If I don't assume they are at least mostly like me, I rapidly lose any ability to know how to treat them kindly/ethically/etc. (Of course sometimes they will just tell me how they want to be treated, but that's fairly rare among the set of all direct and indirect interactions I have with other people)
Your charming fake DID patients are sucking up time, resources, and attention from an already overburdened mental health system while chronic schizophrenics are pushed back out to live on the streets because there's no beds left, so sorry, try not to step in front of a subway train because you're running away from your paranoid delusions. No sympathy. None.
Well, to be fair to Freddie, it is aggravating to have a real problem but not be taken seriously by medical providers because so many people fake the problem all the time.
Myself, having had surgery and been given the baby Tylenol of pain killers with the promise of "if it hurts tomorrow call up and we will prescribe real pain meds" because some people went stupid claiming pain to get drugs, well that day and a bit being in lots of pain for no good reason makes me appreciate where Freddie is coming from.
Granted, he is not exactly being diplomatic about his point, but I can kind of get where he is coming from, I think anyway. (Of course, if other people's behavior didn't limit whether or not I could get prescribed things properly, and/or I didn't have to pay for their stuff, then I would 100% agree that letting them claim whatever issues they want and pay for the treatment is fine with me. Taking the rather poor system we have as a given, however, I would much rather discourage people from making things up for attention if possible.)
The thing that is most liable to have someone think at a glance that you're faking ADHD for adderall would be the presence of people who are clearly faking ADHD for adderall.
I am surprised to see someone in the rationalist community with a "less information is better" mindset.
When you're dealing with medical providers with extremely limited resources, especially time, less information often is better. Feeding providers red herrings and reasons to dismiss you (and they *need* reasons to dismiss *someone*, considering scarce resources) is a great way to avoid getting your real problem addressed.
Yes, it sucks to be deciding, as the patient, what is and isn't a red herring, when that's supposed to be providers' job, and you might screw yourself over that way, too. But busy providers just don't have time for All The Information.
True, but at the same time, lots of people faking ADHD to get Adderall also make a lot of people assume you might be a faker. The message might spread the expectation, or the underlying reality. Claiming that everyone claiming to have ADHD are not just trying to get drugs when in fact many are doing exactly that is not good either. Litany and Gendlin and all.
I don't think people are spreading the message "lots of people with ADHD are fakers" so much as the subtly different "a significant number of people are faking ADHD to get medications", which is perfectly in line with experiences I had as an EMT and my ex-wife had as a trauma pharmacist at the local ER where people would absolutely come in with all sorts of reasons they totally needed some oxycodone, man. But as Scott mentions above, see also the 1% phenomenon of incidence concentration points.
I also have ADHD, so it's in my best interest to not have people think I'm faking when I'm trying to get my meds, so I find the fakers annoying.
I agree that it was oddly rude of your friend to wonder if you were lying if you told them you had ADHD. I don't think I'd be inclined to talk about it as a thing if I *was* faking it to get stims, unless I was explicitly telling someone else how to do that, because it's a terrible idea to casually discuss illegal things. But maybe I'm overthinking that.
I think Freddie has seen a lot of people with "minor" conditions getting huge amount of sympathy, which unintentionally results in people with more serious conditions getting overlooked.
See for example how people who put "autistic" in their Twitter bios are given special treatment, while people who are in institutions due to severe autism are ignored in most discourse about autism and denied a cure for their extremely horrible condition.
As Scott mentions in this article with regards to anorexia, "legitimizing" a mental condition can also have the effect of making people consciously or unconsciously play up minor tics as being a symptom of that condition, until they actually do have that condition. Mental contagions are real things, and the people experiencing them are reporting their real experiences, but talking about how those people aren't faking may well have the effect of leading more people to have those conditions who wouldn't otherwise have had them.
So I think Freddie is upset at Scott for doing something that Freddie sees as potentially turning non-mentally-ill people into slightly-mentally-ill people and taking resources away from existing mentally ill people.
They're certainly not doing it intentionally. It's just not the focus of the debate around autism. The idea that trying to find a cure is bad has latched on in the zeitgeist; autism is a part of their identity, and one they like given how much social status is confers onto them, so any suggestion that maybe having a cure would be a good thing is "eugenics" and "genocide".
There's also very little support for "high functioning" autistic people who don't "fit in". I've had people who claim to be in support of autism rights ridicule me for traits clearly associated with my autism, just because I don't fit in with their preferred idea of what an autistic person is. I also had one person claim that I "weaponize my autism" despite barely ever even mentioning it; the simple fact that a person with autism exists who disagrees with them is seen as an attack.
I don't feel like autism gives me social status. I'm 99.9% sure an alternate version of me who was not autistic would have higher social status.
But said alternate version would not, in fact, be me. He would have a completely-different relationship with his mother, he wouldn't have been chucked out of SJ, and he wouldn't have been kicked out of uni this year. Those weren't just because I lack abilities, they're because of characteristically-autistic *personality* traits, most particularly my extreme honesty, and the choices I made because of those personality traits ("It is the choices we make, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"). So, well, yes, it's part of my identity. They don't call it a "pervasive developmental disorder" for nothing.
I don't want to die so someone else can live a less miserable (and in many ways less virtuous) life in my place, and I don't want people like me to become extinct. I can grant that the latter's based on the generative instinct and we've been delegitimising that for a while now, but is the former really that terrible a thing to ask?
Many of them are openly advocating against researching treatment / cures for autism on the grounds that this is “ableist”. There was apparently a stink at a recent autism conference directing a bunch of hate at a presenter for showing videos of a nonverbal autistic individual who was compelled to engage in self harming behaviors, as part of an effort to recognize the condition of “profound autism”. “Profound autism” has been labeled an ableist concept.
Yes, at least some of these people are harming other autistic people by pushing the notion that the only “real” autism is the quirky neurodivergent TikTok kind, and this is actively drawing research dollars and other resources away from profound autism.
If I am autistic and can get not just a job but an uber-job at Google paying $200K, then why are you (also autistic!) such a fscked-mess that you can't even take care of basic personal hygiene?
There's a baseline problem that the same word cover such a large swathe of territory; but the much larger problem (IMHO) is the people who want the "I'm special, not like the rest of you peasants" points that are easily scooped up by publicizing that you, every day, "struggle with autism".
Hell, if you're a cis-hetero-white-male, what better way to trump the inevitable dismissal you will face in every politically charged situation...
No joke, I'm low-key glad I have at least one victim card in my pocket to play if I ever need it.
I don't *want* to, and generally don't get into situations where people flat-out dismiss me for characteristics I have zero control over, but it's nice to have in case I somehow get stuck in of these dumb arguments
Unfortunately, Freddie just really likes righteous indignation and firing from the hip. That is his whole schtick for getting people engaged with his writing.
I definitely think he is genuine, and I definitely think he cares. But he consistently disappoints me by trying to score points instead of engaging in constructive conversation.
I'd like to read Freddie doing righteous indignation at the bureaucrats who put people with real problems out on the street to get hurt and hurt average people so they can tell average people to shut up and give said bureaucrats more clout and money. It's a King of the Beggars scam with faceless admins instead of a charismatic Fagin. I'd like to read Freddie on how socialists should fight this.
People suffering from debilitating autistic conditions aren't being denied cures though, in any cases, because no such cure is known anyway. At this point, autism cures and all discussion thereof are purely hypothetical.
I think Freddie is reacting to the glamorisation of mental illness, and I think he has a point.
Mental illness is not cool or attractive or romantic, and it's not something that you can perform for a TikTok. It's messy and confusing and fucks up your life and the lives of those around you. This TikTok and other presentations are the same thing as the romantic literary description of consumption, in distinction to the reality of the disease.
And just as I'm willing to bet that there were young women who dressed and acted the part of the romantic literary consumptives, so that every cough and cold was treated as a harbinger of the white death, so the modern young women acting out fad mental problems (are any of them showing dirty living conditions and appearing dishevelled and smelly and pimply-faced?) for the same attention and regard of an audience.
I don't think Deiseach (or Freddie, or anyone else) was ever implying that TikTokers ever go around *saying* that mental illness is cool and attractive and romantic, but that they're perpetuating and capitalizing on a culture in which a certain type of performed mental illness is treated as cool and attractive and romantic (and perhaps to some extent are aware that this is what they're doing).
It's not really gate-keeping. Freddie's beef is w/ the TikTok / Instagram people posting well curated and edited videos about their "debilitating" ADHD but somehow manage to do all the things that someone with debilitating ADHD would have trouble completing. I think he also feels frustrated by the fact that the mental health complex makes it incredibly hard and expensive for people who have actual debilitating mental health issues to get the necessary help they need. Meanwhile, some ADHD influencer is getting her micro-dosed Adderall dialed in because she's sooooo distracted by her complicated on-line life and just can't manage to get all of her dry-cleaning done.
There is apparently some doubt that "the system" could properly treat severe cases of autism however well funded it was. But it *could* do a better job.
FWIW, I evaluate myself as extremely high functioning ADHD. But I was out of college before the term became common, and have neither been diagnosed, not desired such a diagnosis. So I my opinion the really high functioning cased don't need treatment. (Sometimes we need help, but who doesn't.)
Freddie's long-standing position is that he thinks (rightly or wrongly) that a lot of the social media aggrandizement of every minor human tic as proof positive that one suffers from *something* can, and possibly does, overload a precariously overloaded mental healthcare system. Honestly, if someone with self-diagnosed ADHD gets themselves some Adderall and feels better. Great. I have no issue with that. I do think that some level of triage needs to happen whereby the more seriously mentally ill are afforded better care than the highly functional person who just keeps pestering physicians until they get the meds they want.
>What is your evidence that ADHD influencers are causing this problem? I would primarily blame the mental health complex, not Instagram.
The problem in this specific case is that people faking/exaggerating ADHD to get amphetamine is the reason the obstacles to getting amphetamine for ADHD are there. That is *not* costless for the severely-ill people, especially since *being severely-ill makes you worse at navigating bureaucracy*.
Having a internet creates a pressing need to up one’s listening skills. I am trying to be funny but I am serious. I don’t think some of the issues being discussed here are new. (Anything related to onset of apparent madness, fake or not. I think they’ve been around forever. The only thing that’s changed is it can now spread across continents and not just a village. This is not going away. We have to suck it up. It’s a significant change of environment and will be interesting to see if we can adapt to it.
Sorry to hear you were brought down. I likewise deeply appreciate Scott’s post & I am confident many community members still have humanism as a core axiom for their inferences and interactions (this is based on the positive impact rationalist organizations have already had and are continually aiming for!) Taking individuals’ experiences as meaningful and important is a huge part of that. :)
Scott said literally nowhere that these DID friends of his were being treated by the mental health system, much less were being treated for DID reasons.
tourists? They're not "sucking up time, resources, and attention from an already overburdened mental health system" like you said, so they're not tourists in the mental health system. Is tourists even a negative metaphor here? Are they giving money to the mental health system, like tourists give money to a local economy?
If you think that the legions of people who have caught mental disorders from Tik Tok aren't filtering out into the no-bullshit in-real-life mental health system... you're just wrong. The system has already been stretched to the breaking point, and now we get the armies of psychosomatic patients whose conditions are all Instagram-ready, straining it even more. You'll forgive me if I'm sensitive to that reality.
i think we may be using the wrong terminology. I was talking about the 3 individuals with DID, who say their condition "it’s fine, they live with it, it’s no big problem". You might be talking about the Spoonies, which all the examples Scott mentioned were from TikTok, discuss getting specialized medical treatment (and lying to do so) and have numbers in the thousands. I can understand anger over the latter, if you believe they're faking it.
I think it might be worse if TikTok didn't channeled their psychosomatic symptoms in a specific ways. Just think about it, if people decided that it is cool to have a mental disorder but they had no TikTok to explain them how to do it properly, then they might get creative and invent a lot of different symptoms and conditions.
I think I understand your argument/strategy; you want to stop people on TikTok from having such enormous social and monetary incentives in order to slow the phenomenon of social media contagion itself. Because the social-media-contagion version of these disorders are very often making it more difficult for people who had the pre-existing disorders to get adequate treatment.
I empathize with that. I just think you’re fooling yourself that this “well just villainize them” move will do anything beyond making it more difficult for everyone to get treatment. I don’t think the solution of “shame these new (likely lesser) sufferers out of it” will work, because then the people who had that pre-existing disorder now get included in said shaming from the broader public (I don’t believe that this is your intent, but it is the outcome I’ve regularly observed). That just adds more problems for people with the pre-existing condition on top of the increased skepticism from the medical system (which I think you’re largely correct to attribute to the social media crowd).
But also, I subscribe to Scott’s general point that a lot (maybe even most) of these people are experiencing something real and painful. The social contagion examples of anorexia or cutting should indicate that it’s entirely possible for real, painful symptoms to develop for mental disorders that were received largely through social systems. So I’d also like these new people to get treatment, regardless of where they developed their problems or what new name you’d prefer they call their disorder.
In other words, I don’t have a solution to the social media contagion problem, but I think your idea of shaming these people is uniquely terrible and likely to make the problem worse, at the very least in the short-term. Perhaps it would have long-term benefits if you can somehow lessen the financial and social incentives enough to actually make a dent, but you’ll have to recruit a heckuva lot more people to the cause to be effective at anything other than making a whole lot more people’s lives miserable right now. I guess I wish you either massive, immediate luck on that or no luck at all ever.
Beyond that, I think Morally blaming people for having consumed a toxic thing on TikTok is pretty strange, given how many people get sick from consuming fast food, smoking cigarettes, reading horrible blogs online, sitting on their phone/computer all day, etc. Some of those things have warnings built-in because we’ve learned the dangers over time. TikTok does not have warnings for people, especially for young people. So I’m skeptical of the level of vitriol that you’re throwing around here about “consuming resources”, as if those resources aren’t there for precisely these people (and the pre-existing people too, obviously).
It almost reads like a “no true Scotsman” argument, except more along the lines of claiming that “only biological mental disorder origins are acceptable.” Except plenty of truly unwell people got their disorders from some social or environmental system/state prompting their biology to do weird things. Even your earlier example of schizophrenics might not hold up to that kind of scrutiny. After all, there’s plenty of studies that demonstrate links between schizophrenia and meth, LSD, or, to a lesser degree, marijuana. So if smoking weed somehow prompted someone’s schizophrenia, I’m supposed to say, “stop consuming medical resources and please step in front of a subway train” when they seek help? How is that functionally different from saying that to a person who “caught” something akin to DID from TikTok?
While it can be infuriating and horrifying to have a medical problem that gets conflated with some other medical problem in a way that makes it difficult for you or people you care about to get treatment, this is a problem with the system of diagnosis and treatment, not a problem with the people with the other problem.
This was really well said and raises for me the more general issue of blaming and where we assign blame (or accountability).
Someone raised elsewhere in here the issue that they had a harder time getting pain meds after a procedure because of the individuals who engaged in drug-seeking behavior to feed their opioid habits. How far are we gonna get blaming opioid addicts versus the medical and pharmaceutical people who got people hooked and then failed to provide adequate supports to get people unhooked (and the criminal justice system that preferred to criminalize people's addictive behavior -- or the society that prioritized that response over treatment).
We have a funny tendency to blame the individuals who are at the very tail end of a broken down process, and to condemn them morally, rather than considering them to be as powerless as we are (we being people who also need care of various kinds and who sometimes struggle to make good choices in support of our well-being -- which is to say all of us).
I get that triage is important in these situations, but surely you're not suggesting that people don't seek help for something that seems to be a mental health issue because other people are suffering worse ones? I don't think it's the job of patients to screen their own conditions by worthiness.
None of these people have interacted with the mental health system for DID, most of them aren't out (even to their friends) about their alternate personalities, and none of them are asking for your sympathy.
And yet you felt compelled to tell your very large and influential audience about them. And in doing so, you invited judgment of their actions. Sorry, Scott. That's how it works. You don't get to share your cool friends with tens of thousands of subscribers while protecting them from the attention you've foisted on them. You've had a long time to learn that and you keep refusing to do so.
What about the “beans” example, Scott? I don’t think you can rationalize that away as a “real” condition. It’s pretty clearly a mass desire to emulate a Tik-Tok video. And it sucked up plenty of mental health resources.
Sorry, Scott. This wasn’t convincing. Freddie is correct here. Social media hasn’t enabled thousands of people with DID to finally discuss it publicly. Social media created a situation where a lot of bored people fake an already suspect condition to get attention. Even Sybil was lying.
Why can't that be a real condition? Obviously its contours are shaped by cultural knowledge and fads, but only in the same way that the medieval dancing plagues, koro through the ages, and specific anorexia symptoms are shaped by cultural fads. Teenage girls are the typical patient for every culture-bound syndrome; read about some of the stuff medieval nuns got up to.
I’m happy to hear more about this (genuinely), but I honestly don’t understand what you mean in this reply. It just sounds like you’re allowing the word “condition” to be assigned to any kind of mass misbehavior, instead of limiting it to something more akin to a disease.
How about - I'll try to write a full review of the book "Geography Of Madness", a pretty good book on culture-bound syndromes I've been sort of working off here - and we can continue this discussion afterwards if we're still not on the same page?
Can we get numbers? That seems to be what's missing here.
If we agree (as you say with your Crazy Like Us reference) that the prevalence of these conditions is substantially increased by advertising them and (OMG, trigger word) "coddling" them, then isn't a better society one that makes it much harder for people to start down "this path", whether the details of the path are praying to the Madonna fifty time a day or trying to reach a weight of 50lb?
What bizarre definition of disease are you using that rules out the possibility of them being transmissible? Maybe some poor sap's lymph nodes are, in a sense, only swelling up and turning black "because everybody else was doing it," but that doesn't mean they have any less of a very real problem.
Why can't it be a fake condition? "Teenage girls sometimes make stuff up for attention" is a well-established, historically durable phenomenon, you're the one proposing the more novel psychology here.
"Faking it" suggests the condition would respond to a very different set of treatments and incentives than if it were some kind of wholly unconscious reflex. If you're into condemnation of liars, it also suggests some of that.
Culture-bound syndromes are also well established and historically durable phenomena. So while teenage girls sometimes make stuff up for attention, they also get anorexia, engage in non-suicidal self injury, and other experiences that would benefit from treatment.
Some young men are full of s*it while others have serious problems with drug addiction and impulsive behavior. Both seem like can be happening without rendering the other one untrue.
Or.... Teenage girls are unusually impressionable and are particularly susceptible to socially-induced mental disorders. Therefore, it is a good idea to keep them off social media and make sure that they have a sensible circle of friends.
Agreed. This comment inspired me to post in greater detail below about the time that I convinced my large middle school that I believed I had been abducted by aliens, and went from being low-status and mildly bullied to a minor school celebrity that was begged for stories (and slightly feared, perhaps).
I knew I was lying the whole time. It was fun, gave me enormous confidence, and there was never a serious consequence from it.
I know I'm not the only person to have done such a thing, but I'm apparently one of very few who openly admits to it later.
On the other hand, I once met a psychiatrist whose patient was a young (early 20s) man who had suffered from repeated alien abductions and could describe them in vivid detail.
He was an intelligent chap, and self-aware enough to understand the scepticism that his claims engendered. As proof, he offered to show the psychiatrist an implant that the aliens had placed in the roof of his mouth. Upon seeing it, she requested that she be able to extract it and send it for analysis.
The results duly returned, the peculiar lump was a mixture of mercury, silver, tin and zinc. It was, of course, a dislodged filling, and the young man's mind had incorporated it into his hallucination.
> Social media created a situation where a lot of bored people fake an already suspect condition to get attention<
I have a hard time understanding why everyone talks about social media as though it came from another planet. And since when is a mental disorder something you can catch from a toilet seat?
If you get hit over the head with a toilet seat often or hard or both, you can get chronic traumatic encephalopathy which is a bona fide mental disorder.
One can always come up with pat explanations for the group behaviors called mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illnesses. Without a shred of evidence ergot poisoning or religious cults have explained away the 1518 Dancing Plague Strasbourg where hundreds of people were afflicted with the urge to dance until they keeled over and some people danced themselves to death from exhaustion. The 1518 outbreak of uncontrollable dancing was not unique, either. Dancing epidemics reoccurred across various European cities between the 13th and 17th Centuries. There was also a phenomenon that occurred across the centuries where nuns in convents would climb trees, yowl like cats, and lewdly expose their nether regions. This has been explained away by their pent-up sexual frustration and sensory deprivation of the convents, but I never quite understood how climbing trees relieved their sexual frustration.
Of course, there was that infamous outbreak of weird behaviors among the pre-adolescent girls in Salem where several young girls began to scream, and they "threw things about the room, uttered strange sounds, crawled under furniture, and contorted themselves into peculiar positions." This outbreak of inexplicable behavior spread through pre-adolescent girls of Salem. No medical reason at the time could account for these behaviors. Finally, the community hit upon the consensus explanation that the girls were being attacked by the black magic of witches. Ergot poisoning is frequently invoked as an explanation today (but if it was demon ergot, why was it only pre-adolescent girls that were poisoned when the rest of their families were eating the same ergot-infested bread?).
In recent memory, we have the example of the Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic of 1954 and the Tanganyika Laughing Epidemic of 1962. And as recently as 2016 we have the example of the Havana Syndrome, where, instead of witches hexing pre-adolescent girls, the pat explanation for the ailments suffered by State Department employees who worked in the Hotel Nacional in Havana was that the Cuban security services were broadcasting microwaves at our State Department Employees—but then it spread to government employees in a Virginia suburb who hadn't spent time in Cuba. Then, State Department and CIA employees in Hanoi, Guangzhou, and Vienna started coming down with the same syndrome. And it spread to State Department employees in London and Berlin before it petered out. Meanwhile, the people who lived and worked next to these State Department enclaves reported none of the symptoms that our State Department employees were suffering. I blame ergot poisoning!
But “ergot poisoning” was not an obvious common factor. Are you suggesting that there is no clear connection to Tilk-Tok in the epidemic of girls screaming out “beans”?
Ummm. That was sarcasm. — but ergot poisoning has been blamed for a lot of historical outbreaks of mass hysteria with little or no evidence to back it up.
I think the point being made is "TikTok might be serving as a vector to enable superspread of *actual* mental illness", which is not the same as "TikTok is providing an incentive for people to fake mental illness".
I mean, in both cases the obvious solution is the same i.e. "burn TikTok", but there's definitely a difference in world-model there.
(I personally think there's potentially some of both, but I'm trying to explain Beowulf's post.)
What you're ignoring is Aliester Crowley's most important injunction:
Invoke often.
Mental patterns that are repeatedly present acquire their own reality. And it's as real as any other memory, and memories are what mind is made of. This is the mechanism behind the creation of the multiple personalities that Scott talked about. And it's behind "beans", as foolish as the choice for creating that is.
As for jhana, consider that as a possible explanation for the Vietnamese monks who set themselves on fire and just sat there as a political protest. And it was probably created in exactly the same way. (I haven't looked up how one is supposed to induce jhana, but since it involves a couple of hours of meditation every day for a week or so, it seems to fit the general pattern.)
All that you are is your memories plus your current sensory environment. Anything that can reshape your memories, can reshape who you are. (OTOH, the current sensory environment is highly dependent on the body state, both interoception and exteroception. So it's not all one thing.)
True, but I found that my qualia are very malleable. In college, I trained myself to see auras—but it turned out to be a relatively useless skill to acquire. And although fluffing someone else's aura/energy field is a relaxing and pleasurable pass time for both parties involved, one doesn't need to see their energy field to fluff it (someone who can relax and "open" their sensory input can feel it without seeing it). And my ability to see auras was a skill that quickly disappeared when I stopped actively trying to practice it.
When I was taking Med School anatomy, I started having visual "hallucinations" where if I stared at a person's face, their face would dissolve and I could see their muscles and tendons moving as they talked and see their carotid arteries pulsing with blood. I'd have to blink a couple of times to get rid of these views. But the person allowed me to stare longer at them, I could melt away their musculature and see their skulls. Interestingly enough, I could do this for other parts of their bodies in the areas where their derma wasn't covered with clothing. Hands were fascinating to watch in action. This "skill" also went away several weeks after the class was over. Something about working with cadavers "exposed" this ability in my qualia.
I won't try to argue that what I was seeing in these cases was "real". I could just as believe I was deluding myself despite the solidity of my visions. I'm well-grounded in the sciences, but I am now skeptical that what my qualia perceive is necessarily real. I was raised in an atheist household of philosophical materialists. But I guess it didn't stick!
materialism is making less and less sense to me as well. it's very striking to me at the moment - how did i miss that it's sort of nonsense to suggest that matter, an abstraction that we can only establish post-sensing, is the thing giving rise to the thing that invented it?
the map is not the territory, not sure how i spent a decade convinced otherwise
I would much rather expand healthcare accessibility than decide who does and doesn’t deserve access to it-- this is pretty fundamental humanist thought.
Given sufficient political will to reorganize the overall US healthcare system around any remotely sensible sort of cost-benefit analysis, I suspect there would be a lot of lower-hanging fruit. Order-of-magnitude cost reduction in many fields basically everyone agrees are necessary is not only possible, but could be a simple matter of adopting what are already standard practices from other countries. Surplus from all that savings could then be redirected. Seems unlikely such a painstakingly strict rationing of mental health resources would be necessary at that point.
If a significant number of people request care, and diagnoses other than "lying for attention" are ruled out with sufficient certainty... have we tried just giving them what they apparently want? Write a prescription for weekly visits to a maid cafe or something. Plus UBI of course, so everyone involved can afford to consider alternatives.
Perhaps there's a lot of low hanging fruit. If we want to understand a system, try and change it, as they say. Reduction of redundant testing seems promising. UBI is interesting, especially as an alternative to some existing systems. Allow Americans more choice in purchasing drugs that have been approved in other Western nations. Allow government programs to negotiate prices. (Though it seems like private care is subsidizing social care. So 'Medicare for all' might be like the person going from standing on two legs to one leg to zero legs. There are some potential issues with that trend line.)
I think it's worth noting that inflation in the United States for services has been a good bit higher than the official indicies. This is often presented as an industry specific problem, and to some extent it is. But the cost of, say, legal services has increased faster than inflation despite an absolute glut of lawyers. The cost of education has increased faster than inflation. At some point it makes sense to see this as a general problem with services/inflation and not an industry specific issue. The cost of goods has been lower than expected due to importation, offshoring, and automation.
(It will be interesting, in a depressing sort of way, to see how strongly the American medical community resists automation as AI improves. I suspect there will be at least some regulatory barriers thrown up. We already see this kind of thing to some extent.)
As such, I tend to see arguments of the type "we will copy this foreign country and get their results" as frequently overly optimistic, even if foreign countries have some potentially helpful ideas.
Massive American military spending, for good or ill, makes Americans poorer than productivity would indicate.
Also, rural populations impose various costs and America is on the high end in terms of rural populations.
Biggest thing I'd like to change is mostly just making payment terms clear up front. Any standard procedure should have a publicly listed standard price, and if there are complications, cost of follow-up treatment for those (plus maybe a flat fine of five million bucks per iatrogenic death, with as little room for lawyerly negotiation as possible, just to close off that potential perverse incentive) should be borne by the hospital, because they're the ones in the best position to make informed decisions about prevention vs. cure.
When some administrator sees sleep-deprivation-induced treatment errors directly impacting the financial bottom line, rather than being cushioned and obfuscated through various types of insurance or abstract litigation risk or shuffled off to be somebody else's problem, might start to seem like their shareholder-value-maximizing option is actually giving all the doctors and nurses more reasonable hours, hiring additional staff to fill resulting gaps in the duty roster, then running proper time-and-motion studies to see what can safely be deskilled or automated.
The other big thing is drug supply. First of all, the FDA should be required to issue some sort of official opinion on every drug that's already in widespread use, anywhere in the developed world - no more "these statements have not been evaluated" dodge, no more "not invented here" - including rough zero-to-ten ratings for safety and efficacy.
Epipens, and any other commodity of obvious lifesaving medical relevance originally developed with federal funding, should be dropped directly into the public domain, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
FDA inspection fees for drug manufacturing should be assessed per dose actually produced, front-loaded a bit to ensure initial setup isn't horribly flawed. Per-facility-per-drug-per-year price structure strongly discourages idle capacity, or less specialized labs producing small volumes of many different things as-needed, which then makes it excessively difficult to ramp up production when demand spikes (like, say, in a pandemic), and leads to single-source or even no-source problems.
No, humanism is a moral framework used as an axiom used to determine weights of the cost benefit analysis, by definition being independent.
As below, there are many better ways to maximize healthcare access: cutting out the amount of money insurance brokers make on every automated claim despite having no system in place to handle failed automation, patent reform/loophole cuts/patent seizure, having government provided ePCR systems (ePCRs make as much as a 99.99% profit while still forcing nurses to use physical fax and handwritten notes— AS MANY AS 7000 PEOPLE ARE KILLED IN THE US EACH YEAR DUE TO HANDWRITING ERRORS ON PRESCRIPTIONS. This isn’t even a low hang fruit really, it’s pure bad bad bad.)
I 100% agree on the need for patent reform. Maybe a challenge period prior to patents being granted, with a bounty for successful challenges from the general public.
"As below, there are many better ways to maximize healthcare access: cutting out the amount of money insurance brokers make on every automated claim despite having no system in place to handle failed automation"
I'm not sure what this refers to.
"having government provided ePCR systems (ePCRs make as much as a 99.99% profit while still forcing nurses to use physical fax and handwritten notes"
I roughly know what an ePCR system is, but not the incentives associated with it. Do you have some sort of cite or paper regarding this issue?
Pardon, it looks like I slightly conflated the terms and was thinking of pharmacy benefits managers. They work with providers & insurance to set prices and determine eligibility, but once those things are set, insurance basically regards them as Unchangeable, completely automating claims. So, insurance used to all have claims brokers that would handle things, but now 62% of insurance companies don't have them anymore & patients either get what the PBM says or they pay completely out of pocket. (Back in 2019 through august 2020, my claims stopped going through correctly due to a system identification mismatch error, and the automated system to pick up claim denials couldn't fix it, so I was told repeatedly for months in a row that my only option was to CHANGE MY STATE IDENTIFICATION or pay out of pocket. I am very salty about it.)
My experience with ePCRs is actually personal: I worked for a few years both developing and implementing ePCR systems, and there are a lot of major barriers for clinic or hospital staff to using them. There was no standardization among them for decades, so any time a patient needs records to be sent from a system using one ePCR to another with a different data structure, it has to be faxed and re-entered by hand. The quality of ePCRs is also really bad, so often staff have to hand-write notes to make up for things their patient data system is too prohibitive on or not useful.
Attempts to standardize kept running into the issue of "well, we're making money already soooo do we REALLY need to hire more staff to allow our DB to transfer data to other DBs when it can only lose us customers?" At one company I was with, they estimated an absolute minimum for a small clinic to migrate one device system (which could be a single device) from one ePCR system to another as costing $13,800* (post inflation) to get the data reconfigured, with the cost scaling for each system & each clinic or hospital involved: so companies providing ePCRs have been able to grow as long as they stay just under the rate to migrate to one another without needing to make any serious investment in upgrading the product or meeting the needs of staff and patients. One example I found here from 2018 is that ePCR companies (and myself despite years of working on this) had no idea that physicians and nurses use different standard methods to identify inpatients, and that both need to be in the upper-left hand corner of a patient record.
So tldr: it's a natural monopoly as the cost to get new customers is prohibitive compared to the cost of maintaining a current customer.
As a disclaimer, technically the HRSA & CDC have already stepped in and tempted companies to standardize with the prospect of selling medical data to them, so ePCRs WILL get there eventually- 10 U.S. states have now achieved standardization, servicing an estimated 13000 EMS agencies out of 21000. https://nemsis.org/ While this will (again, Eventually) take care of the faxing issue, I have a lot of doubts about the amount of remaining room for competitors to enter the market with products better suited to medical care, as the existing systems have setup large-scale contracts & have the finances to hire dozens of marketers for every engineer-- and it begs the question of whether system usability will improve or costs will ever get lower.
(Additional disclaimer, there are also plenty of companies that have setup virtual secure faxing as a workaround to literally faxing, but somehow this doesn't make me feel better either.)
Thanks for the detailed analysis. I don't know that I have enough context to productively process it into a more coherent political position on my part. If someone was generally in favor of free markets, (i.e. individual consent, meaning the ability of people to say 'no' to agreements they didn't want) What should I advocate for? Some minimum standardization of ePCR?
Hey Freddie another nuts guy here offering a middle way. Hopefully not a bullshit one either. I do think these people have a genuine mental disorder (where genuine here means they can’t just choose to not be symptomatic) but its actual characteristic is a manic need for attention and to be special. There are so many real life situations where this is extremely maladaptive and they just can’t stop doing it. The reason I think that’s an important distinction is that if you’re trying to treat a TikTok person for what they say they have vs the thing that is causing them to say they have whatever you won’t make any progress. That unstoppable hunger for validation might be annoying but I don’t think it’s fake especially when you see someone blowing up their life because they can’t stop posting. I’m sure someone out there is just malicious but probably fewer than you might fear. These are kids trying to stand out in a high school the size of the internet. No wonder they’re having all kinds of negative reactions to that. And yes it’s straining the system but it’s not the kids’ fault we have a world that drives people mad. We’re supposed to grow up around 150 people we are mostly related to not have all our embarrassing growth pangs memorialized forever. I believe it’s socially induced but I don’t think that makes it less real anymore than my PTSD isn’t real because I wasn’t born with it. Once I got it I couldn’t choose not to have it.
Edit: Updated a couple of typos. Which I seem to make exclusively when I comment here.
Would it be feasible / useful to just... hire each of them a few full-time adoring fans? I suspect there are many people now working minimum-wage customer service positions who would consider such a task no worse than their current one, possibly even a step up. Obvious problem is awareness of insincerity would make it less effective (and attempting to conceal the insincerity would be unethical and dangerous), but people have genuine emotional reactions to stuff they logically know isn't real all the time. Just gotta figure out the right dosage.
I think the only treatment is trying to build an understanding that your life matters and you are good enough as you are even if nobody is looking at you and saying so.
Longer term, sure, but when somebody seems to be having real trouble with that sort of confidence even when lots of people ARE looking at them and saying so, and too much of their time and energy goes toward maintenance on various ramshackle coping mechanisms... well, the budget and foundation for such a building project has to come from somewhere.
I know this sounds like a joke about people just needing to toughen up and what not but I actually, honestly, sincerely plus a bunch of other words to mean I am not joking, think working construction jobs makes people more confident and less likely to crave social validation. It just puts you in touch with reality, you can tell how much you know right away, and you get a sense of how hard it is to actually do stuff so you get less anxious about own accomplishments. So, let’s get the kids off TikTok and take them down to Home Depot.
I've heard the same from other places, not least the movies Office Space and Gran Torino, and it's consistent with my own firsthand experiences. Probably won't work for everybody but it definitely seems worth trying.
If you're going to set up a recruitment and training program for that sort of thing, how about focusing it specifically on rooftop solar installation? There's a lot of that coming up, if exponential trendlines are anything to go by, and retrofits onto existing buildings will probably be both easier to slip through the permitting process, and harder to automate, than cookie-cutter arrays out on open fields.
I don’t understand the tone here. You’re writing like Scott wrote a policy piece advocating for DiD teens to get higher priority in mental healthcare (or something equally silly) … but thats not the post he wrote. His claim is just “consider that maybe some of the DiD teens are actually experiencing something and not just literally lying”. Given priors this seems reasonable, and isn’t a super strong claim either way.
So, why the extreme hostility like someone just kicked your puppy? Is there something that I missed?
Excellent post. I am bemused by all the "just faking" takes. They seem to be based on some reductionist impulse that doesn't model well how the mind works.
Of course people sometimes lie. Of course they're sometimes confused about themselves and construct odd narratives. But none of that means deceit or confusion is always or even usually what is going on with weird conditions.
"But none of that means deceit or confusion is always or even usually what is going on with weird conditions."
Neither does asserting the opposite make it so.
The cases we do have some numbers for (like anorexia, or various historical hysterias) are rather more on the "faking it" side than your assertion.
More generally what I am seeing here is a replay of a constant theme in politics:
(a) people hate, HATE HATE HATE, cheaters, in every situation, for whatever reason. This is massively attested across social science, history, literature.
(b) even so, do-gooders constantly insist that none of [insert class] are in fact cheating, whether it's welfare fraud, claiming learning disabilities (to get easier test conditions), refugees or would-be-immigrants, the homeless, or these various medical situations.
(c) what inevitably then happens is that people encounter some case of their actual personal experience that is in fact cheating, and dismiss every claim of group (b) as lying garbage.
This happens over and over again, but group (b) NEVER learn to modulate their claims, to tone them down to something actually truthful like "as far as we can tell, the fraud rate for xyz is 4% and we will willing accept inconveniences that further reduce that, but we also believe that that level of fraud is acceptable for the value of this policy to the other 96%".
And with this refusal, they lose a large number of potential supporters.
But what the hell do I know? I've only seen this play out again and again. My evidence-based assertions count for nothing against the importance of jihad and signaling.
Let's stipulate that X% are faking, and Y% are not, where Y = 100 - X.
You seem to be insisting, with lots of detail, that "X is large." But I never said otherwise.
I'm not making any claim about the size of X or Y, other than that neither is (near) 100 or 0.
We only have a disagreement here if you actually believe that X = 100. If that's your position, well that's a very strong claim indeed, and none of your examples provide evidence for it.
> This sounds like: “I, RC, have the mysterious mental ability to detect liars. I admit I can’t prove this, but come on, you should probably just trust me because it’s perfectly reasonable to think other people have mysterious mental abilities you don’t.”
Detecting lies isn't a mysterious ability. It's a normal social skill, which can be verified in particular cases. And it's probably one that you personally should be putting more work into, for a few reasons.
> It's a normal social skill, which can be verified in particular cases.
And can be verified as hopelessly fallible in other particular cases.
A normal social skill is to look around a room and draw your own conclusions in spite of what someone else might be telling you about the room. What if the room they are discussing happens to be inside them? It doesn’t look the way you want it to look so they must be lying?
They see a lamp on the corner table and you don’t. What next? Tell them they’re lying or ask them what it looks like? I think only one of these paths leads me any closer to the truth.
The normal social skill is _claiming_ an ability to detect lies - and believing one's own claims - while frequently being wrong.
I'd guess the average human lie detector is better than 50% accurate, but no more than 80%, and prone to higher failure rates dealing with strangers, people not of one's exact subculture, and people neuro-divergent in ways different from oneself.
It's clearly something that would be very strongly selected for evolutionarily, so it seems completely reasonable to think that people can do better than random at it. Of course, the ability to lie credibly is *also* strongly selected for...
Also, a pound of reasoning like yours (e.g. based on likely evolutionary pressures) isn't worth an ounce of actually measuring the phenomenon being considered. It is probably worth more than a pound of anecdata, which is where my estimates of human lie detection capability mostly come from. But not entirely - I've probably read things like the article cited by Yug Gnirob in this thread, which I presume (from the periodical cited) is probably based at least in part on actual research. (I didn't click on it this morning.)
I mean sure, if we can demonstrate that humans are no better than random at detecting lies, then we have to infer either that there are no such pressures, or that it's an arms race where the ability to lie and the ability to detect lies remain equalized. Humans being pretty bad at it would be unsurprising. Humans being no better than random at it *would* be, IMO.
Even that link says 54% and 63% (for audio only), making people merely poor at it, not useless.
Also, if we had *no* way to detect lies, lying would likely be a lot more outrageous. As is, we have to take care.
A bit of a side point, but I think lie detection capabilities vary wildly. In much the same way as everyone likes to fancy themselves intelligent, I think everyone likes to fancy themselves good at detecting lies. But in either case, not everyone really is. Some people are probably horrible at it. Most people probably range from kinda poor to so-so. And some people are probably quite skilled indeed. Measuring randomly will only show us what's average, though, not what's actually possible.
One of the many theories about why humans developed rapidly--bigger brains in such a short evolutionary time, is that it was caused by the signals--arms race between ever--better ability to deceive and ever--better ability to spot deception.
I actually think on average people do worse than chance, because the bad liars are unlikely to lie a lot, while the good liars may be going around lying constantly. Which means most lies out there are being delivered by people who are unusually good at lying.
It's also presumably a pair of skills, with varying levels of talent and practice. I'd expect a soft threshold of sorts for "this works against inexperienced liars, but not talented or practiced ones", with the kinds of studies determining lie detection capability ending up with the second kind of liar.
Possibly out of sheer repetition, even, depending on the study design, but I think part of it may be that the detection skill (or one of them) is more for "are they concealing something important" rather than "are they saying something factually untrue", and it's hard to reconcile "concealing something important" with "passes ethics review".
Studies tend to show an amount, but not a ton, of lie detection, so yes. Also, *any* lie detection will result in better than chance results, while good lying ability would merely cancel out an amount of lie detection (as long as we don't think lying ability would be so good as to be *better* than truthtelling in having it believable, or that lying talens would completely overpower lie detection).
I mean, I *do* think lying ability can be good enough to show up as "gets picked more often than chance" if the study design is "one of these is a truth, one of these is a lie, pick which is which."
I'm hoping the studies are more sophisticated than that, but I'm not as confident in that as I might have been three years ago.
> the ability to lie credibly is *also* strongly selected for...
Why should it be? I assert instead that the *inability* to lie convincingly has been strongly selected for. Why else would we have all these physical reactions like sweaty palms when lying? Saying words is not, physically, different from saying other words.
Having obvious tells when lying makes you more believable when you're being honest.
Here, let's turn the temperature down a little. I'll clarify what I meant.
I don't think lie detection being a "normal social skill" is relevant to this discussion. Lying is also a normal social skill. Some people are good at detecting lies, and others aren't. Some people are good at lying, and others aren't. When tested, well-calibrated humans do better than chance at detecting lies, but they're only hitting like 60-70% ish lie detection rates at best.
Being able to suss out malingerers, charlatans, etc. is an important skill, but there are always error bars. I think it's probably a good social skill to be able to suss out people who are trying to scam you, for example. One should be able to tell that someone who has a health emergency and needs your money every two weeks like clockwork probably isn't telling the truth. But RC's implication that normal people should easily be able to tell the difference between a spoonie lying for social credit and a person with a serious but undiagnosed condition seems, to me, to be a different category of thing.
It's a 'normal' social skill when you are talking to people face-to-face and evaluating their voice and expressions and whatnot, sure. How good the average person is at that skill, especially compared to how good they *think* they are, is an open question, but certainly it's one of the things we evolved to do.
But the claim here is about detecting lies through plain text over the internet. I think that moves away from the evolved social skill and more into just 'I am the arbiter of truth' in a way that stops being justified, especially in cases like this.
as someone who was heavily involved in Livejournal and /cgl/ back in the mid 2000s and saw the rise of spoonies, they are by far and large attention seekers making up illnesses to find themselves doted on or to get attention in their self-proclaimed misery. it has not changed in the last 15 years. of course to the detriment of people who genuinely have unsolved and unidentified illness(es). just as you have people faking anorexia, faking personality disorders, etc.
sounds crazy right? people have found a way. it is all about what is posted online and behavior to friends/classmates/family. few if any medical professionals would fall for it unless the parents push for that it's a real thing maybe, but there are people who online act like they have anorexia, post media online to that effect, dress themselves in ways to make it seem like they are (buying multiple sizes of the same shirts and dresses), post their "full day of meals" (tiny tiny portions) to give the illusion of sub 500-600 calorie intake, use makeup and lighting to get good photos to make it look like they are. people do crazy shit for validation and this happens to be one of millions of ways. just as there are anorexics pretending they are not online, there are people pretending they are.
Years back, I was involved in an online group where one person claimed to be bullied in school for being lesbian (the account grew in the telling as she 'revealed' more of what was going on in response to the sympathy she got).
Eventually she admitted that she had made it all up for the attention and sympathy and ego-stroking she got.
So while yeah, lesbian teenagers get bullied in school is true, it's also true that people make shit up online for sympathy and attention, and it can be difficult to distinguish who is telling the truth from who is faking it. Be one of the sympathetic supporters who ends up getting burned by a faker, and you may swing to the other extreme of cynicism about any claims.
(One fad back then was the claims of suicide due to criticism of bad fanfiction writing or bad behaviour online; some people would make fake accounts pretending to be friends and family of the person being criticised, claiming that they were really suffering and everyone criticising them was driving them to despair, and then ending up with "This is Susie's mom/sister/best friend, Susie killed herself yesterday, I hope you're all happy, you drove her to it".
See enough fake suicides and you get very sceptical of people claiming to be depressed and suicidal and they need affirmation and approval from online sources or else they'll self-harm again).
My prior would be that people posting online about their mental health disorders would be more likely to be lying - the nature of these platforms is to win validation via fake internet points and likes. It could both be true that the majority of people that claim a given conditions have it ... and the majority on tik-tok posting about it are hucksters.
My first inclination is to not begrudge those who complain of their misery because even if untrue, they have probably convinced themselves to be more miserable than I am.
I think the hypothesis that "people who incessantly post online about specific issues are more likely to be lying than people who claim to experience these issues but don't post online about it" is probably true.
I am much less concerned about whether or not people are *lying* then whether people might be *mistaken*. It seems true and important that people can be *mistaken* about their own experiences—in the example from the previous post of the person who denies they're hungry and then eats, for instance. Or the woman who said she wasn't thinking (since she was enlightened) and then realized she was. Or if, for example, someone says that God spoke to them, I think we can believe that they believe it, without closing off the possibility that they were *wrong*, i.e. that they experienced something else that they mistook for God speaking to them. In this sense, at least, I think that experiences are not unfalsifiable.
Well, with the jhana stuff it's hard to imagine what they'd be mistaken about. They're describing some kind of physical pleasure. If any of them make claims about having expanded mental powers, then I'm pretty skeptical of that, but less so of someone who just claims to be in a euphoric state.
These posts have reminded me a lot of my experiences with psychedelics. People on psychedelics sometimes think they have deeper thoughts or better creative impulses or improved skills, and they're usually wrong about that. But they also think that they're experiencing an altered mental state that can be pleasurable, terrifying, or therapeutic, and that's very difficult to deny. It wouldn't surprise me at all if jhana worked the same way, where the experience is absolutely real but many specific claims about the experiences are false and merely a result of your brain working wrong while you're in the middle of it.
I myself don't really doubt the jhana stuff. I simply worry that in his eagerness to bolster that particular claim, Scott is making a much broader claim than he needs to, that experience in general is unfalsifiable. So I wanted to push back on that.
You raise a good point. I think it's good and important to separate the two while understanding that most people are interested in whether you're actually hungry rather than whether you think you're hungry. Practically it is difficult to constantly execute as a process when evaluating someone and I would expect most people to conflate the two out of sheer convenience.
I'm not sure this is hugely different. The best way to lie convincingly, in general, is to convince yourself that something is true. I think that most people who say things that are false (even if they should know they're false) have mostly convinced themselves that they're true, so most lies are people saying things they at least partly believe.
Yes, yes, and yes to this. It's so basic and fundamental that we're all having lots of quite different qualia all the time. The simplest example must be colour blindness. In my middle school biology class, my teacher was red-green colourblind, and a classmate asked: so what colour do you see when you look at red or green? The teacher rolled his eyes and pointed out that there is no way he can communicate the answer other than by saying, "the red-green colour."
Something as basic and everyday as what colour stuff is has at least 5% of us experiencing a bunch of completely separate qualia to "the norm." So, yeah, it would be little wonder if lots of other areas of our experience also have significant non-normie populations.
It's probably like what mort people see with the 2 vs 5 picture: a mass of undifferentiated digits that you can dfferentiate with a bunch of effort and mental discipline.
It's funny, I can't see the shapes/digits at all in most of the coloured-dot colourblindness tests, but the 2's in the sea of 5's jump out at me.
If you want some raw examples of people who are "faking" things, you can look at subreddits like FakeDisorderCringe. I was looking for some adult autism discussions and Reddit decided to recommend a site where 256k members ruthlessly mock the social media of people who self diagnose with autism and D.I.D. All of the posts are supposed to be "anonymous" but many of them have more than enough info to find the individual poster and harass them.
I don't know enough about D.I.D. to evaluate those (other than thinking they are a bit silly), but many of the "obvious fakers" of autism they make fun of are... people that seem to have some form of autism and are trying to figure out what's going on. We seem to have ended up at a point where claiming you have a hard to diagnose mental illness makes internet strangers EXTREMELY ANGRY and I don't really think that's a healthy thing for either side.
Everyone always claims that fakers are obviously all "attention seekers" but that honestly doesn't make much sense to me because the odds of getting negative destructive attention are quite high. "Confused about how their own brain works" seems much, much more likely to me based on all of the psychology research I've read.
If you have a mental illness that constrains your life, and you just live within those constraints, that's one thing.
If, on the other hand, the first thing you tell complete strangers, for whom this is irrelevant, that you have a particular condition; if it's the way you define yourself in a byline that allows for 288 characters, if it's something you work at "presenting" to the internet for hours a day, well it's hard not to view that as attention-seeking.
Now such people may have "attention-seeking disorder" (which does seem to be a real thing...) but that's not what they are claiming. (Perhaps they should!)
Curious what would go in the byline that wouldn't indicate attention-seeking. If instead of a mental illness it's their height, you can still assume they're lying about their height for attention. Maybe moreso, because height isn't likely to affect text interactions.
The usual implicit belief here is that one should only seek attention for "good" characteristics - typically either earned accomplishments/skills or socially-acceptable tastes/opinions.
The underlying assumptions are that (1) getting attention for "bad" characteristics is harmful because it incentivizes focusing on those characteristics and disincentivizes self-improvement, and (2) the speaker is qualified to judge which characteristics are "bad" for other people.
In addition to disorders and disabilities, the list of "bad" characteristics tends to include appearance and sexuality, traumatic experiences, and racial and gender identity.
I'll say that (1) is an incomplete argument, because self-improvement is a lesser good to cultural improvement, and cultural improvement comes from people presenting unique perspectives on problems. Like, I only recently learned that virtual reality has a sitting mode, and yet it's incompatible with wheelchairs. https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=54880 That's a thing that's easy to miss when nobody you know is using a wheelchair, but easy to catch when they are.
Even if they're purely attention-seeking, the best way to address it is not to try to berate them into stopping, but to draw attention to the futility of attention as status. Link to Madonna or Kary Perry making songs about how vapid their own work is, or SuperEyepatchWolf talking about hitting a million followers are realizing it's just a meaningless number. Trying to kill a particular approach to attention will just make people go find another approach, and every time one gets shut down it causes collateral damage.
As a guy with diagnosed textbook Tourette's syndrome, I've been morbidly fascinated by the rise of "TikTok Tourette's", which is just absolutely, clearly, not Tourette's (the symptom presentation is totally different, it's just entirely missing the actually most common Tourette's symptoms, and the gender ratio is not just inverted from what you would normally expect, it's inverted by an absolutely enormous effect size the likes of which you never see).
But! That in and of itself doesn't necessarily mean that every single one of them is "faking" -- it's entirely possible that they've got some weird condition that you somehow psyche yourself into by watching too many people do this sort of thing on TikTok. Basically, there's good evidence that most of them don't have classic Tourette's, but it's possible a number of them could be experiencing *something* real. I feel like the degree to which TikTok is capable of generating new psychosomatic disorders is really understudied.
"...the degree to which TikTok is capable of generating new psychosomatic disorders is really understudied."
While I'm sure this happens, I think... lots of things generate psychosomatic disorders. Religion, classically. Sexuality. Puberty. Violence. Aging... The examples that we see newly emerging from social media seem new, but it feels to me like "X gives people disorders" is true for pretty much all X. The fact that shellshock and oedipal fantasies and religious visions and midlife crises have all become familiar and culturally normalised suggests not that TikTok weirdness is different, but that TikTok weirdness will become familiar and normalised in turn as well.
I think the fact that TickTok has effects on people's brains on the same order as religion, sexuality, puberty, violence and aging... well that's a big thing when you look at it. Sure, everything has a chance to cause a psychosomatic disorder, but we would also expect things to do it at different rates or likelihood. If TikTok is up there with some of the most significant life events people experience, that's pretty shocking, and a bit worrisome all things considered. The claim that "TikTok is no worse than shellshock" isn't reassuring to me :D
Indeed. Once upon a time we didn't have shellshock, and then we did, because we invented artillery shells. Once upon a time we didn't have TikTok-induced disorders, and now we do (perhaps).
I'm not sure that is true. The rates and manifestation might be different but I strongly suspect there are underlying mechanisms that are getting reused. Isn't shells-shock just PTSD which we now know can be caused by an array of trauma. And certainly we can find examples of "sword shock" for lack of better terms with pre-gunpowder warfare. There are probably a cluster mechanisms around "young woman coping with severe-social stress confounded by puberty" that get expressed into different "trend conditions" but nevertheless are really just derived from core physiological factors.
I think the argument there is true in a trivial sense. Cavemen likely had the basic biological substrate that will eventually allow their descendants to acquire all sorts of new psychological traumas once they've been exposed to the horrors of the holonet in the year 3,000.
My point is that THESE SPECIFIC DISORDERS didn't use to exist, and now they do. Generalizing and categorizing them away isn't particularly helpful for understanding what's going here in my opinion. The hypothesis is that we live in a world where if these people weren't exposed to social media they wouldn't have the problems they have now.
"...if these people weren't exposed to social media they wouldn't have the problems they have now."
There's two readings of this: (1) if these people weren't exposed to social media, they wouldn't have problems; (2) if these people weren't exposed to social media, their problems would manifest in a different way.
I think, if we disagree, it's because you're leaning more towards (1) and I'm leaning more towards (2).
Turns out, there is pretty much zero mention of PTSD style issues in pre-modern warfare eras. Even 19th century gun powder warfare doesn't seem to turn up much of anything. There are theories about this, but the general theme is that the nature of modern "always on" warfare is particularly rough on people. Fun fact. (Well... not fun per se...)
My wild uninformed guess is that what makes WW1 and beyond modern warfare different is the "Empty Battlefield" phenomenon. In military science, the "Empty Battlefield" is the observation that as modern weapons grow more powerful (with artillery, tanks, air power, machine guns, grenades, rocket launchers, and so on), armies are forced to disperse to an ever greater degree to avoid being annihilated. In the past, soldiers fought shoulder to shoulder with their fellow soldiers in line formations; nowadays, doing that means they'd all be blown to pieces by a single artillery shell, so they disperse as much as possible so that a single artillery shell can only blow up a single squad, fireteam, or even soldier.
However, by that same token every soldier is far more alone than ever before in battle. Standing literally shoulder to shoulder with your mates may have some sort of protective effect against the mental trauma of combat, making you feel less vulnerable to fear, or like there are people who understand you, or like your failure is not your own, or something like that. Being visibly alone and isolated meanwhile would have the opposite of those effects. That would be why this effect only shows up in modern warfare, not even 19th century gunpowder warfare - the line formation was still alive and well in that era.
I'm not sure how you would test this though. Perhaps one could try to compile statistics for the rates of probable PTSD in regular soldiers in the 19th century vs. specialized skirmishers? Skirmishers in that era fought in a recognizably modern way - dispersed, using cover, deploying camouflage - and in fact military observers during the American Civil War, Franco-Prussian War, Russo-Japanese War, and so on remarked that with the increasing power of the weapons being deployed (rifled guns, smokeless powder, machine guns), everyone was learning how to fight in skirmish formation, and if this continued into the future everyone *would* fight in nothing but skirmish formation. If those proto-modern skirmishers had higher rates of PTSD than regular soldiers, then that would be good evidence for this theory.
Of course, the quality of PTSD related documentation from this time period is not very good, so this might never happen.
I’ve read a bunch of accounts of warfare and there’s often mentions of the costs of war. I didn’t tick down the DSM criteria but there’s plenty of references to men having a really tough life after war.
I'm going to register an opinion that PTSD is caused mainly by:
a) bad stuff happening,
b) that you can't do anything about,
c) that people whom you trusted lied about, ignored, etc., and
d) that those people didn't give a shit that they were wrong, or covered up, etc.
In pre-artillery warfare, things changed slowly and there was generally something you could do. But in WWI, no one expected it to be like it was. Same with Vietnam - the previous generation had stories of WWII and Korea, relatively straightforward fights against clear Bad Guys, defending and liberating civilians who wanted you to save them. (Sometimes just propaganda, of course.) Instead they got burning babies.
And in general, I think the crappier the world was, the less insulated we were from the cold equations of life and death, and the less anything could surprise us in this way. One of the changes the Grimm brothers made in later editions was changing "mothers" to "stepmothers" in order to avoid shocking their urban audiences, and that was just 200 years ago. IMO, those kinds of stories prepare children for the real world.
Also, data point of 1, but sufficient quantities of alcohol make PTSD go away temporarily (for me, at around the point where I can't walk straight), as do opioid painkillers (which have their own problems), and cannabis (my preferred choice).
(Back to speaking of children, another not-fun fact: childhood sexual abuse fits the above criteria, and there's pretty much a pipeline from that to drug addiction (speaking of opioids making PTSD go away) and from there of course to homelessness.)
As for pre-modern mentions of PTSD, my personal experience of the "fight" type is that the best description I have is that it's like being possessed by a spirit of vengeance. (I want to say Nemesis, but it's probably just the Erinyes.) So maybe go looking for that kind of stuff, as well as mentions of heavy alcohol or drug use?
Oh interesting. Is your position that jhanas and PTSD both are fake?
That link goes to a short ranting opinion piece on a blog by an anthropologist and a physicist. It doesn't engage with any of the research on PTSD at all. There are interesting questions to be raised about PTSD as a DSM diagnosis, but the physical mechanism criteria for real-ness doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you also feel that nearly all of mental illness is fake.
"As doctors treated more and more battle fatigue cases, they began to understand the impact of precipitating events. The more intense the fight, the greater the number of battle fatigue casualties. A leading cause was artillery fire, since it forced a soldier to sit and take it; other triggers included the death of a buddy or bad news from home, like a “Dear John” breakup letter.
But the most significant factor, doctors learned, was the number of days in combat. A man who had served 200 to 240 days in combat was no longer an effective soldier."
Another answer that is compelling to me is that PTSD is the price we pay for having a society that values life. In a world in which killing your enemies is simply god's will, or a source of glory, or whatever, you don't worry about in. Going from a society like ours, which sees killing and violence as wrong, to one in which it is necessary, and then back again, may be likely to cause psychological trauma in a way past peoples did not have to deal with.
Shell shock (battle fatigue) is not at all PTSD. Two totally different things.
You take a battle fatigued soldier out of the fight for a month and they’re probably “fixed”. Nobody knows anything about PTSD. Guys that went through hell don’t have it. Guys that didn’t do.
Strong suspicion that VA benefits and social desirability has given PTSD broader appeal/acceptance/whatever.
As someone who has never witnessed Tourette's outside of a media portrayal... for some reason, it was just very jarring to learn that you have it. Because I really enjoy your writing, and you are very articulate.
That is an incredibly stupid thing to say, but brains are stupid. I think it's because I read out loud in my head, so it's just hard to conceptualize a writing/vocal mismatch.
I have had similar experiences with people who speak English as a second or third language. If they don't speak it very well, some part of my brain thinks they are stupid, even though I only speak English and they speak three.
Scattered thoughts, but somewhat related to the overall post.
> That is an incredibly stupid thing to say, but brains are stupid. I think it's because I read out loud in my head, so it's just hard to conceptualize a writing/vocal mismatch.
Nah, natural reaction. Questions are good! For what it's worth, if you saw me speaking in public you probably wouldn't be able to tell I had Tourette's, because I don't always present with symptoms. You might be imagining it's kind of like a speech impediment, and it's more like every once in a while a monkey that lives in your brain seizes the controls and causes mischief, but you're a normal person the rest of the time.
I just read the text interview and found it extremely interesting and informative.
I didn't know you were religious, so that was a cool wrinkle - don't get a ton of those types around these parts, and I think it's really necessary to have that voice represented well. Particularly when a lot of atheists either a) have very little personal experience with religion and view it as bizarre or b) had a very horrible personal experience with religion and can only see it through that lens.
Also, the topic of interacting with the cops struck me as terrifying. The thought of having a disorder that occasionally makes you do the worst possible thing, then dealing with people who could kill you on the spot if you make the wrong move, then the knowledge of that potential making you anxious, which can trigger the disorder... Very scary, and not something I would have considered.
Glad to hear that you have a more or less normal life and that your conditions aren't too hugely negative. Also, being a parent as someone with Tourette's seems... probably very difficult on occasion, but also potentially hilarious with the trolling your own kids possibilities.
One of my closest friends during grad school has had Tourette's all his life (he's even told me at one point that his case was considered severe) and I never knew or guessed for years and was slightly shocked when he told me. Nothing approaching a "speech impediment" at all -- his speech is completely normal, and the only eccentric behavior of his that I would imagine comes from Tourette's is that he sometimes makes weird noises when he goes into the bathroom, like he's trying to release something itching to get out of him. Of course his symptoms were probably much more pronounced in childhood, long before I ever knew him.
My impression is that the "spurting out obscenities in public or in the middle of speaking" thing is the form of Tourette's that's most prevalent in the public image but that it's relatively rare.
That impression is pretty much correct. That said, the "spurting out obscenities bit" is actually *totally real*, and of the many media depictions I've seen, most of them aren't super far off the mark; it's more the fixation on that as the central example of Tourette's that's a bit out of whack. It's similar to how Narcolepsy's central symptom is the "sleep attack" in media but there's actually a lot of other presentations, such as cataplexy.
Aaaaand having said all that, I actually do have copralalia. In fact I have basically *all* of the Tourette's symptoms. There's a far worse one than copralalia though, which is kind of nightmare fuel -- copraPRAXIA. Copralalia is "obscene speech," but copropraxia is "obscene touch." The MILD form of this is randomly and involuntarily making obscene gestures (think flipping someone off). The extreme form of it is ... punching people in the nuts, grabbing boobs, etc. It's real, and I do have it, though it is quite rare for me (I have never grabbed a boob. To my shame, I have once or twice punched my best friend in the nuts, long ago in college.)
I consider myself on the "extreme end of moderate" presentation. I have all the symptoms, including the bad ones, occasionally in their worst forms, but not all the time, and most of the time I'm symptom-free. People on the "extreme end of extreme" often are basically incapable of living normal lives.
In my case at least, even with occasional extreme symptoms, you mostly learn to live with it. The real thing I've found about Tourette's is that it really shatters the dynamics of the whole "ableism" conversation. There's a real struggle to be had to make sure disabled people are treated fairly and not discriminated against (ask me how I know), but there ALSO has to be some nuance particularly in the case of Tourette's because... well, other people have rights too (at minimum, the right to not be punched in the nuts). Like, in school, it's just not fair to the other students if I'm disrupting class all day long. It just isn't. But it's also not fair to me to just kick me out of school, and so some negotiation has to be worked out to figure out how to make these things work, which works best when everyone's operating in good faith (nice work if you can get it).
The South Park episode about Tourette's is actually pretty good. If you want an example of "worst depiction of Tourette's ever" it's Nurse Jackie. There's a doctor who has copropraxia, and it manifests as boob-grabbing. Now that is actually a real symptom, so the sin isn't in depicting it that way. The sin is in:
- That doctor has basically NO other Tourette's symptoms, only the crazy one
- That doctor doesn't behave like someone who actually suffers from copropraxia would.
If *I* was a doctor who had that manifestation of copropraxia, here's what I would do:
- Maintain a safe distance from every female employee at all times
- Disclose the fact I have this condition loudly and widely the minute I start working somewhere (in the show the first time the nurses find out about this problem is when their boob is grabbed! WTF???)
- Call in sick on any day I'm feeling particularly stressed or symptomatic
> I'm imagining that the disorder might be a whacked out "truth detector" by unveiling desires and one wouldn't go around grabbing boobs that they didn't like thereby giving away the tell?
It's a good question, but that's not how it works. It's not like your brain is just always drunk and you're losing inhibitions and doing things you deep down want to do in your Freudian id. The best way I can explain it, just from the perspective of someone who has the disease -- is that your brain has to have some way of categorizing words and actions. And at all times, you have an awareness of ones you SHOULD NOT DO RIGHT NOW, whatever that is. And my best guess for how (coprolalia/copropraxia) Tourette's works is that some neurological wire gets crossed and there's a short circuit specifically to that category of thing. My evidence for this is that the thing coprolalia/copropraxia "wants" to do changes based on social context, but it's always something you shouldn't do right now. And the aftermath is always horribly embarrassing.
The nut-punching thing was more like ... the "obscene gesture" that copropraxia would manifest at for me was to, with very little warning* (even to myself) strike directly at my friends nuts and stop exactly three inches before contact. I don't know why, that's just what it would do. Aaaaand one day he flinched. Again, this was one of my best friends. I'd never want to do something like that to them under any conditions, it's not some underlying sublimated desire I've been actively repressing. It's just something *I ABSOLUTELY SHOULDN'T DO RIGHT NOW* and somehow when the wires get crossed, that's the signal that gets sent down the wire.
*Sometimes I get internal warning that tics are about to happen and prepare accordingly (like duck into a closet), this one for whatever reason was on a particularly short fuse.
I'm very sorry in advance, and I hope this doesn't come off as blithe about something difficult, or stereotyped, but I couldn't stop myself from imagining "By George!" as a most excellent (if still frustrating) vocal tic.
Ha, that’s actually pretty funny. Can’t say I’ve ever blurted out “by george!“ in real life. Most of my vocal tics are just random words like “sausages” or “nostrils”
Yay, cool. While I've got your attention for a moment, any advice for a fellow prosocial politically motivated Texan fancy programmer who feels compelled to make a lot of video games and has a lot of runway and wishes there was a way to make that game making skill into a healthy career that's useful for society?
Hoo yeah, I know. I don't like games in the typical sense - I'm not an avid gamer at all and haven't been for a few decades. I just like making games, as an avocation or a passion or something, and I really miss the healthy educational school games scene of the 90s. I've been working on edugames while I'm a stay at home dad, and I already know that, while I love the making, and the result, I do not love the business, or the horrible ecosystem in which I find myself, and I'm definitely not under the illusion that it could pay the bills. I'll pay those with ML work.
> wishes there was a way to make that game making skill into a healthy career that's useful for society?
Not sure I've got an answer for you on that very narrow angle because the games industry is just brutal. I'd say keep your eyes open and think outside the box? I'm now involved in data visualization for improving property tax assessments, for instance.
Thanks! I'm a search ranking ML and data visualization programmer by trade, so I've been looking for ways to go in the other direction. I agree the games industry is brutal, probably to the point where it's not sensible to force it.
"RC is doing an old trick: summing up his opponent’s position as an extreme absolute, then summing up his own position as “it’s diverse and complicated and a middle ground”." - Scott, end of the article
*ahem*
"Either we trust trustworthy-sounding people who we like, when they say stuff that sounds kind of plausible - or we apply extreme skepticism about every not-immediately-verifiable claim!" - Scott, middle of article
RC might have exactly nailed your position, no? In fact, he might understand it better than you do, as your positions seems to come down very strongly on the "believe everyone unless you have evidence to the contrary."
Hmm, my read of "Either we trust trustworthy-sounding people who we like, when they say stuff that sounds kind of plausible - or we apply extreme skepticism about every not-immediately-verifiable claim!" was that RC had set up this dichotomy, said he was going for the skepticism route, but then appealed to the trust-me route, which Scott indicated was hypocritical with this quote.
I was a bit uncertain on that point, till I got to the penultimate paragraph:
"You should believe the spoonies! You should believe the DID people! You should believe that people experience astral projection - it’s just a cheap off-brand lucid dream, and I’ve personally tried lucid dreaming and can confirm it’s real! You should believe that people experience auras - see eg Paranormal Misinterpretations Of Vision Phenomena, Colored Halos Around Faces And Emotion-Evoked Colors: A New Form Of Synesthesia (note first author!), the many stories of people seeing auras while on drugs, and my own Lots Of People Going Around With Mild Hallucinations All The Time! You should believe that people experience John Edwards - I think my parents voted for him in 2004!"
That's a lot of "you should believe" with no mention of the middle ground of "maybe don't be mean about it, but being very skeptical and not really believing them either is fine". There's a bit gap between you should believe and you should maybe believe possibly.
Scott badly conflates several notions: 1) Should we believe arbitrary claims by default 2) Should we believe the people experience the experience they claim 3) Should we believe those experiences are real, or reality-based even if they have malattributed causes.
He doesn't think we should believe things by default - he support Bayesian reasoning - he just has priors outside overton window for a big chunk of this audience so it throws off the conversations more than it might otherwise.
He does seems to strongly believe that claimed experiences are evidences of *some type* experience rather than lying or exaggeration or whatever.
Lastly, it seems a lot of the commenters are getting lost on the point that the "realness of the experiences" doesn't mean the experience is of a real thing ... but probably is grounding a real "something". This point seems to get lost in the examples where there there is disagreement on the specific empiric cases.
Well, Bayesian reasoning doesn't prohibit believing things by default, even before we get to really unusual priors. In a sense RC is arguing how high a probability of some experience being truly experienced conditional on someone claiming to have experienced it is proper.
Evidence of some sort of experience, maybe not the one claimed, that's an entirely different thing, as you say.
I can't say what Scott thinks, but after reading this article, if I assume Scott actually wrote it, I am updating away from Scott being a careful Bayesian. There is not only a lot of conflating of points going on that makes it difficult to evaluate, but I can't help but notice that he takes "thousands of people have claimed this experience over thousands of years" as apparently strong evidence that the particular experience is truly experienced as described. Yet, he doesn't seem to believe other experiences thousands of people claim to experience over thousands of years, like, oh, talking with Gods, or fairies, or whatever, is strong evidence of the particular experience being truly experienced as described. I have a hard time imagining why that would be, and I think that RC is right to point out this discrepency.
Doesn't he though? That's exactly his point in the penultimate paragraph. Believe that people are actually hearing a voice in their head that claims to be a god. Believe that they see colored auras around faces. Believe that they experience a state of serenity and bliss.
That doesn't mean that you have to believe the stated causes behind all of these. You don't have to accept they *actually* talk to god, or have mystical vision, or have transcended the reincarnation cycle if they claim that.
If you really want to pin Scott on not being a proper Bayesian, you should point out that he's using "believe" or "not believe" as a dichotomy. If we're doing a proper Bayesian calculation, we end up with something that looks more like "there's an X% chance that some people experience jhanas, and a Y% chance that any particular person claiming to has."
Well, no, that isn't quite what Scott is saying. There is a big difference between 'I hear a voice in my head that claims to be a god' and "God speaks to me" as a claim, but Scott is conflating the two. The first is pretty easy to believe, the latter not so much. The latter requires believing in God, as well as the fact He decided to talk to Bob here.
Likewise with astral projection. Big difference between "I have lucid dreams I call astral projection" and "I can leave my body and observe things that happen elsewhere via my spirit tethered to my body by a silver thread." EDIT: Observe things that happen elsewhere in a testable manner, I should have specified. Like "I observed what someone across town wrote on a piece of paper in front of witnesses and sealed in an envelope, and I can tell you what it was".
That's before you even get to the incentives to lie about things like talking to God or astral projection. Someone who is qualifying their statement as "I hear a voice that claims to be god" is a lot more believable than claiming to definitely speak to God, because you don't get to be a prophet from the former for the most part. The incentive to claim you can reach zen bliss when meditating is of course that people pay attention to you, think you have accomplished something cool, and possible you start your own cult/temple/medication class and get stuff.
Likewise with DID. Why should I believe that a TikToker whose focus is on their wacky fun multiple personalities actually experiences multiple personalities who take over their body? Scott says "Well, some people have personalities in their heads they talk to." That's rather different from the original point of DID, if only because those other personalities they talk to don't take over their body. Now, if I were a psychiatrist and someone came into my office, said they had DID and asked for help, I would be more likely to believe them, but that isn't the case in question. The case in question is those kids on TikTok saying they have DID with personalities that run their body, etc.
Definitely agree on the believe/don't believe dichotomy point, and I think that is what Resident Contrarian was making. Scott claims he isn't on that dichotomy, then immediately goes into "you should believe X" instead of any sort of % estimate. If I were to give my guess, I'd say "there's an 55% chance that some people experience jhanas, and a 1-5% chance that any particular person claiming to has." I might go as high as 15% for someone I really knew and trusted, who seems to meditate a lot, but honestly that kind of claim is more likely to make me trust them less on other points otherwise. That's in the "I found a rare baseball card in a yard sale and sold it for [X*yearly salary] but decided to give the money away to charity since I was just lucky," territory. I can think of maybe two people I know who I would believe if they claimed that, and maybe have known 10 people who I can totally see claiming that but not actually having done any part of it. For any random person, the probability is really low, even if it is possible.
Well, it's a good thing we're not talking about believing people who think they can curse others, or people who think they've been cursed by a disagreeable old lady who lives near the forest:
As a person who had very bad Most Likely Psychosomatic? stomach/GI pain as a child from ages 8 to about 17: thank you for saying psychosomatic pain is actually painful. I think some people bizarrely equate "psychosomatic pain" with "just making it up". But even though my brain is "making it up," in a sense, it is not something that can be consciously controlled. (Thankfully I mostly no longer experience this pain after starting SNRIs but it was a major formative childhood experience sadly.)
I think acknowledging psychosomatic disorders is particularly hard on people in a modern society. (Source: armchair speculation by a healthy, gainfully-employed-with-good-insurance person in the US.)
Logically, there's no contradiction between "person is in pain" and "we don't know how to make that pain go away, even though there's identical-feeling kinds of pain we do know how to make go away"; it just means that there's several different mechanisms giving rise to the same (or very similar) painful internal state, and we know how to address some but not others. But, if we equate "psychosomatic" with "untreatable" or even just "much harder to treat" (right now, not necessarily in principle), and assume that medical resources are scarce, then it's more efficient to declare "people with psychosomatic symptoms should not get medical attention, because it's largely useless for them and will crowd out people who can benefit from it". But, holding those two positions simultaneously ("this minority of people is experiencing the same kind of pain as everyone else" and "...but they should be discouraged from using the medical system") goes against a ton of moral intuitions, because now you've turned them into second-class citizens! Since clearly you wouldn't be a person who does that, it must follow that the psychosomatic symptoms weren't quite real to begin with.
Unfortunately, I don't know what to do about it. The issue that I'm highlighting seems to come from equating "I genuinely feel like crap" with "the medical system can and ought to fix it" (which leads to problems, because more people feel like crap than the medical system has capacity to fix). Historically, the "can" part was mostly false; now it's often true, and I have to believe that's a good thing. Stronger cultural norms about how the medical system isn't *obligated* to fix everything would presumably help, but it's hard to get them as a society, and telling any given individual that they should have more of those is an asshole thing to do. On top of which, because modern medicine is really quite good most of the time (both in terms of capability and in terms of capacity), feeling healthy feels like it should be a basic right rather than a luxury, but then you're denying basic rights to some people and that's clearly bad!
I want to add to this that people with difficult to understand and treat illnesses mashing their heads against the medical system despite getting no or bad results sometimes makes the medical system figure out how to actually treat them more effectively or efficiently.
---This sounds like: “I, RC, have the mysterious mental ability to detect liars. I admit I can’t prove this, but come on, you should probably just trust me because it’s perfectly reasonable to think other people have mysterious mental abilities you don’t.”---
That's not his argument. He's not saying he has a superpower. He's saying that this community attracts people with below-average social abilities. He's arguing that he's sighted in a blind community, not that he has x-ray vision. He's arguing that normal people have a reasonable capacity for this, but that the Rationalist community is spectacularly vulnerable to this because they're uniquely bad, as a community, at spotting liars and fraudsters. And he's right. You, in particular, Scott, are famously bad at spotting bad-faith actors.
---You should believe the spoonies! You should believe the DID people!---
No. These people are lying to exploit people, and inculcating Munchausen's in large numbers of impressionable teens. One of the reasons people seeking treatment for real illnesses, like, say, migraines, have such difficulty in getting help is because there are so many people straight-up lying to doctors either to get drugs (Saying "I do not want narcotics" makes some processes shockingly easier) or to get a diagnosis for attention. If you stop believing them, almost all cases of these illnesses will *go away*. Accepting them all as valid baits social-status seeking teens (which is why all of these are led by young women) into a life of pain and misery.
