I've seen a theory that mass shooters are likely to not have grown up with a father in the house. I don't find this plausible, but I suppose it should be checked.
I got as far as checking the Columbine shooters and confirming that both grew up with fathers in the house.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's statistically more likely that mass shooters, like all criminals, have a variety of "screwed up family" risk factors, but this one doesn't seem to be much of a slam dunk.
If we find out what matters, we can at least stop wasting our time with interventions that don't work. My bet is that the effects of no father are swamped by the effects of an abusive father.
A theory that was common for a while but that I haven't seen lately is that mass shooters were on anti-depressants.
"The effects of no father are swamped by the effects of an abusive father."
Eh. The level of abuse that would have a socially negative impact are probably far outside the limits set by CSP. And besides, the most common failure mode for fathers is not abuse but neglect, followed by abuse of the wife/mother.
Lack of a father has long been acknowledged by societies as contributing to the failure of young men. It is true that attacking children is a rather spectacular extreme, but even more garden variety nerdowell is more common in fatherless men.
My spidey sense doubts that simply because if that were true, someone would have put their finger on it by now.
Thinking back to Columbine - 1999 - I guess SSRIs were being deployed by then but still if it were a reliably common thread, it would have ginned up more interest with theorists than FPS games or rock music lyrics.
Imagine the US map on cork board covered with pins connected by red thread. Now what do these events all have in common? The shooters were all medicated with Prozac!
A fair number of people have "put their finger" on SSRIs or other adolescent psychiatric meds as a major cause for spree killing. Nobody has really substantiated that with rigorous scientific study, but why would they? This field is as politicized as climatology, but not nearly as well funded. Anybody doing research in the area is rewarded not for the accuracy or insightfulness of their work, but for the extent to which it reinforces the political position of their tribe (or the tribe of their professional peer group).
So it's mostly going to be "It's the guns, stupid, and anybody proposing a theory other than too many guns is obviously a shill for the NRA and should be run out of town", with a modest side order of "it's obviously not the guns, that's hoplophobic nonsense - here's a non-gun theory that's kind of plausible, so lets accept and boost it uncritically". If there's anybody doing actual good science in the area, they're going to be hard to find.
Well, maybe Gary Kleck, but he's one guy and I don't *think* he's done a deep dive into spree killings yet.
Did you see Ross Douthat’s compromise proposal in ‘that terrible newspaper’ today?
Putting a bit more scrutiny on folks 18-25 purchasing firearms. Asking for a couple of adult references during that age range and possibly a peek at their social media.
Probably not enough for the Left and way too much of a burden for the live and breath Second Amendment crowd.
Does anyone have any advice for managing ADHD? I don’t like the side effects of adderall, I don’t that Modafinil more than once a week because of tolerance. I’m also a nicotine user, which helped at the beginning but I’m kicking the habit now.
I would really love a non-chemical alternative, but nothing has worked for me. I’m kind of half hoping that someone here will propose some crazy underground therapy that will help (cbt-based therapy for adhd did little for me)
I recently switched from chrome browser to vivaldi. I'm liking it quite a bit so far! I don't know a lot about the development behind such things, but I'm loving how much control I have over it. It's got the ad blocking of firefox, the privacy protection of duckduckgo, and the tab stacking and backend of chrome! I highly recommend it!
Did the vaccines give enough benefit to outweigh the costs? Same for masks, and for various isolation/"lockdown" etc.?
Were the signatories of the Great Barrington declaration *all* crazy or were some of them reputable researchers who were shouted down instead of being engaged?
To what extent did the disinformation come from politicians and the media amplification, and to what extent from the CDC, WHO, Fauci, etc.?
If we could send a time capsule back to ourselves in January 2020, what advice would we give ourselves? And the bad thing is, there is not consensus on what that would be, is there? Many people would send "Buy masks, don't worry too much because a vaccine will be developed, take it plus multiple boosters, stay home." Others would send "Eat right, get into a healthy weight, don't take the jab, ignore the hysteria if possible, protect the vulnerable."
Clearly the situation has become highly politicized. Each side accuses the other, and in both cases the accusations seem to have some merit. One side ignores the science while shouting "Believe the science", the other spins out into conspiracy theory. There doesn't seem to be a sane in-between place, or even a sane place elsewhere.
On January 1, 2020, the correct move was "China, go into lockdown for six weeks. Rest of world, close borders to China for six weeks". We could easily have eradicated the virus at that point if only we'd overreacted too soon rather than overreacting too late.
On January 31, 2020, the correct move was more like "Six week lockdown for the entire world until the virus is eliminated". The cost of this would have been unthinkable at the time, but of course would have been much better than the months of rolling on-and-off lockdowns that we instead got over the years.
Given that COVID has numerous animal reservoirs, and appears freely able to jump species, how exactly would eradication work in this hypothetical? Are you assuming that all the mice, bats etc in China also respect the lockdown?
Covid has been locally eradicated in quite a few geographies, quite a few times (China, Taiwan, each state of Australia, New Zealand). It always came back, but as far as I know all outbreaks have been traced to leaky quarantine for humans arriving from abroad, and never to animal reservoirs.
> Who is "we" and how are "we" going to make China cooperate? For that matter, how are "we" going to make the people screaming that a travel ban on China was racist cooperate?
I don't know, the scenario I'm responding to involves going backwards in time to tell people what to do. So I guess I use my status as a time traveller from two and a half years in the future to get people to listen to my advice.
If that doesn't work then I guess I'm still just some random jerk on the internet whose policy advice will get ignored anyway.
> Why not ask for a magical pony that farts vaccines as well, if we're asking for straightforwardly impossible things?
"Gaslighting" is one of those relative neologisms that I'd like to banish from the English language. (And I'm pretty sure it will go away soon.)
The original meaning was something very specific: to lie to someone about the past for the specific purpose of making them doubt their own sanity. This is apparently something that happened in a play once. I'm not sure if it happens in real life.
But recently it seems to have just expanded its meaning out to just encompass "lying" or even just "being wrong".
This has been bugging me soooo much. I'll go a step further though, and say that I think it's not just lying about the past: it's manipulating objective reality for the purpose of claiming such manipulation did not occur in order to make someone doubt their sanity.
Applied to the case at hand: unless the Red or Blue tribe created Covid for the sole purpose of claiming it doesn't exist, then no gaslighting happened here. And as daft as both sides are, I'm pretty sure that's a claim that can't be leveled at either.
> If we could send a time capsule back to ourselves in January 2020, what advice would we give ourselves?
"Buy masks, meet people outdoors, eat right, be fit, take the vaccine and boosters. Talk to your friends and relatives before the conspiracy theories reach them, but be prepared that 50% of them will laugh at you; don't waste your time arguing, it is futile."
From my perspective, the middle ground is to keep meeting your friends, but to do so outdoors, with masks if unvaccinated. There is absolutely no need to isolate yourself socially; just take reasonable precautions.
Similarly, you should eat right and try to stay fit even in non-pandemic situations; cardiovascular problems are killing people all the time, covid is just one more reason.
The actual difficulties are: your job or school, where you can be forced to spend a lot of time with many people in unventilated place maskless. Try to work from home and homeschool your kids for a year or two, but these options are not available for everyone.
Shut down MSNBC, CNN and Fox along with social media. Maybe find a way to reanimated Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Yeah and maybe Robin McNeal too.
Vaccines were highly beneficial, at very low cost beyond the loss of social trust when we tried to make the vaccines mandatory. Masks as implemented were close to useless, and probably destroyed more public trust than the vaccine mandates. Lockdowns as implemented were *slightly* useful, but came at a massive cost including probably more loss of public trust than vaccine and mask mandates combines.
The signatories of the Great Barrington declaration were not all crazy.
Disinformation came from all of the sources you name, feeding into each other. And there was a separate strain of disinformation from grassroots activists, though that fed into right-wing politicians and media, so take your pick.
With a retro-time capsule and some reason to believe it would be believed, send back "the folks at Moderna and BionTech have already(*) developed vaccines that are safe and effective; start producing and distributing them as soon as possible. And have them develop boosters for new variants as they emerge. J&J and AstraZenica will have less-good but still useful vaccines in a bit, if you can't ramp up mRNA production fast enough. If you can find any N95 respirators, those are useful in high-threat environments. Virus spread is mostly aerosol, mostly in noisy crowded spaces. Here are some tips for treatment of severe cases. Otherwise don't sweat it, there's not really much more you can do, but you'll muddle through OK."
*Maybe* I'd tell people it was cooked up in a Chinese lab, just to get them to stop tearing apart their neighbors over it. But that would be risky in other ways, so probably not.
* Depending on what day of January 2020 you send it back to
I think the balance of the evidence is heavily against you on masks - mask mandates did in fact result in statistically significant reductions in hospitalisations and deaths. A quick google turned up
but virtually no studies suggesting that mask mandates don't help (the only one I found, although I freely admit I didn't look hard, was https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8395971/, which is so weak as to be basically meaningless).
I don’t believe any of these studies. Epidemiology as a field is way too politicized to be trusted and there is too much tribal loyalty and groupthink. I am certain the conclusions of those studies were predetermined before any data was collected. Cargo cult science the lot of it.
I am probably moving the goalpost, but does statical significance tell us whether the benefit is worth the cost?
And this is the conclusion, which depends on what we take as credible evidence and who we trust. But what is actually credible and who is trustworthy is a large part of the problem, maybe the entire problem.
What should I have done in January 2020 to arrive at the correct solution quickly without receiving a time capsule? Or better, what should I do the next time there is a pandemic or other emergency?
How do we suppress BS without suppressing inquiry?
Wait? Conclusions are almost always more reliable if you wait until you have better data.
I mean, seriously, one thing that surprised me about this pandemic was the sizeable fraction of people who wanted reliable answers *right now* and were (1) willing to imbue expert opinion with far more certainty than it had, than even the experts themselves thought it had, and (2) who became enraged when this or that opinion proved wrong, or this or that intervention didn't work, or didn't work as well as was hoped.
Shit happens. The future is inherently unpredictable, and the future of things about which we have only limited knowledge -- pandemic viral disease being right up there -- is *really* unpredictable. Nevertheless, experts are called upon to make guesses, and politicians are called upon to make decisions. They probably mostly do the best they can, and it's completely inevitable that a solid 8 times out of 10 they'll get it wrong. It's a freaking miracle they get it right at all, ever.
Now if the big lesson learned is for us all to have some God-damned humility, from top to bottom -- if experts hedge their opinions more, and the people expect fewer certainties, and politicians shrug their shoulders a lot more and say "We dunno what to do, but we'll try this thing because it might work, and we will zealously collect data as we go along so we can turn it around, call it off, or try something else if it doesn't, and we'll be sharing that data with you so people can alert us if we miss something" --- that would be fantastic, really inspiring.
But if the "lesson" learned is "We need to throw all these experts and politicians out, and get a brand new set of experts and politicians who will tell us a fresh new set of lies about how certain they are about what to do" that would be sad indeed. That would be evidence that we've failed to learn the most important lesson of all.
"Now if the big lesson learned is for us all to have some God-damned humility, from top to bottom -- if experts hedge their opinions more, and the people expect fewer certainties, and politicians shrug their shoulders a lot more ..."
Well said! Our biggest problem is people saying "Here is the answer" when they _should_ be saying "I don't know" or "Here is our current best guess - and it is likely to change as we get more data."
I think the best process here can be summed up in four words: "Trust the Blue Tribe".
Masks, vaccines and lockdowns all work; masks and vaccines were definitely worthwhile and in most cases lockdowns probably were. Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin don't help (unless you already have malaria or parasitic worms). The virus almost certainly didn't escape from a lab. Covid is not a hoax, and is worth taking seriously. The boring, blue-coded, expert-advised positions are almost always correct.
When you say "Trust the Blue Tribe", I need to make sure I know what you are talking about.
Are you talking about the Blue Tribe leaders during January/February 2020, who were saying things like "Travel bans on people from China is based on racism, we shouldn't be afraid of travelers from China."
Or are you talking about the leaders of the Blue Tribe of March-to-May 2020, who were in favor of lockdowns, in favor of blocking all international flights, in favor of mask-wearing, and against large public events?
Or are you talking about the Blue Tribe leaders in June 2020, who were in favor of large public events, as long as those events were protests against racism?
Hard disagree on lockdowns, soft disagree on masks. I think 18 months of `remote schools' (including kindergartens) probably destroyed way more QALYs than it saved, and that too was a blue tribe policy.
That is where I started, but obviously I am not comfortable with it. My most charitable interpretation of what you’re saying is that the errors and suppression engaged in by the blue tribe were minor and forgivable. If so, I want a process for figuring that out. Just trusting them as a blanket solution would not have been disastrous for me personally, this time. But at best the system is showing signs of strain.
Ultimately, you need a way to judge how much you trust the existing domain experts. Because it is practically impossible to become overnight an expert yourself, especially in a topic that is already politically sensitive, therefore almost everything you read online is disinformation.
My heuristic is to trust people who had an interest in given topic before it became cool, and who are not "professional contrarians". In case of covid, I happen to have a biochemist and a retired doctor in my family, so I was able to ask them.
If you try to educate yourself, the important thing is to get the background knowledge right, before you jump to the politically sensitive topic. For example, you may want to learn the basic things about DNA and evolution as such, before you jump to the question whether covid was created in a lab. Similarly, you may want to become familiar with the history of vaccination and the existing types of vaccines, before you start expressing strong opinions on the safety of covid vaccine.
Solid background education will allow you to dismiss most conspiracy theories as obviously false, which means you will burn less social capital when asking the experts you trust about the rest.
According to random news I see online, Russia has already lost 30 000 soldiers in Ukraine. But also, they have transferred over 200 000 Ukrainian children to Russia, to be reeducated and raised as patriotic Russian citizens.
This made me think: what if the true reason for this war has always been solving the demographic curve of Russia? Conquering the entire Ukraine would have worked too, but this also accomplishes the strategic goal.
200,000 children would be a drop in the bucket in a country of 144 million.
The birth rate in Russia is 1.5 per woman according to Google, so every generation is ~108 million births. I don't think a 0.2% increase in your birth rate is worth going to war over.
