Academia has problems. This is an obvious statement, since it is an institution in a fallen world. It is worth looking at these problems in some depth, however, because they affect the various academic disciplines to varying degrees, and I think that History may be hit the hardest.

This occurred to me as I was reading the book A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: The Old Testament by Brant Pitre and John Bergsma. (It’s a massive tome that could be used to bludgeon a waterbuffalo to death, and I’m still in the introductory materials.) In the prefatory materials is an overview of biblical scholarship over the last two centuries, and this includes some theories which went from being novel, to being dominant, to mostly in the rubbish bin in recent times. And this got me thinking about the problems of academia and how they affect history.

The big problem of academia is that its currency is novelty. You can see this in the economic angle of publish or perish, to be sure, but even if publication didn’t affect people’s job prospects and salaries, it would still affect their reputations and standing as scholars. This selective pressure has a selective effect on scholars, very akin to what the same pressure has on scientists. Those who come up with novelty, for whatever reason, will tend to publish more, and will thus receive more academic status. This has generational effects, since new scholars learn from and have to work with old scholars. (For more on that, see Who Works for Bad Scientists?.)

While true and important, and as I say no one takes evolution seriously enough, it’s not what I want to focus on today. Rather, I want to focus on what limits there are inherent in the field to protect against novelty which is novel by being purely fictitious.

The prototypical example of a system which corrects against novelty-through-pure-fiction is science, but this is painting with an overly broad brush. It is not all sciences that do this, but rather experimental sciences. Theoretical physicists can spin theories about 11-dimensional string vibrations until the cows come home, and no one will ever notice that they don’t work because no one can run an experiment on the things.

The fiction-detecting aspect of experimental science only really works the way it’s advertised to in crowded fields of science. That is, it only works in fields of science where people will be doing the same experiments many times, or at least experiments who results depend upon previous results. This is quite true of experimental physics, especially of basic physics such as newtonian mechanics. It gets less true the less crowded the field is. The more low-hanging fruit there is to pick, the more people will spend their time picking it than looking in each other’s baskets.

Biology, and to the degree that it is a sub-field of that, medicine, are good examples of non-dense fields. There are far more questions to ask than there are researchers with funding to try to find answers. There are exceptions for particularly hot topics where at least several researchers will try to ask the same question, but you just don’t find much in the way of people duplicating each other’s experiments to find out if they get the same results.

Worse, in medicine certain types of answers become can make experiments unethical to try to replicate. If a drug shows a statistically significant result in a clinical trial, running such a clinical trial with a placebo group becomes unethical. All is not lost, since new drugs get run against “standard care” (i.e. the already approved drug) as a control group, so if the original drug is really just a placebo that got lucky, a real drug that comes along will prove better than it. There isn’t much of an ethical way of discovering that the drug is actually just a placebo (with side effects), though.

Chemistry may be the best field simply because chemistry is so closely tied to engineering, and the purpose of engineering is to replicate the heck out of whatever experiment was run. That is, engineering replicates findings by putting things into production on industrial scales, and a million LED lights shipped to Home Depot and Lowes and other such stores replicate the findings that Indiium, Gallium, and Nitrogen, when mixed correctly and an electric current is run through them, emit blue light. (Indium Nitride and Gallium Nitride are the semiconductors used in the blue LED.) But this is far and away the best case, and since it is industrial, it is definitionally not academic.

So what is it about the sciences, where there is some limit on fictitious novelty, that provides this limit? It’s that the test is not whether or not it seems plausible to another human being, but whether or not it actually works when one tries it.

This is, largely, not available in history. It is not entirely absent, as there are historical theories which can be disproved or confirmed by subsequent archaeological finds. These are, however, fairly rare. They are extremely rare in ancient history, such as biblical studies.

The particular theory which got me thinking about this was the Documentary Hypothesis, which more-or-less was a theory created by a liberal protestant in the 1800s that the traditional attribution of the Pentateuch to Moses was ahistorical.

What amazing new archaeological evidence was unearthed that gave rise to this theory? Why, none at all. The guy who came up with it looked at the text and spun his theory out of air. He decided to categorize the various lines and paragraphs and stories in the Pentateuch on the basis of which he thought similar and which he thought different, then took these groupings he thought similar and different from other groupings and attributed them to different authors, at different times.

Of course, being a liberal protestant, he decided that the religion started pure and simple and later got corrupted by law and liturgy. This appealed to his prejudices, and also gave him an interpretive framework to pull out of thin air approximate dates for the various authors he also pulled out of thin air.

