Category: 200 words project

The fat hypothesis – Part I – The 200 words project

In 1955, US President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. Eisenhower insisted on making details of his illness public instead of pretending it didn’t happen. So, the next day, his chief physician, Dr Paul Dudley White, gave a press conference at which he instructed Americans on how to avoid heart disease – stop smoking and cut down on fat and cholesterol. In a follow-up article, White cited the research of a nutritionist at the University of Minnesota, Ancel Keys.

Keys’ “diet-heart hypothesis” (or “fat hypothesis”) stated that excess saturated fats in the diet – from red meat, cheese, butter, and eggs – raises cholesterol, which congeals on the inside of coronary arteries, causing them to harden and narrow, until the flow of blood is staunched and the heart seizes up.

Keys was brilliant, charismatic, and combative. When faced with opposition, he used a 5,000 subject study he had conducted in 7 countries that proved his hypothesis. With support from the President and his physician, he destroyed any opposition to his hypothesis. His work was central in the 1980 dietary guidelines issued by the US government that made fat the enemy.

There was just one problem – Ancel Keys was wrong.

Keys was the original big data guy – a contemporary remarked: “Every time you question this man Keys, he says, ‘I’ve got 5,000 cases. How many do you have? – Ian Leslie, The Guardian

fat hypothesisThanks to source and health.gov for the image

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Source and thanks to: The Sugar Conspiracy by Ian Leslie in the Guardian – a fantastic piece of journalism that inspired this 4 part series.

Um, like and being heard – The 200 words project

2 years ago, I tried cutting out “um”/”you know”/other such filler words from my language. That initiative went nowhere. Recently, however, I’ve been able to make more progress thanks to a post on Seth Godin’s excellent blog.

As Seth explains – “For a million years, people have been judging each other based on voice. Not just on what we say, but on how we say it. I heard a Pulitzer-prize winning author interviewed on a local radio show. The tension of the interview caused an “um” eruption—your words and your approach sell your ideas, and at least on this interview, nothing much got sold.
Or consider the recent college grad who uses thirty or forty “likes” a minute. Hard to see through to the real you when it’s so hard to hear you.”

Acknowledging that you can’t remove this verbal tic by willing it away (as I had tried before), Seth suggests that we don’t try to rid ourselves of the “um” or “like.” Instead, aim to simply replace it with a pause. We don’t need to keep making sounds to keep our place as the speaker. So, we should talk as slowly as needed to until speeding up feels comfortable.

The best part: Our default assumption is that people who choose their words carefully are quite smart. Like you. – Seth Godin


Thanks to – image source

Building Lost Boy 6 seconds at a time – The 200 words project

Ruth Berhe is a Canadian singer-songwriter who, as an 18 year old in 2013, began posting 6 second Vine video covers of popular songs. She gradually gained a following.

In December 2014, she posted a video of a line that she made up about a song, inspired by a television series, themed around Peter Pan. It garnered 84,000 likes in a week – an unusual response for a 6 second video of hers at the time. She took note of the popularity, created a full song titled “Lost Boy” and posted it on YouTube in January 2015. She then released it on iTunes in February 2015. Columbia Records then signed her in July 2015 and she released 4 songs in November 2015 including “Lost Boy.”

Lost Boy cracked the “Top 50” and is a very unusual Top 50 song as it is a piano ballad with no beats and no adornments. Ruth literally built this song and her fledgling music career one 6 second video at a time, thus teaching us all a lesson on how to use the “minimum viable product” approach to build a successful product. Thanks, Ruth, and good luck!

She started to add lines in Vine-able increments. “I would finish studying, come down stairs, and add a line to the chorus,” she explains. “In a week, I had a chorus, so I decided I should turn this into a full song and take it to YouTube. – Ruth Berhe

lost boy

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Source and thanks to: Wikipedia, Billboard.com, Added note – Lost Boy is a song that I’ve come to love thanks to the radio. I thought the story behind the song was fascinating.

The phonograph – The 200 words project

Thomas Edison, working on improving the mechanics of the flow of paper as it moved through the telegraph, was busy recording the various dots and dashes. Work was not going well. The machine gave off a light musical rhythmic sound that resembled human talk heard indistinctly. He wanted to get rid of this sound but he couldn’t. And, over the course of the next few months, the noise continued to haunt him.

