It's been somewhat corrupted now but this is exactly what the term "check your privilege" was meant for. To gain an emotional understanding of the luck of your birth and using that as a basis for empathy/compassion towards others.
After reading that, I jumped down to ask about it. I'm not familiar with the literature, but it's _exactly_ the kind of study that I would expect to fall prey to the replication crisis. Ok, now to go back up and finish reading and see how much the rest depends upon that foundation.
hmmm that conclusion sounds plausible to me; maybe not stability but ive seen plenty of cases where poeple get different answers on math problems based on how you phrase it, I would expect being able to pull numbers out politically charge language word problem may just be a skill.
I don't know exactly how to describe it but "politics makes people dumber" is exactly the kind of thing I would expect to read in a headline and then find out that it either failed to replicate or was straight up fraud.
It's not as bad as the more nakedly partisan versions along the lines of "science proves conservatives are heartless bastards", but it sets of similar alarm bells in my brain.
I will admit that it certainly sounds plausible and makes some kind of sense (Scott certainly seems to agree from his own personal experience), but then again, _tons_ of the replication crisis findings seemed plausible and that they made sense according to your lived experience.
> but then again, _tons_ of the replication crisis findings seemed plausible and that they made sense according to your lived experience.
I have the opposite experience; pop science reaches me when its surprising(if not just straight up politically contentious, "everyones racists look we made a racism test everyone fails")
I have a hard time putting into words why, but this is the kind of study my brain distrusts extra hard compared to a generic psychology paper. I think I have learned pattern-matching heuristics for what kind of technical papers I can trust, and they were sounding alarms when I read Scott's brief description of them.
Yeah my experience as a maths teacher is that even very innocuous changes in the wording of a question have a dramatic impact on student understanding.
You might find research by Gigerenzer to be interesting, he studied in quite a lot of detail how different wordings change how people perform ond logical and statistical tasks, among other things. But in short, it's not just your personal experience.
I had the same feeling. The best way explanation I can give for that feeling is that Kahan's findings sound too Malcolm Gladwell.
So I looked at the Vox article Scott linked, which is summarizes Kahan's findings and also includes quotes from a conversation he had with Kahan. And I had that same feeling of sleaze in the air. Kahan said a couple disingenuous things -- gave examples that appeared to support his ideas, but that really weren't fair tests. One was that people usually pay good attention to data about subjects where their ideological convictions are not relevant, but ignore it when ideology is involved. His example of this was "there’s a lot of disagreement about climate change and gun control, for instance, but almost none over whether antibiotics work, or whether heavy drinking impairs people’s ability to drive." Well, yeah, but there are other factors at work here influencing people's view. The data about the effects of antibiotics and heavy drinking are easy to see in everyday life. The data about climate change and gun control cannot be gleaned the same way -- you have to look up statistics.
Also looked around for attempts to replicate Kahan. Found one -- am not sure whether there are others. It's a 2021 article called "A Preregistered Replication of Motivated Numeracy" (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104768).
From their abstract: "We conducted a large-scale replication of Kahan, Peters, Dawson, and Slovic (2017), using a pre-specified analysis plan with strict evaluation criteria. We did not find good evidence for motivated numeracy; there are distinct patterns in our data at odds with the core predictions of the theory, most notably (i) there is ideologically congruent responding that is not moderated by numeracy, and (ii) when there is moderation, ideologically congruent responding occurs only at the highest levels of numeracy. Our findings suggest that the cumulative evidence for motivated numeracy is weaker than previously thought, and that caution is warranted when this feature of human cognition is leveraged to improve science communication on contested topics such as climate change or immigration."
Polymaths they are. Or is it Poorly-Maths: One of their questions “Imagine that we roll a fair, six-sided dice 1,000 times. Out of 1,000 rolls, how many times do you think the dice would come up as an even number?” - Whatever single number you say - I bet my 1000$ to 100$ you are wrong. Let's roll.
Do you mean Kahan's a Poorly Math or the people who did the replication? I only skimmed the latter. The people who did the replication duplicated Kahan's procedure. And what are you saying about the dice question? Did the researchers make a mistake about what's the right answer? I think the answer's approx 500. Am I overlooking some complication I should have thought of?
It appears in the replication-study as one example of how they assessed the math skill. page 3 "Numeracy was assessed with nine questions, where the first six were
conventional word problems measuring mathematical ability. For
example, one of the questions read: “Imagine .... "" - With no answer. - Well, obviously "500" is the least unlikely result, and the averages of many 1k dice rolls will tend to be closer to "500" the more often one does 1k dice rolls. On one specific 1k rolls, however, it is very likely that "even" happens 450-550 times, but highly unlikely to get exactly "500" times an even result. (Similar as in having a son, a daughter, then a son, then a daughter is as un-likely as having 4 daughters in a row - or better: While imprisoned by the Germans during World War II, the South African statistician John Kerrich tossed a coin 10,000 times. Result: 5,067 heads. ) It is not trivial or obvious. The guy who wrote that up (we had a few tasks like 1k dice rolls) , seems to think it is. Did they really expect people to answer: "500 - with a likelihood of approx. 2.5%. Any other number less likely."
Oh, so what you're objecting is their asking "how many times would the dice come up an even number?" rather than "what's the likeliest # of even results over 1000 throws," or "if you had to estimate, in round numbers, how many of the 1000 throws would be an even number, what would you say"? I mean, I see what you're saying, and the researchers do look a little silly if you understand probability and think about it their question as a probability question. Still, I doubt this little piece of sloppiness distorted their results. People who grasp the basics of the situation would answer 500, and it would not occur to them that the real answer's not that simple. And people with a deeper grasp of probability, etc., like you, would understand what answer they expected from laymen and just write 500 -- don't you think?
500 is simultaneously the mean, median and mode of the distribution. That's obviously the intended answer. If the mean and mode were different you would have a case for ambiguity
How could I disagree? - What about asking it, then? "What's the mean, median and mode of the distribution for "even result" if you throw a legit dice 1k times?" (or so, non native speaker here - but I suppose some in the US would struggle to understand this clear question). My claim was and is: Those authors seem to lack intuition what math-questions (and answers) are clear/hard/(dis)ambiguous or bearing any resemblance to real (!) life. The dice-throw question should have been: If you throw a dice ONE time, what are the chances it shows an odd number? - Rest assured, a big part would have gotten that wrong, too. - If I had been part of that 'study', I'd have switched to mechanical problem solving. Without thinking politics. The study claims, they did not - great for the authors - claim did not replicate; little surprise. (I suppose there is a bias as postulated. I doubt those "tasks" are good enough to prove the bias.)
Honestly, this may be a case where you and I use our greater (not numeracy, exactly) to demonstrate the problem.
I have seen plenty of evidence for climate change in my everyday life; I only need statistics to assure myself that my own perceptions and experience are not anomalous. The same applies to at least a subset of gun control issues.
On the other hand, my experience with antibiotics is sufficiently mixed that I can't (from personal experience alone) rule out a placebo effect, and my experience around drunk drivers is sufficiently slim that relying strictly on personal experience makes me far more confident of climate change.
And again from personal experience, I can confirm that:
lots of people who can do arithmetic have difficulty with word problems,
slight wording changes can make a huge difference for some students, and
a problem that makes them think too strongly of a real world situation will prevent them from concentrating on math well enough to even set up the equations. I wouldn't be surprised if political questions did that for many people.
Do the tasks in the original study make sense, at least? The way Ezra Klein presents the skin-cream-task does not. Scott's link: https://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid - The numbers as presented means both: ppl who used the cream were both more likely to improve their skin conditions as to worsen their rash. Or? - I doubt journalists make us stupid, but I strongly feel most journalists have numeracy-skills too low to be allowed to publish about numbers/statistics/economy/math.
Apparently you're supposed to find the percentage of people who got rashes out of the total number of test subjects, and the people who used the cream have a higher percentage than the people who didn't use the cream, so using the cream is actually (counter-intuitively) worse than not using it.
He then goes on to expand on how even the 'good at maths' people get the politically phrased question wrong (which he doesn't tell us what the question was) and the 'dumb at maths' people get it right when it fits with their biases.
Oh, I finally got it! ALL (fictional) participants had their condition CHANGE. None had "stayed the same, more or less". That is such a crazy idea, I did not even consider it! Thus N1 is 298 and N2 is 128. 75% - or so - of N1 got "better" and 25% worse. While no cream (N2): only ca. 1/6 got worse and 5/6 got better. Ok. 6th grader math. Most adult can not do. - Well, we still lack any information by HOW MUCH skins got better or worse. Don't expect journalists to know math, or math-guys to know medical studies.
A more charitable reading might be that when you're reading a new story, it's almost always a secondary source. The journalist has done research and talked to people and then wrote up his understanding of the issue. So you're relying on the primary source being understood and communicated to the journalist and then the journalist understanding and communicating to you.
Even with impeccable numeracy, there's still more links in the chain that can fail.
True. - Then again, many stories (esp those with numbers) seem to be done by a news-agency (in Germany dpa or Reuters, mostly) then adjusted (shortened) to fit the paper's needs. Not all journalism is investigative. - Re-reported without much understanding. Possibly with misunderstood numbers to begin with. A few years ago, there was widely printed news-piece about some ice (arctic/antarctic?) melting significantly (30% ?) "faster than expected". It even appeared in The Economist! - And none bothered about: Who "expected" (Greta? IPCC? Manifold?) or how much was "expected" or how fast the actual melting was. Information value: zero. Did not subscribe to TE again.
(Comment thread seems to mix up.) Yep, name was familiar. In this case, I am more disappointed by the design "p-makes-dumb-study" - if their other "tasks" were the same level of slightly silly, then biases had it too easy to take over, I suspect. Also: enough time, premium on correctness and a math-centered setting might do much do make the bias-effect disappear. - Still, a fine idea, possibly true to some extent.
Are you assuming that most real-life questions are carefully phrased with mathematical precision? Or that most questions (as opposed to a few of the most important) have enough time, premium on correctness, or a math-centered setting? Or that political survey questions (or honestly, even most voting decisions in a typical US election with dozens of choices to make) are often among the few questions that people consider so important that they will put in extra work before answering? Or even that people who do say "I need some time to research first" will be heard in the polling results and/or conversations?
FWIW, it absolutely make me "slower". I used to be able to speed-read, and I can still suck down familiar, safe fiction rather quickly. But I've tried to read "The Gift of Fear" a few times, and I don't think I've gotten past page 50 before I realize that I only read one sentence in the last hour, and I'm already so strung out I might not be able to sleep that night.
I find this is true of podcasts. I'm fine with listening to "straight" history or even difficult science (Mindscape!) but not economics. I'll deficiently think there is something just a little wrong and I'll want to talk back to the presenter which is impossible. With text, even if the source does not allow comments (annoyingly frequent) I have the option to link or copy and paste to create a rebuttal/clarification.
The thing with podcasts and videos is that when I zone out, they keep going, and it can be hard to get back to exactly where I was. Books stay open to the same page.
I suspect a big part of the issue is applying emotional standards for interpersonal conflict to a situation they can't hope to handle.
When we get in a dispute with someone usually we either get told by our friends nope sorry you're in the wrong and we forget it or they side with us and we feel supported and cared for by our community.
The nature of politics in the modern age is the constant feeling we are the victims of genuine harm and that a.largw fraction of what we still see as part of our community doesn't care. That is deeply hurtful. Before social media we didn't feel personally wronged in the same way because we didn't feel the same clear sense of others saying such hurtful things about us.
It's like in a relationship, if your spouse doesn't back you on something and you eventually realize you were wrong and they shouldn't have it goes away, if they back you it's fine. If there is a persistent sense you were genuinely injured and they aren't willing to be on your side it can fester.
Yes, I think that's important and also particular aspects of how they work. Facebook has the unfortunate feature of bridging different aspects of one's life -- in real life you show off how edgy and woke/anti-woke you are to your college friends while being polite/respectful to your family/coworkers/etc who might feel differently.
It's kinda the equivalent of having your aunt show up at the wild party your throwing. You suddenly have to choose the persona you present and it will shock someone.
Twitter may have less of that but it's likes but no dislikes system is the political equivalent of a room chanting "chug chug" or the girls gone wild production team. It's going to bring out your worst behavior -- and then cut you off so you can't give full context.
I'm not one of those people who sees it as somehow malicious or something. But as a society we've just started college and we haven't yet learned to drink, party and use drugs in moderation and the internet companies are just giving us what we think we want.
Interesting. It may be like (pre-internet) living in a village vs. living in a city.
In a village you could even tell who someone is at a fair distance just by their gait. Because you almost certainly know them quite well.
In a city you encountered strangers all the time. You had to learn that they don't know you and don't care about you, so you avoid or are cautious of them.
With the internet, you are in a village, but the village covers the whole world (at least the part that speaks the same language). If some stranger doesn't like what you said, he's in your face and it's quite difficult to avoid him.
We're also wired to care somewhat about anyone we can talk to. When you can talk to perfect strangers (I don't know who you are, or where you live, or anything about you other than you are interested in the subject of the article), you tend to feel that there should be a community feeling. When it isn't there, you feel offended.
Well, we used to have a healthier internet that primarily lived on forums and IRC chats. Now "the internet" is giant social media platforms which have the flaws you describe (even Discord is a fair distance from the old model). Peter Gerdes makes this point above.
Politics is the mind killer, not just in creating feelings of outrage but in creating feelings of safety. My mantra for these circumstances: Believing the politician might help you is like believing the stripper really likes you.
No, believing the politician might help you is like believing the stripper might throw their underwear at you. It's perfectly possible, but there are so many other people they might throw their underwear at. Strippers do in fact take off their underwear all the time, but only so many people in the room get it thrown at them. Similarly, politicians do things all the time that make real differences to the world, but there's only so many people who get helped by those changes. You may well luck out, but you may not.
Believing the stripper really likes you is like believing the politician really cares about you. That is vanishingly unlikely. They might *pretend* to do it while doing the thing that actually affects your material condition.
To quote "The WIre", "they all disappoint". Even if it's only by quitting politics and joining the Jesuits because he thinks that's a better way to help the world. Not that I'm disappointed **in** that guy, just in the world that caused him to make that probably-accurate assessment. :-/
"Believing the stripper really likes you is like believing the politician really cares about you. That is vanishingly unlikely."
This seems just cynic to me, and I strongly disagree. In fact, it's exactly the kind of polarization that Scott tries to fight.
Unless you mean it in the way "cares more about you personally than they care about millions of other voters". But that's not what I want from a politician, it's obvious that I have to sort out my individual issues myself. Politicians are there for issues that affect me and millions of others as well. Do you think that only vanishingly few politicians deep in their heart care about the people who elected them? How would you even know that? How could you tell apart a world where they do from a world where they don't?
Politicians are also human, they have goals, dreams and desires. I strongly believe that many of them (not all) went into politics out of a desire to create a better world and to help other people. Sure, they quickly learn that it's not as easy as they thought, and they have to learn to work with the cogs and wheels of politics. This does distract from great goals, and a lot of them (have to) become occupied with the small political fights. But do you really think they are just pretending when in their speeches they say that they want to help the uneducated single mother who is struggling, or the gun owner whose rights are threatened to be taken away, and that they care for these people? Do you really believe that the politicians only pretend this sentiment? All politicians, or almost all?
The key is to remember that we're discussing *successful* [politicians, strippers] only. Any ultra-competitive industry where there's a lot of power, status and money on the table, and relatively little scrutiny of day-to-day operations, will attract a starting mix of people who genuinely care about the work and steely sociopaths who mostly want to win the game. Which type of person would you expect to be most effective at navigating the inevitable compromises, at telling the right people what they want to hear, at concealing their distaste at bending the rules when necessary to get ahead?
The principled idealist stays up all night carefully researching the bill they're discussing tomorrow; the sociopath puts in a few more hours of calls to donors so they can afford more Facebook ads, or calls around to arrange the favor for the guy who can fix the situation with the mistress of that party leader whose endorsement really matters. Which one do you think is getting rewarded by the voters in November?
I don't know US politicians very well, but if I look at key politicians in Germany (Scholz, Merz, Habeck, Baerbock, Lindner, Wagenknecht), then I certainly don't have the impression that they don't care about the people they make politics for. Of course, they could all be Sociopaths who deceive me, but I don't think they left obvious traces. So again the question: why do you believe that they are all deceptive sociopaths? Frankly, I find this claim rather absurd.
Same for other European politicians, though I know them less well: how would I know that Macron or Meloni or von der Leyen don't care about the people? Or that Orban truly deep down is not concerned at all about traditional families and does not really believe that people will suffer if that concept is watered down?
For the US, I am much more likely to make some obvious blunder with names. But why are you so certain that all of Obama, Mike Pence, Al Gore truly do not care for the people they make/made politics for? Even for more extreme figures, like Ben Shapiro and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, what makes you so convinced that both of them (especially the one on your own political side) deep down do not believe that transitioning is bad/good for children with gender dysmorphism, and that they really both don't care about these children at all?
It's not about the people -- it's about the system. When you create a system where some people get to make rules that they exempt themselves from, and get to use violence to enforce, no good can come from it (on average -- clearly governments can do good things, but the bad things outweigh them).
I'm not sure the phrase "some people get to make rules that they exempt themselves from" is quite right. The fact is, a lot of those rules aren't (or aren't just) decided by politicians for arbitrary or self-interested or whimsical reasons, but because they have constituencies, including "ordinary" people, that want them. I suspect a lot of people like bank regulations, consumer protections, work safety rules, rules on medical insurance (e.g., requiring medical insurance companies to pay for at least some psychiatric treatment), police, roads that last at least a while and get repaired, cars that don't universally wear out after three years, etc., etc. It may be that some of these rules, as written or enforced, have negative consequences, or can be a pain to comply with (forms, forms, forms). But I get the impression a lot of "ordinary" non-politician folks like rules *in principle.* They just disagree about what rules they want.
I guess we're just under-defining what it would mean to "care" in this context. If you mean that politicians may have vague feelings of warmth and benevolence toward their party-aligned interest groups or values, then... sure? Could be, who knows? Everyone is a hero in their own story; for a politician whose daily life is far removed from most of their constituency, I'd imagine it's easy enough to select one's sympathies and adjust one's information intake so that the best career move for them is also conveniently the one they believe to be most caring to the vulnerable groups who really matter. Put another way, Orban probably does "care" about traditional families, but also I suspect that he arranges to find (and chooses staffers who will help him to find) that the very best projects to defend traditional families are also the ones that would benefit his cronies, harm his enemies and consolidate his power.
On the other hand, if you mean that top-tier national politicians will likely have a deep personal commitment to open-mindedly figuring out what policies would genuinely improve the lives of every part of their citizenry, and to pursuing those policies even at the cost of personal effort and self-sacrifice... then I guess I'd ask, do you have any reason to believe that such a person would succeed in politics? Does the system seem set up to reward and promote them? Why would they not consistently get beaten out the very first time they came up against a sociopath who made the same impassioned professions of caring, but also made it a practical priority to win the game?
"a deep personal commitment to open-mindedly figuring out what policies would genuinely improve the lives of every part of their citizenry, and to pursuing those policies even at the cost of personal effort and self-sacrifice"
You have high standards for caring. I am not sure whether my friends would pass that bar for caring about me, and I probably won't pass that bar for caring about my friends. So yes, there are bars of caring that I don't expect politicians to pass.
I think it's worth looking at business executives for comparison here. Sociopaths are strongly overrepresented among top business executives, but *not* a majority according to any evidence I've been able to pin down. I think it's likely that sociopathic tendencies also become more strongly represented higher up the political ladder, but unlikely that politics filters more strongly for sociopathy than business. After all, business offers significantly greater avenues for self-enrichment than politics does.
It may be important that the US is one of the most strongly 2-party systems. In Germany, if a politician is a terrible person, you can probably instead vote for someone from a different party that would likely ally with your preferred party in the end. In most of the US, it really is a binary choice. That means demonizing the (only) opponent is at least as effective as (and often easier than) demonstrating that you have good judgment or competence. Since those attacks can be outsourced to anonymous groups, it will happen in any race with enough funding that a typical voter will know anything about any of the candidates. (Why yes, this does affect who even runs in the first place.) And so it is distressingly common to vote for someone you know is terrible, because the only actual alternative is worse.
I think you're right that most politicians actually care about helping society in the ways their policies do. But they often make it feel like they care about *you* personally (Bill Clinton was famously good at this), even though they've never met you.
I think it's probable that that's mostly illusory. But, regular non-politician people often do get deeply invested in issues affecting people they don't actually know based on group identity dynamics. So I think it's reasonable to assume that politicians do the same to some degree as well.
Yeah, I think good politicians are masters of the parasocial relationship. They make you feel like they're on your side, have your back, care about you personally, etc. But at best, they wish you well in an abstract way, and will try to keep the people (broadly) from getting shafted too badly. They don't know you personally, and can't know very many of their constituents personally.
You may be right, but how would anyone outside of his closest circle really know? Presidents have enough resources to script just about any response that is visible to the public.
There was a live group present as well. I don't see how that could have been faked. In movie scenes where males cry there's usually a little cut before the first welling of tears and during that somebody either puts drops of liquid in the actor's eyes or some irritating thing like onion juice under his eyes. If Obama had had onion juice or something under his eyes they would have been watering from the beginning.
If you know the name of your local politician, you've already lost "the game", unless you have a business reason to know them. The best policy is total and complete ignorance of politics.
> It’s a plot by STEM people to feel self-satisfied about their own intelligence and superior to more well-rounded types.
I mean, it's not exactly a "plot", but...
From what I understand, one of the reasons why people get caught up in conspiracy theories is the feeling of being special. The sheeple go on about their daily lives, unaware of the perils they face, but you -- you're smarter than that. You know the real truth that is hidden from the rest. You can expose it, and in doing so, perhaps save the world.
