Many people in my family have an autism diagnosis, or autistic traits (genetics!) In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if your sister has autistic traits herself, even if she doesn't meet the "threshold" for diagnosis. Right now, the most common model is the Autism spectrum model. In other words, diagnosing autism isn't a "yes or no" question but rather a "more or less" question. We're all on the spectrum somewhere.
I suspect the spectrum model is equally true with anxiety and restlessness, just as you mentioned in your comment. Or depression, or schizotypal traits, etc. How we express it is cultural, and where we draw the line between normal and disordered is also cultural. When we remove the stigma from autism, like in the neurodiversity community, a lot more edge-case people are willing to get tested or admit that they have it. So then you get into the age old argument- - are autism rates increasing or is diagnostic criteria changing?
And like you said, how useful/helpful is the diagnosis? An autism diagnosis doesn't tell me anything about a person's preferences, personality, experiences, or abilities. But I think it can be very helpful if it helps people access meaningful advice that improves their quality of life.
Wow, I noticed the 20 year discontinuity (to an extrapolated data point) at the end, but looking at it more closely it only levels off in the middle because time went from moving a decade at a time to two years at a time...
This might be a side comment, but the possibility that anorexia always existed but was unnoticed might line up with the thing where women were always fainting at the drop of a hat in the past and how this eventually went away. If everyone just thought passing out was normal instead of an anorexia symptom they wouldn't include it in diagnoses, right?
But then why did women stop fainting in the 20th century?
I think it's more probable that dramatic fainting was a performative social behavior - sort of like how we cough or clear our throats to attract attention, even though we're not sick.
What makes you think they did? Human females the number of presentations for fainting in general practice and in emergency settings is approximately four times higher for young females than for young males (Olde Nordkamp et al. 2009).
If you're looking for anorexia in girls, amenorrhea would be a symptom, though I suppose the Victorians had some euphemism for it and probably there aren't good records.
My understanding is that corsets weren't more restrictive than modern clothing; the horror stories about tight-lacing were very extreme cases, like a future historian basing their understanding of bras on Lady Gaga's outfits
Yeah, I fell into a hole in YouTube a while ago (pre-covid) that is full of historical clothing experts getting extremely annoyed that tight-laced corsets are seen as the norm, rather than being a special-occasion garment. It's like, oh, six-inch platform heels. No-one wears those as an everyday shoe, but you see them a lot at very fancy events (there are photos of Olivia Rodrigo at the White House a couple of days ago wearing them). Because published images are much more likely to be of fancy events, we get a distorted image of the past.
The other problem is that corsets have to be fitted to the specific person and off-the-shelf corsets, the ones that almost every modern person that has ever worn a corset has experience with, are much more restrictive than properly-fitted ones.
There was an actress who had done lots of period films who was put in a properly-fitted corset for the first time for a particular film (or maybe TV show?) and was in raptures about how much more comfortable it was and how much less restrictive, and this whole YouTube community were posting up videos of the interview and saying "see, we told you so".
I was in Basel, Switzerland, a few years ago and the local toy museum had a temporary exhibit on the history of corsets. (I guess they were the only museum with extra space). It was fascinating, and corroborates this view that most corsets were not extremely restrictive.
Turns out to be anaemia. Poor diet, overheated/poorly ventilated rooms, heavy clothing and anaemia on top of stress makes for fainting, especially if it's socially acceptable for women to faint. Probably also was an element of "fainting because I am a Delicate Flower and get attention that way" as well, and perhaps women weren't in fact fainting as much as popular novels and plays described them as doing.
Can we tell a predictive coding story? If your top-down prior is that stress = fainting, and your bottom-up sensory data is giving you stress signals, do you faint?
Better nutrition and better overall health might have reduced the probability of fainting. Modern women (and men !) rarely push their bodies to the absolute limits of survival on the daily basis. We have weekends and 8-hour workdays at the office, not 24/7 shifts of mining coal or carrying buckets of water over multiple miles.
Alternatively, _The Frailty Myth_ has it that early Victorian women were so much discouraged from moving that they had trouble giving birth and so light, ladylike exercise was invented.
It would be interesting to pin down the range of time when fainting was more common. Or, for that matter, to find out something about how common fainting was.
Also, in many cultures, for long periods of time, being thin wasn't even seen as attractive: see Rubens and other art from the era, for example. Or ancient art and sculpture from many different places. When food is scarce, voluptuousness is seen as attractive. When food is plentiful, it flips. (I have seen this flip within my lifetime in India, as a consequence of globalization and economic growth.)
Anorexia is unheard-of in societies where most people live at the edge of starvation, for obvious reasons.
I wonder about the psychology of gender identity in relation to this. It's been very strange watching transmedicalist narratives be completely obliterated by weird continental perspectives that seem to allow and encourage a distinct gender identity for every possible permutation of quale. Gender identity disorder has increasingly become a cultural phenomenon believed to be on a continuum rather than a discrete alleged biological category. In that way it is somewhat opposite to trends described here, yet the increase is still occurring. It seems like you can track the taint of medicalization in through at least two directions I guess. The reference point would be cultures with strong non binary or non static gender norms perhaps.
A lot of people have drawn parallels between the spikes in anorectic teenage girls observed in the 1990s and 2000s, and the current spike we are experiencing in transgender teenagers (specifically trans boys). Lisa Littman's research into "rapid onset gender dysphoria" makes the comparison quite explicit and argues that the underlying mechanism in the two cases is basically identical: social contagion via social media and peer groups.
The other possible example of this "the spectrum".
Presumably in young kids, autism is genuine and not being faked/projected/induced. On the other hand, when I was in Silicon Valley 20 yrs ago, it was definitely a cool disease to be able to say that you had Asperger's.
Peer group effects can easily occur without social contagion. If some mental status has statistical implications for interests or disposition, it'll exhibit a peer group effect, because people choose their friends based on interests or disposition.
In high school, I had two groups of friends, who didn't interact much. The majority of one group is now gay or bisexual (but mostly weren't out then); the majority of the other group became software developers. It would be *possible* to explain this by peer group effects, but the actual explanation is that my friend groups were preselected for the interests at hand - I was on the robotics team and ate lunch with the theater kids.
I instinctively come down hard against the people who declaratively say "You say that you are X, but actually, you are Y, and also fuck you" and in favor of being whatever you like being; but at the same time it's pretty hard for me to understand what people mean when they describe themselves as feeling like a particular thing.
I've never particularly felt like a male or female or anything particular, so I need this shit explained to me.
SlateStarCodex had a helpful (for me) post about the concept of being "cis by default": https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/. It included a request for comments about people having strong positive feelings about their gender matching their sex-assigned-at-birth, and got some responses. (Note also that some X -> Y trans people seem to have a stronger visceral sense of "I'm not X" than "I'm Y".)
People with little experience in the trans community seem to conflate feeling like you're not X with feeling like you are Y pretty often, when really they're related but separate factors and any given trans person seems (to me at least) to differ in how much of each they feel.
I've listened to some videos about detransition, and how much of I'm not X versus I'm Y *might* be a thing to look into to see whether transition is a good idea. I say might because this is a hypothesis.
>(though before you start thinking of this as too exotic, remember that the Irish called their own ethnic violence “The Troubles”)
Yeah, it seems pretty universal to give scary things harmless-sounding euphemisms. People with HIV often refer to it as "the bug" or "high five", for example.
>I was more interested in a sort of sub-thesis that kept recurring under the surface: does naming and pointing to a mental health problem make it worse?
From the department of N=1 studies:
I know a woman who was sexually interfered with as a child. It didn't affect her when it happened. She was old enough to remember it, but the memories weren't painful. It was just a weird person doing stuff. She certainly didn't feel like she'd been victimized.
Only later, when surrounded by friends who talked about how awful CSA is and how it ruins your life forever (etc, etc), did trauma from the event hit her.
This might not be a common experience, but it was unsettling to hear her describe that. She felt a degree of bitterness toward her friends: almost as though they'd caused her to become a victim, not her attacker.
I have heard similar from someone I know, as well — that it didn't seem shameful and horrifying until everyone kept saying how ashamed and horrified she must be.
A common thread here might be that in both of these cases, it doesn't appear to have been violent or forceful — I'd wager that in the more awful cases, other people's reactions aren't needed to make it a terrible memory.
>(though before you start thinking of this as too exotic, remember that the Irish called their own ethnic violence “The Troubles”)
In Sri Lanka we* also called our 30-year-long ethnic civil war the exact same thing ("The Troubles"). Before reading this review I hadn't previously thought to connect this to a kind of cultural euphemising.
*As a Sri Lankan-descendant born in the UK I thought it was fascinating that both countries had "The Troubles" front-of-mind in the 1980s, and as a child I wondered whether every country had The Troubles as well.
I have a kind of mirror version of this where I suspected maybe that I should be upset and freak out, but then upon reflection thought: who gives a fuck? Weirdos gonna weird, no harm no foul? Way worse shit has happened to me? This is of course a profoundly unpopular view that I cannot talk about with anyone, basically.
As someone who grew up in what was basically still stiff-upper-lip British society long after Britain itself had abandoned this, I thank god every day for doing so.
So much dysfunctionality of the US seems to stem from this high-emoting crap and the baggage that goes along with it. Both at the societal level of the absolute incomprehension of other societies and other times; and at the individual level of "thing has happened and therefore I should freak it and continue freaking out until I have ruined the lives of at least three people around me".
This sounds a bit like the Dawkins thing? People seemed to think that just because he said he wasn't horrifically traumatized and that it ruined his life, that it meant he was *defending* it.
Consider this. We tell kids to report if they are inappropriately touched (and a bunch of other stuff related to it). They go to the doctor, who tells them that normally they should not allow anyone to do this, but they need to examine them. We create frameworks why this is okay, rules about it, etc., and the kids show their genitals to strangers. We treat this as normal, no big deal, and most importantly, not traumatizing. On the other hand, if a stranger looks at us too long in a public place while fully clothed, we treat that like an invasion. That bothers us, and we tell an authority (adult, maybe police).
Why is the more egregious invasion not traumatizing, while the objectively less invasive experience is? It seems obvious to me that it's cultural expectation. Not all things can be controlled by cultural expectations, but I am confident that we could create a society where we consider it weird for a doctor to see us naked, just as much as for a different kind of stranger. Yet we don't.
(arab girl drowns because male lifeguard not allowed to touch here) and think "OMG those savages".
But I can easily think of equivalent situations in the US. For example suppose I'm out hiking somewhere really cold, there's a severe rainstorm, and I come across an 8 yr old girl. It seems like the most sensible life-saving response would be for us both to get naked (out of cold clothes) and together (share body heat) in a sleeping bag. And perhaps 30 years ago I'd probably have done that unthinkingly. Would I do that today? Hmm. Save the girl and quite possibly ruin my life; or walk away as not my problem...
Of course it's just as American to deny that this second situation has any analogy with the first...
On the other hand lots of child abuse does seem to have horrible effects independent of “psychologizing it”. Our approach is dumb, but don’t throw out the literal babies with the bathwater! Some people not being affected doesn’t mean some others aren’t.
Absolutely, though it appears that a lot of how we feel about these situations is related to how society depicts them and treats them. Not everything, by any stretch, but a lot more than we tend to give credit for.
There was a famous study a while ago that found exactly this - that child sexual abuse did not seem to traumatize the child when it happened, only later once it was revealed to be stigmatizing. Needless to say it was very controversial. I've looked for it but I can't find it or remember exactly what it was.
I don't know how traumatizing child sexual abuse is, but I have wondered for quite a while how much culture is a factor in sexual assault being more traumatizing than regular old physical assault. The problem is that even trying to know what to search for is difficult in itself.
As other commenter said, child sexual abuse can be anything from “questionable contact once or twice”, which probably is fine in terms of long term harm (although still bad), and regularly happens between young kids themselves, and “brutal rape and beating”, which is really quite bad in the long term, and anything in between. Might be hard to separate those.
You may be referring to Rind et al. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rind_et_al._controversy), a controversial meta-analysis which found that child sexual abuse did not result in significant, long-term negative psychological effects.
I read the literature around it pretty comprehensively about 5 years ago and found myself agreeing pretty heavily with Rind. The Wikipedia article spends a lot of time discussing the "methodological" issues, but Rind was successfully replicated in IIRC 2009, even accounting for those issues.
Fun fact: did you know that both the Senate and the House passed resolutions condemning the study?
Same thought came to my mind immediately when I read your post. To begin with, what constitutes "abuse" is already a function of societal norms. Then, whether or not something is labelled as "abuse" contributes very heavily to feelings of having been a victim. This applies to all sorts of abuse" childhood sexual abuse, childhood physical abuse, FGM, adult sexual or otherwise inappropriate behavior, what have you. Even financial things such as, say, not inheriting from your father because you're a female. As long as the person believes this is the norm, they are either not inconvenienced, or accept the inconvenience the same way as we accept childhood illnesses we can't avoid. I always thought that, for example, in rape cases, the ideal would be a dual approach: come down hard on the rapist with the full force of the law, and have a psychologist downplay the whole thing to the victim as if it had been no big deal. Of course that doesn't work too well in America (or generally "The West") where people believe there must be one "Truth" rather than many culturally biased perceptions.
I worry that the current culture rewards people for being and staying victims. It is *useful* to be able to say your current condition is because you are a victim, and it allows you access to resources for victims. Many people are victims of *something* and may require support and healing, however it is not a healthy mind-set to stay in. People need to be empowered to move on and away from victim status.
This reminds me of the case of one of Larry Nassar's victims (the pedophile Olympics doctor). She was convinced she had received legitimate medical treatment and even defended him publicly until it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had touched her inappropriately for his own gratification. After that, she was one of the many who confronted him in court and gave a tearful victim impact statement.
Someone I know was abused over a long period of time and had sketchy memories of the timeline until they confronted their abuser and he filled in some of the details. Those new details gave the victim a new zeal to seek justice, although they certainly had been traumatized already. But the new information brought a new angle to the trauma.
This is consistent with something I (think I) read in Frank Bures's The Geography of Madness: it is the cultural context of sexual acts with children that causes trauma for the child, not the sexual act itself. He illustrates this with the example of a maturation ritual of the Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea: it involves the boys performing fellatio on an adult man of the tribe, but it is in the context of growing up and "becoming a man". Because it's public and socially accepted, it is not a cause of trauma for anyone involved.
As far as I can tell they are only attested by a single anthropologist, Gilbert Herdt, who refused to tell anyone else where they were in order to protect their "privacy".
An alternative explanation is he simply made them up.
Similar rituals are reported from other peoples of east-central New Guinea, such as the Etoro and Kaluli, by other anthropologists. It would have to be a pretty elaborate and coordinated conspiracy for them all to be made up.
Also, the location and identity of the Sambia does not appear to be that much of a secret any more. The Wikipedia page on the Sambia says that "the Sambia people speak Simbari (called Sambia by Herdt)", and the location of the Simbari linguistic group is given in fairly precise terms in Richard Lloyd (1973), The Angan Languages. The evidence for the Sambia-Simbari connection, as given on Wikipedia, comes from a book called "Pacific Homosexualities" published in 2002. I don't have access to this book, but I can see an extract in Google Books which contains the following quote, said to be from a statement issued by "a few Christianized Simbari":
"The people of Simbari in Marawaka, Eastern Highlands province are protesting the actions of the government in allowing an American anthropologist (Gilbert Herdt) to come and study our people's culture in the 1970s and '80s. Books allegedly written by Mr. Herdt and "discovered" in 1984 were against our customs. We also found that he never lodged copies of his books ... Our requests for assistance from Governor Peti Lafanama and Minister Muki Taranupi have fallen on deaf ears. We want compensation for the damage his books have caused to our customs and traditional beliefs."
So in this statement some of the Simbari seem to have acknowledged that they were the "Sambia" people Herdt studied. Admittedly they are also saying that what Herdt wrote was "against their customs", but these are Christianized Simbari who naturally would like to believe that.
This is called delayed onset PTSD. It doesn't mean she wasn't actually traumatized. A lot of the conversations in response to this thread are extraordinarily minimizing to the biological nature of PTSD. People with that kind of trauma can be dissociated from their body for years without ever realizing it. That doesn't mean the trauma wasn't there, only that they were not aware of it.
I think the question here is not necessarily about how bad or "biological" PTSD is — that is, not minimizing how much trauma may be retained once it has occurred/once PTSD has developed — but rather about the cause of the trauma/PTSD in the first place.
If an event is not viewed as traumatic by an individual at the time, and then they're told it is traumatic and subsequently develop PTSD, how do we distinguish between "PTSD was socially inculcated in this individual" vs "they always had it but it was just delayed onset"?
I had skepticism around this sort of activist push for "mental health awareness" and calls for "normalization." I recall watching the Netflix special by Inside by Bo Burnham and finding the constant discussion of mental illness and suicide very off-putting even though it was made to be humorous. It is not glamorization of mental illness but it seems to be something like treating it lightly.
There is the issue of pathologizing oneself and then saying "this is how a [insert illness] acts. And of course if everyone knows what Borderline Personality/cyclothmia is then maybe people start saying "maybe I have that?" and then maybe doing that makes them think a certain way. Determining how large this phenomena is would be really difficult.
I don't want to return to negatively stigmatizing mental illness. But I think "normalization", whatever that means, may be a bit too far. I imagine we could treat this stuff with a bit of seriousness maybe. Yes, I could imagine spreading information about psychiatric disorders could cause spread. Not sure what to do with this. Scott's humorous world probably isn't it.
> I don't want to return to negatively stigmatizing mental illness. But I think "normalization", whatever that means, may be a bit too far.
Another possibility is that efforts to normalize mental health issues have no effect either way, and in fact follow an increase in actual mental health issues.
Some diseases like diabetes and myopia, as well as autoimmune disorders such as asthma and allergies, are far more prevalent in developed societies in developing societies. Could PTSD, anxiety, and depression be similar? Perhaps, even though we have great material abundance, we live in a maximally mental illness generating environment?
> I recall watching the Netflix special by Inside by Bo Burnham and finding the constant discussion of mental illness and suicide very off-putting even though it was made to be humorous. It is not glamorization of mental illness but it seems to be something like treating it lightly.
For what it's worth, I'd say that anyone who primarily describes Inside as a comedy has made a serious genre error (Netflix very much included) - Burnham is a comedian and humor is his tool, but it's first and foremost an exploration of deteriorating mental health in quarantine. One of those cases where a content warning might need a "no seriously, we mean it" re-claimer.
I think "comedy special" is a genre that originated in an art form that involved standing up and telling jokes, but has changed quite a bit, even though it keeps the same name. Just as "tragedy" originated as a singing competition (oidy) where the winner gets a goat (trag) and gradually changed into something else, but kept the name.
Isn't the very assumption "Of COURSE quarantine has led to deteriorating mental health -- now let's just p-hack till we find it" precisely the problem Scott is talking about?
Why is that the correct prior rather than, eg, "Quarantine led to families being much closer and better mental health among most" or even "mental health is almost all genes and biology, and, unsurprisingly, quarantine had no effect since it did not change either genes or biology"?
Let me try this again: "Inside" is an exploration of *one particular man's* deteriorating mental health during quarantine. I would hope for Burnham's sake that it's mostly artifice, but I get the impression there's a lot of honesty in the emotions there. And it is quite good at getting people to relate to it, which is not *supposed* to be a pleasant thing.
This reminds me of how sometimes I get into a rabbit hole of reading about something like Morgellons disease or those people who are sensitive to electromagnetic radiation from radio signals and things. I'm always a bit worried that I'll develop one of those syndromes after reading about it. But so far my mental health is very robust and things like that don't happen to me.
We're probably all suffering from countless small diseases and pathologies that haven't been classified yet. Maybe a person in the year 2200 will read about 2020 and be amazed that anyone survived.
My mother (who was a doctor) often said that med students will catch every one of the diseases they're learning about, and that's perfectly normal. I should have made the connection to mental health earlier.
Which makes it even more frustrating that every one of the psychiatrists I visited for insomnia insisted that there's underlying depression and anxiety, even though I don't feel at all depressed or anxious.
It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement
without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular
disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every
case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for
some slight ailment of which I had a touch - hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down
the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly
turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which
was the first distemper I plunged into - some fearful, devastating scourge, I know
- and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was
borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again
turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever - read the symptoms - discovered that
I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it - wondered
what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance - found, as I expected, that I had that
too, - began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and
so started alphabetically - read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and
that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I
was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned,
I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I
seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six
letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight.
Why hadn't I got housemaid's knee? Why this invidious reservation?
After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid's knee.
There was an episode of Frasier (who played a call-in radio psychiatrist), who had a patient call in and describe a wide-assortment of mental illnesses they were suffering from in great detail.
Frasier correctly "diagnosed" the caller as a 3rd year psychiatry student.
I suspect that this is because the terms used in textbooks don't really make a lot of sense until you've seen them in-person. The first time this clicked with me was when I encountered my first patient going through a mania phase. They'd just learned that they were going to be moving into the apartment unit they wanted. They decided to be proactive by staying up without sleep for 48 hours straight and packing, but doing nothing more than removing all the stuffing from the couch cushions. And then you go "so *that's* what mania looks like" rather than thinking it's being a little restless and trying to cure your insomnia by going for an hour-long walk.
We can view this increase in trans awareness as an introduction of a foreign idea. Here is one theory: This causes people to not feel good in their bodies like the spread of the other conditions. Here is another: People who would be happier trans or with a different gender identity have always existed and awareness of transgenderism, body dysphoria, gender identity and so forth has allowed people to discover something about themselves and take steps to improve their life. And social awareness creates social acceptance and improves the quality of transpeople's lives. Or maybe it's both?
I think most folks get over their dysphoria, but with acceptance instead of rejection, many people are doing things to their life that reduce their wellbeing. However, there a few folks for whom the increase in wellbeing from transitioning is extreme. The question is how do stop mass delusions in teenage girls, while not hurting the actual people who would benefit from acceptance. To me the clear answer is to accept and encourage transitions, but only for adults over 21.
Hard disagree. I think the problem is that there are a small number of people who are actually trans, and I think the neuroscience needs to develop to the point that early detection and intervention in these few cases becomes tenable
But is this theory correct? I was under the impression that the jury was still out there. In particular, i recall reading that the studies did not correct for sexual orientation (It was a commentary by james cantor, but i cannot find it)
Someone who wants to change their gender, and does so, and is then happier, is clearly trans whether or not their neurology is similar to the Hypothetical Average Cis (Wo)Man.
Maybe they would have been happier anyway as time passes? How do you even measure happiness here? Seems like there could be a lot of pitfalls with this line of reasoning.
Facially false - ugly man gender swaps into hot woman, is happier because hot, despite not being trans. Women with untreatable gender specific part pain gender swaps, no longer has pain, is happy.
In general this stuff is a lot more socially determined construct complicated than that suggests. Are tribal shamans “clearly innately tribal shamans” because they participate in a role slash identity in their culture? Personal satisfaction as a 100% metric for truth is unreasonable and ridiculous
Interesting that a lot of woke people out there think that there aren't significant enough differences between genders when it comes to neurological differences.
Would partially explain why some feminists increasingly are becoming hostile towards trans activists.
Trans people, even the real ones (whatever that means), don’t really ever share the whole range of “psychological traits” of their target gender in my experience. Even the MtFs who knew they were trans from age five, imagine themselves as women daily to the point of it being crippling until transition, feel strong suicidal urges at thoughts of maleness, etc etc , don’t really have feminine lack of assertiveness, or patterns of general thinking and influence, mode of sexual attraction (immediate and visual vs socially embedded and changing), or whatever else. Also, all the brain studies find pre-trans brains are wayyy more similar to assigned sex brains than target sex brains (if there are even significant smaller scale differences in those structures, and n=20 fMRI etc but whatever) (that subject, like so many others, was the subject of a massive campaign of persistent study misreading and misusing to imply that trans brains are just like their gender identity brains which means trans is real!!!!!) (and if anyone wants my 1000 words about this I’ll dig it up). But if you look at relatively unconscious or supposedly innate psychological attributes, at least all trans people both I know personally, which is a lot, and all the ones I have seen in passing, don’t tend towards being biologicallypsychologically women in any significant sense. Also see the interests of MtFs lining up way more closely with the interests of men than women, especially in areas like programming, tech, guns, and being an autistic contrarian (women sometimes are interested in all of these, but ... not at a 50% rate!). All put together I can’t really see “MtFs have woman brains” as true. None of this really rebuts “no biological influence at all, it’s all a massive mess” though, although there’s gotta be some significant sex psychological differences.
I don't trust anecdotal data on this. I think cis people lie to themselves as much as anyone. I also think testosterone and socialization undoubtedly masculinize Trans women (and the converse for Trans men), but that there's no reason to think this wouldn't happen if you subjected cis people to the same conditions. That's a longitudinal question. Also, male interests are more associated with the types of jobs that:
1. Trans people can actually get and maintain
2. You specifically are exposed to
There are a lot of Trans people that work as prostitutes and/or die by their 30s. Just not seeing it, sorry.
> I also think testosterone and socialization undoubtedly masculinize Trans women (and the converse for Trans men), but that there's no reason to think this wouldn't happen if you subjected cis people to the same conditions.
... but testosterone masculinizing behavior slash brain would mean you have a masculine brain. And as IIRC testosterone is a primary driver of all sex differentiation in biology (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation_in_humans - reading the list of syndromes, it seems testosterone issues at various causal points can cause mostly full reversal of apparent sex), while a female brain male body is possible if like the brain doesn’t respond to T but the body does or something, that seems quite tough to pull off mechanically, and doesn’t mesh with I’ve seen. But yes it is tough to figure this stuff out, although I think “anecdotes” can be quite strong in terms of evidence when done correctly, generally that doesn’t work out well. But all of my trans friends were, and continue to be, masculine in ways that just seem weird (strong wills, male style interests, internet autism, very much do not go with the flow, anger issues for some, etc) and idk how to square that with “woman brains slash minds”
"Masculine and feminine brain" is not enough dimensions to capture the relevant questions. All that needs to be the case for my position to hold is for there to be some non trivial non plastic part of the brain that corresponds statistically and in a yudkowskian thing-space sort of sense to something generally found in opposite sex and not birth sex.
Like, I'm not arguing that Trans brains are holistically female or male, just that there is some persistent kernel of maleness or femaleness there (not even for sure having anything to do with masculinity or femininity)
That sounds like a survivorship-bias sort of problem. Wouldn't somebody who lacked a strong will or significant anger, who tended to go along with the flow and blend in socially, but with subjective experience of gender dysphoria held constant, be far more likely to simply hide those feelings? Rather than, say, heroically asserting themselves and overturning their whole life in a quest to resolve the issue.
"Also, male interests are more associated with the types of jobs that:
"1. Trans people can actually get and maintain
"2. You specifically are exposed to"
The guy I knew in MBA school in 1981 who is now said to be "America's highest paid female CEO" made his first fortune by inventing his own industry. He was among the most willful people I've ever met. He made a similar impression upon his highest paid employee, Howard Stern, who called him Martin Luther Queen.
What’s benefit? I’m sure there are numerous practices and massive life choices many take and find beneficial but you disagree are beneficial. Some dislike religious asceticism, some dislike voluntary sexual repression, some dislike hedonism, some dislike conversion therapy, some become eunuchs as a fetish, all of these have many participants who claim they’re awesome. Claiming that, because people find transition good, makes it good, isn’t something you’d claim true for conversion therapy or Islamic repression of women, and is quite odd anyway.
And anyway “MTF brains are significantly F” was both the initial claim here and a common claim to support the idea of trans, so it’s relevant.
Snake oil medicine, energy healing for cancer, new age religions, The Secret, are more things that lots of people like, but the “it is good because it is well liked by participants” is questionable.
Yes, it's capable of being falsified. Just not immediately. It is in roughly the same category of propositions as "it will rain on the first Wednesday of April 2057". In the meantime I trust my own intuitions and reasoning about it based on direct experience more than I trust the reasoning of others, though I don't think that's sufficient to convince others and defer to political conventions of liberty as a stronger argument against encroachments.
IIRC there actually was adversarial collaboration on SSC which showed significant desistance (i.e. not continuing with dysphoric feelings) after puberty, up to half of the cases (the data is all over the place but that's about the middle point). However, there's the other half too. The complication of course it's not just "acceptance" now, it's either rejection in one tribe, or completely disproportional celebration in the other. Imagine getting some complicated surgical procedure were celebrated as a huge achievement for the person and people who had one would have been treated as a hero. Would that increase the number of people getting it? I think so. Wouldn't deny the cases where people actually need one, either - it's just there would be a lot of cases where they really don't.
I was hesitant to bring it up trans issues but that's where my mind went, too. There seems to be far more gender nonconformism now, particularly among young people. The NHS Gender Identity Development Service has seen something like a 3000% increase (not a typo) in referrals over the past decade. Other numbers from around the world are similar.
A common explanation is that dysphoric kids have always existed but hid it in the past. That's plausible if we're talking about kids attending More Country Music High in Cletusville Alabama, I guess.
But look, I was in forums and chat rooms in the early 00s. Places where you could just pick a name and be yourself. I never met an out trans person. I met gay people, but no trans people. They had no reason to hide. They just didn't seem to exist.
This might reflect the social bubble I was in. No doubt people will post replies with differing experiences, which is fair. But there does seem to be an amazing increase in a period of just a few years, and I do wonder about social contagion as an explanation.
Do you think homosexuality has followed a similar pattern? As in if that chatroom was in 1700 you would be telling me you didn't know of any gay people?
Interestingly, the share of US adults identifying as bisexual has indeed increased, from 1.1% in 2008 to 3.2% in 2018. This rise is driven entirely by women. Similarly, the rise in transgender women is much faster than the rise in transgender men, so much so that the gender ratio has reversed from 2009 to 2016 among UK teenagers (see my other post). Maybe the the increase in absolute prevalence of gender dysphoria is due to increased acceptance, but why would the sex ratio change so suddenly, for either bisexuality or transgender identity?
I meant more like maybe it was 0.016% or something in 1700 and it is the same phenomena of a 100 times increase just not as rapidly. Obviously, it would be hard to figure out if this was true.
I ... don’t think so. There have certainly been changes in the idea of homosexuality, but men have been fucking men for a LONG time, in large numbers, and there’s documentation everywhere proving that. Maybe less, but not one in ten thousand (roughly the chance of being struck by lightning in your lifetime, according to the National Weather Service). It certainly wasn’t seen in the Kinsey Scale exclusive homosexual - bisexual - exclusive homosexual sense though, whether or not that Was. I’d recommend an academic paper written about the social construction of homosexuality in ancient Rome - https://www.academia.edu/544127/The_teratogenic_grid - but apparently it was written by a later convicted CP possessor so ... oh well.
Is there any male character in Shakespeare who stands out as almost certainly gay from his traits?
My vague impression is that Shakespeare might not have had the concept of the modern stereotypical gay man in his conceptual repertoire. Foucault argued along these general lines and perhaps he is right in this case. Over a long enough time period, lots of things can change.
Osric in "Hamlet"? Though he is more a fussy courtier type. Mostly it's boys playing girl parts where the girl is pretending to be a boy, like Olivia in "Twelfth Night" or Rosalind in "As You Like It".
In the Merchant of Venice, the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio reads like a gay affair. It's not explicit, but once it's pointed out, it becomes pretty hard to read their scenes any other way
The evolution of the idea of homosexuality as a sexual orientation is intriguing, because up to about the mid 16th century it wasn't really considered in the aspect of character at all as much as it was about behaviour, so sodomy was just another one of the sexual vices.
I was under the impression that, among the aristocracy, a man's marital duty was to produce an heir; everything else was unimportant. Sure, salacious gossip is always fun, but a feudal lord (duke, earl, marquise, whatever) could have 100 lovers of various genders on the side, and as long as his official wife produced him an official heir, no one would hold it against him.
I say "man", because historically women were rarely seen as important enough to merit any kind of notice :-(
I think I would have heard of homosexuality in 1700. In other periods of time, who knows? We're still not sure what causes homosexuality, and there's no reason its frequency should remain steady in time. Anthropologists have found societies where homosexuality apparently doesn't exist (mostly hunter-gatherer ones).
You’re right about some hunter gatherer societies not having homosexuality / male-male sex as a recognized concept, at least wrt what I’ve read, although the converse that many *do* is equally interesting. That they had to go looking for ones where it doesn’t exist says something.
It's nothing I know much about, but I understand that the letters from Renaissance people to each other refer often enough to their own male homosexuality, e.g. Michelangelo's. I mean, it wasn't something you would say out loud in a public place, but it was okay to talk about it with friends.
The issue with using hunter gatherer societies in discussions like this is that they aren't miraculously preserved simulacra of some early human mode of existence but societies that have evolved away from that mode as much as we have (if not more - I bet their generations are shorter), just in a different direction. So just because some hunter-gatherers don't have homosexually we can't say anything about our ancestral hunter gatherers sexual tendencies.
My pet hypothesis (of which I'm very much not convinced) is that this is mostly an 'Old Testament' thing and is more like modern (U.S.) 'prison homosexuality' in that the anti-homosexuality was directed at relatively powerless males that might be tempted to opt out of trying to find a wife (and then reproduce and raise any children). Part of the temptation would be due to polygyny (by the relatively more-powerful males in one's tribe/clan) and the other to being pastoralists, i.e. many young men not being around women for long periods of time. This would also explain the prohibitions against bestiality.
I am mostly convinced that 'prison homosexuality' isn't the same thing as (modern) 'regular homosexuality'.
And then there's 'homosexuality' among other animals – that _could_ be 'real homosexuality', but it could also be 'opportunistic sexuality' – sexual behavior has to be 'implemented' somehow and given the general chaos that is biological evolution generally, it seems pretty likely that, however it's implemented, it wouldn't be 'perfect' (in the sense of always serving evolutionary fitness, i.e. leading to reproduction).
Part of the reason that the Jewish and Christian faiths tend to be anti-homosexual behavior is that their institutional memories run all the way back to the Greco-Roman world, in which male homosexual behavior tended to be exploitive, with the powerful having their way with the less powerful (e.g., slaves, youths, etc.)
People wouldn't have identified as homosexual in the same sense we understand it. There would be the difference between "men who have sex with men (and women)" and "men who are effeminate and play the woman's part" as they understood it.
In a poem of 1675, Rochester can refer to bisexuality (and what seems like "gay for pay") without it being anything more than the general idea of debauchery; from "The Disabled Debauchee":
"Nor shall our love-fits, Chloris, be forgot,
When each the well-looked linkboy strove t’ enjoy,
And the best kiss was the deciding lot
Whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy."
So the idea of "men who have sex with men" (as distinct from "identifying as homosexual/gay") was around back then as much as it is around today.
I still remember the opening chapters of Cephas Goldsworthy's idiosyncratic biography of Rochester, describing the spirit of the 17th century where two young gentlemen, probably drunk, definitely showing-off, either simulated or actually had sex in public, before a jeering crowd, on the balcony of an inn - and when brought to court the case was dismissed, because the enraged judge who would have loved to sentence them was forced to let them go as there were not any laws about public indecency at the time. Plainly the sporting sprigs of the gentry didn't think it would do their reputations any real or lasting harm to have it bruited about that they were doing gay sex things.
The same is recorded in an anecdote about Mark Antony, that when he was a young rakehell and wanting to piss off his censorious father (or his friend's censorious father), they would pretend to be (actually were?) boyfriends:
"According to the historian Plutarch, Antony spent his teenage years wandering through Rome with his brothers and friends gambling, drinking, and becoming involved in scandalous love affairs. Antony's contemporary and enemy, Cicero, charged that he had a homosexual relationship with Gaius Scribonius Curio."
"There was a rumor that Curio and Mark Antony had an affair when they were young. When the two men had been banned from seeing each other by Curio's father, Curio had smuggled Mark Antony in through his father's roof."
Cicero really had a fun time in his Philippics against Antony, from the Second Philippic:
"44 XVIII. Shall we then examine your conduct from the time when you were a boy? I think so. Let us begin at the beginning. Do you recollect that, while you were still clad in the prætexta [white robe with purple border, worn by Roman boys up to the age of 16-17 and by girls until marriage], you became a bankrupt? That was the fault of your father, you will say. I admit that. In truth, such a defence is full of filial affection. But it is peculiarly suited to your own audacity, that you sat among the fourteen rows of the knights, though by the Roscian law there was a place appointed for bankrupts, even if any one had become such by the fault of fortune and not by his own. You assumed the manly gown, which you soon made a womanly one: at first a public prostitute, with a regular price for your wickedness, and that not a low one. But very soon Curio stepped in, who carried you off from your public trade, and, as if he had bestowed a matron’s robe upon you, settled you in a steady and durable wedlock.
45 No boy bought for the gratification of passion was ever so wholly in the power of his master as you were in Curio’s. How often has his father turned you out of his house? How often has he placed guards to prevent you from entering? while you, with night for your accomplice, lust for your encourager, and wages for your compeller, were let down through the roof. That house could no longer endure your wickedness. Do you not know that I am speaking of matters with which I am thoroughly acquainted? Remember that time when Curio, the father, lay weeping in his bed; his son throwing himself at my feet with tears recommended to me you; he entreated me to defend you against his own father, if he demanded six millions of sesterces of you; for that he had been bail for you to that amount. And he himself, burning with love, declared positively that because he was unable to bear the misery of being separated from you, he should go into banishment.
46 And at that time what misery of that most flourishing family did I allay, or rather did I remove! I persuaded the father to pay the son’s debts; to release the young man, endowed as he was with great promise of courage and ability, by the sacrifice of part of his family estate; and to use his privileges and authority as a father to prohibit him not only from all intimacy with, but from every opportunity of meeting you. When you recollected that all this was done by me, would you have dared to provoke me by abuse if you had not been trusting to those swords which we behold?
47 XIX. But let us say no more of your profligacy and debauchery. There are things which it is not possible for me to mention with honour; but you are all the more free for that, inasmuch as you have not scrupled to be an actor in scenes which a modest enemy cannot bring himself to mention."
That said though, I could be wrong, but my impression is that the modern idea of "identity" as based on a person's gender/sexual orientation/race is relatively new. From what I can tell, in ye olde days one's identity was pretty much defined by one's allegiance to a country (which, admittedly, did cluster along racial lines), or a quasi-national entity such as a religious order. One's choice of sexual partners was a preference, and perhaps an aspect of one's character, but not an identity as such.
How long ago did that "allegiance to a country" predominate? My impression is that pre-1815, and even more likely pre-1648, most Europeans didn't particularly identify with the lord who happened to have authority over their territory, and that would have been the closest thing to a modern concept of "country" they had.
Romans went in for sexual invective, especially for denigrating political rivals and opponents in court cases, in a big way so Cicero as an orator can certainly make the most of what he's laying to Antony's charge.
The picture painted is (probably) intentionally hilarious, to make Antony and his affairs sound even more ridiculous: the stricken father, confined to bed and sobbing with grief and chagrin; the love-stricken son, also weeping and throwing himself histrionically at Cicero's feet to demand he pay that huge debt of Antony's and declaring that he couldn't live without his love; and Cicero as the family friend dragged into this highly emotional scene to sort it all out.
And it's interesting that while he's painting the young Mark Antony as effeminate, playing the "wife" to his lover, he then turns it around and has the older Mark Antony being disgraceful by his public affair with a courtesan/actress/manumitted slave he made his mistress:
"The tribune of the people was borne along in a chariot, lictors crowned with laurel preceded him; among whom, on an open litter, was carried an actress; whom honorable men, citizens of the different municipalities, coming out from their towns under compulsion to meet him, saluted not by the name by which she was well known on the stage, but by that of Volumnia. A car followed full of pimps; then a lot of debauched companions; and then his mother, utterly neglected, followed the mistress of her profligate son, as if she had been her daughter-in-law. O the disastrous fecundity of that miserable woman! With the marks of such wickedness as this did that fellow stamp every municipality, and prefecture, and colony, and, in short, the whole of Italy.
...You came to Brundusium, to the bosom and embraces of your actress. What is the matter? Am I speaking falsely? How miserable is it not to be able to deny a fact which it is disgraceful to confess! If you had no shame before the municipal towns, had you none even before your veteran army? For what soldier was there who did not see her at Brundusium? who was there who did not know that she had come so many days' journey to congratulate you? who was there who did not grieve that he was so late in finding out how worthless a man he had been following?"
Yeah, I'm not going to think that an army of veterans would be shocked, shocked! that their general was keeping a mistress, even if she was an actress.
"Again you made a tour through Italy, with that same actress for your companion. Cruel and miserable was the way in which you led your soldiers into the towns; shameful was the pillager in every city, of gold and silver, and above all, of wine.
However, we will say nothing of these things, which are acts of a more hardy sort of villainy. Let us speak rather of his meaner descriptions of worthlessness. You, with those jaws of yours, and those sides of yours, and that strength of body suited to a gladiator, drank such quantities of wine at the marriage of Hippia, that you were forced to vomit the next day in the sight of the Roman people. O action disgraceful not merely to see, but even to hear of! If this had happened to you at supper amid those vast drinking-cups of yours, who would not have thought it scandalous? But in an assembly of the Roman people, a man holding a public office, a master of the horse, to whom it would have been disgraceful even to belch, vomiting filled his own bosom and the whole tribunal with fragments of what he had been eating reeking with wine. But he himself confesses this among his other disgraceful acts. Let us proceed to his more splendid offenses.
[Mark Antony buys, or otherwise takes possession of, the estate of Pompey The Great]:
"But, as some poet or other says,—“ “Ill-gotten gains come quickly to an end.”
It is an incredible thing, and almost a miracle, how he in a few, not months, but days, squandered all that vast wealth. There was an immense quantity of wine, an excessive abundance of very valuable plate, much precious apparel, great quantities of splendid furniture, and other magnificent things in many places, such as one was likely to see belonging to a man who was not indeed luxurious but who was very wealthy. Of all this in a few days there was nothing left.
...Actors seized on this, actresses on that; the house was crowded with gamblers, and full of drunken men; people were drinking all day, and that too in many places; there were added to all this expense (for this fellow was not invariably fortunate) heavy gambling losses. You might see in the cellars of the slaves, couches covered with the most richly embroidered counterpanes of Cnaeus Pompeius. Wonder not, then, that all these things were so soon consumed. Such profligacy as that could have devoured not only the patrimony of one individual, however ample it might have been (as indeed his was), but whole cities and kingdoms. And then his houses and gardens!
...I pity even the walls and the room. For what had that house ever beheld except what was modest, except what proceeded from the purest principles and from the most virtuous practice? For that man was, O conscript fathers, as you yourselves know, not only illustrious abroad, but also admirable at home; and not more praiseworthy for his exploits in foreign countries, than for his domestic arrangements. Now in his house every bedchamber is a brothel, and every diningroom a cookshop. Although he denies this:—Do not, do not make inquiries. He is become economic. He desired that mistress of his to take possession of whatever belonged to her, according to the laws of the Twelve Tables. He has taken his keys from her, and turned her out of doors. What a well-tried citizen! of what proved virtue is he! the most honorable passage in whose life is the one when he divorced himself from this actress."
I think that would depend on how they wanted to socialize, explicitly identifying that way would certainly attract (not totally positive) attention in the early 2000s (especially if as you say there weren't other out ones), and on a text based forum it would be easy for them to just present as whatever gender they wanted.
You did meet them. One was my partner. She went by a female name on forums and chat rooms in the early aughts and nobody was the wiser. Forums and chat rooms offered her a place to be seen as she wanted to be seen, no questions or explanations necessary.
I think that a lot of it was down to "if you don't know about it, you don't apply it to yourself". There may well have been many more trans people than the ones who came out about it, but they just thought they were/were classed by society around them as "tomboys" and "masculine women" or as "sissies" and "effeminate men".
As I said elsewhere, I'm sure I've been aro/ace since I was nine and very decisively told my mother I had no interest in marriage or family, but I had no idea of the concepts even existing until much, much later in life. If I'd never encountered those ideas, I'd have gone on thinking "well, I'm just weird and maybe mentally ill/disordered; normal people want marriage, kids, sex and romance".
Though it's true that there is an element of the copycat; teenagers are trying on identities in order to find one that fits, as they are in the process of constructing a self that is now a separate individual and not centred around their parents, and becoming an adult from a child. Transness may seem to make sense, or at least be something concrete, in the midst of the confusion of puberty and adolescence. A bit like the "lesbian till graduation" college girls of fable? Some will go out the other side and discard it but it was useful for a time they needed it; some will continue thinking "this is me", and some will be right.
I have a friend whose mom had an interesting life trajectory. As a small child in the 1930s, a major movie studio put her forward to the public as their version of Shirley Temple. When her movie career fizzled as a teen, she became a nun at 18. Ten years later, she ran off with a priest, got married and started a family (including my friend).
Lots of big dramatic decisions, but no chemicals or surgeries back then to close off future changes of mind.
Is that 3000% increase in referrals due to an increase in gender nonconformity, or due to an increase in the behavior of referring people to the NHS Gender Identity Development Service?
I "identified" "as" "genderqueer" in, like, 2007 (never mind that the innovation of identity-label discourse was seen as missing the point - from my perspective, the quality of the theory around it has gone steadily downhill, mostly due to its popularization in the media), as did several of my friends. If you'd told us that, in 2021, the Brits would have an NHS service for that, we would've either looked at you like you'd grown a second head or assumed it meant conversion therapy. Probably both - what else could gender nonconformity have to do with *doctors*?
I was wondering the same thing. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of self-reported trans people, along with a flip in the sex ratio from male-dominated to female-dominated. For example, referals to the Gender Identity Development Service in the UK have gone up from 24 to 426 from 2009 to 2016 for adolescent males, and from 15 to 1071 (!!) for adolescent females. Maybe the growth itself can be explained by greater awareness of either gender dysphoria or the GIDS, but what explains the change in the sex ratio from 1.6 to 0.40?
Aren't all trans people are self-reported? Is there some alternative evaluation method that reliably identifies a person's internal subjective experience before they divulge it? If so, who invented mind-reading technology and how do I destroy them?
Yes, it's self reported. Most mental illnesses are self reported, or based on symptoms that are self reported. Psychiatrists don't diagnose depression or anxiety by measuring the patient's brain waves. If there's any point in analyzing the prevalence of any mental illness, there's no reason not to analyze transgender prevalence.
I think there have always been people, who, if they could just hit a button and switch genders (with no terrible social consequences) - they would. (And, of course, some of them might regret it! Grass is greener and all that.)
Of course it's not that easy, so I think it's a function both of how *badly* they want to switch, and how difficult (medically, socially, financially, etc) it is.
Right now on the social-ostracism front it's gotten dramatically easier. Also on the medical front options have gotten better - mainly young people now have a chance of getting medical treatment before secondary sex characteristics are fully developed, letting them physically get much closer to their preferred gender when they reach adulthood.
So, I think there's been the most obvious change on the reduction-of-obstacles front so that's the most straightforward explanation for the increased numbers.
On the demand side, maybe? I think people are more aware of the option, which may cause them to think about it more, and maybe on the margins that increases the desire of some people to switch enough to cross the threshold to overcome the (still not insignificant) obstacles. On the other hand societal gender roles are less constraining than in the past which you'd think would reduce the pressure to switch some.
I'd do it for the weekend. Sounds like fun. Isn't there a Roman parable about a man who gets temporarily transformed into a woman... and then back again? And the gods are having an argument about whether male or female orgasms are better so they ask The Guy Who Was A Woman to resolve their dispute?
Tiresias who was a Greek seer and the father of Manto, also a prophetess (and her name is related to the word, "mantis" meaning "seer, soothsayer, prophet, diviner" which is why Scott uses pictures of mantises for Mantic Monday).
He struck a pair of copulating snakes with a rod and was turned into a woman as punishment by Hera; he became a priestess of Hera, married and had children; seven years later, (s)he again encountered a pair of copulating snakes and was restored to his male form.
Later on, Zeus and Hera were arguing over who gets more pleasure from sex and Tiresias, as having experienced both sexes, was asked for a judgement: he came down on the side of women getting much more pleasure, so once again a displeased Hera punished him, this time with blindness.
That's the one! Well now I feel like I betrayed my ancestors by mistaking it for a Roman fable (I suppose Romans could have repeated it), but I originally heard it from my high school Latin teacher (it was a Catholic school), hence the association with Romans.
Her husband was obviously getting a lot of pleasure from his various affairs, and she didn't want to admit to getting any pleasure from him (or any other man). In that family's warped domestic politics, it served her interest for men to be the sex-crazed fiends and women their long-suffering victims.
Sure, in this case I was imagining the button being a one-time, no reverse sort of deal. So people who hit it should believe they'd be able to live better as the other gender, but they wouldn't need to feel that way to an extreme degree.
Maybe the development of real and artificial sex hormones as treatments in the mid-20th Century made possible new modes of life, which people then developed an urge to pursue?
For example, as a sort of cross between (reverse) gender dysphoria and (reverse) anorexia, probably more males are obsessed with building huge muscles than ever before, in part because steroids make it possible and provide them with lots of role models (and we have more access to images than ever before).
What is interesting is that upper class men in the 17th century where very feminine. In the clothing they wore, and the fact that they had on a thick layer of make up and even fake moles on their face. There was an increasing focus on beauty for men, until apparantly the distinction between masculine and feminine became too small and there was a strong pushback for upper class men becoming more masculine again. I think the Macaroni was especially one step too far towards the feminine for many, and sort of sparked the reversal.
My feeling is that transgenderism has probably always existed. Some percentage of transgender cases might be treatable by therapy (basically, just talking about it); some are not, and may lead to fatal outcomes. However, the number of such cases is quite small, on the order of small fractions of percentage points.
The rising awareness of trans issues had enabled advanced treatment options for body dysphoria sufferers. Unfortunately, rising awareness and rising acceptance also led to some form of trans identity becoming, for lack of a better word, fashionable. The actual number of transgender people had not changed, but the number of people who either want to be transgender (minus the painful side effects), or mistakenly believe themselves to be, had risen by orders of magnitude. Hence the ongoing fractal proliferation of trans-adjacent identities.
I find it neat to read Matthew 19:12, where Jesus says "12 For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”
Probably more towards comically ignorant, but that's okay!
Jesus is talking about divorce, and the comment is his response to the disciples saying that no one getting divorced is a serious dilemma. It's interesting to me that he separates those who "live like" eunuchs from those that are made into eunuchs and also separate from those that are born as such. Plausibly he's talking about those that are asexual (or at least live like they are), as well as those born without genitalia. So it was apparently a known enough thing at the time to reference it.
My guess would be that a fairly high proportion of people who are sexually attracted to the same sex as their assigned sex have some cross-sex gender feelings, which probably come from the same biological origin as the sexual orientation. How these people get classified and deal with their dysphoria depends on cultural context, sometimes handled entirely within the queer community. In the recent past in the US, many people would have been classified as butch or drag queens who are classified as nonbinary today. Having a butch identity historically could include a lot of the things we consider trans associated now, including binding your breasts, presenting in a completely masculine fashion, and being viewed by others as not really a woman. It’s not clear to me whether the old or new way of classification, where many nonbinary people somewhat socially transition but most don’t take hormones, serves people’s quality of life better.
> The most embarrassing extreme of this happened in 1906, when some photogenic Japanese youth carved a poem in a tree, went to a beautiful waterfall, and leapt to his death
Definitely 1903 for Misao Fujimura. I wonder if the book went into the context of the Meiji restoration and modernization, which is pretty fascinating as it relates to how Fujimura's suicide was thought about at the time and since. You could make a strong case that Fujimura's teacher, Soseki, created the legend for his own purposes (skepticism of the Meiji program) out of a lovesick teenager. As an aside, his famous carved goodbye poem seems to me (a non-specialist for sure)......strangely good? And the quality of that poem was another driving factor here, for why this became such a well known example of teen death by suicide.
This question interested me as well so I did a quick search for the first review I could find-- so caveat that this article is the first time I'd heard of "expressed emotion" and I'm not an expert in the topic.
This focuses more on the association between households with high expressed emotion, and relapse of schizophrenia, but also gives some numbers attributed to Leff & Vaughan 1985 which at first glance do line up with the ones for American and British households from the book (the linked article gives the low-EE %, the quote from the book above is the high-EE %, and they add up to 100%). Despite having a university library access I couldn't find the Leff & Vaughan paper quickly, though-- others might have more success.
Also, I think the definition of "expressed emotion" in the article I linked above helps explain the discrepancy that Scott noted above, that the understood knowledge is that white Americans prefer/demand social environments without big displays of emotion. From what I can tell, "expressed emotion" really is just "expressed emotion (from a schizophrenia patient's household towards a schizophrenic person)". It's a pretty limited definition that's about the ways that people around a schizophrenic person at home, respond to that person. So, it makes a lot of sense that a culture's "way of interacting with schizophrenic people at home" could be very different from their "way of interacting with neurotypical people outside of home".
I had never heard this phrase before now. It seems to have been the subject of quite a lot of research and to have changed its meaning over time, a weird and fascinating subtheme in the weird and fascinating intellectual history of schizophrenia research, and I hope Scott will revisit it.
This was so fascinating! I just finished reading the section on anorexia.
I have a question about the huge popularity of intermittent fasting. It is mostly about when you eat, abd eating relatively unprocessed food (any amount) and Dr. Jason Fung explains it. What do you think about it, considering we live in a culture where anorexia is (I suppose) rampant?
I don't really see the connection here... What's the question — are you positing that intermittent fasting's popularity stems from the same root as anorexia's?
It’s fine lol. Intermittent fasting is seen as a nutrition / discipline / weight loss / health thing, and most everyone who does IF, overall, eats a healthy and normal calorie diet. If anything they tend to eat more healthily than most, just out of selection effects. There’s no overall trend at all of malnutrition, or hyper weight loss, or purging and binging, or body image issues on the whole. Many more IFers don’t lose enough weight because they don’t commit than overdo it. You could just as well say Christian or Islamic fasting or many other fasting traditions are related to anorexia. But as the people who do it don’t end up malnutrition or vomiting, it’s fine. That said, IF can certainly participate in the unhealthy relationship an anorexic had with food - an anorexic could intermittent fast unhealthily - and some people have certainly taken IF to extremely unhealthy levels that resemble anorexia and cause serious health issues -but it in no way presents like or interacts with anorexia for the vast majority of intermittent fasters.
That said, IMO itself it doesn’t matter much, might be good but doesn’t seem that useful
"You could just as well say Christian or Islamic fasting or many other fasting traditions are related to anorexia"
Interestingly, in this context, the mystic St. Catherine of Sienna fasted severely and even at the time people were writing her concerned letters about it which she answered in an irritated fashion.
"TO A RELIGIOUS MAN IN FLORENCE WHO WAS SHOCKED AT HER ASCETIC PRACTICES
In the Name of Jesus Christ crucified and of sweet Mary:
Dearest and most beloved father in Christ sweet Jesus: I Catherine, a useless servant of Jesus Christ, commend me to you: with the desire to see us united and transformed in that sweet, eternal and pure Truth which destroys in us all falsity and lying. I thank you cordially, dearest father, for the holy zeal and jealousy which you have toward my soul: in that you are apparently very anxious over what you hear of my life. I am certain that nothing affects you except desire for the honour of God and for my salvation, which makes you fear the assaults and illusions of devils. As to your special fear, father, concerning my behaviour about eating, I am not surprised; for I assure you, that not only do you fear, but I myself tremble, for fear of devilish wiles. Were it not that I trust in the goodness of God, and distrust myself, knowing that in myself I can have no confidence. For you sent, asking me whether or no I believed that I might be deceived, saying that if I did not believe so, that was a wile of the devil. I answer you, that not only about this, which is above the nature of the body, but about all my other activities also, I am always afraid, on account of my frailty and the astuteness of the devil, and think that I may be deceived; for I am perfectly well aware that the devil lost beatitude, but not wisdom, with which wisdom, as I said, I recognized that he might deceive me. But then I turn me, and lean against the Tree of the Most Holy Cross of Christ crucified, and there will I fasten me; and I do not doubt that if I shall be nailed and held with Him by love and with profound humility, the devils will have no power against me—not through my virtue, but through the virtue of Christ crucified.
You sent me word to pray God particularly that I might eat. I tell you, my father, and I say it in the sight of God, that in all ways within my power I have always forced myself once or twice a day to take food. And I have prayed constantly, and do pray God and shall pray Him, that in this matter of eating He will give me grace to live like other creatures, if it is His will—for it is mine. I tell you, that often enough, when I have done what I could, I enter within myself, to recognize my infirmity, and God, who by most special grace has made me correct the sin of gluttony. I grieve much that I have not corrected that miserable fault of mine through love. I for myself do not know what other remedy to adopt, except that I beg you to pray that Highest Eternal Truth, that He give me grace, if it is more for His honour and the salvation of my soul, to enable me to take food if it please Him. And I am sure that the goodness of God will not despise your prayers. I beg you that if you see any remedy you will write me of it; and provided it be for the honour of God, I will accept it willingly. Also I beg you not to be light in judging, if you are not clearly illumined in the sight of God. I say no more to you. Remain in the holy and sweet grace of God. Sweet Jesus, Jesus Love."
Modern writers tend to go wholesale for the "of course she had anorexia" but that's hard to say; the Wikipedia article (unintentionally) puts a more manipulative slant on it:
"She died on 29 April 1380, exhausted by her rigorous fasting.
...When Catherine was sixteen, her older sister Bonaventura died in childbirth; already anguished by this, Catherine soon learned that her parents wanted her to marry Bonaventura's widower. She was absolutely opposed and started a strict fast. She had learned this from Bonaventura, whose husband had been far from considerate but his wife had changed his attitude by refusing to eat until he showed better manners. Besides fasting, Catherine further disappointed her mother by cutting off her long hair as a protest against being overly encouraged to improve her appearance to attract a husband.