And that's setting aside the monstrous awfulness of having welcoming communities with charismatic celebrities having the cost to entry "being sick".
---You should believe that people experience astral projection - it’s just a cheap off-brand lucid dream, and I’ve personally tried lucid dreaming and can confirm it’s real!---
That's not the claim of astral projection, and you should at least have enough respect for people to take their claims at face-value and not rewrite their claim to fit within your experience.
Psychics are literal con-artists who exploit people in grief to extract them from their money. Saying we should just accept claims like this IS NOT RATIONALISM. It's a crutch for people with low social intelligence to navigate some social environments. Online, that crutch has become pervasive and poisoned so much of the online space and is actively hurting people.
There's a reason so much of the mental-illness discussion online is some form of:
/<Downblouse camera angle>
"[dramatic sigh] So, I don't like talking about this* but I have anxiety, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, dysphoria and chronic pain, and I wanted to talk to you guys about what it's like to {ordinary activity}"
*It's their entire online presence and a major if not primary income source/
That reason is not a sudden explosion of mental illness. The reason is that young women are especially vulnerable to things that cause social status spikes. They are generally better at men at detecting these things, and lack the judgment, especially in the modern era where women are not taught potential pitfalls, to understand the costs of trying to exploit them.
> You, in particular, Scott, are famously bad at spotting bad-faith actors.
I've been reading Scott for a long time, and I had never heard he was "famous" for this. And I should note that on the subject of this post, I'm more inclined toward Resident Contrarian.
Just posting in case an update comes from OP, though, given this post, I would not be surprised if he was quite bad at spotting bad faith actors. He does seem to have a set of personal experiences that he has interpreted as requiring him to be particularly credulous.
Look at his conclusions when the New York Times did a hit piece on him. He refused to think the reporter could be acting in bad faith, and when the reporter decided to post the hit piece anyway, believed that that if he had only given a better impression the reporter had not done that and that the reporter wasn't acting in bad faith all along. This is pretty famous by now, although you can argue that Scott isn't famous "for" it.
There's also https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/26/high-energy-ethics/ where Scott claims that someone speculating about a scenario where his outgroup would suffer horribly as a result of being his outgroup, is just conducting a logical thought experiment with no implications for his attitude towards his outgroup.
No he isn't. He's correct that the literal words of the quote describe a thought experiment. But this is not a context where only the literal words apply.
He's right that such extreme thought experiments are a common method of doing moral philosophy. Ignoring literal words is a good way to go off-track, and one cannot ensure that someone who does that will parse your meaning correctly any more than you can make the proverbial horse you've brought to water drink it.
This is ignoring context. A preacher is not a philosophy blog.
Actual human beings use things which literally mean one thing to mean something else. If you look only at literal words you fail at human communication.
>one cannot ensure that someone who does that will parse your meaning correctly
Yes, but it isn't us who's doing that. We're not the speaker, we're the one trying to parse the meaning.
That wasn't a hit piece. If it was a hit piece, it would have been a whole lot worse. Every IRL person I've talked to thought it seemed pretty neutral and fair.
Really the only issue is that they shouldn't have published his last name.
I don't know about famous, but I think there's a point here. Scott seems surprised that "enlightened" people would do bad things - why would they do that when they're enlightened, after all all! While I go "they're not enlightened because that's not something that exists - they're cult leaders, and nothing could be less surprising than cult leaders abusing their followers".
My point is that he starts off by assuming that Enlightenment is a real thing with the qualities typically as ruled to it, and that said ”update” is required (which means that it was not what he expected, even if the exact word ”surprise” wasn’t used).
He does allow for the possibility that there is no such achievable state as enlightenment:
"Doubt Culudasa if you want, but it would be hard to say none of these people had achieved enlightenment – at least if you want to maintain any reason to believe in enlightenment as an achievable state at all."
But the point of the post was not whether such a state exists, but to instead challenge believers in enlightenment. He repeatedly uses words about third parties doing things like "claim", "certify", and "purport", thus not committing himself to the idea that those things are accurate.
A Bayesian always updates on evidence, including outcomes you thought most probable beforehand. He didn't use the word "surprise" because he hadn't indicated any expectations beforehand.
> the monstrous awfulness of having welcoming communities with charismatic celebrities having the cost to entry "being sick"
Ah, yes, the monstrous awfulness of *checks notes* having a community where you can talk about your illness and be heard and understood.
> There's a reason so much of the mental-illness discussion online is some form of...
Yeah, it's that it's happening on social media. Take *any* topic and you'll find lots of attractive young women playing up their attractiveness and quirkiness for views/follows/etc. There are ways in which that's worrisome but it's not especially correlated with the mental illness discourse in particular.
> He's arguing that normal people have a reasonable capacity for this, but that the Rationalist community is spectacularly vulnerable to this because they're uniquely bad, as a community, at spotting liars and fraudsters. And he's right.
He's wrong. Normal people have an ATROCIOUS capacity to detect liars. The literature says the typical person does no better than chance at detecting lies. For an overview, e.g., https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/spycatcher/201203/the-truth-about-lie-detection , but this is far from the only citation on the subject. IIRC, I first read it Anna Salter's Predators, but despite seeing the subject covered again and again in numerous other contexts, I've never seen any sign that there's any evidence that a normal person can do better than chance, and even particularly talented lie detectors only manage 60-70% success rates.
Reading this post, I was reminded of Scott’s article about people calibrating for what the news would or wouldn’t lie about, and how hard it is to explain the difference to people who don’t have the skill of differentiation.
The reason everyone is skeptical is because the way people are talking about jhanas, especially Nick from the original post, pattern-matches very very closely to BS. It just sounds like people lying to themselves and everyone else. It’s hard to explain this because there’s a lot of subtlety to what goes into saying that. The fact that there’s strong social incentives, no burden of proof, and the claims themselves are counter intuitive are just some of the most obvious heuristics involved.
This is, as usual, an interesting post, but I want to make a more basic point: even if I were to grant that Spoonies and DID TikTokkers are mostly charlatans, I still find the Jhana claims to be basically credible and I don't see any contradiction there. In other words, I find this part of RC's claim to be straightforwardly incorrect:
> if I went with believing the jhanists based on the level of evidence they provide, I’d also have to believe both the Spoonies, the DID people, the astral-projecting Wiccans, people who see auras, and John Edwards
I don't really have the time or the inclination to unpack the reasons why I think Wiccans warrant more skepticism than Jhanists. I just want to note that I think we can in fact form reasonable judgments about the plausibility of different subjective claims even in the absence of any truly objective criteria. I had literally never heard of Jhana before reading Scott's original post and I find the claims being made to be so strange that I'm not really sure how to incorporate them into understanding of human experience. Nevertheless, when I read the various accounts I came to the conclusion that the Jhanists are likely telling the truth. Which isn't really how I feel about aura readers.
Can I justify this judgment? Well, yes, I can. I could refer to analog states and markers of claimant credibility and a host of other clues that are guiding my intuition. Can I prove it? Nope. But that's not the point. The point is we don't "have to" believe anything and we can in fact draw distinctions even in areas that are not directly observable.
Correct me if I'm off-base here, but I don't think you're really evaluating these claims on the basis of which are more plausible. I think you're evaluating the *people* making these claims on the basis of who you think is more trustworthy. Wiccans and aura readers are associated with a bunch of other fake shit, like alternative medicines and tarot readings and hexing your ex-boyfriend. Spoonies are seen, fairly or not, as lonely and insecure young people. It's easy to imagine an ulterior motive for these groups -- they want attention, they want to fit in with a culture they like, or maybe they want to convince you to buy plastic gems from them. You learned about jhanists through Scott, so they seem more rational and it's harder to imagine what they have to gain from lying about it. I'm not saying you're wrong about which claims are true, but I don't think jhana is inherently more believable than these other things.
I think you are off base. I get what you are saying, but I'm really not just saying that Nick Cammarata seems like a high-IQ person with a prestigious job, therefore I find him more credible than some hippie who is into crystals and reiki.
Mind you, I think you are correct that *some* of my judgment is based on the people making the claims, and I also don't think this is entirely invalid. But in general, my evaluation of these sorts of claims is mostly based on whether they fit a theory of mind that I find plausible and a theory of physical causality that I find plausible.
To maybe muddy this further, there are different levels on which you can evaluate the plausibility of these claims. I don't believe that auras are real. Does that mean that people who claim to see auras are lying? Well...I'm not sure. I think probably yes in many cases, although you get into a sort of weird question of whether it is possible to lie to yourself.
What about acupuncture? I know many people, whom I like and respect, who believe in the efficacy of acupuncture. I think acupuncture is mostly bullshit, but I don't know if mostly means 60% or 99.9999%. I further don't know whether the effectiveness is purely placebo or rooted in some actual causal mechanism. I am pretty deeply skeptical of the actual efficacy of acupuncture via some sort of physical mechanism; I am somewhat skeptical but also unsure about whether acupuncture has some accidental efficacy via psychosomatic mechanisms; and I don't have much doubt at all that adherents of acupuncture are sincere in their beliefs.
Where I am going with this: I don't slot Jhana into the category of either auras or acupuncture. I'm mostly not basing this judgment on the people making the claims. I'm basing it on some combination of: do the claims violate physical laws or rely on mysterious causal chains? do they seem to involve obvious motivated reasoning? do they correlate heavily with other implausible beliefs? do they mesh with my understanding of how minds work?
So, again, I can't prove any of this, obviously. But I don't at all agree that it is impossible to make judgments or differentiate between these sorts of claims.
I can see auras around people if they're standing under bright lights and I stare at them long enough. This always happens when I watch people performing on a stage, for example. It's a visual snow thing. I'm sure plenty of people lie about seeing them, but even if one sees them the lie is ascribing them meaning.
"Basically, it's like an IRL personality test that you don't actually have to take (!): huge win for everyone. Allow us to change your life with everything you need to know about aura readings and how they work."
But who knows, maybe aura readers are experiencing some kind of low-grade synesthesia, which they are then infusing with a bunch of mystical meaning.
I remember, when young (<10 years old), believing in things I knew weren't true. It's hard to explain. For example convincing myself I could use dowsing rod like things, or that ghosts exist, that I was somehow close to uncovering "deep" secrets about the universe. The Ouija board seems like a paradigmatic example of the sort of thing I'm gesturing at. In my experience anecdotally, some surprisingly large fraction of people when encountering something like a Ouija board (or at least something analogous to it) will claim they genuinely believe they are not a biasing factor. And yet I know from my own experience (again from when I was <10 years old) of how this felt internally. I knew that I was biasing the Ouija board, but I was "playing a game" of believing in it and claiming so, somehow for the sake of the thrill. Again it's hard to explain, but this sort of experience makes me skeptical of a lot of the claims Scott is defending here, because I can so vividly imagine that a lot of people simply do not grow out of the sort of games I (and I think most) grew out of during childhood. Anyone else have similar experiences?
I think I did something like this around ideas like "my stuffed animals are alive", plus a kid down the block claimed to be able to go to the ghost dimension and I sort of played along with it. I have a hard time figuring out what my exact mental state was then, or if it was reducible to something as simple as believing or not believing.
+1 on stuffed animals being alive. I knew that my stuffed animals weren't alive, but I treated them as if they were. I remember I wouldn't leave my stuffed animals upside down on the floor or lying on their faces, I'd always prop them up to a more "comfortable" position even though I knew they couldn't actually feel anything. It's hard to tell the difference at that age between what you know and how you behave: do you really know that stepping on a crack won't actually break your mother's back if you are also very careful not to step on them?
Good point, FLWAB. I'm in my 70s, and if I come across one of my (grown and gone off) kids' old stuffed animals in an "uncomfortable" position I'll mirror the discomfort and automatically reach out to adjust it. I know they're not sentient--I'm (hopefully, by now) grown up--but I also feel their sentient discomfort so immediately and palpably that my hand is in motion before my conscious mind becomes engaged. I rarely even reflect after on how silly I think I am.
So who's moving my hand? Is it a different "I" from the one who knows that synthetic fabric composites aren't sentient? My ("my") own view is that the "I" is in continually changing states of balance as different brain regions and circuits are differently engaged. And (dodging any pronoun here) it seems both possible and ordinary to focus attention in a way that enhances different perspectives under different conditions.
Our natal families teach us ways to construe things and ourselves in ways that conform to shared norms, which is critical to our ability to act socially and has enormous survival value, but it isn't surprising that this involves moving through different identities and worldviews as we mature, and the childish identity that reaches out in my 70s and steadies stuffed animals is one that obviously remains fully active and will until the end. It would throw a small tantrum if I impatiently slapped its hand away and left the toy in discomfort--then "I'd feel angry at myself," and I'm not even sure which direction that phrase should go.
Internal Family Systems Therapy (a multi-agent-mind approach created by someone whom Scott's fascinating insight above now enables me to describe as the apostate Jew Dr Schwartz when he started listening to his patients' parts and eventually his own) would say that we all have very young parts who don't care about the distinction between a stuffed animal being 'truly' alive and not, and one of these moves your hand.
Scott has mentioned this theory before, but given that he is on the other end of the spectrum from the highly polarized people whose parts are visible to their loved ones (body language especially) and his more disassociative friends haven't tried or liked it, he didn't go into much detail. It's powerful and real, but also purely subjective.
It also goes a ways towards explaining the basic question we are wrestling with here about the validity of internal subjective experience because not all parts of ourselves experience things the same way or experience some things at all. Not all of these parts are as interested in honesty and transparency as we on the surface think we are, either. Even without making a psychotherapeutic model of it if you read the book The Elephant in the Brain there is discussion about how different modules like 'the press secretary' come up with explanations for things of which it has no direct knowledge not because it is dishonest but because it has no relation to things like honesty.
Yes, "multi-agent" conveys the idea in part, Leo (no pun on "part"). I see that this is a therapeutic model (I looked up the Schwartz book). I was thinking of it more in terms of brain physiology and neural patterns, but they're not exclusive approaches and perhaps Schwartz deals with that. (I'm not sure the "Elephant" book works on the same level, reading a description of it.)
Somewhat tangentially, Michael Gazzaniga has a well known theory that relates resonant elements of these issues directly to brain physiology: the "Interpreter" persona ("persona" is my word) that is an expression of the left brain's functional role. (In patients with severe epilepsy whose corpus callosum was surgically severed, cutting communication between the brain hemisphere's, the separate roles of the hemisphere's can be studied.) Some elements of the shifting status of the "I" are ones that are relatively simple to observe and manipulate (part of what jhana meditation aims at); I think Gazzaniga's Interpreter lies at another level--but the "press secretary" description reminded me of it.
Because IFS is now almost as popular as "mindfulness" I had wondered if its prevalence has a role to play in this social media promoted flavor of multiple personalities. Speaking about one's "parts" has become very commonplace to the point it wouldn't surprise me that some people took that idea and ran with it experientially. Not that they are faking, but that the approach gave them a framework to build on in practice in a way that changed their actual daily experience.
I will put the stuffed animals in a comfortable position too. I think there is a slightly religious element to it; it is about a certain respect and care not just to the basic physical elements of the world, but to the symbols.
Huh, I tried something like that for years as a kid to see if it would stick, and it didn't. I just stop pretending one day that my 'friend' was anything but a pillow I had drawn a smiling face on to try to feel what the other kids did when they hugged their teddy bears. I remember going in not expecting this to work, not really feeling anything the entire time, and exiting it vaguely disappointed that it didn't. I put a show for others, trying to become the mask, but I could never make myself normal.
… on the positive side, at least I can spin this as having a clear sense of who I am. To frame it negatively, throughout it all I knew exactly why this wasn't working: me.
As a kid I actually did 100% believe that my stuffed animals were, if not exactly alive like me, at least *aware* and capable of suffering in a qualitatively important sense. I got as worried about them going missing as I did about actual pets.
I was also convinced that some white horses could be actual unicorns in disguise.
I remembered the sensation of believing both pretty late into adolescence, and that probably helped me reach the state of mind required to convince my middle school I believed I'd been abducted by aliens (I wrote about that in a comment below).
I hope more folks share stories about believing in bullshit and/or lying about it, rather than just discussing whether or not others are doing it.
Totally, yes. Magical thinking, which loads of people continue to do into adulthood. I think as long as one also remembers that color blindness, synesthesia, and a whole host of other varieties of human experience also really exist (and needed to be discovered and named before they were believed to exist), that we won't make the mistake of assuming magical thinking where it may not be happening.
Believing that you believe things you actually don't believe in is a necessary part of being a functional member of human society. You didn't grow out of it, rather you got so good at it that now you don't even have an inkling that you are doing it: You simply experience it as believing in a given thing. If you're interested in truth wrt this, I recommend you to observe other people's actions and speech closely, I doubt that you can catch yourself doing this.
This reminds me of Louis CK's bit about "his believies", which are things he believe so that he can feel good about himself, but he would never inconvenience himself for the sake of acting in accordance with them.
I don't know if this explains your experience or not, but it's definitely possible for a person to *believe they believe* something without actually believing it - which can be verified in some cases by cleverly using hypotheticals to trick them into using their real beliefs about reality to make excuses for why the thing they believe they believe appears to be false. Eliezer Yudkowski (who certainly has views i consider somewhat less justified, but he's bang on here) wrote a good explanation here:
It seems the argument you're making is "people sometimes have mental states that are impossible for you to conceive of but are nonetheless real."
While Resident Contrarian's argument seems to be "people can deceive others, or even themselves, into believing they have mental states that they do not have."
"Everything is a middle ground. The whole point of all this Bayes stuff is that 'the middle ground' is wide and worth fighting over. We can have a non-absolute middle ground with 1% probability, a non-absolute middle ground with 99% probability, or anything in between."
"You should believe the spoonies! You should believe the DID people! You should believe that people experience astral projection - it’s just a cheap off-brand lucid dream, and I’ve personally tried lucid dreaming and can confirm it’s real!"
You can surround your claim with as much weaselese as you like, but that's your explicit claim.
Yes, I think those three groups are mostly or somewhat real, which if you took as a representative sample would imply that the rate of realness is at or above 75%. I justified why I think that for them, sometimes at extremely great length.
The DID people, especially the famous ones, are almost all liars. Their videos have so much stagecraft it's absurd. Can it be induced in someone? No, but the behavior absolutely can, especially when it's an easy ticket to status if you can do it well.
I've met people similar to spoonies. They're not suffering an underlying condition. They're just massively overweight and eat chips and cookies all day. They claim some underlying condition because it's an easy out.
For that matter, it's at least conceivable that all of them are equally real, and those who happened to also be willing and able to hone their skills at stagecraft and self-promotion are the ones who ended up famous. If an oily used-car salesman tells you the sky is blue, does that make it false?
> I've met people similar to spoonies. They're not suffering an underlying condition. They're just massively overweight and eat chips and cookies all day. They claim some underlying condition because it's an easy out.
Being massively overweight and eating chips and cookies all day means you will have subjective experiences similar to spoonies. The causal mechanism is incorrect (i.e. it's not your thyroid or whatever), but you will in fact be miserable and have no energy. That is a well-established consequence of being massively overweight, and is the #1 or #2 reason to avoid being massively overweight (the other being the greatly-increased risk of death).
Thanks for the post!! I appreciate this a lot, Scott. The comments shared about “””Spoonies””” were deeply uncomfortable to read (even ignoring the deep issues with particularly picking out women from this group), and in general I found it odd that every single one of the examples given were ones that had a straightforward antecedent the was pretty obviously true regardless of the conclusions made from them. I also had thought RC was specifically referring to the online community that uses/propagates Spoon theory, & I had been under the false impression that visual phenomena are non-synesthetic, so good to know!
I can relate a LITTLE bit about disbelief regarding DID since the first person I met with multiple personalities was a very young person that had decided they wanted to develop another personality only a week before, and I thus had a very poor grasp of the topic until good friends of mine also decided to develop a split ego. They are very eloquent and cool. That being said, I was at most guilty of willful ignorance rather than public slander. I find it odd to use a platform for this, even more so as RC recently wrote about going through the tribulations of deeply disabling, inexplicable illness. Maybe they would be more gentle in better circumstances.
I've very rarely seen any mental-illness-focused area of the Internet not be some kind of hellscape. And frankly I'm sympathetic to nearly everyone involved. Self-diagnosis is annoying, but being sick and not knowing what's wrong with you is much worse. Awareness is important, but misinformation is dangerous. Visibility reduces social stigma, but publicly being an embarrassing weirdo increases social stigma.
At the end of the day I land on a similar place to you, Scott. It's likely that a lot of the people who report these things aren't intentionally lying or faking. They might be deeply mistaken about *what* they're experiencing, but they're experiencing *something*. A lot of them are maybe looking for help as well, and are more inclined to trust a community of peers than a doctor. I think they should probably go to a doctor, but I'd rather they get some kind of support than none at all.
Also, your description of OCD didn't sound insane to me. It sounded familiar in some ways. I think some mental illnesses aren't the brain breaking in totally novel ways, but the brain turning reasonably common traits up to pathological degrees. (This is a sentiment that gets plenty of Internet sneering, but it's the most responsible way I can come up with to say that I think I relate to your experience.)
Well, I'm most familiar with ADHD spaces, where the phrase "Everyone's a little bit ADHD" is a bit of a meme. A lot of people seem to have heard it from friends or family and take it to be dismissive, see it as similar to claims that ADHD doesn't really exist, or see it as a complete misunderstanding of what people with ADHD really deal with. I'm like 90% sure this happens with OCD as well, so even if the statement is plausibly true at face value, I didn't want to make it without hedging a little bit.
I am a good example of "a little bit OCD". There are a few things I check multiple times - is the door locked, is the cooker switched off, is my debit card safe in my wallet? It costs me at most 5 minutes a day, and even if I occasionally break some locks or knobs, I probably get value back in terms of being less likely to be burgled or have the house burn down. They are reasonably sensible things to be double-checking!
When I was a kid I used to try to turn counterclockwise as often as I would turn clockwise, though even then I was aware that there would be no real consequence to ending the day rotated...
The important thing is, when I walk down the road after checking two or three times that the front door is really closed and locked, I completely forget about it. If I were going back to check again, then I'd have a problem.
“The evidence for jhanas is thousands of people over thousands of years saying they’ve experienced it, a bunch of my friends who I trust a lot saying it worked for them, a handful of experiments with EEGs that seem to show positive results, and a promise that if I tried hard enough I could replicate the results.”
You buried the lede. It is patently ridiculous to compare mentally troubled TikTok teens with reports from thousands or millions of spiritual teachers and practitioners in many traditions and many countries going back thousands of years.
I know you aren’t equating them. Resident Contrarian is, saying because teen TikTokers are lying about subjective experience so are jhana experiencers. I just think the starting point here should have been “there’re thousands of credible jhana reporters independently corroborating each other over thousands of years. Comparing them to teen TikTok trends is ridiculous on its face. But in any event, there’s an interesting discussion to be had about these TikTok trends...”. It just seemed like you accepted Resident Contrarian’s bad premise at the outset and argued on his terms until much later in the article. Which offended my lawyerly sensibilities.
You think spiritual teachers and traditions going back thousands of years are substantially more likely to be truthful than mentally troubled tik tok teens?
In this context, absolutely. Imagine monastic sages throughout history testifying in court against the testimony of TikTok teens. Who is more credible? It‘s not even remotely a close call. Especially in the Buddhist context, where the Buddha admonishes his followers to test what he teaches rather than take it on faith.
And given I have rather exhaustively tested this particular claim and know it to be true, the deniers have proven themselves to have faulty heuristics.
Science and rationalism are also full of nonsense, self-delusion and sloppy thinking, as illustrated quite clearly by the number of ACT followers denying the reality of jhana because it hasn't been satisfactorily reduced to numbers and presented in a peer reviewed journal.
Ultimately, it all comes down to credibility. Prove to me that the Higgs Boson exists. I haven't seen it. And unlike jhana, I lack the tools to see it for myself. Claims about jhana I can personally verify. Claims about the Higgs Boson I am just asked to take data gathered and analyses performed by others on faith, as no one will give me the keys to the Hadron collider. Giving greater credence to the latter than the former reflects a deeply religious, dogmatic, and irrational worldview masquerading as science. It is the height of nonsense, self-delusion, and sloppy thinking.
There're all sorts of subjective value judgments smuggled into that claim. There are people, many perhaps, who derive more meaning and satisfaction from being part of a religious community versus having Netflix, Facebook, SSRIs, and ecological catastrophe, believe it or not.
I'm very open to the idea that there's something to jhanas, but suggesting the evidence for them is anywhere near as strong as for the Higg's Boson seems absurd. It would be much, much easier for monks to fake the evidence of jhanas (or simply fool themselves while sitting still with their eyes closed) than for scientists to fake the evidence of modern physics.
It is not absurd if you have experienced jhana. To the contrary, having experienced jhana on intensive retreats, to question the possibility of that experience is absurd. Jhana is more real to me than the higgs boson, because one I have direct access to, the other I do not. I really don't care much about trying to convince people of the reality of jhana. But it is very illuminating to hear from people denying the reality of something I know 100% to be a real thing. These are not people to be listened to. They have poorly calibrated sense-making heuristics. Fortunately Scott has not fallen for this nonsense so I can still appreciate his work and take him seriously.
Monks and sages (especially those you've heard of!) tend to be self serving charlatans in my experience. Almost entirely like tiktok girls and most other humans trying to gain influence
This hasn't been my experience at all, and I've spent quite a lot of time with Catholic and Orthodox monks and nuns. There was only one major charlatan I met, and he started a cult and was defrocked. Most monks and nuns I know are particularly devout people who believe their religion deeply and try to follow their conscience wherever it leads them.
I live in India, and am reasonably old. I have almost certainly met, heard of, or come across substantially more religious figures of all stripes than most people in other countries. Sure, some are genuinely delusional themselves, but most are self serving. And you don't need personal experience for this. A cursory glance at the history of religion makes it evident that most religious figures tend to be there to use it to use others, not to be used for the sake of others.
Perhaps the fundamental disconnect between our experiences is that most Catholic and Orthodox monks & nuns give up more than they gain and have little influence on anyone unless they're actually the abbott or abbess.
I imagine there are a lot more self -serving priests, bishops, and popes, but I had much less experience with those.
Still, I think you're being somewhat uncharitable to the religious. When we're looking at historical figures, we're only seeing the ones thay sought power and influence, not the simple sweet ones who led happy parishes and never made a name for themselves outside of that.
This is incredibly lucid and well argued (IMO). A joy to read. Maybe the self-set task to take on someone's argument very systematically forces an exceptional kind of clarity that other forms of writing don't.
Broadly, I agree that the distinction between psychosomatic pain and somatic pain is blurry and irrelevant to the degree of suffering it causes.
But...
Both types of pain are shaped by our expectations of what level of pain we should be feeling.
For jhanas, DID, spoonies, etc. if people have the 'script' beforehand of the type of experience they think is happening to them, they will shape their perceptions to fit that script. And they will verbalize their perceptions and experiences in a way that aligns with a script that they have been exposed to in a type of reciprocal determinism. And so public awareness and perception of these issues (among many others) helps create them.
I believe that affirming and labeling someone's pain / distressing internal experiences may not always be best for them. And that greater cultural awareness of such experiences may lead others to develop them, or lead to those experiences taking a greater role in their consciousness and self perception, prolonging those unpleasant mental states. Obviously, the paternalistic "chin up, it's not that bad, get over it" attitude has its own issues, but believing 'it's a matter of your expectations, and you can stop it if you wanted to" can also be empowering, especially to someone with a strong internal locus of control.
I think I'm with you on the general preference that people cultivate a kind of mental sturdiness relative to life's vagaries. But the message "you can stop it if you want to" seems potentially harsh. Would you say that about phantom limb pain? Someone with chronic migraines? Someone with long Covid or CFS/ME? Who decides which conditions are stop-if-you-want-to and which ones are not?
I had terrible menstrual cramps as a young woman and many people said to me various versions of "you can stop it if you want to" -- a favorite one was that if I exercised more, the cramps would stop. I did intense aerobic exercise 6 hours a week for years. Others said if I calmed my mind down and was less anxious... I meditated, went on extended sitting retreats, became a Buddhist, etc. There was always some other thing a person thought I should do. Therapists thought it has something to do with trauma related to my father... which I could get over if I wanted to. A gynecologist said my uterus had a long skinny neck that made cramps more likely and after I had a kid it would probably get better, which it did.
We have a lot of ideas about what other people should have control over if they really wanted to. I think we all have less control than we think we do.
I think for the vast majority of things it is a strategy that is worth starting with. Assume you I will be fine and soldier on. Giving people a framework for illness/dysfunction is a very dangerous thing. People are amazing rationalizers.
I had a close bereavement last year. It would have been unhelpful and jarring to be told to "soldier on". Of course I did return to my regular life in time - sadder and not at full capacity and not immediately - but the "framework for dysfunction" that centered that i was, in fact, not fine was important for understanding the path back to normalcy.
>Giving people a framework for illness/dysfunction is a very dangerous thing.
How do we advance medicine and develop treatments/cures without frameworks? My own terrible pain was handwaved for 15 years before surgery confirmed a very physical, not at all psychosomatic illness. I feel anger - bordering on rage - about the lack of frameworks available to me as a teenage girl 20 years ago and what it has cost me and others who suffer from a common illness (endometriosis) which has been ignored by medical research because it is attributed to hysterical teenage girls.
I think "you are strong enough to deal with it" is closer to what I wanted to say, not "you can stop it if you want to". Pain is modulated by our expectations of it but I shouldn't have implied that one can just decide to not care about it.
Also, yeah, I suspect cultural factors are at play for a lot of the people with the conditions you mentioned i.e. they are less likely to occur in populations and individuals that value stoicism/strength and more in those that are more empathetic/validating.
"believing 'it's a matter of your expectations, and you can stop it if you wanted to" can also be empowering, especially to someone with a strong internal locus of control" but it can also be the thing that breaks someone's strong internal locus of control if the empowerment repeatedly fails to work.
Nothing undermines the belief that your will rules your own life like repeated, painful experiences that it doesn't, despite your best efforts.
There's definitely a role for "anti-catastrophizing" in pain management, but it's more about altering habits to reduce "dialing up the gain" on pain than it is willing the pain away:
"does that mean can we think brain-built pain away? Can our minds un-build pain? Yes and no, because, as Dr. Moseley explains, 'Pain really is in the mind, but not in the way you think.' This is a good news, bad news kind of thing. I will get to the good news, but let’s get the bad news out of the way first:
"It’s not really possible to think pain away in general. Many wise, calm, confident optimists still have chronic pain.
"Pain is a motivator. It exists to get us to act. We hurt when our brains reckon we should do something differently, for safety … but safety is not always possible. The nature of the danger isn’t always clear. Or avoidable.
"And the brain worries too much: from hangnails to fibromyalgia, it overstates the danger … for rock solid evolutionary reasons. So it can’t be overruled by wishing, force of will, or a carefully cultivated good attitude. The brain powerfully but imperfectly controls how we experience potentially threatening stimuli, but I’m sorry to report that you do not control your brain."
When Resident Contrarian spoke as a contrarian in response to Scott's post on Nick Cammerata, I thought he was excluding easily accessible avenues for understanding the plausibility of Nick's experiences (and of many thousands of others who have reached trance states) by cherry picking the types of people he was skeptical about (spoonies, DID, etc.). Scott has responded to this challenege head on by giving reasons to consider accepting, at least provisionally, claims by people in those groups. What bothered me about RC's stance then was an unwillingness to consider analogical cases far closer to jhana practice than spoonies et al., which are also make it far less demanding to accept the reports of jhana practitioners.
The examples I gave related to descriptions of experiences deploying skill mastery that were explored by Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi in developing his concept of "flow." [I apologize: most of what follows is repasting what I posted in the earlier thread.] People who describe ecstasy in flow experiences--e.g., highly skilled athletes or performing artists--sometimes resemble Nick C in the extremity of their language. In a book that preceded the better known, "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" (which attracted a lot of attention when it was published in 1990), his 1975 "Beyond Boredom and Anxiety," Csikszentmihalyi included Zen masters among the classes of people he felt achieved this type of experience. In much later research, involving more lab monitoring, he and collaborators looked at EEG correlations that extended to video gaming as well.
The model of flow can be useful because it identifies the brain states Nick celebrates as pervasively available in reduced form--we all can get pleasurably lost in small activities involving deployment of ordinary skills (puzzles, games, sports)--with the potential to become overwhelmingly satisfying if honed to a very high degree and optimally deployed. We might feel it's a stretch if a ballet dancer said she felt that when she was locked the midst of a complex performance she had totally mastered, the joy was ten times better than casual sex . . . or a pianist, skier, etc. . . . but we probably wouldn't consider it mysterious or dismiss it out of hand, and we might grant the possibility based on smaller-scale rewards we encounter ordinarily for smaller-scale skill mastery and deployment. (This was a theme of pre-Buddhist Chinese philosophy, such as is found in the "Zhuangzi," c. 300 BCE, and informs a great deal of both Daoist and Confucian thought throughout later history.)
A common feature among these experiences, as found in contemporary experiments, is the measurably suppressed scale of frontal-lobe activity that accompanies focused deployment of mastered skills--correlating to reported loss of any sense of personal identity ("I")--along with intense but effortless attention to the physical environment, as seen, heard, or felt. Hypofrontality--the suppression of the brain's executive function--and the experience of losing the sense of self (in the Buddhist case raised to a central tenet of ideology) is equally a measurable feature of meditative trance states such as jhana. (On the issue of the dissolution of the homuncular "I", I think Rodolfo Llinas's "I Of the Vortex" is a good neuroscientific complement to both Buddhist doctrine and Sartre's existentialism, illustrating why both have purchase, even if you don't want to buy into the whole '-ism' thing.)
So in addition to traveling Scott's difficult route to understand why spoonies, folks with any form of DID, etc. may be reporting real experiences, I think it's important to realize that there are much more accessible paths to figuring out why reports like Nick C's are very plausible (although it would, of course, be easy to lie too--as is always the case with subjective reports of any kind).
PS: I appreciated the move to Ramachandran's discussion of phantom limbs. I thought the book he co-authored on that ("Phantoms In the Brain") was very cogent.
There's a recursion problem here. The problems that come up when you try to decide whether to believe someone or not about their internal mental states are the same problems that come up when you try to define what it means to believe someone.
If a random person tells me that there are multiple personalities living in their head, I'm probably just going to "believe" them because I don't care enough to try and counter their belief. Or I might disbelieve them for the same reason. I don't want to expend the mental energy to counter something I consider improbable.
The real question is how you behave when there is something at stake. Would you hire one of these people for a very important job? Or would you let one of them babysit your kid? Whatever the answers are, they're probably a lot more involved than "yes, I believe people's mental states" or "no, these people are obviously delusional."
If, online, you saw posts from an account claiming to be shared between two or more people - living in the same house without enough budget for separate computers, maybe, or the official face of a small business with sloppy PR practices - would that strike you as inherently implausible?
I'm also a "rounds off to asexual" person. Learning that sexual attraction was a real thing that other people experienced, and wasn't just them exaggerating to be funny/popular, was intensely confusing and strangely eye opening.
On a related note, I was diagnosed with autism as an adult. I'm currently discovering that many "extremely painful and unpleasant" experiences are not that painful/unpleasant for everyone else. My sensory perception is just dialed up to 11 on certain things. This is simultaneously a relief and mildly infuriating. Had I known that walking over grass barefoot should NOT feel like getting stabbed with dozens of tiny knives, for instance, maybe child-me could have worn shoes as an accommodation.
All of this to say: my theory of mind has been shown to be wildly inaccurate, so I now default to believing other people when they report their internal experiences. I'm often skeptical of their conclusions, but not of their stated perception (eg, the angel they "saw" could very well be a hallucination or lucid dream, but I believe their claim that they perceived *something* unusual).
Likewise! When I was a kid, I genuinely thought all sexual people were simply making incomprehensible decisions because they were stupid and bad at predicting the results of their actions. I stand corrected. Mostly. (Joking, joking.)
On the flip side, getting an experience 'right' can make a world of difference, too. I went a very long time not understanding the hype of blowjobs, and thought that it just wasn't really my thing. Then I had one girl do it right, and it was the best thing ever. To this day the only one to ever do it that way, unfortunately.
This was fantastic, thanks for going to the effort to post this. Substantively, I think this is a brave stand against a habit of punching down at people who are opposite the ideal rationalist:
1) They evince a condition or mental state that is foreign, and
2) That condition or mental state is incompatible with a rational view of the world
In other words, the perfect target to punch down on!
Whenever Scott talks about DID, it feels me with rage, something that rarely if ever happens. I can't wrap my head around how a smart educated compassionate mental health professional can be so... well, how do I put it kindly... under-informed.
My last 3 partners, including the current one, have/had DID (one eventually succeeded at killing herself, after a couple of tries, long after we lost touch). (You might think I have a type, but it's the other way around.) I also knew several others, through a mental health support site. As well as a few wannabe DID patients, though those are easy to notice.
None of them wanted to have it. All got it from a severe prolonged childhood trauma. All realized they had it a long time later, when confronted with undeniable evidence. All had it latent (or maybe didn't have it, depending on your definition) until some traumatic event or series of events broke their mind and it all went nuts. All have trouble remembering their childhood, except when one of the many child trauma-holders is out. All have parts that deny being mentally ill. All are good at masking their condition, including, or especially, with doctors. None would ever talk on social media about it. All were high-functioning, up until the breakdown, and are stuck in a mental and emotional hell since. Well, those who are still around. All have long-term chronic physical health problems associated with trauma (see the Body Keeps the Score). All are in therapy, on and off, and have been misdiagnosed multiple times by psychiatrists who don't believe that DID is "real", regardless of evidence.
I think there is some kind of a blind spot among psych professionals, and Scott has been infected, talking about "theory of mind" and basically falling prey to isolated demands for rigor, the term he himself coined. Maybe it is anti-memetic, or maybe they have been inoculated against considering this condition seriously in their training and practice, I don't know. It is very frustrating to watch.
I don't see what in Scott's writing is incompatible with your experience with people with DID.
It seems to me he's describing a different experience of DID, without excluding the experience you're describing which is obviously the more widely studied and understood DID presentation.
Do you think these other presentations should be called something other than DID because calling them DID harms in some way the people you know? I can imagine an argument like that, I'm just not sure if that's what you're saying.
Are you mad for the same kinds of reasons Freddie DeBoer is mad -- that there are people with legitimate mental illness and there are tourists or fakers stealing resources from the legitimate sufferers?
In the communities of "systems" (that's how they often tend to call themselves), there is a distinction between DID as a severe mental disorder that makes your life an unbearable daily struggle and benign multiplicity, whether endogenic, constructed or whatever other kind that does not impair your life. The latter is sometimes called multiplicity or plurality, don't think the terms are settled. There is a fair bit of tension between the two groups, and all the DID people universally hate the TikTokers who switch on camera, as well as movies and shows that portray people with DID as potential or actual dangerous monsters.
I am frustrated that professionals focus on fakers and outliers, which are a tiny fraction compared to those who have to deal with it, often while denying they have it half the time (improving communication between alters is an unsolved problem).
I guess it reminds me how people used to focus on the tiny minority of women who lie about being raped, and paint most reports as unreliable, while in reality sexual assault is vastly underreported. Sadly, in both cases the fakers ruin it for the actual victims.
I am not worried about "stealing resources" at this point. DID patients are a tiny group in any therapist's office, compared with regular people who can afford a therapist to complain about their bosses and spouses. Real hard cases are generally unemployed, often destitute, don't trust professionals and almost never seek professional help.
It sounds like some people would say that there are two flavors of DID, one which causes a great deal of distress and functional impairment and another one which doesn't, but that they're both reasonably referred to as DID (even if with different specifiers). And then there are some people (including you) who say there is only one flavor of DID and that people who are not of that flavor are malingering liars. (am I overstating your position?)
I can see an argument for naming these two experiences by different names, and seeing them both as genuine experiences. I don't myself see a reason to call that entire other group fakers. If they were categorized under a different heading than DID (but not fakers or liars) would it change how you feel about them? Allowing for the fact that for sure bunches of people on social media are lying all the time. I'm speaking more about the people that other people know first hand, like Scott's friends.
I may have been unclear... Sorry. DID has "disorder" right in the name, which means that it strongly negatively interferes with one's life. Functioning multiplicity, where one brain has multiple functioning personalities is apparently a thing, as well. I have read about it, but have no first- or second-hand experience with it. I don't really want to doubt self-reports of happy internal family systems, including humans, frolicking woodland creatures and magical beings, but as long as they are all happy together, it's not a "disorder". I am sure there are some fakers and liars too. And those who created tulpas through meditation for one reason or another. And those who have been convinced by poorly trained therapists. A bell curve has many tails. Some of them also struggle with daily life, often in ways that are different from DID, and need a different diagnosis and treatment.
Yes, it's okay, I know what DID is. The criteria symptoms are overwhelmingly negative things that would come with functional impairments.
I was more asking you whether you'd feel that the people describing the experience Scott relayed are not fakers if we called their experience by some other name that does capture their experience as real -- which seems perhaps merited given that their symptoms don't by and large match with the actual DID diagnosis.
I guess another question might be whether DID might exist on a spectrum like ASD where some common features are shared by people with a very wide range of functioning levels.
Second question first: DID is definitely a spectrum, or, rather, DID is a furthest part of the dissociation spectrum, from mild spacing out all the way through OSDD and eventually to DID. Surprisingly, DSM-5 seems to capture some of the spectrum reasonably well. Also, even at the DID end there are plenty of varieties. Sort of like if you break several porcelain teacups, no two sets of shards are exactly the same.
As to the first question, now that I had a chance to reflect and actually read through Scott's post to the end, I mostly agree with his stance that we ought to consider self-reported experiences as real and not intentional lies, unless there is a good Bayesian reason to the contrary, and keep updating as new evidence comes in, in general and on case-by-case basis. For example, someone profiting from talking about their unusual mental states, whether in terms of money, fame, internet points or other utilons, they are likely to be tempted to exaggerate a little.
> I am frustrated that professionals focus on fakers and outliers
Er, the people who say that DID doesn't exist in its "proper" form usually don't mention teenage girls at all - indeed the debate long predates the "system" community.
Sorry that happened. Since the topic is so close at heart for many people, it can be difficult to navigate the endogenic multiple personalities v traumagenic DID landscape gently. I don’t think Scott means poorly here, only that he has personal experience with the former and not the latter, and thus can most strongly say “I personally have witnessed this.” I still consider this a tentative show of support as he’s asserting that a mechanism exists for some type of split cognition, which is a huge huge axiom to get past for getting people the support they need, but I totally understand the negative reaction--balking at misinfo is a widely shared experience even outside the rationalist community, especially when hurtful. Hope you’re doing alright (and maybe have had chances to try out some neutral sensation meditating!)
And I would be surprised if Scott doesn't have direct experience with patients with traumagenic DID, only that he wasn't talking about that here because it didn't speak to the larger point he was making.
I am 100% sure he had patients like that, they are just not open about it, or the alter in the office is not aware of the system, which is very common. Sort of like back decades ago, when people "didn't know anyone gay", where in reality their gay acquaintances were in the closet.
Oh interesting, I was thinking more that he had patients with DID diagnoses who he knew had DID, but wasn't speaking about that group because he was trying to a make a different kind of point that didn't relate to that group of DID experiencing people.
I'm a psychotherapist and I've had patients with DID -- they knew, I knew, though sometimes not for quite a while. Probably I've had other patients where I just didn't know and maybe they did.
I'm going to frustrate you more by saying there's no reason to think "childhood trauma" causes such things. I've been linking to Greg Cochran on PTSD elsewhere in this thread:
but additionally, on childhood, the belief that people get molded then is left-over Freudianism. Trivers pointed out long ago with his theory of genetic conflict that there's no reason to evolve to be so moldable via our childhood (since we as individuals have different Darwinian interests from those who can shape it), thus we should expect to evolve to be robust in the face of such events. Judith Harris' "The Nurture Assumption" is the popularization of that debunking of emphasis on childhood molding. And as she says there, the reason not to abuse a child is the same as the reason not to abuse an adult: the direct experience of it is bad.
I will agree that locking a kid in a dark room will have effects. The development of the eyes depends on exposure to light. But nobody is claiming DID results from that.
I leave you to believe what you want. No point in arguing given the difference in our experiences. Just thought I'd mention that while, yes, that 90 odd percent of a regular child's personality is genetic does not contradict that being trafficked, prostituted and abused from birth does not have a profound effect that molds the person (or a system) for the rest of their lives.
Re: Trivers. "It would make more evolutionary sense if X rather than Y" is by itself a very weak argument. It would make more evolutionary sense if humans had evolved to be omniscient, because omniscience would be very useful. Unfortunately, omniscience is physically impossible, so this argument fails to establish that everyone is actually omniscient.
Likewise, maybe it would be better if childhood experiences did not have a very strong effect on the rest of one's life, but that does not mean that this would be computationally possible for brain-like minds in general, or that evolution was capable of finding such a solution in practice even if it was theoretically possible.
Re: Harris; it's been a while since I read her book, but as I recall her argument wasn't that childhood would have no effect, it was that much of the influence conventionally attributed to parents actually comes from the peer group instead. Also, she explicitly notes that she isn't saying that extreme child abuse would have no effect:
> However, I’ve been speaking of physical punishment within the normal range— an ordinary spanking from time to time. Surely I’m not crazy enough to tell you that punishment beyond the normal range— the physical abuse of children— has no lasting psychological effects on its victims?
> No, not that crazy. For one thing, severe abuse can produce physical injury— including brain damage- with long-lasting or permanent effects. Another possible long-term consequence is post-traumatic stress disorder.
> But we are looking here at a very wide range of parental behaviors. For abuse not severe enough to produce either of these results, it is not clear to me that there are any psychological effects that children take with them when they leave home. There may be, but there is no conclusive evidence of it.
(p. 296 in my editon)
So even Harris just finds the evidence for "moderate" abuse having serious effects to be inconclusive, and it to be straightforwardly true that sufficiently extreme abuse will have extreme effects.
Bones can reliably break when subject to certain amounts of force, and we know all species are subject to broken bones. In contrast, nobody knows how to reliably "break" a mind to give it DID, nor is there evidence of it occurring in other species.
It's much easier to experiment on other species of animals than humans, and many of them are known for fighting other members of their species. This is something that could be investigated, if people wanted to.
It would indeed be strange for humans to be omniscient, since no other species of animal is. But are other species of animal vulnerable to DID? What reason is there to think that it would be impossible to evolve a brain immune to DID?
My recollection is that her first book was mostly about how people were failing to take genes into account when attributing things to childhood experiences. It was a later book "No Two Alike", which attempted to explain the residual of "non-shared environment" on peer effects that could differently impact even identical twins raised together. Kevin Mitchell instead chalks that up to purely random developmental noise:
You’re right. Extreme escapism in response to trauma can happen at any point in a lifetime, not just childhood. Children are simply more likely to lack other coping skills, means of escaping a recurring traumatic situation, or access to support resources.
Scott did report older friends still having the mental flexibility to develop alternate personalities.
Thank you, this was my response. My mom had DID and didn’t know it until last summer when one of her “personalities” (for lack of a better term) attempted suicide after my parents separated. She only survived because the opiates she took were expired. She was able to go to a treatment facility and worked though her childhood trauma enough to reintegrate herself. But as the one who had to stay and care for her all summer while she suffered, the thought of teens glamorizing DID on TikTok makes me angry.
There's an important difference between "experiencing" something in the sense that their internal experience of the world included that thing, and "experiencing" something in the sense that it actually happened and you're accurately relaying information about the universe.
I think it's very plausible that people are experiencing astral projection in the same way you can experience flying in a dream. I think it's very implausible that anyone can e.g. read playing cards through a wall while astral projecting.
“Experience flying in a dream” is accurately relaying information about the universe if one does, indeed, fly in a dream. “Experiencing astral projection” internally is non-sensical, ie it can’t be distinguished from the claim of *actual* astral projection.
"Flying in a dream" is just a convenient shorthand for talking about a subjective experience that we're using to communicate. I've flown in a plane, and "flown" while skydiving, and dream flying feels different from either of those. But if you've done it too, then we can talk about it and you can understand what I'm saying.
It seems possible to me that there's a similar thing going on with people who feel like they've done astral projection. It probably doesn't feel like "real" astral projection (because "real" astral projection is almost certainly not a thing), but could be communicating an experience multiple people have had.
What would you imagine dreaming about astral projection is like? Is there something that could happen in a dream where you'd wake up and describe it to me as "I dreamt of astral projection"?
Of course someone can dream of astral projection, in the same way they could dream about dying. That isn’t the same as experiencing death. If someone said they experienced death (not that they dreamt of experiencing death), I wouldn’t believe them. Likewise, if someone said they experienced astral projection, which is what Scott said originally.
If someone said they experienced death, you shouldn't believe them that they are now dead. But you have no particular reason to believe they're lying to you on purpose. They very well might have a memory in their head that they're describing as "experiencing death" in an attempt to communicate with you.
If you have a strong distinction between these types of things in your head you might not tell someone you did astral projection if you daydreamed about it. But if you're trying to make accurate predictions about how someone who tells you they experienced it will behave, you have to model the way people feel about their memories as well.
As I understand it, there is genuinely a sensoric experience of being alive. (My pet theory is this relates to imagining being other people, or imagining being somewhere else; the "I am alive" quale is more a "I am here"/"I am not there" quale.) The people who report experiencing being dead then would be actually experiencing the total absence of the being-alive quale.
> Of course someone can dream of astral projection, in the same way they could dream about dying. That isn’t the same as experiencing death.
Natural language is imprecise, and descriptions of experiences even more so. When we describe experiences like "astral projection", it does not literally mean "the experience of literally leaving the body", and so that's what it would feel like to leave the body, which is what your purported analogy to dreaming of death suggests. The description actually means "the experience whose sensations and other perceptions can best be described as leaving the body".
IIRC Astral projection is the origin of imagery depicting witches flying on broomsticks, from a Catholic sect back in the 1500s that taught gender equality. Women in the sect would combine psychedelics and pleasurable application of broom handles. They often reported that they flew away during the experience and returned after. As psychedelics are still around, I find it highly likely that experiences induced by them still occur--even if modern theory does away with the spiritual interpretation.
I liked this piece a lot. In the top-quarter. And I may update some priors. But I am also aware that lie-detecting is not one of Scott's strongest strengths. Remember the guy who tried to scam him ("some bucks to buy the ticket home") and after that guy gave finally up (as Scott insisted to go all the way to buy that ticket instead of handing out some bucks) - Scott still wondered whether that guy's story might have been true after all. ... Sure, we all are self-deluding us to some extent, often believing our own BS. In the end: What does it matter? What are the consequences? In 2022 the number of kids who feel they are the wrong gender may really be a magnitude larger than in 2002. Bryan Caplan: https://betonit.substack.com/p/lgbt-explosion
Fine with me, but I share a F. de Boer view: Should tax-money go to new types of toilets, cover treatments, print brochures about diversity to be handed out in kindergartens (my daughter got one)? - Should media/NGOs be liable for "pushing stories"? If media reports more vividly about suicides, more people end their lives. - Winning herostratic fame is not new, Herostratus burnt that temple down 2378 years ago. At least the authorities then tried to keep him unknown. ;) Many horses bolted, most fences down. - Another take from mru: U.S.A. fact of the day by Tyler Cowen July 11, 2022 in Current Affairs Medicine: What’s new is this: Almost a quarter of Americans over the age of 18 are now medicated for one or more of these conditions. More specifically, prescriptions across three categories of mental health medications — depression, anxiety and A.D.H.D. — have all risen.
Anyways, I am fine with any jhanna. If I thought it would add to my life, I might try. I just don't.
Mother of a preschooler here (so my kid hasn't gotten brochures about diversity yet, but probably will soon). I think insofar as it is the school's job to teach kids how to interact with others, if there's more people presenting as LGBT now than previously then yes, schools should be teaching the kids something about how to interact with those people. Do you agree with this minimal take?
There are several places where you could go from here and still disapprove of the brochures:
- LGBT should not be treated as "normal," it should be treated as an aberration. (I disagree, but I can imagine the bones of an argument centered around "more LGBT is bad for society" and "normalizing LGBT will cause more people to identify as LGBT". I think this is outweighed by the benefit of improving the individual lives in question, but I also think that reasonable people can disagree on the relative magnitude of the benefits and costs here.)
- We're not *normalizing* LGBT so much as *glorifying* it. (The closest I come to personal experience here is the effort to "normalize" women in STEM, and for me it definitely felt like being a woman made it *easier* rather than harder to have a career in STEM; this feels like overshooting the original goal. In the case of women in STEM this seems largely harmless -- from observing how hiring decisions get made, the most bias I've seen was "all else being essentially equal, prefer the female candidate" -- but in other contexts structurally similar encouragement would have bigger downsides.)
- It's not the schools' place to proactively teach proper interaction with unusual people; that should be handled by other structures -- parents, church, etc. (My guess would be that with the decline in church attendance, schools are picking up some of the slack. I think it would be fine for schools to omit this and dump it on parents, but it also doesn't seem unreasonable for schools to be involved. For example, I'd be perfectly happy if along with discussing how to handle emotions, the school would also talk about how if a person wants to be called "they" then that's how you should call them, or how some kids have two mommies.)
- The brochures themselves are cringeworthy and stupid. (I haven't seen them, but my prior is that this is, in fact, true.)
Bathrooms and treatments seem potentially more expensive than brochures. On the subject of bathrooms, all the places I've worked had the same capacity for men's and women's (and varying capacities for single-occupancy), despite having wildly varying gender ratios. I've heard of an engineering outfit that did the rational thing of having more men's bathrooms; the (few) women there didn't seem to think this was proper. I have yet to see a theater do the rational thing of putting in more women's bathrooms. My guess right now is that it's hard to predictably do much better than having capacity be proportional to society-wide proportions. I also think that if the society-wide proportions change (which seems to be true for LGBT right now), then yes, you should change bathroom capacity accordingly.
Treatments are, I think, the really thorny issue, since the cost tends to get spread out across people not getting the treatment (e.g. the insurance pool). I don't have a principled position on the proper level of social support for various difficult-and/or-expensive-to-treat conditions, but I don't think the proper solution to the problem of "a group of people has the experience of great discomfort, but it's currently very expensive / totally impossible to treat" is to deny the discomfort (though the proper solution may well include denying the treatment, or refusing to subsidize it).
1. My daughter got them pre-school, in Germany, 2009. One of her educators - a lesbian - might be a reason, more likely just because it is run by the town. My new kids are in one run by the church, so the "worst" was a book with a silly story about a happy patchwork-family. - The one 'kid with a penis' (I assume) who jumps every morning in a pink princess dress does not seem to miss a back-up. - I might sound very rednecked about it, but my perspective is: Puberty is HARD for ALL kids. It sure was for me. And my elder daughter (now 18y.). When I was 16 and still a virgin, I wondered what was "wrong with me". Knowing that some boys are into boys was in no way helpful for teenage-me. Even today most of us are cis-gender/hetero - even more so among 'humans with kids'. Why do OUR feelings not seem to matter? - This is NO push for "keep a lid on it". Our society will play it out. I just ask the state to keep his fingers out. - 2. A girl in junior high school left to become the first female carpenter in my town. The only issue she had was having to be shown around on all occasions as a shining example of how progressive we all are. Like that one guy in Germany who became a mid-wife. (And whenever I see a brochure with a pic of a woman doing a job, I automatically assume that more than 70% in that profession are male.)
3. One restroom at my old university is now trans/unisex/free for all. On the wall. the paper listing the last cleanings says "Männer-WC". And obviously, it is. - One townhall offered free tampons on their ladies-CRs. Now those dispenser got installed in the men's rooms, too. In case it is visited by a guy bleeding. Many non-bleeding guys and bleeding girls consider this: d.u.m.b..
4. Schools: If they should ever be able to stop boys to bully others (without giving them hormones): GREAT. They failed at that and still fail. I doubt they are able to do much good anyway. Fine if they try not to make things actively worse. I was not taught about 2 moms/2 dads in school. And not much about 1 mom 1 dad either. Nor cooking, nor driving. And I am very fine with that. And very fine with all LGBTs, even vegans. Me boomer, ok? 5. The movement of "LGBTQQIP2SAAR+ MINUS LG" confronts the LGs with placards: "You got gay marriage. And we?" - They even canceled Philly Pride in 2021! Indeed, what do zey miss? FREE gender corrections. 6. Boris Moiseev died. Shalka.
1. Out of curiosity, would you be happier if there were more discussion of how puberty is hard for all kids? (Teenage-me, freshly moved from Russia to the US, definitely thought puberty would be less hard if we Stopped Having Earnest Teacher-Led Discussions About It.)
2. I'm (pleasantly?) surprised the male midwife got paraded as much as the female carpenter. The biggest annoyance I've had as a girl in math was being dragged to stupid girls-in-math events. I once asked my son's male preschool teacher about his experience and it didn't seem like early childhood education was quite as aggressive about celebrating its men, though he might just be more diplomatic about it than I am. In a misery-loves-company way, it's nice to know male midwives get put up on display too.
3. Why obviously? I thought undergraduates were at least 50/50 these days, so I would've expected asymmetry in bathroom capacity to get primarily used up by women. As an occasionally-bleeding girl, my model of the tampon dispensers in men's bathrooms is "now when the one in the women's bathroom inevitably runs out, I can ask a guy to fetch me one from the men's room"; I don't see it doing much harm. (Unless it's mounted in such a way that people keep bumping into it, I suppose.)
4. Remembering kids' literature that was targeted at elementary-school-aged me (right around the collapse of the Soviet Union), it definitely had family models, probably centered on "working mom + working dad" (possibly "+ stay-at-home grandma"). In the US at the time I would expect more of them to have been "stay-at-home mom + working dad." This seems like a reasonable level of cultural propaganda, and I would be totally on board with elementary school kids' books now including families with 2 moms / dads, or single parents, or divorced parents, or other nonstandard arrangements. Especially if we can avoid screaming from all corners about how Progressive this all is (yes, I know, this is not a realistic expectation).
The question of whether home economics, woodworking, and driving belong in schools is, to me, a gray area; I would've gladly traded some of my classes for woodworking, but I can't come up with a principled argument for why it should be part of a core curriculum.
5. I don't think it's surprising that an activism movement should end up splintering and infighting. This provides a reason to avoid getting involved in activism, but doesn't actually invalidate the points being made?
I have trouble understanding the issues around bathrooms : if the locale is big enough, they must have a seldom used both sexes bathroom for handicapped people. Can't the abnormal in sex/gender people use that one ?
> if there's more people presenting as LGBT now than previously then yes, schools should be teaching the kids something about how to interact with those people. Do you agree with this minimal take?
This seems weird. LGBT are presumably just people. Would you approve of schools teaching kids how to interact with Polish people, or short people, or black people? I mean, if you approve of general sensitivity classes, discussions around prejudice, social norms, etc., then sure, there's no special pleading or contradiction in that position and that at least seems like a fairly universally useful class on ethics and etiquette. Targeting specific groups just seems weirdly ideological though.
I think if I were to disagree with this position, I would say that it's reasonable to focus on areas where there's significant change happening: thus, if there's more LGBT people than before, then it's valid to focus on them specifically.
The version of this that I have any direct familiarity with is "women in STEM." I'm at least 90% on board with "we're *people* in STEM, what's the big deal," but it's true that there's at least a few things that people have to start being more aware of as more of us enter the workforce. Drawing from things I've personally run into -- I've heard more conversations about bathrooms at work than the zero I would've expected; my upcoming maternity leave is a new and interesting thing for my manager to plan around; at a previous job I was accidentally forwarded an email in which my manager referred to me as "he" (presumably because he wasn't thinking about which new hire he was talking about), which was mostly amusing but also slightly irritating.
Does any of this *need* to get addressed in kindergarten, or explicitly at all? Probably not. But, I think mild versions of it don't hurt.
I recognize that this is a much less important point than DID people and spoonies, but his third example of lots of people lying (getting Mew without an event code in Pokémon red/blue/yellow) is *also* wrong. I myself caught Mew in Blue with an emulator a few years ago. I don't remember enough details for a full set of instructions, but here's the glitch I used and the rest is elsewhere on the internet:
- Get an Abra that knows teleport
- Go to a particular trainer (I think near nugget bridge?) and get their attention (the exclamation point above their head) from several squares away
- before they finish walking up to you, hit the start button and teleport away to the Pokémon center nearest the area of grass where you can catch Ditto
- Walk into that patch of grass until you get a Ditto encounter; it will be/become a Mew and stay that way after you catch it.
I bring this up to point out that Resident Contrarian was wrong on all three "this large group of people is lying" claims; if you don't believe me, try it yourself.
Going by what's described there, the final step doesn't seem to match what NomalAnomaly describes? And it definitely doesn't seem that someone would be able to catch Mew based on the instructions that ResidentContrarian says they encountered.
You should believe the wiki over me; I was going off memories from 2015 or earlier. The page you linked looks right and I probably did that and forgot the second trainer battle step.
There is a theoretical way to get Mew via the a glitch. However, the number of people who actually got mew with that glitch is a rounding error in the number of people who claimed to have gotten mew via some trick or other.
Why do I say this? All the tricks shared around in forums and instructions boards back then looked nothing like what we know the mew glitch should have looked like today. And yet you had thousands of people claiming that the tricked worked perfectly for them and giving nonsensical advice to those who were claiming to have trouble with the trick.
So I'm not responding to anything in the greater post yet, but I will respond to this: the glitch you are talking about requires several very exactly timed things to happen; it's *possible* to do it on accident, but none of the instructions had anything like "get an exclamation point and then do a split-second teleport then walk to a particular piece of grass". The instructions said guy gave were in the realm of "no, mew is catchable here; just try for hours and hours"
The glitch you are talking about exists, but nobody knew about it until I think 2003, something like four or five years after the period of time I'm talking about.
This isn't me saying you are wrong that there's a Mew glitch that renders Mew Catchable, just that it didn't match these instructions, and wasn't discovered until after I could vote and had kissed a girl. It's sort of how it was always possible to do uranium fission, but you'd doubt a story that said Alexander the Great had it figured out and did it by sitting on pitchblend real hard.
Why isn't it likely that someone had figured out the glitch, but in a pre-wiki era the rumor-transferred instructions had degraded ?
P.S.: In fact I seem to remember something like this happening to me with the debug screen for Sonic 1, the combination to unlock which I had failed to replicate (IIRC it also takes a little of skill and timing, especially as a kid), and I had classified in the "probably fake" category... until I got ahold of a magazine describing the operation in detail, which made me try it again until I was successful.
(At least this is how I remember it now. Some of these memories might be inaccurate to the point of deserving being called "fake".)
1. This glitch existed about five years before it was known
2. It was communicated to this particular guy and nobody else
3. This guy didn't understand any the steps
4. He still got it to work while doing the wrong steps (somehow) and
5. Thus could honestly communicate that he had caught Mew using a method unlike the known methods to cause Mew, one that verifiably didn't work, while having caught him and not lying at all
Why don't I believe something like that, and instead a much simpler explanation that makes at least some sense?
> If there is tall grass in the tile immediately in front of a Trainer's line of sight, or a Trainer is in a cave, then the 'Trainer-Fly' effect can be initiated even if that Trainer is not a long-range Trainer. This can only occur if the player is lucky enough to generate a (natural) wild encounter on the exact tile immediately in front of the Trainer. If the player then blacks out from this wild battle, they will be warped back to the Pokémon Center as normal, but the Trainer will see the player before they warp back (the "!" is visible very briefly during the blackout animation).
> first of all, i am NOT responsible for codes not working, i doubt any of these codes work, but for all of you desprite people who will try anything ( like me ^_^ ) to catch Mew. and no, i have not tried some of these codes, so there is still hope!
Theory :
Out of the jillions of player-hours spent on the game, at least one player managed to randomly catch Mew by this method.
Then his educated (but maybe incorrect) guess of how he managed to do it + the rumor mill did its work resulting in heavily distorted "instructions" on how to do it.
Some of the people following them even managed to catch Mew by (less) chance !
Some of them just pretended they did.
Eventually players managed to pinpoint the exact conditions resulting in the guide above.
(Also, don't you think that, assuming jhana "exists", the early "jhana explorers" (I'm talking about thousands of years ago here) were perhaps in a similar conundrum, with a very tricky to replicate set of conditions ?)
Of course my theory might be wrong : mew-finding claims might have been *completely* (rather than partially) made up, and this being just a coincidence ; and also jhanist claims might be "wrong" too (whatever that means).
But you seem to be much more certain of this than I would be...
The mew thing is fast becoming the most bizarre part of this writing cycle for me. I'm not just sticking this on you - there's like six people who have done the same basic thing.
Like, yeah, there's a Mew glitch; several, in fact. No, none of them resemble the method described in any substantial way except "way someone says you can catch mew in pokemon". Yes, the guy said his method worked as describedby him, and that he had completed it just that way.
There's some incredibly small chance that this guy, the discoverer of the route 9 mew-in-grass trick, actually discovered the fly trick (which evaded millions of players actively looking for a mew exploit for 5-7 years) five or so years early, remembered every single aspect of it wrong, and completely honestly-but-mistakenly but reported he caught mew in an entirely different way than he did.
But if that's the standard, lying doesn't actually exist in any practical sense. "I will believe a 1-in-several-million coincidence happened compounded by a bunch of forgetfulness and confusion to result in a confident, certain and repeated claim rather than believe that someone I never knew might have once lied" is a strong enough commitment to not believing someone lied that it would cover pretty much anything.
There's a sense in which I'm impressed by this - I think the "I don't want lying to exist" reflex stems from an attempt to be nice in a lot of cases. But it's so far out of the zone of how I can imagine framing things mentally that it's thrown me for a loop.
> Between two cities in the game, he said, there was a particular small patch of grass, seemingly exactly like the other patches of grass in which you’d normally walk to flush out animal-fighting fodder. And in that patch of grass, and no other, there was a very small chance of encountering Mew, who could then be caught.
How is this "entirely different" from the trick that I quoted ?
Because trainers never spawn nearby that specific patch of grass ??
I also don't understand why you seem to strawman me with claims much stronger than what I made ? If it wasn't clear, I *agree* with you that that guy was likely lying when he said that he managed to catch Mew like this. But for now I reject that the claim was completely baseless :
> But it was only years after that when I considered that, as time went on, multiple people joined the forum and then eventually came to claim that they too had also caught Mew using this method that didn’t work. The lie, dumb as it was, had proved contagious.
Lying about having seen a bear in the woods is not the same as lying about having seen a unicorn !
(There's also the question about the reliability of your memory for events so long ago...)
> But if that's the standard, lying doesn't actually exist in any practical sense.
That's a really weird take. Lying clearly exists because the *intent* differs from the non-lying case. In fact, intent seems like *the defining characteristic differentiating lies from mistakes*. That you would just try to lump mistakes and lies together is very strange.
> My totally made-up wild guess, which might be completely wrong, is that about 20% have some physical illness we understand perfectly well (like a tumor) that just hasn’t been detected yet, 30% have some physical illness we haven’t discovered/characterized/understood yet, 45% have some psychosomatic condition, and 5% are consciously faking for attention.
What about ensuring proper diet and exercise? Not to say that's always the issue, but I was surprised it wasn't in any of your categories.
“If you have learned to eat salt and follow internet instructions and buy compression socks and squeeze your thighs before you stand up to not faint…and you would faint without those things, go into that appointment and tell them you faint.”
The first thing I would have thought to check for is proper nutrition (why is salt helping?) and is the person too sedentary (so the body has maladapted).
Salt is helping I think because this is orthostatic hypotension. But if this person were seeing a doctor, it would certainly make sense to ask about how they're eating and about activity levels.
I mean, I'd say "developing weird symptoms because of a lack of proper diet and exercise" either falls under "physical illness we understand perfectly well" or "physical illness we haven’t discovered/characterized/understood yet", depending on the symptoms.
Like, a textbook vitamin deficiency resulting from a bad diet would be an example of "physical illness we understand perfectly well". (I of course can't give a central example of the other category, because if I could that would imply I understood the illness and its causes)
"But if you read what they’re saying, it’s reasonable and honest! They’re saying 'If you used to faint all the time, and then after making a bunch of difficult lifestyles you can now mostly avoid fainting, and your doctor asks "do you have a fainting problem yes/no", answer yes!' THIS IS GOOD ADVICE."
It is good advice. As one of those kids who strongly felt a moral obligation not to "lie", and who also had some health problems, I burned myself pretty badly by being "too honest" in a way incompatible with medical box-checking. Now I'm aggressive about curating my medical information to avoid potential red herrings, and recommend the same to others unlucky enough to be medically interesting in some way. Paraphrase of an exchange I had with a geneticist:
Geneticist: "So, it looks like you do have this heritable oddity, and it has evidently caused you some discomfort. That's fibromyalgia."
Me: "No. People use 'fibromyalgia' to mean the discomfort doesn't have a known specific cause. You just found the specific cause."
Geneticist: "'Fibromyalgia' just means 'myalgia', pain, in your fibrous tissue, whatever the cause. Such pain is fairly normal with this oddity."
Me: "Since it's fairly normal with this oddity, let's stick with recording the oddity. Listing 'fibromyalgia' as a symptom seems redundant." (What I didn't say, but was definitely thinking, was "and is also a great way to torpedo my credibility as a patient".)
The geneticist, bless him, listened.
I've heard patient advocates say, no, it's not your job as a patient to decide what's a red herring and what isn't. That's the doctors' job, and, as a patient, you have a right to expect doctors to do the work of doctoring, rather than do it for them. It would be nice if medical providers had the time and other resources to respect that. But they often don't. Medical care is a scarce-enough resource for providers to need and seek reasons to dismiss patients. Excluding dismissal triggers from your chart, unless they're clearly the best explanation for what's going on, is merely prudent.
The average time to diagnosis of celiac disease is 6-10 years. I remember reading numbers like this about other conditions, but I can't remember which ones. Those statistics should humble us about people's poorly understood medical conditions and make this kind of strategic navigation of the medical system both understandable and often necessary.
For something like Ehlers-Danlos, the average time till diagnosis (if diagnosis does occur) is over a decade, and according to EURODIS, about a decade longer for women than it is for men.
"[R]are diseases in the U.S. affect about 30 million people. It takes an average of seven years before a patient is properly diagnosed. Any sort of misdiagnosis doubles this diagnostic delay. Getting a psychological diagnosis extends it 2.5 to 14 times, depending on the disease. 'Once you’ve been labeled an unreliable reporter, it’s almost impossible to get your credibility back,' Dusenbery said. 'Anything you do will just reinforce the perception and the circular logic built into psychogenic theories.'"
Illness may be fairly common, like rheumatoid arthritis, which affects over 3% of women, but invisible when lab results aren't dispositive. Illness may be invisible in a patient already diagnosed with mental illness, or otherwise perceived as untrustworthy. Illness may also become invisible through pseudoscience. Patients who harm their credibility by describing themselves with pseudoscience may nonetheless be genuinely ill, and not just mentally. Moreover, these patients may be acting reasonably, not because pseudoscience is true, but because they've had mainstream medical encounters so unreasonable that pseudoscience seems reasonable to them by comparison. Reasons for invisibility vary, but for patients, there's one steady rule:
The more invisible your illness, the harder you must signal that you're not malingering to avoid dismissal.
This is good stuff, thank you. (I mean, not good obviously the difficulties it's talking about).
A further complication is that the experience of chronic illness makes medical anxiety more likely and that produces it's own additional disqualifying-to-doctors dynamic even though it's just the normal result of coping with a poorly understood illness for a long time.
Having gone recently from someone dealing with a low-grade poorly understood chronic illness to being a cancer patient, I've been amazed at how much more credibility cancer patients get for having things like medical anxiety. It's very normalized -- "of course you're going to worry about every little symptom after this, that's totally understandable and we will be here to do whatever tests and scans will put you at ease."
After years of stumbling through various dismissals from doctors for my mystery post-infectious chronic symptoms, I'm now on the receiving end of an incredible amount of attention and care (and fancy expensive treatment!) over every aspect of my experience. It's weird. Also a little ironic, because likely the chronic inflammation I lived with for years contributed to getting the cancer.
Perhaps not surprising, considering where I assume most readers' thoughts went once you said "cancer" compared to "low-grade [...] chronic illness"... Best of luck !
My wife (and I) got mono back in college. At one of her doctor visits he noted she had a swollen liver. He mentioned that was the literal definition of hepatitis: inflamed or swollen liver. He then noted that in her record. That came back to haunt us later.
It's a relief not to have to decide what I think about some propositions. Sympathies to people who need to make judgment calls due to their job or other circumstances.
I see a lot of that sort of mind-reading in politics. No, the people on the other side can't *really* be frightened or angry or disagree about the facts. They must be up to something nefarious or they just want attention.
When someone proclaims himself to be a very Stable Genius, should I believe him? Believe that he believes it himself even though it’s untrue? Believe that he’s consciously lying? Or maybe incapable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood? So many possibilities - hard to say what the best answer is, really
Ooh, so much this. In politics and every other tribal or emotionally charged topic. (E.g., when your spouse doesn't want to have sex as much as you do, it's tempting to think they might be having an affair - no way do they just NOT want sex.) Politics is the mind killer, but so are other things, and bad epistemology is the main symptom.
Can someone explain the John Edwards reference? I first assumed it to be one of those Berenstein Bears things where people tend to remember the wrong spelling better than the real spelling, but when I Googled "John Edwards" the John Edwards I was thinking of was spelled "John Edwards".
John Edwards was a prominent US Democratic politician. In 2008 it was revealed that he was cheating on his wife while she was dying of cancer, and he has been persona-non-grata since.
John Edward was a television psychic from the show "Crossing Over with John Edward".
"Beyond that, the stories are all slightly different, but smoothing them into a single thread: the person got really into some piece of fiction, and found that one of the characters they were modeling really carefully was now “active” in some sense where could give them advice."
OK, so do we now all update our priors to believe that not only was Julian Jaynes correct, but his theory of how (at least some) minds work remains valid for (at least some of) modern man?
I'm not being sarcastic; that genuinely seems like the appropriate response to Scott's claims.
Two other situations I'd like to see reviewed are food issues (eg gluten-intolerant) and trans-adjacent behavior. Both of them come across as mainly attention seeking from exactly the sort of people who have always sought attention (but, sadly, these days tattoos, or shacking up with the same sex or different race, just don't generate the attention they used to...), and I don't know the extent to which the loudness and unpleasantness of the publicity hounds represents almost all of the "real" community vs almost none of the "real" community
The annoyance at people who claim gluten intolerance has always kind of fascinated me. Though admittedly, I'm not on social media and so don't experience any kind of annoying barrage in my daily life. No doubt social media is filled up with attention-seekers, since that's what it rewards.
As someone who has been gluten free for almost 20 years as a result of sequelae from two bad gut infections and subsequent auto-immunity, my model of gluten intolerance ranges from verified celiac to my situation to the huge numbers of people with IBS symptoms. My GI doc explained way back when I was trying to figure my situation out, "most people with chronic diarrhea experience some improvement by removing gluten from their diet."
If you just take the huge numbers of people who have IBS -- which is hugely common among people with generalized anxiety (which itself is hugely common) -- it seems to me a not surprising adaptation people would make that may not have existed as widely until celiac disease was a more understood thing and gluten free foods were more readily available. When I began eating GF a million years ago, the options were really tiny and now they're huge, so if eating GF held out any hope to improve your gut pain/diarrhea/etc, wouldn't you try it?
I actually think this is an excellent analogy for the two viewpoints. I fully believe that gluten has been a huge a problem for you and many other people. As a bartender, I have also witnessed plenty of people who are ‘gluten free’ and order burger with no bun, then wash it down with a beer.
Both types exist in fair numbers. I think this argument is mostly about which end you approach it from and where you set the norm/bias
I honestly had no idea so many people felt so strongly against gluten intolerance until I read this thread, and I don’t comprehend it at all. If many people really were faking or exaggerating intolerance, the main effect seems to be creating a market that better services folks with a severe gluten allergy and a few folks here and there lowering their diabetes risk, so what’s the problem???