I think it would be weird if the AI-risk community was somehow immune from this impulse; they're human after all. This does not automatically imply that believers in AI-risk are wrong (just like it does not necessarily imply that believers in Illuminati-risk are wrong), but still, it's a potential source of bias that should at least be acknowledged.
Also, when there is a really bad outcome, there seems to be a "need" to believe that someone or something vary large, hypercompetent and malicious is in charge. It is too distressing to believe that one crazy guy like Lee Harvey Oswald could have such a huge impact on the course of human history. Or a handful of terrorists flying planes into buildings. It offers a wierdly satisfying, almost calming effect to believe its not just random chance. Even if the machine is evil, at least the world is orderly.
Try to get three people to keep a secret. Yet, somehow thousands of people have been keeping the real culprits of 9-11 under wraps.
I think this is an area where AI risk departs from the conventions of conspiracy theory, rather than conforming to it. In my experience, almost everyone who's really worried about AI risk doesn't think it's the result of a conspiracy of hypercompetent evil people, but that it's something that'll most likely come about by accident, caused by people who don't adequately recognize the risks of their own actions, or haven't taken sufficient measures to safeguard against them. If they do believe the risks are primarily driven by a few powerful actors, they don't usually believe this is because they're driven by destructive motives, but that they're driven by incentives which would motivate other people to take their places if they were simply removed without institutional barriers being put in place.
I think the conspiracy theories happen because if the real reason is "we're afraid of being killed by robots", most people will go "but killer robots aren't real, that's dumb, you're not dumb, that can't be the real reason" and they make their own reason up instead.
pizzagate real, there are random pedopiles who have "90,000$ pictures of pizza", if q or whatever made it about a spefic pizzashop Id see that as epstains friends trying to discredit the infomation that information human trafficking rings and heres some of their code words
I think the defining feature of a conspiracy theory isn't the exclusivity, but rather that you end up trapped by your beliefs so that evidence against the conspiracy either has no effect or gets morphed somehow into more evidence for the conspiracy.
I mean, being moderately familiar with any weird branch of knowledge gets you all the exclusivity you can want. (This is just as true if your weird branch of knowledge is about microprocessor design or astrology.) But that doesn't make it a conspiracy theory.
Right, but knowledge about microprocessor design doesn't make you special, it just makes you the guy who can design microprocessors. You won't be saving any sheeple from imminent doom with that (not unless they're in dire need of a microrprocessor, I guess).
Hah! All these sheeple around me think their computer is executing the steps of their programs in the order they appear and that when their program reads from memory, it comes from off-chip memory rather than usually getting supplied from one of the levels of cache.
> you end up trapped by your beliefs so that evidence against the conspiracy either has no effect or gets morphed somehow into more evidence for the conspiracy.
As an AI-risk skeptic, this is exactly the feeling I've had regarding some AI-risk responses to things that I interpreted as evidence against AI-risk (i.e. LLM's didn't respond to these instructions b/c they're dumber than we thought, ergo the singularity is even farther away than we thought), that AI-risk proponents interpreted as evidence for even *more* AI risk (i.e. LLM's didn't respond to these intructions so AI is even harder to align than we thought). This may be an unfair correlation, and maybe the fault in response is even on my side, but I have had this experience multiple times. It makes me feel like some people manage to interpret every result as "you should adjust your p(doom) even higher!)"
Loved this part --- "Suppose that outrage addiction is, in fact, trauma addiction. That means the media ecosystem is a giant machine trying to traumatize as many people as possible in order to create repeat customers, ie trauma addicts'
I think we're going to look back and think about cable news as "Cigarettes for your mind" --- small doses probably fine, but as a daily practice will kill you.
Funny you should create that analogy with cigarettes.
We need a warning label before you load your facebook / Instagram / xyz just like we do on cigarette packs - "May cause addiction and feelings of self hatred"
I think they are a good idea even if they're consequentially irrelevant, as punishment to the tobacco companies for claiming strong evidence of zero health risks, and as an expensive signal that the government is doing its job in forcing the sellers of goods to accurately describe those goods to consumers
Sounds like all punishment for some sense of moral righteousness, but no mention of any benefits for the people it's pretending to help, the (would-be) smokers?
err, i mean, even if it doesn't have the *specific* consequence of reducing smoking, or making people less likely to try smoking, or whatever
i tend to be extremely anti-state, indeed upon reading this post it's pretty clear i am traumatized by the state lol
but i do think one of the very few roles the state ought to have is in punishing fraud and ensuring that the sellers of products can't lie about those products
if the state only did this when the effect was large, or if the measure were positive-value, that would create horrible incentives
this seems obvious to me and i'm surprised anyone disagrees? some random bed and breakfast in iowa shouldn't be allowed to claim they serve dinosaur eggs, and if they do the state should stop them, even if literally not a single person has ever stayed there
>roles the state ought to have is in punishing fraud and ensuring that the sellers of products can't lie about those products
Could you elaborate on why
>if the state only did this when the effect was large, or if the measure were positive-value, that would create horrible incentives
If the effect that a seller's lies have is very small, why do those lies matter? ( The "positive-value" question is stickier, since sometimes one needs to deter a damaging lie, even if the cost to enforce it in that particular instance outweighs the immediate reduction in damage. Deterrence has to be credible etc. )
It's interesting to imagine holding media companies financially accountable for their negative public health impacts in the same way we did cigarette companies. Chronic stress has serious physical consequences that impose huge costs on our healthcare systems (not to mention the individual sufferers), and today's metrics-based journalism makes huge amounts of money by peddling products deliberately designed to produce addictive stress responses that destroy your body. If there's a difference between that business model and Big Tobacco's, I certainly don't see it.
At very least, they should be made to fund anti-clickbait public health campaigns for elementary schoolers, the way they did anti-smoking ads back in the day.
"holding media companies financially accountable for their negative public health impacts in the same way we did cigarette companies. "
As far as I know, the impact of the tobacco settlements was to entrench the tobacco companies in their niche. It didn't cause any of them to go under, or even get smaller. The requirement to pay into the settlement fund meant that no new companies will enter the market, but the existing ones will be there as long as people smoke tobacco.
So I don't think this will work the way I think you think it will work. If that's coherent.
I knew somebody who became paranoid in old age, with his paranoia directed at a family member, which caused a lot of distress. The family tried to get the oldster to redirect his paranoia outward toward more distant concerns, such as the President, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy, the other political party, the CIA, the IRS, the Russians, etc., But he remained frustratingly level-headed and realistic about politics.
Eventually, after an adjustment in his blood pressure medicine, his paranoia declined overall and became focused instead on the supermarket checkers union spying on him rather than on his own family, which caused many fewer problems for all concerned. (The checkers never noticed.) The last half decade of his long life was happier than the preceding half decade had been.
In general, there is a lot of mental illness out there all the time. What type of mental illness it manifests itself as (e.g., paranoia) and what sub-type (e.g., political paranoia vs. personal paranoia) and what sub-sub-type (e.g., grocery store checkers) seems pretty contingent and hard to predict.
I would guess it's more likely that customers don't notice what retail workers are or aren't noticing. They could all be talking about that guy behind his back.
1) Why now? Is it about technology? Overall degradation of civil society? Increased polarization (a la Ezra Klein) reaching some sort of inflection point?
2) How do we get out of it? For individual trauma, there’s therapy. For societal trauma? Perhaps a matter of fixing whatever the causes are, I suppose.
Thanks for sharing. And I’m sorry about your experience in college. That sounds really upsetting and unfair.
Chicken blood? He’s saying that political divisions of the type seen in America have led to civil war in the past, including the past in America.
This isn’t true however, it’s a selection bias. There are plenty of examples of very divided societies that healed without civil war and the US isn’t as divided as the ones that did.
I agree with your assessment of Shankar’s statement and with the observation that divided societies have healed on their own; the only thing I would add to that is I’m skeptical a civil war has ever healed a society’s collective trauma. Except perhaps, very cynically, when the result was a war of eradication that left no-one to carry on one side of the grievance.
I think he was being that cynical, and I kind of agree. I think we, today, in WEIRD countries, are historically unusually unlikely to engage in genocide, and so we are facing problems that are historically unprecedented.
Sounds like something René Girard would have a lot to say about. I.E. ancient societies relieved trauma via scapegoats, and Jesus was the last and best. (See Ephesians 2, Jews and Gentiles can now be reconciled with each other and God through Christ.)
1) My model of what he is getting at it somewhat of a combination of 'this is actually an available option' (ala school shooters becoming more common because unwell people feeling like it is an option in the toolbox) and 'cultural tropes' (like stereotypical manager; or stereotypical rich girl. They have their own individual personalities but they have tended towards the trope)
There's also so many people (larger population), reading and writing (better education), all around the world (modern communications), that it makes it far easier for inciting changes in available options & cultural tropes to form and spread.
Ex: if you're a renaissance nobleman, you're raised on classics. This benefits certain parts of your education, as it encourages some ways of behaving. And if you are deathly insulted by someone, settling that formally via a duel is the option that feels available and like it fits in your own mental trope for yourself.
However we don't teach in the same way (for a variety of good reasons and bad), and the culture / discussions are just larger and more varied. If in a subculture it gets more common to punch people for disagreements, then it has an easier time spreading and hiding itself until there's a lot who follow that subculture's rules. (ex: the circulation of trigger warnings as a thing growing until there's enough of a group who expect it as a matter of fact in discussions that it becomes harder to discuss with everyone else due to different norms)
2) There's the classic societal expectation of toughing out some pains. Or like the example Scott gives where war is treated as heroic and inspiring. It is expected to be affected by people you know dying; but if someone punches you then tough it out (rather than becoming flinchy) and maybe get revenge later.
I think we kinda need some of this, but I also want better methods too. It is good to help others feel less down or flinchy from things they've faced, but it is also very bad if we end up with everyone feeling very commonly flinchy. I view it as 'invest some amount of pain early on to avoid a larger more chronic sort of pain later', but I'm not sure that's the right frame for everyone.
In addition to learning how to take a punch, fasting is pretty good? And there's all sort of other medieval "mortification of the flesh" techniques that I haven't investigated yet.
This is helpful! I like where you're going re: "choice option space" -- in different cultures different behaviors are within the available option space. I guess my question is how you shift out of that -- with e.g. duels my impression is that at some point they turned a corner and started being less acceptable, plus new laws were passed/they actually started enforcing existing duels. My guess would be this was a result of overall societal trends where "honor" was a less important and legible concept? But when you start thinking on such a broad level it's hard to see where the room for individual agency to change the tide is.
I'll just point out that Scott's awful college cancellation trauma took place (slightly) _prior_ to the public launches of Facebook etc.
I am a full generation older than Scott and witnessed a couple of such episodes when I was in college. Also, though I did not particularly grasp it in the moment, I narrowly dodged such a cancellation myself related to my role one school year as opinion columnist for the college newspaper.
During the 1990s and early 2000s I resided with my young family in one of the bluest of blue towns in the US and also spent time in the very-similar city neighborhood of my childhood. The strands of thought/practice now summarized as "wokeness" were increasingly clear in those places during that period and by around 2002 were causing serious social conflict for me. Meanwhile my cousins living in the rural/working-class Midwest that our extended family originated from were becoming increasingly alarmed at rising levels of what we would now call "MAGAism" among our extended clan.
All of which is offered as anecdotal pushback against the widespread idea that social media is the cause of the national cultural/intellectual death spiral that we've since fallen into. Social media arguably gave the existing trends new momentum, definitely made them more apparent, and also made them easier for politicians to exploit. But those tides of collective bile were already rising before anybody'd ever heard of Twitter.
So the "why now?" question -- to which far too many Americans nowadays assume the answer is obviously social media/duh/everybody knows that/etc -- is in fact still unanswered.
I've got a friend who saw social justice pathology in college in the 80s. It wasn't invented recently, it escaped.
Also, I've seen an early version in Howard Fast's memoir, _Being Red_ which was about being a communist in the US-- as I recall, a lot of it was in the 50s.
For the easily amused, they were hassling Fast about a description of a black character having a wolfish expression. (This is from memory.) and Fast was arguing that the character had a wolfish expression and besides, Fast was the only best-selling author the Party had.
The interesting question might not be how did this happen-- the memeplex has been around for a long time-- but how did it escape into the general public?
My observation, from the 1990s onwards and on both sides of the woke/MAGA firefight, has been that a particular generation of native-born Americans has been the beating heart of the growing pathology. It is the demographic cohort that I, barely, fit into myself and having two elder siblings I know it firsthand quite well.
These are both great questions! I think about them a lot. I wonder if Scott will do a follow up.
At an individual level, people are only able to heal from trauma if they accept discomfort. The unhealthy cognitive-behavioural pathway that develops as a response to trauma can manifest in a lot of different ways - addiction to substances, for example - which is actually a defense mechanism against unpleasant emotions. Often it makes some sense at the time of the traumatic experience, but continues out years past until the coping behaviour becomes the problem.
To break out of this cycle requires real effort, self honesty and the willingness to face up to our real issues.
How do we do this at a societal level? Maybe have honest conversations with each other, and don’t shy away from people who challenge our beliefs or make us feel uncomfortable. I think there are a few people doing that (Scott, for example, or Lex Fridman, or Piers Morgan.) Increasingly, though, I feel these people only exist on podcasts or Substack and not in mainstream institutions.
I've seen it reported that people in colleges have noted that the students are "less emotionally resilient" than they used to be. There seems to be a general pattern over the past decades that children are raised and supported much more intensively, and conversely are trained far less in the idea that there's a lot of danger in the world that one should watch out for and/or endure. Camille Paglia once said "I was raised in the Italian working-class way, which is "watch out!" The world is a dangerous place. It's up to you to protect yourself, not just from rape, but from anything." And Helen Gurley Brown in 1963 started a sentence of advice "Of course, if he has you pinned in a hammerlock [kick him or something] but if he's just being intellectually persistent ...". It seems people were trained with a much more realistic sense of the dangers out there and (less overtly) with an understanding of the limits of their own control. Compare to the number of mentions in this article of "a sense of helplessness" when some political faction comes to power that you expect to do something that is to your disadvantage -- as if, before that, you didn't emotionally grasp that you are largely helpless in the face of large political movements and the harm they might do to you.
In addition to the points made by MissingMinus and Worley in their responses to you, I think the way we have been raising people in this century is partly responsible.
It starts young with helicopter parenting - the implicit message of that parenting style is that it's dangerous to go alone for even an hour.
Then in school from an early age all the way thru university students are taught that the world is full of dangers: Racism and sexism are all around us (including "internalized" so nowhere is safe). The environment is poison and climate change is gonna bake and drown us like a casserole. Active shooter drills are a traumatizing preparation for something that is extremely unlikely to happen even in the USA. Meanwhile you will see kids physically bullied, or be victimized yourself, and the authorities will fail the victims - this despite all the surveillance cameras that have popped up in the school halls and on the doorbells of every suburb and apartment complex. As a teen you *might* get taught safe sex but you will *definitely* be taught that it can kill you, even while your libido tries to tempt you. You'll get your first job in food service or warehousing or retail, and you will get just enough safety training (that isn't followed) to be ominous, while HR will remind you to be hypervigilant about that racism and sexism stuff you learned in school (plus some that will be new to you).
At some point you will hear about things kids used to do, like trick-or-treating, and be told about how we are now enlightened and we don't do that because can you imagine? What if they poison your candy or hide razors in it? (Sure this has never happened but it's the principle of the thing right?) Besides, candy will kill you diabetically and rot your teeth, and maybe it'll make you fat but also maybe it's fatphobic to say that? (There are no right answers but be vigilant anyway!) And the danger strangers might abduct you. No, no Halloween - we'll just fill the world with spooks and fright year-round. You know, for the children.
I have a weird notion that there might be a physical cause. Maybe some piece of physics or biochemistry we haven't noticed yet. Really, why not?
Maybe emotional side effects of common prescription drugs making people worse-tempered and/or more anxious.
Boring normal explanations are that hostility builds hostility. As the brakes are taken off expressions of anger, they become more common on both sides.
Another one could be sleep deficiency-- a combination of longer work hours and the temptation to miss sleep because online is so entrancing.
Cremieux shows that most of the highly touted effects of lead exposure are actually just artifacts of selection, and that the actual effects are much smaller: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead.
That blog post would be more relevant to the conversation here if it dealt with the fact that the lead-crime data correlation persists so strongly across multiple large nations, including ones having no significant Black population.
The post was mostly about the lead-IQ link, so it didn't devote much space to lead-crime. The former would be a very good explanation of the latter, given the strong link between IQ and criminality (even within sibling pairs, which largely controls for confounders). Showing that the former is exaggerated at best, would lessen the reason to assume the latter, but wouldn't disprove it.
The fact that it shows that lead levels that used to be prevalent in the US ultimately had little role on IQ, as the subsequent radical reduction of levels had no measurable impact on IQ, doesn't preclude, I suppose, that much higher levels of lead that could be present in some other countries that do indeed substantially impact IQ.
Additionally, similar selection effects regarding who gets exposed to lead could be at play in other countries, as in the US. These effects aren't a priori linked to the US Black population, in particular. And the blogpost notes (in footnote 2) this study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2666777 from New Zealand, which found that "when socioeconomic confounding is removed from the picture, the effect of lead on criminal perpetration adds little to the effect of being male." (description in the blog post).
I also didn't see references in your wiki article to studies on multiple large nations showing that lead abatement efforts correlated with decrease in crime (which I'm guessing is the correlation you refer to), but as with the selection confounding the effects of blood lead levels on individuals' criminal propensity, it's not hard to imagine national lead abatement efforts correlating with other factors that would be linked to decreased criminal perpetration, even if the link isn't causal, such as increased state capacity, or development.
But again, I didn't actually see the studies that find such a link.
And within the US, here is a recent study which took advantage of some early-20C "natural experiment" type conditions to test the lead-crime hypothesis across different major metros:
During the period that US cities were putting in lead drinking-water pipes, a city was far from the nearest lead refinery would likely have pipes made from another material. Also, lead only seeps into water when the water is acidic. This sets up a nice natural experiment. Cities with lead pipes and acidic water are the treatment group (their populations were exposed to lead in the drinking water). Cities with lead pipes but non-acidic water, and cities with acidic water but non-lead pipes, are the control groups. The authors measure the effect of childhood lead exposure on homicide rates 20 years later. They find that exposing populations to lead in their drinking water causes much higher homicide rates 20 years later, relative to similar places where kids avoided such exposure.
One possible reason for 'why now?': Society has become increasingly wealthy allowing us to solve most of our immediate material problems, and now the remaining problems can take our focus.
I don't think I'm trauma addicted to politics. I read a lot of political news, but mostly when I'm bored or when it's on an interesting topic. For the most part I don't have strong emotions about it.
Occasionally I do go and read through the opinions of people who outrage me though, which might be extreme sexists, extreme feminists, anti-rationalists, or some other group I strongly disagree with. I might do this once every few months on average when a link to some outrageous subreddit is shared with me, or I'm feeling- so not something I'm compulsively check like an addiction. I do think I get some sort of chemical rush in my system although I don't know if it's endorphins, if nothing else it makes me feel pretty outraged and I'm sure there must be some sort of neurochemical associated with outrage.
I've had trouble with other addiction, specifically sugary food and video games that I very much could not stop any time I wanted to. I still can't completely. Politics does feel different.
You can't stop being ruled by politicians, and any choice you might have about the people ruling you just changes the person, not the ruling. "There are men, in all ages, who mean to exercise power usefully; but who mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters." -- Daniel Webster
I dunno, to me they feel similar. There's a sort of pull, an insatiable nibbling urge, to engage with the mind-blanking activity, to wipe out my current web of thought with a known, predictable, "comforting" web.
Don't have anything smart to add but wanna say that "Bitch Eating Crackers Syndrome" is the best description of anything I've heard in a while
Also think the whole brightline for "trauma" discussion at the start has a neat workaround even in the context of discussions of physical trauma - chronic traumatic encephalopathy is an example of what I'm talking about. The conventionally-understood brightline for "brain injury" is generally getting concussed or knocked out, but football players have brains like swiss cheese partly because it's exacerbated by smaller collisions *all the time*. In fighting, the showings that make you concerned for brain trauma aren't as much "guy gets smoked in 30 seconds", more stuff like Gaethje/Ferguson - where an insanely tough guy is taking a bunch of cumulative damage but none of it is "someone stop the damn fight", but after a point, every jab is getting to him badly til he's never the same again
I think you can understand some part of this through that lens. "Normally" politically-engaged people go into the machine, hang out there taking "traumas" that none of us would consider trauma in isolation, and eventually you hit the brightline with no obvious inciting incident. And then the mechanisms you described make it worse by making the feedback loop practically impossible to bail out of
And yet you have many many people who have spent a lot of time in the political trenches (knocking on doors and handing out leaflets etc.) without indicators of trauma.
I think that posting stuff on the internet may be uniquely bad for some personalities.
Rather like addiction in that sense, at least as we use the term. Some people apparently can have one drink and immediately become an alcoholic; others will drink heavily, but can actually stop dead and suffer no ill effects.
Yeah, some people seem to be able to compartmentalize a bit - at least when it comes to friend-of-a-friend microtraumas - where others are a lot more susceptible to it building up. I think there is something about the Internet that makes this specific thing worse - I'm just not sure whether it's that the nature of Internet encounters leads to more "trauma" inherently, or that the fact that the Internet rewards the most dramatic, "traumatized" reactions with the most exposure just makes it impossible to accurately measure.