And this was a huge hit in academia? Why? There are many threads which went into it, of course, but a significant one is that it was novel. It was new, and fresh, and exciting. It produced an enormous amount of work for scholars to do—someone had to go through the Pentateuch line by line and classify every line according to which theoretical author wrote it.

I think even more than being novel, this produced low-hanging fruit. That is, it made for relatively easy work.

One of the problems that a modern Christian who wants to write about scripture is up against is that he’s implicitly competing with twenty centuries of the most brilliant people in the world, because the brilliant people who had interesting things to say about scripture wrote them down, and Christians valued those writings and kept them and passed them on. There is, at present, an astonishing amount of excellent reading material, if one wants it, available from the saints and doctors of the church. What can one say, today, that has not already been said, and better?

Here, a new theory which overturns everything is the savior of the man in the bottom 99.99% of humanity (i.e. one who is not in the top 0.01%) by genius or talent, or whatever metric one wants to use. With everything overturned, there is new, fresh work to be done that most anyone can do, but not one has done before because no one could have done it before.

And who will bite the hand that feeds him? Certainly, the academic is not known for this counter-productive activity any more than any of his fellow men are.

So we get a century of people arguing over imaginary authors that they have not a shred of evidence for, mostly because it’s easier and more fun than real work.

From what I understand, a similar thing happened with Plato. At some point someone decided that most of the Socratic dialogues weren’t written by Plato because… they didn’t sound the same to him. Skip forward by about a century, and scholarly consensus once again becomes that Plato wrote the stuff commonly attributed to him. What did the intervening century have to show for it? A lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Oh, and a lot of employed academics.

In broad strokes, there are only a few reasons to murder someone:

1. Gaining money or other forms of power
2. To pave the way for love
3. Revenge
4. To gain status that properly belongs to the victim
5. To protect one’s status

These correspond, roughly, to the deadly sins:

1. Greed
2. Lust
3. Wrath
4. Envy
5. Vanity

Today I want to consider murder for revenge. It further subdivides into two possible situations:

1. The murderer is fine with being destroyed in the process
2. The murderer wishes to suffer no repercussions

The former can make an interesting story (such as the sub-plot in Chesterton’s The Sins of Prince Saradine), but it’s not easy for it to sustain a mystery. The main problem is that the murderer should, by hypothesis, confess. This can, however, be handled.

The first way to handle this is to have the murderer leave. This is hard to work unless he thinks the crime won’t be discovered and so no explanation is necessary. That can be done, though, especially for historical crimes being discovered and investigated only years later.

The second way to handle this is to have the murderer leave a confession before leaving but to have the confession intercepted by someone who wants to use the occasion to murder someone by framing him for murder. This is a very workable sort of plot, though it will be complicated.

The third major way is to kill the murderer before he can confess. This may be the most interesting option, especially if he is killed by the victim. Of course, if the murderer is murdered by his victim, this will not be mysterious unless at least one of them uses a scheme for which he does not need to be present, which is where the interesting part comes from. It is very hard to suspect a dead man of murder. If there is anyone one will leave off suspecting of a crime, it’s a dead man.

In a Cadfael story (Saint Peter’s Fair) Hugh Beringar remarks that babes and drunks are the world’s only innocents. But this is not an exhaustive list. Who is so incapable of harm as a man already dead?

What’s specially interesting about two people who have murdered each other is that with any conniving at all, the author can contrive to have everyone suspect them of being murdered by the same person, and this will be a very strange person indeed to have two enemies with so little in common. It also means that the murder will seem to have been done very craftily when it was in fact done very simply. Or at least one of them will be like that. There are absolutely wonderful possibilities for misdirection, here.

(I really want to write a story like this some day. I probably should first write a story with at least two victims at the start who were killed by the same person, so it’s not obvious, though.)

The other major option, and which is more common because it can far more easily sustain a mystery, is for the one seeking revenge to wish to avoid repercussions for his crime. This provides a simple reason for why he does not confess. It can sustain a mystery with little difficulty at all.

It can, of course, be made far more complex than the simple case. The variation that I suspect is most interesting, or at least that I personally find most interesting, is of introducing the complication of the passage of time. This can either be put between the original offense and the present, or between both the original offense and the revenge, and the present.