Well it’s the dude who is perfectly fine and reports no particular problem and drinks 3 beers away for decades. Then he feels sick for a couple weeks and suddenly “I am intolerant and cannot have any gluten”. “Really? What the fuck was going on the past two decades?”
Now people aren’t always upfront about their health issues, and they also do sometimes have weird body changes. But you can see where it would create questions.
I had similar questions about a sister who suddenly came down with 20 allergies.
One time she had a very bad reaction to a peach, and she goes in and gets told she is allergic to tomatos (ate them daily), carrots (ate very regularly), peanut butter (ditto).
So she stops the peaches and all that other stuff for years, and insist that if she eats like a baby carrot she feels kind of weird.
Except you know when I eat peanut butter my throat and mouth sometimes get a bit scratchy/itchy. And, I don’t let that stop me and it probably keeps me tolerant of peanut butter.
Meanwhile my sister has ditched a dozen foods they used to love and made her life much more annoying over some little numbers on a test and one bad reaction to a peach. Plus she gets to be special!
I had a family member do something like that, they were eating something cooked and asking if meat had been cooked in the same vessel (the deep fat fryer).
Upon getting a "yes", they made a big production out of spitting out the half-chewed food and proclaiming that they would have terrible intestinal trouble if they ate it. My uncharitable mental but not verbally expressed reaction was "I remember all the years you ate meat and animal products with no problem, and I bet if I had said 'no' you would have eaten that with no problems afterwards".
It is true people can develop allergies and intolerances in later life. But it's also true that I've seen people eat stuff with no problems, and only if another time they found out that it was on their no-no list, then they suddenly got the reaction.
Maybe stupid question, but from this I am assuming that "drinking too much beer" is very unlikely to result in gluten intolerance ? (But aren't there other allergies that trigger once some threshold of (ab)use is crossed ??)
I for instance “became” allergic to dust/cats at 19 when I spent a huge amount of time cleaning a very dusty/cat hair filled room for a girlfriend as a birthday present. So that seems like some “point” trigger. Except my mom and sister are also allergic to cats, and I was always a “sneezy” guy, so maybe not.
Then I know people who suddenly started to be allergic after like eating a peach, and then it is like “you are super allergic to peaches”. But what about the first 600 peaches they ate?
And then sometimes the “therapy” is total avoidance, and sometimes the therapy is “slow acclimation”.
I think the annoyance at people who claim gluten intolerance comes from a combination of things:
(1) Eliminating gluten is also a good way to reduce calorie intake, since by default it will cause you to eat a lot less carbs, and some people claim gluten intolerance to make this more socially acceptable or avoid talking about their weight. This will annoy the sort of people who are annoyed with all lies, as well as the sort of people who feel like this diminishes the ability of people with actual gluten intolerance to be taken seriously. (This is in many ways analogous to people who claim to be allergic to a food that they actually just don't like the taste of.)
(2) The popularity of gluten-free diets has led to a prevalence of gluten-free foods. This is okay on its own, but sometimes gluten-free substitutes for normally-glutinous foods will be the only options available. This is especially true for vegans - a lot of the time there is the omnivore option and then the "vegan and gluten-free option". Gluten-free substitutes for normally-glutinous foods are usually not very good. As a vegan I would prefer e.g. baked goods to be available that are vegan but not gluten free, and if I'm in a blaming sort of mood I could blame everyone who made gluten-free diets popular.
(3) And yes, the usual BS where people are irrationally annoyed with anyone who talks about having a health problem, which we see in these comments also being directed at spoonies and people with DID and so on. (I could make some attempt to unpack why people do this but it probably wouldn't say anything that hasn't been said many times over elsewhere in this comment section.)
For me, the annoyance came from the fact that the claims about Gluten started out from a very untrustworthy source and were generalized to all of humanity. Then a lot of us got lectured by people we knew about how gluten was poison, and people who didn't eat it were better than us.
So it combined the worst traits of veganism, 'organic' produce, and raw food diets. That a subset of the population have a real metabolic problem with gluten is an entirely separate phenomenon.
Most trans people are not attention seeking and actually get the best symptom responses when others don’t notice they are trans and instead address them the same as any other person that shares their gender, (typically this is late into the transition period, if achieved).
The visibility has overall been regarded by the community as important for expanding the spaces in which trans people are accepted, since there was a very long period of time that trans folks across the entire country had to relocate to get treatment access and avoid violence-and those that couldn’t had a Terrifying mortality rate.
Once such location that was popular historically for relocating was Minnesota. Health officials in the state are finding they have to tackle the challenge of geriatric care for many aging trans folks with basically no existing medical literature for what complications may arise. (How many attention seeking geriatric trans folks have you met?)
"Most trans people are not attention seeking and actually get the best symptom responses when others don’t notice they are trans and instead address them the same as any other person that shares their gender..."
Agree. Why do they need validation as the “other”? Why can’t you choose to be neither? Or both? As someone else mentioned, trans folks reinforce the binary. Trans people imo embrace the gender binary while rejecting the biological binary. The only problem is that picking the mental binary over the physical is that you need surgery and become dependent on medical intervention.
Very common misconception. Many nonbinary people have severe health complications from dysphoria and hence have sought or plan to seek medical intervention to alleviate them through transitional therapy, thus being “trans”. Naturally, no one is immune to cognitive bias so there are binary trans folks that spread harmful opinions about other LGBT people. For the most part though, their transition is exclusively for their own symptom alleviation & self expression, and not to be taken as reflective of how they believe others should act/dress/etc. I find it highly likely you yourself could point at some subset of clothing or presentation you are uncomfortable personally wearing but not with it existing.
You didn’t actually respond to my point. Why do you have to become the other in order to alleviate discomfort? Isn’t doing so reinforcing a binary view of gender? Maybe doing away with the binary view would also relieve discomfort?
Gender expression isn't binary but it is bimodal, and if that should be changed I don't see why we should make people experiencing gender dysphoria especially responsible for changing it. They have enough things to deal with already.
My experience with many many many many many trans people is that almost all of them have tried that, the ones who it worked for become nonbinary, and the majority it doesn't work for.
Pardon? If walking through a grocery store being addressed normally without others paying attention to your presentation & leaving you alone is “craving attention”, then my goodness, I am a FIEND for attention. YOU are a fiend for attention. We live among a sea of fiends, nearly choking on the salty air with how thick it is. Our only hope is the small handful of angels going to the grocery store with the intent of having a panic attack mid-bread aisle, as their intentions are pure and attention free.
If you prefer to engage in logical debate instead of prose, please provide some type of structure to your statements instead of a single “yes, wrong”. That’s irrational and hurtful to very valuable members of our community.
I don't think the problem is with the trans people who just want to go to the grocery store. Maybe I see someone and mentally go "that's a guy", but if they want to be called "she/her", okay, no problem to be polite in public.
The problem is those loud-mouth activists demanding that I not alone say "she/her" but *believe* she/her and that this is a real woman just like a cis woman and if there is any error or misunderstanding, this is not a genuine mistake, this is transphobia which means murder of real trans people.
Maybe "Susie" doesn't pass very well, but if 'she' is not making a big fuss about it, why should I? But if "Susie" loudly goes around demanding everyone acknowledge she is a real woman and if you don't mentally believe it then just saying it is the same thing as transphobia, that's a different matter.
Coeliac disease is a real condition and is more prevalent in certain populations (e.g. the Irish). So it's possibly that someone could have ancestry that did suffer from gluten-intolerance and so is more prone to it, but unfortunately the way it went public and popular did sound more like a bunch of hypochondriacs or people surfing the latest fads.
So I think a lot of people claimed to be gluten-intolerant, and maybe even believed they were because "oh if I eat a lot of this, I get indigestion". And a lot of companies hopped aboard the bandwagon advertising that their products were gluten-free, even for products that would never have contained anything with gluten anyway ever in their manufacture, just to avail of this fad.
[This is a more general response to the dynamic you're describing re: celiac and how it relates to the overall theme of this wider conversation -- not a pointed response to anything you've said here]
I am with you that companies create and fuel fads to make money. The attention economy amplifies this by rewarding people trying to stand out and make money off of their health status or identity. How can we take care of ourselves amid the noise of capitalism and the attention economy? I don't think the answer is in getting pulled into the outrage drama of it, though certainly there are understandable reasons to feel angry about how hard it is to find meaningful space free from the contortions of capitalism and the attention economy.
Woven through this for me is also the idea that we often think we understand more about other people than we do -- like remembering that it can take 10 years for a person to get accurately diagnosed with celiac disease, and that's the case for many other illnesses that people call fake or malingering.
At the same time, why do we really care how other people eat, what stories feel real to them about why they eat the way they do? Every person who eats vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, paleo, low carb, or any other set of dietary preferences has a story about why they eat the way they do. Do we need to have opinions about all of these stories?
Anyone who has experienced long-term gut problems is likely to develop fears and strong preferences around food as a normal response to lack of treatment for their gut problem. Nearly all of us have been raised with some slightly sick or twisted relationship to food ("eat all your food regardless of how full you are or you can't leave the table" and on and on). It feels to me like we could use some compassion for however people figure out how to nourish themselves in the face of of consumer marketing, body image pressure, parental voices, financial issues, moral panics, and a wide range of poorly understood health conditions that impact the gut.
A central theme running through this wider conversation is about tolerating difference -- or at least not ascribing malingering lying liars to people who claim to be having different experiences from us, whether that's gluten intolerance, jhana states, color blindness, lucid dreaming, or being trans. There's also a thread of "if you don't dismiss different people as lying fakers the way I do, that's because you're a pathetic sap who can't read social cues." It seems to me to be a really exhausting way to go through the world feeling so caught up in other people's choices that we take repeated offense at them or imagine that we know enough to judge them.
I guess more generally I come down on the side of not wanting to spend a lot of energy being annoyed at humans behaving like how humans have behaved forever, and to find paths to mutual understanding wherever possible. Starting with a high prior that people we don't understand are lying fakers feels like isn't going to help me that way. Largely it feels like the age-old threat response -- we are wired to feel threatened by difference. The question for me is do we want feed that default limbic response or do we try to balance it with other good qualities that come from other parts of our mind like love, compassion, mutual understanding, and genuine curiosity?
How much are we just giving into our most primitive fear reactions with all our knee-jerk reactivity to others' ways of being and how much are we trying to bring other resources on board? It seems like a question hypothetically relevant to rational-identifying communities. It's not just about dynamics between groups online either; this stuff plays out within marriages, between parents and kids, and inside of every significant relationship we have.
When I first read about the McCullough effect, which causes afterimage-like changes in color perception that far outlast actual afterimages and nobody knows why, I decided to try it and see for myself. I did a marathon training session, staring at my current grids for a full twenty minutes, and then after that I spent *months* experiencing this basically-harmless hallucinatory color distortion in the world around me.
Yes, sometimes people's experience is different from yours in bizarre ways not yet fully explained. That one was even so weird I sometimes second guess my own memories, and am tempted to try again just to see how real it is - but I also recall finding it pretty annoying, so I don't do that, and I am going to recommend against you doing so either.
"I’m just saying I think this is usually a bad gamble."
I think at least PART of the difference lies in that claim that it's a BAD gamble.
One can believe that all of the proffered syndromes (spoonie, trans-adjacent, gluten-intolerant, multiple personalities, jhanas, etc) exist while also believing that most of the people who claim them are attention-seeking.
Which side of this statement you weight as more important depends on your goals. For someone trying to understand the human mind (as a healer, as a researcher, whatever) the fact that any such cases exist is fascinating and worth understanding. Whereas for someone simply trying to live in the world (and irritated by the endless streams of nonsense encountered from every direction) the fact that most such cases are attention-seeking and worth dismissing/ignoring may well be the more salient issue.
“Trans-adjacent” isn’t a syndrome. Gender dysphoria, however, is a disorder and has already been documented to be related to brain development mapping not following the normative pattern for a given sex, with some heritability risk factors and severe mental and physical health consequences if left untreated. Fortunately, treatment has a really great prognosis of approximately 97% of patients recovering from the worst symptoms via transitional therapy, and 99.6% seeing general improvement. Transgender is more of an umbrella term that includes people that are seeking or have received treatment for gender dysphoria. With that high of a symptom improvement rate, I find it odd that rationalist folks here are repeatedly referencing it as an example of unverifiable or unlikely illness. The statistics are clear, especially when compared to very common surgeries like wisdom tooth removal that have approximately a 99.0% success rate, LOWER efficacy than transitional therapy.
- your set of claims essentially boil down to their being a "female" mind that is different from the "male" mind, and gender dysphoria is the condition of a mind in the opposite body from usual.
- OK, fine, except that the feminists have spent 50+ years making precisely the opposite claim, that there are no differences between the male and the female mind
This is part of a larger pattern whereby the feminists (and probably also the anti-racists) want to claim a massively plastic blank-slate mind, almost entirely formed by "culture" whereas the gays and the trans-folk want to claim a "created at birth and mostly non-amenable to change" mind.
I pretty much don't care about which of these positions is correct. I do VERY MUCH care that I am told I have to believe both of them, and constantly have to twist my thinking to match either one depending on the issue that is being argued.
If someone demands that I hold two contradictory views, my natural inclination is to walk away from the discussion as one that is simply not based on rationality or interest in truth.
As to the specifics of what you are arguing (which aren't at all clear to me. What does "97% of patients recovering from the worst symptoms via transitional therapy" mean? We took 100 people who thought they had an opposite-gender mind, we gave them "transitional therapy", and now 97 are happy living as the opposite gender? The obvious question of course is comparisons with the past and other countries [how many of those people in the past came to be perfectly happy in their "natural" bodies and "lifestyle roles" in their twenties or thirties? how much more prevalent is the condition today than fifty or one hundred years ago?] along with cohort studies [how did that happiness evolve over time? how many people felt they made a mistake?]) but there's no point in even going down that road until one can establish that a discussion is being held in good faith.
I've given my reasons for why my default assumption for certain positions is that they are not being argued in good faith.
You are welcome to rebut, for example by agreeing that the feminist position is what it is, but you feel it to be wildly incorrect, and that the fact that so much of social science has been willing to accept it uncritically does, of course, mean that we are justified in being somewhat skeptical of the claims and methods of social science even in other areas (like trans).
I couldn't care less about the politics or morality of these issues. What I care about is the epistemology that these issues are forcing on public discussion.
There is a pretty big middle ground between "massively plastic blank-slate mind" and "created at birth and mostly non-amenable to change" and it is disingenuous to claim otherwise.
Well sure but the point is people don’t stake out that ground. They are almost always claiming one of the extremes depending on what their political goals are.
This is a more fair criticism, I think. An honest start would be recognizing that some aspects really are "baked in", and some aspects really are environmental, and the way in which they interact isn't always obvious or within our control.
Someone clearly wasn't paying attention in the 2000s...
Conceding this removes the politico-legal argument that differential outcomes is IPSO-FACTO proof of discrimination. Why exactly was Larry Summers drummed out of Harvard? Uhh, for making this exact argument...
Recognizing there is a middle ground between two wild extremes doesn't imply anything about what the middle ground looks like. Either make or link the counterargument yourself, vaguely referencing events as if they were common knowledge is no help to anyone.
Thank you for articulating your issue with contradiction; it’s been so many years since I started studying the topic, I forgot that was basically where my understanding started.
The brain mapping refers to components such as literal nerve mappings, motor skills for genitalia, physical arousal responses/hormone handling, and heightened recognition of potential partners---So, to keep it PG, a trans man may have the software installed for booting up a device that adds additional electrical current down south, but instead a device that pumps engine oil and turns a couple gears on a clamp receives the signal. The gear device doesn’t come with an error handler, so it tries to run according to the instructions it receives and sends back a completely garbled packet with results. The software DOES have error handling, so when it receives the garbled packet, it proceeds to blare to the rest of the brain that an error occurred. The error doesn’t pause the software, however, and more signals for electric current are sent to get that dang piston-i-mean-gear going, but errors keep coming back--- eventually resulting in the entire brain panicking, “something is wrong”.
If you’ve ever been stung in the face by a jellyfish, the error signals in the piston handler- the gender dysphoria- is even more uncomfortable than that, and a little less uncomfortable than a half-foot second degree burn. Imagine this amount of discomfort occurs every single time you try to have sex or look in the mirror (those evolutionary partner-recognition mappings kick in to try to give your brain a rough idea of who will give you the best offspring and 4/5 times this mapping results in attraction to the opposite sex-WAIT THAT’S THE OPPOSITE SEX IN THE MIRROR, FUNCTION MISSING ERROR ERROR ERROR ).
Basically, none of the mappings being referred to here are the ones used to work hard at jobs, learn academia, etc. so I would conclude there is no contradiction between transgender health studies and gender anti-discrimination policies (Some researchers try to make arguments regarding how different genders handle skills like spacial reasoning, but this has never been shown to have any correlation with dysphoria and a whole lot of correlation with historical access to education, so I have my doubts.)
Regarding the data, living in a state of unpredictable severe discomfort is so unbearable that gender dysphoria causes suicidal ideation or attempts at an estimated 60-70% rate, jumping up to around 80% in the period right before treatment (the uh. data isn’t entirely clear here as there is bias in subjects not surviving to be surveyed, nor is it known how many folks past the 60-80% would later develop these symptoms without intervention.) Transitional therapy gets this value all the way down to 3%, or a 97% effectiveness at eliminating the worst possible symptom of dysphoria. Of folks that begin transitional therapy 99.6% reported positive results and continue transitioning (up to the point of being surveyed, theoretically indefinitely as there are currently geriatric trans people in the US, though more data is desperately needed here). Regarding historical and generational transgender rates, it is pretty clear that in the past 50 years, there has been the most growth in the number of people seeking treatment in regions that expanded treatment availability (with some states seeing much earlier growth spikes). A lot of theories are getting thrown around about this, but I am still sitting comfortably on the fence, waiting for more data. Does expanded access of limb reattachment post-traumatic accident in the US mean traumatic de-limbing accidents don’t happen elsewhere? I sure hope that’s not what the data shows, or I will start having nightmares about Amazon warehouses.
Except where lesbians are being told if they don't want to have sex with a person with a penis, they are being transphobic because a feminine penis is not at all the same thing as a penis on a male person.
I would agree with John's physical biology-based readings around transgender issues, if the mechanism of activism wasn't out there online contradicting every word he says.
This is a nice clear articulation of a set of reasonable positions.
The one thing I think you leave out (as a scientific data point, not that I care as a policy point) is the extent to which this "solves itself". We all know that teenagers go through a variety of weird experiences as they attempt to "define and find themselves" and it's not clear to me that the behavior you describe is different in kind from every other teenage trauma, whether it's terror at talking to the opposite sex/lack of success in such an exercise (also the source of plenty of suicides and near suicides), sexual experimentation ("lesbian in college"), choosing a despised outgroup (becoming a goth) etc etc.
These are all painful experiences, but mostly what they show is that changing from a kid to an adult is horrible for most of us, and yet it happens and by 30 we have mostly made peace with adult life. What you have not provided data for is the extent to which teen gender dysphoria is essentially one particular manifestation of unease at this transition, an unease that disappears with age, as opposed to the deeper neuro-physiological arguments you give.
No-one is denying that the arguments you give are present in SOME people; what is being denied is that those same circumstances are just as true even as the number of people claiming (and being treated for) the condition skyrockets. (To put it differently, the psychiatrists claim that the situation occurs is around .01% male (1 in 10,000) and .002% female (2 in 100,000) and yet SELF-REPORTED prevalence is around 1%, so 100x higher! It's hard not to look at that discrepancy and conclude that very little of what you are discussing is relevant to the points I am raising.)
Beyond that, your model fails in other ways. For example, as I understand it, transvestitism is substantially more common than the sort of gender dysphoria you describe, yet it presents in a very different way. Few transvestites (as far as I know) consider the issue one of life or death; for example Eddie Izzard doesn't seem to see life in anything like the terms you describe.
Ultimately what I see in your explanation is the same sort of thing as books about the obesity epidemic that spend half their pages talking about familial hypercholesterolemia or Prader-Willi. Yes these are real diseases, yes understanding them may ultimately help us with mass obesity or its side effects. But they has fsckall to do with what most people are worried about as "the obesity epidemic".
Ah, I considered this a thread spinning off from the clarification between "trans-adjacent" and gender dysphoria, answering specific questions about dysphoria. This is NOT a model for the whole umbrella of transgender, gender-nonconforming, & queer people. This includes such a wide variety of folks that I believe trying to characterize singularly would be error-fraught, and my knowledge & experience is insufficient to account for this entire grouping, so I would hesitate to claim "there is no subgroup with higher correlation with attention-seeking/histrionic disorders than the population as a whole", though I can at least confidently claim "there exist multiple subgroups that do not have higher correlation with attention-seeking/histrionic disorders than the population as a whole". I should also note here that I implied but never clarified that I consider seeking needed medical attention to not be a type of "attention seeking", so this includes subgroups that need medical attention. (This was the basis for clarifying between disordered and non-disordered!)
Transvestism is a relatively old term that, to my knowledge, included a non-descript variety of crossdressing, nonbinary expression, trans expression, etc, so I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the number of (X people + dysphoric people) > dysphoric people. The math checks out there.
As stated above, my stance on population growth is very neutral, and I'd prefer to see expanded research before making any concrete judgement calls, though of course I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the expanded accessibility to GNC/queer/trans spaces and trans healthcare outpacing the growth in literature & healthcare training (many trans people have to train their healthcare providers) results in a relative growth rate of inaccurate self-reporting, but as we don't have any numbers for past rates of inaccurate self-reporting, I don't really see any way to determine if this was some number larger than the subgroup value of 0.4% of people that didn't respond positively to treatment for dysphoria, and I don't expect that value to grow by a whole magnitude or anything, so it will stay above the efficacy of (again) wisdom tooth removal. (That would disobey my admittedly-bad understanding of symmetric prediction distribution error.)
For other subgroups that the issue is not life-and-death & NO medical care is being sought, I am not particularly worried about inaccuracy for them. Exploration is fine. :) (This is pure, 100% consequentialist talking here.)
Again going back to your question about dysphoria specifically, the extent to which it can go away without treatment is not currently clear. Early research based on DSM3/4 included no way to distinguish between dysphoric and non-dysphoric gender non-conforming people, and there is a lot of very personal and charged debate going on about it right now. All I can say here is that dysphoria is known to show up as early as 4, and suicidal ideation & attempts are prevalent as early as 10, so I am hesitant to simply sit and hope a patient survives until they are 30 (using the number you provided) when treatment has a 97% efficacy for this symptom (I should note here that the other 3% is relatively consistent with the overall population rate, so it's not unlikely there is comorbidity in these cases). Not only does the math not pan out there, but even if we somehow had an alternate method to guarantee survival, (again using the arbitrary value you provided) if 26 years of suffering can be alleviated, I am all for it.
If you come up with other legitimate questions, I am willing to provide info & models, but I am very exhausted from the topic right now, so will be back Tuesday or so. Have a good weekend.
Because now the new orthodoxy is "you do not have to experience dysphoria to be trans" and that immediately extends the shade of the umbrella to a whole lot more people.
All the brain-mapping etc. is now considered medical gatekeeping. How dare you ask me to undergo questioning from some doctor if I want a prescription for hormones!
As for normative patterns, what even are those? Gender is a social construct, sexuality is a spectrum, and biology is not binary. So how can there be a 'normative' pattern for what is a 'male' brain versus what is a 'female' brain?
I just wanted to say that I really appreciated this post - and Resident Contrarian's.
I tend to approach things like RC - politely skeptical. Which is often a very useful and accurate starting point.
Unfortunately, I also a fair amount of Freddie in me - combative, dunking on people, righteous indignation, etc...
One of my favorite things about reading Scott is that it makes me a better person. He makes me kinder, more thoughtful, more willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. Even if he was wrong about a lot of stuff (which I don't think he is), his writing would have tremendous value for that alone. He rubs off on people, and that's what keeps me coming back.
This discussion seems to hit a lot of tender spots for people, but I think a lot of this is just coming at the problem from opposite ends. There are - undeniably - a lot of people online who say and do things for clout and attention. Particularly young people, particularly on social media. I think RC is correct to bring skepticism to the table.
To Scott's point, I also think that a lot of us are more or less normal, spending our time around more or less normal people. It is extremely helpful to be reminded that there are *lots* of people out there who are not. Many of whom we don't interact with because they fall through the cracks - and many others who we interact with all the time and aren't aware that things are different for them.
Lastly, there are a whole bunch of people who are like me in college. I went through several years where I was intensely depressed and had suicidal ideation. For a while, I was convinced that I had bipolar or something similar.
I did not. I was young and depressed. I never took meds, never seriously did therapy - I just got older. So now I am occasionally depressed, but it is pretty manageable and not a big deal.
From RC's perspective, I would be someone who mistaken believed I had a mental illness - and talked myself into some of the symptoms - because I read too much stuff online. And that would be correct.
From Scott's perspective, I was someone who was legitimately in pain and casting around for something to explain it. That is also correct.
I think, given the heated emotions in this thread, we should try really hard not to talk past each other.
This is a great comment that puts this whole thing into perspective. Thanks to you, to Scott, and to Resident Contrarian. I am taking things to think about from both these perspectives.
Re multiple personalities: I don't think I have any unusual amount of different personalities running around in my head but I can certainly make educated guesses about what kind of advice people I know would give. Having read this I have determined that I will now start receiving simulated relationship advice from an old friend who used to give good relationship advice.
As someone who absolutely does *not* experience interactions with simulated others in this way (it takes significant applied effort for me to even simulate a concrete scenario e.g. “simulate them reacting to me saying a certain thing to them”), I found it interesting to see a whole post (and many comments) of people working out the variations in experience between them in this domain.
When I was a child I was very good at noticing an adult being pervy with me. Maybe I was imagining it, but I was certain. And in many occasions their actions after my pervdar went off confirmed it: a random adult man asking me to go to lunch, or someone at the mall asking me to follow them into the bathroom.
I can often tell a man’s sexual orientation from a static picture, and almost always from a brief interaction. My father came out when I was 14, and I can’t remember thinking he was gay, but I became acutely aware since.
I would say I’m top 90% reading people. I might not have the technical lenguaje to describe someone’s personality, but I can feel who they are in the same way I can feel the answer to an integral is correct. It’s a special type of arousal when you simply know something just is.
I believe narcissists really do believe in the merits of the things they say and the actions they take, but I still feel repulsion and an urge to run away when I’m in front of someone with strong narcissist vibes.
I’m repulsed by the kind of people that would love make a living from videos that teach others how to get rich, even if they never accomplished the feat themselves. I don’t trust people that are trying to sell me something, especially when it involves money, but also ideas.
I can believe most people either experience or believe they experience what they claim. And yet, some of these claims, like lucid dreaming or hyper-phantasia, seem harmless, and others like being a spiritual healer or being aroused by children, seem really dangerous and cause me aversion.
I can’t speak for entire groups of people and their beliefs, but anecdotally there are certain topics that attract people that come off as intentionally deceptive.
To me it comes across as unintentionally deceptive. It's well known that 90% of drivers think they're above average. It wouldn't surprise me if 50% of people genuinely think they're in the top 90% at reading people.
Yeh in countries where drivers are given points for bad driving (getting an automatic ban for bad driving after a certain points tally is reached), the average is non zero and most drivers are zero.
That said I assume people intuitively mean median. I could write a Substack on why cars will never self drive.
If you offered a hundred dollars to anyone reporting a subjective experience of jhana, what do you think your proportion of false reports would look like? The reason I personally default to skeptical is that the incentives as it is skew heavily towards lying.
The costs of lying is incredibly cheap at times. Nobody can call you out on an unfalsifiable internal experience. This extends to other things that are burdensome difficult to falsify (e.g. Canadian girlfriend, you haven't met her, "As a lawyer..." on the Internet, etc.). It doesn't even have to be difficult to justify with yourself: it's a completely harmless lie, you're just trying to fit in, your intentions are good. Or maybe you aren't lying, you're just exaggerating your symptoms, you do have some minor back aches so it's fine to describe it as a chronic back pain. Or, you could have heard about something like that once and created a false memory of it because your experience sounds tangentially similar to what was described.
And the rewards? Social acceptance for buying into the group delusion. Claiming to regularly hear voices from God would be celebrated among a great many communities, the same applies in communities that glorify mental illness. Or purely bragging rights for having a rare experience, of speaking from a position of authority, or on your own prowess (your faith in God, your ability to hold your alcohol, how brave you are, how widely read you are...). Or just sympathy points and concessions, like getting a free comfortable chair for your back aches. When the costs are zero, plenty of folks would make a false report for even marginal social benefit. I used an analogy of getting a hundred dollars at the start, but plenty of folks do regularly spend that much money and more for nothing but temporary status gains!
With these kind of reports, you never get the kind of claims that are easily falsifiable, and when something becomes more falsifiable the incidences of reports will drop. Reported ghost sightings are way down after cellphones. Religions in general have trended towards more unfalsifiable claims as our ability to falsify them has improved and you hardly get reported miracles these days.
This doesn't mean that everyone is lying, but the more incentives line up to lie, the more you would expect lies. To counteract this, skepticism, as well as imposing actual social costs when the lies are finally exposed, is necessary to disincentize lying. Defaulting to "everyone's experience is valid" just incentives more lying.
For all that Scott says "I’m not trying to set up a social norm here" the post is very much about the norm, yes?
The tl;dr is, if you have a norm of being uncritical towards unfalsifiable claims, you're just going to incentivize all the liars when there's any benefit to lying, no matter how minor. I think RC roughly makes the same point as well.
And who would be most hurt by this lying? Those who had been truthfully reporting their experiences in the first place! If you uncritically accept those claims, you're only hurting the very people who do truly suffer from those experiences by equating their claims to that of the liars.
Those folks who genuinely have a glandular problem and can't really lose weight, who's going to believe them now after everyone's claiming their obesity is due to [made up condition]? This is why I'm very sympathetic to Freddie.
Resources to solve problems are limited. Healthcare is limited. Even sympathy is a limited resource, there's only so much you can care about before you go mad.
Other victims are those who would uncritically buy the claims. "I had depression and this one wierd trick solved my problems, join my cult/buy more book to learn more" has got to be one of the older scams.
The claim is equivalence. Plenty of people value social status more than a hundred dollars, and will easily agree to trade a hundred dollars for temporary social gratification (buying a round of drinks, pranks, fashionable products, etc.)
Here, status is the feeling of sounding important and being seen as important. It's the entire reason why online anonymous communities work, because humans like to chase this feeling even if it doesn't benefit them the slightest.
More specifically though I don't think substack commenter are lying. Possibly mistaken or misattributing their internal experiences, but probably not lying for benefit. I'd imagine more than a few gurus in history fake-reported to achieve jhana for substantial social benefit though, just like any other charlatans.
Just like one shouldn't underestimate the possibility that people have experiences that one can't easily imagine, one shouldn't underestimate the possibility that people are more comfortable lying than one is, both to themselves or to others. An half lies too like what a good actor may experience when playing a part, a believer of whatever, which could be real experiences in a literal sense but a lie for all practical purposes, since if reality pushes hard enough their "fake" experiences vanish, like if a fire broke out on set, or if the believer is forced to bet on a prediction. Training data set for this view is also quite big.
Also, this seems to be a debate that touches sensitivities. Scott is sensitive to people disregarding the reality of the experience, and others are sensitive to the system taking the "fakers" seriously to the detriment of those who make better use of it. Maybe a clearer distinction should be made between those who aren't really experiencing the thing, those who are but their experiences would go away if everyone including themselves stopped believing they had "the thing", and those whose experiences remain to some degree regardless of anyone's beliefs of "the thing".
Thank you for this post. I was saving yes! Yes! In my mind for most of the time I was reading it. ( except when I really had to concentrate)
My acquaintance Jake ( who lives in a basement apartment located in my brain) was nodding approvingly. “Quite right” he mumbled more than once. He’s not given to great displays of emotion and was watching something on telly while I was reading, so his few mumbles were very significant. Because I trust his sense of things when all’s said and done and he’s been around the block, if you know what I mean. I’d say more about him but he gets cross when he’s talked about too much.
Ok, so Am totally on board with the multiple personality community. I have a few but Jake I know best.
So why did I invent Jake to speak through of sense and nonsense in the world?
I’ll tell you.
Because when I just talk to myself in the mirror Im never going to be surprised by what I hear back, or what I might say next.
Multiple personalities are a really good hack imo. And, if you’re not shy about them and want to play dress up you can do well as an actor. If you’re not so keen on thesbianism then you could probably be a really good psychiatrist.
Seriously Scott, cudos.
Edit: none of this has anything to do with people being seriously ill in some way. I see Freddy’s got his knickers in a twist about that….
I apologize, that last remark was Jake’s. I never know what’s going to come out of his mouth half the time.
I do wonder if actors, or some of them, aren't in fact DID or whatever is going on there. So many stories about "I was really shy/nervous but when I got up on stage that all went away and I was a completely different person, so I decided to become an actor" and about actors who find it hard to shake off a part even when not performing in the role.
'Talking to yourself' can easily split off into two or more different participants, but I still think deliberately cultivating alters is a bad idea.
I found HPMoR!Harry's discussion with Hermione about the versions of other people that live in his head, and her reaction (realizing that she did as well) interesting for what it implies about the author's internal experience. And how much it contrasts with mine: very much a “what do you mean other people actually see things in their heads? I thought that was just a figure of speech!” moment for me.
I think they're more likely just profoundly narcissist, plus a good helping of imitative ability. The strong narcissist verges on solipsism, he believes he is necessarily the center of the universe, and all the rest of us are just supporting actors that will respond appropriately to whatever persona he chooses to take on.
I think it's that faith that allows one to act. I bet most of us could do it -- if we did it by ourselves, in private, while soaking in the bathtub. Which suggests what keeps us from doing it in the real world is the awareness of the gaze of others, of people realizing we're playing a part and responding negatively to that. "Oh, you're pretending to be distraught about the whales, but I know you're really not, you big faker."
We get instinctively embarassed at the prospect of people judging us and catching us out in emotional fakery, even if the social situation (you're acting in a play) means everyone has agreed, on the surface intellectual level, that emotional fakery is actually desired. I don't think we can overcome the instincts that we develop in childhood, that make us embarassed to be fake. But the narcissist can, because he thinks the reaction of the audience to his fakery will, or at least ought to be, appreciation, because that's what supporting actors do. It's in the script.
Am I crazy for thinking that the issue here is a conflation between believing that someone "feels" something vs. believing that their feeling is linked to an actual phenomenon?
Psychosomatic pain, for example. I can believe and trust a person who says it feels like their leg has been crushed by an ancil. I can accept that the signal being sent to their brain is identical to the one sent to a person who's leg was actually crushed under an anvil. But if their leg was never actually crushed and an x-ray shows their leg to be perfectly healthy, in what way is it wrong to say that their experience is false? "I believe you feel the pain, but in reality your leg isn't broken" seems to be a perfectly reasonable position that is missing from all of this.
Even more bizarre: "believe astral projectionists"? What??
I can believe that someone legitimately believes they are capable of astral projection. I can believe that they are not "lying". But the fact remains that astral projection is *not a real thing*. Whatever real experience they are having, it's not astral projection because that's not a real thing. That's an important distinction, is it not?
You aren't crazy, but then you do the same conflation as everybody else.
It's an important distinction if you're a general deciding whether or not to believe somebody when they say they astral projected to Russia and they're preparing to launch nuclear weapons and we need to issue a preemptive strike immediately. But notice what the important belief is about - it isn't whether or not they experienced seeing Russia preparing to launch nuclear weapons, it's whether or not that experience corresponds to Russia preparing to launch nuclear weapons.
The idea that it's not "really" astral projection, because astral projection isn't "real", is confused. If they are experiencing something that society has collectively agreed to label "astral projection", then they are really experiencing astral projection. The "not a real thing" is the false correspondence between what somebody would see if they were physically standing somewhere, and what they would see if they used astral projection to view that location - not astral projection itself, which after all, is merely a label for an experience.
Now, you may argue that this is exactly what you mean when you say astral projection is not a real thing, which is fine, but what you're really doing there is just insisting that your definition of "real" is the correct one.
That’s pretty confused. I know it’s an example but society hasn’t accepted astral projection and if it did accept it, it wouldn’t be true. It’s a falsifiable claim.
All we mean by that is 'If I say I astally projected, you have an understanding of what I am claiming to have experienced'.
What Scott is talking about here is the internal experience of astral projection, not the ability to see things that are really happening outside of your body.
I would agree the hallucination is real, but it is not reality. In astral projection the claim is that this isn’t just a mental state but actually happening.
""I believe you feel the pain, but in reality your leg isn't broken" seems to be a perfectly reasonable position that is missing from all of this."
The problem there is that the pain is as real as if the leg was really broken, and is as painful. The person claiming they feel this pain is not lying. But a real broken leg can be treated to heal, and medication to control the pain prescribed.
A leg that is not broken gets "you don't need medication, if you still claim to feel pain try exercise or deep breathing or over the counter painkillers, and if you don't stop saying you feel pain, then you need to go to a psychiatrist because you might be crazy, but you are probably just lying to get drugs".
If your leg is not broken but you still feel pain, you will self-limit to not trigger the pain but there is no clear line of "get the x-ray, straighten the bone, put on a cast, get physical therapy when the cast comes off" to treat it, and then what do you do with a pain that is not going away but all the doctors tell you is fake?
EVERYBODY has multiple personalities. We behave differently around bosses, church members, frat brothers, twitter threads, cats, babies, etc. We bring the relevant personality to the fore given whom we are dealing with. Going down a Facebook feed can be very fatiguing because you need to keep swapping out personalities, as Facebook mixes people from different phases of your life.
Likewise, we have multiple demon processes running (that's UNIX terminology. Microsoft Windows uses the term "services.") to handle different scenarios. These processes can have different rules of thumb, different goals, different time preferences, etc.
And this is a feature, not a bug.
Ayn Rand believed that complete integration was an important life goal, and in her novels, the villains self-destructed due to their internal contradictions. In the real world, we have plenty of ultra successful capitalists touting socialism and still having a real good time.
The mystic G. I. Gurdjieff touted exercises to bring the many false I's under the control of the True Self. He likened letting the different I's taking control to being in a state of waking sleep. And I think he had a bit of a point. I think there is a True Self that can wake up and override the Many I's, and some people should wake up their True Self more often. But trying to manage everything with the True Self all the time is brutally fatiguing and inefficient. Setting the Autopilot is useful.
Likewise, completely integrating the Self as Ayn Rand advocated is a dangerous game. When your mental model is imperfect, it is safer to have lots of contradictory fuzzy rules which operate according to context, vs. trying to live completely by some rule based philosophy. The latter is how Marxists get into mass murder and libertarians demand anarchy next Wednesday.
And speaking of libertarians, this Many I's model of the human brain contradicts the axioms of Austrian School Economics. Except in rare cases of deep contemplation, we don't have the ordered preferences described in Austrian School Economics. We have competing mental processes with different preferences. This is why good salespeople can make huge bucks: they can bring the desired background processes to the front. It's also why there is such a market for motivational speakers and self-help gurus.
>EVERYBODY has multiple personalities. We behave differently around bosses, church members, frat brothers, twitter threads, cats, babies, etc. We bring the relevant personality to the fore given whom we are dealing with. Going down a Facebook feed can be very fatiguing because you need to keep swapping out personalities, as Facebook mixes people from different phases of your life.
Very true. The difference between normal people shifting personalities to interact with different people and situations and those who claim to have "multiples" seems to be that the latter have a taste for melodrama.
It might be more than that. Maybe they have more problems swapping. Maybe their True Self is more asleep. Maybe there is psychological danger to having the selves too far apart.
Notice the high rate of mental illness among movie stars. Is acting attractive to those with bipolar disorder and whatnot? Or does the process of acting itself cause personality issues? Might the problem be worse with method actors?
I behave differently around different people but the experience of doing so is twiddling dials on a single personality engine.
If I watch a movie with a character with a strong voice, for some time, my internal narration takes on the tone and rhetorical style of that character. But I don't gain a second internal narration.
Yes, behaving differently or even thinking differently in different social contexts is fundamentally different from having a character in your head that you can consult for advice.
I do have characters in my head that I consult for advice, whom I have ongoing imaginary dialogues with. I just don't imagine that those characters are me (Even though they are animated entirely by my mind.) I could pretend they are me if I really wanted to, but that would seem a bit spooky. Which gets back to what Scott was saying about choosing to go down those paths based upon cultural conditioning.
In the spirit of “An atheist is just a christian that believes in one less god”, you only one more personality to dissociate from self-hood to finally let go of your ego delusion :)
I find both elements of Scott's initial post and this particular thread to be useful to putting into perspective my understanding of my own thought processes.
I understand my own thought process as having different modes of thought, the most common two being 'rational' and 'emotional'. In one sense, both are the same root personality with dials twiddled towards the extremes in different directions, but it's to the point where I can run both modes in parallel when I'm fixated on thinking about an issue where I don't have an answer and have both modes produce different results. I can also spot when I've shifted into one mode or the other by accident.
It's interesting to see that the individuals with DID were part of the same role-playing/fiction community. As someone that has played tabletop RPGs for decades, you see how players adapt over time. New players can't visualize that they're playing a character; what they have is a stat block, and if you ask them something outside that stat block they can't answer (like "what is your character's favorite food'?) Some players never get out of this mode. Those who do tend to next use a character someone else created as a baseline; if they're playing a Wizard, they may play a version of Gandalf or Harry Potter with the serial numbers filed off. With enough practice, you can model a character of your own creation.
In college, I participated in a live-action RPG for several years. This mode of gaming tends to be more social than stat-block and thus requires being more in character. One thing I noticed was that despite being heavily introverted, I was a lot more social in character. Partly, this could be because I was surrounded by other people with similar hobbies; it could also be that being able to use the character as an excuse removed a lot of the risks of embarrassment that I think makes me an introvert. At any rate, while they never were separate personalities, my behavior in "what would [character] do?" mode could vary greatly from the way I would behave normally.
If a close friend tells me about jhanas and that it takes a few months of practice to enter this blissed out, wonderful state, how much time do I spend trying to do it myself?
If a majority of my friends and relatives keep bringing up jhanas, and with a few months of practice they were able to enter this blissed out. wonderful state,, how much time do I spend trying to do it myself?
I would spend more time trying it in the second case. This doesn't mean that I disbelieve my one close friend in the first scenario, that she really had this experiences, just that I make my bet based on how likely her experience as she communicates it comports to my own reality.
In the first scenario, if I come to the conclusion that her experience is unlikely in my reality, I can say "jhanas (likely) aren't real." But I can't say she's lying.
Hypnotism comes to mind. Many of us have had the experience of going to hypnotist shows where the hypnotist brings people up from the audience, puts people under hypnosis, and they do wacky stuff. In my experience (they did this at my high school all four years) every time, there was one or two people where it wouldn't work and they were quickly dismissed from the stage. My recollection in talking to them after was that they just didn't buy it, so it didn't work. But the people who were hypnotized couldn't really describe the experience (they would say it was like being sleepy) and it looked to me in the audience like something legitimately happened to them, but they had no real memory of what they did onstage - the only other explanation I had was that I'd been going to school with a bunch of AMAZING actors who kept their talents on the DL. I believed them, but I didn't "believe" in hypnosis in that I'm nearly certain I would be one of the ones quickly dismissed from the stage.
"Imagine that one day you wake up and suddenly you have terrible leg pain whenever you walk. So you mostly don’t walk anywhere. Or if you do have to walk, you use crutches and go very slowly, because then it doesn’t hurt. And given all of this, you don’t experience leg pain. If you tell your doctor “I have leg pain”, are you lying ?"
I keep having a very similar experience and it's very frustrating, doctors will ask things like "what is your baseline pain level" about things like foot or knee or back pain and I'll be like "well... *baseline* is zero... but if I do things it's more than that... but I'm *not doing very many things* because then it hurts..."
Is there an objective way to tell the difference between people who have a jhana and actors who are pretending to have a jhana? The one fmri study was of ONE person!
Should we believe law enforcement testimony in the same way that Scott has suggested we approach the other claims?
There was a NYT article a few years back that suggested that law enforcement testimony was more likely to be mendacious.
Should we believe someone on trial for a crime that says he/she didn't do it?
I recall Chuang Tzu story:
CT is looking at fish in pond with students.
CT: i wish i was a fish so happy swimming around in the pond.
Student: you are not a fish how possible could you know the fish is happy
CT: you are not me how could possibly know that I don't know the fish is happy
Student: Not already being sure one way or the other is why I asked. Wanting to learn things which you know and I don't is why I became your student. So, to be clear, are you saying you were mostly guessing? Or are there going to be questions about fish telepathy standards and practices on the midterm?
I'm dubious that people experience jhanas because the word has at least two necessary implications. One is the subjective experience, the other is that jhanas are a Buddhist concept that exists along the 8-fold path to Enlightenment. I can believe that people experience some sort of bliss through meditation. That doesn't strike me as an extraordinary claim. The extraordinary claim is that this bliss is a genuine jhana, because that would imply that a genuine step towards Buddhist Enlightenment exists, which strikes me as preposterous, because Buddhist Enlightenment strikes me as preposterous.
I put jhanas in the same category as speaking in tongues. Glossolalia exists, people do "speak in tongues", and many describe the experience as blissful, but I don't for a moment believe that it is God speaking through them in some higher spiritual language.
Cool. I'm still in the market for a word to denote "that one high-energy euphoric intense-focus state with the nice body feelings that's incurred by following the standard instructions and it's a nice thing to do when I've got a spare 20 minutes"
This may be of some utility although it might be only tangentially related.
I categorize mental illness into four categories (Note, the four categories don’t require any of the participants in this scenario to actually have direct access to truth)
Type I: You can convince another person that you’re sane without having to tell them anything you believe is a lie.
Type II: You can convince another person that you’re sane but you have to tell them things that you believe are lies.
Type III: You can communicate with another person but you can’t figure out what lies to tell them in order to convince them that you’re sane.
Type IV: You aren’t able to for coherent enough world models to even communicate with another person.
For most of my life I’ve never pushed past type II, had brief stint on the border of Type III, but I think the reason that this becomes so passionate to people is that there is clearly a major loss of function and the ability to live a good life once you go into category III and IV. For most of human history Type II has been “Not insane, get back to work.”
Another layer I add on top of this is how often and how effortfully you need to summon your will power to be effectively sane to the people around you.
Type A: When you have an irrational impulse you can suppress it as often as you need to in order to appear effectively sane.
Type B: When you have an irrational impulse you can suppress it but not as often as you need to always appear effectively insane.
Type C: When you have an irrational impulse you can’t suppress it in order to appear as sane.
I’m pretty solidly Type B here, which for most of human history wasn’t insane but “Oh, here he goes again, well get back to work when you’re done.” I can communicate rationally pretty much all the time but if I’m in a small room with people for a long time, I have found myself involuntarily trembling and tearing up even after otherwise being asymptomatic for years. Intimacy does it too, like when I first met my wife I parked my car in my garage but didn’t turn the engine off. And when I asked her to marry me she asked me how I felt when we entered the restaurant and I said “slervious” and started to stutter.
Type II and Type B’s are common and take a lot of resources, even though Type III/IV and Type C’s need them more. So I think it causes frustration. Although of course there would probably be fewer resources with Type II’s and Type B’s creating a market.
There are probably a lot of holes here, but I find this an Excellent starting framework, thank you!
Especially grounding since ADHD & autism can take a draining amount of effort even at 1A to maintain an illusion of neurotypical status. I’m sure it only gets more difficult past that- or not worth the facade at all.
The thing I try to start with is presentation, because if you look at it like a mechanic sanity is just the ability to understand other people well enough to choose behaviors that appear sane. There can be all sorts of differences under the hood but the thing I like about that perspective is that its a testable framework, although I have never really tested it on anyone and mostly just mused over it when I did group therapy. I used to think I was way more nuts than I was, until I realized even if I had all sorts of weird thoughts and impulses I could still almost always control them and some people had completely lost that ability. It made me feel very fortunate.
I'm having a hard time figuring out if I'm Type I or Type II.
I appear sane/normal/neurotypical when I put in effort, but generally don't actually lie about anything. But the effort isn't sustainable - I normally can't keep it up for days, and even with a gun to my head probably couldn't keep it up for years.
And like, your comment seems sane to me, so you're at least capable of appearing sane for brief communcations, but you categorize yourself as Type II. Does that mean there were lies in this comment? Or is there some threshold for how much time you have to be able to sustain the appearance of normalcy?
(Similar questions apply to the distinction between Type A and Type B - like, does it count if my irrational impulses are acted on, but only where others can't see?)
I think there’s a pretty smooth sliding scale between type one and type two. I mentioned this in another thread but I had a religious experience. I guess that’s way more common than you’d expect, but while I guess I’m crazy enough to have seen it I still knew not to just talk about it constantly or try to start a cult or something.
I have PTSD so a lot of my stuff is reaction to danger, feeling of impending doom, and one time when I had myself half convinced that a girl at Panera bread was being trafficked so I made a plan to stab someone with my plastic butter knife. I also once got into a staring contest and thought I was going to have to fight a sticker on a bus window in a dark parking lot.
But for the most part, I imagine what a totally sane, totally normal version of me would do, and I just do that.
It's good that you're close enough to sanity that you can still imagine what a sane, normal person would do well enough to emulate them.
It's a shame that this probably means that your instinctive danger sense basically has to be ignored because it's constantly going off, so if you ever do find yourself in a dangerous situation you might hesitate to react more than warranted.
One of the things that brings me peace on that is ti remember there’s not really such a thing as a mindset that’s correct 100% of the time. Although on one occasion I did see a pregnant woman collapse on a cafeteria bench and I paused to consider if she was just sleeping. I did that for probably a solid minute. I was still the first person to go check on her, though. Turns out she just needed to get her blood sugar up.
I think the lies could be lies of omission as much as of commission; you don't tell people about the voices in your head or the weird idea you have that pictures can really see you, because that sounds crazy. So for instance, if you want to switch your seat so that painting on the wall of the guy in a meadow isn't looking at you, you make up an excuse about a draught or light in your eyes or you want to stretch your legs out, not the real reason that the guy in the painting is looking at you.
Because that's crazy talk, and only crazy people do that, and you're playing sane today for the people you work with.
This as well. Like I always sit facing a door because I have a constant fear of being shot and I want to be able to see someone come in but instead of saying that I just show up early to places and make sure I can take that seat.
A guy got really hostile with me at the gym once and I tried to trash talk back (I was in high school) and I mixed up “I’m going to kick your ass” with “I’m going to wipe the smile off your face” and instead said “I’m going to wipe your ass with my face.”
It did at least have the effect of lessening the aggression level of the situation.
If you wanted to maximize your doctor's chances of finding an answer as to why your symptoms exist, why would you not mention what you're doing to minimize them? In the leg pain + crutches example, someone writing an EHR file or (God forbid) paper chart ought to be able to see some crutches and ask what that whole situation is about. That happens even in eyecare, my field.
I agree that communication in healthcare is pretty terrible sometimes, I see it 5 days a week and sometimes on a Saturday when I'm unlucky. Yet, very few patients of mine are keeping their symptoms to themselves. Perhaps it's my position in eyecare as opposed to something more difficult to pin down, like abdominal pain. It can be astoundingly hard to get someone to give a damn about the glaucoma drops that maintain their vision, all while the same patient rings us up several times a day for dry eye med refills.
>This sounds like: “I, RC, have the mysterious mental ability to detect liars. I admit I can’t prove this, but come on, you should probably just trust me because it’s perfectly reasonable to think other people have mysterious mental abilities you don’t.”
If we're talking about in person communication, this doesn't sound like a "mysterious mental ability". Just a normal mental ability to understand other people by their facial expressions, body language, by how they say things, etc.
Given most people can't detect lies better than chance, I have a FAR larger suspicion that he is simply wrong than I do for the jhana people, the spoonies, or the multiple system types. After all, all they're claiming is some subjective experience in their brain. RC is claiming an externally-oriented superpower which evidence strongly suggests doesn't really exist, and to the extent it does exist, doesn't work the way RC claims to be able to detect lies.
This claim about not being able to detect lies better than chance needs to be applied carefully. It was studied in a lab, and may not necessarily apply broadly. People go off many very 'thick' contextual cues when judging lies in the real world which are not available in laboratory tests
It has been repeated over and over again, aiming for a variety of conditions as close to reality as possible, since there are large numbers of people who would benefit a lot from being able to detect lies.
The only useful "contextual clue" for a lie is that it does not fit with the evidence, either directly present (e.g. saying I'm 7' tall when I'm standing in front of you), or known by previous experience (e.g. saying I can fly through the air under my own power when you know humans cannot fly without mechanical devices). That's why cops detect lying in suspects by not informing them of all the evidence they have already, since then the suspect cannot construct a narrative that fits with said evidence, and not by staring really hard at them and noticing that being an interrogation room makes them stressed.
> 99% of psychiatrists aren’t dumb enough to commit someone who has the occasional suicidal thought but would never act on it - but if you work in a mental hospital, you quickly become acquainted with the 1% exceptions.
Is this because in a mental hospital you meet quite a few patients who are extremely angry at being committed for stupid reasons, and it’s always the same doctor?
I think it's because you meet people who are angry about having been committed for what to them are stupid reasons, and right now once they've been treated and back on their meds and stable once again, sure, it looks like they absolutely should not be in the locked ward and if a doctor committed them, then that doctor was too quick on the trigger.
But *before* they were hauled in to be committed? While they were off their meds and high as a kite on paranoia? Whoooo baby, totally different story!
I had probably 6 or 8 schizophrenic roommates, and I even remember some of them (ECT is funny that way). In my experience, the progression tends to be the opposite: the reasons are stupid until they're back on their meds and stable, and then they're agreeable people who want to go home and are working with the medical people to make that happen.
Interesting, but i strongly disagree on the first part where the homonculus is presented. It's not explicit, but it's done in manner that imply the homonculus (aka consciousness) is the real "you", and all the brain treatment thing is conversion detail...
My impression is that this is a dated and misleading conception, rejected by most neuroscientists. The homonculus is not the real "you", it's an important actor but not the driver, it's a module whose task is to build after the fact a summarized, sequential and as coherent as possible story about your internal experiences and decisions...which is super useful for remembering and communication to others, but it's far from what actually happen in your brain in term of experiences and decisions.
i guess this homonculus usually do a good job, but it also fail sometimes (hence the whole unconsciousness concept), and this is also linked to false memories (i guess a progressive drift when the conscious story is stored, re-read, re-stored,...).
So when people talk about weird internal experience, that's the homonculus-edited/summarized/rendered coherent version, not the actual one.
Do they really have special thing going on in the brain, or is their homonculus especially wrong? maybe it is trained to be wrong, in order to produce more fake but more pleasant to remember stories (my guess on jhana) ?
It can probably be both, and it's hard to tell it apart, but one indicator is "are those weird experience people able to do something strange, or only speak about it?" 3d mental image people and color number people can do something others can't, or at least do it much faster. I would then assume it's category 1 weird stuff. Else i would assume it's cat 2 weird stuff: homonculus/consciousness hacking...
It's indeed largely semantic/philosophical, but not only. The humonculus is the only thing you see when asking someone about what he experienced, but it's not the only thing observable when looking at someone having the experience*. This means it's not the only thing that count... Even for the guy having the experience, as long as there are other persistent effects besides the homonculus memory, a "real" experience will change him (addiction, motor skills, probably much more) very differently than homonculus-hacking pseudo experience. As the other modules will behave differently, the future homonculus will also write a different conscious story, inventing mostly coherent "reasons* after the fact even if the conscious experience was reported the same initially. So even for the guy, having the experience or fully persuading him he had it will not be the same, i think mostly after a not too short nor to long period...
(*) back to Jhana: can you interract with Jhana-experiencing people, or does it take them out of it? I guess the latter... This plus the observable behavior being mediation (aka doing absolutely nothing) really add to my believe that jhana is consciousness (homonculus) hacking, which is not the same as actual experience, both for external observers and even for the experiencer (different future behavior), even if short term conscious description is intense pleasure.
We are deeply in total recall territory: the imprinted memories are not the same as actual experience, not only because you did not really do it, but mostly because the implanted thing is not the full neural activity, but the minimal imprint for creating a conscious coherent story. It will lack supporting non conscious neutral changes and maybe details will start to fall apart when you look to closely at your "memories".
But if indeed your full brain state is fully the same, then i agree: simulated experience is the same as the real thing. However, both on total recall and jhana, there are multiple hints that's not the case: your full brain state is not the same after a recall visit (jhana) than a real mars holliday (an activity triggering intense pleasure)
I suppose, in this framework, the real question is what "having an experience" ought to refer to. Scott's interpretation is straightforward: an experience is whatever the "homunculus" observes. Whether or not this corresponds to true events in the world or true states of the rest of the brain is irrelevant. You seem to be concerned about whether these conscious observations map correctly onto "the real you." Maybe there's a subtle distinction to be made here, where your conscious experience does not necessarily accurately represent other parts of your mind, such as your decision-making algorithms. But as long as conscious experience itself is the phenomenon we are concerned with, how could the module of your mind that creates conscious experience be wrong about your conscious experience? It's tautological.
My point was that there is no real you. I suspect we are made of competing/collaborating modules whose collective behavior is rationalized after the fact, as an internal story, by the storytelling module aka homonculus aka consciousness. It seems like an important job, and it is, but i suspect it does not happen all the time, in fact maybe not the majority of time. Ever drived for kilometers then realize you were not really there? Well, you were but the storytelling module went on holidays. Maybe it even goes on holidays much more often but most of the time you don't notice because you simply do not try to tell yourself (or others) a story about what you did.
And i think while there are difference about misremembering, it's linked, just that consciousness is the first very short term remembering then after, it's replayed multiple times, every time the memory is accessed it's edited (but it's also good it goes into long term storage, not accessing it means forgetting) so all memories are heavily edited, i guess it's just most of the time big facts are maintained, partly because you try to maintain coherence... Si my prediction would be that false memories tend to make a better more coherent story that what happened.
Unlike p-zombie, there should be practical consequences is consciousness is more a grafted story telling than the main decision driver. Hacking consciousness will change memories and the way you speak about the experience, but unlike a real experience it will not have all the other brain modules do their work. If there are some persistence it will make a difference even for future behavior. Maybe those modules have their own reinforcement, build special memories different from the verbal story of the consciousness, the one you communicate to the outside...
An example, imagine a sport jhana where i imagine landing a perfect frontflip to the point i really think I did it, at least, and it make me proud. Will i achieve it next time i try it for real?
I think no, because the motor center will not have been trained like they would hand during actual attempts and final success... Even if you convinced you you did it, up to the point to not lie when bragging about it (or, more accurately, believing your own lies) you will still not be able to repeat the feat because the actual training stored something else that the story.
Note that I do not say mental training is not a thing, but it works not by consciousness hacking (you know you never actually succeeded) but by semi-firing your motor centers to prepare them.
I believe that's the reason jhana is not addictive: addiction is not the memory of pleasure (at least not mainly) , so it's not triggered by conscious hacking.
as addiction is part of very old reinrcement training already present in brains so primitive they purely do not have even embryonic consciousness, it makes sense it use a separated memory very different from the conscious story memory... Like motor memory is different in my sport example.
Eh. Credulity is certainly a good default for social interactions. If my wife tells me she has a headache, or is sad, or has experienced jicama I'm certainly not going to contradict her.
But credulity has no place in empirical science, none whatsoever. It's measured evidence, in controlled experiment, repeatable and repeated, or no sale. Nor do arguments along the lines of "well, lots of similar stuff that we thought was false turned out later to be true" or "it would be mean and cruel to not believe this" or "empirical evidence is very, very had (or even impossible) to come up with, so let's just go with whatever seems plausible" cut any ice.
I mean, there's plenty of "Intelligent Design" people who make all three arguments, so this path is well-trodden, and it's probably fine for a scholastic or neo-Platonist, but we surly sons-of-bitches who swore allegience to the skull-and-crossbones black flag of empiricism reject it all out of hand.
But what is empiricism when people self-report experiences? Unless you have a device that measures neurotransmitter activation (and even then), it's not clear what an empiricist does here
It's data, that's all. Unfortunately, there is also copious data that people lie and fantasize and bullshit each other and themselves. So we have data pointing in multiple directions, and the correct empirical stance a priori is agnosticism, not credulity. Maybe they did have this experience, or maybe they made it up. We don't know, a priori.
If it's important you can try to think up more rigorous tests, stuff that avoids the problem of testimony. Sure, maybe brain studies, EEGs, testimony of other witnesses, animal models, someday AGI models ha ha, or just looking at the self-consistency (or lack thereof) of the human witnesses. We do this all the time in the courtroom, right? You have to decide what the balance of the evidence suggests. It's not an impossible task, just one that is rather difficult, and there is zero chance the general solution is as simple as "just believe people who seem sincere."
Research priorities is a social question, not a scientific question, and I already said there is a role for credulity in social questions. Perhaps it is the case that we should, on humane charity grounds, set aside some money and time to investigate stuff that tortures people but for which there is no conventional medical explanation. That would be kind, and we might discover something interesting.
On the other hand, TANSTAAFL, so if the NIH is going to set aside $20 million to study Morgellons or DID, then that's $20 million less to study Stage IV breast cancer or better stroke treatment. So choices have to be made, andif it's the public money I suppose we need to have a big vote on it, see how people rate the priorities.
Thank you for answering this. I'd read RC's post, and decided not to bother expressing my level of belief in his claimed ability to determine that other people are lying about their internal experiences.
I'm glad someone more likely to be heard than me chose to state their similar disbelief.
See, I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding going on here, though Resident Contrarian is certainly free to correct me and I'd welcome it.
I think the objection is to the claimed *mystical* or *spiritual* states. I think Scott believes, because he has been told by people who he trusts, that they can access mental states of blissful experience. He believes this is plausible because he sees other ways we can alter our brain states from alcohol to other drugs, and that studies have been done about fasting etc. to achieve such states. He is not making any decisions on the 'mystical' claims validity, that Buddhism is right about existence of the Atman or whatever.
Resident Contrarian is denying these experiences on , I think, the same mystical grounds. There is no cosmic consciousness or guru or divine guide out there to give you these effects. But if people very strongly want to believe, then they can trick themselves into thinking the miracle is real. So people reporting that they followed the dictates of a religion about achieving a mystic state in that faith's repository are self-deceived or actually lying because they want to fit in, they want to show off, they want to be regarded as special, and other worldly reasons.
Scott is saying "People can think themselves into experiencing transcendent bliss". Resident Contrarian is saying "People can think themselves into thinking they are experiencing transcendent bliss".
I don't think either of them believe in transcendence, qua transcendence, as see "Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person": if these entities are really real, and have all this access to all knowledge, why can't they give me the answer to a maths problem rather than platitudes about love and joy? So they're not real, they're just mental states that we jolted our brains into by pickling them in psychoactive drugs.
Okay, but for all this there really is an important sense in which all the internal hallucinations things aren't real (and the people experiencing them mostly know they aren't real, and can usually convince themselves to stop if they really try). In your psychosomatic pain example - sure, I might ask the witch all these questions, but my *first* question would be whether the real wound was physically debilitating. I know the psychosomatic one wouldn't be.
My earlier impression of Jahnas was that it wasn't so much people experiencing emotions as people convincing themselves they were experiencing these emotions. I think this is a real difference, in the "reality is what doesn't vanish when you look away" sense. If you've convinced yourself you're not angry at your parents, we can still tell whether or not you actually are based on whether you get upset when they're mentioned and avoid meeting them. And if you claim to be able to achieve tracendent bliss just by thinking about it, we can still tell whether you really do based on whether you actively go out of your way to spend time in this state (and specifically, whether you do this more after having experienced this). As you've pointed out, this doesn't happen with the people who claim to have reached jhanas - they don't suddenly meditate a lot more or go out of their way to get to them. So the balance of evidence is strongly against them.
>And if you claim to be able to achieve tracendent bliss just by thinking about it, we can still tell whether you really do based on whether you actively go out of your way to spend time in this state
I think the idea that humans would infinitely seek out bliss and pleasure is a terrible one that I've seen repeated a lot in these discussions. Meaning, purpose, and the plain old variety of experiencing life are all things a lot of people feel drawn to over simple bliss/pleasure. Humans are not pleasure maximizers.
"As you've pointed out, this doesn't happen with the people who claim to have reached jhanas - they don't suddenly meditate a lot more or go out of their way to get to them. So the balance of evidence is strongly against them."
I think that is a basic misunderstanding of the entire Buddhist philosophy and this is why people don't get why, if you can achieve blissful states, you are not spending time seeking them.
Buddhism, as I understand it, is liberation from desire and achieving enlightenment. You put in a lot of work around this. Part of that work is achieving jhana states. Experiencing bliss etc. is a way of demonstrating the underlying truths of the philosophy. If you are working towards liberation from desire, this early state of bliss is to demonstrate the nature (or illusion) of consciousness and what we think we experience in regards to suffering, desire and other 'facts'. If you are working towards liberation, then the experience of bliss is also about learning not to desire this, as well. What is that saying? "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water".
Even in other religious traditions, like my own Catholicism, there are guard-rails around mysticism for this very reason. You don't seek to spend 24/7 in trance, you have to live in the world as it is. Unless you're a monastic (and even then) you can't be in a constant experience of the presence of God, you have other things to do.
Even in our secular world, we know this. People who try to be blissed-out 24/7 generally don't end well. Eating chocolate is pleasurable, but there comes a point when you've had enough and don't want any more. Are you insisting that unless people constantly eat chocolate, and eat nothing but chocolate, even past the point of satiety that the balance of evidence is strongly against them really enjoying chocolate?
Wire-heading also has this cautionary principle about it, the first mention I can think of is in one of Larry Niven's ARM stories where wire-heading was used to commit a murder. The victim starved to death, even though they were free to stand up and go get food at any time, because they couldn't muster the willpower to break the connection for even a few minutes.
In "The Ringworld Engineers" Louis Wu sets it up on a timer so that he can't spend 24/7 under the current, because of his experiences with it:
""Current addiction is the youngest of mankind's sins. At some time in their histories, most of the cultures of human space have seen the habit as a major scourge. It takes users from the labor market and leaves them to die of self-neglect.
Times change. Generations later, these same cultures usually see current addiction as a mixed blessing. Older sins -- alcoholism and drug addiction and compulsive gambling -- cannot compete. People who can be hooked by drugs are happier with the wire. They take longer to die, and they tend not to have children.
It costs almost nothing. An ecstasy peddler can raise the price of the operation, but for what? The user isn't a wirehead until the wire has been embedded in the pleasure center of his brain. Then the peddler has no hold over him, for the user gets his kicks from house current.
And the joy comes pure, with no overtones and no hangover.
So that by Louis Wu's time, those who could be enslaved by the wire or by any lesser means of self-destruction had been breeding themselves out of the human race for eight hundred years.
...It was always a temptation to reset the timer. He'd done it routinely in the early years of his addiction. Neglect had made of him a skeletal rag doll, constantly dirty. Finally he had gathered what remained of his ancient dogged determination, and he had built a timer that took twenty minutes of nitpicking concentration to reset. On its present setting it would give him fifteen hours of current and twelve hours for sleep and for what he called maintenance."
It's rather jarring to see libido described as [emphasis mine] "very important and very blissful __mental__ experience" instead of a "physical experience".. I don't to wax philosophical about the distinction (or lack thereof) between these, just noticing the word choice. Cf. most people would described the feeling of "pumped up" after a workout as physical, not mental.
I have experience with a sociopathic long-distance ex. She told me about extremely traumatic experiences to get sympathy. Then when I realized she had been lying about these and multiple other experiences, I told her that she should get treatment (at that time I didn't really understand sociopathy). She said that a doctor had found an inflammation in her brain that was causing her to hallucinate, and gave her specialized antibiotics to treat it. The drugs then "worked" to cure her. At some point she got desperate and called me as a relative from her birth country and put on a fake accent to support some iteration of this story.
This made me really curious about sociopathy and truth-telling. The thing is I'm quite sure she *believed* much of what she said. She believed her traumatic experiences, and would get really emotional when talking about them - I'm pretty convinced about this. I think at least part of her believed that she had a brain inflammation. How she felt internally when she was impersonating her relative (or at other times, when she would digitally impersonate people) I'm not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was similar to experiences of people with multiple personality disorder.
The experience of dating this person changed my point of view in lots of ways, a lot of which are *damn, actually something like 2% of the population has no natural empathy and totally makes up their experiences, and our institutions and thought leaders are completely clueless about this*. It does seem that sociopathy is pretty bimodal (i.e., there is a clearly distinguishable group of people with "the sociopathy package"), with an extra, looser, packet of the distribution around borderline personality disorder.
But also think, from comparing people I know who are not on the sociopath end of the distribution, that "basically honest" people have different levels of attachment to stories. People I know will combine bits of stories in their heads seemingly for story-telling effect, but genuinely believe the versions they end up with; others will follow various emotional and identity-based confirmation biases, where they make their beliefs and experiences conform to a story or ideology they care about, and genuinely believe them. I don't think this can be cleanly separated from truth-seeking. Memories and experiences are imperfect and we try to "organize" them into coherent structures, often fudging things along the way. For example if someone has competing memories of having two different teachers in second grade, they might cluster our beliefs around it being Mrs. X rather than Mrs. Y, to come up with a more coherent story, and adjust their memories accordingly, even if in fact their teacher was Mrs. Y.
I think that in reporting internal states, there's a really fuzzy distribution of what's going on, and it's not right to just have two clusters of "true" and "false". In fact, unless the state is something that can be clearly compared to a physical feeling that many people have experiences with "naturally" (something like leg pain in phantom limb, or to some extent transgender), I don't think "true" and "false" are very useful quantifiers at all (maybe a better replacement for "true" would be "closely pattern-matching to the experience of many other people).
I think a better approach to talking about people's internal states would include a multi-parameter distribution with one parameter being "strong emotion" vs. "subtle emotion" and another being "story-based" vs. "spontaneous/random" (roughly corresponding to low-decoupling vs. high-decoupling in people's beliefs about politics). Things like brain zaps among people who take anti-depressants are very much on the "spontaneous" side and much less dependent on stories and identity. Things like embodying a character from a work of fiction are (obviously) very story-based.
Some (a little bit) of this speaks to me. I wrote a comment below recounting how I once convinced my middle school - students and staff - that I believed I'd been abducted by aliens. It took a certain willful mental twist into willful pseudo-belief to execute certain maneuvers, particularly when adults asked me about it.
At no point did I have even the slightest concern for how my performance might be negatively impacting others - that my teachers seemed to be honestly worried about me and that I should alleviate the worry of good people. No, I would just pivot harder into the story.
But then, I didn't consider teachers to be "real" people in a way that meant their feelings mattered. They were an Other to be managed, that was all.
My line of argument is different. Let's say someone said they had found a drug that made you feel 10 to 100 times better than heroin. An amount of skepticism would be called for, but it's also something you could keep an open mind about. But now let's say this was followed by the claims that it had no adverse effects, wasn't addictive, and while the person had free access to this new drug, only used it occasionally. This is where you go "hang on..." - it doesn't seem psychologically credible. We know what happens when you use heroin or wirehead.
My guess at what happens with Jhanas is not that this powerful pleasure exists, or that the users have memories of it (as that would be much the same thing from a motivational standpoint), but that they have the memories of having had such an experience, without memories of the actual experience. This seems neither weird nor surprising - you put yourself into an unusual mental state after all, and it probably does feel genuinely pretty good coming down from it (from mere relaxation if nothing else). This is the only way I can make sense of the claims, at least. "I have ready and free access to the most superb pleasure imaginable with no adverse consequences, but this doesn't change my life a lot and I only access it now and then" simply doesn't hold water for me.
Do you eat a super healthy diet and constantly train for and compete in marathons, while balancing all your other obligations? Because that’s what it takes to experience jhana. It’s not at all like heroine because it takes a tremendous amount of willpower and dedication to experience, and even then it is fleeting. Thirsting after it makes it more difficult to attain. So it is definitely not “ready and free access”. It is arduous and difficult to access. Like all other areas of life, our evolutionary drives push us towards easier to access lesser pleasures at the expense of more difficult to reach greater ones.
Yeah, those are the ones I find less credible. I don't doubt they are experiencing some kind of pleasant or relaxed state, but I don't think they are jhanas as traditionally described.
Part of the problem, of course, is the Western and particularly American desire to commodify experiences, see the guy working on a technical solution (a headset, was it?) so that you could reliably and quickly achieve such states: infinite bliss on demand without the need for all that old-fashioned work and discipline, this is the modern era of automation and instant gratification after all.
Perhaps I end up a bit of a hypocrite here then - I am also skeptical of people on places like Substack and Twitter claiming they just slip into it. I think what they’re describing is a at most a very light form of jhana, if it can be called that, which is not something I’ve ever experienced. I spent many hundreds of hours in meditation dealing with monkey mind and back pain. Only on intensive retreat with a lot of momentum in my practice did I experience a truly blissful altered state of consciousness. And after that I’d have to build up the momentum again and get to like day 7 of a retreat to experience it again. I think if the “slip into it” folks experienced what I have (bright light blazing in my closed eyes followed by an overwhelming flood of bliss through my body that left tears in my eyes as it subsided), they would no longer consider the states they’re describing now to be jhana. Instead it’s just a sense of relaxation they experience.
But perhaps I’m just being jealous that they can so easily attain this state that takes me so much effort over such a long period to attain. However, a credible Thai Forest monk I sometimes visit has told me that in his 24 years as a monk, maybe a total of one year was spent in jhana. So I think he’s talking about what I’m talking about, and the “slip into it” folks are talking about a nicotine buzz while we’re talking about a full psychedelic experience. Maybe that nicotine buzz also fits a broad definition of jhana. But it doesn’t seem like we’re talking about the same thing.
I would love to be able to just “slip into it.” In fact I was sort of grieving for several months after the first experience because I couldn’t get back to that place. If these people can do it, more power to them.
"We know what happens when you use heroin or wirehead."
There are also people who claim to have been using heroin for decades with no ill-effects, that they can control their use, that they're not addicted, that they've never had the problems that anti-drugs campaigners claim all addicts experience, so the anti-drugs messages are bullshit.
I don't know, are they lying or telling the truth or somewhere in-between? If you're using heroin for twenty to thirty years, I think that counts as addiction, but it might also be true that you managed to avoid fucking up your life beyond salvaging.
It seems possible some few might accomplish this (although it's more common with other drugs). It certainly doesn't seem like the most common outcome, though. And claims that heroin isn't addictive are _obviously_ incorrect (I'm reminded of the journalist who set out to prove this and was dragged into years and years of addiction...).
I think there is an important distinction between "having an experience" and "believing that one had an experience".
Like, say, with auras. I'm fairly certain that some people (especially after using certain substances) do in fact see auras. But I also remember my mother teaching me about all that stuff when I was a kid. In her cult they were told that people could see auras if they tried hard enough. So, naturally, having been assured by an authority figure that it is possible, all with all that social pressure from fellow cult members, they all, of course, claimed to see auras. My mother offered me to try the same thing. So I stared intently around her, trying to interpret the noise as some sort of signal, and then would claim to see the aura. And a part of me did believe that I did, even though the other part knew, that I just did something akin to cold reading, just interpreting her state and naming an associated color (like, if she was calm, I would say that the aura is blue, etc).
Another example is fake no-contact martial arts. We know for a fact these can't work. But students from those dojos do believe that they experience some sort of force throwing them around. And I don't think they lie about it.
Bear in mind that "aura" is also used to describe symptoms associated with epilepsy and migraines. As someone who gets auras preceding migraines, I didn't realise at first that you were talking about a completely different thing that happens to have the same name, so it may be that the same thing happened in reverse.
I was also about to mention ocular migraines. I've had that, and it's scary - what I see is a very brightly glowing, very real-looking zigzag at the edge of my vision. Luckily, my eye doctor explained what it was.
I'm also near-sighted, and my vision is not fully corrected. In the right circumstances, I do sometimes see auras around glowing objects that I'm not seeing so well.
I suspect a lot of those things are more real than the people telling about them make them sound.