...Her custom of giving away clothing and food without asking anyone's permission cost her family significantly, but she requested nothing for herself. By staying in their midst, she could live out her rejection of them more strongly. She did not want their food, referring to the table laid for her in Heaven with her real family.
...For many years she had accustomed herself to a rigorous abstinence. She received the Holy Eucharist almost daily. This extreme fasting appeared unhealthy in the eyes of the clergy and her own sisterhood. Her confessor, Raymond, ordered her to eat properly. But Catherine claimed that she was unable to, describing her inability to eat as an infermità (illness). From the beginning of 1380, Catherine could neither eat nor swallow water. On 26 February she lost the use of her legs.
Catherine died in Rome, on 29 April 1380, at the age of thirty-three, having eight days earlier suffered a massive stroke which paralyzed her from the waist down."
Fasting has also been used as a legal remedy, even to the point of death, and the historical background to it provided the impulse for the hunger strike in Irish political activity:
"A method of exerting authority, available to all members of Celtic society, was the ritual fast, the troscad. As a legal form of redressing a grievance, this act emerged in the Brehon law system. That it was an ancient ritual can be demonstrated by the fact that it bears almost complete resemblance to the ancient Hindu custom of dharna. This custom is not only found in the Laws of Manu but as prayopavesana (‘waiting for death’) it occurs in ancient Vedic sources. The troscad was ‘Identical with the eastern custom, and no doubt it was believed in pagan times to be attended by similar supernatural effects’; that is, that if the one fasted against ignores the person fasting then they would suffer fearful supernatural penalties. The troscad was the means of compelling justice and establishing one’s rights. Under law, the person wishing to compel justice had to notify the person they were complaining against and then would sit before their door and remain without food until the wrongdoer accepted the administration or arbitration of Justice. ‘He who disregards the faster shall not be dealt with by God nor man … he forfeits his legal rights to anything according to the decision of the Brehon.’
The troscad is referred to in the Irish sagas as well as laws and when Christianity displaced the pagan religion, the troscad continued. We find St Colman fasting against Guaire the Hospitable, St Ronan fasting against Diarmuid, even Patrick himself fasting against several persons to compel them to Justice. Some people even fasted against the saints themselves to get them to give justice and wives also fasted against their erring husbands.
It is fascinating, as well as sad, that in the long centuries of England’s sorry relationship with Ireland, the Irish have continued a tradition of the troscad which has become the political hunger strike. One of the most notable Irish political hunger strikes was that of the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, also an elected Member of Parliament, who was arrested by the English administration in Cork City Hall and forcibly removed from Ireland to London’s Brixton Prison. He died in Brixton on 24 October 1920, on the seventy-fourth day of his hunger strike. He was, of course, not the first Irish political prisoner to die on hunger strike during this period. Thomas Ashe died as a result of forcible feeding on 25 September 1917. MacSwiney’s sacrifice was said to have inspired Mahatma Gandhi to revive the custom of dharna in India as a moral political weapon. In recent times, and perhaps better known, came the hunger strikes in Long Kesh prison camp, when in 1981, ten Irish political prisoners died on hunger strike in an attempt to force the administration to restore their rights as political prisoners, taken away from them in 1974. Among them was Bobby Sands, elected Member of the British Parliament, and Kieran Doherty, elected Member of the Irish Parliament. But these ten Irish prisoners were not the first to resort to the continuing tradition of the troscad in an attempt to assert their rights during the current struggle in the north of Ireland, nor the first to die on hunger strike. Frank Stagg, for example, died after a sixty day hunger strike in Wakefield Prison on 12 February 1976, trying to compel the reinstatement of recognition of special status withdrawn in 1974. The troscad was never entered into lightly and always with full knowledge of the seriousness of the final intent.
The troscad in ancient times was the effective means of someone of lesser social position compelling Justice from someone of higher social position. Thus Druids could fast against a king, or even a man or woman in the lower order of society could fast against their chieftain."
"The Kathiawar Gazetteer of 1884 states, "If a man had a large claim against a chief or another individual of social importance, and all other means of obtaining his rights failed, he would post himself at the door of his debtor and vow to fast until his claim was satisfied. In extreme cases, the creditor was allowed to starve to death, but generally his importunity was rewarded, as few liked to take upon themselves the odium and discredit of causing their creditor's death."
Dharna was not restricted to credit transactions, alone, nor was it always an individual act. Groups of people -- even an entire village -- would stage a collective hunger strike to protest atrocities inflicted by a tax collector or a rapacious landlord."
I feel like a decent prescription, in this and other topics, is: Do Not Reify that which is evil, except where necessary. Contain the reification of potentially damaging concepts to those people who must deal with the handful of real instances (doctors and such), but do not allow such ideas to become well known, even as negatives.
The description of Mental Health Unawareness Campaigns was delightful, thank you.
The evil spirits and PTSD demons don’t seem to quite fit the idea of “not reifying or idolizing evil”, but maybe hunter gatherers are just postmodern anti essentialist deleuzean spirit mystics who have transcended categorical chains.
Alternate hypothesis for why past and current societies with more violence and less stability would seem to have less PTSD: involuntarily and frequently entering fight/flight/freeze mode is only problematic when everything's actually fine.
If you're living in a violent society where threats are everywhere and violence of all kinds happens all the time, you're likely to have good reasons to sit upright in bed in a blind panic when something goes thump in the night. Perhaps symptoms went unnoticed in ancient Rome because trauma-related behaviors and experiences seemed reasonable?
I've often thought about the fact that my PTSD-related sleep disturbances wouldn't be such a problem if someone actually broke into the house. I'd be the only one prepared for a fight. Granted, I'm glad they're subsiding with treatment, as my life is not full of threats and sitting upright in a panic when someone closes a car door outside is unnecessary and exhausting.
Has this been proposed or delved into before by someone who thought about it in a more formal manner than one who lies awake in bed trying to convince herself she'll be fine?
That's basically how my shrink described it. Stuff that is not only normal but necessary in a war zone is bonkers in America.
Hyperawareness, aggression, night terrors, twitchiness around loud noises- survival traits in a world where gunshots at 50 meters are a constant threat. Even flashbacks can have their use; last time I smelled cordite in the air, it meant death, so now the smell of fireworks sets me off. Once I saw a car explode and pelt me with hot frag, and now cars backfiring send me into the gutter for cover.
(fake examples, not applicable to me)
It's only an issue when it comes home with you and you can't shake it off, and it's a only a disorder when it starts disrupting your life. Other than that, it's not a thing to stress about. You were exposed to danger and you're still acting like it, that's all.
Thanks for the good examples. I think this general idea goes a long way toward explaining the whole "But why don't people in [insert war-torn country here] have more PTSD than veterans living in Pleasantville?" conundrum.
Another idea: perhaps societies with less rigid work scheduling allow some flexibility for people with PTSD to work it out. Like, I'm picturing a family living in a multi generational household with various members contributing to the household economy. They farm or they labor in some fashion that ultimately meets their needs. It might not be the end of the world if someone shows up late to plant a field because they didn't sleep the previous night, or gets in a shouting match and storms off all emotional when someone mentions how much they enjoyed last week's crucifixion. And if the aforementioned finds that they can't concentrate on anything, that's alright because this bucket of corn needs to be sorted and it requires no thought at all.
But if I chronically show up late to work because I didn't sleep, get into shouting matches because a coworker said something insensitive about small towns that get incinerated by wildfires, forget important details, and fail to solve the most basic problems because I can't think straight, I might end up fired. And if I get depressed and stay at home and fail to get another job and miss my rent, I might end up on the street. And then I'd be one of those poor souls standing line at the DHS because my behavior is way out of alignment with the context in which I live and work, and my neediness would get written up as a big expensive problem because damn the cost of existing in America is high, and at that point pathologizing my experiences and behavior might make sense.
As someone with a PTSD diagnosis (and my therapist was very cautious about it- she never brought up PTSD and reassured me that my experiences were not abnormal for a whole three months before referring me to a trauma specialist for further evaluation), I've been through rough periods where I had some slack and rough periods where I had absolutely none. The working-through-severe-symptoms-with-no-slack experience was so bad I came very close to swallowing a bunch of percoset but was redirected by nice people to urgent care, where they gave me trazodone instead. There were many times when I wished I could just make a day's pay sorting corn.
Standard disclaimer: I'm doing much better now, don't worry about me, really I'm fine thanks.
This probably also applies to many things other than PTSD. If something makes you less productive than others, or makes you look weird while you are being productive... it is likely to become an issue at job, while you could be productive at home or at a farm.
> There were many times when I wished I could just make a day's pay sorting corn.
Me too. But as I know my luck, soon someone would invent Agile corn-sorting with everyday meetings...
The clueless guy who just doesn't know when he's in real danger is a lot better off today.
The stuff in the book about Big Evil Pharma cunningly foisting a dope-fiend's dream of a moral panic on naive, helpless Japan made sense to me when I read it. And I still mostly believe. When pot has been legal for another ten or twenty years, we will see how much of a market Big Pharma has for various mood enhancers.
My instinct has always been that PTSD and stress in general is less about absolute levels of violence, and more about variance over time.
So, if you live in an era when the primary cause of death is being perforated by another human, the most popular form of entertainment was attending public judicial torture/executions, and you could reasonably expect to murder at least a couple dudes over the course of your life; the level of stress you'd need to get PTSD was comparatively higher.
I've also seen people posit that PTSD is more about sustained levels of high stress. This would check out as well. Pre-Armstrong gun, you stood on a battlefield and fought people you could see, then you died or walked off of it back to normal life.
Post rifled HE cannon, at any time, in any place, with no warning, you can suddenly explode; and battles last for days/weeks/months.
This doesn't quite level with my experiences with people who grew up in places where violence was normal and still ended up with PTSD from particular experiences that were not uncommon in that environment (such as being beaten unconscious by a street gang or being abused as a child by a stepdad), but I think you have a good point that violence can feel normal to people who see it a lot.
I think what it really comes down to is whether you actually believe you are in serious danger. If you grow up in an environment where people are broken on the wheel in public and everyone gathers to watch, you might reasonably not be traumatized by seeing someone broken on the wheel. But if you are held in a cell where your jailer tells you each day they're going to break you on the wheel tomorrow, you might end up with nightmares about being broken on the wheel.
Aren't many PTSD symptoms are completely maladaptive, at least the more serious ones? Being paralyzed with horror is even less reasonable if someone actually is trying to break into your house.
My uneducated guess would be it's something closer to what Nah said - people in the ancient societies being more exposed to such things from childhood. If you learn from the start that the world around is full of death and danger, your brain adapts to this fact as you grow and you're more resistant to such tings. But if you've grown up in a safe world and then your already-formed brain is suddenly exposed to all kinds of horrors, it has greater chances to snap.
I think the difference relates very well to the book review. I think that when violence is normal, we don't feel as much stress about violence. My brother and I physically fought a lot, but it wasn't usually an angry or stressful experience like it would be if it happened at work today. We would wrestle or whatever and then go watch tv. If the same behavior happened at my job, it would bring a lot of stress with it. Someone would go to jail, lives ruined, and it would be so totally out of character for the environment that it would be abnormal and destabilizing.
I've been told the opposite by therapists, and I'd be curious to read the research backing it up: people with significant childhood exposure to trauma/threats (situations where they actually believed they were in danger) are more likely to develop PTSD as adults. The explanation is, if you learn fight or flight as a child, your brain will go nuts with fight or flight as an adult, in ways that aren't helpful.
I think the truth behind Nah's comment, whether s/he intended it this way or not, is more related to what we might consider "safe" exposure to violence from an early age. If people are accustomed to seeing bodies on crosses, they won't be traumatized by seeing bodies on crosses, because it is in fact not threatening in a context where it's considered normal.
I had some exposure to violence as a child (not at home, thankfully), and:
I notice that I become aware of people having arguments way before my friends, I notice that certain types of body language put up big PAY ATENTION flags, etc.
It's similar to my "Is this a snake?" heuristic that is constantly running and compels me to double check branches on the trail if it's dark enough.
This seems to be a well adapted response vis. not catching a bullet that was meant for someone else, but it could easily be the opposite of that.
I'm confused by this - wouldn't an ancient Roman legionary eventually finish the war, go back to peaceful life in Rome, and be in a scenario where hyperalertness is counterproductive?
Thanks for that comment. I'm setting aside the Roman example because it isn't very helpful here, but my central question was this: can PTSD symptoms essentially blend in under circumstances where those behaviors seem to make sense? And could that be part of the answer to historians' question "But wait, where's all the PTSD from thousands of years of warfare?" I've heard/read/been told about how warfare changed with time, and how modern warfare could reasonably generate more PTSD and particularly more hyperalertness, and I am fully convinced of the points made therein. But I'm looking at this one piece of the puzzle that I haven't seen anyone discuss, and I'm wondering if it's been discussed in more detail somewhere by somebody who knows much more than I do.
It's going to be hard to link the two, but there have been situations where children were "raised by wolves" or similar, and act like a wild animal. That may be the kind of scenario you are referencing, where they are hyper vigilant and that's part of how they could survive in the wild with no other human support.
There's a David Drake essay about how war became a lot worse for soldiers in the modern era-- It’s a Lot Like War (Introduction)” Men Hunting Things, David Drake.
From memory: Originally, war was seasonal. It couldn't be allowed to interfere with sowing and harvest.
Eventually, war became more extended in time, and more continuous-- fighting at night became feasible.
I was positing that perhaps life-after-warfare was just chaotic enough that hyperalertness made sense (e.g. there were enough robberies, street violence, etc. to keep people on edge). But I can't draw any conclusions about Rome specifically because I lack that knowledge.
If not in ancient Rome, then perhaps this dynamic was at play at other points in history where historians have been perplexed to find too little PTSD.
But my comment was meant more as a question than an answer; has someone else discussed the possibility that PTSD symptoms might be invisible in chaotic societies because they're not maladaptive in that context?
Yes. Charles Hoge "Once A Warrior, Always A Warrior: Navigating the Transition from Combat to Home Including Combat Stress, PTSD, and mTBI". 2010. Globe Pequot Press.
With regard to the idea that suicide is a result of depression. I wonder if Watters was framing suicide in Japan as shame-induced rather than depression-induced or guilt-induced? It seems possible to frame suicidal motivation in terms of failure to fulfill your relational role (I let my family down) or guilt (My actions have permanently screwed up my life) rather than (I'm terribly sad and I don't think it will get better).
Surely a big confounder on anorexia's arrival in Hong Kong in the 90s is the arrival of "western diet," no? It seems natural that an eating issue that's sticky once developed might have some relation to the microbiome.
As someone who grew up in Hong Kong, I am incredibly skeptical that there was some sudden seismic shift of diet suddenly in the late 80s/early 90s. It had been a British colony for nearly a hundred years, and had adapted to Western foods (as well as developed its own local cuisine) for a good long while at that point.
Besides, the daily fare of most Hong Kong people at that time - and now - remains Cantonese food.
I'm curious how you'd extend the lesson of this book to the current approach to gender trouble. Here was my take from the piece.
"With the best of intentions, my middle-school health teachers gravely instructed us that many girls experienced disordered eating, that high-achieving girls might be drawn to calorie-counting as one more thing to excel at, that it could be an exhilarating way of experiencing control if you lacked it elsewhere. It became a tutorial in how to suffer correctly.
Today, a girl who experiences trauma or distress as her body changes, her desires stir, and men sexualize and harass her is more likely to be told that one option from the symptom pool is to not be a woman. In those same health classes, she may be told that discomfort with her changing body is evidence she might belong in a different body."
I thought I read somewhere that PTSD started in WWI, where it was called "shell-shock", and that this is evidence (along with greater rates found among artillerymen than many close-combat roles, or something like that) that it is actually caused by brain injury from proximity to explosions rather than psychological factors.
I remember seeing something rather convincing along those lines, anyway, but I can't remember where. (Would have thought it was SSC, actually — except surely that would have been mentioned...)
Shell shock was certainly a WW1-era near-equivalent of PTSD, but interestingly it seems to have presented rather differently, as an acute "stare mutely at the walls for hours on end" disease rather than a "go nuts every time you're reminded of your trauma for decades afterwards" disease.
Obviously, this hypothesis doesn't account for PTSD in e.g. sexual assault survivors, but did they have classic PTSD before doctors said they might? (I never followed this up.)
Brain injuries can cause symptoms that overlap with some PTSD symptoms. Emotional dysregulation. Difficulty focusing on tasks and thinking through complex problems. For example.
Warfare fundamentally changed at the beginning of WWI.
From Megiddo on April 16, 1457 BCE (21st day of the first month of the third season, of Year 23 of the reign of Thutmose III; the exact conversion to the Gregorian calendar), there are records of nearly 3500 years of field battles where two armies lined up on a field of battle, fought it out in a day, and one or the other won. An occasional large battle might last into a second day. Battles that made it to a third day are so rare that you can list them (Thermopylae, Leipzig, Gettysburg). There are almost certainly more battles that lasted to a third day in WWI than in all of human history to that point. The Somme lasted 141 days. This is clearly not the same thing as the pre-WWI idea of a battle.
There are lots of technological and tactical changes that lead to this, but the idea that the psychological experience of WWI was qualitatively different from previous wars seems entirely reasonable.
Premodern soldiers were also more likely to be side by side with their comrades, as opposed to hiding in a foxhole and the times they were in danger were better circumscribed. You knew that if you couldn't see the enemy, you weren't in immediate danger.
That sounds a lot less likely to train you to be hypervigilant at inapropriate times than the continuous risk of indirect shelling or aerial bombing is.
IIRC, the first instances of trench warfare occurred during the sieges of Richmond & Petersburg at the end of the American Civil War. This makes me want to look for some first-hand accounts from soldiers about whether they considered this period as qualitatively different from the fighting they'd experienced before and whether their memories of that time were more terrifying after the war ended.
Soldiers in the Boer war had muscle and joint pain, soldiers in WWI had nervous ticks and body movements etc. Watters argues that while distress from war is somewhat universal (although not necessarily even in all cultures and times), people manifest symptoms consistent with whatever the symptom pool is in their time.
I recently also heard that survivors of train crashes in the 19th century often complained of "railroad spine", which later matches descriptions of either shell shock or PTSD.
That was almost certainly somewhere between a misunderstanding and a noble lie. Traumatic brain injury from blast effects can cause symptoms similar to PTSD, but artillery shells are less than 10% explosive and 90+% steel. Before the invention of kevlar, being close enough to an exploding shell for TBI to be a major concern usually meant being riddled by jagged steel fragments at high velocity to the point that TBI isn't going to be your biggest problem.
But the other thing that was a big problem for the health of front-line soldiers, was having their hearts pierced by half a dozen rifle bullets delivered by the firing squad that would normally be summoned for any version of "Private Smith's mind is saying that Private Smith won't be participating in the war any longer". If a doctor instead says that it's Private Smith's *physical brain* that has been injured, no different then a bullet or a bayonet thrust even if you can't see it, then that's not any sort of "cowardice" and we don't have to execute some poor SOB for being disabled by a physical injury.
Some doctors believed that the observed symptoms were being caused by shell-blast because they didn't know any better. And some of them actually were being caused by blast injuries, but see above re fragment lethality. All of this provided cover for the other doctors who would diagnose "shell shock" to soldiers who they knew full well had never been near an exploding shell, to the nods of officers who also knew full well that Private Smith had never been anywhere near an exploding shell but were happy for any excuse to not execute him.
How much of each is impossible to pin down, because the noble liars mostly didn't append notes to their medical reports saying "PS future medical historians I was lying here, PPS present courts-martial please ignore the PS". By World War II, most armies were much less trigger-happy on executing soldiers for cowardice, and the medical consensus had shifted towards "combat fatigue".
"Over the course of decades (plus lots of marketing by enthusiastic therapists), PTSD expanded from a Vietnam-only problem, to all wars, to all natural disasters, to abuse and sexual violence, to the modern understanding where people say they got PTSD from a bad boss, a bad roommate, or an insufficiently woke college reading assignment. "
Where is the person who claims PTSD from an "insufficiently woke college reading" assignment?
"Where is the person who claims PTSD from an "insufficiently woke college reading" assignment?"
Trigger warnings for Classics courses: (interesting article, the guy has some points, but if you're not already aware that the past was nasty, brutish and short, then of course you're going to be shocked that history was different) https://archive.ph/kuxsY
"Jewell posits that professors must be mindful of presenting unethical, insensitive – and potentially traumatic – topics from the ancient world in the classroom. He will give trigger warnings to students in order to prepare them for class discussions.
“There are debates whether taking such an approach doesn’t prepare them for the real world,” he says. “Conversely, some argue that, if someone has had a traumatic assault, the discussion might trigger this experience. I think it’s better to prepare the students than to surprise them.”
"Additionally, Department Chair Jed Esty explained that the portrait was “delivered” to his office and replaced with a photograph of Audre Lorde, a celebrated African-American feminist and author, in a move that was intended to send a message to Esty, whose department agreed to replace the portrait several years ago.
Esty went on to confirm that the portrait of Lorde will remain in Shakespeare’s place until he and his colleagues can reach an agreement on what to do next, announcing the establishment of a “working group” to help monitor the process."
Trigger warnings and getting PTSD from college readings are two very different things. one is simply making the claim that materials could trigger a PTSD that was already there. That's not what Scott claimed, he claimed that "people say they got PTSD from a bad boss, a bad roommate, or an insufficiently woke college reading assignment". I've long advocated for increased reading comprehension in Rationalist circles, and I think this is a key example of the need for better education here.
So again, where is the person who said they "got" PTSD from a insufficiently woke college reading assignment?
I can see your framing where the literal truth or falseness of the claim matters (if we’re interested in having a very accurate idea of how much PTSD diagnosis/self-reports have increased and spread; correct me if wrong)
In a different framing, the important aspect is the trend of a mental illness to spread from a local event (vietnam war) to everybody in more everyday circumstances.
If you don’t include the woke college reading list, the trend point is still clear. But including such an absurd extreme is funny. Laugh!
It seems like an unnecessary pot-shot at the outgroup and as far as I can tell it didn't actually happen. All this "charitability" that Rationalists used to talk about seems to be disappearing.
A problem may be that I can’t model anyone I’ve actually met in life who would have been offended by this (which I may be wrong). If no one is offended, then the looseness of the underlying truth of the joke doesn’t matter.
Though, if so, then ya, the exactness of the truth would matter (or a different example could be used)
It's not about being "offended", it's about Scott signalling tribal allegiance by making incorrect generalisations against the outgroup. That seems like a bad standard to set for Rationalism.
My interpretation is that it's used hyperbolically, much as someone might claim they were going to "die from this exam" or whatever. I've probably even said that I was going to have PTSD from a couple of my math midterms. But once again, that's not a medical claim; it's a turn of phrase.
"I thought that woke people were talking about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment was white supremacy because only white people cared about that kind of thing. "
Why did you think this? Can you link to an article that makes this claim?
As far as I can tell it's completely misunderstanding the argument made usually made here anyway.
The argument tended to be that demanding "low-expressed-emotion" from people who were describing quite emotional events was basically a demand for them to shut-up and never talk about it. Not that "only white people" cared about calmness.
Again, I invite Scott to cite a single article here.
I've spoken truth to power many times on this blog and people mostly just accuse me of being a troll. In one case I was actually censored by Scott himself because I pointed out that one of his blog buddies had deliberately misquoted Marx.
If he'd ban you for only correcting the quote, that would certainly be a wrong move, but I somewhat doubt it's what actually happened. In any case, you can consider yourself stunning and brave from now on, if that's the thing that floats your boat.
OTOH, there were quite substantive cancellation attempts against Scott and SSC community in general, including such heavy artillery as New York Times, and having some very serious real-life consequences (not all of them negative, as it seems, despite the canceller's intent). And also many more minor foot soldiers - I think there's still Reddit communities (maybe more than one?) dedicated to finding fault and stoking outrage against SSC community and everybody adjacent.
The NYT was not trying to cancel and I'm unsure if Scott even claimed that they had tried such a thing. Scott has never presented any evidence of "negative" real life consequences. Even if the NYT's report had lead to "negative consequences" they're well within their right to write an article about Scott.
I don't consider myself "stunning" or "brave" - I'm simply interested in the truth. If Scott Alexander was also interested in the truth he wouldn't have censored me.
It's funny how people think "it's not literally a criminal offense" is a good argument for defending something. Yes, it's not a criminal offense for NYT to publish a hit piece, or de-anonymize somebody against their will, or, for that matter, to lie and publish partisan propaganda or fake news. It'd be very silly to argue that since it's not literally criminal it's ok for a newspaper to do that. So "within their right" is really the worst argument you could think of - outside of the actual courtroom on a criminal case, of course, where it'd be the best one.
As for consequences, your noevidence claim is false again, Scott described activities against him in the past, and it led to actual closing of the previous instance of this blog. Which is not some minor event, so confidently claiming it didn't happen reveals either complete ignorance of the subject you're discussing or complete disregard for whether your statements have actually any connection to factual events. I'd recommend next time you reflectively reach for the standard noevidence trope, actually spending some time checking whether there is some evidence, at least as far as a simple search engine query. I'm pretty sure you'll find some.
Casual and irreverent humor against any and all groups is not only fine, it’s commendable and necessary. If necessary, Scott could just step up the wit against The Right
Is the humour here that Scott thought something that was wrong, had no basis in reality, and nearing total delusion? Because that's an interesting "irreverent humour".
Many people have said stuff like “civility and insisting brown voices be calm and not emotive is white supremacy because it lowers oppressed voices below the voices of oppressors”, diversity training powerpoints abound
None of them are, it seems, committed marxists. Groups are divided - some members of some out group can do something bad, which can be joked about, without it meaning all libters are bad
Casual and irreverent humor directed disproportionately at one group is less commendable *or* necessary. (I don't actually see why humor directed *against* any group is ever commendable or necessary though, given that there are so many other forms that humor can take.)
Every (political) group thinks a significant amount of ire and spite are disproportionately directed at them! Conservatives, liberal, leftists, elites, workers, the poor, billionaires, legislators, blacks, republicans whites, liberal whites (who are made fun of by the previous), gays, trans, armenian nationalists, Bernie bros, trump supporters, the KHive, nerds - they all very much dislike a large group of insults and jokes they see as attacking them. Given that, I’d rather jus have a joke free for all
> so many other forms...
Because the point of a joke is contextual - a joke about politics is interesting in a way that a dad joke just isn’t!
If Scott was more straightforward that his posts were just jokes and not intended to have any relation to reality I would be amenable to that.
However, given the sensitivity that he (and others) have shown to jokes mocking Rationalists (e.g. on Sneerclub) I don't think this is the direction he wants to move in.
I'm just pointing out that he uses these jokes often to insult the outgroup without doing any of the actual work of citations or writing a logical analysis.
If we refer to the (in)famous Smithsonian list of white-dominant culture traits, we find there:
- Avoid conflict, intimacy
- Don't show emotion
- Don't discuss personal life
- Be polite
While it does not (did not) say that "white-dominant culture" and "white supremacy" is the same thing, it is not hard to get this inference from the context.
The fashion of the woke to say "without evidence" after being given reference to the actual evidence is quite bizzarre, but it's a mistake to think it's fooling anyone. I just provided the evidence that Smithsonian mentioned these specific traits as "white dominant" in the context of denouncing white supremacy. If that's not an evidence, then there's nothing that you'd consider evidence.
You admitted yourself that it is an "inference". The Smithsonian chart itself (are people really arguing that the Smithsonian is an influential "woke" source?) says "aspects and assumptions" of white culture, its' not a list of things that "only white people care about", which is what Scott claimed.
Looking rationally at the evidence we can conclude that this is a very bad source if one was trying to prove that it was a common woke argument that "demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment was white supremacy because only white people cared about that kind of thing."
There's nothing to "admit" - it's what you do when you read the text. It's like saying "you admitted yourself that you are breathing and your body is composed of atoms". If you open a book titled "fairy tales" and read "there was once upon a time a king" then you infer it's a story about a fairy-tale king. If there's a section on the woke site about fighting racism and white supremacy, which describes traits attributed to white dominant culture, you make appropriate inferences too. That what "reading texts" means.
> not a list of things that "only white people care about
In the form the woke people published it, it is. I can't guess what the intent of this was, since I am not a mind reader, but fortunately one of the woke axioms is that the intent doesn't matter, isn't it?
> we can conclude that this is a very bad source
No we can't. Why Smithsonian section about how to be woke and fight racism is a bad source about what people who want to be woke and fight racism think and say? I think it's a pretty good source. And in any case, I hope we conclusively disproved the false claim that there's "no evidence", since you recognized that it can be looked rationally at - which is hard to do with something that doesn't exist.
You're making a lot of inferences with no actual proof that this is the correct reading. The Smithsonian article never said anything approaching "demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment was white supremacy because only white people cared about that kind of thing."
If the source did say something like that, you would be able to straightforwardly quote it, not make mind-reading assumptions about an "inference".
Having read the thing referenced, and having read stuff that actually does equate this to white supremacy (I keep up with some developments in math education), I’m not convinced that the Smithsonian’s list actually equates this to white supremacy. The main reason I’m dubious is because this is a pretty dead on list for the white culture I’ve experienced. imo they’re off on a couple points and missing the role that christianity plays in most (even agnostic’s) lives, but overall it seems pretty accurate.
There’s been a lot of debate between marxbro and other people on this thread about this point, but I don’t think I’ve seen any arguments that really convince me that by “white culture” the Smithsonian means “white supremacy”
Does the Smithsonian say this sort of thing in other documents, or is it more that since the equation is made by so many others it seems logical to assume that the Smithsonian is implicitly making it here? Or is there another reason?
The National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian had an exhibit saying that "don't show emotion" and "be polite" was an "aspect of white culture" and an "aspect and assumption of whiteness in the United States". See https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1283372233730203651
I find it annoying and tiresome when people demand citations for things that are obvious and that everyone has had to see a bunch of times.
I believe that Smithsonian list comes from the 1990s. I thought it was a pretty reasonable and objective compared to what we see so much of in recent years. If you took that Smithsonian list of "white culture" traits and entitled it “How to Get to the Moon by 1969” and tacked it up on a college bulletin board, there’d be a nationwide freakout over secret white supremacists running amok on campus.
Speaking of freakouts and lack of citations, did you ever find any evidence that Colin Turnbull was a "gay pedo", as you claimed in one of your blog entries?
"Because they did not seem to respect him or care for him, the Ik never gave him the sense of self-worth he derived from Joseph and other underdogs. And because the Ik never gave him someone like the Pygmy young boy, Kenge, whom he could love and idolize, he grew angry and lonely."
I don't think there's any dispute over him being gay, you can read that in his wikipedia page (or the biography Sailer is discussing).
Joseph A. Towles was ~22 when he met Turnbull. The NYT review states that Kenge was the "same age" when he met Turnbull. If this is evidence of "gay pedo" activity, it seems exceedingly weak.
Colin Turnbull, now largely forgotten, was a British anthropologist who was once famous in intellectual circles for writing books about African tribes. In one, the Mbuti pygmies were described as the most wonderful ever, in the other, the previously obscure Ik were described as the worst people on earth. There was much debate in advanced circles a half century ago about what could make the Ik so horrible.
Eventually, it was figured out that Turnbull was just trash-talking the poor Ik for personal reasons.
The first chapter of Grinker's biography of Turnbull, as published in the New York Times in 1997, is largely gay pedo-porn. Here's the book's opening paragraph:
"On most mornings in 1957, the Scottish anthropologist Colin Macmillan Turnbull would wake up in his hut next to his young Mbuti assistant, Kenge, their legs and arms intertwined in the way that Mbuti men like to sleep with each other to stay warm. At four foot eight, Kenge was more than a foot and a half shorter than Colin, so Colin could hold him easily with his long legs, arms, and wide hands, keeping them both warm in the damp forest nights."
And it just gets creepier from there in its loving description of the Jerry Sandusky of leftist anthropology.
The Mountain People, in contrast, is a Big Gay Snit about how much Turnbull loathes the Ik, especially for not providing him with a boy toy. Grinker writes:
"Turnbull hated the Ik. The Pygmies, and even Joseph Towles [Turnbull's African-American boyfriend] (who had begun his training as an anthropologist), empowered him. But because he could do little to stop the famine and social behaviors that emerged in that context, the Ik threatened his role as protector or saviour. Because they did not seem to respect him or care for him, the Ik never gave him the sense of self-worth he derived from Joseph and other underdogs. And because the Ik never gave him someone like the Pygmy young boy, Kenge, whom he could love and idolize, he grew angry and lonely."
You might expect from my extracts that Grinker's biography of Turnbull is a devastating takedown, but the bulk of it is pretty much hagiograpy, which goes to illustrate a lot about cultural power. Grinker got his initial draft rejected by his editor on the grounds that a straight man shouldn't be writing a biography of a gay hero. So, he gayed up his manuscript and got it through.
In the age of internet bubbles, I no longer dare to guess what is obvious and what is not. This was easier in the TV era, especially in countries with few TV channels -- if it was on the TV repeatedly, you could be pretty sure that people heard about it.
But there is a difference between "never heard about it" and "you give them evidence, and they keep pretending they never heard about it", where the latter is a political tactics.
Tiresome and annoying citation finding is the cost of making political points. It might be advisable to pay them up-front with footnotes or inline links.
+1. With no attribution I'm writing it off as a weakman cheap shot, at best. Quote Robin DiAngelo, and it's an unfortunately justifiable case of nutpicking. Show me it's in the Smithsonian, and now we have something that can't just be dismissed.
Hi Scott, from your dramatic adjectives like "annoying" and "tiresome" I can tell that you're perhaps becoming slightly emotional. Yours is a genre of writing where nobody ever just 'asks' for citations, they 'demand' it. Potentially this is because you wish to change the perception of your own not-very-convincing argument to a more dynamic and convincing argument, with all the drama and flair of a real wordsmith. That's fine, it's something I would expect of someone with a paucity of evidence, but it's not really something that I'm interested in. Let's try to actually look at the evidence rationally and perhaps we'll learn a little something, instead of just signalling against the "woke" outgroup.
I. Citations Needed.
You state that what you've written is "obvious" and that "everyone has seen a bunch of times" - perhaps that's a fine assumption to make if you're only writing for your own ingroup. But Rationalists are writing (ostensibly) for all sorts of people from all kinds of diverse political backgrounds who may or may not have seen the obscure twitter dustup that you are referring to. You may find it helpful to look at academic sites on why citations are useful, such as https://integrity.mit.edu/handbook/citing-your-sources/avoiding-plagiarism-cite-your-source
Citations, even of "obvious" information is useful because often what is ""common knowledge"" can be incorrect or misleading. If you use citations it will be easier for the reader to follow your deductions and, if necessary, criticise them. Which leads me to my next point.
II. Being Charitable to the Smithsonian and Judith Katz
Now that you have actually given citation, a reader (me, in this case) can proceed with making relevant criticisms. Now, what you wrote originally is:
"I thought that woke people were talking about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment was white supremacy because only white people cared about that kind of thing. "
The problem for you is that it _never actually says such a thing in the text you provided_. Actually, if you read the text (and there's no reason for you not to read it, since it's very short and a dot-point list basically) it says the exact opposite: "we have all internalized some aspects of white culture - including people of colour". Now, I may not agree with that statement by the Smithsonian/Katz, but, since you've now provided a citation, and since I've actually read the text, I can see that it doesn't say what you claimed it said. This is a big problem, for you and the integrity of your argument. This is another benefit of citations - it makes it so much more obvious to readers that you are incorrect in this case.
Let's be even more charitable to the Smithsonian and Katz. What does "aspect and assumption" mean in reference to "white culture"? She has the word "assumption" there. Now, here's the dictionary definition of assumption:
"something that you accept as true without question or proof"
Now, words like this are quite important, and it strikes me as quite strange that you haven't picked up on it. What does assumption mean? It means that a person is jumping to conclusions about something without clear evidence. If I'm being charitable to Katz, it seems very much a possibility that Katz was not making any sort of argument here that "be polite" is some sort of inherent part of "White Culture", but simply that white people often make the assumption that they are being polite and not showing emotion. This seems to be a fairly defensible position. Again, if you had actually engaged with the text charitably you would have explored this option.
III. Being Charitable to the "Woke".
Ah yes, "woke". Everyone's favourite outgroup pejorative. Everyone favourite way to signal to the ingroup that you're not even going to bother taking someone else's points seriously. But who is the "woke" here? Since you kindly cited your source I was able to find out that your dubious understanding comes from Judith Katz who, as far as I can tell, is an obscure former academic who works for consultancy firms and has co-authored a few light business management type books.
Basically the problem is that you haven't actually engaged with a wide selection of the "woke". You made an offhanded, uncited, reference to an argument you disagreed with (and that you uncharitably framed) and generalized it to a "woke" position, even though there's little evidence that this argument has spread beyond Katz and the Smithsonian. I hope I don't have to explain why cherry-picking is not a particularly good habit for Rationalists to get into, especially when it comes to political matters.
Again, this isn't a superstar "woke" academic, it isn't someone connected to recent "woke" movements, it's someone who wrote a list of dot-points in 1990 and consults businesses on how to be more inclusive. Perhaps documents from 1990 are considered too "woke" by Rationalists, I'm not really sure, but I'm unconvinced that Katz accurately represents the "woke" as most people understand it.
IV. Post-Mortem Of Your Incorrect Argument and My Actual Criticism
I have already shown why you should use citations, even with "obvious" information. I have also shown what a more charitable engagement with the Smithsonian might look like. I have also shown what a more charitable engagement with the "woke" might look like. But let's go further, let's think about what a Marxist might say about all this.
Katz and the Smithsonian represent the fundamental inability for corporations and other powerful institutions to actually represent the opinions of the masses. Katz, like all liberal reformists, sees the demands of the lower-classes and thinks "something must change". Of course, the underlying condition (capitalism) cannot change, so someone like Katz can only water down the demands, distort them, until they appear like the reflection of some funhouse mirror. This is the clumsy fumblings of liberal politics more generally. Without Marxism, without understanding class, without actually listening to the masses; liberal writings can only appear somewhat clownish.
I can expand on any of these points if you need further clarification. Hopefully you will not find my writing "annoying" or "tiresome" or any other generic insults either.
"it seems very much a possibility that Katz was not making any sort of argument here that "be polite" is some sort of inherent part of "White Culture", but simply that white people often make the assumption that they are being polite and not showing emotion. This seems to be a fairly defensible position."
No, it's not defensible. The poster actually uses a form of the word "assume" when that's relevant, as in "Individuals assumed to be in control of their environment". The section referencing emotions is a list of imperatives, not assumptions.
This is really one of your worst arguments in quite some time.
It doesn't have to say "imperatives", the section under Communication is dos and don'ts. You'd have to strain so far as to pull a muscle in order to interpret "Be polite" as "People assume they are being polite" rather than a norm that one SHOULD be polite.
"So flawed" is not "flawed at all" but "flawed to that extent", and "canceling" someone is not the same as just not reading because you personally find the value to be low.
I enjoy finding "easy mistakes" in Scott's work and pointing them out to him. Very few of his mistakes ever get acknowledged or corrected, even though he has a section for it on his blog.
I thought Scott's remark was just a comment on how some academics think white people are too bottled up about their emotions, while others think white people are more emotional than everyone else.
Going off like you've done on this little observation is, from my subjective viewpoint, tiresome.
Assuming (which means in this context let's run with the idea) Marxbro is white, I'm inclined to see him as a datum for the idea of white people being more emotional than everyone else. He (hmm, I'm assuming again OK?) may be polite and controlled but his rather fervid focus on minor points which he refuses to concede would certainly be an example of emotional behaviour. I'd criticise this if I didn't recognise the same behaviour in me though.
It's actually Scott who is being overly emotional here. Look at the sneering jokes directed at the outgroup. Look at the emotional descriptors such as "annoying" and "tiresome". What I did is simply attention-to-detail and an insistence on proper citations.
I refuse to "concede" points that I am 100% correct about for good reason. To do so would be illogical.
I must remember you lack a sense of humour... Possibly one of self-awareness as well. People keep pointing out you are not 100% correct, but you discount them.
You're probably right Scott makes jokes at the expense of the woke a lot. But they deserve it: perverting the teachings of Foucault to apply the understanding of power to abstract entities like ethnicities; perverting the teachings of Marx to apply class-based analysis on the basis of a single characteristic? Come on, these guys are a joke. You're no fan of religion, and you're happy to criticise those supporting it. Yet for some reason you pick on minor points which are more debatable than you allow to criticise Scott's poking fun at the woke, a group with probably even less intellectual consistency than your average protestant denomination. Why are you allowed to consistently attack religious beliefs as untrue but in your view Scott is not allowed to make much less virulent attacks on a social-political position.
I've already shown why proper citations are not "tiresome". Scott's remarks have been shown to be false, so "going off" (interesting dramatic verb you have used), by which you mean writing a calm and rational analysis, was actually necessary.
I enter this section of the comments with trepidation, because I fear that I am falling into the same trap as TGGP, pouring hundreds of words into a debate that obviously has no hope of changing the interlocutor’s mind. Nitpicking about words is going nowhere; could broadening the evidence base possibly help?
Scott said, as an offhand remark in a joking tone, “I thought that woke people were talking about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment was white supremacy because only white people cared about that kind of thing.” He adds later that this tendency is among “things that are obvious and that everyone has had to see a bunch of times.” I take him to assert the following: there is a widespread, easily documentable belief among a subclass of people interested in social justice that calmness, quietness, and low expressed emotion have a uniquely strong association with white people, or in other but roughly equivalent terms, are elements of “whiteness” or indicative of a white-dominant culture; and that requiring or normalizing these culturally “white” traits is an expression of white supremacy.
If this belief is indeed widespread, we don’t need to engage in intense scrutiny of the exact wording of the Smithsonian document; there should be plenty of other sources expressing the same idea in alternative phrasings. And indeed there are. Many of these documents are quite similar, sharing a common source in a worksheet from Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun (ChangeWork, 2001), but the wide dissemination of this worksheet and its derivatives is sufficient to show that “woke people were talking about” the ideas contained in it. Their variations also clarify the underlying meaning of the disputed passages.
My examples are the first three Google results for “characteristics of white culture”—no cherrypicking.
A worksheet hosted by the Seattle city government.
“White culture assigns a higher value to some ways of behaving than others. It often defines the “other” behaviors as dangerous and/or deviant. For example - Right to comfort. Avoid conflict, emotion . . . Be polite. Comfort level is defined by whites and those that cause discomfort or involved in conflict can be marginalized.” The incorporation of the bullet points from the Tema Okun worksheet is ungrammatical and kind of word-salady, but it seems clear that issuing or obeying the imperatives “Avoid conflict, emotion… Be polite” are behaviors associated with white culture.
This worksheet is hosted by Cascadia College, a community college in Washington State.
Here, the bullet points taken from the Tema Okun handout are titled “Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture in the United States,” but the meaning of this title is clarified by a note asserting that the listed “traits” are “common characteristics of most U.S. White people most of the time.” According to this source, the imperatives “Avoid conflict, intimacy; Don’t show emotion; Don’t discuss personal life; Be polite” are characteristics both of white culture and of most white people. Again, the document is not grammatically coherent due to the bullet point format, but the idea is clearly that most white people accept that it is good or normative to avoid conflict, be polite, etc.
This worksheet is created by the Minnesota Historical Society and hosted on the internet by the Texas Historical Commission.
Here, the characteristics in question are not said to be part of “white culture” but explicitly “white supremacy culture.” The opening paragraph asserts that “The characteristics listed below [...] are damaging because they promote white supremacy thinking.” The authors acknowledge, as marxbro1917 has pointed out, that even “Organizations that are people of color led or a majority people of color can also demonstrate many damaging characteristics of white supremacy culture,” so they do not believe that “only white people” value these norms, but they do link them to white people and white supremacy.
The phrasing here is different from the shorter bullet points, but in the same vein of thought, so it lets us see more clearly what the shorter bullet points might be getting at. For the short “avoid conflict,” we have spelled out that in organizations with white supremacy culture, “a lot of energy in the organization is spent trying to make sure that peopleís feelings arenít getting hurt or working around defensive people.” For the short “Be polite,” we see that white supremacy culture places “emphasis on being polite” and ends up “equating the raising of difficult issues with being impolite, rude, or out of line.” For the short “Don’t show emotion,” we get the claim that white supremacy culture is characterized by “the belief that there is such a thing as being objective,” “the belief that emotions are inherently destructive, irrational, and should not play a role in decision-making or group process,” and the behavior of “invalidating people who show emotion.”
I conclude that there is a common and widespread belief, endorsed by city governments, colleges, and agencies for historical preservation, that norms of politeness, conflict-avoidance, and low emotional expressivity are characteristic either of “white culture” or “white supremacy culture.” I am not going to debate the details of the three examples I’ve provided, because nitpicking at the (admittedly unclear, grammatically upsetting, and perhaps intentionally obfuscatory) phrasing of the specific examples cannot explain away the underlying similarity of idea.
There is something of a game going on here with the terms “white people,” “white culture,” and “white supremacy.” None of the sources says that all white people have the same characteristics or that no non-white people do; in fact several are careful to provide caveats to the contrary. So Scott is technically wrong to say that woke people believe that “only white people cared about that kind of thing.” But naming this complex of norms and values “white culture” and insisting that it is common to “most U.S. White people most of the time” clearly implies that the characteristics, behaviors, or norms in question are uniquely associated with white people and not with other racial groups, although the exact nature of that association is left unspecified. Comparison between the parallel sources also shows that in this discursive environment “white culture” and “white supremacy culture” are more or less equivalent and can be substituted for each other in paraphrases of the same source without comment. It seems clear that many people, especially those who endorsed my third document, would say that caring about or (much more) demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment is a form of white supremacy, just as Scott said.
Even though Scott’s phrasing was more casual than would be ideal in a debate, it was readily intelligible to a good-faith reader and correct in substance. An good-faith correction, if you wanted to nitpick, might be, “You should be more careful in summarizing the views of your ideological outgroup; technically, the common “woke” belief is not that ONLY white people care about quietness and low emotional expression, but that valuing these things is characteristic of white culture and white supremacy.” With this substantive agreement about ideas and minor disagreement about tone, the ground would be cleared for a more productive discussion, e.g. what ends it serves to associate clusters of cultural norms with racial groups, whether calmness and politeness are in fact desirable in workplaces, or (in line with marxbro1917’s Marxist critique above) what material conditions and social structures lead corporations and powerful institutions to frame “white culture” in this way.
"I enter this section of the comments with trepidation, because I fear that I am falling into the same trap as TGGP, pouring hundreds of words into a debate that obviously has no hope of changing the interlocutor’s mind. Nitpicking about words is going nowhere; could broadening the evidence base possibly help?"
I don't understand why you would approach a comments section with "trepidation". Hopefully people are all searching for the truth here, no-matter your political background and beliefs. I'm simply happy to be one of the few who actually approaches "woke" arguments with some charitability rather than a simple dismissiveness and sneering jokes. Remember that TGGP is one of the people who smeared an ideological opponent as a pedophile without any proof. It may often seem like I'm "nitpicking", but often nitpicking citations can be quite important. In the case of TGGP my nitpicking led to the discovery that Steve Sailer's citations were actually very bad and he was simply trying to cancel a member of his ideological outgroup. This, to me, seems like a positive; a probably innocent man now has had a more fairer representation in the court of public opinion. Obviously what we're talking about here is much lower stakes, but the same principles apply. Since I'm a logical person, I try to think more carefully about what proof is actually provided.
Now, in this case, Scott needs to provide me with good evidence that the "woke" in this case clearly, unambiguously contended that:
"I hear woke people talk about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment is white supremacy because only white people care about that kind of thing."
This was Scott's original claim (lets ignore Scott's motte-and-bailey actions for now). He should be held to a high standard of evidence here, as he's speaking about outgroup. I've already asked him for a citation, and he linked me to a twitter account. Now, interestingly this already contradicts his initial statement which was that he "hears" woke people talk about it. This is interesting for a couple reasons. Firstly, he states that he has "heard" this, yet he linked to a twitter. You do not hear twitter, you simply see it and read it. Scott's initial phrasing makes it seem as if this is something he has encountered in real-life; yet when asked for a citation he links to a twitter post. Twitter and real life are two very different things. If I want to find proof for any position imaginable I can simply log onto the world wide web and find a handful of examples of almost any possible position or statement. There! Evidence found! My out-goup REALLLY DOES believe this! But this linking of someone on twitter talking about a text on the Smithsonian website simply doesn't back up Scott's original claim; which was that he "hears" woke people talking about this. How many people? Scott doesn't even say "person" - he indicates that he has "heard" multiple "people" talking about this. In this way Scott gives the impression that this is something he ran into multiple times organically and without even trying - when pushed for a citation he found a twitter screenshot of something the Smithsonian had on their website. That is, Scott didn't organically "hear" this at all, he saw it because he follows online conservative circles who heavily promote this kind of stuff to feed the perpetual conservative outrage echo-chamber.
Furthermore, I'm quite sceptical that the Smithsonian accurately represents the "woke", usually these large institutions do some clumsy ass-covering when it comes to questions of race and class. But let's be charitable to the Smithsonian here, because (as I have previously showed) the Smithsonian website doesn't even say what Scott claimed it said in the original body of his essay.
"Scott said, as an offhand remark in a joking tone, “I thought that woke people were talking about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment was white supremacy because only white people cared about that kind of thing.” He adds later that this tendency is among “things that are obvious and that everyone has had to see a bunch of times.” I take him to assert the following: there is a widespread, easily documentable belief among a subclass of people interested in social justice that calmness, quietness, and low expressed emotion have a uniquely strong association with white people, or in other but roughly equivalent terms, are elements of “whiteness” or indicative of a white-dominant culture; and that requiring or normalizing these culturally “white” traits is an expression of white supremacy."
Now it's very interesting that you said "offhand, joking tone". Let's be a little more charitable to the "woke" here. I'm not entirely sure why we are referring to beliefs of an outgroup using an "offhand, joking tone" in the first place. I suspect that if I were to come into this comments section and start using an "offhand, joking tone" I would not only be scolded, I would be accused of trolling. One wonders why this kind of offhand, joking tone is so accepted when it comes to the "woke". Perhaps this is because Rationalists are not actually interested in investigating political ideologies but are more interested in perpetuating smears and signalling towards their ingroup. I have shown this repeatedly in Scott's treatment of even more left-wing figures such as Marx, which he can barely even read. A combination of un-charitability and poor reading skills leads Scott to wildly incorrect conclusions.
Aside from all that, you've missed a very important part of Scott's argument, he said "because only white people cared about that kind of thing". Not only does he have to find evidence that the "woke" have said that demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment was supremacy, he ALSO has to find evidence that someone argued that "only white people cared about that kind of thing". I will put emphasis on the word "only" here - that is, Scott has to find evidence that not only is this an aspect of "white supremacy", he has to find evidence that someone has said that "ONLY white people" cared about it. This is explicitly the opposite of what his Smithsonian citation actually said. Now, there are a couple of options here. Either Scott is so bad at reading comprehension that he is genuinely ignorant of basic facts of the world around him. Or he doesn't really care about nerdy things such as citations and is simply writing essays to appeal to his ingroup and strengthen them at all costs, with no real care for proper evidence.
Scott, being very slippery in his beliefs, has given a citation that superficially looks as if it is evidence for the first part of that claim. However, in true motte-and-bailey style, he has abandoned trying to defend the second part of the sentence. If you look at the body of the essay he has posted, it is still unchanged and intact. This is a classic method of argumentation when someone knows that they hold extreme views which cannot be backed-up by the actual facts of the matter. I suspect that Scott has not put the citation into the main body of the text because he knows it doesn't really support his statement. In fact, if he were to put his citation into the main body of the text, more people would be able to follow the citation and work out that the citation does not support Scott's essay. In my opinion, Scott has left his essay unchanged because he wants to keep the outgroup insults intact and he does not want (most) people to see his weak citation. Most people will simply read the essay and guffaw along and the outgroup insults. This is not the work of a man who wants to charitably investigate a wide range of beliefs; this is the work of a political propagandist. His motte-and-bailey actions lend support to this conclusion. My interactions with Scott more generally have in the past strengthened this conclusion; often about even more clear-cut issues, where the citations given are so obviously wrong as to be jaw-dropping. See for example here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history#comment-1795464
"If this belief is indeed widespread, we don’t need to engage in intense scrutiny of the exact wording of the Smithsonian document; there should be plenty of other sources expressing the same idea in alternative phrasings. And indeed there are. Many of these documents are quite similar, sharing a common source in a worksheet from Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun (ChangeWork, 2001), but the wide dissemination of this worksheet and its derivatives is sufficient to show that “woke people were talking about” the ideas contained in it. Their variations also clarify the underlying meaning of the disputed passages."
No, this is incorrect. I'll stop you right here, because what you argue simply doesn't follow from the evidence that you have provided. You are using deductions that don't make any sense. This is not evidence that "woke" people were talking about this at all. This is evidence that ChangeWork (a consulting firm) has found some success in the capitalist market and that other corporate bodies have reproduced their materials on their own websites. The basic Marxist insight here is that capitalist institutions do not represent mass movements, and fundamentally cannot represent mass movements. "Wide dissemination" is possible because capitalists have more money and control the means of production; this means that they can spread their materials further than others.
"My examples are the first three Google results for “characteristics of white culture”—no cherrypicking."
There's no evidence that this doesn't also constitute cherry picking. Actually what it shows is that Google will provide similar links when specific combinations of words are entered - no surprise - that's part of their business. It shows that Google will provide the finest cherries for the cherry-pickers.
A worksheet hosted by the Seattle city government.
“White culture assigns a higher value to some ways of behaving than others. It often defines the “other” behaviors as dangerous and/or deviant. For example - Right to comfort. Avoid conflict, emotion . . . Be polite. Comfort level is defined by whites and those that cause discomfort or involved in conflict can be marginalized.” The incorporation of the bullet points from the Tema Okun worksheet is ungrammatical and kind of word-salady, but it seems clear that issuing or obeying the imperatives “Avoid conflict, emotion… Be polite” are behaviors associated with white culture."
Again, I think we should be charitable to what is actually written in the text. I've found that reading comprehension abilities are often quite low in Rationalist circles, leading to various mistakes and misconceptions. So I invite everyone to read closely the actual text you have provided me.
Firstly I can tell that you're unfamiliar with "other" as a category. This link might help you understand a little bit better:
Basically the idea is that "the other" doesn't necessarily represent actual, objective behaviours, but rather a stereotypical idea of what is different to oneself, and is all about building a positive self-image. Note that this self-image doesn't necessarily have a strong relation to reality. The idea that these are "imperatives" is very flimsy. The text itself never says "imperatives" so I'm not sure why you would say that. I also don't find it "word-salady" - perhaps you are just not that familiar with the words you are reading (this goes back to fundamental issues of reading comprehension)
You quoted the part "“Avoid conflict, emotion… Be polite”. But you'll notice, if you cast your eyes to the very next sentence, that the text also says "Comfort level is defined by whites and those that cause discomfort or involved in conflict can be marginalized". The key part here is that this is something _defined_ by whites - that is, a person can internally decide on a set of rules which they then apply unevenly to others. There's no actual statement that white people are in reality better at avoiding conflict, avoiding emotion or being polite.
This worksheet is hosted by Cascadia College, a community college in Washington State.
Here, the bullet points taken from the Tema Okun handout are titled “Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture in the United States,” but the meaning of this title is clarified by a note asserting that the listed “traits” are “common characteristics of most U.S. White people most of the time.” According to this source, the imperatives “Avoid conflict, intimacy; Don’t show emotion; Don’t discuss personal life; Be polite” are characteristics both of white culture and of most white people. Again, the document is not grammatically coherent due to the bullet point format, but the idea is clearly that most white people accept that it is good or normative to avoid conflict, be polite, etc."
The title says "assumptions" very clearly. Here is a definition of "assumption" from the Cambridge Dictionary that you might find useful:
"something that you accept as true without question or proof"
Furthermore, this is the source that was referenced by the Smithsonian document, so this is not an additional source that would strengthen your argument (even if your argument was able to be strengthened, which seems unlikely) but rather the same source simply reproduced elsewhere. Often people who are not looking carefully at citations will do this. In a misguided attempted to strengthen an otherwise weak argument, they will cite what is basically the same source from the same people multiple times. I will assume that you made this mistake naively and were not deliberately trying to do this.
This worksheet is created by the Minnesota Historical Society and hosted on the internet by the Texas Historical Commission.
Here, the characteristics in question are not said to be part of “white culture” but explicitly “white supremacy culture.” The opening paragraph asserts that “The characteristics listed below [...] are damaging because they promote white supremacy thinking.” The authors acknowledge, as marxbro1917 has pointed out, that even “Organizations that are people of color led or a majority people of color can also demonstrate many damaging characteristics of white supremacy culture,” so they do not believe that “only white people” value these norms, but they do link them to white people and white supremacy."
Yes, I am correct and Scott is not correct here. The piece never states that "only" white people do this or believe this.
"The phrasing here is different from the shorter bullet points, but in the same vein of thought, so it lets us see more clearly what the shorter bullet points might be getting at. For the short “avoid conflict,” we have spelled out that in organizations with white supremacy culture, “a lot of energy in the organization is spent trying to make sure that peopleís feelings arenít getting hurt or working around defensive people.”"
Again, this simply doesn't state anything like "I hear woke people talk about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment is white supremacy because only white people care about that kind of thing.". Actually this expresses the opposite, that the organization puts a lot of energy into making sure white people's feelings aren't hurt. This suggests that white people are not calm or quiet during these kinds of discussions, but are overly emotional and prone to feeling hurt.