Conquering all of Ukraine might actually be enough people to be visible - 44 million people - but then you're conquering both old and young people, so it's not really solving your demographic curve.
In 2018, Russia had approx 25 million kids under 15 years old. 0.2m would be hear 1% increase. They had yearly birth rate of 10.7 births per / 1000 population = 1.5 million per year. 200,000 extra kids is sizeable one-time bump in the yearly rate.
One-time, meaning that it's not going to have anything but the most marginal impact. I mean, Russia could certainly try to improve their birth-rates but becoming a nation that literally launches invasions of other countries to steal their children, but not only is that so cartoonishly evil that you'd have a hard time selling that in a fantasy novel, it'd also be a good way to make sure everyone on that long, long border of yours makes "destroying your government" their top foreign issue.
TFR is expressd in children per woman *per lifetime* so I think you need to divide that 108 million births by the ~75 years of a lifetime, giving you ~1.4 million/year, against which +200,000 is no longer trivial.
However I agree this is unlikely to be Putin's goal. A far more plausible reason for kidnapping and rearing Ukrainian kids as right-thinking Russian would be resettle them in the Donbas and along the Azov Coast to draw those regions closer and more reliably into the Russian orbit. One would guess that Russophilia in, say, Mariupol has taken a serious long-term hit among those old enough to know who fired the missile that blew babushka to bloody shreds while she was hanging out the wash. Could help to compensate with some fresh young thinking uncompromised by bitter (or any) experience. The thinking is a little grandiose, but not unheard of: the Nazis ran a very similar program in Ostland circa 1941-44.
Yeah, but I would expect most children are accompanied by their relatives. If they would separate them and put parents in some gulag or whatever, in their tens of thousands, I think we would have heard more about it. In general, we have quite good sources about what is happening in Russia proper (as opposed to Russian occupied parts of Ukraine), actually.
150000 children for adoption is another thing that definitely sounds fake.
The claim was "to be reeducated and raised as patriotic Russian citizens", not "to be adopted". In some cases, because their parents are already patriotic Russian citizens who happened to live in Ukraine before the war and fled eagerly to Russia. In the rest, I expect if those families are not repatriated at the end of the conflict, the parents will be told that either they will raise their children as patriotic Russian citizens, or someone else will. And most will go along with it.
But as far as I know, there is so far zero indication that Russian authorities intend to force these people to stay in Russia even after the war. Certainly it is possible, but purely hypothetical at this point
Apparently the adult women were not forced very hard to remain in Russia when the above account was written, but leaving is not a cakewalk either if you don't have money or documents, and according to that article they are not easily available [to people in camps].
Isn’t the fact that they forced (at least some large number of) them into Russia some indication? If I kidnap you and and tie you down in my hypothetical basement, is there really no indication that I intend to keep you there the day after tomorrow?
> Russia maintains one of the world's most liberal immigration policies; anyone who works in Russia for five years and develops fluency in the Russian language can become a citizen, provided they have not committed a crime. Almost anyone who is hired by a Russian firm can stay in the country and work indefinitely. This reflects a policy change, in response to declining birth rates, on the part of the government of Vladimir Putin from the more restrictive policy enacted after the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.
> Russian-language native-speakers, those married to Russian citizens, highly-qualified specialists, businessmen and refugees are eligible for a simplified immigration procedure. It allows gaining citizenship in 3 years (instead of 5 under the standard procedure) or sometimes skipping temporary or permanent residency.
Playing Devil's Advocate, here are some reasons one might want to become a Russian citizen:
- free universal healthcare (in a country that used to kill doctors for saying that covid is real, but still);
No, not really. But a dictator like Putin can think much more long term than democratically elected governments. In my opinion, the following theory explains Russia's actions best:
Putin's main goal is to restore Russia to super power status and to that end he has pursued mainly three projects during his presidency. The first was to stabilize and then expand the Russian economy to catch up with the west; the second was to turn around Russian demographics; the third was to reform and reinvigorate the Russian army.
After more than 20 years his record was dismal. While the economy (pre-Ukraine invasion) has been stable and living standards higher than when he came into office, it has remained highly dependent on oil and gas. Also, it has not caught up with the west since the great recession in spite of reform efforts, especially during the Medwedew interlude.
Likewise, in spite of financial incentives to have children and conservative to reactionary social and cultural politics, Russian demographics have never reached the replacement rate during his tenure and any temporary success there was has leveled off by now.
The army was the only success he could really point to before the invasion - now it has turned out that it was in part a Potemkin village.
So in the light of his failed ambitions he is thinking about the long game: a necessary precondition to become a super power since at least world war II has been a large population. Based on that even a relatively low GDP per capita like China's grants one super power status.
Ukraine offers some of the most valuable land in this regard with its fertile soils having the potential to support a large population.
Putin can no longer achieve his goals and he has no idea how to get Russians to have more children. But he can ensure that Russia will have the potential to achieve them - not in 10, 20 or even 30 years. But in 50 to 70 years, when nobody will care about the 2022 Ukraine war anymore. Then a Russia with 300 million people and a newly emerging economy could be a force to reckon with.
So he wants both the land and the population of Ukraine.
Depending on how successful Russia will end up being in this war, I would expect to see large scale resettlements of people, similar to Stalin's deportations. I would expect that some of the highest fertility populations such as the Chechnyans will be given land in Ukraine. And ethnic Ukrainians will be deported to Siberia or wherever (and their children "reeducated").
Luckily, it looks like Russia will have to downsize its plans for Ukraine significantly.
The idea that Russia demographic is bottlenecked in food supply sound really weird to me. I can see this being the case in Civilization game but not in real modern world.
Two things about that: firstly, I am trying to provide a rationale for Putin's/Russia's actions - it does not necessarily have to be true in the "real modern world". I think that Putin and especially the Russian nationalists view the world in a way that is indeed in some respects more akin to a game of civilization than the "real modern world" the West perceives (a view that probably also has its flaws).
There is also a historical predecessor of this view: China's one-child policy was explicitly enacted with the limitations of domestic food production in mind (see e.g. here https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12263480/).
Secondly, to steel man the importance of agriculture: the slowdown of population growth in developed and (to a lesser extent) emerging economies post World War II is very much a historic exception. For most of history humanity has been in the Malthusian trap and arguably many developing countries (or often, unfortunately, rather "non-developing countries") still are. Check out the charts here: https://ourworldindata.org/yields-vs-land-use-how-has-the-world-produced-enough-food-for-a-growing-population. In Subsahara-Africa agricultural yield can barely keep up with population growth. Continued malnutrition, food insecurity and a dependence on imports is the result - a severe impediment to economic development. In such a situation everyone is to preoccupied with bare survival to build any human capital. Meanwhile the major economies that managed to achieve a high degree of economic development increased their agricultural production far beyond population growth. If you want to convert population growth into economic might agriculture is crucial.
Putin does not know why population growth has slowed in Russia or what could undo it. But he might just bet that, just like Scott argues in "Meditations on Moloch", that the "real modern world" is the "dream time" and it might be about to end, at least for Russia. Its major economic assets, oil and gas, were going to become worthless in the next 10 to 30 years due to of global decarbonization and an alternative is not in sight. Its arms industry was not going to keep up with the West either and the number of young Russian fighting men was dwindling by the year. So the choice was - in his mind - to gradually lose the great power game in the medium term; or to play his aces while he can still use them. This would merely accelerate the inevitable downfall of Russia's economy; but it would increase its long term potential immensely.
Hi Scott. Do you know what is up with Silexan? The link in your original essay no longer goes to anything.
I had ordered some to give it a try, and well at least there was a placebo effect so I tried reordering it and received something else, called Calm24 from a company called Natura instead.
The packaging says each caplet contains 500mg of ‘cold macerated lavender oil’.
It seems like Amazon might still have the original product with a pack of two 30 count soft gels for 42 bucks so it would seem there has been a jump from 12 to 21 dollars for a two week supply.
I’m not going into lavender withdrawal or anything just a bit confused.
Edit: A bit more annoyance. I tried to set up a return of the stuff I just got from Natura and ran into ‘this product can’t be returned’
Further Edit:
This is meant more of a heads up than a serious question. Of course there is no way for Scott to know what is happening here.
Is the Axial Age an actual thing that happened, or is it mere cherry picking of events? And in case it's real, what may have case such a temporal clustering of philosophical-religious innovation?
I think the silk road was already a thing in 500 BC, so maybe ideas were going back and forward with commerce? Or maybe this was a period of heightened conflicts at the steppe boundary which has catalyzed empire formation?
I hadn't heard of the "Axial Age" idea before, but I just looked it up and is feels contrived to me. The core idea sounds like that most major modern religions/spiritual traditions (Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, and the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition) have their roots in a roughly 500 year period of 800-300 BC.
My first objection is that lumping the Abrahamic religions together is questionable: while Judaism does form the foundation for Christianity and Islam, both have enormous differences from Judaism and from one another, and they date to the first and seventh centuries AD respectively.
Next, the rooting of Judaism, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism in the proposed Axial Age seems arbitrary. All three developed from poorly-attested roots in the second millennium BC, and the internal scriptural narratives that are the main attributions for a specific identifiable founder of the religions don't give dates anywhere near the proposed Axial Age: tradition implies Moses would have lived around 1300 BC, give or take a century or two, and the timings of both the life of Zoroaster and the events of the Bhagavad Gita are vague and ambiguous with estimates anywhere from ~1000-3000 BC. I'm guessing the Axial Age theory is using the building of the Second Temple (516 BC) for Judaism, the founding of the Achaemenid Persian Empire in 648 BC, and the establishment of the Hindu Synthesis around 300 BC. While these are all significant events, they're debatable as key "founding moments" for the respective traditions.
To the extent that there was something going on in the proposed period, I suspect the secret ingredient was the reemergence of urbanization, literacy, and long-distance trade in the Mediterranean region following the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the ensuing Dark Age. I know less about what was going on in India and China around that time period, but I get the impression that both also had very significant periods of reurbanization, state consolidation, and growth of trade (although from a much less drastic baseline than that of post-Bronze Age Europe and the Middle Easy) during that 500 year time span.
Perhaps the culmination of the shift from oral language to (substantially) symbolic language. That was a long, gradual process but it really flowered in that period 800 to 200 BC. I think it’s really easy to underestimate the significance of that transition.
What do you mean by oral vs symbolic language? It sounds like a roundabout way of saying "talking" and "writing", but you sound like you're using the terms as technical jargon that I'm unfamiliar with.
No, but I am trying to emphasize the profound difference between human culture that completely relies on the spoken word for all information transactions (in the broadest possible sense), and one where lots of information resides in written (symbolic) form.
“Talking” and “writing” are perfectly accurate but a bit casual for the point I want to make.
I have not heard of the Axial Age (and therefore don't think Scott has written about it). However, I am currently reading Paper by Mark Kurlansky and there is a good amount of overlap in the time periods described in the first part of Paper. I wonder what impact writing and new technologies such as papyrus had on this period. Kurlansky does mention a significant amount of trade and exchange of ideas happening between China and the Middle East around this time period. Writing could have accelerated the exchange of ideas especially around philosophy and religion.
Anyone else learning to code as an adult whilst working full-time in an unrelated STEM field?
What resources, tips, learning habits, etc. would you recommend?
I've enrolled in a 10-week Python course - partly for the sake of learning itself, and partly for the ability to spin up some basic code to run alongside numerical modelling and CAD programs I used for work. I'm sticking to the script and using Anaconda / Spyder / Jupyter.
I learned some coding high school, but the MATLAB and R I use every day now was learnt "on the job" for biochemistry simulations, and image/data analysis. I don't know if the way I'm doing it is optimal (I learn very deeply but narrowly, just what I need to get my stuff to work).
A piece of advice I think I can give is to remember that automating routine stuff is much more valuable than it seems - even in the unlikely scenario that you don't end up saving any time at all in the long run (cause you do it really fast manually compared to how long it took to automate, only small batches, ended up not using, whatever), you got a valuable addition to your toolbox. I was lazy at first about automating image file management when I had small experiments with a few images, but now I know how to make R handle thousands of files across directories.
Otherwise, completely agree with Unsigned Integer's comments, especially 2 and 3. Re: testing/monitoring I like to do it myself (e.g. insert little printouts into functions to let me know how variables change while they're running).
Have fun! You are doing a kind magic trick when you code. Creating a useful artifact without paying for or ordering any physical parts. Your building materials are your own thoughts. It’s really a kick if you stop to think about for a moment. Notice at no time do your fingers leave your hands. ;)
Don’t get discouraged when things take you a lot longer to learn or do than you think it should. Programmers are notorious for exaggerating how quickly they can learn or accomplish something. If someone says it takes a month to learn X, then you should reasonably expect it to actually take 5 months.
Have an actual project to learn alongside and motivate yourself. Having a real deadline helps too!
Not necessarily 'coding' in the same way but I lied that I knew how to use R at work because I was feeling threatened by a new employee. I was likely to have one file transferred to them because they had experience in using R.
I then spent most of my free time and late nights learning R using some tutorials, troubleshooting my actual work through frenzied searches of stackexchange questions, etc.
I will second having an actual project, and add that learning how to Google about a programming question effectively will take you 80% of the way to knowing what you need to complete most projects.
My number one tip is to remove pride from the equation. You are not better or worse than the computer, and the computer does not think it's better or worse than you. Humility usually means not believing that you're better than everyone else, but in the context of programming, it means being able to handle wading into in a universe where pride does not exist. (Many good programmers have too much pride, and adopting this form of humility does not guarantee that you'll be a good programmer, but I've found that my students who approach learning to program with this kind of humility do well, and the ones who don't do badly.)
My second tip is that, the deeper you get into programming, the more you may feel that you don't actually know how to do anything. It's important to move past that feeling, and realize that everything is just a little bit of learning away, and the more you learn, the easier everything else will be to learn, so just... keep going. If you're not sure how to do a big project, start with the parts you do know how to do, and then build from there. Don't fall into the trap of "I could never be enough of a programmer to do X". As long as you can write code, you can do anything. (Eventually.)
My third tip is that almost all code sucks, and if you know HOW your code sucks, that's GOOD, because that means you learned from writing it!
