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I will not repeat what the president said yesterday about Haiti, because it is too mean spirited to perpetuate. I will say that in my travels in Haiti I met people wealthier in spirit than our poor president.

Photograph by Becky Jaffe

I’ve got a new Bloomberg View piece, which I think any fans of Aunt Pythia will enjoy:

Maybe Sex Robots Will Make Men, Not Women, Obsolete

They might at least create some healthy competition.

For other columns, go here.

I wrote a new Bloomberg View piece about data analysis around sexual harassment and assault:

What We Don’t Know About Sexual Harassment

We lack the data needed to know how prevalent it is.

My other Bloomberg View columns are here.

Also, I quit Twitter, at least for now. It just kept bringing me down.

I’ll be giving a talk at Tufts on Thursday. Here’s the poster, please join me:

Also I’ll be in D.C. on Friday morning to talk data science education with mucky-mucks. That will be livestreamed, or you can join in person as well. Here’s the poster:

I found out there’s going to be another Women’s March by – you guessed it – going to a yarn store and finding there’d been a run on pink yarn. Even better, there are going to be a ton of Women’s Marches in a ton of cities.

Get knitting, folks! And mark your calendars for Saturday, January 20, 2018.

There’s never been a better time for this, I’m sorry to say. And if you don’t know what I mean, listen to this Takeaway episode on John Hockenberry’s systematic sexual harassment and abuse of his female colleagues of color, who he systematically pushed out of senior positions on the show:

#MeToo Hits Home: John Hockenberry Accused of Harassment, Bullying

Bloomberg View

My newest Bloomberg piece is out, in which I consider the problem of false negatives in the context of love and war:

False Negatives Can Be a Matter of Life and Death

Algorithms will repeat our mistakes unless we know what we’re missing.

You can see all of my Bloomberg View pieces here.

Book Club!

I also wanted to announce that my Occupy group Alt Banking is starting a book club. We’re meeting this Sunday from 2-3pm at Columbia (room 409 of the International Affairs Building at Amsterdam and 118th), and we’re discussing the introductions and first chapters of the two following books:

1. Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman, available for free online
2. Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams, which also seems to be available online.

Please join us, we welcome everyone and anyone!

My newest Bloomberg View piece just came out this morning:

Ray Dalio Has an Unbelievable Algorithm

Does it merely reinforce its maker’s biases?

Looking back I just realized that I never posted last week’s Bloomberg View column:

Maybe Facebook Is Broken:

How can you stop people from sharing biased and misleading stuff?

For a complete list of my Bloomberg View articles, go here.

I got my first op-ed in the NY Times today:

The Ivory Tower Can’t Keep Ignoring Tech

Well it’s been a bit more than 3 months since my gastric sleeve surgery and I wanted to give an update.

Clothes

I finished cleaning out my closet yesterday. All my old clothes are gone. I’m ashamed of just how many clothes I had to get rid of. I’ve gone from a size 24 to a size 18, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve decided to go goth.

That means my closet has basically only black clothes in it now. I made a handful of exceptions for stuff I didn’t throw out that was way too small for me 3 months ago, knitted things, and some workout clothes that are not black.

Going goth has been lots of fun, and deciding in advance what to buy has been a time saver as well as efficient. Since everything is black, everything goes with everything else. And since I’m vaguely looking for a certain type of clothing in a specific color, it means I can narrow down my shopping goals quite quickly. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have no rules and start buying a new wardrobe.

The only downside is that it’s kind of boring. But I think that will change once we enter winter and I can wear colorful scarves and hats, that are guaranteed to go with my black outfits. Also, I’m not sure what black summer dresses will be like. I might need a different rule for summer things. Suggestions welcome.

Food

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have more or less changed my entire eating style since the surgery. I rarely eat meat, although I sometimes eat sashimi (especially salmon). I tend to avoid desserts because I don’t have a sweet tooth at all, and things that seemed bland to me before taste rich to me now, which means I don’t seek out buttery things anymore, since olive oil is already buttery to me.

I more or less live off of a quinoa recipe I learned about in college, which is spicy, savory, and somewhat cheesy:

1. saute one or two heads of garlic, one or two onions, a bell pepper, a few chopped potatoes, and some hot peppers in olive oil until soft
2. add 2.5 cups of quinoa and 5 cups of water, simmer for 25 minutes
3. put a bag of shredded cheese on top, stick in 325 degree oven for 12 minutes

I think the most important difference in my eating now versus before the surgery is how hunger works with me. I still get hungry, but it’s of a totally different nature than it used to be.

So before, if I got hungry, it was like a loud panic button in my brain had been set off. I had to eat, and I’d scavenge the fridge for something to turn off the noise. Nowadays, I realize I’m getting hungry, but it simply means that I have to start thinking about food pretty soon. I have time, for example, to cook quinoa as described above, even though it takes at least an hour.