Of the two, my favorite is probably the ones where the revenge is recent but the offense in the past. This is probably most classically done with the child who grows up to avenge a parent, but this possibly should be avoided because it is common enough that, these days, the average reader might count the years since the crime in the past and guess the killer simply based on his age.

It comes to mind that an interesting way around that problem might be to give the murderer some scruple in his revenge, such as waiting for the 18th birthday of the vicitm’s youngest child, on the theory that his children should not be punished for the crime of their father. Something like that would throw a wrench into figuring out the culprit by simple calculations, at least.

There are more variations on murder for revenge, but this post is getting long enough that I think I’ll leave them for later. Enjoy writing your murder mysteries about revenge, and God bless you.

When it comes to the subject of losing weight—more specifically, reducing excess fat stores in the body—it’s fairly common to come across somebody who puts it like this:

It’s just calories in versus calories out. Thermodynamics says that if you take in more calories than you burn, you’ll store them as fat. If you take in fewer, you’ll burn fat. So weight loss is very simple: just burn more calories than you take in. That’s it. Anything else is just people trying to kid themselves that here’s a magic bullet.

This represents a confusion one sees in many fields: making no distinction between the cause of something and the mechanism of how the cause makes it happen. It is quite true that when somebody stores fat in their body they require energy to make the fat and they can’t also burn that energy and therefore the amount of energy they took in was higher than the amount of energy which they burned. No one, anywhere, disputes this. It’s also entirely uninteresting to the subject of fat gain or loss in people with excess fat.

(NOTE: when talking about healthy people—typically lean athletes—regulating what little fat they have, this simplification is probably accurate. This post is not talking about how a body builder can force his body to levels of fat which are dangerously low, or how an athlete can cut to a lower weight class. Those will almost certainly have to be achieved by simple calorie restriction because they are manipulating a healthy body into going outside of the homeostasis it wants to maintain for optimal health).

The question which is actually interesting to the subject of fat gain or loss is why the body stores energy as fat. And this is where the people who love to talk about calories-in-calories-out show their reductionist colors. Tthey will tell you that since fat cells are energy storage, if you take in more calories than you burn, you will necessarily store them as fat. But they give no reason for this, while there are excellent reasons to doubt it.

The reason to doubt that extra calories eaten can only go to fat is that the human metabolism is a highly variable thing. Though I should clarify what I mean here because by “metabolism” some people mean “resting metabolism”, while I mean “total metabolism”. Our bodies spend calories on a lot of things—walking, talking, maintaining our temperature, repairing our bodies, and other things. Very few of these things are fixed costs. One possible reaction to being in a cold environment is moving more or just burning energy for heat. Another is feeling cold and putting on a sweater. Those do not use the same number of calories over the course of an hour.

Let’s consider a very analogous system: finances.

If a person makes an additional $1000 per month, it is possible that his bank account will grow by $1000/month. It is also possible that he will start eating at expensive restaurants, and his bank account won’t change at all. On the flip side, a person whose income doesn’t change can decide to stop eating out and can grow his bank account with no additional income, merely by cutting expenses. And could do both: he could decide his bank account isn’t nearly large enough, work a second job to bring in an extra $1000, move to a tiny, unheated apartment, and eat nothing but porridge for his meals so that his bank account swells rapidly.

It’s that last part that’s most interesting to the moment, because it’s what seems to be the case in people who are, shall we say, famine resistant. Because there’s a really fascinating question about people carrying excess fat which is rarely asked: why do they get hungry?

Seriously, why is it that a person with excess fat feels hungry when he has plenty of energy at his ready disposal? That’s not how the body normally works. The human body, when working correctly, tries to maintain a homeostasis. Granted, it’s a homeostasis with more fat than a bodybuilder would like, but the body tends to regulate hunger on the basis of energy availability. Or in other words, normal people usually stop being hungry when their calories in is roughly equal to their calories out.

At this point, a word is necessary about what we might call the balloon theory of hunger. Basically, it is the model of hunger where the stomach is a balloon with pressure sensors and hunger is merely the pressure sensors detecting whether there’s still room in the stomach to fit something without literally bursting it.