There’s a YouTube channel with a former Aikido master who owned up to the fraud and is now grinding through real martial arts. It’s painfully self aware but kudos to him for taking the lumps.
Well, the whole community built up about tulpas is something that lumpens my porridge.
Tulpas are a Tibetan Buddhist religion element of thoughtform creation, based on a complex and deep philosophical working out of various states of consciousness. They got incorporated into Theosophy and disseminated along the usual New Age lines.
And then a bunch of wannabe specials took over the already diluted concept, half-digested it, and started playing with imaginary friends.
Then some of them jumped aboard the victimhood bandwagon and starting going on about how these totally real and not just made-up entities were victimising them or taking over their lives. Not all, but some.
Reading tulpa posts is both sad and aggravating: you have people who are clearly mentally ill and people who are confidence tricksters in a small, mean way.
Tiktok algorithms introduced me to some of those popular DID accounts (for the reasons unknown to me), and the story the people tell there sounds quite a bit different from how you describe it. In your Dart Vader description, a lot of it sounds deliberate, just with different people sliding into DID with a different speed. Almost like anyone can develop DID if they spend enough effort. DIDtiktoks all tell that it’s a consequence of a major childhood trauma, associated with memory loss, and it’s basically something you almost always had, so you never knew yourself without DID. Just curious, cause it really sounds a whole lot different
My current model is that there are two systems. One is about feeling, the other is about interpretation of the results. Both can be wrong. When the first one is wrong, you get real feelings that don't correspond to the body's condition. When the second one is wrong, you believe you have that feeling, but you don't. It's difficult to distinguish, but that doesn't mean they're the same, as with fake blindness.
You can probably look for behavioural clues, such as presumably blind person dodging a fast movement, or presumably happy one having depression symptoms instead of being full of energy.
I had the impression 'spoonie' referred to someone with chronic illness and refers to not having as much energy (thus the spoon metaphor) to perform everyday tasks as people without a chronic illness. It does not refer solely to malingerers.
If people are part of a culture based around believing or experiencing certain things, questions about lying or telling the truth about those things become fuzzier. Do supporters of a political party really believe everything they tell pollsters they believe about their side and the other side? Sometimes, but I think for most people the answer is that it's complicated. People are very good at persuading themselves that things their culture requires them to believe to be true are actually true. They also often baulk at taking the actions that literally believing those things would mean that they should want to take.
I suppose that does make me more sceptical about believing people's self-reported mental states. You should believe spoonies/people with DIDs/people who experience auras in the same way you should believe people who say that Jesus/Mohammed/Buddha talks to them. Assume they they're telling the truth, but also assume that the nature of what they're self-reporting has been influenced by the culture they belong to - or maybe the other way round, and it was created by the culture they belong to, but has then been influenced by their sensory experiences. And assume that no matter how much they tell you that those experiences are real in every way, they may still not act consistently as if that was the case.
The history of assuming that people's self-reported mental states are accurate, and then using that knowledge to create better treatments, ways of living, or social institutions, is not a happy one. The accuracy of the self-reporting turns out to be contingent on certain other things being true, and those things are in turn contingent, and so on ad infinitum.
One of the things that accuracy often turns out to be contingent on is membership of a certain culture. Another is the existence of the 5% or less of the people who claim to have certain experiences who are genuinely lying through their teeth, and whose motive to do so is removed when the experience is separated from its context. Remove the motivation to lie, and the genuine experiences inexplicably dry up as well.
Not that it's not worth exploring these things, and yes, you've noticed the skulls, but I don't think the prior should be to believe people's self-experience. Or rather I think that should only be a part of your prior, and you need the rest of it to avoid wasting a lot of time - or worse.
I can certainly agree that the middle ground is large and worth fighting over. So let me put it this way:
If spoonies didn't get social validation from claiming to be ill, would they report fewer symptoms to others? Report fewer symptoms to themselves?
Some would, on both counts. And some wouldn't. But I confidently predict that a lot of the psychosomatic sufferers would vanish. And - noting that my measure is quantitative - I also predict that even within Scott's 50% of non-psychosomatic sufferers, fewer symptoms are reported. Heck, even in the Weiss article, a spoonie admits that she made herself seem sicker than she was on social media.
If suffering only appears when given social validation, I am very comfortable rounding that off as fake. I'm not necessarily calling anyone a liar. But it doesn't seem very interesting to debate whether they're deliberately trying to fool me, or accidentally fooling themselves. It's fake either way.
Similarly, I don't believe for a second that meditators experience jhana as described. Let's be polite and not call anyone a liar. There is a world of difference between experiencing jhana, and believing that one has experienced jhana (or even believing that one is currently experiencing jhana). In just the same way, Scott is right that people can experience "astral projection," but Contrarian is right that they cannot experience astral projection.
But in addition to all this - how can I put this nicely? Scott's writings are very keen to give people the benefit of the doubt, which is often a good thing. But not always. Ad hominem is a fallacy, but taking claims from known liars at face value is another kind of fallacy, even if it doesn't have a fancy Latin name.
Is it fair to say that what you describe as "fake suffering" means "this suffering is largely solvable, and the solution is nonmedical"? It seems worthwhile to me to have a word for this, but I'm not entirely certain whether I'd choose the word "fake" or something different.
No, I'm saying it's fake, in the ordinary sense of the word.
Some people have weaponised social courtesy to try to make it unacceptable to question their self-serving claims. So I'm pointing out that treating the "fake suffering" as if it were fake makes it go away. And if we can all agree on that, then it's functionally fake, and I don't care if you're still too scared to use the word.
Note: I am not saying that all spooning suffering is fake, or that we should adopt a blanket policy of treating their suffering as fake. We all know a lot of it is fake, but it's not always easy from the outside to tell which is which. Not getting treatment for real illnesses is much worse than claiming stolen valour for fake ones, so we might prefer to err in favour of taking these claims seriously, even if the upshot is unhealthy social media communities.
Thank you, this clarifies things. I think I find it easier to believe that "if we had never treated the suffering as real, it wouldn't have appeared in the first place" than to believe "if we start treating it as fake now, it will go away." But, this is armchair speculation, and I don't know how you'd even begin to test it.
To clarify, when a child says they're afraid of a monster under the bed / in their closet, would you consider that fake? The monster hopefully is, but is the fear? (I honestly don't know to what extent the fear of monsters under the bed is culturally induced; I don't remember being afraid of anything of the kind, but (a) I generally didn't have a hyperactive imagination, (b) I don't remember a ton about myself that age, and (c) I didn't sleep in a separate room until much later than seems to be the typical age for these things.)
Sometimes it's not fake and they are genuinely afraid. And sometimes they are faking it for attention. And sometimes, when they are very young, they get so wrapped up in performing being afraid that they forget it was an act.
This is actually a great example, because it's easy to tell when young children are faking.
It is? The fact that my husband and I are currently in a state of disagreement about whether our preschooler is faking it makes me think that it's not entirely trivial. What diagnostic do you use, and why does it work better on young children than on adults?
In 1994, when I was 14, I convinced my entire middle school - including some of the teachers! - that I thought I'd been abducted by space aliens.
It was great. I went from being near the very bottom of the social hierarchy and a victim of occasional bullying to an extremely minor celebrity cherished for her weirdo entertainment value. People I didn't know in different grades would stop me in the lunchroom, wanting to hear my stories of gruesome experiments. My yearbook is nothing but comments to watch out for the aliens. The story spread so far it followed me to high school, and then even to goddamn *college.*
I never, ever publicly recanted it.
Now, I 100% knew I hadn't really been abducted by aliens. I knew that the origin of the story was someone misunderstanding my semi-sarcastic remark about why I loved The X-Files, my sarcastically doubling down, and then realizing much too late that recanting would make my audience feel foolish and make my life hell.
But as the story spread and people - total strangers! - asked for more and more details, I consumed more and more alien abduction media for material for my stories. I began occasionally having nightmares about being abducted by aliens. I would tell people those nightmares as if they were actual events, and then I let myself wonder...
...what if they weren't really nightmares?
What if the dreams were really real?
They *could* be real...right?
*Some* people did believe in aliens...right?
*Right?*
This was in 1994, before the internet was a thing where people could go to have their biases confirmed. Maybe if this had happened a few years later, I would have gone deep, deep into alien abduction communities for affirmation and potentially given myself enough justification to really embrace my alien abduction tale as being really *real.*
Or maybe that would never have been possible; I might have just been too aware of the reality. It's hard to say.
What I do know is that I had a really goddamned solid conviction that I hadn't actually-for-reaslies been abducted by aliens but I also knew I *could* make myself almost totally believe it, if I wanted to. I think that I-could-believe-it feeling is what made me so convincing that more than one teacher gently asked me if everything was okay at home (and because teenage girls can be psychopaths, I would assure these kind adults that my parents were good people doing everything they could to protect me from the aliens, but the aliens were either freezing time or turning off their consciousness whenever they visited, so there was nothing my parents could do to help).
It's important to note that I only ever disclosed the truth to my parents and the vice principal / head counselor after the latter became so concerned he called me to his office. I thought it might be reaching a point where CPS or doctors might become involved, so I confessed and asked him to keep the secret to avoid the backlash that would come from the truth getting out. And to his credit, he did! But literally no one else knew that at the time. I went straight from confessing the truth to my vice principal to telling everyone who asked that I he'd grilled about my abduction but *of course* denied it so I wouldn't get carted away to Area 51 or a mental hospital.
My point here is that no one looking in from outside would have been able to say for sure if I thought I'd really been abducted by aliens. A very, very small minority correctly assessed that I was consciously engaging in fiction - I had exactly one yearbook signature saying as much - but everyone else seemed to fully believe that *I* believed, and they were all very wrong about my actual state of mind.
Lots of people lie, and most of them will maintain an obvious lie to the point of absurdity because "involuntary conviction" is less offensive to a most audiences than "willful deception." I realize that my experience is a data point of one, but I'm nevertheless inclined to think that most smart, detailed people ostentatiously engaging in outlandish storytelling without ever crossing a line into being "unacceptably dangerous" to their audience range somewhere along the spectrum I experienced: outright lying to hoping that it might be real so they won't be lying about it.
I do think that there are some people who can take the final step away from reality into truly fully *believing* their own bullshit. I don't have a good sense of how common they might be.
Oh sure, of course, but that's a first draft level twist.
If you want to get into festivals, you need to have the abduction remain completely ambiguous all the way through to the credits. Art is about about the lived experience, not what actually happened.
Did you ever go back to that vice-principal as an adult and say thanks? I don't know what state this was, but in California he would've been what's called a "mandated reporter," meaning if he had any reason to suspect child abuse he's legally obliged to send it in to CPS on pain of up to a year in jail (and of course the loss of his career). If it had later turned out your strange story was the result of abuse, by a teacher or in your family, and he had said nothing he would've been crucified.
So he took a certain amount of risk to his entire future life by choosing to believe the random 14yo whom he'll never seen again, instead of phoning up CPS and letting them sort it out. We need all the people with that kind of basic decency, independent judgment, and courage we can get, these days, especially in schools.
I'm thunderstruck. The mandatory reporting angle never occurred to me! Was it a thing yet in Arizona 1994?
Even if it wasn't, you still make a really good point. I just went back and reread a more detailed narrative essay about this experience, which I wrote in 2004. It reminded me that the V.P. and I had a kind of hilariously long staring contest after he began by asking if I knew why I'd been called to his office. And when he broke first and finally posed the direct question, "Do you believe you were abducted by aliens?", I had an equally long moment of temptation/indecision before I judged the risk too great and deflated out of my theatrical persona back into myself.
I looked him straight in the eye and stated the flat truth: "No. I made it up. It started as a joke and then people believed it, so it kept going. My parents told me not to tell people that, because then everyone would feel stupid and hate me. Please don't blow my cover."
I was weirdly - narcissistically? - confident talking to adults even before doing those many, many weeks of performance art, and I have to imagine it was just so. damn. obvious. to him that I was telling the truth, with the attitude of one "peer" to another, given that I was letting him in on it.
He looked dumbfounded for a moment, then grinned and said, "Don't worry. Your secret is safe with me." Direct quote.
I'm sure he didn't think it was a risk to trust me, but I'm going to look him up in my eighth grade yearbook anyway and see if I can thank him for it.
I had a somewhat similar experience when I learned about cold reading and convinced many middle school peers I had psychic powers. I'm not sure whether any of the teachers bought it - some definitely seemed creeped out by me, but that could just be because I was a weird kid.
Hah, good for you! I would also do some bullshitty hypnotism that I lifted from a Christopher Pike novel as a slumber party trick - I'd put someone into a relaxed state and then suggest they open themselves up as conduits for ghosts (!!!) to speak through. Big hit, everyone wanted to be "possessed."
It occurs to me that the story of one person bamboozling their middle school might not be quite enough for a screenplay, but the story of two competing bamboozlers (alien abduction and psychic powers) in the same school might be a dynamite story.
a priori I would have subjectively considered "some people are right about their jhana experiences" to be significantly more plausible than "some people get great pleasure from being tied up and whipped" (after all, being whipped is in some sense "obviously worse" than meditating). If you believe the latter, why wouldn't you at least think the former is plausible?
Does anyone have experience with those reading techniques that supposedly let you read much faster, by switching off your internal monologue? I think the idea is you stop wasting time vocalising the words in your mind.
Lot's of people have recommended it, and reading faster would be pretty useful. But I'm sceptical. An "internal monologue" seems like another one of these subjective things that may or may not be real. And I feel most time spent reading is just processing the logic/reasoning of what's written anyway, can you really gain reading speed without sacrificing comprehension?
I pretty much only do that. I commented elsewhere in the thread that it was jarring to find out that Lars has Tourette’s, simply because it is harder for me to conceptualize a verbal/writing distinction. I read someone’s writing as if they were speaking it.
That said, you can absolutely turn that off and speed read. It is useful for quickly skimming the page and extracting information. But, for me at least, it involves significantly less engagement with the text and can lead to sloppy comprehension when you get tired.
Scott, there is one distinction between the spoonies case and the jhanas/meditation case that I think you should have mentioned. The proposal in meditation is that there are techniques you can use to produce particular internal or mental states. The use of the word “real” here means that if you use those techniques, you will experience these states. It’s undeniable that we can change our mental states by choice or, especially, by practice in certain ways (lucid dreaming is a good example). So when people say “jhanas are real” they mostly mean “you can really achieve these mental states”.
The spoonies situation is different: the claim that “spoonies illnesses are real” is not a claim that “undiagnosed illness is a mental state you can reach through practice”: in fact it’s the diametric opposite of that claim. Instead the spoonie claim is that these illnesses are not “mental states that I have practiced to achieve” it’s that these illnesses are objectively existing independently of the sufferer’s control: that they absolutely have no choice in those states.
Assessing whether people have techniques that really do produce certain mental states if you practice them requires one approach: consider whether mental states can be changed, and test the technique yourself.
Assessing whether spoonie illnesses etc are not a consequence of practiced changes in mental state requires a different approach: denying that mental states can be changed by choice, and accepting such asserted states with no way of testing them (unlike in the jhana case, where you can test the assertion to some degree yourself).
"the name derived from the idea that physically and mentally well people have unlimited “spoons”, or mental/physical resources they use to deal with their day."
Can we back up for a second? People have unlimited mental/physical resources? Since when. If a "neurotypical" person says "I don't have the mental energy to deal with X right now" they are not looked at like they said something ridiculous. That's a perfectly normal thing to say.
Why does having limited energy all of a sudden make you "special"?
This is I think, another way people are being misleading about all this. They aren't intentionally lying to gain sympathy. They are mistakenly interpreting perfectly normal mental states that they and everyone else in the world has, as being uniquely theirs. Imagining that they are more special than they are. I once saw a meme from someone about how when they add numbers like 24 plus 39 in their head they first add 24 to 40 and then subtract one. Unlike "neurotypical" people who apparently don't have internal mental processes at all and just know what 24 plus 39 is? It's very weird. Obviously this doesn't apply to everything and all conditions mentioned in this article. But I have seen this kind of thing a lot.
The spoons metaphor is derived from what started off as a useful explanation of what having a chronic condition regarding physical limitations was like, then naturally got shared around online and metamorphosed into the type of misuse you example about not having enough mental energy.
I think the idea of "unlimited energy" is misleading, but the general idea is that a person without a disability usually doesn't have to think about the energy they need to navigate their day; unless they are sick or hungry or tired or overworked, for a normal day they can go about normal activities without having to plan out expenditure of physical resources.
Someone with a physical disability or chronic illness has to plan things out because there are now limits on their capacity, so they may have to choose between "preparing, cooking, eating and cleaning up after a meal" versus "getting all my work done". So that may lead to skipping meals, or not doing housework, or not going out for social events, or not taking on more work.
You may have to choose between "do I shower today" versus "do I go out and grocery shop", which is not a tradeoff most people even consider, much less have to engage with.
Hmm, I don't have a chronic illness, but I do think that a similar metaphor is useful even for healthy folks, at least applied to self-discipline. Weren't there all those studies about how our daily self-discipline is a limited resource? I definitely feel this in my day-to-day - on days when I use that self-discipline to go grocery shopping and cook a meal (after a long day of work), I usually can't get myself to do anything productive for the rest of the evening.
I had mono back in the '90s and ran a highish fever for a month. I felt that I could do two 'things' a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. A 'thing' was taking a shower, walking a fairly short distance to the shops etc. So I guess I have experienced that. Once the fever lifted I was back to normal, though.
Scott's examples of high functioning people who talk themselves into having benign DID are missing the point of Resident Contrarian's critique (and Freddie's more informed and searing ones). Suppose an employee pisses off a client, says that it's because "Brad" was on-call personality-wise that day, and threatens ADA action when you discipline them. Do we as a society just accept that their internal experience is valid? Do we want society incentivizing them to use mental health resources in support of them dodging responsibility?
I'm somewhat in a quandary here, as while I agree with the general thrust of the piece, I don't think Resident Contrarian is being as obstinate in doubt as they are presented.
(1) I know this patient is hallucinating when he reports having seen Jesus, because obviously since Jesus is dead he can't appear because obviously the dead don't appear to the living
Reasonable, unless someone wants to bring in the historical record of ghosts. And indeed, in the post about the Hexenhammer, was not part of the argument brought by the believers in witches the fact that there was a long tradition of reasonable-seeming people reporting instances of witchcraft, including having seen witches shapeshift and the like?
What differentiates this from RC going:
(2) I know this person is lying/deluded when he claims to be experiencing mystic spiritual states because obviously mystic spiritual states don't have any objective existence because obviously all the deity stuff is nonsense
Ah, but here we run into the qualification that is attached to "believe reasonable-sounding reports" - only so long as it is *plausible*.
" Either we trust trustworthy-sounding people who we like, when they say stuff that sounds kind of plausible - or we apply extreme skepticism about every not-immediately-verifiable claim!"
Claim (1) also rests on the unstated assumption that "the dead appearing to the living" and "all that deity and spirit stuff" is implausible, *despite* the long historic record of reasonable people reporting deity and spirit stuff. So claim (1) can be restated as:
(1) I know this patient is hallucinating when he reports having seen Jesus, because obviously since Jesus is dead he can't appear because obviously the dead don't appear to the living because obviously all the deity and spirit stuff is nonsense, there are no such things as ghosts and Jesus is not (G)/(g)od because gods don't exist
(2) I know this person is lying/deluded when he claims to be experiencing mystic spiritual states because obviously mystic spiritual states don't have any objective existence because obviously all the deity stuff is nonsense
Both claims agree that the "spirit and deity" stuff is nonsense. If Resident Contrarian was doubting the word of "a bunch of my friends who I trust a lot" saying they really had seen a real actual ghost not a word of a lie, would you agree or disagree with them? Would you, Scott, be convinced that ghosts were real if a bunch of your friends reported seeing one, or would you go for "I believe they believe they saw one, and there are some physical situations/psychological set-ups where people can genuinely believe they saw a ghost" but still "ghosts are not real"?
If the claim was not for achieving a jhana state, but for having the presence of Jesus speaking to them, would you believe it or would you be on Resident Contrarian's side of the fence regarding doubt?
Would you then characterise Resident' Contrarian's position of "doubt without derision or disdain" as "RC is doing an old trick: summing up his opponent’s position as an extreme absolute, then summing up his own position as “it’s diverse and complicated and a middle ground”?
See, I believe in Jesus and the deity and spirit stuff. I'm not sure about jhanas, but I don't a priori deny the possibility of spiritual states. But that is because of my underlying presupposition that belief in deity and spirit stuff is not implausible.
I think the plausibility standard is doing a lot of work here that is not examined, and I think "Well a bunch of my friends said this and I believe them" has more to do with "this reported experience fits within the parameters of what I consider plausible" than anything else. If a bunch of your friends said they had seen Jesus appearing to them, would you be Peter or Thomas in your response?
I’m sufficiently Watters-Pilled (Crazy Pilled?) to full believe spoonies and the people getting tics from Tik Tok is fully understandable and they are not “faking” it. A large part of crazy like us goes over how mental illness seems to look for socially recognizable outlets and then picks a popular to one, they act like they have said illness because the Illness approximates their internal discomfort, over time the brain (with the help of social encouragement) finetunes the general mental illness to the specific case and suddenly those “faking” having DID or anorexia really do have it.
C.S Lewis wrote in the screw tape letters, “A man becomes what he pretends to be”
This whole back and forth seems to be just a rediscovering of the ideas of the book; or maybe trying to falsify it? If people were faking things for attentions (which I’m sure some do) why go so far to actually starve to death?
It’s personally hard to me to look out into general internet and not see insane beliefs genuinely head for social, political or personal reasons, and in the Hansionian sense, it doesn’t matter if they know they are insane or not if it helps them fit in.
In a pragmatic way, I’m going to go beyond just discussing ideas for fun and advocate for censoring any social media post that goes over talking about mental illnesses, so people can’t see the status games and it stops greater social contagion effects. But with that recommendation now we’re just back to the end of Scott’s review of crazy like us, no further along to solving the problem than one year ago
Scott, I think I had/have something similar to your weird subtype of OCD. When I was a kid I’d get a strong impulse to touch corners of objects. Frustratingly it’d often be the interior top corners of door frames, which I couldn’t reach. The impulse was always intrusive and distracting.
Scott, I think I experienced something similar to your weird subtype of OCD. When I was young I’d get intrusive thoughts that I needed to touch the corners of certain objects (doorframes especially).
> A statement like “I could tell he was lying” isn’t quite taboo nonsense there, but it carries much less weight than in other places.
Good. People are functionally incapable of telling if other people are lying - they do no better than chance. Please do not believe you are actually capable of telling someone is lying in a manner other than "comparing what they say to actual evidence."
I think there's two relevant concepts that might bridge the gap between Scott and RC's positions.
When my wife and I started dating, she would half-jokingly assume any other reasonable person would take the same positions on issues (trivial or serious) as she did. Young eager psychology student that I was, I explained that people have a variety of experiences and takes on things based on a huge number of factors and that it was unreasonable to expect anything else. My wife acknowledged this while still playfully holding on to the idea that she was the sane woman in a world gone mad. We now jokingly refer to this error as "The Standard of Normalcy"; that is, the concept of "I think this, so everyone else probably does too". We've caught ourselves doing it multiple times, as well as applying it to others.
The other concept is medical student syndrome, which is common in medical internships and anyone who has taken a first-year psychology course. As soon as you're made aware of particular symptoms, you become hyperaware of them for a little while, and you wonder (because you have no diagnostic expertise) whether you have the condition you've just learned about. I think this can explain at least a portion of the Spoonie crowd - "Oh, hey, this person says that part of their ADHD is walking into the kitchen and forgetting why they came there. I do that. ...do I have undiagnosed ADHD?" That kind of phenomenon can explain how the social media presentation of someone's subjective experience can sort of go viral and dig into other people's subjective experience as well, since there's no "gold standard" of human experience to compare to (it's the Standard of Normalcy again!) This works whether 99% of the Spoonie crowd are faking for attention or if 1% of them are. The information spreads either way.
So we're looking at a situation where a subjective experience of a condition spreads via social media or other channels, and as people encounter it they begin to wonder if they, too, have that condition. Hell, the day I read the jhanas article I was in a particularly good mood for no discernible reason and felt like I couldn't lose. I was open to the idea that I had somehow gotten into a jhana, even though I don't meditate at all and have no interest in cultivating the practice - I thought maybe I just was being particularly thoughtful/mindful and lucked into the positive feedback loop on accident. However, despite the what-if, I brushed it off - surely it's not that easy, and people can have enduring good moods without cause.
I don't know that this is a philosophical difference so much as two people doing an epistemic Standard of Normalcy. RC makes the case "I think it's okay to be skeptical of people's claims if they don't line up with your priors" (based on his own experience of encountering lots of things that are worth doubting), and Scott's making the case "It makes sense to, at the very least, believe people's subjective experience of something, even if there's not a real-world correlate", based on his personal experience of meeting people who certainly seemed to have made-up or at least psychosomatic experiences and nonetheless felt real suffering or impact.
That makes sense the distinction between RC and Scott's priors is about each of them applying their own epistemic standard of normalcy. I guess we could ask how they each got to those priors -- we selectively glean things from our experience. Scott lays out an impressive list of influences that way, some personal and some professional. In that sense, it feels to me like he's provided a lot of justification for why he arrived where he did.
The broader question posed to me by their differing starting points is: how much curiosity is a person willing to bring to an unfamiliar situation before they judge it?
And beyond that, how much curiosity do they think is important and valuable to bring to an unfamiliar situation before they judge it?
My bias will show here -- I hear RC saying "I will judge first and don't see particular value in extending open-minded curiosity to unfamiliar situations" and I hear Scott saying "I am going to extend a lot of open-minded curiosity and I think it's socially/morally valuable to do that." I may be uncharitable to RC in that framing because their way is not mine.
I land hard on Scott's end of the spectrum on this (which is not often how I feel about stances he takes). For me it's both a moral stance (curiosity, compassion, patience, non-judging are valuable traits to balance our hard-wired tendency towards fear and defensiveness) and a belief that epistemic closure impedes science, learning, and discovering new things.
I suppose at another level we could say where a person lands on this spectrum of judging/being curious is just a matter of genetics. One of the five traits on the Big Five personality test is openness to experience. I wonder if everyone in this discussion took that test, whether we'd see their responses to the RC/Scott debate to be consistent with the openness to experience trait (though I suppose other traits could be involved as well).
Thanks for the thoughtful response! I think you're identifying the core mechanic determining whether a person is open to new situations or phenomena they otherwise don't have a ready explanation for, or at least a plausible candidate!
I'm not convinced any particular set of circumstances or experiences would necessarily lead to a given set of priors. For example, I could see a person of faith being open to jhanas because they believe in spiritual experiences, closed to them because it isn't explicitly mentioned in their faith, or evaluate it on non-spiritual terms and view it as a way of hotwiring the brain. I imagine there might be a genetic component or some other predisposition, as you mention with the Big Five.
Personally I'm probably closer to Scott than RC on this spectrum, but I think I frame it in terms of being compassionate and considering harm reduction. If a person says they have momentary visions of the future, but they're brief and disconnected and never of anything important, then how do either of us benefit if I challenge them on it? As long as we're both getting along in the world and our beliefs don't have any impact on our actions, the debate is mostly just a theoretical one.
I think when it gets stickier is when you run into situations where there are primary or secondary effects of giving people this kind of credit, or when you act on those beliefs. I hope I'm representing Freddie's argument accurately when he states that giving credence to faked mental disorder (or people with very mild expressions who romanticize it or treat it like a personality trait) is that it contributes to people's beliefs that people with mental illness never do anything difficult or problematic, and that when you do run into someone with a severe case of a mental disorder, they don't get any forgiveness or contextual consideration, because whoever is adjudicating saw someone on TikTok with the same disorder and they didn't do anything like this, so obviously the disorder is not the issue.
I think Scott is coming at it from the other end of the stick - should someone be considered to be faking or lying about an internal perception or belief if there's no extreme knock-on effects of it? Doesn't that minimize their situation and in turn cause them harm? At what point do you draw the line between diagnosable clinical depression and someone with a case of the blues, and how should they be treated differently?
This is something people can have principled and compassionate arguments for on both sides. A more charitable reading of RC's take might be "In a lot of cases, it doesn't hurt to at least take someone at their word in social practice, but I reserve the right to be privately skeptical and not update my priors or worldview just because a person or group claims a given phenomenon is real". Given that the point of RC's blog is mostly arguing the alternative side(s) of other blogs' arguments, I think that's what he's doing here - showing instances where giving credulity to these claims might cause more harm than good.
Thank you for the more charitable reading of RC, that works for me. Also as you say that he's chosen to inhabit the devil's advocate spot, which is a legitimate role in helping people think things through. I said elsewhere that it seemed to me Scott's writing in response to RC was particularly lucid and forthright, which perhaps was enabled by RC taking the position he did. We all stumble towards our own clarity in these kinds of interactions.
My own experience with causality around big social trends is that it's just too hard to say how one thing will affect another. Does a bunch of people talking on TikTok about mental illness of whatever kind, whether genuinely or in a crass profit-seeking way, undermine support for people with mental illness or increase it? Does it undermine it in some areas and increase it in others? Does it help a bunch of TikTok followers in invisible ways we can't measure? Does it hurt a bunch of others by spreading social contagion mental illness? I think we are often too good at perceiving potential threats and reacting to them (Twain's line about I've had a lot of worries in my life most of which never happened).
On the other side, after claiming all my non-judgmental openness to experience, I will say I by and large think all social media is a terrible toxic pit of garbage and I blame it for all kinds of ills, including our dopamine addiction, our short attention spans, our impatient, uncharitable ways of communicating, our desperate, embarrassing narcissism, our sense of alienation, and on and on. My curiosity ran out on social media a while ago and has turned into epistemic closure and judgmental-ness. I'd like us all to return to our villages and build some barns together.
This was a great back and forth. I don't have much to add - but since I can't click "like" I wanted to say thanks.
I was going to write a top-level comment about how RC's epistemics are bad and he should feel bad, and thank Scott for doing the hard work of countering bad epistemics with good. I won't write that now, I think this exchange is better (and kinder) than what I had in mind. Thanks again!
People respond to incentives and not all incentives are monetary. When you have kids you’ll observe first hand the devious and borderline evil strategies little humans employ to garner attention, acceptance, and love. I’ll be interested to hear how you navigate the balance between compassion and accountability when that time comes.
Your position sounds compassionate but it fails to acknowledge the cost of pathological empathy. Two examples that come to mind are false accusations of the sexual and race variety. Another might be long COVID. Validating people’s pain can unintentionally create a perverse incentive structure despite the best of intentions.
I’d be more interested in hearing about how one navigates these types of costs because it’s easy to advocate for kindness without a cost. For example, in RC’s examples, is it possible we’re creating more mental illness via TikTok + believing people’s pain?
As someone with mild ADHD and an active & visual imagination, I've had to manage my ADHD for decades without interventions or drugs. It's also because being GenX, the diagnosis back when I was a kid was not common at all. Self-management was a learned skill because I found I could focus my distractedness on honing different skillsets and interests. Being autodidactic to a degree helped in this regard as well. My uncle recognized this as being a "Jack of all trades" which he saw as a good thing and encouraged my varied interests in ways my parents did not recognize. But it also meant that I never readily excelled at any one thing. The inability to focus on one interest kept me from totally mastering that skill set. and it wasn't until I changed my undergrad major to Architecture did I manage to corral variant interests into a singular way of thinking and visualizing.
I can have some level of empathy and understanding for some of these people because I've met and worked with many over the decades. But I've also discovered that those with actual issues tend to not broadcast their mental issues. No one I know walks around doing selfie videos talking about their ADHD. The people I know with severe autism are not actively running social media accounts about how they cope with their autism for their 30K followers. The people I know with depression and addiction issues (including family members) don't broadcast that stuff like it's a badge of honor.
I think the idea that these tiktok /instagram folks are actively doing this as some sort of badge of honor or as they put it "destigmatizing" their "illness" aren't really suffering from debilitating mental health issues but just suffering mild anxiety and stress, and I'm sure psychosomatic impacts. I suspect the more popular "DIDs of TikTok" are doing it for the attention. I think we have to be vary wary about the impacts of social media's ability to allow people to magnify what may otherwise not be anything into something bigger.
'This sounds like: “I, RC, have the mysterious mental ability to detect liars. I admit I can’t prove this, but come on, you should probably just trust me because it’s perfectly reasonable to think other people have mysterious mental abilities you don’t.'
This whole thing strikes me as pretty wrong on its face. I haven't read his piece, only these excerpts, so my take exists in that vacuum. Here:
This: "[...] with that comes a group-wide expectation that things that can’t be quantified with math are thus default-unknowable." is cited as the impetus behind this:
"[...] something that seems unlikely to most but is unfalsifiable, and because of that unfalsifiability is then assumed to be true because it was claimed at all."
Whether or not it's accurate to state it's the impetus, the real claim being made is that you are accepting statements that he finds dubious at least in part due to the ultimate unfalsifiability of those statements with the technology that we have at hand.
This is why, per your excerpting, he states that your starting point for these matters is that "we would basically assume that any claim we couldn’t disprove was true, provided we could find at least a few thousand people who claimed it."
Zero of that has to do with spinning a Kreskin hat around on one's head and divine truth from falsehood. Something of a serious charge, I'll add, in communities that care a lot about what truth is.
I think the proportion of kids on TikTok faking conditions for views, sympathy, and clout may be significantly higher than the general population, but I otherwise fully agree with this article. I'm a "spoonie" myself--I have an official diagnosis of idiopathic hypersomnia now, but my whole young adulthood was characterized by chronic sleepiness and pain no doctor could diagnose, so I kept bouncing between specialists and psychologists. I don't even have a "real" diagnosis now (I mean... "Idiopathic" is right in the name), but at least I have confirmation that my sleep latency is abnormal and scientists recognize my sleepiness as real qualia. I only work 20 hours per week and have found a decent quality of life by living within my limited time/energy means, which is what spoon theory is about.
I also have had tinnitus and visual snow since I was very young. I can see auras around people if I stare at them without blinking long enough and they're standing under bright enough light. When I got bored in church I used to unfocus my eyes and watch the aura wiggle around and follow the preacher.
I should thank you for deleting my comment in this thread. I am pretty sure I would feel regret right now if I were looking at it on my phone feeling like my pants had just fallen down while I was giving a commencement speech at Harvard. Clearly your post struck a nerve with me and I want to thank you again for it.
Since this post stemmed from the discussion of the jhanas, it may be relevant to the discussion of DID that, predictably, the Buddhists got there first too. Certain traditions of Tibetan Buddhism prominently feature the practice of "yidam meditation" where the practitioner chooses one of a certain category of enlightened deities ("yidams") and strongly visualizes themselves as *being* this deity, including possessing all of the deity's wisdom, enlightenment, virtue, etc. As far as I know the yidam doesn't follow the practitioner "off the cushion" in the same way that Scott's hypothetical DID case carries Darth Vader around all the time, but the qualities that the practitioner inherits from their yidam are supposed to become permanent over time. (You've got to admire the lateral thinking; reaching enlightenment is hard, so instead of becoming enlightened, why not simply become a different being *who is already enlightened*?)
Sometimes, instead of visualizing being the deity, the practicioner visualizes the deity sitting before them and e.g. bestowing blessings upon them- so this may also be where tulpa stuff comes from, although I've yet to encounter "tulpas" as such in any material from actual Buddhists.
(Important disclaimer - I am, emphatically, not an expert in Buddhism and am quite possibly misrepresenting all of the above in important ways. This is not soteriological advice; please ask your guru if yidams are right for you.)
Is Resident Contrarian really skeptical of jhana, in general, or is he skeptical specifically of the Twitter thread that makes the specific claim that jhana is "10-100x better" than casual sex, and some of the dodgier comments related to that? It may be true that "thousands of people over thousands of years saying they’ve experienced it," and have experienced it, but that thread is still a false description of it. Personally, I find the idea of jhana in general to be extremely plausible--even simple breath meditations can give me, in the right circumstances, a very palpable feeling of tranquility, I'd be surprised if intensive practices didn't provide even more benefit. But thousands of people over thousands of years have not said, specifically, that jhana is a hundred times better than sex, that it eliminates one's desire for casual sex, that it cures drug dependencies, etc. I think it's fallacious to treat the historical records as evidence for this different contemporary claim.
The more serious issue here is that phrase, about rationalist social norms: "People are less able or less willing to point out that someone looks less credible for socially understood reasons than in other less-enlightened-more-practical contexts." To me this is easy to understand. "Socially understood reasons" = all the normal heuristics you use when evaluating a claim in real life. These aren't anything like a "mysterious mental ability to detect liars," they're just normal, informal ideas that you accumulate over a lifetime of experience. Small things in the way people present themselves, present their ideas, certain patterns that you see over and over again.
I don't want to get far into which of these apply to the original thread, because my understanding is that comments shouldn't include anything that looks like a personal attack. I will just say, I have a set of priors around people who make very strong claims about the effects of meditative practices or about their ability to induce states of (sexual or otherwise) euphoria. I'm immediately distrustful of a man who claims that casual sex is just not appealing to him anymore, when it was appealing at a previous time--this is a common thing for men to lie about, and not just in the context of meditative practice, for reasons that I take to be obvious. It's a common thing for men to lie to themselves about. It's also typical for people who work or invest in a particular area to exaggerate how impactful that area is, how great it could be. Not out of a desire to deceive, but spontaneously, from their own enthusiasm.
It's tactless to go into this, obviously far into the realm of ad hominem, and frankly I don't like bringing it up (and am a bit worried that bringing it up will earn me a ban). It's not, "I distrust this, because I can magically detect liars." It's, "I have seen people lie in this particular way over and over again, so it's going to take stronger evidence than self-reporting to make me believe it."
Yeah, I'd consider that's obvious and uncontroversial. My point is that someone who admitted to previously being into casual sex, who suddenly claims it's not enjoyable to them anymore--that specifically is suspect.
In general, in contemporary western culture men are more inclined toward casual sex than women--not always, but enough that it's a frequent, even clichéd, dynamic, for a man to pretend to be looking for something serious when in fact what he wants is just casual sex. If a man claims that casual sex isn't enjoyable for him at all anymore, that's a way of preemptively asserting that what he wants must be serious. That can be helpful to him.
Returning to I think the crucial point here--outside of the very unusual social context which is the Rationalist blogosphere, this isn't a dynamic that needs to be explained. Elsewhere it's seen as pretty obvious, at least as far as I've seen.
The other thing I'm struck by, now reading RC's full post properly, and seeing how centered it is on claims by this one person on Twitter about jhanas, is that Substack is not journalism in some ways that are important for all the conversation among everyone that has followed. (i get that RC and Scott don't claim to be doing journalism, but I think it's worth just looking at for a moment what that means in this instance).
If a journalist were writing a piece on "astounding claims made by a modern day Buddhist on Twitter about jhanas" they would have reached out for comment to a senior meditation teacher in the West, an academic in Buddhist studies from a reputable university, and a researcher who is doing clinical experiments on meditators and their mental states. There are multiple people in each of those three categories, so it would be easy as a journalist to get those three views in short order. An editor would require it.
I am confident that comments from all three of those people -- senior meditation teacher, academic, and clinical researcher -- would have contextualized and moderated the Twitter voice so substantially that none of us would be here days later having conversations about whether those specific and dramatic statements by a person on Twitter represent current Buddhist or scientific thinking about what jhanas are, how they are experienced, what impact they have on practitioners, and how they are understood in the overall context of meditation and Buddhism.
I want to be clear, I'm not calling this person a liar or saying that there aren't other people who would say similar things. Perhaps all their first-person claims are entirely true. But they represent such a tiny thin slice of experience relative to Buddhism, meditation, and jhanas -- not to mention they are small snippets of attention-grabbing sentences on Twitter without the kinds of clarification and nuance that comes with properly interviewing someone. At minimum, that single thin slice of one person's experience really needs to be put into some context, particularly if it's being written about by people without domain-specific knowledge for an audience without domain-specific knowledge.
I really like Substack and many of the voices here, but there are times like this that I wish it weren't quite so easy for people writing about something they know little about to grab one person's dramatic Twitter post and run for miles with it.
I'm glad you wrote this; I was struggling to express a similar idea in a respectful way, which I think you have done very well. I'm still not sure about Jhanas, and obviously I don't know anything about the original Twitter poster, but I admit I have heuristics developed in my personal and professional life which had credibility red flags triggered. In particular, the phrases 'ten ex' and 'better than sex' are poorly correlated with rigor (but it's not a perfect metric!) I actually found some of the comments below, however, much more thoughtful and persuasive, generally *because* they did much of that journalist type work (albeit just quoting, rather than getting a comment on the specific case).
For what it’s worth, perceptual psychologists have figured out surprisingly simple unconscious strategies that people use to catch a ball without computing any of the physics. If you assume you’re in the path of the ball, you can simply run forwards or backwards at whatever speed makes the image of the ball on your retina have constant upward velocity, and you will magically end up in the right place at the right time to catch it. Only small additions need to be made for the general case. Science!
To most people, your claims that these people you know are reliable are pretty suspect. You live in the epicenter of California woo-woo nonsense. I would immediately STOP trusting anyone’s faculties who claimed to have multiple personalities or achieved jhana, for the same reason I wouldn’t put somebody with a broken leg into a relay race. If an old respected lawyer I had trusted for years started talking like that, I wouldn’t give more weight to the claim, instead I’d be inclined to call the bar association for fear of what was about to happen to their clients cases and money.
This is a really weird turn for the blog. I think we all know it’s very hard to be a consistent rationalist and that the allure of cool stuff like Eastern mysticism has corrupted many rationalists of the past. If normie boring materialism isn’t cutting it for you, fine I get that, but every post where you treat this stuff as real is hurting your credibility on other issues.
Other states may not be more rational, but they are in general less credulous, which tends to limit the contagiousness of irrationality. There's a good reason California is the font of more than its share of cults and fads.
>If an old respected lawyer I had trusted for years started talking like that, I wouldn’t give more weight to the claim, instead I’d be inclined to call the bar association for fear of what was about to happen to their clients cases and money.
I'm curious; Would you feel the same way if he spoke about Jesus as his Lord and Saviour?
"This is a really weird turn for the blog. I think we all know it’s very hard to be a consistent rationalist and that the allure of cool stuff like Eastern mysticism has corrupted many rationalists of the past. If normie boring materialism isn’t cutting it for you, fine I get that, but every post where you treat this stuff as real is hurting your credibility on other issues."
I agree wholeheartedly with this, but on reflection I think what's going on here is just another "Categories Were Made for Man"-style sophistic contortion so Scott doesn't have to admit that transgender ideology doesn't make any sense.
Here are some stats to keep in mind to help evaluate claims about unusual states of consciousness and behavior. 1. People who have the diagnosable version of dissociative personality disorder seldom know it until something really weird going on in their life forces them to get a psych evaluation. People who talk about having multiple personalities probably don’t. 2. In anonymous surveys, 25% of women say they had a sexual experience they did not want before the age of 25. For men who grew up in the family of an alcoholic, that rate is more like 40%. But, 75% of these individuals never report these episodes of sexual assault or rape. Of reports of rape and sexual assault which do get reported, 96% of the time, the victim is telling the truth, even if there is not enough evidence to bring the case to trial. 4% of the time the victim is lying. On the other hand, in sexual assault cases, 100% of the time the accuser initially says they didn’t do what they are accused of. People who talk about being sexually assaulted probably were. People who who are accused of sexual assault and deny it probably are lying. 3. In evaluating unusual states of experience, looking at Buddhist practice is interesting because these people who actively choose to pursue attaining these states seldom talk about it, at least the ones I know. Anyone casually chatting in public about attaining this or that level of this or that level of esoteric skill probably hasn’t. That said, some people have
Have my emotional reaction: When I see people getting really angry about possible fakers of illness, I assume they're showing off how tough they are by ignoring other people's pain.
This might be unfair-- as I say, it's my emotional reaction.
Part of this is the history of actual illnesses being discovered which were getting written off, and part of it is (as noted in comments) that people with celiac disease or Ehler-Dahnos have a very hard time getting diagnosed.
Same for endometriosis.
There are a lot of people who have a strong prior that other people's problems aren't real.
Since one of my problems is thinking of jokes, here's a approximate quote from A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Forum: "I can bear any amount of suffering as long as it happens to someone else." (I'd have sworn it was Zero Mostel, but I can't find it.)
One part of my assumption is that I don't get the impression that a lot of the folks on tiktok are seeking professional help. If they're happy with their set of personalities, why would they seek help?
Also, I bet most of the shortage of professional help isn't related to fakers, it's (for the US) arbitrary limits on the number of doctors and a bad insurance regime.
Is there any reason I should assume that RC and FdB are really angry rather than just seeking attention?
I don't know about de Boer, but doesn't Resident Contrarian have a significant history of being poor? If you're poor you meet a lot more screwed-up people with weird belief fetishes, because screwed-up people are overrepresented among the poor, and you meet a lot more fraudsters preying on the gullible, because criminals prefer people who can't afford lawyers. I've been a little poor myself, and I can empathize with that greater level of suspicion. My vague impression of Scott's history is that it's pretty privileged, doesn't include any significant stretch of time being poor. A difference in formative experiences could readily account for a significant difference in a priori assumptions.
Furthermore, when you're poor you can't as easily just tolerate or walk away from such people, because the entire nature of being poor is your options are severely limited. Sometimes you simply must maintain a "friendship" which is toxic and exploitive, because you have no freaking choice, you need what's being offered, even if the emotional/psychological price is ugly and painful and nobody who had the means to reject it would fail to.
So another possibility here is that RC is reacting with some degree of resentment to what he sees as prioritization of a First World Problem[1], which is blissfully unaware of the (arguably much bigger and more pressing) "Third World" problem of people trying to protect themselves from emotional predators and exploitive deception.
Thank you for a thoughtful reply to a provocative comment.
I've had a relatively easy life, and haven't had that level of exposure to fakers.
On the other hand, I do think there's such a thing as framing a situation that's somewhat bad in a way to generate rage.
Are these tictokers who claim without medical evidence that they have various syndromes actually sucking up medical resources for non-existent problems? It seems unlikely
Are they possibly giving added proof to medical practitioners who want to ignore real problems anyway? More plausibly, but this doesn't seem to induce the same level of rage, possibly because it distributes the blame more widely.
That might be the most concise summary of the whole issue: "There are a lot of people who have a strong prior that other people's problems aren't real."
Huh. You figure there are a lot of people who, when they see someone hobbling around on crutches with a leg in a cast, think "Oh I bet that's a fake cast"?
I wouldn't have thought so, but depending on what you mean by "a lot" and extending your example to something a little less visible, a great many people believed Alex Jones about Sandy Hook.
That is a good pun, re: Jaynes’ theory of God, talking to people; 
An important part of his hypothesis is that these voices originated as the internalized voices of an authority figure in the family or tribe that taught them things. Seeing as no one could keep notes the only way to hold onto information was to hold on to the spoken words and I don’t find it difficult to believe that people who relied on nothing but spoken language were very good at holding on to the intonation and voice that went along with those words. It’s not nearly as woo as some people make it out to be. 
Seeing as we are talking about voices in our heads, and, more controversially, God talking to people, and lower case gods talking to people, What is the Rationalist hypothesis on the origin of gods? I mean did they invent use or did we invent them or something else entirely? It seems like a pretty fundamental part of this issue to clarify.
Again I think this subject is too complex to boil down in the way that you or RC have done.
Imagine I'm on a date and my date says "did you want to come up to my apartment for some coffee?" (Imagine also that we're in a 1970s porno I guess). Probably the information being conveyed is not "we would both like a hot beverage."
Here's the thing though. I've met lots of folks - usually straight, religious women - who told every story of getting laid with the assumption that the pretext on which they invited the guy to their apartment was the actual reason they invited the guy up to their apartment. I.e., "I'm not sure how it happened. We made out in my car for a while, I invited him up to play Soul Calibur, and right as I was picking Taki he jumped me."
Now, I'm disinclined to believe they were just blatantly lying about thinking the purpose of the apartment visit was video games. I'm also disinclined to believe their entire brain was running a "let's beat this guy in Soul Caliber" subroutine.
Most likely there were several systems at play:
1) a brain region strategizing to get the dude up to the apartment for intercourse.
2) a brain region strategizing an exit strategy in case the dude was a weirdo.
3) a brain region yelling that only sluts invite a dude to their apartment for sex on the first date.
And the conscious mind, either during the play or in memory, told them a story about really wanting to play video games with the visibly erect man.
Similar self-deception goes into the creation of psychosomatic pain - the pain is real but possibly only because of a brain at war with itself. I've known plenty of folks who tried to kill themselves and were so moved by the outpouring of sympathy they received that they tried again. Obviously you don't take 62 sleeping pills if you're feeling peachy keen, but you might mentally amplify your depression if you think doing so will fulfill a need.
It's wrong, and dangerous, to call those folks liars. But it's also wrong to say they're telling the truth. They're just simply multiple people, each helping to create each other, and each with their own motivations. And a conscious mind attempting to make it all into one coherent story.
I think that you mainly have the right of this. Generally we accept our own descriptions of our own internal states, and it's only polite to extend the same privilege to others too. As a heuristic, I think that will lead you wrong less than an approach which boils down to "everyone else's internal processes are more or less the exact same as mine". I also have no special reason to be skeptical about jhana specifically.
While we're considering the general question though, I do have another difficult case to consider - the peak-end rule. According to various studies, if there is an unpleasant experience that lasts some time, followed by a still unpleasant but less intensely unpleasant experience that lasts some time further, that will be reported as an overall less unpleasant experience than an experience containing just the first part.
Now surely there is a sense in which the people reporting their pain as less in the case where they had the same experience plus extra pain are wrong. It's hard to imagine stopping someone after the first part of the experience and asking them if they want to undergo a bit more pain or not, and having them voluntarily choose to have more (but lesser) pain rather than stop altogether.
Probably the best explanation here is that memory of internal states is different to experience of internal states, and perhaps less reliable, but reported memory of internal states is what we mainly have to go on for these conversations.
Tl;dr: I think your prior for "I have accurate recall of the intensity of a past mental state" should be very very low in normal circumstances, especially if there's a social reward/punishment for holding that state. When discussing altered states and such it should be almost zero.
Hey Scott. I'm sorry to go off-topic, but I wanted to give you a heads-up about something happening in my state that I think you'll be interested in. Governor has appointed a four-person committee to examine all occupational licenses, ostensibly examining barriers, public need, public safety and "philosophical considerations." The reality is that they're looking at, among other things, licensing bachelor's-level social workers as therapists etc. This is something that some of us have seen coming for awhile, though I'm frankly shocked that our state is going to be spearheading this. I anticipate they'll be making arguments about empirically validated treatments and ignoring all of the process-oriented research focused on provider skill (or that no single treatment works for or is appropriate for everyone).
More to come, if you're interested. You have a unique community here who I thought might also find the topic worth discussing. Feedback from professional organizations and relevant licensing boards was just solicited, and won't be accepted after January first.
The "fake DID thing" sounds a lot like what happens with writers and their mental models of the characters they write. For example "I wanted X to happen but the characters wouldn't cooperate" is a common sentiment...
Scott, in all of this I find myself wondering about a different example from Jhana's that sounds quite similar in the relevant aspects (lots of people over thousands of years claim it's true, people [you/I] trust claim it's true, etc.) but I'm positive you would reject it.
The Holy Spirit. Millions of Christians for at least 2,000 years have described it and its effects, and based on your metrics it's at least as plausible as Jhanas. Predicting your reaction, I would expect you to say that these Christians are having a real experience, but not the one they claim they are having. You seem to reject that same conclusion when it comes to Jhanas, but instead you take their word that they are having the experience they say they are.
"...and then some biological switch gets flipped and they are unable to eat whether they want to or not. These people aren’t making it up and their qualia of fullness and revulsion at the thought of eating food are exactly like my qualia when I have eaten eight slices of bread in a row and everyone is staring at me and I suddenly realize I am a disgusting pig."
This does not ring true to me at all. In my experience, anorexics tend to be very very hungry and obsessed with food. It's important to keep in mind that anorexics tend to be deceitful about food and eating, so they may be telling you what they think would make sense to you (as they know that "I can't stand the thought of not looking skeletal," would not).
It's interesting that the discussion section so quickly became more or less about malingering. With obvious offshoots into its siblings factitious and somatoform disorders.
In my first year, one classmate, an older, non-traditional student like me left the program after one semester of psychopathology and diagnosis class. (Basically a line-by-line review of the DSM).
His reasoning for leaving the program was that he was disturbed by how the DSM is revised and edited by committee. It was to his consternation that sometimes politics and personal values of the committee members was part of the process. He believed going into the field that it was a purely statistically derived set of diagnostic criteria for each disorder. That is, he thought that each list of symptoms was meticulously factorially regressed and what hung together was a valid construct.
I won't chime in with an opinion about this, but one can argue based on the process that was in place that this is how homosexuality (which was present as a disorder as recently as DSM 3-TR) was removed. That it was more political pressure than "science" that killed it.
When we came into the parts (every disorder has this) that essentially declares it NOT a disorder if it is socially normative, he concluded that we had unceremoniously replaced words like "sin" with "inappropriate" and that mental health professionals were the new clergy. To use an extreme example--It is the expert witness on the stand in a criminal trial, after all, who tells the jury whether or not the accused was responsible for his actions.
He said he just didn't want to be in that role.
And comes this discussion over lying about symptoms (malingering) where one of the major concerns is over whether people with serious mental illness (generally the heavy hitters like thought disorders and bipolar processes) are being short-shafted by fakers and non-debilitating, even controversial in their existence ones. It's my old nemesis, subjectivity rearing its ugly head again.
One of my favorite psychological tests, the PAI (Morey) actually attempts to take what most people think of as a dichotomous variable (truth vs lying) and stretch it out into a continuous one using a statistical process called discriminant function. On one end of the spectrum is "effortful negative distortion" and the other is "effortful positive distortion." In the middle are things like "non-effortful negative distortion" and "truth." I have found this approach to be more or less right on, because there are all kinds of reasons why people are not giving you a valid protocol, not just antisocial behavior.
This drives my wife crazy, who is a very black-and-white thinker and "hates being lied to." I have never had that sentiment. I generally ask myself "why would the person give me that kind of response?"
At the same time, in my work as a forensic psychologist, I am keenly aware of the implications of the things I write and testify about in court. If I get it wrong, it can be a profound miscarriage of justice. Also, I find it incredibly annoying when I am doing a compensation and pension evaluation for a veteran whose PTSD story is so outlandish that it strains credulity. There are instruments to detect that kind of malingering too, which I use when I get suspicious.
This article made me think of things I had not thought of in a while.
One thing to maybe note is that jhanic states actually are falsifiable. Maybe someone's claim to have experienced it is unfalsifiable, but the existence of these states of mind can be proven or disproven, at least to ones self - not at the scientific level because it's an internal, personal experience, but you can actually experience it if it is real. It doesn't matter if you believe it or not, it will either be extant or not once you get to the level of necessary concentration. If you are truly being neutral about it, then don't believe it or disbelieve it; try for yourself, see what it is people are talking about.
The conversation between RC and Scott could be made clearer if the distinction is made between:
a) believing that someone experienced what they said they experienced
b) believing someone's interpretation of what they experienced
If someone says, "I can see your aura; it looks blue," and they are otherwise a truthful person, you can believe that they are experiencing something that they interpret as a blue aura. That does not mean you have to believe that you radiate light in some wavelength that is mysteriously only accessible to some people.
Also, it felt like RC's argument about the spoonies and DID folk was really an argument that (we should believe) they are lying, not an argument that they are mistaken. Scott already granted that lying exists, and responded with reasons not to think spoonies and DIDs are lying... which is important, but it's also good to recognize that whether the TikTok folk are lying/exaggerating is a different question from whether they are mistaken about having any spoony/DID-like experiences in the first place.
> At the extremes of those extremes, you see things like the jhana thing: where it’s something that seems unlikely to most but is unfalsifiable
I don't get the unfalsifiable claim. Isn't the idea that anyone can experience jhana if they put in the time and effort? How is that different from any scientific experiment? Sure two people can't look at the results, but that's not a requirement for falsification to my knowledge.
Ditto. Got it as a taxi driver, from throwing heavy luggage around. Got so bad I couldn't move one foot in front of the other more than two inches without excruciating pain.
There's a cure they won't give you in America. Don't get the numbing shots in the spine and don't get cortico-steroids localized, either. Go outside the US and get a series of steroid shots in your posterior, in the muscle. 4 or 5 shots in the same number of days. It releases much more slowly. They said it would be good for a year - it's been almost 10 years since I had severe sciatica. Every day from then on, do the stretches to open up your spine and ease the discs back in. That's basically lying flat on your stomach and easing yourself up slowly onto your elbows, then your hands, and arching your back backwards, then slowly letting yourself down again.
The way they treat it in America is insane. Big fat dose of steroids in your ass muscles will fix it.
This is a really difficult topic for me to reason around for a few reasons. I struggle to express them clearly but if I were to sum it up it would be potentially contradictory facts:
1. I have chronic pain conditions and know others who do and see how often the system fails them and how they're treated and I know I don't get anything out of it and would so much prefer to be biking centuries and hiking 14ers again.
2. I believe the evidence says there are personality traits of those who are predisposed to chronic pain and I've absolutely some people get sympathy and pity out of it and engage in a lot of behavior that could really use some CBT.
I run a chronic pain group and I'm nothing but sympathetic and supportive there. But I also think we're sometimes making things worse for ourselves. I see some of them really engaging in behaviors that are attention seeking and making their pain worse. I just don't know how to square this circle other than it's on a case-by-case basis and I probably have no reliable way of knowing myself which type of case I'm looking at.
I don't mean this to sound callous or unsympathetic, but maybe it's a point of view you've never heard.
I'm 42 years old and I have enough physical problems that I could feel like dogshit all day if I wanted to. I have 3 herniated discs in my back and the remnants of a broken kneecap. I wake up totally numb or in pain many times a night. I get this thought a lot: "If I was 14 years old and woke up in my current body, I'd fucking scream." But honestly, most of the time I'm just fine. Drinking and smoking weed helps, but mainly it's that I've adjusted to reality. My pain tolerance has gone up a lot... whereas I see the pain tolerance of everyone around me going down.
One thing I attribute that to is my total refusal to take painkilling drugs, opiates, etc. Anything other than naproxin (Aleve). What would have once have been hell to me is just a minor issue, and I feel like this is the way humans were designed / evolved to get older. A subset of people around me can't handle any pain and medicate themselves but I wonder whether they even deal with a fraction of what I do before resorting to a pill.
Please don't misread this as an argument for being a tough guy / ignoring pain / saying it isn't real or anything like that. I know it's real. I'm saying I think there's a benefit in teaching yourself to adjust to it so it becomes background noise, instead of relying on drugs.
Then again, it's definitely true that I'm not living the most comfortable life I could be living, so maybe I'm just a sucker for pain; my girlfriend is an ex-dominatrix massage therapist, and I won't even let her give me massages most of the time.
There's something about sitting in a group with the same affliction I'd just never do. Unless the affliction was sex addiction, maybe.
No offense taken. I'll address a few of your points.
First of all, I don't really take much by way of medication. Mostly because there is nothing that's shown to work on my condition. I don't do opioids and I also find that when I take an NSAID I get a rebound effect. So it's not something I take daily or anything.
I didn't mention this initially so there's no way you could have known this, but the condition that I and my friends have is rather intense. It's called complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) and by one study out of McGill university the chronic sufferers of it experience persistent pain worse than having a finger amputated without anesthesia or giving childbirth without anesthesia. I think that level of pain transcends merely avoiding ibuprofen.
To bring it back to rationality, Andrés Gomez Emilsson has given a presentation on ending extreme states of suffering as a potential EA cause area. CRPS was one of the conditions that got a mention (along with things like cluster headaches and trigeminal neuralgia).
Having said that, I should have mentioned that our group does a really good job of making our meetings focused on effective treatments, new ideas, tactics, etc. We keep it positive. It's not a big group bitch session or anything. There is so little information out there for this rare condition that it's useful to have a group summarize the latest topics. I do the facebook and online portion, but the in-person group is run by a member of the board for the charitable and research organization, so it's quality information. We often have guest speakers. I've seen these things done poorly and actually make the situation worse, but this group isn't like that. I'm fortunate where I live to be a part of a good group.
I will say, however, as alluded to in my initial comment, that there is likely something to the mind/body connection. I've looked into this more than I should talk about at the risk of boring people. Scott himself has reviewed some of this work by Howard Schubiner previously (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/26/book-review-unlearn-your-pain/). But more recently there's the book _The Way Out_, tons of podcasts, the Curable app, etc. And I think there's something to the idea behind not making our rumination amplify the pain. Engaging in CBT or ACT type therapy can help. Somatic tracking has proven to be a useful tool. There was a recent study investigating the tactics used in _The Way Out_ (Pain Reprocessing Therapy) on chronic back pain and it had impressive results. So I think the pain is 100% real but pain is mediated by the brain and there _may_ be things we can do to change our perception of pain.
To be honest, I suppose if it were something like that, I would desperately want to find a group, too. And it sounds as if your group is focused on solutions. Just to take another swing at the mind/body connection, it brings to mind people I've known in the BDSM community who have their switches flipped in such a way that they truly experience pleasure out of what most of us would consider excruciating pain. I am not one of those people, and it seems to me like something you probably can't just learn to wire yourself into. I guess a question is, to take Scott's analogy of hexadecimal codes, if a guy experiences bliss having his back torn up by golf cleats, or having nails driven through his palms, is he experiencing a different code for that sensation than someone else having the same physical experience? Or is he experiencing the same code and interpreting it in a different way? And how much of this is hardware and how much software? I realize this is an extreme example and a gross oversimplification, but it seems to leave open the possibility of some future form of pain management that rewires the brain to re-interpret specific pain signals without resorting to blocking pain receptors or activating opioid receptors.
I appreciate your thoughtful take, and thank you for sharing the details of your affliction; clearly it seems like something incredibly difficult to cope with.
It is interesting that I found your review of "Unlearn Your Pain" today because I am, myself, recently experiencing a severe relapse of a chronic pain condition which had gone away for several years and came back with a vengeance about 2 months ago. As in, I find myself experiencing hip pain (which I would have declared sciatic nerve induced, due to a bulged L5-S1 disc) sufficient that I cannot stand or walk around for more than about 3 to 10 minutes at a time. Imagine someone driving a railroad spike into your hip socket. That's about the best descriptor I can come up with.
If you like that type of approach check out the Curable app, the book The Way Out by Alan Gordon, and some of the many podcasts such as Like Mind, Like Body.
So RC cites a TikTok video, 'how to lie to your doctor'. The videographer says if you only don't faint because of the weird stuff you do, then tell the doctor you faint. Scott says that's good advice, and offers similar examples.
Yeah but. There is a whole range, from people who compulsively do tiger repellent activity (like the old joke: "Sure it works, do you see any tigers?") then claim there ARE tigers, to people who are actually preventing something. If they all lie, some will do wrong. If they all tell the truth, with suitable explanation, it will work out fine.
(1) I have serious OCD involving touching things & feeling like the universe or the future will become unbalanced if I don't touch them in a certain order a certain number of times. My partners notice and giggle. I try to prevent it from getting in the way of leaving a restaurant or having sex or letting her sleep while I'm fiddling with re-folding my clothes. I don't mind letting them see a little of my inner insanity; as long as it doesn't keep them up at night it's hopefully mildly endearing.
(2) I also learned that my sex drive is much lower than the Platonic Man's. I only found that out after I had 4 or 5 cortisone shots in two days for a broken back in my late 30s and suddenly found myself laying an 18 year old Danish supermodel on a beach in Spain two days after I hadn't been able to get out of bed. Turns out that not jerking off for a couple months has the same effect as that much steroid; it brings me up to the baseline libido of a normal man. Suddenly you actually try a little and it turns out everyone wants to have sex all the time.
And I have (3) a high level of synaesthesia between music, color and visual altitude (the y-axis in space); they work all three ways. As well as (4) a pretty fantastic if imperfect ability to see objects, faces and places in my "mind's eye".
This is all an introduction to my counterpoint to Scott's article but I want to say - I've been drawn repeatedly to Scott's writing, even when I didn't realize it was he who had written something (e.g. the wine article in Asterisk, which I forwarded to my wine industry girlfriend last week without noticing his name in the by-line, just because it was so well written).
Also: I'm a non-practicing Ashkenazi Jew and a Cohen (which I'm guessing Mr. Aaronson is too, sons of Aaron we be) so I chalked up my appreciation of his pedantic verbosity and logic to some Ur-genetic brotherhood. But until now, I didn't really realize how deeply the similarities ran.
So having listed the above cross-wirings of my brain, in spite of all that, I DO deeply doubt the Spoonies' reported internal experiences. I accept that an induced experience (one created by culture or insanity or random firings of the thalamus or whatever) can be just as real to the subject as an experience with objective external referents -- but should it be as important to the REST of us? Whether it's meaningful to the subject is a Platonic question. But our roundly anti-Helenistic ancestors (Scott's, mine, King David's, et al), when they said "DON'T DO THIS" about manifesting deities as personalities, or listening to split personality voices in your head, could quite as easily have been saying "don't touch that golden idol / light switch / dish soap 5 times", as in modern "OCD", or for that matter "don't worship your own sickness".
In other words, we may agree that these brain-meat experiences exist and are "real" if we take the same broadly subjective definition of reality, what makes you want to reject the benefits of multiple personalities as roughly idolatry is just as applicable to the idolatry of objects in OCD or those of the vicissitudes of fate as in phantom illnesses and diagnosis-seeking behavior. They are actually three faces of the same false idol.
I realized one night as I was zipping and unzipping my suitcase, touching it a bunch of times, that I had created an actual one-man cargo cult. I even wrote a short story about it, tying it to a golden calf and a set of false identities created by the protagonist, because those things made sense as the same flaw in thinking to me.
I posit that: When we (me, Freddie de Boer, et al) initially evaluate claims of internal states with a large dose of skepticism, we may be acting in self-defense, and not in a trivial or political sense but in the sense of actually defending ourselves from a cultural virus. You are what you eat; you are what your brain consumes. A psychoanalyst has the dirty job of attempting to believe and of opening the subjective box of an individual's internal world. It requires empathy and skill and a lot of self-control. But the subject's internal issues could well be poison if they were spread as superstition among the general population, which is why social media is such a disastrous tool for psychopaths. So while recognizing and ennobling the human experience of crazy people is an analyst's toolset, and a humane and worthy use of one's time, it may be the most important feature of someone else's time to reject the same subjective observations to prevent them from becoming normalized in society -- if only to protect themselves (and I'm thinking of Freddie here) from being dragged into the type of thinking that caused them to self-victimize in the first place. In other words, your highest goal may be to free that which someone else's highest goal is to put back into a box as quickly as possible, for the sake of their own sanity.
As far as my own OCD and synaesthesia; I figured out that my OCD came from being freaked out by parents telling me about invisible bugs into washing my hands constantly as a child until they realized they'd fucked me up. My synaesthesia came from a piano teacher when I was 4 years old who had a wonderful method of teaching me colored notes with crayons on a piece of graph paper. The latter was a gift and the former a curse, but both are brain viruses, memes made manifest in neuron, in heavy daily use and carried out in flesh like any beating you take as a child. A way of thinking of thought (one mind? two? ego and super-ego?), as you say, can easily turn into a regimental prescription for daily action (father, son, holy ghost) and unless you're in control of the regiment or the prescription or the philosophy itself, and aware of all its potential outcroppings, you're just prey for whoever came up with it and can tell you what it all means. All those external power structures should be avoided.
And so should becoming a member of an online group like "spoonies", whose gestalt is to presume you have undiagnosed illness and proceed from whatever your vaguest symptoms are toward the idea that the medical community is aligned against you. Giving the wrong name to a physical or mental affliction, or diagnosing yourself incorrectly, is more dangerous than having no diagnosis at all.
Skepticism, therefore, especially of group-recognized afflictions, is the only vaccine against mass hysteria. Just like the 10 Commandments are a vaccine against DID and OCD.
--
Just like to add that I've only done 1 year of therapy in my life, years ago in Argentina, "existential therapy" that got rid of my post-alcoholic guilt fairly well. I'd love to be analyzed by Mr. Aaronson, though, because it would be fascinating to hear what someone with my own neuroses would say if able to look at them externally; assuming the man loves himself enough to forgive their occasional stupid/ugliness.
absolutely. The transference is strong with this one.
If I don't assume they are at least mostly like me, I rapidly lose any ability to know how to treat them kindly/ethically/etc. (Of course sometimes they will just tell me how they want to be treated, but that's fairly rare among the set of all direct and indirect interactions I have with other people)
How often do you tell them that you'd prefer to be told?
Losing that attitude is basically a pre-requisite of getting involved in the BDSM community.
Your charming fake DID patients are sucking up time, resources, and attention from an already overburdened mental health system while chronic schizophrenics are pushed back out to live on the streets because there's no beds left, so sorry, try not to step in front of a subway train because you're running away from your paranoid delusions. No sympathy. None.
Well, to be fair to Freddie, it is aggravating to have a real problem but not be taken seriously by medical providers because so many people fake the problem all the time.
Myself, having had surgery and been given the baby Tylenol of pain killers with the promise of "if it hurts tomorrow call up and we will prescribe real pain meds" because some people went stupid claiming pain to get drugs, well that day and a bit being in lots of pain for no good reason makes me appreciate where Freddie is coming from.
Granted, he is not exactly being diplomatic about his point, but I can kind of get where he is coming from, I think anyway. (Of course, if other people's behavior didn't limit whether or not I could get prescribed things properly, and/or I didn't have to pay for their stuff, then I would 100% agree that letting them claim whatever issues they want and pay for the treatment is fine with me. Taking the rather poor system we have as a given, however, I would much rather discourage people from making things up for attention if possible.)
The thing that is most liable to have someone think at a glance that you're faking ADHD for adderall would be the presence of people who are clearly faking ADHD for adderall.
I am surprised to see someone in the rationalist community with a "less information is better" mindset.
When you're dealing with medical providers with extremely limited resources, especially time, less information often is better. Feeding providers red herrings and reasons to dismiss you (and they *need* reasons to dismiss *someone*, considering scarce resources) is a great way to avoid getting your real problem addressed.
Yes, it sucks to be deciding, as the patient, what is and isn't a red herring, when that's supposed to be providers' job, and you might screw yourself over that way, too. But busy providers just don't have time for All The Information.
True, but at the same time, lots of people faking ADHD to get Adderall also make a lot of people assume you might be a faker. The message might spread the expectation, or the underlying reality. Claiming that everyone claiming to have ADHD are not just trying to get drugs when in fact many are doing exactly that is not good either. Litany and Gendlin and all.
I don't think people are spreading the message "lots of people with ADHD are fakers" so much as the subtly different "a significant number of people are faking ADHD to get medications", which is perfectly in line with experiences I had as an EMT and my ex-wife had as a trauma pharmacist at the local ER where people would absolutely come in with all sorts of reasons they totally needed some oxycodone, man. But as Scott mentions above, see also the 1% phenomenon of incidence concentration points.
I also have ADHD, so it's in my best interest to not have people think I'm faking when I'm trying to get my meds, so I find the fakers annoying.
I agree that it was oddly rude of your friend to wonder if you were lying if you told them you had ADHD. I don't think I'd be inclined to talk about it as a thing if I *was* faking it to get stims, unless I was explicitly telling someone else how to do that, because it's a terrible idea to casually discuss illegal things. But maybe I'm overthinking that.
I think Freddie has seen a lot of people with "minor" conditions getting huge amount of sympathy, which unintentionally results in people with more serious conditions getting overlooked.
See for example how people who put "autistic" in their Twitter bios are given special treatment, while people who are in institutions due to severe autism are ignored in most discourse about autism and denied a cure for their extremely horrible condition.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/12/against-against-autism-cures/
As Scott mentions in this article with regards to anorexia, "legitimizing" a mental condition can also have the effect of making people consciously or unconsciously play up minor tics as being a symptom of that condition, until they actually do have that condition. Mental contagions are real things, and the people experiencing them are reporting their real experiences, but talking about how those people aren't faking may well have the effect of leading more people to have those conditions who wouldn't otherwise have had them.
So I think Freddie is upset at Scott for doing something that Freddie sees as potentially turning non-mentally-ill people into slightly-mentally-ill people and taking resources away from existing mentally ill people.
They're certainly not doing it intentionally. It's just not the focus of the debate around autism. The idea that trying to find a cure is bad has latched on in the zeitgeist; autism is a part of their identity, and one they like given how much social status is confers onto them, so any suggestion that maybe having a cure would be a good thing is "eugenics" and "genocide".
There's also very little support for "high functioning" autistic people who don't "fit in". I've had people who claim to be in support of autism rights ridicule me for traits clearly associated with my autism, just because I don't fit in with their preferred idea of what an autistic person is. I also had one person claim that I "weaponize my autism" despite barely ever even mentioning it; the simple fact that a person with autism exists who disagrees with them is seen as an attack.
I don't feel like autism gives me social status. I'm 99.9% sure an alternate version of me who was not autistic would have higher social status.
But said alternate version would not, in fact, be me. He would have a completely-different relationship with his mother, he wouldn't have been chucked out of SJ, and he wouldn't have been kicked out of uni this year. Those weren't just because I lack abilities, they're because of characteristically-autistic *personality* traits, most particularly my extreme honesty, and the choices I made because of those personality traits ("It is the choices we make, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"). So, well, yes, it's part of my identity. They don't call it a "pervasive developmental disorder" for nothing.
I don't want to die so someone else can live a less miserable (and in many ways less virtuous) life in my place, and I don't want people like me to become extinct. I can grant that the latter's based on the generative instinct and we've been delegitimising that for a while now, but is the former really that terrible a thing to ask?
Many of them are openly advocating against researching treatment / cures for autism on the grounds that this is “ableist”. There was apparently a stink at a recent autism conference directing a bunch of hate at a presenter for showing videos of a nonverbal autistic individual who was compelled to engage in self harming behaviors, as part of an effort to recognize the condition of “profound autism”. “Profound autism” has been labeled an ableist concept.
Yes, at least some of these people are harming other autistic people by pushing the notion that the only “real” autism is the quirky neurodivergent TikTok kind, and this is actively drawing research dollars and other resources away from profound autism.
I think it works exactly the opposite way.
If I am autistic and can get not just a job but an uber-job at Google paying $200K, then why are you (also autistic!) such a fscked-mess that you can't even take care of basic personal hygiene?
There's a baseline problem that the same word cover such a large swathe of territory; but the much larger problem (IMHO) is the people who want the "I'm special, not like the rest of you peasants" points that are easily scooped up by publicizing that you, every day, "struggle with autism".
Hell, if you're a cis-hetero-white-male, what better way to trump the inevitable dismissal you will face in every politically charged situation...
No joke, I'm low-key glad I have at least one victim card in my pocket to play if I ever need it.
I don't *want* to, and generally don't get into situations where people flat-out dismiss me for characteristics I have zero control over, but it's nice to have in case I somehow get stuck in of these dumb arguments
Unfortunately, Freddie just really likes righteous indignation and firing from the hip. That is his whole schtick for getting people engaged with his writing.
I definitely think he is genuine, and I definitely think he cares. But he consistently disappoints me by trying to score points instead of engaging in constructive conversation.
I'd like to read Freddie doing righteous indignation at the bureaucrats who put people with real problems out on the street to get hurt and hurt average people so they can tell average people to shut up and give said bureaucrats more clout and money. It's a King of the Beggars scam with faceless admins instead of a charismatic Fagin. I'd like to read Freddie on how socialists should fight this.
+1
People suffering from debilitating autistic conditions aren't being denied cures though, in any cases, because no such cure is known anyway. At this point, autism cures and all discussion thereof are purely hypothetical.
I think Freddie is reacting to the glamorisation of mental illness, and I think he has a point.
Mental illness is not cool or attractive or romantic, and it's not something that you can perform for a TikTok. It's messy and confusing and fucks up your life and the lives of those around you. This TikTok and other presentations are the same thing as the romantic literary description of consumption, in distinction to the reality of the disease.