Last, and far more actionably, play a Zachtronics game. Any Zachtronics game will do, but I think SHENZHEN I/O, SpaceChem, and Infinifactory are particularly good for this. They help cultivate the necessary patience, humility, and logical thinking, and especially help reinforce the principles of "just keep building" and "learn one thing at a time". Don't feel bad if you can't finish them, or even can't progress very far; I've been programming for 24 years, I've written compilers, device drivers, games, servers, OS kernels, physics simulations, avionics*, and just about everything else, yet Infinifactory's the only Zachtronics game I was able to finish… and not for lack of trying, either. :)
By any chance can anyone point me to studies on what the language center(s) of the human brain are doing during dreaming? Google Scholar isn't turning up anything about my specific question.
Some of the popular science articles — which may actually be popular pseudoscience articles — say that the language centers of our brains are mostly off-line during dreaming and that we're not really hearing language, rather we just have the illusion of hearing language in our dreams. Deirdre Barrett PhD from Havard seems to be the designated expert that the popular science press goes to for dream questions, but I can't find any publications by Barrett regarding language in dreams. But she seems to be the source of the claim that our language centers offline during dreams, and that's why we aren't supposed to be able to read in our dreams (she does qualify it in a quote by saying "most people" can't read in their dreams).
The reason I ask is that I had an interesting dream the other night. I was playing ngau-ngau (which is a popular gambling card game in Hong Kong), and all the people sitting around the table were speaking Cantonese. I could understand part of their conversation—especially numbers and swear words—but a lot of their conversation was opaque to me. This wasn't surprising to me, because when I lived in HK, I developed rudimentary conversational skills in Cantonese, but there were frequently words I couldn't understand and I would have to ask what they meant.
Upon waking, though, what struck me about this dream was that if I were *not* really "hearing" language in my dream, why couldn't I either (a) understand all of their conversation, or (b) understood none of their conversation? Full disclosure, I don't know how to play ngau-ngau either, but I wasn't really playing—rather I was just sitting at the table with the players as they smoked, joked, laughed, and swore (and spat).
As for Barrett's claim that I shouldn't be able to read in dreams, after a lifetime of active dreaming, I have been able to "teach" myself to read in dreams. But I'm only reading at about a 1st Grade level right now. "See Spot Dream. Dream, Spot, dream!" I can't decode complex words or phrases that show up on printed material in my dreams. So no reading the latest articles in Nature Dreaming for me.
Anecdotally, I regularly see text in my dreams, but it's barely coherent, often shifting on the page or screen, locally meaningful but drifting randomly between topics. Some of the smaller text-based neural networks, such as GPT-2, remind me very much of this dream text. Years ago when I learned about Markov chains I was also struck by the dreamlike nature of the text they produce.
On a few occasions I've had anxiety dreams full of nonsense javascript.
Some people often talk in their sleep, and say things that make sense within the dream that they're having, so I think people have language. But as far as reading, I've many times read text while in a dream, but the text always sounds like a first- or second-order Markov model of language, mostly grammatical but not making sense. This may be a selective effect, in that I usually remember only what I was dreaming less than a minute before waking up; and the process of waking up may disrupt the text.
Surely everybody hears speech in their dreams, or we would know we were dreaming. If the Language Centre is offline then clearly it’s not the only way to “hear”.
"But she seems to be the source of the claim that our language centers offline during dreams, and that's why we aren't supposed to be able to read in our dreams (she does qualify it in a quote by saying "most people" can't read in their dreams)."
Well then I'm not "most people" because just last night I had an involved dream which included me reading a very long column of text, including illustrations, so my brain is doing *something* there.
Also, I have had dreams where I (or the person who is 'me' in the dream) or another person is speaking another language, and I realise that is going on.
This is a very interesting question, if you are hearing people speaking in your dreams, what does it mean 'no you're *imagining* you are hearing them speak'? Are language centres closed down or do some signals sneak through?
Well, that's a given! ;-) But I was wondering if our industrious PET scan researchers have looked at brain activity of people in REM sleep and seen low activity in the speech center of the brain? After changing my search terms, I came across this meta analysis. The summary says: "Results show that quiescent regions are confined to the inferior and middle frontal cortex and to the inferior parietal lobule." Inferior frontal area is Broca's which in the past was associated with the processing of speech and language.
But then I came across a press release from University of Wisconsin, that claims we dream during REM and non-REM sleep, and there's a certain area that's active when we're dreaming. And that the sections associated with understanding language (not Broca's area) are are active when people report hearing speech in their dreams...
>>> For example, dreams associated with hearing speech triggered activity in Wernicke’s areas on the left side of the cerebral cortex, which is involved in language perception and understanding.
“This suggests that dreams recruit the same brain regions as experiences in wakefulness for specific contents,” lead author Dr. Francesca Siclari says. “This also indicates that dreams are … not ‘inventions’ or ‘confabulations’ that we make up while we wake up.”
<<<
So what we've got is a bunch of tenuous correlations...
(Trigger warnings: psychiatry, long text, Germany, vitriol, badly cascaded section titles, shortages of charity towards the wardens).
In my (limited, Germany-centric, 3rd person) experience, involuntary commitment into clinical psychiatry is best seen as a Moloch-powered soul-crushing machine. While not all encounters with psychiatric clinics end badly, and some might in fact be beneficial, the possibility of landing on the conveyor belt running straight towards the soul mill always exist.
= TL;DR =
Involuntary commitment is a very real threat to any patient of clinical psychiatry, and can make your life worse for a very long time. Never go willingly into any unit with a locked door. They will lie freely, so lie to them in turn if you have any symptoms of psychosis. Do not expected to be treated like an adult(ish) human. For Germany, have a living will naming a trustworthy, rabidly anti-psychiatric friend as a guardian. For the hearing, get a fighter lawyer. If any of your jailors break the law, press criminal charges.
= How psych ward is different from other wards =
If you are naive like me, you might think that a psychiatric ward is like a bone ward, only it is for treating psychic illnesses instead of fractures. Of course, you read/saw "one flew over the cookoo nest", but that was the dark ages. Today, unthinkable. As the late Danton would say: "Ils n’oseront pas!" They would not dare. Yes, there is an anti-psychiatric movement, but then again, there are tons of movements devoid of any substance, why should they be any different?
If you are admitted to a cancer ward with a life expectancy of less than a year without treatment, and form the opinion that you do not want to be treated, you will generally be free to leave against medical advise after signing some forms. Your personal autonomy trumps any amount of outcome difference, end of story.
Contrast that to psychiatry. The moment you walk through the door, your autonomy is in jeopardy. After all, any objection you might have to the proscribed treatment could well be a symptom of your mental illness instead of your will.
If it was the other way round, with the psychiatrists respecting patient autonomy and the oncologists routinely violating it, that would be bad enough, but workable. Human rights issues aside, treating cancers should well work without the patients compliance. Biopsies and CT/MRI images could still be taken (perhaps using a sedative), surgeries would be unaffected, patients might have to be prevented from removing chemotherapy IVs, but otherwise, treatment efficiency should not suffer too much.
They way it is, instead, is horrible. Most psychic illnesses can not be diagnosed based on physical findings, so one is stuck observing the patient for diagnosis instead. Some symptoms will be deducible without any patient cooperation whatsoever, but for most, one will have to rely on the patient to self-report them. In fact, I would be hard pressed to name a field more reliant on patient cooperation for diagnosis.
= How the spectre of involuntary commitment poisons doctor patient relationships =
In a normal doctor patient relationship, this would be no issue. Opioid addictions aside, a patient generally has no incentive to lie to their orthopedist about the presence or absence of joint pain. Their goals align.
A psychiatrist (or psychologist) working within a system permitting involuntary commitment, however, is never just a physician or therapist. They also occupy the position of a kind of attorney general who will have to decide on whether the case warrants bringing in a judge to lock the patient up. If that happens (and the judge agrees -- which he generally will, trusting the expert opinion of the psychiatrist, as there are no physical criteria fit to be used as evidence), our psychiatrist will wear the hat of the prison warden as well when working in a "secure unit" (a very newspeak term itself, as even the short term security provided to the de facto prisoners of mental institutions is very debatable).
The system will only work as long as the patient is unaware of the stakes or (rightly or wrongly) convinced that their symptoms do not warrant commitment.
(continued below, this ended up being part 1 out of 3).
There are a few steps you can take to safeguard your agency while interacting with clinical psychiatry. In particular, there are legal tricks, verbal tactics and strategic considerations when picking a clinic.
== Due process ==
In Germany, a commonly used form of involuntary commitment is the BGB §1906. Here, rather than the court ordering the institutionalization, the court appoints a legal guardian who has the power to have his ward committed, subject to court approval. The thing is, whether you are committed or not is entirely up to your legal guardian. You can specify a legal guardian in an advance decision. Ideally, someone who would rather see you dead than committed. The very worst legal guardian might be an elderly relative with lots of trust in authorities, medical or otherwise.
For the hearing with the judge, get a lawyer. Strike that. Get an attack dog lawyer. You do not want someone seeing them as the guardian of due process over a sad but necessary procedure, you want someone willing to go the extra mile to convince the judge of your sanity. Lawyers making their living suing doctors seem like a good start. Bonus points if you can get a Scientology lawyer, as people in that cult really do not like psychiatry.
People making their living locking up others are treading on thin ice, legally. Find out the relevant maximum time they can keep you without a judge. They went a minute over it? Press criminal charges.
== Verbal tactics ==
The unspoken Miranda warning: anything you tell a mental health care professional can and will be used in an attempt to have you involuntarily committed. Tread carefully.
As I mentioned, the staff will operate on simulacrum level 2, e.g. saying whatever they belive will make you do the stuff they want you to do with minimum fuzz, irregardless of truth. Take a leaf from their book. Lie to them, preferably by omission. Remember, their main triggers are suicidality and psychosis. Admitting to suicidality is subject to tradeoffs: it might cost you months of your freedom, but save your life.
Going through the hell of a secured station for psychosis medication might make sense in some extreme situations. I mean that in roughly the way I would say "selling a kidney for 20$ might make sense in some extreme situations". You are constantly hallucinating being devoured by spiders all the time and there is no Soteria or open station which could give you an anti-psychotic? Probably go for it. You sometimes feel people are following you or the moon talks to you? Not worth it.
If you do not want a psychosis treatment, admitting to anything which can be pattern matched against psychosis is inexcusable. Even pre-Snowden, you might reasonably believe that the NSA probably listens in on most phone calls. But if you mention that, you are lost. Any belief which a committee of elderly statesmen could not unanimously agree on is too controversial to mention. Do not talk about religion, Bayes, surveillance, your role-playing characters, climate change, politics, free will, self-harm, violence, drug use, porn, video games. If hard pressed, admit to owning a bicycle and sometimes being a bit sad. Communicate as you would with a literal-minded extraterrestrial, do not rely on a shared basis of common sense or an understanding of irony. Jokingly referring to your doctors as "my fellow reptiloids" will fail in the worst way imaginable.
Think about it this way: you will present a mask of a reasonably well adjusted person eventually. Doing so now instead of later will save all involved a lot of time, and will prevent you from being fucked up by anti-psychotics and forcibly addicted to tranquilizers.
= Strategic considerations: choosing the right place =
Generally, the further your health care provider is from a secure unit, the safer you are from ending up in it. Being an outpatient is safer than being an inpatient. Being an outpatient seeing an independent psychiatrist is safer than being an outpatient at a psychiatric hospital. Being an inpatient at some clinic where the next secure unit is far away is safer than being one where the secure unit is conveniently downstairs.
In Germany, there are two kinds of hospitals: general hospitals -- which have to take cases -- and specialized (e.g. university) hospitals. When interaction with psychiatry, avoid the latter. As mentioned, the secure stations of general hospitals have to take any new cases, e.g. disoriented persons picked up by the police while they were wandering through the traffic. This means that there is a constant inflow of new patients competing for a limited amount of beds, and one can get released simply by being (or appearing) more sane than the other patients. On the other hand, university hospitals do not have this constant pressure and are thus much more likely to keep you until your 'treatment' is complete.
= Last resort: Getting out by any means =
There is a fine balance between the harm done by staying in the secure unit and the harm the legal system might inflict upon you for breaking some laws while escaping (especially if they send you to forensic psychiatry instead of prison), so I would strongly advise against violence, arson or hostage taking, which will likely mean a longer stay.
They trust you enough to let you go for a walk sometimes? Great, abuse their trust just like they abused yours.
Escape.
You have outside help? Get creative. The security is generally not prison style, so you might get some contraband items in.
While threatening others is a legal offense, pointing a razor blade to your own throat is much less objectionable. Unlike prison, they also pretend to be about helping you, so if you convince whoever is on door access shift at 4:00 am that by the count of ten, you are going to get your blood all over their nice clean white walls unless that door is opened might just conclude that the latter outcome is preferable to the former from a patient health point of view.
== Moral considerations ==
A Singerian Utilitarian myself, I hold think that patient autonomy is of great importance. The obvious way to deal with a patient with a firm death wish is to offer an assisted suicide, not making their lives hell on earth.
I think the prerequisites to a stay in a locked psych unit should be:
* a violent crime
* a regular criminal conviction with a prison sentence, just as any sane offender would get for the same crime
* the court offering the convict the option to spend their sentence in psych unit instead
* the convict accepting that offer (until they decide to opt out again and go to prison)
Even for criminal cases involving criminally incompetent offenders, this is not how it is done in Germany e.g. in StGB §63 [1]: I am not a lawyer, but from my reading, there is no automatic expiry date on the commitment to forensic psychiatry with regard to the crime in question: go to court for battery, get locked up for life. Furthermore, StGB §63 is just the tip of the iceberg: besides federal BGB §1906, the psychiatry laws of the Laender (states) generally allow mentally ill people to be locked up if they are deemed a danger to public safety. Pre-Crime in action.
Of course, this is ripe for abuse, and abused it is. Gustl Mollath [2] was commited to psychiatry for seven years for offenses which probably would not have warranted a prison sentence of equal length (Possibly to shut him up about inconvenient allegations of tax evasion.)
