Oh i agree with you, and think emil is way to pessemistic and binary. (Also, even in accepting societys being shunned by your family for being gay is common, and thus would lead to less eusociality
I just wanted to represent emil. Im personally gay , and a furry , so im very unusual and weird
I mean, the kin selection math works out much easier for say, worker bees who are highly genetically related to the Queen (incorrect, see Igon value's response) than gay uncles, who need to produce like 4 more nieces or nephews per generation just to maintain parity. Saying that another kin selection puzzle is solved and implying that the answer to this puzzle is obvious when your answer is almost certainly wrong is "rude as fuck" as the imaginary Dawkins in my head says.
"the kin selection math works out much easier for say, worker bees who are highly genetically related to the Queen, than gay uncles, who need to produce like 4 more nieces or nephews per generation just to maintain parity"
Not a disagreement with the argument at all, just a small correction: the worker bees are highly genetically related to *each other*, not specially highly to the queen. They share 50% with the queen but 75% with each other (the male has only one set of chromosomes). That's the reason for eusociality, they benefit more from taking care of each other and having the queen make more of them, than they would having offspring of their own (with only 50% in common).
(Yes, theory and language are simplified, this isn't an academic paper.)
Depends on your definition of "error"? There can be multiple levels, like with sickle-cell anemia: on one level a clear error, on another level a byproduct of an adaptation that increases overall population fitness. Similarly, it wouldn't shock me if there were some underlying part of human biological development that increased overall population fitness, but had as a side-effect that a certain small percentage of the population will have an attraction-target error.
Or alternatively, it could be like the blind spot in our eyes. There are ways to evolve an eye that don't have blind spots, like with cephalopods. But the specific way our eyes evolved produced blind spots, and there wasn't any clear path down from the local maximum through the valley of darkness to a higher hill. Is it a pathology that certain parts of our lenses send light to a place that can't detect it? Had they individual consciousness, other cells might judge the cells of the lens of the blind spot to be useless, spending their light rays on barren ground. But the larger organism adapted to the blind spot with special processing in the visual cortex, and the overall performance is pretty good in most cases, but probably not as good as if we'd had octopus eyes.
So yes, homosexuality doesn't seem to favor fitness, but we **don't know what the alternative is**.
The missing piece might be that much (most?) of the human experience is downstream of / higher in the stack than biological drivers to procreate.
The way a lot of evopsy gets used to explain behaviors is reductive to the point of becoming inadequately explanatory.
Even stuff ostensibly related to procreation like a drive to nurture that extends to non blood related children. That impulse might stem from a foundational biological imperative, but still be executed without reference to it because higher up in the stack we’re capable of wanting to be nurturing as an good in its self.
Unclear if non-monogamy leading to conflict is near-universal or something that can be eliminated through cultural norms. If the latter, and maybe even with the former, non-monogamy would be better for group fertility. You get rid of most of the risk of fertile women being unable to have children due to being partnered with infertile men, or not being partnered to anyone, or to reduced fertility due to things like both partners being carriers for recessive diseases.
I would read Engel's Origin of the Family and other historical materialist works to understand the process. Basically we went from alpha male ape gets all women->only marriage within generations>only marriage with cousins>so on. we only developed man-wife monogamy after the development of private property/slavery and maybe some other shit I can't remember.
Almost nobody's definition of mental illness encompasses deliberate decisions alone. Deciding to take precautions against the CIA spying on you is not a mental illness, but a compulsion or strong predisposition to do so is paranoia. And a compulsion or strong predisposition to chastity might constitute a mental illness, while e.g. deciding that sex isn't worth the risk of STDs would not.
Homosexuality, I am repeatedly told, is not a thing that people can or do choose.
Emil's argument is almost the opposite of the movie that every faux-intellectual overquotes. Idiocracy. Great job framing the contradictions in Kirkegaard's theory.
Yes, the irony (as Scott implied with his last point) is that Kirkegaard's ideal of human behavior, if followed to its logical conclusion, would leave no place for contrarian intellectuals like him.
A contrarian take on, say, where the best hunting ground is offers a higher potential reward in prestige status (if you end up being right) than a standard take can offer, and therefore contrarian personality will have been supported by evolution to some degree as a reproductive strategy.
This obviously depends on the difficulty finding a mate. If you go looking for unique hunting grounds, there is a chance you starve to death. This greatly reduces your chance of having children. There is also a chance that you find a new hunting ground. So this is only favored by evolution in the case where the odds of not starving are greater than the chance of your having at least 1 child at some point in the future.
> this is only favored by evolution in the case where the odds of not starving are greater than the chance of your having at least 1 child at some point in the future
That's not a rare circumstance - in many species, the median male has less than two offspring so males must be outliers in order for their genes to increase in frequency in the gene pool. The genetic tendency for increased risk-taking observed in human males indicates that this was probably the case in our ancestral environment.
I meant the potential reward specifically in prestige status for the contrarian intellectual. Not food or material gain. Imagine most people in the group provide arguments that ground A should be tried first. You, by contrast, argue for ground B. If the group’s hunting efforts fail in ground A, but later succeed in ground B, then you should have gained a bigger amount of prestige status than was ever obtainable by arguing for ground A, even if ground A had been the better choice.
(For this example to work as I intend it, assume it will always become known which ground was or would have been better. Also, my point is only valid for socially acceptable contrarianism, not for violating taboos.)
Again, and this mirrors some of what has been said previously, this is only valid if the odds of mating success by maintaining the status quo (non-contrarian) is low. Contrarianism is, by definition a high risk strategy (or else everyone else is maladapted).
It‘s a high-risk-high-reward strategy and therefore, as I put it initially, „will have been supported by evolution to some degree as a reproductive strategy“.
This depends on the numbers (strictly speaking). How much better than chance is the tribe? But in any case and more importantly, when I say „contrarian personality“ I don‘t mean *always* going against the rest of the tribe. I mean eagerly looking for occasions when the mainstream might be getting it wrong for some reason.
I think I interpreted Scott's use of the term as 'enjoying disagreeing with the mainstream' rather than 'looking for mistakes the mainstream is making'.
The dissociation between the two being 'what do you do when the mainstream is right' or 'do you disagree with the mainstream regardless of your expertise on a given topic' or etc.
Admittedly these two will have a lot of behavioral overlap, but I feel like 'is looking for errors people are making and is smarter than other people enough to find them' is better described as being intelligent or being a critical thinker or being curious or etc. Though at this point we're just arguing definitions so no real empirical disagreement here.
Just to be clear, I was not criticising Scott’s point 7, which was about violating taboos, a bad idea in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. I was only replying to LadyJane’s „Kirkegaard’s [own ideal] would leave no place for contrarian intellectuals like him“, where taboo violation was no longer explicitly mentioned.
Some contrarians seem to enjoy their disagreement with the mainstream (though does Scott say that?), and clearly some are stupid, but I would guess that generally enough group decisions will be obvious enough so even those have to pick their spots rather than simply *always* disagreeing.
And then, regarding intelligent contrarians (cf. Steve Sailer just below, „Great Awokening“), it would appear that some “elite mainstream“ has recently become so stupid that anyone who thinks clearly and is not very conformist will end up opposed. The point that I was noting about evolutionary roots of contrarianism admittedly does not apply here.
Actually, in theory, a tribe could be quite bad at picking hunting spots if there is a charismatic-influential but incompetent person and most of the people are very conformist. This relates to your point in your top-level comment below about multipolar equilibriums.
I think there are two quite different contrarian personalities: those who take unpopular stances that are difficult to make a plausible case for (e.g., Apollo 11 was faked on Stanley Kubrick's soundstage) and they enjoy the challenge versus those who take unpopular stances that are easy to make a plausible case for (e.g., much of the new conventional wisdom that came to dominate American thought during the Great Awokening is wrong) because they can accomplish more that way. The latter type hardly seems like having much to do with the former.
When I started writing a third of a century ago, I was attracted to topics on which the conventional wisdom was obviously wrong, with plenty of evidence at hand both from the social sciences and from observing daily life. Being a pro-social guy who believes in telling the truth, this struck me as where I could contribute the most. What's more valuable than being able to document: "Everybody says they believe X, but the great majority of a wide variety of evidence says Y"?
The term "contrarian" seems less apt than John Derbyshire's appellation of "a member of the awkward squad." I would think of "contrarian" as being the kind of person who says "The social sciences are WRONG," while Emil is a voracious fan of the social sciences.
At some level it seems like the fact that evolution designed us to enjoy non-procreative sex -- oral, manual, etc -- would count as "mental illness" in the Emil framework. After all, those members of the species with a strong preference for PIV would tend to have more conceptions.* So, enjoying blow jobs means you're mentally ill? Really? And that's not just us, it's also bonobos, and a range of other (at least) mammals and avians. This just seems like a very poor fit for any kind of common-sense interpretation of "mental illness".
* Except of course they must not have, or we'd all have that preference today. With both bonobos and humans, clearly most sexual encounters are _actually_ about maintaining happy feelings towards members of your social group and especially your pair-bonded mate, not about reproduction. It was evolutionarily adaptive for us _as a species_ to develop female appetite for sex outside of estrus, and relatively hidden estrus, and a general enjoyment of sex accompanied by bursts of oxytocin and other happy-chemicals that make us think positively about our fellow tribe members and work hard to resolve conflicts. What helps the group as a whole may not be what's best for the individual. (Which is basically the point of _The Selfish Gene_. Ants are also extraordinarily good at propagating their assorted species, even while the vast majority of individuals reproduce not at all.)
Non-procreative sex acts can still be evolutionarily adaptive, so long as they don't entirely replace PIV sex. In both humans and bonobos, most sex acts seem to be more for purposes of social bonding (especially formation and reinforcement of pair bonds for mated couples) than for direct procreation, and felatio and cunnilingus can serve that function just as well as PIV sex. For that matter, PIV sex when the woman isn't within a window of a few days around ovulation is also non-procreative, but evolutionary adaptations in many other mammals to focus sexual behavior around female fertility seem to have been lost in both humans and bonobos.
Yes, which I also covered in my post. Lots of researchers speculate on the adaptive functions of non-PIV sex. Apparently, also in spiders (!?) https://www.nature.com/articles/srep25128
Yes, evolution moves in mysterious ways. As a further illustration, I recommend Denise Daniels classic 1983 paper "the evolution of concealed ovulation and self-deception". A taste of the argument:
"Humans are strikingly unusual among primates and most mammals because females do not reveal their critical period of ovulation. ... It would seem that stimulus signs are essential to reproductive success because activities would be drawn to maximizing the probability of copulation when the female is fertile. Human reproductive
success and survival, however, is dependent not only on lack of physical cues of ovulation, but also on lack of psychological awareness.... I hypothesize that concealed ovulation had its origin in strengthening intragroup bonds, during an evolutionary period when only reciprocal sharing and extensive cooperation allowed survival. ...First, individuals of a monogamous pair were menaced less because females with concealed ovulation
attracted other males less. Second, estrous periods lead to dominance ranking, which is incompatible with a shared mode of sociality. Third, females who exhibited sexual receptivity during estrus were disfavored because group harmony suffered from periodic sexual competition or disruption. Because revealing ovulation threatened monogamy, sharing, and cooperation, survival also was threatened. In this light, concealed ovulation became adaptive....A theory on self-deception is proposed. The roots of concealed ovulation indicate that self deception, a facet of the ability to selectively delete information outside of conscious awareness, serves as a balancing process to intelligence and awareness. Self-deception of ovulation became adaptive so that certain interests
could be excluded (selfish propagation of one’s genes by copulation during ovulation) while other more critical activities could be attended to successfully (monogamy, sharing, and cooperation)."
Related: what was the possible evolutionary benefit that made the penis-bone (baculum) disappear among humans? (Hint: apply signalling theory. Signalling male health during coitus is more difficult if you lack a penis bone, hence being able to do PIV even without such a bone is a more credible/honest signal of being healthy/worth mating with.)
...Relevance for the debate: If our ancestors in the very, very old days had used inclusive genetic fitness as a criterium for deciding what is healthy and what is not, they would have labelled women with no detectable sign of estrus (including lacking the psychological ability to know this themselves), and men without any trace of a penis bone, as less-than-healthy people. Moral: It is hideously difficult to second-guess which traits, physical and psychological, that from an evolutionary perspective will turn out to enhance genetic fitness. (Apart from the ethical point that assuming whatever enhances genetic fitness is desirable, is a version of the "what is natural is good" fallacy.)
He's so funny for thinking that "reproductive fitness" isn't a political problem. For some intuition, recall the old quote "everything is about sex, except for sex, which is about power". Or even more directly stated, power is sexy and politics is the discourse of power allocation. So, of course it's political.
As usual, I like Freud's definition best. He didn't have a concept of "mental illness", everything was instead about the symptom itself (i.e. what the patient presents with as a problem), and he classified various symptoms structurally by cause. The DSM's approach is like looking at someone with liver cancer and someone who's an alcoholic with a failing liver and saying "ah, both have liver disorder".
The problem is we're not allowed to talk about cause in psychiatry without it being neurological, because weird effects of subjectivity are inadmissible in falsifiable research that must be reproducible for any arbitrary observer, so we get this whole mess of Scott's Depression Inventory (SDI, ever heard of it?) that make it hard for people to get the right kind of help.
Anyway I'll get off my soapbox. A part of me is glad that Emil K is still hanging around, he's a fun dude to get drunk with.
I don't get what point you're making about politicalness. I'm pretty sure the idea there is just that determining what counts as having an effect on reproductive fitness is much more objective and less subject to influence from people's political opinions than determining what counts as harmful to the person with the condition, those around them and society. A person's politics may influence their personal reproductive fitness, which is my best guess at what you're getting at, but that's quite separate from the ways someone's politics might influence how they define reproductive fitness, which I would expect to be minimal beyond cases like the sort of people who don't believe in evolution at all.
I think the point is that the reproductive fitness of a trait is largely determined by the local politics it finds itself in. Making it a circular question.
Like, 'should ephobophilia be illegal and punished by castration, or legal and treated as an acceptable relationship model' is a political question that 100% determines the reproductive fitness of ephebophiles in your community.
And 'is ephebophilia a mental disorder' is inevitably going to be a big contributing factor to the political question itself, making it a circular question.
The other key thing to clarify for 4Denthusiast is that when I say "politics" I don't mean "political belief", but how institutional or structural decision-making cashes out into the legitimation or delegitimation of various actions. The idea of "political belief" is, for better or for worse, not so relevant in terms of what you can or can't get away with doing.
"cases like the sort of people who don't believe in evolution at all."
This is almost everybody, though. Liberals stereotypically portray themselves now as "the party of science" while strenuously denouncing every individual conclusion that can be drawn from the theory of evolution as it applies to human beings, and conservatives... well.
Hmmm. Most people have at best a vague understanding of genetics and natural selection (and by your snarky remarks, I suspect you may also fall into that category). Of course, the GOP has tried to dilute even the most superficial teaching of evolution in public schools. No doubt that's because, as of 2008, 60% of the GOP believed in creationism. (Granted 38% of Democrats believed in Creationism, but the majority believe in evolution of some sort). The 2nd largest group in each party believed in God-guided evolution. More recent Pew research seems to indicate that the percentage of evolutionists in the GOP has waned since that poll, but grown in the Democratic party.
As for Liberals portraying themselves as the "party of science," we do—and I suspect that must be very annoying to you folks on the radical right. Yet science education in the US, at least at the high school and undergraduate level is so shitty that most liberals believe in evolution (and science in general) without understanding it. On the right, the remainder of the holdouts who still believe in evolution, tend to latch on to crackpot theories based on evolutionary pseudoscience to support their conservative social agendas.
I beg your pardon? Us folks on the radical right? I think you gravely misparsed "and conservatives... well".
When I said almost everybody, I meant almost everybody on both sides. I will thus content myself to point at your angry partisan quacking as a demonstration of what I'm talking about.
Hey, if you shitpost about the Left "denouncing every individual conclusion that can be drawn from the theory of evolution as it applies to human beings"—which is just rightwing bullshittery—it's incumbent upon me to push back on your quacks. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the quacking gander. BTW, I love how the Right lumps all Lefties (centrist Dems, soi-disant progressives, and Marxist, etc.) together as believing the same things.
All quacking aside, I'd not only agree with you that the majority of the US population doesn't understand natural selection (i.e. what you call evolution) but they're also woefully ignorant about the rest of the sciences. And, as a general rule of thumb, I found that the use of the term evolution instead of natural selection is a good indicator that the person pontificating on "evolution" doesn't know what they're talking about because that impreciseness of terminology reflects and impreciseness of understanding. ;-)
I feel like, if I reply to this in good faith you'll just continue on this avenue of "muh right wing" and shitposting accusations, so I'll bow out here, I don't see any fruitful or meaningful way to engage with this type of blinkered partisanship. Let it be known that I think you suck precisely as much as your right-wing counterpart, neither one iota more nor one less.
Right off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of stark examples that reproductive fitness is a political *motivator*. Boko Haram and The Lord's Resistance didn't raid those girls' schools to take hostages (despite how the headlines read). The raiyding them to take "wives" for their young, mostly teenage soldiers. When cornered by government forces, the Lord's Resistance ended up using some of the girls from the Aboke abduction as negotiation tokens, but would only give back those who hadn't been given as rewards to their officers and soldiers. And of the women who were eventually returned from the Boko Haram raid (and not all were returned), many had children and/or were pregnant. So, ideology may motivate those groups but the promise of access to young women was no doubt an incentive.
And of course when it comes to political sex scandals in the US—since 2000, the number of sex scandals for Republican politicians have occurred at 3.4x the rate of Democratic political figures. Obviously, there's a strain of thinking among Conservative officeholders that their office entitles them to sex with their subordinates. Seems like election to public office can improve one's reproductive fitness—and it's often been claimed that political office is an aphrodisiac.
The null hypothesis would be that politicians aren't more likely to sleep with their subordinates based on their political party. I'm not familiar with the data on rates of sex scandals, but you're suggesting these happen at a rate of 3.4x for Republicans over Democrats. There are four possible interpretations of this report I can think of:
1. Republicans are more likely to sleep with their subordinates. (Why would this be?)
2. The report is about sex 'scandals'. So maybe news reporting of scandals is biased against Republicans and/or in favor of Democrats. Since the overwhelming majority of reporters lean Left, it's plausible to suspect they would have a bias toward over-reporting bad news for their opposition and under-reporting bad news for their side.
3. Republican voters like to see a 'nuclear family' on the ballot, so Republican politicians are pressured to present themselves as such to get elected. A gay Republican who sets up a facade with a wife and kids will be more likely to get elected in a Republican district, but would also be more likely to seek out the kind of same-sex extramarital activities that sex scandals are made of.
4. Republicans are more interested in reading about sex scandals about their side. Maybe, since Clinton and Kennedy, Democrats are non-plussed by such reports, considering this aspect of character unimportant in establishing job qualifications, while Republicans are SHOCKED that one of their own could stoop to this kind of behavior and so are much more likely to click. (Democrats may also be more likely to click, if only because it's a subversion Republican narratives about family values.)
I'm partial to the null hypothesis - that party affiliation doesn't impact bedroom behavior - and I think 2, 3, and 4 are likely better explanations for this phenomenon.
Normally I'd agree with you that the null hypothesis seems to be a more reasonable choice, but if we look at Wikipedia's list of historical sex scandals by elected or appointed politicians—at the national level from 2000 to the present—sex scandals have dogged the GOP more—for whatever reason. This may correlate with the fact that exploitive sex seems to be endemic to conservative/authoritarian religious sects such as the Catholic Church and fundamentalist Protestant sects, and these groups have enormous influence on the GOP (and so the same mindset may prevail between the those attracted to GOP authoritarianism and religious authoritarianism).
I tabulated this ratio from this list on Wikipedia of sex scandals from 2000 to the present. Of course, the editors of this page may have been biased in what they included on that list. But since much of the media is rightward-leaning, you'd think there would be a bias against Democrats. Also, I didn't include party official sex scandals — only publicly elected or appointed officials. Feel free to check my numbers. Naturally, the Pizzagate pedo ring didn't make the cut—so any QAnon followers should take this list with a grain of salt.
I remain unconvinced that the explanation is a real-world difference between the parties in sex scandals. Your examples seem like more just-so stories without evidence to rule out more plausible explanations for the data.
(Yes, "without evidence". Citing the same GOP bias toward sex scandal reporting doesn't tell us anything about the fundamental question of WHY we see more sex scandals for Republicans. Have you noticed there are more sex/corruption scandals among political dissidents in Russia and China? Of course, we can see the same thing historically in the US, Great Britain, France, Germany, and dozens of countries in South America, Europe, Africa, etc. Is that evidence that political dissidents are more likely to be corrupt? Perhaps the US is different from every other example where political dissidents are targeted in this EXACT way, but that would be an affirmative hypothesis that should be supported with evidence over the null hypothesis that 'this time isn't different from literally every other time in history'.)
Authoritarian tendencies: You seem convinced the Right is more authoritarian than the Left, but in my experience Right and Left always justify THEIR side's authoritarianism as necessary and proper, while the OTHER side's authoritarianism is blatant power mongering. If that were true, the Patriot Act would not have survived the Obama administration, and Republicans would sincerely be willing to leave abortion policy up to the states. To a non-authoritarian without a party home, it looks a lot like authoritarians vie for control in both major US political parties - with much success.
Right-wing news dominance: I'm not sure why you think news media is rightward-leaning, or even why we should think that's the case? Perhaps your threshold for "Right" is not well-calibrated? The overwhelming majority of news reporters has been heavily Left-leaning for decades - and trending more heavily Left-leaning - as measured by donations in time and money to political candidates over the years. More strikingly, editors lean more heavily Left than reporters do. This can also be seen in measures of reporting bias, as well as in whether reporters are willing to say negative things about a political candidate. It would be strange if a profession that's solid-Left from the professors on down the line somehow produced consistently Right-leaning content almost none of them believe in.
My personal observation has been that on-the-ground reporters are a bit more of a mix of libertarian/populist/progressive Left than editors, and that editors skew heavily establishment Left. This might lead a progressive, populist, or libertarian Left observer to be frustrated at seeing news that steers away from - and at points actively demonizes - their preferred narratives. They might feel the news attacks their viewpoint (as it often does) and conclude from this that therefore the news is more Right-leaning than the evidence demonstrates - especially as low-level reporters voice concerns that their non-establishment views are being silenced (which they often are).
But I don't think there's a strong case that media actually leans Right in any meaningful way. Indeed, it's difficult to square such an assertion with the push in 2016 to change reporting standards to include editorializing opinions in explicitly news articles and headlines, and to reject the long-held standard of acquiring the opposing viewpoint on a story. Were these moves taken so reporters could stop interviewing Left-wing sources about climate change and misinformation, and exclude those viewpoints from their articles? This is opposite of what I've observed.
Religious ... sexploitation? as a widespread cultural norm on the Right: I'll also take issue with inflammatory claims such as "exploitive sex seems to be endemic to conservative/authoritarian religious sects". Unless you can show me in their charters or proselytizing materials where they explicitly endorse such things for believers, this is less of a claim and more of a smear. I'm not Catholic, and I recognize they've struggled with clergy sex scandals for years - with policies and cover-ups that are abhorrent - but it's one thing to claim that they badly bungled their stated ethical standards throughout the scandals, and another to affirmatively claim that they ENDORSE exploitive sex or that exploiting people for sex is just part of what it means to be a rank-and-file Catholic. (Same for Protestants.)
The null hypothesis should be "Catholics are not holier than non-Catholics", including in the all-too-human desire of their leaders to hide embarrassing/abhorrent behavior. It's certainly a stretch to affirmatively claim sex scandals with Priests MUST mean something nefarious about the rank-and-file, entirely without evidence. The whole point of a 'scandal' is that it's something they tried to hide. Your claim implies it's endemic and widespread, not hidden among a privileged few. We would need evidence for that claim.
Indeed, it's difficult to understand what, if anything, can be gleaned from painting with such a broad brush other than strict partisan fist-bumping. However, if you want to do some digging, you could look at actual differences within the Republican party to try and test this hypothesis. For example, it's well-established that there's a Southern wing of the party (the descendants of the Dixiecrats) that was wooed over to the Republican party by focusing on social issues (especially abortion) in the 60's through the 80's. There are issues that are more overtly religious, and held to stronger by Southern Republicans, in such a way that we can easily distinguish different types of Republican politicians. We might hypothesize, then, that if being staunchly religious makes you more susceptible to sex scandals we would see a statistically meaningful increase in Southern socially-conservative Republican sex scandals over, say, New England fiscally-conservative Republicans, etc. Perhaps there's a cultural difference there, but we'd need to test that hypothesis before we make a claim.
Or we could count up the number of Republican politicians of different religious backgrounds and get a per capita scandal prevalence, then look for a statistically meaningful difference among the several groups/denominations (accounting, of course, for multiple comparisons). That would be a scientific approach to testing the hypothesis that the religious Right somehow makes people more scandal-prone. Again, we'd want to test that hypothesis before making broad proclamations about it.
In my experience, life is often more complex than the just-so stories that come easily from looking at a disparity between two numbers in a quick-and-dirty statistic.
Digging around for statistics that can be read a dozen ways, then telling wild ex-post explanations for why it's 'scientific evidence' of the moral failings of millions of people whose political beliefs you disagree with, is not a scientific approach at attempting to better understand the world, so much as old-school partisan political point-scoring.
I will note that this is something I see a lot on the Right, too, so this argument is in good company. There are plenty on the Right who would also cherry-pick some statistic or issue where the Left totally flopped the science and point out (accurately) that the Left is totally NOT the Party of Science. I often see them go on to claim (inaccurately) that this means the Right must therefore be the Party of Science.
There is no Party of Science. Science is a method of discovery that has no pre-conceived ideology. If you subscribe to an ideology, you may have convinced yourself that you do so because of empiricism, but in my experience that's not the case. Indeed, ideology can ensure the same people will look at the same evidence through different lenses to come to whatever preconceived notion they began at. This isn't a baseless claim. The empirical evidence seems to bear this out:
You keep saying what the null hypothesis ought to be, but fundamentally misunderstand what makes the Democrats the "Party of Science": they decide what the null hypothesis is.
Just off the top of my head, that list doesn't include the Tara Reade allegation against Joe Biden. Probably it relates to this criteria: "loss of or damage to reputation caused by actual, accused, or apparent violation of morality or propriety". No reputational damage, no scandal; if no one cares about you, what happened to you doesn't matter.
I think evaluating everything on the level of procreative fitness /at the level of an individual human/ is not useful. It feels rather arbitrary or at least reduces the human experience to something very 2D.
I’m also sure that there are plenty of adaptions that support procreation / continuation of a group that would look prima facie maladaptive taken through EK’s individual organism lens.
Yeah, Emil's position seems both unhelpful from the perspective of psychology, but also weirdly ill-informed from the perspective of evolutionary biology. I guess Richard Dawkins has been cancelled or something, but he wrote some very good books.
Also we tend not to view other "non-mental" illnesses through an evolutionary fitness lens. We view it from a "will this kill you, cause pain, or otherwise disable you" point of view. Those can be correlated with evolutionary fitness, but are certainly not totally overlapping.
Yeah, I mean the elephant in the room here is obviously the Naturalism Fallacy.
I assume Emil responds to this by saying 'I'm not making value judgements about whether mental disorders are good or bad, so the Naturalism Fallacy doesn't apply' but come on, once you call something a disorder you're making a value judgement. If you're not then use a different word.
Cancer affects a lot of post-reproductive aged people and it's definitely still a disease/disorder/malfunction.
It's not clear to me what light is shed by looking through the reproductive fitness lens to understand what's a present day health problem, mental or otherwise.
Absolutely, cancer is a good example. I think the right way to look at this is that reproductive fitness is one among many aspects of “health” (along with being functional in daily life, free of terrible pain, etc). Emil has it backwards in suggesting health js subsidiary to fitness, or at least that’s how I read him.
Here's a simple test: What traits do you want your children to have?
Schizophrenia? No, that's a massive malfunction.
Sickle cell anemia? No, that's a massive malfunction, although they seem to be making progress on a genetic engineering treatment.
Pedophilia? No, that's pretty bad.
Homosexuality? They can grow up to lead happy, productive lives. But, still, homosexuality reduces your chances of grandchildren ... so ... yeah, that's another malfunction, not as bad the ones above, but still a malfunction you don't wish upon your children. Homosexuality is a malfunction of a _basic_ part of life, so what else could it be other than a malfunction?
Yeah, probably. Monastic vocations were respectable in eras of high birthrates, but rapidly faded as family sizes got smaller. As a Catholic baby boomer, I knew a lot of adults with religious vocations. And a lot of them bailed out in the 1970s for heterosexuality -- I respect them. In fact, many of them are among the best people I've known.
The real problem with this framing of monastic vocations is that they're not a compulsion. As you observe, they are a choice -- one that people often give up on, and to persevere to the end requires great intentionality and endurance. This belongs in a very different category from involuntary compulsions, which require zero mental effort to maintain and can't easily, if at all, be overcome. I'll posit that mental illnesses should really only belong in that latter category.
A shortcoming with your original framing is that an ordinary vice like laziness is also something that you don't want your kids to have. But of course, everyone is lazy to some degree, so I think this problem is solved by clarifying that we're not merely talking about falling towards the low (or high) end of the normal human range for some characteristic, but possessing a problem that the large majority of people do not have to any real degree.
Male homosexuality is unusual in that it doesn't all that much exist on a continuum like most human traits. Sexual orientation among men is closer to being a switch: straight or gay.
So, it makes sense to ask parents: Which way do you want the sexual orientation switch flipped in your son?
At present, we don't have a clue how to do this. But it wouldn't be astonishing if in, say the 22nd Century we did.
I suspect that progressive San Francisco Bay Area parents would be leading customers of having their son's switch flipped to straight.
"Sexual orientation among men is closer to being a switch: straight or gay."
There's some truth to this statement, but I think it's exaggerated. It's very common for "gay men" to have partners of both sexes throughout their lives.
I think this cuts back to "I’m also sure that there are plenty of adaptions that support procreation / continuation of a group that would look prima facie maladaptive taken through EK’s individual organism lens."
At some level, the odds of passing down one's genes depends on the success of the society the individual lives in, which will tie into things like 'how likely are people to starve to death / die to violence / etc.?' As such, social constructs that remove some of the reproductive individuals from society that also benefit society at large may be better for the reproductive success of the average member of society.
As an example, you may be more likely to have grandchildren if male child #2 is packed off to a religious life when the alternative is male children #1 & #2 fight over who succeeds the family line, and this is before considering the social benefit from having a small class of individuals that are outside the competition for mates (religious callings in Catholicism, eunuchs in China, etc.).
> social constructs that remove some of the reproductive individuals from society that also benefit society at large may be better for the reproductive success of the average member of society
If a gene improves the reproductive fitness of the average member of a society, it doesn't increase in frequency in the gene pool. It will only be selected for if it improves the reproductive fitness of carriers more than non-carriers.
Your example of increasing the probability of grandchildren would increase gene frequency, but your example of maintaining social stability would not. (Imagine having a gene for causing the collapse of civilization which also enables its carriers to thrive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Soon enough, civilization will have collapsed and all the survivors will have this gene.)
Social constructs evolve and spread independently from genes, but if social constructs decrease the reproductive fitness of their carriers, resistance to believing these social constructs will be selected for.
I think the evidence that argues against this is the success of monogamy, such that similar behavior (mating for life) can be found in some animals. Spreading your genetic material around as much as possible would seem to be the idealization of reproductive fitness, and thus under your arguments should be highly selected for, yet this isn't the case.
Perhaps it's that 'resistance to believing social constructs' is a subset of anti-social behavior, and society by nature works to make sure that conformance to norms of social behavior is highly selected for. From a social evolution perspective, perhaps societies where the benefits from being a member of society outweigh the loss from individual competitive reproductive drive are the ones that truly prosper.
> I think the evidence that argues against this is the success of monogamy
Not at all. Monogamy is a compromise between male and female reproductive strategies with some synergistic effects that make it beneficial for individuals and not simply society as a whole.
Dudes clearly DO wanna spread their genetic material around as much as possible, which is why it's so easier for women to get sex if they want it randomly; and for symmetric reasons they usually dont.
The norm of sexual fidelity - one of the strongest and most serious norms we have - is necessary to keep this arrangement functioning, and still people cheat, constantly.
This criterion is subjective beyond usefulness. For many dads, a son who's disinterested in alcohol and cars would be a malfunction.
Besides, gay couples can have children, and their tendency towards childlessness is driven by social and legal factors much more than by their orientation.
And if a parent converts to antinatalism, then for them Emil's principle gets flipped, and their child's fertility becomes a malfunction.
In what way? One set of my grand-parents had 5 children, 6 grand-children, but only 4 great-grand-children, 3 of whom came from my sibling who married a Catholic and converted.
Not sure why what parents want is a useful test for determining what's illness?
Parents want all kind of crazy things for their kids. They want their kids to be lawyers, to get straight As, to fulfill their unrealized dreams, to take over the family business, to stay close to home, to marry someone they like more, etc etc. Many of these things parents want are not what the kids want and do not move in the direction of the kid's happiness or well-being. Parents are narcissistic. Parents are contradictory.
The purpose of kids' lives is not to deliver grandchildren to their parents. It's to become the people they themselves want and need to become and to live their own lives fully.
I'm having trouble grasping what water "failure in evolutionary terms" is carrying. It feels quite moralistic but I don't feel any duty to give evolution something. Evolution is a process that doesn't need us. Failure is usually measured relative to a goal. If the goal is humanity's survival, then not everyone needs to procreate. What's the specific goal in your mind that not having children is failing to meet?
And another thing - why are the interests of the parents the sole criterion here?
I get that the interest of the subject themselves is sometimes insufficient because their judgement is compromised (though in cases like LGBTQ it isn't), but what about the interests of other family members and friends?
Here's a simple test: What traits do you want your children to have?
Schizophrenia? No, that's a massive malfunction.
Sickle cell anemia? No, that's a massive malfunction, although they seem to be making progress on a genetic engineering treatment.
Pedophilia? No, that's pretty bad.
Homosexuality? They can grow up to lead happy, productive lives. But, still, homosexuality reduces your chances of grandchildren ... so ... yeah, that's another malfunction, not as bad the ones above, but still a malfunction you don't wish upon your children. Homosexuality is a malfunction of a _basic_ part of life, so what else could it be other than a malfunction?
I wouldn't want my children to grow up having the beliefs of Steve Sailor - that would be deeply upsetting in a way them turning out to be gay would not be - but I wouldn't describe it as a mental illness. Intuitions about what sorts of things we want for and out of our children is one of the least useful ways I can imagine thinking about mental illness.
I read the "benefitting your friends" dig not over your value judgement over pedophilia but over your value judgement about homosexuality. I think it's a fair assessment.
Not in the US, certainly, but by the "bad consequences" standard, homosexuality WOULD be a mental illness in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Nigeria, for example.
What behaviors we ascribe the term 'mental disorder' to being contingent on the legality of a behavior seems, once again, unintuitive and unparsimonious.
Agreed. I'm not thrilled with the stability of either criterion (if we take Kirkegaard's criterion as described by current reproductive success). ( Alternatively, if we take Kirkegard's criterion as being set by reproductive success in our environment of evolutionary adaptation, then it is stable, but excruciatingly hard to test. )
To add to the frustration: Even if we had a full causal explanation of some of these preferences, all the way from (for genetic ones) base pairs to proteins to neural firing probabilities to behaviors, it still wouldn't make the question of "Is this a mental illness?" more stable over either time or across societies, according to either social or fecundity criteria.
I'd argue that homosexuality is at most an indirect cause of the suffering gay people experience in those countries. The proximate cause is bigotry against gay people.
No more obvious than homosexuals causing direct harm. Or transsexuals. It's just you just find their proclivities disgusting, and the state wielding overwhelming force agrees with you.
I don't think it's hypocritical to say that acts that have a victim should be punished, while victimless acts should not be punished. As another example, in the spirit of consistency, do you think opponents of Communist regimes are comparable to practicing pedophiles, in that both persist in doing something against the law that has a high risk of imprisonment? It seems to me more reasonable to say that one group is performing an act (child abuse) that *any* healthy society would want to inhibit, while the other is performing an act (criticizing the government) that many healthy societies would *not* want to inhibit.
Yes. Defying the state is a rather dangerous enterprise. I do not judge whether their expected reward is the worth the risk to THEM, but I don't think either would be to me. (Now, if said pedophiles criticized the opponents of the Communist regimes for their crimes, or vice versa, I WOULD condemn that as hypocrisy.)
I'm not keen on the whole "healthy society" framing. Such usually turn out to be "us vs. them" with a few layers of obfuscation, and self-delusion when proposed by intellectually honest interlocutors.
What if homosexuality was harmful to one or both participants? That's a factual question at that point, even though there would probably be no consensus on what the facts actually are. If homosexuality was factually negative, would you switch your position to be against it, or is there another argument that's closer to your real position?
>the other is performing an act (criticizing the government) that many healthy societies would *not* want to inhibit.
This, of course, gets to the core disagreement, determining what counts as healthy for the society. The value of being able to criticize the government is by now so established that even the worst dictatorships at least pay lip service to it. Sexual liberation and everything downstream of it, including de-stigmatization of homosexuality, has a much shorter track record, and the position that this in fact leads to unhealthy societies is not an entirely discredited point of view yet.
Here's the epistemic monkey-wrench: at least a large part of the psychological trauma from child molestation comes from the fact that society expects trauma from child molestation and those who are not directly traumatised are then traumatised by the dissonance.
You can't meaningfully study whether X is traumatising in a society that already widely believes it is.
Do you think you could prove that homosexuality is closer to wearing green hats? You could look at things like STD rates among gay men and conclude otherwise - which has nothing to do with society and looks more like drinking mercury.
If it were factually true that homosexual behavior was a negative individually or for society, would you change your mind to be against it?
Have you looked at alcoholism rates among lawyers, depression rates among dentists, suicide rates among teenagers? The fact a sub-group of people suffers disproportionately from a problem doesn't mean their sub-group is itself ill. It means their circumstances makes them more vulnerable to a certain kind of problem.
It's a public health and/or individual behavioral problem that can be addressed at those levels, without stigmatizing an entire group of people. If you're using the problem this sub-group is more vulnerable to as a means to justify stigmatizing them, then it seems like you might just prefer to do that for your own moral reasons, but not out of logic.
Just as an observation, I feel like this is the contrapositive of Szasz's position. If it's all on a continuum, either everyone's mentally ill or nobody's mentally ill.
That doesn't at all address the question. Could you show that homosexual behavior was closer to "green hats" than "drinking mercury"?
If it's subjective, then agreement or disagreement is a matter of perspective and goals. If it's objective, then we should be able to examine which things fall into which categories and demonstrate that one set of behaviors (lawyering, being gay) is something, and that another set of behaviors (alcoholism, drinking mercury) is different.
What we cannot do, is claim that being gay is "green hat" from an objective standpoint, but back that up with subjective criteria.
Green hats aren't about adultery. They're about cuckoldry. It says so right in your link!
(And while it's interesting to see that someone else is willing to link to wikipedia alias pages to make a point, here it looks more like you're trying to obscure the meaning of the idiom. That link is just a redirect to the page "Cuckold".)
I think Emil's point is that homosexuality has bad consequences for homophobes. It makes them uncomfortable.
Scott does not believe this is a big deal because he does not care about the feelings of homophobes but he does care about the feelings of homosexuals. He is not "friends" with homophobes not in a personal sense, but in the sense that they are his outgroup.
I would say his point is the one he expounds on at length - that homosexuality has bad consequences for homosexuals. The fact that they do not perceive themselves being injured doesn't mean they aren't being injured. (This is a pretty mainstream view as applied to, say, alcoholics.)
He doesn't mention it, but since it seems relevant to this thread I should point out that homosexuality also injures the homosexual's family, and they do perceive the injury.
Biological reproduction is literally what humans were designed for. It is vital to any society that wants to avoid demographic collapse. And it is the thing that brings most individual human beings more happiness and joy than anything else they will ever do. How is not being able to reproduce, or having substantial additional cost and uncertainty associated with reproduction, not a "bad consequence"?
It's not the *worst* thing in the world. You can live a long and reasonably happy life while gay. But there's no shortage of things that are unambiguously considered illnesses that allow for a long and reasonably happy life.
Straight or gay, not everyone wants to reproduce. Not everyone finds the same joy and satisfaction there. The human race doesn't need literally every single person to want to reproduce or to love doing it.
Half of humans live decades past the point that they can reproduce and their lives are not over -- nor are they completely fulfilled -- by having reproduced or not. These people do not spend those decades in a state of illness for not being able to reproduce.
I think the amount of human variation in desires we have and the amount of satisfaction gained outside of reproduction is still safe for the survival and flourishing of humanity. Humans were also designed to walk upright, to use our big brains to invent things like fire, and to make art and culture. All that is pretty cool as well.
"We have to classify pedophilia as a mental illness, because we want insurance to pay for treatment. If someone shows up at a psychiatrist saying “Help, I feel an urge to molest children, is there anything you can do to get rid of that urge or prevent me from acting on it?”, I definitely want insurance to pay for this person’s treatment. Therefore, pedophilia “is” “a” “mental” “illness”, and no sophisticated categorization algorithm will ever convince me otherwise."
That's what Scott is thinking of. But he also wrote:
"If you call something a mental disorder, insurance has to cover treatment for it, which is good."
That was in reference to the transgender disorder or not question. Since a large proportion of rationalists are trans including many of Scott's friends, Scott wanting to get funding for this does mean that he is favoring a definition that would get his friends funding for treatment. I wasn't implying that Scott has pedophile friends, but trans and other mentally ill friends and clients that benefit from such definitions.
(For context, Scott was writing a lot of sentences that could be very easily quoted out of context, and because there was still an obligation to quote literally, Scott *wanted* them to look weird when quoted, so as to avoid people thinking that those sentences were his complete opinion.)
Thanks, this makes a lot of sense, and turns what seemed like an extremely out of place jab into a pretty normal misunderstanding. I think Scott should reply to this.
Also, I think that accusing him to shape his beliefs so that they benefit the interests of his friends is uncharitable.
Would you also accuse a pro-choice activist to be primarily motivated in securing the right to abortion for themselves or their girlfriend, or accuse an animal rights activist of just trying to benefit their pet?
Given the *sheer number* of pro-choice activists who use slogans referring to themselves, "my body my choice" and so on, without the slightest shame, it seems utterly undeniable that they're motivated by almost total selfishness.
I can't think of a single other movement that uses such brazenly self-centered language so frequently.
>In the 2022 ACX survey, some 95% of people claimed to be cisgender.
There are layers to the Rat onion. "Reads ACX" is a layer outside "considers self a LWer/Rat" (14% on the survey you link) is a layer outside "literally lives in a polyamorist cult compound in the Bay Area" (not entirely sure what percent this is, but I can't imagine it's over 10% of self-identified Rats).
Scott is part of that inner core. Stats on the whole onion are massively regressed toward the mean compared to that core (and as noted below, 5% is still well above average). Note the 2% Jewish percentage on that survey, despite the notorious abundance of Jews among the core Rats (I have literally seen a neo-Nazi claim we're a Jewish conspiracy).
5% 𝗶𝘀 a "large proportion" if what you're measuring is the proportion of people claiming to be transgender. It's about ten times the background rate. (Estimate of people claiming to be transgender from https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/ ; US population of 330M taken from wikipedia; share of population that is age 15+ also taken from wikipedia; share of population that is age 13 or 14 incorrectly assumed to be zero. But the calculated background rate doesn't shift much if you just divide "all people of age 13+ claiming to be trans" by the total population of the US. It's the difference between 0.481% and 0.485%)
That speaks of either very powerful selection effects or very powerful social contagion effects.
> Also, I think that accusing him to shape his beliefs so that they benefit the interests of his friends is uncharitable.
Scott specifically stated that he wanted "mental illness" to be defined based on who deserved subsidized treatment.
I'm puzzled about why everyone seems to focus on the homosexuality bit, when Scott was making a much wider point about mental healthcare in general (I even read that bit not about homosexuality but about psychiatry and getting money as a medical doctor)
An illness is a degradation of some natural function with an external etiology. Most of what political hacks want to classify as illness (transgenderism, homosexuality) is actually chimericism: people have a non standard but functional combination of different entirely natural traits. This isn't quite there in terms of definitions. Something like polydactalysm is also obviously not a disease but is not composed of normal human traits. But with homosexuality and transgenderism it is literally just a non standard assemblage of normal sex traits, including normal brain traits. The only weird thing is how high a dose of cross sex hormones trans people's innately gendered brains experience as a result of "natural" puberty.
I don’t think this approach completely avoids value judgments over what’s “functional” a lot of things will fall into a grey area where it has both positive and negative effects, and judging whether it’s “just another way of being” or “a defect” is not necessarily obvious.
Take, for example, certain types of high-functioning autism, where various mental/sensory parameters are tuned to uncommon settings such that one has a mix of effects, e.g. increased mathematical ability and increased sensitivity to sound. Whether this “should” be considered an illness may be a question that two affected people — one a successful mathematician, the other forced to take care of an ill family member in a loud city — may have very different opinions on.
"Disorder" applies perfectly well; the problem you run into is that "mental illness" and "mental disorder" are the same thing.
I tend to prefer using "disease" as the indicator of exogeny. That's not better, measured against usage - people are just as happy to call cancer a disease as they are to call it an illness... and I'm pretty sure most people would _reject_ the idea that cancer is a "disorder".
Honestly there are a lot of hard limits to how much you can change people's thinking by changing language so in retrospect I'm kind of embarrassed to have gotten into this discussion at all.
I agree with you that the difference between a problem that is caused by spontaneous breakdown and a problem that is caused by malevolent forces is important, and that it's a bad thing that people try so hard to conflate them when they talk about disease. I made that very point on an earlier ACX post (probably the same one that Kirkegaard prompted this post by responding to), and most commenters rejected it then too.
My criticism of you is limited to your assertions that the distinction you'd like to make currently exists in the language. I'm with you on the idea that it _should_ exist.
Sickle cell anemia isn't a disease? Cystic fibrosis? Cancer?
Unless you're trying to say there's a difference between illness, disease, disorder, condition, and several other words people mostly use interchangeably, in which case see Scott's point about preferring technical terms for weird definitions and letting the common terms mean what common people (political people) want and need them to mean.
I suggest the broader term "malfunction" to cover everything from sickle cell anemia to schizophrenia. Pedophilia and homosexuality may or may not be mental illnesses, but they are both clearly malfunctions from a Darwinian perspective.
Seems fine but in that case we're all walking around with quite a few of those, for instance I'm 5'10" and I would do better both today and in the EEA mating-wise if I were a few inches taller (based on evidence that human height has been selected for in most cultures), my height is 90% genetic, so is that a genetic malfunction? Seems weird to call it that, as most people would say any hindrance to me is small and I'm within a standard deviation of normal adult male height. It seems like my genes functioned fine - they just code for something not quite optimal in the human environment for the last few hundred thousand years.
You could say "oh but they save you on calorie burn or maybe the height genes are also intelligence genes so you're smarter for giving up some inches" or any number of guesses, but you can make assumptions and just so stories for anything in the EEA and that just undermines the idea of the knowability of EEA selection pressures.
Sexual orientation among men is interesting in not being all that much on a continuum like height is, which is distributed pretty much according to basic bell curve math. Instead, male sexual orientation seems to come in an unusual J-shaped curve with a few gays, even fewer bis, and many straights.
So, male sexual orientation is more like a switch: straight or gay. At present, we have absolutely no idea how to flip that switch, but someday we might and parents will have a choice. What will they tend to choose?
I'm 6'4." Personally, I don't see all that many upsides to being tall. For example, I had cancer in 1996, and having a long torso like mine does increase the risk of cancer.
The main advantage is that women tend to like height in a man. Whether female prejudice against short men could be socially deconstructed by shaming women about their height bigotry is unknown, but the interesting fact about our society is that orders of magnitude less effort has been expended by the media in trying to change female bias against short men compared to efforts to change male bias against fat women. Our culture in the 2020s basically doesn't care about short men at all.
In the past, a tall man signified that he enjoyed good nurture growing up: presumably he had prosperous relatives who kept him better fed than the stunted masses. And prosperous relatives are a good feature in a potential husband. So it made sense in the past for women to be attracted to tall men.
But now, height is mostly a matter of genetic nature. Other than the appeal it holds for the female sex, the advantages and disadvantages of having the genes for height seem to be about equal.
It would definitely increase human happiness if we could socially construct women into being less bigoted against short men, the way men don't care all that much about female height. Without this prejudice, more women could find a man they find attractive.
But nobody cares about this potential social reform.
I think there'd need to be a qualifier in front of "malfunction", to specify the layer. For instance, on the surface, sickle-cell anemia seems like a malfunction. But last I checked, it was a side-effect of a genetic adaptation that, even including the cost of occasional sickle-cell anemia, increased overall fitness in the ancestral environment.
I don't like this, mostly because it enables arguments like "why perform surgery on a healthy body", when any treatment that had a chance of " repairing" a trans person into a cis person would be equivalent to brain surgery. A major and commonly appealing rhetorical argument against trans medical treatment hinges on the inappropriate ontological classification of transgenderism as disease instead of condition
Are you pro or anti medical treatment for transness? I'm confused. Also are you pro or anti treatment for cancer? It seems to me that people prefer to treat both conditions when they have them, why not let them (provided they are voluntarily being treated, doing treatment, and funding treatment - questions of doing surgery on minors or using government subsidies arise in both cases as general questions of consent and cost benefit analysis that apply to all human behavior).
Mandatory hormone treatment for all people with cross sex brain dimorphism, and state funded surgery. It can come out of the 2000+ year reparations budget we're owed, this is my alternative offer to a truth and reconciliation committee aimed at every bastard ever to participate in human civilization.
Would a higher rate of suicide (or other mental illnesses, or the dysphoric feeling itself) in trans individuals not count as a mental defect or whatever term you would want to use? You can use the term "natural" to describe it, but then I feel like you're not differentiating between trans and, say, schizophrenics, which are also "natural" in the sense that schizophrenia happens based on normal human genetics and brain growth. Neither are unnatural in the sense of man-made or from an outside source like a car accident.
A necessary but not comprehensive element of an illness is that it is a degradation of some natural function with an external etiology. This is important because it rules out many things as illnesses, even without fully defining illness. For an example of why, see my second most recent reply in this thread.
I _think_ you are saying that additional qualifiers can be added which would further restrict what gets classified as an illness. Am I interpreting your words correctly?
I enjoy points 4 and 7. They remind me of the old joke that if evolutionary psychologists took their beliefs seriously, they'd stop reducing their biological fitness by ranting about evopsych all the time.
If you're talking about Emil's proposal that all behaviors selected against by the EEA should be considered "disorders", then I agree. If you're talking about my comment, then I have no idea what you mean.
Why do you (or the hypothetical person telling the "old joke" you refer to) think evolutionary psychologists would consider maximizing their biological fitness a moral imperative?
The joke -- and I can't believe you're really making me explain it -- is that evolutionary psychologists tend to justify all human behaviors as strategies to maximize the chance of successful reproduction, but being really into evolutionary psychology is a human behavior that reduces the chance of successful reproduction by making people think you're a weirdo. Therefore evolutionary psychology fails to explain the existence of evolutionary psychologists.
Yes, thank you, I got the joke the first time. Immensely droll. The premise is a misunderstanding of evolutionary psychology I was characterizing as essentially the naturalistic fallacy.
Eh. I know two or three of ev psychology people who have several children; that's a lot better than population average. And ranting about your favorite subject can, if you have luck, raise your status, making it easier to reproduce.
"With my teeth clenched tightly and eyes focused straight ahead, I began devoting myself single-mindedly to my practice, forsaking food and sleep altogether.
Before the month was out, my heart fire began to rise upward against the natural course, parching my lungs of their essential fluids.[1] My feet and legs were always ice-cold: they felt as though they were immersed in tubs of snow. There was a constant buzzing in my ears, as if I were walking beside a raging mountain torrent. I became abnormally weak and timid, shrinking and fearful in whatever I did. I felt totally drained, physically and mentally exhausted. Strange visions appeared to me during waking and sleeping hours alike. My armpits were always wet with perspiration. My eyes watered constantly. I travelled far and wide, visiting wise Zen teachers, seeking out noted physicians. But none of the remedies they offered brought me any relief."
Love that. The man starved and sleep-deprived himself and was like "why do I feel unwell?"
Emil's concept of "mental illness" already has a name:
It's simply the christian (Catholic, dunno about others) concept of unnatural sexual sin but put in secular terms to appeal to a non-Christian audience.