And just as I'm willing to bet that there were young women who dressed and acted the part of the romantic literary consumptives, so that every cough and cold was treated as a harbinger of the white death, so the modern young women acting out fad mental problems (are any of them showing dirty living conditions and appearing dishevelled and smelly and pimply-faced?) for the same attention and regard of an audience.
I don't think Deiseach (or Freddie, or anyone else) was ever implying that TikTokers ever go around *saying* that mental illness is cool and attractive and romantic, but that they're perpetuating and capitalizing on a culture in which a certain type of performed mental illness is treated as cool and attractive and romantic (and perhaps to some extent are aware that this is what they're doing).
It's not really gate-keeping. Freddie's beef is w/ the TikTok / Instagram people posting well curated and edited videos about their "debilitating" ADHD but somehow manage to do all the things that someone with debilitating ADHD would have trouble completing. I think he also feels frustrated by the fact that the mental health complex makes it incredibly hard and expensive for people who have actual debilitating mental health issues to get the necessary help they need. Meanwhile, some ADHD influencer is getting her micro-dosed Adderall dialed in because she's sooooo distracted by her complicated on-line life and just can't manage to get all of her dry-cleaning done.
There is apparently some doubt that "the system" could properly treat severe cases of autism however well funded it was. But it *could* do a better job.
FWIW, I evaluate myself as extremely high functioning ADHD. But I was out of college before the term became common, and have neither been diagnosed, not desired such a diagnosis. So I my opinion the really high functioning cased don't need treatment. (Sometimes we need help, but who doesn't.)
Freddie's long-standing position is that he thinks (rightly or wrongly) that a lot of the social media aggrandizement of every minor human tic as proof positive that one suffers from *something* can, and possibly does, overload a precariously overloaded mental healthcare system. Honestly, if someone with self-diagnosed ADHD gets themselves some Adderall and feels better. Great. I have no issue with that. I do think that some level of triage needs to happen whereby the more seriously mentally ill are afforded better care than the highly functional person who just keeps pestering physicians until they get the meds they want.
>What is your evidence that ADHD influencers are causing this problem? I would primarily blame the mental health complex, not Instagram.
The problem in this specific case is that people faking/exaggerating ADHD to get amphetamine is the reason the obstacles to getting amphetamine for ADHD are there. That is *not* costless for the severely-ill people, especially since *being severely-ill makes you worse at navigating bureaucracy*.
Having a internet creates a pressing need to up one’s listening skills. I am trying to be funny but I am serious. I don’t think some of the issues being discussed here are new. (Anything related to onset of apparent madness, fake or not. I think they’ve been around forever. The only thing that’s changed is it can now spread across continents and not just a village. This is not going away. We have to suck it up. It’s a significant change of environment and will be interesting to see if we can adapt to it.
Sorry to hear you were brought down. I likewise deeply appreciate Scott’s post & I am confident many community members still have humanism as a core axiom for their inferences and interactions (this is based on the positive impact rationalist organizations have already had and are continually aiming for!) Taking individuals’ experiences as meaningful and important is a huge part of that. :)
Scott said literally nowhere that these DID friends of his were being treated by the mental health system, much less were being treated for DID reasons.
Which makes them tourists.
tourists? They're not "sucking up time, resources, and attention from an already overburdened mental health system" like you said, so they're not tourists in the mental health system. Is tourists even a negative metaphor here? Are they giving money to the mental health system, like tourists give money to a local economy?
If you think that the legions of people who have caught mental disorders from Tik Tok aren't filtering out into the no-bullshit in-real-life mental health system... you're just wrong. The system has already been stretched to the breaking point, and now we get the armies of psychosomatic patients whose conditions are all Instagram-ready, straining it even more. You'll forgive me if I'm sensitive to that reality.
There is no line, that's the point, you state probabilities of claims and cite how you got there
i think we may be using the wrong terminology. I was talking about the 3 individuals with DID, who say their condition "it’s fine, they live with it, it’s no big problem". You might be talking about the Spoonies, which all the examples Scott mentioned were from TikTok, discuss getting specialized medical treatment (and lying to do so) and have numbers in the thousands. I can understand anger over the latter, if you believe they're faking it.
Well, this is not a subject on which I'm able to muster much objectivity.
I think it might be worse if TikTok didn't channeled their psychosomatic symptoms in a specific ways. Just think about it, if people decided that it is cool to have a mental disorder but they had no TikTok to explain them how to do it properly, then they might get creative and invent a lot of different symptoms and conditions.
I think I understand your argument/strategy; you want to stop people on TikTok from having such enormous social and monetary incentives in order to slow the phenomenon of social media contagion itself. Because the social-media-contagion version of these disorders are very often making it more difficult for people who had the pre-existing disorders to get adequate treatment.
I empathize with that. I just think you’re fooling yourself that this “well just villainize them” move will do anything beyond making it more difficult for everyone to get treatment. I don’t think the solution of “shame these new (likely lesser) sufferers out of it” will work, because then the people who had that pre-existing disorder now get included in said shaming from the broader public (I don’t believe that this is your intent, but it is the outcome I’ve regularly observed). That just adds more problems for people with the pre-existing condition on top of the increased skepticism from the medical system (which I think you’re largely correct to attribute to the social media crowd).
But also, I subscribe to Scott’s general point that a lot (maybe even most) of these people are experiencing something real and painful. The social contagion examples of anorexia or cutting should indicate that it’s entirely possible for real, painful symptoms to develop for mental disorders that were received largely through social systems. So I’d also like these new people to get treatment, regardless of where they developed their problems or what new name you’d prefer they call their disorder.
In other words, I don’t have a solution to the social media contagion problem, but I think your idea of shaming these people is uniquely terrible and likely to make the problem worse, at the very least in the short-term. Perhaps it would have long-term benefits if you can somehow lessen the financial and social incentives enough to actually make a dent, but you’ll have to recruit a heckuva lot more people to the cause to be effective at anything other than making a whole lot more people’s lives miserable right now. I guess I wish you either massive, immediate luck on that or no luck at all ever.
Beyond that, I think Morally blaming people for having consumed a toxic thing on TikTok is pretty strange, given how many people get sick from consuming fast food, smoking cigarettes, reading horrible blogs online, sitting on their phone/computer all day, etc. Some of those things have warnings built-in because we’ve learned the dangers over time. TikTok does not have warnings for people, especially for young people. So I’m skeptical of the level of vitriol that you’re throwing around here about “consuming resources”, as if those resources aren’t there for precisely these people (and the pre-existing people too, obviously).
It almost reads like a “no true Scotsman” argument, except more along the lines of claiming that “only biological mental disorder origins are acceptable.” Except plenty of truly unwell people got their disorders from some social or environmental system/state prompting their biology to do weird things. Even your earlier example of schizophrenics might not hold up to that kind of scrutiny. After all, there’s plenty of studies that demonstrate links between schizophrenia and meth, LSD, or, to a lesser degree, marijuana. So if smoking weed somehow prompted someone’s schizophrenia, I’m supposed to say, “stop consuming medical resources and please step in front of a subway train” when they seek help? How is that functionally different from saying that to a person who “caught” something akin to DID from TikTok?
While it can be infuriating and horrifying to have a medical problem that gets conflated with some other medical problem in a way that makes it difficult for you or people you care about to get treatment, this is a problem with the system of diagnosis and treatment, not a problem with the people with the other problem.
This was really well said and raises for me the more general issue of blaming and where we assign blame (or accountability).
Someone raised elsewhere in here the issue that they had a harder time getting pain meds after a procedure because of the individuals who engaged in drug-seeking behavior to feed their opioid habits. How far are we gonna get blaming opioid addicts versus the medical and pharmaceutical people who got people hooked and then failed to provide adequate supports to get people unhooked (and the criminal justice system that preferred to criminalize people's addictive behavior -- or the society that prioritized that response over treatment).
We have a funny tendency to blame the individuals who are at the very tail end of a broken down process, and to condemn them morally, rather than considering them to be as powerless as we are (we being people who also need care of various kinds and who sometimes struggle to make good choices in support of our well-being -- which is to say all of us).
I get that triage is important in these situations, but surely you're not suggesting that people don't seek help for something that seems to be a mental health issue because other people are suffering worse ones? I don't think it's the job of patients to screen their own conditions by worthiness.
None of these people have interacted with the mental health system for DID, most of them aren't out (even to their friends) about their alternate personalities, and none of them are asking for your sympathy.
And yet you felt compelled to tell your very large and influential audience about them. And in doing so, you invited judgment of their actions. Sorry, Scott. That's how it works. You don't get to share your cool friends with tens of thousands of subscribers while protecting them from the attention you've foisted on them. You've had a long time to learn that and you keep refusing to do so.
I'm going to put this conversation on hold for 24 hours to give both of us a chance to cool down; if you want to continue it after that, let me know.
What about the “beans” example, Scott? I don’t think you can rationalize that away as a “real” condition. It’s pretty clearly a mass desire to emulate a Tik-Tok video. And it sucked up plenty of mental health resources.
Sorry, Scott. This wasn’t convincing. Freddie is correct here. Social media hasn’t enabled thousands of people with DID to finally discuss it publicly. Social media created a situation where a lot of bored people fake an already suspect condition to get attention. Even Sybil was lying.
Why can't that be a real condition? Obviously its contours are shaped by cultural knowledge and fads, but only in the same way that the medieval dancing plagues, koro through the ages, and specific anorexia symptoms are shaped by cultural fads. Teenage girls are the typical patient for every culture-bound syndrome; read about some of the stuff medieval nuns got up to.
I’m happy to hear more about this (genuinely), but I honestly don’t understand what you mean in this reply. It just sounds like you’re allowing the word “condition” to be assigned to any kind of mass misbehavior, instead of limiting it to something more akin to a disease.
How about - I'll try to write a full review of the book "Geography Of Madness", a pretty good book on culture-bound syndromes I've been sort of working off here - and we can continue this discussion afterwards if we're still not on the same page?
Works for me!
Can we get numbers? That seems to be what's missing here.
If we agree (as you say with your Crazy Like Us reference) that the prevalence of these conditions is substantially increased by advertising them and (OMG, trigger word) "coddling" them, then isn't a better society one that makes it much harder for people to start down "this path", whether the details of the path are praying to the Madonna fifty time a day or trying to reach a weight of 50lb?
I think what he’s saying is when you’re talking about disorders of the mind you have to be really careful throwing around words like
Real
and
Fake.
What bizarre definition of disease are you using that rules out the possibility of them being transmissible? Maybe some poor sap's lymph nodes are, in a sense, only swelling up and turning black "because everybody else was doing it," but that doesn't mean they have any less of a very real problem.
We’re talking about mental illness. It isn’t transmissible like lymph node inflammation.
Why can't it be a fake condition? "Teenage girls sometimes make stuff up for attention" is a well-established, historically durable phenomenon, you're the one proposing the more novel psychology here.
Serious question;
Where does the distinction between real and fake get you in this argument? What does this fork in the road look like?
"Faking it" suggests the condition would respond to a very different set of treatments and incentives than if it were some kind of wholly unconscious reflex. If you're into condemnation of liars, it also suggests some of that.
Culture-bound syndromes are also well established and historically durable phenomena. So while teenage girls sometimes make stuff up for attention, they also get anorexia, engage in non-suicidal self injury, and other experiences that would benefit from treatment.
Some young men are full of s*it while others have serious problems with drug addiction and impulsive behavior. Both seem like can be happening without rendering the other one untrue.
Or.... Teenage girls are unusually impressionable and are particularly susceptible to socially-induced mental disorders. Therefore, it is a good idea to keep them off social media and make sure that they have a sensible circle of friends.
Agreed. This comment inspired me to post in greater detail below about the time that I convinced my large middle school that I believed I had been abducted by aliens, and went from being low-status and mildly bullied to a minor school celebrity that was begged for stories (and slightly feared, perhaps).
I knew I was lying the whole time. It was fun, gave me enormous confidence, and there was never a serious consequence from it.
I know I'm not the only person to have done such a thing, but I'm apparently one of very few who openly admits to it later.
On the other hand, I once met a psychiatrist whose patient was a young (early 20s) man who had suffered from repeated alien abductions and could describe them in vivid detail.
He was an intelligent chap, and self-aware enough to understand the scepticism that his claims engendered. As proof, he offered to show the psychiatrist an implant that the aliens had placed in the roof of his mouth. Upon seeing it, she requested that she be able to extract it and send it for analysis.
The results duly returned, the peculiar lump was a mixture of mercury, silver, tin and zinc. It was, of course, a dislodged filling, and the young man's mind had incorporated it into his hallucination.
This…
Hey, we’re creating AGI. This is part of it. Massive spasms of realignment, some of which is mis-
> Social media created a situation where a lot of bored people fake an already suspect condition to get attention<
I have a hard time understanding why everyone talks about social media as though it came from another planet. And since when is a mental disorder something you can catch from a toilet seat?
You can’t. That’s the point.
If you get hit over the head with a toilet seat often or hard or both, you can get chronic traumatic encephalopathy which is a bona fide mental disorder.
One can always come up with pat explanations for the group behaviors called mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illnesses. Without a shred of evidence ergot poisoning or religious cults have explained away the 1518 Dancing Plague Strasbourg where hundreds of people were afflicted with the urge to dance until they keeled over and some people danced themselves to death from exhaustion. The 1518 outbreak of uncontrollable dancing was not unique, either. Dancing epidemics reoccurred across various European cities between the 13th and 17th Centuries. There was also a phenomenon that occurred across the centuries where nuns in convents would climb trees, yowl like cats, and lewdly expose their nether regions. This has been explained away by their pent-up sexual frustration and sensory deprivation of the convents, but I never quite understood how climbing trees relieved their sexual frustration.
Of course, there was that infamous outbreak of weird behaviors among the pre-adolescent girls in Salem where several young girls began to scream, and they "threw things about the room, uttered strange sounds, crawled under furniture, and contorted themselves into peculiar positions." This outbreak of inexplicable behavior spread through pre-adolescent girls of Salem. No medical reason at the time could account for these behaviors. Finally, the community hit upon the consensus explanation that the girls were being attacked by the black magic of witches. Ergot poisoning is frequently invoked as an explanation today (but if it was demon ergot, why was it only pre-adolescent girls that were poisoned when the rest of their families were eating the same ergot-infested bread?).
In recent memory, we have the example of the Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic of 1954 and the Tanganyika Laughing Epidemic of 1962. And as recently as 2016 we have the example of the Havana Syndrome, where, instead of witches hexing pre-adolescent girls, the pat explanation for the ailments suffered by State Department employees who worked in the Hotel Nacional in Havana was that the Cuban security services were broadcasting microwaves at our State Department Employees—but then it spread to government employees in a Virginia suburb who hadn't spent time in Cuba. Then, State Department and CIA employees in Hanoi, Guangzhou, and Vienna started coming down with the same syndrome. And it spread to State Department employees in London and Berlin before it petered out. Meanwhile, the people who lived and worked next to these State Department enclaves reported none of the symptoms that our State Department employees were suffering. I blame ergot poisoning!
Great. Very informative.
Is there a demographic breakdown of the State Dept employees who reported symptoms?
Not that I know of. This is just info I picked up from news sources and Wikipedia. But it looks suspiciously like a case of "mass hysteria" to me.
But “ergot poisoning” was not an obvious common factor. Are you suggesting that there is no clear connection to Tilk-Tok in the epidemic of girls screaming out “beans”?
Ummm. That was sarcasm. — but ergot poisoning has been blamed for a lot of historical outbreaks of mass hysteria with little or no evidence to back it up.
I think the point being made is "TikTok might be serving as a vector to enable superspread of *actual* mental illness", which is not the same as "TikTok is providing an incentive for people to fake mental illness".
I mean, in both cases the obvious solution is the same i.e. "burn TikTok", but there's definitely a difference in world-model there.
(I personally think there's potentially some of both, but I'm trying to explain Beowulf's post.)
What you're ignoring is Aliester Crowley's most important injunction:
Invoke often.
Mental patterns that are repeatedly present acquire their own reality. And it's as real as any other memory, and memories are what mind is made of. This is the mechanism behind the creation of the multiple personalities that Scott talked about. And it's behind "beans", as foolish as the choice for creating that is.
As for jhana, consider that as a possible explanation for the Vietnamese monks who set themselves on fire and just sat there as a political protest. And it was probably created in exactly the same way. (I haven't looked up how one is supposed to induce jhana, but since it involves a couple of hours of meditation every day for a week or so, it seems to fit the general pattern.)
All that you are is your memories plus your current sensory environment. Anything that can reshape your memories, can reshape who you are. (OTOH, the current sensory environment is highly dependent on the body state, both interoception and exteroception. So it's not all one thing.)
True, but I found that my qualia are very malleable. In college, I trained myself to see auras—but it turned out to be a relatively useless skill to acquire. And although fluffing someone else's aura/energy field is a relaxing and pleasurable pass time for both parties involved, one doesn't need to see their energy field to fluff it (someone who can relax and "open" their sensory input can feel it without seeing it). And my ability to see auras was a skill that quickly disappeared when I stopped actively trying to practice it.
When I was taking Med School anatomy, I started having visual "hallucinations" where if I stared at a person's face, their face would dissolve and I could see their muscles and tendons moving as they talked and see their carotid arteries pulsing with blood. I'd have to blink a couple of times to get rid of these views. But the person allowed me to stare longer at them, I could melt away their musculature and see their skulls. Interestingly enough, I could do this for other parts of their bodies in the areas where their derma wasn't covered with clothing. Hands were fascinating to watch in action. This "skill" also went away several weeks after the class was over. Something about working with cadavers "exposed" this ability in my qualia.
I won't try to argue that what I was seeing in these cases was "real". I could just as believe I was deluding myself despite the solidity of my visions. I'm well-grounded in the sciences, but I am now skeptical that what my qualia perceive is necessarily real. I was raised in an atheist household of philosophical materialists. But I guess it didn't stick!
materialism is making less and less sense to me as well. it's very striking to me at the moment - how did i miss that it's sort of nonsense to suggest that matter, an abstraction that we can only establish post-sensing, is the thing giving rise to the thing that invented it?
the map is not the territory, not sure how i spent a decade convinced otherwise
I was literally just about to link to your writing on DID, thanks for beating me to the punch here :)
I would much rather expand healthcare accessibility than decide who does and doesn’t deserve access to it-- this is pretty fundamental humanist thought.
Are cost benefit analyses not also humanist? This is a hard problem, given scarce resources.
Given sufficient political will to reorganize the overall US healthcare system around any remotely sensible sort of cost-benefit analysis, I suspect there would be a lot of lower-hanging fruit. Order-of-magnitude cost reduction in many fields basically everyone agrees are necessary is not only possible, but could be a simple matter of adopting what are already standard practices from other countries. Surplus from all that savings could then be redirected. Seems unlikely such a painstakingly strict rationing of mental health resources would be necessary at that point.
If a significant number of people request care, and diagnoses other than "lying for attention" are ruled out with sufficient certainty... have we tried just giving them what they apparently want? Write a prescription for weekly visits to a maid cafe or something. Plus UBI of course, so everyone involved can afford to consider alternatives.
Perhaps there's a lot of low hanging fruit. If we want to understand a system, try and change it, as they say. Reduction of redundant testing seems promising. UBI is interesting, especially as an alternative to some existing systems. Allow Americans more choice in purchasing drugs that have been approved in other Western nations. Allow government programs to negotiate prices. (Though it seems like private care is subsidizing social care. So 'Medicare for all' might be like the person going from standing on two legs to one leg to zero legs. There are some potential issues with that trend line.)
I think it's worth noting that inflation in the United States for services has been a good bit higher than the official indicies. This is often presented as an industry specific problem, and to some extent it is. But the cost of, say, legal services has increased faster than inflation despite an absolute glut of lawyers. The cost of education has increased faster than inflation. At some point it makes sense to see this as a general problem with services/inflation and not an industry specific issue. The cost of goods has been lower than expected due to importation, offshoring, and automation.
(It will be interesting, in a depressing sort of way, to see how strongly the American medical community resists automation as AI improves. I suspect there will be at least some regulatory barriers thrown up. We already see this kind of thing to some extent.)
As such, I tend to see arguments of the type "we will copy this foreign country and get their results" as frequently overly optimistic, even if foreign countries have some potentially helpful ideas.
Massive American military spending, for good or ill, makes Americans poorer than productivity would indicate.
Also, rural populations impose various costs and America is on the high end in terms of rural populations.
Biggest thing I'd like to change is mostly just making payment terms clear up front. Any standard procedure should have a publicly listed standard price, and if there are complications, cost of follow-up treatment for those (plus maybe a flat fine of five million bucks per iatrogenic death, with as little room for lawyerly negotiation as possible, just to close off that potential perverse incentive) should be borne by the hospital, because they're the ones in the best position to make informed decisions about prevention vs. cure.
When some administrator sees sleep-deprivation-induced treatment errors directly impacting the financial bottom line, rather than being cushioned and obfuscated through various types of insurance or abstract litigation risk or shuffled off to be somebody else's problem, might start to seem like their shareholder-value-maximizing option is actually giving all the doctors and nurses more reasonable hours, hiring additional staff to fill resulting gaps in the duty roster, then running proper time-and-motion studies to see what can safely be deskilled or automated.
The other big thing is drug supply. First of all, the FDA should be required to issue some sort of official opinion on every drug that's already in widespread use, anywhere in the developed world - no more "these statements have not been evaluated" dodge, no more "not invented here" - including rough zero-to-ten ratings for safety and efficacy.
Epipens, and any other commodity of obvious lifesaving medical relevance originally developed with federal funding, should be dropped directly into the public domain, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
FDA inspection fees for drug manufacturing should be assessed per dose actually produced, front-loaded a bit to ensure initial setup isn't horribly flawed. Per-facility-per-drug-per-year price structure strongly discourages idle capacity, or less specialized labs producing small volumes of many different things as-needed, which then makes it excessively difficult to ramp up production when demand spikes (like, say, in a pandemic), and leads to single-source or even no-source problems.
No, humanism is a moral framework used as an axiom used to determine weights of the cost benefit analysis, by definition being independent.
As below, there are many better ways to maximize healthcare access: cutting out the amount of money insurance brokers make on every automated claim despite having no system in place to handle failed automation, patent reform/loophole cuts/patent seizure, having government provided ePCR systems (ePCRs make as much as a 99.99% profit while still forcing nurses to use physical fax and handwritten notes— AS MANY AS 7000 PEOPLE ARE KILLED IN THE US EACH YEAR DUE TO HANDWRITING ERRORS ON PRESCRIPTIONS. This isn’t even a low hang fruit really, it’s pure bad bad bad.)
I 100% agree on the need for patent reform. Maybe a challenge period prior to patents being granted, with a bounty for successful challenges from the general public.
"As below, there are many better ways to maximize healthcare access: cutting out the amount of money insurance brokers make on every automated claim despite having no system in place to handle failed automation"
I'm not sure what this refers to.
"having government provided ePCR systems (ePCRs make as much as a 99.99% profit while still forcing nurses to use physical fax and handwritten notes"
I roughly know what an ePCR system is, but not the incentives associated with it. Do you have some sort of cite or paper regarding this issue?
Pardon, it looks like I slightly conflated the terms and was thinking of pharmacy benefits managers. They work with providers & insurance to set prices and determine eligibility, but once those things are set, insurance basically regards them as Unchangeable, completely automating claims. So, insurance used to all have claims brokers that would handle things, but now 62% of insurance companies don't have them anymore & patients either get what the PBM says or they pay completely out of pocket. (Back in 2019 through august 2020, my claims stopped going through correctly due to a system identification mismatch error, and the automated system to pick up claim denials couldn't fix it, so I was told repeatedly for months in a row that my only option was to CHANGE MY STATE IDENTIFICATION or pay out of pocket. I am very salty about it.)
My experience with ePCRs is actually personal: I worked for a few years both developing and implementing ePCR systems, and there are a lot of major barriers for clinic or hospital staff to using them. There was no standardization among them for decades, so any time a patient needs records to be sent from a system using one ePCR to another with a different data structure, it has to be faxed and re-entered by hand. The quality of ePCRs is also really bad, so often staff have to hand-write notes to make up for things their patient data system is too prohibitive on or not useful.
Attempts to standardize kept running into the issue of "well, we're making money already soooo do we REALLY need to hire more staff to allow our DB to transfer data to other DBs when it can only lose us customers?" At one company I was with, they estimated an absolute minimum for a small clinic to migrate one device system (which could be a single device) from one ePCR system to another as costing $13,800* (post inflation) to get the data reconfigured, with the cost scaling for each system & each clinic or hospital involved: so companies providing ePCRs have been able to grow as long as they stay just under the rate to migrate to one another without needing to make any serious investment in upgrading the product or meeting the needs of staff and patients. One example I found here from 2018 is that ePCR companies (and myself despite years of working on this) had no idea that physicians and nurses use different standard methods to identify inpatients, and that both need to be in the upper-left hand corner of a patient record.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6066183/
So tldr: it's a natural monopoly as the cost to get new customers is prohibitive compared to the cost of maintaining a current customer.
As a disclaimer, technically the HRSA & CDC have already stepped in and tempted companies to standardize with the prospect of selling medical data to them, so ePCRs WILL get there eventually- 10 U.S. states have now achieved standardization, servicing an estimated 13000 EMS agencies out of 21000. https://nemsis.org/ While this will (again, Eventually) take care of the faxing issue, I have a lot of doubts about the amount of remaining room for competitors to enter the market with products better suited to medical care, as the existing systems have setup large-scale contracts & have the finances to hire dozens of marketers for every engineer-- and it begs the question of whether system usability will improve or costs will ever get lower.
(Additional disclaimer, there are also plenty of companies that have setup virtual secure faxing as a workaround to literally faxing, but somehow this doesn't make me feel better either.)
*Just found a number for EHR deployment costs: https://www.healthit.gov/faq/how-much-going-cost-me
Thanks for the detailed analysis. I don't know that I have enough context to productively process it into a more coherent political position on my part. If someone was generally in favor of free markets, (i.e. individual consent, meaning the ability of people to say 'no' to agreements they didn't want) What should I advocate for? Some minimum standardization of ePCR?
Hey Freddie another nuts guy here offering a middle way. Hopefully not a bullshit one either. I do think these people have a genuine mental disorder (where genuine here means they can’t just choose to not be symptomatic) but its actual characteristic is a manic need for attention and to be special. There are so many real life situations where this is extremely maladaptive and they just can’t stop doing it. The reason I think that’s an important distinction is that if you’re trying to treat a TikTok person for what they say they have vs the thing that is causing them to say they have whatever you won’t make any progress. That unstoppable hunger for validation might be annoying but I don’t think it’s fake especially when you see someone blowing up their life because they can’t stop posting. I’m sure someone out there is just malicious but probably fewer than you might fear. These are kids trying to stand out in a high school the size of the internet. No wonder they’re having all kinds of negative reactions to that. And yes it’s straining the system but it’s not the kids’ fault we have a world that drives people mad. We’re supposed to grow up around 150 people we are mostly related to not have all our embarrassing growth pangs memorialized forever. I believe it’s socially induced but I don’t think that makes it less real anymore than my PTSD isn’t real because I wasn’t born with it. Once I got it I couldn’t choose not to have it.
Edit: Updated a couple of typos. Which I seem to make exclusively when I comment here.
Nicely said Some Guy, thanks.
Yes this is a perspective well worth bringing into this important debate. Thanks.
I consider it kind of like how hypochondriacs do need treatment, only for hypochondria.
Would it be feasible / useful to just... hire each of them a few full-time adoring fans? I suspect there are many people now working minimum-wage customer service positions who would consider such a task no worse than their current one, possibly even a step up. Obvious problem is awareness of insincerity would make it less effective (and attempting to conceal the insincerity would be unethical and dangerous), but people have genuine emotional reactions to stuff they logically know isn't real all the time. Just gotta figure out the right dosage.
I think the only treatment is trying to build an understanding that your life matters and you are good enough as you are even if nobody is looking at you and saying so.
Longer term, sure, but when somebody seems to be having real trouble with that sort of confidence even when lots of people ARE looking at them and saying so, and too much of their time and energy goes toward maintenance on various ramshackle coping mechanisms... well, the budget and foundation for such a building project has to come from somewhere.
I know this sounds like a joke about people just needing to toughen up and what not but I actually, honestly, sincerely plus a bunch of other words to mean I am not joking, think working construction jobs makes people more confident and less likely to crave social validation. It just puts you in touch with reality, you can tell how much you know right away, and you get a sense of how hard it is to actually do stuff so you get less anxious about own accomplishments. So, let’s get the kids off TikTok and take them down to Home Depot.
I've heard the same from other places, not least the movies Office Space and Gran Torino, and it's consistent with my own firsthand experiences. Probably won't work for everybody but it definitely seems worth trying.
If you're going to set up a recruitment and training program for that sort of thing, how about focusing it specifically on rooftop solar installation? There's a lot of that coming up, if exponential trendlines are anything to go by, and retrofits onto existing buildings will probably be both easier to slip through the permitting process, and harder to automate, than cookie-cutter arrays out on open fields.
I don’t understand the tone here. You’re writing like Scott wrote a policy piece advocating for DiD teens to get higher priority in mental healthcare (or something equally silly) … but thats not the post he wrote. His claim is just “consider that maybe some of the DiD teens are actually experiencing something and not just literally lying”. Given priors this seems reasonable, and isn’t a super strong claim either way.
So, why the extreme hostility like someone just kicked your puppy? Is there something that I missed?
Scott didn't mention any of them looking for mental health treatments, nor asking for sympathy.
In fact he specifically described them as high-functioning and happy with their situation.
You seem to be making a lot of weird, unjustified, and hostile assumptions.
Excellent post. I am bemused by all the "just faking" takes. They seem to be based on some reductionist impulse that doesn't model well how the mind works.
Of course people sometimes lie. Of course they're sometimes confused about themselves and construct odd narratives. But none of that means deceit or confusion is always or even usually what is going on with weird conditions.
"But none of that means deceit or confusion is always or even usually what is going on with weird conditions."
Neither does asserting the opposite make it so.
The cases we do have some numbers for (like anorexia, or various historical hysterias) are rather more on the "faking it" side than your assertion.
More generally what I am seeing here is a replay of a constant theme in politics:
(a) people hate, HATE HATE HATE, cheaters, in every situation, for whatever reason. This is massively attested across social science, history, literature.
(b) even so, do-gooders constantly insist that none of [insert class] are in fact cheating, whether it's welfare fraud, claiming learning disabilities (to get easier test conditions), refugees or would-be-immigrants, the homeless, or these various medical situations.
(c) what inevitably then happens is that people encounter some case of their actual personal experience that is in fact cheating, and dismiss every claim of group (b) as lying garbage.
This happens over and over again, but group (b) NEVER learn to modulate their claims, to tone them down to something actually truthful like "as far as we can tell, the fraud rate for xyz is 4% and we will willing accept inconveniences that further reduce that, but we also believe that that level of fraud is acceptable for the value of this policy to the other 96%".
And with this refusal, they lose a large number of potential supporters.
But what the hell do I know? I've only seen this play out again and again. My evidence-based assertions count for nothing against the importance of jihad and signaling.
Let's stipulate that X% are faking, and Y% are not, where Y = 100 - X.
You seem to be insisting, with lots of detail, that "X is large." But I never said otherwise.
I'm not making any claim about the size of X or Y, other than that neither is (near) 100 or 0.
We only have a disagreement here if you actually believe that X = 100. If that's your position, well that's a very strong claim indeed, and none of your examples provide evidence for it.
> My evidence-based assertions count for nothing against the importance of jihad and signaling.
I think there’s an over-the-counter ointment you can get for that rash.
"The cases we do have some numbers for (like anorexia, or various historical hysterias) are rather more on the "faking it" side than your assertion."
Evidence that a majority of people claiming to have anorexia are faking it?
Various historical hysterias refers to what?
This rings very true across any number of situations. Witness the vehemence with which "stolen valor" is punished.
I have in fact heard toned down version of (b) plenty of times, but the self-righteous anger of being cheated is overwhelming.
"The cases we do have some numbers for (like anorexia, or various historical hysterias) are rather more on the "faking it" side than your assertion."
Anorexia can be induced in rodents, given exercise and food deprivation. What does it mean to say that anorexia is 'more on the "faking it" side?'
> This sounds like: “I, RC, have the mysterious mental ability to detect liars. I admit I can’t prove this, but come on, you should probably just trust me because it’s perfectly reasonable to think other people have mysterious mental abilities you don’t.”
Detecting lies isn't a mysterious ability. It's a normal social skill, which can be verified in particular cases. And it's probably one that you personally should be putting more work into, for a few reasons.
Scott does say that 2 paragraphs down as well, but yeah this specific paragraph is rather strong imo
> It's a normal social skill, which can be verified in particular cases.
And can be verified as hopelessly fallible in other particular cases.
A normal social skill is to look around a room and draw your own conclusions in spite of what someone else might be telling you about the room. What if the room they are discussing happens to be inside them? It doesn’t look the way you want it to look so they must be lying?
They see a lamp on the corner table and you don’t. What next? Tell them they’re lying or ask them what it looks like? I think only one of these paths leads me any closer to the truth.
> And it's probably one that you personally should be putting more work into, for a few reasons.
This is extremely obnoxious; I recommend not playing stupid games like this.
The normal social skill is _claiming_ an ability to detect lies - and believing one's own claims - while frequently being wrong.
I'd guess the average human lie detector is better than 50% accurate, but no more than 80%, and prone to higher failure rates dealing with strangers, people not of one's exact subculture, and people neuro-divergent in ways different from oneself.
It's clearly something that would be very strongly selected for evolutionarily, so it seems completely reasonable to think that people can do better than random at it. Of course, the ability to lie credibly is *also* strongly selected for...
Also, a pound of reasoning like yours (e.g. based on likely evolutionary pressures) isn't worth an ounce of actually measuring the phenomenon being considered. It is probably worth more than a pound of anecdata, which is where my estimates of human lie detection capability mostly come from. But not entirely - I've probably read things like the article cited by Yug Gnirob in this thread, which I presume (from the periodical cited) is probably based at least in part on actual research. (I didn't click on it this morning.)
I mean sure, if we can demonstrate that humans are no better than random at detecting lies, then we have to infer either that there are no such pressures, or that it's an arms race where the ability to lie and the ability to detect lies remain equalized. Humans being pretty bad at it would be unsurprising. Humans being no better than random at it *would* be, IMO.
Even that link says 54% and 63% (for audio only), making people merely poor at it, not useless.
Also, if we had *no* way to detect lies, lying would likely be a lot more outrageous. As is, we have to take care.
A bit of a side point, but I think lie detection capabilities vary wildly. In much the same way as everyone likes to fancy themselves intelligent, I think everyone likes to fancy themselves good at detecting lies. But in either case, not everyone really is. Some people are probably horrible at it. Most people probably range from kinda poor to so-so. And some people are probably quite skilled indeed. Measuring randomly will only show us what's average, though, not what's actually possible.
One of the many theories about why humans developed rapidly--bigger brains in such a short evolutionary time, is that it was caused by the signals--arms race between ever--better ability to deceive and ever--better ability to spot deception.
It's hardly a coincidence that all the big-brained animals are intensely social.
I actually think on average people do worse than chance, because the bad liars are unlikely to lie a lot, while the good liars may be going around lying constantly. Which means most lies out there are being delivered by people who are unusually good at lying.
> It's clearly something that would be very strongly selected for evolutionarily,
Sure, but then so would lying. It's an arms race and is there a clearly correct argument that lie detection has won that race?
It's also presumably a pair of skills, with varying levels of talent and practice. I'd expect a soft threshold of sorts for "this works against inexperienced liars, but not talented or practiced ones", with the kinds of studies determining lie detection capability ending up with the second kind of liar.
Possibly out of sheer repetition, even, depending on the study design, but I think part of it may be that the detection skill (or one of them) is more for "are they concealing something important" rather than "are they saying something factually untrue", and it's hard to reconcile "concealing something important" with "passes ethics review".
Studies tend to show an amount, but not a ton, of lie detection, so yes. Also, *any* lie detection will result in better than chance results, while good lying ability would merely cancel out an amount of lie detection (as long as we don't think lying ability would be so good as to be *better* than truthtelling in having it believable, or that lying talens would completely overpower lie detection).
I mean, I *do* think lying ability can be good enough to show up as "gets picked more often than chance" if the study design is "one of these is a truth, one of these is a lie, pick which is which."
I'm hoping the studies are more sophisticated than that, but I'm not as confident in that as I might have been three years ago.
> the ability to lie credibly is *also* strongly selected for...
Why should it be? I assert instead that the *inability* to lie convincingly has been strongly selected for. Why else would we have all these physical reactions like sweaty palms when lying? Saying words is not, physically, different from saying other words.
Having obvious tells when lying makes you more believable when you're being honest.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-pretty-lousy-lie-detectors/
Lying is also a normal social skill.
Agreed! Which is why assuming people are always telling the truth about non-falsifiable claims is a bad idea...
It's also a bad idea to assume that the "normal social skill" of detecting lies will by default be accurate.
Good thing I didn't say that, then. In fact, I said pretty much the opposite of that: it's a skill that some people need to work on....
Here, let's turn the temperature down a little. I'll clarify what I meant.
I don't think lie detection being a "normal social skill" is relevant to this discussion. Lying is also a normal social skill. Some people are good at detecting lies, and others aren't. Some people are good at lying, and others aren't. When tested, well-calibrated humans do better than chance at detecting lies, but they're only hitting like 60-70% ish lie detection rates at best.
Being able to suss out malingerers, charlatans, etc. is an important skill, but there are always error bars. I think it's probably a good social skill to be able to suss out people who are trying to scam you, for example. One should be able to tell that someone who has a health emergency and needs your money every two weeks like clockwork probably isn't telling the truth. But RC's implication that normal people should easily be able to tell the difference between a spoonie lying for social credit and a person with a serious but undiagnosed condition seems, to me, to be a different category of thing.
It's a 'normal' social skill when you are talking to people face-to-face and evaluating their voice and expressions and whatnot, sure. How good the average person is at that skill, especially compared to how good they *think* they are, is an open question, but certainly it's one of the things we evolved to do.
But the claim here is about detecting lies through plain text over the internet. I think that moves away from the evolved social skill and more into just 'I am the arbiter of truth' in a way that stops being justified, especially in cases like this.
Good point.
as someone who was heavily involved in Livejournal and /cgl/ back in the mid 2000s and saw the rise of spoonies, they are by far and large attention seekers making up illnesses to find themselves doted on or to get attention in their self-proclaimed misery. it has not changed in the last 15 years. of course to the detriment of people who genuinely have unsolved and unidentified illness(es). just as you have people faking anorexia, faking personality disorders, etc.
I don't want to take a stance on the other things you said, but I am confused by how one can fake anorexia? Either you are eating or you aren't?
sounds crazy right? people have found a way. it is all about what is posted online and behavior to friends/classmates/family. few if any medical professionals would fall for it unless the parents push for that it's a real thing maybe, but there are people who online act like they have anorexia, post media online to that effect, dress themselves in ways to make it seem like they are (buying multiple sizes of the same shirts and dresses), post their "full day of meals" (tiny tiny portions) to give the illusion of sub 500-600 calorie intake, use makeup and lighting to get good photos to make it look like they are. people do crazy shit for validation and this happens to be one of millions of ways. just as there are anorexics pretending they are not online, there are people pretending they are.
Presumably, the emotional payoff of attention and 'likes' (or whatever) make it a rational activity in which to engage.
Years back, I was involved in an online group where one person claimed to be bullied in school for being lesbian (the account grew in the telling as she 'revealed' more of what was going on in response to the sympathy she got).
Eventually she admitted that she had made it all up for the attention and sympathy and ego-stroking she got.
So while yeah, lesbian teenagers get bullied in school is true, it's also true that people make shit up online for sympathy and attention, and it can be difficult to distinguish who is telling the truth from who is faking it. Be one of the sympathetic supporters who ends up getting burned by a faker, and you may swing to the other extreme of cynicism about any claims.
(One fad back then was the claims of suicide due to criticism of bad fanfiction writing or bad behaviour online; some people would make fake accounts pretending to be friends and family of the person being criticised, claiming that they were really suffering and everyone criticising them was driving them to despair, and then ending up with "This is Susie's mom/sister/best friend, Susie killed herself yesterday, I hope you're all happy, you drove her to it".
See enough fake suicides and you get very sceptical of people claiming to be depressed and suicidal and they need affirmation and approval from online sources or else they'll self-harm again).
My prior would be that people posting online about their mental health disorders would be more likely to be lying - the nature of these platforms is to win validation via fake internet points and likes. It could both be true that the majority of people that claim a given conditions have it ... and the majority on tik-tok posting about it are hucksters.
My first inclination is to not begrudge those who complain of their misery because even if untrue, they have probably convinced themselves to be more miserable than I am.
I think the hypothesis that "people who incessantly post online about specific issues are more likely to be lying than people who claim to experience these issues but don't post online about it" is probably true.
I am much less concerned about whether or not people are *lying* then whether people might be *mistaken*. It seems true and important that people can be *mistaken* about their own experiences—in the example from the previous post of the person who denies they're hungry and then eats, for instance. Or the woman who said she wasn't thinking (since she was enlightened) and then realized she was. Or if, for example, someone says that God spoke to them, I think we can believe that they believe it, without closing off the possibility that they were *wrong*, i.e. that they experienced something else that they mistook for God speaking to them. In this sense, at least, I think that experiences are not unfalsifiable.
Well, with the jhana stuff it's hard to imagine what they'd be mistaken about. They're describing some kind of physical pleasure. If any of them make claims about having expanded mental powers, then I'm pretty skeptical of that, but less so of someone who just claims to be in a euphoric state.
These posts have reminded me a lot of my experiences with psychedelics. People on psychedelics sometimes think they have deeper thoughts or better creative impulses or improved skills, and they're usually wrong about that. But they also think that they're experiencing an altered mental state that can be pleasurable, terrifying, or therapeutic, and that's very difficult to deny. It wouldn't surprise me at all if jhana worked the same way, where the experience is absolutely real but many specific claims about the experiences are false and merely a result of your brain working wrong while you're in the middle of it.
I myself don't really doubt the jhana stuff. I simply worry that in his eagerness to bolster that particular claim, Scott is making a much broader claim than he needs to, that experience in general is unfalsifiable. So I wanted to push back on that.
You raise a good point. I think it's good and important to separate the two while understanding that most people are interested in whether you're actually hungry rather than whether you think you're hungry. Practically it is difficult to constantly execute as a process when evaluating someone and I would expect most people to conflate the two out of sheer convenience.
I'm not sure this is hugely different. The best way to lie convincingly, in general, is to convince yourself that something is true. I think that most people who say things that are false (even if they should know they're false) have mostly convinced themselves that they're true, so most lies are people saying things they at least partly believe.
Perhaps they are getting at: lying vs. mistaken is a spectrum, and habitual liars are frequently sliding along it.
> It seems true and important that people can be *mistaken* about their own experiences
They can be mistaken about the factual implications of their experiences, but they cannot be mistaken about the qualities of the experience itself.
Thus, you cannot doubt that jhana is an experience, you can only doubt any implications one might infer from it.
Yes, yes, and yes to this. It's so basic and fundamental that we're all having lots of quite different qualia all the time. The simplest example must be colour blindness. In my middle school biology class, my teacher was red-green colourblind, and a classmate asked: so what colour do you see when you look at red or green? The teacher rolled his eyes and pointed out that there is no way he can communicate the answer other than by saying, "the red-green colour."
Something as basic and everyday as what colour stuff is has at least 5% of us experiencing a bunch of completely separate qualia to "the norm." So, yeah, it would be little wonder if lots of other areas of our experience also have significant non-normie populations.
It's probably like what mort people see with the 2 vs 5 picture: a mass of undifferentiated digits that you can dfferentiate with a bunch of effort and mental discipline.
It's funny, I can't see the shapes/digits at all in most of the coloured-dot colourblindness tests, but the 2's in the sea of 5's jump out at me.
You're a colorblind synaesthete? "I associate numbers and letters with colors, but they're all the same color."
If you want some raw examples of people who are "faking" things, you can look at subreddits like FakeDisorderCringe. I was looking for some adult autism discussions and Reddit decided to recommend a site where 256k members ruthlessly mock the social media of people who self diagnose with autism and D.I.D. All of the posts are supposed to be "anonymous" but many of them have more than enough info to find the individual poster and harass them.
I don't know enough about D.I.D. to evaluate those (other than thinking they are a bit silly), but many of the "obvious fakers" of autism they make fun of are... people that seem to have some form of autism and are trying to figure out what's going on. We seem to have ended up at a point where claiming you have a hard to diagnose mental illness makes internet strangers EXTREMELY ANGRY and I don't really think that's a healthy thing for either side.
Everyone always claims that fakers are obviously all "attention seekers" but that honestly doesn't make much sense to me because the odds of getting negative destructive attention are quite high. "Confused about how their own brain works" seems much, much more likely to me based on all of the psychology research I've read.
I think context is everything.
If you have a mental illness that constrains your life, and you just live within those constraints, that's one thing.
If, on the other hand, the first thing you tell complete strangers, for whom this is irrelevant, that you have a particular condition; if it's the way you define yourself in a byline that allows for 288 characters, if it's something you work at "presenting" to the internet for hours a day, well it's hard not to view that as attention-seeking.
Now such people may have "attention-seeking disorder" (which does seem to be a real thing...) but that's not what they are claiming. (Perhaps they should!)
Curious what would go in the byline that wouldn't indicate attention-seeking. If instead of a mental illness it's their height, you can still assume they're lying about their height for attention. Maybe moreso, because height isn't likely to affect text interactions.
The usual implicit belief here is that one should only seek attention for "good" characteristics - typically either earned accomplishments/skills or socially-acceptable tastes/opinions.
The underlying assumptions are that (1) getting attention for "bad" characteristics is harmful because it incentivizes focusing on those characteristics and disincentivizes self-improvement, and (2) the speaker is qualified to judge which characteristics are "bad" for other people.
In addition to disorders and disabilities, the list of "bad" characteristics tends to include appearance and sexuality, traumatic experiences, and racial and gender identity.
I'll say that (1) is an incomplete argument, because self-improvement is a lesser good to cultural improvement, and cultural improvement comes from people presenting unique perspectives on problems. Like, I only recently learned that virtual reality has a sitting mode, and yet it's incompatible with wheelchairs. https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=54880 That's a thing that's easy to miss when nobody you know is using a wheelchair, but easy to catch when they are.
Even if they're purely attention-seeking, the best way to address it is not to try to berate them into stopping, but to draw attention to the futility of attention as status. Link to Madonna or Kary Perry making songs about how vapid their own work is, or SuperEyepatchWolf talking about hitting a million followers are realizing it's just a meaningless number. Trying to kill a particular approach to attention will just make people go find another approach, and every time one gets shut down it causes collateral damage.
As a guy with diagnosed textbook Tourette's syndrome, I've been morbidly fascinated by the rise of "TikTok Tourette's", which is just absolutely, clearly, not Tourette's (the symptom presentation is totally different, it's just entirely missing the actually most common Tourette's symptoms, and the gender ratio is not just inverted from what you would normally expect, it's inverted by an absolutely enormous effect size the likes of which you never see).
But! That in and of itself doesn't necessarily mean that every single one of them is "faking" -- it's entirely possible that they've got some weird condition that you somehow psyche yourself into by watching too many people do this sort of thing on TikTok. Basically, there's good evidence that most of them don't have classic Tourette's, but it's possible a number of them could be experiencing *something* real. I feel like the degree to which TikTok is capable of generating new psychosomatic disorders is really understudied.
Right, like I am totally willing to believe a good portion of “TikTok Tourette’s” is something real, even if it’s clearly not actual Tourette’s.
"...the degree to which TikTok is capable of generating new psychosomatic disorders is really understudied."
While I'm sure this happens, I think... lots of things generate psychosomatic disorders. Religion, classically. Sexuality. Puberty. Violence. Aging... The examples that we see newly emerging from social media seem new, but it feels to me like "X gives people disorders" is true for pretty much all X. The fact that shellshock and oedipal fantasies and religious visions and midlife crises have all become familiar and culturally normalised suggests not that TikTok weirdness is different, but that TikTok weirdness will become familiar and normalised in turn as well.
I think the fact that TickTok has effects on people's brains on the same order as religion, sexuality, puberty, violence and aging... well that's a big thing when you look at it. Sure, everything has a chance to cause a psychosomatic disorder, but we would also expect things to do it at different rates or likelihood. If TikTok is up there with some of the most significant life events people experience, that's pretty shocking, and a bit worrisome all things considered. The claim that "TikTok is no worse than shellshock" isn't reassuring to me :D
Indeed. Once upon a time we didn't have shellshock, and then we did, because we invented artillery shells. Once upon a time we didn't have TikTok-induced disorders, and now we do (perhaps).
I'm not sure that is true. The rates and manifestation might be different but I strongly suspect there are underlying mechanisms that are getting reused. Isn't shells-shock just PTSD which we now know can be caused by an array of trauma. And certainly we can find examples of "sword shock" for lack of better terms with pre-gunpowder warfare. There are probably a cluster mechanisms around "young woman coping with severe-social stress confounded by puberty" that get expressed into different "trend conditions" but nevertheless are really just derived from core physiological factors.
I think the argument there is true in a trivial sense. Cavemen likely had the basic biological substrate that will eventually allow their descendants to acquire all sorts of new psychological traumas once they've been exposed to the horrors of the holonet in the year 3,000.
My point is that THESE SPECIFIC DISORDERS didn't use to exist, and now they do. Generalizing and categorizing them away isn't particularly helpful for understanding what's going here in my opinion. The hypothesis is that we live in a world where if these people weren't exposed to social media they wouldn't have the problems they have now.
"...if these people weren't exposed to social media they wouldn't have the problems they have now."
There's two readings of this: (1) if these people weren't exposed to social media, they wouldn't have problems; (2) if these people weren't exposed to social media, their problems would manifest in a different way.
I think, if we disagree, it's because you're leaning more towards (1) and I'm leaning more towards (2).
Turns out, there is pretty much zero mention of PTSD style issues in pre-modern warfare eras. Even 19th century gun powder warfare doesn't seem to turn up much of anything. There are theories about this, but the general theme is that the nature of modern "always on" warfare is particularly rough on people. Fun fact. (Well... not fun per se...)
Huh, that's interesting and not what I expected. I will have to think about that, thank you.
The bit about the past is indeed what Greg Cochran said on the subject:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/ptsd/
My wild uninformed guess is that what makes WW1 and beyond modern warfare different is the "Empty Battlefield" phenomenon. In military science, the "Empty Battlefield" is the observation that as modern weapons grow more powerful (with artillery, tanks, air power, machine guns, grenades, rocket launchers, and so on), armies are forced to disperse to an ever greater degree to avoid being annihilated. In the past, soldiers fought shoulder to shoulder with their fellow soldiers in line formations; nowadays, doing that means they'd all be blown to pieces by a single artillery shell, so they disperse as much as possible so that a single artillery shell can only blow up a single squad, fireteam, or even soldier.
However, by that same token every soldier is far more alone than ever before in battle. Standing literally shoulder to shoulder with your mates may have some sort of protective effect against the mental trauma of combat, making you feel less vulnerable to fear, or like there are people who understand you, or like your failure is not your own, or something like that. Being visibly alone and isolated meanwhile would have the opposite of those effects. That would be why this effect only shows up in modern warfare, not even 19th century gunpowder warfare - the line formation was still alive and well in that era.
I'm not sure how you would test this though. Perhaps one could try to compile statistics for the rates of probable PTSD in regular soldiers in the 19th century vs. specialized skirmishers? Skirmishers in that era fought in a recognizably modern way - dispersed, using cover, deploying camouflage - and in fact military observers during the American Civil War, Franco-Prussian War, Russo-Japanese War, and so on remarked that with the increasing power of the weapons being deployed (rifled guns, smokeless powder, machine guns), everyone was learning how to fight in skirmish formation, and if this continued into the future everyone *would* fight in nothing but skirmish formation. If those proto-modern skirmishers had higher rates of PTSD than regular soldiers, then that would be good evidence for this theory.
Of course, the quality of PTSD related documentation from this time period is not very good, so this might never happen.
Where are you getting this from?
I’ve read a bunch of accounts of warfare and there’s often mentions of the costs of war. I didn’t tick down the DSM criteria but there’s plenty of references to men having a really tough life after war.
I'm going to register an opinion that PTSD is caused mainly by:
a) bad stuff happening,
b) that you can't do anything about,
c) that people whom you trusted lied about, ignored, etc., and
d) that those people didn't give a shit that they were wrong, or covered up, etc.
In pre-artillery warfare, things changed slowly and there was generally something you could do. But in WWI, no one expected it to be like it was. Same with Vietnam - the previous generation had stories of WWII and Korea, relatively straightforward fights against clear Bad Guys, defending and liberating civilians who wanted you to save them. (Sometimes just propaganda, of course.) Instead they got burning babies.
And in general, I think the crappier the world was, the less insulated we were from the cold equations of life and death, and the less anything could surprise us in this way. One of the changes the Grimm brothers made in later editions was changing "mothers" to "stepmothers" in order to avoid shocking their urban audiences, and that was just 200 years ago. IMO, those kinds of stories prepare children for the real world.
Also, data point of 1, but sufficient quantities of alcohol make PTSD go away temporarily (for me, at around the point where I can't walk straight), as do opioid painkillers (which have their own problems), and cannabis (my preferred choice).
(Back to speaking of children, another not-fun fact: childhood sexual abuse fits the above criteria, and there's pretty much a pipeline from that to drug addiction (speaking of opioids making PTSD go away) and from there of course to homelessness.)
As for pre-modern mentions of PTSD, my personal experience of the "fight" type is that the best description I have is that it's like being possessed by a spirit of vengeance. (I want to say Nemesis, but it's probably just the Erinyes.) So maybe go looking for that kind of stuff, as well as mentions of heavy alcohol or drug use?
That's my theory, anyhow.
"Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past."
Shell-shock has a physical mechanism, making it more likely to be real than PTSD:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/ptsd/
Oh interesting. Is your position that jhanas and PTSD both are fake?
That link goes to a short ranting opinion piece on a blog by an anthropologist and a physicist. It doesn't engage with any of the research on PTSD at all. There are interesting questions to be raised about PTSD as a DSM diagnosis, but the physical mechanism criteria for real-ness doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you also feel that nearly all of mental illness is fake.
https://www.historynet.com/let-there-be-light-how-a-ptsd-film-worried-army/
"As doctors treated more and more battle fatigue cases, they began to understand the impact of precipitating events. The more intense the fight, the greater the number of battle fatigue casualties. A leading cause was artillery fire, since it forced a soldier to sit and take it; other triggers included the death of a buddy or bad news from home, like a “Dear John” breakup letter.
But the most significant factor, doctors learned, was the number of days in combat. A man who had served 200 to 240 days in combat was no longer an effective soldier."
There is an interesting discussion about combat stress on historical armies here: https://youtu.be/FDNyU1TQUXg
TLDW: Combat stress is probably worse now because modern combat is more horrific than historical combat.
Another answer that is compelling to me is that PTSD is the price we pay for having a society that values life. In a world in which killing your enemies is simply god's will, or a source of glory, or whatever, you don't worry about in. Going from a society like ours, which sees killing and violence as wrong, to one in which it is necessary, and then back again, may be likely to cause psychological trauma in a way past peoples did not have to deal with.
Shell shock (battle fatigue) is not at all PTSD. Two totally different things.
You take a battle fatigued soldier out of the fight for a month and they’re probably “fixed”. Nobody knows anything about PTSD. Guys that went through hell don’t have it. Guys that didn’t do.
Strong suspicion that VA benefits and social desirability has given PTSD broader appeal/acceptance/whatever.
As someone who has never witnessed Tourette's outside of a media portrayal... for some reason, it was just very jarring to learn that you have it. Because I really enjoy your writing, and you are very articulate.
That is an incredibly stupid thing to say, but brains are stupid. I think it's because I read out loud in my head, so it's just hard to conceptualize a writing/vocal mismatch.
I have had similar experiences with people who speak English as a second or third language. If they don't speak it very well, some part of my brain thinks they are stupid, even though I only speak English and they speak three.
Scattered thoughts, but somewhat related to the overall post.
Thanks!
> That is an incredibly stupid thing to say, but brains are stupid. I think it's because I read out loud in my head, so it's just hard to conceptualize a writing/vocal mismatch.
Nah, natural reaction. Questions are good! For what it's worth, if you saw me speaking in public you probably wouldn't be able to tell I had Tourette's, because I don't always present with symptoms. You might be imagining it's kind of like a speech impediment, and it's more like every once in a while a monkey that lives in your brain seizes the controls and causes mischief, but you're a normal person the rest of the time.
I did a little interview about it once:
https://thebrowser.com/notes/lars-doucet/
If you wanna see how I talk in real life, I appear on podcasts a bunch:
https://narrativespodcast.com/2022/11/01/117-lars-doucet-land-is-a-big-deal/
Cool, I'll check those out!
I just read the text interview and found it extremely interesting and informative.
I didn't know you were religious, so that was a cool wrinkle - don't get a ton of those types around these parts, and I think it's really necessary to have that voice represented well. Particularly when a lot of atheists either a) have very little personal experience with religion and view it as bizarre or b) had a very horrible personal experience with religion and can only see it through that lens.
Also, the topic of interacting with the cops struck me as terrifying. The thought of having a disorder that occasionally makes you do the worst possible thing, then dealing with people who could kill you on the spot if you make the wrong move, then the knowledge of that potential making you anxious, which can trigger the disorder... Very scary, and not something I would have considered.
Glad to hear that you have a more or less normal life and that your conditions aren't too hugely negative. Also, being a parent as someone with Tourette's seems... probably very difficult on occasion, but also potentially hilarious with the trolling your own kids possibilities.
One of my closest friends during grad school has had Tourette's all his life (he's even told me at one point that his case was considered severe) and I never knew or guessed for years and was slightly shocked when he told me. Nothing approaching a "speech impediment" at all -- his speech is completely normal, and the only eccentric behavior of his that I would imagine comes from Tourette's is that he sometimes makes weird noises when he goes into the bathroom, like he's trying to release something itching to get out of him. Of course his symptoms were probably much more pronounced in childhood, long before I ever knew him.
My impression is that the "spurting out obscenities in public or in the middle of speaking" thing is the form of Tourette's that's most prevalent in the public image but that it's relatively rare.
That impression is pretty much correct. That said, the "spurting out obscenities bit" is actually *totally real*, and of the many media depictions I've seen, most of them aren't super far off the mark; it's more the fixation on that as the central example of Tourette's that's a bit out of whack. It's similar to how Narcolepsy's central symptom is the "sleep attack" in media but there's actually a lot of other presentations, such as cataplexy.
Aaaaand having said all that, I actually do have copralalia. In fact I have basically *all* of the Tourette's symptoms. There's a far worse one than copralalia though, which is kind of nightmare fuel -- copraPRAXIA. Copralalia is "obscene speech," but copropraxia is "obscene touch." The MILD form of this is randomly and involuntarily making obscene gestures (think flipping someone off). The extreme form of it is ... punching people in the nuts, grabbing boobs, etc. It's real, and I do have it, though it is quite rare for me (I have never grabbed a boob. To my shame, I have once or twice punched my best friend in the nuts, long ago in college.)
I consider myself on the "extreme end of moderate" presentation. I have all the symptoms, including the bad ones, occasionally in their worst forms, but not all the time, and most of the time I'm symptom-free. People on the "extreme end of extreme" often are basically incapable of living normal lives.
In my case at least, even with occasional extreme symptoms, you mostly learn to live with it. The real thing I've found about Tourette's is that it really shatters the dynamics of the whole "ableism" conversation. There's a real struggle to be had to make sure disabled people are treated fairly and not discriminated against (ask me how I know), but there ALSO has to be some nuance particularly in the case of Tourette's because... well, other people have rights too (at minimum, the right to not be punched in the nuts). Like, in school, it's just not fair to the other students if I'm disrupting class all day long. It just isn't. But it's also not fair to me to just kick me out of school, and so some negotiation has to be worked out to figure out how to make these things work, which works best when everyone's operating in good faith (nice work if you can get it).
The South Park episode about Tourette's is actually pretty good. If you want an example of "worst depiction of Tourette's ever" it's Nurse Jackie. There's a doctor who has copropraxia, and it manifests as boob-grabbing. Now that is actually a real symptom, so the sin isn't in depicting it that way. The sin is in:
- That doctor has basically NO other Tourette's symptoms, only the crazy one
- That doctor doesn't behave like someone who actually suffers from copropraxia would.
If *I* was a doctor who had that manifestation of copropraxia, here's what I would do:
- Maintain a safe distance from every female employee at all times
- Disclose the fact I have this condition loudly and widely the minute I start working somewhere (in the show the first time the nurses find out about this problem is when their boob is grabbed! WTF???)
- Call in sick on any day I'm feeling particularly stressed or symptomatic
> I'm imagining that the disorder might be a whacked out "truth detector" by unveiling desires and one wouldn't go around grabbing boobs that they didn't like thereby giving away the tell?
It's a good question, but that's not how it works. It's not like your brain is just always drunk and you're losing inhibitions and doing things you deep down want to do in your Freudian id. The best way I can explain it, just from the perspective of someone who has the disease -- is that your brain has to have some way of categorizing words and actions. And at all times, you have an awareness of ones you SHOULD NOT DO RIGHT NOW, whatever that is. And my best guess for how (coprolalia/copropraxia) Tourette's works is that some neurological wire gets crossed and there's a short circuit specifically to that category of thing. My evidence for this is that the thing coprolalia/copropraxia "wants" to do changes based on social context, but it's always something you shouldn't do right now. And the aftermath is always horribly embarrassing.
The nut-punching thing was more like ... the "obscene gesture" that copropraxia would manifest at for me was to, with very little warning* (even to myself) strike directly at my friends nuts and stop exactly three inches before contact. I don't know why, that's just what it would do. Aaaaand one day he flinched. Again, this was one of my best friends. I'd never want to do something like that to them under any conditions, it's not some underlying sublimated desire I've been actively repressing. It's just something *I ABSOLUTELY SHOULDN'T DO RIGHT NOW* and somehow when the wires get crossed, that's the signal that gets sent down the wire.
*Sometimes I get internal warning that tics are about to happen and prepare accordingly (like duck into a closet), this one for whatever reason was on a particularly short fuse.
I'm very sorry in advance, and I hope this doesn't come off as blithe about something difficult, or stereotyped, but I couldn't stop myself from imagining "By George!" as a most excellent (if still frustrating) vocal tic.
Ha, that’s actually pretty funny. Can’t say I’ve ever blurted out “by george!“ in real life. Most of my vocal tics are just random words like “sausages” or “nostrils”
Yay, cool. While I've got your attention for a moment, any advice for a fellow prosocial politically motivated Texan fancy programmer who feels compelled to make a lot of video games and has a lot of runway and wishes there was a way to make that game making skill into a healthy career that's useful for society?
Hoo yeah, I know. I don't like games in the typical sense - I'm not an avid gamer at all and haven't been for a few decades. I just like making games, as an avocation or a passion or something, and I really miss the healthy educational school games scene of the 90s. I've been working on edugames while I'm a stay at home dad, and I already know that, while I love the making, and the result, I do not love the business, or the horrible ecosystem in which I find myself, and I'm definitely not under the illusion that it could pay the bills. I'll pay those with ML work.
> wishes there was a way to make that game making skill into a healthy career that's useful for society?
Not sure I've got an answer for you on that very narrow angle because the games industry is just brutal. I'd say keep your eyes open and think outside the box? I'm now involved in data visualization for improving property tax assessments, for instance.
Thanks! I'm a search ranking ML and data visualization programmer by trade, so I've been looking for ways to go in the other direction. I agree the games industry is brutal, probably to the point where it's not sensible to force it.
"RC is doing an old trick: summing up his opponent’s position as an extreme absolute, then summing up his own position as “it’s diverse and complicated and a middle ground”." - Scott, end of the article
*ahem*
"Either we trust trustworthy-sounding people who we like, when they say stuff that sounds kind of plausible - or we apply extreme skepticism about every not-immediately-verifiable claim!" - Scott, middle of article
RC might have exactly nailed your position, no? In fact, he might understand it better than you do, as your positions seems to come down very strongly on the "believe everyone unless you have evidence to the contrary."
Hmm, my read of "Either we trust trustworthy-sounding people who we like, when they say stuff that sounds kind of plausible - or we apply extreme skepticism about every not-immediately-verifiable claim!" was that RC had set up this dichotomy, said he was going for the skepticism route, but then appealed to the trust-me route, which Scott indicated was hypocritical with this quote.
I was a bit uncertain on that point, till I got to the penultimate paragraph:
"You should believe the spoonies! You should believe the DID people! You should believe that people experience astral projection - it’s just a cheap off-brand lucid dream, and I’ve personally tried lucid dreaming and can confirm it’s real! You should believe that people experience auras - see eg Paranormal Misinterpretations Of Vision Phenomena, Colored Halos Around Faces And Emotion-Evoked Colors: A New Form Of Synesthesia (note first author!), the many stories of people seeing auras while on drugs, and my own Lots Of People Going Around With Mild Hallucinations All The Time! You should believe that people experience John Edwards - I think my parents voted for him in 2004!"
That's a lot of "you should believe" with no mention of the middle ground of "maybe don't be mean about it, but being very skeptical and not really believing them either is fine". There's a bit gap between you should believe and you should maybe believe possibly.
Scott badly conflates several notions: 1) Should we believe arbitrary claims by default 2) Should we believe the people experience the experience they claim 3) Should we believe those experiences are real, or reality-based even if they have malattributed causes.
He doesn't think we should believe things by default - he support Bayesian reasoning - he just has priors outside overton window for a big chunk of this audience so it throws off the conversations more than it might otherwise.
He does seems to strongly believe that claimed experiences are evidences of *some type* experience rather than lying or exaggeration or whatever.
Lastly, it seems a lot of the commenters are getting lost on the point that the "realness of the experiences" doesn't mean the experience is of a real thing ... but probably is grounding a real "something". This point seems to get lost in the examples where there there is disagreement on the specific empiric cases.
Well, Bayesian reasoning doesn't prohibit believing things by default, even before we get to really unusual priors. In a sense RC is arguing how high a probability of some experience being truly experienced conditional on someone claiming to have experienced it is proper.
Evidence of some sort of experience, maybe not the one claimed, that's an entirely different thing, as you say.
I can't say what Scott thinks, but after reading this article, if I assume Scott actually wrote it, I am updating away from Scott being a careful Bayesian. There is not only a lot of conflating of points going on that makes it difficult to evaluate, but I can't help but notice that he takes "thousands of people have claimed this experience over thousands of years" as apparently strong evidence that the particular experience is truly experienced as described. Yet, he doesn't seem to believe other experiences thousands of people claim to experience over thousands of years, like, oh, talking with Gods, or fairies, or whatever, is strong evidence of the particular experience being truly experienced as described. I have a hard time imagining why that would be, and I think that RC is right to point out this discrepency.
Doesn't he though? That's exactly his point in the penultimate paragraph. Believe that people are actually hearing a voice in their head that claims to be a god. Believe that they see colored auras around faces. Believe that they experience a state of serenity and bliss.
That doesn't mean that you have to believe the stated causes behind all of these. You don't have to accept they *actually* talk to god, or have mystical vision, or have transcended the reincarnation cycle if they claim that.
If you really want to pin Scott on not being a proper Bayesian, you should point out that he's using "believe" or "not believe" as a dichotomy. If we're doing a proper Bayesian calculation, we end up with something that looks more like "there's an X% chance that some people experience jhanas, and a Y% chance that any particular person claiming to has."
Well, no, that isn't quite what Scott is saying. There is a big difference between 'I hear a voice in my head that claims to be a god' and "God speaks to me" as a claim, but Scott is conflating the two. The first is pretty easy to believe, the latter not so much. The latter requires believing in God, as well as the fact He decided to talk to Bob here.
Likewise with astral projection. Big difference between "I have lucid dreams I call astral projection" and "I can leave my body and observe things that happen elsewhere via my spirit tethered to my body by a silver thread." EDIT: Observe things that happen elsewhere in a testable manner, I should have specified. Like "I observed what someone across town wrote on a piece of paper in front of witnesses and sealed in an envelope, and I can tell you what it was".
That's before you even get to the incentives to lie about things like talking to God or astral projection. Someone who is qualifying their statement as "I hear a voice that claims to be god" is a lot more believable than claiming to definitely speak to God, because you don't get to be a prophet from the former for the most part. The incentive to claim you can reach zen bliss when meditating is of course that people pay attention to you, think you have accomplished something cool, and possible you start your own cult/temple/medication class and get stuff.
Likewise with DID. Why should I believe that a TikToker whose focus is on their wacky fun multiple personalities actually experiences multiple personalities who take over their body? Scott says "Well, some people have personalities in their heads they talk to." That's rather different from the original point of DID, if only because those other personalities they talk to don't take over their body. Now, if I were a psychiatrist and someone came into my office, said they had DID and asked for help, I would be more likely to believe them, but that isn't the case in question. The case in question is those kids on TikTok saying they have DID with personalities that run their body, etc.
Definitely agree on the believe/don't believe dichotomy point, and I think that is what Resident Contrarian was making. Scott claims he isn't on that dichotomy, then immediately goes into "you should believe X" instead of any sort of % estimate. If I were to give my guess, I'd say "there's an 55% chance that some people experience jhanas, and a 1-5% chance that any particular person claiming to has." I might go as high as 15% for someone I really knew and trusted, who seems to meditate a lot, but honestly that kind of claim is more likely to make me trust them less on other points otherwise. That's in the "I found a rare baseball card in a yard sale and sold it for [X*yearly salary] but decided to give the money away to charity since I was just lucky," territory. I can think of maybe two people I know who I would believe if they claimed that, and maybe have known 10 people who I can totally see claiming that but not actually having done any part of it. For any random person, the probability is really low, even if it is possible.
Well, it's a good thing we're not talking about believing people who think they can curse others, or people who think they've been cursed by a disagreeable old lady who lives near the forest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials
As a person who had very bad Most Likely Psychosomatic? stomach/GI pain as a child from ages 8 to about 17: thank you for saying psychosomatic pain is actually painful. I think some people bizarrely equate "psychosomatic pain" with "just making it up". But even though my brain is "making it up," in a sense, it is not something that can be consciously controlled. (Thankfully I mostly no longer experience this pain after starting SNRIs but it was a major formative childhood experience sadly.)
I think acknowledging psychosomatic disorders is particularly hard on people in a modern society. (Source: armchair speculation by a healthy, gainfully-employed-with-good-insurance person in the US.)
Logically, there's no contradiction between "person is in pain" and "we don't know how to make that pain go away, even though there's identical-feeling kinds of pain we do know how to make go away"; it just means that there's several different mechanisms giving rise to the same (or very similar) painful internal state, and we know how to address some but not others. But, if we equate "psychosomatic" with "untreatable" or even just "much harder to treat" (right now, not necessarily in principle), and assume that medical resources are scarce, then it's more efficient to declare "people with psychosomatic symptoms should not get medical attention, because it's largely useless for them and will crowd out people who can benefit from it". But, holding those two positions simultaneously ("this minority of people is experiencing the same kind of pain as everyone else" and "...but they should be discouraged from using the medical system") goes against a ton of moral intuitions, because now you've turned them into second-class citizens! Since clearly you wouldn't be a person who does that, it must follow that the psychosomatic symptoms weren't quite real to begin with.
Unfortunately, I don't know what to do about it. The issue that I'm highlighting seems to come from equating "I genuinely feel like crap" with "the medical system can and ought to fix it" (which leads to problems, because more people feel like crap than the medical system has capacity to fix). Historically, the "can" part was mostly false; now it's often true, and I have to believe that's a good thing. Stronger cultural norms about how the medical system isn't *obligated* to fix everything would presumably help, but it's hard to get them as a society, and telling any given individual that they should have more of those is an asshole thing to do. On top of which, because modern medicine is really quite good most of the time (both in terms of capability and in terms of capacity), feeling healthy feels like it should be a basic right rather than a luxury, but then you're denying basic rights to some people and that's clearly bad!
I want to add to this that people with difficult to understand and treat illnesses mashing their heads against the medical system despite getting no or bad results sometimes makes the medical system figure out how to actually treat them more effectively or efficiently.
---This sounds like: “I, RC, have the mysterious mental ability to detect liars. I admit I can’t prove this, but come on, you should probably just trust me because it’s perfectly reasonable to think other people have mysterious mental abilities you don’t.”---
That's not his argument. He's not saying he has a superpower. He's saying that this community attracts people with below-average social abilities. He's arguing that he's sighted in a blind community, not that he has x-ray vision. He's arguing that normal people have a reasonable capacity for this, but that the Rationalist community is spectacularly vulnerable to this because they're uniquely bad, as a community, at spotting liars and fraudsters. And he's right. You, in particular, Scott, are famously bad at spotting bad-faith actors.
---You should believe the spoonies! You should believe the DID people!---
No. These people are lying to exploit people, and inculcating Munchausen's in large numbers of impressionable teens. One of the reasons people seeking treatment for real illnesses, like, say, migraines, have such difficulty in getting help is because there are so many people straight-up lying to doctors either to get drugs (Saying "I do not want narcotics" makes some processes shockingly easier) or to get a diagnosis for attention. If you stop believing them, almost all cases of these illnesses will *go away*. Accepting them all as valid baits social-status seeking teens (which is why all of these are led by young women) into a life of pain and misery.
And that's setting aside the monstrous awfulness of having welcoming communities with charismatic celebrities having the cost to entry "being sick".
---You should believe that people experience astral projection - it’s just a cheap off-brand lucid dream, and I’ve personally tried lucid dreaming and can confirm it’s real!---
That's not the claim of astral projection, and you should at least have enough respect for people to take their claims at face-value and not rewrite their claim to fit within your experience.
Psychics are literal con-artists who exploit people in grief to extract them from their money. Saying we should just accept claims like this IS NOT RATIONALISM. It's a crutch for people with low social intelligence to navigate some social environments. Online, that crutch has become pervasive and poisoned so much of the online space and is actively hurting people.
There's a reason so much of the mental-illness discussion online is some form of:
/<Downblouse camera angle>
"[dramatic sigh] So, I don't like talking about this* but I have anxiety, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, dysphoria and chronic pain, and I wanted to talk to you guys about what it's like to {ordinary activity}"
*It's their entire online presence and a major if not primary income source/
That reason is not a sudden explosion of mental illness. The reason is that young women are especially vulnerable to things that cause social status spikes. They are generally better at men at detecting these things, and lack the judgment, especially in the modern era where women are not taught potential pitfalls, to understand the costs of trying to exploit them.
> You, in particular, Scott, are famously bad at spotting bad-faith actors.
I've been reading Scott for a long time, and I had never heard he was "famous" for this. And I should note that on the subject of this post, I'm more inclined toward Resident Contrarian.
Just posting in case an update comes from OP, though, given this post, I would not be surprised if he was quite bad at spotting bad faith actors. He does seem to have a set of personal experiences that he has interpreted as requiring him to be particularly credulous.
Look at his conclusions when the New York Times did a hit piece on him. He refused to think the reporter could be acting in bad faith, and when the reporter decided to post the hit piece anyway, believed that that if he had only given a better impression the reporter had not done that and that the reporter wasn't acting in bad faith all along. This is pretty famous by now, although you can argue that Scott isn't famous "for" it.
There's also https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/26/high-energy-ethics/ where Scott claims that someone speculating about a scenario where his outgroup would suffer horribly as a result of being his outgroup, is just conducting a logical thought experiment with no implications for his attitude towards his outgroup.
Scott is right in his high-energy ethics post.
No he isn't. He's correct that the literal words of the quote describe a thought experiment. But this is not a context where only the literal words apply.
He's right that such extreme thought experiments are a common method of doing moral philosophy. Ignoring literal words is a good way to go off-track, and one cannot ensure that someone who does that will parse your meaning correctly any more than you can make the proverbial horse you've brought to water drink it.
This is ignoring context. A preacher is not a philosophy blog.
Actual human beings use things which literally mean one thing to mean something else. If you look only at literal words you fail at human communication.