Not a psychologist or anything to present conjectures on why some people seem more prone than others, but it also does kinda feel (anecdotally) like an inverted-U curve in terms of "exposure to the political machine" vs. "risk of trauma". Actual politicians, people in the system, seem a bit numbed by political realities to the point where they're able to keep an accurate finger on the pulse for the purposes of self-preservation - and obviously people with no political engagement aren't directly traumatized in this way. The kind of trauma that just makes you wronger and wronger kinda seems reserved for those with enough exposure to hear about what's happening, but not enough exposure to stop being surprised by it. But yeah, realistically it's probably as simple as "some people are this way, some people aren't, and it's just their personalities".
As someone who has spent a fair bit of time knocking on doors and handing out leaflets lately, the overwhelming experience from this is actually fine and positive (I live in New Zealand, I don't know to what extent this might differ in the US or other countries). It puts you in front of a lot of basically normal people you would otherwise not have met or not have talked about politics with and what you discover is that the vast, vast majority of them are reasonable and helpful. This experience made me update away from 'the world is getting more polarised' type arguments.
I have a theory that part of it is a matter of your ability to do (or feel like you are doing) something. Going door to door and canvassing feels productive and like you’re doing something. Screaming into the void online feels increasingly hopeless, especially as the algorithms and your own desires to fix the people who are wrong on the internet drive you deeper and deeper into the fray.
You cannot fix people who are wrong - this is true on the internet, or in real life. This is something that I've learned over the decades of my life.
At most you can present information, that people can take in - or not. Many people have not yet learned this; some never will.
Going door to door sorts for people who are willing to listen, at least in a neighborhood where you don't get chased down the street for your views. Posting something on the internet doesn't sort nearly as much.
great writeup! given the ceaseless 24/7 media complex, our shortened attention spans, and the sorta 'clickbait culture,' you know our collective neurochemistry HAS to be outta wack :/
So...what action would you take based on "politics is trauma" vs "news is dumb and makes you angy"?
I mean, I get it, I catch the vibe, news is bad, don't watch, I'm down but...is the trauma angle a rhetorical tool to help convince people or is there something specifically actionable about casting this as trauma?
For example, and I imagine it's the easiest point of concern, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you." By which I mean, even if you avoid news and political media, it will directly impact your personal life in ways that are unavoidable; the difference in Covid policy between California and Florida had dramatic and obvious differences that directly impacted people's lives even if they ignored the news.
So is there some guidance from psychology on how to manage this. Like, a rape victim might be irrationally afraid of rape and that's detrimental but it's not completely irrational, rape is totally a thing that happens, it's more of a large miscalibration of threat levels and likelihood. How do you maneuver that in a productive way?
Most news is not actually useful to you. You can avoid the daily noise and just read summaries later once there has been time to erase the erroneous "first drafts of history".
You could say the same thing about comments here -- don't read them, just wait for Scott to summarize and point out the interesting ones, and if he doesn't do that, there weren't any truly interesting comments.
The comments are for discussion, and so if you appreciate discussion then join in. Otherwise, skipping may in fact be a good idea!
There's some more selection for quality here compared to twitter, and so I'm more likely to get something out of discussing a topic in the comment sections here or on the subreddit. (Though I think there should be better moderation policies, LessWrong manages very well, though you'd want something weaker than that for r/slatestarcodex and here)
If you legitimately get something out of the news, like if you're reading tech news and you're a programmer, then that can be a reason to pay attention... but also most of the time you still don't need to. There's just a lot of it, which is why for example in ML I often read Zvi's posts because following & reading a bunch of people on twitter who post about every minor piece of AI news wouldn't be helpful.
>the difference in Covid policy between California and Florida had dramatic and obvious differences that directly impacted people's lives even if they ignored the news.
And didn't impact the bottom line death totals even more than a smidgen, as near as we can tell from the after-action reports. There's a learning there.
I'd say that given a particular situation, there's a difference between a healthy, rational, well-measured response, and a trauma-fueled response. So we should be engaging with news sources that promote the first response, and not with ones that promote the second response.
Alas, that's as far as my reasoning gets, because I don't know the mechanism. But I suspect that it's healthy to avoid the Facebook/Twitter style Algorithm that creates a Feed out of what it predicts will capture and bind your attention most tightly. There's probably a Bayesian formulation for this, actually. Something to do with it distorting our sense of base rates? (That also probably applies to traditional news, but less so.)
It's not precisely what you're looking for, but here's an example of someone making a first stab at using Bayesian statistics to make accurate assessments about areas of the world where there's social pressure to conceal information:
> is there something specifically actionable about casting this as trauma
When talking about Scott, specifically, casting it as trauma, I think the takeaway is:
These people aren't faking it. They really do experience it as trauma and have traumatic reactions, even if in some sense they're "doing it to themselves". And so any viable solution can't be based on the theory that "they're faking it" or that "it doesn't count because they're doing it to themselves". If we're ever going to get past this, we need to stop doing whatever's creating the trauma, and work on healing the people already affected (assuming we don't want them in charge for a few decades before they all die).
It's a call for more investigation along a particular line that he thinks is promising, but the first step is convincing other people that the line is promising.
Sorry if that comes off as too basic. I just felt like there was a question there that no one was really answering, although perhaps it was just too obvious.
You write, "I find this phenomenon fascinating, and analogizing it to trauma addiction is the only way I’ve been able to make sense of it."
Is there a sense in which this is just simulating understanding by taking a phenomenon we don't understand and lumping it with another phenomenon we don't understand, and calling them the same?
I found this post interesting, but I had that worry throughout, that it's collapsing two poorly-understood behaviors into one in the name of understanding. I find the move to describing everything in terms of trauma both confusing and concerning, and I also find the change in our political behavior confusing and concerning. Come to think of it, maybe this is a reason to believe you're right and they're really the same phenomenon.
Anyway, interesting and something to think over. Thank you.
A whole lot of psychology/psychiatry strikes me as coming up with names for phenomena we don't really understand. A field with more "experts" than experts.
I linked this in the Open Thread from before the most recent one, but long enough after that thread started I doubt many read it, so this is relevant to the state of the field:
I think it was Eliezer who observed that there's a temptation to think that, in naming a phenomenon, you've explained it. But you haven't: you've just named it.
The classic example is when a doctor says a patient's illness has an "idiopathic cause". Sounds very medical and technical - thanks for the diagnosis, doc! But all "idiopathic" means is "we don't know why the patient is sick".
Conversely, there's the temptation to think that, if you haven't solved a problem (or explained a phenomenon), then you haven't made any progress.
But, in fact, identifying a bunch of separate examples as possible instances of the same concept is the first step in understanding that common concept.
(Obviously, "idiopathic cause" is a completely separate situation, and the term exists entirely to protect doctors from the possibility that their patients would realize that they don't know anything.)
>I think it was Eliezer who observed that there's a temptation to think that, in naming a phenomenon, you've explained it. But you haven't: you've just named it.
True, _purely_ naming it isn't progress. Distinguishing it from other phenomena _can_ sometimes be progress. If one successfully cuts nature at the joints, that can be useful.
Like everything, there are names that are useful, and useless (or even less than useless, actively misleading, grouping things that should not be grouped or separating things that should be similar). The hypothesis is that these "experts" have made much more useless names than useful ones.
There is power in naming things. My wife had a TGA. They don't know what causes it, don't know how to prevent it, don't know how to fix it (it goes away in 24 hours, but you never get the memories back while you had it), but hey, it has a name, and it gets diagnosed simply because it ain't anything else they can test for and this is a run-on sentence and I tricked you into reading the entire thing.
The name defines a cluster of observations - even though it’s poorly understood at eg a physiological level, it’s important to diagnose that it’s not a stroke and you can expect to fully recover and not have it come back. Building understanding on that comes later - neuro researchers are working on the hypothesis that it has something to do with blood flow abnormalities within the hippocampus
Excellent observations. I think what has made me stop imbibing has been the queasy similarity of feeling after I’ve doomscrolled a few hours of cable news - very reminiscent of other addictions I’ve experienced. It made me instinctively step away after awhile, beginning in 2022 and even moreso last year. I don’t watch any domestic news anymore. I focus my efforts on being close with my neighbors while avoiding discussing politics at all costs.
I work hard to getting the government to do less, so I don't have to care about the latest infringements on my rights. I live in NY, so this is a constant task.
I think the things you're naming "politics" and "trauma" would, for a large majority of human history, have been called "life."
I don't mean that sarcastically or dismissively. I mean it literally.
In Paleolithic societies (i.e., the large majority of human history), when people lived in small clans and tribes, it was a baseline, normal, and accurate expectation that people outside of your clan or tribe would, often enough, try to kill you. Experiencing a trauma reaction to many interactions with outsiders would be common. "Conspiratorial" reasoning that maybe they will try to kill you would also be common (because it was often correct).
I think the resulting emotional and cognitive patterns, however unpleasant we might find them, are a human norm. It precisely the strong default expectation of peaceable interaction that is WEIRD, in Henrich's sense.
Right, but it's not really PTSD in the clinical sense that Scott is discussing –– unless you think people literally got PTSD from merely hearing that Trump was elected, in which case *shrug emoticon*?
Perhaps PTSD initially emerged from some kind of explosions-inflicted TBI or the continuous anxiety-ridden environment ("hurry up and wait") that emerged only with modern warfare beginning ~WW1.
However, its symptoms are now noted to occur in cases of (e.g.) individuals who were the victims of physical abuse as a child, which was also overwhelmingly common in the ancient world yet you do not see much in the way of Romans commenting on having flashbacks to their father beating them.
I don't think cPTSD (the kind you get from prolonged childhood abuse--PTSD is generally caused by a singular event) is thought to cause flashbacks. Symptoms attributed to cPTSD are less specific than PTSD symptoms so I'm not surprised we don't have accounts connecting childhood abuse to PTSD. Not to say there's nothing to the other possible explanations.
"hurry up and wait", and everything that comes with it and all the little accompanying details and annoyances, is definitely at least as old as the romans
i think i remember literally translating the phrase out of latin at some point and having a chuckle, although i can't remember what primary source it might have been
i think the main thing that made WW1 different was the fact that there was *visibly and obviously* almost no connection between your own actions and your chances of survival; trenches + constant unending staccato artillery barrages doesn't just make death random, it makes it arbitrary
i think that's a different kind of anxiety from the roman legionnaire who believes that his skill with the gladius can give him a better chance at survival (even if it can't)
What do you mean, back then? They're still adaptive reactions now. If something hurts you today, it's probably going to hurt you again. And again. And again. Fear is necessary for survival. Cowards are the ones that end up surviving in the end.
As I said in response to Stephen, fear is one thing and trauma another. If you're walking across the street and you notice a car is speeding at you, it's rational to be afraid and get out of the way as fast as you can. But then afterward you can proceed as normal, just reminding yourself to look both ways next time. It's not adaptive to then get fixated on cars endangering pedestrians.
Perhaps trauma is just fear turned up to eleven? It's easy to imagine a sufficiently strong fear response being so intense that your brain starts to fear cars every time you approach a street. Given that trapped priors also update on just the feeling of fear, it's not hard to see how a single really bad incident with a car could self-reinforce.
It may not be adaptive, there may only be so much capacity for handling stress.
We have skeletons. We need them to be of a certain rather effective size as land animals. Bones are adaptive. Broken bones aren't adaptive, though having some ability to heal broken bones is adaptive.
Evolution can only do what's possible, though it may have some ability to expand what's possible.
The analogy between physical & mental is another thing I'm skeptical of. We made great progress on physical illness once we discovered the germ theory of disease and were able to use better sanitation, vaccines & antibiotics. "Mental health" seems to be closer to the pre-scientific era of physical medicine where people sought treatment even though it doesn't seem to have done them much good.
I'll posit that "trauma" is what we call it when you don't feel able to go out and kill as many of your enemies as you can, until either you're dead or they're all dead. One way or another, that would take care of the problem.
Yep. The movie "Taken" is a fairly pure distillation of that attitude. Sarcastically, I'd love to see a version where Liam Neeson didn't have that "very particular set of skills", and instead we get to see 2 hours of him and his ex-wife "processing trauma" with a therapist, perhaps interspersed with brief scenes from his daughter's new life.
The human brain is far from a perfect Bayesian reasoner. Adaptive only means that it's better than the next viable alternative, and I don't find it too hard to believe that the trapped-prior, hyper-vigilant operating mode leads to better survival than does the mode we would recognise as a standard operating mode today, in a high-threat environment.
I've heard a lot about early males being likely to have been killed by other males, but nothing, literally nothing, about the risks from members of other tribes compared to risks from within the tribe. I don't even know whether there's a way to tell which risk was higher.
This is a cute story, but elides just how complex pre-history could be.
Some peoples appeared to live in small clans and tribes, some in large tribal confederations. Some migrated constantly, some settled near reliable sources of food. Some maintained linkages with neighboring people by marriages, some had giant yearly festivals and some raided their neighbours for wives. Some avoided conflict fairly successfully, some fought in ritualised combat and some killed genocidally.
Many switched between these modes as needed, probably more quickly than modern societies can because things can be completely forgotten in two generations or so.
Different levels of trust and paranoia would be more or less appropriate depending on the era, environment and who your neigbours were.
I'm making no claim whatsoever about the homogeneity or simplicity of early societies. I fully recognize how varied they could be.
My claim is simply that levels of physical violence far in excess of those usually encountered by most living in contemporary Western countries were common.
Fair enough, although I think the pendulum has now swung a bit too far from the 'edenic pacifist' trope to the 'everyone got murdered all the time' end of things. My guess is that the average inter-group warfare rate was much higher than we would be comfortable with, because an average rate of warfare for modern societies (around 20 currently ongoing conflicts, 195 countries) ends up looking like a fairly spectacular 'murder' rate when you have more like 50-100 000 little societies all warring with each other at the same frequency.
That said, my point was that, given the diversity of the past, we should instead think about a lot of these cognitive biases as tools in a tool-box. In times and places where inter-group warfare was common, then being paranoid and ready to hate outsiders became common. In times and places where it was rare, then people were more trusting of strangers (or perhaps more trusting of strangers like them, less trusting of obviously foreign people, or perhaps the opposite, or...).
You can even see it in the subject of this article - it's not politics that drives people crazy, it's specifically US politics. In my society, we have other things to be paranoid and tribalist about. Politics isn't one of them.
This is the thrust of my thought as well. Instead of making connections with contemporary mental illness diagnoses (in people who are otherwise well adjusted), we should be asking why these modules and effects are a ready part of an ordinary, healthy person's mental apparatus. I don't think you can do that without consideration of the kind of small-scale factional politics that would have likely been going on in the EEA. (I think a constant violent threat from outside your group explains things like demonization of the out-group better than it does paranoia or conspiratorial reasoning, which I'd guess are triggered by within-group threats to the power of yourself, your faction, or your chosen leader.) As epistemically problematic as it can be, normal human political behavior is normal. I do think it's worth asking how the contemporary environment is interacting with our natural tendencies to create new and special forms of wrongness and mental maladjustment, though.
Even assuming that to be true, there's still the question of why this *wasn't* much of an issue in developed nations during the mid-to-late 20th century, but suddenly became an issue again in the 21st.
I would hypothesize that the expression of these psychological phenomena closely tracks the ethnic heterogeneity of these nations as increased via immigration. The timing fits.
It does, indeed. But it also tracks the Strauss-Howe generational timetable, which tries to explain why sometimes we have strong consensus optimism as in the Era of Good Feelings or mid-20th Century and sometimes everything seems existentially fraught as in the Civil War and WWII.
Yup, given the scale of government massacres during the 20th century (early as well as mid-to-late, remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide), that would seem to be the period when it would have been the _most_ rational to look at politics through the lens of "Are my rulers about to kill me?". Having political trauma rare then, but common in the 21st is puzzling timing.
I think analogizing this to trauma is a very apt and good idea. Just reading the post makes me feel relieved. The whole political miasma is a discrete phenomenon that everyone can agree is not healthy. Seems promising
I initially liked to describe Trump as the male Rosie O'Donnell, with apologies to her. But catharsis was looming. Suddenly as he became relevant all these people and organizations I felt traumatized by were very very unhappy. I loved it. I still love it
If we hold hands in hostile co-trapped priors there will be more and more trauma like experiences. This is a very memeable concept that could be popular for getting off the outrage treadmill
Agreed. Scott's been working up to this for awhile (his previous post on trapped priors definitely pointed the way to this), but this is the article that feels like it _explains_ the political divide.
Even giving that there exists a clearly defined group of deliberately bad actors, the chances that any given person has both correctly identified who they are and thought of a solution that actually makes things better is very low (definitionally so, as the space of people who have conflicting views is very large). And further, I think that entropic thinking applies in that it is often easier to make complex systems worse than better. Combining these two arguments, I think that unless you have very good reason to think you are right on some issue (something that would pass strict external muster, like "I am a leading nuclear physicist who disagrees with govt safety regulations), you should opt to do nothing. Then again, in practice anyone who actually follows this reasoning probably has better general epistemics than the wider population and therefore causes an adverse effect on average discussion by self-selecting out.
Everyone reading this in the US is orders of magnitude more likely to be canceled by the left-wing/"woke"/"SJWs" than by so-called "fascists." If you're actually concerned about threats to people's livelihoods, that's what you'd combat.
i did a double-take like four times while reading this, and now i am deep in googling a bunch of stuff i never would have dreamed could possibly exist
it sounds like something a paranoid conservative in the 90s would predict as the inevitable outcome of the 'gay agenda' or whatever, only to be ridiculed as a crazy nutjob. "don't you see that if we let gays get married, eventually they'll be using state resources to indoctrinate our children into their political agenda!" is literally like... the go-to example of a crazy and nonsensical worst case scenario that conservatives dreamt up to argue against gay marriage
i feel like if i were to actually examine the object-level issue, i'd probably come down in favor of drag story hour at the local public library. showing kids that people are just people, giving them tangible examples of noncishet individuals so they can get over any discomfort they might feel at the whole idea, or just prevent them from ever feeling that discomfort in the first place by making it clear that drag is normal. also, the trump card argument is that you don't have to bring your kids to drag story time if you don't want to, and the bigots have no right to stop other parents from raising their children however they want
but i can't get over the fact that, well, it feels like i have now lived through two separate cycles of this thing where
1) progressives propose a societal change to help a marginalized group
2) conservatives protest and claim there's a slippery slope which will eventually lead to much more extreme societal change xyz
3) progressives relentlessly mock those on the right for being so ludicrously paranoid, as it is obvious to all that xyz would be horrible and so nobody would ever seriously propose it
4) time passes
5) xyz is seriously proposed by progressives
6) conservatives fight back
7) progressives treat conservatives being opposed to xyz as indicative of serious evil because xyz is obviously morally correct
and this cycle is BAD and SCARY even if in this case i happen to agree with xyz. twenty years ago, if you'd told me that, as a consequence of the pro-gay-rights movmeent, in 2023 there would be individuals dressed in drag reading stories to children in public libraries, and that this was a well-known phenomenon with a googleable label "drag story hour", and that it was part of a deliberate attempt to normalize noncishet gender identities in the eyes of those very children... i mean. i would have laughed in your face and assumed you were a crazy conservative troll. maybe even a leftist doing a false-flag as a paranoid conservative, because nobody could possibly actually be this crazy
i can't quite remember why i would have thought the idea of drag story time for children was so bad... right now it just seems like, yeah, if we want the next generation to stop feeling discomfort with anything outside of the cishet normative range, this is how we do it, and that's a desirable outcome. but i feel very confident that 20 years ago, i would have been shocked and horrified at this outcome
this makes me very worried that at least some of the crazy-sounding worst-case-scenario nonsense slippery slope arguments that conservatives are currently employing might very well be true, and that some of our relentless mocking of their paranoia is probably not going to age well
but it's even scarier to think that something i'd be shocked and horrified over, some outcome that sounds like rush limbaugh nightmare, will seem perfectly normal and sane to 2043!John
and all i can do is hope that progressivism really is trending towards a better world, rather than, say, a random walk through politics-space
I personally do not think cancel culture is the dominant threat to the median individual's livelihood. I believe fascist attitudes exist in political movements coded far-left and far-right, but my assessment is that those elements have penetrated the mainstream right wing as well. Notice I did not say right wing or left wing in my original comment yet you assumed I meant right wing. Unfortunately I think its likely we have irreconcilable views on this issue. Thanks for your reply.
You're being disingenuous: it's obvious what you meant, and pretending otherwise insults us both. But you're right, "politics is distinguishing friend and enemy," and discussion serves no end.
The particular word “fascist” is overwhelmingly more likely to be used by people on the left trying to whip up hatred against people on the right than vice-versa. You are correct that there are people with worrying authoritarian tendencies on both sides of the aisle, but the f-word is still a bad choice, especially if used without any hedging clarification.
I think there was a decent argument that the term "fascist", as used today, is basically a creation of the mid-20th-century communist movement, lumping together all the political movements that used violence to suppress communism.
While it's true that most non-communists (and a chunk of fellow communists) have at one point or another in the 20th century been called fascists by communists, I don't think e.g. the Weimar SPD or Kerensky's liberals would fit the definition as used today.
Anyway, fascism is more centrally anti-egalitarian and nationalist/racial-identitarian than authoritarian. This fits the right while failing to fit the left, which tends to be egalitarian and internationalist even when it advocates authoritarian or violent means to enforce egalitarian policies.
I got into ancient history before I got into modern politics, so my personal definition of "fascism" derives from the sticks bound together into a bundle. "Stronger Together", as Supergirl and Hillary Clinton put it. Unite behind one leader, one party, one nation, one ideal. People who can't or won't unite will be discarded as useless. Stick out, and you'll be chopped down to size. Become a mechanized, standardized part in the giant machine of the state.
I admit, it's quite idiosyncratic, but even without the name, as an internal category it does seem helpful in making sense of the world.