The sin is to waste your productive sexual force for an unproductive, hedonistic end. In the Judaism, this is quite literally called: "To extract one's semen in vain"
Celibacy (in the case of clergy) is supposed to be the suppresion (use?) of that sexual force for other productive ends that are more important (to the church) than reproduction.
Glad you mentioned sin. Its a word that has been excised from discourse in our time on both Left and Right so it's difficult now to remember that until about 50 years ago it was part of the mental landscape of most people in the West -- and not just the religious. Its excision is a measure of the viral success of modern narcissistic notions like self esteem.
I think that - in fundamentals - sins are mostly no more time-bound than humanity itself. Ours is an age in which the 'I-can't-be-to-blame-so-someone-or-something-else-must-be' has become the default mentality.
Most of them aren't, but since the standards have traditionally come in tight packages, weakness of one part drags the whole thing down. If we're to stick with the human condition for a long time hence, new packages will necessarily closely resemble old ones in fundamentals.
Seems like we mostly agree, except looking at your latest post you don't seem to think that this is inevitable? The old order no longer has a consistent self-justification which an educated adult can take seriously, redesigning it from scratch while keeping the essential parts in is entirely alien to the conservative ethos, so they entirely relinquished the intellectual space to progressives, who are going to have to rediscover those essentials the hard and painful way.
plus Buddhists, plus Muslims, Jews and all of those "pagan tribes" who would consider some sex-stuff highly unnatural if the just could conceive of it (Greg Cochran). Plus those Hindu I met in India - and I could rattle on (Confucianism pro-gay??). The Simbari people and a few other Papuas seem different, sure. But sure, ignoring concepts held by most people ever can't go wrong. Down with the fence! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simbari_people#Traditional_practices_and_beliefs
Nope. A huge part of sexual sins in Christianity covers sex which would increase reproductive fitness. Polygamy, causal sex, or even rape in wartime are all evolutionary beneficial, and the churches don't like any of them.
The church (Aquinas, who came up with these categories od sins) considered those sins less bad than Homosexuality, Pedophillia, contraception\abortion etc.
This is because to the church these sins were only bad socially (for obvious reasons) but were still "natural" (in the Latin sense of the word natura) in that they were not sterile sexual acts and they could still result in the creation and continuation of life.
"(I wouldn’t describe this as “benefiting my friends” - I’m against children getting raped whether they’re my friends or not. I think this dig was unworthy of Emil, and ask that he correct it.)"
Are you also against adult men getting raped by other adult men? If so, why are you against pedophilia but not homosexuality?
"Evolutionary psychologists are pretty smart people and can probably coordinate on new terminology and move on, whereas normal people have brought the US to the brink of civil war over pronouns."
Sorry, but it was the "smart people" who invented the bizarre ritual of declaring your pronouns. It falls into the category of things so stupid that only an intellectual can believe them.
I think Scott's point is that pedophilia tends to have bad consequences, whereas homosexuality does not. I'm sure he's also against men raping other men, but that's quite rare.
"Are you also against adult men getting raped by other adult men? If so, why are you against pedophilia but not homosexuality?"
Because I think most-to-all pedophilic sex is rape (at least in the sense of statutory rape, where even if the child seems to consent they're probably under too much pressure to be comfortable with the situation) and I don't think that's true of homosexuality. Obviously I am against adult men raping each other.
I agree with all of that, but the point stands that homosexuality causes significantly more men to be raped than would otherwise be the case. Of course, very few homosexuals rape men, just as (probably?) very few pedophiles actually rape children. If you're saying that pedophilia causes much more suffering relative to happiness and fulfillment than homosexuality, then I'd agree--in modern Western society. In a highly conservative society where homosexuality is punished with death and child marriage is normal, the suffering-to-happiness ratios might be inverted.
Heterosexuality is not a disorder no matter how much harm it causes, because nothing that's a near human universal can be a disorder. Jealously, greed, and arrogance are negative traits, but because they're nearly universal (though not as universal as heterosexuality), they're not mental disorders even though they hurt the person with those traits and often hurt society.
Pedophilic sex is not inherently rape. It's inherently statutory rape, which is in turn because, in many cases, it causes serious harm to children. Homosexuality has also caused enormous suffering. The AIDS epidemic, which first took off in Western gay communities, has killed 40 million people. We have very effective treatments for AIDS now, but that has not stopped gay relationships from being train wrecks, with 58% of gay men cheating on their partners: https://www.thepinknews.com/2018/02/14/most-gay-men-have-cheated-on-their-partner-new-survey-finds/
Wrong answer caused by starting from your conclusion. Heterosexuality is not a mental disorder despite the incredible number of rapes it causes because heterosexuality is *not actually the cause of those rapes*. Gay rapists don't rape because they're gay; if they were heterosexual, they would just rape women instead of men, and vice versa for straight rapists. You're flinging together a bunch of spooky-sounding statistics about the lives of gay men and declaring that the underlying cause is homosexuality, but in fact you haven't showed causation at all. Being exclusively attracted to people of the same sex is not inherently harmful, and acting on this attraction is not inherently harmful. The same can't be said of pedophilia.
Yes and Yes again (to the overconfidence in "smartness" part of your comment). "A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep" (Saul Bellow). So much of our 21st c. malaise can be traced to that. In fact could excessive "smartness" count as a mental disorder?
I think it's astonishing unreasonable to conclude Scott would be accepting of male-male rape based on this article. Your use of this comparison seems to only be explained by an obsession with the culture war clouding your judgment. I'd suggest fixing that
Could you clarify what you mean by "believe them"? Declaring your pronouns seems like an action, not a belief, and I would like to engage with you about the belief you object to rather than trying to guess what it is and respond to that.
2. That you can be of a different gender simply by saying so
3. That the desire to mutilate your genitals is healthy and should be encouraged
4. Even if I grant #1-3, that the gender of a person who looks obviously female and whose name is Samantha is not immediately obvious
5. Even if I grant #1-4, that the number of cases where the correct pronouns are not obvious is large enough to warrant wasting time and effort telling everyone your pronouns. I have never, in my life, been surprised by anyone's pronoun announcements.
Thanks for answering! I have some responses, because yeah, as you've put them these are silly ideas, but they're also not what people are saying, doing, or believing.
1. is a definition squabble, so let's use different words. Many sources use "gender identity" as opposed to "assigned gender". DSM V describes gender dysphoria as "A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least six months’ duration". Even if you don't agree that someone's gender can be different than their sex, it is axiomatic that their gender identity can be.
2. I agree that you can't have a different gender identity simply by saying so. You have to feel so. I don't know how to tell what someone feels besides by what they tell me. *
3. I don't think that having a different gender identity than assigned gender necessarily means you want to remove your sex characteristics, though in many cases it does. Gender affirming surgery, as the scientific literature puts it, does have strict screening requirements (I believe). As only adults receive it, and children who experience gender dysphoria get reversible hormonal treatments, I'm happy to let adults do what they want with their own bodies, especially since it doesn't hurt others.
4 - 5. There are many inefficiencies in speech. Small talk, for instance. Saying your pronouns takes barely any time and less effort. It's not intended to surprise. As I've had it explained to me, it's to prevent people from making bad assumptions in those few cases where it would surprise you, and to normalize sharing how you'd like to be referred to, so that those with non-congruent assigned gender and gender identity feel comfortable sharing as well. I'm happy to add my pronouns (he/him, since I'm cis) to my email signature and slack profile and then never think about them again, which is how I've handled this.
* "Evidence further suggests that brain anatomy and neuronal signaling pathways are more closely aligned with a person’s perceived gender identity. ... However, not enough evidence has associated these differences with GD." per https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7415463/
It would be really interesting to see if further evidence supports that, since that seems like a pretty objective way to tell.
3. Letting adults do what they want with their own bodies is a defensible position, though not one I agree with. Normalizing self-harm, having medical professionals dedicated to helping people mutilate themselves, and ostracizing anyone who opposes self-mutilation, is quite different from passively letting adults do what they want. Analogously, it's one thing to legalize all drugs; it's quite another to have a whole industry set up to validate injecting fentanyl, subsidize the fentanyl, praise drug addiction as brave, and fire anyone who dares question whether teenagers should be getting fentanyl or whether they should at least wait until they're adults.
4-5. But I don't want to normalize sharing how I'd like to be referred to. We had a system for referring to people, one that does not normalize disorder or serve as a litmus test for an offensive ideology. I don't even see how sharing pronouns is supposed to make "those with non-congruent assigned gender and gender identity feel comfortable sharing". If someone who's obviously a man claims to be a woman, he's either comfortable with telling people he's a woman and asking them to use feminine pronouns, or not. If he's comfortable with it, why does everyone else have to do the ritual too? If he's not comfortable with it--possibly because he knows deep down how ridiculous his claim is--how does someone else saying the obvious change anything?
3. At this point, I think we've moved beyond "these are ridiculous beliefs that only an academic could believe" and on to the idea of speech. Your hypothetical mavericks who "dare question" surgical treatment for gender dysphoria express their ideas. People who disagree with them criticize and inflict social consequences on them. Both seem like important parts of the marketplace of ideas. You seem to be applying the Preferred First Speaker doctrine.*
4-5. A few things. One, I think it's a general part of human interaction to tell people how you'd like to be treated, and for others to either treat you that way or not according to their disposition towards you. Two, you'd be surprised how often it's difficult to tell, especially with those who have undergone gender transitions. Three, nobody has to share their pronouns. It's just a voluntary nice thing to do. People are sometimes encouraged to. And surely you can see how people partaking in a voluntary nicety showing that they know you can't always assume how people would like to be treated could make someone about whom you might assume incorrectly more comfortable. This is much the same as any other social glue, like how a coworker saying "hello" to you when you first meet might make you more comfortable than them ignoring your existence.
* 'The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker holds that when Person A speaks, listeners B, C, and D should refrain from their full range of constitutionally protected expression to preserve the ability of Person A to speak without fear of non-governmental consequences that Person A doesn't like. The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker applies different levels of scrutiny and judgment to the first person who speaks and the second person who reacts to them; it asks "why was it necessary for you to say that" or "what was your motive in saying that" or "did you consider how that would impact someone" to the second person and not the first. It's ultimately incoherent as a theory of freedom of expression,' as Ken White of Popehat explains it.
"Sorry, but it was the "smart people" who invented the bizarre ritual of declaring your pronouns. It falls into the category of things so stupid that only an intellectual can believe them."
Reminiscent of Chesterton's classic quote, "If there is one class of men whom history has proved especially and supremely capable of going quite wrong in all directions, it is the class of highly intellectual men."
It doesn't seem to me that Emil thinks that you believe that mental illnesses are just preferences. He responded to you, but also Caplan(mostly Caplan really).
The two of you might meet in the middle, at "mental states that reduce life expectancy"?
ADHD and alcoholism do. I guess maybe anxiety and chronic pain do too, at least via suicide. Pedophilia and other socially undesirable ones surely do, via the risk of punishment. Being Plato or a monk doesn't.
In modern humans, we have raised baseline life expectancy so much that losing some years doesn't usually mean losing some of the fertile ones. That has to impact evolutionary reasoning about modern humans so fundamentally that I for one can't calculate the full breadth of it right now.
QALY is perhaps a better metric than life expectancy. But regardless, I think this proposal suffers from being very sensitive to societal conditions. Homosexuality is the obvious example. If a gay person from a tolerant society moves to a homophobic society, of course their internal experience of attraction hasn't changed at all, but their expected QALY may have changed drastically. It seems very wrong to say that you can be mentally ill in one country, but sane in another.
On the other hand, I'm not that opposed to saying that you can be *disabled* in one country but not another. Maybe this comment is better suited to the post from a while back about the social model of disability. But the connotation of "mental illness" is that it describes a fact about a person, and a definition that can suddenly stop applying when the only thing about the person that's changed is their xy-coordinates doesn't match my intuitions at all.
It turns out most people say PRECISELY that when people move between countries (or even US states) with different "ages of consent”: one could be a pedophile in one, and perfectly sane in another.
No, in that situation, different people have different ideas of what constitutes pedophilia. If I believe the age of consent ought to be 18, then if somebody moves to a country with an age of consent of 13 and starts having sex with 13-year-olds, I don't think they're sane; I think they're a pedophile who's being allowed to get away with it.
This is a definition of pedophilia that's new to me. The standard thresholds are pubescence, local law, and 18 (mostly via Eagleland Osmosis). "The age I think it ought to be" strikes me as unlikely to catch on.
EDIT: Actually, most people are even more arbitrary when calling anime fans pedophiles ("short women are minor-coded" is a classic!), so maybe it will after all.
I can't tell if your reading comprehension is unusually poor or if you just think that intentionally misunderstanding a comment that hurt your feelings is the same as delivering a counterargument to it.
I don't think it's that weird to be mentally ill in one country but not the other. If you have Seasonal Affective Disorder, and you move to live near the equator where you suffer no symptoms, do you still have it? Seems like semantics. Compatibility with this or that country isn't obviously not a fact about a person.
"If you suffer no symptoms" being the key point there... unlike the homosexuality example, your internal experience *has* changed and there are facts about you that are different other than your physical location.
Another framing, if you like, would be to say that someone with SAD *is* still mentally ill regardless of whether they're currently experiencing symptoms. The definition of SAD here would not be "experiencing symptom Y" but "under X condition, I experience symptom Y". Even if you're not under X condition, the underlying fact that you *would* experience Y has not changed.
I think our crux is whether the internal experience of homosexuality changes depending on whether you live in a country where homosexual conduct is e.g. punishable with death. I would expect that it does, that in such the country the internal experience is inseparable from anxiety and shame, you seem to expect that it doesn't.
This is an empirical question. Maybe some gay person(s) who have lived in both types of countries can resolve this?
No, the shame and anxiety in that situation is not caused by homosexuality; it's caused by poor treatment from other people. Threatening someone with beatings, rape, and other nasty things for something they can't change is always going to cause shame and anxiety, regardless of what it is they're being threatened for. Is it really a mental illness to feel anxiety when faced with extreme violence? Are racial minorities mentally ill when they live in racist countries? They might be more *prone* to mental illnesses like depression due to their treatment, but to say their race is itself the mental illness is obviously wrong. Even calling it a physical illness or disability seems incorrect.
Nobody remembers anymore, but gay men's life expectancies dropped precipitously a dozen years after gay liberation began in 1969 at Stonewall, due, precisely, to gay liberation. This fall in life expectancies was especially true in the absolute centers of gay liberation: Castro Street, Santa Monica Boulevard, and Christopher Street.
But it's hard to remember this history because gays and gay liberation emerged as big Winners in the political/moral/cultural narrative. So the obvious historical fact that gay liberation played a massive role in the AIDS disaster has a hard time registering in contemporary brains.
Characteristic 21st Century thinkers prefer to be told who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and then to reason from there: E.g., gays are good, so therefore gay liberation was good. But AIDS was bad, so it couldn't have been caused by anything good, so it must have been caused by somebody who was bad, such as Ronald Reagan.
I take exception to defining anything as mental illness _today_ based on whether if it would have caused problems in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness. There is no such thing as an EEA; evolution never ceases, and each time there's a change in environment, evolutionary pressures change.
If this is in fact what Emil is proposing, then he doesn't understand evolution, and he's most likely yet another Paleofantasist (TM).
If Emil truly believes that the height of human accomplishment consists entirely of spreading one's genes, well, I wonder how he expects writing the article you referenced to contribute to that goal. Usually when someone makes this sort of claim, it turns out to be a pseudo-scientific wrapping for a demand that everyone live according to the imagined mores of some imagined past... generally one where the person making the demand imagines that he'd personally receive automatic deference and status. Any creatures more successful than humans at this kind of fitness are ignored. (And there are plenty of them.)
It's certainly interesting to look at the actual implications of his stated definition. (ADHD good? drunkenness good? credulous religiosity also good, provided the religion opposes contraception...) Of course that's short term; I'm not clear that pursuing a strategy of quantity rather than quality in one's offspring is in fact effective for humans in even the medium term (3-4 generations); has anyone researched this?)
Bottom line - if you are accurately describing this author's position, I don't think much of him.
"If Emil truly believes that the height of human accomplishment consists entirely of spreading one's genes, well"
This strikes me as slightly uncharitable. I believe charitably interpreting Emil would account for his insistence of divorcing the term from moral judgments.
Divorce "mental disorder" from moral judgment? You would need to reprogram most of the english-speaking world. Better to tilt at windmills. Scott's right; the evopsych people need to pick a new term, this one's already taken.
The important idea here is evolutionary mismatch, where evolutionarily recent cultural and technological changes have occurred so rapidly that an intact mechanism becomes maladaptive under novel environmental conditions. Are you saying you don’t believe this phenomenon can play a role in mental health in modern humans?
Absolutely not. I'm objecting to the definition "if it would have resulted in fewer surviving copies of your genes in the EEA, it's 'mental illness'" as being incoherent (which specific environment?) as well as unhelpful.
That said, it's more than likely that (some?) people do maladaptive things today because they have adaptations suitable to an environment that they don't personally live in. We get this kind of thing with physical health, where it tends less arguable. (The sound bite would be sickle cell anemia, for those living in an environment free of malaria.)
However, there's a second common paleofantasy, which is that there was a single best strategy for humans in the EEA, or perhaps two - one for each sex. In practice, a group with somewhat of a mix works better, both for individuals and the group. Thus in an example pertinent to individual advantage, some Gorilla (?) males defend harems, and others act effeminate and harmless, then mate while the alpha isn't watching. Both strategies work, depending on transient circumstances. If the proportion of sneaks is low in a given group, it's an advantage to be one of them - but if the sneak proportion is high, better to be an alpha.
My guess is that this phenomenon may be a lot more relevant when it comes to "deviant" behaviour, which I'm defining as behaviour that's officially frowned upon by a human group, and in particular its leaders - somewhat like many of the things being defined as "mental illness" by this definition from "common sense" reproductive fitness.
Then of course we have the problem that behaviour which causes an individual not to reproduce may lead to lots of extra copies of their genes, carried e.g.. by the children of their siblings. Is courage in defence of kin to be considered "mental illness"? If not, what about the "gay uncle" who allo-parents his sister's children in the hypothetical EEA?
I admit I wasn’t aware of “paleofantasy” as a thing. So I think we agree that even though evolutionary mismatch is probably a useful concept, the idea that there is some actual point in time of a human species level EEA is unhelpfully wrong.
I went back and read Kirkegaard’s Preferences Can Be Sick. He’s really just advocating the evolutionary psychopathology approach of Marco Del Guidice, which is sound IMO. The strength of Del Guidice’s book is how detailed he is on the complexity of the state of current knowledge. It’s on this complexity where Kirkegaard founders.
Take this example: “It used to be popular to be a monk or a nun. Since they are forbidden from having sex and children, this is surely maladaptive behavior.” This is cringey simplistic. It brings up one of my favorite faux controversies in evolution discussions, group level selection. Humans have clearly evolved adaptive group-oriented behaviors; some individual behaviors are only comprehensible at the group level. Your example of non-kin allo-parenting is one. Another example of is altruistic punishment.
It gives this weird impression that the individual human phenotype is not really a behavioral unitary. Maybe we are all acting as network nodes in a sort of hive mind.
A common example of adaptations that went from awesome to awful in a changed environment would be fat storage. Having a body that efficiently used energy and stored surplus energy as fat, rather than burning the surplusage with fiddling or hyperactivity, was pretty great for all of human history until about 50 years ago. In fact it's a bedrock element of the standard behavior of all birds and mammals to use less energy acquiring food than the food itself provides.
That trait went from making you reproductively successful to being a lifelong celibate in the span of just a few generations of human development.
> There is no such thing as an EEA; evolution never ceases
Yes, exactly. If you take a human and put him in the middle of the ocean, he will whine that this is very different from his EEA and that he his not well equipped to deal with this new environment. The fact that his ancestors spent some 300 million years mostly on land is no excuse for failing to evolve gills before he drowns. The cetaceans took a few million years to adopt to the ocean, but they were probably just lazy.
Seriously, the modern human appeared some 300k years ago. Most of that time was spent in the ancestral environment, agriculture only started 20k years ago. I would argue that our species is still in the middle of adapting to the neolithic revolution. In another 50k years, we might evolve defenses against sugar or binge watching TV.
> I'm not clear that pursuing a strategy of quantity rather than quality in one's offspring is in fact effective for humans in even the medium term
Humans are K-selected species, but evolution's idea of that is probably closer to fertile woman giving birth to a child every two years (where r-selected species would give birth to multiple children, possible multiple times a year), which is very different from what most humans who took control over their reproduction rate prefer (mostly because humans prefer fewer starved humans while evolution does not care.)
A millionaire couple who have ten children will be vastly more successful genetically if they had one or two kids, even though their children will not be millionaires. Wealth is ephemeral, ten generations down the road your offspring will likely not benefit from you having been the owner of the kingdom of France or Facebook.
Of course, the most obvious example of all is non-reproductive heterosexuality. If homosexuality is a mental disorder because it impedes reproductive fitness, then by the same logic, heterosexuals who use contraceptives and/or engage in manual, oral, or anal sex are likewise mentally ill. Kirkegaard is free to bite that bullet if he wants, but at that point, upwards of half the adult population would be considered mentally ill. That seems like a pretty useless way to define mental illness.
I'm also not even fully convinced that homosexuality is a disorder from a strictly evolutionary perspective. Obviously it prevents the individual from passing on their genes, but it may have benefits for group selection. I've heard that the math doesn't add up for the Gay Uncle Theory, but I've yet to hear this math explained in sufficient detail for me to consider it debunked. And the Gay Uncle Theory isn't the only way that homosexuality might be evolutionarily beneficial on a group level, it's just the simplest and most well-known explanation.
"Obviously it prevents the individual from passing on their genes"
Does it?
Perhaps you didn't mean those words literally.
But I've always found it weird how, when people discuss how homosexuality has evolved, everyone assumes that gay people don't have children.
Because of course they do!
Gay men marry women and have children all the time. Maybe they've recently started doing that a bit less, since in modern times it has become socially easier for them to come out or find other gay men. Still, I recently overheard a man talk about how all the men he has affairs with have wives. And anyways, modern times don't count.
We can debate whether gay men with traditional families count as truly "gay" or "bisexual". But however we call it, if that covers (or used to cover) the typical man who has sex with men, we've explained the phenomenon.
My intuition is that, while straight men are often disgusted at the thought of sex with men, gay men are seldom disgusted at the thought of sex with women, and therefore they don't have to be particularly "bisexual" to copulate with women, and therefore they do, perhaps because they want children, perhaps to bond with the only companion they're socially allowed, perhaps because they fantasize about men while they do.
Vladimir Horowitz, a great (gay) pianist, said that all pianist are at least one of three: gay, Jewish, or bad, suggesting that being gay makes you a better artist.
He had children.
So did the gay Leonard Bernstein, that other great musician.
If being gay makes you a more successful artist (or gives you any other advantage), perhaps it helps you raise children and helps your children survive - not your brother's or sister's children, your own, because of course, gay people have children! No need to bring up any "gay uncle"!
I'll call this revolutionary concept the "gay father theory".
Gay males before Gay Liberation tended to father about 50% as many children as straight males. That's a _huge_ reproductive fitness loss. That's one reason why the evolutionary persistence of male homosexuality is so puzzling.
As Foucault pointed out, there's not much evidence that male homosexuality in its current form existed before a few hundred years ago. On the other hand, "Charlemagne had eighteen children with seven of his ten known wives or concubines" so are we really going to pretend Charlemagne might have been gay?
"there's not much evidence that male homosexuality in its current form existed before a few hundred years ago"
What do you mean? Obviously men have had sex with men since time immemorial, so perhaps you mean that the men who did were not characterized as effeminate in the Middle Ages or antiquity?
Is it so catastrophic? The only point is to have a larger, however much, generation following than the current one. Evolution doesn't actually care about anything. Some fish eat their own eggs, but as long as a few survive to breed then the species continues.
Maybe the children of gay men tended to survive (reach reproductive age) 50% more?
You could imagine a narrative whereby a gay father is less likely to abandon the mother of his children for a competing female. He can satisfy his sexual desires without abandoning the family unit. Whereas hetero philandering potentially divides loyalties.
I have no idea if this was the case; it's just the first thing that comes to mind. Humans are complicated social animals; the evolutionary persistence of myriad sexual behaviors really doesn't seem that puzzling.
Heterosexuality is obviously an adaptation, not some lowest-energy-state that just falls out. It should be obvious that homosexuality leads to reduced fitness in comparison even if some homosexuals reproduced. All the effort put into homosexual mating is, by Darwinian standards, a waste, whereas effort put into heterosexual mating can pay off.
Traits come in bundles not in isolation. if the same genes that make you attracted to your sex (a downside) also give you some advantage that compensates for that, those genes can prosper.
Or, perhaps, homosexuality can, somehow, make your relatives more fit reproductively. For example, sickle cell anemia is a bad byproduct of a (relatively successful) evolutionary adaptation to falciparum malaria: inherit one allele and you are more likely to survive malaria, but inherit two alleles and you die young without modern medical care from sickle cell anemia. Personally, I'd call sickle cell anemia a malfunction, even though in the big picture, it's just the price that has to be paid.
It's striking how there were a lot of different interesting theories about the causes of male homosexuality put forward in the 1990s. It was a topic of general intellectual interest at the time. For example, Milton Friedman asked me in 1994 how the existence of male homosexuality can be reconciled with natural selection. (Short answer: I dunno.)
Maybe I've just lost interest, but it doesn't seem like much is happening anymore on this topic.
Definitions are made for discriminating thing in ways that serve a purpose of an agent with some intention- that's true in mathematics, in computer science, and in here. I'll say bluntly what is between the lines, but I guess Scott can't write lest he is accused of not being charitable in interpreting the other opinions. Scott's definition is about solving the practical problem of "who needs help". And so are all the million ones that are less precise, but nearly everyone uses, and are adjacent in definition-space to Scott's. These include those of SJW and fundamentalist Christians - they may do weird things in the specifics, but at least they are genuinely caring about the same practical question.
What you have to ask when someone pushes so hard for definitions that defy the usual sense and are openly useless to the problem at hand is: what do they get out of it? The charitable interpretation is: because accepting a fuzzy and politically charged definition makes them so uncomfortable and anxious that they need to spend large amounts of effort trying to battle society even if it makes us all worse off. (Not relevant to the point, but I think this sounds a bit like (Emil)-mental-illness.)
But the less charitable -and more parsimonious- one is that a lot of this debating could be simplified, at least on Caplan's side, by revealing his preference of morality in a simple "I don't care about the problem of helping people".
Here's a simple test: What traits do you want your children to have?
Schizophrenia? No, that's a massive malfunction.
Sickle cell anemia? No, that's a massive malfunction, although they seem to be making progress on a genetic engineering treatment.
Pedophilia? No, that's pretty bad.
Congenital deafness: No.
Homosexuality? They can grow up to lead happy, productive lives. But, still, homosexuality reduces your chances of grandchildren ... so ... yeah, that's another malfunction, not as bad the ones above, but still a malfunction you don't wish upon your children.
Homosexuality is a malfunction of a _basic_ part of life, so what else could it be other than a malfunction?
Here's a simple test: What traits do you want your children to have?
Schizophrenia? No, that's a massive malfunction.
Sickle cell anemia? No, that's a massive malfunction, although they seem to be making progress on a genetic engineering treatment.
Pedophilia? No, that's pretty bad.
Congenital deafness: No.
Homosexuality? They can grow up to lead happy, productive lives. But, still, homosexuality reduces your chances of grandchildren ... so ... yeah, that's another malfunction, not as bad the ones above, but still a malfunction you don't wish upon your children.
Homosexuality is a malfunction of a _basic_ part of life, so what else could it be other than a malfunction?
The reason I used the term "malfunction" rather than "mental illness" is because it seems to apply more broadly to my 5 examples. For instance, nobody considers sickle cell anemia or congenital deafness to be a mental illness, but everybody considers them to be malfunctions. In contrast, everybody considers schizophrenia to be both a mental illness and a malfunction. Pedophilia and homosexuality are in a grey zone.
Scott, you can see where I'm going here: as a potential father, you are probably surprisingly conservative in what you'd hope (even pray) for your child. You'd probably, given the choice, trade off the chance of your child being in the top 95th percentile or higher of math skills for assurance that he or she is not in the bottom 5% of math skills due to a malfunction.
Fine, I'll give a more controversial one. I would like my kid to one day become an effective altruist. But I don't want to call not being EA a mental disorder.
An elephant in the room for contemporary parents these days is the conflict between their natural desire for their children to grow up to be heterosexual and give them grandchildren versus how unfashionable it is in the upper half of society these days to admit that you'd view homosexuality as a malfunction in your children, and if some safe, simple medical breakthrough came along that could assure you that your children would not be homosexual, you'd avail yourself of it.
But you aren't supposed to think like that in 2023.
For example, I suspect that some of the enthusiasm among some parents for gender transitioning their children is a twisted working out of this natural aversion to homosexuality in your children in a culture where "homophobia" is a grave sin: my son won't grow up to be an effeminate gay man, he's really my daughter! My tomboy daughter isn't a future lesbian, but really my son!
Promoting transgenderism is a way to be anti-homosexuality without the social opprobrium.
My view is: First, do no harm. At present, we don't have a safe, simple medical treatment for homosexuality, so don't do anything about it, neither "conversion therapy" nor "gender affirming care."
Sickle cell anemia is precisely what you want if you live in a high malaria region. You don't exactly want it, but having some children with sickle cell anemia is the least bad deal you can make with the universe.
Do my homework: Are there people with the genes for sickle cell who have less severe cases of the disease? If so, how does that work?
One copy of the sickle cell allele and you are more likely to survive falciparum malaria than people with zero copies. But if you inherit two copies, you die as a child without modern medical care.
You can estimate pretty precisely how dangerous is the falciparum malaria threat in a region by finding the percentage of people with one copy of the sickle cell mutation. It peaks at about 25% around the Congo River, IIRC.
It's a fun reply to be sure. Actually, I was saying Caplan is the one saying there are only preferences, not you. Rather, you prefer to say that whether we should call something a mental illness is a mix of political (state funding for people some people think should be given such money) and scientific reasons. I am disagreeing with that, and saying it should only be a matter of science, even if we can't come up with an airtight or maybe even good definition for now (as you showed here with your 7 examples). My post was mainly aimed at Caplan's view (hence the title which is based on Caplan's claim).
I interpreted "Scott and Caplan are actually somewhat in agreement that taxonomies are meaningless, but Scott just wants to keep them in order to get funding for his friends" as addressing my position directly enough that it was worth responding.
I'm not sure if by funding you mean "funding for research" or "funding for insurance". Either way I think that's only a portion of what I'm interested in. There's also commitment laws, consent laws, medical leave laws, social norms, access to medication, etc - and in my ideal world, we wouldn't have government decrees about what insurance has to cover.
I think I fundamentally disagree with your "matter of science" - if you come up with a scientific definition that's different from what we use to talk about ordinary-life things, the definition won't be useful (as I try to demonstrate here). If you somehow come up with a scientific definition that's exactly the same as how we talk about ordinary-life things (which I think would be hard to impossible), then it will coincidentally work, but as soon as ordinary life changes we will want to move away from your scientific definition.
I think it would be more like how the species concept in biology (cladistics) sort of breaks the normal language concept of zebra. At least, according to Gould's old essay (https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/SJ-Gould-What-if-anything-is-a-zebra.pdf), there isn't a way to define zebra by common descent that doesn't include non-zebras. But looking at Wikipedia, maybe Gould just had bad data (?).
A better example would be how biology made us think differently of whales. A common sense perspective would define fish as creatures living in water that swim and have fins (or something close to that). But the whale family break the pattern. We don't teach kids that whales & dolphins are really fish, and we haven't come up with a secondary new scientific term, rather common language changed to fit the science.
That seems more like a problem with monophyletic definitions. If one of my descendants becomes a transhuman space dragon, is there no longer a word to describe baseline humans but not it and its spawn? What's the evolutionary equivalent of an apostate?
Yeah, I think we'll have to accept that paraphyletic terms like "fish", "reptile", "wasp" and so on are here to stay, because to most people they're way more useful than the monophyletic alternatives. Likewise, I think more people have a need for a term meaning 'problematic mental state/trait' than for one meaning 'fitness-reducing mental state/trait'.
Yeah, I agree, in this case think I'm largely in favor of Scott-type definitions, in the sense that the common word is going to be for the things people need help dealing with.
But it would also be nice to have a conceptual space for "this thing is abnormal, and low reproductive fitness, but not generally a problem in daily life, and doesn't seem to be genetic, so let's not worry too much about it unless it turns out to be contagious".
One difference between species and mental illnesses is that species all share a common causal backbone - genetic variation in the tree of life - whereas mental illnesses don't really do so (except maybe in a tautological sense of "mental illnesses have something to do with humans"). The less mechanistic similarity is shared in causing the variance between entities, the less likely there will be that there is a crisp criterion for their classification.
(This point is arguably not limited to mental illnesses. Physical illnesses also have varied mechanisms, e.g. type 2 diabetes vs cholera infections. I'd guess taxonomizing illnesses works best for germ infections (because they can piggyback off the tree of life), whereas it gets complex for non-infections.)
I don't think that the whale analogy is fitting. If the taxonomy of the human psyche had the quality of the taxonomy of animal species (with DNA analysis), nobody sane would discuss these definitions (just like nobody sane claims that whales are fish in 2023).
The problem is that we are not at that point.
The correct analogy would both of you being ancient Christian scholars arguing over the definition of fish. Ancient Scott would define a fish as an animal spending most of their lives in the water (and is somewhat motivated in including a lot of animals in the definition so that he gets to eat them on Fridays), while ancient Emil defines a fish as anything created on the the fifth day of creation which does not fly. Both of you likely believe in the existence of sea monsters which do not in fact exist, and don't even imaging that someone might contest that whales are fish.
Perhaps in a century we will have an EEA-simulator which can exactly simulate how mental traits would have affected evolutionary success, and your definition will become favored as the scientific one.
At the moment, none of the definitions of mental illness are really scientific.
Scott's definition (taking into account if some mental trait leads to harmful outcomes in the US in 2023) might be a bit more culturally relative.
Your definition (taking into account if some mental trait would have been maladaptive in the EEA) might seem more objective, but allows just as much wiggle room for arguing that some trait X was in fact beneficial in the EEA. (Perhaps gay sex among hunters lead to better cohesion during hunts and thus more success against big cats or whatever.)
The main thing is that most people care about the things considered by Scott's definition, and roughly nobody cares about the EEA.
If we were picking a human to send back to 300000 BCE in whose DNA we encode the blueprints for the Death Star, and need to optimize that people in 2023 in that timeline can actually decode the blueprint from their DNA and defeat Lord Vader, and are considering what mental traits we would want a candidate to have, then the complement of your definition of mental illness would be called for.
In practice, that problem does not come up very much.
I like Scott's cynical definition: a "mental illness" is something that psychiatrists get health insurance funding to treat. Society doesn't like pedophilia, so we pay psychiatrists to try to reduce the amount of it. (I have no idea if it works.) Currently, the culturally dominant parts of society publicly approve of homosexuality (although I have my doubts about the universality of their private feelings) so health insurance doesn't pay psychiatrists to try to reduce the amount of it.
For example, anti-Communism was a "mental illness" in the Soviet Union in the 1970s by Scott's definition: psychiatrists got paid to lock up dissidents in mental hospitals and try to cure them of their anti-Communism.
If Dr. Cartwright managed to talk somebody into paying him in the 1850s to treat slaves' desire to runaway as a medical disorder, yeah, then it would be a "mental illness" under this definition.
The wish that how things are classified "should only be a matter of science" has mostly not been the case across the whole history of science, and especially not in areas where the science is young, as it is in psychology. Science unfolds inside of society and political systems and there is no pure uncontaminated science. There may be more and less contaminated by society and politics, but we just don't understand enough about the mind to make it more like theoretical physics.
The biggest problem to me seems to be “relative to what?” Are all animals mentally ill? If not then we are introducing arbitrariness. If I limit myself to my species, then there are also people out there smarter than me and more conscientious than me, therefore I am not mentally optimal. If that is the case, then am I mentally ill? If not more arbitrariness... and so on. Not to mention that plenty of “improving fitness” will be what is called political. Certain beliefs will help you get laid.
Seems to me that you could just add “reproduce and raise healthy functional offspring” to that guy’s definition and you avoid most of the criticisms you’re making.
What do we know about raising healthy functional offspring though? I've heard that throughout most of human history in most cultures corporal punishment of children was the norm. Does it mean they were all terrible parents? But they should've been pushed aside by any culture that forwent the abuse. On the other hand, pain is a powerful motivator so it's plausible that when used properly corporal punishment actually is to the child's eventual benefit. Except how many people are well-adjusted enough to be trusted with using it when it really is to the child's benefit rather than venting or making the child more convenient for them?
So, how about this hypothesis: if you and your child are both mentally healthy and you are not dumb, corporal punishment can actually help the child in the long run, but otherwise it is more likely to hurt them? In this case it is plausible that corporal punishment is to your evolutionary benefit: it definitely is if the conditions above are met, and if not then you hurting your children's fitness might be mitigated by your extended family spending less resources on them.
I think Randolph Nesse's concept of a fitness cliff is relevant here. He argues that for contiually distributed traits subject to fitness trade-offs, the resulting fitness function doesn't have to be normally distributed, but can be slanted. This will result in a point of trait fixation in a population that is not at it's maximal point of fitness, since at one end a catastrophic result for some will occur.
This is proposed to explain why certain mental disorders are fixed in the population. I find it very elegant. We have strong evidence that most psychopathological traits are distributed continually throughout society.
So, looking at it from the gene's eye view, mental disorder is not, in fact, disadvantageous. It can be part of a trait fixating it's underling genetic frequency in an optimal manner. Of course, there are other conceptions, and it surely won't be the whole story. But still, it serves as a reminder that what is being selected for it's evolutionary fitness is not individuals, but gene frequency.
Emil Kirkegaard gets to the conclusion he does because he is is concluding that the competition that matters is at the individual level. But the whole point of evolutionary adaptive explanations is that the traits you are considering have a genetic origin. So, somewhere in there are a set of genes and if you happen to have these series of mutations, poof, you end up gay. And here what matters is whether these genes will prosper in ancestral human populations.
Consider a much simpler case, the genetic inheritance which is responsible for sickle cell disease. Sickle cell disease is caused by a mutation in the hemoglobin-Beta gene found on chromosome 11. So, simple. It is just one gene. And it is recessive, like having blue eyes. You need to inherit the trait from both of your parents if you are to have the disease. Thus every human being has the genetic makeup of one of these 4 states: {NN, NS, SN, SS} where the first letter is your paternal inheritance, the second your maternal inheritance, N is a normal gene and S is a sickle cell gene. NN are normals. They cannot pass the disease to their children. NS and SN are carriers. They do not have the disease but carry the trait and can pass it along to their children. SS have the disease. Were they to reproduce, they would give the trait to every one of their children, but that is not an issue, because until the event of extremely modern medicine, all the SS children died before their sixth birthday.
If Emil Kirkegaard's limited definition of evolutionary fitness was correct, then the sickle cell gene should be bred out of human populations. The SS people are already dead before reproductive age, and the NS and SN people have a 25% immediate failure rate in their children -- and it's actually worse than that. The SS aren't stillborn, which means their parents either committed infanticide or spent years supporting these ill children before their eventual demise. All of this is evolutionary waste.
You would expect that this mutation would fall out of the population and be extremely rare, and if you look at populations where malaria is rare, you would be correct. But in places where malaria is endemic, the mutation thrives, and indeed becomes dominant in the population. Turns out that being SN or NS give you protection from malaria. You are not only less likely to contract it, but also it is less severe when you do. Some researchers in Kenya claim that it gives you a 60% reduction in childhood mortality 'from other causes' before age 6.
This tells us two things. First, malaria -- and anything else you are protected from if you are NS or SN -- is really, really, bad from an evolutionary point of view. If NS and SN parents are able to outbreed NN parents, despite throwing away 25% of their offspring and having another 25% who are genetically NN, thus no different from the NN's offspring -- then carrying the sickle cell trait must be of tremendous advantage to still come out ahead. And second -- evolution is terribly wasteful. All those SS deaths -- you could imagine an alternative world where those embryos conceived as SS would perish early in pregnancy. There are recessive traits where this does seem to happen, called 'homozygous lethals'. Not happening here.
So, back to the inheritability of gayness. The 'wastefulness' of having gay people who do not reproduce around in your prehistoric band doesn't matter. They have _got_ to be less wasteful than the children with sickle cell disease. As long as the genes that produce gayness confer some sort of benefit then it doesn't matter if every so often it also produces somebody that doesn't breed, as long as the benefit is substantial. And it could quite possibly be the _not breeding_ that is the benefit. If mom and pop struggle to raise 2,4 children to reproductive age for the next generation but mom, pop, and pop's brother who doesn't have children can comfortably raise 6 of them, then the genes in pop and pop's brother will prosper. It may also be that not having hungry young mouths to feed and take care of frees up the time needed to invent pottery and philosophy both.
But Emil's not talking about whether a genetic variant is a disorder or not, but whether a trait is. Sickle cell disease is a disorder regardless of whether the genetic variants that cause it are beneficial most of the time.
But you cannot make your definition of illness based on reproductive fitness without looking at the reproductive fitness of the genes involved. It's a problem of the scale of your vision. if the only thing you look at is *how many children will this individual produce* then a good many things will look like evolutionary dead ends. Everybody is in competition with everybody else, and people with more kids are by definition *better*.
But if, instead you were able to look at the genes that cause homosexuality, or a mental illness, or sickle cell disease and check and see how they prosper in human communities, and where lots and lots of copies of these genes are by definition *better*, you could easily end up in a situation where the genes are doing very, very well for themselves despite the fact that it is making certain individuals sick. The genes do not care about the individuals.
The only reason we care about individuals is because we are one. The individual is the unit with which we interact all the time. These days we do not rank people in status based on how many children they have, feel superior to those who have fewer children than we do, and murder 'barren' women for being useless. Fecundity is not how we primarily measure human worth. They are believed to have individual dignity and worth beyond their reproductive competence. This is the whole point of the individual perspective. At the individual level 'do you feel ill' is a very good starting point for studying the individual. But you cannot query individual genes and ask 'do you feel mutated?' or 'do you think this mutation is a good thing?'. The scale is wrong.
You can scale larger than the individual as well. Some societies produce more offspring than others. Are they healthier? Or just poorer and without access to birth control? A society which is seeing an increase in mental illness may decide that this is a problem it would like to change, which will, of course be made more difficult in that we often do not agree whether a given condition is an illness or not.
You are misunderstanding wikipedia. You can talk about the fitness of a genotype, or the fitness of the phenotype -- we do this all of the time. Which is useful depends on what you want to talk about. What you cannot do is say 'I'm going to define fitness as the fitness of the phenotype only. That's the only thing that matters, and all the rest of you who want to talk about the genotype get kicked out of the science club'. Once you know that the phenotype is largely caused by the genotype the genotype is always potentially relevant to any discussion of the phenotype.
My objection is to Emil's Categorisation of his viewpoint as 'coming from the evolutionary perspective' while only treating a tiny subset 'does it help this individual produce more offspring' of what evolutionary biologists think about when they think about evolution.
During the late 1990s, there was much discussion of the theoretical "gay gene." The possible causes of homosexuality, such as the theory assumed by Laura Creighton, were much debated in my circles.
But the question has greatly faded without much of an answer being found.
Ah, the answer was that there isn't one. If there is a genetic determinant, it's got to be a matter of many genes, and interactions with the environment have got to matter, too.
I was waiting for someone to write up this, so I wouldn't have to, so thanks! :D Humans are tribal and particularly family group animals, not solitary. Individual fitness matters, but so does the fitness of the family group. Menopause is useful because even though it keeps a woman from reproducing it also keeps her from dying during a pregnancy she is going to struggle with, and so producing food for the family's young children produced by her own off spring. Homosexuality, so long as it is not too prevalent, does the same only for the off spring of brothers and sisters.
People always seem to want to make the mistake of treating humans like sharks, orangutans or other solitary animals instead of wolves, gorillas, or other more hyper social animals. We can't live on our own for extended periods of time, we have to have a group to work with.
Homosexuals do not invest more in their siblings' children. A woman who stops having more children after menopause and focuses on her existing children can still have high individual fitness. That doesn't apply to a homosexual who has no children of their own. There are eusocial species (not humans) in which a single queen gets to reproduce while lots of worker castes just support her... but those tend to be highly related through things like haplodiploid genetics (or inbreeding in the case of termites).
Right. It's hard to see much evidence in daily life of gay uncles devoting themselves extraordinarily to their siblings' welfare. If they did enough to make up a 50% reduction in their own fertility, you could come up with countless examples you've observed in your own life. But instead, you can come up with a few nice things gay uncles did for nieces and nephews but not exceptionally more than straight uncles did.
Another possibility, however, is that, say, feminine traits are so important to reproductive fitness that some of them leak into the male population. But that seems like the kind of thing evolution would tend to fix. But who knows?
So you seem to be comparing modern behaviors instead of pre-modern behaviors, and you seem to be forgetting that traits need not be "better" to be genetically extant, but merely "good enough".
To the previous point, when families were much closer knit in working extra males bringing home more meat to share with the tribe or clan means more food for the kids and less competition for it. Likewise when an extended family was working a farm. As we get to more modern times when families were more broken into the nuclear family that does become less relevant, however we shouldn't neglect the value of a "bachelor uncle" who might adopt orphaned relatives (men died a lot back then), engage in career nepotism, or just die leaving the relative kids some inheritance. I agree that the modern value for related kids isn't too high, but the premodern was quite high I think, particularly in regions with less abundant food resources.
To the second point, while it is true that in absolute terms a homosexual child means a chunk of the family's ability to reproduce goes away (to some extent) it isn't about having the highest total possible reproductive possibility. If having the occasional (and rare) non-reproducing member isn't too bad it can still continue along, that is to say, still pass selection. Maybe having a non-breeding adult in the clan helps mitigate tail end events, such as food shortages, reducing the variability in kids produced, for instance. Or maybe so many men die without reproducing (I have seen estimates that two times as many females reproduced than males, so estimates that only 35-40% of males reproduce, but I have no idea how reasonable that is) that the occasional male that doesn't die but doesn't reproduce either isn't that big of a deal for the viability of the family line. In the case of women, many die in child birth before having many kids, so apparently that isn't such a hard stop on reproductive fitness, having 50% fewer kids and not dying, that is.
Anthropologists have studied over 1000 pre-industrial cultures. Surely, somebody by now has gone through the cultural profiles looking for evidence of self-sacrificing gay uncles. After all, it would be a popular finding. But I've never heard of much being found.
What is self sacrificing about it? The extended family shares resources, that's what they do. Whether the uncle does not have kids because he just hasn't gotten married yet or his kids are grown or he buggers men, when the family is living communally he is still contributing to them all around.
Further, it seems odd to suggest that family members do not provide resources to other extended family members even into modern times. "Your uncle has some pull in the capital, and can get you a job" has been useful as long as there have been capitals and jobs.
No, "good enough" gets displaced by "better". The frequency of a selected allele goes up, while that of deleterious alleles go down.
These bachelor uncles adopting orphans seem to be more figments of your imagination than reflecting anything in reality. There's no way such a thing outweighs said uncles not having children of their own.
For your example of a small percent of males reproducing: who are the males who don't reproduce descended from? That small percent of successful males of the past. There is continual "truncation selection" of the least fit males (this is how male elephant seals got so big). And deaths in childbirth aren't that common among hunter-gatherers, it was really when doctors got involved in childbirth that such deaths shot up.
No, good enough is good enough, and makes it to the next generation. That's why e.g. octopi tend to die of cancer after just a couple years of life: they don't live long without getting eaten, so "not very resistant to cancer" is good enough. Likewise how not all male elephant seals are giants, despite that being the primary mode of reproduction (smaller ones sometimes sneak sex, or just never reproduce at all... wait...). Plenty of not very good variations exist right next to better variations and continue along, because while they are not great they are good enough.
If you can't grasp that you are not grasping the fundamental process. Evolutionary processes do not produce one "best" outcome, but rather a range of outcomes that all work a little better or a little worse in a range of different circumstances, some of which are just good enough.
In 1976, 10% of U.S. women passed out of their childbearing years without having children. What percent of the population is gay men? Isn't it enough that most people seem to want to reproduce? What is gained from pathologizing a certain amount of human variation? If you want to pathologize either gay men or non-reproducing women, why use ideas about natural selection to do that?
You say "do", present tense. What matters is "did", past tense. When humans lived in more closely knit family units, tribes and clans, where meat from hunts was routinely shared and even later when a family would work a farm together, the investment was in the family, which benefitted the children.
Investment in a child who won't give you grandchildren is a waste in Darwinian terms. There are eusocial species where non-reproducing members can be analogized to somatic cells dedicated to assisting the germ cells in reproduction... but humans aren't like that. Handwaving about families being collective does not change the math of selection.
No, it absolutely does. You care how many viable children the family produces to adulthood, and that number does not grow linearly with the number of reproducing adults, but is a curving function of the environmental constraints. Humans are not eusocial, but we aren't solitary either, leaning towards the heavily social end of the spectrum.
Let's imagine a family of the sort you're discussing. One sibling has a mutation that prevents them from having children. Perhaps there is more food for the children of other siblings (although recall that this non-reproducing sibling still consumes food throughout their lifetime), but that mutation will not get passed down. Kin selection would mean you derive some fitness from the children of your siblings... but you'd derive even more from your own children, so that's who you should prefer investing in. From the perspective of a grandparent, what do you want? Not that any of your offspring simply refrain from having children, but that they avoid wastefully fighting each other for resources with which to reproduce... preferably they'd be fighting non-kin instead.
The concordance rate of homosexuality among identical twins is very low. It's one of the least genetic traits we've measured. Hence Cochran's theory that a pathogen is responsible.
Or other epigenetic factors, see for instance https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18530 . But, of course, we already think that all sorts of mental illnesses are quite likely to be epigenetic in character. Meanwhile a different group of biologists are all trying to demonstrate that it's all the gut microbiome and how that interacts with the brain. see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01479-w And this is just the biologists. The sociologists and and the anthropologists, among others, would like to have a word. :)
All of which goes to demonstrate that an evolutionary psychiatry that collapses all of evolutionary biology into 'does it make it more likely that I will sire lots and lots of children' is going to miss the forest for the leaf of one tree. I am very much in favour of having evolutionary theory inform all sorts of understanding, especially in the humanities where it has been sorely lacking, but there is more to the human experience than counting one's descendants, biggest number wins.
Gut micobiome ... that's a new theory of the cause of homosexuality.
That theory, if true, sounds particularly likely to lead to a medical cure for homosexuality: "Here, take this dietary supplement daily and you won't turn out to be gay."
I haven't read papers that claim gut microbiome causes homosexuality, but there is evidence that this is behind certain people's mental illnesses -- depression and schitzophrenia in some people for example.
I feel like mental disorder (Emil) kinda encompasses mental disorder (Scott). If you can't function socially, that will likely reduce your reproductive fitness
Mental disorder (Scott) seems like a special case of mental disorder (Emil)
First, I don't think this is correct. Second, you get the same special case for each of them by saying "everyone is mentally ill", so it doesn't really help.
1. For instance, let's say we have someone who would have a mental disorder under Scott's definition - let's say a pyromaniac - who is also clever enough to get away with it. Since he gets away with it, it doesn't lessen fitness, and so isn't a mental illness under Emil's definition.
2. Alright, so what even if it _is_ a special case? That just means it's a more restrictive definition, not that they have anything else in common. _Every_ definition of mental disorders will have a classification that is by necessity a subset of "everything is (or everyone has) a mental disorder", without this meaning anything productive.
Being a pyromaniac surely carries a lot of opportunity cost and risk and is therefore not adaptive. Being able to get away with it is a sign of high intelligence, which might be adaptive. Being a pyromaniac by itself though is clearly not adaptive and therefore an emil-mental-illness.
About your point two, I can think of nothing else other than that Emil's definition is grasping reality at its joins and is more useful, enlightening, better explaining the real meaning of the term "mental illness".