See also Günter Wallraff, "13 unerwünschte Reportagen" (13 undesired reports) from 1969. In one of those, he was in a psych ward, disguised as a dangerous alcoholic. At the end, his wife gets him out. It would have sufficed for her to say that she felt threatened by him, and he'd have stayed there for years. http://www.irwish.de/PDF/Wallraff/Wallraff-13_unerwuenschte_Reportagen.pdf
They treat the suicidal patients *a lot* better than the psychotics, to the point where it can be an overall good thing. I wasn't forced to take any medications (they'd probably have forced me to take antidepressants, but they didn't change the regimen I was already willingly taking; on the other hand, when they offered me benzos/fentanyl and I said no, they respected that decision). The psychotic patients get no such mercy; the nurses ask them nicely to take their pills, and if they refuse the nurses forcibly inject them.
To the second question: Depends. Roughly, if they are committed against their will, there needs to be a meeting with a doctor within 24 hours and also the confirmation by a jugde within 48 hours. The latter also potentially decides on a medication against the will of the patient.
The details are regulated by a mixture of national law and law in each of the 16 regional states. My superficial reading says forced medication is possible, if it reduces the reasons that led to commitment (posing a threat to oneself or to others) and only if it's like 'really necessary'. My uninformed guess is, it's mostly the doctor who decides.
Not an expert, just based on some very basic reading. Links or additional info if interested.
The staff of a secure station will operate on Simulacrum Level 2 [0] exclusively. When moving a patient to that station, they will not tell them: "You are psychotic or a danger to yourself / to others and we will lock you up", but they will 'suggest' moving you to the 'protected station' 'for the weekend'. (Protip: this is your cue to go for a toilet break. Do not grab your stuff, just go and hide somewhere non-obvious. They will hardly start a big manhunt for a missing patient. Personally, I would always prefer answering for battery in criminal court to a week in secure ward, but YMMV.)
In my experience, there are two kinds of patients you find on "protected stations (as locked stations are euphemized in Germany): the involuntary ones and the non-voluntary ones. The only difference is the fact that the latter group has not yet realized they are trapped, but are under the illusion of voluntariness. The former group, either waiting for a judge or committed by court already, of course, are under no such illusions. (This becomes obvious when looking at the situation from an accounting point of view: A night in a locked-up psych ward is more expensive than a night in an open psych ward. The only reason to put a patient in a locked ward is to (try to) prevent them from harming themselves or others. If you can justify billing the insurer, but you can't justify keeping the patient there against their will, you were just defrauding the insurer.)
Naturally, forcible psychiatry wards are not conductive to mental health. In the best case, they are boring as hell, in the worst case, they are hell on earth. The patients who get committed to these stations are, by and large, not the ones with the most resilient psyches. Take a person who is somewhat functioning in their familiar home environment (perhaps with frequent trips into nature, support from friends or some other coping mechanisms) and declare them incompetent, deny them their coping mechanisms and lock them up in a ward full of other people with various mental health issues. Chances are they will lose their cool. Success! The psychiatrists were right all along, that person is clearly unstable.
Secure psychiatry is mostly patient storage. The chief objective is that at the end of the day, you still have as many warm bodies as you had at the start of the day. Options for talk therapy will be severely limited compared to non-secure facilities -- which is just as well, as I do not consider the Stockholm syndrome an acceptable basis for psychotherapy. Long term outcomes are generally not tracked. Retrospective patient approval or the lack thereof is also not tracked.
Committed patients are, in general, not treated as adult human beings. A person stating something a staff member finds unlikely might be told to 'stop telling lies', which generally constitutes a faux pas in civil society. This is probably natural as it would be difficult to deny basic agency to people regarded as adult human beings. Of course, denying patient autonomy is a one way road, as they will generally still be held responsible for their actions, a patient who stabbed another person would just be committed forensically instead of going to prison, and any small infractions will be sanctioned by loss of privileges and the like.
There are two places in a hospital where informed consent is not an important. One is the morgue, the other is the locked psych ward. After all, if your patient is not consenting in the first place, why waste time informing them? Naturally, nicer staff members may still be informing patients about procedures on a FYI basis, but the need to convince the patient of anything is just not there.
= Medication =
Medication will take place. For those unfortunate enough to be diagnosed (correctly or otherwise) with a variant of schizophrenia, this will include anti-psychotics, formerly marketed as "pharmacological lobotomy". Credit where credit is due, these are still a marked improvement over that procedure. In many cases antidepressants are on the menu as well. Locked up people will get unruly eventually, but that is what benzodiazepines are for. In fact, benzodiazepines, if responsibly used, might be very helpful for lots of mental health issues. Unless you happened to become addicted to them, perhaps to keep you from pounding at the door while you are locked up.
Naturally the patient is not consulted (or informed) about their medication or any side effects. In my experience, this creates a general aversion towards psychopharmaca that goes along very nicely with their new aversion to mental health institutions and professionals.
= "Curing" patients (or Es gibt nur einen Weg in die Freiheit) =
Eventually, the patient is released as 'cured'. While I have to concede that there are probably patients where the anti-psychotics managed to suppress the hallucinations, I postulate that there are many which basically were just taught to conform to whatever expectations their psychiatrist had. I am sure the psychiatrists are aware of that problem, but less sure what they can do about it. If the only had people committed who were screaming all the time because they hallucinated spiders eating their flesh, a lack of screaming might be a hard to fake indication of improvement. But as long as you have people committed based on voluntary statements about suicidal ideation or their (pre-Snowden) idea that the NSA is listening to their phone calls, it would seem difficult to judge if your intervention was any more effective than simply locking them up until they realized conformity was their only path to freedom.
= A hell created by Moloch =
While it might be helpful to view ones captors as akin to Dr. Mengele to keep aware of the fundamentally adversarial nature of their relationship, I do not believe that the people running 'secured' units are generally evil. Rather, I believe their incentives are simply not aligned to the long term interests of their patients. Suicides on hospital grounds are probably the worst, especially if they failed to have the patient committed. They are probably treating lots of obviously psychotic patients and tend to pattern match based on that. "Any person will have beliefs and behaviours which seem totally weird to most others" is probably not their favorite prior. They will obviously have a more favorite view of the benefit/cost ratio of involuntary commitments, either due to first person insight I lack or as a necessity of doing their job. They will probably not systematically track long term heath outcomes.
Maybe someone can tell me whether this makes sense, or can even do the math:
It occurred to me there is a population-based factor in the observation that technological advance was (before about 1970) exponential even after being adjusted for population.
People have approached that comparison with the unspoken assumption that the way to do it looks something like this:
population doubling time =~ 40 years
tech doubling time =~ 20 years
therefore technology's exponential increase is too high to be accounted for by population
therefore tech has accelerating returns
This comparison assumes that the technology output from N people at time t, tech(N,t), is simply N*tech(1,t), so that tech advances are proportional to population. But this overlooks the fact that tech(N,t) is in reality not a function, but a probability density function (pdf).
My first instinct was to instead test whether tech(N,t) can be written just as a function of N, tech(N), under the supposition that that would mean tech production doesn't depend on pre-existing tech, and so tech has no accelerating returns. This turns out not to work as a test, for tricky semantic reasons I don't want to get into. For now I'm going to write tech(N,t) as tech(N), even though this is not strictly correct.
We observe only a sampling of tech(N), and computing the average of that sample will never give the expected value of tech(N), because it's very skewed. The pdf tech(1) is even more skewed; so we can't compare E(tech(N)) to E(tech(1)) just from observed data without a theoretical adjustment for the observations we never observe. Even if the expected value E(tech(N)) = N * E(tech(1), it would still be the case that we would almost certainly always OBSERVE tech(N) > N * tech(1).
The probability distribution for tech output from 1 person is almost certainly given by a power law of the form p(x) = cx^(-a), a > 1. That would imply that the pdf for tech(1) has much more of its mass in, say, the top 1% of possible observations, than does tech(20), because of black swans. If a < 3, Variance(tech(N)) is infinite, so most of its mass is in parts of the PDF that we never see. If a < 2, the expected value E(tech(N)) is also infinite, which we can interpret as meaning that *all* of its mass is concentrated in parts of the distribution that we never see.
In other words, E(tech(N)) = N * E(tech(1)) doesn't imply that median(tech(N)) = N*median(tech(1)), and so we can't just say that the fact that tech doubling time is less than the population doubling time implies that the output of individuals isn't constant. We have to find out how much of the observed difference can be attributed to the greater skewedness of the probability distribution function (pdf) p(tech(1,t)).
median(tech(N,t)) would still grow faster than N * median(tech(1,t)). But I haven't done the math to figure out how much faster. It may help to know that median(p(x)) = c*2^(1-a).
Going back to the original comparison of population and tech doubling times, we should expect that we'll observe a faster tech doubling time *even if there are no increasing returns to technology*. This is because if we measure the sum of the importances of all tech advances per decade, these measurements won't approximate the expected sum, but will be better approximated as proportional to the significance of the most-significant single advance we happen to snag in our sample. And this significance will (I think) increase exponentially with population.
If I've understood you correctly, I might summarize your argument as: individual contributions to tech are heavy-tailed, so that usually statistical tests for averages don't give meaningful results, and so the "force multiplier" hypothesis for tech growth is unfounded.
If it's true that individual contributions are heavy-tailed, then the growth of tech over time should look "jumpy" rather than smooth. The jumps should be more frequent as population increases. If there's no "force multiplier", then the frequency of jumps should be proportional to population, and the size of the jumps should be identically distributed.
To test your hypothesis, I would look at the growth of tech over time, and see if the differences tech(T_i) - tech(T_i-1) are heavy-tailed. In particular, you'd want to verify it's not lognormal--which is what I'd expect if tech growths smoothly.
(As for the stuff about medians, I couldn't make the connection how that relates to tech doubling time.)
Though it will be harder than that, since I don't suppose that there are /no/ increasing returns to tech. I expect there are increasing returns, but would like to adjust the exponent gotten from historical data for the effect of a (hypothesized) long-tailed distribution of individual returns. Perhaps the first thing would be to try to study the distribution of innovations by individuals in some isolated fields, such as chess, which don't have great synergism with the development of science and tech in general.
But there's little chance that I'll get around to doing that; certainly not this year.
What do people here think of a referendum (either national or state-by-state)? If voters were asked:
"What is the maximum number of weeks into pregnancy that an elective abortion should be allowed?"
then sorting the results and picking the median value gives a length such that half the electorate
thinks it is too long (too lenient) and half the electorate thinks it is too short (too stringent).
It has the advantage that:
It is a direct choice by the voters.
It is a reasonably concrete choice, unlike e.g. picking coefficients in a tax code polynomial.
It has reasonably simple consequences. At most, educating voters about the timeline is reasonably straightforward
and less controversial than the overall issue. ("Typical first heartbeat at N weeks. Typical first neuron at M weeks. Typical viability at...")
Aggregating a one-parameter choice like this with monotonic consequences doesn't get into voting paradoxes.
My _personal_ preference is to allow abortion at any point. Roe v. Wade (which is slightly more restrictive than that) struck me as a reasonable _policy_ - but, unfortunately, Alito is correct that neither "privacy" nor "abortion" nor "bodily autonomy" is in the text of the constitution. I, personally, would prefer to add constitutional amendments specifically protecting all three, but that isn't going to happen.
I'm not sure how what you describe differs from the ordinary legislative process, i.e. what would indeed start happening if Roe were overturned (except it wouldn't happen at the national level, because, assuming Harry Blackmun's reasoning were rejected, the Constitution does not give Congress the power to regulate abortion).
Granted, often bills are passed in the legislature, so the question is being asked of the voters indirectly -- they are asked to vote for representatives who are then asked the direct question "How many weeks?" -- but people are pretty used to pressing their legislators on specific issues that concern them, and in many states (e.g. California) the initiative allows the people to pass laws directly if they choose.
Hope you SF rats are watching Steph Curry do his magic from outside tonight. Hey Steph, put that mouth guard back in your mouth!
Oh, from that distance it should be 4 pointer!
I've seen a theory that mass shooters are likely to not have grown up with a father in the house. I don't find this plausible, but I suppose it should be checked.
David French says we should reduce abortions by not maligning single motherhood and I feel so much angst I'm not sure how to phrase it.
I got as far as checking the Columbine shooters and confirming that both grew up with fathers in the house.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's statistically more likely that mass shooters, like all criminals, have a variety of "screwed up family" risk factors, but this one doesn't seem to be much of a slam dunk.
If we find out what matters, we can at least stop wasting our time with interventions that don't work. My bet is that the effects of no father are swamped by the effects of an abusive father.
A theory that was common for a while but that I haven't seen lately is that mass shooters were on anti-depressants.
"The effects of no father are swamped by the effects of an abusive father."
Eh. The level of abuse that would have a socially negative impact are probably far outside the limits set by CSP. And besides, the most common failure mode for fathers is not abuse but neglect, followed by abuse of the wife/mother.
Lack of a father has long been acknowledged by societies as contributing to the failure of young men. It is true that attacking children is a rather spectacular extreme, but even more garden variety nerdowell is more common in fatherless men.
My spidey sense doubts that simply because if that were true, someone would have put their finger on it by now.
Thinking back to Columbine - 1999 - I guess SSRIs were being deployed by then but still if it were a reliably common thread, it would have ginned up more interest with theorists than FPS games or rock music lyrics.
Imagine the US map on cork board covered with pins connected by red thread. Now what do these events all have in common? The shooters were all medicated with Prozac!
A fair number of people have "put their finger" on SSRIs or other adolescent psychiatric meds as a major cause for spree killing. Nobody has really substantiated that with rigorous scientific study, but why would they? This field is as politicized as climatology, but not nearly as well funded. Anybody doing research in the area is rewarded not for the accuracy or insightfulness of their work, but for the extent to which it reinforces the political position of their tribe (or the tribe of their professional peer group).
So it's mostly going to be "It's the guns, stupid, and anybody proposing a theory other than too many guns is obviously a shill for the NRA and should be run out of town", with a modest side order of "it's obviously not the guns, that's hoplophobic nonsense - here's a non-gun theory that's kind of plausible, so lets accept and boost it uncritically". If there's anybody doing actual good science in the area, they're going to be hard to find.
Well, maybe Gary Kleck, but he's one guy and I don't *think* he's done a deep dive into spree killings yet.
Did you see Ross Douthat’s compromise proposal in ‘that terrible newspaper’ today?