Something I left out is hierarchy. Fascism seems very big on hierarchies for some reason. Not just on a personal level, but also by classifying people into groups and then ordering those groups somehow. Maybe the personal level stuff is just a side-effect of trying to do top-down coordination of a lot of people, but the group stuff makes me think that fascists really like hierarchies for some reason.
Twitter user Covfefe Anon (who used to be a regular commenter on SSC under a different username) has a maxim to that same effect, that “anything that opposes communist” is the only definition of “fascism” that was ever real.
I don't recall running across that name, and I don't use Twitter much, but perhaps I picked it up from SSC comments. Although that maxim sounds just different enough that I suspect we either got it from the same place, or I got it from someone who expanded it from their maxim. There was definitely a bit more history involved.
You're right that authoritarian impulse is what I should have said, however I maintain that legit fascism (not just anti-communism) as you've hinted at below is swelling under the surface, and at times bursts out into the open, of right-wing US politics. My belief that similar attitudes are shared by movements coded as far-left is mostly informed by observations of the Twitter activity of the so-called "Tankie-left." Either way, you're probably right I could've been more precise. Thanks for yout comment.
What decade did you time travel in from? Here in the US politics is dominated by elderly dotards with no military/combat experience who ramble a lot but have no big ideas for actually changing anything.
I saw an analysis recently that made me ever-so-slightly more happy about the gerontocracy. I forget where it was, but I'll try to sum it up.
Pelosi hung on because Ocasio-Cortez primaried her chosen successor, McConnell hangs on because there is no good successor, Biden was picked because everyone else was too extreme and would lose to Trump, and Trump is just ... Trump. Other than that, most politicians are in the normal age range. The problem in these cases seems to be a lack of a good successor, as we're seeing on the House Republican side right now.
More generally, and depressingly, they hypothesized that the new generation was raised on hyper-partisanship and actually bought into it, whereas the old generation knew it was a rhetorical maneuver and just another way of playing politics. So in that sense, "Après moi, le déluge." Let's enjoy the relatively sane leadership while we can. Soon, all politics will look like the House Republicans.
The median age of voting House lawmakers is 57.9 years, down from 58.9 in the 117th Congress (2021-22), 58.0 in the 116th (2019-20) and 58.4 in the 115th (2017-18). The new Senate's median age, on the other hand, is 65.3 years, up from 64.8 in the 117th Congress, 63.6 in the 116th... what do you mean by normal age range? Median age in the US is 38.8...
Normal age range for politicians, that is. Which, especially on the national level, is older than that of the population in general, and older the "higher" the position, and older the healthier and more long-lived Americans become. To be clear, I don't know if this is accurate. But I'd want to look at trends going back to at least WWII if not WWI.
In a literal sense, sure. But in common usage it refers to a situation beyond the norm. Just like how, if we set salaries for elected government officials higher than the median, that doesn't automatically make us a plutocracy all by itself.
On Jan 6, 2021 armed groups attacked the US Capitol in order to prevent the peaceful transition of power. They constructed gallows and shouted "Hang Mike Pence." A sitting Republican Representative texted the President's Chief of Staff suggesting the President declare Martial law and use the military for similar ends.
Deploying the military to clear the riot would have been fine. Riots rely on large numbers of people overwhelming the small number of police in an area. The military is available to tip the scales back when that happens.
So what? If the people want fascism, that's what the people get. That's how democracy works. What the hell are you going to do about it? If you die, you die. No big deal.
Democracy has never been like that, not since 1776 at least (not sure about ancient Greece). There have always been limits on the majority's ability to do arbitrary/criminal things.
Emphasis on "try." Even an authoritarian regime has a hard time getting things done if everyone hates them. How long can a "democracy" realistically hold out against the will of the people?
Well yes, sure, if everybody wants the old Kaiser Wilhelm back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWIH9ix8zgM then the question is moot. But if 70% want absolute monarchy and 30% democracy, the 30% have the right to resistance https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Right_to_resistance (article 20 of the constitution), and then it gets interesting. Note that even in the rigged 1933 elections, the nazis didn't get a majority.
It really only works from a perspective of affluence and assured dignity in which nebulous 'cancellation' is the worst threat imaginable (as opposed to, say, whether the dole will be cut and not enough to live on, or whether the death penalty is on the books, or whether abortion will be criminalised, or whether a fed contractor will or will not be allowed to fire for identity). Sometimes a trauma-like response to the prospect of specific legislation is – well, rational is the wrong word, but certainly sane, because that specific legislation will physically hurt.
I do agree that it isn't healthy to obsess over these things if you can't do anything about them, beyond the votes, the donation to the relevant party/activist group, the odd march. But sequestration from the doomscroll comes at a cost in awareness and willingness to do something more when the right Schelling point comes along.
<i>It really only works from a perspective of affluence and assured dignity in which nebulous 'cancellation' is the worst threat imaginable (as opposed to, say, whether the dole will be cut and not enough to live on, or whether the death penalty is on the books, or whether abortion will be criminalised, or whether a fed contractor will or will not be allowed to fire for identity).</i>
Cancellation normally involves getting somebody fired (or at least trying to), which is if anything even more of a threat to non-affluent, non-assuredly dignified people.
I can't remember ever hearing of someone getting fired from a working-class job on account of having been called out on social media. I doubt it happens very often.
If they broadcast their intention to start a union, or something, I could see it.
Often enough. It may sound astonishing, but sometimes I even set aside the pipe and port, put on my pith helmet, venture forth into the untamed wasteland, and talk to one or two.
I get what you mean, though, and you're right when you specify 'individuals'. In the media, apart from the fluffy faux-compassionate intro blurb ("Janine is not alone. Every year, across the country, over twenty-seven thousand...") they tend to be treated as a blob - striking, marching in yellow vests, rejecting immigration and defecting to the GOP/RN/AfD, pissing into bottles in the warehouses, enduring class contempt behind retail counters. Which is one of the factors that shield them from reputational damage. Even acknowledging kwh's example above, there's no way that a social media call for dismissal is in the top five threats to an ordinary worker's well-being and livelihood.
One of the striking things about politics is that usually the bad actors are convinced they are the good guys, and millions of supporters agree that they are the good guys. A lot of harm has been done in the world by people who meant well. I think this comes down to the fact that political ideas are usually not testable until their adherents get into power, so you can have a compelling story that your ideas will make a heaven on Earth, even if your actual regime will make piles of skulls and wreck the country.
And what would the alternative be? Do you think these "bad actors" are just doing everything for the evulz? Obviously everyone thinks they're in the moral right, even the ones who are completely selfish. Ayn Rand is a good example.
Great post. It's helped me look more clearly at a topic that's been puzzling me, and which is political, albeit not in a classic partisan way.
This is a bit niche, but here we go.
I follow some forums that focus on me/cfs, a chronic disease. The disease has a big problem, which is that people use the lack of clear somatic etiology to argue it is psychosomatic. That has led to a cycle of underfunding which has left the etiology unclear.
A subset of sufferers set up a forum called s4me, which is supposed to be the pre-eminent place for people to discuss Science, for the illness. However by far the most popular kind of post there is one where some dodgy researcher has a hypothesis paper arguing ME is psychosomatic. Such posts quickly garner 100,000 views and 90+ pages of comments, while a good proper expensive study from an Ivy League uni on cytokine patterns in the illness will be lucky to collect 2 pages of comments.
I've long been confused by why the people who perceive themselves as the biggest fans of serious science give most of their attention to the worst science. Your post has helped me understand that these people are traumatised - by not being believed. For these people, this is a political issue and the psychosomatic researchers are *the other side*. Looking at it like this makes me more forgiving of their apparent inability to actually focus much on the science that is trying to help them.
"I've long been confused by why the people who perceive themselves as the biggest fans of serious science give most of their attention to the worst science."
You're got a point, but I think there's also a matter of looking for low-effort opportunities to feel superior. It's easy to see that bad science is bad, and work to evaluate good science to see how plausible or important it might be.
I take quite a different lesson from "ancient warriors didn't get PTSD." As Greg Cochran says, the obvious explanation is that the proliferation of weapons that cause concussive blasts made soldiers into boxers -- their brains got all screwed up, and more screwed up the more combat they saw. Physical damage, not psychic damage.
Tying into that, I find the medicalization of what I'd call quite reasonable responses to American political trends annoying. This cycle of polarization has happened before and it ended in lots of deaths, and the domination of one faction by the other on a very deep level - the total annihilation of one side's core value system and way of life - forevermore. Stakes are high. You probably should be pretty worried about it. If a bunch of people are feeling a certain way about something, and they aren't a cohort whose brains have been constantly pulverized by pressure waves, the first thought should be -- there might be something to it!
"Everyone agrees we’re “addicted to outrage”. I find this phenomenon fascinating, and analogizing it to trauma addiction is the only way I’ve been able to make sense of it."
If you saw a bunch of ants or baboons line up to slaughter each other would you say they got infected by a rage virus, or they are addicted to outrage, or any other thing you could grab out of that hat, or would you just say -- yeah, looks right, it's happened before about a billion times and it makes perfect sense?
Sorry if I come off harsh here. After October 7th I went on a history binge and the overwhelming theme I noticed is that basically the same thing has been happening in the levant over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over since at least the 1920s, yet the overwhelming effort by is always to "move past it" - it's like a horror movie where people keep splitting off even after the first three people to do so were found disassembled. Conflict mindset -- tribe-centric mindset -- is not some sort of delusion or disease. Lately I feel that accusation lands far closer to home on the liberal peacenik camp. Maybe those delusions are in need of the medicalizing frame.
I used to have an mp3 of a version of that, which I can't find on the Internet anymore. I think it was of a live performance by June Tabor. It was wonderful and sad.
Maybe it wasn't your intent, but the implicit message that comes across here is "tribal violence is simply a part of human existence and nothing can be done to prevent it or even understand it." But that seems like an overly bleak view to take.
I think we can understand it. Part of that understanding is that you can't totally prevent it, but you can make it unlikely through deterrence. Heedlessly trampling through your own side's lines to deliver a utopian plea for peace can actually provoke an attack. Also, trying to make sure you win any likely conflict should get at least as much priority as avoiding conflict. It's very hard to effectively deter the potential foe any other way. And, frankly, better that the other tribe suffers than your own.
do you mean in the sense of eliminating all intelligence, or in the sense of replacement with AI?
If replaced with (non-monolithic) AI, it isn't clear if tribal violence would diminish. Some of that is from our specific evolutionary history and our physiology. But part of it may be game theoretic, inherent in alliances and factions and prisoners' dilemmas. That might well remain, even if LLMs inherit the world.
That view as stated would be a contradiction in terms; if tribal violence is indeed a part of human existence and impossible to prevent, then the fact we can know that implies we can at least somewhat understand it.
I kinda believe it, though. Assuming that we need to get rid of the mass polarization in America, the non-murder method looks like "get deeply traumatized bitter enemies who number in the hundreds of millions apiece to get together and work it out". I really don't think this is possible.
I wonder if the reality is just that almost everyone had PTSD because the world was really terrible. Or maybe PTSD is what our evolved trauma response looks like in a WEIRD low-threat environment, like the way widespread food allergies are what our evolved anti-parasite defenses look like in a WEIRD low-threat environment.
We have lots of documents from the past, including documents written by, about, and for highly militarised societies (or sections of societies), and none of them suggest that what we'd consider PTSD symptoms were widespread.
Comparison is not necessarily exact, considering the qualitative differences between ancient traumatic events that got written about and the WEIRD traumatic events.
Yeah, my comment was meant to be in reference to the first possibility ("that almost everyone had PTSD because the world was really terrible").
One interesting piece of research would be to compare recorded rates of PTSD in the First World War, and see if the WEIRD-er sections of society had higher rates than the less WEIRD.
Yeah. There would not have been anything like spending weeks hiding in a hole while artillery shells fell around you in the ancient world, but there would have been plenty of seeing peoples' throats cut at close range, getting knocked ass-over-teakettle as a horse slammed into you, sitting in a walled city as the food ran out and the army outside kept tossing stones over your walls and you waited for the impending sack. You'd think those things would have been about as PTSD-causing as modern warfare, but who knows? I think a common cause of trauma in soldiers is having killed kids in wartime, but I don't think that was at all uncommon in ancient warfare.
Also, just normal daily life--half your kids die before they turn five, a lot of very dangerous daily work by modern standards (low-tech farming with animals, sailing, logging, etc.), lots of crime because there's nothing like an organized police force to stop it, women pretty regularly dying in childbirth--seems pretty damned traumatic. I knew a couple who had a child born with major health problems, who died before her first birthday. It sure looked to me like this massively screwed both of them up as well as ultimately destroying their marriage. But that's basically just a normal part of having a family anytime before modern sanitation and medicine came along--you have six kids and sit with three of them as they crap themselves to death or lie there listlessly with a 104 fever cooking their brain or whatever.
> Stakes are high. You probably should be pretty worried about it.
I agree that you should be worried about politics and how cycles like this often lead to genocide. But there's one thing that I think a lot of people miss (maybe Scott could write a post about it?)
The standard human fear response is really badly suited to this task. Fight-or-flight exists for the ancestral environment, when you had to flee or fight angry animals or murderous tribes. In the modern world of complex people with bad values we don't want to kill, the standard fear response is a very poor match to this problem.
If learning about what your political enemies are doing makes you feel physically bad, afraid, makes your heart beat fast or gives you other somatic symptoms, your body is using the standard fear response.
Some things definitely work to fight your political enemies! Voting, canvassing, writing policy, calling your legislators, running for office, keeping an eye on fringe groups, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting.
But some things feel like they should work when they really, really don't. Doomscrolling/doomwatching, insulting the other side directly or indirectly, heck, I might even throw protesting into the mix. It's relieving, certainly, and I don't begrudge anyone emotional relief, but it alone isn't enough to fix the problem - and oftentimes exacerbates it.
So, by all means, pay attention to politics. Fight what you fear. Just be aware that fear tells you both what to be afraid of and also how to fight it, and that second part hasn't been updated in many millennia.
>In the modern world of complex people with bad values we don't want to kill, the standard fear response is a very poor match to this problem.
True!
<gallows irony>
Even when there are people we _do_ want to kill, the standard fear response is a bad match. Modern warfare involves a great deal of precision. Trembling hands do not craft symmetrically imploding plutonium spheres.
Sadly accurate. I don't follow true crime that much, but I would guess that history's most effective serial killers probably had a blunted fear response.
The bit where PTSD is supposedly just TBI is presently trendy, and it was trendy a bit over a hundred years ago for similar reasons - it makes it easier to get the afflicted proper treatment, as opposed to stigmatization for cowardice and/or mental illness. But it didn't hold up to close examination then, and it doesn't now. There are too many soldiers exposed almost exclusively to e.g. small-arms fire, who develop PTSD. A quick google suggests that 15-20% of US police officers suffer from PTSD, and no matter what the action movies tell you, nobody is shooting artillery at the police here.
Additionally, in a technologically advanced democracy (in which votes bring power, and attention brings votes) we have to reckon with supernormal stimulus. A fake parasitic stimulus can afford the resources to be much more triggering than the genuine article. Like how the moth prefers the orchid that camouflages itself as a moth to actual moths. An invented threat can super stimulate fear, not having to worry about pesky facts. An invented persecution can super stimulate anger, not having to spend any resources on actually existing.
And, in a democracy, you have a civic duty to expose yourself to all these stimuli.
What would actually happen is that all the stupid ants that expose themselves to cordyceps would die. New ants would be "protected" from the fungus by avoiding it.
Not really. I'm talking about something close to immune response of a human where an example of a pathogen can inoculate the body from further infection.
Not that I claim that real life ants work this way. But the point was not about ants in the first place.
My bad, that last "No, you don't," was my denying the existence of any putative civic duty to expose yourself to unpleasant stimuli. I retract any claims I may have implied about the "duties" of eusocial insects.
Eh, it doesn't **need** to be invented. Social media is a way of crowd-sourcing content, and the algorithms filter up whatever the most "interesting" thing is, where by "interesting" they mean "keeps people glued to the screen and interacting more", like some behaviorist motivating rats. Whatever the most outrage-provoking thing that happens is, it's going to be filtered in, not out, and spread to the maximum audience possible.
Of course, there will also be fake stuff, and embellishments, and all that. And you're right that it will spread more. Jussie Smollett comes to mind. But I think all the fakery is organic, and that even without the fakery there'd be plenty to cause outrage.
I'm saying that being fake makes it a more effective provocation to outrage than it would be if it was real. So the algorithmic filter you're talking about (in a certain way) can actually select for fakeness.
It took me a bit to understand your true meaning. Camouflage is the wrong word. You mean something more like "orchid that masquerades as a moth" or "orchid that mimics a moth" etc.
You're right. I was trying to give the sense of a biological principle, and mimicry is a specific form of camouflage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camouflage has a sub-heading for mimesis. The orchid and the evening news aren't *trying* to trick the moth and the citizen; they're enacting a mimetic camouflage strategy in response to pressure.
I took a class with Sheila Jeffreys - the radical feminist - at university. It was a pretty good basic intro to feminism and quite eye-opening. Later she got cancelled though for not being pro-trans. I think her perspective on society would be even more valuable now but of course we don't get to hear it.
While I think it's always worthwhile to hear from your enemies, I always wonder about guys who get really into radical feminism. It's like these Jews who get too close to the alt-right--even if they're right about stuff (and they often are), they still hate you and want to destroy you, *no matter what you do*. The taint is in the blood, and you can't remove it without suicide.
If it comes down to trans people versus radfems, I'm siding with the trans people--at least they don't *all* hate me.
Was there actually much of a scientific basis for the concept of PTSD? My understanding is that there was a political push for it in the wake of Vietnam. And a priori we should expect typical humans of the EEA were more like those ancient warriors https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/ptsd/
> For example, it has been found that women who were sexually abused as children are more likely to be sexually or physically abused in their marriages.
I'm guessing those studies make something like "the nurture assumption" and don't attempt to control for genetic confounds.
As I understand it, PTSD first showed up as "Shell Shock" in WWI.
We're adapted for pre-modern warfare, which tended to be short, purposeful, cathartic, and firewalled by ritual, context and ingroup/outgroup distinctions.
In contrast, modern warfare has an "always on" aspect. Objectives are often intangible. You can't see the person trying to kill you. We're mostly missing the public going to war/coming back from war rituals (thought he modern military does its best to recreate them). The context of combat is often civilian, and the apparent civilians may suddenly try to kill you. We (thankfully) no longer have the cultural apparatus to consistently regard the enemy as not counting as people.
The actual shells in shellshock were indeed relatively new and not part of the EEA.
I think pre-modern war was more "always on" than you may believe. It's harder to be decisive when you have very primitive tribes with equal technology up against each other. That's part of why places like Papua New Guinea have so many languages: nobody was successful enough to make theirs dominant over a wide area.
Likewise in patches of historical Europe where raiding and feuding were almost a hobby. However, I think that's different from the sensory overload of spending weeks on end in a combat zone, with indirect fire a constant threat and - again - being attacked by people you can't strike back at - that was one of the things WWI soldiers complained about.
I suspect that pre-modern combatants were traumatised at a lower rate, but that the effects are obfuscated to us by the religious framing which helped manage it. Maybe that's why Greeks liked their mystery cults, and Medievals endowed chantries and went on pilgrimage.
The craze of politics seems similar to the craze of religion vis-à-vis mental illness diagnosis. The DSM / diagnostic criteria (or at least an older version of them) carved out an exemption from delusions, for common ones, such as those which are parts of religions:
>The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith) (APA 2000: 821).
It's not really an exemption in the sense of getting a pass from judgment it would otherwise incur. Having the same beliefs as people of your cultural milieu is reflective of a healthy brain, even if those beliefs are weird. "Everyone around me thinks this" is the ordinary way to arrive at a weird belief and isn't indicative of psychopathology, just garden-variety human irrationality. If you have arrived at a strange belief, and it isn't shared by people in your culture, and you hold it with unshakable fixity, the problem isn't just the fact that you have a weird belief. That you wandered into one of those all on your own and got stuck there is a sign of larger, usually pathological issues afoot.
I agree. I should have used different words (I copied the citation from https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/pdfs/szasz.pdf, so the author's bias made it into the wording). That's all consistent with my point. Scott starts the post by showing the ways in which politics makes people crazy (people lose basic reasoning abilities, paranoia and conspiracy theories, etc.) which he uses to set the stage for his diagnosis of the politics-addled. But I was noting that when such thinking is shared by other members of the person's cultural milieu, it isn't considered a mental illness - and rightly so - as you point out.
Thinking your mailman is out to get you is probably a sign of more fundamental underlying problems, while thinking Satan is out to get you, which is seemingly more objectively delusional, as the entity doesn't actually exist, may simply be a reflection of regnant beliefs in certain communities.
Political delusions seem similar in that they reflect popular beliefs, rather than individually spawned delusions, so pathologizing them seems questionable.
Trump Jr, among others, started talking about “triggering the libs” long before libs started accusing conservatives of being triggered.
I am alarmed that you missed this, and also alarmed by your defense of students triggered by college courses--in that case because college is explicitly for broadening one’s knowledge base, let alone horizons and tastes, etc. Any person so legitimately triggered by hearing or witnessing college material has no place being in college--legitimate or real though their perceived trauma may be.
And as for the thrust of the article, I think you on one hand miss the forest for the trees (some of us, especially rape victims, saw and heard all of Trump’s speeches and were “triggered” by the familiar behavior of an entitled, power-grabbing bully who could and did respond to every accusation with “she’s lying” (or he or they or whatever it was in any given instance.)
On the other, almost every individual involved in the political and media apparatus is incentivized to make every single citizen feel as anxious and betrayed as possible. People are responding quite understandably, even predictably, to what they are being explicitly manipulated to respond to.