There is some minor truth to this, in that the stomach does in fact have sensors in it which detect the degree to which it is stretched, but a few years of living as a human being should be sufficient to show this model as the rubbish that it is. Consider a few counter-examples:

1. Desert. A person can eat until “they’re so stuffed they can’t eat another bite” then the moment desert comes out they can somehow fit enough additional food to fill a grapefruit.
2. Exercise makes people hungry. Starting a new exercise routine can make one feel ravenously hungry for days. Exercise does not drastically increase the size of someone’s stomach in the first few days.
3. Teenage boys can out-eat their parents combined. I did it often as a teenage boy. (I was on the rowing team in high school and relatively lean, too.) Teenage boys do not have stomachs which are larger than their mother’s and father’s stomach’s combined.
4. Tests show that a stomach can stretch to around the size of an entire human torso before bursting from pressure. They’re incredibly expandable.
5. People who win hot-dog eating contests do not ordinarily eat that much food to feel full.

In short, the theory that being hungry is entirely, or even primarily, about whether your stomach is full is nonsense.

There is also the always-hungry model, which tends to involve some pretend evolutionary biology about humans having evolved in circumstances of constant famine and so we are always hungry in order to pack on as much fat as possible for the next famine which we know is right around the corner.

The main problem with this is that it directly contradicts experience. Americans live in an environment with truly enormous food surpluses always available, and there are plenty of not-fat people who eat until they are not hungry and who nevertheless do not eat the 10,000+ calories that they easily could and this model predicts.

In short, a little bit of experience shows that human beings are not normally ravenous eating machines consuming every calorie that they can get their mouths on.

With these models of human hunger out of the way, the question then comes up and is very pressing: why do fat people get hungry?

It is not the purpose of this post to give the answer to this question. Chief among the reasons why is that there are almost certainly many answers to this question; people’s energy regulation can get screwed up for a variety of unrelated reasons. It is only the purpose to highlight how important finding an answer to this question is for a person who wants to lose excess fat.

(So as to not completely shirk the question, I think that one of the most common is excessive fructose consumption causing insulin insensitivity in the liver, which cascades into general insulin insensitivity, which then disrupts energy regulation, though even that is probably an over-simplification since in general nothing in biology involves just a single hormone. This model, however, at least corresponds well to my own experience of when I gain and lose weight.)

There’s a really good metaphor for the issue in Tom Naughton’s post Toilet Humor: The How vs. Why of Getting Fat. I’m going to give a variant of this metaphor to keep things more pleasant: the kitchen sink.

Suppose that your sink is clogged and filling up with water and about to overflow. It is entirely true that the problem, in an acute sense, is that there is more water going into the sink than coming out of it. If one applied the standard dietary advice to a clogged sink, you would just drastically reduce the flow of water into the sink until the sink was empty.

And it will work if you do that. Cut off the water, and the sink will eventually not be full of water. Evaporation, if nothing else, will see to that.

There’s just one problem: you have the sink for a reason, and that reason is not merely to keep it empty. You want the sink to do work. And the water-in-water-out approach of just cutting off the water in means that your sink can’t do its job. The correct solution to a clogged sink is not to stop washing your dishes. It’s to find out why it’s clogged and clear the clog. Maybe the drain strainer is full. Maybe the pipe is clogged later on. Fixing the problem depends on what the problem is, and there isn’t one problem. But whatever the obstruction in the drain, that’s what you need to fix so that the sink can do its job.

Similarly, a human being almost certainly has things to do besides sitting around not being fat. Many of us are parents. Some of us have jobs. A few of us have friends. Whatever it is, we have more to do than just sitting around not being fat. Just cutting off our food without fixing why we’re hungry when we’ve got excess fat is like just cutting off the water to the sink. Whatever you’ve got to get done in life, you’re going to do a bad job.

Further, people who are constantly hungry tend to be irritable, short-tempered, and lethargic. Even if they manage to fulfill their primary responsibilities well (and they’re probably only doing it passably), they’re going to make life less pleasant for everyone around them. I once had a housemate who was doing a calorie-restricted cut, and I was nearly at the point of begging him to stop because he was just so unpleasant to be around during it.

Interestingly, you can see the same sort of indifference-to-function in sports-medicine vs. regular medicine. If an athlete has a problem where something really hurts when he uses it, the conventional medicine approach is to just stop playing the sport and (I’m exaggerating) get months of bed rest. People into sports medicine know that this is hyper-focusing on a mechanism—in this case, rest—while ignoring that the person is a human being with a life. Sports medicine tries very hard to figure out how to restore athletes to normal function in the context of still living life as an athlete and not considering being wheelchair-bound-but-alive to be an equivalent outcome.