"For the short “Be polite,” we see that white supremacy culture places “emphasis on being polite” and ends up “equating the raising of difficult issues with being impolite, rude, or out of line.” For the short “Don’t show emotion,” we get the claim that white supremacy culture is characterized by “the belief that there is such a thing as being objective,” “the belief that emotions are inherently destructive, irrational, and should not play a role in decision-making or group process,” and the behavior of “invalidating people who show emotion.”"
Again, there was no actual statement that white people have a culture of actually being polite, simply that they equate the raising of difficult issues with being impolite, rude or out of line. We can see that people who are raising difficult, emotional issues aren't necessarily wrong.
"I conclude that there is a common and widespread belief, endorsed by city governments, colleges, and agencies for historical preservation, that norms of politeness, conflict-avoidance, and low emotional expressivity are characteristic either of “white culture” or “white supremacy culture.”"
The conclusion doesn't follow - "widespread belief" here amounts to three cherry-picked Google results you found all of which rely on the same sources and consulting firms. Just because a culture has "norms" this does not mean that "only" this culture has norm - which is the claim Scott Alexander made. Neither does it mean that white people are actually polite or calm - as shown by the texts emphasis on words like "assumptions" and "belief".
"I am not going to debate the details of the three examples I’ve provided, because nitpicking at the (admittedly unclear, grammatically upsetting, and perhaps intentionally obfuscatory) phrasing of the specific examples cannot explain away the underlying similarity of idea."
Likely you are saying that you are "not going to debate" the details because you know that the details don't really support your argument. The idea that the documents in questions are "intentionally obfuscatory" is a strange one and not very charitable to the writers. The possibility that you simply are not very good at reading comprehension for some reason never occurs to you. Neither does it occur to you that you have been primed to think this way by Scott Alexander, a man who has been shown many times to have poor reading comprehension. Another strong possibility is that you do not wish to "debate" this point because you do not wish to show any sort of charitability to the outgroup. In my opinion facts that are hotly contested such as this one should absolutely be up for debate. The idea that certain topics are not up for debate and become tabooed is strange to me, especially when you're essentially just writing off massive segments of the population who are interested in "woke" ideas.
"There is something of a game going on here with the terms “white people,” “white culture,” and “white supremacy.”"
I don't see what the "game" is here. All of these terms are different, this is the reason that they have different terms in the first place and not just a single word or phrase. At best you could maybe say that the different authors of some of the different texts use the terms slightly differently, especially since these different documents appear to have been written many decades apart from each other. That's to be expected. However, if you get the terms mixed up and confuse the different terms used by the different authors, that seems to me like it would be your fault. This is part of why I am emphasising the need for increased reading comprehension abilities within the Rationalist community, by the way.
"None of the sources says that all white people have the same characteristics or that no non-white people do; in fact several are careful to provide caveats to the contrary. So Scott is technically wrong to say that woke people believe that “only white people cared about that kind of thing.”"
Ah, "technically wrong". This is a interesting euphemism for being flatly being wrong. Something that might be used when a person is obviously wrong, but wishes to sugarcoat it. Or, to paraphrase Futuama, "technically wrong, the worst kind of wrong".
"But naming this complex of norms and values “white culture” and insisting that it is common to “most U.S. White people most of the time” clearly implies that the characteristics, behaviors, or norms in question are uniquely associated with white people and not with other racial groups, although the exact nature of that association is left unspecified."
Where does it imply this? As far as I can tell it makes no such implication. Unfortunately when people wish to be uncharitable to a text written by a member of the outgroup they read certain things into the text that simply aren't written there upon closer inspection. Hence the reliance on saying there is an "implication" rather than just actually quoting the source.
"Comparison between the parallel sources also shows that in this discursive environment “white culture” and “white supremacy culture” are more or less equivalent and can be substituted for each other in paraphrases of the same source without comment."
Where do you believe it shows this? I don't think there's any indication that they can (or should) be substituted for each other in the texts provided.
"It seems clear that many people, especially those who endorsed my third document, would say that caring about or (much more) demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment is a form of white supremacy, just as Scott said."
Firstly, that's not actually what Scott said. What Scott said was "I hear woke people talk about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment is white supremacy because only white people care about that kind of thing". Scott's argument contains an important second component, that "only white people care about that sort of thing". There was no indication in your third source that the writers believe such a thing.
Secondly, the third document you're referring to doesn't just talk about a "calm" environment, it explicitly makes statements such as "impatience with any thinking that does not appear “logical” to those with power". Now correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell "calm" and "impatient" are two different things. It seems that the writer is not really of the opinion that white people are actually "calm", but rather that they can be "impatient" and that they can "scapegoat" those that make them feel discomfort. None of this conforms to the false narrative that Scott wrote, and is very good evidence that those who have been accused of being "woke" actually believe something quite different from Scott's uncited and uncharitable remarks.
"Even though Scott’s phrasing was more casual than would be ideal in a debate, it was readily intelligible to a good-faith reader and correct in substance."
I am a good-faith reader, it was both "technically wrong" and incorrect in substance. I have shown this in many instances. I have shown that his lazy (lack of) citations are a wider problem; that one should cite sources even if one feels that the information is "obvious". Scott has continued to lack citations for many of his "jokes" (i.e., his lazy in-group signalling). I have also shown that Scott was not charitable to the actual texts in question, going so far as to completely make up assertions about his ideological opponents, such as that they argued "only white people care about that kind of thing". In all the texts both Scott and you have cited, nobody even came close to making this argument. I have pointed this out at length and yet Scott's essay still does not provide either a correction or a citation. That's absolutely not a rational way to behave, and I feel it actually harms civilization. At a certain point, if this behaviour continues, people will start concluding that Scott is misrepresenting his outgroup deliberately.
Not only is Scott's behaviour not charitable to the actual authors (Katz, Smithsonian), it is not charitable to the wider outgroup. Who is the "woke" here and what are they arguing? Why generalize documents from a couple of select sources (Katz, ChangeWork consulting, etc) into something that "the woke" say? If Scott was interested in being charitable for these arguments, he would have named the people he disagreed with and actually said something of substance about how he disagrees with them. Instead, Scott stereotypes this as something that he "hears" from "woke people". The target of Scott's ire is not Katz or Jones & Okun, but instead the "woke" as a whole. This is how you know that Scott simply isn't approaching the issue in good faith. What Scott does is simply make up a position (which, I will remind you, was not backed up by a single source that he or you have provided) and then say that they "woke" say this. This is the old Trumpian (I actually hate to make this comparison, but in this case it's true) "many people are saying this!". That Scott would degrade public debate in this way is slightly sad, to be honest.
"An good-faith correction, if you wanted to nitpick, might be, “You should be more careful in summarizing the views of your ideological outgroup; technically, the common “woke” belief is not that ONLY white people care about quietness and low emotional expression, but that valuing these things is characteristic of white culture and white supremacy.”"
This is the correction I made for him, plus all my other corrections which still stand. All of these corrections were made in good-faith.
"With this substantive agreement about ideas and minor disagreement about tone, the ground would be cleared for a more productive discussion"
The ground has already been cleared for productive discussion, I have already achieved this in my original post asking for citations and in all my subsequent posts.
"e.g. what ends it serves to associate clusters of cultural norms with racial groups, whether calmness and politeness are in fact desirable in workplaces, or (in line with marxbro1917’s Marxist critique above) what material conditions and social structures lead corporations and powerful institutions to frame “white culture” in this way."
Scott will likely never address these issues. As I have shown, Scott appears to only be interested in signalling to his in-group and being uncharitable to his outgroup. You've indicated that you would find it productive to discuss a Marxist critique about what material conditions and social structures lead corporations and powerful institutions to frame "white culture" in certain ways. I agree, that would be very productive, but I fear that it would be difficult to be productive when one party is not using proper citations and is not being charitable to outgroup sources. And if Scott cannot be charitable to centrist organisations like the Smithsonian I have some doubts that he will be charitable to Marxist sources.
However, I will say that the ground has always been clear for this kind of discussion and I happily invite Scott to join me in a discussion about a Marxist analysis. Or we could simply go over some of the other aspects of this discussion that he has not addressed sufficiently. Let's just say that I'm looking forward to that discussion, but that I wont hold my breath while waiting for it.
Count me as another vote for the "I never saw that before and assumed you were making a cheap shot about how fragile woke people are" group. Not everyone follows the same Twitter feeds you do.
My assumption when I saw that line was that the original complaint was something about tone policing, or the sort of people who believe that if your opponent is getting angry that must mean they don't have any genuine arguments, and I was all set to make a similar (but less marxbro-y) post before I saw this one.
"Don't show emotion" and "Be polite" are both on the list, last page. The only part that doesn't exactly fit the statement in the article is that Scott described it as "only white supremacists care about it" rather than "an aspect of white culture," which is within the bounds of hyperbole.
Ironically, I probably would have used your writing style as Exhibit A of "why an insistent, rules-lawyering demand for exactly perfect debate practice can be utterly toxic to debate, especially if applied more rigidly to your opponent's statements than your own."
"Within the bounds of hyperbole" - why is it that Scott is using hyperbole when describing a political outgroup? Doesn't that seem quite uncharitable to you?
The title quite clearly says aspects and assumptions, as I have said before. This is not "rules-lawyering", this is simple reading comprehension and avoiding being uncharitable to an outgroup.
If you find my debate style "toxic" then I would suggest you simply aren't prepared for political debate in general.
I don't agree with marxbro (in this case or many others), but I think it was reasonable for him to want evidence. There are other people who share your views about woke culture who thought "that's either a joke, or a surprise". I personally hadn't heard about the Smithsonian thing, and now I'm glad I know it.
Even though I can hear some people groaning "don't feed", I'm going to take my own advice to Scott, assume your request for information is sincere, and make one serious effort to treat you with dignity.
You're an ardent supporter of Marxism, right? I'm not sure whether I would disagree with you about it. I certainly see some good, for what it's worth. What I disagree with are your methods.
I'm a former conversational pugilist. I've been there. I feel bad for the way you get into go-nowhere fights on this site, man.
If you really think Marxism is going to triumph again, someday, by revolutions, by sheer fighting, then you should be sitting back, quietly sipping your favorite beverage with confidence.
Otherwise Marxism is competing in the marketplace of ideas. Even when people are trying very hard to shop the marketplace for what's true, they're still affected by salesmanship. Good salesmanship makes ideas attractive. People investigate attractive ideas first. We put the books at the top of our list. We save unattractive ideas for last and kinda push ourselves through the process.
A lot of what you do is just bad salesmanship. I mean stuff like pushing people through many exchanges, frankly telling people they're wrong, telling people they haven't done enough reading / should read / would know if they read, questioning people's motives, calling out Scott for dishonesty when he's made a good faith effort to find the truth, and just generally being highly confrontational. It makes your positions unattractive regardless of their truth or falsity, and I just can't see that being good for your cause. You're not convincing anyone to give Marx an honest try; instead, you're convincing a lot of people to put him at the bottom of their reading list. I don't want that for you as a person and I don't want that for your favorite political philosophy.
I think you could learn a lot from recent book review winner Lars Doucet. He had an idea (Georgism) that he passionately believed in. He didn't move around the comments getting into fights about it. Instead, he wrote a funny, engaging book review. He made a good faith effort to check it for truth, anticipating and acknowledging a lot of concerns, including ones he couldn't address. He made it an offering (something nice that people could silently take or leave) instead of a confrontation (something personal that gives non confrontational people stress or guilt). He did *a lot* of craft work to make it fun and interesting to read. He did a lot of work to understand his audience (it's no accident that he gave a bunch of nerdy politics readers an excuse to bring back the anachronistic "By George". that was playing to the gallery). As a result, a bunch of people, myself included, are reading Henry George, and enjoying it.
You could be that guy. You should be that guy. I disagree with you forever being stuck in a bunch of comment fights.
There are also social media posts (and sorry, I haven't bookmarked them) about "group of black women go to a restaurant, other public place; are asked to turn it down because they're being so loud; go on social media to say this is racism against their culture" which I've definitely seen before.
Propositions that black kids get disciplined in schools more than white kids because of 'cultural behaviours' which include being loud, being boisterous, talking in class, etc.
That one ridiculous tweet which got scrubbed in the immediate aftermath of the tragic shooting of a black teenager, where some bint was going on about "it's been normal for thousands of years for teenagers to fight, including with knives, no reason to call the cops". No, if you see one girl trying her best to stab another, just stand back and let them at it? Really?
"Some bint". This doesn't seem like a very good way to be charitable to someone. In any case, if you don't have any evidence then I'm not really interested with your personal anecdotes from the social media ether.
I don't think "there's a lot worse I could have called [x]" should be the standard of charitability and politeness among Rationalists. I am free to ignore things, of course, but I'd rather highlight your lack of evidence and tendency towards cherry-picking anecdotes.
I'm not "policing" your language, as I have no authority and you have not broken any laws. However, I quite enjoy pointing taboo things out (like that Rationalists are capable of lying) and I will continue to do so.
I'm well within my rights to point out the simple fact that "there's a lot worse I could have called [x]" is not a very high standard of charitability.
I believe you are referring to Bree Newsome. I can't tell Bree from Adam ... or Eve ... but I gather that Bree was recognizable as a vocal member/supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States.
Your paraphrase is remarkably close to the actual quote, which began with the words
"Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons..."
Taking a charitable reading of what you wrote: the phrase "some bint" might be words that I wouldn't use, but they do not detract from the fact that some supporters of BLM were willing to claim that teens fighting with knives was a Black thing that didn't need to be stopped by a Policeman with a gun.
This is another point in favor of the general thought that White/Western culture is more emotionally reserved, and non-White culture is more exuberant.
I think that particular point is a little too simplistic to express the reality, but I also think it is a point that is worth lampooning when it is misused... As in the argument offered by Bree Newsome.
Why are you so concerned with protecting the woke, bro? This is the position which is hugely popular with the American elites and hugely unpopular with the American proletariat. Are you sure you're on the correct side of these barricades, comrade?
I notice that marxism is also very popular among the elites (I suspect much more than among the actual proletariat). This is weird initially, but I think this is also how it was in Russia, for example - most of the Marxists were educated middle-class folks, which were sponsored by contemporary analogues of Jeff Bezos and Tom Steyer, and were largely seeing themselves asthe "woke" vanguard (in the original meaning of the word, as somebody who is aware of things others aren't) whose duty is to educate and agitate a barely conscious proletariat.
This is I think a generic foundation of all Marxist thought, at least as it applies on the ground - while Marxists are acting for the benefit of the proletariat, the actual proletariat is too stupid and too oppressed to know and express their real needs and desires, so instead the Marxist elite is going to do their thinking for them, for their own good. And if they disagree, it only shows how deeply oppressed they are and how they have been forced to internalize their own oppression to the point where they are unable to recognize their own interests (while the Marxist elite, armed with Marxist Science, can easily do that).
I'd say "it's complicated". First, in presidential election, votes are aggregated by state, so VA vote is not only Joe's but many others. Second, interests vary - a lot of people prefer to pay low taxes and receive generous state services, but it usually one or the other. Third, what do you think Joe's true interests are and how should he vote to achieve them?
I'm interested in being charitable. "Woke" is a broad pejorative that is twisted to mean whatever it is people want it to mean, so I don't think it's very useful to say a "woke" position is popular with this or that class.
Nah, that's not true. Woke is used as a pejorative to mean very specific class of people. Nobody says "woke" to mean somebody is not running fast enough, or not good at solving chess puzzles, or is too obsessed with mountain bicycling, or smells bad. Woke has very specific meaning - a type of person who is obsessed with matters concerning identity politics, inequality and oppression and tending to view any event and any question through the lens of those and aggressively demand the same from everybody who comes into contact with them. As Wikipedia quotes:
in this pejorative sense, "woke" was used to describe anyone who was "a slave to identity politics".
I find this description pretty close to target, except that "slave" implies external coercion (btw a woke person would be compelled to object to it for PC reasons), but the relationship between wokes and idpol is more like a relationship between an enthusiastic cult follower and the cult she belongs to.
"being charitable" is for the decadent bourgeoisie. Do you know nothing about the Red Terror? "To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated" - these are the words of the true revolutionary, this is the level of charity our class enemies deserve. You really better decide which side you're on now comrade, if you know what's good for you, it'll be far too late when NKVD will come knocking on your door.
I've seen the word "woke" applied to proletarians as well as members of the bourgeoisie. This is why you need Marxist analysis in the first place, rather than messy and unclear pejoratives.
I don't think a commissar will be interested in these excuses, and all *he* needs is revolutionary consciousness and working-class solidarity, to summarily execute you as the enemy of the people.
Living in Russia, I can say that ADHD (translated as СДВГ) is less recognized by the psychiatry community here because of its unclear aetiology. Doctors usually refuse to treat the patients in the absence of dangerous symptoms, and state the diagnosis as "organic nervous system disorder", "psychoorganic syndrome" or indeed "neurasthenia". Adderall and Ritalin are illegal drugs here. Patients usually get prescribed nootropics (glycine, racetams) and adrenaline reuptake inhibitors (atomoxetine).
The idea that psychiatric diseases (at least some of them?) are caused by psychiatry is certainly very intriguing, and a certain totaly-not-a-cult-not-even-close community would be delighted to hear more about it.
As for Mental Health Unawareness Campaigns - the Big Social Media has already perfected the technology of banning any discussion of particular subject, and of anybody - from a lowly peasant to a President - who dares to mention it. So deploying a total ban on mental health discussion would be just a matter of somebody getting the ears of three-four people in charge. Of course, there would be places who don't play ball - like Substack - that will still allow such things and this particular posting may survive (at least until their hosting turns off their servers and the banks refuse to process their payrolls), but the combined power of Google/Twitter/Facebook should be enough to make a noticeable impact. We already have experts ready to go on TV and tell people whatever needs to be told. We already have cultural gatekeepers ready to force everybody to believe whatever the TV experts say. We already know how to ban words and topics and expell anybody who mentions them, in any context and with any intent, from the polite society. As a society, America is basically made for Mental Health Unawareness Campaign now.
Even if they’re “social constructs spread by marketing”, I don’t think recognizing that and dialectically raising the consciousness is enough to get out - “just pretend you’re not depressed, it’s in your head” is a common line that depressed people lampoon all over the net.
If mental illness is a memetic disease, of course pretending you don't have it when you're already got it is as useful as wearing a mask when you're already infected with a virus. It may help others but for you it's certainly too late for that. So maybe people who say "it's only in your head" aren't trying to help the sick - they are trying to instinctively protect themselves before the meme takes hold?
FWIW I suspect important part of the story with how culture-bound anorexia is is that humans are pretty strongly inclined to pick up cultural/moral taboos about what is and isn't food (Leviticus etc. etc.)
It's only on exposure to modern dieting culture where so many things aren't considered food that this turned into people not eating (and I guess this would explain the correlation with OCD)
Ok since you mentioned it yourself, I have to admit to a dark little secret - there's a part of me which is absolutely certain that this model is the main explanation of why the Bay Area appears to have such *insanely* (pun intended) higher rates of mental health issues than the small town I grew up in.
Back there, sure you could meet a person who's a bit weird sometimes, and there were some people with mental retardation and/or addictions. But things like "depression", "autism" or "anorexia" were stuff from the TV, not the real world. Here everyone either has a mental health issue themselves, or have a partner, close relative or friend who's dealing with it.
Yeah yeah, underdiagnosis, social bubbles, stigma, *I* know. But there's a part of me that doesn't and keeps on feeling like it's those fancy-ass bay area hipsters making up fake problems for themselves because they have no real ones.
I was also surprised about this upon moving to the Bay Area. I think it's a combination of - Bay Area attracts queer people and (frequently autistic) programmers, both of whom have a weird neurotype you'd expect to correlate with other weird neurotypes. Part of it is there's less stigma and more reverse-stigma, so more people classify mild weirdness as a mental disorder and get it treated. And yeah, part of it might be something like the stuff in this post.
The Bay Area probably competes with Boston, Manhattan-Brooklyn, and the D.C. suburbs for the highest average IQ region in the country. Just having a larger vocabulary of terms for psychiatric maladies because you have a larger vocabulary in general likely makes you more likely to see yourself as having one of those interesting illnesses.
It's also fair to liken it to 3rd Year Medical Student syndrome, to people with just enough intelligence and education to get themselves in trouble. We're not talking about people with life science PhDs and years of experience in mental illness. We're mostly talking about programmers and scientists and engineers from only tangentially related areas.
I think I'm in many ways a very central example of the Bay Area person. I have a master's in math from a very nice school, and I worked as a programmer for some FAANGs before moving out of the Bay Area, and I'm the child and brother of medical doctors, and the spouse of a bio researcher, so I know a lot of words, but I don't have deep knowledge or experiences. I see and saw people like me assigning their own mental illnesses with high confidence on maybe low evidence.
I think alcohol is a fairly addictive substance, and if you get excessively exposed to it in your youth, either through the parents' abuse or it being viewed as "cool", you don't need any extra explanations as to why some people would go on to abusing it. Of course, statistically likely someone was "medicating themselves", but I don't have any reasons to believe this was a significant fraction. And even if it was 100%, this still wouldn't bring the [perceived] rates anywhere near those of the bay area.
"Compared to controls, sons of the alcoholics were about four times more likely to be alcoholic but no more likely to be heavy drinkers or have other psychiatric disorders. This increased rate of alcoholism applied whether the sons were raised by their own alcoholic parents or by nonalcoholic foster parents."
I'm not sure why is it supposed to blow my mind? Increase in chances of alcoholism (the right tail of the distribution) but not heavy drinking (the right side but not quite tail of the distribution) is weird, but nowhere near the most counterintuitive finding I've seen in a biological or social study.
"True" is probably the wrong word - there's a difference between someone who makes up a problem so they can sell you something, and someone engaged with a real problem with counterproductively bad infohazard praxis. We *wish* the latter were charlatans.
Yeah. Even if the strongest version of this topic were true, it would still be correct to say "psychiatrists are wrong for the right reasons, and scientologists are right for the wrong reasons".
Under the theory that formless extreme stress finds an outlet determined by your cultural milieu, it seems like the sudden huge spike of anorexia in Hong Kong ought to have *displaced* other disorders. Did it?
Everytime someone refers to Northern Ireland as religious or ethnic violence, a small part of me dies inside.
My Dad's half Northern Irish and half Finnish and my Mom from Kerry and outside the Finnish fourth- I have enough runs of homozygosity in my genome to give the Habsburgs a run for their money.
Yeah, that's in large part why I scorn Lynn's IQ scores about the Republic scoring lower than the North which scores lower than Britain. We're a mongrel mix of pretty much the same!
How would you term it then, if you had to put it in a bucket?
Ulster Scots vs Irish seems like enough of an ethnic difference for ppl to rally behind in principle… if you can tell them apart by surname or dialect or something.
Literally I can't eat fruit or bread and I get iron overload from inheriting from both my Mom and Dad. I'm HLA Class II 16:02 homozygous and every polygenic prediction tool is hilariously off when you're this inbred given the number of regulatory intronic loci we don't even know about yet.
Like they've been banging each other for literal ages politically and sexually.
There's definitely allegations about "that shade of red hair is Catholic and the other shade of red hair is Protestant" in the North. The big difference is between the Planter stock - the Scots (more so than the English) who came over in the reign of James VI and I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantation_of_Ulster
and the division between the 'native' Irish and the Scottish, who after a few generations then became the "Scots-Irish" of the American "Albion's Seed". There's social distinctions and a tendency not to intermarry, but I really doubt there's a huge genetic difference between the two populations (especially since the North of Ireland had long had contact with and movement between Ireland and Scotland).
The IRA covered the last two family funerals on my Mom's side and my Dad's dad was an orphan from Derry/who I get my surname from whose roots go back to Scotland.
And again. I literally can't break down fructose. My skin color is ultraviolet. Like I WISH there was an ethnic divide.
Coeliac disease is an Irish thing, which is why I was bemused when the gluten-free fad started up - are there *that* many coeliacs in America? what do you mean, they're not coeliac, they just think they have some other problem with wheat?
Isn't religion a big part of culture, and ethnicity an important point of geopolitics? Or do you mean that these parts are not central in this conflict?
Young Americans appear to have been undergoing a worsening in mental health since about 2013, roughly the era of the Great Awokening.
The evidence in Haidt and Lukianoff's "The Coddling of the American Mind" points to the second Obama administration as being the era when the national nervous breakdown began.
The authors cite alarming evidence of a recent increase in emotional problems. For example, the percentage of college students who said they suffered from a “psychological disorder” increased among males from 2.7 percent in 2012 to 6.1 percent by 2016 (a 126 percent increase). Over the same four years, the percentage of coeds who saw themselves as psychologically afflicted rose from 5.8 percent to 14.5 percent (150 percent growth).
Haidt and Lukianoff are somewhat impressed by the data assembled in psychologist Jean M. Twenge’s new book "iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood." Twenge theorizes that the rise of smartphones and social media from 2007 onward has made the teenage years a living hell of status anxiety and call-out culture for kids born from 1995 onward. ...
Really? I don't spend much time with kids these days so I wouldn't know. To me, climate change seems like such a boring, slow-motion thing to fear, but I suppose kids are so indoctrinated in goodthink these days that they would be terrified of something that could cause major problems a few generations from now.
In contrast, I lived through three decades (1958-1988) during which nuclear war was a by no means utterly implausible possibility, which strikes me as rather a more dramatic thing to worry about.
But did I? I don't remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, so probably the scariest time of the Cold War for me was the month or so after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas 1979, a day on which I happened to receive as a present the novel "The Third World War" about a Soviet tank invasion thru the Fulda Gap. That was all very depressing and worrisome.
But I also remember that two days later, I took my Christmas gift cash to the record store and bought the epochal debut album "The Pretenders," the underrated "Setting Sons" by The Jam, and my all-time favorite album "London Calling" by The Clash. Here's my review in the Rice U. "Thresher:"
I realize that we have to use ourselves as starting points for thinking about people, but I strongly recommend assimilating the idea that there's a lot of variety among people.
For example, there are apparently a good many people with Christian upbringings who are terrified of Hell, and presumably a smaller but not insignificant number or who are terrified of the end of the world.
This doesn't mean that everyone with such an upbringing is terrified, and I get the impression that even siblings with similar upbringings about religion don't all react the same way.
It would probably be worth studying the difference between people who take potentially terrifying input and actually get terrified vs. those who more or less brush it off.
Presumably, the number of young people terrified of hell has been declining over the course of this century, but we saw in the US an upsurge in college students' depression and anxiety at the same time. Other things that went up while fear of hell went down: social media, wokeness, gender ideology, anti-white hate, etc
If anyone reading this is interested in digging a little deeper into the question of ancient Roman PTSD, they should check out ACOUP's post on the matter. Not sure how to embed links here, but the URL is https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/
On PTSD in wars, is WWI "shell shock" usually regarded as what we would now call PTSD? Because there was a hell of a lot of that and the medical establishment took a while to acknowledge it and it came as big surprise.
Warfare changed a lot in the few decades before WWI. With the exception of sieges, which were always understood to be very wearing on an army (which is why the convention arose that a city would be invested, ie surrounded, and then given the choice between surrender without a sacking or a siege with a sacking, the idea being to try to avoid sieges), most wars before 1900 or so involved set-piece battles lasting a day or two (Leipzig in 1813 was four days and that was regarded as utterly exceptional).
The continuous contact of both armies and the continuous low-level fighting (patrolling, raiding, firing off a few artillery shells, etc) didn't start in WWI - the Russo-Japanese war was like that ten years earlier - but WWI was the first big war to feature it.
So, if there is a discontinuity and PTSD in warfare starts with WWI shell shock, then there is a discontinuity in the experience of warfare itself that takes place at the same time.
This would also suggest that persistent trauma is a bigger deal for PTSD formation than a single big traumatic event; I don't know anywhere near enough about PTSD to know if that is true.
Ancient Greek battles c. 500 B.C. tended to be quite short not just in days but in minutes before one side broke and ran.
It sounds kind of fun to do this with your buddies one summer day every several years from, say, age 17 to 30, assuming that you, personally, didn't get a spear in your back. It was probably a little like big game hunting, something humans had evolved to do.
“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” (Lee)
Though I don't get the impression that the common soldier of the American Civil War would have agreed. Still, most of the complaints from their letters tend to be about the boredom, the constant marching, the lack of and poor quality of food, and the separation from their families. A very different set of issues from the WWI complaints about dead bodies and artillery.
Also the camp diseases, which caused more casualties than the battles in every war before WWI. They didn't get mentioned in the letters much, as dysentery isn't a polite topic of conversation.
Homesickness is an interesting example of the opposite pattern from PTSD or anorexia: rather than it being an apparently new emotional debility that may or may not have roots in the past, it's an old one that is no longer taken seriously even thought it's probably around as much as ever.
Homesickness was acknowledged to be a big problem during the Civil War. According to official medical records recounted in Susan J. Matt's 2011 book "Homesickness: An American History," 5000 soldiers were taken ill with "nostalgia," and 74 of them succumbed to it.
Dr. Matt, who worked with her husband on six campuses before she finally achieved tenure at Utah St. in Ogden, UT, explains how Victorian Americans were extremely sympathetic toward the homesick, but in the 20th Century, when big corporations and big military were shuffling Americans all over the landscape, we were told to buck up and get over it.
In my own life, I can see that homesickness has played a major role in my career decisions, even though home to me is the rather comic San Fernando Valley. I probably should have moved to NYC or DC, the correct locales for a pundit talent. The SFV, in contrast, is a fine place for a screenwriter, but that's not quite who I am.
It's also possible that some people were affected more than others, or that diagnoses were not made until much, much later so that people who might have had it weren't considered as suffering from anything much (or at all). If you don't have a name for something, it's hard to make a coherent whole of the experiences, and the expectation (from yourself as well as from those around you) that you should just "pull yourself together" and "get on with things" means that you don't think of it as a condition until you get 'permission' to do so now that it is Real Medical Condition.
From C.S. Lewis' biography, he spoke very little of his war-time experiences (shipped out to the Somme on his 19th birthday in 1917) and seems to have pushed that part of his life to the back of his mind, or experienced it as being something of the distant past:
"Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gum boots with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire. Familiarity both with the very old and the very recent dead confirmed that view of corpses which had been formed the moment I saw my dead mother. …But for the rest, the war — the frights, the cold, the smell of H[igh].E[xplosive]., the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet — all this shows rarely and faintly in memory."
Note that WWI was probably the first war where the majority of the common soldiers were literate and practiced at writing about themselves (I wouldn't want to strongly oppose the American Civil War as a candidate though) . Previous wars are recounted through the officer classes and exceptional individuals who may skew the accounts a lot.
What are the influential Great War works of literature and were they by officer-types or enlisted-types?
The truth about how awful WWI had been suddenly exploded upon the Western world around 1928-29 about a decade after the end of the war.
"All Quiet on Western Front" was by Erich Maria Remarque, a draftee from a working class background. He was obviously a superior individual, to judge from the women who had affairs with him, such as Hedy Lamarr, Marlene Dietrich, Dolores Del Rio, and his last wife Paulette Goddard, whose estate funded in his name the heroic Tony Judt's professorship at NYU. I would suspect that in most 20th Century armies Remarque would have been identified and sent to officer candidate school, but Germany in WWI had a very small officer corps and it wasn't expected that men of talent be elevated. For example, Hitler remained a corporal after four years of courageous service, despite his evident talents for leadership. Remarque was wounded pretty fast and missed the rest of the war due to convalescence so he missed the chance to promoted to officer class.
Ernest Hemingway: "A Farewell to Arms." The brilliant son of a doctor, Hemingway was obvious officer material, but he was rejected by the U.S. Army in December 1917 for poor eyesight. So he saw the elephant as an ambulance driver.
Among the British writers who revealed the truth about the war, English poet Wilfred Owen was middle class and an officer. Siegfried Sassoon was an upper class half-Baghdadi Jewish officer. Robert Graves was upper middle class and an officer.
The pro-war Ernst Junger ("Storm of Steel") was the son of a wealthy chemical engineer. He enlisted and then became an officer.
So, most of the famous writers were middle class or higher, which
Re: "The Troubles", we also referred to the Second World War as "The Emergency".
The Zanzibarian expression “an attack of the nerves” seems more like it might be a translation/carried over from when the Portuguese were the main colonial power; the French have the expression "crise de nerfs" and it's common enough among working-class/lower middle-class Irish and British to talk about "being on pills for my nerves", so looking up the Portuguese version, there's (what seems to me) the more modern term "colapso nervosa" (nervous breakdown) and (what seems to me) the older term "crise nervosa" https://blog.psicologiaviva.com.br/crise-nervosa/
"The nervous crisis can be triggered by numerous emotional and physical responses that can aggravate your condition, such as: irritability, crying spells, appetite changes, lack of interest in social life, reactivity, alcohol and drug addiction (way to escape from reality), lack of motivation, extreme anger, violence, isolation from people, insomnia, fear, panic, sweating, pain, fatigue, agitation, among others."
So "I'm having trouble with my nerves" is possibly more a universal explanation (along with "possession by demons/spirits") for such illnesses, until Modern Western Science comes along with a Latin or Greek name for the condition instead.
I don't know if anorexia was "introduced" to Hong Kong by adopting Western ideas, it possibly again is "new description from outside of what we already have in our culture". East Asian beauty ideals for women include being thin (sometimes very thin https://martalivesinchina.wordpress.com/2017/08/07/beauty-standards-in-china/ "Every few months, a new “skinny challenge” appears in Chinese social media to prove how thin you are. The most famous ones are the “waist narrower than a A4 sheet of paper”, the “knees together can be covered by an iPhone” and the “holding coins in your collarbone”), so that natural slimness plus adhering to standards meant that "oh, this girl is severely dieting? well, that's normal!"
European societies also have the idea that "you have to suffer to be beautiful", so introducing the idea that "no, actually, starving yourself until your bones show isn't 'normal'" was a unique idea, and yeah, like a lot of trends, it got adopted by everyone to show how up-to-date and special they were (hence why Sing Lee can say "we didn't have anorexia until it became fashionable").
Again, Western societies have been the same way: the glamorisation of tuberculosis, even though it was a genuine scourge, making the ideal of the pale, delicate, wasting away female character in fiction (and probably real life as well, after all, why have a "fainting couch" unless you can decorously lie there all wan and fragile?) and we can't laugh at the Japanese for adopting German crazes around depression, not from the society which went crazy over "The Sorrows of Young Werther" which also had a European fan following to the extent that Thackeray wrote a satirical poem about it in 1855:
Werther had a love for Charlotte
Such as words could never utter;
Would you know how first he met her?
She was cutting bread and butter.
Charlotte was a married lady,
And a moral man was Werther,
And, for all the wealth of Indies,
Would do nothing for to hurt her.
So he sighed and pined and ogled,
And his passion boiled and bubbled,
Till he blew his silly brains out,
And no more was by it troubled.
Charlotte, having seen his body
Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well-conducted person,
Went on cutting bread and butter.
I think that there's a definite point about the adoption of Western science, technology and medicine, so that traditional definitions and treatments of conditions are scrapped in favour of "this is called X and the symptoms are A, B, C and sometimes D and you treat it by regular doses of Z" diagnosis. But I don't think "oh, some societies at some times never even had this condition!" holds true. It may not have been called that, it may have been understood as running amok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_amok or possession by ghosts/spirits/demons, it may have undergone several changes as fashions in diagnosis changed in Western medicine, but that "people C never had illness until they started importing fashions from people D" doesn't make sense.
I don't think anyone would argue "nobody in Japan ever had diabetes until Western medicine took off" because the human body works the same way, pretty much, wherever you are, so why should the human brain and mind be greatly different?
Self-starvation in the past was seen as religious asceticism. For example, St. Catherine of Sienna, a 14th Century mystic, diplomat, reformer, and celebrity starved herself to death at age 33.
My impression of anorexics today is that they tend to be supercilious upper middle class girls who have gotten carried away at out-competing the other girls to be thin. I don't know enough about religious asceticism to say if there are parallels between that and today's anorexics (St. Catherine of Siena was an extraordinary individual, so I'm not confident drawing analogies based on her), or whether the anorexia of the last few decades is a new thing.
We seem to have cross-posted on this, I did mention St. Catherine elsewhere
And even in her time, people were concerned at how severely she fasted, and her reply was that this wasn't by choice, it was an illness (so, like the Hong Kong pre-anoxerics):
From a letter replying to someone who wrote to her regarding her fasting:
"You sent me word to pray God particularly that I might eat. I tell you, my father, and I say it in the sight of God, that in all ways within my power I have always forced myself once or twice a day to take food. And I have prayed constantly, and do pray God and shall pray Him, that in this matter of eating He will give me grace to live like other creatures, if it is His will—for it is mine. I tell you, that often enough, when I have done what I could, I enter within myself, to recognize my infirmity, and God, who by most special grace has made me correct the sin of gluttony. I grieve much that I have not corrected that miserable fault of mine through love. I for myself do not know what other remedy to adopt, except that I beg you to pray that Highest Eternal Truth, that He give me grace, if it is more for His honour and the salvation of my soul, to enable me to take food if it please Him."
> I tell you, that often enough, when I have done what I could, I enter within myself, to recognize my infirmity, and God, who by most special grace has made me correct the sin of gluttony.
It seems like she uses 'gluttony' in the way that I first learned reading C.S. Lewis (in "The Screwtape Letters"), i.e. any 'obsession' with food and eating, NOT just overeating.
One interesting thing that may be related is the "Truman Show Delusion." The Truman Show was a popular movie released in 1998 where the main character is born and raised in an entirely artificial environment. All of the people he interacts with, including his wife and parents, are paid actors and his every move is broadcast to a huge audience. After it was released, a few mentally ill people started claiming that everyone around them was an actor and they were stuck in an artificial world. Nobody knows how many, but it's enough for some psychologists to bring it to the attention of popular media.
According to memories of an old doctor, there still existed a few cases of "hysterical paralysis" in Czechoslovakia in 1950s when he started his carreer, but they disappeared in later decades.
It's a very hard thing to distinguish "knowledge creates the phenomena" and "phenomena creates knowledge" in principle. Both frameworks allows to interpret nearly any evidence in their favour. Multiple people have immediately remembered gender issues, but there is much more fundamental case.
How do we know that it's reality that creates our knowledge and not the other way around? It takes people literal years of constant evidence stream in favour of materialism to accept the simple truth of the litany of Gendlin. Is it, in principle, possible to accure as much evidence in cases of mental illnesses, sexual orientation or gender?
When measuring the "highest-expressed-emotion culture", I think we should distinguish between different kinds of emotions, rather that using "emotions" as a unified whole.
Specifically, I suspect that in safer environments people would feel more free to express emotions of "weakness" (e.g. crying), and in dangerous environments people would perform anger to look more threatening. Similarly, some emotions are more "individualistic" (enjoyment of something), some are more "collectivistic" (admiration of gods or leaders), so different cultures would reward and punish them differently. Depending on how much weight we assign to different types of emotions, we could get opposite conclusions.
Yeah and also the context within which they are expressed. E.g there are some cultures where high emotional repression is expected in public, but are very expressive among close family. Others have a medium level at all times.
So, the obvious question for an effective altruist is how to design a "mental illness" with positive consequences... and then make an awareness campaign about it, hoping that it would replace some of the traditional ones.
I'd have sworn I'd heard about this as an actual psychological syndrome, but my google fu fails me. The story I heard is that it was only discovered in a big military survey, since people who believe this don't show up with psychological problems.
"Japanese medical students went to Germany, learned psychiatry, came back to Japan, and told everyone they were neurasthenic. Being neurasthenic became first a fashion, then a class marker."
I believe something similar can be stated about melancholia versus depression. At least in a German-type context, and if my cultural Fingerspitzengefuhl is not failing me, to have a bout of Melancholia now and then is cool and a marker of high status. It shows you are a sensitive soul; it is related to Weltschmerz.
While being depressed means you're just an average Joe.
I wonder how this applies to psychiatric diseases that don't exist in the West, but do exist in the developing world. Would we get mass outbreaks of Koro if we started worrying about it?
Your articles would be greatly improved if you refrained from injecting random attacks on strawman "woke" people/positions out of nowhere at random intervals. It adds nothing to what you are saying, and makes you sound obsessive. Maybe try imagining a random racist interjection in place of your anti-woke ones if you don't see it.
What patriarchal beauty standards? The patriarchy wants women to be wide-hipped, big-breasted baby-churning machines, it's the fashion media, which is mostly dominated by women like Anna Wintour, that established the starving waif aesthetic.
I suspect anorexia is a copycat effect, like school shootings post-Columbine, a memetic virus that defies conventional mental health analysis.
But it's not established that this is an effect of patriarchal beauty standards, rather than an effect of fashion media beauty standards, or something else.
That is, fashion is very powerful, and maybe it got men too.
Is it though? It always seemed to me that the fashion/models industry is pretty insular, with average woman caring about this stuff much more than the average man. Whereas in the popular culture the female beauty standards are established by biggest actresses and pop stars, who may do some fashion on the side but it isn't their main avenue.
Well, in my bubble the stereotypical supermodel was referred to as "starved" for as long as I remember. Of course, some men like fat and some like thin, but I'm pretty confident that the majority male preference in the last century or so was "moderate amount of fat in the right places".
>Is it though? It always seemed to me that the fashion/models industry is pretty insular,
The fashion/models industry is mostly about "models", not "supermodels". Models are walking clothes hangers intended to make fashionable clothing look maximally beautiful, not to be maximally beautiful themselves. They aren't going to be ugly, but their range of beauty is constrained by the mission requirement and e.g. are generally thinner than most people find highly attractive.
"Supermodels" are the small subset of models who have achieved name recognition and branding as someone who audiences will pay to see (e.g. on the cover of Sports Illustrated), as opposed to just being people a designer will pay so that audiences will see the designer's clothes draped over them. This requires supermodels to be closer to maximally attractive in their own right, in part by being curvier than the average fashion model.
> This requires supermodels to be closer to maximally attractive in their own right, in part by being curvier than the average fashion model.
Right, makes sense.
> They aren't going to be ugly, but their range of beauty is constrained by the mission requirement and e.g. are generally thinner than most people find highly attractive.
I heard this argument before, but never quite understood the logic. Granted, I know approximately nothing of those requirements, but it seems safe to assume that an expensive designer piece of clothing is supposed to closely fit the wearer's figure to present it in the best light. Therefore a "clothes rack" which more or less corresponds to the expected proportions of the wearer would presumably provide for the most accurate/useful impression, why isn't this the case?
It's not really. In the 90s as a child, I certainly felt like that was what must be the agreed upon thing. In the 2000s and 2010s, other straight male friends and I gradually discovered that we all liked a *much* wider variety of female types, and this one was... eh, you know, nowhere near the consensus favorite. This was a slow discovery, because we were nerds, moral, circumspect, and didn't go around discussing our preferences.
At this point, I think "supermodel" is an imposition from the wider culture.
Few men follow fashion. If you look at websites devoted to pictures of hot famous women, they're mostly actresses and singers, and they're mostly shorter and better fed than fashion models.
On anorexia: the thing about the doctor (Sing Lee) inducing it in himself really caught my attention. As the attentive ACX reader knows, it can be induced in animals through similar means (see #14 on https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-april)! My guess is that there is something like this going on: "certain individuals are latent anorexics; weight loss / dieting reveals it." (source: I was/am anorexic).
Something else about the book: Watters talks about exporting western psychiatry being equivalent to handing out smallpox blankets. But then he reveals that he's married to a psychiatrist. He's, uh, maybe working through some stuff here?
Watters has an analogy in the book that imagine if after 9/11, a whole bunch of people from Mozambique flew in and told survivors that they needed to learn rituals for disconnecting their psychic bonds with the spirits of dead relatives. His point was that we would find it weird and insulting, but I think he was also trying to point out that even if these rituals helped Mozambiqueans find peace, outside a larger belief structure they are useless. He also tells the story of a psychiatrist who learns all sorts of stuff about handling psychotic family members in Zanzibar. Then her own husband comes down with psychosis and none of the Zanzibar stuff works. They try religion for example, but you can't just use religion when you need it, it has to be ingrained in your life and beliefs.
Point I'm trying to make, the book could be read as either "American psychiatry sucks" or "American psychiatry works within the context of American belief systems but can't just be copied and pasted to other cultures, the same way you can't just start doing Mozambique spirit rituals tomorrow and expect much from them." I suspect Watters believes some of both.
Here's a half-formed riff: if you synthesized Murray/Hernstein 1994 and DeBoer 2020, you might believe something like "Western society has made it so you have to have a certain (high) level of cognitive processing ability to function effectively, and every year the threshold increases."
If that's right could, we say that the developing countries integrate people experiencing mental health issues more effectively, because they haven't set their thresholds so high yet?
That's an interesting point. Watters rejects the idea that people in Zanzibar have easy lives and can just kind of hang out all day, but the stuff they do does tend to be less cognitively demanding.
Right, adding to CB's half formed riff, it's not "Western society has made life harder", it's "Western society has made life easier, as long as you're above the (rising) water line for cognitive processing^h^h^h discipline".
I say discipline because maybe it's less about processing power ("do a math problem") and more about not having intermittent failures ("never ever ever lose control of your narrative").
> "American psychiatry works within the context of American belief systems but can't just be copied and pasted to other cultures"
Perhaps we could go a step further and say that American psychiatry works on a certain subclass of Americans who are likely to visit and/or become psychiatrists (say, upper middle class New Yorkers who like to talk about themselves way too much) and is ineffective on most other sorts of Americans.
Going back to your original comment, my impression from Sing Lee/general observation is that there is a sort of anorexic metabolic equilibrium but that it took a lot of effort to reach it. Like, it took Sing three months of intense willpower, and I'd be unlikely to reach it just trying to lose ten pounds. Was that your observation, or did you slip into it without trying hard?
Very private question I know, feel free to ignore.
I’m not a doctor, but anecdotally I have helped people contextualize their mental health sort of like the spirits.
I’ve talked to several people who who were actively in the medical system for depression and explained how I see the brain, not as a fighter pilot (you are alone in there, any screw-up is on you) but as the captain of a ship (you command many parts, each of which may be imperfect).
And this helped them! A lot! This framing changed their outlook from “I am a problem” to “I have a problem”, which is much more productive and much less self-hating. It didn’t change their underlying conditions, of course, but I saw a slow-burn change in behavior. That could be a coincidence (the plural of anecdote is not data!) but I have since not been surprised by the practice of attributing mental health to externalized spirits that one is in contact with; it may not be literally true but it can be a helpful coping mechanism.
I'm presuming Watters has investigated and discounted the possibility that people in the past with (what we now call) PTSD might have got less support and so lived less long - perhaps even ended their own lives, and no-one talked about that either - so statistically there were fewer of them around?
I found the trauma section of the book very compelling, in part because it squares with my impression of the United States as a society that is convinced it understands trauma better than any previous society but seems to achieve uniquely poor outcomes. It would be like a land that was convinced it had the best vaccine for polio but you look around and every fourth person is in an iron lung.
Perhaps some are outright malingerers, but clearly for a large number (including a friend of mine) this is real. They really are suffering from a set of symptoms consistent with PTSD. And yet, the vast majority of WWI veterans, Holocaust survivors, everyone who lived through WWII in Western Russia etc., a large fraction of people in the Middle Ages etc. experienced as bad or worse stuff and the vast majority could function as adults. It's hard to escape the conclusion that we've created an expectation of disabling trauma and people fulfill it. Crazy Like Us quotes an American soldier who said that he felt like an actor given a script. Here's PTSD, this is what you do next.
I don't think we can create the anti-psychiatry society like in Scott's post, but we can send a message that left to their own devices the vast majority of people who experience terrible things will recover, and they shouldn't expect PTSD.
> quotes an American soldier who said that he felt like an actor given a script. Here's PTSD, this is what you do next
I once had occasion to hang out with a bunch of veterans, and they would compete with each other for how disabled they were, and gave tips for how to get up to 100% disabled (there are points for each thing, like some kind of D&D game) because that gives you the most benefits. Like "Have you lost movement in your leg? That's 20% right there."
There's some line about disability fraud from an otherwise terrible Chuck Palahniuk novel to the effect "if you fake a limp long enough, it becomes a real limp". I suspect this is true, and can also happen to your brain.
If you remember Carrie Weaver from ER, she originally had a never-really-explained limp; after a few seasons, she got magically cured between seasons, because the fake limp was injuring her. (I don't know if Hugh Laurie had the same problem.)
The VA disability system creates huge incentives for veterans to experience more symptoms so they can get more benefits. They’re not faking anything but when you’re making a subjective judgment about how you feel and there are large external incentives to feel worse, over time many people will feel worse.
I thought about this a lot recently. I was in a car crash a little over a year ago, and I had some lingering psychological effects from that. I'd feel tense, increased heartrate, a little more emotional volatility. The words "PTSD" came into my brain to describe how I felt.
But then I'd take a breath, remember that no one was badly hurt, and I'd feel a little better. I'd also think about my grandfather at Pearl Harbor and get a little perspective. Everyone suffers, and sometimes, some suffering is unbearable and leaves permanent damage. But my grandpa was OK, I'm OK, and we go on.
I don't discount PTSD in the least. But I'd be really careful applying that label to myself. I think most people can recover from awful trauma, but I think we have some incentives (like those you've pointed out) to NOT recovering sometimes.
It may be that lingering on the event in the context of expecting to end up with PTSD would have made things worse, but I think it's worth noting that within the model psychiatrists mostly use now, having traumatic symptoms for a while after a destabilizing event isn't a sign of PTSD. Most people experience such events at some points in their lives, and experience traumatic symptoms for a while, and then they go away. It's only when they persist and potentially worsen with time that it starts being considered PTSD.
I was hit by a car during college, hard enough that I broke its windshield with my body. For a number of months afterwards, I would experience significant anxiety any time I crossed the street. But that gradually went away and within a year I had no traumatic symptoms. Within the PTSD framework, that's how people most commonly respond to trauma.
Have to go to work and haven't read the whole piece, so apologies if this is raised in the post, but:
> "In the same way, Watters suggests, there probably is some base-level objectively-real mental illness. If you have to think of it as something, you can think of it as formless extreme stress, looking for an outlet. But the particular way the stress finds an outlet is based on the patient's cultural preconceptions."
Suppose we buy this. What would be the best of the already-existing ways that cultures conceive mental illness, in terms of overall human flourishing? How *should* extreme stress manifest pathologically? The best one I've been able to come up with is Japanese Hikikomori, ie withdrawal from society. It causes problems, for sure, and I don't mean to minimize it. But of the known ways that that extreme stress can be channeled, I haven't been able to come up with a *less* harmful one.
>The best one I've been able to come up with is Japanese Hikikomori, ie withdrawal from society. It causes problems, for sure, and I don't mean to minimize it. But of the known ways that that extreme stress can be channeled, I haven't been able to come up with a *less* harmful one.
I don't think this is particularly low on the harmfulness scale honestly, because it means that they're living entirely subsidized existences. And while arguably we'd be better off with something like a UBI which would make that an option for everyone, and not a burden focused on some specific income earner, there are are still a lot of other ways of channeling stress which leave people more able to engage with society in positive ways, even if they also engage in negative ones.
Good review, but I think it kind of forgets the 'biodiversity' idea? Particularly the section on the Sri Lankan "gaze of the wild" treatment. Western psychiatry clearly still has a lot to learn about PTSD, and if you believe in cultural evolution at all then Sri Lanka could very well have something to teach. Even if their approach isn't better overall, it might get something right that the West missed.
Focusing on whether the expected outcome is better or worse misses the point; the tragedy is in lost value of information.
It seems made up, even if ones partial to race stuff
That said it has some hilarious quotes
> The distinctive Indian pattern of extremely fast, extremely quarrelsome speech likely results from a combination of African like dopaminergic tone while possessing a normal or even superior group IQ.
> One background part of this chapter which I enjoyed was the section on biological views of mental illness. Westerners tend to spread these in order to reduce stigma - “has a brain chemical malfunction” sounds better than “is possessed by demons”, or even than “is just inexplicably lazy and weird”. But studies generally show that the biological view of mental illness makes people less sympathetic to the mentally ill, more concerned about them being violent, more interested in avoiding them, etc.
> I am skeptical this actually worsens outcomes for schizophrenia; the developed vs. developing world thing is more likely diagnostic differences. Still, oops.
Probably 20 years ago now, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture and Q&A session with the late Dr. Julian Leff, which I found very thought provoking. He did a lot of transcultural research as a psychiatrist, and much of what I remember would seem to agree with Watters observations. In particular, he thought the jury was out as to who was more effective in treating schizophrenia, and mental illness in general, but he thought the edge probably went to traditional (non-western) societies. He observed, like Watters, that the "ill" were better tolerated, integrated, and taken care of by their family and community, than in the west. In "traditional" societies, there is no stigma attached to "is possessed by demons", because that can happen to anyone, so the individual is not blamed and held responsible. The other thing which I found very interesting is that he said in general it is impossible to do western style talking therapies in traditional cultures. The main reason is that there is very little privacy. Everyone knows everyone's business, gossip (news and information) circulates very quickly, it is very difficult to keep secrets. Western style talking therapies crucially rely on privacy and confidentiality, so a client is safe in expressing things it would not do to make public knowledge. That does not work in traditional cultures, thus, the family or community will usually be included in the diagnosis, and treatment, and the "cause" of trouble will be spirits, demons, or malevolent forces which are not the fault of the person, but in fact could afflict anyone.
If anyone is interested, here is a short account of some of Dr. Leff's observations, "The lessons I learned as a psychiatrist from my transcultural work in low and middle-income countries": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6520537/
That's a really interesting part of the article to me, and I appreciate you sharing Dr. Leff's notes. I read a related article from a psychiatrist who is also a member of my faith. I'm a Latter-day Saint (Mormon), and TECHNICALLY we believe in the possibility of "evil spirits" and even possession, but generally no one takes it very seriously, even on the more fundamentalist end of the spectrum. This author asked why we don't, and made some really interesting points.
I think sometimes there's not a clear medical answer to a problem, but there can be a social or spiritual answer. Maybe we've erred to far to the "SCIENCE!!!" side of things in our culture (speaking of Americans and adjacent.) That's not to criticize science in the least, or to cover over the awful things that go wrong with "exorcisms" that end up in the news. But maybe our ancestors were onto something to approach the problem as a "demonic" problem, if that makes any sense. Maybe there's a reason that idea persists in so many cultures, and maybe it's because that concept is advantageous.
I'm still surprised by the "low stigma attached to being possessed by demons" thing. While this doesn't sound stigmatizing to the victim, surely you would still want to stigmatize the [possessee + demon entity which lives in the victim's body], which sounds like the sort of thing you could only effectively do by stigmatizing the victim.
I think this is projecting an overly modern conception of what we mean by "demon". I think "evil spirit" should here be understood as more of a *force*, embodying a certain behaviour, than an intelligent agent who could be bargained with or influenced.
Feels to me like "inflicted" defectiveness (e.g. possession by spirit) is harder to stigmatize than "inherent" defectiveness (e.g. genetic condition).
Same for someone who got brain damage from getting hit on the head by a robber, vs. someone who just turned weird one day for reasons that can't be ascribed to external agency.
I recall a story about the "discovery" of hoarding. Some academic psychologist or psychiatrist happened upon someone crippled by hoarding behaviour. And he thought, "Hum, I've never seen this before. I wonder if it's a thing." So he put out a request to the public asking if anyone had heard of this. He came to work Monday to a ton of e-mails from people saying, "Yes! My partner, mother, aunt, cousin, etc. etc. has this." It was a big problem. But for someone reason it just wasn't widely known.
To me that lends credence to the idea that these issues can be widespread but hidden from general professional and public awareness.
OCD in general was incredibly under reported. I recall an article in the late 1980’s in Scientific American that stated researchers set out to document some known cases expecting to find at best a handful of cases. With a bit of publicity, they were overwhelmed with responses. “Yeah, I have that terrible problem too! You mean there is a name for it and everything? Imagine that.”
I was one of those people. The onset of my OCD came in 1976. I could narrow it to the month with a bit of research. Ironically it started with re-reading a paragraph in Scientific American.
It came as a huge relief to learn I wasn’t the only one suffering from the condition. It was a terrible as an untreated and unacknowledged condition.
It was a heavy lift completing a Computer Science major and a Linguistics minor when there were times I felt compelled to read only the odd numbered pages. I could only focus a small part of my cognitive bandwidth on my studies during my entire tenure of my undergraduate years.
By the early 90’s I had found treatment to put the OCD into near remission. I was very grateful for the relief. Everything was so much less difficult.
There is the story about Michael Burry who was featured in the Big Short. He'd had ocular cancer as a child that resulted in one of his eyes being removed. He had a troublesome glass eye as a result and always assumed his awkwardness and social isolation was due to his glass eye.
Years later he's gone to med school and gotten married and had a child. The school sends the kid for testing and it turns out he has aspergers. And Michael asks about it and suddenly realizes that's what he has and it explains everything.
"The onset of my OCD came in 1976. I could narrow it to the month with a bit of research. Ironically it started with re-reading a paragraph in Scientific American."
Can you tell me more about this? Was there something about the paragraph that triggered it, or are you just saying this is the first OCD symptom you noticed?
There was a reference to the history of thinking about the topic that included a mention of ‘The Creator’. The mechanism of my particular version of OCD relies on ideas were received as an 8 year old. It was pretty much the unabridged canon of Roman Catholic dogma. That stuff really shouldn’t be delivered to a credulous kid at that age.
By the time I was 16, I was through The Church but even at 68 it still isn’t through with me. As an adult I’ve done a close reading of Augustine of Hippo, probably one of the primary formulators of RC dogma, and at times he strikes me as bit of knuckle head. - Getting wrapped around the axel trying to figure out how God will handle the Resurrection of Souls for the people who had engaged in cannibalism! - At times like those I can’t help but hear the writing in the nasal voice of the smug, overweight, pseudo intellectual Comic Book guy on the Simpsons.