I think this last paragraph is very true. There are people who benefit from keeping your anxiety and outrage turned up to 11 all the time. And this can be about a business goal like getting more ad impressions or making your site stickier, but it can also be a kind of dynamic that arises in groups, where people encourage each other to keep focusing on/marinating in whatever keeps them engaged.
I feel like Trump is some kind of weird scissors-statement-made-flesh, because different people react so differently to him. I can observe that a lot of people find his speeches engaging and entertaining, and then I listen and it sounds like word salad to me. And other people find his speeches/statements super upsetting and disturbing.
Though it is not germaine to your point I think it is worth adding context that, when the diagnostic criteria add that carve-out for trauma from consuming media in a work context, what the authors probably have in mind are the social media censors whose duty is to trawl through thousands of pieces of media per day that were reported as depicting child abuse or pedophilia.
I too feel warm and fuzy when I see a well argued point. Thank you for this.
Trauma, as a word more so than a true understanding of the concept, gets thrown around more aggressively these days, presumably due to social media.
Just like a dish you've had far too much of that it eventually loses its appeal. Words like trauma has done the same for me. I can't take it seriously anymore.
I feel sorry for people with "real" trauma. Perhaps we need a new word.
...I don't think you got the point of the article. The trauma described here is just as real as the "real" trauma. Everyone is in pain. Just because you don't think it's justified doesn't make it any less real.
I could be wrong but it seems to me like you're purposefully picking at my words just to make me look polarizing. I get that it's the internet, but it's unnecessary, unless you get a kick out of it.
I think there's definitely a difference in category of trauma we think should occur (ex: we socially expect people to get sad from family members dying; we socially expect people to have a bad time if they have a huge fallout with their friends), versus trauma that we would like to see less of and causes harms that aren't useful even in a social sense (like being traumatized about politics, it would be far better if we managed to dissolve that; or by being traumatized into focusing more on rape than is healthy).
What I personally got from Scott's previous article(s) and this one, I think the cross-cultural comparison link he gave above is one of the ones I'm thinking of, is that
- We should be more careful about certain cultural 'tropes' forming
- The word trauma becomes less useful as we add more things to it. The weight of the word however keeps its inertia, which can cause problems. Like how people avoiding disagreements from the other side isn't healthy (though actively looking isn't healthy either), but if it got called trauma it would be far harder to go "maybe reading other people's viewpoints is good for your general understanding?". This has happened with the word mental disorder some, where it took some time before it became weaker.
- If culture is growing to fit more and more into the trauma category, what we should do is try to forestall that. It hurts, but also we should be encouraging a culture of controlling one's responses to things that hurt... because they makes things hurt less. There's probably better ways, but preventative medicine is better than just treating the symptoms.
Why do you think there's a such a thing as trauma that should occur? There's no real justification for feeling sad about things that are outside of your control. The distinction between "good" and "bad" trauma is completely arbitrary.
And on the topic of encouraging people to control their response to things, even assuming that most people are even capable of that... Not feeling anything in response to things is equivalent to not caring. Caring about things can only lead to pain, but apathy destroys any and all motivation. I know this from personal experience: I'm a nihilist myself, but I'm also self-aware enough to realize that if everyone was like me, society would collapse within a few hours. And I'm assuming the death of humanity isn't your goal.
There's negative-feelings that we (in the general culture sense) think should occur, and trauma that are considered expected to occur because they're about the weight of the feeling. I don't know all the sociocultural pieces of that, but 'being reminded of a lost family member when you see X thing related/important to them' is a common trauma. There's also plenty of trauma that occurs now that is expected, but aren't as entrenched or aren't meta-endorsed.
I consider it plausible that the optimal way is to deliberately avoid/remove all possible trauma. Perhaps we end up with a designed culture that leaves you to be sad for however long if someone you know dies (well, ideally not at all, because we solve aging and do all sorts of other ways to avoid death) that avoids longer-term trauma. But I also consider it plausible that we would end up going "yep that's normal and expected". I consider sadness as an emotion that mostly we shouldn't feel at all, but that sadness is hooked up to reality. I wouldn't press a button to get rid of sadness, but I would press a button that got rid of causes of sadness (modulo various edge case scenarios). Reasons outside your control for being sad happen quite a lot. I'm sad about people I know dying even if I couldn't do anything about it! I don't want to be *overly* sad, like becoming depressive for a month or worse, but I think some amount of sadness is just a part of how humans handle... sad events.
I don't really consider that the distinction between good/bad trauma being arbitrary to be much of a statement? Sure, it would be arbitrary in the generic, just like most social values. We do live within some culture with some values, and then have our own personal values which can disagree with the general culture background(s), but there are general shared tendencies that can be used to form a definition of "trauma we think is part of the general social fabric" / "trauma that is part of human's growing and experiencing bad things" versus "trauma that is too common, or damaging in certain notably negative ways, or would be better managed by some other response".
'Controlling response to things' doesn't mean feeling nothing at all. If someone punches you, you can be pissed off. It is the difference between getting attacked by someone and becoming flinchy about situations like that (trauma) and becoming annoyed/sad/pissed/scared. I'm trying to gesture at a thing where you experience the emotions but don't have a long-lasting ingrained response to it. I think a simple version of this happens a lot, especially when you haven't learned a cultural trope for how you should handle it.
I have real trauma (severely disordered childhood attachment, also was almost murdered along with a bunch of other people in my community in a high-profile incident). I also dislike how easily the word trauma is thrown around, but I think Scott's point is basically accurate. One could reasonably argue that trauma is an approximation of a more complex phenomena, which I think is described by schemas, autonomic nervous system states, and adaption: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip/p/i9xyZBS3qzA8nFXNQ
I'm sorry for what you've been through. Hope you found a way to live with it.
I don't disagree with Scott's point. I just emphasized how easily the word "trauma" gets thrown around, especially in social media contexts that don't really justify it, so much so that it's lost its severity, meaning.
> that in college a bunch of people tried to cancel me for something I’d intended to be an anti-racist joke
In Ireland? Seems odd. Irish universities have largely escaped the extreme wokeness of some US universities.
This all reminds me of that poor woman who joked about AIDS prior to getting her flight. It was clearly an anti-racist joke, and yet the pile on was incredible. It was just then that o became wary of social media and Twitter in particular - which up to then had been great.
In the USA, apparently they require you to get an undergraduate degree in some unrelated subject (in Scott’s case philosophy) before they let you into medical school.
They were all part of the moral panic after 2020. Sure they are there but Scott was talking about being ostracised by peers.
(Also trinity looking into its colonial past isn’t really the same thing as a British university doing the same thing, as many Irish people see it as that).
This is a good analysis, and helps to explain two oddities that, as an outsider, I have when interacting with Americans.
The first is that Americans bang on about politics A LOT. It's all over media and your public discourse, to the point that I know about as much about your internal politics and political discourse as I do my own country's, despite having no interest in it at all and actively avoiding it whenever I can. And, invariably, the first thing that an American tries to do when a topic of conversation strays into anything that their politics has touched, is try to peg which side you are on (i.e. determine if you are a team Red or team Blue supporter). Being on neither side, because you are not an American, is not an acceptable answer and makes people angry.
The second is that, from the outside, a lot of the specific planks seem very strange and nonsensical. The ostensible party of (since a few years ago) free speech, economic liberty, gun rights, social conservatism and religion, for instance. Or the ostensible party of (until a few years ago) free speech, economic regulation, decriminalization of drug offences, environmentalism, freedom from religion, social justice and social programs. I get that the parties are big tents, and that there are social-historical reasons for these various stances, but from outside it seems even more arbitrary than our own political parties and their policies (and at least we have many to choose from). Yet it is treated as not just normal but right in a sort of cosmic sense that these should all fit together just so, and that such a system is not just normal but ordinary and true across time and space. And any suggestion that you might pick and choose between different planks is treated as heresy that puts you in the other team. At the outside, you're allowed to have one deviation only (a democrat who likes guns, for instance. Or a pro-union republican) and that's it.
So the idea that it's two groups huddling ever closer together as they traumatise and demonise each other makes complete sense to me.
Unfortunately a lot of our local coverage of American politics ends up poisoned by... American politics. For instance, one of the newspapers I read is following the election saga, with all the reportage done by an American expat who used to be in government somewhere. So it ends up recapitulating a lot of the biases and suppositions for our local audience.
I think what helps provide perspective for me is to take the alien-eye view and look at the actions of the US government without seeing any of the personalities and internal struggles. At which point it becomes apparent that there's essentially no difference when one party or the other is in power. Stripped of rhetoric and personality, the Trump years (the first Trump years?), viewed from space, just seem like a continuation of business as usual. The Biden years look much the same.
I try not to talk about politics with my friends and family. Much healthier. I also try as much as possible to read from a wide variety of sources and (hopefully) to develop nuanced views on issues. I think this is a good post, but you overstate the pressure to conform, although I can certainly see why it appears that way from the outside
"Everyone agrees we’re 'addicted to outrage.' I find this phenomenon fascinating, and analogizing it to trauma addiction is the only way I’ve been able to make sense of it."
I think of it this way: What people are addicted to isn't outrage per se, but the feeling of moral certitude that comes with it. When you see someone you hate doing something outrageous, it reinforces how correct you are to oppose them. "See! I'm right! These people really *are* dumb/crazy/evil!" That's the part that feels so intoxicating, at least to me.
I don't disagree with the trauma analogy, though. Maybe it could be either, or some mix of both, depending on the person?
Considering "morality" ultimately boils down to whether someone feels good or bad about something, this does just seem like basic tribalism. I'm sure the trauma doesn't help though.
A good example of the addiction to trauma or distress is the reluctance of the more doomsterish adherents of climate change to accept relatively good news. You can be downvoted to oblivion on reddit by pointing out that the more extreme projections are crazy, even if you link to the ISPCC reports or to NASA‘s climate website.
For instance I’ve seen maps on how flooded certain cities will be by 2050, some showing these cities under metres, or several feet, of water while the official statistics show sea level increasing by 3.4mm a year. That rate is accelerating but not significantly.
Assuming some acceleration there will be maximum 100mm increase by 2050 (without acceleration it’s 88mm).
Anyway it’s about 4 inches in American. Most cities don’t flood at the very highest tide in any one year (absent a storm surge) - and the difference between the highest tide of the year and the average high tide is significant*.
Which means that cities will not be under water either at all, or at the most slightly more - and only during extreme conditions - by 2050. (2100 is a different story if acceleration continues but that’s an era that even teenagers can’t personally worry about).
Anyway pointing out that 2050 will be ok can get you downvoted on sites where people are traumatised by climate change.
Is it really trauma, then. Wouldn’t you like to get rid of trauma? Or is it the thrill of something like a roller coaster - something that feels scary but really isn’t.
> Or is it the thrill of something like a roller coaster - something that feels scary but really isn’t.
Interestingly, after getting PTSD, my adrenaline response to things like roller-coasters has completely gone away. In a strange way, I imagine this is similar to becoming addicted to heroin. Only the "good stuff" works for me now.
Interesting observation. My ability to get excited by rollercoasters or skydiving (or whatever near-death experience) has completely vanished. But in my case, I attribute it just to age.
Let's ramble a bit now!
It's really hard when I go skydiving with someone for the first time, to pretend it was exciting and crazy and boy we actually did that isn't that the wildest thing ever. For me, the biggest concerns I have as I plummet toward Earth are how wind blowing up my nose at terminal velocity is kind of uncomfortable and hurts my sinuses, and my ears aren't equalising nearly fast enough.
So why do I keep going skydiving? It's more a circumstantial thing. I don't do it on purpose. Just somehow I'm the only chaperone available whenever someone new wants to do it, and you can't do it alone so... Philo! Strap up and let's plummet.
I have the same reaction to skydiving! It's peaceful and beautiful and all I need to worry about is getting my limbs in the right position, except that since I'm not qualified to solo, I also have to deal with a tandem partner who's going "WOOOOOOOOO!" and acting like it's some sort of Xtreme Sport. :-)
There was some sort of fear reflex that made it difficult to get out of the plane the first time, but it was completely uncoupled from any actual emotion of "fear". My legs refused to move me forward, but since it was tandem, all I had to do was lift them off the floor and my partner moved us out. It was intellectually interesting to notice it happening, at least until I was out of the plane, and then it was all about looking at the planet below.
If you find yourself having to do it again, tell that tandem dude to flip and roll and do some interesting things. It adds a bit of novelty to the experience.
"You can be downvoted to oblivion on reddit by pointing out that the more extreme projections are crazy, "
True, but you can be downvoted for any opinion that is unpopular, which majority opinion of readers of the comment wants to suppress because they think the opinion is bad/dangerous. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with a trauma response.
In this particular example it does. Or a faked trauma response.
On reddit I choose my battles and don’t bother going against a sub‘s ideology , it’s pointless given the way the system works. Just unfollow.
In this case on a generic sub for a country, somebody said they were terrified of what is going to happen by 2050. responding to that with the facts I have above seemed safe enough but I believe I ended up with -100 karma.
So why do people want to believe the worst, and do they actually believe the worst?
I see no evidence that's a trauma response. More likely, I think, 100 people simply see themselves as keyboard activists who make the world better by promoting right ideas and suppressing wrong ideas. Your (supposedly) wrong, or inconvenient, idea was thus worth downvoting for the greater good.
My personal anecdote suggests that this is a major part of it. I wouldn't have minded a lot of the other stuff, but seeing people whom I had trusted, whom I had thought of as friends, say things which implied that my suffering was good and righteous, that was what got to me in the end. So to pick a not-me example, it wasn't just Trump being elected that caused the trauma, it was that half the country supported this **monster** , and were cheering him on, and celebrating that you were now **threatened and powerless** , and whenever you walked down the street you were passing people whom you **knew** would just as soon Thanos-snap you away to make the world a better place in their eyes.
> It was the worst experience of my life.
I hadn't heard this story before. I think I feel your pain.
> entirely new kinds of social technology
That's just plain brilliant!
> John Smith is a Nazi pedophile
After Rufus Sewell's wonderful performance playing Obergruppenführer John Smith in "The Man in the High Castle", both the name and the actor give me the creeps. Most particularly in the "Victoria" miniseries. (I don't recall him being pedophilic, though.)
> traumatic reenactment
I have not read the rest of the post yet, but in my experience, the thing I **really** want is to view the triggering event through a safe and supportive lens. So if I'm left-wing and traumatized by Trump, I'd look up sites where fellow left-wing people point out all the bad things about him, and condemn them and mock them. I'm feeling safer by finding a community where everyone feels the way I do. If my trauma is less common, and it's harder to find a community, there's still a sort of distance involved on the Internet. Or there would be, if I didn't have PTSD. So I constantly try to find examples so that I can calmly sit back and critique them from a distance, but then I come to and realize that I've been pounding my fists bloody on the floor for the last minute. (That's one of the rarer and more extreme examples, but I think it's illustrative enough.) Perhaps some of the re-enactment is similar, in that the traumatized person is looking to build new memories, to reassure themselves that "not all men who act like that are bad", but then...
> I feel like the attractive aspect of this was bonding with other people who were outraged by the event, and getting to retell the story in a way that ended with “and everyone agreed the woke cancellation mob was in the wrong, and the students apologized to the yoga instructor, and she was reinstated and lived happily ever after.”
Looks like I nailed it. :-)
> suppose you are so afraid of everyone that it is impossible to have a good experience with a new person
The most convincing explanation that I've heard is that, with normal memories, the emotional salience fades over time, and it gets "sepia-toned". But with PTSD memories, there's a malfunction somewhere (I've heard the amygdala), and the full, fresh emotional content gets dumped into our nervous system whenever the memory is recalled, thus leading to the creation of new memories with the same salience as the old. Possibly this relates to that thing where, unlike in a classical computer, in the human brain's neural network, memories are written each time they're accessed.
> you are absolutely sure your side is right
See, the thing for me (and possibly you?) is that the side that traumatized me **was** my side. I dunno how that fits into your model, but it feels very significant to me.
> On the other, it might be dangerous to create an expectation of traumatic consequences for minor wrongs.
Oh, yes, here we go.
> Ancient warriors apparently didn’t get PTSD.
They did, however, suffer episodes of possession, as well as whatever happened to poor Ajax. See above about pounding my fists bloody; I spend a lot of time alone because I don't want to see what happens if I'm around someone who triggers me personally. I used to try to "integrate" my PTSD with my old personality, but the desire for vengeance was stronger than anything else I felt. So then I started treating it as a separate thing, talking about how I felt and how my PTSD felt, and that seems to have worked better. But if I had to give it a name, I know exactly what it would be: Nemesi, pteroessa biou rhopa, kyanopi thea, thygater Dikas.
> they had a narrative in which war was heroic and inspiring, not traumatizing
So did we, in June 1914, and before Vietnam. Turned out we were wrong.
> this theory is dangerous even if it’s true
Heh, I was just discussing with Villiam the difference between "rationality as truth-seeking" and "rationality as systematized winning".
> making sure they replace their normal ability to update with a series of triggers that make them replace reality with pre-packaged stories about how the other side is innately evil
~~~But hey, it attracts eyeballs and sells ads! So if that's what the Algorithm determines that you want to see in your Feed, what could possibly be wrong with that!~~~ But seriously, I've been flippantly blaming Facebook (and later Twitter) for this shit, but the true culprit is ad-supported Internet hosting and crowd-sourced content combining with an algorithm that only measures "time spent viewing" and "interaction". I stopped using Facebook as soon as it started making it difficult to see all and only what I chose. I also made sure to make sure news sites never gave me personalized news or ads, just the generic stuff, because I didn't want them playing to my biases. Alas, it didn't magically protect me, but perhaps I am ever so slightly more aware because of it. **shrug**
Magnificent piece. I'm not sure that our current media machine is maximally traumatic, though - media machines in the past have surely gone further in this direction. If your media consumption was German protestant pamphlets in the 16th century, for example. Or Soviet or Nazi propaganda in the 1930s. Or the tradition of martyrology - Foxe's Book Of Martyrs was surely more prominent in the media diet of the English in the late 16th/17th century than its equivalents are today, and its illustrations more traumatising to those at the time than modern day equivalents.
The modern media machine incorporates the profit motive; maybe that mitigates the drive to cause the maximum amount of trauma.
I think it might be worse now. I'd posit that we're also a lot better, in the WEIRD countries anyway, at not simply going around and genociding half our neighbors simply because they're evil monsters. (A handful of people revert every so often, and in America we have the 2nd Amendment.) So if our limit is higher, we can have worse trauma before everything collapses into a 30 Years War! Yay us!
I'm not sure we would be so restrained if a large part of our media was explicitly saying "yes, this group of people who you live alongside will torture you to death if they get the chance, look, here's proof of what they did when they were in control a few years ago, look, here are lots of big pictures of people like you screaming as they are tortured to death, pictures that are more realistic than any pictures you've ever seen".
And by a large part of our media I don't mean a large part of our media sometimes contained articles or posts like that, I mean a large part of our media was mostly that. I don't think we're there yet, or even close to being there yet.
I agree that we're not there yet, and that that might tip the scales. Your description reminds me of radio broadcasts in Rwanda.
My argument is that in other societies, the violence would have started sooner, and thus the type of media you describe would have started sooner. But because we delay the violence and thus the media, we have room for advanced forms of trauma the likes of which the world has never seen.
I have noticed a tendency for my friends to not be very political. Most of them are onto embodiment, meditation, and different experiences that plausably trigger memory reconsolidation.
Given the trapped prior model, I'm curious what the uptick in psychedelics will do to the political landscape.
Fascinating. Great article and many of the comments provide yet more insights. I feel passionately that psychologists should be working on this topic to provide new insights into human thinking. Something like an update to Jon Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", which for sure had its flaws but dug into aspects of this topic. If anyone can point me towards current psychology that does develop these ideas, please let me know.
This also fits with the theory of negative polarization (Nate Silver, Ezra Klein and others have written about). That basically a lot of the source of current political dysfunction is that people are very negatively polarized against the other side, but not strongly positive to their side. Which makes sense with the trauma analogy. Fear of dogs doesn't cause you to love cats
I was going to write something about tribalism and trauma not really being mental illnesses since they're just standard brain function, but... god damn it, what's even the point? It's not like we can fix any of this. Humanity is irredeemably flawed at its core. Knowing that doesn't mean we can suddenly solve it... We're still just human.
I find it interesting that most of these problems seem weirdly US specific.
I'm a European (living in Europe) with a lot of exposure to English-language media, and there's definitely a huge difference between our respective media environments. Not that there isn't politics here, but people seem far less outraged about it. Major news programs still find plenty of time for the "somebody had an accident, please drive safely" or "our national museum just bought some Rembrandt pictures nobody really cares about" kind of stories.
To give a few examples, "dogwhistles" and "triggers" don't have equivalents in my language, the latter are sometimes used by sources that identify themselves as far left, but that's about it. The "<x> are only doing <y> because they hate <z>" rhetoric seems to be entirely missing, I can't think of a single example here while I can think of a dozen in the US. Namecalling also seems to be a lot less common, the worst you hear is usually something along the lines of "are they insane or what?"
I can't figure out why this difference exists. Many people blame polarization on tech and social media, but yet we use almost exactly the same tech and social media (maybe with less X and more Facebook) and polarization is much smaller, so there must be more to it. The UK seems to be closer to the US than the rest of Europe in this regard, so language isolation probably plays a part here, I wonder how Australia and European countries with extremely high English proficiencies are doing at this.
Well, from what I'm hearing, Europe is on the precipice of a "far-right" sweep everywhere, so in case it isn't overzealous fearmongering, things might get more "interesting". A Trump-style candidate hasn't yet been in position to win in any respectable (non-post-communist) country, but they do seem to get ever more popular.