I think Jerome Wakefield solved the how-to-define-a-disorder problem in 1992 with his «harmful dysfunction» analysis. A disorder has to be harmful to the individual or other people (value statement) AND an evolutionary dysfunction (fitness reducing). Both you and Emil alludes to it, but do not mention it explicitly. Here is the paper: https://www.psy.miami.edu/_assets/pdf/rpo-articles/wakefield-1992.pdf
That was so much fun! And mostly right. Just one thing, nay, two: 1. Pederasty (man does boys): Socially tolerated (Plato, Afghanistan) and socially enforced in several tribes of Papua-Guinea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simbari_people#Gender_roles_and_sexuality "Pre-pubescent boys are required to perform fellatio on older males and swallow the semen because it is believed that without this 'male milk' they will fail to mature properly. Upon reaching adulthood, men marry and engage in heterosexual behavior, initially requiring their (under-age) brides to fellate them and later perform penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse. Homosexual behavior past this point is rare." Now, for the Simbari people this seems neither mental-disorder-(Emil) nor mental-disorder-(Scott). Me, I feel different.
2. Maybe some deviant acts in our society we best call: 'crimes' - and some others just 'pervert'? (Some say: certain people seem to have certain sets of preferences that make them more or less prone to commit certain crimes.)
If one can adjust one's actual behaviour to societal/social pressure (as nearly everyone nearly always can and does), then considering applying societal/social pressure seems rather straightforward in dealing with unwanted behavior - not excluding therapeutical approaches, when efficient. "You can do better than fool around!" וְלֹ֖֣א תִּֿנְאָֽ֑ף׃ . Or more East of Eden: sin lies in wait at the door: its urge is for you, yet you can rule over it. "Timshel" תימשל
I don't understand why this battle is being fought over paraphilias, nor over evolutionary fitness. I am getting that Englishman-in-New-York vibe of having wandered in to a culture war I don't understand. Evolutionary fitness is about heritability, and I don't see why it gets a look-in here, given the very small hereditable component in schizophrenia, depression etc. We don't analyse cancer or for that matter broken legs in these terms, despite both of them being clearly negative for survival prospects.
The paraphilias don't fit for several reasons. They don't seem to disable sufferers in other areas of their lives (see high-functioning pillars of society with 12,749 extreme images on their laptop) which doesn't go with intuitive understandings of illness, they don't seem to be routinely incompatible with reproduction (see married fathers of four with 12,749 extreme images on their laptop). They are in fact an evolutionary tool. Consider peahens: there was presumably a time when peafowl of either sex were drab brown things, and a peahen who imprinted on an abstract painting with a lot of eyes in it would be a raging fetishist, no question. Fast forward a bit and having that fetish is crucial to her reproductive fitness: and it is just a fetish, it's not in itself about better food gathering qualities or camouflage from predators.
So are people trying to motte and bailey their way to an R D Laing position, where the motte is schizophrenia and the bailey is being gay? I think the sort of schizophrenic who is instructed by God to murder complete strangers, or their parents, is a more useful type case.
"Osteoporosis is highly polygenic and heritable, with heritability ranging from 50 to 80%; most inherited susceptibility is associated with the cumulative effect of many common genetic variants."
Nitpick re: the ephebophilia example: assuming the men have already had children, 3 would probably be more likely to help them have children of their own so eventually he might end up with more grandchildren than 1 and 2
Unfortunately, for genetic reasons, a child is evolutionary more beneficial than a grandchild.
The only exception would be if two children would have a kid together, making the man both the paternal and maternal grandfather. In that case the man would be genetically indifferent between the a child and a grandchild, but the case is creepy for other reasons.
As a matter of fact, introversion is correlated with mental illness. So sure, it is in the direction of problems, away from optimal. But one of my points was that everything in this area is clinal, or close to everything. People with panic disorders, unipolar depression, GAD and the like are about 1 standard deviation below average in extroversion. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20804236/
Reminds me also of that (possibly apocryphal?) thing where modern chickens are *hyper* aggressive and can really hurt one another badly, in part because early breeding programs selected the most prolific hens in each coop. Turns out the way to be the most prolific hen in a coop was to bully all the others violently and break the others' eggs; but once you have a coop of all bullies, however, it's not nearly as effective. So we made a species of jerk chickens that didn't notably outperform the alternative.
In hindsight, of course, they should have picked the highest-laying *coops*, not the highest-laying *individual hens*. When you've got a species with complex social interactions and specialized roles, it's really dangerous to assess fitness only on the basis of individual childbearing numbers! Which is to say, I don't think that mental-disorder-(Emil) even resolves the ambiguity that Emil probably wants it to, because human reproductive fitness itself depends on the social dynamics of what other people around you are doing. Anchoring mental illness in evolutionary biology doesn't even excise the cultural relativism!
Isn't there a similar hypothesis that having a few homosexual individuals is beneficial to a group? Which exclaims why it wasn't weeded out by evolution.
And I think evo psych has a fair amount to say about personality and genetics. One reason that human personality exists on such a wide gamut is that different traits are useful to the group in different situations, so selecting for, say, just extroverts leaves the group vulnerable to different threats than having just introverts.
For a more extreme example of group fitness being different than individual fitness, look at a worker ant. They're a genetic dead end, but clearly important for the colony to function.
"Isn't there a similar hypothesis that having a few homosexual individuals is beneficial to a group? Which exclaims why it wasn't weeded out by evolution."
The thing is, group selection is miserably weak compared to individual selection. Individual selection is likely to wipe out any non-breeding genes before the benefit for group manifests. The non-breeding individual would have to serve very close relatives very efficiently to make up for not breeding and keep the non-breeding genes in the gene pool (e.g. in social insects it seems to work well.). I don't mean that group selection doesn't work at all, without it we wouldn't have multicellular organisms. But still.
Right. I replied somewhat hastily to the use of group selection to explain deleterious traits. We don't know how well homosexuals used to breed in traditional societies, maybe they were average breeders. Also, homosexuality has moderately low heritability, which makes it harder to be genetically "wiped out" or "take over" the gene pool.
Ants are haplodiploid, and thus much more related to their siblings than humans are. They also have a nest to defend (typical of eusocial species), while humans do not:
What I find so puzzling about these debates is why it seems that sophisticated individuals like Caplain or this new individual can nevertheless seem to become super convinced there is something like the 'true' meaning of a term and that it can be somehow divined just by thinking about the distinctions they care about. And why do they always seem to assume that these new meanings carry along the usual morally associations? And once they realize they aren't using the terms like others are why don't they just introduce some nuetral term and stipulatively define it to make their argument.
I understand that they might believe that they have a more elegant choice of terminology but surely they don't believe that words always just mean whatever it takes to give the most elegant account and even if they did believe that why would they think those words retain their usual moral associations?
Like why do they never just say: I think terms like preference and mental illness are too vague/inelegant so I propose we use spreference and smental illness instead with these new meanings and then explain why they think this new means of description supports their moral views?
Because it's a weak move in the political/social game. Requiring buy in for your new terms is a much harder sell than claiming those already in wide use. I guess people generally aren't cynical enough to run this calculation explicitly, but it's probably hard-wired somehow.
I understand that when I see a politician or even a random person do it but that doesn't make sense for Caplain and many others.
I think it's pretty obvious that Caplain could have been more persuasive on feminism had he written his stuff in the form: let's stipulate feminism means the belief that men and women are equal therefore it's not true feminism when ... insert the views he dislikes. And that's what people do unconsciously ...they try to shift definitions to make them more, not less, appealing.
I sus he's motivated by much the same things are motivating me to write this comment: conditioned to feel that saying smart shit is rewarding and a desire to feel like the person who is saying what's not admitted.
That proves far too much and doesn't really explain the answer. Anytime I ask, "why did that person defend that seemingly crazy argument" you could say, "speech is about usefulness not truth".
Sure, it's true in a sense but it doesn't explain anything. Caplain isn't out there using political/TV psychic tricks to get people to support his beliefs and he makes similar errors even in cases where the opposite belief would help his cause (eg persuading people on feminism...see my other reply). The question is why does this kind of error seem very sticky in people who otherwise seem to derive credibility by avoiding bad arguments.
First, even if you are correct it doesn't explain the phenomenon: ie it doesn't explain why people like Caplain to make this mistake/persuasive choice but NOT a broad range of other effective persuasive tricks we see politicians use all the time. What needs explaining is why ppl like him seem particularly likely to make this mistake and not in proportion to it's persuasive power.
Also, I'm very skeptical that it can be determined more easily on a useful definition of useful. I mean, on any very concrete definition of useful in terms of observable outcomes (maximize wealth, children, mates, lifespan, leisure time) we see that people behave non-usefully probably more than they behave usefully in their speech.
For instance, anyone meeting attractive (to them) individuals while far from home (vacation, biz trip etc) should lie through their teeth about their social status and accomplishments. Probably should do so w/ everyone. The external punishments are essentially zero and extremely low likelihood of being found out. Yet if I talk to someone on vacation or in some other one time encounter truth seems to be a better predictor of their responses than usefulness. Indeed, this is true across a huge range of activities where good sociopathic lying has positive impact on external outcomes.
Of course you can say things like, but they might feel guilty, in the evolutionary environment it wouldn't have been a good deal etc etc,. But that no longer provides a real explanation because usefulness isn't something one can observe. It's also incredibly vulnerable to just-so style stories (whatever the action you can give a story about how it's useful in this wider sense).
I don't know why you are makings such such heavy going of this: people don't do useful thing X, because they don't know it's useful, or they don't know how to do jt.
When In say semantics is about usefulness , I mean i) we do.things with with words ii) there is nothing to establish the True Mean ing beyond that. I don't mean "all.speech acts are useful".
Because the question is to explain why of all the possible fallacies that Caplain etc indulge in, all of which are persuasively/tribally useful, they seem to be pretty good at avoiding most of them but not this particular fallacy about meaning. I agree you've given an explanation of why many smart people engage in that fallacy but also most smart people engage in a broad swath of such fallacies in whatever way lets them support their tribal/whatever alignments. While Caplain is hardly immune from this he seems to suffer from this particular fallacy at a hugely outsized rate relative to a theory which just says: yah ppl say whatever's useful to say and don't really care much about truth.
It's equivalent to me asking, "Hey why does Jane use an electric grinder in a context where Jane uses old timey mechanical drills, sanders etc etc." Yes, remarking that electric grinders are useful explains why they are common items used by many people. However, it doesn't meaningfully explain why Jane doesn't use an electric grinders as that would need to distinguish between how she relates grinders (where she does pick the 'useful' option) and other tools where she doesn't.
Caplain and other people we are talking about are like Jane in that they seem to systematically avoid many common fallacies despite them also being useful persuasive/etc devices and while they certainly aren't perfect the fact that they seem to regularly fall into one sort of fallacy even while avoiding others that. would be similarly useful requires an explanation which identifies what is different about this case from all the cases where they don't indulge in some useful fallacy.
Most of my response was heading off the argument that you could basically just say whatever way they did in fact choose to use language must be what was useful.o
I think a lot of people are mistaken about the lack of reproductive fitness for homosexuals throughout history - yes, perhaps it lessens it a bit, but for the overwhelming part of history, loving your wife was a secondary consideration at best and most everyone was expected to marry and have a family regardless of their sexual preferences.
Heterosexuality is obviously an adaptation. It arose because directing mating efforts toward the opposite sex will predictably result in more offspring than not directing in such a manner. A trait that systematically resulted in fewer offspring should be expected to get weeded out to the point where its frequency is determined by de novo mutations.
>It arose because directing mating efforts toward the opposite sex will predictably result in more offspring than not directing in such a manner.
Perhaps, but I think I remember reading a theory that homosexuality in males often goes hand-in-hand with hypersexuality, and often these men are somewhat bisexual and will typically have sex with whatever willing partner is available. Which also happens to usually involve other (hypersexual) men. But they would still often have as many if not more children than otherwise non-hypersexual men.
I'm not sure if that theory really reflects reality, can't even remember where I saw it (hopefully I'm not repeating some theory thought up by an alt-righter in order to make homosexuals look bad to conservatives). But it seems like it could be possible in an evolutionary sense for animals that display homosexual behavior to actually be more reproductively successful than their less horny heterosexual peers.
Obviously this doesn't explain homosexuality between females, but I think it's likely that female sexual preference had little to no impact on evolutionary success in our species... the males undoubtedly didn't leave them with much choice. And forging closer ties between females was likely slightly beneficial if anything.
Bisexuality is more common among females while obligate homosexuality is more common among males.
I know William Bucker of Traditions of Conflict (@Evolving_Moloch on Twitter) downplays female mate choice since so many societies constraint said choice, but I can't go that far. Genetic conflict has been known about since Trivers, and females able to "win" such conflicts by acting in their own interest will have an advantage over those that don't. Females may be stereotypically more passive in mating than males, but they aren't completely so and this is indicative of a capacity they've retained even as they've evolved through a history of attempts to constrain that capacity.
I think this article is excellent on its own, but an important point that is only hinted at here and there is that Emil's definition presumes adaptation to a particular environment. This environment is obviously not modernity, but it is obviously not the savannah either since basically no modern humans are adapted to living on the savannah. So where is it? The answer is it's nowhere because human evolution has been ongoing, indeed accelerating, for 100,000 with each new adaptation causing a change in environment which introduces new evolutionary pressures.
However, you are simply and obviously wrong that homosexuality "seems basically okay for everyone involved". First of all there's AIDS, duh and that should be case closed. But even if there wasn't AIDS, gay (not lesbian) people mostly lead really squalid lives. Yes you doubtless know some gay people who seem pretty fine, you also almost certainly know some manic depressives who seem just fine too.
One does wonder to what degree this is a made-up category for moderns unable to sit sufficiently still in a boring classroom.
>3: Ephebophilia
As phrased ("only"), 1 and 3 exclude almost all of fertile females. 2 is the least disordered of the three, per Emil's disorder definitions.
>5: Chronic Pain, Panic Attacks, Or, If You Insist, Nightmares
>I think Emil has to bite the bullet that conditions which make people miserable and ruin their lives aren’t mental disorders as long as they don’t affect functioning.
If they don't affect functioning, they sound inconsequentially mild. Being "miserable" and having a "ruined life" sounds incompatible with unaffected functioning.
On alcohol & fecundity: Mormons are supposedly teetotalers, and seem to have lots of children. As are Seventh Day Adventists. I'm not sure if Orthodox Jews are teetotalers or not, but they, too, tend to have many children.
Is it possible that there is an aspect of "non-overlapping magisteria" here when trying to characterize certain behaviors strictly through the lens of their apparently dysgenic consequences?
I.e., a man who is monogamous may have fewer children than a promiscuous one, but that doesn't imply that man 1 suffers from some disorder. Perhaps some behaviors should be assessed through the lens of improvements to social harmonization rather than the absolute magnitude of offspring produced by that strategy?
The social consequences of these behaviors (unrestrained promiscuity is clearly frowned upon for its social destructiveness!) have implications for the future reproductive fitness of men via their social standing - or even their very survival, as sexual jealousy is a leading cause of various forms of violence.
There's actually good reasons to think that a certain amount of pedophilic attraction would have been adaptive for men in ancestral societies. It seems irrational and maladaptive for men to be attracted to little girls in modern societies where we have high ages of consent and marriage is only practised between adults. But in the hunter-gatherer societies we evolved in which they practice child marriage the adaptive value of pedophilic attraction would be that it would motivate men to secure child brides.
I've noticed that most arguments about the adaptive value of attraction to particular age groups naively focus on the female's current fertility and whether having sex with them would lead to reproduction at that age. Humans don't run around having one-night-stands with eachother but instead form long-term bonds so what really needs to be considered is the TOTAL amount of offspring a man can potentially get from a female.
An 8yo girl has all of her fertile years ahead of her can give a man many more offspring than a 30yo who is approaching the end of her fertility (about 40 in HG societies). So imagine we have two men. The first man is attracted most to 8yo girls: "Oh, the're so cute and pretty! I want to hold one and keep her for myself!". The second man is attracted most to 30yo women. The first man would be more likely to secure an 8yo wife while the second man would be more likely to secure a 30yo wife, whether by seducing them, making deals with their dads, or by kidnapping them from other tribes. Since the 8yo has many more fertile years ahead of her than the 30yo the first man would leave behind more descendants than the second man.
The logic really isn't complicated. A certain amount amount of pedophilic attraction would have been adaptive in ancestral hunter-gatherer societies and so must have become normal in men. But it's such a taboo topic at the moment our society isn't ready to accept this. If we lived in a tribe in the Amazon where men marry girls when they're 8yo and start having intercourse with them when they're 12 (I'm not making this up) people would be much more accepting of the claim that pedophilic attraction can have adaptive value.
>>They're talking about people who are only attracted to prepubescents.
But that's mostly a caricature. The idea of the man who's only attracted to prepubescents and not attracted at all to adults doesn't really exist.
>>Maybe, although the higher the morality rates the more beneficial to have a bride that's fertile now.
Not quite. In order to monopolise a female's fertile lifespan the best time to secure is before the onset of her fertily not after it. If your shift starts at 8 o'clock you don't get to work after 8 but just before it. This is not theoretical, we see it happening. In traditional hunter-gatherer societies men usually marry and start having sex with girls a few years before they start ovulating.
I'm not claiming that marrying prepubescents can't increase fitness generally, I said that marrying 8 year olds over 30 year olds wouldn't necessarily do so depending on circumstances. The higher the rate of mortality, the lower the chance that a fertile lifespan will be fully utilized. If you only have a week to live there's no point in getting a job that starts in two weeks.
The more technical terms you are looking for are Fisher's reproductive value vs fecundity, some interesting interesting work has been done in recent years by Lassek and Gaulin and such, they make a couple mistakes about fecundity, and most researchers don't even seem to understand what Fisher meant when he talked about reproductive value etc. I would recommend relevant section in The Genetical Theory, Fisher has a very interesting graph of reproductive value and left some pretty funny comments under it.
If you want to see a brief history of the stuff around fecundity I have loosely outlined it in a previous post, (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-can-fetish-research-tell-us/comments) if you ctrl f my name. Also made a comment under this post that might interest you, and TGGP already mentioned the old Hanson post.
I think the high rate of comorbidity between paedo- and homophilia would suggest that it's a disordering of the sexual function rather than normal variation. And an evolutionary explanation for the paedo who prefers 6 year olds over 11 year olds would seem to stretch credulity. Also, I'm not aware of any paedophiliac tendencies in other pair-bonding species.
"Emil proposes an alternate definition: a mental disorder is a mental trait which lowers reproductive fitness."
I don't think this can be a useful definition. Evolution has many uses for genetic diversity. A trait which lowers your chance to reproduce in one environment may enhance your chance in a different environment, or it may enhance the chance of your group reproducing.
Some traits may have survival value for the individual, but we still might want to consider them mental disorders: psychopathy, for example
A man who volunteers for a dangerous mission to explore outer space may be lowering his chances of reproducing, but we don't want to call that a mental disorder.
Yes, it's extremely stupid. What we class as a mental illness essentially depends on whether it causes harm or not. Einstein level intelligence is probably evolutionarily maladaptive but we don't class high IQ people as mentally ill and give them lead pills to bring their IQ down to normal because high intelligence is a good thing for people and society. Whether it's evolutionary adaptive or not is irrelevant.
Problem with the term illness is it comes with a lot of baguage: Social stigma, or the opposite: societal help in term of treatment reimbursement or other monetary/non monetary benefits, protection against discrimination and getting fired. Also, in some cases, removal of full adult autonomy (forced treatments or internment) and/or partial removal of judiciary responsability.
Defining something as an illness has more to do with those "side effects" than any logical consideration, or actual treatments.
Maladaptive may be better: socially maladapted and reproductively maladapted are clearly different but relatively easy to understand things.
My own definition is quite pragmatic but neither very useful nor without problematic cases: an illness is a condition that make someone suffer (pain or unhappiness) for which a treatment exists or could theoretically exists, the treatment being anything (that at least alleviate the problem(s) and would be voluntarily taken by the ill person.
This is not foolproof: with this definition, poverty is an illness ;-p.
I agree with the baggage problem. I have always been severely annoyed by the tendency for discourse to place connotation over denotation, I was in a college-level history class decades ago wherein Catholicism's "cult of the Saints" was discussed and people thought it was an anti-Catholic bigoted accusation that they were Jim Jones or David Koresh level crazy.
A huge amount of the disagreement here is motivated by wanting to keep certain conditions from being labeled "illness", or to acquire such a label, for political and social reasons. So alcoholism is an illness because we want people to not be seen as responsible for their addiction but also want them to try to cure it. Meanwhile, a host of variant sexual behaviors are NOT an illness because those communities and their allies don't want anybody trying to "cure" them, which they're averse to for pretty good historical reasons. (And the gender-identity folks have drawn the toughest position in this game, needing to walk the fine line of it being a life-threatening illness so they can get coverage for the cure, but also needing the only acceptable cure to be affirmative medical interventions.)
But unfortunately, I think your choice of "maladaptive" also has too many negative connotations to work. Sadly almost every term that would serve this purpose has too many negative connotations because abnormalities have been the basis for shunning and cruelty across every culture that has a language with a term for it. Even "suboptimal" is too negative, you can almost hear the "whaddaya mean, that I'm not as good?!" You can use language like "divergent", "atypical" or "non-standard" that indicates it's not the majority behavior, but any suggestion that this divergent behavior is worse in any way will trigger all the fears of persecution that people in those categories have.
Homosexuality is clearly a malfunction of the fundamental reproductive drive, but it's politically unpopular to say that.
Amusingly, that homosexuality is a malfunction is one of that ever-increasing list of things that are so obvious that nobody is supposed to say it anymore because they are stereotypes, which we are supposed to believe can't possibly be true. So, therefore, all good people are oblivious to the obvious. Not surprisingly, our society is becoming ever more dysfunctional, especially among the truest of true believers in the new faith: liberal teenage girls whose rates of mental illness have soared during the Great Awokening.
"Homosexuality is clearly a malfunction of the fundamental reproductive drive, but it's politically unpopular to say that."
I suppose it depends on whether one takes "malfunction" as suggesting that there is some sort of motivation or obligation to fix it.
In the absence of that suggestion - well, I use my sugar-sensitive taste buds to respond to aspartame and sucralose a lot of the time, and I'm childfree, so I use my genitals for orgasms, not for making copies of my DNA. I view this as creative repurposing. :-)
At present, the only known way to fix homosexuality in any sense of the word is through gender transition: e.g., give your lesbian tomboy daughter testosterone and a mastectomy and call her your son.
But in the future, perhaps a less ... severe method will emerge. Say that parents could take a pill with no side effects before conceiving a child that would lower the chance of the child growing up to be homosexual by 50%. What percentage of Scott's neighbors in Berkeley who are planning families would sign up for that service if they could have the pills delivered in a brown paper wrapper so the neighbors would never know?
Good question. In general, for most characteristics without multipolar equilibriums, there is usually an advantage towards winding up with the most common version of a trait. Given an analog of your hypothetical pill for e.g. degree of religiosity, I'd expect the number of atheists to drop. I'd expect the population distributions of many traits to tend towards a delta function.
( I've seen claims that e.g. left-handedness has an equilibrium concentration.)
Given such a pill that worked on adults (admittedly even less likely), the tradeoffs could get fun to watch. If STD statistics were the dominant motivator, then men would tend to switch from homosexual to heterosexual and women would tend to switch from heterosexual to homosexual.
I would *hate* this concept of "genetic maladaptation" - at least as defined in these terms.
I'm looking at this from the perspective of developmental systems theory lately, the idea of which is that (contra the popular view and people like Richard Dawkins) it isn't just the genes that replicate themselves. Genes can't, in fact, replicate themselves in the absence of a whole complex interacting web of developmental resources that includes the cytoplasm of the reproductive cell, the environmental conditions that allow for reproduction and so on (which for humans includes a very complex cultural context). What reproduces itself, then, isn't the gene, or the individual, but the entire developmental system, which includes much of culture.
In that context, the question of whether a particular individual is reproductively successful is irrelevant; what matters is a much broader system. So, to take an imaginary example, it might be the case that homosexuality contributes to the community in which others who aren't the direct offspring of homosexuals are raised by being extra adults who are able to provide resources and care or whatever, and in that way would contribute to an overall developmental system. That's just a made up just-so story; the point is that it *could* be the case, and to understand whether the trait of homosexuality is "maladaptive" for the developmental system we'd have to know whether it is the case or not. Another example would be a teacher who doesn't have children but contributes to the overall developmental system of very many children by educating them.
I'm reminded of a very post-Darwinian line from Nietzsche, where he says something to the effect of "no matter what your characteristics are, they are all part of the nature of the species, and thus all part of the output of a phenomenally successful evolutionary lineage." (He says it a lot more eloquently...) In terms of adaptive fitness, it might even be the case that society benefits in some opaque way from sociopathy or depression or whatever, and if those conditions were removed from the social environment the developmental system would be less reproductively successful. The point isn't that sociopathy and depression are "fine" or shouldn't be treated; the point is that we can't even form a coherent concept of "genetic maladaptation" if we're myopically focused on the individual's success or lack thereof of passing on their own personal genes at the expense of looking at the broader developmental system.
Right, it's a theory that would be popular with the media ("Gay Men Found to Be Self-Sacrificing Heroes") if there were evidence for it, but nobody has managed to find much evidence for it over the quarter of a century or so that it has been around.
It could be that the community benefits from the existence of homosexuals through, say, better art. It could be that 150 years from now, advances in medical science have allowed parents to choose to avoid male homosexual children the way Down's Syndrome children have been phased out over the course of my lifetime. Cultural historians might well notice that culture has gotten less entertaining since most of the gays were phased out.
But it's still hard to square that with the Darwinian math.
There are some things you point out e.g. schizophrenics where you say it's not maladaptive because they have more children.
But the real adaptive strategy is to have more *grandchildren*. If your kids die before reproducing, then they might as well not exist as far as your genes are concerned.
I think a number of those conditions cause more children through carelessness. But if they don't grow up (because of carelessness) then do they actually increase fitness? We aren't salmon after all.
Would those guys who cheat by putting more of their sperm into sperm banks (whether by owning the sperm bank or by signing up for more donations than they're supposed to) be the height of mental health?
A lot of confusion can be avoided by introducing (1) a selected effects account of function and (2) distinguishing dysfunction from cases of fitness-reducing evolutionary mismatch. (And also just looking at the philosophy of biology that's been discussing this for several decades and arguably made a lot more headway: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1093/bjps/axw021#_i11 )
Emil is groping towards (1) without recognising the relevance of (2). Scott’s counterexamples are somewhat less persuasive once Emil has this in hand, but he can still get to his conclusion when it comes to thinking about ‘disorder’.
A selected effects account of function says that the function of a trait is the effect for which that trait has been selected (importantly, not what caused that trait to develop in the first place, but what causes that trait to be maintained in the population, so we don’t need to go all the way back to the savannah. Additionally, Caucasians losing their skin pigmentation was clearly a more recent selection pressure producing a particular phenotype). Insofar as a phenotype is failing to produce the effect for which it was selected, it is dysfunctional. Osteoarthritis is dysfunctional because joints were not selected to stiffen and cause pain.
Importantly, putting someone in an environment for which their phenotype was not selected will often make them worse off, but does not mean they are dysfunctional: there is simply a fitness-reducing mismatch between the environment they evolved for and the environment they are in. (Compare: someone who has lactose intolerance because their ancestors never needed to develop lactose digestion and who lives in a city where only dairy is available will do terribly, but they are not dysfunctional. Someone whose ancestors did evolve this, but who cannot digest lactose, is dysfunctional).
Here’s what this gets us:
ADHD: We need to remember that a range of phenotypes can evolve and all be selected for (e.g. the range of heights), so there can be a range of attentional capacities, and many people think ADHD is just people at the lower end of the attentional bell curve. Insofar as people with ADHD do poorly today compared to ‘the savannah’, it’s because it’s a case of mismatch without thereby being dysfunctional. If people with ADHD are doing better fitness-wise today than the average person, then this doesn’t show the average person is dysfunctional because their level of attention is still doing exactly what it was selected for.
Alcoholism: A tendency to become addicted to alcohol needs to have been selected by some other pressure in order to have evolved at all (e.g. ‘liking GABA’), and whatever that trait is wouldn’t decrease fitness on the savannah given there’s no alcohol, and so that trait isn’t a dysfunction. Since Chinese people have developed anti-alcoholism adaptations, this seems like evidence that alcoholism was fitness lowering in the recent ancestral environment, undermining the relevance of the observation that people who like alcohol have more kids today. Once someone without anti-alcohol adaptations gets put into an environment with alcohol, ‘liking GABA too much’ becomes fitness reducing due to mismatch. Insofar as some groups have weaker anti-alcohol adaptations, they are in the middle of a transition, developing new traits in response to the changed environment.
Attraction: If men evolved to be attracted to women of child-bearing age, someone who is only attracted to women who are not of child-bearing age (either too young or too old), would be dysfunctional.
Chronic pain: Pain evolved to signal damage. Insofar as our nervous system is sending messages of pain when there is no damage, then there is dysfunction present.
Nightmares: nightmares probably aren’t a dysfunction given their prevalence. Nightmare disorder, however, plausibly is given it’s not what was selected for.
Things get a lot more complicated once we introduce culture and cultural learning, as we have learned to do all kinds of things that we weren’t selected to (use mobile phones, flick lightswitches, attend college). So I’m not sure about things like ‘pursuing philosophy’ or ‘violating taboos’ but I think we need to keep the reference class on traits which were selected for. Pursuing philosophy is arguably a form of seeking prestige/status, or excessive curiosity. Seeking status in general is a trait that we evolved as social beings. Seeking so much status that you no longer have children is plausibly dysfunctional, like continually eating so much your stomach gets distended?
Ok, that's dysfunction, but what happens when we start thinking about ‘disorder’?
Suppose a selected effects account of function gives us all we need for our scientific investigations. Accepting this while still asking about ‘disorder’ means tacitly accepting that extra-scientific considerations are going to be relevant to guiding usage of this term, and so values are on the table, meaning some of Scott’s other points come back into play.
Many negative mismatches are managed by making our environment much more like the ancestral one (e.g. avoiding dairy, avoiding direct UV light) but when this is infeasible, we arguably envelop those mismatches into our folk understanding of dysfunction (as in, can't 'function' normally in our society). When it’s a dysfunction or mismatch that directly impedes quality of life in ways we care about, perhaps that's when we call it a disorder (hence why same sex attraction isn’t disordered).
Both you and Scott are right, but in different ways.
You're absolutely right that hunting giraffes (or other large mammals) is a very *difficult* task, not to be dismissed with a "super easy, barely an inconvenience!" by a modern city dweller who would get himself kicked to death if he tried to attempt such a feat.
However, Scott makes a good point in that hunting giraffes is *conceptually* simple. It's difficult to do, but if you're of normal human intelligence, it's easy to grasp: here's a large animal. We'll work together to kill it without getting killed ourselves, then skin it, gut it, cook it, and eat the meat. You could explain it to a child (leaving aside the child being grossed out/sad at the thought of killing a cute fluffy critter).
Contrast this with a metric bleep-ton of very complex, cognitively demanding, abstract tasks that you have to do in the modern world, like "fill out your income tax return," especially if you have a PMC (Professional-Managerial Class) type job. You need a ton more abstract reasoning, numeracy, literacy, ability to plan long-term and to get along and communicate with people who are not part of your hunter-gatherer band - all skills that were not applicable in our ancestral environment.
My background: hard science degree, music degree, former pro violist, current microchip chemist, group sports as a kid, combat sports as an adolescent, took up practical shooting a few years back.
The practical shooting is the most cognitively demanding thing I've ever done with the exception of one (1) class I took back in college. You need to be aware of literally everything (in the sense of literally everything) in your surroundings and coordinate your body and focus while min-maxing your movement versus the difficulty of the shot and you will be timed to the hundredths of a second while you're doing it.
While our savannah hunters might not have been able to solve the ballistic equations on paper, they absolutely could do those calculation in their head-- to the point where they could calculate and apply the necessary force vector to heave a projectile at a moving target.
Why we want to reserve cognition as something that only applies to paper/screens instead of action is a bizarre prejudice to me. We'd never say that autists lack the cognitive abilities to recognize social signals.
Disagree, what you're describing when hunting/shooting is mostly System 1 intuitive processing. Training that to be effective takes some effort but once it's there it takes much less cognitive processing to use. Paper/screens/PMC-type work is mostly System 2 processing. Much more cognitively demanding. That's basically the entire basis of Kahneman and Tversky's Nobel prize.
Probably the reason you find shooting so hard to pick up is because you didn't have much practice at that type of thing when you were young so training those skills is quite difficult. Hunting giraffe to a prehistoric human would be learned intuitively in their youth.
Practical shooting is literally a puzzle game. You know the objective ahead of time, and you have ~5 minutes to plan it out. There's almost nothing intuitive about it. You are making conscious decisions, just very, very fast. Typing a word is done through muscle memory. Breaking a shot requires a conscious decision (and the mental focus to hold on the target between the decision and the bullet actually leaving the gun). The high level guys can go through a recap of what they just did breaking it down to a ridiculous level of detail.
I *have* a for-realsises engineering job, and I've been doing my own taxes since I've had to pay them. The amount of cognitive effort involved in practical shooting is so much higher that it would be unsustainable for even a few consecutive minutes let alone a workday. This might (might) be because of the imperative nature of each successive decision and the fact that there are so many more decisions to be made.
Ok I didn't realize practical shooting was something specific that required making complex System 2 decisions as part of the process. You seem to think that practical shooting and hunting giraffe would require the same amount of cognitive load. Yeah, nah.
I've never hunted giraffe, and I suspect you haven't either.
The reason I suspect the cognitive load would be similar is the dynamic similarities. You'd be tracking your own body, any hazards associated with the ground you're running across, the other members of your party, what they are doing with their weapons so you don't endanger them or yourself or interfere with their attempt, the movement of the animal, any other member of the herd, your escape route should one or more of them turn on you... The "throw* might be system one (and the actual running), but everything else (including the path you'd be running) is system 2.
Emil's definition is not widely shared in his chosen field. Randy Nesse is the best known "evolutionary psychiatrist." Reproductive outcomes are just one possible concern. Other explanations for disease (all disease, not just mental illness) include:
- Mismatch: our bodies are unprepared to cope with modern environments
- Infection: pathogens evolve faster than we do
- Constraints: there are some things that natural selection just can’t do
- Trade-Offs: every trait has advantages and disadvantages
- Reproduction: natural selection maximizes gene replication, not health or happiness
- Defensive responses: Adaptive reactions are often unpleasant
The problem with Kirkegaard's account isn't merely limited to weird edge cases etc. rather its a problem with virtually all WIERD societies, given their low fertility rates etc. The point about drawing a line being hard is something I have brought up many times previously, along with various considerations as to the EEA when assessing current, past and future humans. The important point relating to Szasz/Caplan etc. is that none of the various reasonable taxonomies that have been proposed say relating to moral goodness/evolutionary adaptiveness/widely held legal and social norms etc. actually describe what the DSM 5 is, rather a Szaszian account of different interest groups with different values, positive beliefs and moral beliefs all (reluctantly) compromising to create some weird amalgamation that is the current taxonomy. This is important as lay people and even some experts and such take it for granted that the current taxonomy actually consistently carves nature at its joints and such, with only a handful of people active behind the scenes seeing how the DSM is actually compilled, say Richard Green or Blanchard and Cantor vs Rind etc. I should add that a pretty good reason to be interested in the Evolutionary psychiatry account of things is that it almost certainly has the best chances of working out various diseases' etiology.
On a related note it's important to note that heterosexual pedophilia and nepiophilia actually seem extremely rare, with the most plausible explanation behind offending being sadism/power dynamics/opportunistic rape or extreme emotional congruence with children/some sort of intellectual disability, this is supported not only by various quantitative data such as that from phallometry (despite all its problems this is a consistent finding) and various qualitative data looking at various cases of physical and virtual offending. Interestingly Scott seems to roughly imply although not explicitly say that ephebophilia (his example borders hebephilia) is adaptive, which has some interesting implications for modern prevalence etc. unfortunately Cantor doesn't share his hebe data (0.0sd cutpoint specificity values would be nice as a start) and since Blanchard 2008 they explicitly don't use epheb stimulus, their are lots of other problems such as the fact that most research has used controls selected for teleiophilia whether it be SOAs or volunteers etc. and researchers seem disinterested in actually establishing prevalence estimates instead needlessly focusing on validating the test against ideal groups and such. If Scott is right its sort of interesting that very few evolutionary psychologists and such have touched on this topic, maybe Lassek and Gaulin recently (although they make quite a lot of mistakes) and maybe if you caught someone like Trivers off guard he might mention a couple things, and there is that Robin Hanson post from a while back, but for the most part evo psychologists just heard some stuff about Montagu or Symons and anovulatory cycles etc. then leave it at that.
Scientifically researching pedophilia by showing child pornography to subjects sounds like a career disaster ready to happen. You might even wind up in jail.
We're not supposed to look down upon sexual minorities anymore, except for pedophiles, so there's a huge amount of energy out there hoping to find a pedophile to punish.
From what I understand its legal to use such material in Canada which is where most of this research takes place, I know other researchers do other stuff like audio tapes and silhouettes etc. There is quite a lot of ambiguity surrounding what material Cantor and Blanchard use, in particular it might be worthwhile for them to sort stimulus not on the basis of age but on tanner stages or something like that, and ensure that stuff such as body hair etc. aren't significantly modified.
Scott, I agree that your definition makes sense and is useful, but it's got an important consequence that I don't think you've addressed: psychologists should not be allowed to make determinations about whether something is a mental disorder since having expertise about the working of the brain does not give you any special authority to determine whether something is moral or good for society. Mental disorders should be defined by religious leaders, ethical philosophers, or whoever has moral authority in our culture, and then given to psychologists to treat. Allowing psychologists to decide whether something is included in the DSM is a category error just like asking an expert in the material properties of concrete where we should build the next bridge.
I don't know if sexual attraction to children is something that would be a mental illness by Scott metrics, either.
(But note a MAJOR difference between "sexual attraction" and "rape" - rape is unacceptable regardless of the age of the victim, so child-raping pedophiles seem not really different from adult-raping non-pedophiles, by this criteria. And just in case this needs to be said, *any* sex with a child is rape.)
I feel like both Emil and Scott are using a narrow definition of fitness that's not in line with modern evolutionary theory. For example, in the discussion of chronic pain, we see how narrow Scott's definition of "evolutionary fitness" is: "hunt, gather, or have sex". This is far too narrow a definition to be taken as a serious connection to modern evolutionary theory. What does it mean to have a disorder that "ruins their lives", but you're still passably functional? Does it interfere with your ability to maintain long-term relationships? Does it impede your ability to plan for the future? Do you spend a lot of time trying to get rid of your chronic nightmares, or make you less willing to take small risks that might lead to big payoffs later? This is important in a hunter-gatherer society that will need to track the movement of herds, trends in the weather, etc. Long-term survival is a lot more complicated than "find a willing mate as often as possible".
Let's go through some of the others to get a fuller picture:
ADHD - As I said above, having more kids is NOT synonymous with fitness. Scott waves a hand briefly in the direction of "it's more complicated than that", but not in a way most modern evolutionary theorists would recognize.
Alcoholism - Again, problems arise with "it's more complicated". Plus, I'd suggest religious teetotalers are more likely to have lots more children (i.e. Mormons, Adventists, etc.).
Ephebophile - there are good evolutionary reasons for society to prefer mating of younger men (who can take care of their offspring) over older men. A society where fitness is optimized for "every man wants to always mate with girls the moment they go through puberty" would not be positively selected for. Meanwhile, a society where older men pair up with women near their age (especially on the savanna) is going to ensure the wisdom of the elderly is preserved, while not sacrificing the fitness of the youth. Experience his hard-won, and shouldn't be thrown away, but it needs to pass down to the next generation, not take the next generation's place. Thus, you need to keep elderly people alive (preferably by pairing them up) without preventing younger generations from having and raising their own children. Therefore, the most fit scenario is absolutely #3.
Plato - If you have people in your society who contribute to societal fitness but don't directly reproduce you'll out compete a society that does. The extreme of this is the human body, where a tiny fraction of cells are actual gametes, but without the majority of OTHER cells functioning properly the gametes are useless.
Severity - An asexual person who never procreates, but who enables six other people to do so and expands the community's resources to support that population increase is a net gain for the community. Genes that select for asexuality will persist to the extent they expand resources greater than their prevalence in the community (again, cf multicellular organisms vs. gametes). Meanwhile, a schizophrenic who is unable to take care of themselves and has a schizophrenic child unable to take care of themselves is a net LOSS for the community, consuming resources but unable to produce them or to create resource-producing offspring.
(That's the extreme/pretend case where schizophrenia is 100% genetically dominant - see my concluding paragraph for why I think it's a problem to specifically identify something as truly 'unfit'.)
Emil the contrarian - it's important that a community be able to survive tail events, because circumstances change. This is especially true in an evolutionary environment where every species is constantly shifting strategies to get ahead of every other species. While continuity along the current strategy is important, it's also important for a community to continuously be experimenting with new potential strategies for fitness. Even if it costs you 2% of your population (or more!) experimenting on non-fit strategies, it's worth it to devote this resource to 'R&D' of the next fitness strategy for your community to embrace. Otherwise, you're stuck in the same fitness strategy. That strategy will work ... until it doesn't and you're wiped out - probably in favor of a community that is able to drive social adaptation through 'random mutation' by contrarians. Maybe doomsday preppers are mostly idiots who waste their lives. But if 0.0001% of the time you get a tail-end risk that wipes out 99.9% of the population, it's the preppers who'll survive. Until then (maybe for the next 300 years?) they just look like useless idiots.
Once we expand our view from "eat, sleep, procreate" to the more complicated view of long-term evolutionary fitness of a community, most of Scott's objections don't seem to fit the discussion at all. However, if we're asking about community fitness, this makes it more difficult for us to identify something as 'disordered', because society is complicated and it can be difficult to tell when a condition is truly "unfit" versus being a Chesterton fence nobody quite understands what to do with.
I think the biggest objection to Emil's definition is that it's EXACTLY the thing that drove the eugenics movement a hundred years ago to begin sterilization programs and ... other things. It's probably a road we shouldn't go down under any circumstances.
> I weakly predict that alcoholics have the most [children] (they have lots of chances for drunken flings without contraception)
But maybe that is more than offset by the negative effects of the childrens' likely haphazard upbringing and possible outright neglect by alcoholic parents.
Also (on a related topic) it seems odd that the Chinese were the first to brew alcohol and yet a good proportion of Asian people, far more than a typical westerner, are intolerant of it due to the rs671 (ALDH2*2) allele on chromosome 12, which results in a less functional acetaldehyde dehydrogenase enzyme (says he, cribbing from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_flush_reaction )
It would be natural to assume they were more tolerant of alcohol, not less, since those who were not would have been at a reproductive disadvantage over time, just as western adults are generally more tolerant of lactose, as their ancestors have presumably been consuming dairy products for longer than those of the Chinese.
"But maybe that is more than offset by the negative effects of the childrens' likely haphazard upbringing and possible outright neglect by alcoholic parents."
I don't think this is taking the evolutionary fitness argument seriously. Evolution doesn't care if your children are neglected and haphazardly raised if it doesn't make them have fewer kids themselves. In our current society, it doesn't (poor people have more kids than rich people). You can argue you're talking about something other than our current society, but that's why I go into all the stuff about EEA and weird comparison groups.
"Discovery of late Stone Age jugs suggest that intentionally fermented beverages existed at least as early as the Neolithic period (c. 10,000 BC).
The ability to metabolize alcohol likely predates humanity with primates eating fermenting fruit.[3]
The oldest verifiable brewery has been found in a prehistoric burial site in a cave near Haifa in modern-day Israel. Researchers have found residue of 13,000-year-old beer that they think might have been used for ritual feasts to honor the dead. The traces of a wheat-and-barley-based alcohol were found in stone mortars carved into the cave floor.[4] Some have proposed that alcoholic drinks predated agriculture and it was the desire for alcoholic drinks that lead to agriculture and civilization.[5][6]
As early as 7000 BC, chemical analysis of jars from the Neolithic village Jiahu in the Henan province of northern China revealed traces of a mixed fermented beverage. According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences[7] in December 2004,[8] chemical analysis of the residue confirmed that a fermented drink made of grapes, hawthorn berries, honey, and rice was being produced in 7000–6650 BC.[9][10] This is approximately the time when barley beer and grape wine were beginning to be made in the Middle East. "
>This definition would cover depression, where people might be too depressed to hunt or gather or woo mates. It would cover pedophilia, where people have sex with children (and not adults) and so can’t reproduce. But it would also cover homosexuality, which also lowers people’s chances of having children.
I don't even think you can say this with confidence.
For depression, how sure are we that it never helps you conserve your resources by 'hibernating' and lowering your energy output in low-resource periods when running around failing at hunting all day will kill you? Or keeps you home from wars and blood fueds and so forth that would see you dead pretty often?
For pedophilia, how sure are we that snapping up the best spouse when they are too young for anyone else to be interested, and grooming them to be devoted to you for life, is actually a bad evolutionary strategy (even if it's morally detestible)?
For homosexuality, are we admitting all the stuff about inclusive fitness (resources to nieces and nephews, sexy son hypothesis, etc)? And in traditional cultures, how sure are we that gay people aren't being herded into marriage anyway, do they actually have less children in traditional cultures? Does being gay strengthen your bonds with other men and get you more resources and protections (think bonobos), does being a lesbian help you resist getting pregnant outside wedlock and lead to fewer children with higher rates of survival?
In the evolutionary environment, do schizophrenics have fewer children, or are they treated as shamans and visionaries and given many wives?
Etc.
And that's assuming that we're judging fitness based on some imagined evolutionary environment that we have no way to actually measure or confidently predict. If we make it relative to a given modern culture, then not only does that mean what is and isn't a mental disorder is different in every culture in the world and over time within every culture, but it probably means that things like intelligence and impulse control are mental disorders because they anti-correlate with birth rates in modern societies.
Emil's definition has the property of *sounding* simple and objective, but I'm pretty sure it's actually quite incoherent and would rely on lots of subjective and arbitrary handwaving to implement. I don't think it actually describes a compact or useful concept.
"For depression, how sure are we that it never helps you conserve your resources by 'hibernating' and lowering your energy output in low-resource periods when running around failing at hunting all day will kill you? Or keeps you home from wars and blood fueds and so forth that would see you dead pretty often?"
I don't know if it *never* helps you do this, but I'm very sure that it's often not because of this - for example, lots of cases of depression are caused by people giving themselves bad hormones through contraception.
This feels like one of the same mistakes I saw people making in the cognitive biases thread, which is "I can think of one situation where something resembling this might have been useful, so it's not really a bias" while ignoring that in real life most of the times people use it were in situations where it was wildly counterproductive. I would almost *define* "bias" as "people consistently using strategies they have for some good reason, in situations where it's counterproductive to do so". This also seems like how (some) mental disorders work - dieting is potentially a good strategy if you're fat, but if you use it when you're super-thin, then you're anorexic and it's bad.
Fitness is so contextually dependent that it's just hard to say if a suite of symptoms we might classify as "depression" is residing in a local fitness peak or fitness valley. The answer to that question is likely depends on differences in circumstances that make its hard to make blanket statements even if we were good at knowing fitness to a degree we, in reality, aren't. Beyond that, it's just bizarre to substitute every instance in which we'd describe someone as mentally ill with them displaying traits that show some level of suboptimal evolutionary fitness. The natural response to that is, "So what?" I know why we'd care if someone is experiencing major depressive disorder, and it's not "their evolutionary fitness is suboptimal." You can't escape the value judgment by moving it one step up the chain. We still have to answer why it matters.
If someone has a really great hammer - like Thor's Hammer they're always going to be looking for ways to use it(like 'if I swing it around fast enough can I fly?'). If one has a trait society values it can get overused as a tool to understand (or mis-) stuff. Analytical thinking.
I believe that defining "mental illness" like morals/ethics is about balancing(e.g. doctrine of the mean, middle path). Balancing the primitive reproductive instinct with the higher intellect's concern for society as a whole. The latter being far more subjective. From a smattering of reading it seems the West's smartest have been on a analytical thinking bender for a few hundred years which resulted in DSM recommending treating 'this' illness with 'this' pill(1). I think that mental illness is often caused by cultural characteristics and must be treated within a given environment(2). I read that an American treatment for Bulimia was used by American doctors in Singapore where there was a more mild form present and it made the condition worse there(3). That's not to say that some conditions aren't generally occurring and generally treatable(e.g. depression).
Lastly, I'd say that as as all civilizations age, morality loosens which creates tears in the social fabric(Khaldun, 1377, etc). Consider Freud's idea that all "sociable feelings of affection" not appropriately sexual are "aim-inhibited"(1921). A bit over-stated, imo, but it fits that these inhibitions would start to break down as the social fabric condition worsens(communities fragment, people become divided, lonely and so other alt. compensations are sought).
Please know that I'm not saying that there is never a time some people aren't attracted to the same sex but in a healthy society there would be fewer that felt the need to act on it and one would hope exceptions would be made for those that felt compelled to live that lifestyle.
[I can fill in the footnotes if anyone is interested]
"Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found? I am, therefore, myself a complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes. I live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them—I absolutely do not care which—as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude...The various philosophies are but so many attempts at expressing what this stuff really is.”
--William James, The Will to Believe, 1897 via Kaag & Van Belle, 2003
"I defined mental health as a process of ongoing dedication to reality at all costs. And ‘at all costs’ means no matter how uncomfortable the reality makes us. Now, in our pain-avoiding culture mental health is not always encouraged.”
--M. Scott Peck, Further Along The Road Less Travelled, 1993
Evolutionary fitness is about more than the number of kids you have. If you have 100 kids and you can’t feed any of them, that’s bad for your genes. It’s probably better to think in terms of how many great grandchildren you will have. It’s not clear that things like ADHD and alcoholism would result in you having more great grandchildren. Especially in a world without government-provided welfare.
1) "benefits [...] friends" would seem to obviously refer to Scott being friends with LGBTQ+ folks but not with pedophiles.
2) ADHD isn't a mental disorder
3) Chronic pain clearly reduces fitness.
4) Nightmares also clearly have health and social impacts (being less rested and looking visibly shaken in the morning -- not something you can hide from your tribe) that reduce fitness.
5) The idea that it's good and a human right to be president when you''re patently less invested in the nation, properly speaking ('nation' and 'prenatal' have a common root -- a gay man without children will have nonstandard biases about the future and why wouldn't this make a difference to how he governs?) seems nonobvious.
6) Someone who can't get it up except for 14 y/os is going to have only one child per spouse -- even if his dream comes true and he gets that 14 y/o, she's going to look downright matronly by 16 after her first child. Obviously reduces fitness.
7) Alcoholism isn't itself a mental disorder, though likely most alcholics also have underlying mental disorders that contribute.
8) Emil isn't exhibiting a trait called 'contrarianism', he's saying what seems true to him, a trait known as 'honesty' and which is overall valued-enough by society that it seems strong selected-for evolutionarily.
An interesting question to me is whether some of these mental illnesses existed in primitive humans at all. Primitive tribes that still exist today don't appear to have homosexuality, sexual fetishism, or gender identity disorder, nor even the ability to conceive of such things. Maybe primitive humans also didn't have persistent anxiety attacks or nightmare disorders? Just as you point out that alcoholism is only possible after the invention of alcohol, and we lacked time to develop defenses against it, maybe some of those other conditions can only exist after certain cultural technologies are brought into existence, creating psychological hazards against which we had evolved no defenses.
In light of our having evolved almost entirely in kinship groups of fewer than 100 people, I wouldn't be surprised if nearly every abnormal behavior pattern we observe today is recent in origin and caused by current social obligations and conditions being radically unlike those we evolved to survive in. (Of course that makes evo-psych functionally useless at predicting modern behavior and maladies, as many have already concluded for their own reasons.) Or alternatively, that there's some underlying malady that manifests itself differently now than it did on the African Savannah, and which we view as different because we're getting hung up on specifics, e.g. people who today are schizophrenic would instead have had a strong delusion that their penis was stolen by a witch, or a compulsion to move towards the sun at all times of the day, or something totally alien and inconceivable to us.
> I wouldn't describe this as "benefiting my friends"
I...would? I...I thought that everything you've written on this topic, including this very post, was loudly and explicitly in favor of defining mental illness in a way to benefit your friends? I'm confused as to why you object to that characterization.
> 1: ADHD
You explicitly do not believe that ADHD is a for-real not-for-pretend thing that really exists in the real world.
> Psychiatric guidelines are very clear on this point: only give Adderall to people who “genuinely” “have” “ADHD”.
>
> But “ability to concentrate” is a normally distributed trait, like IQ. We draw a line at some point on the far left of the bell curve and tell the people on the far side that they’ve “got” “the disease” of “ADHD”. This isn’t just me saying this. It’s the neurostructural literature, the the genetics literature, a bunch of other studies, and the the Consensus Conference On ADHD. This doesn’t mean ADHD is “just laziness” or “isn’t biological” – of course it’s biological! Height is biological! But that doesn’t mean the world is divided into two natural categories of “healthy people” and “people who have Height Deficiency Syndrome“. Attention is the same way. Some people really do have poor concentration, they suffer a lot from it, and it’s not their fault. They just don’t form a discrete population.
The pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas, as distinct from the pre-Columbian inhabitants of Asia and Europe and Africa, form a natural category in the real world. The people who "have" "ADHD" do not. Do you disagree with this summary of your position?
As I understand it, you do believe that *some* "mental disorders" are things that really for-real not-for-pretend exist in the real world, but that that is *irrelevant* to whether they are included in mental-disorder-(Scott). Even when some particular "mental disorder" does happen to point to a genuine geographic feature of the territory, that's not your stated justification for including it in mental-disorder-(Scott). Right?
That is to say, you do not believe that mental-disorder-(Scott) is a thing that really for-real not-for-pretend exists in the real world. (Right?) But because of the particular quirks of government dysfunctions, your friends with ADHD won't get funding for Adderall unless we pretend that it is. That would make your friends sad, because they want Adderall in order to do the things that are important to them. Therefore you endorse treating mental-disorder-(Scott) as if it is real, even though you do not believe it is, because at this point in time that is the strategy that will yield the results you want from the government. If later your government has different dysfunctions, then you will endorse a different definition of "mental disorder" with the same purpose of your friends getting funding for Adderall. I...which part of this summary do you object to? You describe this as a "dig", but, I mean, I sort of thought this was what you've been shouting from the rooftops.
It sounds like maybe it's just the "friends" part you object to? But, I mean. That seems obvious? Suppose Adolf Hitler "has" "ADHD", that is, Adolf Hitler is less capable of focus and long-term planning than the historical Hitler was. This Adolf Hitler would like to construct an elaborate multi-year plan to take over the German government and exterminate the Jews, but he keeps getting distracted and not following through. This makes him sad. Do you want mental-disorder-(Scott) to get Adderall for him, or not? Presumably not. You've loudly and explicitly and repeatedly endorsed the idea of defining "mental disorder" in order to get the results you want, not in order to accurately point to any particular geographic feature of the territory. (Again, do you disagree with that summary? If so, which part?) The results you want include helping your friends self-modify and do not include helping your enemies self-modify.
I suppose you could insist that mental-disorder-(Scott) includes ADHD when the things you would do with Adderall are good and does not include ADHD when the things you would do with Adderall are bad. But then you're just baking your friends and enemies into mental-disorder-(Scott).
Do you agree that "increase global utility and make the world a better place" is a more accurate description of my goal than "help my friends"? If not, what's your example of something where I aim at helping my friends over making the world a better place?
Such questions are weighted with too much inherent bias to be answered easily.
It may be true that something helps the world *and* coincidentally aligns with your social milieu, or it could be motivated reasoning that you want to help your friends so you've convinced yourself it helps the world. How would anyone go about convincing you- especially if they're just Joe Commenter, and not one of your friends?
The same complaint gets leveled at longtermist EA- it could be true this is the "most important century" but it's particularly convenient when people get to ride their moral high horse for doing things they'd want to do anyways. Sometimes incentives really do align ever so nicely, like planets unleashing the Titans. But not very often.
To be clear, I understand *you think* "makes the world a better place" is a more accurate description of your goals, but since we disagree on just what's good for "global utility," I think "helps your friends" gets at the heart because that plays such a big role in your defining global utility. But I'm just another Joe Commenter, you're the rich and famous psychiatrist-philosopher, so surely your lofty and noble intentions are beyond reproach or silly human concerns like friendship.
Edit: And if the sarcasm at the end there is too bitter or over the top- I don't think it's (generally) a bad thing to be influenced by one's friends. I do think it's irritating that many people, especially of certain social groups, try to avoid acknowledging that or refuse to consider the effect.
As for you, I think you're talking about two very different things.
"You care more about the people you care more about!" is an accusation that is tautologically true. See e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/24/nominating-oneself-for-the-short-end-of-a-tradeoff. Scott Alexander cares more about the well-being of "good-people-(Scott)" than about the well-being of "bad-people-(Scott)". He wants to go out of his way to help "good people who incidentally hurt others through no fault of their own", if necessary by hurting "bad people" in the process. Notice that you could replace the "Scott Alexander" in that statement with literally anyone else in the entire world. You could say "Emil Kirkegaard wants to help his friends" with precisely equal justification.
Meanwhile, it's obviously a true observation about the world that humans desperately want whatever-they-wanted-to-do-anyway to turn out to coincidentally be necessary to Save The World: see every wish-fulfillment fantasy isekai ever. But that's irrelevant to the issue at hand, which (last time I checked) was which set of people to consider as "normal human brain operation" and which set to consider as somehow specially disordered. Scott and Emil don't disagree about the effects on the world (I mean, they do, but it's irrelevant). The dispute is over what criteria to use to judge.
>Meanwhile, it's obviously a true observation about the world that humans desperately want whatever-they-wanted-to-do-anyway to turn out to coincidentally be necessary to Save The World: see every wish-fulfillment fantasy isekai ever. But that's irrelevant to the issue at hand,
I disagree that this is irrelevant; I think it plays a role in the selection of criteria, and clearly plays a role in Scott's personal justification thereof. It's one of the rationalist fallacies and has been complained about as long as the internet rationalists have been a semi-coherent group. Hence Scott calling it "more accurate."
At any rate, I like your Russell conjugation point.
Okay, so what I take from this is that my understanding of the criteria you're using to decide on a definition was correct. So, thank you for that.
As for "make the world a better place" versus "help my friends"...well, I don't know why you'd use the words "more accurate", because this is just a Russell conjugation. I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pigheaded. I want to make the world a better place, you want to help your friends, he wants to shape the world according to his desires. Calling you firm instead of obstinate would certainly have been nicer, and being angry at a guy for saying not-nice things to you is justified more or less by definition, so sure, by all means.
Scott's objecting because Scott's reading it as Emil calling him sort of pro-pedophilia: "I’m against children getting raped whether they’re my friends or not"
Scott makes a good point that both are valid categories, but I think what he misses is that disorder-(Scott) is a more recent, politically-driven definition than disorder-(Emil), and worse, like many political efforts, attempts to co-opt and subvert existing definitions. if there were an entirely different term for disorder-(Scott) then we wouldn't be having this conversation, but we are having it because there is a political effort to eliminate the older, more scientific definition.
This manifests in the trans argument, too. What trans people claim to experience is not what science has meant or what the billions of people Scott appeals to here mean when they say man, woman, he, she, etc. Those terms have a precise scientific meaning that aligns nearly perfectly with the vernacular meanings, even if the vernacular meaning is fuzzy and reliant on subjective judgment. Almost no one, until very recently, used those terms to refer to an imperceptible mental state, nor are they denying the existence of such by using them in the traditional context - it's just that it's not relevant, nor what people are talking about. The insistence on subverting existing words exists precisely because inventing new words that specifically refer to mental states, ze/zir, etc - don't in any way enforce their use, because that was never what anyone was talking about anyway.
I don't think this is true. People were using words meaning approximately "mental disorder" since before Darwin discovered evolution. What did they mean? I think "these people seem dysfunctional in society and are going against our values".
I think they were speaking from a teleological point of view: not "these people are dysfunctional in society" but rather "the human mind is not supposed to be that way."
But society's values before Darwin tended to be more or less aligned with reproduction and evolutionary fitness. Most cultures were worried about dying out or being defeated in battle due to lack of numbers, so they tended to promote functionally pro-reproduction values. It's like my long-running question why didn't anybody come up with the nature vs. nurture distinction before Galton in the second half of the 19th Century? Well, the answer seems to be that nature and nurture tended to be aligned. For example, the English were very concerned with "breeding," but they tended to use it to cover both nature and nurture. For example, to call a man "well-bred" could apply to both who his parents were and how they brought him up.
But now our values have changed in anti-Darwinian directions so we make up all new mental disorders like "homophobia" and "transphobia."
Would it be accurate to say that, if someone were given a large harem and a buffet, doing *anything other* than eating, sleeping, and having procreative sex forever (and maybe a few other health-preserving things) would be a mental illness under this definition?
"A few other health-preserving things" is a vast field, from making sure the food is cooked correctly to making enough money to pay your army to make sure no one comes to conquer your harem and buffet.
Presumably you want to make sure your children and grandchildren aren't all massacred the instant you die? Or more seriously, that your genetic line continues, not just for the moment, but for the long run (or as close as we can come).
The other big issue with Emil's proposal is that behavioral evolutionary strategies ussually reach multipolar equilibriums rather than being dominated by a single strategy.
Such as:
If your entire tribe is strictly monogamous (by instinctual evolutionary fiat rather than cultural norms), then the first person to want polyamorous relationships may be able to snag several confused wives and have a huge advantage.
If your entire tribe is polyamorous, the first person to explain the idea of monogamy and credibly offer 100% certain paternity to the best man in town or 100% of their resources dedicated to just one person's kids to the best woman in town can probably monopolize the best available mate.
The equilibrium is some people being monogamous and some people being poly, in whatever ratio roughly equalizes their fitness. Importantly, this should be something approaching a non-exploitable equilibrium; no monogamous person should expect better outcomes if they flip to being poly, and vice -versa.
In terms of things like depression, adhd, being contrarian, etc etc etc., we may expect equilibriums like these to hold for many of these traits, such that it's not really meaningful to ask whether it is more fit to have them or not have them, because the answer depends on marginal difference based on the state of the local social equilibrium they appear in.
Although I think gist of Scott's argument.is right on, It's similar, to another way to stipulate what counts as mental disorders - they are the class of conditions that are "harmful dysfunctions".
Some conditions are dysfunctions (evolutionarily maladaptive) but they are not harmful, at least for us today. There's no need to so anything about them - they should not count as mental disorders. Some conditions may not be dysfunctions evolutionarily (for example, antisocial personality may be a very adaptive parasitic strategy ), but they are harmful to society. Thys,, although we should minimize the harms antisocial people do, they are not technically mentally disordered. Only the conjunction of dysfunctional adaptation AND harmfulness (something that society decides) should count as mental disorder.
This idea was proposed a while back by psychologist/philosopher Jerome Wakefield. To avoid reinventing the wheel, his article would be good starting point to take things further. Heres the PDF:
I just read this paper for class. It's a pretty good attempt but I think his analysis suffers from his devotion to Aristotelian categories. I believe that mental disorder, like almost all useful concepts, is better understood as a cluster of family resemblance, and that many of the criteria he dismisses by showing counter-examples are in fact very relevant to how disorder-ish something is.
Here's my proposal for a semi-objective definition of "illness" (I just came up with it right now, maybe it's bad): Imagine an utopia constructed through something like Rawls' Veil of Ignorance scenario, where all unborn souls are perfect rationalists and committed contractualists. Before the creation of the world they set up a code of conduct which they remember and obey after being born. An illness would then be a condition of your body or mind that would require special accommodation. It's a fuzzy category - the more special accommodation it would require, the more of an illness it is.
* Queerness is very easy to accommodate (just agree to not persecute them), and therefore is not an illness.
* Paraplegia requires some accommodation (covering wheelchairs under universal healthcare, putting ramps everywhere) so it's an illness.
* Schizophrenia is a condition that none of the unborn souls would want even after coming to an agreement, so it's a pretty serious illness. They could however agree to put them schizophrenics on (extra) welfare and compose social rules about how to treat them properly.
* Urge to murder requires constant willpower on the part of its sufferer and constant vigilance on part of society, so it's as serious as it gets.
The purpose of this definition is to factor out the social and political factors in the common meaning of the term, so that it's limited to the domain of medical science. Since man's sole remaining enemy is nature, any bodily/mental condition that is still challenging to treat must have been caused by nature.
You don't need a veil of ignorance: just ask parents what traits they want in their children. It takes a _lot_ of social pressure to keep parents from not wanting homosexuality in their kids.
But then things like "really wants to marry a twelve year old" and "blindly obeys authority" will be mental illnesses in one culture but not in another, which seems like the very thing Max Chaplin was trying to avoid with his definition.
I think this post gives pretty good evidence that there are phenomena that fall outside of the definition of “disorder-(Emil)” yet are addressed by the definition of “disorder-(Scott),” and that using disorder-(Scott) to categorize them gets people the help and treatment they need.
But there’s an unaddressed question of what to do with those illnesses that meet both definitions. One of the major conclusions from Kirkegaard’s piece is: “There is no need to inject politics into the scientific study of mental illnesses, in the same way we don't inject politics into the study of many other natural phenomena.”
If there are mental illnesses that meet both the disorder-(Scott) and the disorder-(Emil) definitions, yet using the (Scott) definition allows political interference that prevents finding the root cause of the illness,* then using disorder-(Emil) might be preferable.
For Scott, who is actively treating people with mental illnesses, it's probably super obvious why the good done by one definition outweighs the other. It might be less clear to those without experience in the field.
*I do not have any in mind. I only point it out as a possibility.
Although the edge cases Scott brings up have reduced my conviction that the evo-psyc definition of mental disorder is the singular correct definition, I disagree with Scott about who should own the term. The reason both sides want the term “Mental Disorder” is that the current term communicates that the described concept is an official, quantified thing – and (often) therefore qualifying for insurance coverage and/or protected class status. However, only the Emil (and Cochran, from whom I first heard it) definition is quantifiable. While “Reduces reproductive fitness” is theoretically calculable given sufficient records over a sufficient timescale, “Bad for people and society” is simply a qualitative descriptor that will far too often simply be determined by the whims of whatever group is in power. Allowing the latter definition to use the Mental Disorder term therefore simply results in giving the those in power the ability to say, “It is scientifically determined that you are a disgusting bigot for disagreeing with me on what is good for people and society.”
Perhaps the primary benefit of teleology is that it makes debates like this trivial.
Caplan is saying that mental illnesses are only preferences, Scott says they're social dysfunctions, Emil says they're evolutionary disfunctions, and all seem to miss the point due to a rejection of teleology. Emil tries to replace teleology with evolutionary fitness, Scott with flourishing in general, and Caplan doesn't try to replace it at all.
Surely the very idea of illness and disease comes from a teleological point of view? You can't say something is a defective member of a category if you don't believe the category exists. In the same way, you can't say a man whose dying of cancer has a disease unless you have some idea that he is not supposed to be like that. That there is such a thing as a human qua human, and that deviations from the form of humanity is a disorder. Someone whose eyes have been gouged out has something wrong with them because humans are supposed to have eyes. Similarly, humans who are caught in schizophrenic delusions have something wrong with them because humans are supposed to be rational animals. Not perfectly rational, but rational enough to recognize that they're not Napoleon or Jesus. Or to realize that it is very unlikely that the CIA can read your thoughts, or that there is no benefit to locking and unlocking the door 21 times every time you leave the house. Mental disorders are deviations from what the human mind is supposed to be, just as physical disorders are deviations from what how the human body is supposed to function.
Modern philosophies ditched teleology, and with it ditched all the "supposed to"'s. Yet without teleology, how can you really say that a madman has something wrong with them, and needs to be cured, or just has their own way of thinking that is different from yours but just as valid? You're forced to resort to justifications for calling it bad anyway, even though there isn't such a thing as a "right" way to be human. It's bad because it reduces reproductive fitness! It's bad because it causes social disfunction! These things are true, but don't capture the truth of it. Even if your schizophrenic delusions cause you no social or reproductive dysfunction (perhaps you live in a community that has decided delusional schizophrenics are sacred beings who should be taken care of and who you should have lots of children with) you still have something wrong with you because humans are not supposed to have schizophrenic delusions!
Certainly it is useful to have a concept of mental-disorder (Scott) and mental-disorder (Emil) to refer to specific aspects of mental dysfunction, but neither serve to adequate replace the idea of mental dysfunction itself.
I don't understand the argument. Modern philosophies did ditch teleology, ie avoid justifying things by "supposed to" when there is no possible mechanisms between the object and the goal. But natural selection can be described as teleological if the 'goal' is understood to be optimizing fitness.
Natural selection is used as a poor man's replacement for teleology. It has to be, because the concept of teleology is so interwoven into the Western mind that you can't get rid of it without having some real structural failures. You need something to take it's place. The problem is that replacing all of teleology with natural selection is asking too much of it.
It requires you to reduce everything to that which benefits survival. Yet most living things are more than just reproduction and self-preservation. Survival and reproduction are essential parts of all living things, but not the only thing about them, and when you try to reduce them that way the cracks show. Take for example monks (whether Christian or Buddhist) who take vows of celibacy. If humans are supposed to optimize fitness, then these humans have something wrong with them. As does any fertile male who declines sex when offered, every widower who does not remarry out of love, and anyone who chooses not to have children for any reason. If everything is "supposed to" maximize fitness, then something is very wrong with all these people: they are as disordered as a schizophrenic who thinks he's a rubber duck. They need a cure.
Yet we don't think this way, because we understand that humans are more than optimizing fitness. A schizophrenic who thinks he's a rubber duck doesn't have a mental disorder because it prevents his survival and reproduction, but because human's aren't supposed to think they're something that they are obviously not. Whether he reproduces is irrelevant to that. So when you tie mental dysfunction to the only teleology you'll allow (Survival of the Fittest) you find that you can't properly define mental disorders because only the disorders that prevent reproduction and survival count as disorders anymore. Meanwhile those of us who believe that a human mind has a certain form, a certain way it is supposed to be, can recognize disease and disorder as anything that lies outside of that form. The man with an extra arm, and the man with an extra personality, can both be safely labeled as having a disorder without having to investigate whether the extra arm improves the man's ability to climb trees for fruit, and whether the extra personality is quite the ladies man. Because we all know that's immaterial.
I would describe someone who stigmatizes a person classified as having a mental illness as suffering from bigotry, which while not a mental illness itself, exactly, comes pretty close. Perhaps the problem can best be solved not by abandoning the categorization scheme for another one, but by extending it further! Personally, I would rather stigmatize a bigot than a schitzophrenic.
The attractive thing about Emil's approach to defining mental illness is that it's consistent -- there's a rule, a criterion, for defining mental illness. One feels as though if mental illness is a real thing, there *should* be a single clear criterion. Scott, on the other hand, has a mushier definition: bad for people and society. “Bad for” is just vaguer and more inclusive than “reduces evolutionary fitness,” and bad for people and society gives two possible arenas (individual & society) for “bad for” to happen to. So Scott’s criterion lacks that satisfying crispness, that put-your-finger-on-the-essence-of-it quality. However, Scott’s larger and looser criterion works much better than Emil’s. It is not possible to do to Scott’s criterion what Scott does to Emil’s — come up with a bunch of examples for which the criterion fades. And note that Scott also admits that “it’s somewhere between undesirable and impossible to have an apolitical taxonomy of mental disorders.”
It seems to me that the failure of Emil’s precise criterion here, and the success of Scott’s looser, and contaminated-by-politics-and-practicality criterion is a good example of how it does not work to categorize human variation human using simple, clear-cut rules. In grad school I was involved in developing scales for categorizing dream reports on various dimensions. One was presence/absence of aggression. The problem was that many dream reports had elements that defied categorization on that scale: There were dreams where someone said, “how’s the weather?” and the dreamer somehow knew that phrase was a death threat, and dreams where someone unsheathed a sword, and the dreamer knew that the entire purpose of the sword was to cut up a sheet of brownies. And even when I made extra categories to account for such aggressive nonaggression dreams there were still dreams that did not fit into either the old or the new categories.
One reason I am pessimistic about AI alignment is that I am sure the same problem will surface regarding the AI being aligned with our species's best interests. I don’t think there is any guideline that will work. “Don’t harm people” — but doctors routinely cause pain, and surgeons cut people open. “Don’t harm people unless your goal in doing so is to improve their wellbeing over the long run” — but what about punishments meant to deter people from harming others? And besides these examples involving individuals, there are many situations where a group of people are involved, and somebody has to make decisions that will worsen things for some in order to help others. And then of course there's the stuff that involves taking into account how much power to do harm or good a person has, and giving the powerful ones special treatment and exceptions to the rules so as to maintain their goodwill, for the sake of humanity. And so on and so on.
I think it's important to acknowledge that some things, while important problems that must be addressed, defy easy measurement or categorization. To do otherwise risks falling into the trap of regarding things that are more easily measured as being more real or more important than those that aren't. The more ambiguous the criteria are, the more vulnerable to abuse, yes, but sometimes we have to work with things the way they are and accept the risk.
Yeah, I agree, some things defy easy measurement and categorization. I think pretty much anything involving human differences falls into that category. However, there are some situations where it makes sense to tolerate the imperfections of our categorizations, and others where it does not. For instance, I think it makes sense to accept that the definition of mental illness is not perfectly crisp, and is somewhat influenced by social attitudes and politics. There is clearly such a thing as mental illness, and we need a working definition of it and a way of classifying its forms in order to address the problems to society and the individual that come with mental illness. We can live with the problems that result from the imperfections in our definition and classifications.
But aligning an AI so that its behavior is consistent with the long term wellbeing of our species does not seem to me to be a situation where we can live the the problems that result from the inevitable imperfections in how we define long-term human wellbeing.
Yeah, I agree with that too. Unfortunately, I do not think that there is a set of criteria that all human beings would agree protects their interests (in fact, I do not think that there is a common set of shared interests or values that all human beings would agree to). So AI alignment is a challenging problem (though, no more challenging that public policy ever is).
Figuring out the the actual reproductive fitness of a given psychological or behavioral trait is so hard as to be impossible in most cases where there is any kind of question over whether a given set of symptoms should be considered a mental illness. You can see it in the replies where people offer arm-chair supposition about what is and is not fit that seems profoundly naïve about how complicated evolutionary fitness is. This is embodying the negative stereotype of evo-psych as filled with intuitively reasoned, dubiously supported just-so stories. The main advantage of this theory, if not just a rhetorical cudgel that attempts to allow a person define what they dislike as a form of mental illness - is supposed to be a principled simplicity, but in pragmatic terms, it offers nothing of the sort.
Definitions that rely on dysfunction require importing value judgments about where the problem is located. That may get tricky at times, but I'm not convinced it is any less so than this approach that tries to offer a semblance of formalism in exchange for giving up all the basic reasons why we even care if someone is mentally ill or not.
I'd add that one of the other explicitly offered advantages of this is that it supposedly takes out "politics." It strikes me as absurd to suggest that defining mental health in terms of evolutionary fitness would be apolitical. We don't have to pretend like eugenics is a new idea or conveniently forget the decidedly political atmosphere of eugenic evaluation as it has actually existed. It's an invitation to people's political biases disguised, poorly, as scientific.
I think the "Scott-Emil" question is similar in a strange sense to the "is-ought" distinction. Putting aside the pejorative sense, you can't accuse of hypocrisy someone who professes no principles and does whatever they want, you can't accuse a consequentialist of ignoring their principles because of the consequences, and you can't point out discordance between biological and social definitions if you only subscribe to the social definition. Scott appears to be taking an engineering approach, rather than a scientific approach: not as well suited to learning fundamental truths of the world, but quite well suited to navigating reality as we find it.
Yes, that's true, I hadn't thought of that. But it seems to me that a practical engineering approach makes more sense in this case. The things that get called illnesses are just heterogenous. We tend to call things illnesses if they cause pain or disablity; or if they are just look unusual and peculiar; or if it is evident that some part of the body or mind is working in an unusual way, even if so far that has not led to any pain or disability; or if [probably some other stuff]. You'd probably find the same sort of mix if you looked at all the things called spices, or games, or hobbies. That's they way human categories are. They're kind of a mess, but in practice they work pretty well. Given that, I don't think it works to think like a scientist and try to find the essential thing that defines illness (or spices or games or hobbies). There isn't one.
A clarification that I think would help bridge part of the gap between the two definitions of mental illness is the following: evolutionary fitness is based on group evolutionary fitness not individual evolutionary fitness. This is a common mistake. Small groups, composed of a mix of individuals with a particular mix of traits, that were more likely to survive and pass down their sets of genes, collectively, are more evolutionarily fit. The logic is easy to see - a group where one male impregnates every female will very quickly die off for a host of reasons. Other examples abound - groups where people are willing to die for each other would outperform groups where everyone is selfish. Human evolution did not optimize for individual procreation.
With this revised definition of evolutionary fitness, I think that an evo-fitness definition of mental illness makes more sense. Homosexuality, in limited doses, can possibly increase a groups evolutionary fitness through different channels, or at the very least not hurt it. More importantly, anti-social behavior fits nicely into this definition of mental illness-(Johan).
If you want to have 'reproductive fitness' as a criterion, you really, really need to take into account 'selfish gene' arguments. It makes no sense to consider reproduction by the individual human being as the metric.
I am not sure if alcoholism leads to more or to fewer children, but I think it is implausible that both 1) alcoholism leads to more children and 2) Chinese, being exposed to alcohol the longest, evolved to have adaptations against alcoholism. It is not impossible - may be alcoholism leads to more children but fewer grandchildren, but this is a bit far fetched and, in any case just reminds us that evolutionary fitness is determined by the rate of offspring multiplication, not the number of first generation offspring.
Kierkegard falls in the naturalistic fallacy. If animals do it is good, otherwise is bad. For example, if a person decides to spend his or her life in a monastery living a life of celibacy, prayer and meditation, Kierkegard considers this as something bad because if doesnt lead to reproduction. But that is a total whim, why is having biological descendants necessarily good? For the most diverse reasons, there are plenty of people who dont want to (myself) and so what?
¨maladaptive¨ comes from Latin, ¨Malus¨ (bad) and ¨adaptio¨ (adaptation), it means bad adaptation. To adapt is good, so bad adaptation is bad, it is an ethical argument.
Desiring no children is already ”bad” (maladaptive) from the point of view of evolution (roughly understood), EK didn’t invent that idea. His labelling it ”mental illness” doesn’t have any additional ethical significance, even though it sounds dramatic.
¨Desiring no children is already ”bad” (maladaptive) from the point of view of evolution (roughly understood)¨
Precisely, I dont agree with this statement. Things aren´t good or bad for evolution. Evolution is a statement of fact, it has nothing to do with morality. A person who has schizophrenia will have less chances of reproducing, but that in itself is neither good nor bad. If that doesn´t bother him there is no problem, no illness. Schizophrenia is a mental illness not because it affects reproduction but because it causes a person tu suffer. Psychiatry exists not to make people reproduce, but to alleviate suffering. Lots of people dont have children and dont want to have children and that doesn´t make them suffer, there´s no illness.
Chronic pain is related to structural issues in your muscles and joints that cause inflammation, and rarely as simple as neurological wiring. Often it comes from sedentary behavior, the aftermath of a car accident, or a prolonged period of bad posture. Classifying it with the rest of these seems like a bad idea. Someone who deals with the dislocation of their rib who experiences chronic pain is not mentally ill. Their pain is not caused by funky neurology. The whole “pain is created by your thoughts” idea is a mental illness. It’s on par with the law of attraction stuff.
Prenatal testing has halved the number of babies born with Down syndrome in Europe, study finds
Date: December 18, 2020
Source: Massachusetts General Hospital
Summary: A new study finds that the growth of prenatal screening in Europe has reduced the number of babies being born per year with Down syndrome (DS) by an average of 54 percent.
There are noticeably fewer Down syndrome people around than when I was a kid around 1970, when many huge Catholic families had a Down child. You don't hear much about a Down Genocide because Down people don't write a lot of op-eds. But, if there hasn't been one, where'd they go?
I know what you're saying (revealed preference vs stated preference). But I have met parents who insisted their 4-year old was a "they". I'm guessing they were proud of this. What parents will choose if they are given the ability will probably surprise you, even shock you. It is all about signaling, really.
Re. "Also making a value judgment, I would call homosexuality an unusual but valid preference: it’s not my thing, but seems basically okay for everyone involved." -
Homosexuality is a case that makes the relativism of values clear. In evolutionary times, up until the 19th century, personal survival depended mostly on group survival, where "group" is the group level at which defense is organized; and group survival depended mostly on reproduction rates. Under those circumstances, /not reproducing/ was a sin, very harmful to the group. Almost every society on Earth before 1800 heavily emphasized that everyone should--in a moral sense--have children. Homosexuality was in some cases frowned on only if it stopped a person from reproducing; ancient Athens is an especially clear case, in which open homosexuality among men was fine IF both men also planned on fathering children. (There are exceptions such as Norse culture, which had a strategy of all-consuming hyper-masculinity. There were also cultures in which "homosexuality" was forbidden, but pederasty with boy slaves didn't count as homosexuality, as is seen in Islamic records of the doings and sayings of Mohammed's companions.)
And, let's be clear, those societies were CORRECT to shame people who chose not to reproduce. Such behavior was a serious threat to their group's survival. A 5% hit in reproductive rate is easily enough to exterminate a group.
In the 20th century, reproductive rate did not give much of a group survival benefit, if any, and so homosexuality without reproduction did no social harm; and so it was WRONG to shame people who chose not to reproduce. In fact, it now seems perhaps correct to discourage people who DO reproduce--and American society does that now, aggressively. Just ask any couple who has 8 or more kids, and they can tell you dozens of stories about people pressuring them not to have so many children. That never happened before the 20th century.
If you're shocked by the idea that it's sometimes correct to discourage homosexuality, ask yourself: Why aren't you shocked by the practice of discouraging large families? Isn't that exactly the sort of interfering in other people's sexuality as discouraging homosexuality? And if your answer begins with, "Because if everyone has large families," -- gotcha! You agree with me.
In developed nations, reproductive rate has fallen so much that it is now becoming an issue, particularly in Europe. Expect sympathy for homosexuals to drop in Italy starting about now. But the important thing is to notice that this is morally CORRECT, in Italy, today. It is right for a group to discourage behavior that threatens the survival of that group--but what behaviors do that, changes over time. We must not injure future generations by using the concept of "rights" to fix morality in stone when it comes to behaviors whose adaptive effects change over time.
Disagreement with your moral beliefs is not "relativism." Relativism is the view moral statements are propositional, but their truth is contextually dependent on the values of the culture doing the judging or the culture being judged. Very few people, and even fewer people with knowledge of academic moral philosophy, are actually moral relativists. The term is almost always used as a criticism of someone else's views with an implicit understanding that being a relativist is mistaken.
Having children is not a moral obligation and, as the present shows, people's declination in the past to have children did not actually threaten the continued existence of flourishing humans. Not everyone must have the same preference, and you cannot create a moral obligation out of assuming society would collapse if everyone had one particular person's set of preferences. This is also why it is not immoral to want to be something other than a farmer. Society can do just fine with different people doing different things.
(Also, not that it is the most important problem with your argument, but homosexuals are perfectly capable of having children. You've got some more ideas about family unit obligations buried in your premises.)
Re. "Disagreement with your moral beliefs is not "relativism." Relativism is the view moral statements are propositional, but their truth is contextually dependent on the values of the culture doing the judging or the culture being judged.": Yes; that's literally /what my comment is about/. Did you read it?
"Having children is not a moral obligation" -- you are imagining that you can refute my /argument/, backed up by historical facts, by merely saying "it ain't so". And you are stripping the context out of the matter, and pretending you can baldly state a moral absolute. The entire point of my comment is that doing so is wrong. Context matters.
"as the present shows, people's declination in the past to have children did not actually threaten the continued existence of flourishing humans." : Did you even read what I wrote? I wrote of /group/ survival, not /human/ survival. And I wrote of what is write at different times. Are you aware that the past is not the present?
" Not everyone must have the same preference, and you cannot create a moral obligation out of assuming society would collapse if everyone had one particular person's set of preferences." -- Of course not everyone must have the same preference, but it is right for society to discourage behavior that might destroy it. That's /what ethics is/: the set of things society encourages and discourages. It's wrong to create a moral obligation out of /assumptions/, but I assumed nothing other than that definition of ethics. I should probably use the word "ethics" instead of "morals", to clarify that I'm not talking about arbitrary absolute rules dictated by ancient nomadic herdsmen or Ivy League professors.
"This is also why it is not immoral to want to be something other than a farmer." -- ????
"homosexuals are perfectly capable of having children." -- If you'd actually read what I wrote, you'd have noticed that I wrote about social pressure against people who choose /not/ to have children.
You asserted something, and I asserted the opposite. The argument you offered in favor of your assertion - that society would collapse in the face of everyone being homosexual and therefore homosexuality is harmful to the common good - collapses once break down a simple fallacious leap in reasoning you made, which I addressed. Your response to that was bewilderment. It does not follow from the fact that if everyone behaves in a certain way society would not sustain that everyone must refrain from that behavior. The trivial example I offered is not being a farmer. If everyone refused to be a farmer, there would be mass suffering. That doesn't mean everyone is obligated to be a farmer. Society can sustain different people doing different things. We don't need every single human to be breeders to avoid a dire population collapse any more than we need every person to be a farmer to avoid famine. One does not follow the other.
Homosexuals have always existed, and their existence has not threatened human flourishing. This is because not everyone is homosexual (and not every homosexual is childless). Understanding how the past unfolded is meant to help you understand the present, where most people continue to not be gay and homosexuality does not threaten societal reproduction. That you're worried about human population falling in certain areas (while the overall global population continues to rise, though perhaps not among people you want it to) does not mean we are facing a kind of population crunch that would cause mass suffering, or would morally obligate people to all have children. Your reasoning from "not having children is immoral" to ... "homosexuality is immoral" has several gaps you're trying to leap over.
"The argument you offered in favor of your assertion - that society would collapse in the face of everyone being homosexual and therefore homosexuality is harmful to the common good."
...
"That you're worried about human population falling in certain areas (while the overall global population continues to rise, though perhaps not among people you want it to) does not mean we are facing a kind of population crunch that would cause mass suffering, or would morally obligate people to all have children. Your reasoning from "not having children is immoral" to ... "homosexuality is immoral" has several gaps you're trying to leap over."
I specifically wrote, every time I mentioned the subject, that I was speaking of social pressure against PEOPLE WHO FAIL TO REPRODUCE, not against homosexuality. I specifically wrote that, in the 20th century, it was WRONG to shame people who chose not to reproduce (which includes homosexuals who choose not to reproduce). THE ENTIRE POINT OF MY COMMENT was to attack absolute, timeless claims like " "homosexuality is immoral".
Stop accusing me of writing things I didn't write. I'm not going to reply to you unless you try again from the beginning, and show that you can read more carefully.
I think I did misread you. My first interpretation had you making inappropriate guesses as to what best advances evolutionary fitness at different points in time married to a idiosyncratic notion of moral obligation that at times is descriptive and other times prescriptive for advancement of social interest. I did reform this into a stronger, more common argument, though one I obviously do not think highly of, and responded to that thinking that's probably what you meant.
To the unreformed version, I guess I'll just note that we're still in "evolutionary times," the advantages or disadvantages of homosexuality or reproductive behavior to a society are not crudely reducible into population reproduction or lack thereof, which itself is only obliquely related to societal flourishing, and it is queer and almost certainly incorrect to use the language of moral obligation just to describe what a society favors or disfavors. This is an actual example of relativism in the wild, so there is that. I think you are unclear whether you think this is descriptive or has obligatory force, but in either case you can cut out the middle-man of the argument and just note if a society condemns or permits homosexual behavior irrespective of whether or not it advances its "group survival." You need to be more clear if "group survival" is inherently a moral good or only so if a society deems it as such, because these have different implications and you flip between them. This is why you at once describe ethics as whatever a society encourages or discourages while also arguing it is inherently correct for a society to discourage that which threatens it. The metaethics on this is confused, and that's what caused me to read you differently.
Re. "it is queer and almost certainly incorrect to use the language of moral obligation just to describe what a society favors or disfavors.":
A society evolves in the direction of favoring things that seem good for it, and disfavoring things that seem bad for it. Any postulation of ethical goals other than things that are good and things that are bad, is dangerous metaphysical non-sense. The cases when a society fails to favor things that are good for it, or endorses behaviors that are bad for it, are due either to ignorance, to insufficient intelligence, or to this particular metaphysical nonsense.
"Moral obligation" is an abstract concept which does not "exist" in the Platonic sense, meaning it isn't an obligation at all. There is no obligation; there are groups that survive, and groups that don't. If morality isn't ethics (which I use to speak of a social code for the benefit of society), then there's no contradiction in adopting a morality which says that life is bad, and thus one has a moral obligation to destroy society. I think many people unconsciously believe something like this in America today.
Re. "You need to be more clear if "group survival" is inherently a moral good or only so if a society deems it as such, because these have different implications and you flip between them.":
I don't think I have to be clear about that, given that group morality evolves. This evolution selects, imperfectly, for behaviors which benefit the group. Evolution is imperfect, so there will always be differences between what's actually good for group survival, and what ethics groups enforce. But for the purposes of my argument, I don't need to investigate the noise. Group ethics tracks group survival (and flourishing) advantage closely enough that I don't see the need to distinguish them /within this argument/. In politics, by contrast, one directs one's attention entirely towards the ways in which group norms fail to track those which would be optimal for the group's benefit.
(Groups are nested within groups, so there are many different levels of group morality: the individual, the family, the tribe or neighborhood, the city, the subculture, the culture, the nation, humanity, mammalian life, life in general. I call it unethical to pick out one single level of group as trumping all other levels, and usually unethical to weigh allegiance to a larger group more than allegiance to a smaller group. I'm working within an evolutionary framework, which says it's always ultimately harmful to promote ethical frameworks which are evolutionarily unstable, and thus lead inevitably to the destruction of groups using those frameworks.)
"It does not follow from the fact that if everyone behaves in a certain way society would not sustain that everyone must refrain from that behavior. The trivial example I offered is not being a farmer. If everyone refused to be a farmer, there would be mass suffering."
I'll reply to that, since it is coherent. In the specific instance of homosexuality--which is not what my argument is about--I wrote that a 5% reduction in reproductive rate could easily lead to extinction. I did pull that number out of my ass, but I stand by it, because 0.95^4 = 0.81. In a strict monogamous society, this could be created by just 2.5% of the population being male homosexuals who don't raise children. It's true that a single homosexual male per generation not raising a child wouldn't necessarily cause that group to collapse, IF there are more than 40 people in that group.
Numbers matter. For whatever the behavior in question is, you have to do the math. In this particular case, yes, actually, a small fraction of people failing to raise children can lead to extinction during times of intense competition between groups; remember population changes exponentially over time.
I don't think you understand that what I'm arguing against isn't homosexuality, but the assumption that a thing that is unethical today, is always unethical, in all circumstances. This is the basic dysfunctional assumption of deontological ethics. So you could say I'm arguing against deontological ethics, and for consequentialism.
No one believes that the same behavior must be ethical or unethical in all possible circumstances irrespective of context. It is a trite observation refuting a position held by exactly no one easily refuted by trivial thought experiments. With respect to your demographic modeling, you are not describing the actual demography of human populations, which are vast, and not under meaningful threat of extinction through lack of reproduction, which can and does change in response to changing conditions. There is no realistic set of prior conditions outside of ancient bottleneck events where human populations were under meaningful threat of extinction from insufficient reproduction.
At one point during your argument, you spoke as though Italians are obligated to advance the the interests of the abstract concept of Italian nationality, which was strange, and likely speaks to you having an underdeveloped idea of what counts as a unit of "society" that one's behavior is supposed to advance, which you may or may not believe is what morality functionally is. This may be at work here too with you defining social groups in expansive and limited ways as convenience demands. To be clear, it isn't at all obvious that one's moral obligations would be aimed at that specifically. And if it was, such an idea is much more home in a deontological normative framework than a consequentialist one, fwiw.
I would expect that before 1800 many children died because food was scarce. So a pair of gays who don't have kids means more food is left for everyone else's kids -- ultimately, the group's capacity to raise the new generation doesn't change. What you need to do is *tax* the childless people (childless for any reason, not just homosexuality), so that their resources actually are distributed to other people's kids.
So I think this argument doesn't hold water.
Also, if a guy refuses to have sex with women, there are many guys perfectly willing to replace him. So in a pre-1800 society that actually tries to maximize group's children, the optimal strategy would be to make gays adopt and raise children that their parents cannot feed / illegitimate children / orphans.
"Also, if a guy refuses to have sex with women, there are many guys perfectly willing to replace him."
This is correct. The issue isn't actually to reproduce, but to support children. We also see this in some ancient Greek cities, such as Sparta, where it was respectable to ask some great warrior to impregnate your wife.
"So I think this argument doesn't hold water."
My argument is not about homosexuality. My argument is that
A) Ethics are justified by what is beneficial and what is harmful to society.
B) What is beneficial and what is harmful changes with time.
C) Therefore, ethics change with time.
So you're not disagreeing with me, just correcting or refining certain points. We could take what you've written, and say that taxing childless people (which the US does today, big-time) is good when raising more children is good, and bad when raising more children is bad. But that argument would generate less emotional response, and people would ignore it, or not think of tax law as being a moral code (which it is).
Prior to the industrial revolution, people weren't the key to production. Almost everyone worked the land, and there was a maximum yield you could get from a certain plot of land. The estate on which you worked might be able to produce enough surplus value to outfit and employ one knight in feudal times, and in other eras it was captured in other ways, but adding population didn't make Lord Fancypants Orchards produce any more food. Only industrialization allowed labor to flourish without being tied to the land.
If growing your population had any value, it was mostly in being able to spread your culture, or having excess population for war or to make it through plagues.
We're probably exiting this brief era and heading back to the status quo of people being burdens beyond a certain number.
As I understand the anthropological just-so story, this is actually just one end of a dynamic. As I recall, there's a difference between societies limited by the number of people, and societies limited by the quantity of resources. In the first, population growth was the key, females of child-bearing age were the group's most valuable asset, and bride-price was more common. In the second, access to existing resources was the key, males equipped for inter- (and intra-) group competition were the group's valuable asset, and dowry was more common. As the world filled up, we shifted into the 2nd mode more. And new technology changes the balance.
One thing missing from any definition of mental illness is conventiality. Laziness for example is harmful both evolutionarily and to one's well being but it's not a mental illness because it's 'normal'. Same goes for lots of psychological dispositions.
Of course this means there's an inherent problem with any formulation of mental illness in practical terms because it's ridiculous to have conventiality determine social policy. A better term for 'mental illness' would be something like 'negative mental anomaly'. Which would justify setting it aside for study as a composite but not justify a lot of the societal and policy attitudes we have.
Then at those times it's not beneficial. Point is that laziness may end up in the middle of the pack when it comes to the harmfulness/helpfulness of behavioral tendencies, and if so would not qualify as a mental illness, even in your system that categorizes common but dysfunctional behaviors as mental illness.
On the other hand I am sort of on board with the idea of very common behaviors being illnesses. For instance why not think of most of us, and in fact much of the modern world, as screen-addicted? Despite all the benefits of being able to access info and people online, I'm inclined to think that on balance it is bad for us to spend anything like as much time online as most do.. We weren't designed to sit still this much, and online interactions are pretty limited and impoverished compared to in-person ones
Someone who is bothered by his own ”laziness” and goes to a psychiatrist complaining about it would probably get some kind of treatment and might qualify for certain diagnoses depending on how he is bothered. The psychiatrist would probably call it lack of initiative or interest or motivation.
The thing is that an outsider can’t impose a diagnosis of mental illness on a person just because he is lazy; that’s not how the diagnostic criteria are written.
When Kierkegaard says that your definition "benefits your friends," he may just mean, "you likey [the current match-up between percieved and diagnosed illnesses]".
The better way to pit Scott versus Kierkegaard is to investigate whether or not Scott's definition of mental illness would satisfy him in a backtest. Would Scott, teleported to 1920, be happy with a definition of mental illness that was political? Or would he try to Caplanize or Kierkegaardize it by trying to come up with an "objective" definition?
Reproductive fitness isn’t just about the interests of the individual, it’s also about the interests of the group. The selfish gene has a hand in both pies at once. A small but steady minority population of homosexuals might serve a prosocial tribal purpose that enhances group viability or kin success, in some subtle way that we’re biased not to notice because we’re so focused on individualism.
Um, and do you also think most lesbians were raped by women in their adolescence? Good grief, are you a troll or do you truly know next to nothing about about gayness and gay people?
This fix (gender transition) is no fix at all if you think in term of homosexuality being an illness cause it prevent reproduction. Sperm/ovule donation could be such a fix, in theory but probably not in practice.
Anyway, things that are reproductive maladaptation are not necessarily bad, neither for individuals or for society (provided it does not force the whole population fertility below replacement level for too long). With 9 billion homo sapiens on earth, I would consider reproduction maladaptation as positive by default, only need to check for which traits it select (who are those who reproduce the most) and if it cause individual pain (physical or mental).
Social maladaptation is more complex: it may be a problem of the individual, or a problem with the current social acceptable window of behaviors.
I would guess that a large percentage of gays would (at least in the early teen years) swallow a magic pills that would turn them hetero, if there was such a pill. I don't think this would work in reverse.
We know that sexual orientation is pretty much unchangeable, so the best alternative to the pill is to actually embrace your identity. Which is fine.
But it just kind of feels to me that homosexuality is not considered to be illness only because there can be no cure. Am I looking at this wrongly?
“Chinese people seem to have some anti-alcoholism genetic adaptations, […] but still others - like the Inuit - clearly have none.”
Scott, what the heck. You link to the Wikipedia article on “Alcohol Flush Reaction” (aka “Asian Flush”) in that first sentence, which says right in the introduction:
“The condition may be also highly prevalent in some Southeast Asian and Inuit populations.”
I wasn’t able to track down the source of that claim in the citations, and that “may be prevalent” in that sentence makes it very ambiguous, but it doesn’t sound to me like this is quite that clear!
The kierke guy things homosexuals are less eusocial/prosocial then straights a d that gays spend more energy on hedonism
Oh i agree with you, and think emil is way to pessemistic and binary. (Also, even in accepting societys being shunned by your family for being gay is common, and thus would lead to less eusociality
I just wanted to represent emil. Im personally gay , and a furry , so im very unusual and weird
I mean, the kin selection math works out much easier for say, worker bees who are highly genetically related to the Queen (incorrect, see Igon value's response) than gay uncles, who need to produce like 4 more nieces or nephews per generation just to maintain parity. Saying that another kin selection puzzle is solved and implying that the answer to this puzzle is obvious when your answer is almost certainly wrong is "rude as fuck" as the imaginary Dawkins in my head says.
Except that if you read the original post https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/homosexuality-is-a-mental-illness Kirkegaard actually addresses the bevy of possible alternate explanations and found them wanting. So who is ignorant of what?
"the kin selection math works out much easier for say, worker bees who are highly genetically related to the Queen, than gay uncles, who need to produce like 4 more nieces or nephews per generation just to maintain parity"
Not a disagreement with the argument at all, just a small correction: the worker bees are highly genetically related to *each other*, not specially highly to the queen. They share 50% with the queen but 75% with each other (the male has only one set of chromosomes). That's the reason for eusociality, they benefit more from taking care of each other and having the queen make more of them, than they would having offspring of their own (with only 50% in common).
(Yes, theory and language are simplified, this isn't an academic paper.)
Ah yeah, I misremembered and this is an important and relevant correction. I'll edit that in.
Depends on your definition of "error"? There can be multiple levels, like with sickle-cell anemia: on one level a clear error, on another level a byproduct of an adaptation that increases overall population fitness. Similarly, it wouldn't shock me if there were some underlying part of human biological development that increased overall population fitness, but had as a side-effect that a certain small percentage of the population will have an attraction-target error.
Or alternatively, it could be like the blind spot in our eyes. There are ways to evolve an eye that don't have blind spots, like with cephalopods. But the specific way our eyes evolved produced blind spots, and there wasn't any clear path down from the local maximum through the valley of darkness to a higher hill. Is it a pathology that certain parts of our lenses send light to a place that can't detect it? Had they individual consciousness, other cells might judge the cells of the lens of the blind spot to be useless, spending their light rays on barren ground. But the larger organism adapted to the blind spot with special processing in the visual cortex, and the overall performance is pretty good in most cases, but probably not as good as if we'd had octopus eyes.
So yes, homosexuality doesn't seem to favor fitness, but we **don't know what the alternative is**.
The missing piece might be that much (most?) of the human experience is downstream of / higher in the stack than biological drivers to procreate.
The way a lot of evopsy gets used to explain behaviors is reductive to the point of becoming inadequately explanatory.
Even stuff ostensibly related to procreation like a drive to nurture that extends to non blood related children. That impulse might stem from a foundational biological imperative, but still be executed without reference to it because higher up in the stack we’re capable of wanting to be nurturing as an good in its self.
Male monogamy might increase fertility for the group-- less conflict and betrayal. I'm not sure if group fertility is part of the theory.
Unclear if non-monogamy leading to conflict is near-universal or something that can be eliminated through cultural norms. If the latter, and maybe even with the former, non-monogamy would be better for group fertility. You get rid of most of the risk of fertile women being unable to have children due to being partnered with infertile men, or not being partnered to anyone, or to reduced fertility due to things like both partners being carriers for recessive diseases.
I would read Engel's Origin of the Family and other historical materialist works to understand the process. Basically we went from alpha male ape gets all women->only marriage within generations>only marriage with cousins>so on. we only developed man-wife monogamy after the development of private property/slavery and maybe some other shit I can't remember.
https://shura.shu.ac.uk/14159/3/Beaken%20-%20Engels%2C%20Neanderthals%20and%20the%20Human%20Family%20%28AM%29.pdf is a good modern examination of historical materialist conception of family progression.
Almost nobody's definition of mental illness encompasses deliberate decisions alone. Deciding to take precautions against the CIA spying on you is not a mental illness, but a compulsion or strong predisposition to do so is paranoia. And a compulsion or strong predisposition to chastity might constitute a mental illness, while e.g. deciding that sex isn't worth the risk of STDs would not.
Homosexuality, I am repeatedly told, is not a thing that people can or do choose.
Emil's argument is almost the opposite of the movie that every faux-intellectual overquotes. Idiocracy. Great job framing the contradictions in Kirkegaard's theory.
Yes, the irony (as Scott implied with his last point) is that Kirkegaard's ideal of human behavior, if followed to its logical conclusion, would leave no place for contrarian intellectuals like him.
A contrarian take on, say, where the best hunting ground is offers a higher potential reward in prestige status (if you end up being right) than a standard take can offer, and therefore contrarian personality will have been supported by evolution to some degree as a reproductive strategy.
This obviously depends on the difficulty finding a mate. If you go looking for unique hunting grounds, there is a chance you starve to death. This greatly reduces your chance of having children. There is also a chance that you find a new hunting ground. So this is only favored by evolution in the case where the odds of not starving are greater than the chance of your having at least 1 child at some point in the future.
> this is only favored by evolution in the case where the odds of not starving are greater than the chance of your having at least 1 child at some point in the future
That's not a rare circumstance - in many species, the median male has less than two offspring so males must be outliers in order for their genes to increase in frequency in the gene pool. The genetic tendency for increased risk-taking observed in human males indicates that this was probably the case in our ancestral environment.
I meant the potential reward specifically in prestige status for the contrarian intellectual. Not food or material gain. Imagine most people in the group provide arguments that ground A should be tried first. You, by contrast, argue for ground B. If the group’s hunting efforts fail in ground A, but later succeed in ground B, then you should have gained a bigger amount of prestige status than was ever obtainable by arguing for ground A, even if ground A had been the better choice.
(For this example to work as I intend it, assume it will always become known which ground was or would have been better. Also, my point is only valid for socially acceptable contrarianism, not for violating taboos.)
Again, and this mirrors some of what has been said previously, this is only valid if the odds of mating success by maintaining the status quo (non-contrarian) is low. Contrarianism is, by definition a high risk strategy (or else everyone else is maladapted).
It‘s a high-risk-high-reward strategy and therefore, as I put it initially, „will have been supported by evolution to some degree as a reproductive strategy“.
A higher potential reward, sure, but not a higher expected reward (unless the whole tribe is worse than chance at picking hunting spots).
This depends on the numbers (strictly speaking). How much better than chance is the tribe? But in any case and more importantly, when I say „contrarian personality“ I don‘t mean *always* going against the rest of the tribe. I mean eagerly looking for occasions when the mainstream might be getting it wrong for some reason.
I think I interpreted Scott's use of the term as 'enjoying disagreeing with the mainstream' rather than 'looking for mistakes the mainstream is making'.
The dissociation between the two being 'what do you do when the mainstream is right' or 'do you disagree with the mainstream regardless of your expertise on a given topic' or etc.
Admittedly these two will have a lot of behavioral overlap, but I feel like 'is looking for errors people are making and is smarter than other people enough to find them' is better described as being intelligent or being a critical thinker or being curious or etc. Though at this point we're just arguing definitions so no real empirical disagreement here.
Just to be clear, I was not criticising Scott’s point 7, which was about violating taboos, a bad idea in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. I was only replying to LadyJane’s „Kirkegaard’s [own ideal] would leave no place for contrarian intellectuals like him“, where taboo violation was no longer explicitly mentioned.
