don't fit in with Britain and refuse to assimilate, and at worst, support terrorism. So Mr. Kier's "fly kick" (must be a soccer term), while deplorable, is merely an expression of anger at the takeover of his country by those cultural aliens, it matters not whether Sikh, Muslim, or Hindu. And, while deplorable, it hardly rises to the level of blowing up the tube.

How the end of the U.S. could play out

In researching the short U.S. Treasuries trade, I came upon an article by one Paco Ahlgren, The End of the U.S. As We Know It: Tracking the Dollar Downward. Keep in mind that this was published at the beginning of February, when stocks still had a downward leg in the future and even later have climbed, as confidence in the economy has increased. Here's an excerpt:

Look, there is absolutely no way the gargantuan political machine in Washington will ever consider backing the dollar with gold -- much less (God forbid) cutting spending and taxes at the same time. The dollar is doomed.

So what will happen next? I keep coming to only one bleak conclusion: the United States will have to default. And that will be the final call for the dollar. Food shortages, rationing, and martial law could become the status quo.

It will undoubtedly seem farfetched to some of you, but I don't think the United States can survive the failure of its currency -- especially considering that the catastrophe will be the direct result of decades of governmental lies and manipulation. The states sent legislators to Washington who have systematically and purposely destroyed our currency. They manufactured an irresponsible Ponzi scheme that created false prosperity, over and over again. I simply don't think the states in the Union -- many of whom asserted their independence at another point in history -- will sit still for more of the same.

So why not be realistic? Why not consider the true consequences of the $8.5 trillion in stimulus coming down the pike?

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (2005), if Texas were an independent nation, its economy would be the 15th largest on earth -- ahead of Australia, Switzerland, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. The state is extremely business friendly; its constitution requires a referendum to implement an income tax -- an initiative which has never come close to becoming reality. Texas has the longest contiguous border with Mexico, along with some very large port cities. Beyond all that, Texas sports three of the ten largest cities in the United States.

If that isn't enough to make you raise your eyebrows, consider this: the economies of New York and California are both larger even than Texas's. Now, remind me again why these economic blocs would want to remain in a bankrupt union whose currency has failed? [...]
[My emphases. Copyright Paco Ahlgren.]

So, what is anyone with a high future time orientation, such as an investor or parents with children, supposed to do? (NB: I'm not saying I have any answers here, I'm just trying to figure this out.)

Short Treasuries is one move to make (via TBT). Strange as it may seem to say, buying a house might not be too bad either, if you can finance today and pay off your mortgage with vastly cheaper dollars. Then there are hard assets: gold and other precious metals, base metals, agricultural land, shares in companies that own and produce hard assets (like Potash Corporation, which owns outright something like 50% of the world's supply of potash). Don't forget oil.

Then there are more serious investments, like guns and ammo, canned food, gold coins, a country hideout. If we get to the stage where those things are truly useful, financial investments of any kind could be goners.

How did we get here? It's very simple: people want more than they are legitimately entitled to, and they figured out that they could get it from the government.