One positive consequence: I have more time to think

One negative consequence: I can never, ever, ever overeat. I have never really tried to do this, and so I’ve never thrown up or anything, but trust me, I’ve gotten uncomfortable. It’s not something you want to do regularly. It makes you regret your choices.

Exercise

I’ve started running. For the first time in maybe 12 years, I’m regularly jogging. And when I say jogging, to be clear I’m incredibly slow and I don’t go far – it’s fair to say that speed walkers would easily overtake me – but it’s something I couldn’t have done 3 months ago so that’s cool.

But it’s also necessary. I have lots of anxiety, and I need to let out steam somehow. I’m trying my best to make that healthy rather than unhealthy.

Why am I so anxious? I don’t know. It’s hard being a parent to teenagers. It’s hard being a woman in this age of misogyny. It’s hard being a human in this age of political cruelty.

I don’t want to become an alcoholic. I’ve noticed that, since my operation, alcohol works really really well. It hits me hard, it makes me forget my problems, it takes me on a fast ride. It also ends soon and I don’t end up with a hangover. What’s not to love? Except I have plenty of reasons to know better.

Moreover, I have lost food as a source of comfort. To be honest, I don’t think I ever had a disordered way of eating (except for the doctor-approved diets I went on!) but I did know how to comfort myself with food. And before you blame my obesity on that, let me suggest that thin people comfort themselves with food all the time but aren’t accused of bad behavior.

That’s not to say I don’t love my quinoa – I do! – or that I don’t like running – I do! – but that it’s more like an outlet to deal with anxiety and grief than I’d like it to be.

Long story short, I’m doing great, and I feel healthy, and the world still is what it is.

I was on WBUR’s Open Source with Christopher Lydon – a show I regularly listened to when I lived in Somerville – last night discussing Max Tegmark’s new book, Life 3.0. Other guests were Erik Brynjolfsson and Yarden Katz. Here’s the episode:

Intelligence By Design

I’m very happy with an essay that just came out this morning with Boston Review, on futurism:

Know Thy Futurist

Also, my newest Bloomberg View column came out this morning, about how we’re having the wrong conversation about personal data:

The Equifax Hack Started the Wrong Conversation

For the rest of my Bloomberg View columns, go here.

My latest Bloomberg View article is out. I interviewed Michal Kosinski, gaydar algorithm author, about the ethical responsibilities of data scientists:

‘Gaydar’ Shows How Creepy Algorithms Can Get

Read my other Bloomberg View columns here.

The paperback edition of my book just came out last week, so I’ve been on a tear with interviews, and I’m also doing two public events in New York City in the next week. I wanted to tell you about it in case you have time to come!

1. I’ll be at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday morning, on a panel with Tim Wu entitled Big Data & You (free event)
2. I’ll be at an Authors @ Grand Central Tech event on Tuesday evening (this costs $20 but you get a copy of my paperback)
3. I was on the 99% Invisible podcast with Roman Mars! The episode is called the Age of the Algorithm.
4. I was on the Leonard Lopate Show for thirty whole minutes!
5. I was on the Tom Barnard Show in an episode with comedian Mitch Fatel.
6. I was on the Political Book Show podcast
7. I was on the EdSurge podcast
8. I was on the Future of Work podcast
9. I was on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

My latest Bloomberg View column is out, in which I try to imagine an internet optimized for citizens rather than consumers:

Facebook and Google, Show Us Your Ad Data

For other columns, take a look here.

I have a new and disgusting if useful way of thinking about weight loss. You’re welcome in advance.

A couple of weeks into the starvation diet and right after my surgery, I complained to my husband that all my weight loss – something like 20 pounds or so at the time – had been taken out of my boobs. I was sad to see them go, I told him. Why couldn’t the weight loss happen elsewhere?!

He demurred. You should look at yourself as a container – most likely a bag – of liquid, he said, much like a plastic container of milk. After all, we’re almost entirely made up of liquid. So, thinking that way, and considering that a whole gallon of milk weighs 8 pounds or so, you’ve lost more than two gallons of milk, which means that your weight loss most definitely hasn’t entirely come from your boobs. Because, after all, they didn’t start out as big as gallons of milk, nor are they entirely gone.

This explanation was foolproof but left me with a queazy feeling which has since only grown.

As of my last weighing, which close readers of my blog will know happened at my doctor’s office last week and not my home, since I threw away my scale, I’ve lost 43 pounds and counting. That’s about 5 gallons of milk, friends. And it’s definitely not exclusively coming out of my sad, baggy boobs.

Indeed I have a new theory about how one loses fat, and it’s called my “sponge theory of fat loss.”

Namely, I think every fat cell in my body is losing weight at the same rate. That’s not to say, of course, that all parts of my body are losing weight at the same rate, since my fat cells accumulate in certain areas like hips, butt, and stomach (and until recently, boobs). Although it has to be said that my shoes have been seeming to grow bigger, which is mysterious. I never thought of my feet as at all fat.