Some contrarians seem to enjoy their disagreement with the mainstream (though does Scott say that?), and clearly some are stupid, but I would guess that generally enough group decisions will be obvious enough so even those have to pick their spots rather than simply *always* disagreeing.
And then, regarding intelligent contrarians (cf. Steve Sailer just below, „Great Awokening“), it would appear that some “elite mainstream“ has recently become so stupid that anyone who thinks clearly and is not very conformist will end up opposed. The point that I was noting about evolutionary roots of contrarianism admittedly does not apply here.
Actually, in theory, a tribe could be quite bad at picking hunting spots if there is a charismatic-influential but incompetent person and most of the people are very conformist. This relates to your point in your top-level comment below about multipolar equilibriums.
The fewer contrarians there are, the greater the reward. Because of more and lower hanging fruit.
So there should be some equlibrium ratio of contrarians to non-contrarians.
This whole subthread is why evopsych gets called "just-so stories".
I think there are two quite different contrarian personalities: those who take unpopular stances that are difficult to make a plausible case for (e.g., Apollo 11 was faked on Stanley Kubrick's soundstage) and they enjoy the challenge versus those who take unpopular stances that are easy to make a plausible case for (e.g., much of the new conventional wisdom that came to dominate American thought during the Great Awokening is wrong) because they can accomplish more that way. The latter type hardly seems like having much to do with the former.
When I started writing a third of a century ago, I was attracted to topics on which the conventional wisdom was obviously wrong, with plenty of evidence at hand both from the social sciences and from observing daily life. Being a pro-social guy who believes in telling the truth, this struck me as where I could contribute the most. What's more valuable than being able to document: "Everybody says they believe X, but the great majority of a wide variety of evidence says Y"?
The term "contrarian" seems less apt than John Derbyshire's appellation of "a member of the awkward squad." I would think of "contrarian" as being the kind of person who says "The social sciences are WRONG," while Emil is a voracious fan of the social sciences.
At some level it seems like the fact that evolution designed us to enjoy non-procreative sex -- oral, manual, etc -- would count as "mental illness" in the Emil framework. After all, those members of the species with a strong preference for PIV would tend to have more conceptions.* So, enjoying blow jobs means you're mentally ill? Really? And that's not just us, it's also bonobos, and a range of other (at least) mammals and avians. This just seems like a very poor fit for any kind of common-sense interpretation of "mental illness".
* Except of course they must not have, or we'd all have that preference today. With both bonobos and humans, clearly most sexual encounters are _actually_ about maintaining happy feelings towards members of your social group and especially your pair-bonded mate, not about reproduction. It was evolutionarily adaptive for us _as a species_ to develop female appetite for sex outside of estrus, and relatively hidden estrus, and a general enjoyment of sex accompanied by bursts of oxytocin and other happy-chemicals that make us think positively about our fellow tribe members and work hard to resolve conflicts. What helps the group as a whole may not be what's best for the individual. (Which is basically the point of _The Selfish Gene_. Ants are also extraordinarily good at propagating their assorted species, even while the vast majority of individuals reproduce not at all.)
Non-procreative sex acts can still be evolutionarily adaptive, so long as they don't entirely replace PIV sex. In both humans and bonobos, most sex acts seem to be more for purposes of social bonding (especially formation and reinforcement of pair bonds for mated couples) than for direct procreation, and felatio and cunnilingus can serve that function just as well as PIV sex. For that matter, PIV sex when the woman isn't within a window of a few days around ovulation is also non-procreative, but evolutionary adaptations in many other mammals to focus sexual behavior around female fertility seem to have been lost in both humans and bonobos.
Yes, which I also covered in my post. Lots of researchers speculate on the adaptive functions of non-PIV sex. Apparently, also in spiders (!?) https://www.nature.com/articles/srep25128
Yes, evolution moves in mysterious ways. As a further illustration, I recommend Denise Daniels classic 1983 paper "the evolution of concealed ovulation and self-deception". A taste of the argument:
"Humans are strikingly unusual among primates and most mammals because females do not reveal their critical period of ovulation. ... It would seem that stimulus signs are essential to reproductive success because activities would be drawn to maximizing the probability of copulation when the female is fertile. Human reproductive
success and survival, however, is dependent not only on lack of physical cues of ovulation, but also on lack of psychological awareness.... I hypothesize that concealed ovulation had its origin in strengthening intragroup bonds, during an evolutionary period when only reciprocal sharing and extensive cooperation allowed survival. ...First, individuals of a monogamous pair were menaced less because females with concealed ovulation
attracted other males less. Second, estrous periods lead to dominance ranking, which is incompatible with a shared mode of sociality. Third, females who exhibited sexual receptivity during estrus were disfavored because group harmony suffered from periodic sexual competition or disruption. Because revealing ovulation threatened monogamy, sharing, and cooperation, survival also was threatened. In this light, concealed ovulation became adaptive....A theory on self-deception is proposed. The roots of concealed ovulation indicate that self deception, a facet of the ability to selectively delete information outside of conscious awareness, serves as a balancing process to intelligence and awareness. Self-deception of ovulation became adaptive so that certain interests
could be excluded (selfish propagation of one’s genes by copulation during ovulation) while other more critical activities could be attended to successfully (monogamy, sharing, and cooperation)."
Related: what was the possible evolutionary benefit that made the penis-bone (baculum) disappear among humans? (Hint: apply signalling theory. Signalling male health during coitus is more difficult if you lack a penis bone, hence being able to do PIV even without such a bone is a more credible/honest signal of being healthy/worth mating with.)
...Relevance for the debate: If our ancestors in the very, very old days had used inclusive genetic fitness as a criterium for deciding what is healthy and what is not, they would have labelled women with no detectable sign of estrus (including lacking the psychological ability to know this themselves), and men without any trace of a penis bone, as less-than-healthy people. Moral: It is hideously difficult to second-guess which traits, physical and psychological, that from an evolutionary perspective will turn out to enhance genetic fitness. (Apart from the ethical point that assuming whatever enhances genetic fitness is desirable, is a version of the "what is natural is good" fallacy.)
"So, enjoying blow jobs means you're mentally ill? Really?"
You'd be surprised how recently society and the law agreed with this idea. Personally I'll take my mental illness with a side of fries, but...
He's so funny for thinking that "reproductive fitness" isn't a political problem. For some intuition, recall the old quote "everything is about sex, except for sex, which is about power". Or even more directly stated, power is sexy and politics is the discourse of power allocation. So, of course it's political.
As usual, I like Freud's definition best. He didn't have a concept of "mental illness", everything was instead about the symptom itself (i.e. what the patient presents with as a problem), and he classified various symptoms structurally by cause. The DSM's approach is like looking at someone with liver cancer and someone who's an alcoholic with a failing liver and saying "ah, both have liver disorder".
The problem is we're not allowed to talk about cause in psychiatry without it being neurological, because weird effects of subjectivity are inadmissible in falsifiable research that must be reproducible for any arbitrary observer, so we get this whole mess of Scott's Depression Inventory (SDI, ever heard of it?) that make it hard for people to get the right kind of help.
Anyway I'll get off my soapbox. A part of me is glad that Emil K is still hanging around, he's a fun dude to get drunk with.
I don't get what point you're making about politicalness. I'm pretty sure the idea there is just that determining what counts as having an effect on reproductive fitness is much more objective and less subject to influence from people's political opinions than determining what counts as harmful to the person with the condition, those around them and society. A person's politics may influence their personal reproductive fitness, which is my best guess at what you're getting at, but that's quite separate from the ways someone's politics might influence how they define reproductive fitness, which I would expect to be minimal beyond cases like the sort of people who don't believe in evolution at all.
I think the point is that the reproductive fitness of a trait is largely determined by the local politics it finds itself in. Making it a circular question.
Like, 'should ephobophilia be illegal and punished by castration, or legal and treated as an acceptable relationship model' is a political question that 100% determines the reproductive fitness of ephebophiles in your community.
And 'is ephebophilia a mental disorder' is inevitably going to be a big contributing factor to the political question itself, making it a circular question.
Yep, exactly, great example.
The other key thing to clarify for 4Denthusiast is that when I say "politics" I don't mean "political belief", but how institutional or structural decision-making cashes out into the legitimation or delegitimation of various actions. The idea of "political belief" is, for better or for worse, not so relevant in terms of what you can or can't get away with doing.
"cases like the sort of people who don't believe in evolution at all."
This is almost everybody, though. Liberals stereotypically portray themselves now as "the party of science" while strenuously denouncing every individual conclusion that can be drawn from the theory of evolution as it applies to human beings, and conservatives... well.
Hmmm. Most people have at best a vague understanding of genetics and natural selection (and by your snarky remarks, I suspect you may also fall into that category). Of course, the GOP has tried to dilute even the most superficial teaching of evolution in public schools. No doubt that's because, as of 2008, 60% of the GOP believed in creationism. (Granted 38% of Democrats believed in Creationism, but the majority believe in evolution of some sort). The 2nd largest group in each party believed in God-guided evolution. More recent Pew research seems to indicate that the percentage of evolutionists in the GOP has waned since that poll, but grown in the Democratic party.
As for Liberals portraying themselves as the "party of science," we do—and I suspect that must be very annoying to you folks on the radical right. Yet science education in the US, at least at the high school and undergraduate level is so shitty that most liberals believe in evolution (and science in general) without understanding it. On the right, the remainder of the holdouts who still believe in evolution, tend to latch on to crackpot theories based on evolutionary pseudoscience to support their conservative social agendas.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/108226/republicans-democrats-differ-creationism.aspx
I beg your pardon? Us folks on the radical right? I think you gravely misparsed "and conservatives... well".
When I said almost everybody, I meant almost everybody on both sides. I will thus content myself to point at your angry partisan quacking as a demonstration of what I'm talking about.
Hey, if you shitpost about the Left "denouncing every individual conclusion that can be drawn from the theory of evolution as it applies to human beings"—which is just rightwing bullshittery—it's incumbent upon me to push back on your quacks. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the quacking gander. BTW, I love how the Right lumps all Lefties (centrist Dems, soi-disant progressives, and Marxist, etc.) together as believing the same things.
All quacking aside, I'd not only agree with you that the majority of the US population doesn't understand natural selection (i.e. what you call evolution) but they're also woefully ignorant about the rest of the sciences. And, as a general rule of thumb, I found that the use of the term evolution instead of natural selection is a good indicator that the person pontificating on "evolution" doesn't know what they're talking about because that impreciseness of terminology reflects and impreciseness of understanding. ;-)
I feel like, if I reply to this in good faith you'll just continue on this avenue of "muh right wing" and shitposting accusations, so I'll bow out here, I don't see any fruitful or meaningful way to engage with this type of blinkered partisanship. Let it be known that I think you suck precisely as much as your right-wing counterpart, neither one iota more nor one less.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/who-believes-in-science
Yes, excellent, this is exactly the thing. Thank you!
Right off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of stark examples that reproductive fitness is a political *motivator*. Boko Haram and The Lord's Resistance didn't raid those girls' schools to take hostages (despite how the headlines read). The raiyding them to take "wives" for their young, mostly teenage soldiers. When cornered by government forces, the Lord's Resistance ended up using some of the girls from the Aboke abduction as negotiation tokens, but would only give back those who hadn't been given as rewards to their officers and soldiers. And of the women who were eventually returned from the Boko Haram raid (and not all were returned), many had children and/or were pregnant. So, ideology may motivate those groups but the promise of access to young women was no doubt an incentive.
And of course when it comes to political sex scandals in the US—since 2000, the number of sex scandals for Republican politicians have occurred at 3.4x the rate of Democratic political figures. Obviously, there's a strain of thinking among Conservative officeholders that their office entitles them to sex with their subordinates. Seems like election to public office can improve one's reproductive fitness—and it's often been claimed that political office is an aphrodisiac.
The null hypothesis would be that politicians aren't more likely to sleep with their subordinates based on their political party. I'm not familiar with the data on rates of sex scandals, but you're suggesting these happen at a rate of 3.4x for Republicans over Democrats. There are four possible interpretations of this report I can think of:
1. Republicans are more likely to sleep with their subordinates. (Why would this be?)
2. The report is about sex 'scandals'. So maybe news reporting of scandals is biased against Republicans and/or in favor of Democrats. Since the overwhelming majority of reporters lean Left, it's plausible to suspect they would have a bias toward over-reporting bad news for their opposition and under-reporting bad news for their side.
3. Republican voters like to see a 'nuclear family' on the ballot, so Republican politicians are pressured to present themselves as such to get elected. A gay Republican who sets up a facade with a wife and kids will be more likely to get elected in a Republican district, but would also be more likely to seek out the kind of same-sex extramarital activities that sex scandals are made of.
4. Republicans are more interested in reading about sex scandals about their side. Maybe, since Clinton and Kennedy, Democrats are non-plussed by such reports, considering this aspect of character unimportant in establishing job qualifications, while Republicans are SHOCKED that one of their own could stoop to this kind of behavior and so are much more likely to click. (Democrats may also be more likely to click, if only because it's a subversion Republican narratives about family values.)
I'm partial to the null hypothesis - that party affiliation doesn't impact bedroom behavior - and I think 2, 3, and 4 are likely better explanations for this phenomenon.
Normally I'd agree with you that the null hypothesis seems to be a more reasonable choice, but if we look at Wikipedia's list of historical sex scandals by elected or appointed politicians—at the national level from 2000 to the present—sex scandals have dogged the GOP more—for whatever reason. This may correlate with the fact that exploitive sex seems to be endemic to conservative/authoritarian religious sects such as the Catholic Church and fundamentalist Protestant sects, and these groups have enormous influence on the GOP (and so the same mindset may prevail between the those attracted to GOP authoritarianism and religious authoritarianism).
I tabulated this ratio from this list on Wikipedia of sex scandals from 2000 to the present. Of course, the editors of this page may have been biased in what they included on that list. But since much of the media is rightward-leaning, you'd think there would be a bias against Democrats. Also, I didn't include party official sex scandals — only publicly elected or appointed officials. Feel free to check my numbers. Naturally, the Pizzagate pedo ring didn't make the cut—so any QAnon followers should take this list with a grain of salt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_sex_scandals_in_the_United_States
I remain unconvinced that the explanation is a real-world difference between the parties in sex scandals. Your examples seem like more just-so stories without evidence to rule out more plausible explanations for the data.
(Yes, "without evidence". Citing the same GOP bias toward sex scandal reporting doesn't tell us anything about the fundamental question of WHY we see more sex scandals for Republicans. Have you noticed there are more sex/corruption scandals among political dissidents in Russia and China? Of course, we can see the same thing historically in the US, Great Britain, France, Germany, and dozens of countries in South America, Europe, Africa, etc. Is that evidence that political dissidents are more likely to be corrupt? Perhaps the US is different from every other example where political dissidents are targeted in this EXACT way, but that would be an affirmative hypothesis that should be supported with evidence over the null hypothesis that 'this time isn't different from literally every other time in history'.)
Authoritarian tendencies: You seem convinced the Right is more authoritarian than the Left, but in my experience Right and Left always justify THEIR side's authoritarianism as necessary and proper, while the OTHER side's authoritarianism is blatant power mongering. If that were true, the Patriot Act would not have survived the Obama administration, and Republicans would sincerely be willing to leave abortion policy up to the states. To a non-authoritarian without a party home, it looks a lot like authoritarians vie for control in both major US political parties - with much success.
Right-wing news dominance: I'm not sure why you think news media is rightward-leaning, or even why we should think that's the case? Perhaps your threshold for "Right" is not well-calibrated? The overwhelming majority of news reporters has been heavily Left-leaning for decades - and trending more heavily Left-leaning - as measured by donations in time and money to political candidates over the years. More strikingly, editors lean more heavily Left than reporters do. This can also be seen in measures of reporting bias, as well as in whether reporters are willing to say negative things about a political candidate. It would be strange if a profession that's solid-Left from the professors on down the line somehow produced consistently Right-leaning content almost none of them believe in.
My personal observation has been that on-the-ground reporters are a bit more of a mix of libertarian/populist/progressive Left than editors, and that editors skew heavily establishment Left. This might lead a progressive, populist, or libertarian Left observer to be frustrated at seeing news that steers away from - and at points actively demonizes - their preferred narratives. They might feel the news attacks their viewpoint (as it often does) and conclude from this that therefore the news is more Right-leaning than the evidence demonstrates - especially as low-level reporters voice concerns that their non-establishment views are being silenced (which they often are).
But I don't think there's a strong case that media actually leans Right in any meaningful way. Indeed, it's difficult to square such an assertion with the push in 2016 to change reporting standards to include editorializing opinions in explicitly news articles and headlines, and to reject the long-held standard of acquiring the opposing viewpoint on a story. Were these moves taken so reporters could stop interviewing Left-wing sources about climate change and misinformation, and exclude those viewpoints from their articles? This is opposite of what I've observed.
Religious ... sexploitation? as a widespread cultural norm on the Right: I'll also take issue with inflammatory claims such as "exploitive sex seems to be endemic to conservative/authoritarian religious sects". Unless you can show me in their charters or proselytizing materials where they explicitly endorse such things for believers, this is less of a claim and more of a smear. I'm not Catholic, and I recognize they've struggled with clergy sex scandals for years - with policies and cover-ups that are abhorrent - but it's one thing to claim that they badly bungled their stated ethical standards throughout the scandals, and another to affirmatively claim that they ENDORSE exploitive sex or that exploiting people for sex is just part of what it means to be a rank-and-file Catholic. (Same for Protestants.)
The null hypothesis should be "Catholics are not holier than non-Catholics", including in the all-too-human desire of their leaders to hide embarrassing/abhorrent behavior. It's certainly a stretch to affirmatively claim sex scandals with Priests MUST mean something nefarious about the rank-and-file, entirely without evidence. The whole point of a 'scandal' is that it's something they tried to hide. Your claim implies it's endemic and widespread, not hidden among a privileged few. We would need evidence for that claim.
Indeed, it's difficult to understand what, if anything, can be gleaned from painting with such a broad brush other than strict partisan fist-bumping. However, if you want to do some digging, you could look at actual differences within the Republican party to try and test this hypothesis. For example, it's well-established that there's a Southern wing of the party (the descendants of the Dixiecrats) that was wooed over to the Republican party by focusing on social issues (especially abortion) in the 60's through the 80's. There are issues that are more overtly religious, and held to stronger by Southern Republicans, in such a way that we can easily distinguish different types of Republican politicians. We might hypothesize, then, that if being staunchly religious makes you more susceptible to sex scandals we would see a statistically meaningful increase in Southern socially-conservative Republican sex scandals over, say, New England fiscally-conservative Republicans, etc. Perhaps there's a cultural difference there, but we'd need to test that hypothesis before we make a claim.
Or we could count up the number of Republican politicians of different religious backgrounds and get a per capita scandal prevalence, then look for a statistically meaningful difference among the several groups/denominations (accounting, of course, for multiple comparisons). That would be a scientific approach to testing the hypothesis that the religious Right somehow makes people more scandal-prone. Again, we'd want to test that hypothesis before making broad proclamations about it.
In my experience, life is often more complex than the just-so stories that come easily from looking at a disparity between two numbers in a quick-and-dirty statistic.
Digging around for statistics that can be read a dozen ways, then telling wild ex-post explanations for why it's 'scientific evidence' of the moral failings of millions of people whose political beliefs you disagree with, is not a scientific approach at attempting to better understand the world, so much as old-school partisan political point-scoring.
I will note that this is something I see a lot on the Right, too, so this argument is in good company. There are plenty on the Right who would also cherry-pick some statistic or issue where the Left totally flopped the science and point out (accurately) that the Left is totally NOT the Party of Science. I often see them go on to claim (inaccurately) that this means the Right must therefore be the Party of Science.
There is no Party of Science. Science is a method of discovery that has no pre-conceived ideology. If you subscribe to an ideology, you may have convinced yourself that you do so because of empiricism, but in my experience that's not the case. Indeed, ideology can ensure the same people will look at the same evidence through different lenses to come to whatever preconceived notion they began at. This isn't a baseless claim. The empirical evidence seems to bear this out:
https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvy025
You keep saying what the null hypothesis ought to be, but fundamentally misunderstand what makes the Democrats the "Party of Science": they decide what the null hypothesis is.
Just off the top of my head, that list doesn't include the Tara Reade allegation against Joe Biden. Probably it relates to this criteria: "loss of or damage to reputation caused by actual, accused, or apparent violation of morality or propriety". No reputational damage, no scandal; if no one cares about you, what happened to you doesn't matter.
It's hard to take Reade seriously. But now that she's "defected" to Russia, we'll never know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_sexual_assault_allegation
I think evaluating everything on the level of procreative fitness /at the level of an individual human/ is not useful. It feels rather arbitrary or at least reduces the human experience to something very 2D.
I’m also sure that there are plenty of adaptions that support procreation / continuation of a group that would look prima facie maladaptive taken through EK’s individual organism lens.
Yeah, Emil's position seems both unhelpful from the perspective of psychology, but also weirdly ill-informed from the perspective of evolutionary biology. I guess Richard Dawkins has been cancelled or something, but he wrote some very good books.
Also we tend not to view other "non-mental" illnesses through an evolutionary fitness lens. We view it from a "will this kill you, cause pain, or otherwise disable you" point of view. Those can be correlated with evolutionary fitness, but are certainly not totally overlapping.
Yeah, I mean the elephant in the room here is obviously the Naturalism Fallacy.
I assume Emil responds to this by saying 'I'm not making value judgements about whether mental disorders are good or bad, so the Naturalism Fallacy doesn't apply' but come on, once you call something a disorder you're making a value judgement. If you're not then use a different word.
I came here to say this so thank you!
Cancer affects a lot of post-reproductive aged people and it's definitely still a disease/disorder/malfunction.
It's not clear to me what light is shed by looking through the reproductive fitness lens to understand what's a present day health problem, mental or otherwise.
Absolutely, cancer is a good example. I think the right way to look at this is that reproductive fitness is one among many aspects of “health” (along with being functional in daily life, free of terrible pain, etc). Emil has it backwards in suggesting health js subsidiary to fitness, or at least that’s how I read him.
Here's a simple test: What traits do you want your children to have?
Schizophrenia? No, that's a massive malfunction.
Sickle cell anemia? No, that's a massive malfunction, although they seem to be making progress on a genetic engineering treatment.
Pedophilia? No, that's pretty bad.
Homosexuality? They can grow up to lead happy, productive lives. But, still, homosexuality reduces your chances of grandchildren ... so ... yeah, that's another malfunction, not as bad the ones above, but still a malfunction you don't wish upon your children. Homosexuality is a malfunction of a _basic_ part of life, so what else could it be other than a malfunction?
A child who becomes a monk or nun will also reduce your chances of grandchildren.
Would you call a monastic vocation a malfunction?
Yeah, probably. Monastic vocations were respectable in eras of high birthrates, but rapidly faded as family sizes got smaller. As a Catholic baby boomer, I knew a lot of adults with religious vocations. And a lot of them bailed out in the 1970s for heterosexuality -- I respect them. In fact, many of them are among the best people I've known.
The real problem with this framing of monastic vocations is that they're not a compulsion. As you observe, they are a choice -- one that people often give up on, and to persevere to the end requires great intentionality and endurance. This belongs in a very different category from involuntary compulsions, which require zero mental effort to maintain and can't easily, if at all, be overcome. I'll posit that mental illnesses should really only belong in that latter category.
A shortcoming with your original framing is that an ordinary vice like laziness is also something that you don't want your kids to have. But of course, everyone is lazy to some degree, so I think this problem is solved by clarifying that we're not merely talking about falling towards the low (or high) end of the normal human range for some characteristic, but possessing a problem that the large majority of people do not have to any real degree.
Male homosexuality is unusual in that it doesn't all that much exist on a continuum like most human traits. Sexual orientation among men is closer to being a switch: straight or gay.
So, it makes sense to ask parents: Which way do you want the sexual orientation switch flipped in your son?
At present, we don't have a clue how to do this. But it wouldn't be astonishing if in, say the 22nd Century we did.
I suspect that progressive San Francisco Bay Area parents would be leading customers of having their son's switch flipped to straight.
"Sexual orientation among men is closer to being a switch: straight or gay."
There's some truth to this statement, but I think it's exaggerated. It's very common for "gay men" to have partners of both sexes throughout their lives.
I think this cuts back to "I’m also sure that there are plenty of adaptions that support procreation / continuation of a group that would look prima facie maladaptive taken through EK’s individual organism lens."
At some level, the odds of passing down one's genes depends on the success of the society the individual lives in, which will tie into things like 'how likely are people to starve to death / die to violence / etc.?' As such, social constructs that remove some of the reproductive individuals from society that also benefit society at large may be better for the reproductive success of the average member of society.
As an example, you may be more likely to have grandchildren if male child #2 is packed off to a religious life when the alternative is male children #1 & #2 fight over who succeeds the family line, and this is before considering the social benefit from having a small class of individuals that are outside the competition for mates (religious callings in Catholicism, eunuchs in China, etc.).
> social constructs that remove some of the reproductive individuals from society that also benefit society at large may be better for the reproductive success of the average member of society
If a gene improves the reproductive fitness of the average member of a society, it doesn't increase in frequency in the gene pool. It will only be selected for if it improves the reproductive fitness of carriers more than non-carriers.
Your example of increasing the probability of grandchildren would increase gene frequency, but your example of maintaining social stability would not. (Imagine having a gene for causing the collapse of civilization which also enables its carriers to thrive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Soon enough, civilization will have collapsed and all the survivors will have this gene.)
Social constructs evolve and spread independently from genes, but if social constructs decrease the reproductive fitness of their carriers, resistance to believing these social constructs will be selected for.
I think the evidence that argues against this is the success of monogamy, such that similar behavior (mating for life) can be found in some animals. Spreading your genetic material around as much as possible would seem to be the idealization of reproductive fitness, and thus under your arguments should be highly selected for, yet this isn't the case.
Perhaps it's that 'resistance to believing social constructs' is a subset of anti-social behavior, and society by nature works to make sure that conformance to norms of social behavior is highly selected for. From a social evolution perspective, perhaps societies where the benefits from being a member of society outweigh the loss from individual competitive reproductive drive are the ones that truly prosper.
> I think the evidence that argues against this is the success of monogamy
Not at all. Monogamy is a compromise between male and female reproductive strategies with some synergistic effects that make it beneficial for individuals and not simply society as a whole.
Dudes clearly DO wanna spread their genetic material around as much as possible, which is why it's so easier for women to get sex if they want it randomly; and for symmetric reasons they usually dont.
The norm of sexual fidelity - one of the strongest and most serious norms we have - is necessary to keep this arrangement functioning, and still people cheat, constantly.
This criterion is subjective beyond usefulness. For many dads, a son who's disinterested in alcohol and cars would be a malfunction.
Besides, gay couples can have children, and their tendency towards childlessness is driven by social and legal factors much more than by their orientation.
And if a parent converts to antinatalism, then for them Emil's principle gets flipped, and their child's fertility becomes a malfunction.
Being a traditional Catholic is a malfunction...
In what way? One set of my grand-parents had 5 children, 6 grand-children, but only 4 great-grand-children, 3 of whom came from my sibling who married a Catholic and converted.
Well, I mean, I don't want my kid to be one, so by Sailer's definition...
Not sure why what parents want is a useful test for determining what's illness?
Parents want all kind of crazy things for their kids. They want their kids to be lawyers, to get straight As, to fulfill their unrealized dreams, to take over the family business, to stay close to home, to marry someone they like more, etc etc. Many of these things parents want are not what the kids want and do not move in the direction of the kid's happiness or well-being. Parents are narcissistic. Parents are contradictory.
The purpose of kids' lives is not to deliver grandchildren to their parents. It's to become the people they themselves want and need to become and to live their own lives fully.
I'm having trouble grasping what water "failure in evolutionary terms" is carrying. It feels quite moralistic but I don't feel any duty to give evolution something. Evolution is a process that doesn't need us. Failure is usually measured relative to a goal. If the goal is humanity's survival, then not everyone needs to procreate. What's the specific goal in your mind that not having children is failing to meet?
And another thing - why are the interests of the parents the sole criterion here?
I get that the interest of the subject themselves is sometimes insufficient because their judgement is compromised (though in cases like LGBTQ it isn't), but what about the interests of other family members and friends?
Here's a simple test: What traits do you want your children to have?
Schizophrenia? No, that's a massive malfunction.
Sickle cell anemia? No, that's a massive malfunction, although they seem to be making progress on a genetic engineering treatment.
Pedophilia? No, that's pretty bad.
Homosexuality? They can grow up to lead happy, productive lives. But, still, homosexuality reduces your chances of grandchildren ... so ... yeah, that's another malfunction, not as bad the ones above, but still a malfunction you don't wish upon your children. Homosexuality is a malfunction of a _basic_ part of life, so what else could it be other than a malfunction?
I wouldn't want my children to grow up having the beliefs of Steve Sailor - that would be deeply upsetting in a way them turning out to be gay would not be - but I wouldn't describe it as a mental illness. Intuitions about what sorts of things we want for and out of our children is one of the least useful ways I can imagine thinking about mental illness.
I read the "benefitting your friends" dig not over your value judgement over pedophilia but over your value judgement about homosexuality. I think it's a fair assessment.
I think Scott's point is that pedophilia tends to have bad consequences, whereas homosexuality does not.
Not in the US, certainly, but by the "bad consequences" standard, homosexuality WOULD be a mental illness in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Nigeria, for example.
By our definition of bad consequences, or theirs?
The examples I picked had the death penalty for homosexuality, so probably both? ymmv.
What behaviors we ascribe the term 'mental disorder' to being contingent on the legality of a behavior seems, once again, unintuitive and unparsimonious.
I agree. I don't think "bad consequences" is a good criterion either.
Agreed. I'm not thrilled with the stability of either criterion (if we take Kirkegaard's criterion as described by current reproductive success). ( Alternatively, if we take Kirkegard's criterion as being set by reproductive success in our environment of evolutionary adaptation, then it is stable, but excruciatingly hard to test. )
To add to the frustration: Even if we had a full causal explanation of some of these preferences, all the way from (for genetic ones) base pairs to proteins to neural firing probabilities to behaviors, it still wouldn't make the question of "Is this a mental illness?" more stable over either time or across societies, according to either social or fecundity criteria.
I'd argue that homosexuality is at most an indirect cause of the suffering gay people experience in those countries. The proximate cause is bigotry against gay people.
If you would say the same thing about the suffering pedophiles experience in the US, mutatis mutandis, sure. I condemn only hypocrisy.
Obviously pedophiles cause direct harm. There's no hypocrisy with Scott's statements here.
No more obvious than homosexuals causing direct harm. Or transsexuals. It's just you just find their proclivities disgusting, and the state wielding overwhelming force agrees with you.
But then it seems like imposing the death penalty is the mental illness.
If you would say the same thing about pedophiles, sure. I condemn only hypocrisy.
I don't think it's hypocritical to say that acts that have a victim should be punished, while victimless acts should not be punished. As another example, in the spirit of consistency, do you think opponents of Communist regimes are comparable to practicing pedophiles, in that both persist in doing something against the law that has a high risk of imprisonment? It seems to me more reasonable to say that one group is performing an act (child abuse) that *any* healthy society would want to inhibit, while the other is performing an act (criticizing the government) that many healthy societies would *not* want to inhibit.
Yes. Defying the state is a rather dangerous enterprise. I do not judge whether their expected reward is the worth the risk to THEM, but I don't think either would be to me. (Now, if said pedophiles criticized the opponents of the Communist regimes for their crimes, or vice versa, I WOULD condemn that as hypocrisy.)
I'm not keen on the whole "healthy society" framing. Such usually turn out to be "us vs. them" with a few layers of obfuscation, and self-delusion when proposed by intellectually honest interlocutors.
What if homosexuality was harmful to one or both participants? That's a factual question at that point, even though there would probably be no consensus on what the facts actually are. If homosexuality was factually negative, would you switch your position to be against it, or is there another argument that's closer to your real position?
>the other is performing an act (criticizing the government) that many healthy societies would *not* want to inhibit.
This, of course, gets to the core disagreement, determining what counts as healthy for the society. The value of being able to criticize the government is by now so established that even the worst dictatorships at least pay lip service to it. Sexual liberation and everything downstream of it, including de-stigmatization of homosexuality, has a much shorter track record, and the position that this in fact leads to unhealthy societies is not an entirely discredited point of view yet.
Here's the epistemic monkey-wrench: at least a large part of the psychological trauma from child molestation comes from the fact that society expects trauma from child molestation and those who are not directly traumatised are then traumatised by the dissonance.
You can't meaningfully study whether X is traumatising in a society that already widely believes it is.
I think there are two classes of bad consequences.
Some bad consequences are very society dependent. A society might punish people for wearing green hats or something.
Some consequences are less society dependent. A preference for drinking mercury will lead to bad outcomes no matter what society thinks about it.
Homosexuality is like wearing green hats, while pedophilia would also mess with kids in a society where it was considered good and proper.
Do you think you could prove that homosexuality is closer to wearing green hats? You could look at things like STD rates among gay men and conclude otherwise - which has nothing to do with society and looks more like drinking mercury.
If it were factually true that homosexual behavior was a negative individually or for society, would you change your mind to be against it?
Have you looked at alcoholism rates among lawyers, depression rates among dentists, suicide rates among teenagers? The fact a sub-group of people suffers disproportionately from a problem doesn't mean their sub-group is itself ill. It means their circumstances makes them more vulnerable to a certain kind of problem.
It's a public health and/or individual behavioral problem that can be addressed at those levels, without stigmatizing an entire group of people. If you're using the problem this sub-group is more vulnerable to as a means to justify stigmatizing them, then it seems like you might just prefer to do that for your own moral reasons, but not out of logic.
Just as an observation, I feel like this is the contrapositive of Szasz's position. If it's all on a continuum, either everyone's mentally ill or nobody's mentally ill.
That doesn't at all address the question. Could you show that homosexual behavior was closer to "green hats" than "drinking mercury"?
If it's subjective, then agreement or disagreement is a matter of perspective and goals. If it's objective, then we should be able to examine which things fall into which categories and demonstrate that one set of behaviors (lawyering, being gay) is something, and that another set of behaviors (alcoholism, drinking mercury) is different.
What we cannot do, is claim that being gay is "green hat" from an objective standpoint, but back that up with subjective criteria.
In fact, green hats connote adultery in China, and are screened out of content aimed at Chinese markets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_hat_%28chinese_idiom%29
Green hats aren't about adultery. They're about cuckoldry. It says so right in your link!
(And while it's interesting to see that someone else is willing to link to wikipedia alias pages to make a point, here it looks more like you're trying to obscure the meaning of the idiom. That link is just a redirect to the page "Cuckold".)
It's also worth checking how old the redirect is. In this case, it's twelve years old, so probably not one made specifically to support this point.
That seems like it's splitting a fine hair: one implies the other, and is the kind of subtle distinction that usually doesn't survive translation.
Yep
I think Emil's point is that homosexuality has bad consequences for homophobes. It makes them uncomfortable.
Scott does not believe this is a big deal because he does not care about the feelings of homophobes but he does care about the feelings of homosexuals. He is not "friends" with homophobes not in a personal sense, but in the sense that they are his outgroup.
I would say his point is the one he expounds on at length - that homosexuality has bad consequences for homosexuals. The fact that they do not perceive themselves being injured doesn't mean they aren't being injured. (This is a pretty mainstream view as applied to, say, alcoholics.)
He doesn't mention it, but since it seems relevant to this thread I should point out that homosexuality also injures the homosexual's family, and they do perceive the injury.
Biological reproduction is literally what humans were designed for. It is vital to any society that wants to avoid demographic collapse. And it is the thing that brings most individual human beings more happiness and joy than anything else they will ever do. How is not being able to reproduce, or having substantial additional cost and uncertainty associated with reproduction, not a "bad consequence"?
It's not the *worst* thing in the world. You can live a long and reasonably happy life while gay. But there's no shortage of things that are unambiguously considered illnesses that allow for a long and reasonably happy life.
Straight or gay, not everyone wants to reproduce. Not everyone finds the same joy and satisfaction there. The human race doesn't need literally every single person to want to reproduce or to love doing it.
Half of humans live decades past the point that they can reproduce and their lives are not over -- nor are they completely fulfilled -- by having reproduced or not. These people do not spend those decades in a state of illness for not being able to reproduce.
I think the amount of human variation in desires we have and the amount of satisfaction gained outside of reproduction is still safe for the survival and flourishing of humanity. Humans were also designed to walk upright, to use our big brains to invent things like fire, and to make art and culture. All that is pretty cool as well.
Humans were literally designed?
In his prior piece, Scott wrote:
"We have to classify pedophilia as a mental illness, because we want insurance to pay for treatment. If someone shows up at a psychiatrist saying “Help, I feel an urge to molest children, is there anything you can do to get rid of that urge or prevent me from acting on it?”, I definitely want insurance to pay for this person’s treatment. Therefore, pedophilia “is” “a” “mental” “illness”, and no sophisticated categorization algorithm will ever convince me otherwise."
That's what Scott is thinking of. But he also wrote:
"If you call something a mental disorder, insurance has to cover treatment for it, which is good."
That was in reference to the transgender disorder or not question. Since a large proportion of rationalists are trans including many of Scott's friends, Scott wanting to get funding for this does mean that he is favoring a definition that would get his friends funding for treatment. I wasn't implying that Scott has pedophile friends, but trans and other mentally ill friends and clients that benefit from such definitions.
Oh, this was the post with the weird gibberish interposed through the text! I was wondering why you had so many weird quotation marks.
(For context, Scott was writing a lot of sentences that could be very easily quoted out of context, and because there was still an obligation to quote literally, Scott *wanted* them to look weird when quoted, so as to avoid people thinking that those sentences were his complete opinion.)
Thanks, this makes a lot of sense, and turns what seemed like an extremely out of place jab into a pretty normal misunderstanding. I think Scott should reply to this.
That was my take, too!
> Since a large proportion of rationalists are trans
In the 2022 ACX survey, some 95% of people claimed to be cisgender.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScHznuYU9nWqDyNvZ8fQySdWHk5rrj2IdEDMgarf3s34bSPrA/viewanalytics
Also, I think that accusing him to shape his beliefs so that they benefit the interests of his friends is uncharitable.
Would you also accuse a pro-choice activist to be primarily motivated in securing the right to abortion for themselves or their girlfriend, or accuse an animal rights activist of just trying to benefit their pet?
Given the *sheer number* of pro-choice activists who use slogans referring to themselves, "my body my choice" and so on, without the slightest shame, it seems utterly undeniable that they're motivated by almost total selfishness.
I can't think of a single other movement that uses such brazenly self-centered language so frequently.
What about conservatives and their guns. And christians and their delusions? \S
Examples of such language please?
“Over my dead body”, “from my dead cold hands” w.r.t. any regulative gun-related proposals.
>In the 2022 ACX survey, some 95% of people claimed to be cisgender.
There are layers to the Rat onion. "Reads ACX" is a layer outside "considers self a LWer/Rat" (14% on the survey you link) is a layer outside "literally lives in a polyamorist cult compound in the Bay Area" (not entirely sure what percent this is, but I can't imagine it's over 10% of self-identified Rats).
Scott is part of that inner core. Stats on the whole onion are massively regressed toward the mean compared to that core (and as noted below, 5% is still well above average). Note the 2% Jewish percentage on that survey, despite the notorious abundance of Jews among the core Rats (I have literally seen a neo-Nazi claim we're a Jewish conspiracy).
5% 𝗶𝘀 a "large proportion" if what you're measuring is the proportion of people claiming to be transgender. It's about ten times the background rate. (Estimate of people claiming to be transgender from https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/ ; US population of 330M taken from wikipedia; share of population that is age 15+ also taken from wikipedia; share of population that is age 13 or 14 incorrectly assumed to be zero. But the calculated background rate doesn't shift much if you just divide "all people of age 13+ claiming to be trans" by the total population of the US. It's the difference between 0.481% and 0.485%)
That speaks of either very powerful selection effects or very powerful social contagion effects.
> Also, I think that accusing him to shape his beliefs so that they benefit the interests of his friends is uncharitable.
Scott specifically stated that he wanted "mental illness" to be defined based on who deserved subsidized treatment.
I'm puzzled about why everyone seems to focus on the homosexuality bit, when Scott was making a much wider point about mental healthcare in general (I even read that bit not about homosexuality but about psychiatry and getting money as a medical doctor)
Any time a culture war topic like this comes up in a post, it's safe to assume it will become the main thing everyone wants to talk about.
An illness is a degradation of some natural function with an external etiology. Most of what political hacks want to classify as illness (transgenderism, homosexuality) is actually chimericism: people have a non standard but functional combination of different entirely natural traits. This isn't quite there in terms of definitions. Something like polydactalysm is also obviously not a disease but is not composed of normal human traits. But with homosexuality and transgenderism it is literally just a non standard assemblage of normal sex traits, including normal brain traits. The only weird thing is how high a dose of cross sex hormones trans people's innately gendered brains experience as a result of "natural" puberty.
I don’t think this approach completely avoids value judgments over what’s “functional” a lot of things will fall into a grey area where it has both positive and negative effects, and judging whether it’s “just another way of being” or “a defect” is not necessarily obvious.
Take, for example, certain types of high-functioning autism, where various mental/sensory parameters are tuned to uncommon settings such that one has a mix of effects, e.g. increased mathematical ability and increased sensitivity to sound. Whether this “should” be considered an illness may be a question that two affected people — one a successful mathematician, the other forced to take care of an ill family member in a loud city — may have very different opinions on.
It doesn't. But the term still wouldn't be illness. That's the wrong pejorative term for something endogenous.
"Disorder" applies perfectly well; the problem you run into is that "mental illness" and "mental disorder" are the same thing.
I tend to prefer using "disease" as the indicator of exogeny. That's not better, measured against usage - people are just as happy to call cancer a disease as they are to call it an illness... and I'm pretty sure most people would _reject_ the idea that cancer is a "disorder".
Honestly there are a lot of hard limits to how much you can change people's thinking by changing language so in retrospect I'm kind of embarrassed to have gotten into this discussion at all.
I agree with you that the difference between a problem that is caused by spontaneous breakdown and a problem that is caused by malevolent forces is important, and that it's a bad thing that people try so hard to conflate them when they talk about disease. I made that very point on an earlier ACX post (probably the same one that Kirkegaard prompted this post by responding to), and most commenters rejected it then too.
My criticism of you is limited to your assertions that the distinction you'd like to make currently exists in the language. I'm with you on the idea that it _should_ exist.
Does a genetic problem count as having an external etiology?
No.
Sickle cell anemia isn't a disease? Cystic fibrosis? Cancer?
Unless you're trying to say there's a difference between illness, disease, disorder, condition, and several other words people mostly use interchangeably, in which case see Scott's point about preferring technical terms for weird definitions and letting the common terms mean what common people (political people) want and need them to mean.
I suggest the broader term "malfunction" to cover everything from sickle cell anemia to schizophrenia. Pedophilia and homosexuality may or may not be mental illnesses, but they are both clearly malfunctions from a Darwinian perspective.
Seems fine but in that case we're all walking around with quite a few of those, for instance I'm 5'10" and I would do better both today and in the EEA mating-wise if I were a few inches taller (based on evidence that human height has been selected for in most cultures), my height is 90% genetic, so is that a genetic malfunction? Seems weird to call it that, as most people would say any hindrance to me is small and I'm within a standard deviation of normal adult male height. It seems like my genes functioned fine - they just code for something not quite optimal in the human environment for the last few hundred thousand years.
You could say "oh but they save you on calorie burn or maybe the height genes are also intelligence genes so you're smarter for giving up some inches" or any number of guesses, but you can make assumptions and just so stories for anything in the EEA and that just undermines the idea of the knowability of EEA selection pressures.
Sexual orientation among men is interesting in not being all that much on a continuum like height is, which is distributed pretty much according to basic bell curve math. Instead, male sexual orientation seems to come in an unusual J-shaped curve with a few gays, even fewer bis, and many straights.
So, male sexual orientation is more like a switch: straight or gay. At present, we have absolutely no idea how to flip that switch, but someday we might and parents will have a choice. What will they tend to choose?
I'm 6'4." Personally, I don't see all that many upsides to being tall. For example, I had cancer in 1996, and having a long torso like mine does increase the risk of cancer.
The main advantage is that women tend to like height in a man. Whether female prejudice against short men could be socially deconstructed by shaming women about their height bigotry is unknown, but the interesting fact about our society is that orders of magnitude less effort has been expended by the media in trying to change female bias against short men compared to efforts to change male bias against fat women. Our culture in the 2020s basically doesn't care about short men at all.
In the past, a tall man signified that he enjoyed good nurture growing up: presumably he had prosperous relatives who kept him better fed than the stunted masses. And prosperous relatives are a good feature in a potential husband. So it made sense in the past for women to be attracted to tall men.
But now, height is mostly a matter of genetic nature. Other than the appeal it holds for the female sex, the advantages and disadvantages of having the genes for height seem to be about equal.
It would definitely increase human happiness if we could socially construct women into being less bigoted against short men, the way men don't care all that much about female height. Without this prejudice, more women could find a man they find attractive.
But nobody cares about this potential social reform.
I think there'd need to be a qualifier in front of "malfunction", to specify the layer. For instance, on the surface, sickle-cell anemia seems like a malfunction. But last I checked, it was a side-effect of a genetic adaptation that, even including the cost of occasional sickle-cell anemia, increased overall fitness in the ancestral environment.
I don't like this, mostly because it enables arguments like "why perform surgery on a healthy body", when any treatment that had a chance of " repairing" a trans person into a cis person would be equivalent to brain surgery. A major and commonly appealing rhetorical argument against trans medical treatment hinges on the inappropriate ontological classification of transgenderism as disease instead of condition
Are you pro or anti medical treatment for transness? I'm confused. Also are you pro or anti treatment for cancer? It seems to me that people prefer to treat both conditions when they have them, why not let them (provided they are voluntarily being treated, doing treatment, and funding treatment - questions of doing surgery on minors or using government subsidies arise in both cases as general questions of consent and cost benefit analysis that apply to all human behavior).
Mandatory hormone treatment for all people with cross sex brain dimorphism, and state funded surgery. It can come out of the 2000+ year reparations budget we're owed, this is my alternative offer to a truth and reconciliation committee aimed at every bastard ever to participate in human civilization.
Would a higher rate of suicide (or other mental illnesses, or the dysphoric feeling itself) in trans individuals not count as a mental defect or whatever term you would want to use? You can use the term "natural" to describe it, but then I feel like you're not differentiating between trans and, say, schizophrenics, which are also "natural" in the sense that schizophrenia happens based on normal human genetics and brain growth. Neither are unnatural in the sense of man-made or from an outside source like a car accident.
You could call it a defect, just not an illness. I'm splitting hairs over the endogenous vs exogenous axis, not the value axis.
"An illness is a degradation of some natural function with an external etiology."
That would include vasectomies. Perhaps modify the definition to restrict it to _unwanted_ changes?
A necessary but not comprehensive element of an illness is that it is a degradation of some natural function with an external etiology. This is important because it rules out many things as illnesses, even without fully defining illness. For an example of why, see my second most recent reply in this thread.
"A necessary but not comprehensive element"
I _think_ you are saying that additional qualifiers can be added which would further restrict what gets classified as an illness. Am I interpreting your words correctly?
Yes. And I'm doing that specifically to avoid the trap of reintroducing subjective criteria into the part of the definition I care about.
Many Thanks!
I enjoy points 4 and 7. They remind me of the old joke that if evolutionary psychologists took their beliefs seriously, they'd stop reducing their biological fitness by ranting about evopsych all the time.
That's literally just the naturalistic fallacy rehashed.
If you're talking about Emil's proposal that all behaviors selected against by the EEA should be considered "disorders", then I agree. If you're talking about my comment, then I have no idea what you mean.
Why do you (or the hypothetical person telling the "old joke" you refer to) think evolutionary psychologists would consider maximizing their biological fitness a moral imperative?
Who said anything about a moral imperative?
The joke -- and I can't believe you're really making me explain it -- is that evolutionary psychologists tend to justify all human behaviors as strategies to maximize the chance of successful reproduction, but being really into evolutionary psychology is a human behavior that reduces the chance of successful reproduction by making people think you're a weirdo. Therefore evolutionary psychology fails to explain the existence of evolutionary psychologists.
Yes, thank you, I got the joke the first time. Immensely droll. The premise is a misunderstanding of evolutionary psychology I was characterizing as essentially the naturalistic fallacy.
Eh. I know two or three of ev psychology people who have several children; that's a lot better than population average. And ranting about your favorite subject can, if you have luck, raise your status, making it easier to reproduce.
"Is an interest in philosophy (or science, or art, or any other worthy endeavor) that reaches the point where it consumes your life a mental illness?"
This reminds me a bit of of Hakuin's "Zen sickness".
"With my teeth clenched tightly and eyes focused straight ahead, I began devoting myself single-mindedly to my practice, forsaking food and sleep altogether.
Before the month was out, my heart fire began to rise upward against the natural course, parching my lungs of their essential fluids.[1] My feet and legs were always ice-cold: they felt as though they were immersed in tubs of snow. There was a constant buzzing in my ears, as if I were walking beside a raging mountain torrent. I became abnormally weak and timid, shrinking and fearful in whatever I did. I felt totally drained, physically and mentally exhausted. Strange visions appeared to me during waking and sleeping hours alike. My armpits were always wet with perspiration. My eyes watered constantly. I travelled far and wide, visiting wise Zen teachers, seeking out noted physicians. But none of the remedies they offered brought me any relief."
Love that. The man starved and sleep-deprived himself and was like "why do I feel unwell?"
Great job avoiding an argument about definitions while arguing about definitions.
Emil's concept of "mental illness" already has a name:
It's simply the christian (Catholic, dunno about others) concept of unnatural sexual sin but put in secular terms to appeal to a non-Christian audience.
Celibacy is not considered sexual sin in traditional Christianity.
What is “traditional Christianity”? Protestantism? Catholicism? Eastern Orthodoxy?
I was thinking mainly of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
The sin is to waste your productive sexual force for an unproductive, hedonistic end. In the Judaism, this is quite literally called: "To extract one's semen in vain"
Celibacy (in the case of clergy) is supposed to be the suppresion (use?) of that sexual force for other productive ends that are more important (to the church) than reproduction.
I didn't realize that the Jews were worried about Christian morality.
Glad you mentioned sin. Its a word that has been excised from discourse in our time on both Left and Right so it's difficult now to remember that until about 50 years ago it was part of the mental landscape of most people in the West -- and not just the religious. Its excision is a measure of the viral success of modern narcissistic notions like self esteem.
Sin requires agreed upon standards. Old ones decayed past usefulness, replacements haven't yet been established. Now is the time of monsters.
I think that - in fundamentals - sins are mostly no more time-bound than humanity itself. Ours is an age in which the 'I-can't-be-to-blame-so-someone-or-something-else-must-be' has become the default mentality.
Most of them aren't, but since the standards have traditionally come in tight packages, weakness of one part drags the whole thing down. If we're to stick with the human condition for a long time hence, new packages will necessarily closely resemble old ones in fundamentals.
Interesting discussion (I think) but I'm not sure if we're agreeing or disagreeing here Xpym? https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
Seems like we mostly agree, except looking at your latest post you don't seem to think that this is inevitable? The old order no longer has a consistent self-justification which an educated adult can take seriously, redesigning it from scratch while keeping the essential parts in is entirely alien to the conservative ethos, so they entirely relinquished the intellectual space to progressives, who are going to have to rediscover those essentials the hard and painful way.
plus Buddhists, plus Muslims, Jews and all of those "pagan tribes" who would consider some sex-stuff highly unnatural if the just could conceive of it (Greg Cochran). Plus those Hindu I met in India - and I could rattle on (Confucianism pro-gay??). The Simbari people and a few other Papuas seem different, sure. But sure, ignoring concepts held by most people ever can't go wrong. Down with the fence! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simbari_people#Traditional_practices_and_beliefs
Nope. A huge part of sexual sins in Christianity covers sex which would increase reproductive fitness. Polygamy, causal sex, or even rape in wartime are all evolutionary beneficial, and the churches don't like any of them.
The church (Aquinas, who came up with these categories od sins) considered those sins less bad than Homosexuality, Pedophillia, contraception\abortion etc.
This is because to the church these sins were only bad socially (for obvious reasons) but were still "natural" (in the Latin sense of the word natura) in that they were not sterile sexual acts and they could still result in the creation and continuation of life.
Frankly, I don't see how acausal sex could be anything but a crime against Nature, regardless of the Church's feelings.