Putting a bit more scrutiny on folks 18-25 purchasing firearms. Asking for a couple of adult references during that age range and possibly a peek at their social media.
Probably not enough for the Left and way too much of a burden for the live and breath Second Amendment crowd.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/opinion/school-shootings-gun-reform.html?referringSource=articleShare
Does anyone have any advice for managing ADHD? I don’t like the side effects of adderall, I don’t that Modafinil more than once a week because of tolerance. I’m also a nicotine user, which helped at the beginning but I’m kicking the habit now.
I would really love a non-chemical alternative, but nothing has worked for me. I’m kind of half hoping that someone here will propose some crazy underground therapy that will help (cbt-based therapy for adhd did little for me)
...have you tried bullet journaling?
I recently switched from chrome browser to vivaldi. I'm liking it quite a bit so far! I don't know a lot about the development behind such things, but I'm loving how much control I have over it. It's got the ad blocking of firefox, the privacy protection of duckduckgo, and the tab stacking and backend of chrome! I highly recommend it!
I feel like both the red and blue tribes have been trying to gaslight me on covid. Do we have enough reliable data now to push back?
On which particular part of the gaslighting?
Any of it.
Did the vaccines give enough benefit to outweigh the costs? Same for masks, and for various isolation/"lockdown" etc.?
Were the signatories of the Great Barrington declaration *all* crazy or were some of them reputable researchers who were shouted down instead of being engaged?
To what extent did the disinformation come from politicians and the media amplification, and to what extent from the CDC, WHO, Fauci, etc.?
If we could send a time capsule back to ourselves in January 2020, what advice would we give ourselves? And the bad thing is, there is not consensus on what that would be, is there? Many people would send "Buy masks, don't worry too much because a vaccine will be developed, take it plus multiple boosters, stay home." Others would send "Eat right, get into a healthy weight, don't take the jab, ignore the hysteria if possible, protect the vulnerable."
Clearly the situation has become highly politicized. Each side accuses the other, and in both cases the accusations seem to have some merit. One side ignores the science while shouting "Believe the science", the other spins out into conspiracy theory. There doesn't seem to be a sane in-between place, or even a sane place elsewhere.
On January 1, 2020, the correct move was "China, go into lockdown for six weeks. Rest of world, close borders to China for six weeks". We could easily have eradicated the virus at that point if only we'd overreacted too soon rather than overreacting too late.
On January 31, 2020, the correct move was more like "Six week lockdown for the entire world until the virus is eliminated". The cost of this would have been unthinkable at the time, but of course would have been much better than the months of rolling on-and-off lockdowns that we instead got over the years.
Given that COVID has numerous animal reservoirs, and appears freely able to jump species, how exactly would eradication work in this hypothetical? Are you assuming that all the mice, bats etc in China also respect the lockdown?
Covid has been locally eradicated in quite a few geographies, quite a few times (China, Taiwan, each state of Australia, New Zealand). It always came back, but as far as I know all outbreaks have been traced to leaky quarantine for humans arriving from abroad, and never to animal reservoirs.
Also all your examples are islands. (Except China whose numbers I don’t believe)
Omicron is believed to have come from mice
> Who is "we" and how are "we" going to make China cooperate? For that matter, how are "we" going to make the people screaming that a travel ban on China was racist cooperate?
I don't know, the scenario I'm responding to involves going backwards in time to tell people what to do. So I guess I use my status as a time traveller from two and a half years in the future to get people to listen to my advice.
If that doesn't work then I guess I'm still just some random jerk on the internet whose policy advice will get ignored anyway.
> Why not ask for a magical pony that farts vaccines as well, if we're asking for straightforwardly impossible things?
We've already got a time machine!
"Gaslighting" is one of those relative neologisms that I'd like to banish from the English language. (And I'm pretty sure it will go away soon.)
The original meaning was something very specific: to lie to someone about the past for the specific purpose of making them doubt their own sanity. This is apparently something that happened in a play once. I'm not sure if it happens in real life.
But recently it seems to have just expanded its meaning out to just encompass "lying" or even just "being wrong".
Thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you.
This has been bugging me soooo much. I'll go a step further though, and say that I think it's not just lying about the past: it's manipulating objective reality for the purpose of claiming such manipulation did not occur in order to make someone doubt their sanity.
Applied to the case at hand: unless the Red or Blue tribe created Covid for the sole purpose of claiming it doesn't exist, then no gaslighting happened here. And as daft as both sides are, I'm pretty sure that's a claim that can't be leveled at either.
1944 film
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslight_(1944_film)
That's a joke wikipedia page, there was never such a film.
Maybe so. It’s a pretty elaborate joke if it is. IMDB says you can rent it for 3 dollars and has a trailer for it.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0036855/
> If we could send a time capsule back to ourselves in January 2020, what advice would we give ourselves?
"Buy masks, meet people outdoors, eat right, be fit, take the vaccine and boosters. Talk to your friends and relatives before the conspiracy theories reach them, but be prepared that 50% of them will laugh at you; don't waste your time arguing, it is futile."
From my perspective, the middle ground is to keep meeting your friends, but to do so outdoors, with masks if unvaccinated. There is absolutely no need to isolate yourself socially; just take reasonable precautions.
Similarly, you should eat right and try to stay fit even in non-pandemic situations; cardiovascular problems are killing people all the time, covid is just one more reason.
The actual difficulties are: your job or school, where you can be forced to spend a lot of time with many people in unventilated place maskless. Try to work from home and homeschool your kids for a year or two, but these options are not available for everyone.
tongue in cheek.
Shut down MSNBC, CNN and Fox along with social media. Maybe find a way to reanimated Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Yeah and maybe Robin McNeal too.
Vaccines were highly beneficial, at very low cost beyond the loss of social trust when we tried to make the vaccines mandatory. Masks as implemented were close to useless, and probably destroyed more public trust than the vaccine mandates. Lockdowns as implemented were *slightly* useful, but came at a massive cost including probably more loss of public trust than vaccine and mask mandates combines.
The signatories of the Great Barrington declaration were not all crazy.
Disinformation came from all of the sources you name, feeding into each other. And there was a separate strain of disinformation from grassroots activists, though that fed into right-wing politicians and media, so take your pick.
With a retro-time capsule and some reason to believe it would be believed, send back "the folks at Moderna and BionTech have already(*) developed vaccines that are safe and effective; start producing and distributing them as soon as possible. And have them develop boosters for new variants as they emerge. J&J and AstraZenica will have less-good but still useful vaccines in a bit, if you can't ramp up mRNA production fast enough. If you can find any N95 respirators, those are useful in high-threat environments. Virus spread is mostly aerosol, mostly in noisy crowded spaces. Here are some tips for treatment of severe cases. Otherwise don't sweat it, there's not really much more you can do, but you'll muddle through OK."
*Maybe* I'd tell people it was cooked up in a Chinese lab, just to get them to stop tearing apart their neighbors over it. But that would be risky in other ways, so probably not.
* Depending on what day of January 2020 you send it back to
I think the balance of the evidence is heavily against you on masks - mask mandates did in fact result in statistically significant reductions in hospitalisations and deaths. A quick google turned up
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0252315
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01394-0
https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/Documents/nCoV/COVID-WWKSF/2022/03/wwksf-mask-mandates-population-level-outcomes.pdf?sc_lang=en
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2021.01072
but virtually no studies suggesting that mask mandates don't help (the only one I found, although I freely admit I didn't look hard, was https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8395971/, which is so weak as to be basically meaningless).
I don’t believe any of these studies. Epidemiology as a field is way too politicized to be trusted and there is too much tribal loyalty and groupthink. I am certain the conclusions of those studies were predetermined before any data was collected. Cargo cult science the lot of it.
I am probably moving the goalpost, but does statical significance tell us whether the benefit is worth the cost?
And this is the conclusion, which depends on what we take as credible evidence and who we trust. But what is actually credible and who is trustworthy is a large part of the problem, maybe the entire problem.
What should I have done in January 2020 to arrive at the correct solution quickly without receiving a time capsule? Or better, what should I do the next time there is a pandemic or other emergency?
How do we suppress BS without suppressing inquiry?
I am tied in a knot.
I may have been unclear. I am less interested in the conclusions than the process of getting to a conclusion reliably.
Wait? Conclusions are almost always more reliable if you wait until you have better data.
I mean, seriously, one thing that surprised me about this pandemic was the sizeable fraction of people who wanted reliable answers *right now* and were (1) willing to imbue expert opinion with far more certainty than it had, than even the experts themselves thought it had, and (2) who became enraged when this or that opinion proved wrong, or this or that intervention didn't work, or didn't work as well as was hoped.
Shit happens. The future is inherently unpredictable, and the future of things about which we have only limited knowledge -- pandemic viral disease being right up there -- is *really* unpredictable. Nevertheless, experts are called upon to make guesses, and politicians are called upon to make decisions. They probably mostly do the best they can, and it's completely inevitable that a solid 8 times out of 10 they'll get it wrong. It's a freaking miracle they get it right at all, ever.
Now if the big lesson learned is for us all to have some God-damned humility, from top to bottom -- if experts hedge their opinions more, and the people expect fewer certainties, and politicians shrug their shoulders a lot more and say "We dunno what to do, but we'll try this thing because it might work, and we will zealously collect data as we go along so we can turn it around, call it off, or try something else if it doesn't, and we'll be sharing that data with you so people can alert us if we miss something" --- that would be fantastic, really inspiring.
But if the "lesson" learned is "We need to throw all these experts and politicians out, and get a brand new set of experts and politicians who will tell us a fresh new set of lies about how certain they are about what to do" that would be sad indeed. That would be evidence that we've failed to learn the most important lesson of all.
"Now if the big lesson learned is for us all to have some God-damned humility, from top to bottom -- if experts hedge their opinions more, and the people expect fewer certainties, and politicians shrug their shoulders a lot more ..."
Well said! Our biggest problem is people saying "Here is the answer" when they _should_ be saying "I don't know" or "Here is our current best guess - and it is likely to change as we get more data."
I think the best process here can be summed up in four words: "Trust the Blue Tribe".
Masks, vaccines and lockdowns all work; masks and vaccines were definitely worthwhile and in most cases lockdowns probably were. Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin don't help (unless you already have malaria or parasitic worms). The virus almost certainly didn't escape from a lab. Covid is not a hoax, and is worth taking seriously. The boring, blue-coded, expert-advised positions are almost always correct.
When you say "Trust the Blue Tribe", I need to make sure I know what you are talking about.
Are you talking about the Blue Tribe leaders during January/February 2020, who were saying things like "Travel bans on people from China is based on racism, we shouldn't be afraid of travelers from China."
Or are you talking about the leaders of the Blue Tribe of March-to-May 2020, who were in favor of lockdowns, in favor of blocking all international flights, in favor of mask-wearing, and against large public events?
Or are you talking about the Blue Tribe leaders in June 2020, who were in favor of large public events, as long as those events were protests against racism?
Hard disagree on lockdowns, soft disagree on masks. I think 18 months of `remote schools' (including kindergartens) probably destroyed way more QALYs than it saved, and that too was a blue tribe policy.
That is where I started, but obviously I am not comfortable with it. My most charitable interpretation of what you’re saying is that the errors and suppression engaged in by the blue tribe were minor and forgivable. If so, I want a process for figuring that out. Just trusting them as a blanket solution would not have been disastrous for me personally, this time. But at best the system is showing signs of strain.
I’ve no intelligent input here but want to register my empathy with this question.
Ultimately, you need a way to judge how much you trust the existing domain experts. Because it is practically impossible to become overnight an expert yourself, especially in a topic that is already politically sensitive, therefore almost everything you read online is disinformation.
My heuristic is to trust people who had an interest in given topic before it became cool, and who are not "professional contrarians". In case of covid, I happen to have a biochemist and a retired doctor in my family, so I was able to ask them.
If you try to educate yourself, the important thing is to get the background knowledge right, before you jump to the politically sensitive topic. For example, you may want to learn the basic things about DNA and evolution as such, before you jump to the question whether covid was created in a lab. Similarly, you may want to become familiar with the history of vaccination and the existing types of vaccines, before you start expressing strong opinions on the safety of covid vaccine.
Solid background education will allow you to dismiss most conspiracy theories as obviously false, which means you will burn less social capital when asking the experts you trust about the rest.
Hear hear!
According to random news I see online, Russia has already lost 30 000 soldiers in Ukraine. But also, they have transferred over 200 000 Ukrainian children to Russia, to be reeducated and raised as patriotic Russian citizens.
This made me think: what if the true reason for this war has always been solving the demographic curve of Russia? Conquering the entire Ukraine would have worked too, but this also accomplishes the strategic goal.
200,000 children would be a drop in the bucket in a country of 144 million.
The birth rate in Russia is 1.5 per woman according to Google, so every generation is ~108 million births. I don't think a 0.2% increase in your birth rate is worth going to war over.
Conquering all of Ukraine might actually be enough people to be visible - 44 million people - but then you're conquering both old and young people, so it's not really solving your demographic curve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia
In 2018, Russia had approx 25 million kids under 15 years old. 0.2m would be hear 1% increase. They had yearly birth rate of 10.7 births per / 1000 population = 1.5 million per year. 200,000 extra kids is sizeable one-time bump in the yearly rate.
One-time, meaning that it's not going to have anything but the most marginal impact. I mean, Russia could certainly try to improve their birth-rates but becoming a nation that literally launches invasions of other countries to steal their children, but not only is that so cartoonishly evil that you'd have a hard time selling that in a fantasy novel, it'd also be a good way to make sure everyone on that long, long border of yours makes "destroying your government" their top foreign issue.
TFR is expressd in children per woman *per lifetime* so I think you need to divide that 108 million births by the ~75 years of a lifetime, giving you ~1.4 million/year, against which +200,000 is no longer trivial.
However I agree this is unlikely to be Putin's goal. A far more plausible reason for kidnapping and rearing Ukrainian kids as right-thinking Russian would be resettle them in the Donbas and along the Azov Coast to draw those regions closer and more reliably into the Russian orbit. One would guess that Russophilia in, say, Mariupol has taken a serious long-term hit among those old enough to know who fired the missile that blew babushka to bloody shreds while she was hanging out the wash. Could help to compensate with some fresh young thinking uncompromised by bitter (or any) experience. The thinking is a little grandiose, but not unheard of: the Nazis ran a very similar program in Ostland circa 1941-44.