Now, the reason I call it the sponge theory is that, as my voluminous thighs lose weight, they get increasingly spongey. That is, if you squeeze them, you feel like you’re maybe wringing out a sponge. This isn’t necessarily a bad sensation, but it’s definitely weird. It’s basically a loss of density just as much, or more than, a loss of volume.

But I do think the overall loss of volume is catching up in intensity. My skin is excessive for my needs, if you catch my drift. And that’s not going away.

I’ll tell you a secret. When I was young, like maybe 39 or 40, I went on a low carb diet. To be more precise: I decided to eat stuff my friend Laura ate. I modeled myself after her. She’s tiny, and eats well, and loves food, and so I thought, why not give that a try? I lived for months on healthy food like nuts, vegetables, fruit, lentils, and cheese.

It was a good life, and I lost quite a bit of weight. I never got to the point I am now, but I did get close. And you know what happened next? I saw my boobs disappearing, and my skin get excessive for my needs, and I freaked out. I ate a bagel. A single, delicious, still-warm-from-the-oven cinnamon raisin Absolute Bagel with cream cheese. It was delicious, my friends, and it broke me. Somehow I could never look back.

I now have a theory about that, too, because why not, an overactive mind. My theory is that I’d managed to develop a “skinny biome” in my stomach due to the hard work of adjusting to the Laura diet, but that it was precarious for whatever reason, and that bagel tipped my over into a fat person’s biome once again.

To clarify:

1. I never ate any poop.
2. I don’t regret this experiment. It taught me that real weight loss would mean a major shift in my body, including lots of extra skin that I would have to adjust to over time (and which I definitely wasn’t ready for 7 years ago).
3. There’s good reason to think that one of the main reasons that bariatric surgery works is because it fosters a skinny biome.
4. That means I can expect to want to eat like Laura, rather than using my limited will power to force myself to at all times.
5. Which is good, because honestly nobody’s got that kind of willpower to be perfect all the time.
6. Correction: some people do fight every minute of every day to stay thin, but I wouldn’t want to be one of them. Too many other things to do.

Long story short, in the past 7 years I’ve tried to come to terms with what major weight loss would do to my skin. I haven’t, yet. By night I have nightmares that yards and yards of my own excess skin smother me in my sleep. By day I feel guilty for the implicit ageism of my fears. I want to be someone who loves every inch of herself, even the extra skin.

This is what I want to say to people who congratulate me for losing a ton of weight, starting now and ending never: Please don’t equate thin with beautiful. I liked my body so much more when I was fat, when I looked like an enormous buddha, full and round. I didn’t do this to look better, I did it to be healthier, to bike in the summer and to avoid diabetes. I’m hoping to eventually find a way to love my body in spite of how it looks, but it’s a monumental challenge.

Statistically speaking I’m expected to lose quite a few more gallons of milk before stabilizing. I’m scared. I’ve decided to give it a few years of adjustment before turning to surgical means of dealing with excess skin, which would be expensive, dangerous, and a blow to my identity as someone who can adjust to things and rise above issues of vanity.

Wish me luck.

My newest Bloomberg View column just came out:

So, I’m learning to eat again. Like a newborn child perhaps, but worse, since I have all sorts of memories of how much I can eat and what I like to eat that are misleading. A Bayesian prior that I can’t easily shake.

Pescatarian

For example, once I was cleared to eat ground meat, I made myself a pot of beef chili, which is something I’ve always loved to eat. I knew I could only eat a bit of it at a time, but I figured that was fine, since I’d share it with other people. But the truth is, I couldn’t eat it at all. I tried one tiny bowl of it and it felt like a million tons in my stomach.

That’s been the way it is for me, with pretty much all meat, including chicken. I can’t seem to eat meat and feel good afterwards.

By contrast, I can eat fish. To be more precise, sashimi. I’ve really enjoyed salmon sashimi. And tofu. I’ve been pretty much addicted to tofu. Anything Thai, and the lighter the sauce the better.

Traveling

Traveling while learning to eat sucks. I went away with my kids for a few days to West Springfield, MA. Talk about a food desert. The best restaurant we went to was Bertucci’s, followed by IHOP, followed by Friendly’s. Not an exaggeration. And since I’m not eating pasta or doughy bread, Bertucci’s was tough. And since I don’t want to eat sweet things, IHOP was basically impossible. And since I don’t digest fried things, Friendly’s was awful.

Out of desperation, I google searched “good healthy food near me” and it came up with two results: Dunkin Donuts and a martini bar.

Basically I lived off of the cheese I brought with me for the trip. I now kind of understand why rich people pay so much to vacation in fancy places with healthy food. I would have paid good money for avocado toast.