Agreed, sex which violates causality tends to result in someone becoming their own grandfather, which is definitely a crime against Nature.
With the Trinitarian view of God's son being the same as God's father, that might be considered "playing God."
**applause**
"(I wouldn’t describe this as “benefiting my friends” - I’m against children getting raped whether they’re my friends or not. I think this dig was unworthy of Emil, and ask that he correct it.)"
Are you also against adult men getting raped by other adult men? If so, why are you against pedophilia but not homosexuality?
"Evolutionary psychologists are pretty smart people and can probably coordinate on new terminology and move on, whereas normal people have brought the US to the brink of civil war over pronouns."
Sorry, but it was the "smart people" who invented the bizarre ritual of declaring your pronouns. It falls into the category of things so stupid that only an intellectual can believe them.
I think Scott's point is that pedophilia tends to have bad consequences, whereas homosexuality does not. I'm sure he's also against men raping other men, but that's quite rare.
"Are you also against adult men getting raped by other adult men? If so, why are you against pedophilia but not homosexuality?"
Because I think most-to-all pedophilic sex is rape (at least in the sense of statutory rape, where even if the child seems to consent they're probably under too much pressure to be comfortable with the situation) and I don't think that's true of homosexuality. Obviously I am against adult men raping each other.
I agree with all of that, but the point stands that homosexuality causes significantly more men to be raped than would otherwise be the case. Of course, very few homosexuals rape men, just as (probably?) very few pedophiles actually rape children. If you're saying that pedophilia causes much more suffering relative to happiness and fulfillment than homosexuality, then I'd agree--in modern Western society. In a highly conservative society where homosexuality is punished with death and child marriage is normal, the suffering-to-happiness ratios might be inverted.
Heterosexuality has caused billions of women to be raped. Is heterosexuality a mental disorder?
Obviously the distinction is that pedophilic sex is inherently rape, while gay sex (and straight sex) are not inherently rape.
Heterosexuality is not a disorder no matter how much harm it causes, because nothing that's a near human universal can be a disorder. Jealously, greed, and arrogance are negative traits, but because they're nearly universal (though not as universal as heterosexuality), they're not mental disorders even though they hurt the person with those traits and often hurt society.
Pedophilic sex is not inherently rape. It's inherently statutory rape, which is in turn because, in many cases, it causes serious harm to children. Homosexuality has also caused enormous suffering. The AIDS epidemic, which first took off in Western gay communities, has killed 40 million people. We have very effective treatments for AIDS now, but that has not stopped gay relationships from being train wrecks, with 58% of gay men cheating on their partners: https://www.thepinknews.com/2018/02/14/most-gay-men-have-cheated-on-their-partner-new-survey-finds/
Wrong answer caused by starting from your conclusion. Heterosexuality is not a mental disorder despite the incredible number of rapes it causes because heterosexuality is *not actually the cause of those rapes*. Gay rapists don't rape because they're gay; if they were heterosexual, they would just rape women instead of men, and vice versa for straight rapists. You're flinging together a bunch of spooky-sounding statistics about the lives of gay men and declaring that the underlying cause is homosexuality, but in fact you haven't showed causation at all. Being exclusively attracted to people of the same sex is not inherently harmful, and acting on this attraction is not inherently harmful. The same can't be said of pedophilia.
Yes and Yes again (to the overconfidence in "smartness" part of your comment). "A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep" (Saul Bellow). So much of our 21st c. malaise can be traced to that. In fact could excessive "smartness" count as a mental disorder?
I think it's astonishing unreasonable to conclude Scott would be accepting of male-male rape based on this article. Your use of this comparison seems to only be explained by an obsession with the culture war clouding your judgment. I'd suggest fixing that
Except I didn't conclude that? It was a rhetorical question? Read my followup comment, posted well before yours, if you don't believe me.
Could you clarify what you mean by "believe them"? Declaring your pronouns seems like an action, not a belief, and I would like to engage with you about the belief you object to rather than trying to guess what it is and respond to that.
Sure, I mean these specific beliefs:
1. That gender is different from sex
2. That you can be of a different gender simply by saying so
3. That the desire to mutilate your genitals is healthy and should be encouraged
4. Even if I grant #1-3, that the gender of a person who looks obviously female and whose name is Samantha is not immediately obvious
5. Even if I grant #1-4, that the number of cases where the correct pronouns are not obvious is large enough to warrant wasting time and effort telling everyone your pronouns. I have never, in my life, been surprised by anyone's pronoun announcements.
Thanks for answering! I have some responses, because yeah, as you've put them these are silly ideas, but they're also not what people are saying, doing, or believing.
1. is a definition squabble, so let's use different words. Many sources use "gender identity" as opposed to "assigned gender". DSM V describes gender dysphoria as "A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least six months’ duration". Even if you don't agree that someone's gender can be different than their sex, it is axiomatic that their gender identity can be.
2. I agree that you can't have a different gender identity simply by saying so. You have to feel so. I don't know how to tell what someone feels besides by what they tell me. *
3. I don't think that having a different gender identity than assigned gender necessarily means you want to remove your sex characteristics, though in many cases it does. Gender affirming surgery, as the scientific literature puts it, does have strict screening requirements (I believe). As only adults receive it, and children who experience gender dysphoria get reversible hormonal treatments, I'm happy to let adults do what they want with their own bodies, especially since it doesn't hurt others.
4 - 5. There are many inefficiencies in speech. Small talk, for instance. Saying your pronouns takes barely any time and less effort. It's not intended to surprise. As I've had it explained to me, it's to prevent people from making bad assumptions in those few cases where it would surprise you, and to normalize sharing how you'd like to be referred to, so that those with non-congruent assigned gender and gender identity feel comfortable sharing as well. I'm happy to add my pronouns (he/him, since I'm cis) to my email signature and slack profile and then never think about them again, which is how I've handled this.
* "Evidence further suggests that brain anatomy and neuronal signaling pathways are more closely aligned with a person’s perceived gender identity. ... However, not enough evidence has associated these differences with GD." per https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7415463/
It would be really interesting to see if further evidence supports that, since that seems like a pretty objective way to tell.
3. Letting adults do what they want with their own bodies is a defensible position, though not one I agree with. Normalizing self-harm, having medical professionals dedicated to helping people mutilate themselves, and ostracizing anyone who opposes self-mutilation, is quite different from passively letting adults do what they want. Analogously, it's one thing to legalize all drugs; it's quite another to have a whole industry set up to validate injecting fentanyl, subsidize the fentanyl, praise drug addiction as brave, and fire anyone who dares question whether teenagers should be getting fentanyl or whether they should at least wait until they're adults.
4-5. But I don't want to normalize sharing how I'd like to be referred to. We had a system for referring to people, one that does not normalize disorder or serve as a litmus test for an offensive ideology. I don't even see how sharing pronouns is supposed to make "those with non-congruent assigned gender and gender identity feel comfortable sharing". If someone who's obviously a man claims to be a woman, he's either comfortable with telling people he's a woman and asking them to use feminine pronouns, or not. If he's comfortable with it, why does everyone else have to do the ritual too? If he's not comfortable with it--possibly because he knows deep down how ridiculous his claim is--how does someone else saying the obvious change anything?
3. At this point, I think we've moved beyond "these are ridiculous beliefs that only an academic could believe" and on to the idea of speech. Your hypothetical mavericks who "dare question" surgical treatment for gender dysphoria express their ideas. People who disagree with them criticize and inflict social consequences on them. Both seem like important parts of the marketplace of ideas. You seem to be applying the Preferred First Speaker doctrine.*
4-5. A few things. One, I think it's a general part of human interaction to tell people how you'd like to be treated, and for others to either treat you that way or not according to their disposition towards you. Two, you'd be surprised how often it's difficult to tell, especially with those who have undergone gender transitions. Three, nobody has to share their pronouns. It's just a voluntary nice thing to do. People are sometimes encouraged to. And surely you can see how people partaking in a voluntary nicety showing that they know you can't always assume how people would like to be treated could make someone about whom you might assume incorrectly more comfortable. This is much the same as any other social glue, like how a coworker saying "hello" to you when you first meet might make you more comfortable than them ignoring your existence.
* 'The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker holds that when Person A speaks, listeners B, C, and D should refrain from their full range of constitutionally protected expression to preserve the ability of Person A to speak without fear of non-governmental consequences that Person A doesn't like. The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker applies different levels of scrutiny and judgment to the first person who speaks and the second person who reacts to them; it asks "why was it necessary for you to say that" or "what was your motive in saying that" or "did you consider how that would impact someone" to the second person and not the first. It's ultimately incoherent as a theory of freedom of expression,' as Ken White of Popehat explains it.
"Sorry, but it was the "smart people" who invented the bizarre ritual of declaring your pronouns. It falls into the category of things so stupid that only an intellectual can believe them."
Reminiscent of Chesterton's classic quote, "If there is one class of men whom history has proved especially and supremely capable of going quite wrong in all directions, it is the class of highly intellectual men."
It doesn't seem to me that Emil thinks that you believe that mental illnesses are just preferences. He responded to you, but also Caplan(mostly Caplan really).
Correct!
The two of you might meet in the middle, at "mental states that reduce life expectancy"?
ADHD and alcoholism do. I guess maybe anxiety and chronic pain do too, at least via suicide. Pedophilia and other socially undesirable ones surely do, via the risk of punishment. Being Plato or a monk doesn't.
In modern humans, we have raised baseline life expectancy so much that losing some years doesn't usually mean losing some of the fertile ones. That has to impact evolutionary reasoning about modern humans so fundamentally that I for one can't calculate the full breadth of it right now.
QALY is perhaps a better metric than life expectancy. But regardless, I think this proposal suffers from being very sensitive to societal conditions. Homosexuality is the obvious example. If a gay person from a tolerant society moves to a homophobic society, of course their internal experience of attraction hasn't changed at all, but their expected QALY may have changed drastically. It seems very wrong to say that you can be mentally ill in one country, but sane in another.
On the other hand, I'm not that opposed to saying that you can be *disabled* in one country but not another. Maybe this comment is better suited to the post from a while back about the social model of disability. But the connotation of "mental illness" is that it describes a fact about a person, and a definition that can suddenly stop applying when the only thing about the person that's changed is their xy-coordinates doesn't match my intuitions at all.
It turns out most people say PRECISELY that when people move between countries (or even US states) with different "ages of consent”: one could be a pedophile in one, and perfectly sane in another.
No, in that situation, different people have different ideas of what constitutes pedophilia. If I believe the age of consent ought to be 18, then if somebody moves to a country with an age of consent of 13 and starts having sex with 13-year-olds, I don't think they're sane; I think they're a pedophile who's being allowed to get away with it.
This is a definition of pedophilia that's new to me. The standard thresholds are pubescence, local law, and 18 (mostly via Eagleland Osmosis). "The age I think it ought to be" strikes me as unlikely to catch on.
EDIT: Actually, most people are even more arbitrary when calling anime fans pedophiles ("short women are minor-coded" is a classic!), so maybe it will after all.
I can't tell if your reading comprehension is unusually poor or if you just think that intentionally misunderstanding a comment that hurt your feelings is the same as delivering a counterargument to it.
Not Eagleland but Bearland (i.e., California, specifically, Hollywood).
It was a TV Tropes reference.
I don't think it's that weird to be mentally ill in one country but not the other. If you have Seasonal Affective Disorder, and you move to live near the equator where you suffer no symptoms, do you still have it? Seems like semantics. Compatibility with this or that country isn't obviously not a fact about a person.
"If you suffer no symptoms" being the key point there... unlike the homosexuality example, your internal experience *has* changed and there are facts about you that are different other than your physical location.
Another framing, if you like, would be to say that someone with SAD *is* still mentally ill regardless of whether they're currently experiencing symptoms. The definition of SAD here would not be "experiencing symptom Y" but "under X condition, I experience symptom Y". Even if you're not under X condition, the underlying fact that you *would* experience Y has not changed.
I think our crux is whether the internal experience of homosexuality changes depending on whether you live in a country where homosexual conduct is e.g. punishable with death. I would expect that it does, that in such the country the internal experience is inseparable from anxiety and shame, you seem to expect that it doesn't.
This is an empirical question. Maybe some gay person(s) who have lived in both types of countries can resolve this?
No, the shame and anxiety in that situation is not caused by homosexuality; it's caused by poor treatment from other people. Threatening someone with beatings, rape, and other nasty things for something they can't change is always going to cause shame and anxiety, regardless of what it is they're being threatened for. Is it really a mental illness to feel anxiety when faced with extreme violence? Are racial minorities mentally ill when they live in racist countries? They might be more *prone* to mental illnesses like depression due to their treatment, but to say their race is itself the mental illness is obviously wrong. Even calling it a physical illness or disability seems incorrect.
Nobody remembers anymore, but gay men's life expectancies dropped precipitously a dozen years after gay liberation began in 1969 at Stonewall, due, precisely, to gay liberation. This fall in life expectancies was especially true in the absolute centers of gay liberation: Castro Street, Santa Monica Boulevard, and Christopher Street.
But it's hard to remember this history because gays and gay liberation emerged as big Winners in the political/moral/cultural narrative. So the obvious historical fact that gay liberation played a massive role in the AIDS disaster has a hard time registering in contemporary brains.
Characteristic 21st Century thinkers prefer to be told who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and then to reason from there: E.g., gays are good, so therefore gay liberation was good. But AIDS was bad, so it couldn't have been caused by anything good, so it must have been caused by somebody who was bad, such as Ronald Reagan.
Or Nancy Reagan.
Liking hotdogs = mental disorder.
I take exception to defining anything as mental illness _today_ based on whether if it would have caused problems in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness. There is no such thing as an EEA; evolution never ceases, and each time there's a change in environment, evolutionary pressures change.
If this is in fact what Emil is proposing, then he doesn't understand evolution, and he's most likely yet another Paleofantasist (TM).
If Emil truly believes that the height of human accomplishment consists entirely of spreading one's genes, well, I wonder how he expects writing the article you referenced to contribute to that goal. Usually when someone makes this sort of claim, it turns out to be a pseudo-scientific wrapping for a demand that everyone live according to the imagined mores of some imagined past... generally one where the person making the demand imagines that he'd personally receive automatic deference and status. Any creatures more successful than humans at this kind of fitness are ignored. (And there are plenty of them.)
It's certainly interesting to look at the actual implications of his stated definition. (ADHD good? drunkenness good? credulous religiosity also good, provided the religion opposes contraception...) Of course that's short term; I'm not clear that pursuing a strategy of quantity rather than quality in one's offspring is in fact effective for humans in even the medium term (3-4 generations); has anyone researched this?)
Bottom line - if you are accurately describing this author's position, I don't think much of him.
"If Emil truly believes that the height of human accomplishment consists entirely of spreading one's genes, well"
This strikes me as slightly uncharitable. I believe charitably interpreting Emil would account for his insistence of divorcing the term from moral judgments.
Divorce "mental disorder" from moral judgment? You would need to reprogram most of the english-speaking world. Better to tilt at windmills. Scott's right; the evopsych people need to pick a new term, this one's already taken.
The important idea here is evolutionary mismatch, where evolutionarily recent cultural and technological changes have occurred so rapidly that an intact mechanism becomes maladaptive under novel environmental conditions. Are you saying you don’t believe this phenomenon can play a role in mental health in modern humans?
Absolutely not. I'm objecting to the definition "if it would have resulted in fewer surviving copies of your genes in the EEA, it's 'mental illness'" as being incoherent (which specific environment?) as well as unhelpful.
That said, it's more than likely that (some?) people do maladaptive things today because they have adaptations suitable to an environment that they don't personally live in. We get this kind of thing with physical health, where it tends less arguable. (The sound bite would be sickle cell anemia, for those living in an environment free of malaria.)
However, there's a second common paleofantasy, which is that there was a single best strategy for humans in the EEA, or perhaps two - one for each sex. In practice, a group with somewhat of a mix works better, both for individuals and the group. Thus in an example pertinent to individual advantage, some Gorilla (?) males defend harems, and others act effeminate and harmless, then mate while the alpha isn't watching. Both strategies work, depending on transient circumstances. If the proportion of sneaks is low in a given group, it's an advantage to be one of them - but if the sneak proportion is high, better to be an alpha.
My guess is that this phenomenon may be a lot more relevant when it comes to "deviant" behaviour, which I'm defining as behaviour that's officially frowned upon by a human group, and in particular its leaders - somewhat like many of the things being defined as "mental illness" by this definition from "common sense" reproductive fitness.
Then of course we have the problem that behaviour which causes an individual not to reproduce may lead to lots of extra copies of their genes, carried e.g.. by the children of their siblings. Is courage in defence of kin to be considered "mental illness"? If not, what about the "gay uncle" who allo-parents his sister's children in the hypothetical EEA?
I admit I wasn’t aware of “paleofantasy” as a thing. So I think we agree that even though evolutionary mismatch is probably a useful concept, the idea that there is some actual point in time of a human species level EEA is unhelpfully wrong.
I went back and read Kirkegaard’s Preferences Can Be Sick. He’s really just advocating the evolutionary psychopathology approach of Marco Del Guidice, which is sound IMO. The strength of Del Guidice’s book is how detailed he is on the complexity of the state of current knowledge. It’s on this complexity where Kirkegaard founders.
Take this example: “It used to be popular to be a monk or a nun. Since they are forbidden from having sex and children, this is surely maladaptive behavior.” This is cringey simplistic. It brings up one of my favorite faux controversies in evolution discussions, group level selection. Humans have clearly evolved adaptive group-oriented behaviors; some individual behaviors are only comprehensible at the group level. Your example of non-kin allo-parenting is one. Another example of is altruistic punishment.
It gives this weird impression that the individual human phenotype is not really a behavioral unitary. Maybe we are all acting as network nodes in a sort of hive mind.
I believe Jonathan Haidt called humans "90% chimp 10% bee".
A common example of adaptations that went from awesome to awful in a changed environment would be fat storage. Having a body that efficiently used energy and stored surplus energy as fat, rather than burning the surplusage with fiddling or hyperactivity, was pretty great for all of human history until about 50 years ago. In fact it's a bedrock element of the standard behavior of all birds and mammals to use less energy acquiring food than the food itself provides.
That trait went from making you reproductively successful to being a lifelong celibate in the span of just a few generations of human development.
> There is no such thing as an EEA; evolution never ceases
Yes, exactly. If you take a human and put him in the middle of the ocean, he will whine that this is very different from his EEA and that he his not well equipped to deal with this new environment. The fact that his ancestors spent some 300 million years mostly on land is no excuse for failing to evolve gills before he drowns. The cetaceans took a few million years to adopt to the ocean, but they were probably just lazy.
Seriously, the modern human appeared some 300k years ago. Most of that time was spent in the ancestral environment, agriculture only started 20k years ago. I would argue that our species is still in the middle of adapting to the neolithic revolution. In another 50k years, we might evolve defenses against sugar or binge watching TV.
> I'm not clear that pursuing a strategy of quantity rather than quality in one's offspring is in fact effective for humans in even the medium term
Humans are K-selected species, but evolution's idea of that is probably closer to fertile woman giving birth to a child every two years (where r-selected species would give birth to multiple children, possible multiple times a year), which is very different from what most humans who took control over their reproduction rate prefer (mostly because humans prefer fewer starved humans while evolution does not care.)
A millionaire couple who have ten children will be vastly more successful genetically if they had one or two kids, even though their children will not be millionaires. Wealth is ephemeral, ten generations down the road your offspring will likely not benefit from you having been the owner of the kingdom of France or Facebook.
Of course, the most obvious example of all is non-reproductive heterosexuality. If homosexuality is a mental disorder because it impedes reproductive fitness, then by the same logic, heterosexuals who use contraceptives and/or engage in manual, oral, or anal sex are likewise mentally ill. Kirkegaard is free to bite that bullet if he wants, but at that point, upwards of half the adult population would be considered mentally ill. That seems like a pretty useless way to define mental illness.
I'm also not even fully convinced that homosexuality is a disorder from a strictly evolutionary perspective. Obviously it prevents the individual from passing on their genes, but it may have benefits for group selection. I've heard that the math doesn't add up for the Gay Uncle Theory, but I've yet to hear this math explained in sufficient detail for me to consider it debunked. And the Gay Uncle Theory isn't the only way that homosexuality might be evolutionarily beneficial on a group level, it's just the simplest and most well-known explanation.
"Obviously it prevents the individual from passing on their genes"
Does it?
Perhaps you didn't mean those words literally.
But I've always found it weird how, when people discuss how homosexuality has evolved, everyone assumes that gay people don't have children.
Because of course they do!
Gay men marry women and have children all the time. Maybe they've recently started doing that a bit less, since in modern times it has become socially easier for them to come out or find other gay men. Still, I recently overheard a man talk about how all the men he has affairs with have wives. And anyways, modern times don't count.
We can debate whether gay men with traditional families count as truly "gay" or "bisexual". But however we call it, if that covers (or used to cover) the typical man who has sex with men, we've explained the phenomenon.
My intuition is that, while straight men are often disgusted at the thought of sex with men, gay men are seldom disgusted at the thought of sex with women, and therefore they don't have to be particularly "bisexual" to copulate with women, and therefore they do, perhaps because they want children, perhaps to bond with the only companion they're socially allowed, perhaps because they fantasize about men while they do.
Vladimir Horowitz, a great (gay) pianist, said that all pianist are at least one of three: gay, Jewish, or bad, suggesting that being gay makes you a better artist.
He had children.
So did the gay Leonard Bernstein, that other great musician.
If being gay makes you a more successful artist (or gives you any other advantage), perhaps it helps you raise children and helps your children survive - not your brother's or sister's children, your own, because of course, gay people have children! No need to bring up any "gay uncle"!
I'll call this revolutionary concept the "gay father theory".
Gay males before Gay Liberation tended to father about 50% as many children as straight males. That's a _huge_ reproductive fitness loss. That's one reason why the evolutionary persistence of male homosexuality is so puzzling.
The question is whether that would have been true further back in time than that, assuming you're talking about the 20th century.
The 20th century was already very different from the way things have always been, in many ways.
Still, good point against my "theory".
As Foucault pointed out, there's not much evidence that male homosexuality in its current form existed before a few hundred years ago. On the other hand, "Charlemagne had eighteen children with seven of his ten known wives or concubines" so are we really going to pretend Charlemagne might have been gay?
"there's not much evidence that male homosexuality in its current form existed before a few hundred years ago"
What do you mean? Obviously men have had sex with men since time immemorial, so perhaps you mean that the men who did were not characterized as effeminate in the Middle Ages or antiquity?
I'm not a big fan of Foucault, but I respect his finding that the current version of male homosexuality wasn't really obvious before recent centuries:
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-whip-hand/
For example, Shakespeare presumably knew a lot of Theatre Kids, but how many of Shakespeare's characters seem obviously gay?
I dunno.
Is it so catastrophic? The only point is to have a larger, however much, generation following than the current one. Evolution doesn't actually care about anything. Some fish eat their own eggs, but as long as a few survive to breed then the species continues.
Maybe the children of gay men tended to survive (reach reproductive age) 50% more?
You could imagine a narrative whereby a gay father is less likely to abandon the mother of his children for a competing female. He can satisfy his sexual desires without abandoning the family unit. Whereas hetero philandering potentially divides loyalties.
I have no idea if this was the case; it's just the first thing that comes to mind. Humans are complicated social animals; the evolutionary persistence of myriad sexual behaviors really doesn't seem that puzzling.
Heterosexuality is obviously an adaptation, not some lowest-energy-state that just falls out. It should be obvious that homosexuality leads to reduced fitness in comparison even if some homosexuals reproduced. All the effort put into homosexual mating is, by Darwinian standards, a waste, whereas effort put into heterosexual mating can pay off.
Traits come in bundles not in isolation. if the same genes that make you attracted to your sex (a downside) also give you some advantage that compensates for that, those genes can prosper.
Besides, how else do you explain that gays exist?
Or, perhaps, homosexuality can, somehow, make your relatives more fit reproductively. For example, sickle cell anemia is a bad byproduct of a (relatively successful) evolutionary adaptation to falciparum malaria: inherit one allele and you are more likely to survive malaria, but inherit two alleles and you die young without modern medical care from sickle cell anemia. Personally, I'd call sickle cell anemia a malfunction, even though in the big picture, it's just the price that has to be paid.
There's no indication that homosexuality is associated with protection from any diseases posing a high fitness cost like malaria.
How do gays exist? Cochran's pathogenic theory is the most plausible explanation I've read.
It's striking how there were a lot of different interesting theories about the causes of male homosexuality put forward in the 1990s. It was a topic of general intellectual interest at the time. For example, Milton Friedman asked me in 1994 how the existence of male homosexuality can be reconciled with natural selection. (Short answer: I dunno.)
Maybe I've just lost interest, but it doesn't seem like much is happening anymore on this topic.
>gay men are seldom disgusted at the thought of sex with women
Hmm. I don't think this is true.
Definitions are made for discriminating thing in ways that serve a purpose of an agent with some intention- that's true in mathematics, in computer science, and in here. I'll say bluntly what is between the lines, but I guess Scott can't write lest he is accused of not being charitable in interpreting the other opinions. Scott's definition is about solving the practical problem of "who needs help". And so are all the million ones that are less precise, but nearly everyone uses, and are adjacent in definition-space to Scott's. These include those of SJW and fundamentalist Christians - they may do weird things in the specifics, but at least they are genuinely caring about the same practical question.
What you have to ask when someone pushes so hard for definitions that defy the usual sense and are openly useless to the problem at hand is: what do they get out of it? The charitable interpretation is: because accepting a fuzzy and politically charged definition makes them so uncomfortable and anxious that they need to spend large amounts of effort trying to battle society even if it makes us all worse off. (Not relevant to the point, but I think this sounds a bit like (Emil)-mental-illness.)
But the less charitable -and more parsimonious- one is that a lot of this debating could be simplified, at least on Caplan's side, by revealing his preference of morality in a simple "I don't care about the problem of helping people".
Here's a simple test: What traits do you want your children to have?
Schizophrenia? No, that's a massive malfunction.
Sickle cell anemia? No, that's a massive malfunction, although they seem to be making progress on a genetic engineering treatment.
Pedophilia? No, that's pretty bad.
Congenital deafness: No.
Homosexuality? They can grow up to lead happy, productive lives. But, still, homosexuality reduces your chances of grandchildren ... so ... yeah, that's another malfunction, not as bad the ones above, but still a malfunction you don't wish upon your children.
Homosexuality is a malfunction of a _basic_ part of life, so what else could it be other than a malfunction?
Here's a simple test: What traits do you want your children to have?
Schizophrenia? No, that's a massive malfunction.
Sickle cell anemia? No, that's a massive malfunction, although they seem to be making progress on a genetic engineering treatment.
Pedophilia? No, that's pretty bad.
Congenital deafness: No.
Homosexuality? They can grow up to lead happy, productive lives. But, still, homosexuality reduces your chances of grandchildren ... so ... yeah, that's another malfunction, not as bad the ones above, but still a malfunction you don't wish upon your children.
Homosexuality is a malfunction of a _basic_ part of life, so what else could it be other than a malfunction?
I would like my children to be good at math, but if they're bad at math I don't want to call it a mental illness.
(haha, yes, dyscalculia, I mean ordinarily bad at math, plus I think dyscalculia is technically a "learning disability")
Sorry about the multiple posts. AstralCodexTen suddenly went offline around midnight PDT.
What about your children not being able to read due to severe dyslexia?
What about not being able to speak or to even be able to understand your speech?
Those seem like increasingly severe "malfunctions."
The reason I used the term "malfunction" rather than "mental illness" is because it seems to apply more broadly to my 5 examples. For instance, nobody considers sickle cell anemia or congenital deafness to be a mental illness, but everybody considers them to be malfunctions. In contrast, everybody considers schizophrenia to be both a mental illness and a malfunction. Pedophilia and homosexuality are in a grey zone.
Scott, you can see where I'm going here: as a potential father, you are probably surprisingly conservative in what you'd hope (even pray) for your child. You'd probably, given the choice, trade off the chance of your child being in the top 95th percentile or higher of math skills for assurance that he or she is not in the bottom 5% of math skills due to a malfunction.
Fine, I'll give a more controversial one. I would like my kid to one day become an effective altruist. But I don't want to call not being EA a mental disorder.
An elephant in the room for contemporary parents these days is the conflict between their natural desire for their children to grow up to be heterosexual and give them grandchildren versus how unfashionable it is in the upper half of society these days to admit that you'd view homosexuality as a malfunction in your children, and if some safe, simple medical breakthrough came along that could assure you that your children would not be homosexual, you'd avail yourself of it.
But you aren't supposed to think like that in 2023.
For example, I suspect that some of the enthusiasm among some parents for gender transitioning their children is a twisted working out of this natural aversion to homosexuality in your children in a culture where "homophobia" is a grave sin: my son won't grow up to be an effeminate gay man, he's really my daughter! My tomboy daughter isn't a future lesbian, but really my son!
Promoting transgenderism is a way to be anti-homosexuality without the social opprobrium.
My view is: First, do no harm. At present, we don't have a safe, simple medical treatment for homosexuality, so don't do anything about it, neither "conversion therapy" nor "gender affirming care."
In my anecdotal experience more people transition into homosexuality than out of it.
Sickle cell anemia is precisely what you want if you live in a high malaria region. You don't exactly want it, but having some children with sickle cell anemia is the least bad deal you can make with the universe.
Do my homework: Are there people with the genes for sickle cell who have less severe cases of the disease? If so, how does that work?
One copy of the sickle cell allele and you are more likely to survive falciparum malaria than people with zero copies. But if you inherit two copies, you die as a child without modern medical care.
You can estimate pretty precisely how dangerous is the falciparum malaria threat in a region by finding the percentage of people with one copy of the sickle cell mutation. It peaks at about 25% around the Congo River, IIRC.
It's a fun reply to be sure. Actually, I was saying Caplan is the one saying there are only preferences, not you. Rather, you prefer to say that whether we should call something a mental illness is a mix of political (state funding for people some people think should be given such money) and scientific reasons. I am disagreeing with that, and saying it should only be a matter of science, even if we can't come up with an airtight or maybe even good definition for now (as you showed here with your 7 examples). My post was mainly aimed at Caplan's view (hence the title which is based on Caplan's claim).
I interpreted "Scott and Caplan are actually somewhat in agreement that taxonomies are meaningless, but Scott just wants to keep them in order to get funding for his friends" as addressing my position directly enough that it was worth responding.
I'm not sure if by funding you mean "funding for research" or "funding for insurance". Either way I think that's only a portion of what I'm interested in. There's also commitment laws, consent laws, medical leave laws, social norms, access to medication, etc - and in my ideal world, we wouldn't have government decrees about what insurance has to cover.
I think I fundamentally disagree with your "matter of science" - if you come up with a scientific definition that's different from what we use to talk about ordinary-life things, the definition won't be useful (as I try to demonstrate here). If you somehow come up with a scientific definition that's exactly the same as how we talk about ordinary-life things (which I think would be hard to impossible), then it will coincidentally work, but as soon as ordinary life changes we will want to move away from your scientific definition.
I think it would be more like how the species concept in biology (cladistics) sort of breaks the normal language concept of zebra. At least, according to Gould's old essay (https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/SJ-Gould-What-if-anything-is-a-zebra.pdf), there isn't a way to define zebra by common descent that doesn't include non-zebras. But looking at Wikipedia, maybe Gould just had bad data (?).
A better example would be how biology made us think differently of whales. A common sense perspective would define fish as creatures living in water that swim and have fins (or something close to that). But the whale family break the pattern. We don't teach kids that whales & dolphins are really fish, and we haven't come up with a secondary new scientific term, rather common language changed to fit the science.
But a monophyletic definition would include dolphins as fish, and humans too! So it seems like science lost that battle.
That seems more like a problem with monophyletic definitions. If one of my descendants becomes a transhuman space dragon, is there no longer a word to describe baseline humans but not it and its spawn? What's the evolutionary equivalent of an apostate?
Yeah, I think we'll have to accept that paraphyletic terms like "fish", "reptile", "wasp" and so on are here to stay, because to most people they're way more useful than the monophyletic alternatives. Likewise, I think more people have a need for a term meaning 'problematic mental state/trait' than for one meaning 'fitness-reducing mental state/trait'.
Yeah, I agree, in this case think I'm largely in favor of Scott-type definitions, in the sense that the common word is going to be for the things people need help dealing with.
But it would also be nice to have a conceptual space for "this thing is abnormal, and low reproductive fitness, but not generally a problem in daily life, and doesn't seem to be genetic, so let's not worry too much about it unless it turns out to be contagious".
If you're arguing for more things like "birds are dinosaurs," I denounce you and all your works.
One difference between species and mental illnesses is that species all share a common causal backbone - genetic variation in the tree of life - whereas mental illnesses don't really do so (except maybe in a tautological sense of "mental illnesses have something to do with humans"). The less mechanistic similarity is shared in causing the variance between entities, the less likely there will be that there is a crisp criterion for their classification.
(This point is arguably not limited to mental illnesses. Physical illnesses also have varied mechanisms, e.g. type 2 diabetes vs cholera infections. I'd guess taxonomizing illnesses works best for germ infections (because they can piggyback off the tree of life), whereas it gets complex for non-infections.)
"Calling whales fish is superficial," said Tom Swifty.
I think you want something more like
"It's breaching!" said Tom, superficially.
Whether whales are fish already came up in an earlier post by Scott: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
I don't think that the whale analogy is fitting. If the taxonomy of the human psyche had the quality of the taxonomy of animal species (with DNA analysis), nobody sane would discuss these definitions (just like nobody sane claims that whales are fish in 2023).
The problem is that we are not at that point.
The correct analogy would both of you being ancient Christian scholars arguing over the definition of fish. Ancient Scott would define a fish as an animal spending most of their lives in the water (and is somewhat motivated in including a lot of animals in the definition so that he gets to eat them on Fridays), while ancient Emil defines a fish as anything created on the the fifth day of creation which does not fly. Both of you likely believe in the existence of sea monsters which do not in fact exist, and don't even imaging that someone might contest that whales are fish.
Perhaps in a century we will have an EEA-simulator which can exactly simulate how mental traits would have affected evolutionary success, and your definition will become favored as the scientific one.
At the moment, none of the definitions of mental illness are really scientific.
Scott's definition (taking into account if some mental trait leads to harmful outcomes in the US in 2023) might be a bit more culturally relative.
Your definition (taking into account if some mental trait would have been maladaptive in the EEA) might seem more objective, but allows just as much wiggle room for arguing that some trait X was in fact beneficial in the EEA. (Perhaps gay sex among hunters lead to better cohesion during hunts and thus more success against big cats or whatever.)
The main thing is that most people care about the things considered by Scott's definition, and roughly nobody cares about the EEA.
If we were picking a human to send back to 300000 BCE in whose DNA we encode the blueprints for the Death Star, and need to optimize that people in 2023 in that timeline can actually decode the blueprint from their DNA and defeat Lord Vader, and are considering what mental traits we would want a candidate to have, then the complement of your definition of mental illness would be called for.
In practice, that problem does not come up very much.
IIRC even beavers had been ruled to be fish, so that they were allowed food for christians on fridays.
I like Scott's cynical definition: a "mental illness" is something that psychiatrists get health insurance funding to treat. Society doesn't like pedophilia, so we pay psychiatrists to try to reduce the amount of it. (I have no idea if it works.) Currently, the culturally dominant parts of society publicly approve of homosexuality (although I have my doubts about the universality of their private feelings) so health insurance doesn't pay psychiatrists to try to reduce the amount of it.
For example, anti-Communism was a "mental illness" in the Soviet Union in the 1970s by Scott's definition: psychiatrists got paid to lock up dissidents in mental hospitals and try to cure them of their anti-Communism.
That view would seem to force one to accept the runaway slaves diagnosis too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania
If Dr. Cartwright managed to talk somebody into paying him in the 1850s to treat slaves' desire to runaway as a medical disorder, yeah, then it would be a "mental illness" under this definition.
The wish that how things are classified "should only be a matter of science" has mostly not been the case across the whole history of science, and especially not in areas where the science is young, as it is in psychology. Science unfolds inside of society and political systems and there is no pure uncontaminated science. There may be more and less contaminated by society and politics, but we just don't understand enough about the mind to make it more like theoretical physics.
The case of autism was conspicuous by its absence in this piece - perhaps "is autism a mental disorder?" is a topic too radioactive even for you?
Autism is obviously a mental disorder at the extremes, although I agree that people can have autistic traits which don't reach that level and are fine. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/12/against-against-autism-cures/ . I didn't include it because it's probably got very complicated evolutionary origins. I write more about them at https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/13/autism-and-intelligence-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ .
The biggest problem to me seems to be “relative to what?” Are all animals mentally ill? If not then we are introducing arbitrariness. If I limit myself to my species, then there are also people out there smarter than me and more conscientious than me, therefore I am not mentally optimal. If that is the case, then am I mentally ill? If not more arbitrariness... and so on. Not to mention that plenty of “improving fitness” will be what is called political. Certain beliefs will help you get laid.
Presumably people who don't want to have children would have fewer children. Is not wanting to have children a mental disorder?
If you're looking for evolutionary fitness or somesuch, number of grandchildren might be a better measure.
Seems to me that you could just add “reproduce and raise healthy functional offspring” to that guy’s definition and you avoid most of the criticisms you’re making.
What do we know about raising healthy functional offspring though? I've heard that throughout most of human history in most cultures corporal punishment of children was the norm. Does it mean they were all terrible parents? But they should've been pushed aside by any culture that forwent the abuse. On the other hand, pain is a powerful motivator so it's plausible that when used properly corporal punishment actually is to the child's eventual benefit. Except how many people are well-adjusted enough to be trusted with using it when it really is to the child's benefit rather than venting or making the child more convenient for them?
So, how about this hypothesis: if you and your child are both mentally healthy and you are not dumb, corporal punishment can actually help the child in the long run, but otherwise it is more likely to hurt them? In this case it is plausible that corporal punishment is to your evolutionary benefit: it definitely is if the conditions above are met, and if not then you hurting your children's fitness might be mitigated by your extended family spending less resources on them.
I think Randolph Nesse's concept of a fitness cliff is relevant here. He argues that for contiually distributed traits subject to fitness trade-offs, the resulting fitness function doesn't have to be normally distributed, but can be slanted. This will result in a point of trait fixation in a population that is not at it's maximal point of fitness, since at one end a catastrophic result for some will occur.
This is proposed to explain why certain mental disorders are fixed in the population. I find it very elegant. We have strong evidence that most psychopathological traits are distributed continually throughout society.
So, looking at it from the gene's eye view, mental disorder is not, in fact, disadvantageous. It can be part of a trait fixating it's underling genetic frequency in an optimal manner. Of course, there are other conceptions, and it surely won't be the whole story. But still, it serves as a reminder that what is being selected for it's evolutionary fitness is not individuals, but gene frequency.
Emil Kirkegaard gets to the conclusion he does because he is is concluding that the competition that matters is at the individual level. But the whole point of evolutionary adaptive explanations is that the traits you are considering have a genetic origin. So, somewhere in there are a set of genes and if you happen to have these series of mutations, poof, you end up gay. And here what matters is whether these genes will prosper in ancestral human populations.
Consider a much simpler case, the genetic inheritance which is responsible for sickle cell disease. Sickle cell disease is caused by a mutation in the hemoglobin-Beta gene found on chromosome 11. So, simple. It is just one gene. And it is recessive, like having blue eyes. You need to inherit the trait from both of your parents if you are to have the disease. Thus every human being has the genetic makeup of one of these 4 states: {NN, NS, SN, SS} where the first letter is your paternal inheritance, the second your maternal inheritance, N is a normal gene and S is a sickle cell gene. NN are normals. They cannot pass the disease to their children. NS and SN are carriers. They do not have the disease but carry the trait and can pass it along to their children. SS have the disease. Were they to reproduce, they would give the trait to every one of their children, but that is not an issue, because until the event of extremely modern medicine, all the SS children died before their sixth birthday.
If Emil Kirkegaard's limited definition of evolutionary fitness was correct, then the sickle cell gene should be bred out of human populations. The SS people are already dead before reproductive age, and the NS and SN people have a 25% immediate failure rate in their children -- and it's actually worse than that. The SS aren't stillborn, which means their parents either committed infanticide or spent years supporting these ill children before their eventual demise. All of this is evolutionary waste.
You would expect that this mutation would fall out of the population and be extremely rare, and if you look at populations where malaria is rare, you would be correct. But in places where malaria is endemic, the mutation thrives, and indeed becomes dominant in the population. Turns out that being SN or NS give you protection from malaria. You are not only less likely to contract it, but also it is less severe when you do. Some researchers in Kenya claim that it gives you a 60% reduction in childhood mortality 'from other causes' before age 6.
This tells us two things. First, malaria -- and anything else you are protected from if you are NS or SN -- is really, really, bad from an evolutionary point of view. If NS and SN parents are able to outbreed NN parents, despite throwing away 25% of their offspring and having another 25% who are genetically NN, thus no different from the NN's offspring -- then carrying the sickle cell trait must be of tremendous advantage to still come out ahead. And second -- evolution is terribly wasteful. All those SS deaths -- you could imagine an alternative world where those embryos conceived as SS would perish early in pregnancy. There are recessive traits where this does seem to happen, called 'homozygous lethals'. Not happening here.
So, back to the inheritability of gayness. The 'wastefulness' of having gay people who do not reproduce around in your prehistoric band doesn't matter. They have _got_ to be less wasteful than the children with sickle cell disease. As long as the genes that produce gayness confer some sort of benefit then it doesn't matter if every so often it also produces somebody that doesn't breed, as long as the benefit is substantial. And it could quite possibly be the _not breeding_ that is the benefit. If mom and pop struggle to raise 2,4 children to reproductive age for the next generation but mom, pop, and pop's brother who doesn't have children can comfortably raise 6 of them, then the genes in pop and pop's brother will prosper. It may also be that not having hungry young mouths to feed and take care of frees up the time needed to invent pottery and philosophy both.
But Emil's not talking about whether a genetic variant is a disorder or not, but whether a trait is. Sickle cell disease is a disorder regardless of whether the genetic variants that cause it are beneficial most of the time.
But you cannot make your definition of illness based on reproductive fitness without looking at the reproductive fitness of the genes involved. It's a problem of the scale of your vision. if the only thing you look at is *how many children will this individual produce* then a good many things will look like evolutionary dead ends. Everybody is in competition with everybody else, and people with more kids are by definition *better*.
But if, instead you were able to look at the genes that cause homosexuality, or a mental illness, or sickle cell disease and check and see how they prosper in human communities, and where lots and lots of copies of these genes are by definition *better*, you could easily end up in a situation where the genes are doing very, very well for themselves despite the fact that it is making certain individuals sick. The genes do not care about the individuals.
The only reason we care about individuals is because we are one. The individual is the unit with which we interact all the time. These days we do not rank people in status based on how many children they have, feel superior to those who have fewer children than we do, and murder 'barren' women for being useless. Fecundity is not how we primarily measure human worth. They are believed to have individual dignity and worth beyond their reproductive competence. This is the whole point of the individual perspective. At the individual level 'do you feel ill' is a very good starting point for studying the individual. But you cannot query individual genes and ask 'do you feel mutated?' or 'do you think this mutation is a good thing?'. The scale is wrong.
You can scale larger than the individual as well. Some societies produce more offspring than others. Are they healthier? Or just poorer and without access to birth control? A society which is seeing an increase in mental illness may decide that this is a problem it would like to change, which will, of course be made more difficult in that we often do not agree whether a given condition is an illness or not.
"But you cannot make your definition of illness based on reproductive fitness without looking at the reproductive fitness of the genes involved."
Wikipedia says "Fitness can be defined either with respect to a genotype or to a *phenotype* in a given environment or time."
You are misunderstanding wikipedia. You can talk about the fitness of a genotype, or the fitness of the phenotype -- we do this all of the time. Which is useful depends on what you want to talk about. What you cannot do is say 'I'm going to define fitness as the fitness of the phenotype only. That's the only thing that matters, and all the rest of you who want to talk about the genotype get kicked out of the science club'. Once you know that the phenotype is largely caused by the genotype the genotype is always potentially relevant to any discussion of the phenotype.
You can talk about genotype, but are you actually contradicting Emil then? Or just talking about a different topic?
My objection is to Emil's Categorisation of his viewpoint as 'coming from the evolutionary perspective' while only treating a tiny subset 'does it help this individual produce more offspring' of what evolutionary biologists think about when they think about evolution.
During the late 1990s, there was much discussion of the theoretical "gay gene." The possible causes of homosexuality, such as the theory assumed by Laura Creighton, were much debated in my circles.
But the question has greatly faded without much of an answer being found.
Ah, the answer was that there isn't one. If there is a genetic determinant, it's got to be a matter of many genes, and interactions with the environment have got to matter, too.
> But if, instead you were able to look at the genes that cause homosexuality
Homosexuality is among the least genetically-connected of all conditions.
I was waiting for someone to write up this, so I wouldn't have to, so thanks! :D Humans are tribal and particularly family group animals, not solitary. Individual fitness matters, but so does the fitness of the family group. Menopause is useful because even though it keeps a woman from reproducing it also keeps her from dying during a pregnancy she is going to struggle with, and so producing food for the family's young children produced by her own off spring. Homosexuality, so long as it is not too prevalent, does the same only for the off spring of brothers and sisters.
People always seem to want to make the mistake of treating humans like sharks, orangutans or other solitary animals instead of wolves, gorillas, or other more hyper social animals. We can't live on our own for extended periods of time, we have to have a group to work with.
Homosexuals do not invest more in their siblings' children. A woman who stops having more children after menopause and focuses on her existing children can still have high individual fitness. That doesn't apply to a homosexual who has no children of their own. There are eusocial species (not humans) in which a single queen gets to reproduce while lots of worker castes just support her... but those tend to be highly related through things like haplodiploid genetics (or inbreeding in the case of termites).
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/group-selection-and-homosexuality/
Right. It's hard to see much evidence in daily life of gay uncles devoting themselves extraordinarily to their siblings' welfare. If they did enough to make up a 50% reduction in their own fertility, you could come up with countless examples you've observed in your own life. But instead, you can come up with a few nice things gay uncles did for nieces and nephews but not exceptionally more than straight uncles did.
Another possibility, however, is that, say, feminine traits are so important to reproductive fitness that some of them leak into the male population. But that seems like the kind of thing evolution would tend to fix. But who knows?
So you seem to be comparing modern behaviors instead of pre-modern behaviors, and you seem to be forgetting that traits need not be "better" to be genetically extant, but merely "good enough".
To the previous point, when families were much closer knit in working extra males bringing home more meat to share with the tribe or clan means more food for the kids and less competition for it. Likewise when an extended family was working a farm. As we get to more modern times when families were more broken into the nuclear family that does become less relevant, however we shouldn't neglect the value of a "bachelor uncle" who might adopt orphaned relatives (men died a lot back then), engage in career nepotism, or just die leaving the relative kids some inheritance. I agree that the modern value for related kids isn't too high, but the premodern was quite high I think, particularly in regions with less abundant food resources.
To the second point, while it is true that in absolute terms a homosexual child means a chunk of the family's ability to reproduce goes away (to some extent) it isn't about having the highest total possible reproductive possibility. If having the occasional (and rare) non-reproducing member isn't too bad it can still continue along, that is to say, still pass selection. Maybe having a non-breeding adult in the clan helps mitigate tail end events, such as food shortages, reducing the variability in kids produced, for instance. Or maybe so many men die without reproducing (I have seen estimates that two times as many females reproduced than males, so estimates that only 35-40% of males reproduce, but I have no idea how reasonable that is) that the occasional male that doesn't die but doesn't reproduce either isn't that big of a deal for the viability of the family line. In the case of women, many die in child birth before having many kids, so apparently that isn't such a hard stop on reproductive fitness, having 50% fewer kids and not dying, that is.
Anthropologists have studied over 1000 pre-industrial cultures. Surely, somebody by now has gone through the cultural profiles looking for evidence of self-sacrificing gay uncles. After all, it would be a popular finding. But I've never heard of much being found.
What is self sacrificing about it? The extended family shares resources, that's what they do. Whether the uncle does not have kids because he just hasn't gotten married yet or his kids are grown or he buggers men, when the family is living communally he is still contributing to them all around.
Further, it seems odd to suggest that family members do not provide resources to other extended family members even into modern times. "Your uncle has some pull in the capital, and can get you a job" has been useful as long as there have been capitals and jobs.
No, "good enough" gets displaced by "better". The frequency of a selected allele goes up, while that of deleterious alleles go down.
These bachelor uncles adopting orphans seem to be more figments of your imagination than reflecting anything in reality. There's no way such a thing outweighs said uncles not having children of their own.
For your example of a small percent of males reproducing: who are the males who don't reproduce descended from? That small percent of successful males of the past. There is continual "truncation selection" of the least fit males (this is how male elephant seals got so big). And deaths in childbirth aren't that common among hunter-gatherers, it was really when doctors got involved in childbirth that such deaths shot up.
No, good enough is good enough, and makes it to the next generation. That's why e.g. octopi tend to die of cancer after just a couple years of life: they don't live long without getting eaten, so "not very resistant to cancer" is good enough. Likewise how not all male elephant seals are giants, despite that being the primary mode of reproduction (smaller ones sometimes sneak sex, or just never reproduce at all... wait...). Plenty of not very good variations exist right next to better variations and continue along, because while they are not great they are good enough.
If you can't grasp that you are not grasping the fundamental process. Evolutionary processes do not produce one "best" outcome, but rather a range of outcomes that all work a little better or a little worse in a range of different circumstances, some of which are just good enough.
In 1976, 10% of U.S. women passed out of their childbearing years without having children. What percent of the population is gay men? Isn't it enough that most people seem to want to reproduce? What is gained from pathologizing a certain amount of human variation? If you want to pathologize either gay men or non-reproducing women, why use ideas about natural selection to do that?
You say "do", present tense. What matters is "did", past tense. When humans lived in more closely knit family units, tribes and clans, where meat from hunts was routinely shared and even later when a family would work a farm together, the investment was in the family, which benefitted the children.
Investment in a child who won't give you grandchildren is a waste in Darwinian terms. There are eusocial species where non-reproducing members can be analogized to somatic cells dedicated to assisting the germ cells in reproduction... but humans aren't like that. Handwaving about families being collective does not change the math of selection.
No, it absolutely does. You care how many viable children the family produces to adulthood, and that number does not grow linearly with the number of reproducing adults, but is a curving function of the environmental constraints. Humans are not eusocial, but we aren't solitary either, leaning towards the heavily social end of the spectrum.
Some scientists once tried to deliberately induce selection for restrained breeding. Instead the result was cannibalizing the children of others
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QsMJQSFj7WfoTMNgW/the-tragedy-of-group-selectionism
Let's imagine a family of the sort you're discussing. One sibling has a mutation that prevents them from having children. Perhaps there is more food for the children of other siblings (although recall that this non-reproducing sibling still consumes food throughout their lifetime), but that mutation will not get passed down. Kin selection would mean you derive some fitness from the children of your siblings... but you'd derive even more from your own children, so that's who you should prefer investing in. From the perspective of a grandparent, what do you want? Not that any of your offspring simply refrain from having children, but that they avoid wastefully fighting each other for resources with which to reproduce... preferably they'd be fighting non-kin instead.
The concordance rate of homosexuality among identical twins is very low. It's one of the least genetic traits we've measured. Hence Cochran's theory that a pathogen is responsible.
Or other epigenetic factors, see for instance https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18530 . But, of course, we already think that all sorts of mental illnesses are quite likely to be epigenetic in character. Meanwhile a different group of biologists are all trying to demonstrate that it's all the gut microbiome and how that interacts with the brain. see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01479-w And this is just the biologists. The sociologists and and the anthropologists, among others, would like to have a word. :)
All of which goes to demonstrate that an evolutionary psychiatry that collapses all of evolutionary biology into 'does it make it more likely that I will sire lots and lots of children' is going to miss the forest for the leaf of one tree. I am very much in favour of having evolutionary theory inform all sorts of understanding, especially in the humanities where it has been sorely lacking, but there is more to the human experience than counting one's descendants, biggest number wins.
> But, of course, we already think that all sorts of mental illnesses are quite likely to be epigenetic in character.
Who is "we"? I know epigenetics is a buzz word among people who know little about the subject.
All I meant by 'we' here is 'bunch of papers published in the prestigious sceince magazines'.
Gut micobiome ... that's a new theory of the cause of homosexuality.
That theory, if true, sounds particularly likely to lead to a medical cure for homosexuality: "Here, take this dietary supplement daily and you won't turn out to be gay."