And yet even after having been an atheist for over 50 years those ideas still occasionally hold sway over my thinking and I will have to make a conscious effort to remind myself that it is a defective thought process.
The thing is, there is no ‘reasoning’ your way out of it. As I mentioned the OCD is under control. Much better than the basket case condition pre treatment. But I have to deal with the side effects of high dose Prozac and too much Xanax for the last 30 plus years.
I’ve been researching MDMA and Psilocybin therapies. I’m afraid my age will disqualify me for officially sanctioned treatment even if it gets approved somewhere in the US.
So I’ve been looking at therapy centers in Holland and Jamaica. Their promotional literature doesn’t inspire confidence.
I joined the local Pscychedelic Society and there are some underground therapists around but again there is always an off putting New Age vibe to those folks. If they start referring to themselves as shamans and wear wolf pelts during treatment, I can’t take them seriously.
Knowing people who hoard, it’s obvious that was not a media spread mimetic pathology. There’s at least a case for stuff like “tumblr girl emo depression anorexia” being like that in a way that isn’t hoarding. It’s much more directly related to the objects and what you do with them, whereas anorexia or depression are much more interpersonal and relate to other parts of life and society.
From the opening paragraph, I was expecting something about mental illnesses in other cultures that are dying out. That would be an interesting topic for a post.
> But studies generally show that the biological view of mental illness makes people less sympathetic to the mentally ill, more concerned about them being violent, more interested in avoiding them, etc.
Heads-up, the link in this paragraph is inaccessible from Germany. (Yes, I know I could VPN.)
Thanks! I was commenting mostly so Scott knows this site is inaccessible and can, if he wants, choose not to use it if there is an alternate source. :)
If it was, it did the opposite of the job you’re suggesting. All the anecdotes in the comments plus the questionability of the books examples have left me thinking that these issues have been around a lot longer and are much deeper than possible for “media spread mimetic illnesses”
Which also suggests that the “wokesies” isn’t an issue as simple as “the media said it so they’re copying the dumb ideas”, which I also think is a necessary corrective for the large numbers of people thinking “well there’s a bunch of dumb stuff that’s spreading so we just need to fight it and stop spreading it and then it’ll stop, no deep philosophical reckonings needed”, which didn’t really work for conservatives.
This reminds me of the way a lot of people see religion. They know it's irrational, know they don't have a positive argument for it, but their tribe believes it, so they grasp for straws saying it's needed as a bulwark against some even more undesirable thing.
"Of course, the null hypothesis is that there are lots of people suffering in silence until people raise awareness of and destigmatize a mental illness, after which they break their silence, admit they have a problem, and seek treatment. I am slightly skeptical of this, because a lot of mental health problems are hard to suffer in silence - if nothing else, anorexia results in hospitalizations once a patient’s body weight becomes incompatible with healthy life. Still, this is an important counterargument, and one that I hope people do more research into."
I think that the null hypothesis is almost certainly right in this an in many other cases, and the strongest evidence I have for this is childhood sexual abuse. I'm almost certain that we've always been brutally sexually abusing children as a society for as long as humans have been around. Even if that's not the case, I KNOW that the boomers in America were often sexually abused as children. Both my parents were raped / abused as kids. My grandmother was raped. About 75% of my aunts / uncles were abused / raped. Around 20% of the boomer friends I have that I’ve had deep conversations with have shared stories with me of them being raped / sexually abused as children. I think the actual real prevalence based on my own experience is probably somewhere between 20%-50%. Go talk to some of your boomer friends that actually trust you and learn how common it was!
And yet, in 1960s there was total, absolute denial in American society that childhood sexual abuse even existed. From The Body Keeps the score:
(Dr. Van Der Kolk): "In my new job I was confronted on an almost daily basis with issues I thought I had left behind at the VA. My experience with combat veterans had so sensitized me to the impact of trauma that I now listened with a very different ear when depressed and anxious patients told me stories of molestation and family violence. I was particularly struck by how many female patients spoke of being sexually abused as children. This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of psychiatry at the time stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States, occurring about once in every million women. Given that there were then only about one hundred million women living in the United States, I wondered how forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to my office in the basement of the hospital."
"Furthermore, the textbook said, “There is little agreement about the role of father-daughter incest as a source of serious subsequent psychopathology.” My patients with incest histories were hardly free of “subsequent psychopathology”—they were profoundly depressed, confused, and often engaged in bizarrely self-harmful behaviors, such as cutting themselves with razor blades. The textbook went on to practically endorse incest, explaining that “such incestuous activity diminishes the subject’s chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world.” In fact, as it turned out, incest had devastating effects on women’s well-being."...
"As Roland Summit wrote in his classic study The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome: “Initiation, intimidation, stigmatization, isolation, helplessness and self-blame depend on a terrifying reality of child sexual abuse. Any attempts by the child to divulge the secret will be countered by an adult conspiracy of silence and disbelief. ‘Don’t worry about things like that; that could never happen in our family.’ ‘How could you ever think of such a terrible thing?’ ‘Don’t let me ever hear you say anything like that again!’ The average child never asks and never tells.”"
"After forty years of doing this work I still regularly hear myself saying, “That’s unbelievable,” when patients tell me about their childhoods. They often are as incredulous as I am—how could parents inflict such torture and terror on their own child? Part of them continues to insist that they must have made the experience up or that they are exaggerating. All of them are ashamed about what happened to them, and they blame themselves—on some level they firmly believe that these terrible things were done to them because they are terrible people."
What conclusion can we draw from this? I think the most reasonable one is that psychiatrists (and doctors in general) are EXTREMELY bad at their jobs. They see what they want to see, they are controlled by the prevailing narratives they’ve been taught, and they don’t really listen to their patients. It’s clearly true that if you’re told during medical school to ignore really significant problems that essentially all doctors will happily ignore these problems for their whole career. And society has awesome mechanisms in place that can brutally suppress any stories of abuse or problems from getting out into wider awareness. These mechanisms (which also exist in other cultures) are so strong that I think they mostly invalidate whatever Crazy like Us is trying to say. The author of Crazy like Us would have to have done MUCH more rigorous work to overcome the fact that there are powerful conspiracies in every society that work to obscure and hide all kinds of mental problems / abuse / internal feelings. It doesn’t look to me like he’s done that work.
"As Roland Summit wrote in his classic study The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome"
The classic study that's extremely controversial to this day?
I've never been that convinced by the "everyone pretended child sexual abuse didn't happen" narrative because it doesn't take a lot of effort to find a lot of stuff about it that was written pre-1980s, nor does it explain why in the 1980s there was (supposedly) a massive shift into considering it something incredibly serious.
Interesting reading, especially given that I was taught that anorexia was significantly *less* culture-bound than bulimia. Pulling the citation I remembered (1), it looks like they cite 5 articles by S. Lee in their meta-analysis along the way to ultimately concluding that AN doesn't qualify - I'd say that cuts against the specific claim Watters is making depending on his specific citation, but the BN section definitely supports his overall thesis.
Yes and no but mostly yes; clean categories are hard and keeping them consistent over time is even harder. The classic George Carlin bit will tell you that the euphemism evolved from shell shock, to combat fatigue, to operational exhaustion, to post-traumatic stress disorder, but there are nuances that may or may not be relevant in any given case. (Or even real? The initial theory behind shell shock being caused by physical damage to the brain was eventually discarded, but it does bear some remarkable similarities to chronic traumatic encephalopathy.)
"Combat stress reaction", "acute stress disorder", and "post-traumatic stress disorder" are all formal names describing three distinct 'stages' of what can be a response to a single trauma. Are they the same thing? Depends whether you're interested in a soldier who can keep it together for the rest of the op, or a friend who chooses alcoholism as the lesser of evils.
As I understand it, shell shock and PTSD have different symptoms because war has changed. With PTSD you become hypervigilant; that didn't happen with shell shock because being shelled didn't teach you vigilance. The shell killed you or it didn't, regardless of whether you were paying attention.
Keeping in mind the very well supported (IMHO) lead crime hypothesis - what odds does everyone give that the rise in transgenderism being due to hormone disrupting chemicals in the environment?
I can give odds somewhere between .01% and 99.9%! I don’t really think there’s a way to know or even guess at this point, and there are a lot of different potential causes.
tangential, but i heard this new meta analysis of the lead-crime hypothesis found it was mostly publication bias. i've only read the abstract though, so could be bogus https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_774797_smxx.pdf
Lead being bad for intelligence and other stuff has a pile of evidence, even if it didn’t cause crime, but it still seemed to. Lead exposure at higher levels causes directly visible effects https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1388220.html
Science is very hard. Individual papers can be wrong through a dizzying number of pathways, and without understanding the paper deeply as well as the dozens of such on the same topic there’s no way to know what is or isn’t what it says it is
I wonder how though, do low iq people have similar crime causation as lead->low iq-> crime? Hm
I mean that lead caused crime to rise. In a similar way that hormone disrupting chemicals caused at least part of the rise in people identifying as transgender.
A long time ago, I read about how hormones in the environment were causing girls to go through puberty earlier. Then, many years later, I read that it wasn't hormones in the environment at all; it's because kids are getting fatter, and some of the puberty hormones come from body fat.
Even worse - it’s not (just? maybe both? Maybe not) because they’re fatter, women in primitive tribes are quite healthily plump - it’s because they aren’t starved, allowing earlier development. Menarche in modern primitive is about 12-13-14, while in rural farming communities it reached up to 16-17 due to lack of food, and is now 10-11-12 - leaving space for the hormonal hypothesis but not necessarily as much.
This seems heavily invested in a static model of mental illness as something you either have or don't have. If you instead look at mental illness as self-reinforcing instability in a dynamical system, it seems pretty obvious that environment will influence the rate at which it manifests itself into visible symptoms.
I mean all illnesses are self reinforcing instabilities in dynamical systems, and the environment influencing it (I e child abuse causing trauma, job stress causing depression) doesn’t prove that it spreads by acting out from the mental illness being publicly described.
Well, look at ADHD diagnoses right here in the US-of-A.
Do more people have ADHD today? Maybe. Or have we diagnosed more people with ADHD, whether as a result of increased medicalization or because of something else? Maybe. Or some of both? Maybe. I dunno.
"Sometimes we apply the same metaphor to the human world, eg “falling linguistic biodiversity" when minority languages get replaced by English or whatever."
Do they, or do they just call it "linguistic diversity"? Searching "linguistic biodiversity" just brings up the usual guff about how indigenous peoples have special ecological knowledge western science is unable to discover or incorporate.
"If you want an objectively real psychiatric illness with no culture-bound component, schizophrenia is as close as you’re going to get."
And this I highly doubt, at least that other people are going to agree with it. The anti-psychiatry movement tends to focus quite a lot on schizophrenia. If you want an uncontroversial mental illness, you go for something like Alzheimer's or brain damage, something with obvious physical effects on the brain, but I don't know if those count as "psychiatric illnesses".
Idk schizophrenia seems very much not socially caused (in the “media contagion” sense, other social causes idk). Nobody wants to be schizophrenic, it’s universally portrayed badly, it’s extreme and debilitating, people who have it and relayed severe illnesses usually don’t know they have it initially or need to realize it, as opposed to something like anorexia where it’s a willed action schizophrenia is much less intentional and more on a deep level of disruption, etc
I’m very sympathetic to the anti psychiatry movement but ... being who they would be, people who have undergone psych treatment for severe mental illness, they tend to be rather crazy and dumb, which is unfortunate. This is obvious on the anti psychiatry subreddit, where most posts are (at least were when I last checked) kinda nonsensical.
You're quite wrong to consider the anti-psychiatry movement solely something of people who have actually undergone treatment for mental health issues. Academia, when it is looking at psychiatry from an outside perspective, tends to lean heavily towards anti-psychiatry.
You also fail to realise that it is not simply a matter of being socially caused or not, but to what extent schizophrenia is even an actual "thing".
Nothing would make me happier than for psychiatry to disappear in a puff of sparking dust and deep conscious understanding. Nevertheless, I’m just describing the anti psychiatry people I’ve met and seen, and although they’re very earnest and have their interest in the right direction, there’s a lot of bad ideas and dumb people there, and most of them were on psychs.
> You also fail to realise that it is not simply a matter of being socially caused or not, but to what extent schizophrenia is even an actual "thing".
No I don’t lol, I believe all psych illnesses are constructed BS in a general sense. Nevertheless, trying to be realistic and useful, and saying The Truth seems to be less useful for many schizophrenics than Olanzapine.
"Academia, when it is looking at psychiatry from an outside perspective, tends to lean heavily towards anti-psychiatry."
What is "academia"? Which field of academia outside of psychiatry focuses on psychiatry? Who are the prominent scholars who tend to lean heavily anti-psychiatry?
I'm surprised you're not drawing a connection to the copycat suicide/suicide contagion/Werther effect literature. I think there's also a bunch of projects specifically looking at 13 reasons why?
re zanzibar: "But they are weirdly blase about this. Their position is that everyone gets possessed by spirits sometimes."
Remember this is the position contended by Hubert Dreyfus (philosopher at UC Berkeley) about the correct way to interpret Bronze Age Europe (and specifically the Illiad). And it was more or less what Julian Jaynes said...
Like in scotts book review of jaynes, contact with primitive / indigenous / isolated people doesn’t seem to mesh with the possession / god command theory.
I think you need to reread Scott's review. My take away from this point is the precise opposite of yours -- that maybe this was in fact what happened, and was filtered out by outside observers who forced what they saw into their worldview.
I mean, in America today, you have half the country insisting (basically correctly) that the other half of the country refuses to understand them, denies their axiomatic starting point, filters out all data that doesn't mesh with their pre-conceptions, and insists on their explanations for the behavior of "the other" rather than the explanations from that other. If Red State and Blue State can't accurately construct a mental model of people so close to them, why should we ascribe much value to the mental models created by 19th C observers of hunter-gatherers?
It's not a book of particular interest to me, but heck, you can see the point in the very title!
Section V - clearly we read it differently, but I take the anthropological evidence as extremely against jaynes position or the disassociation one
As for that Reddit post, basically everything said about the topic of “thinking in words and consciousness” is incoherent nonsense. I would bet guess his intelligence or capability before and after that post or realization were the same. Looking at his post history, he seems to have extreme anxiety - https://ii.reddit.com/user/thegoldengiraffe/submitted/ - and I suspect that post and all the stuff about it was more relating to him having very weird ideas about himself and social interactions than anything meaningful. I’m reminded of the Scott post about how Buddhist meditator enlightenment people perceive massive changes in their thinking and emotions - saying it changed their life - when people around them didn’t notice it at all and the emotional changes did not happen in practice - still got anxious and mad etc.
> If Red State and Blue State can't accurately construct a mental model
The ideological Turing test isn’t the same as mode of thought research IMO. That seems like a really weird jump - yes it shows people can be wrong a lot, but I don’t think they are in this case.
Obviously Greece and Rome were weird and quirky. But I seriously doubt it was so in the way Jaynes claims. Specifically, anthropologists who talked to the primitives - who do still worship and sacrifice to gods and pray to nature and see spirits and magic - don’t appear to disassociate in general course of life in the way claimed. Wouldn’t you see that in their language? Anthropological recordings in extreme detail of their lives and actions? The way jaynes describes it all, you really would. But you don’t.
Well, like so much, what you latch onto as important is perhaps different from what I latch onto.
To me the significant issue here is that people can have very different mental models of not just how others think, but even of how they think.
One aspect of this is that the standard WEIRD mental model is of the unitary mind -- anything that smacks of a non-unitary mind is a pathology of some sort. Whereas I see most of human history as seeing the mind as non-unitary, with the details of that non-unitariness being less important.
This is not even some weird exotic savages (or Bronze Age Greeks) thing. IMHO the idea of Satan is the pre-20th C's western version of this idea -- "part of me" feels desires and interests that "the rest of me" does not feel, and Satan is the name I give to that minority part of me. IMHO much of 19th C literature is best understood as being written in a context where this model was no longer tenable, even as an alternative model (the somewhat unsatisfactory medicalized model of today)had not yet been born. Much of what is interpreted as misogynistic in that literature and art seems to me more confused attempts by the artist to work out this non-unitary self within a cultural framework that was beginning to assert that the previous explanation for these feelings was stupid and primitive.
As for Red vs Blue, my point is precisely that this is NOT just ideological litmus test. That is precisely what I said -- you are so convinced you understand the opposite mind that you don't feel you even need to look further.
Consider two statements:
- the most important problem in America today is Race. Our entire society should be built around dealing with this.
- the most important problem in America today is Satan. Our entire society should be built around dealing with this.
These are not people who agree that we need to paint the house, but can't decide whether it should be green vs yellow; these are people with fundamentally different understandings of what it means to be human, and how humans relate to each other.
a “model of how you think” (which by the way is not unitiary at all - different “parts” can have different “models” and this is true even for westerners) and “how you actually think” probably don’t have as much relation as you’re suggesting IMO
In particular even if all Greeks thought they were disassociative godcommand executors (Christians also say they live to obey gods commands) - which was in no way supported for either them or especially modern primitives - they wouldn’t necessarily be anyways in the same way that people who thought “memory is a kind palace” (crude example) don’t actually make memory that, people who claim they have DID on Twitter don’t actually have separation between their personalities
As for satan ... you can go talk to devout Christians today,I’ve done that, they don’t actually show any divergence whatsoever in the “way of thinking” from modern atheists - they talk about thinking differently but lots of atheists vary just as much in talking about that too, and it in practice does not seem to relate at all to thinking in fact and observation or experience etc
I don’t know what to say if you think reds and blues have fundamentally different anything ... people switch sides constantly, and it’s not any more fundamentally different than a mathematician and a baker are fundamentally different (and many mathematicians are amateur bakers, and some bakers are amateur mathematicians!)
Anorexia might be a kind of special case, among the other disorders covered in the book. I think there is plenty of anecdotal experience (and maybe even some research but I haven't looked) about the 'contagiousness' of anorexia - especially in settings such as all-girl, boarding schools. This isn't to say that anorexia is solely a role-playing phenomenon but, like hypnosis, it might be very difficult to tell the difference between someone who has the condition and someone who is acting like they have the condition, with death a a possible outcome in both instances.
"Zanzibari schizophrenics never feel that different from anyone else - everyone gets possessed by spirits sometimes, everyone gets attacks of the nerves sometimes, lots of people never leave their family homes."
How is this different from the western model of "everyone is a little bit mentally ill, it's only a psychiatric problem if it interferes with a normal life"?
>the few anorexics he was able to find couldn't be less interested in thinness or beauty standards or anything like that. Also (unlike in the West) they weren't delusionally sure that they were fat. They were very aware that they were starving themselves to death, and they were against this. They just felt like they had some sort of nausea or stomach disease which made it impossible for them to eat.
I (an American man) have struggled with this *exact same condition* (laced with emetophobia), peaking mainly in 2016-2017. (Although, while I became quite underweight, I don't believe it severely impeded me functioning or quite reached the extent of being immediately medically dangerous. I'm about 95% over it now.)
The only time, apart from the above post, that I've ever seen mention of such a condition was in a textbook I was flipping through in the psychiatry section of my alma mater's bookstore. The textbook labeled it as, I think, "food avoidant disorder" and was careful to classify it as separate from an actual eating disorder (the book seemed to imply that eating disorders necessarily require a distorted perception of one's body / the risks of eating a certain way).
Does anyone have any familiarity or further knowledge of this disorder? I can't help but feel curious to learn more.
There are splitters and lumpers when it comes to eating disorders - some want to make fine distinctions between anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, etc. Others note that these often bleed into each other and have unusual presentations, arguing that they're all the same biological program being activated. I'm not sure which camp is right.
But I'm pretty sure the effective treatment is the same for "regular" AN and other restrictive eating conditions: you have to suffer through regaining lost weight, keeping it on until whatever program deactivates, and then be vigilant in the future. I (also an American man) followed this program with some success, with varying levels of vigilance (currently sort of at a low point, but much better than previous episodes).
My two cents: in the neurodiversity community there has been some discussion about food avoidance as an aspect of sensory processing difficulties. A lot of teen girls getting diagnosed with eating disorders actually have underlying autism traits, or ADHD, that makes the feeling of eating uncomfortable.
I can relate to your story--during a certain time of my life, I found it very difficult to make myself eat. I'm a woman, but I've always had a positive body image and didn't think I was fat or worry about getting fat. I just also always felt kind of turned off by the sensations of eating, and found it fatiguing and unpleasant.
I do have an ADHD diagnosis and several autistic brothers/uncles/cousins. In addition, I'm sensitive to certain noises, lights, and smells.
Probably the most helpful thing for me was learning to cook. Once I started to enjoy the sensory process of chopping, smelling ingredients, and seeing/hearing the food cooking, the eating part wasn't quite so off-putting.
>I assume there is some sort of inspector who comes around and makes sure you attribute mental illness to demons, and if not, they take away your indigenous society license
I would guess it's something more like various indigenous people describing the various things they believe in to english-speaking Christians, and those English-speakers rounding them all off to 'demons' or 'spirits.'
Certainly they're not all referring to the Christian notion of 'demons', I suspect there's a lot of variance and metaphor in there.
I came across this article today about the dancing plagues. This is a fun read despite the explanatory just-so stories. None of them seem convincing to me. (BTW, the ergot theory has largely been disproven.) Also, the author's claim that modern raves are multi-day events is mostly bullshit, I think. Having attended a few Raves in the 90's, none of them lasted beyond a single evening. Most of the dancers stumbled home at dawn after our MDMA and LSD highs wore off. Certainly the DJs were exhausted by dawn!
i was thinking about the point made in your conclusion recently wrt all the talk i've seen recently about adhd. it seems like it's everywhere on twitter recently (chickenpox_plane.jpg), and i've been wondering to what extent it's a "real" phenomenon, and even to what extent that question itself makes sense. i have a few other hypotheses about what might be going on, but i haven't done investigation beyond the surface-level.
If public awareness of a mental illness increases its prevalence by making the symptoms of already mentally ill people better fit the expected illness, then it might be a good idea to run public awareness campaigns for mental illnesses whose symptoms are relatively harmless.
I've read a fair number of accounts of anorexia, and the thing that struck me was that a very high proportion started with food restriction in childhood. (Sorry, no records.) What was odd was that it didn't seem to matter whether the food restriction was imposed by parents or chosen by the child.
This argues in favor of an anorexia switch, though I don't have a baseline for how common food restriction in childhood is in general, considering how terrified a lot of people are of being fat or having a fat child.
An argument against an anorexia switch is that anorexia doesn't seem to be a common response to starvation from poverty or imprisonment, though food hoarding is.
I've been reading lately that there's a lot of psychiatric comorbidity with anorexia, and I don't know where that leaves any theories.
In some AN recovery circles there's a mantra: "diets are what make people fat." The idea is that most people who diet eventually give up and re-gain lost weight, plus some more. Most of us know people who have had that happen. There are also studies of dieters (and one good study of systematic starvation) that show this effect.
With that in mind, let's tell a just-so story: as the US got richer, food became cheaper and more abundant. Also food marketers got good at increasing food reward by making processed food more of a superstimulus. Accordingly, most people's weight went up.
This was more of a chubbiness epidemic than an obesity epidemic. Many people responded by dieting, because of beauty standards or the patriarchy or whatever. Problem solved, right?
No - it led to an obesity epidemic: most dieters failed and gained even more weight. And it led to an anorexia epidemic: some dieters were really good at it, and a switch flipped in their brains.
I don't totally buy this story, but I think it's worth considering. If we believe in the anorexia switch (I do), it helps make sense why famine doesn't seem to create an anorexia epidemic, but widespread availability of tasty food does.
I think at least some fraction of obesity is the result of dieting. I've read accounts by people who gain 25 pounds extra after each ineffective diet. Make that mistake four times (and some do, it's culturally supported) and that a gain of 100 pounds.
I've seen quite a few people say that they stopped gaining weight after they stopped dieting.
I'm also reminded of the deaf community and its occasional desire to have children *not* receive cochlear implants so they can grow up and join the deaf community.
If a disease, mental or otherwise, is "normalized", sufferers are going to form a community - and a community disproportionately characterized by the most severe and hard-to-treat sufferers, because those are the ones who need it most and have the worst alternatives. Which is good for them. What's not good for them, is for the medical community to develop more effective treatments so that they wind up having their support community die out (literally or otherwise) around them.
So there's a conflict of interest where the community benefits from there *not* being highly effective treatments, or for such treatments not being recognized as effective. And, perhaps relevant here, from marginal sufferers in the broader world being lead to believe that they are going to suffer greatly, that there is nothing to be done about it but to turn to the support community, when really with a finite period of treatment with the right doctors they can live happy, normal lives in the broader community.
Since public discussion of [disease or condition] is going to be dominated by A: the spokesmen of the support community and B: the relevant doctors, we need the doctors to step up and provide realistic guidance against the sometimes perverse evangelism of the support community. If the doctors aren't doing that, if they are instead saying, "Yep, this is real bad and if you feel it might apply to you, you have to come to us and be prepared for the long haul" when that's not necessarily the case, I can see the dynamic Watters describes being reinforced.
Does Watters talk at all about, e.g, the emergence of an "anorexic community" in Hong Kong?
I've been really enjoying a lecture series by Robert Sapolsky, which is drawn from Stanford's introductory class on human behavioral biology. This is a weak area in my knowledge base and he's a superb lecturer. He has a very good story about encountering a schizophrenic woman among the Masai during his field research.
This sets up a fascinating lecture on the biological underpinnings of religion (not recorded in the most recent iteration, this is an older version) in which he argues that the shamanistic thinking induced by the distantly related schizotypal phenotype is the reason that the genetic basis of schizophrenia persists in human populations and forms the basis of religious ritual & tradition.
If I hadn't actually read this book myself, just from reading this review I would think the book was about something completely different than what it is actually about. The title of the book, which Scott seems to mistaken to be, "Not Crazy Until We Showed Up", is actually "Crazy Like Us". It's not about the spread of Western mental illnesses via some meme about their existence, it's about the spread of the ways mental illness manifests in western influenced ways. Watters isn't saying people weren't crazy before Western Psychiatry showed up, he's saying they were crazy in different ways and now the ways they are being crazy are becoming Westernized.
Scott also seems to have missed the secondary thesis of the book which is that a/the major way that western diagnostic criteria are unique from many of the alternatives it is replacing is that they are individual(mental)-ontological rather than social-ontological. This might be hard for a western-trained psychiatrist to truly grok but there are cultures and languages in the world that do not even have a word for mind. The existence of a "private inner" world of "thinking" and "knowing" in many tribes in Papua New Guinea for example are subsumed under the activity and label of "hearing"(See Anna Wierzbicka's Semantics. Primes and Universals pg. 197 for a discussion of this). In light of the ways that many cultures(nearly all of the ones Watters cites in the book) have seen what we call "mental illnesses" as more like "social/relational illnesses," he wants us to consider this alternative and the consequences of the way we conceptualize the problem as individual/mental in the first place. If we thought of them more as relationship/social problems would that put us on better tracks towards the treatment of them? I don't know, but that's the question Watters wants us to ask ourselves.
Watters 3rd thesis is summed up by his quoting of psychologist Ken Miller who said, “The meaning of a horrible event has a tremendous impact on the human psyche, and that meaning differs across the world.The meaning matters as much as the event itself.” Watters doesn't prescribe just not talking about "mental illness" as Scott seems to imply throughout his review, he wants us to pay attention to the WAY we talk about it and the MEANING we ascribe to it, to realize their are alternatives, and to consider the consequences of thinking we have identified universal features of human existence when the lens we are looking at them through is in fact culturally specific. He's not saying there isn't SOMETHING universal happening to which our psychiatric diagnosis criteria points. He's just pointing out that the way we conceptualize what is happening is not universal, that should tell us that we haven't nailed down what's happening yet, and that if we do want to identify something universal then paying attention to the differences in how they manifest in different cultures should be an important part in that process.
Although I really *want* to believe the thesis of the book and plan to read it to see if I'm convinced, I feel compelled to offer a wildly different explanation for the entire slate of phenomena the book is trying to explain. This idea comes courtesy of a friend.
Everywhere, in the past, child death was common. Children got diseases, starved, had gruesome accidents. Mothers died in childbirth not infrequently. How bad can anything else really be when you've grown accustomed to the death of your siblings and later your children? Key word is accustomed. You didn't have a special tragedy. You had the same tragedy as your friend down the road.
Many places, recently, though at varying times, child death has become very, very uncommon. It's possible for something like anorexia to be "the literal worst". It's much more likely that my worst and my neighbor's worst are two different things. We can now imagine seeking to get a handle on special difficulties that in the past would have been completely overshadowed by ordinary life.
I appreciate your suggestion and I can relate to your thesis on a personal level. My child had leukemia at age 3. Most people in my community were utterly horrified and could hardly comprehend what was happening, because their children had never had a life-threatening illness. I found it very helpful to read novels and essays written in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, when childhood illness and mortality was common, and discussed openly.
Oof, I'm really sorry. I have a 3 year old right now, and this is hard to imagine happening. If you don't mind, I'm going to try to remember this comment (1) to appreciate my life and (2) as advice if really bad things happen.
When Scott brings up the apparent social contagion effect of talking about mental illness, I can't help but think of the trans movement in the US the past decade. It went from being a phenomenon more-or-less specific to serial killer movies to a fad ... pretty quickly. I'd be curious if the recent trend of trans teenagers is funging against other, more common psychiatric syndromes like anorexia.
Two examples of PTSD before it was a thing in the culture: Frodo in Lord of the Rings. Early in the story, he gets a sliver from a Nazgul's sword in his shoulder. He never fully recovers, and is especially haunted by in on anniversaries.
Thorby in Heinlein's _Citizen of the Galaxy_ (1957)-- he was kidnapped into slavery (I think his parents were killed in front of him) when he was a small child. He has nightmares and a triggerable temper as a result.
This is especially striking because it's PTSD which *isn't* from being a soldier in combat.
One theme running through this book review (that is particularly visible in the discussion of PTSD) is the Western trend to diagnose more and more things as psychiatric illnesses. I think that in turn is mainly caused by a Western philosophy of life where people are individuals entitled to happiness and success, but if they aren't happily achieving success something must be wrong with them. I.e. I am problematic if I don't live up to an unrealistic standard for human beings that is expressed through all kinds of channels including the work-place, the treatment of the unemployed, or the lives of other people we see on TV or social media. Hence there is a large demand to produce diagnoses to address the perceived abundance of personal defects.
I agree with the book that in general the West is very successful in exporting this aspect of its culture overseas. The most harmful aspect of which might be exporting the idea of "There is a problem with me, I am deficient". Once this idea has been successfully implanted somewhere, this will naturally also create a robust demand for Western styles of psychotherapy, apparently justifying the mushrooming of psychiatric diagnoses.
Sigh. I'd be willing to bet (a small amount of) money that someone will take the last couple paragraphs of this post and use them to claim Scott believes mental illness is a delusion.
An alternate null hypothesis is that dead mean tell no tales.
Many forms of mental illness were much more likely to be quickly fatal under past conditions (and to a lesser extent, present conditions in the third world and developing world today) than they are in the developed world today.
Before the Vietnam war, there were a lot of well-documented cases of soldiers getting PTSD, but people called it things like "cowardice" or "shell-shock," and their commanders shot them for getting it.
The timeline you discuss for the prevalence of anorexia in Europe lines up almost perfectly with the hypothesis "nobody gets diagnosed with anorexia in countries where people die of starvation that is clearly caused by poverty and insufficient availability of food on a regular basis." The late 1800s saw a temporary end of widespread famine in the West. Famine was really bad all over the world again by the 1930s, and then eliminated again under the green revolution which had fully taken hold in the West by the early 1960s. During a period of famine, everybody knows that practically everyone is undernourished to the point of causing adverse health conditions and premature death unless they are lucky and work really hard not to have that happen. If a relatively small number of people happen to also be undernourished because they are psychologically predisposed to under-eat, they're lost in the crowds of people who are undernourished because there's just not enough food. (Hence, anorexia as a diagnosable condition only exists in settings where there is ample food. Since far more people are psychologically predisposed to overeat to the point of causing adverse health condition than are predisposed to under-eat this way, anorexia as a diagnosable condition exists if and only if obesity is also somewhat prevalent.)
China had famines in the twentieth century a couple decades past when they stopped happening in the West. I don't know about the history of famine specifically in Hong Kong post-WWII, but Hong Kong currently imports over 90% of its food with the majority coming from China, so I suspect food availability in Hong Kong somewhat paralleled its availability in China.
(It's also possible that anorexia as a mental condition regardless of its diagnosability doesn't occur in times of famine. Scarcity of food during people's early childhood is well-documented to have lasting impact on their eating habits -- though it's better-documented in mice. People who had too little to eat as young children have a greater propensity to overeat the rest of their lives. So it seems somewhat likely that being born in or around a time of famine prevents some people who would otherwise have developed anorexia from ever developing it.)
If the end of food scarcity caused the increase in anorexia, the sudden discovery of its prevalence in response to its first high-profile case is not at all surprising. Discovery of prevalence in response to the first high-profile case of something happening are common. (E.g. Many people, including a past version of me, believe(d) that the name "Britney" became massively more prevalent because Britney's fans were naming their children after her. But in reality, Britney was born at the peak of the popularity of her name. It was just that most people heard of her before they had really heard of anyone else Britney, and then shortly thereafter started encountering far more people sharing her name. And names, especially first names, are not conditions that people are generally keeping secret/hiding in the closet.)
Conversely, modern conditions have also eliminated many other types of stressors that could trigger symptoms that were previously diagnosed as mental illness.
I experienced temporary blindness as a teenager. I'd been being fairly active outside on a hot day for several hours without drinking any water. When I stopped being able to see, someone I was with suspected it was induced by heat/dehydration, and led me to the shade and gave me some water, and by the time I finished drinking the water, I could see again. A lot of the symptoms of hysteria are also symptoms of heat exhaustion, heat stroke, CO2 poisoning, dehydration, and/or malnourishment. (The folk remedies for these conditions also tended to treat them like everybody believed this condition was exacerbated by heat and lack of fresh air.) It seems likely to me that people in the 1800s were conditioned to respond to stress by exhibiting these symptoms because they were living in physical conditions that also cause these symptoms, and most things in biology have complicated multifaceted causes. When people in well-ventilated air-conditioned rooms get suddenly stressed, they don't tend to exhibit symptoms of heat exhaustion nearly as often as people in hot, stuffy rooms do when they get stressed. I don't see why this would require any invocation of culture or expectations to explain it.
I don't doubt that culture somewhat affects people's psychology including their mental pathologies and response to stress. But the past is full of people who had a life expectancy of 30 who spent their whole lives subjected to the whim of nature; and the modern third world is not quite as bad off as the past was, but it's still a lot closer to dealing with those sorts of conditions than the present first world. And I suspect that the drastic differences in material conditions between the groups being compared (over time or place to place) have had a much larger impact on responses to stress and diagnoses of such responses than any shifts in culture have had.
Our brain is great at pattern matching. No surprise that when we learn about some new pattern we tend to match reality to this. And this can include our own personal experiences. When we learn about some new mental illness we can ask ourselves whether we have it and find some similarities as everything is on the spectrum. On the other hand when we learn about this pattern matching thing we can meta-pattern-match and wonder whether some group of people just pattern match to some condition and doesn't actually have it, or do have it but only due to this pattern matching and otherwise would have a different condition. Once again, this seems as a really difficult problem.
Here is some of my personal experience with such pattern matching. When I was a teenager I identified myself as a man. I thought of it as a meaningful category with which I identified some of my personal qualities and experiences. But later I learned more about sexism and gender. I reevaluated my experiences and figured out that I don't actually mean anything by saying that I am a man. I have some qualities which the society might identify with manliness but it's mostly due to sexism and I don't really care about it. This qualities are not masculine or feminine, they are mine. And this completely explained away my feeling of gender identity. I used to feel something and then I stopped. I can imagine thet if I never learned this information I could have identified myself as a man till the end of my life.
So did feminist propaganda contaminate me and turned me into agender or I have found a better framework to classify my experience? Somewhat both? When I look back I see that I definetely wasn't a typical man. But again my expirience actually changed when I got rid of a "man" label.
Later I became really curious what people actually meant when they claimed to be of a certain gender and that it's super important for them. Could they explain away their gender identity as I did? I talked with such people, I also got a partner who was very into my masculinity and it meant something for her so I tried to understand. And I figured out that gender identity isn't a void idea and that it even have some meaning for myself. My previous position of "I don't even understand what you mean by this gender identity stuff" stopped being true. And there was a period when I thought that it may be valid to consider myself a man again. But then again I learned even more information on the topic, I reflexed and figured that I actually miss some of the things people are talking about. I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have disophoria in a female body, neither I do in a male one. I used to be not happy with having a beard but I now I accept it. Which actually contrasts very much with some of my man-friends who are very found of having a beard and male body. Once again I came to the conclusion that "man" label doesn't actually fit me. And on every step changing the label affected the way I parse my inner experience.
Similar thing happened with me and autism. I have some symptoms since childhood, including nervous tics, being clueless or detested by lots of social games my peers are playing and I guess my gender ambivalence is a symptom in itself. But I'm very high functional and until I learned about autistic spectrum I had no idea that I can have an actual condition.
And then I was somewhat unsure at first. Some of the symptoms fited but others were unrelatable, like masking, sensory sensitivity or having emotional outbursts. And then I though more about it and talked more to autistic people. And now I understand that even these symptoms which I considered completely unrelatable, can be applied to me. But to understand this I had to accept a new framwork and interpret my experience through it.
Again I can imagine living whole my life without thinking about myself as an autistic person. It is a result of awareness that I think of myself as an autist now. It didn't create my symptoms, but it changed the way I perceive myself and the way I act. Currently I'm less trying to fit in and do lots of social activities and behave myself accordingly. And thinking of being more prosocial feels exausting. Which it didn't used to feel when I didn't identify myself as an autistic person.
I wonder how much of that is intellectual decision though in this case. If you're really agender, do you identify as agender, or do you identify as cisgender because you don't feel anything about it, cis-by-default (https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/cis-by-default/)?
Anecdotally, I would feel somewhat weird calling myself agender precisely because it would mean that I have strong feelings on the issue (and yes, also biologically male). My judgments on all specific questions you list in the last paragraph seem to be near-same as yours, and yet in questionnaries and surveys I list myself as a man, because I'm in a male body and not in conflict with it.
It depends on the framework you use. If you have never heard about gender identity, you are not even cis-by-default, you do not have a category for this sort of things at all. Later when you figure out that there is a distinction between cis people and trans people you assume that you are cis, thus becoming cis-by-default. And then, when you actually think about this, with the knowledge of agenderism as a valid category, you may understand that you are agender. This is more or less what happened to me.
The fact that some frameworks are less mainstream than others obviously contributes. The desision to switch frameworks, or reclassify yourself inside a framework is to a degree an intellectual one. It may require some effort to overcome the stigma or some historical social context. Objectively there is nothing special about not having a gender identity or having a pretty weak feeling of one, compared to having a strong experience of it. It's just different intervals on a spectrum. But historically, calling yourself a man is much more "normal" thing to do, thus your question - it may feel as if one requires an extra motivation to identify as an agender, as if you are making a political statement, not just describing yourself.
For me this "extra motivation" is just the desire to be more accurate and truthful. Probably the fact that I'm autistic contributes: I care less about societal expectations, thus it's extremely easy for me to ignore the "normality" of things. I suspect that this in general has something to do with the fact that autism is heavily correlated with both binary and non-binary transgederism.
But I can easily imagine that there are a lot of actually agender people who identify as cis. Especially among social conservatives who just don't understand the idea of gender and gender identity and thus just assume that it's all bullshit and social hysteria.
Well, if we're going off our autistic tendencies for accuracy… I wouldn't find the statement "I am a man" false or inaccurate. "I don't feel a visceral feeling that I am a man and wouldn't hold onto it if I woke up in a female/intersex body" need not necessarily entail "It is not true/accurate that I am a man" (and conversely for women) - this is, to an extent, a definition problem, and definitions try to point at clusters in thingspace. And, just like a human losing a leg is still a human due to a huge overdefining number of other features, despite no longer being a "featherless biped", a man without a gender identity may well still be a man, despite not _viscerally_, instinctively identifying as one, because of being overdefined by biological criteria like having testicles, having clitoris longer than a certain length (normally called by another name), having no hypospadia, having generally high androgen level and stuff. "Agender", on the other hand, would feel like a description that states "I am uncomfortable with either male or female gender identity", which is not necessarily entailed by "I don't viscerally have one". (Hence also the alternative term for cis-by-default, "cis-genderless", which I found today when googling: people like myself - which may, of course, be a group so narrow as to only include myself, although I find this unlikely - are genderless insofar as our visceral identity goes but cis in that we don't feel the need to shed off our assigned gender.)
This was an interesting discussion, and I hope I haven't offended you in any way.
> definitions try to point at clusters in thingspace
> This was an interesting discussion, and I hope I haven't offended you in any way.
Oh, I love talking with people who understand the ideas behind Human Guide to Words! It's so liberating as if you can get rid of baby-walkers and actually communicate for real. Zero offence taken, and I agree that it's an interesting conversation.
If we are talking about body, hormones, genitalia and chomosomes - the thingspace cluster usually called "biological sex" then it would be pretty accurate to say that I'm male.
If we are talking about gender expression - it's somewhat masculine in my case. Most of the time I wear men's clothes. I have long hair and do not actively try to behave in a gender conformist manner, but in absolute majority of cases stranger on the streets intuitively assume that I'm a man.
If we are talking about gender identity, then I lack any, thus calling me a man would be false, and calling me agender would be true in this context.
If we take a less accurate framework where all these things are put in the same cluster of manhood, than you can consider me a man. This wouldn't be false, just less accurate than a more nuanced framework where all these things are considered separately.
Such definition as cis-genderless can describe me in a framework focused on whether or not a person went through gender transitioning. I think it's a helpful category and it describes me as well.
Hm. I mean, despite all the trans people and non-binary people and whatnot, gender identity is anchored to biological sex in some way - in other words, being male and having masculine gender identity do cluster together, however imperfectly. There are reasons why trans people are usually not satisfied with declaring their gender identity and then doing everything else just as they did before, they actively try to "pass"/"present as"/transition - these are, indeed, related clusters. And I could argue that words "man" and "woman" normally characterize the big cluster and using them for the smaller one is what's inaccurate :)
(Are you sure you're not me in disguise? I also have long hair! :D )
Indeed, gender identity is rooted in biology. And I don't think this is inspite of trans people existing, on the contrary, the existence of trans people is an evidence in favour of it: that there is some kind of biological mechanism being responsible for gender identity, that may mismatch with other parts of ones body. On the other hand biology is rooted in chemistry and chemistry is rooted in physics, this however doesn't prevent us from meaningfully talking about chemical or biological categories. Likewise here. We can use the category of gender identity separate from the category of biological sex, to add more nuance to our categorisation and highlight the interesting edge cases where these categories do not correlate. Thus increasing our accuracy.
> There are reasons why trans people are usually not satisfied with declaring their gender identity.
Indeed. Gender expression is also a thing. And of course these things are connected. Usually expression and identity are put in the same cluster called "gender", but I prefere to separate them for even more nuance.
> I could argue that words "man" and "woman" normally characterize the big cluster and using them for the smaller one is what's inaccurate
I agree that this state of affairs is potentially misleading. Sadly, this is how people have been historically using such definitions and little can be done here now. However, this doesn't actually make the model less accurate, just harder to understand than it counterfactually could have been. It's like a programming code written in a not very good manner, thus it's not very comprehensible but still calculates the right answer.
Few months ago I came with a thought on modern society feels like we need to interfere with everything and we find it hard to accept that something is going to work better if we leave it alone.
This might be a good case to think about.
Besides I have to complement you for the reviews and articles, I've found this blog few days ago, and your writings are really interesting (also added your podcast to playlist, next long ride I'll listen to you)
@Scott you're a great reviewer; please review better books. Your arabian nights review was life-changingly good, and although this one is cool, I just don't feel like it has the meat of something that a classic would. Would love to hear your commentary on idk Blaise Pascal's Pensees or Confucius' Analects or something.
>I hear woke people talk about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment is white supremacy because only white people care about that kind of thing.
Maybe woke people are extremely-high-expressed-emotion folks who express whatever gripes they have with mainstream American culture by attributing them to white supremacy.
> Those who jump off a waterfall or throw themselves in front of a train are weak-minded. [...] How useless they are! Such weak-minded people would only cause harm even if they remained alive.
Gotta love how the author seems to have zero interest in preventing suicide and instead just wants to stigmatize them after they're dead. (It's not clear that this attitude would reduce suicide at all; the sentiment "no, suicide doesn't make you hard-working, intelligent, sensitive, or admirable" is more plausibly useful.)
> The island nation was [insert some term other than “inundated” or “flooded”] with a [insert some term other than “tide”] of counselors, therapists, and psychiatrists
The island nation was slammed again with a wave of counselors, therapists, and psychiatrists.
in "The cultural animal" (Baumeister 2005)* he compares the hydraulic model of emotions versus a self-inflating feedback model.
the hydraulic model of emotions assume that there is a quantity of emotions and if you don't let it go out the pressure will keep increasing until it explodes. this applies to anger sexual desire trauma etc.
but all the available evidence shows no support whatsoever to the hydraulic model. You do not see that getting angry is reducing one's anger and so on, outside qualified circumstances.
the feedback self-inflating model says is that sometimes using the emotions is actually amplifying and self-perpetuating it. and we do have evidence in anger for example that getting angry or on average makes you more angry. And ruminating about traumatic experience increases the effect of the trauma, and so on.
2. lipostat, obesity and anorexia
assuming that obesity is mostly caused by failure of the lipostat - the body weight management mechanism is faulty, this will directly cause both obesity and anorexia.
People who write about psychogenic pain say that it's culturally "contagious". For example, they claim that the prevalence of back pain in the US is higher than it used to be, due to the claims of experts that the spine is a delicate structure that has to be used in specific ways to avoid pain/injury. This creates fear around using the spine, leading to pain.
Whiplash is one of the chronic pain syndromes that's supposedly culturally contagious. According to Alan Gordon, whiplash doesn't exist in Lithuania, despite frequent car accidents. Pain can occur immediately after an accident, but it resolves in a few days. This is supposedly because there is no cultural awareness of whiplash.
The idea of psychogenic pain "fads" sounds plausible to me but I don't know how strong the evidence is. Here are two citations about whiplash in Lithuania.
> But nope, according to Crazy Like Us scientists have determined that white Americans are the highest-expressed-emotion culture in the world
Of course they are. Americans invented the "crazy" (note the scarequotes) idea that emotions can matter in the workplace (and thus, e.g., the horrible salesman smile plastered on people, say, telling you you're fired or something). There is the "bottled-up Brit" stereotype, but these are the same Brits that popularized boxing as a way to let their emotions out - not karate or kapoeira, boxing, i.e., the literal "punch the bag" exercise.
Many people in my family have an autism diagnosis, or autistic traits (genetics!) In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if your sister has autistic traits herself, even if she doesn't meet the "threshold" for diagnosis. Right now, the most common model is the Autism spectrum model. In other words, diagnosing autism isn't a "yes or no" question but rather a "more or less" question. We're all on the spectrum somewhere.
I suspect the spectrum model is equally true with anxiety and restlessness, just as you mentioned in your comment. Or depression, or schizotypal traits, etc. How we express it is cultural, and where we draw the line between normal and disordered is also cultural. When we remove the stigma from autism, like in the neurodiversity community, a lot more edge-case people are willing to get tested or admit that they have it. So then you get into the age old argument- - are autism rates increasing or is diagnostic criteria changing?
And like you said, how useful/helpful is the diagnosis? An autism diagnosis doesn't tell me anything about a person's preferences, personality, experiences, or abilities. But I think it can be very helpful if it helps people access meaningful advice that improves their quality of life.
F'd up time scale on that obesity chart.
Wow, I noticed the 20 year discontinuity (to an extrapolated data point) at the end, but looking at it more closely it only levels off in the middle because time went from moving a decade at a time to two years at a time...
Exactly.
And the 2007/8 point is a smaller number than 2005/6 (which actually says 2005/5006), but is _higher_ on the chart.
If you graph it out properly, the rate is climbing fairly steadily from the end of the 70s onwards.
The y-axis isn't great either...
This might be a side comment, but the possibility that anorexia always existed but was unnoticed might line up with the thing where women were always fainting at the drop of a hat in the past and how this eventually went away. If everyone just thought passing out was normal instead of an anorexia symptom they wouldn't include it in diagnoses, right?
But then why did women stop fainting in the 20th century?
I think it's more probable that dramatic fainting was a performative social behavior - sort of like how we cough or clear our throats to attract attention, even though we're not sick.
They stopped fainting because we started hospitalizing them for malnutrition before they could faint from malnutrition 😎😎😎😎
But really I have no clue
Or speaking in tongues in certain contexts.
What makes you think they did? Human females the number of presentations for fainting in general practice and in emergency settings is approximately four times higher for young females than for young males (Olde Nordkamp et al. 2009).
Wasn't that largely corsets?
If you're looking for anorexia in girls, amenorrhea would be a symptom, though I suppose the Victorians had some euphemism for it and probably there aren't good records.
My understanding is that corsets weren't more restrictive than modern clothing; the horror stories about tight-lacing were very extreme cases, like a future historian basing their understanding of bras on Lady Gaga's outfits
Yeah, I fell into a hole in YouTube a while ago (pre-covid) that is full of historical clothing experts getting extremely annoyed that tight-laced corsets are seen as the norm, rather than being a special-occasion garment. It's like, oh, six-inch platform heels. No-one wears those as an everyday shoe, but you see them a lot at very fancy events (there are photos of Olivia Rodrigo at the White House a couple of days ago wearing them). Because published images are much more likely to be of fancy events, we get a distorted image of the past.
The other problem is that corsets have to be fitted to the specific person and off-the-shelf corsets, the ones that almost every modern person that has ever worn a corset has experience with, are much more restrictive than properly-fitted ones.
There was an actress who had done lots of period films who was put in a properly-fitted corset for the first time for a particular film (or maybe TV show?) and was in raptures about how much more comfortable it was and how much less restrictive, and this whole YouTube community were posting up videos of the interview and saying "see, we told you so".
relevant vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExJskBZcW0
From the same source, on the extent to which those published images were heavily "photoshopped" even a century before the invention of photoshop.
https://youtu.be/gYGUfg_NJzg
Thanks very much. It's hard to be cynical enough.
Perhaps we know what the dogs looked like.
I was in Basel, Switzerland, a few years ago and the local toy museum had a temporary exhibit on the history of corsets. (I guess they were the only museum with extra space). It was fascinating, and corroborates this view that most corsets were not extremely restrictive.
Look at "greensickness" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypochromic_anemia
Turns out to be anaemia. Poor diet, overheated/poorly ventilated rooms, heavy clothing and anaemia on top of stress makes for fainting, especially if it's socially acceptable for women to faint. Probably also was an element of "fainting because I am a Delicate Flower and get attention that way" as well, and perhaps women weren't in fact fainting as much as popular novels and plays described them as doing.
Can we tell a predictive coding story? If your top-down prior is that stress = fainting, and your bottom-up sensory data is giving you stress signals, do you faint?
Better nutrition and better overall health might have reduced the probability of fainting. Modern women (and men !) rarely push their bodies to the absolute limits of survival on the daily basis. We have weekends and 8-hour workdays at the office, not 24/7 shifts of mining coal or carrying buckets of water over multiple miles.
But 19th century women who are always fainting, generally belong to the leisured upper class, and certainly not working in coal mines.
Alternatively, _The Frailty Myth_ has it that early Victorian women were so much discouraged from moving that they had trouble giving birth and so light, ladylike exercise was invented.
It would be interesting to pin down the range of time when fainting was more common. Or, for that matter, to find out something about how common fainting was.
That's upper class early Victorian women, of course.
Incorrect. Human women faint at a rate double the rate of men. This is true today as it was then.
I doubt this is true; extant clothing from the period shows a range of sizes consistent with generally healthy weight.
Also, in many cultures, for long periods of time, being thin wasn't even seen as attractive: see Rubens and other art from the era, for example. Or ancient art and sculpture from many different places. When food is scarce, voluptuousness is seen as attractive. When food is plentiful, it flips. (I have seen this flip within my lifetime in India, as a consequence of globalization and economic growth.)
Anorexia is unheard-of in societies where most people live at the edge of starvation, for obvious reasons.
It was performative status signaling, just like today.
Awesome review!
>keeping all of their emotions “bottled up”,
Is this a bit too close to a water metaphor?
Yeah, talk about insensitive. They just had a tsunami! Yeesh.
I wonder about the psychology of gender identity in relation to this. It's been very strange watching transmedicalist narratives be completely obliterated by weird continental perspectives that seem to allow and encourage a distinct gender identity for every possible permutation of quale. Gender identity disorder has increasingly become a cultural phenomenon believed to be on a continuum rather than a discrete alleged biological category. In that way it is somewhat opposite to trends described here, yet the increase is still occurring. It seems like you can track the taint of medicalization in through at least two directions I guess. The reference point would be cultures with strong non binary or non static gender norms perhaps.
Scott sort of alluded to this towards the end of his review of "Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind" https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/
A lot of people have drawn parallels between the spikes in anorectic teenage girls observed in the 1990s and 2000s, and the current spike we are experiencing in transgender teenagers (specifically trans boys). Lisa Littman's research into "rapid onset gender dysphoria" makes the comparison quite explicit and argues that the underlying mechanism in the two cases is basically identical: social contagion via social media and peer groups.
The other possible example of this "the spectrum".
Presumably in young kids, autism is genuine and not being faked/projected/induced. On the other hand, when I was in Silicon Valley 20 yrs ago, it was definitely a cool disease to be able to say that you had Asperger's.
Peer group effects can easily occur without social contagion. If some mental status has statistical implications for interests or disposition, it'll exhibit a peer group effect, because people choose their friends based on interests or disposition.
In high school, I had two groups of friends, who didn't interact much. The majority of one group is now gay or bisexual (but mostly weren't out then); the majority of the other group became software developers. It would be *possible* to explain this by peer group effects, but the actual explanation is that my friend groups were preselected for the interests at hand - I was on the robotics team and ate lunch with the theater kids.
Fair point.
I wonder about this as well.
I instinctively come down hard against the people who declaratively say "You say that you are X, but actually, you are Y, and also fuck you" and in favor of being whatever you like being; but at the same time it's pretty hard for me to understand what people mean when they describe themselves as feeling like a particular thing.
I've never particularly felt like a male or female or anything particular, so I need this shit explained to me.
SlateStarCodex had a helpful (for me) post about the concept of being "cis by default": https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/. It included a request for comments about people having strong positive feelings about their gender matching their sex-assigned-at-birth, and got some responses. (Note also that some X -> Y trans people seem to have a stronger visceral sense of "I'm not X" than "I'm Y".)
People with little experience in the trans community seem to conflate feeling like you're not X with feeling like you are Y pretty often, when really they're related but separate factors and any given trans person seems (to me at least) to differ in how much of each they feel.
I've listened to some videos about detransition, and how much of I'm not X versus I'm Y *might* be a thing to look into to see whether transition is a good idea. I say might because this is a hypothesis.
Or you don’t. ;-)
>(though before you start thinking of this as too exotic, remember that the Irish called their own ethnic violence “The Troubles”)
Yeah, it seems pretty universal to give scary things harmless-sounding euphemisms. People with HIV often refer to it as "the bug" or "high five", for example.
>I was more interested in a sort of sub-thesis that kept recurring under the surface: does naming and pointing to a mental health problem make it worse?
From the department of N=1 studies:
I know a woman who was sexually interfered with as a child. It didn't affect her when it happened. She was old enough to remember it, but the memories weren't painful. It was just a weird person doing stuff. She certainly didn't feel like she'd been victimized.
Only later, when surrounded by friends who talked about how awful CSA is and how it ruins your life forever (etc, etc), did trauma from the event hit her.
This might not be a common experience, but it was unsettling to hear her describe that. She felt a degree of bitterness toward her friends: almost as though they'd caused her to become a victim, not her attacker.
I have heard similar from someone I know, as well — that it didn't seem shameful and horrifying until everyone kept saying how ashamed and horrified she must be.
A common thread here might be that in both of these cases, it doesn't appear to have been violent or forceful — I'd wager that in the more awful cases, other people's reactions aren't needed to make it a terrible memory.
>(though before you start thinking of this as too exotic, remember that the Irish called their own ethnic violence “The Troubles”)
In Sri Lanka we* also called our 30-year-long ethnic civil war the exact same thing ("The Troubles"). Before reading this review I hadn't previously thought to connect this to a kind of cultural euphemising.
*As a Sri Lankan-descendant born in the UK I thought it was fascinating that both countries had "The Troubles" front-of-mind in the 1980s, and as a child I wondered whether every country had The Troubles as well.
I'm wondering whether (in either case) calling it anything more specific might not reveal preferences and so be avoided in public.
I have a kind of mirror version of this where I suspected maybe that I should be upset and freak out, but then upon reflection thought: who gives a fuck? Weirdos gonna weird, no harm no foul? Way worse shit has happened to me? This is of course a profoundly unpopular view that I cannot talk about with anyone, basically.
As someone who grew up in what was basically still stiff-upper-lip British society long after Britain itself had abandoned this, I thank god every day for doing so.
So much dysfunctionality of the US seems to stem from this high-emoting crap and the baggage that goes along with it. Both at the societal level of the absolute incomprehension of other societies and other times; and at the individual level of "thing has happened and therefore I should freak it and continue freaking out until I have ruined the lives of at least three people around me".
In the play 'Angels in America', one of the characters refers to AIDS as 'the troubles'. FWIW
This sounds a bit like the Dawkins thing? People seemed to think that just because he said he wasn't horrifically traumatized and that it ruined his life, that it meant he was *defending* it.