As a side note, I’ve never been more aware of how most of America eats. The food available in places like this is unhealthy, addictive, and omnipresent. Not to mention very, very cheap. Which is to say, there is a systemic problem we will have to face sooner or later when it comes to health.

Throwing the Rulebook Out the Window

I think I mentioned before that the instructions I’ve received from the surgeon’s office – specifically, from the nutritionist – have been hard to follow, in part because they’re extra strict to make allowances for the fact that they assume practically everyone cheats. That’s not a theory, I asked. And since I’m actually trying to be compliant, that makes it kind of ridiculous.

For example, the instructions tell you to eat meat with mayonnaise so that it will go down easier. But they also tell you not to ever eat something with more than 25% fat in a meal. That’s hard to do, so the conclusion is to mix up your meat with diet mayonnaise to force it down.

I mean, yuck. Who wants to force down chunks of chicken or beef with diet mayonnaise? I’d rather never eat meat in the first place.

More generally, though, I once again think the entire causal relationship has been misunderstood.

It’s easy enough to do as a nutritionist: if you notice that people who eat high fat foods don’t lose as much weight as people who eat lean foods, it’s natural to tell everyone to eat lean foods. But that doesn’t mean such advice will be heeded or will work.

My perspective is that I’ve thrown the dice on this surgery, and it has changed my hormones, and my stomach biome, and my tastes will change, and I might end up being one of those people who both desire and consume lean foods. And if I’m lucky, and I end up wanting to eat lean foods, this surgery will have been a success. But I cannot make it a success with sheer force of will.

You see, I also like my cheese, and sometimes my entire “meal” (still the size of a snack) consists of eating cheese, and I’m sure it’s more than 25% fat, but I’m not planning to replace it with diet cheese. Instead, I’m happy to report, other meals all I want is fruit, or salad, and they’ll have to balance stuff out.

Long story short, I’m ending up relatively noncompliant, after all. The only things I’m being super careful about are my vitamin patches and my protein intake, which seem important.

I don’t know how this will all end up, but I do know that I value delicious and satisfying food, and I’d rather be listening to my body and eating good food than ignoring my body and eating plastic.

I wrote a new Bloomberg View column about some of the tools to fight bad algorithms:

Look Who’s Fighting Our Algorithmic Overlords

Take a look at my older Bloomberg View columns here.

This is a guest post by Becky Jaffe.

One way to disarm the dangerous ideology of white supremacy is to teach and learn Black history inside and outside of the classroom. Here is a personal list I compiled from my own collection of books and documentaries I would like to share with you. I have arranged the order of the titles into a poem in homage to these freedom writers. The first version of the poem omits the authors, while the second version includes authors and clickable links for more information on each title and author.

Please add your own inspirational thinkers in the comments below. Let us not give an ideological inch to the white nationalists in the white house.

A Black History Curriculum in Poem Form:

Kindred
Roots
Country of My Skull
Things Fall Apart
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Cry, The Beloved Country
An African Elegy

Americanah
Life Upon These Shores
To Be a Slave
To Kill a Mockingbird
My Bondage and My Freedom
Black Skin, White Masks
Their Eyes Were Watching God
The Half Has Never Been Told
Tales of Tenderness and Power
The Poisonwood Bible
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Weep Not, Child
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Parting the Waters
Up From Slavery
Native Son
Invisible Man
Hidden Figures
Ain’t I a Woman?
I Am Not Your Negro

Between the World and Me
Eyes on the Prize
You Must Set Forth At Dawn
Long Walk to Freedom
Long Night’s Journey Into Day
Homegoing
The Audacity of Hope
Naming Our Destiny
Astonishing the Gods
I, Too, Am America
A Raisin in the Sun
The Souls of Black Folk
Unbowed
Beloved
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For
Anything We Love Can Be Saved

—

Here is the same poem with the authors included and clickable links for each title:

Kindred by Octavia Butler
Roots by Alex Haley
Country of My Skull by Antje Krog
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney
Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton
An African Elegy by Ben Okri

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi
Life Upon These Shores by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
To Be a Slave by Julius Lester
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass
Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward E. Baptist
Tales of Tenderness and Power by Bessie Head
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs
Weep Not, Child by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch
Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
Native Son by Richard Wright
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
Ain’t I a Woman? By Sojourner Truth
I Am Not Your Negro – James Baldwin documentary

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Eyes on the Prize documentary
You Must Set Forth At Dawn by Wole Soyinka
Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
Long Night’s Journey Into Day – documentary
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
Naming Our Destiny by June Jordan
Astonishing the Gods by Ben Okri
I, Too, Am America by Langston Hughes
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
Unbowed by Wangari Maathai
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For by Alice Walker
Anything We Love Can Be Saved by Alice Walker

It went up this morning, I hope you like it:

The era of blind faith in big data must end