I haven't read papers that claim gut microbiome causes homosexuality, but there is evidence that this is behind certain people's mental illnesses -- depression and schitzophrenia in some people for example.
>First, malaria -- and anything else you are protected from if you are NS or SN -- is really, really, bad from an evolutionary point of view.
It's not great from a personal point of view either!
I feel like mental disorder (Emil) kinda encompasses mental disorder (Scott). If you can't function socially, that will likely reduce your reproductive fitness
Mental disorder (Scott) seems like a special case of mental disorder (Emil)
First, I don't think this is correct. Second, you get the same special case for each of them by saying "everyone is mentally ill", so it doesn't really help.
why do you think my claim is not correct?
and could you elaborate on your second point? I sincerely do not understand it
1. For instance, let's say we have someone who would have a mental disorder under Scott's definition - let's say a pyromaniac - who is also clever enough to get away with it. Since he gets away with it, it doesn't lessen fitness, and so isn't a mental illness under Emil's definition.
2. Alright, so what even if it _is_ a special case? That just means it's a more restrictive definition, not that they have anything else in common. _Every_ definition of mental disorders will have a classification that is by necessity a subset of "everything is (or everyone has) a mental disorder", without this meaning anything productive.
I need to think about your point 2.
But point one is trivially refuted:
Being a pyromaniac surely carries a lot of opportunity cost and risk and is therefore not adaptive. Being able to get away with it is a sign of high intelligence, which might be adaptive. Being a pyromaniac by itself though is clearly not adaptive and therefore an emil-mental-illness.
About your point two, I can think of nothing else other than that Emil's definition is grasping reality at its joins and is more useful, enlightening, better explaining the real meaning of the term "mental illness".
I think Jerome Wakefield solved the how-to-define-a-disorder problem in 1992 with his «harmful dysfunction» analysis. A disorder has to be harmful to the individual or other people (value statement) AND an evolutionary dysfunction (fitness reducing). Both you and Emil alludes to it, but do not mention it explicitly. Here is the paper: https://www.psy.miami.edu/_assets/pdf/rpo-articles/wakefield-1992.pdf
That was so much fun! And mostly right. Just one thing, nay, two: 1. Pederasty (man does boys): Socially tolerated (Plato, Afghanistan) and socially enforced in several tribes of Papua-Guinea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simbari_people#Gender_roles_and_sexuality "Pre-pubescent boys are required to perform fellatio on older males and swallow the semen because it is believed that without this 'male milk' they will fail to mature properly. Upon reaching adulthood, men marry and engage in heterosexual behavior, initially requiring their (under-age) brides to fellate them and later perform penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse. Homosexual behavior past this point is rare." Now, for the Simbari people this seems neither mental-disorder-(Emil) nor mental-disorder-(Scott). Me, I feel different.
2. Maybe some deviant acts in our society we best call: 'crimes' - and some others just 'pervert'? (Some say: certain people seem to have certain sets of preferences that make them more or less prone to commit certain crimes.)
If one can adjust one's actual behaviour to societal/social pressure (as nearly everyone nearly always can and does), then considering applying societal/social pressure seems rather straightforward in dealing with unwanted behavior - not excluding therapeutical approaches, when efficient. "You can do better than fool around!" וְלֹ֖֣א תִּֿנְאָֽ֑ף׃ . Or more East of Eden: sin lies in wait at the door: its urge is for you, yet you can rule over it. "Timshel" תימשל
I don't understand why this battle is being fought over paraphilias, nor over evolutionary fitness. I am getting that Englishman-in-New-York vibe of having wandered in to a culture war I don't understand. Evolutionary fitness is about heritability, and I don't see why it gets a look-in here, given the very small hereditable component in schizophrenia, depression etc. We don't analyse cancer or for that matter broken legs in these terms, despite both of them being clearly negative for survival prospects.
The paraphilias don't fit for several reasons. They don't seem to disable sufferers in other areas of their lives (see high-functioning pillars of society with 12,749 extreme images on their laptop) which doesn't go with intuitive understandings of illness, they don't seem to be routinely incompatible with reproduction (see married fathers of four with 12,749 extreme images on their laptop). They are in fact an evolutionary tool. Consider peahens: there was presumably a time when peafowl of either sex were drab brown things, and a peahen who imprinted on an abstract painting with a lot of eyes in it would be a raging fetishist, no question. Fast forward a bit and having that fetish is crucial to her reproductive fitness: and it is just a fetish, it's not in itself about better food gathering qualities or camouflage from predators.
So are people trying to motte and bailey their way to an R D Laing position, where the motte is schizophrenia and the bailey is being gay? I think the sort of schizophrenic who is instructed by God to murder complete strangers, or their parents, is a more useful type case.
My understanding is that schizophrenia is looking increasingly genetic, while homosexuality is mostly not.
The subtext is that Kierkegaard is expressing a polite form.of far -right views.
<mild snark>
"or for that matter broken legs in these terms, despite both of them being clearly negative"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9933300/
"Osteoporosis is highly polygenic and heritable, with heritability ranging from 50 to 80%; most inherited susceptibility is associated with the cumulative effect of many common genetic variants."
</mild snark>
Onset typically age 50+. Possibly a bit earlier if your hunter gatherer diet is deficient in calcium but still way too old to have selection effects.
The fact that it is so highly genetically determined is a strong indication this is likely to be the case.
"still way too old to have selection effects"
Good point!
Nitpick re: the ephebophilia example: assuming the men have already had children, 3 would probably be more likely to help them have children of their own so eventually he might end up with more grandchildren than 1 and 2
Unfortunately, for genetic reasons, a child is evolutionary more beneficial than a grandchild.
The only exception would be if two children would have a kid together, making the man both the paternal and maternal grandfather. In that case the man would be genetically indifferent between the a child and a grandchild, but the case is creepy for other reasons.
By Emil's definition, being shy is a mental illness
As a matter of fact, introversion is correlated with mental illness. So sure, it is in the direction of problems, away from optimal. But one of my points was that everything in this area is clinal, or close to everything. People with panic disorders, unipolar depression, GAD and the like are about 1 standard deviation below average in extroversion. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20804236/
Reminds me also of that (possibly apocryphal?) thing where modern chickens are *hyper* aggressive and can really hurt one another badly, in part because early breeding programs selected the most prolific hens in each coop. Turns out the way to be the most prolific hen in a coop was to bully all the others violently and break the others' eggs; but once you have a coop of all bullies, however, it's not nearly as effective. So we made a species of jerk chickens that didn't notably outperform the alternative.
In hindsight, of course, they should have picked the highest-laying *coops*, not the highest-laying *individual hens*. When you've got a species with complex social interactions and specialized roles, it's really dangerous to assess fitness only on the basis of individual childbearing numbers! Which is to say, I don't think that mental-disorder-(Emil) even resolves the ambiguity that Emil probably wants it to, because human reproductive fitness itself depends on the social dynamics of what other people around you are doing. Anchoring mental illness in evolutionary biology doesn't even excise the cultural relativism!
Isn't there a similar hypothesis that having a few homosexual individuals is beneficial to a group? Which exclaims why it wasn't weeded out by evolution.
And I think evo psych has a fair amount to say about personality and genetics. One reason that human personality exists on such a wide gamut is that different traits are useful to the group in different situations, so selecting for, say, just extroverts leaves the group vulnerable to different threats than having just introverts.
For a more extreme example of group fitness being different than individual fitness, look at a worker ant. They're a genetic dead end, but clearly important for the colony to function.
"Isn't there a similar hypothesis that having a few homosexual individuals is beneficial to a group? Which exclaims why it wasn't weeded out by evolution."
The thing is, group selection is miserably weak compared to individual selection. Individual selection is likely to wipe out any non-breeding genes before the benefit for group manifests. The non-breeding individual would have to serve very close relatives very efficiently to make up for not breeding and keep the non-breeding genes in the gene pool (e.g. in social insects it seems to work well.). I don't mean that group selection doesn't work at all, without it we wouldn't have multicellular organisms. But still.
As pointed out elsewhere in this comment section - it is common (or at least used to be) for homosexual individuals to still have children.
Right. I replied somewhat hastily to the use of group selection to explain deleterious traits. We don't know how well homosexuals used to breed in traditional societies, maybe they were average breeders. Also, homosexuality has moderately low heritability, which makes it harder to be genetically "wiped out" or "take over" the gene pool.
Hard to make a model of group selection work:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/group-selection-and-homosexuality/
Ants are haplodiploid, and thus much more related to their siblings than humans are. They also have a nest to defend (typical of eusocial species), while humans do not:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/10/26/the-third-sex/
I read that on Less Wrong, "Conjuring An Evolution To Serve You."
Thanks for the citation! That must be where I originally ran across it as well.
What I find so puzzling about these debates is why it seems that sophisticated individuals like Caplain or this new individual can nevertheless seem to become super convinced there is something like the 'true' meaning of a term and that it can be somehow divined just by thinking about the distinctions they care about. And why do they always seem to assume that these new meanings carry along the usual morally associations? And once they realize they aren't using the terms like others are why don't they just introduce some nuetral term and stipulatively define it to make their argument.
I understand that they might believe that they have a more elegant choice of terminology but surely they don't believe that words always just mean whatever it takes to give the most elegant account and even if they did believe that why would they think those words retain their usual moral associations?
Like why do they never just say: I think terms like preference and mental illness are too vague/inelegant so I propose we use spreference and smental illness instead with these new meanings and then explain why they think this new means of description supports their moral views?
Because it's a weak move in the political/social game. Requiring buy in for your new terms is a much harder sell than claiming those already in wide use. I guess people generally aren't cynical enough to run this calculation explicitly, but it's probably hard-wired somehow.
I understand that when I see a politician or even a random person do it but that doesn't make sense for Caplain and many others.
I think it's pretty obvious that Caplain could have been more persuasive on feminism had he written his stuff in the form: let's stipulate feminism means the belief that men and women are equal therefore it's not true feminism when ... insert the views he dislikes. And that's what people do unconsciously ...they try to shift definitions to make them more, not less, appealing.
I sus he's motivated by much the same things are motivating me to write this comment: conditioned to feel that saying smart shit is rewarding and a desire to feel like the person who is saying what's not admitted.
Yes, semantics is about usefulness not truth.
That proves far too much and doesn't really explain the answer. Anytime I ask, "why did that person defend that seemingly crazy argument" you could say, "speech is about usefulness not truth".
Sure, it's true in a sense but it doesn't explain anything. Caplain isn't out there using political/TV psychic tricks to get people to support his beliefs and he makes similar errors even in cases where the opposite belief would help his cause (eg persuading people on feminism...see my other reply). The question is why does this kind of error seem very sticky in people who otherwise seem to derive credibility by avoiding bad arguments.
Usefulness and uselessness can be established (and often more easily than truth/falsehood). So it's not some vacuous, on-size fits-all thing.
People who aren't philosophers keep making this kind of error because they are not philosophers.
First, even if you are correct it doesn't explain the phenomenon: ie it doesn't explain why people like Caplain to make this mistake/persuasive choice but NOT a broad range of other effective persuasive tricks we see politicians use all the time. What needs explaining is why ppl like him seem particularly likely to make this mistake and not in proportion to it's persuasive power.
Also, I'm very skeptical that it can be determined more easily on a useful definition of useful. I mean, on any very concrete definition of useful in terms of observable outcomes (maximize wealth, children, mates, lifespan, leisure time) we see that people behave non-usefully probably more than they behave usefully in their speech.
For instance, anyone meeting attractive (to them) individuals while far from home (vacation, biz trip etc) should lie through their teeth about their social status and accomplishments. Probably should do so w/ everyone. The external punishments are essentially zero and extremely low likelihood of being found out. Yet if I talk to someone on vacation or in some other one time encounter truth seems to be a better predictor of their responses than usefulness. Indeed, this is true across a huge range of activities where good sociopathic lying has positive impact on external outcomes.
Of course you can say things like, but they might feel guilty, in the evolutionary environment it wouldn't have been a good deal etc etc,. But that no longer provides a real explanation because usefulness isn't something one can observe. It's also incredibly vulnerable to just-so style stories (whatever the action you can give a story about how it's useful in this wider sense).
I don't know why you are makings such such heavy going of this: people don't do useful thing X, because they don't know it's useful, or they don't know how to do jt.
When In say semantics is about usefulness , I mean i) we do.things with with words ii) there is nothing to establish the True Mean ing beyond that. I don't mean "all.speech acts are useful".
Because the question is to explain why of all the possible fallacies that Caplain etc indulge in, all of which are persuasively/tribally useful, they seem to be pretty good at avoiding most of them but not this particular fallacy about meaning. I agree you've given an explanation of why many smart people engage in that fallacy but also most smart people engage in a broad swath of such fallacies in whatever way lets them support their tribal/whatever alignments. While Caplain is hardly immune from this he seems to suffer from this particular fallacy at a hugely outsized rate relative to a theory which just says: yah ppl say whatever's useful to say and don't really care much about truth.
It's equivalent to me asking, "Hey why does Jane use an electric grinder in a context where Jane uses old timey mechanical drills, sanders etc etc." Yes, remarking that electric grinders are useful explains why they are common items used by many people. However, it doesn't meaningfully explain why Jane doesn't use an electric grinders as that would need to distinguish between how she relates grinders (where she does pick the 'useful' option) and other tools where she doesn't.
Caplain and other people we are talking about are like Jane in that they seem to systematically avoid many common fallacies despite them also being useful persuasive/etc devices and while they certainly aren't perfect the fact that they seem to regularly fall into one sort of fallacy even while avoiding others that. would be similarly useful requires an explanation which identifies what is different about this case from all the cases where they don't indulge in some useful fallacy.
Most of my response was heading off the argument that you could basically just say whatever way they did in fact choose to use language must be what was useful.o
I think a better framing of mental illness would include a notion of 'mental distress'. For various speculative ruminations on this topic, see my following blog post: https://www.awanderingmind.blog/posts/2022-02-02-on-being-mentally-unwell-part-2.html
I think a lot of people are mistaken about the lack of reproductive fitness for homosexuals throughout history - yes, perhaps it lessens it a bit, but for the overwhelming part of history, loving your wife was a secondary consideration at best and most everyone was expected to marry and have a family regardless of their sexual preferences.
Heterosexuality is obviously an adaptation. It arose because directing mating efforts toward the opposite sex will predictably result in more offspring than not directing in such a manner. A trait that systematically resulted in fewer offspring should be expected to get weeded out to the point where its frequency is determined by de novo mutations.
>It arose because directing mating efforts toward the opposite sex will predictably result in more offspring than not directing in such a manner.
Perhaps, but I think I remember reading a theory that homosexuality in males often goes hand-in-hand with hypersexuality, and often these men are somewhat bisexual and will typically have sex with whatever willing partner is available. Which also happens to usually involve other (hypersexual) men. But they would still often have as many if not more children than otherwise non-hypersexual men.
I'm not sure if that theory really reflects reality, can't even remember where I saw it (hopefully I'm not repeating some theory thought up by an alt-righter in order to make homosexuals look bad to conservatives). But it seems like it could be possible in an evolutionary sense for animals that display homosexual behavior to actually be more reproductively successful than their less horny heterosexual peers.
Obviously this doesn't explain homosexuality between females, but I think it's likely that female sexual preference had little to no impact on evolutionary success in our species... the males undoubtedly didn't leave them with much choice. And forging closer ties between females was likely slightly beneficial if anything.
Bisexuality is more common among females while obligate homosexuality is more common among males.
I know William Bucker of Traditions of Conflict (@Evolving_Moloch on Twitter) downplays female mate choice since so many societies constraint said choice, but I can't go that far. Genetic conflict has been known about since Trivers, and females able to "win" such conflicts by acting in their own interest will have an advantage over those that don't. Females may be stereotypically more passive in mating than males, but they aren't completely so and this is indicative of a capacity they've retained even as they've evolved through a history of attempts to constrain that capacity.
I think this article is excellent on its own, but an important point that is only hinted at here and there is that Emil's definition presumes adaptation to a particular environment. This environment is obviously not modernity, but it is obviously not the savannah either since basically no modern humans are adapted to living on the savannah. So where is it? The answer is it's nowhere because human evolution has been ongoing, indeed accelerating, for 100,000 with each new adaptation causing a change in environment which introduces new evolutionary pressures.
However, you are simply and obviously wrong that homosexuality "seems basically okay for everyone involved". First of all there's AIDS, duh and that should be case closed. But even if there wasn't AIDS, gay (not lesbian) people mostly lead really squalid lives. Yes you doubtless know some gay people who seem pretty fine, you also almost certainly know some manic depressives who seem just fine too.
>1: ADHD
One does wonder to what degree this is a made-up category for moderns unable to sit sufficiently still in a boring classroom.
>3: Ephebophilia
As phrased ("only"), 1 and 3 exclude almost all of fertile females. 2 is the least disordered of the three, per Emil's disorder definitions.
>5: Chronic Pain, Panic Attacks, Or, If You Insist, Nightmares
>I think Emil has to bite the bullet that conditions which make people miserable and ruin their lives aren’t mental disorders as long as they don’t affect functioning.
If they don't affect functioning, they sound inconsequentially mild. Being "miserable" and having a "ruined life" sounds incompatible with unaffected functioning.
I'm pretty sure that having interrupted sleep does in fact cause dysfunction.
Yeah, me too. The example is just painfully internally contradictory.
On alcohol & fecundity: Mormons are supposedly teetotalers, and seem to have lots of children. As are Seventh Day Adventists. I'm not sure if Orthodox Jews are teetotalers or not, but they, too, tend to have many children.
Good point!
Umm.. .."mental-disorder-(Emil)" would classify feminism as a mental illness. Not sure if he realizes that, or wants to go there.
"Wow. I didn't know that. You're telling me now for the first time."
Is it possible that there is an aspect of "non-overlapping magisteria" here when trying to characterize certain behaviors strictly through the lens of their apparently dysgenic consequences?
I.e., a man who is monogamous may have fewer children than a promiscuous one, but that doesn't imply that man 1 suffers from some disorder. Perhaps some behaviors should be assessed through the lens of improvements to social harmonization rather than the absolute magnitude of offspring produced by that strategy?
The social consequences of these behaviors (unrestrained promiscuity is clearly frowned upon for its social destructiveness!) have implications for the future reproductive fitness of men via their social standing - or even their very survival, as sexual jealousy is a leading cause of various forms of violence.
There's actually good reasons to think that a certain amount of pedophilic attraction would have been adaptive for men in ancestral societies. It seems irrational and maladaptive for men to be attracted to little girls in modern societies where we have high ages of consent and marriage is only practised between adults. But in the hunter-gatherer societies we evolved in which they practice child marriage the adaptive value of pedophilic attraction would be that it would motivate men to secure child brides.
I've noticed that most arguments about the adaptive value of attraction to particular age groups naively focus on the female's current fertility and whether having sex with them would lead to reproduction at that age. Humans don't run around having one-night-stands with eachother but instead form long-term bonds so what really needs to be considered is the TOTAL amount of offspring a man can potentially get from a female.
An 8yo girl has all of her fertile years ahead of her can give a man many more offspring than a 30yo who is approaching the end of her fertility (about 40 in HG societies). So imagine we have two men. The first man is attracted most to 8yo girls: "Oh, the're so cute and pretty! I want to hold one and keep her for myself!". The second man is attracted most to 30yo women. The first man would be more likely to secure an 8yo wife while the second man would be more likely to secure a 30yo wife, whether by seducing them, making deals with their dads, or by kidnapping them from other tribes. Since the 8yo has many more fertile years ahead of her than the 30yo the first man would leave behind more descendants than the second man.
The logic really isn't complicated. A certain amount amount of pedophilic attraction would have been adaptive in ancestral hunter-gatherer societies and so must have become normal in men. But it's such a taboo topic at the moment our society isn't ready to accept this. If we lived in a tribe in the Amazon where men marry girls when they're 8yo and start having intercourse with them when they're 12 (I'm not making this up) people would be much more accepting of the claim that pedophilic attraction can have adaptive value.
They're talking about people who are only attracted to prepubescents.
"Since the 8yo has many more fertile years ahead of her than the 30yo the first man would leave behind more descendants than the second man. "
Maybe, although the higher the morality rates the more beneficial to have a bride that's fertile now.
>>They're talking about people who are only attracted to prepubescents.
But that's mostly a caricature. The idea of the man who's only attracted to prepubescents and not attracted at all to adults doesn't really exist.
>>Maybe, although the higher the morality rates the more beneficial to have a bride that's fertile now.
Not quite. In order to monopolise a female's fertile lifespan the best time to secure is before the onset of her fertily not after it. If your shift starts at 8 o'clock you don't get to work after 8 but just before it. This is not theoretical, we see it happening. In traditional hunter-gatherer societies men usually marry and start having sex with girls a few years before they start ovulating.
I'm not claiming that marrying prepubescents can't increase fitness generally, I said that marrying 8 year olds over 30 year olds wouldn't necessarily do so depending on circumstances. The higher the rate of mortality, the lower the chance that a fertile lifespan will be fully utilized. If you only have a week to live there's no point in getting a job that starts in two weeks.
Robin Hanson argued something like that:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/pedophiles-are-long-term-matershtml
Until she becomes 13 and he is no longer attracted to her. Isn’t that kind of embedded in this proposition?
The more technical terms you are looking for are Fisher's reproductive value vs fecundity, some interesting interesting work has been done in recent years by Lassek and Gaulin and such, they make a couple mistakes about fecundity, and most researchers don't even seem to understand what Fisher meant when he talked about reproductive value etc. I would recommend relevant section in The Genetical Theory, Fisher has a very interesting graph of reproductive value and left some pretty funny comments under it.
If you want to see a brief history of the stuff around fecundity I have loosely outlined it in a previous post, (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-can-fetish-research-tell-us/comments) if you ctrl f my name. Also made a comment under this post that might interest you, and TGGP already mentioned the old Hanson post.
I think the high rate of comorbidity between paedo- and homophilia would suggest that it's a disordering of the sexual function rather than normal variation. And an evolutionary explanation for the paedo who prefers 6 year olds over 11 year olds would seem to stretch credulity. Also, I'm not aware of any paedophiliac tendencies in other pair-bonding species.
"Emil proposes an alternate definition: a mental disorder is a mental trait which lowers reproductive fitness."
I don't think this can be a useful definition. Evolution has many uses for genetic diversity. A trait which lowers your chance to reproduce in one environment may enhance your chance in a different environment, or it may enhance the chance of your group reproducing.
Some traits may have survival value for the individual, but we still might want to consider them mental disorders: psychopathy, for example
A man who volunteers for a dangerous mission to explore outer space may be lowering his chances of reproducing, but we don't want to call that a mental disorder.
Yes, it's extremely stupid. What we class as a mental illness essentially depends on whether it causes harm or not. Einstein level intelligence is probably evolutionarily maladaptive but we don't class high IQ people as mentally ill and give them lead pills to bring their IQ down to normal because high intelligence is a good thing for people and society. Whether it's evolutionary adaptive or not is irrelevant.
Extremely high IQ by itself isn't maladaptive, but the tradeoffs required to achieve it weren't worth it in the EEA.
Emil seems to consider a rather wide range of mental illnesses:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2636
Problem with the term illness is it comes with a lot of baguage: Social stigma, or the opposite: societal help in term of treatment reimbursement or other monetary/non monetary benefits, protection against discrimination and getting fired. Also, in some cases, removal of full adult autonomy (forced treatments or internment) and/or partial removal of judiciary responsability.
Defining something as an illness has more to do with those "side effects" than any logical consideration, or actual treatments.
Maladaptive may be better: socially maladapted and reproductively maladapted are clearly different but relatively easy to understand things.
My own definition is quite pragmatic but neither very useful nor without problematic cases: an illness is a condition that make someone suffer (pain or unhappiness) for which a treatment exists or could theoretically exists, the treatment being anything (that at least alleviate the problem(s) and would be voluntarily taken by the ill person.
This is not foolproof: with this definition, poverty is an illness ;-p.
I agree with the baggage problem. I have always been severely annoyed by the tendency for discourse to place connotation over denotation, I was in a college-level history class decades ago wherein Catholicism's "cult of the Saints" was discussed and people thought it was an anti-Catholic bigoted accusation that they were Jim Jones or David Koresh level crazy.
A huge amount of the disagreement here is motivated by wanting to keep certain conditions from being labeled "illness", or to acquire such a label, for political and social reasons. So alcoholism is an illness because we want people to not be seen as responsible for their addiction but also want them to try to cure it. Meanwhile, a host of variant sexual behaviors are NOT an illness because those communities and their allies don't want anybody trying to "cure" them, which they're averse to for pretty good historical reasons. (And the gender-identity folks have drawn the toughest position in this game, needing to walk the fine line of it being a life-threatening illness so they can get coverage for the cure, but also needing the only acceptable cure to be affirmative medical interventions.)
But unfortunately, I think your choice of "maladaptive" also has too many negative connotations to work. Sadly almost every term that would serve this purpose has too many negative connotations because abnormalities have been the basis for shunning and cruelty across every culture that has a language with a term for it. Even "suboptimal" is too negative, you can almost hear the "whaddaya mean, that I'm not as good?!" You can use language like "divergent", "atypical" or "non-standard" that indicates it's not the majority behavior, but any suggestion that this divergent behavior is worse in any way will trigger all the fears of persecution that people in those categories have.
Homosexuality is clearly a malfunction of the fundamental reproductive drive, but it's politically unpopular to say that.
Amusingly, that homosexuality is a malfunction is one of that ever-increasing list of things that are so obvious that nobody is supposed to say it anymore because they are stereotypes, which we are supposed to believe can't possibly be true. So, therefore, all good people are oblivious to the obvious. Not surprisingly, our society is becoming ever more dysfunctional, especially among the truest of true believers in the new faith: liberal teenage girls whose rates of mental illness have soared during the Great Awokening.
"Homosexuality is clearly a malfunction of the fundamental reproductive drive, but it's politically unpopular to say that."
I suppose it depends on whether one takes "malfunction" as suggesting that there is some sort of motivation or obligation to fix it.
In the absence of that suggestion - well, I use my sugar-sensitive taste buds to respond to aspartame and sucralose a lot of the time, and I'm childfree, so I use my genitals for orgasms, not for making copies of my DNA. I view this as creative repurposing. :-)
At present, the only known way to fix homosexuality in any sense of the word is through gender transition: e.g., give your lesbian tomboy daughter testosterone and a mastectomy and call her your son.
But in the future, perhaps a less ... severe method will emerge. Say that parents could take a pill with no side effects before conceiving a child that would lower the chance of the child growing up to be homosexual by 50%. What percentage of Scott's neighbors in Berkeley who are planning families would sign up for that service if they could have the pills delivered in a brown paper wrapper so the neighbors would never know?
20%?
80%?
Good question. In general, for most characteristics without multipolar equilibriums, there is usually an advantage towards winding up with the most common version of a trait. Given an analog of your hypothetical pill for e.g. degree of religiosity, I'd expect the number of atheists to drop. I'd expect the population distributions of many traits to tend towards a delta function.
( I've seen claims that e.g. left-handedness has an equilibrium concentration.)
Given such a pill that worked on adults (admittedly even less likely), the tradeoffs could get fun to watch. If STD statistics were the dominant motivator, then men would tend to switch from homosexual to heterosexual and women would tend to switch from heterosexual to homosexual.
I would *hate* this concept of "genetic maladaptation" - at least as defined in these terms.
I'm looking at this from the perspective of developmental systems theory lately, the idea of which is that (contra the popular view and people like Richard Dawkins) it isn't just the genes that replicate themselves. Genes can't, in fact, replicate themselves in the absence of a whole complex interacting web of developmental resources that includes the cytoplasm of the reproductive cell, the environmental conditions that allow for reproduction and so on (which for humans includes a very complex cultural context). What reproduces itself, then, isn't the gene, or the individual, but the entire developmental system, which includes much of culture.
In that context, the question of whether a particular individual is reproductively successful is irrelevant; what matters is a much broader system. So, to take an imaginary example, it might be the case that homosexuality contributes to the community in which others who aren't the direct offspring of homosexuals are raised by being extra adults who are able to provide resources and care or whatever, and in that way would contribute to an overall developmental system. That's just a made up just-so story; the point is that it *could* be the case, and to understand whether the trait of homosexuality is "maladaptive" for the developmental system we'd have to know whether it is the case or not. Another example would be a teacher who doesn't have children but contributes to the overall developmental system of very many children by educating them.
I'm reminded of a very post-Darwinian line from Nietzsche, where he says something to the effect of "no matter what your characteristics are, they are all part of the nature of the species, and thus all part of the output of a phenomenally successful evolutionary lineage." (He says it a lot more eloquently...) In terms of adaptive fitness, it might even be the case that society benefits in some opaque way from sociopathy or depression or whatever, and if those conditions were removed from the social environment the developmental system would be less reproductively successful. The point isn't that sociopathy and depression are "fine" or shouldn't be treated; the point is that we can't even form a coherent concept of "genetic maladaptation" if we're myopically focused on the individual's success or lack thereof of passing on their own personal genes at the expense of looking at the broader developmental system.
It's a made up just-so story which doesn't actually appear to be the case
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/group-selection-and-homosexuality/
Yes, I would expect most made up just-so stories to not actually be the case!
It DOES matter which individuals are reproductively successful in humans, because we aren't a eusocial species.
Right, it's a theory that would be popular with the media ("Gay Men Found to Be Self-Sacrificing Heroes") if there were evidence for it, but nobody has managed to find much evidence for it over the quarter of a century or so that it has been around.
It could be that the community benefits from the existence of homosexuals through, say, better art. It could be that 150 years from now, advances in medical science have allowed parents to choose to avoid male homosexual children the way Down's Syndrome children have been phased out over the course of my lifetime. Cultural historians might well notice that culture has gotten less entertaining since most of the gays were phased out.
But it's still hard to square that with the Darwinian math.
There are some things you point out e.g. schizophrenics where you say it's not maladaptive because they have more children.
But the real adaptive strategy is to have more *grandchildren*. If your kids die before reproducing, then they might as well not exist as far as your genes are concerned.
I think a number of those conditions cause more children through carelessness. But if they don't grow up (because of carelessness) then do they actually increase fitness? We aren't salmon after all.
I don't believe schizophrenics have more children.
Would those guys who cheat by putting more of their sperm into sperm banks (whether by owning the sperm bank or by signing up for more donations than they're supposed to) be the height of mental health?
If they donate their sperm while wearing a t-shirt with Darwin's picture on it, would that be evidence for or against? :-)
"I’ve pointed out a useful category (mental conditions which are bad for people and society)."
I'd count that as two useful categories.
A lot of confusion can be avoided by introducing (1) a selected effects account of function and (2) distinguishing dysfunction from cases of fitness-reducing evolutionary mismatch. (And also just looking at the philosophy of biology that's been discussing this for several decades and arguably made a lot more headway: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1093/bjps/axw021#_i11 )
Emil is groping towards (1) without recognising the relevance of (2). Scott’s counterexamples are somewhat less persuasive once Emil has this in hand, but he can still get to his conclusion when it comes to thinking about ‘disorder’.
A selected effects account of function says that the function of a trait is the effect for which that trait has been selected (importantly, not what caused that trait to develop in the first place, but what causes that trait to be maintained in the population, so we don’t need to go all the way back to the savannah. Additionally, Caucasians losing their skin pigmentation was clearly a more recent selection pressure producing a particular phenotype). Insofar as a phenotype is failing to produce the effect for which it was selected, it is dysfunctional. Osteoarthritis is dysfunctional because joints were not selected to stiffen and cause pain.
Importantly, putting someone in an environment for which their phenotype was not selected will often make them worse off, but does not mean they are dysfunctional: there is simply a fitness-reducing mismatch between the environment they evolved for and the environment they are in. (Compare: someone who has lactose intolerance because their ancestors never needed to develop lactose digestion and who lives in a city where only dairy is available will do terribly, but they are not dysfunctional. Someone whose ancestors did evolve this, but who cannot digest lactose, is dysfunctional).
Here’s what this gets us:
ADHD: We need to remember that a range of phenotypes can evolve and all be selected for (e.g. the range of heights), so there can be a range of attentional capacities, and many people think ADHD is just people at the lower end of the attentional bell curve. Insofar as people with ADHD do poorly today compared to ‘the savannah’, it’s because it’s a case of mismatch without thereby being dysfunctional. If people with ADHD are doing better fitness-wise today than the average person, then this doesn’t show the average person is dysfunctional because their level of attention is still doing exactly what it was selected for.
Alcoholism: A tendency to become addicted to alcohol needs to have been selected by some other pressure in order to have evolved at all (e.g. ‘liking GABA’), and whatever that trait is wouldn’t decrease fitness on the savannah given there’s no alcohol, and so that trait isn’t a dysfunction. Since Chinese people have developed anti-alcoholism adaptations, this seems like evidence that alcoholism was fitness lowering in the recent ancestral environment, undermining the relevance of the observation that people who like alcohol have more kids today. Once someone without anti-alcohol adaptations gets put into an environment with alcohol, ‘liking GABA too much’ becomes fitness reducing due to mismatch. Insofar as some groups have weaker anti-alcohol adaptations, they are in the middle of a transition, developing new traits in response to the changed environment.
Attraction: If men evolved to be attracted to women of child-bearing age, someone who is only attracted to women who are not of child-bearing age (either too young or too old), would be dysfunctional.
Chronic pain: Pain evolved to signal damage. Insofar as our nervous system is sending messages of pain when there is no damage, then there is dysfunction present.
Nightmares: nightmares probably aren’t a dysfunction given their prevalence. Nightmare disorder, however, plausibly is given it’s not what was selected for.
Things get a lot more complicated once we introduce culture and cultural learning, as we have learned to do all kinds of things that we weren’t selected to (use mobile phones, flick lightswitches, attend college). So I’m not sure about things like ‘pursuing philosophy’ or ‘violating taboos’ but I think we need to keep the reference class on traits which were selected for. Pursuing philosophy is arguably a form of seeking prestige/status, or excessive curiosity. Seeking status in general is a trait that we evolved as social beings. Seeking so much status that you no longer have children is plausibly dysfunctional, like continually eating so much your stomach gets distended?
Ok, that's dysfunction, but what happens when we start thinking about ‘disorder’?
Suppose a selected effects account of function gives us all we need for our scientific investigations. Accepting this while still asking about ‘disorder’ means tacitly accepting that extra-scientific considerations are going to be relevant to guiding usage of this term, and so values are on the table, meaning some of Scott’s other points come back into play.
Many negative mismatches are managed by making our environment much more like the ancestral one (e.g. avoiding dairy, avoiding direct UV light) but when this is infeasible, we arguably envelop those mismatches into our folk understanding of dysfunction (as in, can't 'function' normally in our society). When it’s a dysfunction or mismatch that directly impedes quality of life in ways we care about, perhaps that's when we call it a disorder (hence why same sex attraction isn’t disordered).
"when the most demanding cognitive task around was hunting giraffes."
This is an excellent example of "things I don't understand are easy."
Heh.
Both you and Scott are right, but in different ways.
You're absolutely right that hunting giraffes (or other large mammals) is a very *difficult* task, not to be dismissed with a "super easy, barely an inconvenience!" by a modern city dweller who would get himself kicked to death if he tried to attempt such a feat.
However, Scott makes a good point in that hunting giraffes is *conceptually* simple. It's difficult to do, but if you're of normal human intelligence, it's easy to grasp: here's a large animal. We'll work together to kill it without getting killed ourselves, then skin it, gut it, cook it, and eat the meat. You could explain it to a child (leaving aside the child being grossed out/sad at the thought of killing a cute fluffy critter).
Contrast this with a metric bleep-ton of very complex, cognitively demanding, abstract tasks that you have to do in the modern world, like "fill out your income tax return," especially if you have a PMC (Professional-Managerial Class) type job. You need a ton more abstract reasoning, numeracy, literacy, ability to plan long-term and to get along and communicate with people who are not part of your hunter-gatherer band - all skills that were not applicable in our ancestral environment.
Hence, both you and Scott are right.
Here's the thing though:
It's *incredibly* cognitively demanding.
My background: hard science degree, music degree, former pro violist, current microchip chemist, group sports as a kid, combat sports as an adolescent, took up practical shooting a few years back.
The practical shooting is the most cognitively demanding thing I've ever done with the exception of one (1) class I took back in college. You need to be aware of literally everything (in the sense of literally everything) in your surroundings and coordinate your body and focus while min-maxing your movement versus the difficulty of the shot and you will be timed to the hundredths of a second while you're doing it.
While our savannah hunters might not have been able to solve the ballistic equations on paper, they absolutely could do those calculation in their head-- to the point where they could calculate and apply the necessary force vector to heave a projectile at a moving target.
Why we want to reserve cognition as something that only applies to paper/screens instead of action is a bizarre prejudice to me. We'd never say that autists lack the cognitive abilities to recognize social signals.
Disagree, what you're describing when hunting/shooting is mostly System 1 intuitive processing. Training that to be effective takes some effort but once it's there it takes much less cognitive processing to use. Paper/screens/PMC-type work is mostly System 2 processing. Much more cognitively demanding. That's basically the entire basis of Kahneman and Tversky's Nobel prize.
Probably the reason you find shooting so hard to pick up is because you didn't have much practice at that type of thing when you were young so training those skills is quite difficult. Hunting giraffe to a prehistoric human would be learned intuitively in their youth.
Yeah, nah.
Practical shooting is literally a puzzle game. You know the objective ahead of time, and you have ~5 minutes to plan it out. There's almost nothing intuitive about it. You are making conscious decisions, just very, very fast. Typing a word is done through muscle memory. Breaking a shot requires a conscious decision (and the mental focus to hold on the target between the decision and the bullet actually leaving the gun). The high level guys can go through a recap of what they just did breaking it down to a ridiculous level of detail.
I *have* a for-realsises engineering job, and I've been doing my own taxes since I've had to pay them. The amount of cognitive effort involved in practical shooting is so much higher that it would be unsustainable for even a few consecutive minutes let alone a workday. This might (might) be because of the imperative nature of each successive decision and the fact that there are so many more decisions to be made.
Ok I didn't realize practical shooting was something specific that required making complex System 2 decisions as part of the process. You seem to think that practical shooting and hunting giraffe would require the same amount of cognitive load. Yeah, nah.
I've never hunted giraffe, and I suspect you haven't either.
The reason I suspect the cognitive load would be similar is the dynamic similarities. You'd be tracking your own body, any hazards associated with the ground you're running across, the other members of your party, what they are doing with their weapons so you don't endanger them or yourself or interfere with their attempt, the movement of the animal, any other member of the herd, your escape route should one or more of them turn on you... The "throw* might be system one (and the actual running), but everything else (including the path you'd be running) is system 2.
He didn't say it's easy. He said it was the most demanding cognitive task around.
He was clearly implying that giraffe hunting was less congnitively demanding than modern life.
Perhaps noticing that was too cogniviely demanding for you.
It was a joke. (OK, semi-joke.)
Hunting giraffes with spears sounds terrifying.
Emil's definition is not widely shared in his chosen field. Randy Nesse is the best known "evolutionary psychiatrist." Reproductive outcomes are just one possible concern. Other explanations for disease (all disease, not just mental illness) include:
- Mismatch: our bodies are unprepared to cope with modern environments
- Infection: pathogens evolve faster than we do
- Constraints: there are some things that natural selection just can’t do
- Trade-Offs: every trait has advantages and disadvantages
- Reproduction: natural selection maximizes gene replication, not health or happiness
- Defensive responses: Adaptive reactions are often unpleasant
Review of Nesse's book:
https://open.substack.com/pub/affectivemedicine/p/good-reasons-for-bad-feelings?r=1jkibi&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Martin Brune also wrote a fairly accessible book, his Textbook of Evolutionary Psychiatry.
The problem with Kirkegaard's account isn't merely limited to weird edge cases etc. rather its a problem with virtually all WIERD societies, given their low fertility rates etc. The point about drawing a line being hard is something I have brought up many times previously, along with various considerations as to the EEA when assessing current, past and future humans. The important point relating to Szasz/Caplan etc. is that none of the various reasonable taxonomies that have been proposed say relating to moral goodness/evolutionary adaptiveness/widely held legal and social norms etc. actually describe what the DSM 5 is, rather a Szaszian account of different interest groups with different values, positive beliefs and moral beliefs all (reluctantly) compromising to create some weird amalgamation that is the current taxonomy. This is important as lay people and even some experts and such take it for granted that the current taxonomy actually consistently carves nature at its joints and such, with only a handful of people active behind the scenes seeing how the DSM is actually compilled, say Richard Green or Blanchard and Cantor vs Rind etc. I should add that a pretty good reason to be interested in the Evolutionary psychiatry account of things is that it almost certainly has the best chances of working out various diseases' etiology.
On a related note it's important to note that heterosexual pedophilia and nepiophilia actually seem extremely rare, with the most plausible explanation behind offending being sadism/power dynamics/opportunistic rape or extreme emotional congruence with children/some sort of intellectual disability, this is supported not only by various quantitative data such as that from phallometry (despite all its problems this is a consistent finding) and various qualitative data looking at various cases of physical and virtual offending. Interestingly Scott seems to roughly imply although not explicitly say that ephebophilia (his example borders hebephilia) is adaptive, which has some interesting implications for modern prevalence etc. unfortunately Cantor doesn't share his hebe data (0.0sd cutpoint specificity values would be nice as a start) and since Blanchard 2008 they explicitly don't use epheb stimulus, their are lots of other problems such as the fact that most research has used controls selected for teleiophilia whether it be SOAs or volunteers etc. and researchers seem disinterested in actually establishing prevalence estimates instead needlessly focusing on validating the test against ideal groups and such. If Scott is right its sort of interesting that very few evolutionary psychologists and such have touched on this topic, maybe Lassek and Gaulin recently (although they make quite a lot of mistakes) and maybe if you caught someone like Trivers off guard he might mention a couple things, and there is that Robin Hanson post from a while back, but for the most part evo psychologists just heard some stuff about Montagu or Symons and anovulatory cycles etc. then leave it at that.
Scientifically researching pedophilia by showing child pornography to subjects sounds like a career disaster ready to happen. You might even wind up in jail.
We're not supposed to look down upon sexual minorities anymore, except for pedophiles, so there's a huge amount of energy out there hoping to find a pedophile to punish.
From what I understand its legal to use such material in Canada which is where most of this research takes place, I know other researchers do other stuff like audio tapes and silhouettes etc. There is quite a lot of ambiguity surrounding what material Cantor and Blanchard use, in particular it might be worthwhile for them to sort stimulus not on the basis of age but on tanner stages or something like that, and ensure that stuff such as body hair etc. aren't significantly modified.
Blanchard is a brave man.
Scott, I agree that your definition makes sense and is useful, but it's got an important consequence that I don't think you've addressed: psychologists should not be allowed to make determinations about whether something is a mental disorder since having expertise about the working of the brain does not give you any special authority to determine whether something is moral or good for society. Mental disorders should be defined by religious leaders, ethical philosophers, or whoever has moral authority in our culture, and then given to psychologists to treat. Allowing psychologists to decide whether something is included in the DSM is a category error just like asking an expert in the material properties of concrete where we should build the next bridge.
I think we would actually want some of the people deciding where to put the bridge to be experts on concrete.
I don't know if sexual attraction to children is something that would be a mental illness by Scott metrics, either.
(But note a MAJOR difference between "sexual attraction" and "rape" - rape is unacceptable regardless of the age of the victim, so child-raping pedophiles seem not really different from adult-raping non-pedophiles, by this criteria. And just in case this needs to be said, *any* sex with a child is rape.)
I feel like both Emil and Scott are using a narrow definition of fitness that's not in line with modern evolutionary theory. For example, in the discussion of chronic pain, we see how narrow Scott's definition of "evolutionary fitness" is: "hunt, gather, or have sex". This is far too narrow a definition to be taken as a serious connection to modern evolutionary theory. What does it mean to have a disorder that "ruins their lives", but you're still passably functional? Does it interfere with your ability to maintain long-term relationships? Does it impede your ability to plan for the future? Do you spend a lot of time trying to get rid of your chronic nightmares, or make you less willing to take small risks that might lead to big payoffs later? This is important in a hunter-gatherer society that will need to track the movement of herds, trends in the weather, etc. Long-term survival is a lot more complicated than "find a willing mate as often as possible".
Let's go through some of the others to get a fuller picture:
ADHD - As I said above, having more kids is NOT synonymous with fitness. Scott waves a hand briefly in the direction of "it's more complicated than that", but not in a way most modern evolutionary theorists would recognize.
Alcoholism - Again, problems arise with "it's more complicated". Plus, I'd suggest religious teetotalers are more likely to have lots more children (i.e. Mormons, Adventists, etc.).
Ephebophile - there are good evolutionary reasons for society to prefer mating of younger men (who can take care of their offspring) over older men. A society where fitness is optimized for "every man wants to always mate with girls the moment they go through puberty" would not be positively selected for. Meanwhile, a society where older men pair up with women near their age (especially on the savanna) is going to ensure the wisdom of the elderly is preserved, while not sacrificing the fitness of the youth. Experience his hard-won, and shouldn't be thrown away, but it needs to pass down to the next generation, not take the next generation's place. Thus, you need to keep elderly people alive (preferably by pairing them up) without preventing younger generations from having and raising their own children. Therefore, the most fit scenario is absolutely #3.
Plato - If you have people in your society who contribute to societal fitness but don't directly reproduce you'll out compete a society that does. The extreme of this is the human body, where a tiny fraction of cells are actual gametes, but without the majority of OTHER cells functioning properly the gametes are useless.
Severity - An asexual person who never procreates, but who enables six other people to do so and expands the community's resources to support that population increase is a net gain for the community. Genes that select for asexuality will persist to the extent they expand resources greater than their prevalence in the community (again, cf multicellular organisms vs. gametes). Meanwhile, a schizophrenic who is unable to take care of themselves and has a schizophrenic child unable to take care of themselves is a net LOSS for the community, consuming resources but unable to produce them or to create resource-producing offspring.
(That's the extreme/pretend case where schizophrenia is 100% genetically dominant - see my concluding paragraph for why I think it's a problem to specifically identify something as truly 'unfit'.)
Emil the contrarian - it's important that a community be able to survive tail events, because circumstances change. This is especially true in an evolutionary environment where every species is constantly shifting strategies to get ahead of every other species. While continuity along the current strategy is important, it's also important for a community to continuously be experimenting with new potential strategies for fitness. Even if it costs you 2% of your population (or more!) experimenting on non-fit strategies, it's worth it to devote this resource to 'R&D' of the next fitness strategy for your community to embrace. Otherwise, you're stuck in the same fitness strategy. That strategy will work ... until it doesn't and you're wiped out - probably in favor of a community that is able to drive social adaptation through 'random mutation' by contrarians. Maybe doomsday preppers are mostly idiots who waste their lives. But if 0.0001% of the time you get a tail-end risk that wipes out 99.9% of the population, it's the preppers who'll survive. Until then (maybe for the next 300 years?) they just look like useless idiots.
Once we expand our view from "eat, sleep, procreate" to the more complicated view of long-term evolutionary fitness of a community, most of Scott's objections don't seem to fit the discussion at all. However, if we're asking about community fitness, this makes it more difficult for us to identify something as 'disordered', because society is complicated and it can be difficult to tell when a condition is truly "unfit" versus being a Chesterton fence nobody quite understands what to do with.
I think the biggest objection to Emil's definition is that it's EXACTLY the thing that drove the eugenics movement a hundred years ago to begin sterilization programs and ... other things. It's probably a road we shouldn't go down under any circumstances.
> I weakly predict that alcoholics have the most [children] (they have lots of chances for drunken flings without contraception)
But maybe that is more than offset by the negative effects of the childrens' likely haphazard upbringing and possible outright neglect by alcoholic parents.
Also (on a related topic) it seems odd that the Chinese were the first to brew alcohol and yet a good proportion of Asian people, far more than a typical westerner, are intolerant of it due to the rs671 (ALDH2*2) allele on chromosome 12, which results in a less functional acetaldehyde dehydrogenase enzyme (says he, cribbing from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_flush_reaction )
It would be natural to assume they were more tolerant of alcohol, not less, since those who were not would have been at a reproductive disadvantage over time, just as western adults are generally more tolerant of lactose, as their ancestors have presumably been consuming dairy products for longer than those of the Chinese.
"But maybe that is more than offset by the negative effects of the childrens' likely haphazard upbringing and possible outright neglect by alcoholic parents."
I don't think this is taking the evolutionary fitness argument seriously. Evolution doesn't care if your children are neglected and haphazardly raised if it doesn't make them have fewer kids themselves. In our current society, it doesn't (poor people have more kids than rich people). You can argue you're talking about something other than our current society, but that's why I go into all the stuff about EEA and weird comparison groups.
"the Chinese were the first to brew alcohol"
Priority dispute time? :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_alcoholic_drinks starts:
"Discovery of late Stone Age jugs suggest that intentionally fermented beverages existed at least as early as the Neolithic period (c. 10,000 BC).
The ability to metabolize alcohol likely predates humanity with primates eating fermenting fruit.[3]
The oldest verifiable brewery has been found in a prehistoric burial site in a cave near Haifa in modern-day Israel. Researchers have found residue of 13,000-year-old beer that they think might have been used for ritual feasts to honor the dead. The traces of a wheat-and-barley-based alcohol were found in stone mortars carved into the cave floor.[4] Some have proposed that alcoholic drinks predated agriculture and it was the desire for alcoholic drinks that lead to agriculture and civilization.[5][6]
As early as 7000 BC, chemical analysis of jars from the Neolithic village Jiahu in the Henan province of northern China revealed traces of a mixed fermented beverage. According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences[7] in December 2004,[8] chemical analysis of the residue confirmed that a fermented drink made of grapes, hawthorn berries, honey, and rice was being produced in 7000–6650 BC.[9][10] This is approximately the time when barley beer and grape wine were beginning to be made in the Middle East. "
I always thought of the East Asian intolerance to alcohol as an adaptation that decreases the risk of alcoholism.
>This definition would cover depression, where people might be too depressed to hunt or gather or woo mates. It would cover pedophilia, where people have sex with children (and not adults) and so can’t reproduce. But it would also cover homosexuality, which also lowers people’s chances of having children.
I don't even think you can say this with confidence.
For depression, how sure are we that it never helps you conserve your resources by 'hibernating' and lowering your energy output in low-resource periods when running around failing at hunting all day will kill you? Or keeps you home from wars and blood fueds and so forth that would see you dead pretty often?
For pedophilia, how sure are we that snapping up the best spouse when they are too young for anyone else to be interested, and grooming them to be devoted to you for life, is actually a bad evolutionary strategy (even if it's morally detestible)?
For homosexuality, are we admitting all the stuff about inclusive fitness (resources to nieces and nephews, sexy son hypothesis, etc)? And in traditional cultures, how sure are we that gay people aren't being herded into marriage anyway, do they actually have less children in traditional cultures? Does being gay strengthen your bonds with other men and get you more resources and protections (think bonobos), does being a lesbian help you resist getting pregnant outside wedlock and lead to fewer children with higher rates of survival?
In the evolutionary environment, do schizophrenics have fewer children, or are they treated as shamans and visionaries and given many wives?
Etc.
And that's assuming that we're judging fitness based on some imagined evolutionary environment that we have no way to actually measure or confidently predict. If we make it relative to a given modern culture, then not only does that mean what is and isn't a mental disorder is different in every culture in the world and over time within every culture, but it probably means that things like intelligence and impulse control are mental disorders because they anti-correlate with birth rates in modern societies.
Emil's definition has the property of *sounding* simple and objective, but I'm pretty sure it's actually quite incoherent and would rely on lots of subjective and arbitrary handwaving to implement. I don't think it actually describes a compact or useful concept.
"For depression, how sure are we that it never helps you conserve your resources by 'hibernating' and lowering your energy output in low-resource periods when running around failing at hunting all day will kill you? Or keeps you home from wars and blood fueds and so forth that would see you dead pretty often?"
I don't know if it *never* helps you do this, but I'm very sure that it's often not because of this - for example, lots of cases of depression are caused by people giving themselves bad hormones through contraception.
This feels like one of the same mistakes I saw people making in the cognitive biases thread, which is "I can think of one situation where something resembling this might have been useful, so it's not really a bias" while ignoring that in real life most of the times people use it were in situations where it was wildly counterproductive. I would almost *define* "bias" as "people consistently using strategies they have for some good reason, in situations where it's counterproductive to do so". This also seems like how (some) mental disorders work - dieting is potentially a good strategy if you're fat, but if you use it when you're super-thin, then you're anorexic and it's bad.