Consider this. We tell kids to report if they are inappropriately touched (and a bunch of other stuff related to it). They go to the doctor, who tells them that normally they should not allow anyone to do this, but they need to examine them. We create frameworks why this is okay, rules about it, etc., and the kids show their genitals to strangers. We treat this as normal, no big deal, and most importantly, not traumatizing. On the other hand, if a stranger looks at us too long in a public place while fully clothed, we treat that like an invasion. That bothers us, and we tell an authority (adult, maybe police).
Why is the more egregious invasion not traumatizing, while the objectively less invasive experience is? It seems obvious to me that it's cultural expectation. Not all things can be controlled by cultural expectations, but I am confident that we could create a society where we consider it weird for a doctor to see us naked, just as much as for a different kind of stranger. Yet we don't.
It is very American to read stories like this:
https://www.france24.com/en/20150810-dubai-father-stops-rescue-drowning-daughter-dishonour
(arab girl drowns because male lifeguard not allowed to touch here) and think "OMG those savages".
But I can easily think of equivalent situations in the US. For example suppose I'm out hiking somewhere really cold, there's a severe rainstorm, and I come across an 8 yr old girl. It seems like the most sensible life-saving response would be for us both to get naked (out of cold clothes) and together (share body heat) in a sleeping bag. And perhaps 30 years ago I'd probably have done that unthinkingly. Would I do that today? Hmm. Save the girl and quite possibly ruin my life; or walk away as not my problem...
Of course it's just as American to deny that this second situation has any analogy with the first...
On the other hand lots of child abuse does seem to have horrible effects independent of “psychologizing it”. Our approach is dumb, but don’t throw out the literal babies with the bathwater! Some people not being affected doesn’t mean some others aren’t.
Absolutely, though it appears that a lot of how we feel about these situations is related to how society depicts them and treats them. Not everything, by any stretch, but a lot more than we tend to give credit for.
There was a famous study a while ago that found exactly this - that child sexual abuse did not seem to traumatize the child when it happened, only later once it was revealed to be stigmatizing. Needless to say it was very controversial. I've looked for it but I can't find it or remember exactly what it was.
I don't know how traumatizing child sexual abuse is, but I have wondered for quite a while how much culture is a factor in sexual assault being more traumatizing than regular old physical assault. The problem is that even trying to know what to search for is difficult in itself.
As other commenter said, child sexual abuse can be anything from “questionable contact once or twice”, which probably is fine in terms of long term harm (although still bad), and regularly happens between young kids themselves, and “brutal rape and beating”, which is really quite bad in the long term, and anything in between. Might be hard to separate those.
er I meant “which [in some cases] is still” in the first example
You may be referring to Rind et al. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rind_et_al._controversy), a controversial meta-analysis which found that child sexual abuse did not result in significant, long-term negative psychological effects.
I read the literature around it pretty comprehensively about 5 years ago and found myself agreeing pretty heavily with Rind. The Wikipedia article spends a lot of time discussing the "methodological" issues, but Rind was successfully replicated in IIRC 2009, even accounting for those issues.
Fun fact: did you know that both the Senate and the House passed resolutions condemning the study?
That reminds me of Scott's post on the virtue of silence.
Same thought came to my mind immediately when I read your post. To begin with, what constitutes "abuse" is already a function of societal norms. Then, whether or not something is labelled as "abuse" contributes very heavily to feelings of having been a victim. This applies to all sorts of abuse" childhood sexual abuse, childhood physical abuse, FGM, adult sexual or otherwise inappropriate behavior, what have you. Even financial things such as, say, not inheriting from your father because you're a female. As long as the person believes this is the norm, they are either not inconvenienced, or accept the inconvenience the same way as we accept childhood illnesses we can't avoid. I always thought that, for example, in rape cases, the ideal would be a dual approach: come down hard on the rapist with the full force of the law, and have a psychologist downplay the whole thing to the victim as if it had been no big deal. Of course that doesn't work too well in America (or generally "The West") where people believe there must be one "Truth" rather than many culturally biased perceptions.
I worry that the current culture rewards people for being and staying victims. It is *useful* to be able to say your current condition is because you are a victim, and it allows you access to resources for victims. Many people are victims of *something* and may require support and healing, however it is not a healthy mind-set to stay in. People need to be empowered to move on and away from victim status.
This reminds me of the case of one of Larry Nassar's victims (the pedophile Olympics doctor). She was convinced she had received legitimate medical treatment and even defended him publicly until it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had touched her inappropriately for his own gratification. After that, she was one of the many who confronted him in court and gave a tearful victim impact statement.
Someone I know was abused over a long period of time and had sketchy memories of the timeline until they confronted their abuser and he filled in some of the details. Those new details gave the victim a new zeal to seek justice, although they certainly had been traumatized already. But the new information brought a new angle to the trauma.
This is consistent with something I (think I) read in Frank Bures's The Geography of Madness: it is the cultural context of sexual acts with children that causes trauma for the child, not the sexual act itself. He illustrates this with the example of a maturation ritual of the Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea: it involves the boys performing fellatio on an adult man of the tribe, but it is in the context of growing up and "becoming a man". Because it's public and socially accepted, it is not a cause of trauma for anyone involved.
Are you sure the Sambia exist?
As far as I can tell they are only attested by a single anthropologist, Gilbert Herdt, who refused to tell anyone else where they were in order to protect their "privacy".
An alternative explanation is he simply made them up.
Similar rituals are reported from other peoples of east-central New Guinea, such as the Etoro and Kaluli, by other anthropologists. It would have to be a pretty elaborate and coordinated conspiracy for them all to be made up.
Also, the location and identity of the Sambia does not appear to be that much of a secret any more. The Wikipedia page on the Sambia says that "the Sambia people speak Simbari (called Sambia by Herdt)", and the location of the Simbari linguistic group is given in fairly precise terms in Richard Lloyd (1973), The Angan Languages. The evidence for the Sambia-Simbari connection, as given on Wikipedia, comes from a book called "Pacific Homosexualities" published in 2002. I don't have access to this book, but I can see an extract in Google Books which contains the following quote, said to be from a statement issued by "a few Christianized Simbari":
"The people of Simbari in Marawaka, Eastern Highlands province are protesting the actions of the government in allowing an American anthropologist (Gilbert Herdt) to come and study our people's culture in the 1970s and '80s. Books allegedly written by Mr. Herdt and "discovered" in 1984 were against our customs. We also found that he never lodged copies of his books ... Our requests for assistance from Governor Peti Lafanama and Minister Muki Taranupi have fallen on deaf ears. We want compensation for the damage his books have caused to our customs and traditional beliefs."
So in this statement some of the Simbari seem to have acknowledged that they were the "Sambia" people Herdt studied. Admittedly they are also saying that what Herdt wrote was "against their customs", but these are Christianized Simbari who naturally would like to believe that.
This is called delayed onset PTSD. It doesn't mean she wasn't actually traumatized. A lot of the conversations in response to this thread are extraordinarily minimizing to the biological nature of PTSD. People with that kind of trauma can be dissociated from their body for years without ever realizing it. That doesn't mean the trauma wasn't there, only that they were not aware of it.
What is the proposed mechanism for delayed onset PTSD as distinct from socially mediated / expectation-based PTSD?
I think the question here is not necessarily about how bad or "biological" PTSD is — that is, not minimizing how much trauma may be retained once it has occurred/once PTSD has developed — but rather about the cause of the trauma/PTSD in the first place.
If an event is not viewed as traumatic by an individual at the time, and then they're told it is traumatic and subsequently develop PTSD, how do we distinguish between "PTSD was socially inculcated in this individual" vs "they always had it but it was just delayed onset"?
I had skepticism around this sort of activist push for "mental health awareness" and calls for "normalization." I recall watching the Netflix special by Inside by Bo Burnham and finding the constant discussion of mental illness and suicide very off-putting even though it was made to be humorous. It is not glamorization of mental illness but it seems to be something like treating it lightly.
There is the issue of pathologizing oneself and then saying "this is how a [insert illness] acts. And of course if everyone knows what Borderline Personality/cyclothmia is then maybe people start saying "maybe I have that?" and then maybe doing that makes them think a certain way. Determining how large this phenomena is would be really difficult.
I don't want to return to negatively stigmatizing mental illness. But I think "normalization", whatever that means, may be a bit too far. I imagine we could treat this stuff with a bit of seriousness maybe. Yes, I could imagine spreading information about psychiatric disorders could cause spread. Not sure what to do with this. Scott's humorous world probably isn't it.
> I don't want to return to negatively stigmatizing mental illness. But I think "normalization", whatever that means, may be a bit too far.
Another possibility is that efforts to normalize mental health issues have no effect either way, and in fact follow an increase in actual mental health issues.
Some diseases like diabetes and myopia, as well as autoimmune disorders such as asthma and allergies, are far more prevalent in developed societies in developing societies. Could PTSD, anxiety, and depression be similar? Perhaps, even though we have great material abundance, we live in a maximally mental illness generating environment?
> I recall watching the Netflix special by Inside by Bo Burnham and finding the constant discussion of mental illness and suicide very off-putting even though it was made to be humorous. It is not glamorization of mental illness but it seems to be something like treating it lightly.
For what it's worth, I'd say that anyone who primarily describes Inside as a comedy has made a serious genre error (Netflix very much included) - Burnham is a comedian and humor is his tool, but it's first and foremost an exploration of deteriorating mental health in quarantine. One of those cases where a content warning might need a "no seriously, we mean it" re-claimer.
I think "comedy special" is a genre that originated in an art form that involved standing up and telling jokes, but has changed quite a bit, even though it keeps the same name. Just as "tragedy" originated as a singing competition (oidy) where the winner gets a goat (trag) and gradually changed into something else, but kept the name.
Huh. I thought tragedy started as goat-fucking humor, like the girls and swans stuff the Emperor Justinian's wife started with.
Isn't the very assumption "Of COURSE quarantine has led to deteriorating mental health -- now let's just p-hack till we find it" precisely the problem Scott is talking about?
Why is that the correct prior rather than, eg, "Quarantine led to families being much closer and better mental health among most" or even "mental health is almost all genes and biology, and, unsurprisingly, quarantine had no effect since it did not change either genes or biology"?
Let me try this again: "Inside" is an exploration of *one particular man's* deteriorating mental health during quarantine. I would hope for Burnham's sake that it's mostly artifice, but I get the impression there's a lot of honesty in the emotions there. And it is quite good at getting people to relate to it, which is not *supposed* to be a pleasant thing.
This reminds me of how sometimes I get into a rabbit hole of reading about something like Morgellons disease or those people who are sensitive to electromagnetic radiation from radio signals and things. I'm always a bit worried that I'll develop one of those syndromes after reading about it. But so far my mental health is very robust and things like that don't happen to me.
We're probably all suffering from countless small diseases and pathologies that haven't been classified yet. Maybe a person in the year 2200 will read about 2020 and be amazed that anyone survived.
My mother (who was a doctor) often said that med students will catch every one of the diseases they're learning about, and that's perfectly normal. I should have made the connection to mental health earlier.
Which makes it even more frustrating that every one of the psychiatrists I visited for insomnia insisted that there's underlying depression and anxiety, even though I don't feel at all depressed or anxious.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_students%27_disease
Jerome K Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, 1909
It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement
without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular
disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every
case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for
some slight ailment of which I had a touch - hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down
the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly
turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which
was the first distemper I plunged into - some fearful, devastating scourge, I know
- and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was
borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again
turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever - read the symptoms - discovered that
I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it - wondered
what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance - found, as I expected, that I had that
too, - began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and
so started alphabetically - read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and
that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I
was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned,
I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I
seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six
letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight.
Why hadn't I got housemaid's knee? Why this invidious reservation?
After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid's knee.
For a book from the nineteenth century, I am eternally amazed by how much of it holds up as well as this bit. A wonderful quote. :)
We love this bit! Jerome K Jerome rocks
There was an episode of Frasier (who played a call-in radio psychiatrist), who had a patient call in and describe a wide-assortment of mental illnesses they were suffering from in great detail.
Frasier correctly "diagnosed" the caller as a 3rd year psychiatry student.
Every time I use WebMD, I wind up thinking I have at least one disease that I read about.
I suspect that this is because the terms used in textbooks don't really make a lot of sense until you've seen them in-person. The first time this clicked with me was when I encountered my first patient going through a mania phase. They'd just learned that they were going to be moving into the apartment unit they wanted. They decided to be proactive by staying up without sleep for 48 hours straight and packing, but doing nothing more than removing all the stuffing from the couch cushions. And then you go "so *that's* what mania looks like" rather than thinking it's being a little restless and trying to cure your insomnia by going for an hour-long walk.
My mind goes to gender dysphoria.
We can view this increase in trans awareness as an introduction of a foreign idea. Here is one theory: This causes people to not feel good in their bodies like the spread of the other conditions. Here is another: People who would be happier trans or with a different gender identity have always existed and awareness of transgenderism, body dysphoria, gender identity and so forth has allowed people to discover something about themselves and take steps to improve their life. And social awareness creates social acceptance and improves the quality of transpeople's lives. Or maybe it's both?
What do you guys think?
I think most folks get over their dysphoria, but with acceptance instead of rejection, many people are doing things to their life that reduce their wellbeing. However, there a few folks for whom the increase in wellbeing from transitioning is extreme. The question is how do stop mass delusions in teenage girls, while not hurting the actual people who would benefit from acceptance. To me the clear answer is to accept and encourage transitions, but only for adults over 21.
Hard disagree. I think the problem is that there are a small number of people who are actually trans, and I think the neuroscience needs to develop to the point that early detection and intervention in these few cases becomes tenable
But what would it mean to be "actually trans"?
Neurological states matching those of target gender
But is this theory correct? I was under the impression that the jury was still out there. In particular, i recall reading that the studies did not correct for sexual orientation (It was a commentary by james cantor, but i cannot find it)
would that have changed the result?
Someone who wants to change their gender, and does so, and is then happier, is clearly trans whether or not their neurology is similar to the Hypothetical Average Cis (Wo)Man.
Sounds a bit "no true scotsman"
Maybe they would have been happier anyway as time passes? How do you even measure happiness here? Seems like there could be a lot of pitfalls with this line of reasoning.
Facially false - ugly man gender swaps into hot woman, is happier because hot, despite not being trans. Women with untreatable gender specific part pain gender swaps, no longer has pain, is happy.
In general this stuff is a lot more socially determined construct complicated than that suggests. Are tribal shamans “clearly innately tribal shamans” because they participate in a role slash identity in their culture? Personal satisfaction as a 100% metric for truth is unreasonable and ridiculous
Interesting that a lot of woke people out there think that there aren't significant enough differences between genders when it comes to neurological differences.
Would partially explain why some feminists increasingly are becoming hostile towards trans activists.
Trans people, even the real ones (whatever that means), don’t really ever share the whole range of “psychological traits” of their target gender in my experience. Even the MtFs who knew they were trans from age five, imagine themselves as women daily to the point of it being crippling until transition, feel strong suicidal urges at thoughts of maleness, etc etc , don’t really have feminine lack of assertiveness, or patterns of general thinking and influence, mode of sexual attraction (immediate and visual vs socially embedded and changing), or whatever else. Also, all the brain studies find pre-trans brains are wayyy more similar to assigned sex brains than target sex brains (if there are even significant smaller scale differences in those structures, and n=20 fMRI etc but whatever) (that subject, like so many others, was the subject of a massive campaign of persistent study misreading and misusing to imply that trans brains are just like their gender identity brains which means trans is real!!!!!) (and if anyone wants my 1000 words about this I’ll dig it up). But if you look at relatively unconscious or supposedly innate psychological attributes, at least all trans people both I know personally, which is a lot, and all the ones I have seen in passing, don’t tend towards being biologicallypsychologically women in any significant sense. Also see the interests of MtFs lining up way more closely with the interests of men than women, especially in areas like programming, tech, guns, and being an autistic contrarian (women sometimes are interested in all of these, but ... not at a 50% rate!). All put together I can’t really see “MtFs have woman brains” as true. None of this really rebuts “no biological influence at all, it’s all a massive mess” though, although there’s gotta be some significant sex psychological differences.
(if this is over any line I’ll delete & shut up)
I don't trust anecdotal data on this. I think cis people lie to themselves as much as anyone. I also think testosterone and socialization undoubtedly masculinize Trans women (and the converse for Trans men), but that there's no reason to think this wouldn't happen if you subjected cis people to the same conditions. That's a longitudinal question. Also, male interests are more associated with the types of jobs that:
1. Trans people can actually get and maintain
2. You specifically are exposed to
There are a lot of Trans people that work as prostitutes and/or die by their 30s. Just not seeing it, sorry.
Agree current data inadequate of course.
> I also think testosterone and socialization undoubtedly masculinize Trans women (and the converse for Trans men), but that there's no reason to think this wouldn't happen if you subjected cis people to the same conditions.
... but testosterone masculinizing behavior slash brain would mean you have a masculine brain. And as IIRC testosterone is a primary driver of all sex differentiation in biology (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation_in_humans - reading the list of syndromes, it seems testosterone issues at various causal points can cause mostly full reversal of apparent sex), while a female brain male body is possible if like the brain doesn’t respond to T but the body does or something, that seems quite tough to pull off mechanically, and doesn’t mesh with I’ve seen. But yes it is tough to figure this stuff out, although I think “anecdotes” can be quite strong in terms of evidence when done correctly, generally that doesn’t work out well. But all of my trans friends were, and continue to be, masculine in ways that just seem weird (strong wills, male style interests, internet autism, very much do not go with the flow, anger issues for some, etc) and idk how to square that with “woman brains slash minds”
"Masculine and feminine brain" is not enough dimensions to capture the relevant questions. All that needs to be the case for my position to hold is for there to be some non trivial non plastic part of the brain that corresponds statistically and in a yudkowskian thing-space sort of sense to something generally found in opposite sex and not birth sex.
Like, I'm not arguing that Trans brains are holistically female or male, just that there is some persistent kernel of maleness or femaleness there (not even for sure having anything to do with masculinity or femininity)
That sounds like a survivorship-bias sort of problem. Wouldn't somebody who lacked a strong will or significant anger, who tended to go along with the flow and blend in socially, but with subjective experience of gender dysphoria held constant, be far more likely to simply hide those feelings? Rather than, say, heroically asserting themselves and overturning their whole life in a quest to resolve the issue.
"Also, male interests are more associated with the types of jobs that:
"1. Trans people can actually get and maintain
"2. You specifically are exposed to"
The guy I knew in MBA school in 1981 who is now said to be "America's highest paid female CEO" made his first fortune by inventing his own industry. He was among the most willful people I've ever met. He made a similar impression upon his highest paid employee, Howard Stern, who called him Martin Luther Queen.
I'm not sure why it would be relevant that they do/don't. Should not our standard for transness be:
"Would benefit from gender transition".
What’s benefit? I’m sure there are numerous practices and massive life choices many take and find beneficial but you disagree are beneficial. Some dislike religious asceticism, some dislike voluntary sexual repression, some dislike hedonism, some dislike conversion therapy, some become eunuchs as a fetish, all of these have many participants who claim they’re awesome. Claiming that, because people find transition good, makes it good, isn’t something you’d claim true for conversion therapy or Islamic repression of women, and is quite odd anyway.
And anyway “MTF brains are significantly F” was both the initial claim here and a common claim to support the idea of trans, so it’s relevant.
Snake oil medicine, energy healing for cancer, new age religions, The Secret, are more things that lots of people like, but the “it is good because it is well liked by participants” is questionable.
Not in my opinion no.
I think there's something about imprinting on social roles-- it's not just about the body.
I was surprised when I realized there's no such thing as "dressing like a woman", there's only dressing like a woman from a particular culture.
I bet it helps to be assertive if you're weighing whether to transition.
Is this a theological belief or a rational belief? ie
- is it capable of being falsified?
- what does it rest upon if you concede that neuroscience cannot confirm it?
Yes, it's capable of being falsified. Just not immediately. It is in roughly the same category of propositions as "it will rain on the first Wednesday of April 2057". In the meantime I trust my own intuitions and reasoning about it based on direct experience more than I trust the reasoning of others, though I don't think that's sufficient to convince others and defer to political conventions of liberty as a stronger argument against encroachments.
IIRC there actually was adversarial collaboration on SSC which showed significant desistance (i.e. not continuing with dysphoric feelings) after puberty, up to half of the cases (the data is all over the place but that's about the middle point). However, there's the other half too. The complication of course it's not just "acceptance" now, it's either rejection in one tribe, or completely disproportional celebration in the other. Imagine getting some complicated surgical procedure were celebrated as a huge achievement for the person and people who had one would have been treated as a hero. Would that increase the number of people getting it? I think so. Wouldn't deny the cases where people actually need one, either - it's just there would be a lot of cases where they really don't.
Puberty blockers until 18.
Yes, the enbyphant in the room.
I was hesitant to bring it up trans issues but that's where my mind went, too. There seems to be far more gender nonconformism now, particularly among young people. The NHS Gender Identity Development Service has seen something like a 3000% increase (not a typo) in referrals over the past decade. Other numbers from around the world are similar.
A common explanation is that dysphoric kids have always existed but hid it in the past. That's plausible if we're talking about kids attending More Country Music High in Cletusville Alabama, I guess.
But look, I was in forums and chat rooms in the early 00s. Places where you could just pick a name and be yourself. I never met an out trans person. I met gay people, but no trans people. They had no reason to hide. They just didn't seem to exist.
This might reflect the social bubble I was in. No doubt people will post replies with differing experiences, which is fair. But there does seem to be an amazing increase in a period of just a few years, and I do wonder about social contagion as an explanation.
Do you think homosexuality has followed a similar pattern? As in if that chatroom was in 1700 you would be telling me you didn't know of any gay people?
I looked into this, and the answer seems to be no. The share of US adults identifying as homosexual went from 1.6% in 2008 to 2.4% in 2016, before declining to 1.7% in 2018: https://qz.com/1601527/the-rise-of-bisexuals-in-america-is-driven-by-women/
Interestingly, the share of US adults identifying as bisexual has indeed increased, from 1.1% in 2008 to 3.2% in 2018. This rise is driven entirely by women. Similarly, the rise in transgender women is much faster than the rise in transgender men, so much so that the gender ratio has reversed from 2009 to 2016 among UK teenagers (see my other post). Maybe the the increase in absolute prevalence of gender dysphoria is due to increased acceptance, but why would the sex ratio change so suddenly, for either bisexuality or transgender identity?
I meant more like maybe it was 0.016% or something in 1700 and it is the same phenomena of a 100 times increase just not as rapidly. Obviously, it would be hard to figure out if this was true.
I ... don’t think so. There have certainly been changes in the idea of homosexuality, but men have been fucking men for a LONG time, in large numbers, and there’s documentation everywhere proving that. Maybe less, but not one in ten thousand (roughly the chance of being struck by lightning in your lifetime, according to the National Weather Service). It certainly wasn’t seen in the Kinsey Scale exclusive homosexual - bisexual - exclusive homosexual sense though, whether or not that Was. I’d recommend an academic paper written about the social construction of homosexuality in ancient Rome - https://www.academia.edu/544127/The_teratogenic_grid - but apparently it was written by a later convicted CP possessor so ... oh well.
a lot more people get struck by lightning than I would have guessed!
Most cases of men fucking men have not been homosexuality but loose standards.
Same thing also causes men to fuck hands, mouths, and any hole that is roughly right size.
This is very different from homosexuality as in preferring same-sex partners, even if same word is used for both.
Is there any male character in Shakespeare who stands out as almost certainly gay from his traits?
My vague impression is that Shakespeare might not have had the concept of the modern stereotypical gay man in his conceptual repertoire. Foucault argued along these general lines and perhaps he is right in this case. Over a long enough time period, lots of things can change.
Osric in "Hamlet"? Though he is more a fussy courtier type. Mostly it's boys playing girl parts where the girl is pretending to be a boy, like Olivia in "Twelfth Night" or Rosalind in "As You Like It".
If memory serves, a significant number of Shakespeare’s love sonnets are written from a male perspective and addressed to a male “youth”
In the Merchant of Venice, the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio reads like a gay affair. It's not explicit, but once it's pointed out, it becomes pretty hard to read their scenes any other way
The evolution of the idea of homosexuality as a sexual orientation is intriguing, because up to about the mid 16th century it wasn't really considered in the aspect of character at all as much as it was about behaviour, so sodomy was just another one of the sexual vices.
By the 18th century, at least in London, a distinct sub-culture had evolved with the molly-houses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_house
I was under the impression that, among the aristocracy, a man's marital duty was to produce an heir; everything else was unimportant. Sure, salacious gossip is always fun, but a feudal lord (duke, earl, marquise, whatever) could have 100 lovers of various genders on the side, and as long as his official wife produced him an official heir, no one would hold it against him.
I say "man", because historically women were rarely seen as important enough to merit any kind of notice :-(
I think I would have heard of homosexuality in 1700. In other periods of time, who knows? We're still not sure what causes homosexuality, and there's no reason its frequency should remain steady in time. Anthropologists have found societies where homosexuality apparently doesn't exist (mostly hunter-gatherer ones).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4534200/
You’re right about some hunter gatherer societies not having homosexuality / male-male sex as a recognized concept, at least wrt what I’ve read, although the converse that many *do* is equally interesting. That they had to go looking for ones where it doesn’t exist says something.
It's nothing I know much about, but I understand that the letters from Renaissance people to each other refer often enough to their own male homosexuality, e.g. Michelangelo's. I mean, it wasn't something you would say out loud in a public place, but it was okay to talk about it with friends.
Greg Cochran has cited its absence among many hunter-gatherers as evidence for his pathogenic theory.
The issue with using hunter gatherer societies in discussions like this is that they aren't miraculously preserved simulacra of some early human mode of existence but societies that have evolved away from that mode as much as we have (if not more - I bet their generations are shorter), just in a different direction. So just because some hunter-gatherers don't have homosexually we can't say anything about our ancestral hunter gatherers sexual tendencies.
Also, male homosexuality is mentioned in both the Old Testament and New Testament, so it couldn't have been that rare in ancient times.
My pet hypothesis (of which I'm very much not convinced) is that this is mostly an 'Old Testament' thing and is more like modern (U.S.) 'prison homosexuality' in that the anti-homosexuality was directed at relatively powerless males that might be tempted to opt out of trying to find a wife (and then reproduce and raise any children). Part of the temptation would be due to polygyny (by the relatively more-powerful males in one's tribe/clan) and the other to being pastoralists, i.e. many young men not being around women for long periods of time. This would also explain the prohibitions against bestiality.
I am mostly convinced that 'prison homosexuality' isn't the same thing as (modern) 'regular homosexuality'.
And then there's 'homosexuality' among other animals – that _could_ be 'real homosexuality', but it could also be 'opportunistic sexuality' – sexual behavior has to be 'implemented' somehow and given the general chaos that is biological evolution generally, it seems pretty likely that, however it's implemented, it wouldn't be 'perfect' (in the sense of always serving evolutionary fitness, i.e. leading to reproduction).
Part of the reason that the Jewish and Christian faiths tend to be anti-homosexual behavior is that their institutional memories run all the way back to the Greco-Roman world, in which male homosexual behavior tended to be exploitive, with the powerful having their way with the less powerful (e.g., slaves, youths, etc.)
Is there reason to believe they'd be concerned about this exploitative power difference in particular?
I thought the biblical prohibition of gay sex predated Greek influence over the Jews.
People wouldn't have identified as homosexual in the same sense we understand it. There would be the difference between "men who have sex with men (and women)" and "men who are effeminate and play the woman's part" as they understood it.
In a poem of 1675, Rochester can refer to bisexuality (and what seems like "gay for pay") without it being anything more than the general idea of debauchery; from "The Disabled Debauchee":
"Nor shall our love-fits, Chloris, be forgot,
When each the well-looked linkboy strove t’ enjoy,
And the best kiss was the deciding lot
Whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy."
So the idea of "men who have sex with men" (as distinct from "identifying as homosexual/gay") was around back then as much as it is around today.
I still remember the opening chapters of Cephas Goldsworthy's idiosyncratic biography of Rochester, describing the spirit of the 17th century where two young gentlemen, probably drunk, definitely showing-off, either simulated or actually had sex in public, before a jeering crowd, on the balcony of an inn - and when brought to court the case was dismissed, because the enraged judge who would have loved to sentence them was forced to let them go as there were not any laws about public indecency at the time. Plainly the sporting sprigs of the gentry didn't think it would do their reputations any real or lasting harm to have it bruited about that they were doing gay sex things.
The same is recorded in an anecdote about Mark Antony, that when he was a young rakehell and wanting to piss off his censorious father (or his friend's censorious father), they would pretend to be (actually were?) boyfriends:
"According to the historian Plutarch, Antony spent his teenage years wandering through Rome with his brothers and friends gambling, drinking, and becoming involved in scandalous love affairs. Antony's contemporary and enemy, Cicero, charged that he had a homosexual relationship with Gaius Scribonius Curio."
"There was a rumor that Curio and Mark Antony had an affair when they were young. When the two men had been banned from seeing each other by Curio's father, Curio had smuggled Mark Antony in through his father's roof."
Cicero really had a fun time in his Philippics against Antony, from the Second Philippic:
"44 XVIII. Shall we then examine your conduct from the time when you were a boy? I think so. Let us begin at the beginning. Do you recollect that, while you were still clad in the prætexta [white robe with purple border, worn by Roman boys up to the age of 16-17 and by girls until marriage], you became a bankrupt? That was the fault of your father, you will say. I admit that. In truth, such a defence is full of filial affection. But it is peculiarly suited to your own audacity, that you sat among the fourteen rows of the knights, though by the Roscian law there was a place appointed for bankrupts, even if any one had become such by the fault of fortune and not by his own. You assumed the manly gown, which you soon made a womanly one: at first a public prostitute, with a regular price for your wickedness, and that not a low one. But very soon Curio stepped in, who carried you off from your public trade, and, as if he had bestowed a matron’s robe upon you, settled you in a steady and durable wedlock.
45 No boy bought for the gratification of passion was ever so wholly in the power of his master as you were in Curio’s. How often has his father turned you out of his house? How often has he placed guards to prevent you from entering? while you, with night for your accomplice, lust for your encourager, and wages for your compeller, were let down through the roof. That house could no longer endure your wickedness. Do you not know that I am speaking of matters with which I am thoroughly acquainted? Remember that time when Curio, the father, lay weeping in his bed; his son throwing himself at my feet with tears recommended to me you; he entreated me to defend you against his own father, if he demanded six millions of sesterces of you; for that he had been bail for you to that amount. And he himself, burning with love, declared positively that because he was unable to bear the misery of being separated from you, he should go into banishment.
46 And at that time what misery of that most flourishing family did I allay, or rather did I remove! I persuaded the father to pay the son’s debts; to release the young man, endowed as he was with great promise of courage and ability, by the sacrifice of part of his family estate; and to use his privileges and authority as a father to prohibit him not only from all intimacy with, but from every opportunity of meeting you. When you recollected that all this was done by me, would you have dared to provoke me by abuse if you had not been trusting to those swords which we behold?
47 XIX. But let us say no more of your profligacy and debauchery. There are things which it is not possible for me to mention with honour; but you are all the more free for that, inasmuch as you have not scrupled to be an actor in scenes which a modest enemy cannot bring himself to mention."
That Cicero quote is awesome :-)
That said though, I could be wrong, but my impression is that the modern idea of "identity" as based on a person's gender/sexual orientation/race is relatively new. From what I can tell, in ye olde days one's identity was pretty much defined by one's allegiance to a country (which, admittedly, did cluster along racial lines), or a quasi-national entity such as a religious order. One's choice of sexual partners was a preference, and perhaps an aspect of one's character, but not an identity as such.
How long ago did that "allegiance to a country" predominate? My impression is that pre-1815, and even more likely pre-1648, most Europeans didn't particularly identify with the lord who happened to have authority over their territory, and that would have been the closest thing to a modern concept of "country" they had.
Romans went in for sexual invective, especially for denigrating political rivals and opponents in court cases, in a big way so Cicero as an orator can certainly make the most of what he's laying to Antony's charge.
The picture painted is (probably) intentionally hilarious, to make Antony and his affairs sound even more ridiculous: the stricken father, confined to bed and sobbing with grief and chagrin; the love-stricken son, also weeping and throwing himself histrionically at Cicero's feet to demand he pay that huge debt of Antony's and declaring that he couldn't live without his love; and Cicero as the family friend dragged into this highly emotional scene to sort it all out.
And it's interesting that while he's painting the young Mark Antony as effeminate, playing the "wife" to his lover, he then turns it around and has the older Mark Antony being disgraceful by his public affair with a courtesan/actress/manumitted slave he made his mistress:
"The tribune of the people was borne along in a chariot, lictors crowned with laurel preceded him; among whom, on an open litter, was carried an actress; whom honorable men, citizens of the different municipalities, coming out from their towns under compulsion to meet him, saluted not by the name by which she was well known on the stage, but by that of Volumnia. A car followed full of pimps; then a lot of debauched companions; and then his mother, utterly neglected, followed the mistress of her profligate son, as if she had been her daughter-in-law. O the disastrous fecundity of that miserable woman! With the marks of such wickedness as this did that fellow stamp every municipality, and prefecture, and colony, and, in short, the whole of Italy.
...You came to Brundusium, to the bosom and embraces of your actress. What is the matter? Am I speaking falsely? How miserable is it not to be able to deny a fact which it is disgraceful to confess! If you had no shame before the municipal towns, had you none even before your veteran army? For what soldier was there who did not see her at Brundusium? who was there who did not know that she had come so many days' journey to congratulate you? who was there who did not grieve that he was so late in finding out how worthless a man he had been following?"
Yeah, I'm not going to think that an army of veterans would be shocked, shocked! that their general was keeping a mistress, even if she was an actress.
"Again you made a tour through Italy, with that same actress for your companion. Cruel and miserable was the way in which you led your soldiers into the towns; shameful was the pillager in every city, of gold and silver, and above all, of wine.
However, we will say nothing of these things, which are acts of a more hardy sort of villainy. Let us speak rather of his meaner descriptions of worthlessness. You, with those jaws of yours, and those sides of yours, and that strength of body suited to a gladiator, drank such quantities of wine at the marriage of Hippia, that you were forced to vomit the next day in the sight of the Roman people. O action disgraceful not merely to see, but even to hear of! If this had happened to you at supper amid those vast drinking-cups of yours, who would not have thought it scandalous? But in an assembly of the Roman people, a man holding a public office, a master of the horse, to whom it would have been disgraceful even to belch, vomiting filled his own bosom and the whole tribunal with fragments of what he had been eating reeking with wine. But he himself confesses this among his other disgraceful acts. Let us proceed to his more splendid offenses.
[Mark Antony buys, or otherwise takes possession of, the estate of Pompey The Great]:
"But, as some poet or other says,—“ “Ill-gotten gains come quickly to an end.”
It is an incredible thing, and almost a miracle, how he in a few, not months, but days, squandered all that vast wealth. There was an immense quantity of wine, an excessive abundance of very valuable plate, much precious apparel, great quantities of splendid furniture, and other magnificent things in many places, such as one was likely to see belonging to a man who was not indeed luxurious but who was very wealthy. Of all this in a few days there was nothing left.
...Actors seized on this, actresses on that; the house was crowded with gamblers, and full of drunken men; people were drinking all day, and that too in many places; there were added to all this expense (for this fellow was not invariably fortunate) heavy gambling losses. You might see in the cellars of the slaves, couches covered with the most richly embroidered counterpanes of Cnaeus Pompeius. Wonder not, then, that all these things were so soon consumed. Such profligacy as that could have devoured not only the patrimony of one individual, however ample it might have been (as indeed his was), but whole cities and kingdoms. And then his houses and gardens!
...I pity even the walls and the room. For what had that house ever beheld except what was modest, except what proceeded from the purest principles and from the most virtuous practice? For that man was, O conscript fathers, as you yourselves know, not only illustrious abroad, but also admirable at home; and not more praiseworthy for his exploits in foreign countries, than for his domestic arrangements. Now in his house every bedchamber is a brothel, and every diningroom a cookshop. Although he denies this:—Do not, do not make inquiries. He is become economic. He desired that mistress of his to take possession of whatever belonged to her, according to the laws of the Twelve Tables. He has taken his keys from her, and turned her out of doors. What a well-tried citizen! of what proved virtue is he! the most honorable passage in whose life is the one when he divorced himself from this actress."
> They had no reason to hide.
I think that would depend on how they wanted to socialize, explicitly identifying that way would certainly attract (not totally positive) attention in the early 2000s (especially if as you say there weren't other out ones), and on a text based forum it would be easy for them to just present as whatever gender they wanted.
Wait there were definitely isolated nerdy trans internet folx in the 00s. How many idk but there were
You did meet them. One was my partner. She went by a female name on forums and chat rooms in the early aughts and nobody was the wiser. Forums and chat rooms offered her a place to be seen as she wanted to be seen, no questions or explanations necessary.
I mean that figuratively not literally. I have no idea who you are. I'm simply proposing that you could have met one and had no idea.
I'm sure this was the case.
I think that a lot of it was down to "if you don't know about it, you don't apply it to yourself". There may well have been many more trans people than the ones who came out about it, but they just thought they were/were classed by society around them as "tomboys" and "masculine women" or as "sissies" and "effeminate men".
As I said elsewhere, I'm sure I've been aro/ace since I was nine and very decisively told my mother I had no interest in marriage or family, but I had no idea of the concepts even existing until much, much later in life. If I'd never encountered those ideas, I'd have gone on thinking "well, I'm just weird and maybe mentally ill/disordered; normal people want marriage, kids, sex and romance".
Though it's true that there is an element of the copycat; teenagers are trying on identities in order to find one that fits, as they are in the process of constructing a self that is now a separate individual and not centred around their parents, and becoming an adult from a child. Transness may seem to make sense, or at least be something concrete, in the midst of the confusion of puberty and adolescence. A bit like the "lesbian till graduation" college girls of fable? Some will go out the other side and discard it but it was useful for a time they needed it; some will continue thinking "this is me", and some will be right.
People choosing a life of celibacy has been culturally recognized for a very long time.
I have a friend whose mom had an interesting life trajectory. As a small child in the 1930s, a major movie studio put her forward to the public as their version of Shirley Temple. When her movie career fizzled as a teen, she became a nun at 18. Ten years later, she ran off with a priest, got married and started a family (including my friend).
Lots of big dramatic decisions, but no chemicals or surgeries back then to close off future changes of mind.
And some will have themselves mutilated and sterilized over a fad.
Is that 3000% increase in referrals due to an increase in gender nonconformity, or due to an increase in the behavior of referring people to the NHS Gender Identity Development Service?
I "identified" "as" "genderqueer" in, like, 2007 (never mind that the innovation of identity-label discourse was seen as missing the point - from my perspective, the quality of the theory around it has gone steadily downhill, mostly due to its popularization in the media), as did several of my friends. If you'd told us that, in 2021, the Brits would have an NHS service for that, we would've either looked at you like you'd grown a second head or assumed it meant conversion therapy. Probably both - what else could gender nonconformity have to do with *doctors*?
I was wondering the same thing. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of self-reported trans people, along with a flip in the sex ratio from male-dominated to female-dominated. For example, referals to the Gender Identity Development Service in the UK have gone up from 24 to 426 from 2009 to 2016 for adolescent males, and from 15 to 1071 (!!) for adolescent females. Maybe the growth itself can be explained by greater awareness of either gender dysphoria or the GIDS, but what explains the change in the sex ratio from 1.6 to 0.40?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324768316_Sex_Ratio_in_Children_and_Adolescents_Referred_to_the_Gender_Identity_Development_Service_in_the_UK_2009-2016
Aren't all trans people are self-reported? Is there some alternative evaluation method that reliably identifies a person's internal subjective experience before they divulge it? If so, who invented mind-reading technology and how do I destroy them?
Yes, it's self reported. Most mental illnesses are self reported, or based on symptoms that are self reported. Psychiatrists don't diagnose depression or anxiety by measuring the patient's brain waves. If there's any point in analyzing the prevalence of any mental illness, there's no reason not to analyze transgender prevalence.
I think there have always been people, who, if they could just hit a button and switch genders (with no terrible social consequences) - they would. (And, of course, some of them might regret it! Grass is greener and all that.)
Of course it's not that easy, so I think it's a function both of how *badly* they want to switch, and how difficult (medically, socially, financially, etc) it is.
Right now on the social-ostracism front it's gotten dramatically easier. Also on the medical front options have gotten better - mainly young people now have a chance of getting medical treatment before secondary sex characteristics are fully developed, letting them physically get much closer to their preferred gender when they reach adulthood.
So, I think there's been the most obvious change on the reduction-of-obstacles front so that's the most straightforward explanation for the increased numbers.
On the demand side, maybe? I think people are more aware of the option, which may cause them to think about it more, and maybe on the margins that increases the desire of some people to switch enough to cross the threshold to overcome the (still not insignificant) obstacles. On the other hand societal gender roles are less constraining than in the past which you'd think would reduce the pressure to switch some.
A lot of people would “switch genders at will” who aren’t trans in any way shape or form!
I'd do it for the weekend. Sounds like fun. Isn't there a Roman parable about a man who gets temporarily transformed into a woman... and then back again? And the gods are having an argument about whether male or female orgasms are better so they ask The Guy Who Was A Woman to resolve their dispute?
Tiresias who was a Greek seer and the father of Manto, also a prophetess (and her name is related to the word, "mantis" meaning "seer, soothsayer, prophet, diviner" which is why Scott uses pictures of mantises for Mantic Monday).
He struck a pair of copulating snakes with a rod and was turned into a woman as punishment by Hera; he became a priestess of Hera, married and had children; seven years later, (s)he again encountered a pair of copulating snakes and was restored to his male form.
Later on, Zeus and Hera were arguing over who gets more pleasure from sex and Tiresias, as having experienced both sexes, was asked for a judgement: he came down on the side of women getting much more pleasure, so once again a displeased Hera punished him, this time with blindness.
That's the one! Well now I feel like I betrayed my ancestors by mistaking it for a Roman fable (I suppose Romans could have repeated it), but I originally heard it from my high school Latin teacher (it was a Catholic school), hence the association with Romans.
> Well now I feel like I betrayed my ancestors by mistaking it for a Roman fable
Maybe as a punishment your username should be changed to Ceres.
Wait, why was Hera on the side of "men get more pleasure"?
Her husband was obviously getting a lot of pleasure from his various affairs, and she didn't want to admit to getting any pleasure from him (or any other man). In that family's warped domestic politics, it served her interest for men to be the sex-crazed fiends and women their long-suffering victims.
Sure, in this case I was imagining the button being a one-time, no reverse sort of deal. So people who hit it should believe they'd be able to live better as the other gender, but they wouldn't need to feel that way to an extreme degree.
Maybe the development of real and artificial sex hormones as treatments in the mid-20th Century made possible new modes of life, which people then developed an urge to pursue?
For example, as a sort of cross between (reverse) gender dysphoria and (reverse) anorexia, probably more males are obsessed with building huge muscles than ever before, in part because steroids make it possible and provide them with lots of role models (and we have more access to images than ever before).
I think more along the latter.
What is the optimum response from society? I think something like:
"Oh, you think you might be a woman born in a man's body (or v-v). OK, here are your options..."
What is interesting is that upper class men in the 17th century where very feminine. In the clothing they wore, and the fact that they had on a thick layer of make up and even fake moles on their face. There was an increasing focus on beauty for men, until apparantly the distinction between masculine and feminine became too small and there was a strong pushback for upper class men becoming more masculine again. I think the Macaroni was especially one step too far towards the feminine for many, and sort of sparked the reversal.
cf. the anti-emo backlash, which was followed by ultramasculine "bro"/"party rocker" style
My feeling is that transgenderism has probably always existed. Some percentage of transgender cases might be treatable by therapy (basically, just talking about it); some are not, and may lead to fatal outcomes. However, the number of such cases is quite small, on the order of small fractions of percentage points.
The rising awareness of trans issues had enabled advanced treatment options for body dysphoria sufferers. Unfortunately, rising awareness and rising acceptance also led to some form of trans identity becoming, for lack of a better word, fashionable. The actual number of transgender people had not changed, but the number of people who either want to be transgender (minus the painful side effects), or mistakenly believe themselves to be, had risen by orders of magnitude. Hence the ongoing fractal proliferation of trans-adjacent identities.
I find it neat to read Matthew 19:12, where Jesus says "12 For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”
Was he referencing the Chinese eunuchs? Or am I being comically ignorant here.
I think the Middle East was only vaguely aware of China at the time. But there were also eunuchs in the Middle East.
Probably more towards comically ignorant, but that's okay!
Jesus is talking about divorce, and the comment is his response to the disciples saying that no one getting divorced is a serious dilemma. It's interesting to me that he separates those who "live like" eunuchs from those that are made into eunuchs and also separate from those that are born as such. Plausibly he's talking about those that are asexual (or at least live like they are), as well as those born without genitalia. So it was apparently a known enough thing at the time to reference it.
My guess would be that a fairly high proportion of people who are sexually attracted to the same sex as their assigned sex have some cross-sex gender feelings, which probably come from the same biological origin as the sexual orientation. How these people get classified and deal with their dysphoria depends on cultural context, sometimes handled entirely within the queer community. In the recent past in the US, many people would have been classified as butch or drag queens who are classified as nonbinary today. Having a butch identity historically could include a lot of the things we consider trans associated now, including binding your breasts, presenting in a completely masculine fashion, and being viewed by others as not really a woman. It’s not clear to me whether the old or new way of classification, where many nonbinary people somewhat socially transition but most don’t take hormones, serves people’s quality of life better.
> The most embarrassing extreme of this happened in 1906, when some photogenic Japanese youth carved a poem in a tree, went to a beautiful waterfall, and leapt to his death
Looks like this was actually in 1903?
Definitely 1903 for Misao Fujimura. I wonder if the book went into the context of the Meiji restoration and modernization, which is pretty fascinating as it relates to how Fujimura's suicide was thought about at the time and since. You could make a strong case that Fujimura's teacher, Soseki, created the legend for his own purposes (skepticism of the Meiji program) out of a lovesick teenager. As an aside, his famous carved goodbye poem seems to me (a non-specialist for sure)......strangely good? And the quality of that poem was another driving factor here, for why this became such a well known example of teen death by suicide.
Thanks, fixed.
What's the source for the expressed emotion measurements?
This question interested me as well so I did a quick search for the first review I could find-- so caveat that this article is the first time I'd heard of "expressed emotion" and I'm not an expert in the topic.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-psychiatric-treatment/article/expressed-emotion-across-cultures/CC598258E8D8F7E0B4EFD9DA141A916C
This focuses more on the association between households with high expressed emotion, and relapse of schizophrenia, but also gives some numbers attributed to Leff & Vaughan 1985 which at first glance do line up with the ones for American and British households from the book (the linked article gives the low-EE %, the quote from the book above is the high-EE %, and they add up to 100%). Despite having a university library access I couldn't find the Leff & Vaughan paper quickly, though-- others might have more success.
Also, I think the definition of "expressed emotion" in the article I linked above helps explain the discrepancy that Scott noted above, that the understood knowledge is that white Americans prefer/demand social environments without big displays of emotion. From what I can tell, "expressed emotion" really is just "expressed emotion (from a schizophrenia patient's household towards a schizophrenic person)". It's a pretty limited definition that's about the ways that people around a schizophrenic person at home, respond to that person. So, it makes a lot of sense that a culture's "way of interacting with schizophrenic people at home" could be very different from their "way of interacting with neurotypical people outside of home".
I had never heard this phrase before now. It seems to have been the subject of quite a lot of research and to have changed its meaning over time, a weird and fascinating subtheme in the weird and fascinating intellectual history of schizophrenia research, and I hope Scott will revisit it.
> Japan - a country where committing suicide is basically the national pastime
That's the stereotype, but Japan actually has a lower suicide rate than the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-rates-by-country OWID’s data says otherwise - with Japan as much higher - likely due to age structure adjustment? Also suicide rate has been falling for a while in Japan apparently (maybe)
It's probably because that chart ends in 2005, another from the same site ending in 2016:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-rate?country=USA~DEU~JPN~KOR~RUS~FRA
Those trends seem in line with the 2019 WHO data on the Wikipedia page with Japan now lower than the US.
On the other big statistic Japan is known for (fertility rate) it doesn't stand out much from western countries these days either.
Here's another article about the suicide rate in Japan:
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00381/japan-records-lowest-suicide-rate-since-statistics-were-first-kept-in-1978.html
A huge rise in the 90s, followed by a steep decline starting around 2010.
This was so fascinating! I just finished reading the section on anorexia.
I have a question about the huge popularity of intermittent fasting. It is mostly about when you eat, abd eating relatively unprocessed food (any amount) and Dr. Jason Fung explains it. What do you think about it, considering we live in a culture where anorexia is (I suppose) rampant?
I don't really see the connection here... What's the question — are you positing that intermittent fasting's popularity stems from the same root as anorexia's?
Yes. Exactly. You put it better than I did.
It’s fine lol. Intermittent fasting is seen as a nutrition / discipline / weight loss / health thing, and most everyone who does IF, overall, eats a healthy and normal calorie diet. If anything they tend to eat more healthily than most, just out of selection effects. There’s no overall trend at all of malnutrition, or hyper weight loss, or purging and binging, or body image issues on the whole. Many more IFers don’t lose enough weight because they don’t commit than overdo it. You could just as well say Christian or Islamic fasting or many other fasting traditions are related to anorexia. But as the people who do it don’t end up malnutrition or vomiting, it’s fine. That said, IF can certainly participate in the unhealthy relationship an anorexic had with food - an anorexic could intermittent fast unhealthily - and some people have certainly taken IF to extremely unhealthy levels that resemble anorexia and cause serious health issues -but it in no way presents like or interacts with anorexia for the vast majority of intermittent fasters.
That said, IMO itself it doesn’t matter much, might be good but doesn’t seem that useful
"You could just as well say Christian or Islamic fasting or many other fasting traditions are related to anorexia"
Interestingly, in this context, the mystic St. Catherine of Sienna fasted severely and even at the time people were writing her concerned letters about it which she answered in an irritated fashion.
"TO A RELIGIOUS MAN IN FLORENCE WHO WAS SHOCKED AT HER ASCETIC PRACTICES
In the Name of Jesus Christ crucified and of sweet Mary:
Dearest and most beloved father in Christ sweet Jesus: I Catherine, a useless servant of Jesus Christ, commend me to you: with the desire to see us united and transformed in that sweet, eternal and pure Truth which destroys in us all falsity and lying. I thank you cordially, dearest father, for the holy zeal and jealousy which you have toward my soul: in that you are apparently very anxious over what you hear of my life. I am certain that nothing affects you except desire for the honour of God and for my salvation, which makes you fear the assaults and illusions of devils. As to your special fear, father, concerning my behaviour about eating, I am not surprised; for I assure you, that not only do you fear, but I myself tremble, for fear of devilish wiles. Were it not that I trust in the goodness of God, and distrust myself, knowing that in myself I can have no confidence. For you sent, asking me whether or no I believed that I might be deceived, saying that if I did not believe so, that was a wile of the devil. I answer you, that not only about this, which is above the nature of the body, but about all my other activities also, I am always afraid, on account of my frailty and the astuteness of the devil, and think that I may be deceived; for I am perfectly well aware that the devil lost beatitude, but not wisdom, with which wisdom, as I said, I recognized that he might deceive me. But then I turn me, and lean against the Tree of the Most Holy Cross of Christ crucified, and there will I fasten me; and I do not doubt that if I shall be nailed and held with Him by love and with profound humility, the devils will have no power against me—not through my virtue, but through the virtue of Christ crucified.
You sent me word to pray God particularly that I might eat. I tell you, my father, and I say it in the sight of God, that in all ways within my power I have always forced myself once or twice a day to take food. And I have prayed constantly, and do pray God and shall pray Him, that in this matter of eating He will give me grace to live like other creatures, if it is His will—for it is mine. I tell you, that often enough, when I have done what I could, I enter within myself, to recognize my infirmity, and God, who by most special grace has made me correct the sin of gluttony. I grieve much that I have not corrected that miserable fault of mine through love. I for myself do not know what other remedy to adopt, except that I beg you to pray that Highest Eternal Truth, that He give me grace, if it is more for His honour and the salvation of my soul, to enable me to take food if it please Him. And I am sure that the goodness of God will not despise your prayers. I beg you that if you see any remedy you will write me of it; and provided it be for the honour of God, I will accept it willingly. Also I beg you not to be light in judging, if you are not clearly illumined in the sight of God. I say no more to you. Remain in the holy and sweet grace of God. Sweet Jesus, Jesus Love."
Modern writers tend to go wholesale for the "of course she had anorexia" but that's hard to say; the Wikipedia article (unintentionally) puts a more manipulative slant on it:
"She died on 29 April 1380, exhausted by her rigorous fasting.
...When Catherine was sixteen, her older sister Bonaventura died in childbirth; already anguished by this, Catherine soon learned that her parents wanted her to marry Bonaventura's widower. She was absolutely opposed and started a strict fast. She had learned this from Bonaventura, whose husband had been far from considerate but his wife had changed his attitude by refusing to eat until he showed better manners. Besides fasting, Catherine further disappointed her mother by cutting off her long hair as a protest against being overly encouraged to improve her appearance to attract a husband.
...Her custom of giving away clothing and food without asking anyone's permission cost her family significantly, but she requested nothing for herself. By staying in their midst, she could live out her rejection of them more strongly. She did not want their food, referring to the table laid for her in Heaven with her real family.
...For many years she had accustomed herself to a rigorous abstinence. She received the Holy Eucharist almost daily. This extreme fasting appeared unhealthy in the eyes of the clergy and her own sisterhood. Her confessor, Raymond, ordered her to eat properly. But Catherine claimed that she was unable to, describing her inability to eat as an infermità (illness). From the beginning of 1380, Catherine could neither eat nor swallow water. On 26 February she lost the use of her legs.
Catherine died in Rome, on 29 April 1380, at the age of thirty-three, having eight days earlier suffered a massive stroke which paralyzed her from the waist down."
Fasting has also been used as a legal remedy, even to the point of death, and the historical background to it provided the impulse for the hunger strike in Irish political activity:
https://stairnaheireann.net/2017/08/11/brehon-law-the-troscad-4/
"A method of exerting authority, available to all members of Celtic society, was the ritual fast, the troscad. As a legal form of redressing a grievance, this act emerged in the Brehon law system. That it was an ancient ritual can be demonstrated by the fact that it bears almost complete resemblance to the ancient Hindu custom of dharna. This custom is not only found in the Laws of Manu but as prayopavesana (‘waiting for death’) it occurs in ancient Vedic sources. The troscad was ‘Identical with the eastern custom, and no doubt it was believed in pagan times to be attended by similar supernatural effects’; that is, that if the one fasted against ignores the person fasting then they would suffer fearful supernatural penalties. The troscad was the means of compelling justice and establishing one’s rights. Under law, the person wishing to compel justice had to notify the person they were complaining against and then would sit before their door and remain without food until the wrongdoer accepted the administration or arbitration of Justice. ‘He who disregards the faster shall not be dealt with by God nor man … he forfeits his legal rights to anything according to the decision of the Brehon.’
The troscad is referred to in the Irish sagas as well as laws and when Christianity displaced the pagan religion, the troscad continued. We find St Colman fasting against Guaire the Hospitable, St Ronan fasting against Diarmuid, even Patrick himself fasting against several persons to compel them to Justice. Some people even fasted against the saints themselves to get them to give justice and wives also fasted against their erring husbands.
It is fascinating, as well as sad, that in the long centuries of England’s sorry relationship with Ireland, the Irish have continued a tradition of the troscad which has become the political hunger strike. One of the most notable Irish political hunger strikes was that of the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, also an elected Member of Parliament, who was arrested by the English administration in Cork City Hall and forcibly removed from Ireland to London’s Brixton Prison. He died in Brixton on 24 October 1920, on the seventy-fourth day of his hunger strike. He was, of course, not the first Irish political prisoner to die on hunger strike during this period. Thomas Ashe died as a result of forcible feeding on 25 September 1917. MacSwiney’s sacrifice was said to have inspired Mahatma Gandhi to revive the custom of dharna in India as a moral political weapon. In recent times, and perhaps better known, came the hunger strikes in Long Kesh prison camp, when in 1981, ten Irish political prisoners died on hunger strike in an attempt to force the administration to restore their rights as political prisoners, taken away from them in 1974. Among them was Bobby Sands, elected Member of the British Parliament, and Kieran Doherty, elected Member of the Irish Parliament. But these ten Irish prisoners were not the first to resort to the continuing tradition of the troscad in an attempt to assert their rights during the current struggle in the north of Ireland, nor the first to die on hunger strike. Frank Stagg, for example, died after a sixty day hunger strike in Wakefield Prison on 12 February 1976, trying to compel the reinstatement of recognition of special status withdrawn in 1974. The troscad was never entered into lightly and always with full knowledge of the seriousness of the final intent.
The troscad in ancient times was the effective means of someone of lesser social position compelling Justice from someone of higher social position. Thus Druids could fast against a king, or even a man or woman in the lower order of society could fast against their chieftain."
On Indian dharna: https://www.downtoearth.org.in/coverage/dharna-to-defecation-the-indian-art-of-protest-30999
"The Kathiawar Gazetteer of 1884 states, "If a man had a large claim against a chief or another individual of social importance, and all other means of obtaining his rights failed, he would post himself at the door of his debtor and vow to fast until his claim was satisfied. In extreme cases, the creditor was allowed to starve to death, but generally his importunity was rewarded, as few liked to take upon themselves the odium and discredit of causing their creditor's death."
Dharna was not restricted to credit transactions, alone, nor was it always an individual act. Groups of people -- even an entire village -- would stage a collective hunger strike to protest atrocities inflicted by a tax collector or a rapacious landlord."
