Seth Roberts

Sure, we can learn about human nature by looking at art. I've done that. What's less obvious, at least to me, is how much can be learned about human nature by observing art students. I got a glimpse of this from talking to a student at California College...

Kaiping Peng, a friend of mine who is a professor at Berkeley, recently said to me that professors have an unusual place in our society: They are expected to tell the truth. Hardly anyone else is, he said. But what happens when they do?

The most impressive professorial truth-telling in...

Two days ago, Dubner and Levitt, the Freakonomics authors, moved their blog to the Opinion section of the NY Times website. There was a big announcement on the Times home page. Dubner posted a short and modest note about the move ("we are excited and flattered"). It got...

Some interesting observations related to the Shangri-La Diet have come my way recently:

1. From the Shangri-La Diet forums:

I stumbled on SLD when, after a sinus infection, I lost my ability to smell and therefore also taste the flavor of the food I was...

I recently met an undergraduate named Samantha who is majoring in Economics at UC Berkeley. She is almost done. I asked her a few questions about her education:

SR: Did UC Berkeley help you figure out what you were good at?

Samantha: No. In UC Berkeley classes you...

At the San Francisco Chocolate Salon, which I attended because of my interest in connoisseurship and gifts, I learned some sad truths about elementary-school education. A San Francisco public school teacher told me:

1. The curriculum is mandated. Tests are mandated. And they disagree. For example, you...

I started talking with Catherine Pauling, who has worked at UC Berkeley more than 20 years, because I confused her with someone else. While she was head student adviser in the Math Department, she increased the number of majors from 170 to 600 in 5 years. "Some math professors were...

Andrew Gelman astutely noted that the three researchers (Michel Cabanac, Anthony Sclafani, and Israel Ramirez) whose work I used the most to come up with the Shangri-La Diet were not at Harvard or Yale or Rockefeller University. Isn't that where breakthrough research is supposed to come from? This...

A few weeks ago, the manager of a New Orleans art gallery told me a story that I wish had surprised me.

When he was a senior at Tulane University, he took a Political Science class about the British Political System. For his term paper he wrote about the functions...

Sicko is a great movie, one of the most emotion-evoking films I have ever seen. In a CNBC interview, Moore said something that is at the heart of Sicko:

They [HMOs] are required by law ... to maximize profits for their shareholders. That's what the law...

Generalization #1: Everyone likes to be listened to. Being a professor is being paid to be listened to. It's like being a restaurant reviewer or a professional athlete -- your job is doing what others do for fun. Generalization #2: American colleges are run more for the benefit of professors...

Yesterday on BART I saw someone reading The And of Poverty. It was an illegal Chinese edition of The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. I asked the person reading it what she thought of it. "Very ethnocentric," she said. "Very Jeffrey-Sachs-centric," I said. (For a good critique, see The...

On Book TV last weekend I saw a discussion of the terrific-sounding new book You Can Hear Me Now by Nicholas Sullivan, about how an ex-banker named Iqbal Quadir started GrameenPhone, which helps poor people in Bangladesh get cell phones. From the discussion:

Someone from the UN:...

According to Bryan Caplan, "our [higher] educational system is a big waste of time and money." He is writing a book about this -- yay! He attended college at the place I know the most about -- UC Berkeley. Here is why it is a big waste of time....

Jane Jacobs, the urban and economic theorist, wrote:

Only in stagnant economies does work stay docilely within given categories. And wherever it is forced to stay within prearranged categories -- whether by zoning, by economic planning, or by guilds, associations or unions -- the process of adding new...

Recently I heard something -- a very ordinary bit of info -- that neatly summed up the trouble with college. Someone told me about a friend of hers who was a graduate student in English at Berkeley. Her friend taught a small class of freshman and sophomores. He was enthusiastic...

"Blogging, of course, is one of the ultimate forms of self-experimentation," Tyler Cowen wrote me. I wasn't quite sure what he meant. He explained: "Your blood pressure, how your brain is working, what new ideas you have, how your attention span has changed, how you now read other people's...

To deal with the threat posed by open-access journals (which I praise and have published in), a group of scientific publishers including Elsevier has hired Washington public relations consultant Eric Dezenhall to help them. According to this article, Mr. Dezenhall has...

The problem with Michael Pollan's latest food piece in the New York Times is that it isn't very . . . nutritious. It doesn't tell a story with new and interesting facts -- like the story of Joel Salatin, a brilliant Virginia farmer, well told by Pollan in The...

The Bell Curve (1994) by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which argued that IQ is destiny, was the most IQ-glorifying book since . . . well, ever. Now Mr Murray has taken a big step away from his position in that book, yet he continues to glorify IQ.

In...