Fitness is so contextually dependent that it's just hard to say if a suite of symptoms we might classify as "depression" is residing in a local fitness peak or fitness valley. The answer to that question is likely depends on differences in circumstances that make its hard to make blanket statements even if we were good at knowing fitness to a degree we, in reality, aren't. Beyond that, it's just bizarre to substitute every instance in which we'd describe someone as mentally ill with them displaying traits that show some level of suboptimal evolutionary fitness. The natural response to that is, "So what?" I know why we'd care if someone is experiencing major depressive disorder, and it's not "their evolutionary fitness is suboptimal." You can't escape the value judgment by moving it one step up the chain. We still have to answer why it matters.
If someone has a really great hammer - like Thor's Hammer they're always going to be looking for ways to use it(like 'if I swing it around fast enough can I fly?'). If one has a trait society values it can get overused as a tool to understand (or mis-) stuff. Analytical thinking.
I believe that defining "mental illness" like morals/ethics is about balancing(e.g. doctrine of the mean, middle path). Balancing the primitive reproductive instinct with the higher intellect's concern for society as a whole. The latter being far more subjective. From a smattering of reading it seems the West's smartest have been on a analytical thinking bender for a few hundred years which resulted in DSM recommending treating 'this' illness with 'this' pill(1). I think that mental illness is often caused by cultural characteristics and must be treated within a given environment(2). I read that an American treatment for Bulimia was used by American doctors in Singapore where there was a more mild form present and it made the condition worse there(3). That's not to say that some conditions aren't generally occurring and generally treatable(e.g. depression).
Lastly, I'd say that as as all civilizations age, morality loosens which creates tears in the social fabric(Khaldun, 1377, etc). Consider Freud's idea that all "sociable feelings of affection" not appropriately sexual are "aim-inhibited"(1921). A bit over-stated, imo, but it fits that these inhibitions would start to break down as the social fabric condition worsens(communities fragment, people become divided, lonely and so other alt. compensations are sought).
Please know that I'm not saying that there is never a time some people aren't attracted to the same sex but in a healthy society there would be fewer that felt the need to act on it and one would hope exceptions would be made for those that felt compelled to live that lifestyle.
[I can fill in the footnotes if anyone is interested]
"Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found? I am, therefore, myself a complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes. I live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them—I absolutely do not care which—as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude...The various philosophies are but so many attempts at expressing what this stuff really is.”
--William James, The Will to Believe, 1897 via Kaag & Van Belle, 2003
"I defined mental health as a process of ongoing dedication to reality at all costs. And ‘at all costs’ means no matter how uncomfortable the reality makes us. Now, in our pain-avoiding culture mental health is not always encouraged.”
--M. Scott Peck, Further Along The Road Less Travelled, 1993
" ‘at all costs’ "
I'd add: but not all a once!
Evolutionary fitness is about more than the number of kids you have. If you have 100 kids and you can’t feed any of them, that’s bad for your genes. It’s probably better to think in terms of how many great grandchildren you will have. It’s not clear that things like ADHD and alcoholism would result in you having more great grandchildren. Especially in a world without government-provided welfare.
mental illness: a pattern of behavior that annoys enough people enough that they would do something about it
1) "benefits [...] friends" would seem to obviously refer to Scott being friends with LGBTQ+ folks but not with pedophiles.
2) ADHD isn't a mental disorder
3) Chronic pain clearly reduces fitness.
4) Nightmares also clearly have health and social impacts (being less rested and looking visibly shaken in the morning -- not something you can hide from your tribe) that reduce fitness.
5) The idea that it's good and a human right to be president when you''re patently less invested in the nation, properly speaking ('nation' and 'prenatal' have a common root -- a gay man without children will have nonstandard biases about the future and why wouldn't this make a difference to how he governs?) seems nonobvious.
6) Someone who can't get it up except for 14 y/os is going to have only one child per spouse -- even if his dream comes true and he gets that 14 y/o, she's going to look downright matronly by 16 after her first child. Obviously reduces fitness.
7) Alcoholism isn't itself a mental disorder, though likely most alcholics also have underlying mental disorders that contribute.
8) Emil isn't exhibiting a trait called 'contrarianism', he's saying what seems true to him, a trait known as 'honesty' and which is overall valued-enough by society that it seems strong selected-for evolutionarily.
An interesting question to me is whether some of these mental illnesses existed in primitive humans at all. Primitive tribes that still exist today don't appear to have homosexuality, sexual fetishism, or gender identity disorder, nor even the ability to conceive of such things. Maybe primitive humans also didn't have persistent anxiety attacks or nightmare disorders? Just as you point out that alcoholism is only possible after the invention of alcohol, and we lacked time to develop defenses against it, maybe some of those other conditions can only exist after certain cultural technologies are brought into existence, creating psychological hazards against which we had evolved no defenses.
In light of our having evolved almost entirely in kinship groups of fewer than 100 people, I wouldn't be surprised if nearly every abnormal behavior pattern we observe today is recent in origin and caused by current social obligations and conditions being radically unlike those we evolved to survive in. (Of course that makes evo-psych functionally useless at predicting modern behavior and maladies, as many have already concluded for their own reasons.) Or alternatively, that there's some underlying malady that manifests itself differently now than it did on the African Savannah, and which we view as different because we're getting hung up on specifics, e.g. people who today are schizophrenic would instead have had a strong delusion that their penis was stolen by a witch, or a compulsion to move towards the sun at all times of the day, or something totally alien and inconceivable to us.
> I wouldn't describe this as "benefiting my friends"
I...would? I...I thought that everything you've written on this topic, including this very post, was loudly and explicitly in favor of defining mental illness in a way to benefit your friends? I'm confused as to why you object to that characterization.
> 1: ADHD
You explicitly do not believe that ADHD is a for-real not-for-pretend thing that really exists in the real world.
> Psychiatric guidelines are very clear on this point: only give Adderall to people who “genuinely” “have” “ADHD”.
>
> But “ability to concentrate” is a normally distributed trait, like IQ. We draw a line at some point on the far left of the bell curve and tell the people on the far side that they’ve “got” “the disease” of “ADHD”. This isn’t just me saying this. It’s the neurostructural literature, the the genetics literature, a bunch of other studies, and the the Consensus Conference On ADHD. This doesn’t mean ADHD is “just laziness” or “isn’t biological” – of course it’s biological! Height is biological! But that doesn’t mean the world is divided into two natural categories of “healthy people” and “people who have Height Deficiency Syndrome“. Attention is the same way. Some people really do have poor concentration, they suffer a lot from it, and it’s not their fault. They just don’t form a discrete population.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
The pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas, as distinct from the pre-Columbian inhabitants of Asia and Europe and Africa, form a natural category in the real world. The people who "have" "ADHD" do not. Do you disagree with this summary of your position?
As I understand it, you do believe that *some* "mental disorders" are things that really for-real not-for-pretend exist in the real world, but that that is *irrelevant* to whether they are included in mental-disorder-(Scott). Even when some particular "mental disorder" does happen to point to a genuine geographic feature of the territory, that's not your stated justification for including it in mental-disorder-(Scott). Right?
That is to say, you do not believe that mental-disorder-(Scott) is a thing that really for-real not-for-pretend exists in the real world. (Right?) But because of the particular quirks of government dysfunctions, your friends with ADHD won't get funding for Adderall unless we pretend that it is. That would make your friends sad, because they want Adderall in order to do the things that are important to them. Therefore you endorse treating mental-disorder-(Scott) as if it is real, even though you do not believe it is, because at this point in time that is the strategy that will yield the results you want from the government. If later your government has different dysfunctions, then you will endorse a different definition of "mental disorder" with the same purpose of your friends getting funding for Adderall. I...which part of this summary do you object to? You describe this as a "dig", but, I mean, I sort of thought this was what you've been shouting from the rooftops.
It sounds like maybe it's just the "friends" part you object to? But, I mean. That seems obvious? Suppose Adolf Hitler "has" "ADHD", that is, Adolf Hitler is less capable of focus and long-term planning than the historical Hitler was. This Adolf Hitler would like to construct an elaborate multi-year plan to take over the German government and exterminate the Jews, but he keeps getting distracted and not following through. This makes him sad. Do you want mental-disorder-(Scott) to get Adderall for him, or not? Presumably not. You've loudly and explicitly and repeatedly endorsed the idea of defining "mental disorder" in order to get the results you want, not in order to accurately point to any particular geographic feature of the territory. (Again, do you disagree with that summary? If so, which part?) The results you want include helping your friends self-modify and do not include helping your enemies self-modify.
I suppose you could insist that mental-disorder-(Scott) includes ADHD when the things you would do with Adderall are good and does not include ADHD when the things you would do with Adderall are bad. But then you're just baking your friends and enemies into mental-disorder-(Scott).
Do you agree that "increase global utility and make the world a better place" is a more accurate description of my goal than "help my friends"? If not, what's your example of something where I aim at helping my friends over making the world a better place?
Such questions are weighted with too much inherent bias to be answered easily.
It may be true that something helps the world *and* coincidentally aligns with your social milieu, or it could be motivated reasoning that you want to help your friends so you've convinced yourself it helps the world. How would anyone go about convincing you- especially if they're just Joe Commenter, and not one of your friends?
The same complaint gets leveled at longtermist EA- it could be true this is the "most important century" but it's particularly convenient when people get to ride their moral high horse for doing things they'd want to do anyways. Sometimes incentives really do align ever so nicely, like planets unleashing the Titans. But not very often.
To be clear, I understand *you think* "makes the world a better place" is a more accurate description of your goals, but since we disagree on just what's good for "global utility," I think "helps your friends" gets at the heart because that plays such a big role in your defining global utility. But I'm just another Joe Commenter, you're the rich and famous psychiatrist-philosopher, so surely your lofty and noble intentions are beyond reproach or silly human concerns like friendship.
Edit: And if the sarcasm at the end there is too bitter or over the top- I don't think it's (generally) a bad thing to be influenced by one's friends. I do think it's irritating that many people, especially of certain social groups, try to avoid acknowledging that or refuse to consider the effect.
As for you, I think you're talking about two very different things.
"You care more about the people you care more about!" is an accusation that is tautologically true. See e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/24/nominating-oneself-for-the-short-end-of-a-tradeoff. Scott Alexander cares more about the well-being of "good-people-(Scott)" than about the well-being of "bad-people-(Scott)". He wants to go out of his way to help "good people who incidentally hurt others through no fault of their own", if necessary by hurting "bad people" in the process. Notice that you could replace the "Scott Alexander" in that statement with literally anyone else in the entire world. You could say "Emil Kirkegaard wants to help his friends" with precisely equal justification.
Meanwhile, it's obviously a true observation about the world that humans desperately want whatever-they-wanted-to-do-anyway to turn out to coincidentally be necessary to Save The World: see every wish-fulfillment fantasy isekai ever. But that's irrelevant to the issue at hand, which (last time I checked) was which set of people to consider as "normal human brain operation" and which set to consider as somehow specially disordered. Scott and Emil don't disagree about the effects on the world (I mean, they do, but it's irrelevant). The dispute is over what criteria to use to judge.
>Meanwhile, it's obviously a true observation about the world that humans desperately want whatever-they-wanted-to-do-anyway to turn out to coincidentally be necessary to Save The World: see every wish-fulfillment fantasy isekai ever. But that's irrelevant to the issue at hand,
I disagree that this is irrelevant; I think it plays a role in the selection of criteria, and clearly plays a role in Scott's personal justification thereof. It's one of the rationalist fallacies and has been complained about as long as the internet rationalists have been a semi-coherent group. Hence Scott calling it "more accurate."
At any rate, I like your Russell conjugation point.
Ohhhh.
Okay, so what I take from this is that my understanding of the criteria you're using to decide on a definition was correct. So, thank you for that.
As for "make the world a better place" versus "help my friends"...well, I don't know why you'd use the words "more accurate", because this is just a Russell conjugation. I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pigheaded. I want to make the world a better place, you want to help your friends, he wants to shape the world according to his desires. Calling you firm instead of obstinate would certainly have been nicer, and being angry at a guy for saying not-nice things to you is justified more or less by definition, so sure, by all means.
Scott's objecting because Scott's reading it as Emil calling him sort of pro-pedophilia: "I’m against children getting raped whether they’re my friends or not"
Scott makes a good point that both are valid categories, but I think what he misses is that disorder-(Scott) is a more recent, politically-driven definition than disorder-(Emil), and worse, like many political efforts, attempts to co-opt and subvert existing definitions. if there were an entirely different term for disorder-(Scott) then we wouldn't be having this conversation, but we are having it because there is a political effort to eliminate the older, more scientific definition.
This manifests in the trans argument, too. What trans people claim to experience is not what science has meant or what the billions of people Scott appeals to here mean when they say man, woman, he, she, etc. Those terms have a precise scientific meaning that aligns nearly perfectly with the vernacular meanings, even if the vernacular meaning is fuzzy and reliant on subjective judgment. Almost no one, until very recently, used those terms to refer to an imperceptible mental state, nor are they denying the existence of such by using them in the traditional context - it's just that it's not relevant, nor what people are talking about. The insistence on subverting existing words exists precisely because inventing new words that specifically refer to mental states, ze/zir, etc - don't in any way enforce their use, because that was never what anyone was talking about anyway.
I don't think this is true. People were using words meaning approximately "mental disorder" since before Darwin discovered evolution. What did they mean? I think "these people seem dysfunctional in society and are going against our values".
I think they were speaking from a teleological point of view: not "these people are dysfunctional in society" but rather "the human mind is not supposed to be that way."
But society's values before Darwin tended to be more or less aligned with reproduction and evolutionary fitness. Most cultures were worried about dying out or being defeated in battle due to lack of numbers, so they tended to promote functionally pro-reproduction values. It's like my long-running question why didn't anybody come up with the nature vs. nurture distinction before Galton in the second half of the 19th Century? Well, the answer seems to be that nature and nurture tended to be aligned. For example, the English were very concerned with "breeding," but they tended to use it to cover both nature and nurture. For example, to call a man "well-bred" could apply to both who his parents were and how they brought him up.
But now our values have changed in anti-Darwinian directions so we make up all new mental disorders like "homophobia" and "transphobia."
Would it be accurate to say that, if someone were given a large harem and a buffet, doing *anything other* than eating, sleeping, and having procreative sex forever (and maybe a few other health-preserving things) would be a mental illness under this definition?
"A few other health-preserving things" is a vast field, from making sure the food is cooked correctly to making enough money to pay your army to make sure no one comes to conquer your harem and buffet.
Really, what is the point of empire other than to create a healthy separation between the barbarians and your harem-and-buffet zone?
Presumably you want to make sure your children and grandchildren aren't all massacred the instant you die? Or more seriously, that your genetic line continues, not just for the moment, but for the long run (or as close as we can come).
The other big issue with Emil's proposal is that behavioral evolutionary strategies ussually reach multipolar equilibriums rather than being dominated by a single strategy.
Such as:
If your entire tribe is strictly monogamous (by instinctual evolutionary fiat rather than cultural norms), then the first person to want polyamorous relationships may be able to snag several confused wives and have a huge advantage.
If your entire tribe is polyamorous, the first person to explain the idea of monogamy and credibly offer 100% certain paternity to the best man in town or 100% of their resources dedicated to just one person's kids to the best woman in town can probably monopolize the best available mate.
The equilibrium is some people being monogamous and some people being poly, in whatever ratio roughly equalizes their fitness. Importantly, this should be something approaching a non-exploitable equilibrium; no monogamous person should expect better outcomes if they flip to being poly, and vice -versa.
In terms of things like depression, adhd, being contrarian, etc etc etc., we may expect equilibriums like these to hold for many of these traits, such that it's not really meaningful to ask whether it is more fit to have them or not have them, because the answer depends on marginal difference based on the state of the local social equilibrium they appear in.
Although I think gist of Scott's argument.is right on, It's similar, to another way to stipulate what counts as mental disorders - they are the class of conditions that are "harmful dysfunctions".
Some conditions are dysfunctions (evolutionarily maladaptive) but they are not harmful, at least for us today. There's no need to so anything about them - they should not count as mental disorders. Some conditions may not be dysfunctions evolutionarily (for example, antisocial personality may be a very adaptive parasitic strategy ), but they are harmful to society. Thys,, although we should minimize the harms antisocial people do, they are not technically mentally disordered. Only the conjunction of dysfunctional adaptation AND harmfulness (something that society decides) should count as mental disorder.
This idea was proposed a while back by psychologist/philosopher Jerome Wakefield. To avoid reinventing the wheel, his article would be good starting point to take things further. Heres the PDF:
https://www.psy.miami.edu/_assets/pdf/rpo-articles/wakefield-1992.pdf
From Euthymic Chickens: https://jnicanorozores.substack.com
Very interesting, thank you!
I just read this paper for class. It's a pretty good attempt but I think his analysis suffers from his devotion to Aristotelian categories. I believe that mental disorder, like almost all useful concepts, is better understood as a cluster of family resemblance, and that many of the criteria he dismisses by showing counter-examples are in fact very relevant to how disorder-ish something is.
Here's my proposal for a semi-objective definition of "illness" (I just came up with it right now, maybe it's bad): Imagine an utopia constructed through something like Rawls' Veil of Ignorance scenario, where all unborn souls are perfect rationalists and committed contractualists. Before the creation of the world they set up a code of conduct which they remember and obey after being born. An illness would then be a condition of your body or mind that would require special accommodation. It's a fuzzy category - the more special accommodation it would require, the more of an illness it is.
* Queerness is very easy to accommodate (just agree to not persecute them), and therefore is not an illness.
* Paraplegia requires some accommodation (covering wheelchairs under universal healthcare, putting ramps everywhere) so it's an illness.
* Schizophrenia is a condition that none of the unborn souls would want even after coming to an agreement, so it's a pretty serious illness. They could however agree to put them schizophrenics on (extra) welfare and compose social rules about how to treat them properly.
* Urge to murder requires constant willpower on the part of its sufferer and constant vigilance on part of society, so it's as serious as it gets.
The purpose of this definition is to factor out the social and political factors in the common meaning of the term, so that it's limited to the domain of medical science. Since man's sole remaining enemy is nature, any bodily/mental condition that is still challenging to treat must have been caused by nature.
You don't need a veil of ignorance: just ask parents what traits they want in their children. It takes a _lot_ of social pressure to keep parents from not wanting homosexuality in their kids.
But then things like "really wants to marry a twelve year old" and "blindly obeys authority" will be mental illnesses in one culture but not in another, which seems like the very thing Max Chaplin was trying to avoid with his definition.
I think this post gives pretty good evidence that there are phenomena that fall outside of the definition of “disorder-(Emil)” yet are addressed by the definition of “disorder-(Scott),” and that using disorder-(Scott) to categorize them gets people the help and treatment they need.
But there’s an unaddressed question of what to do with those illnesses that meet both definitions. One of the major conclusions from Kirkegaard’s piece is: “There is no need to inject politics into the scientific study of mental illnesses, in the same way we don't inject politics into the study of many other natural phenomena.”
If there are mental illnesses that meet both the disorder-(Scott) and the disorder-(Emil) definitions, yet using the (Scott) definition allows political interference that prevents finding the root cause of the illness,* then using disorder-(Emil) might be preferable.
For Scott, who is actively treating people with mental illnesses, it's probably super obvious why the good done by one definition outweighs the other. It might be less clear to those without experience in the field.
*I do not have any in mind. I only point it out as a possibility.
Although the edge cases Scott brings up have reduced my conviction that the evo-psyc definition of mental disorder is the singular correct definition, I disagree with Scott about who should own the term. The reason both sides want the term “Mental Disorder” is that the current term communicates that the described concept is an official, quantified thing – and (often) therefore qualifying for insurance coverage and/or protected class status. However, only the Emil (and Cochran, from whom I first heard it) definition is quantifiable. While “Reduces reproductive fitness” is theoretically calculable given sufficient records over a sufficient timescale, “Bad for people and society” is simply a qualitative descriptor that will far too often simply be determined by the whims of whatever group is in power. Allowing the latter definition to use the Mental Disorder term therefore simply results in giving the those in power the ability to say, “It is scientifically determined that you are a disgusting bigot for disagreeing with me on what is good for people and society.”
Perhaps the primary benefit of teleology is that it makes debates like this trivial.
Caplan is saying that mental illnesses are only preferences, Scott says they're social dysfunctions, Emil says they're evolutionary disfunctions, and all seem to miss the point due to a rejection of teleology. Emil tries to replace teleology with evolutionary fitness, Scott with flourishing in general, and Caplan doesn't try to replace it at all.
Surely the very idea of illness and disease comes from a teleological point of view? You can't say something is a defective member of a category if you don't believe the category exists. In the same way, you can't say a man whose dying of cancer has a disease unless you have some idea that he is not supposed to be like that. That there is such a thing as a human qua human, and that deviations from the form of humanity is a disorder. Someone whose eyes have been gouged out has something wrong with them because humans are supposed to have eyes. Similarly, humans who are caught in schizophrenic delusions have something wrong with them because humans are supposed to be rational animals. Not perfectly rational, but rational enough to recognize that they're not Napoleon or Jesus. Or to realize that it is very unlikely that the CIA can read your thoughts, or that there is no benefit to locking and unlocking the door 21 times every time you leave the house. Mental disorders are deviations from what the human mind is supposed to be, just as physical disorders are deviations from what how the human body is supposed to function.
Modern philosophies ditched teleology, and with it ditched all the "supposed to"'s. Yet without teleology, how can you really say that a madman has something wrong with them, and needs to be cured, or just has their own way of thinking that is different from yours but just as valid? You're forced to resort to justifications for calling it bad anyway, even though there isn't such a thing as a "right" way to be human. It's bad because it reduces reproductive fitness! It's bad because it causes social disfunction! These things are true, but don't capture the truth of it. Even if your schizophrenic delusions cause you no social or reproductive dysfunction (perhaps you live in a community that has decided delusional schizophrenics are sacred beings who should be taken care of and who you should have lots of children with) you still have something wrong with you because humans are not supposed to have schizophrenic delusions!
Certainly it is useful to have a concept of mental-disorder (Scott) and mental-disorder (Emil) to refer to specific aspects of mental dysfunction, but neither serve to adequate replace the idea of mental dysfunction itself.
hear! hear!
I don't understand the argument. Modern philosophies did ditch teleology, ie avoid justifying things by "supposed to" when there is no possible mechanisms between the object and the goal. But natural selection can be described as teleological if the 'goal' is understood to be optimizing fitness.
Natural selection is used as a poor man's replacement for teleology. It has to be, because the concept of teleology is so interwoven into the Western mind that you can't get rid of it without having some real structural failures. You need something to take it's place. The problem is that replacing all of teleology with natural selection is asking too much of it.
It requires you to reduce everything to that which benefits survival. Yet most living things are more than just reproduction and self-preservation. Survival and reproduction are essential parts of all living things, but not the only thing about them, and when you try to reduce them that way the cracks show. Take for example monks (whether Christian or Buddhist) who take vows of celibacy. If humans are supposed to optimize fitness, then these humans have something wrong with them. As does any fertile male who declines sex when offered, every widower who does not remarry out of love, and anyone who chooses not to have children for any reason. If everything is "supposed to" maximize fitness, then something is very wrong with all these people: they are as disordered as a schizophrenic who thinks he's a rubber duck. They need a cure.
Yet we don't think this way, because we understand that humans are more than optimizing fitness. A schizophrenic who thinks he's a rubber duck doesn't have a mental disorder because it prevents his survival and reproduction, but because human's aren't supposed to think they're something that they are obviously not. Whether he reproduces is irrelevant to that. So when you tie mental dysfunction to the only teleology you'll allow (Survival of the Fittest) you find that you can't properly define mental disorders because only the disorders that prevent reproduction and survival count as disorders anymore. Meanwhile those of us who believe that a human mind has a certain form, a certain way it is supposed to be, can recognize disease and disorder as anything that lies outside of that form. The man with an extra arm, and the man with an extra personality, can both be safely labeled as having a disorder without having to investigate whether the extra arm improves the man's ability to climb trees for fruit, and whether the extra personality is quite the ladies man. Because we all know that's immaterial.
I would describe someone who stigmatizes a person classified as having a mental illness as suffering from bigotry, which while not a mental illness itself, exactly, comes pretty close. Perhaps the problem can best be solved not by abandoning the categorization scheme for another one, but by extending it further! Personally, I would rather stigmatize a bigot than a schitzophrenic.
The attractive thing about Emil's approach to defining mental illness is that it's consistent -- there's a rule, a criterion, for defining mental illness. One feels as though if mental illness is a real thing, there *should* be a single clear criterion. Scott, on the other hand, has a mushier definition: bad for people and society. “Bad for” is just vaguer and more inclusive than “reduces evolutionary fitness,” and bad for people and society gives two possible arenas (individual & society) for “bad for” to happen to. So Scott’s criterion lacks that satisfying crispness, that put-your-finger-on-the-essence-of-it quality. However, Scott’s larger and looser criterion works much better than Emil’s. It is not possible to do to Scott’s criterion what Scott does to Emil’s — come up with a bunch of examples for which the criterion fades. And note that Scott also admits that “it’s somewhere between undesirable and impossible to have an apolitical taxonomy of mental disorders.”
It seems to me that the failure of Emil’s precise criterion here, and the success of Scott’s looser, and contaminated-by-politics-and-practicality criterion is a good example of how it does not work to categorize human variation human using simple, clear-cut rules. In grad school I was involved in developing scales for categorizing dream reports on various dimensions. One was presence/absence of aggression. The problem was that many dream reports had elements that defied categorization on that scale: There were dreams where someone said, “how’s the weather?” and the dreamer somehow knew that phrase was a death threat, and dreams where someone unsheathed a sword, and the dreamer knew that the entire purpose of the sword was to cut up a sheet of brownies. And even when I made extra categories to account for such aggressive nonaggression dreams there were still dreams that did not fit into either the old or the new categories.
One reason I am pessimistic about AI alignment is that I am sure the same problem will surface regarding the AI being aligned with our species's best interests. I don’t think there is any guideline that will work. “Don’t harm people” — but doctors routinely cause pain, and surgeons cut people open. “Don’t harm people unless your goal in doing so is to improve their wellbeing over the long run” — but what about punishments meant to deter people from harming others? And besides these examples involving individuals, there are many situations where a group of people are involved, and somebody has to make decisions that will worsen things for some in order to help others. And then of course there's the stuff that involves taking into account how much power to do harm or good a person has, and giving the powerful ones special treatment and exceptions to the rules so as to maintain their goodwill, for the sake of humanity. And so on and so on.
I think it's important to acknowledge that some things, while important problems that must be addressed, defy easy measurement or categorization. To do otherwise risks falling into the trap of regarding things that are more easily measured as being more real or more important than those that aren't. The more ambiguous the criteria are, the more vulnerable to abuse, yes, but sometimes we have to work with things the way they are and accept the risk.
Yeah, I agree, some things defy easy measurement and categorization. I think pretty much anything involving human differences falls into that category. However, there are some situations where it makes sense to tolerate the imperfections of our categorizations, and others where it does not. For instance, I think it makes sense to accept that the definition of mental illness is not perfectly crisp, and is somewhat influenced by social attitudes and politics. There is clearly such a thing as mental illness, and we need a working definition of it and a way of classifying its forms in order to address the problems to society and the individual that come with mental illness. We can live with the problems that result from the imperfections in our definition and classifications.
But aligning an AI so that its behavior is consistent with the long term wellbeing of our species does not seem to me to be a situation where we can live the the problems that result from the inevitable imperfections in how we define long-term human wellbeing.
Yeah, I agree with that too. Unfortunately, I do not think that there is a set of criteria that all human beings would agree protects their interests (in fact, I do not think that there is a common set of shared interests or values that all human beings would agree to). So AI alignment is a challenging problem (though, no more challenging that public policy ever is).
Figuring out the the actual reproductive fitness of a given psychological or behavioral trait is so hard as to be impossible in most cases where there is any kind of question over whether a given set of symptoms should be considered a mental illness. You can see it in the replies where people offer arm-chair supposition about what is and is not fit that seems profoundly naïve about how complicated evolutionary fitness is. This is embodying the negative stereotype of evo-psych as filled with intuitively reasoned, dubiously supported just-so stories. The main advantage of this theory, if not just a rhetorical cudgel that attempts to allow a person define what they dislike as a form of mental illness - is supposed to be a principled simplicity, but in pragmatic terms, it offers nothing of the sort.
Definitions that rely on dysfunction require importing value judgments about where the problem is located. That may get tricky at times, but I'm not convinced it is any less so than this approach that tries to offer a semblance of formalism in exchange for giving up all the basic reasons why we even care if someone is mentally ill or not.
I'd add that one of the other explicitly offered advantages of this is that it supposedly takes out "politics." It strikes me as absurd to suggest that defining mental health in terms of evolutionary fitness would be apolitical. We don't have to pretend like eugenics is a new idea or conveniently forget the decidedly political atmosphere of eugenic evaluation as it has actually existed. It's an invitation to people's political biases disguised, poorly, as scientific.
I think the "Scott-Emil" question is similar in a strange sense to the "is-ought" distinction. Putting aside the pejorative sense, you can't accuse of hypocrisy someone who professes no principles and does whatever they want, you can't accuse a consequentialist of ignoring their principles because of the consequences, and you can't point out discordance between biological and social definitions if you only subscribe to the social definition. Scott appears to be taking an engineering approach, rather than a scientific approach: not as well suited to learning fundamental truths of the world, but quite well suited to navigating reality as we find it.
Yes, that's true, I hadn't thought of that. But it seems to me that a practical engineering approach makes more sense in this case. The things that get called illnesses are just heterogenous. We tend to call things illnesses if they cause pain or disablity; or if they are just look unusual and peculiar; or if it is evident that some part of the body or mind is working in an unusual way, even if so far that has not led to any pain or disability; or if [probably some other stuff]. You'd probably find the same sort of mix if you looked at all the things called spices, or games, or hobbies. That's they way human categories are. They're kind of a mess, but in practice they work pretty well. Given that, I don't think it works to think like a scientist and try to find the essential thing that defines illness (or spices or games or hobbies). There isn't one.
A clarification that I think would help bridge part of the gap between the two definitions of mental illness is the following: evolutionary fitness is based on group evolutionary fitness not individual evolutionary fitness. This is a common mistake. Small groups, composed of a mix of individuals with a particular mix of traits, that were more likely to survive and pass down their sets of genes, collectively, are more evolutionarily fit. The logic is easy to see - a group where one male impregnates every female will very quickly die off for a host of reasons. Other examples abound - groups where people are willing to die for each other would outperform groups where everyone is selfish. Human evolution did not optimize for individual procreation.
With this revised definition of evolutionary fitness, I think that an evo-fitness definition of mental illness makes more sense. Homosexuality, in limited doses, can possibly increase a groups evolutionary fitness through different channels, or at the very least not hurt it. More importantly, anti-social behavior fits nicely into this definition of mental illness-(Johan).
I'm not convinced that fitness criteria still apply in the modern world.
If you want to have 'reproductive fitness' as a criterion, you really, really need to take into account 'selfish gene' arguments. It makes no sense to consider reproduction by the individual human being as the metric.
I am not sure if alcoholism leads to more or to fewer children, but I think it is implausible that both 1) alcoholism leads to more children and 2) Chinese, being exposed to alcohol the longest, evolved to have adaptations against alcoholism. It is not impossible - may be alcoholism leads to more children but fewer grandchildren, but this is a bit far fetched and, in any case just reminds us that evolutionary fitness is determined by the rate of offspring multiplication, not the number of first generation offspring.
Good point!
Kierkegard falls in the naturalistic fallacy. If animals do it is good, otherwise is bad. For example, if a person decides to spend his or her life in a monastery living a life of celibacy, prayer and meditation, Kierkegard considers this as something bad because if doesnt lead to reproduction. But that is a total whim, why is having biological descendants necessarily good? For the most diverse reasons, there are plenty of people who dont want to (myself) and so what?
He doesn’t consider it ”bad”, he considers it maladaptive and therefore illness (which I don’t agree with). It’s not an ethical argument.
He does end up with so many things becoming mental illness that he blows up the whole category.
¨maladaptive¨ comes from Latin, ¨Malus¨ (bad) and ¨adaptio¨ (adaptation), it means bad adaptation. To adapt is good, so bad adaptation is bad, it is an ethical argument.
This is the etymological fallacy.
Desiring no children is already ”bad” (maladaptive) from the point of view of evolution (roughly understood), EK didn’t invent that idea. His labelling it ”mental illness” doesn’t have any additional ethical significance, even though it sounds dramatic.
¨Desiring no children is already ”bad” (maladaptive) from the point of view of evolution (roughly understood)¨
Precisely, I dont agree with this statement. Things aren´t good or bad for evolution. Evolution is a statement of fact, it has nothing to do with morality. A person who has schizophrenia will have less chances of reproducing, but that in itself is neither good nor bad. If that doesn´t bother him there is no problem, no illness. Schizophrenia is a mental illness not because it affects reproduction but because it causes a person tu suffer. Psychiatry exists not to make people reproduce, but to alleviate suffering. Lots of people dont have children and dont want to have children and that doesn´t make them suffer, there´s no illness.
Chronic pain is related to structural issues in your muscles and joints that cause inflammation, and rarely as simple as neurological wiring. Often it comes from sedentary behavior, the aftermath of a car accident, or a prolonged period of bad posture. Classifying it with the rest of these seems like a bad idea. Someone who deals with the dislocation of their rib who experiences chronic pain is not mentally ill. Their pain is not caused by funky neurology. The whole “pain is created by your thoughts” idea is a mental illness. It’s on par with the law of attraction stuff.
Emil Kirkegaard only exists so people can say they won an argument against Kierkegaard and impress people who don't know how to spell.
Here's an interesting statistic:
Prenatal testing has halved the number of babies born with Down syndrome in Europe, study finds
Date: December 18, 2020
Source: Massachusetts General Hospital
Summary: A new study finds that the growth of prenatal screening in Europe has reduced the number of babies being born per year with Down syndrome (DS) by an average of 54 percent.
There are noticeably fewer Down syndrome people around than when I was a kid around 1970, when many huge Catholic families had a Down child. You don't hear much about a Down Genocide because Down people don't write a lot of op-eds. But, if there hasn't been one, where'd they go?
I know what you're saying (revealed preference vs stated preference). But I have met parents who insisted their 4-year old was a "they". I'm guessing they were proud of this. What parents will choose if they are given the ability will probably surprise you, even shock you. It is all about signaling, really.
Re. "Also making a value judgment, I would call homosexuality an unusual but valid preference: it’s not my thing, but seems basically okay for everyone involved." -
Homosexuality is a case that makes the relativism of values clear. In evolutionary times, up until the 19th century, personal survival depended mostly on group survival, where "group" is the group level at which defense is organized; and group survival depended mostly on reproduction rates. Under those circumstances, /not reproducing/ was a sin, very harmful to the group. Almost every society on Earth before 1800 heavily emphasized that everyone should--in a moral sense--have children. Homosexuality was in some cases frowned on only if it stopped a person from reproducing; ancient Athens is an especially clear case, in which open homosexuality among men was fine IF both men also planned on fathering children. (There are exceptions such as Norse culture, which had a strategy of all-consuming hyper-masculinity. There were also cultures in which "homosexuality" was forbidden, but pederasty with boy slaves didn't count as homosexuality, as is seen in Islamic records of the doings and sayings of Mohammed's companions.)
And, let's be clear, those societies were CORRECT to shame people who chose not to reproduce. Such behavior was a serious threat to their group's survival. A 5% hit in reproductive rate is easily enough to exterminate a group.
In the 20th century, reproductive rate did not give much of a group survival benefit, if any, and so homosexuality without reproduction did no social harm; and so it was WRONG to shame people who chose not to reproduce. In fact, it now seems perhaps correct to discourage people who DO reproduce--and American society does that now, aggressively. Just ask any couple who has 8 or more kids, and they can tell you dozens of stories about people pressuring them not to have so many children. That never happened before the 20th century.
If you're shocked by the idea that it's sometimes correct to discourage homosexuality, ask yourself: Why aren't you shocked by the practice of discouraging large families? Isn't that exactly the sort of interfering in other people's sexuality as discouraging homosexuality? And if your answer begins with, "Because if everyone has large families," -- gotcha! You agree with me.
In developed nations, reproductive rate has fallen so much that it is now becoming an issue, particularly in Europe. Expect sympathy for homosexuals to drop in Italy starting about now. But the important thing is to notice that this is morally CORRECT, in Italy, today. It is right for a group to discourage behavior that threatens the survival of that group--but what behaviors do that, changes over time. We must not injure future generations by using the concept of "rights" to fix morality in stone when it comes to behaviors whose adaptive effects change over time.
Disagreement with your moral beliefs is not "relativism." Relativism is the view moral statements are propositional, but their truth is contextually dependent on the values of the culture doing the judging or the culture being judged. Very few people, and even fewer people with knowledge of academic moral philosophy, are actually moral relativists. The term is almost always used as a criticism of someone else's views with an implicit understanding that being a relativist is mistaken.
Having children is not a moral obligation and, as the present shows, people's declination in the past to have children did not actually threaten the continued existence of flourishing humans. Not everyone must have the same preference, and you cannot create a moral obligation out of assuming society would collapse if everyone had one particular person's set of preferences. This is also why it is not immoral to want to be something other than a farmer. Society can do just fine with different people doing different things.
(Also, not that it is the most important problem with your argument, but homosexuals are perfectly capable of having children. You've got some more ideas about family unit obligations buried in your premises.)
Re. "Disagreement with your moral beliefs is not "relativism." Relativism is the view moral statements are propositional, but their truth is contextually dependent on the values of the culture doing the judging or the culture being judged.": Yes; that's literally /what my comment is about/. Did you read it?
"Having children is not a moral obligation" -- you are imagining that you can refute my /argument/, backed up by historical facts, by merely saying "it ain't so". And you are stripping the context out of the matter, and pretending you can baldly state a moral absolute. The entire point of my comment is that doing so is wrong. Context matters.
"as the present shows, people's declination in the past to have children did not actually threaten the continued existence of flourishing humans." : Did you even read what I wrote? I wrote of /group/ survival, not /human/ survival. And I wrote of what is write at different times. Are you aware that the past is not the present?
" Not everyone must have the same preference, and you cannot create a moral obligation out of assuming society would collapse if everyone had one particular person's set of preferences." -- Of course not everyone must have the same preference, but it is right for society to discourage behavior that might destroy it. That's /what ethics is/: the set of things society encourages and discourages. It's wrong to create a moral obligation out of /assumptions/, but I assumed nothing other than that definition of ethics. I should probably use the word "ethics" instead of "morals", to clarify that I'm not talking about arbitrary absolute rules dictated by ancient nomadic herdsmen or Ivy League professors.
"This is also why it is not immoral to want to be something other than a farmer." -- ????
"homosexuals are perfectly capable of having children." -- If you'd actually read what I wrote, you'd have noticed that I wrote about social pressure against people who choose /not/ to have children.
You asserted something, and I asserted the opposite. The argument you offered in favor of your assertion - that society would collapse in the face of everyone being homosexual and therefore homosexuality is harmful to the common good - collapses once break down a simple fallacious leap in reasoning you made, which I addressed. Your response to that was bewilderment. It does not follow from the fact that if everyone behaves in a certain way society would not sustain that everyone must refrain from that behavior. The trivial example I offered is not being a farmer. If everyone refused to be a farmer, there would be mass suffering. That doesn't mean everyone is obligated to be a farmer. Society can sustain different people doing different things. We don't need every single human to be breeders to avoid a dire population collapse any more than we need every person to be a farmer to avoid famine. One does not follow the other.
Homosexuals have always existed, and their existence has not threatened human flourishing. This is because not everyone is homosexual (and not every homosexual is childless). Understanding how the past unfolded is meant to help you understand the present, where most people continue to not be gay and homosexuality does not threaten societal reproduction. That you're worried about human population falling in certain areas (while the overall global population continues to rise, though perhaps not among people you want it to) does not mean we are facing a kind of population crunch that would cause mass suffering, or would morally obligate people to all have children. Your reasoning from "not having children is immoral" to ... "homosexuality is immoral" has several gaps you're trying to leap over.
"The argument you offered in favor of your assertion - that society would collapse in the face of everyone being homosexual and therefore homosexuality is harmful to the common good."
...
"That you're worried about human population falling in certain areas (while the overall global population continues to rise, though perhaps not among people you want it to) does not mean we are facing a kind of population crunch that would cause mass suffering, or would morally obligate people to all have children. Your reasoning from "not having children is immoral" to ... "homosexuality is immoral" has several gaps you're trying to leap over."
I specifically wrote, every time I mentioned the subject, that I was speaking of social pressure against PEOPLE WHO FAIL TO REPRODUCE, not against homosexuality. I specifically wrote that, in the 20th century, it was WRONG to shame people who chose not to reproduce (which includes homosexuals who choose not to reproduce). THE ENTIRE POINT OF MY COMMENT was to attack absolute, timeless claims like " "homosexuality is immoral".
Stop accusing me of writing things I didn't write. I'm not going to reply to you unless you try again from the beginning, and show that you can read more carefully.
I think I did misread you. My first interpretation had you making inappropriate guesses as to what best advances evolutionary fitness at different points in time married to a idiosyncratic notion of moral obligation that at times is descriptive and other times prescriptive for advancement of social interest. I did reform this into a stronger, more common argument, though one I obviously do not think highly of, and responded to that thinking that's probably what you meant.
To the unreformed version, I guess I'll just note that we're still in "evolutionary times," the advantages or disadvantages of homosexuality or reproductive behavior to a society are not crudely reducible into population reproduction or lack thereof, which itself is only obliquely related to societal flourishing, and it is queer and almost certainly incorrect to use the language of moral obligation just to describe what a society favors or disfavors. This is an actual example of relativism in the wild, so there is that. I think you are unclear whether you think this is descriptive or has obligatory force, but in either case you can cut out the middle-man of the argument and just note if a society condemns or permits homosexual behavior irrespective of whether or not it advances its "group survival." You need to be more clear if "group survival" is inherently a moral good or only so if a society deems it as such, because these have different implications and you flip between them. This is why you at once describe ethics as whatever a society encourages or discourages while also arguing it is inherently correct for a society to discourage that which threatens it. The metaethics on this is confused, and that's what caused me to read you differently.
Re. "it is queer and almost certainly incorrect to use the language of moral obligation just to describe what a society favors or disfavors.":
A society evolves in the direction of favoring things that seem good for it, and disfavoring things that seem bad for it. Any postulation of ethical goals other than things that are good and things that are bad, is dangerous metaphysical non-sense. The cases when a society fails to favor things that are good for it, or endorses behaviors that are bad for it, are due either to ignorance, to insufficient intelligence, or to this particular metaphysical nonsense.
"Moral obligation" is an abstract concept which does not "exist" in the Platonic sense, meaning it isn't an obligation at all. There is no obligation; there are groups that survive, and groups that don't. If morality isn't ethics (which I use to speak of a social code for the benefit of society), then there's no contradiction in adopting a morality which says that life is bad, and thus one has a moral obligation to destroy society. I think many people unconsciously believe something like this in America today.
Re. "You need to be more clear if "group survival" is inherently a moral good or only so if a society deems it as such, because these have different implications and you flip between them.":
I don't think I have to be clear about that, given that group morality evolves. This evolution selects, imperfectly, for behaviors which benefit the group. Evolution is imperfect, so there will always be differences between what's actually good for group survival, and what ethics groups enforce. But for the purposes of my argument, I don't need to investigate the noise. Group ethics tracks group survival (and flourishing) advantage closely enough that I don't see the need to distinguish them /within this argument/. In politics, by contrast, one directs one's attention entirely towards the ways in which group norms fail to track those which would be optimal for the group's benefit.
(Groups are nested within groups, so there are many different levels of group morality: the individual, the family, the tribe or neighborhood, the city, the subculture, the culture, the nation, humanity, mammalian life, life in general. I call it unethical to pick out one single level of group as trumping all other levels, and usually unethical to weigh allegiance to a larger group more than allegiance to a smaller group. I'm working within an evolutionary framework, which says it's always ultimately harmful to promote ethical frameworks which are evolutionarily unstable, and thus lead inevitably to the destruction of groups using those frameworks.)
"It does not follow from the fact that if everyone behaves in a certain way society would not sustain that everyone must refrain from that behavior. The trivial example I offered is not being a farmer. If everyone refused to be a farmer, there would be mass suffering."
I'll reply to that, since it is coherent. In the specific instance of homosexuality--which is not what my argument is about--I wrote that a 5% reduction in reproductive rate could easily lead to extinction. I did pull that number out of my ass, but I stand by it, because 0.95^4 = 0.81. In a strict monogamous society, this could be created by just 2.5% of the population being male homosexuals who don't raise children. It's true that a single homosexual male per generation not raising a child wouldn't necessarily cause that group to collapse, IF there are more than 40 people in that group.
Numbers matter. For whatever the behavior in question is, you have to do the math. In this particular case, yes, actually, a small fraction of people failing to raise children can lead to extinction during times of intense competition between groups; remember population changes exponentially over time.
I don't think you understand that what I'm arguing against isn't homosexuality, but the assumption that a thing that is unethical today, is always unethical, in all circumstances. This is the basic dysfunctional assumption of deontological ethics. So you could say I'm arguing against deontological ethics, and for consequentialism.
No one believes that the same behavior must be ethical or unethical in all possible circumstances irrespective of context. It is a trite observation refuting a position held by exactly no one easily refuted by trivial thought experiments. With respect to your demographic modeling, you are not describing the actual demography of human populations, which are vast, and not under meaningful threat of extinction through lack of reproduction, which can and does change in response to changing conditions. There is no realistic set of prior conditions outside of ancient bottleneck events where human populations were under meaningful threat of extinction from insufficient reproduction.
At one point during your argument, you spoke as though Italians are obligated to advance the the interests of the abstract concept of Italian nationality, which was strange, and likely speaks to you having an underdeveloped idea of what counts as a unit of "society" that one's behavior is supposed to advance, which you may or may not believe is what morality functionally is. This may be at work here too with you defining social groups in expansive and limited ways as convenience demands. To be clear, it isn't at all obvious that one's moral obligations would be aimed at that specifically. And if it was, such an idea is much more home in a deontological normative framework than a consequentialist one, fwiw.
I would expect that before 1800 many children died because food was scarce. So a pair of gays who don't have kids means more food is left for everyone else's kids -- ultimately, the group's capacity to raise the new generation doesn't change. What you need to do is *tax* the childless people (childless for any reason, not just homosexuality), so that their resources actually are distributed to other people's kids.
So I think this argument doesn't hold water.
Also, if a guy refuses to have sex with women, there are many guys perfectly willing to replace him. So in a pre-1800 society that actually tries to maximize group's children, the optimal strategy would be to make gays adopt and raise children that their parents cannot feed / illegitimate children / orphans.
"Also, if a guy refuses to have sex with women, there are many guys perfectly willing to replace him."
This is correct. The issue isn't actually to reproduce, but to support children. We also see this in some ancient Greek cities, such as Sparta, where it was respectable to ask some great warrior to impregnate your wife.
"So I think this argument doesn't hold water."
My argument is not about homosexuality. My argument is that
A) Ethics are justified by what is beneficial and what is harmful to society.
B) What is beneficial and what is harmful changes with time.
C) Therefore, ethics change with time.
So you're not disagreeing with me, just correcting or refining certain points. We could take what you've written, and say that taxing childless people (which the US does today, big-time) is good when raising more children is good, and bad when raising more children is bad. But that argument would generate less emotional response, and people would ignore it, or not think of tax law as being a moral code (which it is).
Prior to the industrial revolution, people weren't the key to production. Almost everyone worked the land, and there was a maximum yield you could get from a certain plot of land. The estate on which you worked might be able to produce enough surplus value to outfit and employ one knight in feudal times, and in other eras it was captured in other ways, but adding population didn't make Lord Fancypants Orchards produce any more food. Only industrialization allowed labor to flourish without being tied to the land.
If growing your population had any value, it was mostly in being able to spread your culture, or having excess population for war or to make it through plagues.
We're probably exiting this brief era and heading back to the status quo of people being burdens beyond a certain number.
As I understand the anthropological just-so story, this is actually just one end of a dynamic. As I recall, there's a difference between societies limited by the number of people, and societies limited by the quantity of resources. In the first, population growth was the key, females of child-bearing age were the group's most valuable asset, and bride-price was more common. In the second, access to existing resources was the key, males equipped for inter- (and intra-) group competition were the group's valuable asset, and dowry was more common. As the world filled up, we shifted into the 2nd mode more. And new technology changes the balance.
One thing missing from any definition of mental illness is conventiality. Laziness for example is harmful both evolutionarily and to one's well being but it's not a mental illness because it's 'normal'. Same goes for lots of psychological dispositions.
Of course this means there's an inherent problem with any formulation of mental illness in practical terms because it's ridiculous to have conventiality determine social policy. A better term for 'mental illness' would be something like 'negative mental anomaly'. Which would justify setting it aside for study as a composite but not justify a lot of the societal and policy attitudes we have.
There are probably some substantial benefits to being lazy -- such as reduced stress because one has low expectations for own achievements.
And what about when it isn't beneficial?
Then at those times it's not beneficial. Point is that laziness may end up in the middle of the pack when it comes to the harmfulness/helpfulness of behavioral tendencies, and if so would not qualify as a mental illness, even in your system that categorizes common but dysfunctional behaviors as mental illness.
On the other hand I am sort of on board with the idea of very common behaviors being illnesses. For instance why not think of most of us, and in fact much of the modern world, as screen-addicted? Despite all the benefits of being able to access info and people online, I'm inclined to think that on balance it is bad for us to spend anything like as much time online as most do.. We weren't designed to sit still this much, and online interactions are pretty limited and impoverished compared to in-person ones
So why isn't unbeneficial laziness a mental illness?
For the record I've never called laziness a mental illness.
Someone who is bothered by his own ”laziness” and goes to a psychiatrist complaining about it would probably get some kind of treatment and might qualify for certain diagnoses depending on how he is bothered. The psychiatrist would probably call it lack of initiative or interest or motivation.
The thing is that an outsider can’t impose a diagnosis of mental illness on a person just because he is lazy; that’s not how the diagnostic criteria are written.
I understand all that, my point is that laziness meets the criteria set up for 'mental illness' but yet is not classified as such.
Do you mean the standard criteria or Scott’s or Kirkegaard’s?
Both.
When Kierkegaard says that your definition "benefits your friends," he may just mean, "you likey [the current match-up between percieved and diagnosed illnesses]".
The better way to pit Scott versus Kierkegaard is to investigate whether or not Scott's definition of mental illness would satisfy him in a backtest. Would Scott, teleported to 1920, be happy with a definition of mental illness that was political? Or would he try to Caplanize or Kierkegaardize it by trying to come up with an "objective" definition?
That's my steelman anyway.
Reproductive fitness isn’t just about the interests of the individual, it’s also about the interests of the group. The selfish gene has a hand in both pies at once. A small but steady minority population of homosexuals might serve a prosocial tribal purpose that enhances group viability or kin success, in some subtle way that we’re biased not to notice because we’re so focused on individualism.
Arent most gay men raped in their adolescence?
Um, and do you also think most lesbians were raped by women in their adolescence? Good grief, are you a troll or do you truly know next to nothing about about gayness and gay people?
This fix (gender transition) is no fix at all if you think in term of homosexuality being an illness cause it prevent reproduction. Sperm/ovule donation could be such a fix, in theory but probably not in practice.
Anyway, things that are reproductive maladaptation are not necessarily bad, neither for individuals or for society (provided it does not force the whole population fertility below replacement level for too long). With 9 billion homo sapiens on earth, I would consider reproduction maladaptation as positive by default, only need to check for which traits it select (who are those who reproduce the most) and if it cause individual pain (physical or mental).
Social maladaptation is more complex: it may be a problem of the individual, or a problem with the current social acceptable window of behaviors.
I would guess that a large percentage of gays would (at least in the early teen years) swallow a magic pills that would turn them hetero, if there was such a pill. I don't think this would work in reverse.
We know that sexual orientation is pretty much unchangeable, so the best alternative to the pill is to actually embrace your identity. Which is fine.
But it just kind of feels to me that homosexuality is not considered to be illness only because there can be no cure. Am I looking at this wrongly?
“Chinese people seem to have some anti-alcoholism genetic adaptations, […] but still others - like the Inuit - clearly have none.”
Scott, what the heck. You link to the Wikipedia article on “Alcohol Flush Reaction” (aka “Asian Flush”) in that first sentence, which says right in the introduction:
“The condition may be also highly prevalent in some Southeast Asian and Inuit populations.”
I wasn’t able to track down the source of that claim in the citations, and that “may be prevalent” in that sentence makes it very ambiguous, but it doesn’t sound to me like this is quite that clear!