>one cannot ensure that someone who does that will parse your meaning correctly
Yes, but it isn't us who's doing that. We're not the speaker, we're the one trying to parse the meaning.
That wasn't a hit piece. If it was a hit piece, it would have been a whole lot worse. Every IRL person I've talked to thought it seemed pretty neutral and fair.
Really the only issue is that they shouldn't have published his last name.
I don't know about famous, but I think there's a point here. Scott seems surprised that "enlightened" people would do bad things - why would they do that when they're enlightened, after all all! While I go "they're not enlightened because that's not something that exists - they're cult leaders, and nothing could be less surprising than cult leaders abusing their followers".
In his post on it, he didn't say it was "surprising":
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/16/is-enlightenment-compatible-with-sex-scandals/
He noted a number of scandals as a stylized fact and says we should update our notion of Buddhist "enlightenment" based on that fact.
My point is that he starts off by assuming that Enlightenment is a real thing with the qualities typically as ruled to it, and that said ”update” is required (which means that it was not what he expected, even if the exact word ”surprise” wasn’t used).
This strikes me as remarkably non-skeptical.
He does allow for the possibility that there is no such achievable state as enlightenment:
"Doubt Culudasa if you want, but it would be hard to say none of these people had achieved enlightenment – at least if you want to maintain any reason to believe in enlightenment as an achievable state at all."
But the point of the post was not whether such a state exists, but to instead challenge believers in enlightenment. He repeatedly uses words about third parties doing things like "claim", "certify", and "purport", thus not committing himself to the idea that those things are accurate.
A Bayesian always updates on evidence, including outcomes you thought most probable beforehand. He didn't use the word "surprise" because he hadn't indicated any expectations beforehand.
> the monstrous awfulness of having welcoming communities with charismatic celebrities having the cost to entry "being sick"
Ah, yes, the monstrous awfulness of *checks notes* having a community where you can talk about your illness and be heard and understood.
> There's a reason so much of the mental-illness discussion online is some form of...
Yeah, it's that it's happening on social media. Take *any* topic and you'll find lots of attractive young women playing up their attractiveness and quirkiness for views/follows/etc. There are ways in which that's worrisome but it's not especially correlated with the mental illness discourse in particular.
> He's arguing that normal people have a reasonable capacity for this, but that the Rationalist community is spectacularly vulnerable to this because they're uniquely bad, as a community, at spotting liars and fraudsters. And he's right.
He's wrong. Normal people have an ATROCIOUS capacity to detect liars. The literature says the typical person does no better than chance at detecting lies. For an overview, e.g., https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/spycatcher/201203/the-truth-about-lie-detection , but this is far from the only citation on the subject. IIRC, I first read it Anna Salter's Predators, but despite seeing the subject covered again and again in numerous other contexts, I've never seen any sign that there's any evidence that a normal person can do better than chance, and even particularly talented lie detectors only manage 60-70% success rates.
Reading this post, I was reminded of Scott’s article about people calibrating for what the news would or wouldn’t lie about, and how hard it is to explain the difference to people who don’t have the skill of differentiation.
The reason everyone is skeptical is because the way people are talking about jhanas, especially Nick from the original post, pattern-matches very very closely to BS. It just sounds like people lying to themselves and everyone else. It’s hard to explain this because there’s a lot of subtlety to what goes into saying that. The fact that there’s strong social incentives, no burden of proof, and the claims themselves are counter intuitive are just some of the most obvious heuristics involved.
This is, as usual, an interesting post, but I want to make a more basic point: even if I were to grant that Spoonies and DID TikTokkers are mostly charlatans, I still find the Jhana claims to be basically credible and I don't see any contradiction there. In other words, I find this part of RC's claim to be straightforwardly incorrect:
> if I went with believing the jhanists based on the level of evidence they provide, I’d also have to believe both the Spoonies, the DID people, the astral-projecting Wiccans, people who see auras, and John Edwards
I don't really have the time or the inclination to unpack the reasons why I think Wiccans warrant more skepticism than Jhanists. I just want to note that I think we can in fact form reasonable judgments about the plausibility of different subjective claims even in the absence of any truly objective criteria. I had literally never heard of Jhana before reading Scott's original post and I find the claims being made to be so strange that I'm not really sure how to incorporate them into understanding of human experience. Nevertheless, when I read the various accounts I came to the conclusion that the Jhanists are likely telling the truth. Which isn't really how I feel about aura readers.
Can I justify this judgment? Well, yes, I can. I could refer to analog states and markers of claimant credibility and a host of other clues that are guiding my intuition. Can I prove it? Nope. But that's not the point. The point is we don't "have to" believe anything and we can in fact draw distinctions even in areas that are not directly observable.
Correct me if I'm off-base here, but I don't think you're really evaluating these claims on the basis of which are more plausible. I think you're evaluating the *people* making these claims on the basis of who you think is more trustworthy. Wiccans and aura readers are associated with a bunch of other fake shit, like alternative medicines and tarot readings and hexing your ex-boyfriend. Spoonies are seen, fairly or not, as lonely and insecure young people. It's easy to imagine an ulterior motive for these groups -- they want attention, they want to fit in with a culture they like, or maybe they want to convince you to buy plastic gems from them. You learned about jhanists through Scott, so they seem more rational and it's harder to imagine what they have to gain from lying about it. I'm not saying you're wrong about which claims are true, but I don't think jhana is inherently more believable than these other things.
I think you are off base. I get what you are saying, but I'm really not just saying that Nick Cammarata seems like a high-IQ person with a prestigious job, therefore I find him more credible than some hippie who is into crystals and reiki.
Mind you, I think you are correct that *some* of my judgment is based on the people making the claims, and I also don't think this is entirely invalid. But in general, my evaluation of these sorts of claims is mostly based on whether they fit a theory of mind that I find plausible and a theory of physical causality that I find plausible.
To maybe muddy this further, there are different levels on which you can evaluate the plausibility of these claims. I don't believe that auras are real. Does that mean that people who claim to see auras are lying? Well...I'm not sure. I think probably yes in many cases, although you get into a sort of weird question of whether it is possible to lie to yourself.
What about acupuncture? I know many people, whom I like and respect, who believe in the efficacy of acupuncture. I think acupuncture is mostly bullshit, but I don't know if mostly means 60% or 99.9999%. I further don't know whether the effectiveness is purely placebo or rooted in some actual causal mechanism. I am pretty deeply skeptical of the actual efficacy of acupuncture via some sort of physical mechanism; I am somewhat skeptical but also unsure about whether acupuncture has some accidental efficacy via psychosomatic mechanisms; and I don't have much doubt at all that adherents of acupuncture are sincere in their beliefs.
Where I am going with this: I don't slot Jhana into the category of either auras or acupuncture. I'm mostly not basing this judgment on the people making the claims. I'm basing it on some combination of: do the claims violate physical laws or rely on mysterious causal chains? do they seem to involve obvious motivated reasoning? do they correlate heavily with other implausible beliefs? do they mesh with my understanding of how minds work?
So, again, I can't prove any of this, obviously. But I don't at all agree that it is impossible to make judgments or differentiate between these sorts of claims.
I can see auras around people if they're standing under bright lights and I stare at them long enough. This always happens when I watch people performing on a stage, for example. It's a visual snow thing. I'm sure plenty of people lie about seeing them, but even if one sees them the lie is ascribing them meaning.
Yeah, and just to be clear: I believe you. What you are describing sounds like an entirely plausible visual perceptual phenomenon.
What I was referring to was more of the fortune-telling style of aura reading. E.g.:
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a29846295/aura-readings-guide/
"Basically, it's like an IRL personality test that you don't actually have to take (!): huge win for everyone. Allow us to change your life with everything you need to know about aura readings and how they work."
But who knows, maybe aura readers are experiencing some kind of low-grade synesthesia, which they are then infusing with a bunch of mystical meaning.
I think that your last sentence is probably true for some of them.
Wait, isn't it obvious ?
Jhanists only have subjective claims, while Wiccans also have objective ones ?
I remember, when young (<10 years old), believing in things I knew weren't true. It's hard to explain. For example convincing myself I could use dowsing rod like things, or that ghosts exist, that I was somehow close to uncovering "deep" secrets about the universe. The Ouija board seems like a paradigmatic example of the sort of thing I'm gesturing at. In my experience anecdotally, some surprisingly large fraction of people when encountering something like a Ouija board (or at least something analogous to it) will claim they genuinely believe they are not a biasing factor. And yet I know from my own experience (again from when I was <10 years old) of how this felt internally. I knew that I was biasing the Ouija board, but I was "playing a game" of believing in it and claiming so, somehow for the sake of the thrill. Again it's hard to explain, but this sort of experience makes me skeptical of a lot of the claims Scott is defending here, because I can so vividly imagine that a lot of people simply do not grow out of the sort of games I (and I think most) grew out of during childhood. Anyone else have similar experiences?
I think I did something like this around ideas like "my stuffed animals are alive", plus a kid down the block claimed to be able to go to the ghost dimension and I sort of played along with it. I have a hard time figuring out what my exact mental state was then, or if it was reducible to something as simple as believing or not believing.
+1 on stuffed animals being alive. I knew that my stuffed animals weren't alive, but I treated them as if they were. I remember I wouldn't leave my stuffed animals upside down on the floor or lying on their faces, I'd always prop them up to a more "comfortable" position even though I knew they couldn't actually feel anything. It's hard to tell the difference at that age between what you know and how you behave: do you really know that stepping on a crack won't actually break your mother's back if you are also very careful not to step on them?
Good point, FLWAB. I'm in my 70s, and if I come across one of my (grown and gone off) kids' old stuffed animals in an "uncomfortable" position I'll mirror the discomfort and automatically reach out to adjust it. I know they're not sentient--I'm (hopefully, by now) grown up--but I also feel their sentient discomfort so immediately and palpably that my hand is in motion before my conscious mind becomes engaged. I rarely even reflect after on how silly I think I am.
So who's moving my hand? Is it a different "I" from the one who knows that synthetic fabric composites aren't sentient? My ("my") own view is that the "I" is in continually changing states of balance as different brain regions and circuits are differently engaged. And (dodging any pronoun here) it seems both possible and ordinary to focus attention in a way that enhances different perspectives under different conditions.
Our natal families teach us ways to construe things and ourselves in ways that conform to shared norms, which is critical to our ability to act socially and has enormous survival value, but it isn't surprising that this involves moving through different identities and worldviews as we mature, and the childish identity that reaches out in my 70s and steadies stuffed animals is one that obviously remains fully active and will until the end. It would throw a small tantrum if I impatiently slapped its hand away and left the toy in discomfort--then "I'd feel angry at myself," and I'm not even sure which direction that phrase should go.
Internal Family Systems Therapy (a multi-agent-mind approach created by someone whom Scott's fascinating insight above now enables me to describe as the apostate Jew Dr Schwartz when he started listening to his patients' parts and eventually his own) would say that we all have very young parts who don't care about the distinction between a stuffed animal being 'truly' alive and not, and one of these moves your hand.
Scott has mentioned this theory before, but given that he is on the other end of the spectrum from the highly polarized people whose parts are visible to their loved ones (body language especially) and his more disassociative friends haven't tried or liked it, he didn't go into much detail. It's powerful and real, but also purely subjective.
It also goes a ways towards explaining the basic question we are wrestling with here about the validity of internal subjective experience because not all parts of ourselves experience things the same way or experience some things at all. Not all of these parts are as interested in honesty and transparency as we on the surface think we are, either. Even without making a psychotherapeutic model of it if you read the book The Elephant in the Brain there is discussion about how different modules like 'the press secretary' come up with explanations for things of which it has no direct knowledge not because it is dishonest but because it has no relation to things like honesty.
Yes, "multi-agent" conveys the idea in part, Leo (no pun on "part"). I see that this is a therapeutic model (I looked up the Schwartz book). I was thinking of it more in terms of brain physiology and neural patterns, but they're not exclusive approaches and perhaps Schwartz deals with that. (I'm not sure the "Elephant" book works on the same level, reading a description of it.)
Somewhat tangentially, Michael Gazzaniga has a well known theory that relates resonant elements of these issues directly to brain physiology: the "Interpreter" persona ("persona" is my word) that is an expression of the left brain's functional role. (In patients with severe epilepsy whose corpus callosum was surgically severed, cutting communication between the brain hemisphere's, the separate roles of the hemisphere's can be studied.) Some elements of the shifting status of the "I" are ones that are relatively simple to observe and manipulate (part of what jhana meditation aims at); I think Gazzaniga's Interpreter lies at another level--but the "press secretary" description reminded me of it.
Because IFS is now almost as popular as "mindfulness" I had wondered if its prevalence has a role to play in this social media promoted flavor of multiple personalities. Speaking about one's "parts" has become very commonplace to the point it wouldn't surprise me that some people took that idea and ran with it experientially. Not that they are faking, but that the approach gave them a framework to build on in practice in a way that changed their actual daily experience.
I will put the stuffed animals in a comfortable position too. I think there is a slightly religious element to it; it is about a certain respect and care not just to the basic physical elements of the world, but to the symbols.
Huh, I tried something like that for years as a kid to see if it would stick, and it didn't. I just stop pretending one day that my 'friend' was anything but a pillow I had drawn a smiling face on to try to feel what the other kids did when they hugged their teddy bears. I remember going in not expecting this to work, not really feeling anything the entire time, and exiting it vaguely disappointed that it didn't. I put a show for others, trying to become the mask, but I could never make myself normal.
… on the positive side, at least I can spin this as having a clear sense of who I am. To frame it negatively, throughout it all I knew exactly why this wasn't working: me.
As a kid I actually did 100% believe that my stuffed animals were, if not exactly alive like me, at least *aware* and capable of suffering in a qualitatively important sense. I got as worried about them going missing as I did about actual pets.
I was also convinced that some white horses could be actual unicorns in disguise.
I remembered the sensation of believing both pretty late into adolescence, and that probably helped me reach the state of mind required to convince my middle school I believed I'd been abducted by aliens (I wrote about that in a comment below).
I hope more folks share stories about believing in bullshit and/or lying about it, rather than just discussing whether or not others are doing it.
Totally, yes. Magical thinking, which loads of people continue to do into adulthood. I think as long as one also remembers that color blindness, synesthesia, and a whole host of other varieties of human experience also really exist (and needed to be discovered and named before they were believed to exist), that we won't make the mistake of assuming magical thinking where it may not be happening.
Believing that you believe things you actually don't believe in is a necessary part of being a functional member of human society. You didn't grow out of it, rather you got so good at it that now you don't even have an inkling that you are doing it: You simply experience it as believing in a given thing. If you're interested in truth wrt this, I recommend you to observe other people's actions and speech closely, I doubt that you can catch yourself doing this.
This reminds me of Louis CK's bit about "his believies", which are things he believe so that he can feel good about himself, but he would never inconvenience himself for the sake of acting in accordance with them.
I don't know if this explains your experience or not, but it's definitely possible for a person to *believe they believe* something without actually believing it - which can be verified in some cases by cleverly using hypotheticals to trick them into using their real beliefs about reality to make excuses for why the thing they believe they believe appears to be false. Eliezer Yudkowski (who certainly has views i consider somewhat less justified, but he's bang on here) wrote a good explanation here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief
It seems the argument you're making is "people sometimes have mental states that are impossible for you to conceive of but are nonetheless real."
While Resident Contrarian's argument seems to be "people can deceive others, or even themselves, into believing they have mental states that they do not have."
These positions aren't contradictory.
Not quite. Scott's position is "and therefore we should believe them" and RC's position is "We shouldn't"
From my conclusion:
"Everything is a middle ground. The whole point of all this Bayes stuff is that 'the middle ground' is wide and worth fighting over. We can have a non-absolute middle ground with 1% probability, a non-absolute middle ground with 99% probability, or anything in between."
Immediately after:
"You should believe the spoonies! You should believe the DID people! You should believe that people experience astral projection - it’s just a cheap off-brand lucid dream, and I’ve personally tried lucid dreaming and can confirm it’s real!"
You can surround your claim with as much weaselese as you like, but that's your explicit claim.
Yes, I think those three groups are mostly or somewhat real, which if you took as a representative sample would imply that the rate of realness is at or above 75%. I justified why I think that for them, sometimes at extremely great length.
The DID people, especially the famous ones, are almost all liars. Their videos have so much stagecraft it's absurd. Can it be induced in someone? No, but the behavior absolutely can, especially when it's an easy ticket to status if you can do it well.
I've met people similar to spoonies. They're not suffering an underlying condition. They're just massively overweight and eat chips and cookies all day. They claim some underlying condition because it's an easy out.
And you just motte'd lucid dreaming.
It's 100% possible for the most famous DIDs to be liars while the typical DID is for real. Famous people are a tiny proportion of any population.
For that matter, it's at least conceivable that all of them are equally real, and those who happened to also be willing and able to hone their skills at stagecraft and self-promotion are the ones who ended up famous. If an oily used-car salesman tells you the sky is blue, does that make it false?
> I've met people similar to spoonies. They're not suffering an underlying condition. They're just massively overweight and eat chips and cookies all day. They claim some underlying condition because it's an easy out.
Being massively overweight and eating chips and cookies all day means you will have subjective experiences similar to spoonies. The causal mechanism is incorrect (i.e. it's not your thyroid or whatever), but you will in fact be miserable and have no energy. That is a well-established consequence of being massively overweight, and is the #1 or #2 reason to avoid being massively overweight (the other being the greatly-increased risk of death).
Being massively overweight and eating chips and cookies all day seems like it would cause a lot of physical pain and fatigue. Depression, too.
The DID people are in fact lying and if you can’t see that it’s really hard for me to understand where you’re coming from
Thanks for the post!! I appreciate this a lot, Scott. The comments shared about “””Spoonies””” were deeply uncomfortable to read (even ignoring the deep issues with particularly picking out women from this group), and in general I found it odd that every single one of the examples given were ones that had a straightforward antecedent the was pretty obviously true regardless of the conclusions made from them. I also had thought RC was specifically referring to the online community that uses/propagates Spoon theory, & I had been under the false impression that visual phenomena are non-synesthetic, so good to know!
I can relate a LITTLE bit about disbelief regarding DID since the first person I met with multiple personalities was a very young person that had decided they wanted to develop another personality only a week before, and I thus had a very poor grasp of the topic until good friends of mine also decided to develop a split ego. They are very eloquent and cool. That being said, I was at most guilty of willful ignorance rather than public slander. I find it odd to use a platform for this, even more so as RC recently wrote about going through the tribulations of deeply disabling, inexplicable illness. Maybe they would be more gentle in better circumstances.
I've very rarely seen any mental-illness-focused area of the Internet not be some kind of hellscape. And frankly I'm sympathetic to nearly everyone involved. Self-diagnosis is annoying, but being sick and not knowing what's wrong with you is much worse. Awareness is important, but misinformation is dangerous. Visibility reduces social stigma, but publicly being an embarrassing weirdo increases social stigma.
At the end of the day I land on a similar place to you, Scott. It's likely that a lot of the people who report these things aren't intentionally lying or faking. They might be deeply mistaken about *what* they're experiencing, but they're experiencing *something*. A lot of them are maybe looking for help as well, and are more inclined to trust a community of peers than a doctor. I think they should probably go to a doctor, but I'd rather they get some kind of support than none at all.
Also, your description of OCD didn't sound insane to me. It sounded familiar in some ways. I think some mental illnesses aren't the brain breaking in totally novel ways, but the brain turning reasonably common traits up to pathological degrees. (This is a sentiment that gets plenty of Internet sneering, but it's the most responsible way I can come up with to say that I think I relate to your experience.)
The idea that mental disorders are normal human traits turned up to pathological degrees is sneered at? It seems very common sense to me.
Well, I'm most familiar with ADHD spaces, where the phrase "Everyone's a little bit ADHD" is a bit of a meme. A lot of people seem to have heard it from friends or family and take it to be dismissive, see it as similar to claims that ADHD doesn't really exist, or see it as a complete misunderstanding of what people with ADHD really deal with. I'm like 90% sure this happens with OCD as well, so even if the statement is plausibly true at face value, I didn't want to make it without hedging a little bit.
Oh yeah, got it, that makes sense. It can be both true and used to minimize other people's experience.
I am a good example of "a little bit OCD". There are a few things I check multiple times - is the door locked, is the cooker switched off, is my debit card safe in my wallet? It costs me at most 5 minutes a day, and even if I occasionally break some locks or knobs, I probably get value back in terms of being less likely to be burgled or have the house burn down. They are reasonably sensible things to be double-checking!
When I was a kid I used to try to turn counterclockwise as often as I would turn clockwise, though even then I was aware that there would be no real consequence to ending the day rotated...
The important thing is, when I walk down the road after checking two or three times that the front door is really closed and locked, I completely forget about it. If I were going back to check again, then I'd have a problem.
“The evidence for jhanas is thousands of people over thousands of years saying they’ve experienced it, a bunch of my friends who I trust a lot saying it worked for them, a handful of experiments with EEGs that seem to show positive results, and a promise that if I tried hard enough I could replicate the results.”
You buried the lede. It is patently ridiculous to compare mentally troubled TikTok teens with reports from thousands or millions of spiritual teachers and practitioners in many traditions and many countries going back thousands of years.
I'm not really equating them - I think jhana is just an objectively real thing, and that whatever's going on on TikTok is probably a bunch of culture-bound syndromes - see also my comment at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-resident-contrarian-on-unfalsifiable/comment/10385311 .
I know you aren’t equating them. Resident Contrarian is, saying because teen TikTokers are lying about subjective experience so are jhana experiencers. I just think the starting point here should have been “there’re thousands of credible jhana reporters independently corroborating each other over thousands of years. Comparing them to teen TikTok trends is ridiculous on its face. But in any event, there’s an interesting discussion to be had about these TikTok trends...”. It just seemed like you accepted Resident Contrarian’s bad premise at the outset and argued on his terms until much later in the article. Which offended my lawyerly sensibilities.
Mostly not *independently* corroborating each other, surely?
Relevant Twitter thread, on a guy who did do a lot of meditation without having heard about jhanas in advance: https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1590892946735656960?t=MVsNt4HA_1sQlYseGAFC-w&s=19
You think spiritual teachers and traditions going back thousands of years are substantially more likely to be truthful than mentally troubled tik tok teens?
In this context, absolutely. Imagine monastic sages throughout history testifying in court against the testimony of TikTok teens. Who is more credible? It‘s not even remotely a close call. Especially in the Buddhist context, where the Buddha admonishes his followers to test what he teaches rather than take it on faith.
And given I have rather exhaustively tested this particular claim and know it to be true, the deniers have proven themselves to have faulty heuristics.
I don’t think it is clear. Religions are full of nonsense self delusion and sloppy thinking.
Science and rationalism are also full of nonsense, self-delusion and sloppy thinking, as illustrated quite clearly by the number of ACT followers denying the reality of jhana because it hasn't been satisfactorily reduced to numbers and presented in a peer reviewed journal.
Ultimately, it all comes down to credibility. Prove to me that the Higgs Boson exists. I haven't seen it. And unlike jhana, I lack the tools to see it for myself. Claims about jhana I can personally verify. Claims about the Higgs Boson I am just asked to take data gathered and analyses performed by others on faith, as no one will give me the keys to the Hadron collider. Giving greater credence to the latter than the former reflects a deeply religious, dogmatic, and irrational worldview masquerading as science. It is the height of nonsense, self-delusion, and sloppy thinking.
Accepting scientific claims that have followed the standard publishing route has led to amazing technologies and huge improvements in quality of life.
Accepting religious claims mostly hasn't.
By their fruits shall ye know them.
There're all sorts of subjective value judgments smuggled into that claim. There are people, many perhaps, who derive more meaning and satisfaction from being part of a religious community versus having Netflix, Facebook, SSRIs, and ecological catastrophe, believe it or not.
I'm very open to the idea that there's something to jhanas, but suggesting the evidence for them is anywhere near as strong as for the Higg's Boson seems absurd. It would be much, much easier for monks to fake the evidence of jhanas (or simply fool themselves while sitting still with their eyes closed) than for scientists to fake the evidence of modern physics.
It is not absurd if you have experienced jhana. To the contrary, having experienced jhana on intensive retreats, to question the possibility of that experience is absurd. Jhana is more real to me than the higgs boson, because one I have direct access to, the other I do not. I really don't care much about trying to convince people of the reality of jhana. But it is very illuminating to hear from people denying the reality of something I know 100% to be a real thing. These are not people to be listened to. They have poorly calibrated sense-making heuristics. Fortunately Scott has not fallen for this nonsense so I can still appreciate his work and take him seriously.
Monks and sages (especially those you've heard of!) tend to be self serving charlatans in my experience. Almost entirely like tiktok girls and most other humans trying to gain influence
How many monks and sages have you met?
This hasn't been my experience at all, and I've spent quite a lot of time with Catholic and Orthodox monks and nuns. There was only one major charlatan I met, and he started a cult and was defrocked. Most monks and nuns I know are particularly devout people who believe their religion deeply and try to follow their conscience wherever it leads them.
I live in India, and am reasonably old. I have almost certainly met, heard of, or come across substantially more religious figures of all stripes than most people in other countries. Sure, some are genuinely delusional themselves, but most are self serving. And you don't need personal experience for this. A cursory glance at the history of religion makes it evident that most religious figures tend to be there to use it to use others, not to be used for the sake of others.
Perhaps the fundamental disconnect between our experiences is that most Catholic and Orthodox monks & nuns give up more than they gain and have little influence on anyone unless they're actually the abbott or abbess.
I imagine there are a lot more self -serving priests, bishops, and popes, but I had much less experience with those.
Still, I think you're being somewhat uncharitable to the religious. When we're looking at historical figures, we're only seeing the ones thay sought power and influence, not the simple sweet ones who led happy parishes and never made a name for themselves outside of that.
This is incredibly lucid and well argued (IMO). A joy to read. Maybe the self-set task to take on someone's argument very systematically forces an exceptional kind of clarity that other forms of writing don't.
Broadly, I agree that the distinction between psychosomatic pain and somatic pain is blurry and irrelevant to the degree of suffering it causes.
But...
Both types of pain are shaped by our expectations of what level of pain we should be feeling.
For jhanas, DID, spoonies, etc. if people have the 'script' beforehand of the type of experience they think is happening to them, they will shape their perceptions to fit that script. And they will verbalize their perceptions and experiences in a way that aligns with a script that they have been exposed to in a type of reciprocal determinism. And so public awareness and perception of these issues (among many others) helps create them.
I believe that affirming and labeling someone's pain / distressing internal experiences may not always be best for them. And that greater cultural awareness of such experiences may lead others to develop them, or lead to those experiences taking a greater role in their consciousness and self perception, prolonging those unpleasant mental states. Obviously, the paternalistic "chin up, it's not that bad, get over it" attitude has its own issues, but believing 'it's a matter of your expectations, and you can stop it if you wanted to" can also be empowering, especially to someone with a strong internal locus of control.
I think I'm with you on the general preference that people cultivate a kind of mental sturdiness relative to life's vagaries. But the message "you can stop it if you want to" seems potentially harsh. Would you say that about phantom limb pain? Someone with chronic migraines? Someone with long Covid or CFS/ME? Who decides which conditions are stop-if-you-want-to and which ones are not?
I had terrible menstrual cramps as a young woman and many people said to me various versions of "you can stop it if you want to" -- a favorite one was that if I exercised more, the cramps would stop. I did intense aerobic exercise 6 hours a week for years. Others said if I calmed my mind down and was less anxious... I meditated, went on extended sitting retreats, became a Buddhist, etc. There was always some other thing a person thought I should do. Therapists thought it has something to do with trauma related to my father... which I could get over if I wanted to. A gynecologist said my uterus had a long skinny neck that made cramps more likely and after I had a kid it would probably get better, which it did.
We have a lot of ideas about what other people should have control over if they really wanted to. I think we all have less control than we think we do.
I think for the vast majority of things it is a strategy that is worth starting with. Assume you I will be fine and soldier on. Giving people a framework for illness/dysfunction is a very dangerous thing. People are amazing rationalizers.
I had a close bereavement last year. It would have been unhelpful and jarring to be told to "soldier on". Of course I did return to my regular life in time - sadder and not at full capacity and not immediately - but the "framework for dysfunction" that centered that i was, in fact, not fine was important for understanding the path back to normalcy.
>Giving people a framework for illness/dysfunction is a very dangerous thing.
How do we advance medicine and develop treatments/cures without frameworks? My own terrible pain was handwaved for 15 years before surgery confirmed a very physical, not at all psychosomatic illness. I feel anger - bordering on rage - about the lack of frameworks available to me as a teenage girl 20 years ago and what it has cost me and others who suffer from a common illness (endometriosis) which has been ignored by medical research because it is attributed to hysterical teenage girls.
I think "you are strong enough to deal with it" is closer to what I wanted to say, not "you can stop it if you want to". Pain is modulated by our expectations of it but I shouldn't have implied that one can just decide to not care about it.
Also, yeah, I suspect cultural factors are at play for a lot of the people with the conditions you mentioned i.e. they are less likely to occur in populations and individuals that value stoicism/strength and more in those that are more empathetic/validating.
"believing 'it's a matter of your expectations, and you can stop it if you wanted to" can also be empowering, especially to someone with a strong internal locus of control" but it can also be the thing that breaks someone's strong internal locus of control if the empowerment repeatedly fails to work.
Nothing undermines the belief that your will rules your own life like repeated, painful experiences that it doesn't, despite your best efforts.
There's definitely a role for "anti-catastrophizing" in pain management, but it's more about altering habits to reduce "dialing up the gain" on pain than it is willing the pain away:
https://www.painscience.com/articles/pain-is-weird.php
https://www.painscience.com/articles/sensitization.php
https://www.painscience.com/articles/mind-over-pain.php
"does that mean can we think brain-built pain away? Can our minds un-build pain? Yes and no, because, as Dr. Moseley explains, 'Pain really is in the mind, but not in the way you think.' This is a good news, bad news kind of thing. I will get to the good news, but let’s get the bad news out of the way first:
"It’s not really possible to think pain away in general. Many wise, calm, confident optimists still have chronic pain.
"Pain is a motivator. It exists to get us to act. We hurt when our brains reckon we should do something differently, for safety … but safety is not always possible. The nature of the danger isn’t always clear. Or avoidable.
"And the brain worries too much: from hangnails to fibromyalgia, it overstates the danger … for rock solid evolutionary reasons. So it can’t be overruled by wishing, force of will, or a carefully cultivated good attitude. The brain powerfully but imperfectly controls how we experience potentially threatening stimuli, but I’m sorry to report that you do not control your brain."
When Resident Contrarian spoke as a contrarian in response to Scott's post on Nick Cammerata, I thought he was excluding easily accessible avenues for understanding the plausibility of Nick's experiences (and of many thousands of others who have reached trance states) by cherry picking the types of people he was skeptical about (spoonies, DID, etc.). Scott has responded to this challenege head on by giving reasons to consider accepting, at least provisionally, claims by people in those groups. What bothered me about RC's stance then was an unwillingness to consider analogical cases far closer to jhana practice than spoonies et al., which are also make it far less demanding to accept the reports of jhana practitioners.
The examples I gave related to descriptions of experiences deploying skill mastery that were explored by Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi in developing his concept of "flow." [I apologize: most of what follows is repasting what I posted in the earlier thread.] People who describe ecstasy in flow experiences--e.g., highly skilled athletes or performing artists--sometimes resemble Nick C in the extremity of their language. In a book that preceded the better known, "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" (which attracted a lot of attention when it was published in 1990), his 1975 "Beyond Boredom and Anxiety," Csikszentmihalyi included Zen masters among the classes of people he felt achieved this type of experience. In much later research, involving more lab monitoring, he and collaborators looked at EEG correlations that extended to video gaming as well.
The model of flow can be useful because it identifies the brain states Nick celebrates as pervasively available in reduced form--we all can get pleasurably lost in small activities involving deployment of ordinary skills (puzzles, games, sports)--with the potential to become overwhelmingly satisfying if honed to a very high degree and optimally deployed. We might feel it's a stretch if a ballet dancer said she felt that when she was locked the midst of a complex performance she had totally mastered, the joy was ten times better than casual sex . . . or a pianist, skier, etc. . . . but we probably wouldn't consider it mysterious or dismiss it out of hand, and we might grant the possibility based on smaller-scale rewards we encounter ordinarily for smaller-scale skill mastery and deployment. (This was a theme of pre-Buddhist Chinese philosophy, such as is found in the "Zhuangzi," c. 300 BCE, and informs a great deal of both Daoist and Confucian thought throughout later history.)
A common feature among these experiences, as found in contemporary experiments, is the measurably suppressed scale of frontal-lobe activity that accompanies focused deployment of mastered skills--correlating to reported loss of any sense of personal identity ("I")--along with intense but effortless attention to the physical environment, as seen, heard, or felt. Hypofrontality--the suppression of the brain's executive function--and the experience of losing the sense of self (in the Buddhist case raised to a central tenet of ideology) is equally a measurable feature of meditative trance states such as jhana. (On the issue of the dissolution of the homuncular "I", I think Rodolfo Llinas's "I Of the Vortex" is a good neuroscientific complement to both Buddhist doctrine and Sartre's existentialism, illustrating why both have purchase, even if you don't want to buy into the whole '-ism' thing.)
So in addition to traveling Scott's difficult route to understand why spoonies, folks with any form of DID, etc. may be reporting real experiences, I think it's important to realize that there are much more accessible paths to figuring out why reports like Nick C's are very plausible (although it would, of course, be easy to lie too--as is always the case with subjective reports of any kind).
PS: I appreciated the move to Ramachandran's discussion of phantom limbs. I thought the book he co-authored on that ("Phantoms In the Brain") was very cogent.
There's a recursion problem here. The problems that come up when you try to decide whether to believe someone or not about their internal mental states are the same problems that come up when you try to define what it means to believe someone.
If a random person tells me that there are multiple personalities living in their head, I'm probably just going to "believe" them because I don't care enough to try and counter their belief. Or I might disbelieve them for the same reason. I don't want to expend the mental energy to counter something I consider improbable.
The real question is how you behave when there is something at stake. Would you hire one of these people for a very important job? Or would you let one of them babysit your kid? Whatever the answers are, they're probably a lot more involved than "yes, I believe people's mental states" or "no, these people are obviously delusional."
If, online, you saw posts from an account claiming to be shared between two or more people - living in the same house without enough budget for separate computers, maybe, or the official face of a small business with sloppy PR practices - would that strike you as inherently implausible?
I'm also a "rounds off to asexual" person. Learning that sexual attraction was a real thing that other people experienced, and wasn't just them exaggerating to be funny/popular, was intensely confusing and strangely eye opening.
On a related note, I was diagnosed with autism as an adult. I'm currently discovering that many "extremely painful and unpleasant" experiences are not that painful/unpleasant for everyone else. My sensory perception is just dialed up to 11 on certain things. This is simultaneously a relief and mildly infuriating. Had I known that walking over grass barefoot should NOT feel like getting stabbed with dozens of tiny knives, for instance, maybe child-me could have worn shoes as an accommodation.
All of this to say: my theory of mind has been shown to be wildly inaccurate, so I now default to believing other people when they report their internal experiences. I'm often skeptical of their conclusions, but not of their stated perception (eg, the angel they "saw" could very well be a hallucination or lucid dream, but I believe their claim that they perceived *something* unusual).
Likewise! When I was a kid, I genuinely thought all sexual people were simply making incomprehensible decisions because they were stupid and bad at predicting the results of their actions. I stand corrected. Mostly. (Joking, joking.)
On the flip side, getting an experience 'right' can make a world of difference, too. I went a very long time not understanding the hype of blowjobs, and thought that it just wasn't really my thing. Then I had one girl do it right, and it was the best thing ever. To this day the only one to ever do it that way, unfortunately.
This was fantastic, thanks for going to the effort to post this. Substantively, I think this is a brave stand against a habit of punching down at people who are opposite the ideal rationalist:
1) They evince a condition or mental state that is foreign, and
2) That condition or mental state is incompatible with a rational view of the world
In other words, the perfect target to punch down on!
Punching down is underrated.
Agreed. It is an important societal defense mechanism.
Whenever Scott talks about DID, it feels me with rage, something that rarely if ever happens. I can't wrap my head around how a smart educated compassionate mental health professional can be so... well, how do I put it kindly... under-informed.
My last 3 partners, including the current one, have/had DID (one eventually succeeded at killing herself, after a couple of tries, long after we lost touch). (You might think I have a type, but it's the other way around.) I also knew several others, through a mental health support site. As well as a few wannabe DID patients, though those are easy to notice.
None of them wanted to have it. All got it from a severe prolonged childhood trauma. All realized they had it a long time later, when confronted with undeniable evidence. All had it latent (or maybe didn't have it, depending on your definition) until some traumatic event or series of events broke their mind and it all went nuts. All have trouble remembering their childhood, except when one of the many child trauma-holders is out. All have parts that deny being mentally ill. All are good at masking their condition, including, or especially, with doctors. None would ever talk on social media about it. All were high-functioning, up until the breakdown, and are stuck in a mental and emotional hell since. Well, those who are still around. All have long-term chronic physical health problems associated with trauma (see the Body Keeps the Score). All are in therapy, on and off, and have been misdiagnosed multiple times by psychiatrists who don't believe that DID is "real", regardless of evidence.
I think there is some kind of a blind spot among psych professionals, and Scott has been infected, talking about "theory of mind" and basically falling prey to isolated demands for rigor, the term he himself coined. Maybe it is anti-memetic, or maybe they have been inoculated against considering this condition seriously in their training and practice, I don't know. It is very frustrating to watch.
I don't see what in Scott's writing is incompatible with your experience with people with DID.
It seems to me he's describing a different experience of DID, without excluding the experience you're describing which is obviously the more widely studied and understood DID presentation.
Do you think these other presentations should be called something other than DID because calling them DID harms in some way the people you know? I can imagine an argument like that, I'm just not sure if that's what you're saying.
Are you mad for the same kinds of reasons Freddie DeBoer is mad -- that there are people with legitimate mental illness and there are tourists or fakers stealing resources from the legitimate sufferers?
In the communities of "systems" (that's how they often tend to call themselves), there is a distinction between DID as a severe mental disorder that makes your life an unbearable daily struggle and benign multiplicity, whether endogenic, constructed or whatever other kind that does not impair your life. The latter is sometimes called multiplicity or plurality, don't think the terms are settled. There is a fair bit of tension between the two groups, and all the DID people universally hate the TikTokers who switch on camera, as well as movies and shows that portray people with DID as potential or actual dangerous monsters.
I am frustrated that professionals focus on fakers and outliers, which are a tiny fraction compared to those who have to deal with it, often while denying they have it half the time (improving communication between alters is an unsolved problem).
I guess it reminds me how people used to focus on the tiny minority of women who lie about being raped, and paint most reports as unreliable, while in reality sexual assault is vastly underreported. Sadly, in both cases the fakers ruin it for the actual victims.
I am not worried about "stealing resources" at this point. DID patients are a tiny group in any therapist's office, compared with regular people who can afford a therapist to complain about their bosses and spouses. Real hard cases are generally unemployed, often destitute, don't trust professionals and almost never seek professional help.
Thanks for expanding on that.
It sounds like some people would say that there are two flavors of DID, one which causes a great deal of distress and functional impairment and another one which doesn't, but that they're both reasonably referred to as DID (even if with different specifiers). And then there are some people (including you) who say there is only one flavor of DID and that people who are not of that flavor are malingering liars. (am I overstating your position?)
I can see an argument for naming these two experiences by different names, and seeing them both as genuine experiences. I don't myself see a reason to call that entire other group fakers. If they were categorized under a different heading than DID (but not fakers or liars) would it change how you feel about them? Allowing for the fact that for sure bunches of people on social media are lying all the time. I'm speaking more about the people that other people know first hand, like Scott's friends.
I may have been unclear... Sorry. DID has "disorder" right in the name, which means that it strongly negatively interferes with one's life. Functioning multiplicity, where one brain has multiple functioning personalities is apparently a thing, as well. I have read about it, but have no first- or second-hand experience with it. I don't really want to doubt self-reports of happy internal family systems, including humans, frolicking woodland creatures and magical beings, but as long as they are all happy together, it's not a "disorder". I am sure there are some fakers and liars too. And those who created tulpas through meditation for one reason or another. And those who have been convinced by poorly trained therapists. A bell curve has many tails. Some of them also struggle with daily life, often in ways that are different from DID, and need a different diagnosis and treatment.
Yes, it's okay, I know what DID is. The criteria symptoms are overwhelmingly negative things that would come with functional impairments.
I was more asking you whether you'd feel that the people describing the experience Scott relayed are not fakers if we called their experience by some other name that does capture their experience as real -- which seems perhaps merited given that their symptoms don't by and large match with the actual DID diagnosis.
I guess another question might be whether DID might exist on a spectrum like ASD where some common features are shared by people with a very wide range of functioning levels.
Second question first: DID is definitely a spectrum, or, rather, DID is a furthest part of the dissociation spectrum, from mild spacing out all the way through OSDD and eventually to DID. Surprisingly, DSM-5 seems to capture some of the spectrum reasonably well. Also, even at the DID end there are plenty of varieties. Sort of like if you break several porcelain teacups, no two sets of shards are exactly the same.
As to the first question, now that I had a chance to reflect and actually read through Scott's post to the end, I mostly agree with his stance that we ought to consider self-reported experiences as real and not intentional lies, unless there is a good Bayesian reason to the contrary, and keep updating as new evidence comes in, in general and on case-by-case basis. For example, someone profiting from talking about their unusual mental states, whether in terms of money, fame, internet points or other utilons, they are likely to be tempted to exaggerate a little.
> I am frustrated that professionals focus on fakers and outliers
Er, the people who say that DID doesn't exist in its "proper" form usually don't mention teenage girls at all - indeed the debate long predates the "system" community.
Sorry that happened. Since the topic is so close at heart for many people, it can be difficult to navigate the endogenic multiple personalities v traumagenic DID landscape gently. I don’t think Scott means poorly here, only that he has personal experience with the former and not the latter, and thus can most strongly say “I personally have witnessed this.” I still consider this a tentative show of support as he’s asserting that a mechanism exists for some type of split cognition, which is a huge huge axiom to get past for getting people the support they need, but I totally understand the negative reaction--balking at misinfo is a widely shared experience even outside the rationalist community, especially when hurtful. Hope you’re doing alright (and maybe have had chances to try out some neutral sensation meditating!)
And I would be surprised if Scott doesn't have direct experience with patients with traumagenic DID, only that he wasn't talking about that here because it didn't speak to the larger point he was making.
I am 100% sure he had patients like that, they are just not open about it, or the alter in the office is not aware of the system, which is very common. Sort of like back decades ago, when people "didn't know anyone gay", where in reality their gay acquaintances were in the closet.
Oh interesting, I was thinking more that he had patients with DID diagnoses who he knew had DID, but wasn't speaking about that group because he was trying to a make a different kind of point that didn't relate to that group of DID experiencing people.
I'm a psychotherapist and I've had patients with DID -- they knew, I knew, though sometimes not for quite a while. Probably I've had other patients where I just didn't know and maybe they did.
I'm going to frustrate you more by saying there's no reason to think "childhood trauma" causes such things. I've been linking to Greg Cochran on PTSD elsewhere in this thread:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/ptsd/
but additionally, on childhood, the belief that people get molded then is left-over Freudianism. Trivers pointed out long ago with his theory of genetic conflict that there's no reason to evolve to be so moldable via our childhood (since we as individuals have different Darwinian interests from those who can shape it), thus we should expect to evolve to be robust in the face of such events. Judith Harris' "The Nurture Assumption" is the popularization of that debunking of emphasis on childhood molding. And as she says there, the reason not to abuse a child is the same as the reason not to abuse an adult: the direct experience of it is bad.
I will agree that locking a kid in a dark room will have effects. The development of the eyes depends on exposure to light. But nobody is claiming DID results from that.
I leave you to believe what you want. No point in arguing given the difference in our experiences. Just thought I'd mention that while, yes, that 90 odd percent of a regular child's personality is genetic does not contradict that being trafficked, prostituted and abused from birth does not have a profound effect that molds the person (or a system) for the rest of their lives.
I wouldn't go so far in attributing things to genetics... but the rest appears to be "non-shared environment", or random noise.
http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2009/06/nature-nurture-and-noise.html
Re: Trivers. "It would make more evolutionary sense if X rather than Y" is by itself a very weak argument. It would make more evolutionary sense if humans had evolved to be omniscient, because omniscience would be very useful. Unfortunately, omniscience is physically impossible, so this argument fails to establish that everyone is actually omniscient.
Likewise, maybe it would be better if childhood experiences did not have a very strong effect on the rest of one's life, but that does not mean that this would be computationally possible for brain-like minds in general, or that evolution was capable of finding such a solution in practice even if it was theoretically possible.
My old https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4MpodyRwdYXEeC3jn/problems-in-evolutionary-psychology goes a bit more into the limitations of this kind of evolutionary reasoning.
Re: Harris; it's been a while since I read her book, but as I recall her argument wasn't that childhood would have no effect, it was that much of the influence conventionally attributed to parents actually comes from the peer group instead. Also, she explicitly notes that she isn't saying that extreme child abuse would have no effect:
> However, I’ve been speaking of physical punishment within the normal range— an ordinary spanking from time to time. Surely I’m not crazy enough to tell you that punishment beyond the normal range— the physical abuse of children— has no lasting psychological effects on its victims?
> No, not that crazy. For one thing, severe abuse can produce physical injury— including brain damage- with long-lasting or permanent effects. Another possible long-term consequence is post-traumatic stress disorder.
> But we are looking here at a very wide range of parental behaviors. For abuse not severe enough to produce either of these results, it is not clear to me that there are any psychological effects that children take with them when they leave home. There may be, but there is no conclusive evidence of it.
(p. 296 in my editon)
So even Harris just finds the evidence for "moderate" abuse having serious effects to be inconclusive, and it to be straightforwardly true that sufficiently extreme abuse will have extreme effects.
Yes, absolutely. Evolution isn't omnipotent.
Bones are fairly strong, but they can break.
Bones can reliably break when subject to certain amounts of force, and we know all species are subject to broken bones. In contrast, nobody knows how to reliably "break" a mind to give it DID, nor is there evidence of it occurring in other species.
If it did occur in other species, how would we know? Wouldn't that just seem like a temperamental and unpredictable animal?
It's much easier to experiment on other species of animals than humans, and many of them are known for fighting other members of their species. This is something that could be investigated, if people wanted to.
It would indeed be strange for humans to be omniscient, since no other species of animal is. But are other species of animal vulnerable to DID? What reason is there to think that it would be impossible to evolve a brain immune to DID?
My recollection is that her first book was mostly about how people were failing to take genes into account when attributing things to childhood experiences. It was a later book "No Two Alike", which attempted to explain the residual of "non-shared environment" on peer effects that could differently impact even identical twins raised together. Kevin Mitchell instead chalks that up to purely random developmental noise:
http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2009/06/nature-nurture-and-noise.html
If your cat had multiple cat personalities, how would you distinguish that from just having a moody cat?
[Possibly applies vice versa if you are a cat whose owner has DID.]
You’re right. Extreme escapism in response to trauma can happen at any point in a lifetime, not just childhood. Children are simply more likely to lack other coping skills, means of escaping a recurring traumatic situation, or access to support resources.
Scott did report older friends still having the mental flexibility to develop alternate personalities.
Thank you, this was my response. My mom had DID and didn’t know it until last summer when one of her “personalities” (for lack of a better term) attempted suicide after my parents separated. She only survived because the opiates she took were expired. She was able to go to a treatment facility and worked though her childhood trauma enough to reintegrate herself. But as the one who had to stay and care for her all summer while she suffered, the thought of teens glamorizing DID on TikTok makes me angry.
“You should believe that people experience astral projection”
I don’t believe you believe this
There's an important difference between "experiencing" something in the sense that their internal experience of the world included that thing, and "experiencing" something in the sense that it actually happened and you're accurately relaying information about the universe.
I think it's very plausible that people are experiencing astral projection in the same way you can experience flying in a dream. I think it's very implausible that anyone can e.g. read playing cards through a wall while astral projecting.
“Experience flying in a dream” is accurately relaying information about the universe if one does, indeed, fly in a dream. “Experiencing astral projection” internally is non-sensical, ie it can’t be distinguished from the claim of *actual* astral projection.
"Flying in a dream" is just a convenient shorthand for talking about a subjective experience that we're using to communicate. I've flown in a plane, and "flown" while skydiving, and dream flying feels different from either of those. But if you've done it too, then we can talk about it and you can understand what I'm saying.
It seems possible to me that there's a similar thing going on with people who feel like they've done astral projection. It probably doesn't feel like "real" astral projection (because "real" astral projection is almost certainly not a thing), but could be communicating an experience multiple people have had.
What would you imagine dreaming about astral projection is like? Is there something that could happen in a dream where you'd wake up and describe it to me as "I dreamt of astral projection"?
Of course someone can dream of astral projection, in the same way they could dream about dying. That isn’t the same as experiencing death. If someone said they experienced death (not that they dreamt of experiencing death), I wouldn’t believe them. Likewise, if someone said they experienced astral projection, which is what Scott said originally.
If someone said they experienced death, you shouldn't believe them that they are now dead. But you have no particular reason to believe they're lying to you on purpose. They very well might have a memory in their head that they're describing as "experiencing death" in an attempt to communicate with you.
If you have a strong distinction between these types of things in your head you might not tell someone you did astral projection if you daydreamed about it. But if you're trying to make accurate predictions about how someone who tells you they experienced it will behave, you have to model the way people feel about their memories as well.
“If you have a strong distinction between these types of things in your head”
They *are* different things. And so if someone says they experience astral projection (again, not as a dream), then I mistrust them
As I understand it, there is genuinely a sensoric experience of being alive. (My pet theory is this relates to imagining being other people, or imagining being somewhere else; the "I am alive" quale is more a "I am here"/"I am not there" quale.) The people who report experiencing being dead then would be actually experiencing the total absence of the being-alive quale.
Maybe, maybe not. Because it's potentially self-contradictary it's a bad example that only confuses the matter.
> Of course someone can dream of astral projection, in the same way they could dream about dying. That isn’t the same as experiencing death.
Natural language is imprecise, and descriptions of experiences even more so. When we describe experiences like "astral projection", it does not literally mean "the experience of literally leaving the body", and so that's what it would feel like to leave the body, which is what your purported analogy to dreaming of death suggests. The description actually means "the experience whose sensations and other perceptions can best be described as leaving the body".
IIRC Astral projection is the origin of imagery depicting witches flying on broomsticks, from a Catholic sect back in the 1500s that taught gender equality. Women in the sect would combine psychedelics and pleasurable application of broom handles. They often reported that they flew away during the experience and returned after. As psychedelics are still around, I find it highly likely that experiences induced by them still occur--even if modern theory does away with the spiritual interpretation.
You seem to have completely missed the point of the entire discussion here. What do you think Scott means when he says this?
I liked this piece a lot. In the top-quarter. And I may update some priors. But I am also aware that lie-detecting is not one of Scott's strongest strengths. Remember the guy who tried to scam him ("some bucks to buy the ticket home") and after that guy gave finally up (as Scott insisted to go all the way to buy that ticket instead of handing out some bucks) - Scott still wondered whether that guy's story might have been true after all. ... Sure, we all are self-deluding us to some extent, often believing our own BS. In the end: What does it matter? What are the consequences? In 2022 the number of kids who feel they are the wrong gender may really be a magnitude larger than in 2002. Bryan Caplan: https://betonit.substack.com/p/lgbt-explosion
Fine with me, but I share a F. de Boer view: Should tax-money go to new types of toilets, cover treatments, print brochures about diversity to be handed out in kindergartens (my daughter got one)? - Should media/NGOs be liable for "pushing stories"? If media reports more vividly about suicides, more people end their lives. - Winning herostratic fame is not new, Herostratus burnt that temple down 2378 years ago. At least the authorities then tried to keep him unknown. ;) Many horses bolted, most fences down. - Another take from mru: U.S.A. fact of the day by Tyler Cowen July 11, 2022 in Current Affairs Medicine: What’s new is this: Almost a quarter of Americans over the age of 18 are now medicated for one or more of these conditions. More specifically, prescriptions across three categories of mental health medications — depression, anxiety and A.D.H.D. — have all risen.
Anyways, I am fine with any jhanna. If I thought it would add to my life, I might try. I just don't.
Mother of a preschooler here (so my kid hasn't gotten brochures about diversity yet, but probably will soon). I think insofar as it is the school's job to teach kids how to interact with others, if there's more people presenting as LGBT now than previously then yes, schools should be teaching the kids something about how to interact with those people. Do you agree with this minimal take?
There are several places where you could go from here and still disapprove of the brochures:
- LGBT should not be treated as "normal," it should be treated as an aberration. (I disagree, but I can imagine the bones of an argument centered around "more LGBT is bad for society" and "normalizing LGBT will cause more people to identify as LGBT". I think this is outweighed by the benefit of improving the individual lives in question, but I also think that reasonable people can disagree on the relative magnitude of the benefits and costs here.)
- We're not *normalizing* LGBT so much as *glorifying* it. (The closest I come to personal experience here is the effort to "normalize" women in STEM, and for me it definitely felt like being a woman made it *easier* rather than harder to have a career in STEM; this feels like overshooting the original goal. In the case of women in STEM this seems largely harmless -- from observing how hiring decisions get made, the most bias I've seen was "all else being essentially equal, prefer the female candidate" -- but in other contexts structurally similar encouragement would have bigger downsides.)
- It's not the schools' place to proactively teach proper interaction with unusual people; that should be handled by other structures -- parents, church, etc. (My guess would be that with the decline in church attendance, schools are picking up some of the slack. I think it would be fine for schools to omit this and dump it on parents, but it also doesn't seem unreasonable for schools to be involved. For example, I'd be perfectly happy if along with discussing how to handle emotions, the school would also talk about how if a person wants to be called "they" then that's how you should call them, or how some kids have two mommies.)
- The brochures themselves are cringeworthy and stupid. (I haven't seen them, but my prior is that this is, in fact, true.)
Bathrooms and treatments seem potentially more expensive than brochures. On the subject of bathrooms, all the places I've worked had the same capacity for men's and women's (and varying capacities for single-occupancy), despite having wildly varying gender ratios. I've heard of an engineering outfit that did the rational thing of having more men's bathrooms; the (few) women there didn't seem to think this was proper. I have yet to see a theater do the rational thing of putting in more women's bathrooms. My guess right now is that it's hard to predictably do much better than having capacity be proportional to society-wide proportions. I also think that if the society-wide proportions change (which seems to be true for LGBT right now), then yes, you should change bathroom capacity accordingly.
Treatments are, I think, the really thorny issue, since the cost tends to get spread out across people not getting the treatment (e.g. the insurance pool). I don't have a principled position on the proper level of social support for various difficult-and/or-expensive-to-treat conditions, but I don't think the proper solution to the problem of "a group of people has the experience of great discomfort, but it's currently very expensive / totally impossible to treat" is to deny the discomfort (though the proper solution may well include denying the treatment, or refusing to subsidize it).
1. My daughter got them pre-school, in Germany, 2009. One of her educators - a lesbian - might be a reason, more likely just because it is run by the town. My new kids are in one run by the church, so the "worst" was a book with a silly story about a happy patchwork-family. - The one 'kid with a penis' (I assume) who jumps every morning in a pink princess dress does not seem to miss a back-up. - I might sound very rednecked about it, but my perspective is: Puberty is HARD for ALL kids. It sure was for me. And my elder daughter (now 18y.). When I was 16 and still a virgin, I wondered what was "wrong with me". Knowing that some boys are into boys was in no way helpful for teenage-me. Even today most of us are cis-gender/hetero - even more so among 'humans with kids'. Why do OUR feelings not seem to matter? - This is NO push for "keep a lid on it". Our society will play it out. I just ask the state to keep his fingers out. - 2. A girl in junior high school left to become the first female carpenter in my town. The only issue she had was having to be shown around on all occasions as a shining example of how progressive we all are. Like that one guy in Germany who became a mid-wife. (And whenever I see a brochure with a pic of a woman doing a job, I automatically assume that more than 70% in that profession are male.)
3. One restroom at my old university is now trans/unisex/free for all. On the wall. the paper listing the last cleanings says "Männer-WC". And obviously, it is. - One townhall offered free tampons on their ladies-CRs. Now those dispenser got installed in the men's rooms, too. In case it is visited by a guy bleeding. Many non-bleeding guys and bleeding girls consider this: d.u.m.b..
4. Schools: If they should ever be able to stop boys to bully others (without giving them hormones): GREAT. They failed at that and still fail. I doubt they are able to do much good anyway. Fine if they try not to make things actively worse. I was not taught about 2 moms/2 dads in school. And not much about 1 mom 1 dad either. Nor cooking, nor driving. And I am very fine with that. And very fine with all LGBTs, even vegans. Me boomer, ok? 5. The movement of "LGBTQQIP2SAAR+ MINUS LG" confronts the LGs with placards: "You got gay marriage. And we?" - They even canceled Philly Pride in 2021! Indeed, what do zey miss? FREE gender corrections. 6. Boris Moiseev died. Shalka.
1. Out of curiosity, would you be happier if there were more discussion of how puberty is hard for all kids? (Teenage-me, freshly moved from Russia to the US, definitely thought puberty would be less hard if we Stopped Having Earnest Teacher-Led Discussions About It.)
2. I'm (pleasantly?) surprised the male midwife got paraded as much as the female carpenter. The biggest annoyance I've had as a girl in math was being dragged to stupid girls-in-math events. I once asked my son's male preschool teacher about his experience and it didn't seem like early childhood education was quite as aggressive about celebrating its men, though he might just be more diplomatic about it than I am. In a misery-loves-company way, it's nice to know male midwives get put up on display too.
3. Why obviously? I thought undergraduates were at least 50/50 these days, so I would've expected asymmetry in bathroom capacity to get primarily used up by women. As an occasionally-bleeding girl, my model of the tampon dispensers in men's bathrooms is "now when the one in the women's bathroom inevitably runs out, I can ask a guy to fetch me one from the men's room"; I don't see it doing much harm. (Unless it's mounted in such a way that people keep bumping into it, I suppose.)
4. Remembering kids' literature that was targeted at elementary-school-aged me (right around the collapse of the Soviet Union), it definitely had family models, probably centered on "working mom + working dad" (possibly "+ stay-at-home grandma"). In the US at the time I would expect more of them to have been "stay-at-home mom + working dad." This seems like a reasonable level of cultural propaganda, and I would be totally on board with elementary school kids' books now including families with 2 moms / dads, or single parents, or divorced parents, or other nonstandard arrangements. Especially if we can avoid screaming from all corners about how Progressive this all is (yes, I know, this is not a realistic expectation).
The question of whether home economics, woodworking, and driving belong in schools is, to me, a gray area; I would've gladly traded some of my classes for woodworking, but I can't come up with a principled argument for why it should be part of a core curriculum.
5. I don't think it's surprising that an activism movement should end up splintering and infighting. This provides a reason to avoid getting involved in activism, but doesn't actually invalidate the points being made?
I have trouble understanding the issues around bathrooms : if the locale is big enough, they must have a seldom used both sexes bathroom for handicapped people. Can't the abnormal in sex/gender people use that one ?
> if there's more people presenting as LGBT now than previously then yes, schools should be teaching the kids something about how to interact with those people. Do you agree with this minimal take?
This seems weird. LGBT are presumably just people. Would you approve of schools teaching kids how to interact with Polish people, or short people, or black people? I mean, if you approve of general sensitivity classes, discussions around prejudice, social norms, etc., then sure, there's no special pleading or contradiction in that position and that at least seems like a fairly universally useful class on ethics and etiquette. Targeting specific groups just seems weirdly ideological though.
I think if I were to disagree with this position, I would say that it's reasonable to focus on areas where there's significant change happening: thus, if there's more LGBT people than before, then it's valid to focus on them specifically.
The version of this that I have any direct familiarity with is "women in STEM." I'm at least 90% on board with "we're *people* in STEM, what's the big deal," but it's true that there's at least a few things that people have to start being more aware of as more of us enter the workforce. Drawing from things I've personally run into -- I've heard more conversations about bathrooms at work than the zero I would've expected; my upcoming maternity leave is a new and interesting thing for my manager to plan around; at a previous job I was accidentally forwarded an email in which my manager referred to me as "he" (presumably because he wasn't thinking about which new hire he was talking about), which was mostly amusing but also slightly irritating.
Does any of this *need* to get addressed in kindergarten, or explicitly at all? Probably not. But, I think mild versions of it don't hurt.
I recognize that this is a much less important point than DID people and spoonies, but his third example of lots of people lying (getting Mew without an event code in Pokémon red/blue/yellow) is *also* wrong. I myself caught Mew in Blue with an emulator a few years ago. I don't remember enough details for a full set of instructions, but here's the glitch I used and the rest is elsewhere on the internet:
- Get an Abra that knows teleport
- Go to a particular trainer (I think near nugget bridge?) and get their attention (the exclamation point above their head) from several squares away
- before they finish walking up to you, hit the start button and teleport away to the Pokémon center nearest the area of grass where you can catch Ditto
- Walk into that patch of grass until you get a Ditto encounter; it will be/become a Mew and stay that way after you catch it.
I bring this up to point out that Resident Contrarian was wrong on all three "this large group of people is lying" claims; if you don't believe me, try it yourself.
Yes, this is https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew_glitch - it's quite reproducible, I've done it myself (not in an emulator).
Going by what's described there, the final step doesn't seem to match what NomalAnomaly describes? And it definitely doesn't seem that someone would be able to catch Mew based on the instructions that ResidentContrarian says they encountered.
You should believe the wiki over me; I was going off memories from 2015 or earlier. The page you linked looks right and I probably did that and forgot the second trainer battle step.
There is a theoretical way to get Mew via the a glitch. However, the number of people who actually got mew with that glitch is a rounding error in the number of people who claimed to have gotten mew via some trick or other.
Why do I say this? All the tricks shared around in forums and instructions boards back then looked nothing like what we know the mew glitch should have looked like today. And yet you had thousands of people claiming that the tricked worked perfectly for them and giving nonsensical advice to those who were claiming to have trouble with the trick.
So I'm not responding to anything in the greater post yet, but I will respond to this: the glitch you are talking about requires several very exactly timed things to happen; it's *possible* to do it on accident, but none of the instructions had anything like "get an exclamation point and then do a split-second teleport then walk to a particular piece of grass". The instructions said guy gave were in the realm of "no, mew is catchable here; just try for hours and hours"
The glitch you are talking about exists, but nobody knew about it until I think 2003, something like four or five years after the period of time I'm talking about.
This isn't me saying you are wrong that there's a Mew glitch that renders Mew Catchable, just that it didn't match these instructions, and wasn't discovered until after I could vote and had kissed a girl. It's sort of how it was always possible to do uranium fission, but you'd doubt a story that said Alexander the Great had it figured out and did it by sitting on pitchblend real hard.
Why isn't it likely that someone had figured out the glitch, but in a pre-wiki era the rumor-transferred instructions had degraded ?
P.S.: In fact I seem to remember something like this happening to me with the debug screen for Sonic 1, the combination to unlock which I had failed to replicate (IIRC it also takes a little of skill and timing, especially as a kid), and I had classified in the "probably fake" category... until I got ahold of a magazine describing the operation in detail, which made me try it again until I was successful.
(At least this is how I remember it now. Some of these memories might be inaccurate to the point of deserving being called "fake".)
So to be clear, your premise seems to be:
1. This glitch existed about five years before it was known
2. It was communicated to this particular guy and nobody else
3. This guy didn't understand any the steps
4. He still got it to work while doing the wrong steps (somehow) and
5. Thus could honestly communicate that he had caught Mew using a method unlike the known methods to cause Mew, one that verifiably didn't work, while having caught him and not lying at all
Why don't I believe something like that, and instead a much simpler explanation that makes at least some sense?
So, I went digging a bit :
(I used to play Pokémon Red on an emulator, though never got very far, and never experimented with any glitches.)
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew_glitch#Mew_glitch_without_a_long-range_Trainer
> If there is tall grass in the tile immediately in front of a Trainer's line of sight, or a Trainer is in a cave, then the 'Trainer-Fly' effect can be initiated even if that Trainer is not a long-range Trainer. This can only occur if the player is lucky enough to generate a (natural) wild encounter on the exact tile immediately in front of the Trainer. If the player then blacks out from this wild battle, they will be warped back to the Pokémon Center as normal, but the Trainer will see the player before they warp back (the "!" is visible very briefly during the blackout animation).
And : https://www.angelfire.com/bc/mewonline/mewcodes.html
> first of all, i am NOT responsible for codes not working, i doubt any of these codes work, but for all of you desprite people who will try anything ( like me ^_^ ) to catch Mew. and no, i have not tried some of these codes, so there is still hope!
Theory :
Out of the jillions of player-hours spent on the game, at least one player managed to randomly catch Mew by this method.
Then his educated (but maybe incorrect) guess of how he managed to do it + the rumor mill did its work resulting in heavily distorted "instructions" on how to do it.
Some of the people following them even managed to catch Mew by (less) chance !
Some of them just pretended they did.
Eventually players managed to pinpoint the exact conditions resulting in the guide above.
(Also, don't you think that, assuming jhana "exists", the early "jhana explorers" (I'm talking about thousands of years ago here) were perhaps in a similar conundrum, with a very tricky to replicate set of conditions ?)
Of course my theory might be wrong : mew-finding claims might have been *completely* (rather than partially) made up, and this being just a coincidence ; and also jhanist claims might be "wrong" too (whatever that means).
But you seem to be much more certain of this than I would be...
The mew thing is fast becoming the most bizarre part of this writing cycle for me. I'm not just sticking this on you - there's like six people who have done the same basic thing.
Like, yeah, there's a Mew glitch; several, in fact. No, none of them resemble the method described in any substantial way except "way someone says you can catch mew in pokemon". Yes, the guy said his method worked as describedby him, and that he had completed it just that way.
There's some incredibly small chance that this guy, the discoverer of the route 9 mew-in-grass trick, actually discovered the fly trick (which evaded millions of players actively looking for a mew exploit for 5-7 years) five or so years early, remembered every single aspect of it wrong, and completely honestly-but-mistakenly but reported he caught mew in an entirely different way than he did.
But if that's the standard, lying doesn't actually exist in any practical sense. "I will believe a 1-in-several-million coincidence happened compounded by a bunch of forgetfulness and confusion to result in a confident, certain and repeated claim rather than believe that someone I never knew might have once lied" is a strong enough commitment to not believing someone lied that it would cover pretty much anything.
There's a sense in which I'm impressed by this - I think the "I don't want lying to exist" reflex stems from an attempt to be nice in a lot of cases. But it's so far out of the zone of how I can imagine framing things mentally that it's thrown me for a loop.
You say
> Between two cities in the game, he said, there was a particular small patch of grass, seemingly exactly like the other patches of grass in which you’d normally walk to flush out animal-fighting fodder. And in that patch of grass, and no other, there was a very small chance of encountering Mew, who could then be caught.
How is this "entirely different" from the trick that I quoted ?
Because trainers never spawn nearby that specific patch of grass ??
I also don't understand why you seem to strawman me with claims much stronger than what I made ? If it wasn't clear, I *agree* with you that that guy was likely lying when he said that he managed to catch Mew like this. But for now I reject that the claim was completely baseless :
> But it was only years after that when I considered that, as time went on, multiple people joined the forum and then eventually came to claim that they too had also caught Mew using this method that didn’t work. The lie, dumb as it was, had proved contagious.
Lying about having seen a bear in the woods is not the same as lying about having seen a unicorn !
(There's also the question about the reliability of your memory for events so long ago...)
> But if that's the standard, lying doesn't actually exist in any practical sense.
That's a really weird take. Lying clearly exists because the *intent* differs from the non-lying case. In fact, intent seems like *the defining characteristic differentiating lies from mistakes*. That you would just try to lump mistakes and lies together is very strange.
> My totally made-up wild guess, which might be completely wrong, is that about 20% have some physical illness we understand perfectly well (like a tumor) that just hasn’t been detected yet, 30% have some physical illness we haven’t discovered/characterized/understood yet, 45% have some psychosomatic condition, and 5% are consciously faking for attention.
What about ensuring proper diet and exercise? Not to say that's always the issue, but I was surprised it wasn't in any of your categories.
My reaction is especially to the example here:
“If you have learned to eat salt and follow internet instructions and buy compression socks and squeeze your thighs before you stand up to not faint…and you would faint without those things, go into that appointment and tell them you faint.”
The first thing I would have thought to check for is proper nutrition (why is salt helping?) and is the person too sedentary (so the body has maladapted).
Salt is helping I think because this is orthostatic hypotension. But if this person were seeing a doctor, it would certainly make sense to ask about how they're eating and about activity levels.
I mean, I'd say "developing weird symptoms because of a lack of proper diet and exercise" either falls under "physical illness we understand perfectly well" or "physical illness we haven’t discovered/characterized/understood yet", depending on the symptoms.
Like, a textbook vitamin deficiency resulting from a bad diet would be an example of "physical illness we understand perfectly well". (I of course can't give a central example of the other category, because if I could that would imply I understood the illness and its causes)
Malnutrition is a physical illness we understand perfectly well.
"But if you read what they’re saying, it’s reasonable and honest! They’re saying 'If you used to faint all the time, and then after making a bunch of difficult lifestyles you can now mostly avoid fainting, and your doctor asks "do you have a fainting problem yes/no", answer yes!' THIS IS GOOD ADVICE."
It is good advice. As one of those kids who strongly felt a moral obligation not to "lie", and who also had some health problems, I burned myself pretty badly by being "too honest" in a way incompatible with medical box-checking. Now I'm aggressive about curating my medical information to avoid potential red herrings, and recommend the same to others unlucky enough to be medically interesting in some way. Paraphrase of an exchange I had with a geneticist:
Geneticist: "So, it looks like you do have this heritable oddity, and it has evidently caused you some discomfort. That's fibromyalgia."
Me: "No. People use 'fibromyalgia' to mean the discomfort doesn't have a known specific cause. You just found the specific cause."
Geneticist: "'Fibromyalgia' just means 'myalgia', pain, in your fibrous tissue, whatever the cause. Such pain is fairly normal with this oddity."
Me: "Since it's fairly normal with this oddity, let's stick with recording the oddity. Listing 'fibromyalgia' as a symptom seems redundant." (What I didn't say, but was definitely thinking, was "and is also a great way to torpedo my credibility as a patient".)
The geneticist, bless him, listened.
I've heard patient advocates say, no, it's not your job as a patient to decide what's a red herring and what isn't. That's the doctors' job, and, as a patient, you have a right to expect doctors to do the work of doctoring, rather than do it for them. It would be nice if medical providers had the time and other resources to respect that. But they often don't. Medical care is a scarce-enough resource for providers to need and seek reasons to dismiss patients. Excluding dismissal triggers from your chart, unless they're clearly the best explanation for what's going on, is merely prudent.
The average time to diagnosis of celiac disease is 6-10 years. I remember reading numbers like this about other conditions, but I can't remember which ones. Those statistics should humble us about people's poorly understood medical conditions and make this kind of strategic navigation of the medical system both understandable and often necessary.
For something like Ehlers-Danlos, the average time till diagnosis (if diagnosis does occur) is over a decade, and according to EURODIS, about a decade longer for women than it is for men.
"[R]are diseases in the U.S. affect about 30 million people. It takes an average of seven years before a patient is properly diagnosed. Any sort of misdiagnosis doubles this diagnostic delay. Getting a psychological diagnosis extends it 2.5 to 14 times, depending on the disease. 'Once you’ve been labeled an unreliable reporter, it’s almost impossible to get your credibility back,' Dusenbery said. 'Anything you do will just reinforce the perception and the circular logic built into psychogenic theories.'"
https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2018/11/women-more-often-misdiagnosed-because-of-gaps-in-trust-and-knowledge/#:~:text=For%20women%20with%20non,in%2C%20according%20to%20Dusenbery.
Illness may be fairly common, like rheumatoid arthritis, which affects over 3% of women, but invisible when lab results aren't dispositive. Illness may be invisible in a patient already diagnosed with mental illness, or otherwise perceived as untrustworthy. Illness may also become invisible through pseudoscience. Patients who harm their credibility by describing themselves with pseudoscience may nonetheless be genuinely ill, and not just mentally. Moreover, these patients may be acting reasonably, not because pseudoscience is true, but because they've had mainstream medical encounters so unreasonable that pseudoscience seems reasonable to them by comparison. Reasons for invisibility vary, but for patients, there's one steady rule:
The more invisible your illness, the harder you must signal that you're not malingering to avoid dismissal.
This is good stuff, thank you. (I mean, not good obviously the difficulties it's talking about).
A further complication is that the experience of chronic illness makes medical anxiety more likely and that produces it's own additional disqualifying-to-doctors dynamic even though it's just the normal result of coping with a poorly understood illness for a long time.
Having gone recently from someone dealing with a low-grade poorly understood chronic illness to being a cancer patient, I've been amazed at how much more credibility cancer patients get for having things like medical anxiety. It's very normalized -- "of course you're going to worry about every little symptom after this, that's totally understandable and we will be here to do whatever tests and scans will put you at ease."
After years of stumbling through various dismissals from doctors for my mystery post-infectious chronic symptoms, I'm now on the receiving end of an incredible amount of attention and care (and fancy expensive treatment!) over every aspect of my experience. It's weird. Also a little ironic, because likely the chronic inflammation I lived with for years contributed to getting the cancer.
Perhaps not surprising, considering where I assume most readers' thoughts went once you said "cancer" compared to "low-grade [...] chronic illness"... Best of luck !
My wife (and I) got mono back in college. At one of her doctor visits he noted she had a swollen liver. He mentioned that was the literal definition of hepatitis: inflamed or swollen liver. He then noted that in her record. That came back to haunt us later.
Ouch! I can only imagine!
It's a relief not to have to decide what I think about some propositions. Sympathies to people who need to make judgment calls due to their job or other circumstances.
I see a lot of that sort of mind-reading in politics. No, the people on the other side can't *really* be frightened or angry or disagree about the facts. They must be up to something nefarious or they just want attention.
^^^ 100%. There are definitely a lot of clout chasers out there, but there are also a lot of earnest people who get dismissed as clout chasers.
When someone proclaims himself to be a very Stable Genius, should I believe him? Believe that he believes it himself even though it’s untrue? Believe that he’s consciously lying? Or maybe incapable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood? So many possibilities - hard to say what the best answer is, really
Ooh, so much this. In politics and every other tribal or emotionally charged topic. (E.g., when your spouse doesn't want to have sex as much as you do, it's tempting to think they might be having an affair - no way do they just NOT want sex.) Politics is the mind killer, but so are other things, and bad epistemology is the main symptom.
Can someone explain the John Edwards reference? I first assumed it to be one of those Berenstein Bears things where people tend to remember the wrong spelling better than the real spelling, but when I Googled "John Edwards" the John Edwards I was thinking of was spelled "John Edwards".
John Edwards was a prominent US Democratic politician. In 2008 it was revealed that he was cheating on his wife while she was dying of cancer, and he has been persona-non-grata since.
John Edward was a television psychic from the show "Crossing Over with John Edward".
Also a Puritan preacher, and I suspect RC had him in mind too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinners_in_the_Hands_of_an_Angry_God
John Edward was a television spirit medium.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5faETIK03E
South Park also made an episode about him, where they dubbed him the biggest douche in the universe.
"Beyond that, the stories are all slightly different, but smoothing them into a single thread: the person got really into some piece of fiction, and found that one of the characters they were modeling really carefully was now “active” in some sense where could give them advice."
OK, so do we now all update our priors to believe that not only was Julian Jaynes correct, but his theory of how (at least some) minds work remains valid for (at least some of) modern man?
I'm not being sarcastic; that genuinely seems like the appropriate response to Scott's claims.