I feel like a decent prescription, in this and other topics, is: Do Not Reify that which is evil, except where necessary. Contain the reification of potentially damaging concepts to those people who must deal with the handful of real instances (doctors and such), but do not allow such ideas to become well known, even as negatives.
The description of Mental Health Unawareness Campaigns was delightful, thank you.
The evil spirits and PTSD demons don’t seem to quite fit the idea of “not reifying or idolizing evil”, but maybe hunter gatherers are just postmodern anti essentialist deleuzean spirit mystics who have transcended categorical chains.
Perhaps "reify these things only in order to other them as external enemies or invaders"?
Hmm maybe this is the theory behind "demons"
Alternate hypothesis for why past and current societies with more violence and less stability would seem to have less PTSD: involuntarily and frequently entering fight/flight/freeze mode is only problematic when everything's actually fine.
If you're living in a violent society where threats are everywhere and violence of all kinds happens all the time, you're likely to have good reasons to sit upright in bed in a blind panic when something goes thump in the night. Perhaps symptoms went unnoticed in ancient Rome because trauma-related behaviors and experiences seemed reasonable?
I've often thought about the fact that my PTSD-related sleep disturbances wouldn't be such a problem if someone actually broke into the house. I'd be the only one prepared for a fight. Granted, I'm glad they're subsiding with treatment, as my life is not full of threats and sitting upright in a panic when someone closes a car door outside is unnecessary and exhausting.
Has this been proposed or delved into before by someone who thought about it in a more formal manner than one who lies awake in bed trying to convince herself she'll be fine?
That's basically how my shrink described it. Stuff that is not only normal but necessary in a war zone is bonkers in America.
Hyperawareness, aggression, night terrors, twitchiness around loud noises- survival traits in a world where gunshots at 50 meters are a constant threat. Even flashbacks can have their use; last time I smelled cordite in the air, it meant death, so now the smell of fireworks sets me off. Once I saw a car explode and pelt me with hot frag, and now cars backfiring send me into the gutter for cover.
(fake examples, not applicable to me)
It's only an issue when it comes home with you and you can't shake it off, and it's a only a disorder when it starts disrupting your life. Other than that, it's not a thing to stress about. You were exposed to danger and you're still acting like it, that's all.
Thanks for the good examples. I think this general idea goes a long way toward explaining the whole "But why don't people in [insert war-torn country here] have more PTSD than veterans living in Pleasantville?" conundrum.
Another idea: perhaps societies with less rigid work scheduling allow some flexibility for people with PTSD to work it out. Like, I'm picturing a family living in a multi generational household with various members contributing to the household economy. They farm or they labor in some fashion that ultimately meets their needs. It might not be the end of the world if someone shows up late to plant a field because they didn't sleep the previous night, or gets in a shouting match and storms off all emotional when someone mentions how much they enjoyed last week's crucifixion. And if the aforementioned finds that they can't concentrate on anything, that's alright because this bucket of corn needs to be sorted and it requires no thought at all.
But if I chronically show up late to work because I didn't sleep, get into shouting matches because a coworker said something insensitive about small towns that get incinerated by wildfires, forget important details, and fail to solve the most basic problems because I can't think straight, I might end up fired. And if I get depressed and stay at home and fail to get another job and miss my rent, I might end up on the street. And then I'd be one of those poor souls standing line at the DHS because my behavior is way out of alignment with the context in which I live and work, and my neediness would get written up as a big expensive problem because damn the cost of existing in America is high, and at that point pathologizing my experiences and behavior might make sense.
As someone with a PTSD diagnosis (and my therapist was very cautious about it- she never brought up PTSD and reassured me that my experiences were not abnormal for a whole three months before referring me to a trauma specialist for further evaluation), I've been through rough periods where I had some slack and rough periods where I had absolutely none. The working-through-severe-symptoms-with-no-slack experience was so bad I came very close to swallowing a bunch of percoset but was redirected by nice people to urgent care, where they gave me trazodone instead. There were many times when I wished I could just make a day's pay sorting corn.
Standard disclaimer: I'm doing much better now, don't worry about me, really I'm fine thanks.
This probably also applies to many things other than PTSD. If something makes you less productive than others, or makes you look weird while you are being productive... it is likely to become an issue at job, while you could be productive at home or at a farm.
> There were many times when I wished I could just make a day's pay sorting corn.
Me too. But as I know my luck, soon someone would invent Agile corn-sorting with everyday meetings...
The clueless guy who just doesn't know when he's in real danger is a lot better off today.
The stuff in the book about Big Evil Pharma cunningly foisting a dope-fiend's dream of a moral panic on naive, helpless Japan made sense to me when I read it. And I still mostly believe. When pot has been legal for another ten or twenty years, we will see how much of a market Big Pharma has for various mood enhancers.
My instinct has always been that PTSD and stress in general is less about absolute levels of violence, and more about variance over time.
So, if you live in an era when the primary cause of death is being perforated by another human, the most popular form of entertainment was attending public judicial torture/executions, and you could reasonably expect to murder at least a couple dudes over the course of your life; the level of stress you'd need to get PTSD was comparatively higher.
I've also seen people posit that PTSD is more about sustained levels of high stress. This would check out as well. Pre-Armstrong gun, you stood on a battlefield and fought people you could see, then you died or walked off of it back to normal life.
Post rifled HE cannon, at any time, in any place, with no warning, you can suddenly explode; and battles last for days/weeks/months.
This doesn't quite level with my experiences with people who grew up in places where violence was normal and still ended up with PTSD from particular experiences that were not uncommon in that environment (such as being beaten unconscious by a street gang or being abused as a child by a stepdad), but I think you have a good point that violence can feel normal to people who see it a lot.
I think what it really comes down to is whether you actually believe you are in serious danger. If you grow up in an environment where people are broken on the wheel in public and everyone gathers to watch, you might reasonably not be traumatized by seeing someone broken on the wheel. But if you are held in a cell where your jailer tells you each day they're going to break you on the wheel tomorrow, you might end up with nightmares about being broken on the wheel.
Aren't many PTSD symptoms are completely maladaptive, at least the more serious ones? Being paralyzed with horror is even less reasonable if someone actually is trying to break into your house.
My uneducated guess would be it's something closer to what Nah said - people in the ancient societies being more exposed to such things from childhood. If you learn from the start that the world around is full of death and danger, your brain adapts to this fact as you grow and you're more resistant to such tings. But if you've grown up in a safe world and then your already-formed brain is suddenly exposed to all kinds of horrors, it has greater chances to snap.
I think the difference relates very well to the book review. I think that when violence is normal, we don't feel as much stress about violence. My brother and I physically fought a lot, but it wasn't usually an angry or stressful experience like it would be if it happened at work today. We would wrestle or whatever and then go watch tv. If the same behavior happened at my job, it would bring a lot of stress with it. Someone would go to jail, lives ruined, and it would be so totally out of character for the environment that it would be abnormal and destabilizing.
I've been told the opposite by therapists, and I'd be curious to read the research backing it up: people with significant childhood exposure to trauma/threats (situations where they actually believed they were in danger) are more likely to develop PTSD as adults. The explanation is, if you learn fight or flight as a child, your brain will go nuts with fight or flight as an adult, in ways that aren't helpful.
I think the truth behind Nah's comment, whether s/he intended it this way or not, is more related to what we might consider "safe" exposure to violence from an early age. If people are accustomed to seeing bodies on crosses, they won't be traumatized by seeing bodies on crosses, because it is in fact not threatening in a context where it's considered normal.
Correction: in ways that aren't *always* helpful (sometimes they are very helpful)
This checks out as well.
I had some exposure to violence as a child (not at home, thankfully), and:
I notice that I become aware of people having arguments way before my friends, I notice that certain types of body language put up big PAY ATENTION flags, etc.
It's similar to my "Is this a snake?" heuristic that is constantly running and compels me to double check branches on the trail if it's dark enough.
This seems to be a well adapted response vis. not catching a bullet that was meant for someone else, but it could easily be the opposite of that.
I'm confused by this - wouldn't an ancient Roman legionary eventually finish the war, go back to peaceful life in Rome, and be in a scenario where hyperalertness is counterproductive?
A Roman legionary wouldn't be hyperalert to begin with, because the types of wars he fought didn't teach hyperalertness.
There's a series of blog posts from a military historian about changes in warfare. The third one specifically addresses PTSD.
https://acoup.blog/2021/01/29/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-i-soldiers-warriors-and/
https://acoup.blog/2021/02/05/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iia-the-many-faces-of-battle/
https://acoup.blog/2021/02/12/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iib-a-soldiers-lot/
https://acoup.blog/2021/02/19/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iii-the-cult-of-the-badass/
Thanks for that comment. I'm setting aside the Roman example because it isn't very helpful here, but my central question was this: can PTSD symptoms essentially blend in under circumstances where those behaviors seem to make sense? And could that be part of the answer to historians' question "But wait, where's all the PTSD from thousands of years of warfare?" I've heard/read/been told about how warfare changed with time, and how modern warfare could reasonably generate more PTSD and particularly more hyperalertness, and I am fully convinced of the points made therein. But I'm looking at this one piece of the puzzle that I haven't seen anyone discuss, and I'm wondering if it's been discussed in more detail somewhere by somebody who knows much more than I do.
But thanks for the links. I'll check those out.
It's going to be hard to link the two, but there have been situations where children were "raised by wolves" or similar, and act like a wild animal. That may be the kind of scenario you are referencing, where they are hyper vigilant and that's part of how they could survive in the wild with no other human support.
Holy moly, comment/link of the month. Thank you.
There's a David Drake essay about how war became a lot worse for soldiers in the modern era-- It’s a Lot Like War (Introduction)” Men Hunting Things, David Drake.
From memory: Originally, war was seasonal. It couldn't be allowed to interfere with sowing and harvest.
Eventually, war became more extended in time, and more continuous-- fighting at night became feasible.
War became a lot louder because of explosives.
Death became more random.
I was positing that perhaps life-after-warfare was just chaotic enough that hyperalertness made sense (e.g. there were enough robberies, street violence, etc. to keep people on edge). But I can't draw any conclusions about Rome specifically because I lack that knowledge.
If not in ancient Rome, then perhaps this dynamic was at play at other points in history where historians have been perplexed to find too little PTSD.
But my comment was meant more as a question than an answer; has someone else discussed the possibility that PTSD symptoms might be invisible in chaotic societies because they're not maladaptive in that context?
Yes. Charles Hoge "Once A Warrior, Always A Warrior: Navigating the Transition from Combat to Home Including Combat Stress, PTSD, and mTBI". 2010. Globe Pequot Press.
With regard to the idea that suicide is a result of depression. I wonder if Watters was framing suicide in Japan as shame-induced rather than depression-induced or guilt-induced? It seems possible to frame suicidal motivation in terms of failure to fulfill your relational role (I let my family down) or guilt (My actions have permanently screwed up my life) rather than (I'm terribly sad and I don't think it will get better).
Surely a big confounder on anorexia's arrival in Hong Kong in the 90s is the arrival of "western diet," no? It seems natural that an eating issue that's sticky once developed might have some relation to the microbiome.
….Within months?
As someone who grew up in Hong Kong, I am incredibly skeptical that there was some sudden seismic shift of diet suddenly in the late 80s/early 90s. It had been a British colony for nearly a hundred years, and had adapted to Western foods (as well as developed its own local cuisine) for a good long while at that point.
Besides, the daily fare of most Hong Kong people at that time - and now - remains Cantonese food.
I'm a big fan of Crazy Like Us, and I drew on it (particularly the anorexia example) in my piece for Plough on the narrow acceptable ways for women to give voice to pain: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/culture-of-life/let-the-body-testify
I'm curious how you'd extend the lesson of this book to the current approach to gender trouble. Here was my take from the piece.
"With the best of intentions, my middle-school health teachers gravely instructed us that many girls experienced disordered eating, that high-achieving girls might be drawn to calorie-counting as one more thing to excel at, that it could be an exhilarating way of experiencing control if you lacked it elsewhere. It became a tutorial in how to suffer correctly.
Today, a girl who experiences trauma or distress as her body changes, her desires stir, and men sexualize and harass her is more likely to be told that one option from the symptom pool is to not be a woman. In those same health classes, she may be told that discomfort with her changing body is evidence she might belong in a different body."
I thought I read somewhere that PTSD started in WWI, where it was called "shell-shock", and that this is evidence (along with greater rates found among artillerymen than many close-combat roles, or something like that) that it is actually caused by brain injury from proximity to explosions rather than psychological factors.
I remember seeing something rather convincing along those lines, anyway, but I can't remember where. (Would have thought it was SSC, actually — except surely that would have been mentioned...)
Shell shock was certainly a WW1-era near-equivalent of PTSD, but interestingly it seems to have presented rather differently, as an acute "stare mutely at the walls for hours on end" disease rather than a "go nuts every time you're reminded of your trauma for decades afterwards" disease.
Probably in either Perl's paper in Lancet (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanneurol/article/PIIS1474-4422(16)300057-6/abstract) or the New York Times article discussing it (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/magazine/what-if-ptsd-is-more-physical-than-psychological.html). It's a bit of a hot take, but I find it intriguing too.
Obviously, this hypothesis doesn't account for PTSD in e.g. sexual assault survivors, but did they have classic PTSD before doctors said they might? (I never followed this up.)
Brain injuries can cause symptoms that overlap with some PTSD symptoms. Emotional dysregulation. Difficulty focusing on tasks and thinking through complex problems. For example.
I’ll have to read the book, but just from the review the hunter gatherer spirit PTSD alike sounded to me pretty much like ptsd honestly
Warfare fundamentally changed at the beginning of WWI.
From Megiddo on April 16, 1457 BCE (21st day of the first month of the third season, of Year 23 of the reign of Thutmose III; the exact conversion to the Gregorian calendar), there are records of nearly 3500 years of field battles where two armies lined up on a field of battle, fought it out in a day, and one or the other won. An occasional large battle might last into a second day. Battles that made it to a third day are so rare that you can list them (Thermopylae, Leipzig, Gettysburg). There are almost certainly more battles that lasted to a third day in WWI than in all of human history to that point. The Somme lasted 141 days. This is clearly not the same thing as the pre-WWI idea of a battle.
There are lots of technological and tactical changes that lead to this, but the idea that the psychological experience of WWI was qualitatively different from previous wars seems entirely reasonable.
+1
Premodern soldiers were also more likely to be side by side with their comrades, as opposed to hiding in a foxhole and the times they were in danger were better circumscribed. You knew that if you couldn't see the enemy, you weren't in immediate danger.
That sounds a lot less likely to train you to be hypervigilant at inapropriate times than the continuous risk of indirect shelling or aerial bombing is.
IIRC, the first instances of trench warfare occurred during the sieges of Richmond & Petersburg at the end of the American Civil War. This makes me want to look for some first-hand accounts from soldiers about whether they considered this period as qualitatively different from the fighting they'd experienced before and whether their memories of that time were more terrifying after the war ended.
The book had a section on this. American Civil War soldiers had their own psychological response to war, Da Costa syndrome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Costa%27s_syndrome
Soldiers in the Boer war had muscle and joint pain, soldiers in WWI had nervous ticks and body movements etc. Watters argues that while distress from war is somewhat universal (although not necessarily even in all cultures and times), people manifest symptoms consistent with whatever the symptom pool is in their time.
I recently also heard that survivors of train crashes in the 19th century often complained of "railroad spine", which later matches descriptions of either shell shock or PTSD.
That was almost certainly somewhere between a misunderstanding and a noble lie. Traumatic brain injury from blast effects can cause symptoms similar to PTSD, but artillery shells are less than 10% explosive and 90+% steel. Before the invention of kevlar, being close enough to an exploding shell for TBI to be a major concern usually meant being riddled by jagged steel fragments at high velocity to the point that TBI isn't going to be your biggest problem.
But the other thing that was a big problem for the health of front-line soldiers, was having their hearts pierced by half a dozen rifle bullets delivered by the firing squad that would normally be summoned for any version of "Private Smith's mind is saying that Private Smith won't be participating in the war any longer". If a doctor instead says that it's Private Smith's *physical brain* that has been injured, no different then a bullet or a bayonet thrust even if you can't see it, then that's not any sort of "cowardice" and we don't have to execute some poor SOB for being disabled by a physical injury.
Some doctors believed that the observed symptoms were being caused by shell-blast because they didn't know any better. And some of them actually were being caused by blast injuries, but see above re fragment lethality. All of this provided cover for the other doctors who would diagnose "shell shock" to soldiers who they knew full well had never been near an exploding shell, to the nods of officers who also knew full well that Private Smith had never been anywhere near an exploding shell but were happy for any excuse to not execute him.
How much of each is impossible to pin down, because the noble liars mostly didn't append notes to their medical reports saying "PS future medical historians I was lying here, PPS present courts-martial please ignore the PS". By World War II, most armies were much less trigger-happy on executing soldiers for cowardice, and the medical consensus had shifted towards "combat fatigue".
"Over the course of decades (plus lots of marketing by enthusiastic therapists), PTSD expanded from a Vietnam-only problem, to all wars, to all natural disasters, to abuse and sexual violence, to the modern understanding where people say they got PTSD from a bad boss, a bad roommate, or an insufficiently woke college reading assignment. "
Where is the person who claims PTSD from an "insufficiently woke college reading" assignment?
"Where is the person who claims PTSD from an "insufficiently woke college reading" assignment?"
Trigger warnings for Classics courses: (interesting article, the guy has some points, but if you're not already aware that the past was nasty, brutish and short, then of course you're going to be shocked that history was different) https://archive.ph/kuxsY
"Jewell posits that professors must be mindful of presenting unethical, insensitive – and potentially traumatic – topics from the ancient world in the classroom. He will give trigger warnings to students in order to prepare them for class discussions.
“There are debates whether taking such an approach doesn’t prepare them for the real world,” he says. “Conversely, some argue that, if someone has had a traumatic assault, the discussion might trigger this experience. I think it’s better to prepare the students than to surprise them.”
Shakespeare is not diverse and inclusive enough! https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=8521
"Additionally, Department Chair Jed Esty explained that the portrait was “delivered” to his office and replaced with a photograph of Audre Lorde, a celebrated African-American feminist and author, in a move that was intended to send a message to Esty, whose department agreed to replace the portrait several years ago.
Esty went on to confirm that the portrait of Lorde will remain in Shakespeare’s place until he and his colleagues can reach an agreement on what to do next, announcing the establishment of a “working group” to help monitor the process."
University of Washington student government resolution about PTSD in the classroom and the need for trigger warnings: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NIvvSk3aVOItK3Zk-_823aYE8WZZ5rytFb2Gpit301g/edit
Trigger warnings and getting PTSD from college readings are two very different things. one is simply making the claim that materials could trigger a PTSD that was already there. That's not what Scott claimed, he claimed that "people say they got PTSD from a bad boss, a bad roommate, or an insufficiently woke college reading assignment". I've long advocated for increased reading comprehension in Rationalist circles, and I think this is a key example of the need for better education here.
So again, where is the person who said they "got" PTSD from a insufficiently woke college reading assignment?
I can see your framing where the literal truth or falseness of the claim matters (if we’re interested in having a very accurate idea of how much PTSD diagnosis/self-reports have increased and spread; correct me if wrong)
In a different framing, the important aspect is the trend of a mental illness to spread from a local event (vietnam war) to everybody in more everyday circumstances.
If you don’t include the woke college reading list, the trend point is still clear. But including such an absurd extreme is funny. Laugh!
Sense of humor is generally not strongly developed in people with extreme views.
I actually have a very healthy sense of humour but if I were to use it here people would accuse me of "trolling" even more often.
Or it could just be developed very differently. I imagine if you're an extreme marxist, Adam Smith is some funny bathroom reading.
It seems like an unnecessary pot-shot at the outgroup and as far as I can tell it didn't actually happen. All this "charitability" that Rationalists used to talk about seems to be disappearing.
A problem may be that I can’t model anyone I’ve actually met in life who would have been offended by this (which I may be wrong). If no one is offended, then the looseness of the underlying truth of the joke doesn’t matter.
Though, if so, then ya, the exactness of the truth would matter (or a different example could be used)
It's not about being "offended", it's about Scott signalling tribal allegiance by making incorrect generalisations against the outgroup. That seems like a bad standard to set for Rationalism.
I think the point here is that we started using the term "PTSD" a little too loosely, perhaps.
My interpretation is that it's used hyperbolically, much as someone might claim they were going to "die from this exam" or whatever. I've probably even said that I was going to have PTSD from a couple of my math midterms. But once again, that's not a medical claim; it's a turn of phrase.
"I thought that woke people were talking about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment was white supremacy because only white people cared about that kind of thing. "
Why did you think this? Can you link to an article that makes this claim?
Or are you just signalling against the outgroup?
I second this. I know Scott's trying to be funny here but it really comes across as signalling against the woke group, which is growing tiresome.
As far as I can tell it's completely misunderstanding the argument made usually made here anyway.
The argument tended to be that demanding "low-expressed-emotion" from people who were describing quite emotional events was basically a demand for them to shut-up and never talk about it. Not that "only white people" cared about calmness.
Again, I invite Scott to cite a single article here.
Also known as "speaking truth to power".
I've spoken truth to power many times on this blog and people mostly just accuse me of being a troll. In one case I was actually censored by Scott himself because I pointed out that one of his blog buddies had deliberately misquoted Marx.
I spoke truth to power in this very comments section by pointing out that Steve Sailer made up false pedophilia accusations.
If he'd ban you for only correcting the quote, that would certainly be a wrong move, but I somewhat doubt it's what actually happened. In any case, you can consider yourself stunning and brave from now on, if that's the thing that floats your boat.
OTOH, there were quite substantive cancellation attempts against Scott and SSC community in general, including such heavy artillery as New York Times, and having some very serious real-life consequences (not all of them negative, as it seems, despite the canceller's intent). And also many more minor foot soldiers - I think there's still Reddit communities (maybe more than one?) dedicated to finding fault and stoking outrage against SSC community and everybody adjacent.
The NYT was not trying to cancel and I'm unsure if Scott even claimed that they had tried such a thing. Scott has never presented any evidence of "negative" real life consequences. Even if the NYT's report had lead to "negative consequences" they're well within their right to write an article about Scott.
I don't consider myself "stunning" or "brave" - I'm simply interested in the truth. If Scott Alexander was also interested in the truth he wouldn't have censored me.
It's funny how people think "it's not literally a criminal offense" is a good argument for defending something. Yes, it's not a criminal offense for NYT to publish a hit piece, or de-anonymize somebody against their will, or, for that matter, to lie and publish partisan propaganda or fake news. It'd be very silly to argue that since it's not literally criminal it's ok for a newspaper to do that. So "within their right" is really the worst argument you could think of - outside of the actual courtroom on a criminal case, of course, where it'd be the best one.
As for consequences, your noevidence claim is false again, Scott described activities against him in the past, and it led to actual closing of the previous instance of this blog. Which is not some minor event, so confidently claiming it didn't happen reveals either complete ignorance of the subject you're discussing or complete disregard for whether your statements have actually any connection to factual events. I'd recommend next time you reflectively reach for the standard noevidence trope, actually spending some time checking whether there is some evidence, at least as far as a simple search engine query. I'm pretty sure you'll find some.
Casual and irreverent humor against any and all groups is not only fine, it’s commendable and necessary. If necessary, Scott could just step up the wit against The Right
Is the humour here that Scott thought something that was wrong, had no basis in reality, and nearing total delusion? Because that's an interesting "irreverent humour".
Many jokes have no basis in reality
That said, people do do that. https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333
Many people have said stuff like “civility and insisting brown voices be calm and not emotive is white supremacy because it lowers oppressed voices below the voices of oppressors”, diversity training powerpoints abound
None of them are, it seems, committed marxists. Groups are divided - some members of some out group can do something bad, which can be joked about, without it meaning all libters are bad
If you think about it, joking and irony are the real safe space for oppressed ideas.
This is precisely why we have to police the jokes.
That doesn't say "only white people cared about that kind of thing", which was Scott's claim.
Casual and irreverent humor directed disproportionately at one group is less commendable *or* necessary. (I don't actually see why humor directed *against* any group is ever commendable or necessary though, given that there are so many other forms that humor can take.)
Every (political) group thinks a significant amount of ire and spite are disproportionately directed at them! Conservatives, liberal, leftists, elites, workers, the poor, billionaires, legislators, blacks, republicans whites, liberal whites (who are made fun of by the previous), gays, trans, armenian nationalists, Bernie bros, trump supporters, the KHive, nerds - they all very much dislike a large group of insults and jokes they see as attacking them. Given that, I’d rather jus have a joke free for all
> so many other forms...
Because the point of a joke is contextual - a joke about politics is interesting in a way that a dad joke just isn’t!
If Scott was more straightforward that his posts were just jokes and not intended to have any relation to reality I would be amenable to that.
However, given the sensitivity that he (and others) have shown to jokes mocking Rationalists (e.g. on Sneerclub) I don't think this is the direction he wants to move in.
I'm just pointing out that he uses these jokes often to insult the outgroup without doing any of the actual work of citations or writing a logical analysis.
🤓🤓🤓🤓🤯🤯🤯🤯
I don't know what this response means.
If we refer to the (in)famous Smithsonian list of white-dominant culture traits, we find there:
- Avoid conflict, intimacy
- Don't show emotion
- Don't discuss personal life
- Be polite
While it does not (did not) say that "white-dominant culture" and "white supremacy" is the same thing, it is not hard to get this inference from the context.
Sounds like you're making an "inference" without any actual evidence.
The fashion of the woke to say "without evidence" after being given reference to the actual evidence is quite bizzarre, but it's a mistake to think it's fooling anyone. I just provided the evidence that Smithsonian mentioned these specific traits as "white dominant" in the context of denouncing white supremacy. If that's not an evidence, then there's nothing that you'd consider evidence.
You admitted yourself that it is an "inference". The Smithsonian chart itself (are people really arguing that the Smithsonian is an influential "woke" source?) says "aspects and assumptions" of white culture, its' not a list of things that "only white people care about", which is what Scott claimed.
Looking rationally at the evidence we can conclude that this is a very bad source if one was trying to prove that it was a common woke argument that "demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment was white supremacy because only white people cared about that kind of thing."
There's nothing to "admit" - it's what you do when you read the text. It's like saying "you admitted yourself that you are breathing and your body is composed of atoms". If you open a book titled "fairy tales" and read "there was once upon a time a king" then you infer it's a story about a fairy-tale king. If there's a section on the woke site about fighting racism and white supremacy, which describes traits attributed to white dominant culture, you make appropriate inferences too. That what "reading texts" means.
> not a list of things that "only white people care about
In the form the woke people published it, it is. I can't guess what the intent of this was, since I am not a mind reader, but fortunately one of the woke axioms is that the intent doesn't matter, isn't it?
> we can conclude that this is a very bad source
No we can't. Why Smithsonian section about how to be woke and fight racism is a bad source about what people who want to be woke and fight racism think and say? I think it's a pretty good source. And in any case, I hope we conclusively disproved the false claim that there's "no evidence", since you recognized that it can be looked rationally at - which is hard to do with something that doesn't exist.
You're making a lot of inferences with no actual proof that this is the correct reading. The Smithsonian article never said anything approaching "demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment was white supremacy because only white people cared about that kind of thing."
If the source did say something like that, you would be able to straightforwardly quote it, not make mind-reading assumptions about an "inference".
Having read the thing referenced, and having read stuff that actually does equate this to white supremacy (I keep up with some developments in math education), I’m not convinced that the Smithsonian’s list actually equates this to white supremacy. The main reason I’m dubious is because this is a pretty dead on list for the white culture I’ve experienced. imo they’re off on a couple points and missing the role that christianity plays in most (even agnostic’s) lives, but overall it seems pretty accurate.
There’s been a lot of debate between marxbro and other people on this thread about this point, but I don’t think I’ve seen any arguments that really convince me that by “white culture” the Smithsonian means “white supremacy”
Does the Smithsonian say this sort of thing in other documents, or is it more that since the equation is made by so many others it seems logical to assume that the Smithsonian is implicitly making it here? Or is there another reason?
The National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian had an exhibit saying that "don't show emotion" and "be polite" was an "aspect of white culture" and an "aspect and assumption of whiteness in the United States". See https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1283372233730203651
I find it annoying and tiresome when people demand citations for things that are obvious and that everyone has had to see a bunch of times.
I believe that Smithsonian list comes from the 1990s. I thought it was a pretty reasonable and objective compared to what we see so much of in recent years. If you took that Smithsonian list of "white culture" traits and entitled it “How to Get to the Moon by 1969” and tacked it up on a college bulletin board, there’d be a nationwide freakout over secret white supremacists running amok on campus.
Speaking of freakouts and lack of citations, did you ever find any evidence that Colin Turnbull was a "gay pedo", as you claimed in one of your blog entries?
This is the blog entry:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/who-was-right-about-human-nature-ayn
It quotes Grinker:
"Because they did not seem to respect him or care for him, the Ik never gave him the sense of self-worth he derived from Joseph and other underdogs. And because the Ik never gave him someone like the Pygmy young boy, Kenge, whom he could love and idolize, he grew angry and lonely."
I don't think there's any dispute over him being gay, you can read that in his wikipedia page (or the biography Sailer is discussing).
Joseph A. Towles was ~22 when he met Turnbull. The NYT review states that Kenge was the "same age" when he met Turnbull. If this is evidence of "gay pedo" activity, it seems exceedingly weak.
Colin Turnbull, now largely forgotten, was a British anthropologist who was once famous in intellectual circles for writing books about African tribes. In one, the Mbuti pygmies were described as the most wonderful ever, in the other, the previously obscure Ik were described as the worst people on earth. There was much debate in advanced circles a half century ago about what could make the Ik so horrible.
Eventually, it was figured out that Turnbull was just trash-talking the poor Ik for personal reasons.
As I wrote in my original blogpost:
https://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/10/who-was-right-about-human-nature-ayn.html
The first chapter of Grinker's biography of Turnbull, as published in the New York Times in 1997, is largely gay pedo-porn. Here's the book's opening paragraph:
"On most mornings in 1957, the Scottish anthropologist Colin Macmillan Turnbull would wake up in his hut next to his young Mbuti assistant, Kenge, their legs and arms intertwined in the way that Mbuti men like to sleep with each other to stay warm. At four foot eight, Kenge was more than a foot and a half shorter than Colin, so Colin could hold him easily with his long legs, arms, and wide hands, keeping them both warm in the damp forest nights."
And it just gets creepier from there in its loving description of the Jerry Sandusky of leftist anthropology.
The Mountain People, in contrast, is a Big Gay Snit about how much Turnbull loathes the Ik, especially for not providing him with a boy toy. Grinker writes:
"Turnbull hated the Ik. The Pygmies, and even Joseph Towles [Turnbull's African-American boyfriend] (who had begun his training as an anthropologist), empowered him. But because he could do little to stop the famine and social behaviors that emerged in that context, the Ik threatened his role as protector or saviour. Because they did not seem to respect him or care for him, the Ik never gave him the sense of self-worth he derived from Joseph and other underdogs. And because the Ik never gave him someone like the Pygmy young boy, Kenge, whom he could love and idolize, he grew angry and lonely."
https://archive.org/stream/anthronotesnat2212000hunt/anthronotesnat2212000hunt_djvu.txt
You might expect from my extracts that Grinker's biography of Turnbull is a devastating takedown, but the bulk of it is pretty much hagiograpy, which goes to illustrate a lot about cultural power. Grinker got his initial draft rejected by his editor on the grounds that a straight man shouldn't be writing a biography of a gay hero. So, he gayed up his manuscript and got it through.
There's a 2012 documentary "Ikland" in which the filmmakers go visit the tribe and see how Turnbull's tales were malicious lies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikland#cite_note-nyt-7
Does it present evidence that he was a pedophile, though?
None of that indicates that any of Turnbull's lovers were underage. If you have any evidence, you should present it.
As you could have read for yourself above, Grinker's biography of Colin Turnbull describes his Mbuti bedmate as a "young boy."
"And because the Ik never gave him someone like the Pygmy young boy, Kenge, whom he could love and idolize, he grew angry and lonely."
To other readers, sorry for this digression into a distasteful culdesac in the history of anthropology. I'm not sure what this is about.
In the age of internet bubbles, I no longer dare to guess what is obvious and what is not. This was easier in the TV era, especially in countries with few TV channels -- if it was on the TV repeatedly, you could be pretty sure that people heard about it.
But there is a difference between "never heard about it" and "you give them evidence, and they keep pretending they never heard about it", where the latter is a political tactics.
Tiresome and annoying citation finding is the cost of making political points. It might be advisable to pay them up-front with footnotes or inline links.
+1. With no attribution I'm writing it off as a weakman cheap shot, at best. Quote Robin DiAngelo, and it's an unfortunately justifiable case of nutpicking. Show me it's in the Smithsonian, and now we have something that can't just be dismissed.
Hi Scott, from your dramatic adjectives like "annoying" and "tiresome" I can tell that you're perhaps becoming slightly emotional. Yours is a genre of writing where nobody ever just 'asks' for citations, they 'demand' it. Potentially this is because you wish to change the perception of your own not-very-convincing argument to a more dynamic and convincing argument, with all the drama and flair of a real wordsmith. That's fine, it's something I would expect of someone with a paucity of evidence, but it's not really something that I'm interested in. Let's try to actually look at the evidence rationally and perhaps we'll learn a little something, instead of just signalling against the "woke" outgroup.
I. Citations Needed.
You state that what you've written is "obvious" and that "everyone has seen a bunch of times" - perhaps that's a fine assumption to make if you're only writing for your own ingroup. But Rationalists are writing (ostensibly) for all sorts of people from all kinds of diverse political backgrounds who may or may not have seen the obscure twitter dustup that you are referring to. You may find it helpful to look at academic sites on why citations are useful, such as https://integrity.mit.edu/handbook/citing-your-sources/avoiding-plagiarism-cite-your-source
Citations, even of "obvious" information is useful because often what is ""common knowledge"" can be incorrect or misleading. If you use citations it will be easier for the reader to follow your deductions and, if necessary, criticise them. Which leads me to my next point.
II. Being Charitable to the Smithsonian and Judith Katz
Now that you have actually given citation, a reader (me, in this case) can proceed with making relevant criticisms. Now, what you wrote originally is:
"I thought that woke people were talking about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment was white supremacy because only white people cared about that kind of thing. "
The problem for you is that it _never actually says such a thing in the text you provided_. Actually, if you read the text (and there's no reason for you not to read it, since it's very short and a dot-point list basically) it says the exact opposite: "we have all internalized some aspects of white culture - including people of colour". Now, I may not agree with that statement by the Smithsonian/Katz, but, since you've now provided a citation, and since I've actually read the text, I can see that it doesn't say what you claimed it said. This is a big problem, for you and the integrity of your argument. This is another benefit of citations - it makes it so much more obvious to readers that you are incorrect in this case.
Let's be even more charitable to the Smithsonian and Katz. What does "aspect and assumption" mean in reference to "white culture"? She has the word "assumption" there. Now, here's the dictionary definition of assumption:
"something that you accept as true without question or proof"
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/assumption
Now, words like this are quite important, and it strikes me as quite strange that you haven't picked up on it. What does assumption mean? It means that a person is jumping to conclusions about something without clear evidence. If I'm being charitable to Katz, it seems very much a possibility that Katz was not making any sort of argument here that "be polite" is some sort of inherent part of "White Culture", but simply that white people often make the assumption that they are being polite and not showing emotion. This seems to be a fairly defensible position. Again, if you had actually engaged with the text charitably you would have explored this option.
III. Being Charitable to the "Woke".
Ah yes, "woke". Everyone's favourite outgroup pejorative. Everyone favourite way to signal to the ingroup that you're not even going to bother taking someone else's points seriously. But who is the "woke" here? Since you kindly cited your source I was able to find out that your dubious understanding comes from Judith Katz who, as far as I can tell, is an obscure former academic who works for consultancy firms and has co-authored a few light business management type books.
This is what is often called "cherry picking":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking
Basically the problem is that you haven't actually engaged with a wide selection of the "woke". You made an offhanded, uncited, reference to an argument you disagreed with (and that you uncharitably framed) and generalized it to a "woke" position, even though there's little evidence that this argument has spread beyond Katz and the Smithsonian. I hope I don't have to explain why cherry-picking is not a particularly good habit for Rationalists to get into, especially when it comes to political matters.
Again, this isn't a superstar "woke" academic, it isn't someone connected to recent "woke" movements, it's someone who wrote a list of dot-points in 1990 and consults businesses on how to be more inclusive. Perhaps documents from 1990 are considered too "woke" by Rationalists, I'm not really sure, but I'm unconvinced that Katz accurately represents the "woke" as most people understand it.
IV. Post-Mortem Of Your Incorrect Argument and My Actual Criticism
I have already shown why you should use citations, even with "obvious" information. I have also shown what a more charitable engagement with the Smithsonian might look like. I have also shown what a more charitable engagement with the "woke" might look like. But let's go further, let's think about what a Marxist might say about all this.
Katz and the Smithsonian represent the fundamental inability for corporations and other powerful institutions to actually represent the opinions of the masses. Katz, like all liberal reformists, sees the demands of the lower-classes and thinks "something must change". Of course, the underlying condition (capitalism) cannot change, so someone like Katz can only water down the demands, distort them, until they appear like the reflection of some funhouse mirror. This is the clumsy fumblings of liberal politics more generally. Without Marxism, without understanding class, without actually listening to the masses; liberal writings can only appear somewhat clownish.
I can expand on any of these points if you need further clarification. Hopefully you will not find my writing "annoying" or "tiresome" or any other generic insults either.
"it seems very much a possibility that Katz was not making any sort of argument here that "be polite" is some sort of inherent part of "White Culture", but simply that white people often make the assumption that they are being polite and not showing emotion. This seems to be a fairly defensible position."
No, it's not defensible. The poster actually uses a form of the word "assume" when that's relevant, as in "Individuals assumed to be in control of their environment". The section referencing emotions is a list of imperatives, not assumptions.
This is really one of your worst arguments in quite some time.
No, it's a list of "aspects and assumptions". Where does it say "imperatives"?
It doesn't have to say "imperatives", the section under Communication is dos and don'ts. You'd have to strain so far as to pull a muscle in order to interpret "Be polite" as "People assume they are being polite" rather than a norm that one SHOULD be polite.
Seems like you're reading words into a text that simply aren't there because you've been primed to do it by other members of your political tribe.
It says "assumptions" right there in the heading. This is a very short text and I don't see why people are unable to read it.
Honest question, why do you still read Scott's posts if you find them so flawed?
Contrary to popular belief, "flawed" does not mean "worthless". Pointing out that something is "problematic" doesn't require "canceling" it.
"So flawed" is not "flawed at all" but "flawed to that extent", and "canceling" someone is not the same as just not reading because you personally find the value to be low.
I enjoy finding "easy mistakes" in Scott's work and pointing them out to him. Very few of his mistakes ever get acknowledged or corrected, even though he has a section for it on his blog.
It's like Harvey, the invisible rabbit, which only you can see.
I thought Scott's remark was just a comment on how some academics think white people are too bottled up about their emotions, while others think white people are more emotional than everyone else.
Going off like you've done on this little observation is, from my subjective viewpoint, tiresome.
Assuming (which means in this context let's run with the idea) Marxbro is white, I'm inclined to see him as a datum for the idea of white people being more emotional than everyone else. He (hmm, I'm assuming again OK?) may be polite and controlled but his rather fervid focus on minor points which he refuses to concede would certainly be an example of emotional behaviour. I'd criticise this if I didn't recognise the same behaviour in me though.
It's actually Scott who is being overly emotional here. Look at the sneering jokes directed at the outgroup. Look at the emotional descriptors such as "annoying" and "tiresome". What I did is simply attention-to-detail and an insistence on proper citations.
I refuse to "concede" points that I am 100% correct about for good reason. To do so would be illogical.
I must remember you lack a sense of humour... Possibly one of self-awareness as well. People keep pointing out you are not 100% correct, but you discount them.
You're probably right Scott makes jokes at the expense of the woke a lot. But they deserve it: perverting the teachings of Foucault to apply the understanding of power to abstract entities like ethnicities; perverting the teachings of Marx to apply class-based analysis on the basis of a single characteristic? Come on, these guys are a joke. You're no fan of religion, and you're happy to criticise those supporting it. Yet for some reason you pick on minor points which are more debatable than you allow to criticise Scott's poking fun at the woke, a group with probably even less intellectual consistency than your average protestant denomination. Why are you allowed to consistently attack religious beliefs as untrue but in your view Scott is not allowed to make much less virulent attacks on a social-political position.
I've already shown why proper citations are not "tiresome". Scott's remarks have been shown to be false, so "going off" (interesting dramatic verb you have used), by which you mean writing a calm and rational analysis, was actually necessary.
You haven't shown anything other than how ridiculous you're willing to be.
How am I being "ridiculous"?
I enter this section of the comments with trepidation, because I fear that I am falling into the same trap as TGGP, pouring hundreds of words into a debate that obviously has no hope of changing the interlocutor’s mind. Nitpicking about words is going nowhere; could broadening the evidence base possibly help?
Scott said, as an offhand remark in a joking tone, “I thought that woke people were talking about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment was white supremacy because only white people cared about that kind of thing.” He adds later that this tendency is among “things that are obvious and that everyone has had to see a bunch of times.” I take him to assert the following: there is a widespread, easily documentable belief among a subclass of people interested in social justice that calmness, quietness, and low expressed emotion have a uniquely strong association with white people, or in other but roughly equivalent terms, are elements of “whiteness” or indicative of a white-dominant culture; and that requiring or normalizing these culturally “white” traits is an expression of white supremacy.
If this belief is indeed widespread, we don’t need to engage in intense scrutiny of the exact wording of the Smithsonian document; there should be plenty of other sources expressing the same idea in alternative phrasings. And indeed there are. Many of these documents are quite similar, sharing a common source in a worksheet from Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun (ChangeWork, 2001), but the wide dissemination of this worksheet and its derivatives is sufficient to show that “woke people were talking about” the ideas contained in it. Their variations also clarify the underlying meaning of the disputed passages.
My examples are the first three Google results for “characteristics of white culture”—no cherrypicking.
https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/RSJI/GRE/whiteculturehandout.pdf
A worksheet hosted by the Seattle city government.
“White culture assigns a higher value to some ways of behaving than others. It often defines the “other” behaviors as dangerous and/or deviant. For example - Right to comfort. Avoid conflict, emotion . . . Be polite. Comfort level is defined by whites and those that cause discomfort or involved in conflict can be marginalized.” The incorporation of the bullet points from the Tema Okun worksheet is ungrammatical and kind of word-salady, but it seems clear that issuing or obeying the imperatives “Avoid conflict, emotion… Be polite” are behaviors associated with white culture.
https://www.cascadia.edu/discover/about/diversity/documents/Some%20Aspects%20and%20Assumptions%20of%20White%20Culture%20in%20the%20United%20States.pdf
This worksheet is hosted by Cascadia College, a community college in Washington State.
Here, the bullet points taken from the Tema Okun handout are titled “Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture in the United States,” but the meaning of this title is clarified by a note asserting that the listed “traits” are “common characteristics of most U.S. White people most of the time.” According to this source, the imperatives “Avoid conflict, intimacy; Don’t show emotion; Don’t discuss personal life; Be polite” are characteristics both of white culture and of most white people. Again, the document is not grammatically coherent due to the bullet point format, but the idea is clearly that most white people accept that it is good or normative to avoid conflict, be polite, etc.
https://www.thc.texas.gov/public/upload/preserve/museums/files/White_Supremacy_Culture.pdf
This worksheet is created by the Minnesota Historical Society and hosted on the internet by the Texas Historical Commission.
Here, the characteristics in question are not said to be part of “white culture” but explicitly “white supremacy culture.” The opening paragraph asserts that “The characteristics listed below [...] are damaging because they promote white supremacy thinking.” The authors acknowledge, as marxbro1917 has pointed out, that even “Organizations that are people of color led or a majority people of color can also demonstrate many damaging characteristics of white supremacy culture,” so they do not believe that “only white people” value these norms, but they do link them to white people and white supremacy.
The phrasing here is different from the shorter bullet points, but in the same vein of thought, so it lets us see more clearly what the shorter bullet points might be getting at. For the short “avoid conflict,” we have spelled out that in organizations with white supremacy culture, “a lot of energy in the organization is spent trying to make sure that peopleís feelings arenít getting hurt or working around defensive people.” For the short “Be polite,” we see that white supremacy culture places “emphasis on being polite” and ends up “equating the raising of difficult issues with being impolite, rude, or out of line.” For the short “Don’t show emotion,” we get the claim that white supremacy culture is characterized by “the belief that there is such a thing as being objective,” “the belief that emotions are inherently destructive, irrational, and should not play a role in decision-making or group process,” and the behavior of “invalidating people who show emotion.”
I conclude that there is a common and widespread belief, endorsed by city governments, colleges, and agencies for historical preservation, that norms of politeness, conflict-avoidance, and low emotional expressivity are characteristic either of “white culture” or “white supremacy culture.” I am not going to debate the details of the three examples I’ve provided, because nitpicking at the (admittedly unclear, grammatically upsetting, and perhaps intentionally obfuscatory) phrasing of the specific examples cannot explain away the underlying similarity of idea.
There is something of a game going on here with the terms “white people,” “white culture,” and “white supremacy.” None of the sources says that all white people have the same characteristics or that no non-white people do; in fact several are careful to provide caveats to the contrary. So Scott is technically wrong to say that woke people believe that “only white people cared about that kind of thing.” But naming this complex of norms and values “white culture” and insisting that it is common to “most U.S. White people most of the time” clearly implies that the characteristics, behaviors, or norms in question are uniquely associated with white people and not with other racial groups, although the exact nature of that association is left unspecified. Comparison between the parallel sources also shows that in this discursive environment “white culture” and “white supremacy culture” are more or less equivalent and can be substituted for each other in paraphrases of the same source without comment. It seems clear that many people, especially those who endorsed my third document, would say that caring about or (much more) demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment is a form of white supremacy, just as Scott said.
Even though Scott’s phrasing was more casual than would be ideal in a debate, it was readily intelligible to a good-faith reader and correct in substance. An good-faith correction, if you wanted to nitpick, might be, “You should be more careful in summarizing the views of your ideological outgroup; technically, the common “woke” belief is not that ONLY white people care about quietness and low emotional expression, but that valuing these things is characteristic of white culture and white supremacy.” With this substantive agreement about ideas and minor disagreement about tone, the ground would be cleared for a more productive discussion, e.g. what ends it serves to associate clusters of cultural norms with racial groups, whether calmness and politeness are in fact desirable in workplaces, or (in line with marxbro1917’s Marxist critique above) what material conditions and social structures lead corporations and powerful institutions to frame “white culture” in this way.
Part 1:
"I enter this section of the comments with trepidation, because I fear that I am falling into the same trap as TGGP, pouring hundreds of words into a debate that obviously has no hope of changing the interlocutor’s mind. Nitpicking about words is going nowhere; could broadening the evidence base possibly help?"
I don't understand why you would approach a comments section with "trepidation". Hopefully people are all searching for the truth here, no-matter your political background and beliefs. I'm simply happy to be one of the few who actually approaches "woke" arguments with some charitability rather than a simple dismissiveness and sneering jokes. Remember that TGGP is one of the people who smeared an ideological opponent as a pedophile without any proof. It may often seem like I'm "nitpicking", but often nitpicking citations can be quite important. In the case of TGGP my nitpicking led to the discovery that Steve Sailer's citations were actually very bad and he was simply trying to cancel a member of his ideological outgroup. This, to me, seems like a positive; a probably innocent man now has had a more fairer representation in the court of public opinion. Obviously what we're talking about here is much lower stakes, but the same principles apply. Since I'm a logical person, I try to think more carefully about what proof is actually provided.
Now, in this case, Scott needs to provide me with good evidence that the "woke" in this case clearly, unambiguously contended that:
"I hear woke people talk about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment is white supremacy because only white people care about that kind of thing."
This was Scott's original claim (lets ignore Scott's motte-and-bailey actions for now). He should be held to a high standard of evidence here, as he's speaking about outgroup. I've already asked him for a citation, and he linked me to a twitter account. Now, interestingly this already contradicts his initial statement which was that he "hears" woke people talk about it. This is interesting for a couple reasons. Firstly, he states that he has "heard" this, yet he linked to a twitter. You do not hear twitter, you simply see it and read it. Scott's initial phrasing makes it seem as if this is something he has encountered in real-life; yet when asked for a citation he links to a twitter post. Twitter and real life are two very different things. If I want to find proof for any position imaginable I can simply log onto the world wide web and find a handful of examples of almost any possible position or statement. There! Evidence found! My out-goup REALLLY DOES believe this! But this linking of someone on twitter talking about a text on the Smithsonian website simply doesn't back up Scott's original claim; which was that he "hears" woke people talking about this. How many people? Scott doesn't even say "person" - he indicates that he has "heard" multiple "people" talking about this. In this way Scott gives the impression that this is something he ran into multiple times organically and without even trying - when pushed for a citation he found a twitter screenshot of something the Smithsonian had on their website. That is, Scott didn't organically "hear" this at all, he saw it because he follows online conservative circles who heavily promote this kind of stuff to feed the perpetual conservative outrage echo-chamber.
Furthermore, I'm quite sceptical that the Smithsonian accurately represents the "woke", usually these large institutions do some clumsy ass-covering when it comes to questions of race and class. But let's be charitable to the Smithsonian here, because (as I have previously showed) the Smithsonian website doesn't even say what Scott claimed it said in the original body of his essay.
"Scott said, as an offhand remark in a joking tone, “I thought that woke people were talking about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment was white supremacy because only white people cared about that kind of thing.” He adds later that this tendency is among “things that are obvious and that everyone has had to see a bunch of times.” I take him to assert the following: there is a widespread, easily documentable belief among a subclass of people interested in social justice that calmness, quietness, and low expressed emotion have a uniquely strong association with white people, or in other but roughly equivalent terms, are elements of “whiteness” or indicative of a white-dominant culture; and that requiring or normalizing these culturally “white” traits is an expression of white supremacy."
Now it's very interesting that you said "offhand, joking tone". Let's be a little more charitable to the "woke" here. I'm not entirely sure why we are referring to beliefs of an outgroup using an "offhand, joking tone" in the first place. I suspect that if I were to come into this comments section and start using an "offhand, joking tone" I would not only be scolded, I would be accused of trolling. One wonders why this kind of offhand, joking tone is so accepted when it comes to the "woke". Perhaps this is because Rationalists are not actually interested in investigating political ideologies but are more interested in perpetuating smears and signalling towards their ingroup. I have shown this repeatedly in Scott's treatment of even more left-wing figures such as Marx, which he can barely even read. A combination of un-charitability and poor reading skills leads Scott to wildly incorrect conclusions.
Aside from all that, you've missed a very important part of Scott's argument, he said "because only white people cared about that kind of thing". Not only does he have to find evidence that the "woke" have said that demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment was supremacy, he ALSO has to find evidence that someone argued that "only white people cared about that kind of thing". I will put emphasis on the word "only" here - that is, Scott has to find evidence that not only is this an aspect of "white supremacy", he has to find evidence that someone has said that "ONLY white people" cared about it. This is explicitly the opposite of what his Smithsonian citation actually said. Now, there are a couple of options here. Either Scott is so bad at reading comprehension that he is genuinely ignorant of basic facts of the world around him. Or he doesn't really care about nerdy things such as citations and is simply writing essays to appeal to his ingroup and strengthen them at all costs, with no real care for proper evidence.
Scott, being very slippery in his beliefs, has given a citation that superficially looks as if it is evidence for the first part of that claim. However, in true motte-and-bailey style, he has abandoned trying to defend the second part of the sentence. If you look at the body of the essay he has posted, it is still unchanged and intact. This is a classic method of argumentation when someone knows that they hold extreme views which cannot be backed-up by the actual facts of the matter. I suspect that Scott has not put the citation into the main body of the text because he knows it doesn't really support his statement. In fact, if he were to put his citation into the main body of the text, more people would be able to follow the citation and work out that the citation does not support Scott's essay. In my opinion, Scott has left his essay unchanged because he wants to keep the outgroup insults intact and he does not want (most) people to see his weak citation. Most people will simply read the essay and guffaw along and the outgroup insults. This is not the work of a man who wants to charitably investigate a wide range of beliefs; this is the work of a political propagandist. His motte-and-bailey actions lend support to this conclusion. My interactions with Scott more generally have in the past strengthened this conclusion; often about even more clear-cut issues, where the citations given are so obviously wrong as to be jaw-dropping. See for example here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history#comment-1795464
Part 2
"If this belief is indeed widespread, we don’t need to engage in intense scrutiny of the exact wording of the Smithsonian document; there should be plenty of other sources expressing the same idea in alternative phrasings. And indeed there are. Many of these documents are quite similar, sharing a common source in a worksheet from Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun (ChangeWork, 2001), but the wide dissemination of this worksheet and its derivatives is sufficient to show that “woke people were talking about” the ideas contained in it. Their variations also clarify the underlying meaning of the disputed passages."
No, this is incorrect. I'll stop you right here, because what you argue simply doesn't follow from the evidence that you have provided. You are using deductions that don't make any sense. This is not evidence that "woke" people were talking about this at all. This is evidence that ChangeWork (a consulting firm) has found some success in the capitalist market and that other corporate bodies have reproduced their materials on their own websites. The basic Marxist insight here is that capitalist institutions do not represent mass movements, and fundamentally cannot represent mass movements. "Wide dissemination" is possible because capitalists have more money and control the means of production; this means that they can spread their materials further than others.
"My examples are the first three Google results for “characteristics of white culture”—no cherrypicking."
There's no evidence that this doesn't also constitute cherry picking. Actually what it shows is that Google will provide similar links when specific combinations of words are entered - no surprise - that's part of their business. It shows that Google will provide the finest cherries for the cherry-pickers.
"https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/RSJI/GRE/whiteculturehandout.pdf
A worksheet hosted by the Seattle city government.
“White culture assigns a higher value to some ways of behaving than others. It often defines the “other” behaviors as dangerous and/or deviant. For example - Right to comfort. Avoid conflict, emotion . . . Be polite. Comfort level is defined by whites and those that cause discomfort or involved in conflict can be marginalized.” The incorporation of the bullet points from the Tema Okun worksheet is ungrammatical and kind of word-salady, but it seems clear that issuing or obeying the imperatives “Avoid conflict, emotion… Be polite” are behaviors associated with white culture."
Again, I think we should be charitable to what is actually written in the text. I've found that reading comprehension abilities are often quite low in Rationalist circles, leading to various mistakes and misconceptions. So I invite everyone to read closely the actual text you have provided me.
Firstly I can tell that you're unfamiliar with "other" as a category. This link might help you understand a little bit better:
https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Other
Basically the idea is that "the other" doesn't necessarily represent actual, objective behaviours, but rather a stereotypical idea of what is different to oneself, and is all about building a positive self-image. Note that this self-image doesn't necessarily have a strong relation to reality. The idea that these are "imperatives" is very flimsy. The text itself never says "imperatives" so I'm not sure why you would say that. I also don't find it "word-salady" - perhaps you are just not that familiar with the words you are reading (this goes back to fundamental issues of reading comprehension)
You quoted the part "“Avoid conflict, emotion… Be polite”. But you'll notice, if you cast your eyes to the very next sentence, that the text also says "Comfort level is defined by whites and those that cause discomfort or involved in conflict can be marginalized". The key part here is that this is something _defined_ by whites - that is, a person can internally decide on a set of rules which they then apply unevenly to others. There's no actual statement that white people are in reality better at avoiding conflict, avoiding emotion or being polite.
"https://www.cascadia.edu/discover/about/diversity/documents/Some%20Aspects%20and%20Assumptions%20of%20White%20Culture%20in%20the%20United%20States.pdf
This worksheet is hosted by Cascadia College, a community college in Washington State.
Here, the bullet points taken from the Tema Okun handout are titled “Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture in the United States,” but the meaning of this title is clarified by a note asserting that the listed “traits” are “common characteristics of most U.S. White people most of the time.” According to this source, the imperatives “Avoid conflict, intimacy; Don’t show emotion; Don’t discuss personal life; Be polite” are characteristics both of white culture and of most white people. Again, the document is not grammatically coherent due to the bullet point format, but the idea is clearly that most white people accept that it is good or normative to avoid conflict, be polite, etc."
The title says "assumptions" very clearly. Here is a definition of "assumption" from the Cambridge Dictionary that you might find useful:
"something that you accept as true without question or proof"
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/assumption
Furthermore, this is the source that was referenced by the Smithsonian document, so this is not an additional source that would strengthen your argument (even if your argument was able to be strengthened, which seems unlikely) but rather the same source simply reproduced elsewhere. Often people who are not looking carefully at citations will do this. In a misguided attempted to strengthen an otherwise weak argument, they will cite what is basically the same source from the same people multiple times. I will assume that you made this mistake naively and were not deliberately trying to do this.
"https://www.thc.texas.gov/public/upload/preserve/museums/files/White_Supremacy_Culture.pdf
This worksheet is created by the Minnesota Historical Society and hosted on the internet by the Texas Historical Commission.
Here, the characteristics in question are not said to be part of “white culture” but explicitly “white supremacy culture.” The opening paragraph asserts that “The characteristics listed below [...] are damaging because they promote white supremacy thinking.” The authors acknowledge, as marxbro1917 has pointed out, that even “Organizations that are people of color led or a majority people of color can also demonstrate many damaging characteristics of white supremacy culture,” so they do not believe that “only white people” value these norms, but they do link them to white people and white supremacy."