A few months later, he had a sudden thought – could that weird sound just have been hearing himself indistinctly? So, he spent the next few months studying sound. That single epiphany led to the discovery of the phonograph – thus laying the foundations for every music and record player produced since.

In studying great inventors, Robert Greene noticed their habit of processing and evaluating every idea that entered their mind. They viewed every idea as a possibility. Most led nowhere. However, some worked and they were often big ideas. Nobody could have discovered the phonograph in Edison’s time by rational thought. It needed a leap provided by chance and, luckily for us, Edison was open to it.

Like seeds flying through space, ideas require the soil of a highly prepared and open mind to take route in and sprout a meaningful idea. – Robert Greene

mastery, phonograph, edisonImage Source

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Source and thanks to: Mastery by Robert Greene

PS: This marks edition 125 of the 200 words project and edition 400 of weekly synthesized notes of interesting stories and ideas (the version before the 200 words project was not shared here). Here’s to 400 more..

Foundations of culture – The 200 words project

When he visited Jeff Bezos’ investment office, venture capitalist Bryce Roberts noticed a piece of furniture that seemed out of place – a table with a wooden door atop some legs jerry rigged together. The “door desk,” he was told, was a symbol of the early frugality Amazon embraced early on which, in turn, was a key part of Amazon’s culture.

Image Source

On reading the story behind the compliance crisis HR services company Zenefits faced a few months back, Bryce shared an anecdote that caught his attention. Zenefits founder Conrad Parker made a small decision early on – he created a macro to bypass the systems created to certify that someone had completed the required training to sell insurance in the state of California. He believed that 52 hours was too long to spend in training.

This act resulted in serious compliance issues that threatened to wreck the company. Each article about the Zenefits crisis showed glimpses of the tone the macro set within the company. Ever since, a lot of work has gone in to tear out the old foundation in hopes of saving the company.

Like cement, the cultural foundation for new projects/companies/teams sets early. Mindful, we must be…

These small, seemingly insignificant, early decisions to save money by building ramshackled desks or building tools to cheat the system set the foundation for company culture that everything after gets built upon. – Bryce Roberts

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Source and thanks to: Bryce’s blog post – “When Culture Sets“

Leadership and consistency – The 200 words project

Essayists like Ralph Waldo Emerson who shaped the 19th century view on leadership defined it around heroic consistency of message – no matter what the evidence. So, political campaigns are now lost the moment a candidate switches views on a topic. While political candidates are often guilty of changing views based on when it suits them, we also end up punishing those who’re changing it because of better data.

The greatest leaders, however, have always been incredibly persuadable.

Abraham Lincoln, for example, was a notorious flip flopper who changed his views on the civil rights movement as new data presented itself. Sadly, the 2012 “Lincoln” movie made no mention of this inconsistencies –Pulitzer Prize winning historian Eric Foner lamented the absence of his hallmark of greatness – his capacity for change and growth. Even black scholar and activist W E B De Bois, who was often critical of Lincoln, admired his always critical and flexible brand of leadership.

As Jeff Bezos says – people who were right a lot of their time were often people who changed their mind. Perhaps we should revisit our responses when we see our leaders change their point of view based on sound evidence?

Abraham Lincoln is the greatest figure of the 19th century. He was to be admired not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet he triumphed. Out of his contradictions and inconsistencies, he fought his way to the pinnacles. And his fight was within as well as without. – W.E.B De Bois

leadership, consistency, change, flexible

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Source and thanks to: Persuadable by Al Pitampalli

The Wright brothers’ lean startup – The 200 words project

After initial successes with a printing press and an aerodynamic bicycle, Wilbur Wright became interested in flying machines. He requested the Smithsonian museum for all materials on flying machines. The more he read, the more he believed his brother and him could be the inventors of flying machines. However, the others in the field were experts who had an enormous head start. The favorite was a team led by Samuel Langley, secretary of Smithsonian institution, funded by the government.

But, while all the other inventors focused their energy working in laboratories building powerful engines to get the machine in the air (versus keeping it flying), the Wright brothers focused on gaining real flying experience. They developed a feel for the product by spending most of their time testing their designs out. They frequently crashed, iterated based on user, i.e. their, feedback and kept getting better. They, then, built the three-axis control around the mental model of a pilot as a bicyclist who would learn to balance the aircraft with practice.