Well, from what I'm reading, Europe is in a "far-right" sweep everywhere. In Sweden the "Sweden Democrats" were for many years considered to be "un-voteable Racists/Nazis" and now part of the government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Democrats
Denmark. Netherlands. Brexit. In France, LePen's Front national is just waiting to take over. In my ol' Germany the "fascist" AfD is strongest party in the East, and - in polls - number two in the west. Well, media tells us they are "rechts-extremistisch" - and I never heard how this is different from "racist" and/or "fascist" (one can be a racist without being fascist, sure). So, not that sure there is no dog-whistling - the AfD is "obviously" xenophobe, and also homophobe - while its leader is a lesbian who lives in Switzerland with her life-partner, a Sri-Lankan film-maker. They have two kids, it seems. https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/alice-weidel-und-die-schweiz-willkommen-immer-wieder-bedroht-und-jetzt-von-der-anti-terroreinheit-geschuetzt-400708115716 - The "dog-whistle" is probably more of an US thing as there are only two parties, who tend to have rather more centric candidates than in our multi-party system (median voter theorem). If neither Trump nor DeSantis is an anti-semitic dictator, you have to go for "whistles" to make a story. If neither Hillary nor even Bernie plan the nationalization of amazon: dito. While in Germany Mr Höcke (AfD) loves to play with Nazi-symbols and the JuSo (young Social-Democrats) write about nationalizing BMW.
One difficulty for me as an American is that lots of media will call a European politician far-right whether his platform is "take in fewer refugees and slightly cut social programs" or "invade the neighbors for liebenstraum." It's hard to tell from far away what a coalition government including AfD in Germany or Vox in Spain would actually do, or what a it would look like if Le Pen ended up as the next French president. I'm guessing none of these would be actual nightmarish disasters, but I could just be flat wrong.
Our European media is rather quick to call "far-right" ANY new party who says "take in fewer refugees and slightly cut social programs". I have not yet heard of one party (except Putin's) to call for "Lebensraum". - There might be some who go for "Liebes-Traum"/love-dream: The flying Yogis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOpbZC9Gk-Uhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Law_Party (watch the video, unforgettable)
Germany now has one brand-new party that says: "take in fewer refugees and massively expand social programs for Germans", called Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. Far-left. Thus fine.
On the other hand, with only two parties, a candidate can be very terrible and still electable as the lesser of two evils. The quirks of our election system make it likely that you'll have to choose between _only_ AfD or JuSo in some races.
I suspect that it may be important whether you can create for yourself a bubble of people who share your political opinions. Within the bubble, the hysteria gets amplified. Meeting people outside your bubble may give you some sanity check. And it's probably better if you have more than two parties, so you often meet people who are neither "your side" nor the "enemy".
Even supporters of small parties can get fanatical and create a bubble, if that's what they want. But with a large party, this can happen also to moderate members. (I think Scott mentioned that almost everyone around him is a Democrat, without him actively trying to make it so.) Then the moderate members are regularly exposed to the hysteria that they... may think is exaggerated, but they are not entirely opposed to.
I have definitely seen people with batshit crazy political opinions in Slovakia. I think there is a difference between "this person is crazy by temperament, and they chose politics as their favorite topic" and "this person is crazy by contagion, because they happen to be surrounded by crazy people and gradually get used to their rhetoric". The former, well, crazy people exist everywhere. The latter are created by bubbles; for example could be a family member of a crazy person.
Australia has a roughly similar culture to the US but much more muted; the news these days is all about the Australian Open happening down the road from me, with occasional stories about how the current Prime Minister Broke Election Promises about tax cuts, could have been written in any decade over the past hundred years.
But I do watch the US with interest; for one I am an American citizen who lived in Washington until 1999, for another the stuff that happens in your great country does tend to affect us down under. For example after George Floyd was killed we had the occasional riot here about Aboriginal rights and mistreatment by police and some activists revived an old case from 2015 about an Aboriginal man who died in police custody. And of course we have a large Arab population so the Free Palestine stuff happened in Sydney and Melbourne too.
Overall it sure seems less crazy than the US. The main threat to our Prime Ministers is being unexpectedly deposed by their own party which happens every couple of years. But no one gets mailed bombs or attacked with a hammer. Also we banned guns like 30 years ago and our schools are very safe.
Yeah, this post in particular struck me as closest to some of the SSC "greatest hits," and one of, possibly the, best serious post of ACX (Bay Area Houseparty series holds the position for humorous posts).
This is a great post, thanks for writing it. I also suffer from the obsessive habit of engaging with written material that 'triggers' me in one way or another, and I have also begun to come around to the position that it's due to an unconscious wish to reenact certain events, but give them a better ending. Also agree 100% with disengaging (or at least strategically minimising) exposure to outrage/fear inducing media.
One book I've read recently included its own definition of trauma, which featured, in part, the subjective criteria "The person feels they are powerless to control the circumstance or event"
Looking through that lens at how many people approach politics - that seems to fit strongly. Even for a person with an superlatively internal locus of control, almost everything that goes on in politics - and especially the payload of political news - involves things that are objectively entirely outside one's power to influence.
The supreme court is deciding whether you're allowed to get gay-married? with the exception of a lawyer and a handful of plaintiffs, the rest of the country can do nothing but sit back and watch.
worried about what topics - and viewpoints - are getting taught in schools? Even if you're active in your own PTA, there's an entire nation out there shifting in ways you can hear about, but can't impact.
Political news is a never-ending stream of things that might be going wrong, things that might make your life worse, that you have effectively no power to stop.
I find myself genuinely caring about some things entirely outside my control more than I do about most things in my control, even many of the more important ones. For example, I'm more emotionally invested in the war in Ukraine than I am in my career success. In that context, is it surprising that I have unhealthy and counterproductive habits involving the news and social media? I can't just focus on the less important things, even if they're the only ones I can affect.
I know a few people who keep themselves reasonably well informed about world affairs but have no strong interest in or emotional response to things that they can't affect, especially when those things also can't affect them. These people do not talk about news and politics, either in person or on social media. I suppose that their attitude is the healthier one, but it's hard for me not to perceive them as myopic.
* rather than adding politics to the list of potential triggers, it might make more sense to slim down the list of 'mental illnesses' that has been so expanded in recent times. For example, much of what is now called depression used to be called that plain old thing.... unhappiness.
* One aspect of the post-60s 'revolution' that gets little attention is that it saw a retreat from the Christian conception of the individual as an intrinsically flawed being – prone to sin and prone to error. Now maximal 'self esteem' is valorised. People drunk on their own self esteem will have inflated expectations that they deserve never to be made 'unhappy' by anything so annoying as 'reality'.
<i>* One aspect of the post-60s 'revolution' that gets little attention is that it saw a retreat from the Christian conception of the individual as an intrinsically flawed being – prone to sin and prone to error. Now maximal 'self esteem' is valorised. People drunk on their own self esteem will have inflated expectations that they deserve never to be made 'unhappy' by anything so annoying as 'reality'.</i>
Not only that, but the Christian conception was that life is full of suffering and hardship -- "Man that is born of a woman has but a short time to live, and is full of heaviness," "In the midst of life we are in death," and all that. If you suffered, then, that was obviously bad, but it wasn't regarded as some kind of cosmic unfairness the way it tends to be now.
Minimal *physical* suffering, maybe. Assuming that Scott is right and large numbers of people are literally being traumatised by politics, it seems that plenty of people have rather a lot of suffering in their lives.
> Is this actually a good way to express a concept for public consumption?
The snag is that claims of trauma not directly related to violence and tragedy are themselves triggering because they feel like emotional blackmail, weaponised "hurt feelings", and narcissism.
regular religion and regular politics both deserve an exemption. The kind of ruminating, self-upsetting behaviour Scott talks about here can crop up in either sphere, and be equally traumatizing. I have definitely met laymen who refer to their "religious trauma"
"already maxed our our ability to feel" < s/our/out/
That cancellation experience as part of your experience to draw on has made you one of the most well-rounded thought leaders I'm aware of. Great for society and those who read you. Not great for you.
I've skirted the edges of cancellation (I've been, how do I say... micro-canceled?) and it's deeply unpleasant and unsettling. Finally understanding how shallow and fleeting is "friendship" is hard. Approval or even willingness-to-associate-with-you can be removed by the slightest whim.
Realising what you thought were deep and personal connections were in fact tenuous threads... a very disconcerting world-view adjustment.
I am very sorry you had to endure it.
I suppose, for those who are going through cancellation, or whatever, I should link two resources I found helpful. Warning: both of these are going to be from people who are probably your outgroup.
I was going to link a video, but now I can't find it. So I shall summarise. When you are canceled, or go through a struggle session, or whatever you want to call it, it is quite literally one of the worst things that can happen to you, and those who trivialise it saying things like "oh poor snowflake lost your job and now you have to find another one" or whatever are failing to grasp the level of pain those individuals are going through.
Now that I think about it, maybe avoiding trauma-inducing media is the opposite of what you want to do. The problem is that the triggering content is only consumed intermittently, reinforcing trapped priors. But there is a physical limit to how much distress a situation can cause. If you constantly consume the triggering content without pause, you will eventually grow completely numb to it. This is the idea behind Exposure Therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_therapy , and presumably the same thing that causes Stockholm Syndrome.
...You know, maybe this is why I was able stop caring about things. I used to have plenty of empathy, far too much of it, even. Reading about horrible things happening on the other side of the world was enough to make me suicidal. But I guess there's a limit to how bad you can feel about things, because I eventually just stopped being able to feel empathy. It's definitely better this way, but... I'm still so miserable. Am I still caring too much? Is it even possible for me to feel happy?
I’m very sorry you’re in this situation. It sounds familiar. I was there a long time too and found my way out by using ancient technology which has fallen into cultural disfavor.
For much of human history in most cultures there has been aculturally shared answer to this question: you can’t be happy without a personal relationship with the transcendent, ie to being itself. This is generally held to require a personal commitment and effort to develop this relationship over time, ie to see the good in things, to cultivate compassion for others, and to focus on changing the small things right in front of you.
Saying any more in detail is likely to trigger emotional responses that I would say are unhelpful. Pm me personally if you’d like. You can be happy if you want to, it is indeed possible.
But a lot of people spend tons and tons of time circling the political misery wells and never walk away with a maxed-out emotional response as they always keep coming back for more.
I think the heart of exposure therapy is not just exposing yourself to something fear-inducing, but also receiving evidence that the thing is not harmful. If your news source keeps saying "<outgroup> is bad!" in convincing and traumatic ways and never says "<outgroup> is good sometimes, actually", you'll never get that second part. It's why you can exposure-therapy with safe, friendly, sleepy dogs and get past cynophobia, but not so much with one-sided political news. Or, in other words, doing exposure therapy on a cynophobe by using big, angry, growling dogs probably won't work at all.
What I've found helpful, when looking at politics, is to take a deep breath, stand back, and think through: Am I really going to be personally affected by this? ( Or will any of the handful of people who I care about be affected? ) For the vast majority of "issues", the answer is either "no", or "only in very unlikely circumstances".
Admittedly I'm in a relatively favorable situation for this. I'm 65, and the youngest person who I care about is 63, so I can dismiss concerns about anything more than 20 years or so from now. There are also things which could harm me within that window, but they tend to be things over which I have no control (or so close to no control that it rounds off to zero), e.g. whether Putin finally does decide to use nukes. I tend to be fatalistic about those hazards.
Reality is that what I actually should focus on are potential medical issues, not political ones. Eventually some medical issue _will_ kill me, but no one avoids that.
Looking at many events and saying "This is not my problem." is a great comfort.
Perhaps you are running a hill-climbing algorithm, and you've gotten as high as you can go, but it's not high enough. To get somewhere higher, you'd have to go back down and then travel a bit, before going up again. But if the lower areas are covered in an ocean of pain, that's a problem.
A slight flaw in this theory is that politics has existed for literally the entire existence of humanity, but this love affair with political trauma has only showed up among the general population in the past 20 years or so, and has conspicuously coupled itself primarily with one political view of the world. Similarly, it's pretty suspicious that rates of mental illness are ludicrously high these days, and this leads to rates of medication being ludicrously high. And the rates are politically lopsided. Strangely, lopsided in favour of the side that broadly thinks about "systemic" things, and "alienation" and "group identity."
I believe Scott has talked about contrarians before, mostly negatively. Well, an obvious good thing about contrarians is they reject nonsense about belonging to groups, or believing school yard taunts. The more you hear it, the more you reject it. In this particular case we can call it being psychologically anti-fragile. Of course, back in my day we had sayings about sticks and stones, and talk being cheap, so it wasn't just contrarians who could ignore this stuff. Funny how I've seen modern young people outright and explicitly reject the sticks and stones theory, and now it's just a truism that "words have power."
I'm not saying the concept of trauma is a conspiracy to sell pills. I am saying this entire way of thinking is both dangerous and wrong. Very very obviously, nobody is being helped by psychology and therapy in this case, and the entire political discourse will obviously make everybody who believes it trauma victims. Or to more neutrally say it, it will awaken in them a true class consciousness. It's designed to do this. Nobody acted in a conspiracy to do it, it's just in the water.
The definition of mental health has consistently shifted with political tides, because there is immense political power in defining what “good” means.
I think “trapped prior” could easily explain this but I would add that “any prior about outcomes of the future that isn’t positive will likely get worse over time”. Hope is a virtue, ie it has to be cultivated intentionally. For a long time most western cultures kept saying this over and over, the gramscian cultural power being used to tell people “keep calm and carry on.” Then in the last few decades that shifts and the cultural powers tell us constantly how awful everything is. The people who disagree the most are, unsurprisingly, the happiest.
That said, lots of people on the right are indeed worrying. How do you approach this in an evidence based fashion when things like “this one historical event” can’t be drawn from a distribution? There’s no evidence-based way to predict whether or not, say, the robots will kill us all or whether the WEF will make us live in pods and eat bugs. It’s like the technological acceleration means we all get our priors trapped by whatever self-reinforcing media we consume. The traditional religions have answers here, but I don’t see how materialist rationality plus “maximizing QALY” can get anyone out of a trapped prior that now it’s different than the past and hope is foolish.
I feel like someone in 1929 saying, well, yeah this looks bad and to be honest it’ll probably get get nastier. But 70 years from now things will be way way way better! But there I go exposing my priors again.
I'm not sure if the entirety of the effect cannot be sufficiently explained by the rise of social media. The Noughties weren't a praticularly caring decade, as I recall.
The major shift, as I recall happened when Twitter became mainstream, with Justine Sacco possibly being the canary in the coalmine. (We could also point to the stuff happening around the Arab Spring, London riots of 2011, etc.) In short, suddenly there was a way to organize a globally reaching mob that had actual power to get stuff done - like getting a random woman none of them cared about in the slightest fired over a tasteless tweet.
The result was entirely predictable. Add thereto the fact that staying off social media became increasingly not done (and possibly suspicious in itself - what've you got to hide), and suddenly the norms of the internet started filtering back to the real world.
In the heady days of the 2000s we could jokingly talk about the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (GIFT). Turns out, you don't actually need anonymity, just a different set of incentives, and suddenly everyone's a Fuckwad offline, too.
I think it's a perfectly acceptable material and efficient explanation, to use some Aristotle here, that social media has caused this. I'd personally put it to 2007 and the launch of the Iphone though. There was social media prior to this, but it was the Iphone that brought the idea of constant social media to the masses.
But I think there's also the formal and final explanation, that being awakened to class consciousness is the point. There's political power to be gained by convincing everyone they're horrifically oppressed at every instance of existence.
No, I'd say that the big change came with Twitter. I was kinda there when it happened.
The earlier attempts at mainstream social media were mostly geared towards replicating offline social networks - like Facebook for personal stuff, or LinkedIn for professional connections. The big change Twitter brought was that tweets were broadcast to everyone (so to speak).
So, essentially, what you got was the ability to beam your half-backed 140 character snippets to the entire world. Back when I joined - within its first year of operations - it didn't really know what it was for (tweeting that you're eating soup so your mum doesn't worry was a suggested use-case). However, it turned out that journalists were a significant portion of the early adopters and evangelists (I happened to run in those circles back then), and that brought in the politicians. Suddenly, Twitter was Important in a way that no other social network was. Yes, smartphones played into that, mostly because you could easily tweet straight from your iPhone right in the thick of things.
Because of Twitter's specific architecture, it was suddenly a lot easier to amplify things. The standard mechanism being some celebrity retweeting a random thing, that gets picked up by their followers, some of whom are also celebrities, and before you know it, it's trending. All the while you have a bunch of journalists (who likely also have the follower numbers to participate in the amplification) watching for anything that could be made into a Story (because, concurrently, the economics of journalism have changed and you need to produce tons of low-effort material if you want to pay the bills).
The change happened slowly, then all at once, but by that time (ca. 2013) I'd left Twitter.
> There's political power to be gained by convincing everyone they're horrifically oppressed at every instance of existence.
There's some merit to the suggestion that it is to make sure Occupy Wall Street never happens again.
“Ever since then, when I read arguments promoting social justice and cancel culture, or saying that their victims are probably bad people and shouldn’t be allowed to defend themselves, I get all kinds of easily noticeable unpleasant bodily and emotional reactions.”
This is called a schema, and you can manually rewrite this belief/emotional response. After the rewrite, the autonomic nervous system activation won’t get triggered either.
Does this mean that if as a victim of sexual abuse I speak (outside therapy) about the abuse I am traumatizing others, that I should obtain consent before doing so? It seems like yes, it does mean that
> I had my bad cancellation experience before “cancel culture” entered the national scene. But once it did, I found myself over-focusing on cancel culture stories, especially the most outrageous ones (“college students attack white yoga instructor for culturally appropriating ancient Indian practice!”) Looking back, I feel like the attractive aspect of this was bonding with other people who were outraged by the event, and getting to retell the story in a way that ended with “and everyone agreed the woke cancellation mob was in the wrong, and the students apologized to the yoga instructor, and she was reinstated and lived happily ever after.” Or, even if that didn’t happen, getting to retell it in a way that had moral clarity, where no reasonable person was on the side of the cancellers - even if things ended badly for the yoga instructor, I could tell it in a way that ended with “but she was clearly a misunderstood martyr, and this proves the rightness of the anti-woke cause.”
---
Scott, isn't the simplest psychological explanation that you got set upon by a mob, and that the best thing an individual facing a mob can do is get a crowd of their own to back them up?
Even if you aren't bonding and connecting directly, knowledge that the people who made you suffer are getting pushed back, so they aren't likely to make you suffer again, can provide relief, but if you don't know whether they're getting any pushback or not, your mind is free to submit the worst-case scenarios at its leisure.
To use war as an example, the fact that you were victimized by it is even more reason to keep constantly abreast of the state of the fighting, because that's the only way to know your side is winning. (And this is important, because if your side loses, you're gonna get victimized all over again.)
First, an underlying premise here is that psychic injuries are different from the physical ones. They're not 'fake' - they absolutely do matter - but they're affected by the victim's mindset. If a war causes you to lose your home, or even a limb, that is a very concrete form of victimization in a way that "having friends be mad at you" is not. There are forms of cancellation with more concrete impacts: losing your livelihood, being kicked out of school, etc. But when cancellation means "a bunch of people were shitty to me and made me feel bad," there's an inherent psychological aspect to it. That's not to say they don't matter, but that a part of the trauma involved comes from the victim's mindset and expectations, just as how a rape victim may be more traumatized by an emailed threat than someone else.
Second, it leads to a sense that you can define the world as "us" vs "them" in a way that doesn't always map clearly to reality. In a war, the two sides are usually pretty well defined. A given person is going to be your ally or your enemy. But applying that logic to complicated social situations breaks down - someone who might be your ally in one aspect could be your enemy in another. If you see that someone is your enemy in one aspect, and conclude that they're your enemy in _every_ aspect, then you will start to see everything they do as some kind of threat to you. Worse, you may assume that anyone who is allied with your enemy in any capacity is also thereby your enemy, and pretty quickly the world is divided in two.
I think that "my friends are mad at me" may be underselling the case a bit.
A much more useful framework to apply would be ostracism, in the OG sense of being "cut off from the people". In Scott's case, he received death threats and was subjected to a struggle session, whilst at the same time his friends turned away. In other words, people were out to get him, and he had nobody he could count on for support, let alone defense.
> But applying that logic to complicated social situations breaks down - someone who might be your ally in one aspect could be your enemy in another. If you see that someone is your enemy in one aspect, and conclude that they're your enemy in _every_ aspect, then you will start to see everything they do as some kind of threat to you. Worse, you may assume that anyone who is allied with your enemy in any capacity is also thereby your enemy, and pretty quickly the world is divided in two.
Welcome to 2024.
The funny thing is that a lot of it is a case of "what goes around comes around". Nevertheless, as the wisdom of Holocaust survivors helpfully informs us "When someone tells you they want to kill you, believe them!" If people are telling you, unprompted, that they hate your kind of folk and want them to suffer, you have zero reason to interpret such statements with any degree of charity.
The fact that someone could be your ally in some aspect is completely irrelevant if they don't want to be your ally, because they see you as irredeemably evil.
As an old white man, I had less motive to feel traumatized by Trump than most people. Of course am a Liberal and so could feel some threat. But I have a secret weapon. I am an economist and can write (then on facebook now on Substack https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com ) criticizing specific Trump policies like trade wars and tax cuts for the rich that create deficits. This means I'm not a HELPLESS victim. It also provided a reason to limit the range of issues I will pay attention to and potentially few outraged by.
Is a trade war with China a bad idea? The world isn’t just about economics - not that I fully accept that free ttade raises all boats, anyway - there’s also politics.