What is the source for the 200 000 to-be-reeducated children? Honestly it sounds fake
The UN says that 971,000 Ukrainian refugees ended up in Russia, so 200,000 children isn't unreasonable - I would expect that refugees are going to have a high proportion of women and children. https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine/location?secret=unhcrrestricted
This article from April says Ukrainian officials say over 150,000 Ukrainian children ended up in the Russian adoption system, although it admits it's based on limited information: https://www.euractiv.com/section/europe-s-east/news/vulnerable-ukrainian-children-at-risk-of-illegal-adoption/
Yeah, but I would expect most children are accompanied by their relatives. If they would separate them and put parents in some gulag or whatever, in their tens of thousands, I think we would have heard more about it. In general, we have quite good sources about what is happening in Russia proper (as opposed to Russian occupied parts of Ukraine), actually.
150000 children for adoption is another thing that definitely sounds fake.
The claim was "to be reeducated and raised as patriotic Russian citizens", not "to be adopted". In some cases, because their parents are already patriotic Russian citizens who happened to live in Ukraine before the war and fled eagerly to Russia. In the rest, I expect if those families are not repatriated at the end of the conflict, the parents will be told that either they will raise their children as patriotic Russian citizens, or someone else will. And most will go along with it.
But as far as I know, there is so far zero indication that Russian authorities intend to force these people to stay in Russia even after the war. Certainly it is possible, but purely hypothetical at this point
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/forced-evacuation-ukraine-mariupol-russia/
Apparently the adult women were not forced very hard to remain in Russia when the above account was written, but leaving is not a cakewalk either if you don't have money or documents, and according to that article they are not easily available [to people in camps].
Isn’t the fact that they forced (at least some large number of) them into Russia some indication? If I kidnap you and and tie you down in my hypothetical basement, is there really no indication that I intend to keep you there the day after tomorrow?
Do you know what Ukraine's prewar demographics looked like? Did they have more young people per capita than Russia?
The tfr was one of the lowest in the world.
More information from Wikipedia:
> Russia maintains one of the world's most liberal immigration policies; anyone who works in Russia for five years and develops fluency in the Russian language can become a citizen, provided they have not committed a crime. Almost anyone who is hired by a Russian firm can stay in the country and work indefinitely. This reflects a policy change, in response to declining birth rates, on the part of the government of Vladimir Putin from the more restrictive policy enacted after the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.
> Russian-language native-speakers, those married to Russian citizens, highly-qualified specialists, businessmen and refugees are eligible for a simplified immigration procedure. It allows gaining citizenship in 3 years (instead of 5 under the standard procedure) or sometimes skipping temporary or permanent residency.
Playing Devil's Advocate, here are some reasons one might want to become a Russian citizen:
- free universal healthcare (in a country that used to kill doctors for saying that covid is real, but still);
- free education;
- sex ratio men : women = 86 : 100.
No, not really. But a dictator like Putin can think much more long term than democratically elected governments. In my opinion, the following theory explains Russia's actions best:
Putin's main goal is to restore Russia to super power status and to that end he has pursued mainly three projects during his presidency. The first was to stabilize and then expand the Russian economy to catch up with the west; the second was to turn around Russian demographics; the third was to reform and reinvigorate the Russian army.
After more than 20 years his record was dismal. While the economy (pre-Ukraine invasion) has been stable and living standards higher than when he came into office, it has remained highly dependent on oil and gas. Also, it has not caught up with the west since the great recession in spite of reform efforts, especially during the Medwedew interlude.
Likewise, in spite of financial incentives to have children and conservative to reactionary social and cultural politics, Russian demographics have never reached the replacement rate during his tenure and any temporary success there was has leveled off by now.
The army was the only success he could really point to before the invasion - now it has turned out that it was in part a Potemkin village.
So in the light of his failed ambitions he is thinking about the long game: a necessary precondition to become a super power since at least world war II has been a large population. Based on that even a relatively low GDP per capita like China's grants one super power status.
Ukraine offers some of the most valuable land in this regard with its fertile soils having the potential to support a large population.
Putin can no longer achieve his goals and he has no idea how to get Russians to have more children. But he can ensure that Russia will have the potential to achieve them - not in 10, 20 or even 30 years. But in 50 to 70 years, when nobody will care about the 2022 Ukraine war anymore. Then a Russia with 300 million people and a newly emerging economy could be a force to reckon with.
So he wants both the land and the population of Ukraine.
Depending on how successful Russia will end up being in this war, I would expect to see large scale resettlements of people, similar to Stalin's deportations. I would expect that some of the highest fertility populations such as the Chechnyans will be given land in Ukraine. And ethnic Ukrainians will be deported to Siberia or wherever (and their children "reeducated").
Luckily, it looks like Russia will have to downsize its plans for Ukraine significantly.
The idea that Russia demographic is bottlenecked in food supply sound really weird to me. I can see this being the case in Civilization game but not in real modern world.
Two things about that: firstly, I am trying to provide a rationale for Putin's/Russia's actions - it does not necessarily have to be true in the "real modern world". I think that Putin and especially the Russian nationalists view the world in a way that is indeed in some respects more akin to a game of civilization than the "real modern world" the West perceives (a view that probably also has its flaws).
There is also a historical predecessor of this view: China's one-child policy was explicitly enacted with the limitations of domestic food production in mind (see e.g. here https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12263480/).
Secondly, to steel man the importance of agriculture: the slowdown of population growth in developed and (to a lesser extent) emerging economies post World War II is very much a historic exception. For most of history humanity has been in the Malthusian trap and arguably many developing countries (or often, unfortunately, rather "non-developing countries") still are. Check out the charts here: https://ourworldindata.org/yields-vs-land-use-how-has-the-world-produced-enough-food-for-a-growing-population. In Subsahara-Africa agricultural yield can barely keep up with population growth. Continued malnutrition, food insecurity and a dependence on imports is the result - a severe impediment to economic development. In such a situation everyone is to preoccupied with bare survival to build any human capital. Meanwhile the major economies that managed to achieve a high degree of economic development increased their agricultural production far beyond population growth. If you want to convert population growth into economic might agriculture is crucial.
Putin does not know why population growth has slowed in Russia or what could undo it. But he might just bet that, just like Scott argues in "Meditations on Moloch", that the "real modern world" is the "dream time" and it might be about to end, at least for Russia. Its major economic assets, oil and gas, were going to become worthless in the next 10 to 30 years due to of global decarbonization and an alternative is not in sight. Its arms industry was not going to keep up with the West either and the number of young Russian fighting men was dwindling by the year. So the choice was - in his mind - to gradually lose the great power game in the medium term; or to play his aces while he can still use them. This would merely accelerate the inevitable downfall of Russia's economy; but it would increase its long term potential immensely.
Actually, they seem almost the same:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ukraine_population_pyramid_1.1.2021.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Russian_population_(demographic)_pyramid_(structure)_on_January,_1st,_2022.png
Hi Scott. Do you know what is up with Silexan? The link in your original essay no longer goes to anything.
I had ordered some to give it a try, and well at least there was a placebo effect so I tried reordering it and received something else, called Calm24 from a company called Natura instead.
The packaging says each caplet contains 500mg of ‘cold macerated lavender oil’.
It seems like Amazon might still have the original product with a pack of two 30 count soft gels for 42 bucks so it would seem there has been a jump from 12 to 21 dollars for a two week supply.
I’m not going into lavender withdrawal or anything just a bit confused.
Edit: A bit more annoyance. I tried to set up a return of the stuff I just got from Natura and ran into ‘this product can’t be returned’
Further Edit:
This is meant more of a heads up than a serious question. Of course there is no way for Scott to know what is happening here.
So Scott is the invisible hand of the market? :)
500% jump in demand for lavender oil capsules, economists baffled 😁
It's the Scott Effect in action, he must only use this power for great good!
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/science/asteroids-algorithm-planetary-defense.html?
Using somewhat old astronomical data to find asteroids and their orbits. A lot of computation in the cloud.
Is the Axial Age an actual thing that happened, or is it mere cherry picking of events? And in case it's real, what may have case such a temporal clustering of philosophical-religious innovation?
I think the silk road was already a thing in 500 BC, so maybe ideas were going back and forward with commerce? Or maybe this was a period of heightened conflicts at the steppe boundary which has catalyzed empire formation?
Has scott ever written on the subject?
Not sure if this will address your question directly, but John Vervaeke discusses the Axial Age in his long lecture series 'The Meaning Crisis'. Might have some thoughts you'd find interesting here in the second lecture: https://youtu.be/aF9HeXg65AE?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ&t=2505
Oh, thanks!
I’ve read a bit about it and to me it falls in the ‘interesting coincidence’ category.
I hadn't heard of the "Axial Age" idea before, but I just looked it up and is feels contrived to me. The core idea sounds like that most major modern religions/spiritual traditions (Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, and the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition) have their roots in a roughly 500 year period of 800-300 BC.
My first objection is that lumping the Abrahamic religions together is questionable: while Judaism does form the foundation for Christianity and Islam, both have enormous differences from Judaism and from one another, and they date to the first and seventh centuries AD respectively.
Next, the rooting of Judaism, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism in the proposed Axial Age seems arbitrary. All three developed from poorly-attested roots in the second millennium BC, and the internal scriptural narratives that are the main attributions for a specific identifiable founder of the religions don't give dates anywhere near the proposed Axial Age: tradition implies Moses would have lived around 1300 BC, give or take a century or two, and the timings of both the life of Zoroaster and the events of the Bhagavad Gita are vague and ambiguous with estimates anywhere from ~1000-3000 BC. I'm guessing the Axial Age theory is using the building of the Second Temple (516 BC) for Judaism, the founding of the Achaemenid Persian Empire in 648 BC, and the establishment of the Hindu Synthesis around 300 BC. While these are all significant events, they're debatable as key "founding moments" for the respective traditions.
To the extent that there was something going on in the proposed period, I suspect the secret ingredient was the reemergence of urbanization, literacy, and long-distance trade in the Mediterranean region following the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the ensuing Dark Age. I know less about what was going on in India and China around that time period, but I get the impression that both also had very significant periods of reurbanization, state consolidation, and growth of trade (although from a much less drastic baseline than that of post-Bronze Age Europe and the Middle Easy) during that 500 year time span.
Perhaps the culmination of the shift from oral language to (substantially) symbolic language. That was a long, gradual process but it really flowered in that period 800 to 200 BC. I think it’s really easy to underestimate the significance of that transition.
the birth of Duality, maybe.
What do you mean by oral vs symbolic language? It sounds like a roundabout way of saying "talking" and "writing", but you sound like you're using the terms as technical jargon that I'm unfamiliar with.
No, but I am trying to emphasize the profound difference between human culture that completely relies on the spoken word for all information transactions (in the broadest possible sense), and one where lots of information resides in written (symbolic) form.
“Talking” and “writing” are perfectly accurate but a bit casual for the point I want to make.
I have not heard of the Axial Age (and therefore don't think Scott has written about it). However, I am currently reading Paper by Mark Kurlansky and there is a good amount of overlap in the time periods described in the first part of Paper. I wonder what impact writing and new technologies such as papyrus had on this period. Kurlansky does mention a significant amount of trade and exchange of ideas happening between China and the Middle East around this time period. Writing could have accelerated the exchange of ideas especially around philosophy and religion.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61609689
Using AI to improve tennis play.
Has Scott ever written an update opinion on Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs effort? Is it providing a lot of utility? Is he missing key drugs?
I don't have the answers (though it looks like they are trying to get to 1000 drugs by the end of the year: https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/health/how-mark-cubans-online-pharmacy-plans-to-make-medications-affordable/2807435/). I am just amazed that he actually called it "Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drug Company". Of the "comically named billionaire hobby companies" this easily beats out Musk's BORING company.
Hey Scott, check out this Language Log post if you haven't seen it already. It's about the origins of the name Moloch and there is surely some kabbalistic fun to be had: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=54844#more-54844
Anyone else learning to code as an adult whilst working full-time in an unrelated STEM field?
What resources, tips, learning habits, etc. would you recommend?
I've enrolled in a 10-week Python course - partly for the sake of learning itself, and partly for the ability to spin up some basic code to run alongside numerical modelling and CAD programs I used for work. I'm sticking to the script and using Anaconda / Spyder / Jupyter.
I learned some coding high school, but the MATLAB and R I use every day now was learnt "on the job" for biochemistry simulations, and image/data analysis. I don't know if the way I'm doing it is optimal (I learn very deeply but narrowly, just what I need to get my stuff to work).
A piece of advice I think I can give is to remember that automating routine stuff is much more valuable than it seems - even in the unlikely scenario that you don't end up saving any time at all in the long run (cause you do it really fast manually compared to how long it took to automate, only small batches, ended up not using, whatever), you got a valuable addition to your toolbox. I was lazy at first about automating image file management when I had small experiments with a few images, but now I know how to make R handle thousands of files across directories.
Otherwise, completely agree with Unsigned Integer's comments, especially 2 and 3. Re: testing/monitoring I like to do it myself (e.g. insert little printouts into functions to let me know how variables change while they're running).
Have fun! You are doing a kind magic trick when you code. Creating a useful artifact without paying for or ordering any physical parts. Your building materials are your own thoughts. It’s really a kick if you stop to think about for a moment. Notice at no time do your fingers leave your hands. ;)
What’s not to like?
Don’t get discouraged when things take you a lot longer to learn or do than you think it should. Programmers are notorious for exaggerating how quickly they can learn or accomplish something. If someone says it takes a month to learn X, then you should reasonably expect it to actually take 5 months.
Have an actual project to learn alongside and motivate yourself. Having a real deadline helps too!
Not necessarily 'coding' in the same way but I lied that I knew how to use R at work because I was feeling threatened by a new employee. I was likely to have one file transferred to them because they had experience in using R.
I then spent most of my free time and late nights learning R using some tutorials, troubleshooting my actual work through frenzied searches of stackexchange questions, etc.
I will second having an actual project, and add that learning how to Google about a programming question effectively will take you 80% of the way to knowing what you need to complete most projects.