Yes, I am correct and Scott is not correct here. The piece never states that "only" white people do this or believe this.
"The phrasing here is different from the shorter bullet points, but in the same vein of thought, so it lets us see more clearly what the shorter bullet points might be getting at. For the short “avoid conflict,” we have spelled out that in organizations with white supremacy culture, “a lot of energy in the organization is spent trying to make sure that peopleís feelings arenít getting hurt or working around defensive people.”"
Again, this simply doesn't state anything like "I hear woke people talk about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment is white supremacy because only white people care about that kind of thing.". Actually this expresses the opposite, that the organization puts a lot of energy into making sure white people's feelings aren't hurt. This suggests that white people are not calm or quiet during these kinds of discussions, but are overly emotional and prone to feeling hurt.
"For the short “Be polite,” we see that white supremacy culture places “emphasis on being polite” and ends up “equating the raising of difficult issues with being impolite, rude, or out of line.” For the short “Don’t show emotion,” we get the claim that white supremacy culture is characterized by “the belief that there is such a thing as being objective,” “the belief that emotions are inherently destructive, irrational, and should not play a role in decision-making or group process,” and the behavior of “invalidating people who show emotion.”"
Again, there was no actual statement that white people have a culture of actually being polite, simply that they equate the raising of difficult issues with being impolite, rude or out of line. We can see that people who are raising difficult, emotional issues aren't necessarily wrong.
"I conclude that there is a common and widespread belief, endorsed by city governments, colleges, and agencies for historical preservation, that norms of politeness, conflict-avoidance, and low emotional expressivity are characteristic either of “white culture” or “white supremacy culture.”"
The conclusion doesn't follow - "widespread belief" here amounts to three cherry-picked Google results you found all of which rely on the same sources and consulting firms. Just because a culture has "norms" this does not mean that "only" this culture has norm - which is the claim Scott Alexander made. Neither does it mean that white people are actually polite or calm - as shown by the texts emphasis on words like "assumptions" and "belief".
Part 3
"I am not going to debate the details of the three examples I’ve provided, because nitpicking at the (admittedly unclear, grammatically upsetting, and perhaps intentionally obfuscatory) phrasing of the specific examples cannot explain away the underlying similarity of idea."
Likely you are saying that you are "not going to debate" the details because you know that the details don't really support your argument. The idea that the documents in questions are "intentionally obfuscatory" is a strange one and not very charitable to the writers. The possibility that you simply are not very good at reading comprehension for some reason never occurs to you. Neither does it occur to you that you have been primed to think this way by Scott Alexander, a man who has been shown many times to have poor reading comprehension. Another strong possibility is that you do not wish to "debate" this point because you do not wish to show any sort of charitability to the outgroup. In my opinion facts that are hotly contested such as this one should absolutely be up for debate. The idea that certain topics are not up for debate and become tabooed is strange to me, especially when you're essentially just writing off massive segments of the population who are interested in "woke" ideas.
"There is something of a game going on here with the terms “white people,” “white culture,” and “white supremacy.”"
I don't see what the "game" is here. All of these terms are different, this is the reason that they have different terms in the first place and not just a single word or phrase. At best you could maybe say that the different authors of some of the different texts use the terms slightly differently, especially since these different documents appear to have been written many decades apart from each other. That's to be expected. However, if you get the terms mixed up and confuse the different terms used by the different authors, that seems to me like it would be your fault. This is part of why I am emphasising the need for increased reading comprehension abilities within the Rationalist community, by the way.
"None of the sources says that all white people have the same characteristics or that no non-white people do; in fact several are careful to provide caveats to the contrary. So Scott is technically wrong to say that woke people believe that “only white people cared about that kind of thing.”"
Ah, "technically wrong". This is a interesting euphemism for being flatly being wrong. Something that might be used when a person is obviously wrong, but wishes to sugarcoat it. Or, to paraphrase Futuama, "technically wrong, the worst kind of wrong".
"But naming this complex of norms and values “white culture” and insisting that it is common to “most U.S. White people most of the time” clearly implies that the characteristics, behaviors, or norms in question are uniquely associated with white people and not with other racial groups, although the exact nature of that association is left unspecified."
Where does it imply this? As far as I can tell it makes no such implication. Unfortunately when people wish to be uncharitable to a text written by a member of the outgroup they read certain things into the text that simply aren't written there upon closer inspection. Hence the reliance on saying there is an "implication" rather than just actually quoting the source.
"Comparison between the parallel sources also shows that in this discursive environment “white culture” and “white supremacy culture” are more or less equivalent and can be substituted for each other in paraphrases of the same source without comment."
Where do you believe it shows this? I don't think there's any indication that they can (or should) be substituted for each other in the texts provided.
"It seems clear that many people, especially those who endorsed my third document, would say that caring about or (much more) demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment is a form of white supremacy, just as Scott said."
Firstly, that's not actually what Scott said. What Scott said was "I hear woke people talk about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment is white supremacy because only white people care about that kind of thing". Scott's argument contains an important second component, that "only white people care about that sort of thing". There was no indication in your third source that the writers believe such a thing.
Secondly, the third document you're referring to doesn't just talk about a "calm" environment, it explicitly makes statements such as "impatience with any thinking that does not appear “logical” to those with power". Now correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell "calm" and "impatient" are two different things. It seems that the writer is not really of the opinion that white people are actually "calm", but rather that they can be "impatient" and that they can "scapegoat" those that make them feel discomfort. None of this conforms to the false narrative that Scott wrote, and is very good evidence that those who have been accused of being "woke" actually believe something quite different from Scott's uncited and uncharitable remarks.
"Even though Scott’s phrasing was more casual than would be ideal in a debate, it was readily intelligible to a good-faith reader and correct in substance."
I am a good-faith reader, it was both "technically wrong" and incorrect in substance. I have shown this in many instances. I have shown that his lazy (lack of) citations are a wider problem; that one should cite sources even if one feels that the information is "obvious". Scott has continued to lack citations for many of his "jokes" (i.e., his lazy in-group signalling). I have also shown that Scott was not charitable to the actual texts in question, going so far as to completely make up assertions about his ideological opponents, such as that they argued "only white people care about that kind of thing". In all the texts both Scott and you have cited, nobody even came close to making this argument. I have pointed this out at length and yet Scott's essay still does not provide either a correction or a citation. That's absolutely not a rational way to behave, and I feel it actually harms civilization. At a certain point, if this behaviour continues, people will start concluding that Scott is misrepresenting his outgroup deliberately.
Not only is Scott's behaviour not charitable to the actual authors (Katz, Smithsonian), it is not charitable to the wider outgroup. Who is the "woke" here and what are they arguing? Why generalize documents from a couple of select sources (Katz, ChangeWork consulting, etc) into something that "the woke" say? If Scott was interested in being charitable for these arguments, he would have named the people he disagreed with and actually said something of substance about how he disagrees with them. Instead, Scott stereotypes this as something that he "hears" from "woke people". The target of Scott's ire is not Katz or Jones & Okun, but instead the "woke" as a whole. This is how you know that Scott simply isn't approaching the issue in good faith. What Scott does is simply make up a position (which, I will remind you, was not backed up by a single source that he or you have provided) and then say that they "woke" say this. This is the old Trumpian (I actually hate to make this comparison, but in this case it's true) "many people are saying this!". That Scott would degrade public debate in this way is slightly sad, to be honest.
"An good-faith correction, if you wanted to nitpick, might be, “You should be more careful in summarizing the views of your ideological outgroup; technically, the common “woke” belief is not that ONLY white people care about quietness and low emotional expression, but that valuing these things is characteristic of white culture and white supremacy.”"
This is the correction I made for him, plus all my other corrections which still stand. All of these corrections were made in good-faith.
"With this substantive agreement about ideas and minor disagreement about tone, the ground would be cleared for a more productive discussion"
The ground has already been cleared for productive discussion, I have already achieved this in my original post asking for citations and in all my subsequent posts.
"e.g. what ends it serves to associate clusters of cultural norms with racial groups, whether calmness and politeness are in fact desirable in workplaces, or (in line with marxbro1917’s Marxist critique above) what material conditions and social structures lead corporations and powerful institutions to frame “white culture” in this way."
Scott will likely never address these issues. As I have shown, Scott appears to only be interested in signalling to his in-group and being uncharitable to his outgroup. You've indicated that you would find it productive to discuss a Marxist critique about what material conditions and social structures lead corporations and powerful institutions to frame "white culture" in certain ways. I agree, that would be very productive, but I fear that it would be difficult to be productive when one party is not using proper citations and is not being charitable to outgroup sources. And if Scott cannot be charitable to centrist organisations like the Smithsonian I have some doubts that he will be charitable to Marxist sources.
However, I will say that the ground has always been clear for this kind of discussion and I happily invite Scott to join me in a discussion about a Marxist analysis. Or we could simply go over some of the other aspects of this discussion that he has not addressed sufficiently. Let's just say that I'm looking forward to that discussion, but that I wont hold my breath while waiting for it.
Never seen it, glad you cited it here, and thank you.
Count me as another vote for the "I never saw that before and assumed you were making a cheap shot about how fragile woke people are" group. Not everyone follows the same Twitter feeds you do.
My assumption when I saw that line was that the original complaint was something about tone policing, or the sort of people who believe that if your opponent is getting angry that must mean they don't have any genuine arguments, and I was all set to make a similar (but less marxbro-y) post before I saw this one.
If you follow Scott's link you'll notice it never actually says what he claims in the main body of the post.
Of course, Scott then proceeded to motte-and-bailey the issue with his citation.
This is why citations are useful - it shows us immediately that someone's evidence doesn't back up their claims.
"Don't show emotion" and "Be polite" are both on the list, last page. The only part that doesn't exactly fit the statement in the article is that Scott described it as "only white supremacists care about it" rather than "an aspect of white culture," which is within the bounds of hyperbole.
Ironically, I probably would have used your writing style as Exhibit A of "why an insistent, rules-lawyering demand for exactly perfect debate practice can be utterly toxic to debate, especially if applied more rigidly to your opponent's statements than your own."
"Within the bounds of hyperbole" - why is it that Scott is using hyperbole when describing a political outgroup? Doesn't that seem quite uncharitable to you?
The title quite clearly says aspects and assumptions, as I have said before. This is not "rules-lawyering", this is simple reading comprehension and avoiding being uncharitable to an outgroup.
If you find my debate style "toxic" then I would suggest you simply aren't prepared for political debate in general.
I don't agree with marxbro (in this case or many others), but I think it was reasonable for him to want evidence. There are other people who share your views about woke culture who thought "that's either a joke, or a surprise". I personally hadn't heard about the Smithsonian thing, and now I'm glad I know it.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/
What do you disagree with me about?
Oh, marx, bros, the usual.
That doesn't really narrow it down. What specifically do you disagree with?
Even though I can hear some people groaning "don't feed", I'm going to take my own advice to Scott, assume your request for information is sincere, and make one serious effort to treat you with dignity.
You're an ardent supporter of Marxism, right? I'm not sure whether I would disagree with you about it. I certainly see some good, for what it's worth. What I disagree with are your methods.
I'm a former conversational pugilist. I've been there. I feel bad for the way you get into go-nowhere fights on this site, man.
If you really think Marxism is going to triumph again, someday, by revolutions, by sheer fighting, then you should be sitting back, quietly sipping your favorite beverage with confidence.
Otherwise Marxism is competing in the marketplace of ideas. Even when people are trying very hard to shop the marketplace for what's true, they're still affected by salesmanship. Good salesmanship makes ideas attractive. People investigate attractive ideas first. We put the books at the top of our list. We save unattractive ideas for last and kinda push ourselves through the process.
A lot of what you do is just bad salesmanship. I mean stuff like pushing people through many exchanges, frankly telling people they're wrong, telling people they haven't done enough reading / should read / would know if they read, questioning people's motives, calling out Scott for dishonesty when he's made a good faith effort to find the truth, and just generally being highly confrontational. It makes your positions unattractive regardless of their truth or falsity, and I just can't see that being good for your cause. You're not convincing anyone to give Marx an honest try; instead, you're convincing a lot of people to put him at the bottom of their reading list. I don't want that for you as a person and I don't want that for your favorite political philosophy.
I think you could learn a lot from recent book review winner Lars Doucet. He had an idea (Georgism) that he passionately believed in. He didn't move around the comments getting into fights about it. Instead, he wrote a funny, engaging book review. He made a good faith effort to check it for truth, anticipating and acknowledging a lot of concerns, including ones he couldn't address. He made it an offering (something nice that people could silently take or leave) instead of a confrontation (something personal that gives non confrontational people stress or guilt). He did *a lot* of craft work to make it fun and interesting to read. He did a lot of work to understand his audience (it's no accident that he gave a bunch of nerdy politics readers an excuse to bring back the anachronistic "By George". that was playing to the gallery). As a result, a bunch of people, myself included, are reading Henry George, and enjoying it.
You could be that guy. You should be that guy. I disagree with you forever being stuck in a bunch of comment fights.
There are also social media posts (and sorry, I haven't bookmarked them) about "group of black women go to a restaurant, other public place; are asked to turn it down because they're being so loud; go on social media to say this is racism against their culture" which I've definitely seen before.
Propositions that black kids get disciplined in schools more than white kids because of 'cultural behaviours' which include being loud, being boisterous, talking in class, etc.
That one ridiculous tweet which got scrubbed in the immediate aftermath of the tragic shooting of a black teenager, where some bint was going on about "it's been normal for thousands of years for teenagers to fight, including with knives, no reason to call the cops". No, if you see one girl trying her best to stab another, just stand back and let them at it? Really?
"Some bint". This doesn't seem like a very good way to be charitable to someone. In any case, if you don't have any evidence then I'm not really interested with your personal anecdotes from the social media ether.
There's a lot worse I could have called her. But you are free to accept or ignore as you like, and likewise with the rest of us.
I don't think "there's a lot worse I could have called [x]" should be the standard of charitability and politeness among Rationalists. I am free to ignore things, of course, but I'd rather highlight your lack of evidence and tendency towards cherry-picking anecdotes.
Honey-bunny, stop calling people on here liars before you start policing my language.
I'm not "policing" your language, as I have no authority and you have not broken any laws. However, I quite enjoy pointing taboo things out (like that Rationalists are capable of lying) and I will continue to do so.
I'm well within my rights to point out the simple fact that "there's a lot worse I could have called [x]" is not a very high standard of charitability.
I believe you are referring to Bree Newsome. I can't tell Bree from Adam ... or Eve ... but I gather that Bree was recognizable as a vocal member/supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States.
Your paraphrase is remarkably close to the actual quote, which began with the words
"Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons..."
Taking a charitable reading of what you wrote: the phrase "some bint" might be words that I wouldn't use, but they do not detract from the fact that some supporters of BLM were willing to claim that teens fighting with knives was a Black thing that didn't need to be stopped by a Policeman with a gun.
This is another point in favor of the general thought that White/Western culture is more emotionally reserved, and non-White culture is more exuberant.
I think that particular point is a little too simplistic to express the reality, but I also think it is a point that is worth lampooning when it is misused... As in the argument offered by Bree Newsome.
"Where society has told Black people to “be quiet”, or that we’re “too loud”, revelling in joy is an act of resistance."
https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/what-is-black-joy
A friend posted on Facebook that it was just a knife fight, why would you involve the police? Somehow linking this to white supremacy.
Of course, my understanding of a knife fight involves more than one knife. Only one knife makes it seem more like a stabbing.
Why are you so concerned with protecting the woke, bro? This is the position which is hugely popular with the American elites and hugely unpopular with the American proletariat. Are you sure you're on the correct side of these barricades, comrade?
I notice that marxism is also very popular among the elites (I suspect much more than among the actual proletariat). This is weird initially, but I think this is also how it was in Russia, for example - most of the Marxists were educated middle-class folks, which were sponsored by contemporary analogues of Jeff Bezos and Tom Steyer, and were largely seeing themselves asthe "woke" vanguard (in the original meaning of the word, as somebody who is aware of things others aren't) whose duty is to educate and agitate a barely conscious proletariat.
This is I think a generic foundation of all Marxist thought, at least as it applies on the ground - while Marxists are acting for the benefit of the proletariat, the actual proletariat is too stupid and too oppressed to know and express their real needs and desires, so instead the Marxist elite is going to do their thinking for them, for their own good. And if they disagree, it only shows how deeply oppressed they are and how they have been forced to internalize their own oppression to the point where they are unable to recognize their own interests (while the Marxist elite, armed with Marxist Science, can easily do that).
That is true, but at the same time:
Does anybody doubt that Joe "Brokeasshit" Coalminer, VA is voting against his interests once every four years?
I'll answer for you: No.
I'd say "it's complicated". First, in presidential election, votes are aggregated by state, so VA vote is not only Joe's but many others. Second, interests vary - a lot of people prefer to pay low taxes and receive generous state services, but it usually one or the other. Third, what do you think Joe's true interests are and how should he vote to achieve them?
I'm interested in being charitable. "Woke" is a broad pejorative that is twisted to mean whatever it is people want it to mean, so I don't think it's very useful to say a "woke" position is popular with this or that class.
Nah, that's not true. Woke is used as a pejorative to mean very specific class of people. Nobody says "woke" to mean somebody is not running fast enough, or not good at solving chess puzzles, or is too obsessed with mountain bicycling, or smells bad. Woke has very specific meaning - a type of person who is obsessed with matters concerning identity politics, inequality and oppression and tending to view any event and any question through the lens of those and aggressively demand the same from everybody who comes into contact with them. As Wikipedia quotes:
in this pejorative sense, "woke" was used to describe anyone who was "a slave to identity politics".
I find this description pretty close to target, except that "slave" implies external coercion (btw a woke person would be compelled to object to it for PC reasons), but the relationship between wokes and idpol is more like a relationship between an enthusiastic cult follower and the cult she belongs to.
"being charitable" is for the decadent bourgeoisie. Do you know nothing about the Red Terror? "To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated" - these are the words of the true revolutionary, this is the level of charity our class enemies deserve. You really better decide which side you're on now comrade, if you know what's good for you, it'll be far too late when NKVD will come knocking on your door.
I've seen the word "woke" applied to proletarians as well as members of the bourgeoisie. This is why you need Marxist analysis in the first place, rather than messy and unclear pejoratives.
I don't think a commissar will be interested in these excuses, and all *he* needs is revolutionary consciousness and working-class solidarity, to summarily execute you as the enemy of the people.
A commissar wouldn't be considering unclear bourgeois categories such as "woke". They would be considering Marxist categories.
Excellent post: interesting, thoughtful, and funny.
There is an error in the sentence ending "(presumably because staff are less emotions)".
Living in Russia, I can say that ADHD (translated as СДВГ) is less recognized by the psychiatry community here because of its unclear aetiology. Doctors usually refuse to treat the patients in the absence of dangerous symptoms, and state the diagnosis as "organic nervous system disorder", "psychoorganic syndrome" or indeed "neurasthenia". Adderall and Ritalin are illegal drugs here. Patients usually get prescribed nootropics (glycine, racetams) and adrenaline reuptake inhibitors (atomoxetine).
At the same time there are some articles in popular online magazines telling stories about children and adults struggling with ADHD in Russia. (https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.the-village.ru%2Fcity%2Fstories%2F285860-adhd) Some people order illegal drugs from nearby countries. Researchers also are aware of it. At the same time, I see some articles talking about US problems with over-medicalization of ADHD with dangerous narcotics driven by profit-seeking pharma companies. (https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Flenta.ru%2Farticles%2F2019%2F02%2F12%2Fadderallnation%2F)
So if you ever wondered what would happen to ADHD people if stimulants weren't legal, Russia seems like a good test case.
The idea that psychiatric diseases (at least some of them?) are caused by psychiatry is certainly very intriguing, and a certain totaly-not-a-cult-not-even-close community would be delighted to hear more about it.
As for Mental Health Unawareness Campaigns - the Big Social Media has already perfected the technology of banning any discussion of particular subject, and of anybody - from a lowly peasant to a President - who dares to mention it. So deploying a total ban on mental health discussion would be just a matter of somebody getting the ears of three-four people in charge. Of course, there would be places who don't play ball - like Substack - that will still allow such things and this particular posting may survive (at least until their hosting turns off their servers and the banks refuse to process their payrolls), but the combined power of Google/Twitter/Facebook should be enough to make a noticeable impact. We already have experts ready to go on TV and tell people whatever needs to be told. We already have cultural gatekeepers ready to force everybody to believe whatever the TV experts say. We already know how to ban words and topics and expell anybody who mentions them, in any context and with any intent, from the polite society. As a society, America is basically made for Mental Health Unawareness Campaign now.
Even if they’re “social constructs spread by marketing”, I don’t think recognizing that and dialectically raising the consciousness is enough to get out - “just pretend you’re not depressed, it’s in your head” is a common line that depressed people lampoon all over the net.
If mental illness is a memetic disease, of course pretending you don't have it when you're already got it is as useful as wearing a mask when you're already infected with a virus. It may help others but for you it's certainly too late for that. So maybe people who say "it's only in your head" aren't trying to help the sick - they are trying to instinctively protect themselves before the meme takes hold?
"It's only in your head, and I'd like to keep it from getting into anyone else's head" does make a certain amount of sense.
(It's still a ridiculous phrase, all of human experience is located within our heads!)
FWIW I suspect important part of the story with how culture-bound anorexia is is that humans are pretty strongly inclined to pick up cultural/moral taboos about what is and isn't food (Leviticus etc. etc.)
It's only on exposure to modern dieting culture where so many things aren't considered food that this turned into people not eating (and I guess this would explain the correlation with OCD)
Ok since you mentioned it yourself, I have to admit to a dark little secret - there's a part of me which is absolutely certain that this model is the main explanation of why the Bay Area appears to have such *insanely* (pun intended) higher rates of mental health issues than the small town I grew up in.
Back there, sure you could meet a person who's a bit weird sometimes, and there were some people with mental retardation and/or addictions. But things like "depression", "autism" or "anorexia" were stuff from the TV, not the real world. Here everyone either has a mental health issue themselves, or have a partner, close relative or friend who's dealing with it.
Yeah yeah, underdiagnosis, social bubbles, stigma, *I* know. But there's a part of me that doesn't and keeps on feeling like it's those fancy-ass bay area hipsters making up fake problems for themselves because they have no real ones.
I was also surprised about this upon moving to the Bay Area. I think it's a combination of - Bay Area attracts queer people and (frequently autistic) programmers, both of whom have a weird neurotype you'd expect to correlate with other weird neurotypes. Part of it is there's less stigma and more reverse-stigma, so more people classify mild weirdness as a mental disorder and get it treated. And yeah, part of it might be something like the stuff in this post.
The Bay Area probably competes with Boston, Manhattan-Brooklyn, and the D.C. suburbs for the highest average IQ region in the country. Just having a larger vocabulary of terms for psychiatric maladies because you have a larger vocabulary in general likely makes you more likely to see yourself as having one of those interesting illnesses.
It's also fair to liken it to 3rd Year Medical Student syndrome, to people with just enough intelligence and education to get themselves in trouble. We're not talking about people with life science PhDs and years of experience in mental illness. We're mostly talking about programmers and scientists and engineers from only tangentially related areas.
I think I'm in many ways a very central example of the Bay Area person. I have a master's in math from a very nice school, and I worked as a programmer for some FAANGs before moving out of the Bay Area, and I'm the child and brother of medical doctors, and the spouse of a bio researcher, so I know a lot of words, but I don't have deep knowledge or experiences. I see and saw people like me assigning their own mental illnesses with high confidence on maybe low evidence.
Indeed.
In contrast, in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1950, people would have just said, "I got the blues" but then written a catchy song about it.
You think everyone was just drinking for fun? At least some of those people weren't trying to self medicate their depression and anxiety?
I think alcohol is a fairly addictive substance, and if you get excessively exposed to it in your youth, either through the parents' abuse or it being viewed as "cool", you don't need any extra explanations as to why some people would go on to abusing it. Of course, statistically likely someone was "medicating themselves", but I don't have any reasons to believe this was a significant fraction. And even if it was 100%, this still wouldn't bring the [perceived] rates anywhere near those of the bay area.
Ready to have your mind blown?
"Compared to controls, sons of the alcoholics were about four times more likely to be alcoholic but no more likely to be heavy drinkers or have other psychiatric disorders. This increased rate of alcoholism applied whether the sons were raised by their own alcoholic parents or by nonalcoholic foster parents."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780126914030500677
I'm not sure why is it supposed to blow my mind? Increase in chances of alcoholism (the right tail of the distribution) but not heavy drinking (the right side but not quite tail of the distribution) is weird, but nowhere near the most counterintuitive finding I've seen in a biological or social study.
Sorry! I should have been more clear. The rate of alcoholism is exactly the same regardless of environment. It's almost entirely a genetic phenomenon.
That seems a little odd, it's entirely genetic but only for males? (I don't suppose there's a way to access the full study?)
I'm just entertained the notion that Scientology's attitude towards psychiatrists as charlatans might be (somewhat) true.
"True" is probably the wrong word - there's a difference between someone who makes up a problem so they can sell you something, and someone engaged with a real problem with counterproductively bad infohazard praxis. We *wish* the latter were charlatans.
Yeah. Even if the strongest version of this topic were true, it would still be correct to say "psychiatrists are wrong for the right reasons, and scientologists are right for the wrong reasons".
Under the theory that formless extreme stress finds an outlet determined by your cultural milieu, it seems like the sudden huge spike of anorexia in Hong Kong ought to have *displaced* other disorders. Did it?
Everytime someone refers to Northern Ireland as religious or ethnic violence, a small part of me dies inside.
My Dad's half Northern Irish and half Finnish and my Mom from Kerry and outside the Finnish fourth- I have enough runs of homozygosity in my genome to give the Habsburgs a run for their money.
So you're well entitled to sing "The Orange and the Green" 😀https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3Q6U0MYNS0
Yeah, that's in large part why I scorn Lynn's IQ scores about the Republic scoring lower than the North which scores lower than Britain. We're a mongrel mix of pretty much the same!
How would you term it then, if you had to put it in a bucket?
Ulster Scots vs Irish seems like enough of an ethnic difference for ppl to rally behind in principle… if you can tell them apart by surname or dialect or something.
Geopolitical/cultural
Literally I can't eat fruit or bread and I get iron overload from inheriting from both my Mom and Dad. I'm HLA Class II 16:02 homozygous and every polygenic prediction tool is hilariously off when you're this inbred given the number of regulatory intronic loci we don't even know about yet.
Like they've been banging each other for literal ages politically and sexually.
Years ago I had a discussion with P. M. Lawrence on my blog about the extent to which the big division in Northern Ireland is religious/ethnic:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/pathetic-that-this-even-has-to-be-pointed-out/#comment-13481
From a Seamus Heaney poem: https://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/sh-what.htm
"Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:
Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule
That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod
And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap"
There's definitely allegations about "that shade of red hair is Catholic and the other shade of red hair is Protestant" in the North. The big difference is between the Planter stock - the Scots (more so than the English) who came over in the reign of James VI and I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantation_of_Ulster
and the division between the 'native' Irish and the Scottish, who after a few generations then became the "Scots-Irish" of the American "Albion's Seed". There's social distinctions and a tendency not to intermarry, but I really doubt there's a huge genetic difference between the two populations (especially since the North of Ireland had long had contact with and movement between Ireland and Scotland).
I've heard that everyone was defined as Catholic or Protestant, with Jews as Protestants.
And there's an sf novel (title unfortunately forgotten) which turns on whether aliens are defined as Catholic or Protestant.
It's a geopolitical and cultural conflict.
The IRA covered the last two family funerals on my Mom's side and my Dad's dad was an orphan from Derry/who I get my surname from whose roots go back to Scotland.
And again. I literally can't break down fructose. My skin color is ultraviolet. Like I WISH there was an ethnic divide.
What do you mean by "covered" the funerals? Paid for them?
Oh wait, technical definition of ethnic has nothing to do with genetics. Sure, call it that.
Coeliac disease is an Irish thing, which is why I was bemused when the gluten-free fad started up - are there *that* many coeliacs in America? what do you mean, they're not coeliac, they just think they have some other problem with wheat?
Another fad disorder, plain and simple.
Coeliac disease is a real biological disorder. Non-coeliac problems with gluten are probably a fad disorder.
Exactly, that's the 'some other problem' Deiseach mentioned.
Isn't religion a big part of culture, and ethnicity an important point of geopolitics? Or do you mean that these parts are not central in this conflict?
Young Americans appear to have been undergoing a worsening in mental health since about 2013, roughly the era of the Great Awokening.
The evidence in Haidt and Lukianoff's "The Coddling of the American Mind" points to the second Obama administration as being the era when the national nervous breakdown began.
The authors cite alarming evidence of a recent increase in emotional problems. For example, the percentage of college students who said they suffered from a “psychological disorder” increased among males from 2.7 percent in 2012 to 6.1 percent by 2016 (a 126 percent increase). Over the same four years, the percentage of coeds who saw themselves as psychologically afflicted rose from 5.8 percent to 14.5 percent (150 percent growth).
Haidt and Lukianoff are somewhat impressed by the data assembled in psychologist Jean M. Twenge’s new book "iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood." Twenge theorizes that the rise of smartphones and social media from 2007 onward has made the teenage years a living hell of status anxiety and call-out culture for kids born from 1995 onward. ...
It isn't just wokeness, there's also fear of climate change.
Really? I don't spend much time with kids these days so I wouldn't know. To me, climate change seems like such a boring, slow-motion thing to fear, but I suppose kids are so indoctrinated in goodthink these days that they would be terrified of something that could cause major problems a few generations from now.
In contrast, I lived through three decades (1958-1988) during which nuclear war was a by no means utterly implausible possibility, which strikes me as rather a more dramatic thing to worry about.
But did I? I don't remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, so probably the scariest time of the Cold War for me was the month or so after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas 1979, a day on which I happened to receive as a present the novel "The Third World War" about a Soviet tank invasion thru the Fulda Gap. That was all very depressing and worrisome.
But I also remember that two days later, I took my Christmas gift cash to the record store and bought the epochal debut album "The Pretenders," the underrated "Setting Sons" by The Jam, and my all-time favorite album "London Calling" by The Clash. Here's my review in the Rice U. "Thresher:"
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245433/m1/11/
And then I went to the Whisky-a-Go-Go several times thru New Year's Eve.
So, I must confess to having had a great time even during this most worrisome crisis.
I've read about terrified young people.
I realize that we have to use ourselves as starting points for thinking about people, but I strongly recommend assimilating the idea that there's a lot of variety among people.
For example, there are apparently a good many people with Christian upbringings who are terrified of Hell, and presumably a smaller but not insignificant number or who are terrified of the end of the world.
This doesn't mean that everyone with such an upbringing is terrified, and I get the impression that even siblings with similar upbringings about religion don't all react the same way.
It would probably be worth studying the difference between people who take potentially terrifying input and actually get terrified vs. those who more or less brush it off.
Thanks
Presumably, the number of young people terrified of hell has been declining over the course of this century, but we saw in the US an upsurge in college students' depression and anxiety at the same time. Other things that went up while fear of hell went down: social media, wokeness, gender ideology, anti-white hate, etc
If anyone reading this is interested in digging a little deeper into the question of ancient Roman PTSD, they should check out ACOUP's post on the matter. Not sure how to embed links here, but the URL is https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/
Ah, it's automatic. Convenient.
PTSD was recently studied in Turkana warriors in Africa in this PNAS paper. https://www.pnas.org/content/118/15/e2020430118
Highly recommended for an insight into what it probably looked like throughout human history
There are clues in classical literature that Roman soldiers suffered from something like PTSD.
On PTSD in wars, is WWI "shell shock" usually regarded as what we would now call PTSD? Because there was a hell of a lot of that and the medical establishment took a while to acknowledge it and it came as big surprise.
Warfare changed a lot in the few decades before WWI. With the exception of sieges, which were always understood to be very wearing on an army (which is why the convention arose that a city would be invested, ie surrounded, and then given the choice between surrender without a sacking or a siege with a sacking, the idea being to try to avoid sieges), most wars before 1900 or so involved set-piece battles lasting a day or two (Leipzig in 1813 was four days and that was regarded as utterly exceptional).
The continuous contact of both armies and the continuous low-level fighting (patrolling, raiding, firing off a few artillery shells, etc) didn't start in WWI - the Russo-Japanese war was like that ten years earlier - but WWI was the first big war to feature it.
So, if there is a discontinuity and PTSD in warfare starts with WWI shell shock, then there is a discontinuity in the experience of warfare itself that takes place at the same time.
This would also suggest that persistent trauma is a bigger deal for PTSD formation than a single big traumatic event; I don't know anywhere near enough about PTSD to know if that is true.
Ancient Greek battles c. 500 B.C. tended to be quite short not just in days but in minutes before one side broke and ran.
It sounds kind of fun to do this with your buddies one summer day every several years from, say, age 17 to 30, assuming that you, personally, didn't get a spear in your back. It was probably a little like big game hunting, something humans had evolved to do.
“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” (Lee)
Though I don't get the impression that the common soldier of the American Civil War would have agreed. Still, most of the complaints from their letters tend to be about the boredom, the constant marching, the lack of and poor quality of food, and the separation from their families. A very different set of issues from the WWI complaints about dead bodies and artillery.
Also the camp diseases, which caused more casualties than the battles in every war before WWI. They didn't get mentioned in the letters much, as dysentery isn't a polite topic of conversation.
Homesickness is an interesting example of the opposite pattern from PTSD or anorexia: rather than it being an apparently new emotional debility that may or may not have roots in the past, it's an old one that is no longer taken seriously even thought it's probably around as much as ever.
Homesickness was acknowledged to be a big problem during the Civil War. According to official medical records recounted in Susan J. Matt's 2011 book "Homesickness: An American History," 5000 soldiers were taken ill with "nostalgia," and 74 of them succumbed to it.
https://vdare.com/articles/homesickness-there-s-a-reason-stand-and-deliver-s-escalante-returned-to-bolivia
Dr. Matt, who worked with her husband on six campuses before she finally achieved tenure at Utah St. in Ogden, UT, explains how Victorian Americans were extremely sympathetic toward the homesick, but in the 20th Century, when big corporations and big military were shuffling Americans all over the landscape, we were told to buck up and get over it.
In my own life, I can see that homesickness has played a major role in my career decisions, even though home to me is the rather comic San Fernando Valley. I probably should have moved to NYC or DC, the correct locales for a pundit talent. The SFV, in contrast, is a fine place for a screenwriter, but that's not quite who I am.
It's also possible that some people were affected more than others, or that diagnoses were not made until much, much later so that people who might have had it weren't considered as suffering from anything much (or at all). If you don't have a name for something, it's hard to make a coherent whole of the experiences, and the expectation (from yourself as well as from those around you) that you should just "pull yourself together" and "get on with things" means that you don't think of it as a condition until you get 'permission' to do so now that it is Real Medical Condition.
From C.S. Lewis' biography, he spoke very little of his war-time experiences (shipped out to the Somme on his 19th birthday in 1917) and seems to have pushed that part of his life to the back of his mind, or experienced it as being something of the distant past:
"Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gum boots with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire. Familiarity both with the very old and the very recent dead confirmed that view of corpses which had been formed the moment I saw my dead mother. …But for the rest, the war — the frights, the cold, the smell of H[igh].E[xplosive]., the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet — all this shows rarely and faintly in memory."
Note that WWI was probably the first war where the majority of the common soldiers were literate and practiced at writing about themselves (I wouldn't want to strongly oppose the American Civil War as a candidate though) . Previous wars are recounted through the officer classes and exceptional individuals who may skew the accounts a lot.
What are the influential Great War works of literature and were they by officer-types or enlisted-types?
The truth about how awful WWI had been suddenly exploded upon the Western world around 1928-29 about a decade after the end of the war.
"All Quiet on Western Front" was by Erich Maria Remarque, a draftee from a working class background. He was obviously a superior individual, to judge from the women who had affairs with him, such as Hedy Lamarr, Marlene Dietrich, Dolores Del Rio, and his last wife Paulette Goddard, whose estate funded in his name the heroic Tony Judt's professorship at NYU. I would suspect that in most 20th Century armies Remarque would have been identified and sent to officer candidate school, but Germany in WWI had a very small officer corps and it wasn't expected that men of talent be elevated. For example, Hitler remained a corporal after four years of courageous service, despite his evident talents for leadership. Remarque was wounded pretty fast and missed the rest of the war due to convalescence so he missed the chance to promoted to officer class.
Ernest Hemingway: "A Farewell to Arms." The brilliant son of a doctor, Hemingway was obvious officer material, but he was rejected by the U.S. Army in December 1917 for poor eyesight. So he saw the elephant as an ambulance driver.
Among the British writers who revealed the truth about the war, English poet Wilfred Owen was middle class and an officer. Siegfried Sassoon was an upper class half-Baghdadi Jewish officer. Robert Graves was upper middle class and an officer.
The pro-war Ernst Junger ("Storm of Steel") was the son of a wealthy chemical engineer. He enlisted and then became an officer.
So, most of the famous writers were middle class or higher, which
I've seen a thick book of letters by Civil War soldiers.
Re: "The Troubles", we also referred to the Second World War as "The Emergency".
The Zanzibarian expression “an attack of the nerves” seems more like it might be a translation/carried over from when the Portuguese were the main colonial power; the French have the expression "crise de nerfs" and it's common enough among working-class/lower middle-class Irish and British to talk about "being on pills for my nerves", so looking up the Portuguese version, there's (what seems to me) the more modern term "colapso nervosa" (nervous breakdown) and (what seems to me) the older term "crise nervosa" https://blog.psicologiaviva.com.br/crise-nervosa/
"The nervous crisis can be triggered by numerous emotional and physical responses that can aggravate your condition, such as: irritability, crying spells, appetite changes, lack of interest in social life, reactivity, alcohol and drug addiction (way to escape from reality), lack of motivation, extreme anger, violence, isolation from people, insomnia, fear, panic, sweating, pain, fatigue, agitation, among others."
So "I'm having trouble with my nerves" is possibly more a universal explanation (along with "possession by demons/spirits") for such illnesses, until Modern Western Science comes along with a Latin or Greek name for the condition instead.
I don't know if anorexia was "introduced" to Hong Kong by adopting Western ideas, it possibly again is "new description from outside of what we already have in our culture". East Asian beauty ideals for women include being thin (sometimes very thin https://martalivesinchina.wordpress.com/2017/08/07/beauty-standards-in-china/ "Every few months, a new “skinny challenge” appears in Chinese social media to prove how thin you are. The most famous ones are the “waist narrower than a A4 sheet of paper”, the “knees together can be covered by an iPhone” and the “holding coins in your collarbone”), so that natural slimness plus adhering to standards meant that "oh, this girl is severely dieting? well, that's normal!"
European societies also have the idea that "you have to suffer to be beautiful", so introducing the idea that "no, actually, starving yourself until your bones show isn't 'normal'" was a unique idea, and yeah, like a lot of trends, it got adopted by everyone to show how up-to-date and special they were (hence why Sing Lee can say "we didn't have anorexia until it became fashionable").
Again, Western societies have been the same way: the glamorisation of tuberculosis, even though it was a genuine scourge, making the ideal of the pale, delicate, wasting away female character in fiction (and probably real life as well, after all, why have a "fainting couch" unless you can decorously lie there all wan and fragile?) and we can't laugh at the Japanese for adopting German crazes around depression, not from the society which went crazy over "The Sorrows of Young Werther" which also had a European fan following to the extent that Thackeray wrote a satirical poem about it in 1855:
Werther had a love for Charlotte
Such as words could never utter;
Would you know how first he met her?
She was cutting bread and butter.
Charlotte was a married lady,
And a moral man was Werther,
And, for all the wealth of Indies,
Would do nothing for to hurt her.
So he sighed and pined and ogled,
And his passion boiled and bubbled,
Till he blew his silly brains out,
And no more was by it troubled.
Charlotte, having seen his body
Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well-conducted person,
Went on cutting bread and butter.
I think that there's a definite point about the adoption of Western science, technology and medicine, so that traditional definitions and treatments of conditions are scrapped in favour of "this is called X and the symptoms are A, B, C and sometimes D and you treat it by regular doses of Z" diagnosis. But I don't think "oh, some societies at some times never even had this condition!" holds true. It may not have been called that, it may have been understood as running amok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_amok or possession by ghosts/spirits/demons, it may have undergone several changes as fashions in diagnosis changed in Western medicine, but that "people C never had illness until they started importing fashions from people D" doesn't make sense.
I don't think anyone would argue "nobody in Japan ever had diabetes until Western medicine took off" because the human body works the same way, pretty much, wherever you are, so why should the human brain and mind be greatly different?
Self-starvation in the past was seen as religious asceticism. For example, St. Catherine of Sienna, a 14th Century mystic, diplomat, reformer, and celebrity starved herself to death at age 33.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_of_Siena
My impression of anorexics today is that they tend to be supercilious upper middle class girls who have gotten carried away at out-competing the other girls to be thin. I don't know enough about religious asceticism to say if there are parallels between that and today's anorexics (St. Catherine of Siena was an extraordinary individual, so I'm not confident drawing analogies based on her), or whether the anorexia of the last few decades is a new thing.
We seem to have cross-posted on this, I did mention St. Catherine elsewhere
And even in her time, people were concerned at how severely she fasted, and her reply was that this wasn't by choice, it was an illness (so, like the Hong Kong pre-anoxerics):
From a letter replying to someone who wrote to her regarding her fasting:
"You sent me word to pray God particularly that I might eat. I tell you, my father, and I say it in the sight of God, that in all ways within my power I have always forced myself once or twice a day to take food. And I have prayed constantly, and do pray God and shall pray Him, that in this matter of eating He will give me grace to live like other creatures, if it is His will—for it is mine. I tell you, that often enough, when I have done what I could, I enter within myself, to recognize my infirmity, and God, who by most special grace has made me correct the sin of gluttony. I grieve much that I have not corrected that miserable fault of mine through love. I for myself do not know what other remedy to adopt, except that I beg you to pray that Highest Eternal Truth, that He give me grace, if it is more for His honour and the salvation of my soul, to enable me to take food if it please Him."
> I tell you, that often enough, when I have done what I could, I enter within myself, to recognize my infirmity, and God, who by most special grace has made me correct the sin of gluttony.
It seems like she uses 'gluttony' in the way that I first learned reading C.S. Lewis (in "The Screwtape Letters"), i.e. any 'obsession' with food and eating, NOT just overeating.
Neat!
One interesting thing that may be related is the "Truman Show Delusion." The Truman Show was a popular movie released in 1998 where the main character is born and raised in an entirely artificial environment. All of the people he interacts with, including his wife and parents, are paid actors and his every move is broadcast to a huge audience. After it was released, a few mentally ill people started claiming that everyone around them was an actor and they were stuck in an artificial world. Nobody knows how many, but it's enough for some psychologists to bring it to the attention of popular media.
According to memories of an old doctor, there still existed a few cases of "hysterical paralysis" in Czechoslovakia in 1950s when he started his carreer, but they disappeared in later decades.
It's a very hard thing to distinguish "knowledge creates the phenomena" and "phenomena creates knowledge" in principle. Both frameworks allows to interpret nearly any evidence in their favour. Multiple people have immediately remembered gender issues, but there is much more fundamental case.
How do we know that it's reality that creates our knowledge and not the other way around? It takes people literal years of constant evidence stream in favour of materialism to accept the simple truth of the litany of Gendlin. Is it, in principle, possible to accure as much evidence in cases of mental illnesses, sexual orientation or gender?
When measuring the "highest-expressed-emotion culture", I think we should distinguish between different kinds of emotions, rather that using "emotions" as a unified whole.
Specifically, I suspect that in safer environments people would feel more free to express emotions of "weakness" (e.g. crying), and in dangerous environments people would perform anger to look more threatening. Similarly, some emotions are more "individualistic" (enjoyment of something), some are more "collectivistic" (admiration of gods or leaders), so different cultures would reward and punish them differently. Depending on how much weight we assign to different types of emotions, we could get opposite conclusions.
Yeah and also the context within which they are expressed. E.g there are some cultures where high emotional repression is expected in public, but are very expressive among close family. Others have a medium level at all times.
So, the obvious question for an effective altruist is how to design a "mental illness" with positive consequences... and then make an awareness campaign about it, hoping that it would replace some of the traditional ones.
Refusal to drink coke, fear of reading Reddit...
A belief that people are conspiring to do you good.
Mm, I like this one. Commencing placebo-powered self-brainwashing.
I'd have sworn I'd heard about this as an actual psychological syndrome, but my google fu fails me. The story I heard is that it was only discovered in a big military survey, since people who believe this don't show up with psychological problems.
I have no idea whether this is a true story.
"Japanese medical students went to Germany, learned psychiatry, came back to Japan, and told everyone they were neurasthenic. Being neurasthenic became first a fashion, then a class marker."
I believe something similar can be stated about melancholia versus depression. At least in a German-type context, and if my cultural Fingerspitzengefuhl is not failing me, to have a bout of Melancholia now and then is cool and a marker of high status. It shows you are a sensitive soul; it is related to Weltschmerz.
While being depressed means you're just an average Joe.
As a native German speaker, 'Melancholie' to me definitely also has the element of being more transient, so that would fit.
I wonder how this applies to psychiatric diseases that don't exist in the West, but do exist in the developing world. Would we get mass outbreaks of Koro if we started worrying about it?
Your articles would be greatly improved if you refrained from injecting random attacks on strawman "woke" people/positions out of nowhere at random intervals. It adds nothing to what you are saying, and makes you sound obsessive. Maybe try imagining a random racist interjection in place of your anti-woke ones if you don't see it.
for example?
I'm fascinated by the reaction to these kind of off-hand comments in the post. It kind of hammers home just how touchy the "woke" can be.
I mean, many of us see it the opposite way. The presence of these off-hand comments just hammers home how touchy the "anti-woke" can be.
I didn't see anything in what Scott wrote that wasn't true or relevant to the topic.
I think people generally prefer charitable and nice comments. Scott prefers this too:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
At least, he did back in 2014.
What patriarchal beauty standards? The patriarchy wants women to be wide-hipped, big-breasted baby-churning machines, it's the fashion media, which is mostly dominated by women like Anna Wintour, that established the starving waif aesthetic.
I suspect anorexia is a copycat effect, like school shootings post-Columbine, a memetic virus that defies conventional mental health analysis.
Men want status as well as sexual satisfaction.
It's fairly common for fat women to talk about men who want sex with them, but are unwilling to be seen with them in public.
I certainly see enough men talking about their revulsion against fat women.
But it's not established that this is an effect of patriarchal beauty standards, rather than an effect of fashion media beauty standards, or something else.
That is, fashion is very powerful, and maybe it got men too.
"Supermodel" is shorthand for "extremely attractive woman".
Is it though? It always seemed to me that the fashion/models industry is pretty insular, with average woman caring about this stuff much more than the average man. Whereas in the popular culture the female beauty standards are established by biggest actresses and pop stars, who may do some fashion on the side but it isn't their main avenue.
I don't know, I do see men talking about supermodels as ideally attractive.
I've also seen men describing supermodels as too thin, but not as recently.
Well, in my bubble the stereotypical supermodel was referred to as "starved" for as long as I remember. Of course, some men like fat and some like thin, but I'm pretty confident that the majority male preference in the last century or so was "moderate amount of fat in the right places".
>Is it though? It always seemed to me that the fashion/models industry is pretty insular,
The fashion/models industry is mostly about "models", not "supermodels". Models are walking clothes hangers intended to make fashionable clothing look maximally beautiful, not to be maximally beautiful themselves. They aren't going to be ugly, but their range of beauty is constrained by the mission requirement and e.g. are generally thinner than most people find highly attractive.
"Supermodels" are the small subset of models who have achieved name recognition and branding as someone who audiences will pay to see (e.g. on the cover of Sports Illustrated), as opposed to just being people a designer will pay so that audiences will see the designer's clothes draped over them. This requires supermodels to be closer to maximally attractive in their own right, in part by being curvier than the average fashion model.
> This requires supermodels to be closer to maximally attractive in their own right, in part by being curvier than the average fashion model.
Right, makes sense.
> They aren't going to be ugly, but their range of beauty is constrained by the mission requirement and e.g. are generally thinner than most people find highly attractive.
I heard this argument before, but never quite understood the logic. Granted, I know approximately nothing of those requirements, but it seems safe to assume that an expensive designer piece of clothing is supposed to closely fit the wearer's figure to present it in the best light. Therefore a "clothes rack" which more or less corresponds to the expected proportions of the wearer would presumably provide for the most accurate/useful impression, why isn't this the case?
It's not really. In the 90s as a child, I certainly felt like that was what must be the agreed upon thing. In the 2000s and 2010s, other straight male friends and I gradually discovered that we all liked a *much* wider variety of female types, and this one was... eh, you know, nowhere near the consensus favorite. This was a slow discovery, because we were nerds, moral, circumspect, and didn't go around discussing our preferences.
At this point, I think "supermodel" is an imposition from the wider culture.
Edit: I was born in 1982, so I should probably say "in the 90s as a teenager".
Few men follow fashion. If you look at websites devoted to pictures of hot famous women, they're mostly actresses and singers, and they're mostly shorter and better fed than fashion models.
For comparison, there was a review of this book on the sub-Reddit a few months ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/l8vxfc/book_review_crazy_like_us/
On anorexia: the thing about the doctor (Sing Lee) inducing it in himself really caught my attention. As the attentive ACX reader knows, it can be induced in animals through similar means (see #14 on https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-april)! My guess is that there is something like this going on: "certain individuals are latent anorexics; weight loss / dieting reveals it." (source: I was/am anorexic).
Something else about the book: Watters talks about exporting western psychiatry being equivalent to handing out smallpox blankets. But then he reveals that he's married to a psychiatrist. He's, uh, maybe working through some stuff here?
Watters has an analogy in the book that imagine if after 9/11, a whole bunch of people from Mozambique flew in and told survivors that they needed to learn rituals for disconnecting their psychic bonds with the spirits of dead relatives. His point was that we would find it weird and insulting, but I think he was also trying to point out that even if these rituals helped Mozambiqueans find peace, outside a larger belief structure they are useless. He also tells the story of a psychiatrist who learns all sorts of stuff about handling psychotic family members in Zanzibar. Then her own husband comes down with psychosis and none of the Zanzibar stuff works. They try religion for example, but you can't just use religion when you need it, it has to be ingrained in your life and beliefs.
Point I'm trying to make, the book could be read as either "American psychiatry sucks" or "American psychiatry works within the context of American belief systems but can't just be copied and pasted to other cultures, the same way you can't just start doing Mozambique spirit rituals tomorrow and expect much from them." I suspect Watters believes some of both.
Here's a half-formed riff: if you synthesized Murray/Hernstein 1994 and DeBoer 2020, you might believe something like "Western society has made it so you have to have a certain (high) level of cognitive processing ability to function effectively, and every year the threshold increases."
If that's right could, we say that the developing countries integrate people experiencing mental health issues more effectively, because they haven't set their thresholds so high yet?
That's an interesting point. Watters rejects the idea that people in Zanzibar have easy lives and can just kind of hang out all day, but the stuff they do does tend to be less cognitively demanding.
Right, adding to CB's half formed riff, it's not "Western society has made life harder", it's "Western society has made life easier, as long as you're above the (rising) water line for cognitive processing^h^h^h discipline".
I say discipline because maybe it's less about processing power ("do a math problem") and more about not having intermittent failures ("never ever ever lose control of your narrative").
> "American psychiatry works within the context of American belief systems but can't just be copied and pasted to other cultures"
Perhaps we could go a step further and say that American psychiatry works on a certain subclass of Americans who are likely to visit and/or become psychiatrists (say, upper middle class New Yorkers who like to talk about themselves way too much) and is ineffective on most other sorts of Americans.
Going back to your original comment, my impression from Sing Lee/general observation is that there is a sort of anorexic metabolic equilibrium but that it took a lot of effort to reach it. Like, it took Sing three months of intense willpower, and I'd be unlikely to reach it just trying to lose ten pounds. Was that your observation, or did you slip into it without trying hard?
Very private question I know, feel free to ignore.
> there is a sort of anorexic metabolic equilibrium but that it took a lot of effort to reach it
Yeah, I can buy that - but I think for for some people the threshold is a lot lower than others.
Personally I don't remember the trigger (had the issue since early childhood), but it was plausibly due to an injury that required hospitalization.
quick typo: the post has the incorrect "Abhkazia" instead of the correct "Abkhazia" (k <--> h)
I’m not a doctor, but anecdotally I have helped people contextualize their mental health sort of like the spirits.
I’ve talked to several people who who were actively in the medical system for depression and explained how I see the brain, not as a fighter pilot (you are alone in there, any screw-up is on you) but as the captain of a ship (you command many parts, each of which may be imperfect).
And this helped them! A lot! This framing changed their outlook from “I am a problem” to “I have a problem”, which is much more productive and much less self-hating. It didn’t change their underlying conditions, of course, but I saw a slow-burn change in behavior. That could be a coincidence (the plural of anecdote is not data!) but I have since not been surprised by the practice of attributing mental health to externalized spirits that one is in contact with; it may not be literally true but it can be a helpful coping mechanism.
Scott's most Straussian post yet?
What do you REALLY mean by that?
>Meanwhile, “in 1902 n article reported that fully one-third of patients visiting hospitals for consultations were suffering from the new disease.”
Did you mean "an article"?
I'm presuming Watters has investigated and discounted the possibility that people in the past with (what we now call) PTSD might have got less support and so lived less long - perhaps even ended their own lives, and no-one talked about that either - so statistically there were fewer of them around?
Also some relevant discussion about PTSD in ancient soldiers over on ACOUP: https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/ and https://acoup.blog/2021/02/12/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iib-a-soldiers-lot/
I found the trauma section of the book very compelling, in part because it squares with my impression of the United States as a society that is convinced it understands trauma better than any previous society but seems to achieve uniquely poor outcomes. It would be like a land that was convinced it had the best vaccine for polio but you look around and every fourth person is in an iron lung.
I see this most clearly with recent war veterans. 45% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans file for disability, a large fraction psychological: https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2012/05/27/almost-half-new-veterans-seek-disability-benefits/sYQAAY00ddXBRoqfsKMheJ/story.html
Perhaps some are outright malingerers, but clearly for a large number (including a friend of mine) this is real. They really are suffering from a set of symptoms consistent with PTSD. And yet, the vast majority of WWI veterans, Holocaust survivors, everyone who lived through WWII in Western Russia etc., a large fraction of people in the Middle Ages etc. experienced as bad or worse stuff and the vast majority could function as adults. It's hard to escape the conclusion that we've created an expectation of disabling trauma and people fulfill it. Crazy Like Us quotes an American soldier who said that he felt like an actor given a script. Here's PTSD, this is what you do next.
I don't think we can create the anti-psychiatry society like in Scott's post, but we can send a message that left to their own devices the vast majority of people who experience terrible things will recover, and they shouldn't expect PTSD.
> quotes an American soldier who said that he felt like an actor given a script. Here's PTSD, this is what you do next
I once had occasion to hang out with a bunch of veterans, and they would compete with each other for how disabled they were, and gave tips for how to get up to 100% disabled (there are points for each thing, like some kind of D&D game) because that gives you the most benefits. Like "Have you lost movement in your leg? That's 20% right there."
There's some line about disability fraud from an otherwise terrible Chuck Palahniuk novel to the effect "if you fake a limp long enough, it becomes a real limp". I suspect this is true, and can also happen to your brain.
That sounds like the kind of line that GPT-3 would come up with if you prompted it with a bunch of Chuck Palahniuk novels.
If you remember Carrie Weaver from ER, she originally had a never-really-explained limp; after a few seasons, she got magically cured between seasons, because the fake limp was injuring her. (I don't know if Hugh Laurie had the same problem.)
Injuring the actress, obviously.
The VA disability system creates huge incentives for veterans to experience more symptoms so they can get more benefits. They’re not faking anything but when you’re making a subjective judgment about how you feel and there are large external incentives to feel worse, over time many people will feel worse.
I thought about this a lot recently. I was in a car crash a little over a year ago, and I had some lingering psychological effects from that. I'd feel tense, increased heartrate, a little more emotional volatility. The words "PTSD" came into my brain to describe how I felt.
But then I'd take a breath, remember that no one was badly hurt, and I'd feel a little better. I'd also think about my grandfather at Pearl Harbor and get a little perspective. Everyone suffers, and sometimes, some suffering is unbearable and leaves permanent damage. But my grandpa was OK, I'm OK, and we go on.
I don't discount PTSD in the least. But I'd be really careful applying that label to myself. I think most people can recover from awful trauma, but I think we have some incentives (like those you've pointed out) to NOT recovering sometimes.
It may be that lingering on the event in the context of expecting to end up with PTSD would have made things worse, but I think it's worth noting that within the model psychiatrists mostly use now, having traumatic symptoms for a while after a destabilizing event isn't a sign of PTSD. Most people experience such events at some points in their lives, and experience traumatic symptoms for a while, and then they go away. It's only when they persist and potentially worsen with time that it starts being considered PTSD.
I was hit by a car during college, hard enough that I broke its windshield with my body. For a number of months afterwards, I would experience significant anxiety any time I crossed the street. But that gradually went away and within a year I had no traumatic symptoms. Within the PTSD framework, that's how people most commonly respond to trauma.
Have to go to work and haven't read the whole piece, so apologies if this is raised in the post, but:
> "In the same way, Watters suggests, there probably is some base-level objectively-real mental illness. If you have to think of it as something, you can think of it as formless extreme stress, looking for an outlet. But the particular way the stress finds an outlet is based on the patient's cultural preconceptions."
Suppose we buy this. What would be the best of the already-existing ways that cultures conceive mental illness, in terms of overall human flourishing? How *should* extreme stress manifest pathologically? The best one I've been able to come up with is Japanese Hikikomori, ie withdrawal from society. It causes problems, for sure, and I don't mean to minimize it. But of the known ways that that extreme stress can be channeled, I haven't been able to come up with a *less* harmful one.