Two other situations I'd like to see reviewed are food issues (eg gluten-intolerant) and trans-adjacent behavior. Both of them come across as mainly attention seeking from exactly the sort of people who have always sought attention (but, sadly, these days tattoos, or shacking up with the same sex or different race, just don't generate the attention they used to...), and I don't know the extent to which the loudness and unpleasantness of the publicity hounds represents almost all of the "real" community vs almost none of the "real" community
The annoyance at people who claim gluten intolerance has always kind of fascinated me. Though admittedly, I'm not on social media and so don't experience any kind of annoying barrage in my daily life. No doubt social media is filled up with attention-seekers, since that's what it rewards.
As someone who has been gluten free for almost 20 years as a result of sequelae from two bad gut infections and subsequent auto-immunity, my model of gluten intolerance ranges from verified celiac to my situation to the huge numbers of people with IBS symptoms. My GI doc explained way back when I was trying to figure my situation out, "most people with chronic diarrhea experience some improvement by removing gluten from their diet."
If you just take the huge numbers of people who have IBS -- which is hugely common among people with generalized anxiety (which itself is hugely common) -- it seems to me a not surprising adaptation people would make that may not have existed as widely until celiac disease was a more understood thing and gluten free foods were more readily available. When I began eating GF a million years ago, the options were really tiny and now they're huge, so if eating GF held out any hope to improve your gut pain/diarrhea/etc, wouldn't you try it?
I actually think this is an excellent analogy for the two viewpoints. I fully believe that gluten has been a huge a problem for you and many other people. As a bartender, I have also witnessed plenty of people who are ‘gluten free’ and order burger with no bun, then wash it down with a beer.
Both types exist in fair numbers. I think this argument is mostly about which end you approach it from and where you set the norm/bias
“But wheat is a treat!”
I honestly had no idea so many people felt so strongly against gluten intolerance until I read this thread, and I don’t comprehend it at all. If many people really were faking or exaggerating intolerance, the main effect seems to be creating a market that better services folks with a severe gluten allergy and a few folks here and there lowering their diabetes risk, so what’s the problem???
Well it’s the dude who is perfectly fine and reports no particular problem and drinks 3 beers away for decades. Then he feels sick for a couple weeks and suddenly “I am intolerant and cannot have any gluten”. “Really? What the fuck was going on the past two decades?”
Now people aren’t always upfront about their health issues, and they also do sometimes have weird body changes. But you can see where it would create questions.
I had similar questions about a sister who suddenly came down with 20 allergies.
One time she had a very bad reaction to a peach, and she goes in and gets told she is allergic to tomatos (ate them daily), carrots (ate very regularly), peanut butter (ditto).
So she stops the peaches and all that other stuff for years, and insist that if she eats like a baby carrot she feels kind of weird.
Except you know when I eat peanut butter my throat and mouth sometimes get a bit scratchy/itchy. And, I don’t let that stop me and it probably keeps me tolerant of peanut butter.
Meanwhile my sister has ditched a dozen foods they used to love and made her life much more annoying over some little numbers on a test and one bad reaction to a peach. Plus she gets to be special!
I had a family member do something like that, they were eating something cooked and asking if meat had been cooked in the same vessel (the deep fat fryer).
Upon getting a "yes", they made a big production out of spitting out the half-chewed food and proclaiming that they would have terrible intestinal trouble if they ate it. My uncharitable mental but not verbally expressed reaction was "I remember all the years you ate meat and animal products with no problem, and I bet if I had said 'no' you would have eaten that with no problems afterwards".
It is true people can develop allergies and intolerances in later life. But it's also true that I've seen people eat stuff with no problems, and only if another time they found out that it was on their no-no list, then they suddenly got the reaction.
Maybe stupid question, but from this I am assuming that "drinking too much beer" is very unlikely to result in gluten intolerance ? (But aren't there other allergies that trigger once some threshold of (ab)use is crossed ??)
IDK allergies are a fucking mystery to me.
I for instance “became” allergic to dust/cats at 19 when I spent a huge amount of time cleaning a very dusty/cat hair filled room for a girlfriend as a birthday present. So that seems like some “point” trigger. Except my mom and sister are also allergic to cats, and I was always a “sneezy” guy, so maybe not.
Then I know people who suddenly started to be allergic after like eating a peach, and then it is like “you are super allergic to peaches”. But what about the first 600 peaches they ate?
And then sometimes the “therapy” is total avoidance, and sometimes the therapy is “slow acclimation”.
I think the annoyance at people who claim gluten intolerance comes from a combination of things:
(1) Eliminating gluten is also a good way to reduce calorie intake, since by default it will cause you to eat a lot less carbs, and some people claim gluten intolerance to make this more socially acceptable or avoid talking about their weight. This will annoy the sort of people who are annoyed with all lies, as well as the sort of people who feel like this diminishes the ability of people with actual gluten intolerance to be taken seriously. (This is in many ways analogous to people who claim to be allergic to a food that they actually just don't like the taste of.)
(2) The popularity of gluten-free diets has led to a prevalence of gluten-free foods. This is okay on its own, but sometimes gluten-free substitutes for normally-glutinous foods will be the only options available. This is especially true for vegans - a lot of the time there is the omnivore option and then the "vegan and gluten-free option". Gluten-free substitutes for normally-glutinous foods are usually not very good. As a vegan I would prefer e.g. baked goods to be available that are vegan but not gluten free, and if I'm in a blaming sort of mood I could blame everyone who made gluten-free diets popular.
(3) And yes, the usual BS where people are irrationally annoyed with anyone who talks about having a health problem, which we see in these comments also being directed at spoonies and people with DID and so on. (I could make some attempt to unpack why people do this but it probably wouldn't say anything that hasn't been said many times over elsewhere in this comment section.)
As someone with celiac disease who is not vegan, I prefer my desserts to be gluten-free but not vegan, haha.
For me, the annoyance came from the fact that the claims about Gluten started out from a very untrustworthy source and were generalized to all of humanity. Then a lot of us got lectured by people we knew about how gluten was poison, and people who didn't eat it were better than us.
So it combined the worst traits of veganism, 'organic' produce, and raw food diets. That a subset of the population have a real metabolic problem with gluten is an entirely separate phenomenon.
Most trans people are not attention seeking and actually get the best symptom responses when others don’t notice they are trans and instead address them the same as any other person that shares their gender, (typically this is late into the transition period, if achieved).
The visibility has overall been regarded by the community as important for expanding the spaces in which trans people are accepted, since there was a very long period of time that trans folks across the entire country had to relocate to get treatment access and avoid violence-and those that couldn’t had a Terrifying mortality rate.
Once such location that was popular historically for relocating was Minnesota. Health officials in the state are finding they have to tackle the challenge of geriatric care for many aging trans folks with basically no existing medical literature for what complications may arise. (How many attention seeking geriatric trans folks have you met?)
I discuss stats in another post, the efficacy rates are quite reassuring. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-resident-contrarian-on-unfalsifiable/comment/10387969?r=1nw0k2&utm_medium=ios
"Most trans people are not attention seeking and actually get the best symptom responses when others don’t notice they are trans and instead address them the same as any other person that shares their gender..."
That is the attention that they crave.
Agree. Why do they need validation as the “other”? Why can’t you choose to be neither? Or both? As someone else mentioned, trans folks reinforce the binary. Trans people imo embrace the gender binary while rejecting the biological binary. The only problem is that picking the mental binary over the physical is that you need surgery and become dependent on medical intervention.
Very common misconception. Many nonbinary people have severe health complications from dysphoria and hence have sought or plan to seek medical intervention to alleviate them through transitional therapy, thus being “trans”. Naturally, no one is immune to cognitive bias so there are binary trans folks that spread harmful opinions about other LGBT people. For the most part though, their transition is exclusively for their own symptom alleviation & self expression, and not to be taken as reflective of how they believe others should act/dress/etc. I find it highly likely you yourself could point at some subset of clothing or presentation you are uncomfortable personally wearing but not with it existing.
You didn’t actually respond to my point. Why do you have to become the other in order to alleviate discomfort? Isn’t doing so reinforcing a binary view of gender? Maybe doing away with the binary view would also relieve discomfort?
Gender expression isn't binary but it is bimodal, and if that should be changed I don't see why we should make people experiencing gender dysphoria especially responsible for changing it. They have enough things to deal with already.
My experience with many many many many many trans people is that almost all of them have tried that, the ones who it worked for become nonbinary, and the majority it doesn't work for.
Pardon? If walking through a grocery store being addressed normally without others paying attention to your presentation & leaving you alone is “craving attention”, then my goodness, I am a FIEND for attention. YOU are a fiend for attention. We live among a sea of fiends, nearly choking on the salty air with how thick it is. Our only hope is the small handful of angels going to the grocery store with the intent of having a panic attack mid-bread aisle, as their intentions are pure and attention free.
If you prefer to engage in logical debate instead of prose, please provide some type of structure to your statements instead of a single “yes, wrong”. That’s irrational and hurtful to very valuable members of our community.
I don't think the problem is with the trans people who just want to go to the grocery store. Maybe I see someone and mentally go "that's a guy", but if they want to be called "she/her", okay, no problem to be polite in public.
The problem is those loud-mouth activists demanding that I not alone say "she/her" but *believe* she/her and that this is a real woman just like a cis woman and if there is any error or misunderstanding, this is not a genuine mistake, this is transphobia which means murder of real trans people.
Maybe "Susie" doesn't pass very well, but if 'she' is not making a big fuss about it, why should I? But if "Susie" loudly goes around demanding everyone acknowledge she is a real woman and if you don't mentally believe it then just saying it is the same thing as transphobia, that's a different matter.
Coeliac disease is a real condition and is more prevalent in certain populations (e.g. the Irish). So it's possibly that someone could have ancestry that did suffer from gluten-intolerance and so is more prone to it, but unfortunately the way it went public and popular did sound more like a bunch of hypochondriacs or people surfing the latest fads.
So I think a lot of people claimed to be gluten-intolerant, and maybe even believed they were because "oh if I eat a lot of this, I get indigestion". And a lot of companies hopped aboard the bandwagon advertising that their products were gluten-free, even for products that would never have contained anything with gluten anyway ever in their manufacture, just to avail of this fad.
[This is a more general response to the dynamic you're describing re: celiac and how it relates to the overall theme of this wider conversation -- not a pointed response to anything you've said here]
I am with you that companies create and fuel fads to make money. The attention economy amplifies this by rewarding people trying to stand out and make money off of their health status or identity. How can we take care of ourselves amid the noise of capitalism and the attention economy? I don't think the answer is in getting pulled into the outrage drama of it, though certainly there are understandable reasons to feel angry about how hard it is to find meaningful space free from the contortions of capitalism and the attention economy.
Woven through this for me is also the idea that we often think we understand more about other people than we do -- like remembering that it can take 10 years for a person to get accurately diagnosed with celiac disease, and that's the case for many other illnesses that people call fake or malingering.
At the same time, why do we really care how other people eat, what stories feel real to them about why they eat the way they do? Every person who eats vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, paleo, low carb, or any other set of dietary preferences has a story about why they eat the way they do. Do we need to have opinions about all of these stories?
Anyone who has experienced long-term gut problems is likely to develop fears and strong preferences around food as a normal response to lack of treatment for their gut problem. Nearly all of us have been raised with some slightly sick or twisted relationship to food ("eat all your food regardless of how full you are or you can't leave the table" and on and on). It feels to me like we could use some compassion for however people figure out how to nourish themselves in the face of of consumer marketing, body image pressure, parental voices, financial issues, moral panics, and a wide range of poorly understood health conditions that impact the gut.
A central theme running through this wider conversation is about tolerating difference -- or at least not ascribing malingering lying liars to people who claim to be having different experiences from us, whether that's gluten intolerance, jhana states, color blindness, lucid dreaming, or being trans. There's also a thread of "if you don't dismiss different people as lying fakers the way I do, that's because you're a pathetic sap who can't read social cues." It seems to me to be a really exhausting way to go through the world feeling so caught up in other people's choices that we take repeated offense at them or imagine that we know enough to judge them.
I guess more generally I come down on the side of not wanting to spend a lot of energy being annoyed at humans behaving like how humans have behaved forever, and to find paths to mutual understanding wherever possible. Starting with a high prior that people we don't understand are lying fakers feels like isn't going to help me that way. Largely it feels like the age-old threat response -- we are wired to feel threatened by difference. The question for me is do we want feed that default limbic response or do we try to balance it with other good qualities that come from other parts of our mind like love, compassion, mutual understanding, and genuine curiosity?
How much are we just giving into our most primitive fear reactions with all our knee-jerk reactivity to others' ways of being and how much are we trying to bring other resources on board? It seems like a question hypothetically relevant to rational-identifying communities. It's not just about dynamics between groups online either; this stuff plays out within marriages, between parents and kids, and inside of every significant relationship we have.
When I first read about the McCullough effect, which causes afterimage-like changes in color perception that far outlast actual afterimages and nobody knows why, I decided to try it and see for myself. I did a marathon training session, staring at my current grids for a full twenty minutes, and then after that I spent *months* experiencing this basically-harmless hallucinatory color distortion in the world around me.
Yes, sometimes people's experience is different from yours in bizarre ways not yet fully explained. That one was even so weird I sometimes second guess my own memories, and am tempted to try again just to see how real it is - but I also recall finding it pretty annoying, so I don't do that, and I am going to recommend against you doing so either.
"I’m just saying I think this is usually a bad gamble."
I think at least PART of the difference lies in that claim that it's a BAD gamble.
One can believe that all of the proffered syndromes (spoonie, trans-adjacent, gluten-intolerant, multiple personalities, jhanas, etc) exist while also believing that most of the people who claim them are attention-seeking.
Which side of this statement you weight as more important depends on your goals. For someone trying to understand the human mind (as a healer, as a researcher, whatever) the fact that any such cases exist is fascinating and worth understanding. Whereas for someone simply trying to live in the world (and irritated by the endless streams of nonsense encountered from every direction) the fact that most such cases are attention-seeking and worth dismissing/ignoring may well be the more salient issue.
“Trans-adjacent” isn’t a syndrome. Gender dysphoria, however, is a disorder and has already been documented to be related to brain development mapping not following the normative pattern for a given sex, with some heritability risk factors and severe mental and physical health consequences if left untreated. Fortunately, treatment has a really great prognosis of approximately 97% of patients recovering from the worst symptoms via transitional therapy, and 99.6% seeing general improvement. Transgender is more of an umbrella term that includes people that are seeking or have received treatment for gender dysphoria. With that high of a symptom improvement rate, I find it odd that rationalist folks here are repeatedly referencing it as an example of unverifiable or unlikely illness. The statistics are clear, especially when compared to very common surgeries like wisdom tooth removal that have approximately a 99.0% success rate, LOWER efficacy than transitional therapy.
If ∃(x∋T) for which x=¬d, then ∀(x∋T) x=¬d ???
I have no strong opinions on this issue EXCEPT:
- your set of claims essentially boil down to their being a "female" mind that is different from the "male" mind, and gender dysphoria is the condition of a mind in the opposite body from usual.
- OK, fine, except that the feminists have spent 50+ years making precisely the opposite claim, that there are no differences between the male and the female mind
This is part of a larger pattern whereby the feminists (and probably also the anti-racists) want to claim a massively plastic blank-slate mind, almost entirely formed by "culture" whereas the gays and the trans-folk want to claim a "created at birth and mostly non-amenable to change" mind.
I pretty much don't care about which of these positions is correct. I do VERY MUCH care that I am told I have to believe both of them, and constantly have to twist my thinking to match either one depending on the issue that is being argued.
If someone demands that I hold two contradictory views, my natural inclination is to walk away from the discussion as one that is simply not based on rationality or interest in truth.
As to the specifics of what you are arguing (which aren't at all clear to me. What does "97% of patients recovering from the worst symptoms via transitional therapy" mean? We took 100 people who thought they had an opposite-gender mind, we gave them "transitional therapy", and now 97 are happy living as the opposite gender? The obvious question of course is comparisons with the past and other countries [how many of those people in the past came to be perfectly happy in their "natural" bodies and "lifestyle roles" in their twenties or thirties? how much more prevalent is the condition today than fifty or one hundred years ago?] along with cohort studies [how did that happiness evolve over time? how many people felt they made a mistake?]) but there's no point in even going down that road until one can establish that a discussion is being held in good faith.
I've given my reasons for why my default assumption for certain positions is that they are not being argued in good faith.
You are welcome to rebut, for example by agreeing that the feminist position is what it is, but you feel it to be wildly incorrect, and that the fact that so much of social science has been willing to accept it uncritically does, of course, mean that we are justified in being somewhat skeptical of the claims and methods of social science even in other areas (like trans).
I couldn't care less about the politics or morality of these issues. What I care about is the epistemology that these issues are forcing on public discussion.
There is a pretty big middle ground between "massively plastic blank-slate mind" and "created at birth and mostly non-amenable to change" and it is disingenuous to claim otherwise.
Well sure but the point is people don’t stake out that ground. They are almost always claiming one of the extremes depending on what their political goals are.
This is a more fair criticism, I think. An honest start would be recognizing that some aspects really are "baked in", and some aspects really are environmental, and the way in which they interact isn't always obvious or within our control.
Someone clearly wasn't paying attention in the 2000s...
Conceding this removes the politico-legal argument that differential outcomes is IPSO-FACTO proof of discrimination. Why exactly was Larry Summers drummed out of Harvard? Uhh, for making this exact argument...
Recognizing there is a middle ground between two wild extremes doesn't imply anything about what the middle ground looks like. Either make or link the counterargument yourself, vaguely referencing events as if they were common knowledge is no help to anyone.
Thank you for articulating your issue with contradiction; it’s been so many years since I started studying the topic, I forgot that was basically where my understanding started.
The brain mapping refers to components such as literal nerve mappings, motor skills for genitalia, physical arousal responses/hormone handling, and heightened recognition of potential partners---So, to keep it PG, a trans man may have the software installed for booting up a device that adds additional electrical current down south, but instead a device that pumps engine oil and turns a couple gears on a clamp receives the signal. The gear device doesn’t come with an error handler, so it tries to run according to the instructions it receives and sends back a completely garbled packet with results. The software DOES have error handling, so when it receives the garbled packet, it proceeds to blare to the rest of the brain that an error occurred. The error doesn’t pause the software, however, and more signals for electric current are sent to get that dang piston-i-mean-gear going, but errors keep coming back--- eventually resulting in the entire brain panicking, “something is wrong”.
If you’ve ever been stung in the face by a jellyfish, the error signals in the piston handler- the gender dysphoria- is even more uncomfortable than that, and a little less uncomfortable than a half-foot second degree burn. Imagine this amount of discomfort occurs every single time you try to have sex or look in the mirror (those evolutionary partner-recognition mappings kick in to try to give your brain a rough idea of who will give you the best offspring and 4/5 times this mapping results in attraction to the opposite sex-WAIT THAT’S THE OPPOSITE SEX IN THE MIRROR, FUNCTION MISSING ERROR ERROR ERROR ).
Basically, none of the mappings being referred to here are the ones used to work hard at jobs, learn academia, etc. so I would conclude there is no contradiction between transgender health studies and gender anti-discrimination policies (Some researchers try to make arguments regarding how different genders handle skills like spacial reasoning, but this has never been shown to have any correlation with dysphoria and a whole lot of correlation with historical access to education, so I have my doubts.)
Regarding the data, living in a state of unpredictable severe discomfort is so unbearable that gender dysphoria causes suicidal ideation or attempts at an estimated 60-70% rate, jumping up to around 80% in the period right before treatment (the uh. data isn’t entirely clear here as there is bias in subjects not surviving to be surveyed, nor is it known how many folks past the 60-80% would later develop these symptoms without intervention.) Transitional therapy gets this value all the way down to 3%, or a 97% effectiveness at eliminating the worst possible symptom of dysphoria. Of folks that begin transitional therapy 99.6% reported positive results and continue transitioning (up to the point of being surveyed, theoretically indefinitely as there are currently geriatric trans people in the US, though more data is desperately needed here). Regarding historical and generational transgender rates, it is pretty clear that in the past 50 years, there has been the most growth in the number of people seeking treatment in regions that expanded treatment availability (with some states seeing much earlier growth spikes). A lot of theories are getting thrown around about this, but I am still sitting comfortably on the fence, waiting for more data. Does expanded access of limb reattachment post-traumatic accident in the US mean traumatic de-limbing accidents don’t happen elsewhere? I sure hope that’s not what the data shows, or I will start having nightmares about Amazon warehouses.
"heightened recognition of potential partners"
Except where lesbians are being told if they don't want to have sex with a person with a penis, they are being transphobic because a feminine penis is not at all the same thing as a penis on a male person.
I would agree with John's physical biology-based readings around transgender issues, if the mechanism of activism wasn't out there online contradicting every word he says.
This is a nice clear articulation of a set of reasonable positions.
The one thing I think you leave out (as a scientific data point, not that I care as a policy point) is the extent to which this "solves itself". We all know that teenagers go through a variety of weird experiences as they attempt to "define and find themselves" and it's not clear to me that the behavior you describe is different in kind from every other teenage trauma, whether it's terror at talking to the opposite sex/lack of success in such an exercise (also the source of plenty of suicides and near suicides), sexual experimentation ("lesbian in college"), choosing a despised outgroup (becoming a goth) etc etc.
These are all painful experiences, but mostly what they show is that changing from a kid to an adult is horrible for most of us, and yet it happens and by 30 we have mostly made peace with adult life. What you have not provided data for is the extent to which teen gender dysphoria is essentially one particular manifestation of unease at this transition, an unease that disappears with age, as opposed to the deeper neuro-physiological arguments you give.
No-one is denying that the arguments you give are present in SOME people; what is being denied is that those same circumstances are just as true even as the number of people claiming (and being treated for) the condition skyrockets. (To put it differently, the psychiatrists claim that the situation occurs is around .01% male (1 in 10,000) and .002% female (2 in 100,000) and yet SELF-REPORTED prevalence is around 1%, so 100x higher! It's hard not to look at that discrepancy and conclude that very little of what you are discussing is relevant to the points I am raising.)
Beyond that, your model fails in other ways. For example, as I understand it, transvestitism is substantially more common than the sort of gender dysphoria you describe, yet it presents in a very different way. Few transvestites (as far as I know) consider the issue one of life or death; for example Eddie Izzard doesn't seem to see life in anything like the terms you describe.
Ultimately what I see in your explanation is the same sort of thing as books about the obesity epidemic that spend half their pages talking about familial hypercholesterolemia or Prader-Willi. Yes these are real diseases, yes understanding them may ultimately help us with mass obesity or its side effects. But they has fsckall to do with what most people are worried about as "the obesity epidemic".
Ah, I considered this a thread spinning off from the clarification between "trans-adjacent" and gender dysphoria, answering specific questions about dysphoria. This is NOT a model for the whole umbrella of transgender, gender-nonconforming, & queer people. This includes such a wide variety of folks that I believe trying to characterize singularly would be error-fraught, and my knowledge & experience is insufficient to account for this entire grouping, so I would hesitate to claim "there is no subgroup with higher correlation with attention-seeking/histrionic disorders than the population as a whole", though I can at least confidently claim "there exist multiple subgroups that do not have higher correlation with attention-seeking/histrionic disorders than the population as a whole". I should also note here that I implied but never clarified that I consider seeking needed medical attention to not be a type of "attention seeking", so this includes subgroups that need medical attention. (This was the basis for clarifying between disordered and non-disordered!)
Transvestism is a relatively old term that, to my knowledge, included a non-descript variety of crossdressing, nonbinary expression, trans expression, etc, so I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the number of (X people + dysphoric people) > dysphoric people. The math checks out there.
As stated above, my stance on population growth is very neutral, and I'd prefer to see expanded research before making any concrete judgement calls, though of course I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the expanded accessibility to GNC/queer/trans spaces and trans healthcare outpacing the growth in literature & healthcare training (many trans people have to train their healthcare providers) results in a relative growth rate of inaccurate self-reporting, but as we don't have any numbers for past rates of inaccurate self-reporting, I don't really see any way to determine if this was some number larger than the subgroup value of 0.4% of people that didn't respond positively to treatment for dysphoria, and I don't expect that value to grow by a whole magnitude or anything, so it will stay above the efficacy of (again) wisdom tooth removal. (That would disobey my admittedly-bad understanding of symmetric prediction distribution error.)
For other subgroups that the issue is not life-and-death & NO medical care is being sought, I am not particularly worried about inaccuracy for them. Exploration is fine. :) (This is pure, 100% consequentialist talking here.)
Again going back to your question about dysphoria specifically, the extent to which it can go away without treatment is not currently clear. Early research based on DSM3/4 included no way to distinguish between dysphoric and non-dysphoric gender non-conforming people, and there is a lot of very personal and charged debate going on about it right now. All I can say here is that dysphoria is known to show up as early as 4, and suicidal ideation & attempts are prevalent as early as 10, so I am hesitant to simply sit and hope a patient survives until they are 30 (using the number you provided) when treatment has a 97% efficacy for this symptom (I should note here that the other 3% is relatively consistent with the overall population rate, so it's not unlikely there is comorbidity in these cases). Not only does the math not pan out there, but even if we somehow had an alternate method to guarantee survival, (again using the arbitrary value you provided) if 26 years of suffering can be alleviated, I am all for it.
If you come up with other legitimate questions, I am willing to provide info & models, but I am very exhausted from the topic right now, so will be back Tuesday or so. Have a good weekend.
Because now the new orthodoxy is "you do not have to experience dysphoria to be trans" and that immediately extends the shade of the umbrella to a whole lot more people.
All the brain-mapping etc. is now considered medical gatekeeping. How dare you ask me to undergo questioning from some doctor if I want a prescription for hormones!
As for normative patterns, what even are those? Gender is a social construct, sexuality is a spectrum, and biology is not binary. So how can there be a 'normative' pattern for what is a 'male' brain versus what is a 'female' brain?
Even skeletons can be trans!
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2011/04/06/5000-year-old-transgender-skeleton-discovered/
I just wanted to say that I really appreciated this post - and Resident Contrarian's.
I tend to approach things like RC - politely skeptical. Which is often a very useful and accurate starting point.
Unfortunately, I also a fair amount of Freddie in me - combative, dunking on people, righteous indignation, etc...
One of my favorite things about reading Scott is that it makes me a better person. He makes me kinder, more thoughtful, more willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. Even if he was wrong about a lot of stuff (which I don't think he is), his writing would have tremendous value for that alone. He rubs off on people, and that's what keeps me coming back.
This discussion seems to hit a lot of tender spots for people, but I think a lot of this is just coming at the problem from opposite ends. There are - undeniably - a lot of people online who say and do things for clout and attention. Particularly young people, particularly on social media. I think RC is correct to bring skepticism to the table.
To Scott's point, I also think that a lot of us are more or less normal, spending our time around more or less normal people. It is extremely helpful to be reminded that there are *lots* of people out there who are not. Many of whom we don't interact with because they fall through the cracks - and many others who we interact with all the time and aren't aware that things are different for them.
Lastly, there are a whole bunch of people who are like me in college. I went through several years where I was intensely depressed and had suicidal ideation. For a while, I was convinced that I had bipolar or something similar.
I did not. I was young and depressed. I never took meds, never seriously did therapy - I just got older. So now I am occasionally depressed, but it is pretty manageable and not a big deal.
From RC's perspective, I would be someone who mistaken believed I had a mental illness - and talked myself into some of the symptoms - because I read too much stuff online. And that would be correct.
From Scott's perspective, I was someone who was legitimately in pain and casting around for something to explain it. That is also correct.
I think, given the heated emotions in this thread, we should try really hard not to talk past each other.
This is a great comment that puts this whole thing into perspective. Thanks to you, to Scott, and to Resident Contrarian. I am taking things to think about from both these perspectives.
Re multiple personalities: I don't think I have any unusual amount of different personalities running around in my head but I can certainly make educated guesses about what kind of advice people I know would give. Having read this I have determined that I will now start receiving simulated relationship advice from an old friend who used to give good relationship advice.
An interesting article about techniques in this vein: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X79Rc5cA5mSWBexnd/shoulder-advisors-101
As someone who absolutely does *not* experience interactions with simulated others in this way (it takes significant applied effort for me to even simulate a concrete scenario e.g. “simulate them reacting to me saying a certain thing to them”), I found it interesting to see a whole post (and many comments) of people working out the variations in experience between them in this domain.
Thanks for the link, that's super interesting! I'm sure I had heard about this idea in the past but I've never seen a detailed explanation like this.
When I was a child I was very good at noticing an adult being pervy with me. Maybe I was imagining it, but I was certain. And in many occasions their actions after my pervdar went off confirmed it: a random adult man asking me to go to lunch, or someone at the mall asking me to follow them into the bathroom.
I can often tell a man’s sexual orientation from a static picture, and almost always from a brief interaction. My father came out when I was 14, and I can’t remember thinking he was gay, but I became acutely aware since.
I would say I’m top 90% reading people. I might not have the technical lenguaje to describe someone’s personality, but I can feel who they are in the same way I can feel the answer to an integral is correct. It’s a special type of arousal when you simply know something just is.
I believe narcissists really do believe in the merits of the things they say and the actions they take, but I still feel repulsion and an urge to run away when I’m in front of someone with strong narcissist vibes.
I’m repulsed by the kind of people that would love make a living from videos that teach others how to get rich, even if they never accomplished the feat themselves. I don’t trust people that are trying to sell me something, especially when it involves money, but also ideas.
I can believe most people either experience or believe they experience what they claim. And yet, some of these claims, like lucid dreaming or hyper-phantasia, seem harmless, and others like being a spiritual healer or being aroused by children, seem really dangerous and cause me aversion.
I can’t speak for entire groups of people and their beliefs, but anecdotally there are certain topics that attract people that come off as intentionally deceptive.
90th percentile. Thanks!
> there are certain topics that attract people that come off as intentionally deceptive.
Yes, and ironically, "I would say I’m top 90% reading people" is definitely one of them :P
To me it comes across as unintentionally deceptive. It's well known that 90% of drivers think they're above average. It wouldn't surprise me if 50% of people genuinely think they're in the top 90% at reading people.
90% of drivers can be above average, but not above the median.
Yeh in countries where drivers are given points for bad driving (getting an automatic ban for bad driving after a certain points tally is reached), the average is non zero and most drivers are zero.
That said I assume people intuitively mean median. I could write a Substack on why cars will never self drive.
If you offered a hundred dollars to anyone reporting a subjective experience of jhana, what do you think your proportion of false reports would look like? The reason I personally default to skeptical is that the incentives as it is skew heavily towards lying.
The costs of lying is incredibly cheap at times. Nobody can call you out on an unfalsifiable internal experience. This extends to other things that are burdensome difficult to falsify (e.g. Canadian girlfriend, you haven't met her, "As a lawyer..." on the Internet, etc.). It doesn't even have to be difficult to justify with yourself: it's a completely harmless lie, you're just trying to fit in, your intentions are good. Or maybe you aren't lying, you're just exaggerating your symptoms, you do have some minor back aches so it's fine to describe it as a chronic back pain. Or, you could have heard about something like that once and created a false memory of it because your experience sounds tangentially similar to what was described.
And the rewards? Social acceptance for buying into the group delusion. Claiming to regularly hear voices from God would be celebrated among a great many communities, the same applies in communities that glorify mental illness. Or purely bragging rights for having a rare experience, of speaking from a position of authority, or on your own prowess (your faith in God, your ability to hold your alcohol, how brave you are, how widely read you are...). Or just sympathy points and concessions, like getting a free comfortable chair for your back aches. When the costs are zero, plenty of folks would make a false report for even marginal social benefit. I used an analogy of getting a hundred dollars at the start, but plenty of folks do regularly spend that much money and more for nothing but temporary status gains!
With these kind of reports, you never get the kind of claims that are easily falsifiable, and when something becomes more falsifiable the incidences of reports will drop. Reported ghost sightings are way down after cellphones. Religions in general have trended towards more unfalsifiable claims as our ability to falsify them has improved and you hardly get reported miracles these days.
This doesn't mean that everyone is lying, but the more incentives line up to lie, the more you would expect lies. To counteract this, skepticism, as well as imposing actual social costs when the lies are finally exposed, is necessary to disincentize lying. Defaulting to "everyone's experience is valid" just incentives more lying.
Yeah, good points. Though, let's not mix up what's a good norm to have and what's a good guess.
For all that Scott says "I’m not trying to set up a social norm here" the post is very much about the norm, yes?
The tl;dr is, if you have a norm of being uncritical towards unfalsifiable claims, you're just going to incentivize all the liars when there's any benefit to lying, no matter how minor. I think RC roughly makes the same point as well.
And who would be most hurt by this lying? Those who had been truthfully reporting their experiences in the first place! If you uncritically accept those claims, you're only hurting the very people who do truly suffer from those experiences by equating their claims to that of the liars.
Those folks who genuinely have a glandular problem and can't really lose weight, who's going to believe them now after everyone's claiming their obesity is due to [made up condition]? This is why I'm very sympathetic to Freddie.
Resources to solve problems are limited. Healthcare is limited. Even sympathy is a limited resource, there's only so much you can care about before you go mad.
Other victims are those who would uncritically buy the claims. "I had depression and this one wierd trick solved my problems, join my cult/buy more book to learn more" has got to be one of the older scams.
Who is offering the money in this scenario?
The claim is equivalence. Plenty of people value social status more than a hundred dollars, and will easily agree to trade a hundred dollars for temporary social gratification (buying a round of drinks, pranks, fashionable products, etc.)
I can accept that in general, but who gets status from a comment on a Substack using an anonymous handle? Can’t even get karma.
Here, status is the feeling of sounding important and being seen as important. It's the entire reason why online anonymous communities work, because humans like to chase this feeling even if it doesn't benefit them the slightest.
More specifically though I don't think substack commenter are lying. Possibly mistaken or misattributing their internal experiences, but probably not lying for benefit. I'd imagine more than a few gurus in history fake-reported to achieve jhana for substantial social benefit though, just like any other charlatans.
I think it’s pretty likely that a few of the jhana claimers got more subscribers to their blogs from this. Which can eventually translate into money
Agree, and well put
Just like one shouldn't underestimate the possibility that people have experiences that one can't easily imagine, one shouldn't underestimate the possibility that people are more comfortable lying than one is, both to themselves or to others. An half lies too like what a good actor may experience when playing a part, a believer of whatever, which could be real experiences in a literal sense but a lie for all practical purposes, since if reality pushes hard enough their "fake" experiences vanish, like if a fire broke out on set, or if the believer is forced to bet on a prediction. Training data set for this view is also quite big.
Also, this seems to be a debate that touches sensitivities. Scott is sensitive to people disregarding the reality of the experience, and others are sensitive to the system taking the "fakers" seriously to the detriment of those who make better use of it. Maybe a clearer distinction should be made between those who aren't really experiencing the thing, those who are but their experiences would go away if everyone including themselves stopped believing they had "the thing", and those whose experiences remain to some degree regardless of anyone's beliefs of "the thing".
Thank you for this post. I was saving yes! Yes! In my mind for most of the time I was reading it. ( except when I really had to concentrate)
My acquaintance Jake ( who lives in a basement apartment located in my brain) was nodding approvingly. “Quite right” he mumbled more than once. He’s not given to great displays of emotion and was watching something on telly while I was reading, so his few mumbles were very significant. Because I trust his sense of things when all’s said and done and he’s been around the block, if you know what I mean. I’d say more about him but he gets cross when he’s talked about too much.
Ok, so Am totally on board with the multiple personality community. I have a few but Jake I know best.
So why did I invent Jake to speak through of sense and nonsense in the world?
I’ll tell you.
Because when I just talk to myself in the mirror Im never going to be surprised by what I hear back, or what I might say next.
Multiple personalities are a really good hack imo. And, if you’re not shy about them and want to play dress up you can do well as an actor. If you’re not so keen on thesbianism then you could probably be a really good psychiatrist.
Seriously Scott, cudos.
Edit: none of this has anything to do with people being seriously ill in some way. I see Freddy’s got his knickers in a twist about that….
I apologize, that last remark was Jake’s. I never know what’s going to come out of his mouth half the time.
I do wonder if actors, or some of them, aren't in fact DID or whatever is going on there. So many stories about "I was really shy/nervous but when I got up on stage that all went away and I was a completely different person, so I decided to become an actor" and about actors who find it hard to shake off a part even when not performing in the role.
'Talking to yourself' can easily split off into two or more different participants, but I still think deliberately cultivating alters is a bad idea.
I found HPMoR!Harry's discussion with Hermione about the versions of other people that live in his head, and her reaction (realizing that she did as well) interesting for what it implies about the author's internal experience. And how much it contrasts with mine: very much a “what do you mean other people actually see things in their heads? I thought that was just a figure of speech!” moment for me.
I think they're more likely just profoundly narcissist, plus a good helping of imitative ability. The strong narcissist verges on solipsism, he believes he is necessarily the center of the universe, and all the rest of us are just supporting actors that will respond appropriately to whatever persona he chooses to take on.
I think it's that faith that allows one to act. I bet most of us could do it -- if we did it by ourselves, in private, while soaking in the bathtub. Which suggests what keeps us from doing it in the real world is the awareness of the gaze of others, of people realizing we're playing a part and responding negatively to that. "Oh, you're pretending to be distraught about the whales, but I know you're really not, you big faker."
We get instinctively embarassed at the prospect of people judging us and catching us out in emotional fakery, even if the social situation (you're acting in a play) means everyone has agreed, on the surface intellectual level, that emotional fakery is actually desired. I don't think we can overcome the instincts that we develop in childhood, that make us embarassed to be fake. But the narcissist can, because he thinks the reaction of the audience to his fakery will, or at least ought to be, appreciation, because that's what supporting actors do. It's in the script.
Am I crazy for thinking that the issue here is a conflation between believing that someone "feels" something vs. believing that their feeling is linked to an actual phenomenon?
Psychosomatic pain, for example. I can believe and trust a person who says it feels like their leg has been crushed by an ancil. I can accept that the signal being sent to their brain is identical to the one sent to a person who's leg was actually crushed under an anvil. But if their leg was never actually crushed and an x-ray shows their leg to be perfectly healthy, in what way is it wrong to say that their experience is false? "I believe you feel the pain, but in reality your leg isn't broken" seems to be a perfectly reasonable position that is missing from all of this.
Even more bizarre: "believe astral projectionists"? What??
I can believe that someone legitimately believes they are capable of astral projection. I can believe that they are not "lying". But the fact remains that astral projection is *not a real thing*. Whatever real experience they are having, it's not astral projection because that's not a real thing. That's an important distinction, is it not?
You aren't crazy, but then you do the same conflation as everybody else.
It's an important distinction if you're a general deciding whether or not to believe somebody when they say they astral projected to Russia and they're preparing to launch nuclear weapons and we need to issue a preemptive strike immediately. But notice what the important belief is about - it isn't whether or not they experienced seeing Russia preparing to launch nuclear weapons, it's whether or not that experience corresponds to Russia preparing to launch nuclear weapons.
The idea that it's not "really" astral projection, because astral projection isn't "real", is confused. If they are experiencing something that society has collectively agreed to label "astral projection", then they are really experiencing astral projection. The "not a real thing" is the false correspondence between what somebody would see if they were physically standing somewhere, and what they would see if they used astral projection to view that location - not astral projection itself, which after all, is merely a label for an experience.
Now, you may argue that this is exactly what you mean when you say astral projection is not a real thing, which is fine, but what you're really doing there is just insisting that your definition of "real" is the correct one.
That’s pretty confused. I know it’s an example but society hasn’t accepted astral projection and if it did accept it, it wouldn’t be true. It’s a falsifiable claim.
All we mean by that is 'If I say I astally projected, you have an understanding of what I am claiming to have experienced'.
What Scott is talking about here is the internal experience of astral projection, not the ability to see things that are really happening outside of your body.
Would you insist on telling somebody who said they experienced hallucinations that the hallucinations aren't a real thing?
I would agree the hallucination is real, but it is not reality. In astral projection the claim is that this isn’t just a mental state but actually happening.
Whose claim? It's not Scott's claim.
Didn’t say it was.
""I believe you feel the pain, but in reality your leg isn't broken" seems to be a perfectly reasonable position that is missing from all of this."
The problem there is that the pain is as real as if the leg was really broken, and is as painful. The person claiming they feel this pain is not lying. But a real broken leg can be treated to heal, and medication to control the pain prescribed.
A leg that is not broken gets "you don't need medication, if you still claim to feel pain try exercise or deep breathing or over the counter painkillers, and if you don't stop saying you feel pain, then you need to go to a psychiatrist because you might be crazy, but you are probably just lying to get drugs".
If your leg is not broken but you still feel pain, you will self-limit to not trigger the pain but there is no clear line of "get the x-ray, straighten the bone, put on a cast, get physical therapy when the cast comes off" to treat it, and then what do you do with a pain that is not going away but all the doctors tell you is fake?
EVERYBODY has multiple personalities. We behave differently around bosses, church members, frat brothers, twitter threads, cats, babies, etc. We bring the relevant personality to the fore given whom we are dealing with. Going down a Facebook feed can be very fatiguing because you need to keep swapping out personalities, as Facebook mixes people from different phases of your life.
Likewise, we have multiple demon processes running (that's UNIX terminology. Microsoft Windows uses the term "services.") to handle different scenarios. These processes can have different rules of thumb, different goals, different time preferences, etc.
And this is a feature, not a bug.
Ayn Rand believed that complete integration was an important life goal, and in her novels, the villains self-destructed due to their internal contradictions. In the real world, we have plenty of ultra successful capitalists touting socialism and still having a real good time.
The mystic G. I. Gurdjieff touted exercises to bring the many false I's under the control of the True Self. He likened letting the different I's taking control to being in a state of waking sleep. And I think he had a bit of a point. I think there is a True Self that can wake up and override the Many I's, and some people should wake up their True Self more often. But trying to manage everything with the True Self all the time is brutally fatiguing and inefficient. Setting the Autopilot is useful.
Likewise, completely integrating the Self as Ayn Rand advocated is a dangerous game. When your mental model is imperfect, it is safer to have lots of contradictory fuzzy rules which operate according to context, vs. trying to live completely by some rule based philosophy. The latter is how Marxists get into mass murder and libertarians demand anarchy next Wednesday.
And speaking of libertarians, this Many I's model of the human brain contradicts the axioms of Austrian School Economics. Except in rare cases of deep contemplation, we don't have the ordered preferences described in Austrian School Economics. We have competing mental processes with different preferences. This is why good salespeople can make huge bucks: they can bring the desired background processes to the front. It's also why there is such a market for motivational speakers and self-help gurus.
>EVERYBODY has multiple personalities. We behave differently around bosses, church members, frat brothers, twitter threads, cats, babies, etc. We bring the relevant personality to the fore given whom we are dealing with. Going down a Facebook feed can be very fatiguing because you need to keep swapping out personalities, as Facebook mixes people from different phases of your life.
Very true. The difference between normal people shifting personalities to interact with different people and situations and those who claim to have "multiples" seems to be that the latter have a taste for melodrama.
It might be more than that. Maybe they have more problems swapping. Maybe their True Self is more asleep. Maybe there is psychological danger to having the selves too far apart.
Notice the high rate of mental illness among movie stars. Is acting attractive to those with bipolar disorder and whatnot? Or does the process of acting itself cause personality issues? Might the problem be worse with method actors?
I behave differently around different people but the experience of doing so is twiddling dials on a single personality engine.
If I watch a movie with a character with a strong voice, for some time, my internal narration takes on the tone and rhetorical style of that character. But I don't gain a second internal narration.
Yes, behaving differently or even thinking differently in different social contexts is fundamentally different from having a character in your head that you can consult for advice.
I do have characters in my head that I consult for advice, whom I have ongoing imaginary dialogues with. I just don't imagine that those characters are me (Even though they are animated entirely by my mind.) I could pretend they are me if I really wanted to, but that would seem a bit spooky. Which gets back to what Scott was saying about choosing to go down those paths based upon cultural conditioning.
In the spirit of “An atheist is just a christian that believes in one less god”, you only one more personality to dissociate from self-hood to finally let go of your ego delusion :)
I find both elements of Scott's initial post and this particular thread to be useful to putting into perspective my understanding of my own thought processes.
I understand my own thought process as having different modes of thought, the most common two being 'rational' and 'emotional'. In one sense, both are the same root personality with dials twiddled towards the extremes in different directions, but it's to the point where I can run both modes in parallel when I'm fixated on thinking about an issue where I don't have an answer and have both modes produce different results. I can also spot when I've shifted into one mode or the other by accident.
It's interesting to see that the individuals with DID were part of the same role-playing/fiction community. As someone that has played tabletop RPGs for decades, you see how players adapt over time. New players can't visualize that they're playing a character; what they have is a stat block, and if you ask them something outside that stat block they can't answer (like "what is your character's favorite food'?) Some players never get out of this mode. Those who do tend to next use a character someone else created as a baseline; if they're playing a Wizard, they may play a version of Gandalf or Harry Potter with the serial numbers filed off. With enough practice, you can model a character of your own creation.
In college, I participated in a live-action RPG for several years. This mode of gaming tends to be more social than stat-block and thus requires being more in character. One thing I noticed was that despite being heavily introverted, I was a lot more social in character. Partly, this could be because I was surrounded by other people with similar hobbies; it could also be that being able to use the character as an excuse removed a lot of the risks of embarrassment that I think makes me an introvert. At any rate, while they never were separate personalities, my behavior in "what would [character] do?" mode could vary greatly from the way I would behave normally.
If a close friend tells me about jhanas and that it takes a few months of practice to enter this blissed out, wonderful state, how much time do I spend trying to do it myself?
If a majority of my friends and relatives keep bringing up jhanas, and with a few months of practice they were able to enter this blissed out. wonderful state,, how much time do I spend trying to do it myself?
I would spend more time trying it in the second case. This doesn't mean that I disbelieve my one close friend in the first scenario, that she really had this experiences, just that I make my bet based on how likely her experience as she communicates it comports to my own reality.
In the first scenario, if I come to the conclusion that her experience is unlikely in my reality, I can say "jhanas (likely) aren't real." But I can't say she's lying.
Hypnotism comes to mind. Many of us have had the experience of going to hypnotist shows where the hypnotist brings people up from the audience, puts people under hypnosis, and they do wacky stuff. In my experience (they did this at my high school all four years) every time, there was one or two people where it wouldn't work and they were quickly dismissed from the stage. My recollection in talking to them after was that they just didn't buy it, so it didn't work. But the people who were hypnotized couldn't really describe the experience (they would say it was like being sleepy) and it looked to me in the audience like something legitimately happened to them, but they had no real memory of what they did onstage - the only other explanation I had was that I'd been going to school with a bunch of AMAZING actors who kept their talents on the DL. I believed them, but I didn't "believe" in hypnosis in that I'm nearly certain I would be one of the ones quickly dismissed from the stage.
"Imagine that one day you wake up and suddenly you have terrible leg pain whenever you walk. So you mostly don’t walk anywhere. Or if you do have to walk, you use crutches and go very slowly, because then it doesn’t hurt. And given all of this, you don’t experience leg pain. If you tell your doctor “I have leg pain”, are you lying ?"
I keep having a very similar experience and it's very frustrating, doctors will ask things like "what is your baseline pain level" about things like foot or knee or back pain and I'll be like "well... *baseline* is zero... but if I do things it's more than that... but I'm *not doing very many things* because then it hurts..."
Is there an objective way to tell the difference between people who have a jhana and actors who are pretending to have a jhana? The one fmri study was of ONE person!
Should we believe law enforcement testimony in the same way that Scott has suggested we approach the other claims?
There was a NYT article a few years back that suggested that law enforcement testimony was more likely to be mendacious.
Should we believe someone on trial for a crime that says he/she didn't do it?
I recall Chuang Tzu story:
CT is looking at fish in pond with students.
CT: i wish i was a fish so happy swimming around in the pond.
Student: you are not a fish how possible could you know the fish is happy
CT: you are not me how could possibly know that I don't know the fish is happy
Student: Not already being sure one way or the other is why I asked. Wanting to learn things which you know and I don't is why I became your student. So, to be clear, are you saying you were mostly guessing? Or are there going to be questions about fish telepathy standards and practices on the midterm?
I'm dubious that people experience jhanas because the word has at least two necessary implications. One is the subjective experience, the other is that jhanas are a Buddhist concept that exists along the 8-fold path to Enlightenment. I can believe that people experience some sort of bliss through meditation. That doesn't strike me as an extraordinary claim. The extraordinary claim is that this bliss is a genuine jhana, because that would imply that a genuine step towards Buddhist Enlightenment exists, which strikes me as preposterous, because Buddhist Enlightenment strikes me as preposterous.
I put jhanas in the same category as speaking in tongues. Glossolalia exists, people do "speak in tongues", and many describe the experience as blissful, but I don't for a moment believe that it is God speaking through them in some higher spiritual language.
It sounds like your only gripe is with the word "jhana" itself? That doesn't seem worth arguing over.
Cool. I'm still in the market for a word to denote "that one high-energy euphoric intense-focus state with the nice body feelings that's incurred by following the standard instructions and it's a nice thing to do when I've got a spare 20 minutes"
>I am at least willing to listen to that particular Chesterton’s Fence.
As a fan of mixed metaphors, I enjoyed visualizing this one.
This may be of some utility although it might be only tangentially related.
I categorize mental illness into four categories (Note, the four categories don’t require any of the participants in this scenario to actually have direct access to truth)
Type I: You can convince another person that you’re sane without having to tell them anything you believe is a lie.
Type II: You can convince another person that you’re sane but you have to tell them things that you believe are lies.
Type III: You can communicate with another person but you can’t figure out what lies to tell them in order to convince them that you’re sane.
Type IV: You aren’t able to for coherent enough world models to even communicate with another person.
For most of my life I’ve never pushed past type II, had brief stint on the border of Type III, but I think the reason that this becomes so passionate to people is that there is clearly a major loss of function and the ability to live a good life once you go into category III and IV. For most of human history Type II has been “Not insane, get back to work.”
Another layer I add on top of this is how often and how effortfully you need to summon your will power to be effectively sane to the people around you.
Type A: When you have an irrational impulse you can suppress it as often as you need to in order to appear effectively sane.
Type B: When you have an irrational impulse you can suppress it but not as often as you need to always appear effectively insane.
Type C: When you have an irrational impulse you can’t suppress it in order to appear as sane.
I’m pretty solidly Type B here, which for most of human history wasn’t insane but “Oh, here he goes again, well get back to work when you’re done.” I can communicate rationally pretty much all the time but if I’m in a small room with people for a long time, I have found myself involuntarily trembling and tearing up even after otherwise being asymptomatic for years. Intimacy does it too, like when I first met my wife I parked my car in my garage but didn’t turn the engine off. And when I asked her to marry me she asked me how I felt when we entered the restaurant and I said “slervious” and started to stutter.
Type II and Type B’s are common and take a lot of resources, even though Type III/IV and Type C’s need them more. So I think it causes frustration. Although of course there would probably be fewer resources with Type II’s and Type B’s creating a market.
There are probably a lot of holes here, but I find this an Excellent starting framework, thank you!
Especially grounding since ADHD & autism can take a draining amount of effort even at 1A to maintain an illusion of neurotypical status. I’m sure it only gets more difficult past that- or not worth the facade at all.
The thing I try to start with is presentation, because if you look at it like a mechanic sanity is just the ability to understand other people well enough to choose behaviors that appear sane. There can be all sorts of differences under the hood but the thing I like about that perspective is that its a testable framework, although I have never really tested it on anyone and mostly just mused over it when I did group therapy. I used to think I was way more nuts than I was, until I realized even if I had all sorts of weird thoughts and impulses I could still almost always control them and some people had completely lost that ability. It made me feel very fortunate.
I'm having a hard time figuring out if I'm Type I or Type II.
I appear sane/normal/neurotypical when I put in effort, but generally don't actually lie about anything. But the effort isn't sustainable - I normally can't keep it up for days, and even with a gun to my head probably couldn't keep it up for years.
And like, your comment seems sane to me, so you're at least capable of appearing sane for brief communcations, but you categorize yourself as Type II. Does that mean there were lies in this comment? Or is there some threshold for how much time you have to be able to sustain the appearance of normalcy?
(Similar questions apply to the distinction between Type A and Type B - like, does it count if my irrational impulses are acted on, but only where others can't see?)
I think there’s a pretty smooth sliding scale between type one and type two. I mentioned this in another thread but I had a religious experience. I guess that’s way more common than you’d expect, but while I guess I’m crazy enough to have seen it I still knew not to just talk about it constantly or try to start a cult or something.
I have PTSD so a lot of my stuff is reaction to danger, feeling of impending doom, and one time when I had myself half convinced that a girl at Panera bread was being trafficked so I made a plan to stab someone with my plastic butter knife. I also once got into a staring contest and thought I was going to have to fight a sticker on a bus window in a dark parking lot.
But for the most part, I imagine what a totally sane, totally normal version of me would do, and I just do that.
It's good that you're close enough to sanity that you can still imagine what a sane, normal person would do well enough to emulate them.
It's a shame that this probably means that your instinctive danger sense basically has to be ignored because it's constantly going off, so if you ever do find yourself in a dangerous situation you might hesitate to react more than warranted.
One of the things that brings me peace on that is ti remember there’s not really such a thing as a mindset that’s correct 100% of the time. Although on one occasion I did see a pregnant woman collapse on a cafeteria bench and I paused to consider if she was just sleeping. I did that for probably a solid minute. I was still the first person to go check on her, though. Turns out she just needed to get her blood sugar up.
I think the lies could be lies of omission as much as of commission; you don't tell people about the voices in your head or the weird idea you have that pictures can really see you, because that sounds crazy. So for instance, if you want to switch your seat so that painting on the wall of the guy in a meadow isn't looking at you, you make up an excuse about a draught or light in your eyes or you want to stretch your legs out, not the real reason that the guy in the painting is looking at you.
Because that's crazy talk, and only crazy people do that, and you're playing sane today for the people you work with.
This as well. Like I always sit facing a door because I have a constant fear of being shot and I want to be able to see someone come in but instead of saying that I just show up early to places and make sure I can take that seat.
“Slervious” is hilarious and great - I nominate it as a candidate to become an actual word.
A guy got really hostile with me at the gym once and I tried to trash talk back (I was in high school) and I mixed up “I’m going to kick your ass” with “I’m going to wipe the smile off your face” and instead said “I’m going to wipe your ass with my face.”
It did at least have the effect of lessening the aggression level of the situation.
🤣That is also hilarious and great
If you wanted to maximize your doctor's chances of finding an answer as to why your symptoms exist, why would you not mention what you're doing to minimize them? In the leg pain + crutches example, someone writing an EHR file or (God forbid) paper chart ought to be able to see some crutches and ask what that whole situation is about. That happens even in eyecare, my field.
I agree that communication in healthcare is pretty terrible sometimes, I see it 5 days a week and sometimes on a Saturday when I'm unlucky. Yet, very few patients of mine are keeping their symptoms to themselves. Perhaps it's my position in eyecare as opposed to something more difficult to pin down, like abdominal pain. It can be astoundingly hard to get someone to give a damn about the glaucoma drops that maintain their vision, all while the same patient rings us up several times a day for dry eye med refills.
Reasons you might not mention what you're doing to minimize your symptoms:
(1) There isn't time, the appointment is rushed
(2) You're literally just being asked a battery of yes/no questions, with no opportunity for free-form response
(3) Some doctors really will go "oh, well if that helps, then just keep doing that" and not prescribe any additional treatment
(4) You're not sure which things are relevant and you don't want to get dismissed as a hypochondriac for bringing up too many irrelevant things
Huh, an evil personality in their heads giving them advice? Well, at least it's not something creepy like being possessed by a demon….
Henry Kramer would have thoughts, I'm sure.
>This sounds like: “I, RC, have the mysterious mental ability to detect liars. I admit I can’t prove this, but come on, you should probably just trust me because it’s perfectly reasonable to think other people have mysterious mental abilities you don’t.”
If we're talking about in person communication, this doesn't sound like a "mysterious mental ability". Just a normal mental ability to understand other people by their facial expressions, body language, by how they say things, etc.
Given most people can't detect lies better than chance, I have a FAR larger suspicion that he is simply wrong than I do for the jhana people, the spoonies, or the multiple system types. After all, all they're claiming is some subjective experience in their brain. RC is claiming an externally-oriented superpower which evidence strongly suggests doesn't really exist, and to the extent it does exist, doesn't work the way RC claims to be able to detect lies.
This claim about not being able to detect lies better than chance needs to be applied carefully. It was studied in a lab, and may not necessarily apply broadly. People go off many very 'thick' contextual cues when judging lies in the real world which are not available in laboratory tests
It has been repeated over and over again, aiming for a variety of conditions as close to reality as possible, since there are large numbers of people who would benefit a lot from being able to detect lies.
The only useful "contextual clue" for a lie is that it does not fit with the evidence, either directly present (e.g. saying I'm 7' tall when I'm standing in front of you), or known by previous experience (e.g. saying I can fly through the air under my own power when you know humans cannot fly without mechanical devices). That's why cops detect lying in suspects by not informing them of all the evidence they have already, since then the suspect cannot construct a narrative that fits with said evidence, and not by staring really hard at them and noticing that being an interrogation room makes them stressed.
Didn't make it much past the first section; will finish reading later once I have this sudden bout of uncontrollable shaking back under control.
(No, this is not sarcasm, and yes, it took several minutes to type this and correct the typos)
> 99% of psychiatrists aren’t dumb enough to commit someone who has the occasional suicidal thought but would never act on it - but if you work in a mental hospital, you quickly become acquainted with the 1% exceptions.
Is this because in a mental hospital you meet quite a few patients who are extremely angry at being committed for stupid reasons, and it’s always the same doctor?
I think it's because you meet people who are angry about having been committed for what to them are stupid reasons, and right now once they've been treated and back on their meds and stable once again, sure, it looks like they absolutely should not be in the locked ward and if a doctor committed them, then that doctor was too quick on the trigger.
But *before* they were hauled in to be committed? While they were off their meds and high as a kite on paranoia? Whoooo baby, totally different story!
I had probably 6 or 8 schizophrenic roommates, and I even remember some of them (ECT is funny that way). In my experience, the progression tends to be the opposite: the reasons are stupid until they're back on their meds and stable, and then they're agreeable people who want to go home and are working with the medical people to make that happen.
Interesting, but i strongly disagree on the first part where the homonculus is presented. It's not explicit, but it's done in manner that imply the homonculus (aka consciousness) is the real "you", and all the brain treatment thing is conversion detail...
My impression is that this is a dated and misleading conception, rejected by most neuroscientists. The homonculus is not the real "you", it's an important actor but not the driver, it's a module whose task is to build after the fact a summarized, sequential and as coherent as possible story about your internal experiences and decisions...which is super useful for remembering and communication to others, but it's far from what actually happen in your brain in term of experiences and decisions.
i guess this homonculus usually do a good job, but it also fail sometimes (hence the whole unconsciousness concept), and this is also linked to false memories (i guess a progressive drift when the conscious story is stored, re-read, re-stored,...).
So when people talk about weird internal experience, that's the homonculus-edited/summarized/rendered coherent version, not the actual one.
Do they really have special thing going on in the brain, or is their homonculus especially wrong? maybe it is trained to be wrong, in order to produce more fake but more pleasant to remember stories (my guess on jhana) ?
It can probably be both, and it's hard to tell it apart, but one indicator is "are those weird experience people able to do something strange, or only speak about it?" 3d mental image people and color number people can do something others can't, or at least do it much faster. I would then assume it's category 1 weird stuff. Else i would assume it's cat 2 weird stuff: homonculus/consciousness hacking...
It's indeed largely semantic/philosophical, but not only. The humonculus is the only thing you see when asking someone about what he experienced, but it's not the only thing observable when looking at someone having the experience*. This means it's not the only thing that count... Even for the guy having the experience, as long as there are other persistent effects besides the homonculus memory, a "real" experience will change him (addiction, motor skills, probably much more) very differently than homonculus-hacking pseudo experience. As the other modules will behave differently, the future homonculus will also write a different conscious story, inventing mostly coherent "reasons* after the fact even if the conscious experience was reported the same initially. So even for the guy, having the experience or fully persuading him he had it will not be the same, i think mostly after a not too short nor to long period...
(*) back to Jhana: can you interract with Jhana-experiencing people, or does it take them out of it? I guess the latter... This plus the observable behavior being mediation (aka doing absolutely nothing) really add to my believe that jhana is consciousness (homonculus) hacking, which is not the same as actual experience, both for external observers and even for the experiencer (different future behavior), even if short term conscious description is intense pleasure.
We are deeply in total recall territory: the imprinted memories are not the same as actual experience, not only because you did not really do it, but mostly because the implanted thing is not the full neural activity, but the minimal imprint for creating a conscious coherent story. It will lack supporting non conscious neutral changes and maybe details will start to fall apart when you look to closely at your "memories".
But if indeed your full brain state is fully the same, then i agree: simulated experience is the same as the real thing. However, both on total recall and jhana, there are multiple hints that's not the case: your full brain state is not the same after a recall visit (jhana) than a real mars holliday (an activity triggering intense pleasure)
I suppose, in this framework, the real question is what "having an experience" ought to refer to. Scott's interpretation is straightforward: an experience is whatever the "homunculus" observes. Whether or not this corresponds to true events in the world or true states of the rest of the brain is irrelevant. You seem to be concerned about whether these conscious observations map correctly onto "the real you." Maybe there's a subtle distinction to be made here, where your conscious experience does not necessarily accurately represent other parts of your mind, such as your decision-making algorithms. But as long as conscious experience itself is the phenomenon we are concerned with, how could the module of your mind that creates conscious experience be wrong about your conscious experience? It's tautological.
(Misremembering is another issue.)
My point was that there is no real you. I suspect we are made of competing/collaborating modules whose collective behavior is rationalized after the fact, as an internal story, by the storytelling module aka homonculus aka consciousness. It seems like an important job, and it is, but i suspect it does not happen all the time, in fact maybe not the majority of time. Ever drived for kilometers then realize you were not really there? Well, you were but the storytelling module went on holidays. Maybe it even goes on holidays much more often but most of the time you don't notice because you simply do not try to tell yourself (or others) a story about what you did.
And i think while there are difference about misremembering, it's linked, just that consciousness is the first very short term remembering then after, it's replayed multiple times, every time the memory is accessed it's edited (but it's also good it goes into long term storage, not accessing it means forgetting) so all memories are heavily edited, i guess it's just most of the time big facts are maintained, partly because you try to maintain coherence... Si my prediction would be that false memories tend to make a better more coherent story that what happened.
Unlike p-zombie, there should be practical consequences is consciousness is more a grafted story telling than the main decision driver. Hacking consciousness will change memories and the way you speak about the experience, but unlike a real experience it will not have all the other brain modules do their work. If there are some persistence it will make a difference even for future behavior. Maybe those modules have their own reinforcement, build special memories different from the verbal story of the consciousness, the one you communicate to the outside...
An example, imagine a sport jhana where i imagine landing a perfect frontflip to the point i really think I did it, at least, and it make me proud. Will i achieve it next time i try it for real?
I think no, because the motor center will not have been trained like they would hand during actual attempts and final success... Even if you convinced you you did it, up to the point to not lie when bragging about it (or, more accurately, believing your own lies) you will still not be able to repeat the feat because the actual training stored something else that the story.
Note that I do not say mental training is not a thing, but it works not by consciousness hacking (you know you never actually succeeded) but by semi-firing your motor centers to prepare them.
I believe that's the reason jhana is not addictive: addiction is not the memory of pleasure (at least not mainly) , so it's not triggered by conscious hacking.
as addiction is part of very old reinrcement training already present in brains so primitive they purely do not have even embryonic consciousness, it makes sense it use a separated memory very different from the conscious story memory... Like motor memory is different in my sport example.
Eh. Credulity is certainly a good default for social interactions. If my wife tells me she has a headache, or is sad, or has experienced jicama I'm certainly not going to contradict her.
But credulity has no place in empirical science, none whatsoever. It's measured evidence, in controlled experiment, repeatable and repeated, or no sale. Nor do arguments along the lines of "well, lots of similar stuff that we thought was false turned out later to be true" or "it would be mean and cruel to not believe this" or "empirical evidence is very, very had (or even impossible) to come up with, so let's just go with whatever seems plausible" cut any ice.
I mean, there's plenty of "Intelligent Design" people who make all three arguments, so this path is well-trodden, and it's probably fine for a scholastic or neo-Platonist, but we surly sons-of-bitches who swore allegience to the skull-and-crossbones black flag of empiricism reject it all out of hand.
But what is empiricism when people self-report experiences? Unless you have a device that measures neurotransmitter activation (and even then), it's not clear what an empiricist does here
It's data, that's all. Unfortunately, there is also copious data that people lie and fantasize and bullshit each other and themselves. So we have data pointing in multiple directions, and the correct empirical stance a priori is agnosticism, not credulity. Maybe they did have this experience, or maybe they made it up. We don't know, a priori.
If it's important you can try to think up more rigorous tests, stuff that avoids the problem of testimony. Sure, maybe brain studies, EEGs, testimony of other witnesses, animal models, someday AGI models ha ha, or just looking at the self-consistency (or lack thereof) of the human witnesses. We do this all the time in the courtroom, right? You have to decide what the balance of the evidence suggests. It's not an impossible task, just one that is rather difficult, and there is zero chance the general solution is as simple as "just believe people who seem sincere."
Credulity impacts research priorities. You have to believe there is a problem worth studying before funding the study.
Research priorities is a social question, not a scientific question, and I already said there is a role for credulity in social questions. Perhaps it is the case that we should, on humane charity grounds, set aside some money and time to investigate stuff that tortures people but for which there is no conventional medical explanation. That would be kind, and we might discover something interesting.
On the other hand, TANSTAAFL, so if the NIH is going to set aside $20 million to study Morgellons or DID, then that's $20 million less to study Stage IV breast cancer or better stroke treatment. So choices have to be made, andif it's the public money I suppose we need to have a big vote on it, see how people rate the priorities.
Thank you for answering this. I'd read RC's post, and decided not to bother expressing my level of belief in his claimed ability to determine that other people are lying about their internal experiences.
I'm glad someone more likely to be heard than me chose to state their similar disbelief.
See, I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding going on here, though Resident Contrarian is certainly free to correct me and I'd welcome it.
I think the objection is to the claimed *mystical* or *spiritual* states. I think Scott believes, because he has been told by people who he trusts, that they can access mental states of blissful experience. He believes this is plausible because he sees other ways we can alter our brain states from alcohol to other drugs, and that studies have been done about fasting etc. to achieve such states. He is not making any decisions on the 'mystical' claims validity, that Buddhism is right about existence of the Atman or whatever.
Resident Contrarian is denying these experiences on , I think, the same mystical grounds. There is no cosmic consciousness or guru or divine guide out there to give you these effects. But if people very strongly want to believe, then they can trick themselves into thinking the miracle is real. So people reporting that they followed the dictates of a religion about achieving a mystic state in that faith's repository are self-deceived or actually lying because they want to fit in, they want to show off, they want to be regarded as special, and other worldly reasons.
Scott is saying "People can think themselves into experiencing transcendent bliss". Resident Contrarian is saying "People can think themselves into thinking they are experiencing transcendent bliss".
I don't think either of them believe in transcendence, qua transcendence, as see "Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person": if these entities are really real, and have all this access to all knowledge, why can't they give me the answer to a maths problem rather than platitudes about love and joy? So they're not real, they're just mental states that we jolted our brains into by pickling them in psychoactive drugs.
Okay, but for all this there really is an important sense in which all the internal hallucinations things aren't real (and the people experiencing them mostly know they aren't real, and can usually convince themselves to stop if they really try). In your psychosomatic pain example - sure, I might ask the witch all these questions, but my *first* question would be whether the real wound was physically debilitating. I know the psychosomatic one wouldn't be.
My earlier impression of Jahnas was that it wasn't so much people experiencing emotions as people convincing themselves they were experiencing these emotions. I think this is a real difference, in the "reality is what doesn't vanish when you look away" sense. If you've convinced yourself you're not angry at your parents, we can still tell whether or not you actually are based on whether you get upset when they're mentioned and avoid meeting them. And if you claim to be able to achieve tracendent bliss just by thinking about it, we can still tell whether you really do based on whether you actively go out of your way to spend time in this state (and specifically, whether you do this more after having experienced this). As you've pointed out, this doesn't happen with the people who claim to have reached jhanas - they don't suddenly meditate a lot more or go out of their way to get to them. So the balance of evidence is strongly against them.
>And if you claim to be able to achieve tracendent bliss just by thinking about it, we can still tell whether you really do based on whether you actively go out of your way to spend time in this state
I think the idea that humans would infinitely seek out bliss and pleasure is a terrible one that I've seen repeated a lot in these discussions. Meaning, purpose, and the plain old variety of experiencing life are all things a lot of people feel drawn to over simple bliss/pleasure. Humans are not pleasure maximizers.
"As you've pointed out, this doesn't happen with the people who claim to have reached jhanas - they don't suddenly meditate a lot more or go out of their way to get to them. So the balance of evidence is strongly against them."
I think that is a basic misunderstanding of the entire Buddhist philosophy and this is why people don't get why, if you can achieve blissful states, you are not spending time seeking them.
Buddhism, as I understand it, is liberation from desire and achieving enlightenment. You put in a lot of work around this. Part of that work is achieving jhana states. Experiencing bliss etc. is a way of demonstrating the underlying truths of the philosophy. If you are working towards liberation from desire, this early state of bliss is to demonstrate the nature (or illusion) of consciousness and what we think we experience in regards to suffering, desire and other 'facts'. If you are working towards liberation, then the experience of bliss is also about learning not to desire this, as well. What is that saying? "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water".
Even in other religious traditions, like my own Catholicism, there are guard-rails around mysticism for this very reason. You don't seek to spend 24/7 in trance, you have to live in the world as it is. Unless you're a monastic (and even then) you can't be in a constant experience of the presence of God, you have other things to do.
Even in our secular world, we know this. People who try to be blissed-out 24/7 generally don't end well. Eating chocolate is pleasurable, but there comes a point when you've had enough and don't want any more. Are you insisting that unless people constantly eat chocolate, and eat nothing but chocolate, even past the point of satiety that the balance of evidence is strongly against them really enjoying chocolate?
Wire-heading also has this cautionary principle about it, the first mention I can think of is in one of Larry Niven's ARM stories where wire-heading was used to commit a murder. The victim starved to death, even though they were free to stand up and go get food at any time, because they couldn't muster the willpower to break the connection for even a few minutes.
In "The Ringworld Engineers" Louis Wu sets it up on a timer so that he can't spend 24/7 under the current, because of his experiences with it:
""Current addiction is the youngest of mankind's sins. At some time in their histories, most of the cultures of human space have seen the habit as a major scourge. It takes users from the labor market and leaves them to die of self-neglect.
Times change. Generations later, these same cultures usually see current addiction as a mixed blessing. Older sins -- alcoholism and drug addiction and compulsive gambling -- cannot compete. People who can be hooked by drugs are happier with the wire. They take longer to die, and they tend not to have children.
It costs almost nothing. An ecstasy peddler can raise the price of the operation, but for what? The user isn't a wirehead until the wire has been embedded in the pleasure center of his brain. Then the peddler has no hold over him, for the user gets his kicks from house current.
And the joy comes pure, with no overtones and no hangover.
So that by Louis Wu's time, those who could be enslaved by the wire or by any lesser means of self-destruction had been breeding themselves out of the human race for eight hundred years.
...It was always a temptation to reset the timer. He'd done it routinely in the early years of his addiction. Neglect had made of him a skeletal rag doll, constantly dirty. Finally he had gathered what remained of his ancient dogged determination, and he had built a timer that took twenty minutes of nitpicking concentration to reset. On its present setting it would give him fifteen hours of current and twelve hours for sleep and for what he called maintenance."
It's rather jarring to see libido described as [emphasis mine] "very important and very blissful __mental__ experience" instead of a "physical experience".. I don't to wax philosophical about the distinction (or lack thereof) between these, just noticing the word choice. Cf. most people would described the feeling of "pumped up" after a workout as physical, not mental.
I have experience with a sociopathic long-distance ex. She told me about extremely traumatic experiences to get sympathy. Then when I realized she had been lying about these and multiple other experiences, I told her that she should get treatment (at that time I didn't really understand sociopathy). She said that a doctor had found an inflammation in her brain that was causing her to hallucinate, and gave her specialized antibiotics to treat it. The drugs then "worked" to cure her. At some point she got desperate and called me as a relative from her birth country and put on a fake accent to support some iteration of this story.
This made me really curious about sociopathy and truth-telling. The thing is I'm quite sure she *believed* much of what she said. She believed her traumatic experiences, and would get really emotional when talking about them - I'm pretty convinced about this. I think at least part of her believed that she had a brain inflammation. How she felt internally when she was impersonating her relative (or at other times, when she would digitally impersonate people) I'm not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was similar to experiences of people with multiple personality disorder.
The experience of dating this person changed my point of view in lots of ways, a lot of which are *damn, actually something like 2% of the population has no natural empathy and totally makes up their experiences, and our institutions and thought leaders are completely clueless about this*. It does seem that sociopathy is pretty bimodal (i.e., there is a clearly distinguishable group of people with "the sociopathy package"), with an extra, looser, packet of the distribution around borderline personality disorder.
But also think, from comparing people I know who are not on the sociopath end of the distribution, that "basically honest" people have different levels of attachment to stories. People I know will combine bits of stories in their heads seemingly for story-telling effect, but genuinely believe the versions they end up with; others will follow various emotional and identity-based confirmation biases, where they make their beliefs and experiences conform to a story or ideology they care about, and genuinely believe them. I don't think this can be cleanly separated from truth-seeking. Memories and experiences are imperfect and we try to "organize" them into coherent structures, often fudging things along the way. For example if someone has competing memories of having two different teachers in second grade, they might cluster our beliefs around it being Mrs. X rather than Mrs. Y, to come up with a more coherent story, and adjust their memories accordingly, even if in fact their teacher was Mrs. Y.
I think that in reporting internal states, there's a really fuzzy distribution of what's going on, and it's not right to just have two clusters of "true" and "false". In fact, unless the state is something that can be clearly compared to a physical feeling that many people have experiences with "naturally" (something like leg pain in phantom limb, or to some extent transgender), I don't think "true" and "false" are very useful quantifiers at all (maybe a better replacement for "true" would be "closely pattern-matching to the experience of many other people).
I think a better approach to talking about people's internal states would include a multi-parameter distribution with one parameter being "strong emotion" vs. "subtle emotion" and another being "story-based" vs. "spontaneous/random" (roughly corresponding to low-decoupling vs. high-decoupling in people's beliefs about politics). Things like brain zaps among people who take anti-depressants are very much on the "spontaneous" side and much less dependent on stories and identity. Things like embodying a character from a work of fiction are (obviously) very story-based.
Some (a little bit) of this speaks to me. I wrote a comment below recounting how I once convinced my middle school - students and staff - that I believed I'd been abducted by aliens. It took a certain willful mental twist into willful pseudo-belief to execute certain maneuvers, particularly when adults asked me about it.
At no point did I have even the slightest concern for how my performance might be negatively impacting others - that my teachers seemed to be honestly worried about me and that I should alleviate the worry of good people. No, I would just pivot harder into the story.
But then, I didn't consider teachers to be "real" people in a way that meant their feelings mattered. They were an Other to be managed, that was all.
My line of argument is different. Let's say someone said they had found a drug that made you feel 10 to 100 times better than heroin. An amount of skepticism would be called for, but it's also something you could keep an open mind about. But now let's say this was followed by the claims that it had no adverse effects, wasn't addictive, and while the person had free access to this new drug, only used it occasionally. This is where you go "hang on..." - it doesn't seem psychologically credible. We know what happens when you use heroin or wirehead.
My guess at what happens with Jhanas is not that this powerful pleasure exists, or that the users have memories of it (as that would be much the same thing from a motivational standpoint), but that they have the memories of having had such an experience, without memories of the actual experience. This seems neither weird nor surprising - you put yourself into an unusual mental state after all, and it probably does feel genuinely pretty good coming down from it (from mere relaxation if nothing else). This is the only way I can make sense of the claims, at least. "I have ready and free access to the most superb pleasure imaginable with no adverse consequences, but this doesn't change my life a lot and I only access it now and then" simply doesn't hold water for me.