"ut I’m skipping entirely over the non-optional Section C: “persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event”. "
Um .... blocking people on Facebook and X. There are some people on X who use an automated blocking system. E.g. anybody who followed Andrew Tate got blocked by 3rd Wave Feminists, anybody who follows J.K.Rowling gets blocked by Transfolk.
"Then you can change the wording from “five apples and eight oranges”, to “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” and these same people will flounder and say idiotic things."
If anybody ever asked me that, I would not assume it was "can you perform addition or subtraction, as it might be?" but that there was some opinion searching going on ("do you think Democrats ought to be shot dead and we need extra guns to make sure we get them all?") and yeah I'd go off on a tangent about "no shooty no gunz no Demz".
As for that article:
(1) It's from 2014, anyone remember what the Big Threat at that time was? I notice Klein pulls in Scalia as a Partisan Bogeyman to get Science Guy to agree with him on this, which probably proves Science Guy's point for him, but I can't remember what we were all supposed to clutch our pearls about back then
"If it costs five billion pounds a year to maintain Britain's nuclear defenses, and seventy-five pounds a year to feed a starving African child, how many African children could be saved from starvation if the Ministry of Defense abandoned nuclear weapons?"
As a therapist, this is interesting, but I think the addiction framing is a lot more useful than the trauma framing in explaining why people seek to be outraged. I think people are more dopamine-seeking than ever before thanks to technology and optimized algorithms that are able to give us immediate stimulation (higher in both frequency and magnitude). And one of the most stimulating things is to be outraged.
That said, I do think the trauma analogy is useful when explaining the symptoms people experience after being exposed to the politically outraging material. Someone with military PTSD might experience heightened anxiety when in front of a window for example. Someone with political “PTSD” will experience higher vigilance around domains where the other party might be present.
Important, insightful, generous in human sympathy--I love this essay. I can think of three related sub-points that might be worth adding, all connected with history and especially the way history is often constructed and taught (I spent my working life as a college history teacher). First, history does seem to contain not a few moments in which political events led to dramatic, unpredictable, and often violent change, occasionally leading to things like war, reeducation camps, or major social reordering. Consider the French Revolution, or the 1860 US presidential election, or the Communist victory in China in 1949. That's not *at all* to say we are on the verge of such changes--just that the models are there to influence the way people think and, especially, fear. Second, the way historians teach and write about their subject tends to emphasize such dramatic changes, the strong beliefs and disagreements that led to them, and their consequences (=dangers, at least for some); and then we assign papers or tests to get students to think about these, etc. A European history survey is likely to spend two weeks on the French Revolution, with lots of dripping guillotine blades, etc., but little time at all on, say, the relatively tepid 1720s and 30s. So we emphasize the sudden change model and its risks. Third, history is often told according to a trope of trauma. Sometimes this means trauma followed by vindication (think about the ways the stories of Alfred the Great or Robert the Bruce have been told), or trauma followed by "we're still waiting for vindication," or trauma and "this may happen again at any time." I realize that many students are just trying to get through a course requirement and may not be paying that close attention--but I think all this may have some effect nevertheless.
To relate my possibly seemingly extraneous point to the essay's approach, it may be worthwhile considering the way cultural/intellectual/educational/official-institutional-type structures may affect--perhaps encourage in this case, perhaps discourage or repress in others--certain types of psychological phenomena. I would add I don't think this is some conspiracy to get students riled up and unhappy, or divide them, or whatever--although some teachers probably tell themselves getting students riled up is a good thing and admire themselves for doing so. I think a lot of it proceeds from more subtle ways people (not just teachers) are taught to construct narrative, or are led to to do so.
Why is almost everyone taking the "ancient warriors didn't get PTSD" claim at face value? The simplest explanation is that it's not true. They simply didn't have the language to describe PTSD, and in warrior cultures where combat was valorized, people would've been strongly incentivized to cover up symptoms of combat-related trauma. The really extreme cases that couldn't be covered up would just be attributed to individual "madness."
That's not to say that all of the other explanations are wrong: It's easy enough to believe that modern warfare is *more* traumatic for various reasons. But the idea that pre-modern combatants didn't get PTSD at all just seems like an erroneous assumption.
1. Basically every single person in the society would have been in combat, and thus implicitly there would be enormously high PTSD rates;
2. Ancient warriors shittalked each other so even if they were personally unwilling to admit to PTSD then they would mention it happening to their political enemies;
3. Herodotus, although he is unwilling to firmly protect the claim in a rare bout of skepticism, notes the existence of conversion disorder, which is an extremely rare condition, and would also be "cowardly" to have, but there is AFAIK no similar text about what should be much more common; and
4. "Shell shock" was basically a completely novel diagnosis at the time it came into existence, and looks like it in terms of how the medical establishment comes to terms with it.
The one actual study done in a traditional society (Turkana pastoralists) found endemic PTSD--indeed, rates of nightmares, flashbacks, and hypervigilance were higher than among modern combat veterans. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8054015/.
The only difference was that Turkana warriors didn't experience symptoms of guilt or depression.
You keep bringing up the racism = trauma thing and it keeps persuading me in the opposite direction. That seems like made-up bullshit in exactly the same way as "it's okay to ignore lockdowns to attend a thousand-person George Floyd protest": who benefits? And if one element of trauma is made-up, probably others are too.
You say the DSM exists to draw a boundary around what counts and what doesn't, why should we assume this boundary corresponds to what actually exists rather than what psychologists would prefer we gave our sympathy to?
If people can traumatize themselves over the wrong person being elected President, it seems obvious to me that they could also traumatize themselves over a history of slavery and racism and systematic disenfranchisement? In neither case is it necessary or an inherent fact about the world (i.e., it's what you describe as "made-up"), but that doesn't mean that the trauma reactions aren't genuine.
If everyone goes around chopping off their right hand as a show of political solidarity, that's bad on a whole bunch of levels, but at the end of the day they still only have one working hand. You can argue yourself blue about how they don't deserve sympathy for self-inflicted injuries, and I'm not unsympathetic to that point of view. But the damage is done, and I'd rather we investigate the mechanism by which it happened, so that we can keep it from happening in the future. There are still some kids out there with both hands. (Also, we should work on building or growing new hands.)
Scott, always love your thoughts, though I don't find this argument particularly persuasive.
The question is whether is provides a good explanation or is useful to frame politics as trauma. If the argument is essentially the principles of astrology (cherry picking and flexibly applying nebulous dimensional criteria), then it is not a useful for explanation. For example, zero-ing in on "avoidance" components of PTSD and "re-enactment" components as explanations of behavior - while real phenomena in PTSD - can obviously be used as a carte blanche for any type of behavior. In this framing, avoidance or engagement or anything in between (so all behavior) are seen as evidence of trauma. But this is about as useful as hearing from Geico that you could save up to 15% or more.
There are many other features of political engagement that are better explained by other threads - tribalism, meaning making, connection, motivated reasoning, appreciation of threat. Further, political engagement is a large enterprise that is going to involve the whole breadth of human cognition, and because of this complexity nothing is every going to reduce down to something like trauma psychology.
I agree there are underlying structures and organization to the brain that pervade all of our functioning, and something like predictive processing seems to have a lot of value. I don't suppose that DSM diagnoses represent categorically distinct processes - that the circuits and learning of trauma are just absent in people. But it is also a mistake to reify a DSM diagnosis, and use its ill defined margins to explain cognitive phenomena.
I've long thought that political doomscrolling is similar to cutting--both forms of self-harm that are incomprehensible to me. There does seem to be that weird element of trauma addiction in both, but people seem to think they are doing something virtuous with the doomscrolling. "I'm staying informed!" As far as I know, cutters see it as something secret and shameful. But I could be easily mistaken here.
This is an excellent piece that I suspect people are going to nitpick the details of in order to avoid engaging with the central point, which strikes me as quite plausible. In fact, casting the discussion in terms of trauma and psychiatric disorder in general is likely to be a major distraction for a lot of people. Perhaps a slightly milder way of putting things is this: trauma represents a set of normal psychological processes under extreme conditions. Politics seems to engage those same normal psychological processes, often to a surprising degree.
From my own personal experience, I have noticed that my reaction to a lot of political issues can be surprisingly vibes-based, depending on my own personal interaction with that issue. For example, immigration is just not a hot-button for me. I have opinions about policy and I have opinions about the culture war aspects of immigration, but I can't pretend to have a ton of emotional energy around them. On the other hand, there are some issues related to identity politics where I personally have gotten enmeshed in arguments and accusations and find that I have emotional reactions that seem disconnected from my actual beliefs about those issues. I might find myself reacting defensively or with an internal eyeroll toward certain statements even if, objectively, I don't think those statements are invalid opinions to hold. (I might not agree with them, but there are lots of opinions I don't agree with that I'm respectful of.)
I wouldn't call my reactions here trauma per se, but they have convinced me that in general the right stance toward most political news and discussions is disengagement, the opposite of Scott's depiction of trauma addiction. That is, I've recognized that a lot of my experience of politics is a sort of low-key unpleasant emotional reactivity that seems at best pointless and at worst actively harmful.
> D3: Persistent distorted cognitions about the cause or consequences of the traumatic events that lead the individual to blame himself or others.
> As stated, this doesn’t really apply to politics.
Doesn't it? It seems to me that the political trauma syndrome includes plenty of distorted thinking about why the other side does the traumatizing thing, or the consequences thereof, and plenty of blaming. This very blog post cites an excellent example:
> I've had arguments with people who believe that no pro-life conservative really cares about fetuses, they just want to punish women for being sluts by denying them control over their bodies. And I've had arguments with people who believe that no pro-lockdown liberal really cares about COVID deaths, they just like the government being able to force people to wear masks as a sign of submission.
This kind of topic exploration shows an unparalleled ability to simulate the mind of another person, plus the ability to express the resulting exploration such that a third person can feel like they themselves understand the second person.
I regularly wish I could debate on one topic or another, and I don't love every post, but this feels a lot like "to whom shall we go" -- I've never found comparable insight elsewhere.
Sometimes I feel like he's writing directly to me. It's probably that, as we engage with his site, our thoughts are somewhat channeled in the same direction as his, and so something that pops up deep in a discussion in a comment thread in a previous week, is similar to something he's pondering himself which inspires him to write hist next post.
Over the past few years and especially months considering it’s an election year now, I’ve subconsciously drifted towards not talking about or engaging with political discussion... even going as far as muting my headset if I heard my friends bring up Trump or something.
Where’s the value? It doesn’t make sense. I’d rather talk about WoW. Seeing this post also made me think that maybe Scott saw something on social media or heard something that triggered him to write this too.
> The coastal elites/the patriarchy/the rich/the liberal media may all be real groups with agendas different from yours, but the way some people think about them actively plotting to dismantle everything good in the world shades into paranoia
This is not true. This is a dynamic that actually happens with authoritarian backsliding countries (e.g. Turkey); as governments turn authoritarian and consolidate power over elites (especially in journalism), elites race to cut deals with people in the security apparatus to be early investors/adopters of the winning side/team.
They don't actively plot to dismantle everything good in the world, but they sure do plot to dismantle what's left of democratic institutions in their particular country (or just continue market competition).
Also interesting: the authoritarian security apparatus people have limited bandwidth to cut deals with various elites, just like how the NYT didn't have infinite flunkies to handle mail.
If outrage-based political media can succeed brilliantly by using trauma addiction as a marketing principle, I worry that this suggests a scary vulnerability in consumer psychology in general.
It's common for products to use addiction dynamics to maintain high levels of consumer demand, but we tend to think about that as a manipulation of the customer's pleasure circuitry (putting small amounts of sugar in our bread and chips, putting addictive reward systems in our smartphone games, getting kids hooked on smoooth relaxing nicotine, etc.). If it 's just as easy to get someone addicted by traumatizing them, then that lays the groundwork for an entirely new level of consumer hellscape, because it's on average much easier and cheaper to frighten or hurt someone than to figure out how to please them.
Arguably some products work like this already, reaching out to make your life suddenly much worse in order to get you obsessively returning to them for solutions that never pan out. A lot of cosmetic marketing starts by highlighting how a previously-unnoticed feature of your body is actually horrifyingly gross and ugly, you should definitely buy something to fix it so that people don't sneer at you behind your back (as they are almost certainly already doing). Porn exposure in childhood can lead to sex addiction and compulsive porn habits in adulthood, so places like PornHub will definitely benefit from having graphic sexual content widely available to kids on the internet. It's not a new dynamic - trauma marketing is basically how Harold Hill sells trombones to the rubes in _The Music Man_ - but something about the individual's vulnerability to uninvited pop-up memes in an online environment makes it feel particularly threatening in the context of twenty-first century virtual life. In the old days, the protection racket had to actually move in and take over your neighborhood, but these days they can just blast out a scary link on Twitter and work on converting whoever clicks.
I've noticed that it seems like every sexual assault is about every other sexual assault. For example, when Kavanaugh was getting accused, the focus didn't really seem to be on "What actually happened in this case?". The focus was more on "Are we a society that takes sexual assault seriously?", with women had been victims in unrelated cases acting like the result of that case was a referendum on their situation.
This post gives me a framework to make sense of that phenomenon.
Oooh, that's a good connection! It's why less and less is about the object-level issue any more, and it's more and more about the broader context, the people who are on each side, and so forth.
> Each time they hear another outrage they’re somewhere between dejected and enraged. But they keep doing it. For hours a day. They will justify this with claims like “I need to stay informed so I can make a difference”. Then they will forget to vote because they were tired on Election Day.
This is actually what powers the motivation pyramid scheme that fuels the far-left (maybe the far right too). On some level, they feel they need to participate as much as possible maximize other people's motivation, in order to minimize the number of people on their side who end up not showing for election day.
This is a good piece, and it makes me want to be more charitable toward people who get triggered by politics (for whatever reason, I'm not one of them).
It also helps me understand how contemporary culture seems so effective in fostering a sort of learned helplessness (also a trauma cause and/or effect, yes?) in so many people. Part of it must also have to do with the diversion of people's social brains from local and irl toward more distant concerns.
Helplessness can be seductive if you're living a depressing but comfortable life. You get to enjoy a sense of moral superiority without taking responsibility for anything. You're affirmed in taking refuge in whatever soothing or sedating amusements you're inclined to fill your time with, while admiring the impressive person you could and would be if it weren't for all those factors beyond your control. Maybe this plays a role in political trauma addiction?
I'm currently reading this post, but... where did PTSD come from, then? I thought that it was ~first recognized in veterans of WW1, so the reasons why that blog offers don't seem to hold up if that's the case.
"I tend to think the difference lies in part on the moral weight placed on warfare"
My understanding was that the countries and soldiers went into WW1 with tremendous gusto to protect/expand their country or allies. Nobody considered it a necessary evil, at least at the start.
"But I also suspect that the raw ubiquity of the experience mattered too."
War was still pretty common at that point, and WW1 itself was so all-encompassing that it seems like everyone they knew would either have died or understand it themself, and they would have known their comrades from before as well (I believe WW1 was the end of putting everyone from 1 town in the same unit, as some towns lost their entire young adult male population).
"Moreover, these societies tended to have rituals surrounding the transition out of war."
If this is the case, when did it stop and why? If medieval Europe had these rituals, why not the Europe of 1918, which was still very Christian?
Was WW1 just so overwhelmingly horrible, with so many deaths in such horrible and hopeless conditions (e.g. trench warfare and war of attrition), continued over such a long and continuous time period (ancient armies typically couldn't do much in winter or fight continuously for months), and at such a scale and death rate (maybe you observe literally every other man in your age group in your town and the surrounding towns die in the first few months), that it just completely overwhelmed all of these mechanisms? No placebo ritual, no pre-existing belief in the glory of war, could overcome such an experience? And there was nobody to talk to, because they were all dead?
"I'm currently reading this post, but... where did PTSD come from, then? I thought that it was ~first recognized in veterans of WW1, so the reasons why that blog offers don't seem to hold up if that's the case."
World War One was the first 24/7/365 war. If you study e.g. the American Civil War, it's all about the Battle of X and the Battle of Y and the Battle of Z, and when you look them up X and Y were over in an afternoon and Z was the Big One that lasted *three whole days*. Which makes for a very scary afternoon, or three days, but the rest of the time you're just marching or camping out in the woods or getting dysentery or whatever. Sieges could last longer, but they were mostly just tedium while they were happening.
Then you get to World War One, and you look up "Battle of the Somme" in wikipedia, and the first thing in the stat block is "date: 1 July 1916 – 18 November 1916 (140 days)". And the other 225 days of the year are spent hunkering down in a trench wondering when the nightly harassment by mortar fire is going to commence. Nobody had the industrial logistics to support anything like that until about the 20th century.
Things people can endure for an afternoon or three days, they may not be able to endure for months on end. Years is probably right out.
Probably also relevant that for most of human history, the danger in war was of a type that you could *do something about*. Yes, there's a man on a big scary horse riding towards you with a long pointy stick, but you've got a long pointy stick of your own and a good shield as well. You are the captain of your fate, or at least the lieutenant of your fate; there's things you can do that make a difference.
Then you get to the months leading up to the Somme, and every night a dozen mortar bombs fall around you, and maybe one of them will land right in your section of the trench and maybe it won't, but there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
All armies in WW1, as far as I'm aware, rotated troops out of combat regularly. Even if the battles could go on for 140 days, no individual soldier would fight for anywhere near that length of time.
WWI troop "rotations" were from front-line trenches to second-line trenches to nominal "reserve" trenches, and back. And even the reserve trenches were usually within artillery range.
If I recall "Storm of Steel" correctly, the only times Junger wasn't at the front were when he was recovering from wounds, or going to whatever the Germans called OCS. I think he got to visit his home town once, for two whole weeks out of four years of war; I don't recall whether that was coincident with a period of convalescence.
>>>[Part 4] does not apply to exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or pictures, unless this exposure is work-related.
>>>Did someone prove it was a natural law that you can only be traumatized by seeing a story on TV if it’s for work? Or is this another unprincipled compromise?
Great article, and good point, but here's some potentially useful anecdotal material:
In Google Search it used to be that you could go work in Zurich, which was attractive, but you'd work on the safe search team, and they'd retire you from it after a year, because they determined that any more than that caused serious damage.
Looking at the really bad stuff that Google filters out of search results directly causes observable PTSD. I think. And I think this is what they're getting at, not a natural law but an experientially determined special case.
A regular person with a regular breakable brain could and probably would look away when it felt like too much, but if it was your job, and you felt a moral obligation to do it because it was helping mitigate the problem for everyone else, you probably wouldn't look away when you should.
... And it seems like some of the problem here is that regular people have been convinced that doomscrolling is their job and moral obligation.
(Edit: I changed "regular people have decided" to "regular people have been convinced that")
This line of argument reminded me of a quote I keep in my quotes file:
"Outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but over time devour us from the inside out. And it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure. We prefer think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy involuntary reaction to negative stimuli thrust upon us by the world we live in, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it’s a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again.
"And, as with all vices, vast and lucrative industries are ready to supply the necessary material. It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulses to judge and punish and get us all riled up with righteous indignation.”
- Tim Kreider, "Isn't It Outrageous?" in the NYT
I know that's not quite the mechanism that Scott proposes here. In Kreider's essay, this behavior is about the "high" of righteous indignation; in Scott's, it's about trauma and re-enactment.
I think the best formulation about the effect of politics is that it fucks people up.
My training in psychology was old-school, and I was taught that PTSD was essentially shell-shock, and that events that caused the same syndrome in people who were not in combat had the same characteristics as combat: violence & injury, or danger of injury or death far beyond what most people ever experience — suddenness & unexpectedness — situation in which you have virtually no power to protect yourself. PTSD symptoms were things that you mostly do not see in other disorders: nightmares, flashbacks, avoidance of innocuous things that were reminders of the trauma, desperate efforts to push the memory out of awareness, loss of the basic sense of everydayness and reasonable safety we walk around with, a weird sense of numbness and separateness. Had a training with famous psychologist Donald Meichenbaum who described some of his cases, and all were caused by events involving a combat-level of horrific violence: prisoners who had been tortured; a truck driver who had had to brake suddenly, and when he did a steel rod from his cargo broke through the back of his cab and went all the way through the skull of his hitchhiker; a woman who accidentally shot her daughter.
While I have no doubt that other sorts of bad experiences can do terrible damage to people that can last a lifetime, it seems to me that there really is something unique about the damage done by combat-like experiences. I myself have had 2 experiences that probably make it into the less severe end of that category, and both caused a unique cluster of symptoms. The first occurred when I was about 12. I witnessed a young guy who had had a motorcycle accident lying in the street with a terribly mangled leg, screaming like I did not know it was even possible to scream. For quite a long time afterwards I had dreams of the event, and also extremely vivid involuntary replays of the memory when I was awake. I did not like looking at the part of the road where the guy had lain. And I felt weird all the time . It was pretty much the way the Harry Potter dementors made people feel — like I would never be happy again. I couldn’t get away from the dark glimpse I’ve gotten of somebody’s agony, the knowledge that that could happen to anyone.
The second incident happened when I was an adult. The electricity was out, and I lit my little backpacking stove in the bathroom to make a cup of tea. Saw that the rubber ring on the tank was on fire, and realized that was going to lead to the pressurized gas exploding out of the tank. Started to reach for the knob that would shut off the tank, then changed my mind and yanked my hand back. A nanosecond later the ring burned through and stove turned into a giant blowtorch and lit parts of my bathroom on fire. I was unhurt and the fire department put out the fire quickly so that the damage was not too bad. But for about a week I could not sleep, and kept having involuntary replays of the incident, plus involuntary imaginings of what would have happened if I hadn’t yanked my hand back at the last moment. I had to leave work on a couple of afternoons because I simply could not pay attention to what people were saying — my mind was completely taken up by replays of the event, and of the event that had almost happened. And I had again that same feeling of no longer being in the land of the living.