My number one tip is to remove pride from the equation. You are not better or worse than the computer, and the computer does not think it's better or worse than you. Humility usually means not believing that you're better than everyone else, but in the context of programming, it means being able to handle wading into in a universe where pride does not exist. (Many good programmers have too much pride, and adopting this form of humility does not guarantee that you'll be a good programmer, but I've found that my students who approach learning to program with this kind of humility do well, and the ones who don't do badly.)
My second tip is that, the deeper you get into programming, the more you may feel that you don't actually know how to do anything. It's important to move past that feeling, and realize that everything is just a little bit of learning away, and the more you learn, the easier everything else will be to learn, so just... keep going. If you're not sure how to do a big project, start with the parts you do know how to do, and then build from there. Don't fall into the trap of "I could never be enough of a programmer to do X". As long as you can write code, you can do anything. (Eventually.)
My third tip is that almost all code sucks, and if you know HOW your code sucks, that's GOOD, because that means you learned from writing it!
Last, and far more actionably, play a Zachtronics game. Any Zachtronics game will do, but I think SHENZHEN I/O, SpaceChem, and Infinifactory are particularly good for this. They help cultivate the necessary patience, humility, and logical thinking, and especially help reinforce the principles of "just keep building" and "learn one thing at a time". Don't feel bad if you can't finish them, or even can't progress very far; I've been programming for 24 years, I've written compilers, device drivers, games, servers, OS kernels, physics simulations, avionics*, and just about everything else, yet Infinifactory's the only Zachtronics game I was able to finish… and not for lack of trying, either. :)
*(okay, that one was in Kerbal Space Program)
By any chance can anyone point me to studies on what the language center(s) of the human brain are doing during dreaming? Google Scholar isn't turning up anything about my specific question.
Some of the popular science articles — which may actually be popular pseudoscience articles — say that the language centers of our brains are mostly off-line during dreaming and that we're not really hearing language, rather we just have the illusion of hearing language in our dreams. Deirdre Barrett PhD from Havard seems to be the designated expert that the popular science press goes to for dream questions, but I can't find any publications by Barrett regarding language in dreams. But she seems to be the source of the claim that our language centers offline during dreams, and that's why we aren't supposed to be able to read in our dreams (she does qualify it in a quote by saying "most people" can't read in their dreams).
The reason I ask is that I had an interesting dream the other night. I was playing ngau-ngau (which is a popular gambling card game in Hong Kong), and all the people sitting around the table were speaking Cantonese. I could understand part of their conversation—especially numbers and swear words—but a lot of their conversation was opaque to me. This wasn't surprising to me, because when I lived in HK, I developed rudimentary conversational skills in Cantonese, but there were frequently words I couldn't understand and I would have to ask what they meant.
Upon waking, though, what struck me about this dream was that if I were *not* really "hearing" language in my dream, why couldn't I either (a) understand all of their conversation, or (b) understood none of their conversation? Full disclosure, I don't know how to play ngau-ngau either, but I wasn't really playing—rather I was just sitting at the table with the players as they smoked, joked, laughed, and swore (and spat).
As for Barrett's claim that I shouldn't be able to read in dreams, after a lifetime of active dreaming, I have been able to "teach" myself to read in dreams. But I'm only reading at about a 1st Grade level right now. "See Spot Dream. Dream, Spot, dream!" I can't decode complex words or phrases that show up on printed material in my dreams. So no reading the latest articles in Nature Dreaming for me.
Maybe Andrea Moro's chapter here would be of interest:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-07296-8?code=d4e0ae14-25c2-4892-88cc-fd5ee16e618b&page=2
Anecdotally, I regularly see text in my dreams, but it's barely coherent, often shifting on the page or screen, locally meaningful but drifting randomly between topics. Some of the smaller text-based neural networks, such as GPT-2, remind me very much of this dream text. Years ago when I learned about Markov chains I was also struck by the dreamlike nature of the text they produce.
On a few occasions I've had anxiety dreams full of nonsense javascript.
Weird. I was having trouble writing a C# method in a dream last night. It wasn’t because I couldn’t read.
Some people often talk in their sleep, and say things that make sense within the dream that they're having, so I think people have language. But as far as reading, I've many times read text while in a dream, but the text always sounds like a first- or second-order Markov model of language, mostly grammatical but not making sense. This may be a selective effect, in that I usually remember only what I was dreaming less than a minute before waking up; and the process of waking up may disrupt the text.
There's an old blog by the wife of a very vocal sleep talker:
https://sleeptalkinman.blogspot.com
"The bagels have declared independence. The bakery is up in arms! There's a giant flour cloud enveloping everything. Don't trust the macaroons."
And as I said elsewhere, Markov chain text is what most of my dream-English reads like. Not much in the way of grammar or topic coherence.
Surely everybody hears speech in their dreams, or we would know we were dreaming. If the Language Centre is offline then clearly it’s not the only way to “hear”.
Or the "am I dreaming" bit is also offline.
"But she seems to be the source of the claim that our language centers offline during dreams, and that's why we aren't supposed to be able to read in our dreams (she does qualify it in a quote by saying "most people" can't read in their dreams)."
Well then I'm not "most people" because just last night I had an involved dream which included me reading a very long column of text, including illustrations, so my brain is doing *something* there.
Also, I have had dreams where I (or the person who is 'me' in the dream) or another person is speaking another language, and I realise that is going on.
This is a very interesting question, if you are hearing people speaking in your dreams, what does it mean 'no you're *imagining* you are hearing them speak'? Are language centres closed down or do some signals sneak through?
What it means is they don’t really understand the brain.
Well, that's a given! ;-) But I was wondering if our industrious PET scan researchers have looked at brain activity of people in REM sleep and seen low activity in the speech center of the brain? After changing my search terms, I came across this meta analysis. The summary says: "Results show that quiescent regions are confined to the inferior and middle frontal cortex and to the inferior parietal lobule." Inferior frontal area is Broca's which in the past was associated with the processing of speech and language.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16186026/
But then I came across a press release from University of Wisconsin, that claims we dream during REM and non-REM sleep, and there's a certain area that's active when we're dreaming. And that the sections associated with understanding language (not Broca's area) are are active when people report hearing speech in their dreams...
>>> For example, dreams associated with hearing speech triggered activity in Wernicke’s areas on the left side of the cerebral cortex, which is involved in language perception and understanding.
“This suggests that dreams recruit the same brain regions as experiences in wakefulness for specific contents,” lead author Dr. Francesca Siclari says. “This also indicates that dreams are … not ‘inventions’ or ‘confabulations’ that we make up while we wake up.”
<<<
So what we've got is a bunch of tenuous correlations...
Scott's recent article on the Hearing Voices Movement ( https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-the ) convinced me to post a wall of text I had previously drafted with regard to involuntary commitment to psychiatry.
Involuntary commitment (and how to avoid it)
(Trigger warnings: psychiatry, long text, Germany, vitriol, badly cascaded section titles, shortages of charity towards the wardens).
In my (limited, Germany-centric, 3rd person) experience, involuntary commitment into clinical psychiatry is best seen as a Moloch-powered soul-crushing machine. While not all encounters with psychiatric clinics end badly, and some might in fact be beneficial, the possibility of landing on the conveyor belt running straight towards the soul mill always exist.
= TL;DR =
Involuntary commitment is a very real threat to any patient of clinical psychiatry, and can make your life worse for a very long time. Never go willingly into any unit with a locked door. They will lie freely, so lie to them in turn if you have any symptoms of psychosis. Do not expected to be treated like an adult(ish) human. For Germany, have a living will naming a trustworthy, rabidly anti-psychiatric friend as a guardian. For the hearing, get a fighter lawyer. If any of your jailors break the law, press criminal charges.
= How psych ward is different from other wards =
If you are naive like me, you might think that a psychiatric ward is like a bone ward, only it is for treating psychic illnesses instead of fractures. Of course, you read/saw "one flew over the cookoo nest", but that was the dark ages. Today, unthinkable. As the late Danton would say: "Ils n’oseront pas!" They would not dare. Yes, there is an anti-psychiatric movement, but then again, there are tons of movements devoid of any substance, why should they be any different?
If you are admitted to a cancer ward with a life expectancy of less than a year without treatment, and form the opinion that you do not want to be treated, you will generally be free to leave against medical advise after signing some forms. Your personal autonomy trumps any amount of outcome difference, end of story.
Contrast that to psychiatry. The moment you walk through the door, your autonomy is in jeopardy. After all, any objection you might have to the proscribed treatment could well be a symptom of your mental illness instead of your will.
If it was the other way round, with the psychiatrists respecting patient autonomy and the oncologists routinely violating it, that would be bad enough, but workable. Human rights issues aside, treating cancers should well work without the patients compliance. Biopsies and CT/MRI images could still be taken (perhaps using a sedative), surgeries would be unaffected, patients might have to be prevented from removing chemotherapy IVs, but otherwise, treatment efficiency should not suffer too much.
They way it is, instead, is horrible. Most psychic illnesses can not be diagnosed based on physical findings, so one is stuck observing the patient for diagnosis instead. Some symptoms will be deducible without any patient cooperation whatsoever, but for most, one will have to rely on the patient to self-report them. In fact, I would be hard pressed to name a field more reliant on patient cooperation for diagnosis.
= How the spectre of involuntary commitment poisons doctor patient relationships =
In a normal doctor patient relationship, this would be no issue. Opioid addictions aside, a patient generally has no incentive to lie to their orthopedist about the presence or absence of joint pain. Their goals align.
A psychiatrist (or psychologist) working within a system permitting involuntary commitment, however, is never just a physician or therapist. They also occupy the position of a kind of attorney general who will have to decide on whether the case warrants bringing in a judge to lock the patient up. If that happens (and the judge agrees -- which he generally will, trusting the expert opinion of the psychiatrist, as there are no physical criteria fit to be used as evidence), our psychiatrist will wear the hat of the prison warden as well when working in a "secure unit" (a very newspeak term itself, as even the short term security provided to the de facto prisoners of mental institutions is very debatable).
The system will only work as long as the patient is unaware of the stakes or (rightly or wrongly) convinced that their symptoms do not warrant commitment.
(continued below, this ended up being part 1 out of 3).
(continued, part 3)
= Avoiding involuntary commitment =
There are a few steps you can take to safeguard your agency while interacting with clinical psychiatry. In particular, there are legal tricks, verbal tactics and strategic considerations when picking a clinic.
== Due process ==
In Germany, a commonly used form of involuntary commitment is the BGB §1906. Here, rather than the court ordering the institutionalization, the court appoints a legal guardian who has the power to have his ward committed, subject to court approval. The thing is, whether you are committed or not is entirely up to your legal guardian. You can specify a legal guardian in an advance decision. Ideally, someone who would rather see you dead than committed. The very worst legal guardian might be an elderly relative with lots of trust in authorities, medical or otherwise.
For the hearing with the judge, get a lawyer. Strike that. Get an attack dog lawyer. You do not want someone seeing them as the guardian of due process over a sad but necessary procedure, you want someone willing to go the extra mile to convince the judge of your sanity. Lawyers making their living suing doctors seem like a good start. Bonus points if you can get a Scientology lawyer, as people in that cult really do not like psychiatry.
People making their living locking up others are treading on thin ice, legally. Find out the relevant maximum time they can keep you without a judge. They went a minute over it? Press criminal charges.
== Verbal tactics ==
The unspoken Miranda warning: anything you tell a mental health care professional can and will be used in an attempt to have you involuntarily committed. Tread carefully.
As I mentioned, the staff will operate on simulacrum level 2, e.g. saying whatever they belive will make you do the stuff they want you to do with minimum fuzz, irregardless of truth. Take a leaf from their book. Lie to them, preferably by omission. Remember, their main triggers are suicidality and psychosis. Admitting to suicidality is subject to tradeoffs: it might cost you months of your freedom, but save your life.
Going through the hell of a secured station for psychosis medication might make sense in some extreme situations. I mean that in roughly the way I would say "selling a kidney for 20$ might make sense in some extreme situations". You are constantly hallucinating being devoured by spiders all the time and there is no Soteria or open station which could give you an anti-psychotic? Probably go for it. You sometimes feel people are following you or the moon talks to you? Not worth it.
If you do not want a psychosis treatment, admitting to anything which can be pattern matched against psychosis is inexcusable. Even pre-Snowden, you might reasonably believe that the NSA probably listens in on most phone calls. But if you mention that, you are lost. Any belief which a committee of elderly statesmen could not unanimously agree on is too controversial to mention. Do not talk about religion, Bayes, surveillance, your role-playing characters, climate change, politics, free will, self-harm, violence, drug use, porn, video games. If hard pressed, admit to owning a bicycle and sometimes being a bit sad. Communicate as you would with a literal-minded extraterrestrial, do not rely on a shared basis of common sense or an understanding of irony. Jokingly referring to your doctors as "my fellow reptiloids" will fail in the worst way imaginable.
Think about it this way: you will present a mask of a reasonably well adjusted person eventually. Doing so now instead of later will save all involved a lot of time, and will prevent you from being fucked up by anti-psychotics and forcibly addicted to tranquilizers.
= Strategic considerations: choosing the right place =
Generally, the further your health care provider is from a secure unit, the safer you are from ending up in it. Being an outpatient is safer than being an inpatient. Being an outpatient seeing an independent psychiatrist is safer than being an outpatient at a psychiatric hospital. Being an inpatient at some clinic where the next secure unit is far away is safer than being one where the secure unit is conveniently downstairs.
In Germany, there are two kinds of hospitals: general hospitals -- which have to take cases -- and specialized (e.g. university) hospitals. When interaction with psychiatry, avoid the latter. As mentioned, the secure stations of general hospitals have to take any new cases, e.g. disoriented persons picked up by the police while they were wandering through the traffic. This means that there is a constant inflow of new patients competing for a limited amount of beds, and one can get released simply by being (or appearing) more sane than the other patients. On the other hand, university hospitals do not have this constant pressure and are thus much more likely to keep you until your 'treatment' is complete.
= Last resort: Getting out by any means =
There is a fine balance between the harm done by staying in the secure unit and the harm the legal system might inflict upon you for breaking some laws while escaping (especially if they send you to forensic psychiatry instead of prison), so I would strongly advise against violence, arson or hostage taking, which will likely mean a longer stay.