Do you eat a super healthy diet and constantly train for and compete in marathons, while balancing all your other obligations? Because that’s what it takes to experience jhana. It’s not at all like heroine because it takes a tremendous amount of willpower and dedication to experience, and even then it is fleeting. Thirsting after it makes it more difficult to attain. So it is definitely not “ready and free access”. It is arduous and difficult to access. Like all other areas of life, our evolutionary drives push us towards easier to access lesser pleasures at the expense of more difficult to reach greater ones.
People seem to have very different ideas about this - some here have claimed they can slip into it at a moment’s notice with minimal effort.
Yeah, those are the ones I find less credible. I don't doubt they are experiencing some kind of pleasant or relaxed state, but I don't think they are jhanas as traditionally described.
Part of the problem, of course, is the Western and particularly American desire to commodify experiences, see the guy working on a technical solution (a headset, was it?) so that you could reliably and quickly achieve such states: infinite bliss on demand without the need for all that old-fashioned work and discipline, this is the modern era of automation and instant gratification after all.
Perhaps I end up a bit of a hypocrite here then - I am also skeptical of people on places like Substack and Twitter claiming they just slip into it. I think what they’re describing is a at most a very light form of jhana, if it can be called that, which is not something I’ve ever experienced. I spent many hundreds of hours in meditation dealing with monkey mind and back pain. Only on intensive retreat with a lot of momentum in my practice did I experience a truly blissful altered state of consciousness. And after that I’d have to build up the momentum again and get to like day 7 of a retreat to experience it again. I think if the “slip into it” folks experienced what I have (bright light blazing in my closed eyes followed by an overwhelming flood of bliss through my body that left tears in my eyes as it subsided), they would no longer consider the states they’re describing now to be jhana. Instead it’s just a sense of relaxation they experience.
But perhaps I’m just being jealous that they can so easily attain this state that takes me so much effort over such a long period to attain. However, a credible Thai Forest monk I sometimes visit has told me that in his 24 years as a monk, maybe a total of one year was spent in jhana. So I think he’s talking about what I’m talking about, and the “slip into it” folks are talking about a nicotine buzz while we’re talking about a full psychedelic experience. Maybe that nicotine buzz also fits a broad definition of jhana. But it doesn’t seem like we’re talking about the same thing.
I would love to be able to just “slip into it.” In fact I was sort of grieving for several months after the first experience because I couldn’t get back to that place. If these people can do it, more power to them.
"We know what happens when you use heroin or wirehead."
There are also people who claim to have been using heroin for decades with no ill-effects, that they can control their use, that they're not addicted, that they've never had the problems that anti-drugs campaigners claim all addicts experience, so the anti-drugs messages are bullshit.
I don't know, are they lying or telling the truth or somewhere in-between? If you're using heroin for twenty to thirty years, I think that counts as addiction, but it might also be true that you managed to avoid fucking up your life beyond salvaging.
It seems possible some few might accomplish this (although it's more common with other drugs). It certainly doesn't seem like the most common outcome, though. And claims that heroin isn't addictive are _obviously_ incorrect (I'm reminded of the journalist who set out to prove this and was dragged into years and years of addiction...).
I think there is an important distinction between "having an experience" and "believing that one had an experience".
Like, say, with auras. I'm fairly certain that some people (especially after using certain substances) do in fact see auras. But I also remember my mother teaching me about all that stuff when I was a kid. In her cult they were told that people could see auras if they tried hard enough. So, naturally, having been assured by an authority figure that it is possible, all with all that social pressure from fellow cult members, they all, of course, claimed to see auras. My mother offered me to try the same thing. So I stared intently around her, trying to interpret the noise as some sort of signal, and then would claim to see the aura. And a part of me did believe that I did, even though the other part knew, that I just did something akin to cold reading, just interpreting her state and naming an associated color (like, if she was calm, I would say that the aura is blue, etc).
Another example is fake no-contact martial arts. We know for a fact these can't work. But students from those dojos do believe that they experience some sort of force throwing them around. And I don't think they lie about it.
Bear in mind that "aura" is also used to describe symptoms associated with epilepsy and migraines. As someone who gets auras preceding migraines, I didn't realise at first that you were talking about a completely different thing that happens to have the same name, so it may be that the same thing happened in reverse.
I was also about to mention ocular migraines. I've had that, and it's scary - what I see is a very brightly glowing, very real-looking zigzag at the edge of my vision. Luckily, my eye doctor explained what it was.
I'm also near-sighted, and my vision is not fully corrected. In the right circumstances, I do sometimes see auras around glowing objects that I'm not seeing so well.
I suspect a lot of those things are more real than the people telling about them make them sound.
Great example with Aikido/KungFu/some taekwondo.
There’s a YouTube channel with a former Aikido master who owned up to the fraud and is now grinding through real martial arts. It’s painfully self aware but kudos to him for taking the lumps.
We know you're talking about tulpas in the third section Scott, you don't have to hide it.
But the claimed experience of people with tulpas is quite different to the claimed experience of people with DID.
Not to mention all the controversy over whether or not DID even in the officially diagnosed sense exists...
Well, the whole community built up about tulpas is something that lumpens my porridge.
Tulpas are a Tibetan Buddhist religion element of thoughtform creation, based on a complex and deep philosophical working out of various states of consciousness. They got incorporated into Theosophy and disseminated along the usual New Age lines.
And then a bunch of wannabe specials took over the already diluted concept, half-digested it, and started playing with imaginary friends.
Then some of them jumped aboard the victimhood bandwagon and starting going on about how these totally real and not just made-up entities were victimising them or taking over their lives. Not all, but some.
Reading tulpa posts is both sad and aggravating: you have people who are clearly mentally ill and people who are confidence tricksters in a small, mean way.
Tiktok algorithms introduced me to some of those popular DID accounts (for the reasons unknown to me), and the story the people tell there sounds quite a bit different from how you describe it. In your Dart Vader description, a lot of it sounds deliberate, just with different people sliding into DID with a different speed. Almost like anyone can develop DID if they spend enough effort. DIDtiktoks all tell that it’s a consequence of a major childhood trauma, associated with memory loss, and it’s basically something you almost always had, so you never knew yourself without DID. Just curious, cause it really sounds a whole lot different
My current model is that there are two systems. One is about feeling, the other is about interpretation of the results. Both can be wrong. When the first one is wrong, you get real feelings that don't correspond to the body's condition. When the second one is wrong, you believe you have that feeling, but you don't. It's difficult to distinguish, but that doesn't mean they're the same, as with fake blindness.
You can probably look for behavioural clues, such as presumably blind person dodging a fast movement, or presumably happy one having depression symptoms instead of being full of energy.
I had the impression 'spoonie' referred to someone with chronic illness and refers to not having as much energy (thus the spoon metaphor) to perform everyday tasks as people without a chronic illness. It does not refer solely to malingerers.
If people are part of a culture based around believing or experiencing certain things, questions about lying or telling the truth about those things become fuzzier. Do supporters of a political party really believe everything they tell pollsters they believe about their side and the other side? Sometimes, but I think for most people the answer is that it's complicated. People are very good at persuading themselves that things their culture requires them to believe to be true are actually true. They also often baulk at taking the actions that literally believing those things would mean that they should want to take.
I suppose that does make me more sceptical about believing people's self-reported mental states. You should believe spoonies/people with DIDs/people who experience auras in the same way you should believe people who say that Jesus/Mohammed/Buddha talks to them. Assume they they're telling the truth, but also assume that the nature of what they're self-reporting has been influenced by the culture they belong to - or maybe the other way round, and it was created by the culture they belong to, but has then been influenced by their sensory experiences. And assume that no matter how much they tell you that those experiences are real in every way, they may still not act consistently as if that was the case.
The history of assuming that people's self-reported mental states are accurate, and then using that knowledge to create better treatments, ways of living, or social institutions, is not a happy one. The accuracy of the self-reporting turns out to be contingent on certain other things being true, and those things are in turn contingent, and so on ad infinitum.
One of the things that accuracy often turns out to be contingent on is membership of a certain culture. Another is the existence of the 5% or less of the people who claim to have certain experiences who are genuinely lying through their teeth, and whose motive to do so is removed when the experience is separated from its context. Remove the motivation to lie, and the genuine experiences inexplicably dry up as well.
Not that it's not worth exploring these things, and yes, you've noticed the skulls, but I don't think the prior should be to believe people's self-experience. Or rather I think that should only be a part of your prior, and you need the rest of it to avoid wasting a lot of time - or worse.
I can certainly agree that the middle ground is large and worth fighting over. So let me put it this way:
If spoonies didn't get social validation from claiming to be ill, would they report fewer symptoms to others? Report fewer symptoms to themselves?
Some would, on both counts. And some wouldn't. But I confidently predict that a lot of the psychosomatic sufferers would vanish. And - noting that my measure is quantitative - I also predict that even within Scott's 50% of non-psychosomatic sufferers, fewer symptoms are reported. Heck, even in the Weiss article, a spoonie admits that she made herself seem sicker than she was on social media.
If suffering only appears when given social validation, I am very comfortable rounding that off as fake. I'm not necessarily calling anyone a liar. But it doesn't seem very interesting to debate whether they're deliberately trying to fool me, or accidentally fooling themselves. It's fake either way.
Similarly, I don't believe for a second that meditators experience jhana as described. Let's be polite and not call anyone a liar. There is a world of difference between experiencing jhana, and believing that one has experienced jhana (or even believing that one is currently experiencing jhana). In just the same way, Scott is right that people can experience "astral projection," but Contrarian is right that they cannot experience astral projection.
But in addition to all this - how can I put this nicely? Scott's writings are very keen to give people the benefit of the doubt, which is often a good thing. But not always. Ad hominem is a fallacy, but taking claims from known liars at face value is another kind of fallacy, even if it doesn't have a fancy Latin name.
Is it fair to say that what you describe as "fake suffering" means "this suffering is largely solvable, and the solution is nonmedical"? It seems worthwhile to me to have a word for this, but I'm not entirely certain whether I'd choose the word "fake" or something different.
No, I'm saying it's fake, in the ordinary sense of the word.
Some people have weaponised social courtesy to try to make it unacceptable to question their self-serving claims. So I'm pointing out that treating the "fake suffering" as if it were fake makes it go away. And if we can all agree on that, then it's functionally fake, and I don't care if you're still too scared to use the word.
Note: I am not saying that all spooning suffering is fake, or that we should adopt a blanket policy of treating their suffering as fake. We all know a lot of it is fake, but it's not always easy from the outside to tell which is which. Not getting treatment for real illnesses is much worse than claiming stolen valour for fake ones, so we might prefer to err in favour of taking these claims seriously, even if the upshot is unhealthy social media communities.
Thank you, this clarifies things. I think I find it easier to believe that "if we had never treated the suffering as real, it wouldn't have appeared in the first place" than to believe "if we start treating it as fake now, it will go away." But, this is armchair speculation, and I don't know how you'd even begin to test it.
To clarify, when a child says they're afraid of a monster under the bed / in their closet, would you consider that fake? The monster hopefully is, but is the fear? (I honestly don't know to what extent the fear of monsters under the bed is culturally induced; I don't remember being afraid of anything of the kind, but (a) I generally didn't have a hyperactive imagination, (b) I don't remember a ton about myself that age, and (c) I didn't sleep in a separate room until much later than seems to be the typical age for these things.)
Well, it depends, doesn't it?
Sometimes it's not fake and they are genuinely afraid. And sometimes they are faking it for attention. And sometimes, when they are very young, they get so wrapped up in performing being afraid that they forget it was an act.
This is actually a great example, because it's easy to tell when young children are faking.
It is? The fact that my husband and I are currently in a state of disagreement about whether our preschooler is faking it makes me think that it's not entirely trivial. What diagnostic do you use, and why does it work better on young children than on adults?
In 1994, when I was 14, I convinced my entire middle school - including some of the teachers! - that I thought I'd been abducted by space aliens.
It was great. I went from being near the very bottom of the social hierarchy and a victim of occasional bullying to an extremely minor celebrity cherished for her weirdo entertainment value. People I didn't know in different grades would stop me in the lunchroom, wanting to hear my stories of gruesome experiments. My yearbook is nothing but comments to watch out for the aliens. The story spread so far it followed me to high school, and then even to goddamn *college.*
I never, ever publicly recanted it.
Now, I 100% knew I hadn't really been abducted by aliens. I knew that the origin of the story was someone misunderstanding my semi-sarcastic remark about why I loved The X-Files, my sarcastically doubling down, and then realizing much too late that recanting would make my audience feel foolish and make my life hell.
But as the story spread and people - total strangers! - asked for more and more details, I consumed more and more alien abduction media for material for my stories. I began occasionally having nightmares about being abducted by aliens. I would tell people those nightmares as if they were actual events, and then I let myself wonder...
...what if they weren't really nightmares?
What if the dreams were really real?
They *could* be real...right?
*Some* people did believe in aliens...right?
*Right?*
This was in 1994, before the internet was a thing where people could go to have their biases confirmed. Maybe if this had happened a few years later, I would have gone deep, deep into alien abduction communities for affirmation and potentially given myself enough justification to really embrace my alien abduction tale as being really *real.*
Or maybe that would never have been possible; I might have just been too aware of the reality. It's hard to say.
What I do know is that I had a really goddamned solid conviction that I hadn't actually-for-reaslies been abducted by aliens but I also knew I *could* make myself almost totally believe it, if I wanted to. I think that I-could-believe-it feeling is what made me so convincing that more than one teacher gently asked me if everything was okay at home (and because teenage girls can be psychopaths, I would assure these kind adults that my parents were good people doing everything they could to protect me from the aliens, but the aliens were either freezing time or turning off their consciousness whenever they visited, so there was nothing my parents could do to help).
It's important to note that I only ever disclosed the truth to my parents and the vice principal / head counselor after the latter became so concerned he called me to his office. I thought it might be reaching a point where CPS or doctors might become involved, so I confessed and asked him to keep the secret to avoid the backlash that would come from the truth getting out. And to his credit, he did! But literally no one else knew that at the time. I went straight from confessing the truth to my vice principal to telling everyone who asked that I he'd grilled about my abduction but *of course* denied it so I wouldn't get carted away to Area 51 or a mental hospital.
My point here is that no one looking in from outside would have been able to say for sure if I thought I'd really been abducted by aliens. A very, very small minority correctly assessed that I was consciously engaging in fiction - I had exactly one yearbook signature saying as much - but everyone else seemed to fully believe that *I* believed, and they were all very wrong about my actual state of mind.
Lots of people lie, and most of them will maintain an obvious lie to the point of absurdity because "involuntary conviction" is less offensive to a most audiences than "willful deception." I realize that my experience is a data point of one, but I'm nevertheless inclined to think that most smart, detailed people ostentatiously engaging in outlandish storytelling without ever crossing a line into being "unacceptably dangerous" to their audience range somewhere along the spectrum I experienced: outright lying to hoping that it might be real so they won't be lying about it.
I do think that there are some people who can take the final step away from reality into truly fully *believing* their own bullshit. I don't have a good sense of how common they might be.
Damn. This was a great post.
There’s a screenplay in this story. You should think about writing it.
Thanks!
I never really considered it to be a story that goes much of anywhere in the third act (so to speak), but...hmm.
In a movie, you're allowed to just make up a more satisfying third act where the protagonist does get abducted by aliens, you know.
Oh sure, of course, but that's a first draft level twist.
If you want to get into festivals, you need to have the abduction remain completely ambiguous all the way through to the credits. Art is about about the lived experience, not what actually happened.
This just nails it.
You wrote the better version of my comment.
Aw shucks, thanks! Having firsthand experience helps!
Did you ever go back to that vice-principal as an adult and say thanks? I don't know what state this was, but in California he would've been what's called a "mandated reporter," meaning if he had any reason to suspect child abuse he's legally obliged to send it in to CPS on pain of up to a year in jail (and of course the loss of his career). If it had later turned out your strange story was the result of abuse, by a teacher or in your family, and he had said nothing he would've been crucified.
So he took a certain amount of risk to his entire future life by choosing to believe the random 14yo whom he'll never seen again, instead of phoning up CPS and letting them sort it out. We need all the people with that kind of basic decency, independent judgment, and courage we can get, these days, especially in schools.
I'm thunderstruck. The mandatory reporting angle never occurred to me! Was it a thing yet in Arizona 1994?
Even if it wasn't, you still make a really good point. I just went back and reread a more detailed narrative essay about this experience, which I wrote in 2004. It reminded me that the V.P. and I had a kind of hilariously long staring contest after he began by asking if I knew why I'd been called to his office. And when he broke first and finally posed the direct question, "Do you believe you were abducted by aliens?", I had an equally long moment of temptation/indecision before I judged the risk too great and deflated out of my theatrical persona back into myself.
I looked him straight in the eye and stated the flat truth: "No. I made it up. It started as a joke and then people believed it, so it kept going. My parents told me not to tell people that, because then everyone would feel stupid and hate me. Please don't blow my cover."
I was weirdly - narcissistically? - confident talking to adults even before doing those many, many weeks of performance art, and I have to imagine it was just so. damn. obvious. to him that I was telling the truth, with the attitude of one "peer" to another, given that I was letting him in on it.
He looked dumbfounded for a moment, then grinned and said, "Don't worry. Your secret is safe with me." Direct quote.
I'm sure he didn't think it was a risk to trust me, but I'm going to look him up in my eighth grade yearbook anyway and see if I can thank him for it.
I had a somewhat similar experience when I learned about cold reading and convinced many middle school peers I had psychic powers. I'm not sure whether any of the teachers bought it - some definitely seemed creeped out by me, but that could just be because I was a weird kid.
Hah, good for you! I would also do some bullshitty hypnotism that I lifted from a Christopher Pike novel as a slumber party trick - I'd put someone into a relaxed state and then suggest they open themselves up as conduits for ghosts (!!!) to speak through. Big hit, everyone wanted to be "possessed."
It occurs to me that the story of one person bamboozling their middle school might not be quite enough for a screenplay, but the story of two competing bamboozlers (alien abduction and psychic powers) in the same school might be a dynamite story.
a priori I would have subjectively considered "some people are right about their jhana experiences" to be significantly more plausible than "some people get great pleasure from being tied up and whipped" (after all, being whipped is in some sense "obviously worse" than meditating). If you believe the latter, why wouldn't you at least think the former is plausible?
Does anyone have experience with those reading techniques that supposedly let you read much faster, by switching off your internal monologue? I think the idea is you stop wasting time vocalising the words in your mind.
Lot's of people have recommended it, and reading faster would be pretty useful. But I'm sceptical. An "internal monologue" seems like another one of these subjective things that may or may not be real. And I feel most time spent reading is just processing the logic/reasoning of what's written anyway, can you really gain reading speed without sacrificing comprehension?
What? There are people who monologue what they read?
I pretty much only do that. I commented elsewhere in the thread that it was jarring to find out that Lars has Tourette’s, simply because it is harder for me to conceptualize a verbal/writing distinction. I read someone’s writing as if they were speaking it.
That said, you can absolutely turn that off and speed read. It is useful for quickly skimming the page and extracting information. But, for me at least, it involves significantly less engagement with the text and can lead to sloppy comprehension when you get tired.
In the middle ages, reading without saying the words out loud was considered impressive.
Yep. I "hear" everything I read in the same "voice" I think with.
Scott, there is one distinction between the spoonies case and the jhanas/meditation case that I think you should have mentioned. The proposal in meditation is that there are techniques you can use to produce particular internal or mental states. The use of the word “real” here means that if you use those techniques, you will experience these states. It’s undeniable that we can change our mental states by choice or, especially, by practice in certain ways (lucid dreaming is a good example). So when people say “jhanas are real” they mostly mean “you can really achieve these mental states”.
The spoonies situation is different: the claim that “spoonies illnesses are real” is not a claim that “undiagnosed illness is a mental state you can reach through practice”: in fact it’s the diametric opposite of that claim. Instead the spoonie claim is that these illnesses are not “mental states that I have practiced to achieve” it’s that these illnesses are objectively existing independently of the sufferer’s control: that they absolutely have no choice in those states.
Assessing whether people have techniques that really do produce certain mental states if you practice them requires one approach: consider whether mental states can be changed, and test the technique yourself.
Assessing whether spoonie illnesses etc are not a consequence of practiced changes in mental state requires a different approach: denying that mental states can be changed by choice, and accepting such asserted states with no way of testing them (unlike in the jhana case, where you can test the assertion to some degree yourself).
Scott writes:
about Spoonies:
"the name derived from the idea that physically and mentally well people have unlimited “spoons”, or mental/physical resources they use to deal with their day."
Can we back up for a second? People have unlimited mental/physical resources? Since when. If a "neurotypical" person says "I don't have the mental energy to deal with X right now" they are not looked at like they said something ridiculous. That's a perfectly normal thing to say.
Why does having limited energy all of a sudden make you "special"?
This is I think, another way people are being misleading about all this. They aren't intentionally lying to gain sympathy. They are mistakenly interpreting perfectly normal mental states that they and everyone else in the world has, as being uniquely theirs. Imagining that they are more special than they are. I once saw a meme from someone about how when they add numbers like 24 plus 39 in their head they first add 24 to 40 and then subtract one. Unlike "neurotypical" people who apparently don't have internal mental processes at all and just know what 24 plus 39 is? It's very weird. Obviously this doesn't apply to everything and all conditions mentioned in this article. But I have seen this kind of thing a lot.
The spoons metaphor is derived from what started off as a useful explanation of what having a chronic condition regarding physical limitations was like, then naturally got shared around online and metamorphosed into the type of misuse you example about not having enough mental energy.
https://creakyjoints.org.au/living-with-arthritis/how-the-spoon-theory-helps-me-explain-the-fatigue-of-chronic-illness/
I think the idea of "unlimited energy" is misleading, but the general idea is that a person without a disability usually doesn't have to think about the energy they need to navigate their day; unless they are sick or hungry or tired or overworked, for a normal day they can go about normal activities without having to plan out expenditure of physical resources.
Someone with a physical disability or chronic illness has to plan things out because there are now limits on their capacity, so they may have to choose between "preparing, cooking, eating and cleaning up after a meal" versus "getting all my work done". So that may lead to skipping meals, or not doing housework, or not going out for social events, or not taking on more work.
You may have to choose between "do I shower today" versus "do I go out and grocery shop", which is not a tradeoff most people even consider, much less have to engage with.
Hmm, I don't have a chronic illness, but I do think that a similar metaphor is useful even for healthy folks, at least applied to self-discipline. Weren't there all those studies about how our daily self-discipline is a limited resource? I definitely feel this in my day-to-day - on days when I use that self-discipline to go grocery shopping and cook a meal (after a long day of work), I usually can't get myself to do anything productive for the rest of the evening.
I had mono back in the '90s and ran a highish fever for a month. I felt that I could do two 'things' a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. A 'thing' was taking a shower, walking a fairly short distance to the shops etc. So I guess I have experienced that. Once the fever lifted I was back to normal, though.
Scott's examples of high functioning people who talk themselves into having benign DID are missing the point of Resident Contrarian's critique (and Freddie's more informed and searing ones). Suppose an employee pisses off a client, says that it's because "Brad" was on-call personality-wise that day, and threatens ADA action when you discipline them. Do we as a society just accept that their internal experience is valid? Do we want society incentivizing them to use mental health resources in support of them dodging responsibility?
I also find odd that Scott seems to be doubling down on the "why would people make this stuff up", when he gave one of the best explanations I've seen of exactly why people make this stuff up (Section 8 of https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-the ).
I'm somewhat in a quandary here, as while I agree with the general thrust of the piece, I don't think Resident Contrarian is being as obstinate in doubt as they are presented.
(1) I know this patient is hallucinating when he reports having seen Jesus, because obviously since Jesus is dead he can't appear because obviously the dead don't appear to the living
Reasonable, unless someone wants to bring in the historical record of ghosts. And indeed, in the post about the Hexenhammer, was not part of the argument brought by the believers in witches the fact that there was a long tradition of reasonable-seeming people reporting instances of witchcraft, including having seen witches shapeshift and the like?
What differentiates this from RC going:
(2) I know this person is lying/deluded when he claims to be experiencing mystic spiritual states because obviously mystic spiritual states don't have any objective existence because obviously all the deity stuff is nonsense
Ah, but here we run into the qualification that is attached to "believe reasonable-sounding reports" - only so long as it is *plausible*.
" Either we trust trustworthy-sounding people who we like, when they say stuff that sounds kind of plausible - or we apply extreme skepticism about every not-immediately-verifiable claim!"
Claim (1) also rests on the unstated assumption that "the dead appearing to the living" and "all that deity and spirit stuff" is implausible, *despite* the long historic record of reasonable people reporting deity and spirit stuff. So claim (1) can be restated as:
(1) I know this patient is hallucinating when he reports having seen Jesus, because obviously since Jesus is dead he can't appear because obviously the dead don't appear to the living because obviously all the deity and spirit stuff is nonsense, there are no such things as ghosts and Jesus is not (G)/(g)od because gods don't exist
(2) I know this person is lying/deluded when he claims to be experiencing mystic spiritual states because obviously mystic spiritual states don't have any objective existence because obviously all the deity stuff is nonsense
Both claims agree that the "spirit and deity" stuff is nonsense. If Resident Contrarian was doubting the word of "a bunch of my friends who I trust a lot" saying they really had seen a real actual ghost not a word of a lie, would you agree or disagree with them? Would you, Scott, be convinced that ghosts were real if a bunch of your friends reported seeing one, or would you go for "I believe they believe they saw one, and there are some physical situations/psychological set-ups where people can genuinely believe they saw a ghost" but still "ghosts are not real"?
If the claim was not for achieving a jhana state, but for having the presence of Jesus speaking to them, would you believe it or would you be on Resident Contrarian's side of the fence regarding doubt?
Would you then characterise Resident' Contrarian's position of "doubt without derision or disdain" as "RC is doing an old trick: summing up his opponent’s position as an extreme absolute, then summing up his own position as “it’s diverse and complicated and a middle ground”?
See, I believe in Jesus and the deity and spirit stuff. I'm not sure about jhanas, but I don't a priori deny the possibility of spiritual states. But that is because of my underlying presupposition that belief in deity and spirit stuff is not implausible.
I think the plausibility standard is doing a lot of work here that is not examined, and I think "Well a bunch of my friends said this and I believe them" has more to do with "this reported experience fits within the parameters of what I consider plausible" than anything else. If a bunch of your friends said they had seen Jesus appearing to them, would you be Peter or Thomas in your response?
I’m sufficiently Watters-Pilled (Crazy Pilled?) to full believe spoonies and the people getting tics from Tik Tok is fully understandable and they are not “faking” it. A large part of crazy like us goes over how mental illness seems to look for socially recognizable outlets and then picks a popular to one, they act like they have said illness because the Illness approximates their internal discomfort, over time the brain (with the help of social encouragement) finetunes the general mental illness to the specific case and suddenly those “faking” having DID or anorexia really do have it.
C.S Lewis wrote in the screw tape letters, “A man becomes what he pretends to be”
This whole back and forth seems to be just a rediscovering of the ideas of the book; or maybe trying to falsify it? If people were faking things for attentions (which I’m sure some do) why go so far to actually starve to death?
It’s personally hard to me to look out into general internet and not see insane beliefs genuinely head for social, political or personal reasons, and in the Hansionian sense, it doesn’t matter if they know they are insane or not if it helps them fit in.
In a pragmatic way, I’m going to go beyond just discussing ideas for fun and advocate for censoring any social media post that goes over talking about mental illnesses, so people can’t see the status games and it stops greater social contagion effects. But with that recommendation now we’re just back to the end of Scott’s review of crazy like us, no further along to solving the problem than one year ago
Scott, I think I had/have something similar to your weird subtype of OCD. When I was a kid I’d get a strong impulse to touch corners of objects. Frustratingly it’d often be the interior top corners of door frames, which I couldn’t reach. The impulse was always intrusive and distracting.
Scott, I think I experienced something similar to your weird subtype of OCD. When I was young I’d get intrusive thoughts that I needed to touch the corners of certain objects (doorframes especially).
> A statement like “I could tell he was lying” isn’t quite taboo nonsense there, but it carries much less weight than in other places.
Good. People are functionally incapable of telling if other people are lying - they do no better than chance. Please do not believe you are actually capable of telling someone is lying in a manner other than "comparing what they say to actual evidence."
I was literally in the middle of writing a reply to say exactly this.
It's pretty funny that RC says this while discounting other peoples "fake" experiences.
I think there's two relevant concepts that might bridge the gap between Scott and RC's positions.
When my wife and I started dating, she would half-jokingly assume any other reasonable person would take the same positions on issues (trivial or serious) as she did. Young eager psychology student that I was, I explained that people have a variety of experiences and takes on things based on a huge number of factors and that it was unreasonable to expect anything else. My wife acknowledged this while still playfully holding on to the idea that she was the sane woman in a world gone mad. We now jokingly refer to this error as "The Standard of Normalcy"; that is, the concept of "I think this, so everyone else probably does too". We've caught ourselves doing it multiple times, as well as applying it to others.
The other concept is medical student syndrome, which is common in medical internships and anyone who has taken a first-year psychology course. As soon as you're made aware of particular symptoms, you become hyperaware of them for a little while, and you wonder (because you have no diagnostic expertise) whether you have the condition you've just learned about. I think this can explain at least a portion of the Spoonie crowd - "Oh, hey, this person says that part of their ADHD is walking into the kitchen and forgetting why they came there. I do that. ...do I have undiagnosed ADHD?" That kind of phenomenon can explain how the social media presentation of someone's subjective experience can sort of go viral and dig into other people's subjective experience as well, since there's no "gold standard" of human experience to compare to (it's the Standard of Normalcy again!) This works whether 99% of the Spoonie crowd are faking for attention or if 1% of them are. The information spreads either way.
So we're looking at a situation where a subjective experience of a condition spreads via social media or other channels, and as people encounter it they begin to wonder if they, too, have that condition. Hell, the day I read the jhanas article I was in a particularly good mood for no discernible reason and felt like I couldn't lose. I was open to the idea that I had somehow gotten into a jhana, even though I don't meditate at all and have no interest in cultivating the practice - I thought maybe I just was being particularly thoughtful/mindful and lucked into the positive feedback loop on accident. However, despite the what-if, I brushed it off - surely it's not that easy, and people can have enduring good moods without cause.
I don't know that this is a philosophical difference so much as two people doing an epistemic Standard of Normalcy. RC makes the case "I think it's okay to be skeptical of people's claims if they don't line up with your priors" (based on his own experience of encountering lots of things that are worth doubting), and Scott's making the case "It makes sense to, at the very least, believe people's subjective experience of something, even if there's not a real-world correlate", based on his personal experience of meeting people who certainly seemed to have made-up or at least psychosomatic experiences and nonetheless felt real suffering or impact.
Interesting all of this!
That makes sense the distinction between RC and Scott's priors is about each of them applying their own epistemic standard of normalcy. I guess we could ask how they each got to those priors -- we selectively glean things from our experience. Scott lays out an impressive list of influences that way, some personal and some professional. In that sense, it feels to me like he's provided a lot of justification for why he arrived where he did.
The broader question posed to me by their differing starting points is: how much curiosity is a person willing to bring to an unfamiliar situation before they judge it?
And beyond that, how much curiosity do they think is important and valuable to bring to an unfamiliar situation before they judge it?
My bias will show here -- I hear RC saying "I will judge first and don't see particular value in extending open-minded curiosity to unfamiliar situations" and I hear Scott saying "I am going to extend a lot of open-minded curiosity and I think it's socially/morally valuable to do that." I may be uncharitable to RC in that framing because their way is not mine.
I land hard on Scott's end of the spectrum on this (which is not often how I feel about stances he takes). For me it's both a moral stance (curiosity, compassion, patience, non-judging are valuable traits to balance our hard-wired tendency towards fear and defensiveness) and a belief that epistemic closure impedes science, learning, and discovering new things.
I suppose at another level we could say where a person lands on this spectrum of judging/being curious is just a matter of genetics. One of the five traits on the Big Five personality test is openness to experience. I wonder if everyone in this discussion took that test, whether we'd see their responses to the RC/Scott debate to be consistent with the openness to experience trait (though I suppose other traits could be involved as well).
Thanks for the thoughtful response! I think you're identifying the core mechanic determining whether a person is open to new situations or phenomena they otherwise don't have a ready explanation for, or at least a plausible candidate!
I'm not convinced any particular set of circumstances or experiences would necessarily lead to a given set of priors. For example, I could see a person of faith being open to jhanas because they believe in spiritual experiences, closed to them because it isn't explicitly mentioned in their faith, or evaluate it on non-spiritual terms and view it as a way of hotwiring the brain. I imagine there might be a genetic component or some other predisposition, as you mention with the Big Five.
Personally I'm probably closer to Scott than RC on this spectrum, but I think I frame it in terms of being compassionate and considering harm reduction. If a person says they have momentary visions of the future, but they're brief and disconnected and never of anything important, then how do either of us benefit if I challenge them on it? As long as we're both getting along in the world and our beliefs don't have any impact on our actions, the debate is mostly just a theoretical one.
I think when it gets stickier is when you run into situations where there are primary or secondary effects of giving people this kind of credit, or when you act on those beliefs. I hope I'm representing Freddie's argument accurately when he states that giving credence to faked mental disorder (or people with very mild expressions who romanticize it or treat it like a personality trait) is that it contributes to people's beliefs that people with mental illness never do anything difficult or problematic, and that when you do run into someone with a severe case of a mental disorder, they don't get any forgiveness or contextual consideration, because whoever is adjudicating saw someone on TikTok with the same disorder and they didn't do anything like this, so obviously the disorder is not the issue.
I think Scott is coming at it from the other end of the stick - should someone be considered to be faking or lying about an internal perception or belief if there's no extreme knock-on effects of it? Doesn't that minimize their situation and in turn cause them harm? At what point do you draw the line between diagnosable clinical depression and someone with a case of the blues, and how should they be treated differently?
This is something people can have principled and compassionate arguments for on both sides. A more charitable reading of RC's take might be "In a lot of cases, it doesn't hurt to at least take someone at their word in social practice, but I reserve the right to be privately skeptical and not update my priors or worldview just because a person or group claims a given phenomenon is real". Given that the point of RC's blog is mostly arguing the alternative side(s) of other blogs' arguments, I think that's what he's doing here - showing instances where giving credulity to these claims might cause more harm than good.
Thank you for the more charitable reading of RC, that works for me. Also as you say that he's chosen to inhabit the devil's advocate spot, which is a legitimate role in helping people think things through. I said elsewhere that it seemed to me Scott's writing in response to RC was particularly lucid and forthright, which perhaps was enabled by RC taking the position he did. We all stumble towards our own clarity in these kinds of interactions.
My own experience with causality around big social trends is that it's just too hard to say how one thing will affect another. Does a bunch of people talking on TikTok about mental illness of whatever kind, whether genuinely or in a crass profit-seeking way, undermine support for people with mental illness or increase it? Does it undermine it in some areas and increase it in others? Does it help a bunch of TikTok followers in invisible ways we can't measure? Does it hurt a bunch of others by spreading social contagion mental illness? I think we are often too good at perceiving potential threats and reacting to them (Twain's line about I've had a lot of worries in my life most of which never happened).
On the other side, after claiming all my non-judgmental openness to experience, I will say I by and large think all social media is a terrible toxic pit of garbage and I blame it for all kinds of ills, including our dopamine addiction, our short attention spans, our impatient, uncharitable ways of communicating, our desperate, embarrassing narcissism, our sense of alienation, and on and on. My curiosity ran out on social media a while ago and has turned into epistemic closure and judgmental-ness. I'd like us all to return to our villages and build some barns together.
This was a great back and forth. I don't have much to add - but since I can't click "like" I wanted to say thanks.
I was going to write a top-level comment about how RC's epistemics are bad and he should feel bad, and thank Scott for doing the hard work of countering bad epistemics with good. I won't write that now, I think this exchange is better (and kinder) than what I had in mind. Thanks again!
People respond to incentives and not all incentives are monetary. When you have kids you’ll observe first hand the devious and borderline evil strategies little humans employ to garner attention, acceptance, and love. I’ll be interested to hear how you navigate the balance between compassion and accountability when that time comes.
Your position sounds compassionate but it fails to acknowledge the cost of pathological empathy. Two examples that come to mind are false accusations of the sexual and race variety. Another might be long COVID. Validating people’s pain can unintentionally create a perverse incentive structure despite the best of intentions.
I’d be more interested in hearing about how one navigates these types of costs because it’s easy to advocate for kindness without a cost. For example, in RC’s examples, is it possible we’re creating more mental illness via TikTok + believing people’s pain?
As someone with mild ADHD and an active & visual imagination, I've had to manage my ADHD for decades without interventions or drugs. It's also because being GenX, the diagnosis back when I was a kid was not common at all. Self-management was a learned skill because I found I could focus my distractedness on honing different skillsets and interests. Being autodidactic to a degree helped in this regard as well. My uncle recognized this as being a "Jack of all trades" which he saw as a good thing and encouraged my varied interests in ways my parents did not recognize. But it also meant that I never readily excelled at any one thing. The inability to focus on one interest kept me from totally mastering that skill set. and it wasn't until I changed my undergrad major to Architecture did I manage to corral variant interests into a singular way of thinking and visualizing.
I can have some level of empathy and understanding for some of these people because I've met and worked with many over the decades. But I've also discovered that those with actual issues tend to not broadcast their mental issues. No one I know walks around doing selfie videos talking about their ADHD. The people I know with severe autism are not actively running social media accounts about how they cope with their autism for their 30K followers. The people I know with depression and addiction issues (including family members) don't broadcast that stuff like it's a badge of honor.
I think the idea that these tiktok /instagram folks are actively doing this as some sort of badge of honor or as they put it "destigmatizing" their "illness" aren't really suffering from debilitating mental health issues but just suffering mild anxiety and stress, and I'm sure psychosomatic impacts. I suspect the more popular "DIDs of TikTok" are doing it for the attention. I think we have to be vary wary about the impacts of social media's ability to allow people to magnify what may otherwise not be anything into something bigger.
'This sounds like: “I, RC, have the mysterious mental ability to detect liars. I admit I can’t prove this, but come on, you should probably just trust me because it’s perfectly reasonable to think other people have mysterious mental abilities you don’t.'
This whole thing strikes me as pretty wrong on its face. I haven't read his piece, only these excerpts, so my take exists in that vacuum. Here:
This: "[...] with that comes a group-wide expectation that things that can’t be quantified with math are thus default-unknowable." is cited as the impetus behind this:
"[...] something that seems unlikely to most but is unfalsifiable, and because of that unfalsifiability is then assumed to be true because it was claimed at all."
Whether or not it's accurate to state it's the impetus, the real claim being made is that you are accepting statements that he finds dubious at least in part due to the ultimate unfalsifiability of those statements with the technology that we have at hand.
This is why, per your excerpting, he states that your starting point for these matters is that "we would basically assume that any claim we couldn’t disprove was true, provided we could find at least a few thousand people who claimed it."
Zero of that has to do with spinning a Kreskin hat around on one's head and divine truth from falsehood. Something of a serious charge, I'll add, in communities that care a lot about what truth is.
I think the proportion of kids on TikTok faking conditions for views, sympathy, and clout may be significantly higher than the general population, but I otherwise fully agree with this article. I'm a "spoonie" myself--I have an official diagnosis of idiopathic hypersomnia now, but my whole young adulthood was characterized by chronic sleepiness and pain no doctor could diagnose, so I kept bouncing between specialists and psychologists. I don't even have a "real" diagnosis now (I mean... "Idiopathic" is right in the name), but at least I have confirmation that my sleep latency is abnormal and scientists recognize my sleepiness as real qualia. I only work 20 hours per week and have found a decent quality of life by living within my limited time/energy means, which is what spoon theory is about.
I also have had tinnitus and visual snow since I was very young. I can see auras around people if I stare at them without blinking long enough and they're standing under bright enough light. When I got bored in church I used to unfocus my eyes and watch the aura wiggle around and follow the preacher.
Scott,
I should thank you for deleting my comment in this thread. I am pretty sure I would feel regret right now if I were looking at it on my phone feeling like my pants had just fallen down while I was giving a commencement speech at Harvard. Clearly your post struck a nerve with me and I want to thank you again for it.
Since this post stemmed from the discussion of the jhanas, it may be relevant to the discussion of DID that, predictably, the Buddhists got there first too. Certain traditions of Tibetan Buddhism prominently feature the practice of "yidam meditation" where the practitioner chooses one of a certain category of enlightened deities ("yidams") and strongly visualizes themselves as *being* this deity, including possessing all of the deity's wisdom, enlightenment, virtue, etc. As far as I know the yidam doesn't follow the practitioner "off the cushion" in the same way that Scott's hypothetical DID case carries Darth Vader around all the time, but the qualities that the practitioner inherits from their yidam are supposed to become permanent over time. (You've got to admire the lateral thinking; reaching enlightenment is hard, so instead of becoming enlightened, why not simply become a different being *who is already enlightened*?)
Sometimes, instead of visualizing being the deity, the practicioner visualizes the deity sitting before them and e.g. bestowing blessings upon them- so this may also be where tulpa stuff comes from, although I've yet to encounter "tulpas" as such in any material from actual Buddhists.
(Important disclaimer - I am, emphatically, not an expert in Buddhism and am quite possibly misrepresenting all of the above in important ways. This is not soteriological advice; please ask your guru if yidams are right for you.)
Or for another context, this is exactly what good actors do; assume a persona.
"..So move his soul to his own conceit..."
How many "personalities" did Robin Williams have?
I am convinced there is a continuum here that has an end point at DID, the operative word being dissociative.
I think you are right in the main about Yidam practice, but what does the term "tulpa" refer to? I haven't encountered that before.
It seems to me that Scott, if he errs at all, errs on the side of compassion. Which I find an admirable quality.
Is Resident Contrarian really skeptical of jhana, in general, or is he skeptical specifically of the Twitter thread that makes the specific claim that jhana is "10-100x better" than casual sex, and some of the dodgier comments related to that? It may be true that "thousands of people over thousands of years saying they’ve experienced it," and have experienced it, but that thread is still a false description of it. Personally, I find the idea of jhana in general to be extremely plausible--even simple breath meditations can give me, in the right circumstances, a very palpable feeling of tranquility, I'd be surprised if intensive practices didn't provide even more benefit. But thousands of people over thousands of years have not said, specifically, that jhana is a hundred times better than sex, that it eliminates one's desire for casual sex, that it cures drug dependencies, etc. I think it's fallacious to treat the historical records as evidence for this different contemporary claim.
The more serious issue here is that phrase, about rationalist social norms: "People are less able or less willing to point out that someone looks less credible for socially understood reasons than in other less-enlightened-more-practical contexts." To me this is easy to understand. "Socially understood reasons" = all the normal heuristics you use when evaluating a claim in real life. These aren't anything like a "mysterious mental ability to detect liars," they're just normal, informal ideas that you accumulate over a lifetime of experience. Small things in the way people present themselves, present their ideas, certain patterns that you see over and over again.
I don't want to get far into which of these apply to the original thread, because my understanding is that comments shouldn't include anything that looks like a personal attack. I will just say, I have a set of priors around people who make very strong claims about the effects of meditative practices or about their ability to induce states of (sexual or otherwise) euphoria. I'm immediately distrustful of a man who claims that casual sex is just not appealing to him anymore, when it was appealing at a previous time--this is a common thing for men to lie about, and not just in the context of meditative practice, for reasons that I take to be obvious. It's a common thing for men to lie to themselves about. It's also typical for people who work or invest in a particular area to exaggerate how impactful that area is, how great it could be. Not out of a desire to deceive, but spontaneously, from their own enthusiasm.
It's tactless to go into this, obviously far into the realm of ad hominem, and frankly I don't like bringing it up (and am a bit worried that bringing it up will earn me a ban). It's not, "I distrust this, because I can magically detect liars." It's, "I have seen people lie in this particular way over and over again, so it's going to take stronger evidence than self-reporting to make me believe it."
Yeah, I'd consider that's obvious and uncontroversial. My point is that someone who admitted to previously being into casual sex, who suddenly claims it's not enjoyable to them anymore--that specifically is suspect.
In general, in contemporary western culture men are more inclined toward casual sex than women--not always, but enough that it's a frequent, even clichéd, dynamic, for a man to pretend to be looking for something serious when in fact what he wants is just casual sex. If a man claims that casual sex isn't enjoyable for him at all anymore, that's a way of preemptively asserting that what he wants must be serious. That can be helpful to him.
Returning to I think the crucial point here--outside of the very unusual social context which is the Rationalist blogosphere, this isn't a dynamic that needs to be explained. Elsewhere it's seen as pretty obvious, at least as far as I've seen.
Nothing you've said strikes me as ad hominem and it actually helped me understand this perspective better than I did before.
The other thing I'm struck by, now reading RC's full post properly, and seeing how centered it is on claims by this one person on Twitter about jhanas, is that Substack is not journalism in some ways that are important for all the conversation among everyone that has followed. (i get that RC and Scott don't claim to be doing journalism, but I think it's worth just looking at for a moment what that means in this instance).
If a journalist were writing a piece on "astounding claims made by a modern day Buddhist on Twitter about jhanas" they would have reached out for comment to a senior meditation teacher in the West, an academic in Buddhist studies from a reputable university, and a researcher who is doing clinical experiments on meditators and their mental states. There are multiple people in each of those three categories, so it would be easy as a journalist to get those three views in short order. An editor would require it.
I am confident that comments from all three of those people -- senior meditation teacher, academic, and clinical researcher -- would have contextualized and moderated the Twitter voice so substantially that none of us would be here days later having conversations about whether those specific and dramatic statements by a person on Twitter represent current Buddhist or scientific thinking about what jhanas are, how they are experienced, what impact they have on practitioners, and how they are understood in the overall context of meditation and Buddhism.
I want to be clear, I'm not calling this person a liar or saying that there aren't other people who would say similar things. Perhaps all their first-person claims are entirely true. But they represent such a tiny thin slice of experience relative to Buddhism, meditation, and jhanas -- not to mention they are small snippets of attention-grabbing sentences on Twitter without the kinds of clarification and nuance that comes with properly interviewing someone. At minimum, that single thin slice of one person's experience really needs to be put into some context, particularly if it's being written about by people without domain-specific knowledge for an audience without domain-specific knowledge.
I really like Substack and many of the voices here, but there are times like this that I wish it weren't quite so easy for people writing about something they know little about to grab one person's dramatic Twitter post and run for miles with it.
I'm glad you wrote this; I was struggling to express a similar idea in a respectful way, which I think you have done very well. I'm still not sure about Jhanas, and obviously I don't know anything about the original Twitter poster, but I admit I have heuristics developed in my personal and professional life which had credibility red flags triggered. In particular, the phrases 'ten ex' and 'better than sex' are poorly correlated with rigor (but it's not a perfect metric!) I actually found some of the comments below, however, much more thoughtful and persuasive, generally *because* they did much of that journalist type work (albeit just quoting, rather than getting a comment on the specific case).
'better than sex' is really a hopeless metric to have a discussion about don't you think? In some cases a toothache can be better than sex.
This can be perfectly summed up by an old latin quote
"De poetas y locos, todos tenemos un poco"
"Of poets and madmen, we all have a bit"
For what it’s worth, perceptual psychologists have figured out surprisingly simple unconscious strategies that people use to catch a ball without computing any of the physics. If you assume you’re in the path of the ball, you can simply run forwards or backwards at whatever speed makes the image of the ball on your retina have constant upward velocity, and you will magically end up in the right place at the right time to catch it. Only small additions need to be made for the general case. Science!
To most people, your claims that these people you know are reliable are pretty suspect. You live in the epicenter of California woo-woo nonsense. I would immediately STOP trusting anyone’s faculties who claimed to have multiple personalities or achieved jhana, for the same reason I wouldn’t put somebody with a broken leg into a relay race. If an old respected lawyer I had trusted for years started talking like that, I wouldn’t give more weight to the claim, instead I’d be inclined to call the bar association for fear of what was about to happen to their clients cases and money.
This is a really weird turn for the blog. I think we all know it’s very hard to be a consistent rationalist and that the allure of cool stuff like Eastern mysticism has corrupted many rationalists of the past. If normie boring materialism isn’t cutting it for you, fine I get that, but every post where you treat this stuff as real is hurting your credibility on other issues.
Other states may not be more rational, but they are in general less credulous, which tends to limit the contagiousness of irrationality. There's a good reason California is the font of more than its share of cults and fads.
>If an old respected lawyer I had trusted for years started talking like that, I wouldn’t give more weight to the claim, instead I’d be inclined to call the bar association for fear of what was about to happen to their clients cases and money.
I'm curious; Would you feel the same way if he spoke about Jesus as his Lord and Saviour?
"This is a really weird turn for the blog. I think we all know it’s very hard to be a consistent rationalist and that the allure of cool stuff like Eastern mysticism has corrupted many rationalists of the past. If normie boring materialism isn’t cutting it for you, fine I get that, but every post where you treat this stuff as real is hurting your credibility on other issues."
I agree wholeheartedly with this, but on reflection I think what's going on here is just another "Categories Were Made for Man"-style sophistic contortion so Scott doesn't have to admit that transgender ideology doesn't make any sense.
Here are some stats to keep in mind to help evaluate claims about unusual states of consciousness and behavior. 1. People who have the diagnosable version of dissociative personality disorder seldom know it until something really weird going on in their life forces them to get a psych evaluation. People who talk about having multiple personalities probably don’t. 2. In anonymous surveys, 25% of women say they had a sexual experience they did not want before the age of 25. For men who grew up in the family of an alcoholic, that rate is more like 40%. But, 75% of these individuals never report these episodes of sexual assault or rape. Of reports of rape and sexual assault which do get reported, 96% of the time, the victim is telling the truth, even if there is not enough evidence to bring the case to trial. 4% of the time the victim is lying. On the other hand, in sexual assault cases, 100% of the time the accuser initially says they didn’t do what they are accused of. People who talk about being sexually assaulted probably were. People who who are accused of sexual assault and deny it probably are lying. 3. In evaluating unusual states of experience, looking at Buddhist practice is interesting because these people who actively choose to pursue attaining these states seldom talk about it, at least the ones I know. Anyone casually chatting in public about attaining this or that level of this or that level of esoteric skill probably hasn’t. That said, some people have
Have my emotional reaction: When I see people getting really angry about possible fakers of illness, I assume they're showing off how tough they are by ignoring other people's pain.
This might be unfair-- as I say, it's my emotional reaction.
Part of this is the history of actual illnesses being discovered which were getting written off, and part of it is (as noted in comments) that people with celiac disease or Ehler-Dahnos have a very hard time getting diagnosed.
Same for endometriosis.
There are a lot of people who have a strong prior that other people's problems aren't real.
Since one of my problems is thinking of jokes, here's a approximate quote from A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Forum: "I can bear any amount of suffering as long as it happens to someone else." (I'd have sworn it was Zero Mostel, but I can't find it.)
One part of my assumption is that I don't get the impression that a lot of the folks on tiktok are seeking professional help. If they're happy with their set of personalities, why would they seek help?
Also, I bet most of the shortage of professional help isn't related to fakers, it's (for the US) arbitrary limits on the number of doctors and a bad insurance regime.
Is there any reason I should assume that RC and FdB are really angry rather than just seeking attention?
I don't know about de Boer, but doesn't Resident Contrarian have a significant history of being poor? If you're poor you meet a lot more screwed-up people with weird belief fetishes, because screwed-up people are overrepresented among the poor, and you meet a lot more fraudsters preying on the gullible, because criminals prefer people who can't afford lawyers. I've been a little poor myself, and I can empathize with that greater level of suspicion. My vague impression of Scott's history is that it's pretty privileged, doesn't include any significant stretch of time being poor. A difference in formative experiences could readily account for a significant difference in a priori assumptions.
Furthermore, when you're poor you can't as easily just tolerate or walk away from such people, because the entire nature of being poor is your options are severely limited. Sometimes you simply must maintain a "friendship" which is toxic and exploitive, because you have no freaking choice, you need what's being offered, even if the emotional/psychological price is ugly and painful and nobody who had the means to reject it would fail to.
So another possibility here is that RC is reacting with some degree of resentment to what he sees as prioritization of a First World Problem[1], which is blissfully unaware of the (arguably much bigger and more pressing) "Third World" problem of people trying to protect themselves from emotional predators and exploitive deception.
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[1] https://imgflip.com/i/70j7m4
Thank you for a thoughtful reply to a provocative comment.
I've had a relatively easy life, and haven't had that level of exposure to fakers.
On the other hand, I do think there's such a thing as framing a situation that's somewhat bad in a way to generate rage.
Are these tictokers who claim without medical evidence that they have various syndromes actually sucking up medical resources for non-existent problems? It seems unlikely
Are they possibly giving added proof to medical practitioners who want to ignore real problems anyway? More plausibly, but this doesn't seem to induce the same level of rage, possibly because it distributes the blame more widely.
That might be the most concise summary of the whole issue: "There are a lot of people who have a strong prior that other people's problems aren't real."
Huh. You figure there are a lot of people who, when they see someone hobbling around on crutches with a leg in a cast, think "Oh I bet that's a fake cast"?
I wouldn't have thought so, but depending on what you mean by "a lot" and extending your example to something a little less visible, a great many people believed Alex Jones about Sandy Hook.
> If, as Jaynes hypothesizes, the ancients’ relationship to their deities was similar to a modern DID patient’s relationship to their alters,
Fantastic alter altar pun
That is a good pun, re: Jaynes’ theory of God, talking to people; 
An important part of his hypothesis is that these voices originated as the internalized voices of an authority figure in the family or tribe that taught them things. Seeing as no one could keep notes the only way to hold onto information was to hold on to the spoken words and I don’t find it difficult to believe that people who relied on nothing but spoken language were very good at holding on to the intonation and voice that went along with those words. It’s not nearly as woo as some people make it out to be. 
Seeing as we are talking about voices in our heads, and, more controversially, God talking to people, and lower case gods talking to people, What is the Rationalist hypothesis on the origin of gods? I mean did they invent use or did we invent them or something else entirely? It seems like a pretty fundamental part of this issue to clarify.
Again I think this subject is too complex to boil down in the way that you or RC have done.
Imagine I'm on a date and my date says "did you want to come up to my apartment for some coffee?" (Imagine also that we're in a 1970s porno I guess). Probably the information being conveyed is not "we would both like a hot beverage."
Here's the thing though. I've met lots of folks - usually straight, religious women - who told every story of getting laid with the assumption that the pretext on which they invited the guy to their apartment was the actual reason they invited the guy up to their apartment. I.e., "I'm not sure how it happened. We made out in my car for a while, I invited him up to play Soul Calibur, and right as I was picking Taki he jumped me."
Now, I'm disinclined to believe they were just blatantly lying about thinking the purpose of the apartment visit was video games. I'm also disinclined to believe their entire brain was running a "let's beat this guy in Soul Caliber" subroutine.
Most likely there were several systems at play:
1) a brain region strategizing to get the dude up to the apartment for intercourse.
2) a brain region strategizing an exit strategy in case the dude was a weirdo.
3) a brain region yelling that only sluts invite a dude to their apartment for sex on the first date.
And the conscious mind, either during the play or in memory, told them a story about really wanting to play video games with the visibly erect man.
Similar self-deception goes into the creation of psychosomatic pain - the pain is real but possibly only because of a brain at war with itself. I've known plenty of folks who tried to kill themselves and were so moved by the outpouring of sympathy they received that they tried again. Obviously you don't take 62 sleeping pills if you're feeling peachy keen, but you might mentally amplify your depression if you think doing so will fulfill a need.
It's wrong, and dangerous, to call those folks liars. But it's also wrong to say they're telling the truth. They're just simply multiple people, each helping to create each other, and each with their own motivations. And a conscious mind attempting to make it all into one coherent story.
I agree. Isn't it part of the old Buddhist saw that we are all by nature masters of self-deception?
And that all this criticism of people who are faking it just a way of saying, you suck more than I do?
I think that you mainly have the right of this. Generally we accept our own descriptions of our own internal states, and it's only polite to extend the same privilege to others too. As a heuristic, I think that will lead you wrong less than an approach which boils down to "everyone else's internal processes are more or less the exact same as mine". I also have no special reason to be skeptical about jhana specifically.
While we're considering the general question though, I do have another difficult case to consider - the peak-end rule. According to various studies, if there is an unpleasant experience that lasts some time, followed by a still unpleasant but less intensely unpleasant experience that lasts some time further, that will be reported as an overall less unpleasant experience than an experience containing just the first part.
Now surely there is a sense in which the people reporting their pain as less in the case where they had the same experience plus extra pain are wrong. It's hard to imagine stopping someone after the first part of the experience and asking them if they want to undergo a bit more pain or not, and having them voluntarily choose to have more (but lesser) pain rather than stop altogether.
Probably the best explanation here is that memory of internal states is different to experience of internal states, and perhaps less reliable, but reported memory of internal states is what we mainly have to go on for these conversations.
Tl;dr: I think your prior for "I have accurate recall of the intensity of a past mental state" should be very very low in normal circumstances, especially if there's a social reward/punishment for holding that state. When discussing altered states and such it should be almost zero.
Hey Scott. I'm sorry to go off-topic, but I wanted to give you a heads-up about something happening in my state that I think you'll be interested in. Governor has appointed a four-person committee to examine all occupational licenses, ostensibly examining barriers, public need, public safety and "philosophical considerations." The reality is that they're looking at, among other things, licensing bachelor's-level social workers as therapists etc. This is something that some of us have seen coming for awhile, though I'm frankly shocked that our state is going to be spearheading this. I anticipate they'll be making arguments about empirically validated treatments and ignoring all of the process-oriented research focused on provider skill (or that no single treatment works for or is appropriate for everyone).
More to come, if you're interested. You have a unique community here who I thought might also find the topic worth discussing. Feedback from professional organizations and relevant licensing boards was just solicited, and won't be accepted after January first.
I am officially naming this the “O Lucky Man” thread.
https://www.google.com/search?q=o+lucky+man&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari
The "fake DID thing" sounds a lot like what happens with writers and their mental models of the characters they write. For example "I wanted X to happen but the characters wouldn't cooperate" is a common sentiment...
> I thought that people talking about teenage boys desperate to see their neighbor naked or something were making humorous exaggerations.
Huh. I also thought that...
Scott, in all of this I find myself wondering about a different example from Jhana's that sounds quite similar in the relevant aspects (lots of people over thousands of years claim it's true, people [you/I] trust claim it's true, etc.) but I'm positive you would reject it.
The Holy Spirit. Millions of Christians for at least 2,000 years have described it and its effects, and based on your metrics it's at least as plausible as Jhanas. Predicting your reaction, I would expect you to say that these Christians are having a real experience, but not the one they claim they are having. You seem to reject that same conclusion when it comes to Jhanas, but instead you take their word that they are having the experience they say they are.
Have you thought about the disconnect?
Scott totally lost me here. TikTok DID is so transparently fake it’s laughable
I don't think he's actually dived into it much - normally to his credit! In this case, I think RC is closer to accurate.
"...and then some biological switch gets flipped and they are unable to eat whether they want to or not. These people aren’t making it up and their qualia of fullness and revulsion at the thought of eating food are exactly like my qualia when I have eaten eight slices of bread in a row and everyone is staring at me and I suddenly realize I am a disgusting pig."
This does not ring true to me at all. In my experience, anorexics tend to be very very hungry and obsessed with food. It's important to keep in mind that anorexics tend to be deceitful about food and eating, so they may be telling you what they think would make sense to you (as they know that "I can't stand the thought of not looking skeletal," would not).
It's interesting that the discussion section so quickly became more or less about malingering. With obvious offshoots into its siblings factitious and somatoform disorders.
In my first year, one classmate, an older, non-traditional student like me left the program after one semester of psychopathology and diagnosis class. (Basically a line-by-line review of the DSM).
His reasoning for leaving the program was that he was disturbed by how the DSM is revised and edited by committee. It was to his consternation that sometimes politics and personal values of the committee members was part of the process. He believed going into the field that it was a purely statistically derived set of diagnostic criteria for each disorder. That is, he thought that each list of symptoms was meticulously factorially regressed and what hung together was a valid construct.
I won't chime in with an opinion about this, but one can argue based on the process that was in place that this is how homosexuality (which was present as a disorder as recently as DSM 3-TR) was removed. That it was more political pressure than "science" that killed it.
When we came into the parts (every disorder has this) that essentially declares it NOT a disorder if it is socially normative, he concluded that we had unceremoniously replaced words like "sin" with "inappropriate" and that mental health professionals were the new clergy. To use an extreme example--It is the expert witness on the stand in a criminal trial, after all, who tells the jury whether or not the accused was responsible for his actions.
He said he just didn't want to be in that role.
And comes this discussion over lying about symptoms (malingering) where one of the major concerns is over whether people with serious mental illness (generally the heavy hitters like thought disorders and bipolar processes) are being short-shafted by fakers and non-debilitating, even controversial in their existence ones. It's my old nemesis, subjectivity rearing its ugly head again.
One of my favorite psychological tests, the PAI (Morey) actually attempts to take what most people think of as a dichotomous variable (truth vs lying) and stretch it out into a continuous one using a statistical process called discriminant function. On one end of the spectrum is "effortful negative distortion" and the other is "effortful positive distortion." In the middle are things like "non-effortful negative distortion" and "truth." I have found this approach to be more or less right on, because there are all kinds of reasons why people are not giving you a valid protocol, not just antisocial behavior.
This drives my wife crazy, who is a very black-and-white thinker and "hates being lied to." I have never had that sentiment. I generally ask myself "why would the person give me that kind of response?"
At the same time, in my work as a forensic psychologist, I am keenly aware of the implications of the things I write and testify about in court. If I get it wrong, it can be a profound miscarriage of justice. Also, I find it incredibly annoying when I am doing a compensation and pension evaluation for a veteran whose PTSD story is so outlandish that it strains credulity. There are instruments to detect that kind of malingering too, which I use when I get suspicious.
This article made me think of things I had not thought of in a while.
One thing to maybe note is that jhanic states actually are falsifiable. Maybe someone's claim to have experienced it is unfalsifiable, but the existence of these states of mind can be proven or disproven, at least to ones self - not at the scientific level because it's an internal, personal experience, but you can actually experience it if it is real. It doesn't matter if you believe it or not, it will either be extant or not once you get to the level of necessary concentration. If you are truly being neutral about it, then don't believe it or disbelieve it; try for yourself, see what it is people are talking about.
The conversation between RC and Scott could be made clearer if the distinction is made between:
a) believing that someone experienced what they said they experienced
b) believing someone's interpretation of what they experienced
If someone says, "I can see your aura; it looks blue," and they are otherwise a truthful person, you can believe that they are experiencing something that they interpret as a blue aura. That does not mean you have to believe that you radiate light in some wavelength that is mysteriously only accessible to some people.
Also, it felt like RC's argument about the spoonies and DID folk was really an argument that (we should believe) they are lying, not an argument that they are mistaken. Scott already granted that lying exists, and responded with reasons not to think spoonies and DIDs are lying... which is important, but it's also good to recognize that whether the TikTok folk are lying/exaggerating is a different question from whether they are mistaken about having any spoony/DID-like experiences in the first place.
> At the extremes of those extremes, you see things like the jhana thing: where it’s something that seems unlikely to most but is unfalsifiable
I don't get the unfalsifiable claim. Isn't the idea that anyone can experience jhana if they put in the time and effort? How is that different from any scientific experiment? Sure two people can't look at the results, but that's not a requirement for falsification to my knowledge.
> "Imagine that one day you wake up and suddenly you have terrible leg pain whenever you walk."
I really wish I had to "imagine" this. Sciatica sucks.
Lift with your legs, not your backs, kids. You *really* don't want a bulged disc.
Ditto. Got it as a taxi driver, from throwing heavy luggage around. Got so bad I couldn't move one foot in front of the other more than two inches without excruciating pain.
There's a cure they won't give you in America. Don't get the numbing shots in the spine and don't get cortico-steroids localized, either. Go outside the US and get a series of steroid shots in your posterior, in the muscle. 4 or 5 shots in the same number of days. It releases much more slowly. They said it would be good for a year - it's been almost 10 years since I had severe sciatica. Every day from then on, do the stretches to open up your spine and ease the discs back in. That's basically lying flat on your stomach and easing yourself up slowly onto your elbows, then your hands, and arching your back backwards, then slowly letting yourself down again.
The way they treat it in America is insane. Big fat dose of steroids in your ass muscles will fix it.
This is a really difficult topic for me to reason around for a few reasons. I struggle to express them clearly but if I were to sum it up it would be potentially contradictory facts:
1. I have chronic pain conditions and know others who do and see how often the system fails them and how they're treated and I know I don't get anything out of it and would so much prefer to be biking centuries and hiking 14ers again.
2. I believe the evidence says there are personality traits of those who are predisposed to chronic pain and I've absolutely some people get sympathy and pity out of it and engage in a lot of behavior that could really use some CBT.
I run a chronic pain group and I'm nothing but sympathetic and supportive there. But I also think we're sometimes making things worse for ourselves. I see some of them really engaging in behaviors that are attention seeking and making their pain worse. I just don't know how to square this circle other than it's on a case-by-case basis and I probably have no reliable way of knowing myself which type of case I'm looking at.
I don't mean this to sound callous or unsympathetic, but maybe it's a point of view you've never heard.
I'm 42 years old and I have enough physical problems that I could feel like dogshit all day if I wanted to. I have 3 herniated discs in my back and the remnants of a broken kneecap. I wake up totally numb or in pain many times a night. I get this thought a lot: "If I was 14 years old and woke up in my current body, I'd fucking scream." But honestly, most of the time I'm just fine. Drinking and smoking weed helps, but mainly it's that I've adjusted to reality. My pain tolerance has gone up a lot... whereas I see the pain tolerance of everyone around me going down.
One thing I attribute that to is my total refusal to take painkilling drugs, opiates, etc. Anything other than naproxin (Aleve). What would have once have been hell to me is just a minor issue, and I feel like this is the way humans were designed / evolved to get older. A subset of people around me can't handle any pain and medicate themselves but I wonder whether they even deal with a fraction of what I do before resorting to a pill.
Please don't misread this as an argument for being a tough guy / ignoring pain / saying it isn't real or anything like that. I know it's real. I'm saying I think there's a benefit in teaching yourself to adjust to it so it becomes background noise, instead of relying on drugs.
Then again, it's definitely true that I'm not living the most comfortable life I could be living, so maybe I'm just a sucker for pain; my girlfriend is an ex-dominatrix massage therapist, and I won't even let her give me massages most of the time.
There's something about sitting in a group with the same affliction I'd just never do. Unless the affliction was sex addiction, maybe.
No offense taken. I'll address a few of your points.
First of all, I don't really take much by way of medication. Mostly because there is nothing that's shown to work on my condition. I don't do opioids and I also find that when I take an NSAID I get a rebound effect. So it's not something I take daily or anything.
I didn't mention this initially so there's no way you could have known this, but the condition that I and my friends have is rather intense. It's called complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) and by one study out of McGill university the chronic sufferers of it experience persistent pain worse than having a finger amputated without anesthesia or giving childbirth without anesthesia. I think that level of pain transcends merely avoiding ibuprofen.
To bring it back to rationality, Andrés Gomez Emilsson has given a presentation on ending extreme states of suffering as a potential EA cause area. CRPS was one of the conditions that got a mention (along with things like cluster headaches and trigeminal neuralgia).
Having said that, I should have mentioned that our group does a really good job of making our meetings focused on effective treatments, new ideas, tactics, etc. We keep it positive. It's not a big group bitch session or anything. There is so little information out there for this rare condition that it's useful to have a group summarize the latest topics. I do the facebook and online portion, but the in-person group is run by a member of the board for the charitable and research organization, so it's quality information. We often have guest speakers. I've seen these things done poorly and actually make the situation worse, but this group isn't like that. I'm fortunate where I live to be a part of a good group.
I will say, however, as alluded to in my initial comment, that there is likely something to the mind/body connection. I've looked into this more than I should talk about at the risk of boring people. Scott himself has reviewed some of this work by Howard Schubiner previously (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/26/book-review-unlearn-your-pain/). But more recently there's the book _The Way Out_, tons of podcasts, the Curable app, etc. And I think there's something to the idea behind not making our rumination amplify the pain. Engaging in CBT or ACT type therapy can help. Somatic tracking has proven to be a useful tool. There was a recent study investigating the tactics used in _The Way Out_ (Pain Reprocessing Therapy) on chronic back pain and it had impressive results. So I think the pain is 100% real but pain is mediated by the brain and there _may_ be things we can do to change our perception of pain.
(It would be interesting to hear Scott's updated take on these techniques and this study. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2784694)
To be honest, I suppose if it were something like that, I would desperately want to find a group, too. And it sounds as if your group is focused on solutions. Just to take another swing at the mind/body connection, it brings to mind people I've known in the BDSM community who have their switches flipped in such a way that they truly experience pleasure out of what most of us would consider excruciating pain. I am not one of those people, and it seems to me like something you probably can't just learn to wire yourself into. I guess a question is, to take Scott's analogy of hexadecimal codes, if a guy experiences bliss having his back torn up by golf cleats, or having nails driven through his palms, is he experiencing a different code for that sensation than someone else having the same physical experience? Or is he experiencing the same code and interpreting it in a different way? And how much of this is hardware and how much software? I realize this is an extreme example and a gross oversimplification, but it seems to leave open the possibility of some future form of pain management that rewires the brain to re-interpret specific pain signals without resorting to blocking pain receptors or activating opioid receptors.
I appreciate your thoughtful take, and thank you for sharing the details of your affliction; clearly it seems like something incredibly difficult to cope with.
It is interesting that I found your review of "Unlearn Your Pain" today because I am, myself, recently experiencing a severe relapse of a chronic pain condition which had gone away for several years and came back with a vengeance about 2 months ago. As in, I find myself experiencing hip pain (which I would have declared sciatic nerve induced, due to a bulged L5-S1 disc) sufficient that I cannot stand or walk around for more than about 3 to 10 minutes at a time. Imagine someone driving a railroad spike into your hip socket. That's about the best descriptor I can come up with.
I am very interested in it going back away ASAP.
If you like that type of approach check out the Curable app, the book The Way Out by Alan Gordon, and some of the many podcasts such as Like Mind, Like Body.
So RC cites a TikTok video, 'how to lie to your doctor'. The videographer says if you only don't faint because of the weird stuff you do, then tell the doctor you faint. Scott says that's good advice, and offers similar examples.
Yeah but. There is a whole range, from people who compulsively do tiger repellent activity (like the old joke: "Sure it works, do you see any tigers?") then claim there ARE tigers, to people who are actually preventing something. If they all lie, some will do wrong. If they all tell the truth, with suitable explanation, it will work out fine.
So this is odd:
(1) I have serious OCD involving touching things & feeling like the universe or the future will become unbalanced if I don't touch them in a certain order a certain number of times. My partners notice and giggle. I try to prevent it from getting in the way of leaving a restaurant or having sex or letting her sleep while I'm fiddling with re-folding my clothes. I don't mind letting them see a little of my inner insanity; as long as it doesn't keep them up at night it's hopefully mildly endearing.
(2) I also learned that my sex drive is much lower than the Platonic Man's. I only found that out after I had 4 or 5 cortisone shots in two days for a broken back in my late 30s and suddenly found myself laying an 18 year old Danish supermodel on a beach in Spain two days after I hadn't been able to get out of bed. Turns out that not jerking off for a couple months has the same effect as that much steroid; it brings me up to the baseline libido of a normal man. Suddenly you actually try a little and it turns out everyone wants to have sex all the time.
And I have (3) a high level of synaesthesia between music, color and visual altitude (the y-axis in space); they work all three ways. As well as (4) a pretty fantastic if imperfect ability to see objects, faces and places in my "mind's eye".
This is all an introduction to my counterpoint to Scott's article but I want to say - I've been drawn repeatedly to Scott's writing, even when I didn't realize it was he who had written something (e.g. the wine article in Asterisk, which I forwarded to my wine industry girlfriend last week without noticing his name in the by-line, just because it was so well written).
Also: I'm a non-practicing Ashkenazi Jew and a Cohen (which I'm guessing Mr. Aaronson is too, sons of Aaron we be) so I chalked up my appreciation of his pedantic verbosity and logic to some Ur-genetic brotherhood. But until now, I didn't really realize how deeply the similarities ran.
So having listed the above cross-wirings of my brain, in spite of all that, I DO deeply doubt the Spoonies' reported internal experiences. I accept that an induced experience (one created by culture or insanity or random firings of the thalamus or whatever) can be just as real to the subject as an experience with objective external referents -- but should it be as important to the REST of us? Whether it's meaningful to the subject is a Platonic question. But our roundly anti-Helenistic ancestors (Scott's, mine, King David's, et al), when they said "DON'T DO THIS" about manifesting deities as personalities, or listening to split personality voices in your head, could quite as easily have been saying "don't touch that golden idol / light switch / dish soap 5 times", as in modern "OCD", or for that matter "don't worship your own sickness".
In other words, we may agree that these brain-meat experiences exist and are "real" if we take the same broadly subjective definition of reality, what makes you want to reject the benefits of multiple personalities as roughly idolatry is just as applicable to the idolatry of objects in OCD or those of the vicissitudes of fate as in phantom illnesses and diagnosis-seeking behavior. They are actually three faces of the same false idol.
I realized one night as I was zipping and unzipping my suitcase, touching it a bunch of times, that I had created an actual one-man cargo cult. I even wrote a short story about it, tying it to a golden calf and a set of false identities created by the protagonist, because those things made sense as the same flaw in thinking to me.
I posit that: When we (me, Freddie de Boer, et al) initially evaluate claims of internal states with a large dose of skepticism, we may be acting in self-defense, and not in a trivial or political sense but in the sense of actually defending ourselves from a cultural virus. You are what you eat; you are what your brain consumes. A psychoanalyst has the dirty job of attempting to believe and of opening the subjective box of an individual's internal world. It requires empathy and skill and a lot of self-control. But the subject's internal issues could well be poison if they were spread as superstition among the general population, which is why social media is such a disastrous tool for psychopaths. So while recognizing and ennobling the human experience of crazy people is an analyst's toolset, and a humane and worthy use of one's time, it may be the most important feature of someone else's time to reject the same subjective observations to prevent them from becoming normalized in society -- if only to protect themselves (and I'm thinking of Freddie here) from being dragged into the type of thinking that caused them to self-victimize in the first place. In other words, your highest goal may be to free that which someone else's highest goal is to put back into a box as quickly as possible, for the sake of their own sanity.
As far as my own OCD and synaesthesia; I figured out that my OCD came from being freaked out by parents telling me about invisible bugs into washing my hands constantly as a child until they realized they'd fucked me up. My synaesthesia came from a piano teacher when I was 4 years old who had a wonderful method of teaching me colored notes with crayons on a piece of graph paper. The latter was a gift and the former a curse, but both are brain viruses, memes made manifest in neuron, in heavy daily use and carried out in flesh like any beating you take as a child. A way of thinking of thought (one mind? two? ego and super-ego?), as you say, can easily turn into a regimental prescription for daily action (father, son, holy ghost) and unless you're in control of the regiment or the prescription or the philosophy itself, and aware of all its potential outcroppings, you're just prey for whoever came up with it and can tell you what it all means. All those external power structures should be avoided.
And so should becoming a member of an online group like "spoonies", whose gestalt is to presume you have undiagnosed illness and proceed from whatever your vaguest symptoms are toward the idea that the medical community is aligned against you. Giving the wrong name to a physical or mental affliction, or diagnosing yourself incorrectly, is more dangerous than having no diagnosis at all.
Skepticism, therefore, especially of group-recognized afflictions, is the only vaccine against mass hysteria. Just like the 10 Commandments are a vaccine against DID and OCD.
--
Just like to add that I've only done 1 year of therapy in my life, years ago in Argentina, "existential therapy" that got rid of my post-alcoholic guilt fairly well. I'd love to be analyzed by Mr. Aaronson, though, because it would be fascinating to hear what someone with my own neuroses would say if able to look at them externally; assuming the man loves himself enough to forgive their occasional stupid/ugliness.