The rest, as they say, is history. They were likely among the first product managers who used the agile methodology / lean approach to building products.

Key to the Wright brothers success was that their competitors over-valued stability and tried to design wings in a V-shape to compensate for gusts of wind. But, Wilbur decided to think in terms of a bicycle – inherently uncertain but dependent on the rider. The pilot had to learn to work with the wind. = paraphrased from Mastery by Robert Greene

Wright brothersImage Source

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Source and thanks to: Mastery by Robert Greene

Persist or not? – The 200 words project

We are told that persistence is a great trait to have. But, at what point does persistence become stupidity?

Before entrepreneur and musician Derek Sivers started CDBaby.com, he spent two years promoting various projects. The projects always felt uphill and progress came with massive effort.

When he started CDBaby.com, the first internet store for independent musicians to sell their songs, it felt like a hit song. People loved it and, suddenly, all previously locked doors opened. Based on his experiences, Derek cautions us against the idea that success comes from being persistent. Instead, he insists it comes from persistently improving on an idea that customers love.

Derek’s advice is aligned to the advice on building a “minimum viable product.” As the image below shows, the way to build an MVP is to keep attacking the customer problem with lower effort approaches and, then, iterating to build a sophisticated solution

mvp, persistence,
Image Source

Present each new idea or improvement to the world. If multiple people are saying, “Wow! Yes! I need this! I’d be happy to pay you to do this!” then you should probably do it. But if the response is anything less, don’t pursue it. – Derek Sivers

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Source and thanks to: Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

Curing stomach ulcer – The 200 words project

Before the 20th century, stomach ulcer was not a respectable disease. As stress was the believed cause, Europe and America had health spas and quack treatments to cure ulcers.

Eventually doctors realized they could see the ulcers with X-ray machines, but these machines were in big cities like New York and London. So, doctors in those cities started identifying ulcers in urban businessmen who probably smoked a lot of cigarettes and had a high-pressure lifestyle. Stress again – it all fit.

In 1981, Doctors Warren and Marshall in Australia noticed that biopsies of ulcer and stomach cancer patients seemed to have bacteria called Helicobacter. Everybody who got stomach cancer developed it on a background of gastritis. And, when there was no Helicobacter, there was no gastritis. Despite initial apathy, they went on to prove that ulcers were caused by Helicobacter. And, they won the Nobel prize in 2004.

What makes this story is amazing is that there were other doctors who’d observed this before them. In every case, they dismissed the evidence as it went against the commonly held belief. In effect, Doctors Warren and Marshall won the Nobel prize for being open to evidence that contradicted their beliefs.

To gastroenterologists, the concept of a germ causing ulcers was like saying that the Earth is flat. After that I realized my paper was going to have difficulty being accepted. You think, “It’s science; it’s got to be accepted.” But it’s not an absolute given. The idea was too weird. – Dr Barry Marshall

ulcerImage Source: Discover Magazine, Ian Regnard

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Source and thanks to: Persuadable by Al Pitampalli, Discovery Magazine’s interview with Dr Marshall

Failure and the social sciences – The 200 words project

(concluding the “why science is hard” series – Parts I, II)

Recently, a few famous psychology findings were called into question by what some have called the reproducibility crisis. The reproducibility idea seems like common sense – take a study and do it again. If you get the same result, that’s evidence that the findings are true, and if the result doesn’t turn up again, they’re false.

Yet in practice, it’s nowhere near this simple. 3 reasons for this are –
1. Regression to the mean. Initial studies likely had a known bias toward overestimating the magnitude of an effect. So, it is natural that future studies will show a much lower effect.
2. Different design and analysis approaches. While researcher incentives can lead to certain questionable research practices, there is wide variance on design and analysis approaches even among the best researchers.
3. Hard to recreate the exact conditions. Finally, and this is especially true for “social sciences,” the human behavior and motives of the lab subjects is nearly impossible to replicate

So, how should we think of reproducibility? As with the soccer card study in part I, treat an individual study as a data point, encourage more studies and, taken together, we’re likely to get closer to the truth.

social sciences

Science isn’t broken. It’s just a hell of a lot harder than we give it credit for. – Christie Aschwanden, Lead Sciene Writer @ the excellent FiveThirtyEight

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Source and thanks to: The FiveThirtyEight Blog – Failure is Moving Science Forward