They trust you enough to let you go for a walk sometimes? Great, abuse their trust just like they abused yours.
Escape.
You have outside help? Get creative. The security is generally not prison style, so you might get some contraband items in.
While threatening others is a legal offense, pointing a razor blade to your own throat is much less objectionable. Unlike prison, they also pretend to be about helping you, so if you convince whoever is on door access shift at 4:00 am that by the count of ten, you are going to get your blood all over their nice clean white walls unless that door is opened might just conclude that the latter outcome is preferable to the former from a patient health point of view.
== Moral considerations ==
A Singerian Utilitarian myself, I hold think that patient autonomy is of great importance. The obvious way to deal with a patient with a firm death wish is to offer an assisted suicide, not making their lives hell on earth.
I think the prerequisites to a stay in a locked psych unit should be:
* a violent crime
* a regular criminal conviction with a prison sentence, just as any sane offender would get for the same crime
* the court offering the convict the option to spend their sentence in psych unit instead
* the convict accepting that offer (until they decide to opt out again and go to prison)
Even for criminal cases involving criminally incompetent offenders, this is not how it is done in Germany e.g. in StGB §63 [1]: I am not a lawyer, but from my reading, there is no automatic expiry date on the commitment to forensic psychiatry with regard to the crime in question: go to court for battery, get locked up for life. Furthermore, StGB §63 is just the tip of the iceberg: besides federal BGB §1906, the psychiatry laws of the Laender (states) generally allow mentally ill people to be locked up if they are deemed a danger to public safety. Pre-Crime in action.
Of course, this is ripe for abuse, and abused it is. Gustl Mollath [2] was commited to psychiatry for seven years for offenses which probably would not have warranted a prison sentence of equal length (Possibly to shut him up about inconvenient allegations of tax evasion.)
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels
[1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__63.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustl_Mollath
See also Günter Wallraff, "13 unerwünschte Reportagen" (13 undesired reports) from 1969. In one of those, he was in a psych ward, disguised as a dangerous alcoholic. At the end, his wife gets him out. It would have sufficed for her to say that she felt threatened by him, and he'd have stayed there for years. http://www.irwish.de/PDF/Wallraff/Wallraff-13_unerwuenschte_Reportagen.pdf
My experience, as a twice-inmate in Australia:
They treat the suicidal patients *a lot* better than the psychotics, to the point where it can be an overall good thing. I wasn't forced to take any medications (they'd probably have forced me to take antidepressants, but they didn't change the regimen I was already willingly taking; on the other hand, when they offered me benzos/fentanyl and I said no, they respected that decision). The psychotic patients get no such mercy; the nurses ask them nicely to take their pills, and if they refuse the nurses forcibly inject them.
I'm glad you're still with us.
How long do people typically spend in a psych hospital per commitment in Germany?
Do committed psych patients have a legal right to refuse medication?
To the second question: Depends. Roughly, if they are committed against their will, there needs to be a meeting with a doctor within 24 hours and also the confirmation by a jugde within 48 hours. The latter also potentially decides on a medication against the will of the patient.
The details are regulated by a mixture of national law and law in each of the 16 regional states. My superficial reading says forced medication is possible, if it reduces the reasons that led to commitment (posing a threat to oneself or to others) and only if it's like 'really necessary'. My uninformed guess is, it's mostly the doctor who decides.
Not an expert, just based on some very basic reading. Links or additional info if interested.
Thanks for this.
Good summary of my thoughts on the matter, and why I refuse to see mental health professionals.
(continued pt.2)
= Life in a locked psych station =
The staff of a secure station will operate on Simulacrum Level 2 [0] exclusively. When moving a patient to that station, they will not tell them: "You are psychotic or a danger to yourself / to others and we will lock you up", but they will 'suggest' moving you to the 'protected station' 'for the weekend'. (Protip: this is your cue to go for a toilet break. Do not grab your stuff, just go and hide somewhere non-obvious. They will hardly start a big manhunt for a missing patient. Personally, I would always prefer answering for battery in criminal court to a week in secure ward, but YMMV.)
In my experience, there are two kinds of patients you find on "protected stations (as locked stations are euphemized in Germany): the involuntary ones and the non-voluntary ones. The only difference is the fact that the latter group has not yet realized they are trapped, but are under the illusion of voluntariness. The former group, either waiting for a judge or committed by court already, of course, are under no such illusions. (This becomes obvious when looking at the situation from an accounting point of view: A night in a locked-up psych ward is more expensive than a night in an open psych ward. The only reason to put a patient in a locked ward is to (try to) prevent them from harming themselves or others. If you can justify billing the insurer, but you can't justify keeping the patient there against their will, you were just defrauding the insurer.)
Naturally, forcible psychiatry wards are not conductive to mental health. In the best case, they are boring as hell, in the worst case, they are hell on earth. The patients who get committed to these stations are, by and large, not the ones with the most resilient psyches. Take a person who is somewhat functioning in their familiar home environment (perhaps with frequent trips into nature, support from friends or some other coping mechanisms) and declare them incompetent, deny them their coping mechanisms and lock them up in a ward full of other people with various mental health issues. Chances are they will lose their cool. Success! The psychiatrists were right all along, that person is clearly unstable.
Secure psychiatry is mostly patient storage. The chief objective is that at the end of the day, you still have as many warm bodies as you had at the start of the day. Options for talk therapy will be severely limited compared to non-secure facilities -- which is just as well, as I do not consider the Stockholm syndrome an acceptable basis for psychotherapy. Long term outcomes are generally not tracked. Retrospective patient approval or the lack thereof is also not tracked.
Committed patients are, in general, not treated as adult human beings. A person stating something a staff member finds unlikely might be told to 'stop telling lies', which generally constitutes a faux pas in civil society. This is probably natural as it would be difficult to deny basic agency to people regarded as adult human beings. Of course, denying patient autonomy is a one way road, as they will generally still be held responsible for their actions, a patient who stabbed another person would just be committed forensically instead of going to prison, and any small infractions will be sanctioned by loss of privileges and the like.
There are two places in a hospital where informed consent is not an important. One is the morgue, the other is the locked psych ward. After all, if your patient is not consenting in the first place, why waste time informing them? Naturally, nicer staff members may still be informing patients about procedures on a FYI basis, but the need to convince the patient of anything is just not there.
= Medication =
Medication will take place. For those unfortunate enough to be diagnosed (correctly or otherwise) with a variant of schizophrenia, this will include anti-psychotics, formerly marketed as "pharmacological lobotomy". Credit where credit is due, these are still a marked improvement over that procedure. In many cases antidepressants are on the menu as well. Locked up people will get unruly eventually, but that is what benzodiazepines are for. In fact, benzodiazepines, if responsibly used, might be very helpful for lots of mental health issues. Unless you happened to become addicted to them, perhaps to keep you from pounding at the door while you are locked up.
Naturally the patient is not consulted (or informed) about their medication or any side effects. In my experience, this creates a general aversion towards psychopharmaca that goes along very nicely with their new aversion to mental health institutions and professionals.
= "Curing" patients (or Es gibt nur einen Weg in die Freiheit) =
Eventually, the patient is released as 'cured'. While I have to concede that there are probably patients where the anti-psychotics managed to suppress the hallucinations, I postulate that there are many which basically were just taught to conform to whatever expectations their psychiatrist had. I am sure the psychiatrists are aware of that problem, but less sure what they can do about it. If the only had people committed who were screaming all the time because they hallucinated spiders eating their flesh, a lack of screaming might be a hard to fake indication of improvement. But as long as you have people committed based on voluntary statements about suicidal ideation or their (pre-Snowden) idea that the NSA is listening to their phone calls, it would seem difficult to judge if your intervention was any more effective than simply locking them up until they realized conformity was their only path to freedom.
= A hell created by Moloch =
While it might be helpful to view ones captors as akin to Dr. Mengele to keep aware of the fundamentally adversarial nature of their relationship, I do not believe that the people running 'secured' units are generally evil. Rather, I believe their incentives are simply not aligned to the long term interests of their patients. Suicides on hospital grounds are probably the worst, especially if they failed to have the patient committed. They are probably treating lots of obviously psychotic patients and tend to pattern match based on that. "Any person will have beliefs and behaviours which seem totally weird to most others" is probably not their favorite prior. They will obviously have a more favorite view of the benefit/cost ratio of involuntary commitments, either due to first person insight I lack or as a necessity of doing their job. They will probably not systematically track long term heath outcomes.
Maybe someone can tell me whether this makes sense, or can even do the math:
It occurred to me there is a population-based factor in the observation that technological advance was (before about 1970) exponential even after being adjusted for population.
People have approached that comparison with the unspoken assumption that the way to do it looks something like this:
population doubling time =~ 40 years
tech doubling time =~ 20 years
therefore technology's exponential increase is too high to be accounted for by population
therefore tech has accelerating returns
This comparison assumes that the technology output from N people at time t, tech(N,t), is simply N*tech(1,t), so that tech advances are proportional to population. But this overlooks the fact that tech(N,t) is in reality not a function, but a probability density function (pdf).
My first instinct was to instead test whether tech(N,t) can be written just as a function of N, tech(N), under the supposition that that would mean tech production doesn't depend on pre-existing tech, and so tech has no accelerating returns. This turns out not to work as a test, for tricky semantic reasons I don't want to get into. For now I'm going to write tech(N,t) as tech(N), even though this is not strictly correct.
We observe only a sampling of tech(N), and computing the average of that sample will never give the expected value of tech(N), because it's very skewed. The pdf tech(1) is even more skewed; so we can't compare E(tech(N)) to E(tech(1)) just from observed data without a theoretical adjustment for the observations we never observe. Even if the expected value E(tech(N)) = N * E(tech(1), it would still be the case that we would almost certainly always OBSERVE tech(N) > N * tech(1).
The probability distribution for tech output from 1 person is almost certainly given by a power law of the form p(x) = cx^(-a), a > 1. That would imply that the pdf for tech(1) has much more of its mass in, say, the top 1% of possible observations, than does tech(20), because of black swans. If a < 3, Variance(tech(N)) is infinite, so most of its mass is in parts of the PDF that we never see. If a < 2, the expected value E(tech(N)) is also infinite, which we can interpret as meaning that *all* of its mass is concentrated in parts of the distribution that we never see.
In other words, E(tech(N)) = N * E(tech(1)) doesn't imply that median(tech(N)) = N*median(tech(1)), and so we can't just say that the fact that tech doubling time is less than the population doubling time implies that the output of individuals isn't constant. We have to find out how much of the observed difference can be attributed to the greater skewedness of the probability distribution function (pdf) p(tech(1,t)).
median(tech(N,t)) would still grow faster than N * median(tech(1,t)). But I haven't done the math to figure out how much faster. It may help to know that median(p(x)) = c*2^(1-a).
Going back to the original comparison of population and tech doubling times, we should expect that we'll observe a faster tech doubling time *even if there are no increasing returns to technology*. This is because if we measure the sum of the importances of all tech advances per decade, these measurements won't approximate the expected sum, but will be better approximated as proportional to the significance of the most-significant single advance we happen to snag in our sample. And this significance will (I think) increase exponentially with population.
If I've understood you correctly, I might summarize your argument as: individual contributions to tech are heavy-tailed, so that usually statistical tests for averages don't give meaningful results, and so the "force multiplier" hypothesis for tech growth is unfounded.
If it's true that individual contributions are heavy-tailed, then the growth of tech over time should look "jumpy" rather than smooth. The jumps should be more frequent as population increases. If there's no "force multiplier", then the frequency of jumps should be proportional to population, and the size of the jumps should be identically distributed.
To test your hypothesis, I would look at the growth of tech over time, and see if the differences tech(T_i) - tech(T_i-1) are heavy-tailed. In particular, you'd want to verify it's not lognormal--which is what I'd expect if tech growths smoothly.
(As for the stuff about medians, I couldn't make the connection how that relates to tech doubling time.)
Though it will be harder than that, since I don't suppose that there are /no/ increasing returns to tech. I expect there are increasing returns, but would like to adjust the exponent gotten from historical data for the effect of a (hypothesized) long-tailed distribution of individual returns. Perhaps the first thing would be to try to study the distribution of innovations by individuals in some isolated fields, such as chess, which don't have great synergism with the development of science and tech in general.
But there's little chance that I'll get around to doing that; certainly not this year.
That's a good idea. The stuff about medians was to explain the idea topeople who aren't familiar with heavy-tailed distributions.
I think there’s a huge number of assumptions there, from beginning to end.
Re Alito et. al. overturning Roe v. Wade
What do people here think of a referendum (either national or state-by-state)? If voters were asked:
"What is the maximum number of weeks into pregnancy that an elective abortion should be allowed?"
then sorting the results and picking the median value gives a length such that half the electorate
thinks it is too long (too lenient) and half the electorate thinks it is too short (too stringent).
It has the advantage that:
It is a direct choice by the voters.
It is a reasonably concrete choice, unlike e.g. picking coefficients in a tax code polynomial.
It has reasonably simple consequences. At most, educating voters about the timeline is reasonably straightforward
and less controversial than the overall issue. ("Typical first heartbeat at N weeks. Typical first neuron at M weeks. Typical viability at...")
Aggregating a one-parameter choice like this with monotonic consequences doesn't get into voting paradoxes.
My _personal_ preference is to allow abortion at any point. Roe v. Wade (which is slightly more restrictive than that) struck me as a reasonable _policy_ - but, unfortunately, Alito is correct that neither "privacy" nor "abortion" nor "bodily autonomy" is in the text of the constitution. I, personally, would prefer to add constitutional amendments specifically protecting all three, but that isn't going to happen.
I'm not sure how what you describe differs from the ordinary legislative process, i.e. what would indeed start happening if Roe were overturned (except it wouldn't happen at the national level, because, assuming Harry Blackmun's reasoning were rejected, the Constitution does not give Congress the power to regulate abortion).
Granted, often bills are passed in the legislature, so the question is being asked of the voters indirectly -- they are asked to vote for representatives who are then asked the direct question "How many weeks?" -- but people are pretty used to pressing their legislators on specific issues that concern them, and in many states (e.g. California) the initiative allows the people to pass laws directly if they choose.