Anyone else?
>The best one I've been able to come up with is Japanese Hikikomori, ie withdrawal from society. It causes problems, for sure, and I don't mean to minimize it. But of the known ways that that extreme stress can be channeled, I haven't been able to come up with a *less* harmful one.
I don't think this is particularly low on the harmfulness scale honestly, because it means that they're living entirely subsidized existences. And while arguably we'd be better off with something like a UBI which would make that an option for everyone, and not a burden focused on some specific income earner, there are are still a lot of other ways of channeling stress which leave people more able to engage with society in positive ways, even if they also engage in negative ones.
Good review, but I think it kind of forgets the 'biodiversity' idea? Particularly the section on the Sri Lankan "gaze of the wild" treatment. Western psychiatry clearly still has a lot to learn about PTSD, and if you believe in cultural evolution at all then Sri Lanka could very well have something to teach. Even if their approach isn't better overall, it might get something right that the West missed.
Focusing on whether the expected outcome is better or worse misses the point; the tragedy is in lost value of information.
ooh excited for the schizophrenia post. I wanna know to what extent https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1270547158882832387.html is legit or totally made up (cw: racism).
It seems made up, even if ones partial to race stuff
That said it has some hilarious quotes
> The distinctive Indian pattern of extremely fast, extremely quarrelsome speech likely results from a combination of African like dopaminergic tone while possessing a normal or even superior group IQ.
> Take a super athletic white guy, load him with unhealthy amounts of T and he will still never be able to move like this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=f6iG-TKZE38&t=4m43s…
Even black women and children have a natural "bounce" that full grown white men lack.
Hilarious!
That guy is, even for race science dark magicians, a new breed of crank lmao
If all of the brain's functions can be described as some kind of Bayesian inference, then only one thing can go wrong with it.
> One background part of this chapter which I enjoyed was the section on biological views of mental illness. Westerners tend to spread these in order to reduce stigma - “has a brain chemical malfunction” sounds better than “is possessed by demons”, or even than “is just inexplicably lazy and weird”. But studies generally show that the biological view of mental illness makes people less sympathetic to the mentally ill, more concerned about them being violent, more interested in avoiding them, etc.
> I am skeptical this actually worsens outcomes for schizophrenia; the developed vs. developing world thing is more likely diagnostic differences. Still, oops.
Probably 20 years ago now, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture and Q&A session with the late Dr. Julian Leff, which I found very thought provoking. He did a lot of transcultural research as a psychiatrist, and much of what I remember would seem to agree with Watters observations. In particular, he thought the jury was out as to who was more effective in treating schizophrenia, and mental illness in general, but he thought the edge probably went to traditional (non-western) societies. He observed, like Watters, that the "ill" were better tolerated, integrated, and taken care of by their family and community, than in the west. In "traditional" societies, there is no stigma attached to "is possessed by demons", because that can happen to anyone, so the individual is not blamed and held responsible. The other thing which I found very interesting is that he said in general it is impossible to do western style talking therapies in traditional cultures. The main reason is that there is very little privacy. Everyone knows everyone's business, gossip (news and information) circulates very quickly, it is very difficult to keep secrets. Western style talking therapies crucially rely on privacy and confidentiality, so a client is safe in expressing things it would not do to make public knowledge. That does not work in traditional cultures, thus, the family or community will usually be included in the diagnosis, and treatment, and the "cause" of trouble will be spirits, demons, or malevolent forces which are not the fault of the person, but in fact could afflict anyone.
If anyone is interested, here is a short account of some of Dr. Leff's observations, "The lessons I learned as a psychiatrist from my transcultural work in low and middle-income countries": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6520537/
That's a really interesting part of the article to me, and I appreciate you sharing Dr. Leff's notes. I read a related article from a psychiatrist who is also a member of my faith. I'm a Latter-day Saint (Mormon), and TECHNICALLY we believe in the possibility of "evil spirits" and even possession, but generally no one takes it very seriously, even on the more fundamentalist end of the spectrum. This author asked why we don't, and made some really interesting points.
I think sometimes there's not a clear medical answer to a problem, but there can be a social or spiritual answer. Maybe we've erred to far to the "SCIENCE!!!" side of things in our culture (speaking of Americans and adjacent.) That's not to criticize science in the least, or to cover over the awful things that go wrong with "exorcisms" that end up in the news. But maybe our ancestors were onto something to approach the problem as a "demonic" problem, if that makes any sense. Maybe there's a reason that idea persists in so many cultures, and maybe it's because that concept is advantageous.
I'm still surprised by the "low stigma attached to being possessed by demons" thing. While this doesn't sound stigmatizing to the victim, surely you would still want to stigmatize the [possessee + demon entity which lives in the victim's body], which sounds like the sort of thing you could only effectively do by stigmatizing the victim.
I think this is projecting an overly modern conception of what we mean by "demon". I think "evil spirit" should here be understood as more of a *force*, embodying a certain behaviour, than an intelligent agent who could be bargained with or influenced.
Stigmatizing the act of possessing someone would require the demon to care that it was being stigmatized.
Presumably if you tell a sermon "hey, we all disapprove of this thing you're doing," it will just laugh and go "yeah, I would hope so, I'm evil."
*tell a demon
Feels to me like "inflicted" defectiveness (e.g. possession by spirit) is harder to stigmatize than "inherent" defectiveness (e.g. genetic condition).
Same for someone who got brain damage from getting hit on the head by a robber, vs. someone who just turned weird one day for reasons that can't be ascribed to external agency.
I recall a story about the "discovery" of hoarding. Some academic psychologist or psychiatrist happened upon someone crippled by hoarding behaviour. And he thought, "Hum, I've never seen this before. I wonder if it's a thing." So he put out a request to the public asking if anyone had heard of this. He came to work Monday to a ton of e-mails from people saying, "Yes! My partner, mother, aunt, cousin, etc. etc. has this." It was a big problem. But for someone reason it just wasn't widely known.
To me that lends credence to the idea that these issues can be widespread but hidden from general professional and public awareness.
OCD in general was incredibly under reported. I recall an article in the late 1980’s in Scientific American that stated researchers set out to document some known cases expecting to find at best a handful of cases. With a bit of publicity, they were overwhelmed with responses. “Yeah, I have that terrible problem too! You mean there is a name for it and everything? Imagine that.”
I was one of those people. The onset of my OCD came in 1976. I could narrow it to the month with a bit of research. Ironically it started with re-reading a paragraph in Scientific American.
It came as a huge relief to learn I wasn’t the only one suffering from the condition. It was a terrible as an untreated and unacknowledged condition.
It was a heavy lift completing a Computer Science major and a Linguistics minor when there were times I felt compelled to read only the odd numbered pages. I could only focus a small part of my cognitive bandwidth on my studies during my entire tenure of my undergraduate years.
By the early 90’s I had found treatment to put the OCD into near remission. I was very grateful for the relief. Everything was so much less difficult.
There is the story about Michael Burry who was featured in the Big Short. He'd had ocular cancer as a child that resulted in one of his eyes being removed. He had a troublesome glass eye as a result and always assumed his awkwardness and social isolation was due to his glass eye.
Years later he's gone to med school and gotten married and had a child. The school sends the kid for testing and it turns out he has aspergers. And Michael asks about it and suddenly realizes that's what he has and it explains everything.
"The onset of my OCD came in 1976. I could narrow it to the month with a bit of research. Ironically it started with re-reading a paragraph in Scientific American."
Can you tell me more about this? Was there something about the paragraph that triggered it, or are you just saying this is the first OCD symptom you noticed?
There was a reference to the history of thinking about the topic that included a mention of ‘The Creator’. The mechanism of my particular version of OCD relies on ideas were received as an 8 year old. It was pretty much the unabridged canon of Roman Catholic dogma. That stuff really shouldn’t be delivered to a credulous kid at that age.
By the time I was 16, I was through The Church but even at 68 it still isn’t through with me. As an adult I’ve done a close reading of Augustine of Hippo, probably one of the primary formulators of RC dogma, and at times he strikes me as bit of knuckle head. - Getting wrapped around the axel trying to figure out how God will handle the Resurrection of Souls for the people who had engaged in cannibalism! - At times like those I can’t help but hear the writing in the nasal voice of the smug, overweight, pseudo intellectual Comic Book guy on the Simpsons.
And yet even after having been an atheist for over 50 years those ideas still occasionally hold sway over my thinking and I will have to make a conscious effort to remind myself that it is a defective thought process.
You might be interested in _Reconceiving My Body_ by Gil Hedley-- a detailed account of recovery from very rigid Catholicism.
The thing is, there is no ‘reasoning’ your way out of it. As I mentioned the OCD is under control. Much better than the basket case condition pre treatment. But I have to deal with the side effects of high dose Prozac and too much Xanax for the last 30 plus years.
I’ve been researching MDMA and Psilocybin therapies. I’m afraid my age will disqualify me for officially sanctioned treatment even if it gets approved somewhere in the US.
So I’ve been looking at therapy centers in Holland and Jamaica. Their promotional literature doesn’t inspire confidence.
I joined the local Pscychedelic Society and there are some underground therapists around but again there is always an off putting New Age vibe to those folks. If they start referring to themselves as shamans and wear wolf pelts during treatment, I can’t take them seriously.
Hedley did a lot of reasoning *and* a lot of bodywork.
Knowing people who hoard, it’s obvious that was not a media spread mimetic pathology. There’s at least a case for stuff like “tumblr girl emo depression anorexia” being like that in a way that isn’t hoarding. It’s much more directly related to the objects and what you do with them, whereas anorexia or depression are much more interpersonal and relate to other parts of life and society.
From the opening paragraph, I was expecting something about mental illnesses in other cultures that are dying out. That would be an interesting topic for a post.
> But studies generally show that the biological view of mental illness makes people less sympathetic to the mentally ill, more concerned about them being violent, more interested in avoiding them, etc.
Heads-up, the link in this paragraph is inaccessible from Germany. (Yes, I know I could VPN.)
Thanks! I was commenting mostly so Scott knows this site is inaccessible and can, if he wants, choose not to use it if there is an alternate source. :)
Trying to decide if this is a Straussian post on CW issues.
If it was, it did the opposite of the job you’re suggesting. All the anecdotes in the comments plus the questionability of the books examples have left me thinking that these issues have been around a lot longer and are much deeper than possible for “media spread mimetic illnesses”
I doubt it really was tho
Which also suggests that the “wokesies” isn’t an issue as simple as “the media said it so they’re copying the dumb ideas”, which I also think is a necessary corrective for the large numbers of people thinking “well there’s a bunch of dumb stuff that’s spreading so we just need to fight it and stop spreading it and then it’ll stop, no deep philosophical reckonings needed”, which didn’t really work for conservatives.
This reminds me of the way a lot of people see religion. They know it's irrational, know they don't have a positive argument for it, but their tribe believes it, so they grasp for straws saying it's needed as a bulwark against some even more undesirable thing.
You say:
"Of course, the null hypothesis is that there are lots of people suffering in silence until people raise awareness of and destigmatize a mental illness, after which they break their silence, admit they have a problem, and seek treatment. I am slightly skeptical of this, because a lot of mental health problems are hard to suffer in silence - if nothing else, anorexia results in hospitalizations once a patient’s body weight becomes incompatible with healthy life. Still, this is an important counterargument, and one that I hope people do more research into."
I think that the null hypothesis is almost certainly right in this an in many other cases, and the strongest evidence I have for this is childhood sexual abuse. I'm almost certain that we've always been brutally sexually abusing children as a society for as long as humans have been around. Even if that's not the case, I KNOW that the boomers in America were often sexually abused as children. Both my parents were raped / abused as kids. My grandmother was raped. About 75% of my aunts / uncles were abused / raped. Around 20% of the boomer friends I have that I’ve had deep conversations with have shared stories with me of them being raped / sexually abused as children. I think the actual real prevalence based on my own experience is probably somewhere between 20%-50%. Go talk to some of your boomer friends that actually trust you and learn how common it was!
And yet, in 1960s there was total, absolute denial in American society that childhood sexual abuse even existed. From The Body Keeps the score:
(Dr. Van Der Kolk): "In my new job I was confronted on an almost daily basis with issues I thought I had left behind at the VA. My experience with combat veterans had so sensitized me to the impact of trauma that I now listened with a very different ear when depressed and anxious patients told me stories of molestation and family violence. I was particularly struck by how many female patients spoke of being sexually abused as children. This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of psychiatry at the time stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States, occurring about once in every million women. Given that there were then only about one hundred million women living in the United States, I wondered how forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to my office in the basement of the hospital."
"Furthermore, the textbook said, “There is little agreement about the role of father-daughter incest as a source of serious subsequent psychopathology.” My patients with incest histories were hardly free of “subsequent psychopathology”—they were profoundly depressed, confused, and often engaged in bizarrely self-harmful behaviors, such as cutting themselves with razor blades. The textbook went on to practically endorse incest, explaining that “such incestuous activity diminishes the subject’s chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world.” In fact, as it turned out, incest had devastating effects on women’s well-being."...
"As Roland Summit wrote in his classic study The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome: “Initiation, intimidation, stigmatization, isolation, helplessness and self-blame depend on a terrifying reality of child sexual abuse. Any attempts by the child to divulge the secret will be countered by an adult conspiracy of silence and disbelief. ‘Don’t worry about things like that; that could never happen in our family.’ ‘How could you ever think of such a terrible thing?’ ‘Don’t let me ever hear you say anything like that again!’ The average child never asks and never tells.”"
"After forty years of doing this work I still regularly hear myself saying, “That’s unbelievable,” when patients tell me about their childhoods. They often are as incredulous as I am—how could parents inflict such torture and terror on their own child? Part of them continues to insist that they must have made the experience up or that they are exaggerating. All of them are ashamed about what happened to them, and they blame themselves—on some level they firmly believe that these terrible things were done to them because they are terrible people."
What conclusion can we draw from this? I think the most reasonable one is that psychiatrists (and doctors in general) are EXTREMELY bad at their jobs. They see what they want to see, they are controlled by the prevailing narratives they’ve been taught, and they don’t really listen to their patients. It’s clearly true that if you’re told during medical school to ignore really significant problems that essentially all doctors will happily ignore these problems for their whole career. And society has awesome mechanisms in place that can brutally suppress any stories of abuse or problems from getting out into wider awareness. These mechanisms (which also exist in other cultures) are so strong that I think they mostly invalidate whatever Crazy like Us is trying to say. The author of Crazy like Us would have to have done MUCH more rigorous work to overcome the fact that there are powerful conspiracies in every society that work to obscure and hide all kinds of mental problems / abuse / internal feelings. It doesn’t look to me like he’s done that work.
The comments section here has half sunk my initial idea that all these mental illnesses are “mimetic media caused” tbh
I’m much less convinced of this books thesis now. Especially
> often engaged in bizarrely self-harmful behaviors, such as cutting themselves with razor blades
This is a common thing you see in the whole mentally ill girls with anorexia and depression thing today.
> I think the most reasonable one is that psychiatrists (and doctors in general) are EXTREMELY bad at their jobs.
Yep.
"As Roland Summit wrote in his classic study The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome"
The classic study that's extremely controversial to this day?
I've never been that convinced by the "everyone pretended child sexual abuse didn't happen" narrative because it doesn't take a lot of effort to find a lot of stuff about it that was written pre-1980s, nor does it explain why in the 1980s there was (supposedly) a massive shift into considering it something incredibly serious.
Mental Health Unawareness culture sounds like a very good idea.
> I. Anorexia In Hong Kong
Interesting reading, especially given that I was taught that anorexia was significantly *less* culture-bound than bulimia. Pulling the citation I remembered (1), it looks like they cite 5 articles by S. Lee in their meta-analysis along the way to ultimately concluding that AN doesn't qualify - I'd say that cuts against the specific claim Watters is making depending on his specific citation, but the BN section definitely supports his overall thesis.
1) Keel & Klump, 2003 - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12956542/
Isn't' PTSD the new name for shell shock?
Yes and no but mostly yes; clean categories are hard and keeping them consistent over time is even harder. The classic George Carlin bit will tell you that the euphemism evolved from shell shock, to combat fatigue, to operational exhaustion, to post-traumatic stress disorder, but there are nuances that may or may not be relevant in any given case. (Or even real? The initial theory behind shell shock being caused by physical damage to the brain was eventually discarded, but it does bear some remarkable similarities to chronic traumatic encephalopathy.)
"Combat stress reaction", "acute stress disorder", and "post-traumatic stress disorder" are all formal names describing three distinct 'stages' of what can be a response to a single trauma. Are they the same thing? Depends whether you're interested in a soldier who can keep it together for the rest of the op, or a friend who chooses alcoholism as the lesser of evils.
As I understand it, shell shock and PTSD have different symptoms because war has changed. With PTSD you become hypervigilant; that didn't happen with shell shock because being shelled didn't teach you vigilance. The shell killed you or it didn't, regardless of whether you were paying attention.
Keeping in mind the very well supported (IMHO) lead crime hypothesis - what odds does everyone give that the rise in transgenderism being due to hormone disrupting chemicals in the environment?
I can give odds somewhere between .01% and 99.9%! I don’t really think there’s a way to know or even guess at this point, and there are a lot of different potential causes.
tangential, but i heard this new meta analysis of the lead-crime hypothesis found it was mostly publication bias. i've only read the abstract though, so could be bogus https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_774797_smxx.pdf
This was discoursed, and was wrong probably
https://mobile.twitter.com/IronEconomist/status/1137349736309149696 https://mobile.twitter.com/jamesfeigenbaum/status/1395881023406235648
Lead being bad for intelligence and other stuff has a pile of evidence, even if it didn’t cause crime, but it still seemed to. Lead exposure at higher levels causes directly visible effects https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1388220.html
Science is very hard. Individual papers can be wrong through a dizzying number of pathways, and without understanding the paper deeply as well as the dozens of such on the same topic there’s no way to know what is or isn’t what it says it is
I wonder how though, do low iq people have similar crime causation as lead->low iq-> crime? Hm
i see, thanks for the correction! i know lead exposure is definitely a bad thing, but i wasn't sure if maybe it didn't cause the crime wave
Wouldn't the timing be off? Crime peaked in the 70s, but being transgender seems to be peaking now, or perhaps hasn't even peaked yet.
I mean that lead caused crime to rise. In a similar way that hormone disrupting chemicals caused at least part of the rise in people identifying as transgender.
Oh, ok. I misread your post.
A long time ago, I read about how hormones in the environment were causing girls to go through puberty earlier. Then, many years later, I read that it wasn't hormones in the environment at all; it's because kids are getting fatter, and some of the puberty hormones come from body fat.
Even worse - it’s not (just? maybe both? Maybe not) because they’re fatter, women in primitive tribes are quite healthily plump - it’s because they aren’t starved, allowing earlier development. Menarche in modern primitive is about 12-13-14, while in rural farming communities it reached up to 16-17 due to lack of food, and is now 10-11-12 - leaving space for the hormonal hypothesis but not necessarily as much.
This seems heavily invested in a static model of mental illness as something you either have or don't have. If you instead look at mental illness as self-reinforcing instability in a dynamical system, it seems pretty obvious that environment will influence the rate at which it manifests itself into visible symptoms.
I mean all illnesses are self reinforcing instabilities in dynamical systems, and the environment influencing it (I e child abuse causing trauma, job stress causing depression) doesn’t prove that it spreads by acting out from the mental illness being publicly described.
Well, look at ADHD diagnoses right here in the US-of-A.
Do more people have ADHD today? Maybe. Or have we diagnosed more people with ADHD, whether as a result of increased medicalization or because of something else? Maybe. Or some of both? Maybe. I dunno.
Maybe it's more complicated:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/17/joint-over-and-underdiagnosis/
"Sometimes we apply the same metaphor to the human world, eg “falling linguistic biodiversity" when minority languages get replaced by English or whatever."
Do they, or do they just call it "linguistic diversity"? Searching "linguistic biodiversity" just brings up the usual guff about how indigenous peoples have special ecological knowledge western science is unable to discover or incorporate.
"If you want an objectively real psychiatric illness with no culture-bound component, schizophrenia is as close as you’re going to get."
And this I highly doubt, at least that other people are going to agree with it. The anti-psychiatry movement tends to focus quite a lot on schizophrenia. If you want an uncontroversial mental illness, you go for something like Alzheimer's or brain damage, something with obvious physical effects on the brain, but I don't know if those count as "psychiatric illnesses".
Idk schizophrenia seems very much not socially caused (in the “media contagion” sense, other social causes idk). Nobody wants to be schizophrenic, it’s universally portrayed badly, it’s extreme and debilitating, people who have it and relayed severe illnesses usually don’t know they have it initially or need to realize it, as opposed to something like anorexia where it’s a willed action schizophrenia is much less intentional and more on a deep level of disruption, etc
I’m very sympathetic to the anti psychiatry movement but ... being who they would be, people who have undergone psych treatment for severe mental illness, they tend to be rather crazy and dumb, which is unfortunate. This is obvious on the anti psychiatry subreddit, where most posts are (at least were when I last checked) kinda nonsensical.
You're quite wrong to consider the anti-psychiatry movement solely something of people who have actually undergone treatment for mental health issues. Academia, when it is looking at psychiatry from an outside perspective, tends to lean heavily towards anti-psychiatry.
You also fail to realise that it is not simply a matter of being socially caused or not, but to what extent schizophrenia is even an actual "thing".
Nothing would make me happier than for psychiatry to disappear in a puff of sparking dust and deep conscious understanding. Nevertheless, I’m just describing the anti psychiatry people I’ve met and seen, and although they’re very earnest and have their interest in the right direction, there’s a lot of bad ideas and dumb people there, and most of them were on psychs.
> You also fail to realise that it is not simply a matter of being socially caused or not, but to what extent schizophrenia is even an actual "thing".
No I don’t lol, I believe all psych illnesses are constructed BS in a general sense. Nevertheless, trying to be realistic and useful, and saying The Truth seems to be less useful for many schizophrenics than Olanzapine.
"Academia, when it is looking at psychiatry from an outside perspective, tends to lean heavily towards anti-psychiatry."
What is "academia"? Which field of academia outside of psychiatry focuses on psychiatry? Who are the prominent scholars who tend to lean heavily anti-psychiatry?
I'm surprised you're not drawing a connection to the copycat suicide/suicide contagion/Werther effect literature. I think there's also a bunch of projects specifically looking at 13 reasons why?
re zanzibar: "But they are weirdly blase about this. Their position is that everyone gets possessed by spirits sometimes."
Remember this is the position contended by Hubert Dreyfus (philosopher at UC Berkeley) about the correct way to interpret Bronze Age Europe (and specifically the Illiad). And it was more or less what Julian Jaynes said...
Like in scotts book review of jaynes, contact with primitive / indigenous / isolated people doesn’t seem to mesh with the possession / god command theory.
(Wish substack had an edit feature, I meant that as a theory for “primitive mental stage” in general, not about ptsd or occasional
I think you need to reread Scott's review. My take away from this point is the precise opposite of yours -- that maybe this was in fact what happened, and was filtered out by outside observers who forced what they saw into their worldview.
I mean, in America today, you have half the country insisting (basically correctly) that the other half of the country refuses to understand them, denies their axiomatic starting point, filters out all data that doesn't mesh with their pre-conceptions, and insists on their explanations for the behavior of "the other" rather than the explanations from that other. If Red State and Blue State can't accurately construct a mental model of people so close to them, why should we ascribe much value to the mental models created by 19th C observers of hunter-gatherers?
It's not a book of particular interest to me, but heck, you can see the point in the very title!
https://www.amazon.com/Spirit-Catches-You-Fall-Down/dp/0374533407
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/
Section V - clearly we read it differently, but I take the anthropological evidence as extremely against jaynes position or the disassociation one
As for that Reddit post, basically everything said about the topic of “thinking in words and consciousness” is incoherent nonsense. I would bet guess his intelligence or capability before and after that post or realization were the same. Looking at his post history, he seems to have extreme anxiety - https://ii.reddit.com/user/thegoldengiraffe/submitted/ - and I suspect that post and all the stuff about it was more relating to him having very weird ideas about himself and social interactions than anything meaningful. I’m reminded of the Scott post about how Buddhist meditator enlightenment people perceive massive changes in their thinking and emotions - saying it changed their life - when people around them didn’t notice it at all and the emotional changes did not happen in practice - still got anxious and mad etc.
> If Red State and Blue State can't accurately construct a mental model
The ideological Turing test isn’t the same as mode of thought research IMO. That seems like a really weird jump - yes it shows people can be wrong a lot, but I don’t think they are in this case.
Obviously Greece and Rome were weird and quirky. But I seriously doubt it was so in the way Jaynes claims. Specifically, anthropologists who talked to the primitives - who do still worship and sacrifice to gods and pray to nature and see spirits and magic - don’t appear to disassociate in general course of life in the way claimed. Wouldn’t you see that in their language? Anthropological recordings in extreme detail of their lives and actions? The way jaynes describes it all, you really would. But you don’t.
Well, like so much, what you latch onto as important is perhaps different from what I latch onto.
To me the significant issue here is that people can have very different mental models of not just how others think, but even of how they think.
One aspect of this is that the standard WEIRD mental model is of the unitary mind -- anything that smacks of a non-unitary mind is a pathology of some sort. Whereas I see most of human history as seeing the mind as non-unitary, with the details of that non-unitariness being less important.
This is not even some weird exotic savages (or Bronze Age Greeks) thing. IMHO the idea of Satan is the pre-20th C's western version of this idea -- "part of me" feels desires and interests that "the rest of me" does not feel, and Satan is the name I give to that minority part of me. IMHO much of 19th C literature is best understood as being written in a context where this model was no longer tenable, even as an alternative model (the somewhat unsatisfactory medicalized model of today)had not yet been born. Much of what is interpreted as misogynistic in that literature and art seems to me more confused attempts by the artist to work out this non-unitary self within a cultural framework that was beginning to assert that the previous explanation for these feelings was stupid and primitive.
As for Red vs Blue, my point is precisely that this is NOT just ideological litmus test. That is precisely what I said -- you are so convinced you understand the opposite mind that you don't feel you even need to look further.
Consider two statements:
- the most important problem in America today is Race. Our entire society should be built around dealing with this.
- the most important problem in America today is Satan. Our entire society should be built around dealing with this.
These are not people who agree that we need to paint the house, but can't decide whether it should be green vs yellow; these are people with fundamentally different understandings of what it means to be human, and how humans relate to each other.
a “model of how you think” (which by the way is not unitiary at all - different “parts” can have different “models” and this is true even for westerners) and “how you actually think” probably don’t have as much relation as you’re suggesting IMO
In particular even if all Greeks thought they were disassociative godcommand executors (Christians also say they live to obey gods commands) - which was in no way supported for either them or especially modern primitives - they wouldn’t necessarily be anyways in the same way that people who thought “memory is a kind palace” (crude example) don’t actually make memory that, people who claim they have DID on Twitter don’t actually have separation between their personalities
As for satan ... you can go talk to devout Christians today,I’ve done that, they don’t actually show any divergence whatsoever in the “way of thinking” from modern atheists - they talk about thinking differently but lots of atheists vary just as much in talking about that too, and it in practice does not seem to relate at all to thinking in fact and observation or experience etc
I don’t know what to say if you think reds and blues have fundamentally different anything ... people switch sides constantly, and it’s not any more fundamentally different than a mathematician and a baker are fundamentally different (and many mathematicians are amateur bakers, and some bakers are amateur mathematicians!)
Anorexia might be a kind of special case, among the other disorders covered in the book. I think there is plenty of anecdotal experience (and maybe even some research but I haven't looked) about the 'contagiousness' of anorexia - especially in settings such as all-girl, boarding schools. This isn't to say that anorexia is solely a role-playing phenomenon but, like hypnosis, it might be very difficult to tell the difference between someone who has the condition and someone who is acting like they have the condition, with death a a possible outcome in both instances.
"Zanzibari schizophrenics never feel that different from anyone else - everyone gets possessed by spirits sometimes, everyone gets attacks of the nerves sometimes, lots of people never leave their family homes."
How is this different from the western model of "everyone is a little bit mentally ill, it's only a psychiatric problem if it interferes with a normal life"?
>the few anorexics he was able to find couldn't be less interested in thinness or beauty standards or anything like that. Also (unlike in the West) they weren't delusionally sure that they were fat. They were very aware that they were starving themselves to death, and they were against this. They just felt like they had some sort of nausea or stomach disease which made it impossible for them to eat.
I (an American man) have struggled with this *exact same condition* (laced with emetophobia), peaking mainly in 2016-2017. (Although, while I became quite underweight, I don't believe it severely impeded me functioning or quite reached the extent of being immediately medically dangerous. I'm about 95% over it now.)
The only time, apart from the above post, that I've ever seen mention of such a condition was in a textbook I was flipping through in the psychiatry section of my alma mater's bookstore. The textbook labeled it as, I think, "food avoidant disorder" and was careful to classify it as separate from an actual eating disorder (the book seemed to imply that eating disorders necessarily require a distorted perception of one's body / the risks of eating a certain way).
Does anyone have any familiarity or further knowledge of this disorder? I can't help but feel curious to learn more.
There are splitters and lumpers when it comes to eating disorders - some want to make fine distinctions between anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, etc. Others note that these often bleed into each other and have unusual presentations, arguing that they're all the same biological program being activated. I'm not sure which camp is right.
But I'm pretty sure the effective treatment is the same for "regular" AN and other restrictive eating conditions: you have to suffer through regaining lost weight, keeping it on until whatever program deactivates, and then be vigilant in the future. I (also an American man) followed this program with some success, with varying levels of vigilance (currently sort of at a low point, but much better than previous episodes).
Here is a good source on the differences between anorexia and ARFID (Avoidant-restrictive Food Intake Disorder)
https://www.oliverpyattcenters.com/arfid-different-anorexia-nervosa/
My two cents: in the neurodiversity community there has been some discussion about food avoidance as an aspect of sensory processing difficulties. A lot of teen girls getting diagnosed with eating disorders actually have underlying autism traits, or ADHD, that makes the feeling of eating uncomfortable.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-020-04479-3
I can relate to your story--during a certain time of my life, I found it very difficult to make myself eat. I'm a woman, but I've always had a positive body image and didn't think I was fat or worry about getting fat. I just also always felt kind of turned off by the sensations of eating, and found it fatiguing and unpleasant.
I do have an ADHD diagnosis and several autistic brothers/uncles/cousins. In addition, I'm sensitive to certain noises, lights, and smells.
Probably the most helpful thing for me was learning to cook. Once I started to enjoy the sensory process of chopping, smelling ingredients, and seeing/hearing the food cooking, the eating part wasn't quite so off-putting.
>I assume there is some sort of inspector who comes around and makes sure you attribute mental illness to demons, and if not, they take away your indigenous society license
I would guess it's something more like various indigenous people describing the various things they believe in to english-speaking Christians, and those English-speakers rounding them all off to 'demons' or 'spirits.'
Certainly they're not all referring to the Christian notion of 'demons', I suspect there's a lot of variance and metaphor in there.
I came across this article today about the dancing plagues. This is a fun read despite the explanatory just-so stories. None of them seem convincing to me. (BTW, the ergot theory has largely been disproven.) Also, the author's claim that modern raves are multi-day events is mostly bullshit, I think. Having attended a few Raves in the 90's, none of them lasted beyond a single evening. Most of the dancers stumbled home at dawn after our MDMA and LSD highs wore off. Certainly the DJs were exhausted by dawn!
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-dancing-plague-of-1518
i was thinking about the point made in your conclusion recently wrt all the talk i've seen recently about adhd. it seems like it's everywhere on twitter recently (chickenpox_plane.jpg), and i've been wondering to what extent it's a "real" phenomenon, and even to what extent that question itself makes sense. i have a few other hypotheses about what might be going on, but i haven't done investigation beyond the surface-level.
If public awareness of a mental illness increases its prevalence by making the symptoms of already mentally ill people better fit the expected illness, then it might be a good idea to run public awareness campaigns for mental illnesses whose symptoms are relatively harmless.
I've read a fair number of accounts of anorexia, and the thing that struck me was that a very high proportion started with food restriction in childhood. (Sorry, no records.) What was odd was that it didn't seem to matter whether the food restriction was imposed by parents or chosen by the child.
This argues in favor of an anorexia switch, though I don't have a baseline for how common food restriction in childhood is in general, considering how terrified a lot of people are of being fat or having a fat child.
An argument against an anorexia switch is that anorexia doesn't seem to be a common response to starvation from poverty or imprisonment, though food hoarding is.
I've been reading lately that there's a lot of psychiatric comorbidity with anorexia, and I don't know where that leaves any theories.
It's conceivable that anorexia is related to using willpower to not eat, rather than food just not being available.
In some AN recovery circles there's a mantra: "diets are what make people fat." The idea is that most people who diet eventually give up and re-gain lost weight, plus some more. Most of us know people who have had that happen. There are also studies of dieters (and one good study of systematic starvation) that show this effect.
With that in mind, let's tell a just-so story: as the US got richer, food became cheaper and more abundant. Also food marketers got good at increasing food reward by making processed food more of a superstimulus. Accordingly, most people's weight went up.
This was more of a chubbiness epidemic than an obesity epidemic. Many people responded by dieting, because of beauty standards or the patriarchy or whatever. Problem solved, right?
No - it led to an obesity epidemic: most dieters failed and gained even more weight. And it led to an anorexia epidemic: some dieters were really good at it, and a switch flipped in their brains.
I don't totally buy this story, but I think it's worth considering. If we believe in the anorexia switch (I do), it helps make sense why famine doesn't seem to create an anorexia epidemic, but widespread availability of tasty food does.
I think at least some fraction of obesity is the result of dieting. I've read accounts by people who gain 25 pounds extra after each ineffective diet. Make that mistake four times (and some do, it's culturally supported) and that a gain of 100 pounds.
I've seen quite a few people say that they stopped gaining weight after they stopped dieting.
I'm also reminded of the deaf community and its occasional desire to have children *not* receive cochlear implants so they can grow up and join the deaf community.
If a disease, mental or otherwise, is "normalized", sufferers are going to form a community - and a community disproportionately characterized by the most severe and hard-to-treat sufferers, because those are the ones who need it most and have the worst alternatives. Which is good for them. What's not good for them, is for the medical community to develop more effective treatments so that they wind up having their support community die out (literally or otherwise) around them.
So there's a conflict of interest where the community benefits from there *not* being highly effective treatments, or for such treatments not being recognized as effective. And, perhaps relevant here, from marginal sufferers in the broader world being lead to believe that they are going to suffer greatly, that there is nothing to be done about it but to turn to the support community, when really with a finite period of treatment with the right doctors they can live happy, normal lives in the broader community.
Since public discussion of [disease or condition] is going to be dominated by A: the spokesmen of the support community and B: the relevant doctors, we need the doctors to step up and provide realistic guidance against the sometimes perverse evangelism of the support community. If the doctors aren't doing that, if they are instead saying, "Yep, this is real bad and if you feel it might apply to you, you have to come to us and be prepared for the long haul" when that's not necessarily the case, I can see the dynamic Watters describes being reinforced.
Does Watters talk at all about, e.g, the emergence of an "anorexic community" in Hong Kong?
I've been really enjoying a lecture series by Robert Sapolsky, which is drawn from Stanford's introductory class on human behavioral biology. This is a weak area in my knowledge base and he's a superb lecturer. He has a very good story about encountering a schizophrenic woman among the Masai during his field research.
https://youtu.be/nEnklxGAmak?t=2853
This sets up a fascinating lecture on the biological underpinnings of religion (not recorded in the most recent iteration, this is an older version) in which he argues that the shamanistic thinking induced by the distantly related schizotypal phenotype is the reason that the genetic basis of schizophrenia persists in human populations and forms the basis of religious ritual & tradition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI
If I hadn't actually read this book myself, just from reading this review I would think the book was about something completely different than what it is actually about. The title of the book, which Scott seems to mistaken to be, "Not Crazy Until We Showed Up", is actually "Crazy Like Us". It's not about the spread of Western mental illnesses via some meme about their existence, it's about the spread of the ways mental illness manifests in western influenced ways. Watters isn't saying people weren't crazy before Western Psychiatry showed up, he's saying they were crazy in different ways and now the ways they are being crazy are becoming Westernized.
Scott also seems to have missed the secondary thesis of the book which is that a/the major way that western diagnostic criteria are unique from many of the alternatives it is replacing is that they are individual(mental)-ontological rather than social-ontological. This might be hard for a western-trained psychiatrist to truly grok but there are cultures and languages in the world that do not even have a word for mind. The existence of a "private inner" world of "thinking" and "knowing" in many tribes in Papua New Guinea for example are subsumed under the activity and label of "hearing"(See Anna Wierzbicka's Semantics. Primes and Universals pg. 197 for a discussion of this). In light of the ways that many cultures(nearly all of the ones Watters cites in the book) have seen what we call "mental illnesses" as more like "social/relational illnesses," he wants us to consider this alternative and the consequences of the way we conceptualize the problem as individual/mental in the first place. If we thought of them more as relationship/social problems would that put us on better tracks towards the treatment of them? I don't know, but that's the question Watters wants us to ask ourselves.
Watters 3rd thesis is summed up by his quoting of psychologist Ken Miller who said, “The meaning of a horrible event has a tremendous impact on the human psyche, and that meaning differs across the world.The meaning matters as much as the event itself.” Watters doesn't prescribe just not talking about "mental illness" as Scott seems to imply throughout his review, he wants us to pay attention to the WAY we talk about it and the MEANING we ascribe to it, to realize their are alternatives, and to consider the consequences of thinking we have identified universal features of human existence when the lens we are looking at them through is in fact culturally specific. He's not saying there isn't SOMETHING universal happening to which our psychiatric diagnosis criteria points. He's just pointing out that the way we conceptualize what is happening is not universal, that should tell us that we haven't nailed down what's happening yet, and that if we do want to identify something universal then paying attention to the differences in how they manifest in different cultures should be an important part in that process.
Although I really *want* to believe the thesis of the book and plan to read it to see if I'm convinced, I feel compelled to offer a wildly different explanation for the entire slate of phenomena the book is trying to explain. This idea comes courtesy of a friend.
Everywhere, in the past, child death was common. Children got diseases, starved, had gruesome accidents. Mothers died in childbirth not infrequently. How bad can anything else really be when you've grown accustomed to the death of your siblings and later your children? Key word is accustomed. You didn't have a special tragedy. You had the same tragedy as your friend down the road.
Many places, recently, though at varying times, child death has become very, very uncommon. It's possible for something like anorexia to be "the literal worst". It's much more likely that my worst and my neighbor's worst are two different things. We can now imagine seeking to get a handle on special difficulties that in the past would have been completely overshadowed by ordinary life.
I appreciate your suggestion and I can relate to your thesis on a personal level. My child had leukemia at age 3. Most people in my community were utterly horrified and could hardly comprehend what was happening, because their children had never had a life-threatening illness. I found it very helpful to read novels and essays written in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, when childhood illness and mortality was common, and discussed openly.
Oof, I'm really sorry. I have a 3 year old right now, and this is hard to imagine happening. If you don't mind, I'm going to try to remember this comment (1) to appreciate my life and (2) as advice if really bad things happen.
Weird question: Where does the discussion on animal depression fit in Ethan Waters view?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/science/depressed-fish.html
(The fish depression fits less well in my view because they seem to be experiencing withdrawal rather than depression?
When Scott brings up the apparent social contagion effect of talking about mental illness, I can't help but think of the trans movement in the US the past decade. It went from being a phenomenon more-or-less specific to serial killer movies to a fad ... pretty quickly. I'd be curious if the recent trend of trans teenagers is funging against other, more common psychiatric syndromes like anorexia.
Two examples of PTSD before it was a thing in the culture: Frodo in Lord of the Rings. Early in the story, he gets a sliver from a Nazgul's sword in his shoulder. He never fully recovers, and is especially haunted by in on anniversaries.
Thorby in Heinlein's _Citizen of the Galaxy_ (1957)-- he was kidnapped into slavery (I think his parents were killed in front of him) when he was a small child. He has nightmares and a triggerable temper as a result.
This is especially striking because it's PTSD which *isn't* from being a soldier in combat.
One theme running through this book review (that is particularly visible in the discussion of PTSD) is the Western trend to diagnose more and more things as psychiatric illnesses. I think that in turn is mainly caused by a Western philosophy of life where people are individuals entitled to happiness and success, but if they aren't happily achieving success something must be wrong with them. I.e. I am problematic if I don't live up to an unrealistic standard for human beings that is expressed through all kinds of channels including the work-place, the treatment of the unemployed, or the lives of other people we see on TV or social media. Hence there is a large demand to produce diagnoses to address the perceived abundance of personal defects.
I agree with the book that in general the West is very successful in exporting this aspect of its culture overseas. The most harmful aspect of which might be exporting the idea of "There is a problem with me, I am deficient". Once this idea has been successfully implanted somewhere, this will naturally also create a robust demand for Western styles of psychotherapy, apparently justifying the mushrooming of psychiatric diagnoses.
Sigh. I'd be willing to bet (a small amount of) money that someone will take the last couple paragraphs of this post and use them to claim Scott believes mental illness is a delusion.
An alternate null hypothesis is that dead mean tell no tales.
Many forms of mental illness were much more likely to be quickly fatal under past conditions (and to a lesser extent, present conditions in the third world and developing world today) than they are in the developed world today.
Before the Vietnam war, there were a lot of well-documented cases of soldiers getting PTSD, but people called it things like "cowardice" or "shell-shock," and their commanders shot them for getting it.
The timeline you discuss for the prevalence of anorexia in Europe lines up almost perfectly with the hypothesis "nobody gets diagnosed with anorexia in countries where people die of starvation that is clearly caused by poverty and insufficient availability of food on a regular basis." The late 1800s saw a temporary end of widespread famine in the West. Famine was really bad all over the world again by the 1930s, and then eliminated again under the green revolution which had fully taken hold in the West by the early 1960s. During a period of famine, everybody knows that practically everyone is undernourished to the point of causing adverse health conditions and premature death unless they are lucky and work really hard not to have that happen. If a relatively small number of people happen to also be undernourished because they are psychologically predisposed to under-eat, they're lost in the crowds of people who are undernourished because there's just not enough food. (Hence, anorexia as a diagnosable condition only exists in settings where there is ample food. Since far more people are psychologically predisposed to overeat to the point of causing adverse health condition than are predisposed to under-eat this way, anorexia as a diagnosable condition exists if and only if obesity is also somewhat prevalent.)
China had famines in the twentieth century a couple decades past when they stopped happening in the West. I don't know about the history of famine specifically in Hong Kong post-WWII, but Hong Kong currently imports over 90% of its food with the majority coming from China, so I suspect food availability in Hong Kong somewhat paralleled its availability in China.
(It's also possible that anorexia as a mental condition regardless of its diagnosability doesn't occur in times of famine. Scarcity of food during people's early childhood is well-documented to have lasting impact on their eating habits -- though it's better-documented in mice. People who had too little to eat as young children have a greater propensity to overeat the rest of their lives. So it seems somewhat likely that being born in or around a time of famine prevents some people who would otherwise have developed anorexia from ever developing it.)
If the end of food scarcity caused the increase in anorexia, the sudden discovery of its prevalence in response to its first high-profile case is not at all surprising. Discovery of prevalence in response to the first high-profile case of something happening are common. (E.g. Many people, including a past version of me, believe(d) that the name "Britney" became massively more prevalent because Britney's fans were naming their children after her. But in reality, Britney was born at the peak of the popularity of her name. It was just that most people heard of her before they had really heard of anyone else Britney, and then shortly thereafter started encountering far more people sharing her name. And names, especially first names, are not conditions that people are generally keeping secret/hiding in the closet.)
Conversely, modern conditions have also eliminated many other types of stressors that could trigger symptoms that were previously diagnosed as mental illness.
I experienced temporary blindness as a teenager. I'd been being fairly active outside on a hot day for several hours without drinking any water. When I stopped being able to see, someone I was with suspected it was induced by heat/dehydration, and led me to the shade and gave me some water, and by the time I finished drinking the water, I could see again. A lot of the symptoms of hysteria are also symptoms of heat exhaustion, heat stroke, CO2 poisoning, dehydration, and/or malnourishment. (The folk remedies for these conditions also tended to treat them like everybody believed this condition was exacerbated by heat and lack of fresh air.) It seems likely to me that people in the 1800s were conditioned to respond to stress by exhibiting these symptoms because they were living in physical conditions that also cause these symptoms, and most things in biology have complicated multifaceted causes. When people in well-ventilated air-conditioned rooms get suddenly stressed, they don't tend to exhibit symptoms of heat exhaustion nearly as often as people in hot, stuffy rooms do when they get stressed. I don't see why this would require any invocation of culture or expectations to explain it.
I don't doubt that culture somewhat affects people's psychology including their mental pathologies and response to stress. But the past is full of people who had a life expectancy of 30 who spent their whole lives subjected to the whim of nature; and the modern third world is not quite as bad off as the past was, but it's still a lot closer to dealing with those sorts of conditions than the present first world. And I suspect that the drastic differences in material conditions between the groups being compared (over time or place to place) have had a much larger impact on responses to stress and diagnoses of such responses than any shifts in culture have had.
Hard not to notice the parallels between anorexia and gender dysphoria
“has a brain chemical malfunction” sounds better than “is possessed by demons”, or even than “is just inexplicably lazy and weird”
It kind of really doesn't, given all this context. Meh.
Our brain is great at pattern matching. No surprise that when we learn about some new pattern we tend to match reality to this. And this can include our own personal experiences. When we learn about some new mental illness we can ask ourselves whether we have it and find some similarities as everything is on the spectrum. On the other hand when we learn about this pattern matching thing we can meta-pattern-match and wonder whether some group of people just pattern match to some condition and doesn't actually have it, or do have it but only due to this pattern matching and otherwise would have a different condition. Once again, this seems as a really difficult problem.
Here is some of my personal experience with such pattern matching. When I was a teenager I identified myself as a man. I thought of it as a meaningful category with which I identified some of my personal qualities and experiences. But later I learned more about sexism and gender. I reevaluated my experiences and figured out that I don't actually mean anything by saying that I am a man. I have some qualities which the society might identify with manliness but it's mostly due to sexism and I don't really care about it. This qualities are not masculine or feminine, they are mine. And this completely explained away my feeling of gender identity. I used to feel something and then I stopped. I can imagine thet if I never learned this information I could have identified myself as a man till the end of my life.
So did feminist propaganda contaminate me and turned me into agender or I have found a better framework to classify my experience? Somewhat both? When I look back I see that I definetely wasn't a typical man. But again my expirience actually changed when I got rid of a "man" label.
Later I became really curious what people actually meant when they claimed to be of a certain gender and that it's super important for them. Could they explain away their gender identity as I did? I talked with such people, I also got a partner who was very into my masculinity and it meant something for her so I tried to understand. And I figured out that gender identity isn't a void idea and that it even have some meaning for myself. My previous position of "I don't even understand what you mean by this gender identity stuff" stopped being true. And there was a period when I thought that it may be valid to consider myself a man again. But then again I learned even more information on the topic, I reflexed and figured that I actually miss some of the things people are talking about. I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have disophoria in a female body, neither I do in a male one. I used to be not happy with having a beard but I now I accept it. Which actually contrasts very much with some of my man-friends who are very found of having a beard and male body. Once again I came to the conclusion that "man" label doesn't actually fit me. And on every step changing the label affected the way I parse my inner experience.
Similar thing happened with me and autism. I have some symptoms since childhood, including nervous tics, being clueless or detested by lots of social games my peers are playing and I guess my gender ambivalence is a symptom in itself. But I'm very high functional and until I learned about autistic spectrum I had no idea that I can have an actual condition.
And then I was somewhat unsure at first. Some of the symptoms fited but others were unrelatable, like masking, sensory sensitivity or having emotional outbursts. And then I though more about it and talked more to autistic people. And now I understand that even these symptoms which I considered completely unrelatable, can be applied to me. But to understand this I had to accept a new framwork and interpret my experience through it.
Again I can imagine living whole my life without thinking about myself as an autistic person. It is a result of awareness that I think of myself as an autist now. It didn't create my symptoms, but it changed the way I perceive myself and the way I act. Currently I'm less trying to fit in and do lots of social activities and behave myself accordingly. And thinking of being more prosocial feels exausting. Which it didn't used to feel when I didn't identify myself as an autistic person.
I wonder how much of that is intellectual decision though in this case. If you're really agender, do you identify as agender, or do you identify as cisgender because you don't feel anything about it, cis-by-default (https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/cis-by-default/)?
Anecdotally, I would feel somewhat weird calling myself agender precisely because it would mean that I have strong feelings on the issue (and yes, also biologically male). My judgments on all specific questions you list in the last paragraph seem to be near-same as yours, and yet in questionnaries and surveys I list myself as a man, because I'm in a male body and not in conflict with it.
It depends on the framework you use. If you have never heard about gender identity, you are not even cis-by-default, you do not have a category for this sort of things at all. Later when you figure out that there is a distinction between cis people and trans people you assume that you are cis, thus becoming cis-by-default. And then, when you actually think about this, with the knowledge of agenderism as a valid category, you may understand that you are agender. This is more or less what happened to me.
The fact that some frameworks are less mainstream than others obviously contributes. The desision to switch frameworks, or reclassify yourself inside a framework is to a degree an intellectual one. It may require some effort to overcome the stigma or some historical social context. Objectively there is nothing special about not having a gender identity or having a pretty weak feeling of one, compared to having a strong experience of it. It's just different intervals on a spectrum. But historically, calling yourself a man is much more "normal" thing to do, thus your question - it may feel as if one requires an extra motivation to identify as an agender, as if you are making a political statement, not just describing yourself.
For me this "extra motivation" is just the desire to be more accurate and truthful. Probably the fact that I'm autistic contributes: I care less about societal expectations, thus it's extremely easy for me to ignore the "normality" of things. I suspect that this in general has something to do with the fact that autism is heavily correlated with both binary and non-binary transgederism.
But I can easily imagine that there are a lot of actually agender people who identify as cis. Especially among social conservatives who just don't understand the idea of gender and gender identity and thus just assume that it's all bullshit and social hysteria.
Well, if we're going off our autistic tendencies for accuracy… I wouldn't find the statement "I am a man" false or inaccurate. "I don't feel a visceral feeling that I am a man and wouldn't hold onto it if I woke up in a female/intersex body" need not necessarily entail "It is not true/accurate that I am a man" (and conversely for women) - this is, to an extent, a definition problem, and definitions try to point at clusters in thingspace. And, just like a human losing a leg is still a human due to a huge overdefining number of other features, despite no longer being a "featherless biped", a man without a gender identity may well still be a man, despite not _viscerally_, instinctively identifying as one, because of being overdefined by biological criteria like having testicles, having clitoris longer than a certain length (normally called by another name), having no hypospadia, having generally high androgen level and stuff. "Agender", on the other hand, would feel like a description that states "I am uncomfortable with either male or female gender identity", which is not necessarily entailed by "I don't viscerally have one". (Hence also the alternative term for cis-by-default, "cis-genderless", which I found today when googling: people like myself - which may, of course, be a group so narrow as to only include myself, although I find this unlikely - are genderless insofar as our visceral identity goes but cis in that we don't feel the need to shed off our assigned gender.)
This was an interesting discussion, and I hope I haven't offended you in any way.
> definitions try to point at clusters in thingspace
> This was an interesting discussion, and I hope I haven't offended you in any way.
Oh, I love talking with people who understand the ideas behind Human Guide to Words! It's so liberating as if you can get rid of baby-walkers and actually communicate for real. Zero offence taken, and I agree that it's an interesting conversation.
If we are talking about body, hormones, genitalia and chomosomes - the thingspace cluster usually called "biological sex" then it would be pretty accurate to say that I'm male.
If we are talking about gender expression - it's somewhat masculine in my case. Most of the time I wear men's clothes. I have long hair and do not actively try to behave in a gender conformist manner, but in absolute majority of cases stranger on the streets intuitively assume that I'm a man.
If we are talking about gender identity, then I lack any, thus calling me a man would be false, and calling me agender would be true in this context.
If we take a less accurate framework where all these things are put in the same cluster of manhood, than you can consider me a man. This wouldn't be false, just less accurate than a more nuanced framework where all these things are considered separately.
Such definition as cis-genderless can describe me in a framework focused on whether or not a person went through gender transitioning. I think it's a helpful category and it describes me as well.
Hm. I mean, despite all the trans people and non-binary people and whatnot, gender identity is anchored to biological sex in some way - in other words, being male and having masculine gender identity do cluster together, however imperfectly. There are reasons why trans people are usually not satisfied with declaring their gender identity and then doing everything else just as they did before, they actively try to "pass"/"present as"/transition - these are, indeed, related clusters. And I could argue that words "man" and "woman" normally characterize the big cluster and using them for the smaller one is what's inaccurate :)
(Are you sure you're not me in disguise? I also have long hair! :D )
Indeed, gender identity is rooted in biology. And I don't think this is inspite of trans people existing, on the contrary, the existence of trans people is an evidence in favour of it: that there is some kind of biological mechanism being responsible for gender identity, that may mismatch with other parts of ones body. On the other hand biology is rooted in chemistry and chemistry is rooted in physics, this however doesn't prevent us from meaningfully talking about chemical or biological categories. Likewise here. We can use the category of gender identity separate from the category of biological sex, to add more nuance to our categorisation and highlight the interesting edge cases where these categories do not correlate. Thus increasing our accuracy.
> There are reasons why trans people are usually not satisfied with declaring their gender identity.
Indeed. Gender expression is also a thing. And of course these things are connected. Usually expression and identity are put in the same cluster called "gender", but I prefere to separate them for even more nuance.
> I could argue that words "man" and "woman" normally characterize the big cluster and using them for the smaller one is what's inaccurate
I agree that this state of affairs is potentially misleading. Sadly, this is how people have been historically using such definitions and little can be done here now. However, this doesn't actually make the model less accurate, just harder to understand than it counterfactually could have been. It's like a programming code written in a not very good manner, thus it's not very comprehensible but still calculates the right answer.
Few months ago I came with a thought on modern society feels like we need to interfere with everything and we find it hard to accept that something is going to work better if we leave it alone.
This might be a good case to think about.
Besides I have to complement you for the reviews and articles, I've found this blog few days ago, and your writings are really interesting (also added your podcast to playlist, next long ride I'll listen to you)
so short version: lots of psychiatric diseases have large social components?
@Scott you're a great reviewer; please review better books. Your arabian nights review was life-changingly good, and although this one is cool, I just don't feel like it has the meat of something that a classic would. Would love to hear your commentary on idk Blaise Pascal's Pensees or Confucius' Analects or something.
>I hear woke people talk about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment is white supremacy because only white people care about that kind of thing.
Maybe woke people are extremely-high-expressed-emotion folks who express whatever gripes they have with mainstream American culture by attributing them to white supremacy.
> Those who jump off a waterfall or throw themselves in front of a train are weak-minded. [...] How useless they are! Such weak-minded people would only cause harm even if they remained alive.
Gotta love how the author seems to have zero interest in preventing suicide and instead just wants to stigmatize them after they're dead. (It's not clear that this attitude would reduce suicide at all; the sentiment "no, suicide doesn't make you hard-working, intelligent, sensitive, or admirable" is more plausibly useful.)
> The island nation was [insert some term other than “inundated” or “flooded”] with a [insert some term other than “tide”] of counselors, therapists, and psychiatrists
The island nation was slammed again with a wave of counselors, therapists, and psychiatrists.
Wave won't work better as it was replaced above… or is that the point? :)
1. Hydraulic model of emotions:
in "The cultural animal" (Baumeister 2005)* he compares the hydraulic model of emotions versus a self-inflating feedback model.
the hydraulic model of emotions assume that there is a quantity of emotions and if you don't let it go out the pressure will keep increasing until it explodes. this applies to anger sexual desire trauma etc.
but all the available evidence shows no support whatsoever to the hydraulic model. You do not see that getting angry is reducing one's anger and so on, outside qualified circumstances.
the feedback self-inflating model says is that sometimes using the emotions is actually amplifying and self-perpetuating it. and we do have evidence in anger for example that getting angry or on average makes you more angry. And ruminating about traumatic experience increases the effect of the trauma, and so on.
2. lipostat, obesity and anorexia
assuming that obesity is mostly caused by failure of the lipostat - the body weight management mechanism is faulty, this will directly cause both obesity and anorexia.
Just read the book, really liked it, thanks Scott for the essay/review!
People who write about psychogenic pain say that it's culturally "contagious". For example, they claim that the prevalence of back pain in the US is higher than it used to be, due to the claims of experts that the spine is a delicate structure that has to be used in specific ways to avoid pain/injury. This creates fear around using the spine, leading to pain.
Whiplash is one of the chronic pain syndromes that's supposedly culturally contagious. According to Alan Gordon, whiplash doesn't exist in Lithuania, despite frequent car accidents. Pain can occur immediately after an accident, but it resolves in a few days. This is supposedly because there is no cultural awareness of whiplash.
The idea of psychogenic pain "fads" sounds plausible to me but I don't know how strong the evidence is. Here are two citations about whiplash in Lithuania.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10084524/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8622449/
> But nope, according to Crazy Like Us scientists have determined that white Americans are the highest-expressed-emotion culture in the world
Of course they are. Americans invented the "crazy" (note the scarequotes) idea that emotions can matter in the workplace (and thus, e.g., the horrible salesman smile plastered on people, say, telling you you're fired or something). There is the "bottled-up Brit" stereotype, but these are the same Brits that popularized boxing as a way to let their emotions out - not karate or kapoeira, boxing, i.e., the literal "punch the bag" exercise.