So, in conclusion, the real question when it comes to someone who wants to lose excess fat is not how to get rid of excess fat. It’s how to fix the fact that they’re hungry when they shouldn’t be. If you fix that, then the person will certainly lose excess fat—people who aren’t hungry don’t eat as many calories. But they’ll do it while still being a functional human being.

In short: one should treat the problem, not the symptom. To do that, one must first identify the problem.

I’ve had good results from using an extremely low-carb (i.e. low carbohydrate) diet to lose weight, so I’m highly skeptical whenever a study shows that they don’t do that. There are studies that show that they do, too, in addition to my experience, so something is going on when one has highly conflicting studies. The only thing to do is to actually dig into the studies.

And the thing one finds with many of the “low carb” diets in such studies is that they are frequently quite high carb. “Low carb” will often be defined as less than 100 grams of carbohydrate per day. People who have success eat well under 50 and frequently less than 20 grams of carbohydrate per day. A diet with 5-10 times as much carbohydrate being tested as a “low carb” diet simply doesn’t tell anyone anything useful.

But another big problem one sees is studies which test compliance at the same time they test efficacy. That is, the study breaks people up into groups and tells them what to do, but then records what they do as part of the group that they were assigned to. So if someone in the low carb group eats nothing but pasta, his weight performance will count to the low carb diet average in that study.

There are legitimate reasons for this, but they’re all for medical practitioners. Basically, such studies are useful to know how likely, if you prescribe a diet to all of one’s patients, is one to see results. Great for doctors, useless for the rest of us.

The other problem is that we largely already know what compliance with any behavioral change is in human beings: very low. It doesn’t much matter what you’re talking about, people don’t, typically, change for the better.

Where this is really egregious is where people look at these studies and don’t distinguish between the efficacy of the behavioral change and the degree to which the study told us what we already know about human beings: they don’t comply.

Hell, the compliance rates on taking a single pill a day are far from perfect; just look at all the people one knows who forget the pill from time to time. The compliance rate on 2x, 3x, and 4x pills per day is progressively worse, just from simple observation. Who, who has been proscribed taking a pill 3x per day, actually manages to take it 3x per day for all the days of the prescription?

When this comes to bigger stuff like diet and exercise, a simple and only somewhat inaccurate model is that people don’t comply. So a study which measures compliance + some change will mostly show no effect. But that’s uninteresting for people who will actually change.

Consider other areas of life: lifting weights or running. If you did a study to find out if lifting weights makes you stronger in which you also measured compliance, you’d find out that lifting weights doesn’t make you stronger. If you did a studying measuring whether running makes you a better runner, which also measures compliance, you’d find out that running doesn’t make you better at running. Hell, as long as the study is also measuring compliance, you’d find out that practicing piano doesn’t make you play piano better and taking dance lessons doesn’t teach you how to dance. Because in all these studies, the fact that most people stopped lifting weights, running, practicing piano, and never went to the dance lessons would dominate the results.

Or to put it simply, doing something only has an effect if you actually do it. No kidding.

Which is why what we need are studies which also measure compliance and separate people into groups based on compliance. This does introduce problems. Probably the biggest problem is that it will cost a lot of money because it will require really large groups of people. With 90%+ of people non-complying, you need a ten times larger group of people to study, and that costs a lot of money.

The second problem is that this switches out measuring the efficacy of the diet (or whatever) together with compliance for measuring the efficacy of the diet together with whatever preconditions (genetics, preferences, etc) make one likely to actually stick with it.

However, this is clearly a much more useful thing for an individual to measure. If I’m considering lifting weights, I want to know how much stronger I might get if I can stick with it. If I find I can’t stick with it, I don’t really care what it would do, anyway. And I don’t much care why I can stick with it, either.

If it turns out that only 10% of the population can stick with some diet, then I will consider taking my chances on finding out if I’m in the lucky 10%. Weight lifting works that way, to a limited degree. Everyone can get somewhat stronger, but only a fraction of the population can get hugely strong.

But there’s another issue at play, which has to do with motivation: knowing that something will work if I stick to it makes it vastly more likely that I will stick to it. If I actually believe that there is a causal connection between an action and a benefit, it is much easier to keep doing the action until I get the benefit.

Which is yet another reason that studies which measure compliance as well as an effect are worthless: the study participants didn’t know whether sticking to the plan even had any potential benefit.

So, in short, when it comes to studies showing no benefit to something, always check to see whether it’s a study that’s just telling you that human beings rarely change. It’s not completely worthless, but it’s only telling you what you already know.