These 2 events actually would not make it onto the list of the worst things I’ve been through. They were shocking and grisly, but unlike the things on the Really Bad list, they did not damage my self esteem, or my feeling of fellowship with other people, and they did not involve a loss. However, they caused a syndrome that the worst things in my life have not.
I really think there is a good case for reserving a special word for the syndrome some people get after sudden shocking, grisly life-or-death events. If you want to use the term PTSD for the effects of a much broader class of harmful events, that’s OK I guess, but then you need a new word for the special class of harmful events that get stuck on replay in the mind, and cause that dementor-bled feeling. I don’t think politics causes anything remotely like that experience. Politics just fucks us up
Eremolalos, I want you to know your comments are the most consistently insightful, unique and interesting of the ACX commentariat. If there were a subscribe function just for comment sections, you'd be on my shortlist.
“ So for example, in 1979 some psychologists asked partisans to read pairs of studies about capital punishment (a controversial issue at the time), then asked them to rate the methodologies on a scale from -8 to 8. Conservatives rated the pro-punishment study at about +2 and the anti-execution study as about -2; liberals gave an only slightly smaller difference the opposite direction.”
I know this is nitpicky, and doesn’t invalidate the broader point, but the above is actually a perfectly valid example of bayesian reasoning. Suppose I believe P(death penalty reduces crime) = 0.8, that 30% of studies on any given topic are flawed, and that all good studies will be accurate but flawed studies always return the wrong result. Thus, if a study agrees with me the probability that it is correct is 0.7*0.8/(0.7*0.8 + 0.3*0.2) = 0.9, so only a 10% chance that it is flawed, while my estimation that the death penalty is effective is also now 90%, because this is wrong if and only if the study is flawed.* On the other hand, if I encunter a study which contradicts my prior, I calculate the probaiblity of the study being flawed is 0.3*0.8/(0.3*0.8 + 0.7 * 0.2) = 0.63, meaning a 63% chance the study is flawed, but also only a 63% chance that I am right about the death penalty. So studies which contridict my priors are about 6 times more likely to be flawed than studies which don’t.
Of course, in practice I doubt the particpants updated their beliefs about the death penalty at all, but this was also rational. Given they were in a lab, and that they probablly rightly suspected relavent information about the studies was being withheld, the optimal strategy would be “evaluate studies based on my priors, because I lack a better way to do so, but don’t update in the way the studies would otherwise suggest.” Not that they were thinking this, but human behavior often comes closer to what the math would say is optimal than their concious thoughts would lead you to believe.
*this isn’t very realistic, which is why I orignally modeled flawed studies as random, but that makes the math harder to follow
I was thinking that something along those lines could explain trapped priors. It's our lizard brain's attempt to do Bayesian reasoning, pretty much getting it right (!) at each step, but getting the final assembly of the pieces wrong.
The step where it goes wrong is taking those evaluations of which study is right / which is flawed, and using *those* to update the priors. My slight existing confidence one way on the death penalty means that a pair of opposing studies looks like slight evidence in favor of my established position, and presto the feedback loop begins.
> persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event
This is "safe spaces", I think? Not in the original sense, but in the sense of "anyone with possibly Republican-leaning views must be banished from the entire campus and all speakers vetted beforehand". Also, the kind of person that thrived in pre-Musk twitter but has now quit in disgust, because the previous owners had figured out that one way to maximise engagement/retention was to not confront you with people or ideas you don't want to hear.
Regarding PTSD before the era of Van der Kolk: an interesting data point comes from Kate Summerscale's book The Haunting of Alma Fielding. The setting is 1930s Britain, everyone knows that a catastrophic war is just round the corner, and people need outlets for their anxiety. No-one has heard of PTSD yet (shell shock maybe, but you don't get that from living in London). But, polite society does believe in the supernatural, and the title character expresses her trauma (as we'd call it in modern terms) in hauntings, apparitions and becoming a medium.
To quote one review: "Nandor Fodor - a Jewish-Hungarian refugee and chief ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical research - begins to investigate. In doing so he discovers a different and darker type of haunting: trauma, alienation, loss - and the foreshadowing of a nation's worst fears. As the spectre of Fascism lengthens over Europe, and as Fodor's obsession with the case deepens, Alma becomes ever more disturbed."
You bring up complex PTSD in passing, but at times approach political trauma in this post as if there is a discrete initial traumatic event that later symptoms and retraumatization stem from. I'd like to point out that societal and environmental sources of trauma often last over long periods of time. In my experience, the people who are most passionate about the discourse are currently in horrible situations, not responding to them after the fact. If I look at my own history I became more chill online about religion and gender-related issues after I moved out of the Bible Belt, and again after I stopped living with my mother. (There are a bunch of confounding factors there, of course, both moves also marked significant changes in my lifestyle.) The strategies for dealing with ongoing trauma look different from the response to trauma's aftermath.
Separately: you mention but don't go into self-harm as a cause of addiction to trauma. I am aware that I live in a bubble of mental illness but I do think self-harm accounts for some of the more dramatic cases of that condition known as Terminally Online Disorder. I don't know comorbidity rates but it isn't controversial that depression and trauma can go hand in hand, and if you want to make yourself miserable on purpose digging deep into the blogs of people who hate your in-group is a fantastic way to do it.
Yeah, I mention that briefly because I don't really understand self-harm, I feel nervous talking about it without understanding it, and lots of people think the textbook example of self-harm (cutting) involves getting literal pain endorphins, which doesn't apply as well to politics.
But the person I use as my example is probably the person you're thinking of too, and it's pretty striking!
I think self-harm is a variant of what's going on in some cultures where people who have lost a loved one rend their garments, scream & jump into the grave. It's an enactment of the unbearableness of what the mourner is feeling. In cultures where it is taken that way, it probably brings some relief to the mourner. They feel they have managed to communicate the depth of the anguish. They have let it out. Now the other mourners can share in the task of bearing the unbearable. People who cut themselves are doing the same enactment -- and perhaps feel that the universe at least gets it now, or that various imagined others, if they could see the cutting, would at last grasp the size of the cutter's pain. Many I have talked to about cutting describe it as a way of letting out the pain, and say they feel calmer afterwards.
Have you never used the intentional infliction of pain as a way to focus your mind? Not necessarily anything damaging, just stuff like pressing a fingernail into flesh. Or have you tried and found that it doesn't do anything for you?
I'm generally not a fan of Big Diagnostic turning every behavior at every standard deviation from the mean a diagnosable condition, but I think you're onto something here.
I think I had trauma around growing up gay (among other things). Being born in 1993 and realizing my orientation around 2003 I was old enough to where I guess it felt like there was a lot of ambient anti-gay sentiment. I'm aware many people clearly think this is absurd, and should objectively not be traumatizing.
Probably legalization of gay marriage 'cured' this trauma but also became a sort of obsession, and finding out someone voted against it (especially a younger person) would feel deeply violating in a way where it felt somewhat rape-adjacent in my mind. It was like they wanted to remove autonomy and dignity from me, in a very personal way and for no clear reason, and that was layered on top of the other stigma-related trauma I had around my sexual orientation. The trauma says “GET AWAY FROM THE HOMOPHOBIA! FIND SAFETY!!!” but it feels like you can’t do that if it’s the law of your country.
I think tho thankfully with legalization in Western countries and things settling down I've become center-left slightly anti-woke (I'm also a cis white man). The gay marriage thing, in terms of its psychic meaning, can easily be interpreted as "then society decided homophobia was bad", and I think this allowed me to move on. Maybe I’m fortunate.
I only seem to get traumatized around things that specifically affect me. I also consume ~no news or social media which seems to have palpably improved my mental health.
The Latvian pine slug (Album ashkeniger) is a large and rare species of slug that lives in the forests of Latvia, Pskov Oblast (formerly part of the Soviet Union). It is the largest land slug in Europe, reaching up to 30 cm in length; being slightly longer than the Turkish giant slug and Russian tundra snail. Male snails are slightly larger but with smaller nervous systems compared to females. It feeds exclusively on fresh and locally sourced organic matter. Its shell is dark grey with a distinct “cracked” texture, marked with white spots vaguely resembling the letter “Z”. It is also known as the grey cracker slug or the Latvian japper.
The life cycle of the Latvian pine slug is complex and intriguing. All individuals are born as males, with some transitioning to females as they mature. The trigger for this process is unclear; debate is ongoing whether this is genetically predetermined or influenced by the sex ratio of the population. The male slug aggressively pursues females and repeatedly attempts to initiate copulation. As the female is smaller in size, the male eventually corners her and deposits his sperm. She then lays up to 200 eggs in moist soil or under logs. The eggs hatch after a few weeks: slug parental care is infrequent and highly variable between subspecies, seemingly having substantial effects on the fitness of its offspring.
The slug is abundantly found, but may be threatened by climate change as increased drought spells would lead to desiccation of the eggs and massive population drops. However, some researchers suggest that the slugs would simply adapt by migrating and laying eggs in moister areas.
can't even talk about slugs without somehow involving Russia... males being less intelligent than females... transitioning... rape culture... climate change... migration...
why are the media paying so much attention to this perverted liberal mollusc that attacks our values and corrupts our children?
This resonated with me particularly given my experience with my dad and brother who got into Rush Limbaugh early. I remember being with my dad and hearing Limbaugh repeating over and over again "Liberals HATE YOU! They HATE YOU!" Like a mantra. It's forcing a trapped prior. Any disagreement if with them if you're not part of that isn't just a disagreement. It's reinforcing that "liberals hate you and don't respect you". It's not about facts anymore. It's about reliving that.
> they find listening a politically discordant opinion is as unpleasant as (let’s say) a claustrophobic person sitting in an enclosed space.
If only that was all of the problem. The problem is they find the knowledge that somebody, somewhere on campus (or even off campus) is listening to a discordant opinion is equally intolerable. It's like a claustrophobic person that thinks there should be no enclosed spaces in the universe, at all.
> imagine having to sit through a six-week diversity training workshop and give the answers the lecturer wants or else you’ll fail
The correct analogy would be "imagine somebody giving a diversity training where the participation is completely voluntary and you free to not go there at all, but you still are offended by the fact that somebody goes there". Which, admittedly, happens, but I think less frequently than the original one.
That sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Imagine it: you're standing with your friends and family, listening to Sorbin happily recounting the massacre of Huguenots in nearby cities, and calling on the people of Orleans to band together and go door-to-door killing every Huguenot family. People are cheering — even some people you called trusted friends.
Maybe you fear for yourself or someone you love, from this massacre or from later retaliation. Maybe you have no personal fear, but you hate murder and love peace, out of piety or humanistic principles or plain old kindness.
I have no trauma from the 16th-century French civil wars, but I find that awful to think about. I'm distressed by the thought that it happened in real life, and more distressed by analogues that are happening now rather than the distant past. In my opinion, that's a perfectly normal reaction to someone calling for, and others cheering for, a massacre.
Politically discordant opinions aren't just about what colours to put on campaign posters and whether "person of left-handedness" is more polite; they're very often matters of life and death for thousands or millions.
SSC post "Not just a mere political issue" (March 2013) discusses this in more detail: it's kind of odd that we can just set aside some of these disagreements. That's mostly a good thing — I don't want a civil war. But it's hardly surprising that we often won't.
> Ancient warriors apparently didn’t get PTSD. Everything about this claim is still controversial, but the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that they had a narrative in which war was heroic and inspiring, not traumatizing. I think this story is backed up by cross-cultural comparisons and research on depression: thinking you’re supposed to feel traumatized is a risk factor for problematic trauma symptoms.
Poverty in the US seems PTSD coded as well. I've never experienced poverty, so maybe this is my ignorance talking, but my parents and aunts and uncles all did. Like third-world, grim meathook poverty including death from preventable illnesses, not having enough to eat, and the random bout of horrific violence. When they escaped they lived as illegal immigrants in another country. Don't get me wrong, they weren't fleeing the Khmer Rouge or anything, but it was closer to that than US poverty. And... as far as I can tell, none of them have PTSD from it. They're not supposed to feel traumatized by this, because everyone went through this, so... they're fine?
Meanwhile a bunch of friends here in the US grew up in relatively cushy (but probably still bad) first-world poverty and they seem scarred for life from it. They're "supposed to" feel traumatized by it, so they are.
Psychologist here. Several decades ago, trauma was thought of as the modern term for shellshock -- the state some people fell into after combat. It was thought to occur outside of combat under conditions where someone had a shocking, terrifying experinece, one far worse than most people experience : Violent beatings and rapes, torture, being involved in some ghastly accident where you or the people you know are mutilated, etc. Anyhow, PTSD is common after combat, but way less than 50% of people develop it. So even PTSD defined very strictly is something that occurs to a minority of people.
Here's a theory: maybe the reason so many people feel traumatised is that society's just got much bigger than any human mind can track, meaning that we feel -- often accurately -- that our lives are at the mercy of impersonal forces we can't hope to control. Look at all the worry about AI taking our jobs, for example -- lots of people seem to agree that this is a worrying prospect, but nobody says "Well, let's just stop producing advanced AIs, problem solved." It's like technological development has gained a momentum of its own, and can't be stopped even if there's broad societal agreement that it's bad. (Aside: yes, I know not everybody thinks AI research is bad; my point is that, even among those who think it is, nobody seems to consider "don't develop AIs that will put people out of jobs" to be a feasible solution.) Or look at the economy. Even experts disagree on what is actually good for economic growth, or whether a given step to boost the economy will be good for actual people; from the perspective of an ordinary person, "the economy" might as well be some kind of capricious Lovecraftian god, which could choose to make you unemployed tomorrow for no reason whatsoever. As I understand it, perceived lack of control is a risk factor in being traumatised -- hence, for example, the theory that PTSD first became prevalent in the Great War because soldiers were spending so much time sitting in trenches getting shelled, without being able to make even token retaliation. So maybe a perceived lack of control over how our lives turn out is partly responsible for why everybody seems so crazy nowadays.
(Note 1: I'm aware that out-of-control events have always been a risk -- a medieval peasant might get his crops destroyed by the blight, or burnt by an invading army. But at the day-to-day level, most of his life would be lived among the same villagers he'd always known, people whom he'd know quite well, so there wouldn't have been this impersonal quality which we find in modern life. Even if he was a serf and only partially free, his lord was a specific individual whom he could appeal to, at least in principle, if he didn't like how his village was being run. You can't appeal to the global economy if you don't like how its affecting your community. Even appealing to your MP, or local equivalent, is unlikely to have much effect, and the chain between you writing to your MP and meaningful structural economic change occurring is going to be much longer and more convoluted than the chain between you petitioning your lord to do something and your lord doing it.)
(Note 2: This theory would also explain why things seem to have got so much crazier since the Covid lockdowns. "The government can and does repeatedly shut down society for indefinite amounts of time, at unpredictable intervals, with virtually no prior warning" is like a textbook case of a situation where ordinary people lack control over their own lives.)
Another, not necessarily exclusive, theory: Human beings evolved to live in small tribes, probably no larger than Dunbar's Number (150 or so) and quite possibly significantly smaller. We also evolved in a world where we didn't regularly get news from far away. The result is that, whenever we hear about anything happening, we subconsciously react as if it pertains to a tribe of 150 or so people, as opposed to a nation of 150 million. Consequently, bad news takes on much more salience than it objectively deserves. For example, say you read the newspapers regularly, and every week they report some new murder happening. Now, in a country of tens or hundreds of millions, one murder a week really isn't worth worrying about. In a tribe of 150 people, though, it very much is -- that's literally a third of the tribe being murdered within a year! And because our brains still think we're living in a small tribe, we instinctively react as if we're in the 1/3-of-the-tribe-murdered-by-this-time-next-year situation, rather than the tiny-murder-rate-not-worth-worrying-about situation. Keep this going for long enough, and it's no wonder everybody ends up paranoid and jumpy.
We also live in a world where many of the "people" we encounter are digital representations, some of real people, some of imaginary ones: TV, movies, video games, & now chatbots. t's likely that anyone who keeps the TV on a lot or games logs more time per day with virtual people than they do with real. I don't think we thrive in that setup.
True! On the bright side, Microsoft discontinued its "Clippy". We could have been in a world where an intrusive animated paperclip attempted (incompetently) to be "helpful" to everyone on Windows... At least we aren't forced into continuously interacting with _that_. :-)
While it was a pretty minor one compared to what Scott personally experienced I actually did feel a period of secondhand trauma during the nyt incident.
Yeah! I stopped paying attention to the news several years ago, (sometime around Trumps first impeachment, I had TDS before that.) The news media now makes money by pushing your buttons so that tomorrow you'll come back for more. I encourage everyone to get off that tread mill, and pay attention to what is going on around you. (locally)
There’s a scene in the movie Dream Scenario (minimal spoilers) where Nicholas Cage’s students have to undergo a group cognitive behavioral session consisting of Cage standing on the other side of the gymnasium, and taking a few steps closer to them at a time - the goal being he can stand right in front of then without freaking them out.
I think this basically needs to happen with voters.
I suspect that this definition of trauma proves too much and that basically anything could be called trauma by these lights.
Take going to the grocery store (I work at a grocery store, so it's the first example that comes to mind). Anecdotally, people are worse at math in grocery stores than elsewhere, given some of the questions that I've been asked about people's receipts. The people whom I discuss politics with sound a good deal less paranoid than customers, who are sometimes convinced that we're trying to overcharge them or think that the credit card reader is stealing their information. Unlike political trauma, people physically experience going to a grocery store. Not everybody experiences being hypervigilant, irritable, and persistently negative as a result of grocery shopping, just like not everybody experiences that about politics, but a lot of people do. Some people avoid the trauma by doing Instacart, but others become unhealthily obsessed with comparison shopping.
Are grocery stores generally traumatic? I find the idea ridiculous, but many of Scott's reasons for politics being traumatic apply equally well or better to shopping. Maybe the people I know are just bizarrely well-behaved around politics, though. For that matter, I could make a similar argument about capitalism, communism, sleep (that one makes people really bad at math), school, having children, or loads of other common activities.
The most reasonable conclusion is to reject this redefinition of trauma as an overreach, and so politics aren't traumatic unless you want to hold that basically every activity is traumatic.
I remember when Less Wrong had the policy, Politcs is the Mindkiller. I thought it was so obviously true of American politics (and perhaps one reason that Canadians, as an outside party, were so successful at comedy). But it wasn't true of Canadian politics! Canadians could talk about Conservative vs NDP vs Bloc without all the "all heat, no light" of American politics.
Now Canadian politics has the same mindkiller-ness as Americans. Even discussing American politics causes a lot of (most) Canadians to forget all rationality and go completely tribal.
Am I looking at my youth with rose-coloured (note the U in 'coloured') glasses? I don't think so, but I can't think of a good way to prove it one way or another.
I haven't read it, but I've been curious about it. If correct, that would be another angle on Scott's point.
It's very tempting to assume that Nehls is just crazy, but we're all witnessing people around us being crazy, so something we don't understand is clearly going on.
So, by any chance, would anyone here have an educated opinion on Nehls' view? Obviously right, obviously wrong, sort of correct but completely wrong angle, professional, amateurish, sounds like nonsense for a certain reason - what is it?
Didn't find this post interesting as usual. Felt like I already believed something similar and didn't need to be convinced that many people are traumatized by politics or more generally that politics is overly emotional.
But of course, the topic of improving political discourse is important, so I'm not sure what I'd have preferred. I'm tempted to say a call to action, but IDK if that's Scott's thing. Maybe more speculative prescriptions, beyond consuming less outrage clickbait.
EDIT: Just remembered my speculation about dog whistles--mainstream media takes for granted that every message is optimized, and so any potential ambiguity is necessarily intentional. The average person thinks that's insane. Maybe subtext is real, but not everyone can or will make use of it, so it's wrong to assume.
I'm not convinced by this article; the usual political nonsense doesn't feel like trauma, emotionally.
It seems more lime: to demonstrate our allegiance to the in-group, we publicly denounce the outgroup. This is east to do when the outgroup is Trump.
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Those real life crime channels seem strange to me. What are we doing, watching these documentaries about horrible murders?
Maybe there's something of the same quality to Trump coverage. He's enough material for not just an episode, or a series, or a two season DVD boxed set, but an entire tv channel of his crazy criminal antics.
Yeah - it is just motivated reasoning, if being the victim brings you more cultural points than you try to present yourself as the victim. I’ve read that actually everything we say is formulated by a “press secretary”, everything is motivated, but in politics we have more need for the press secretary, because we have more divergent needs. It is rational to be paranoid in politics
The unfortunate Captain Cook failed to ask some obvious questions, beyond oh, how nice, they hunk I'm the God Lono. We may forgive his ignorance of Hawaiian religion. But even if you were only familiar with Christianity, some questions along the lines of, hey what happened to that Jesus guy at the end? Might come to mind.
.and so to Trump, who seems worryingly unconcerned with how the story ends.
So, he's competing to be elected as some kind of God-King, locally known as "The President". In his case, the role of the candidate seems to be to be as rituallly impure as possible, violating the sacred taboos of kingship. In the religion of the United States of America, intercourse with a young virgin girl is regarded as maximally ritually polluting.
So, you have this guy, you set him up to be as impure as possible, you elect him God-king ... then what? Does a large wicker Whitehouse lie ahead?
I suffer a lot from this, especially since my latest smartphone now receives automatic news-feeds. I wish I could just stop reading them but they are addictive and I always fall prey to the (lame?) excuse of wanting to stay informed. So I end up getting worked up a lot (being a social conservative, but not a particularly economic one, I get the feeling - probably not wrong? - that I am part of a vanishing minority these days). I want to feel that my point of view is rational, that I am not the crazy one. Seeing a bunch of news articles which constantly disagree with you, "triggers" you because suddenly you are the crazy one! But I would stop short of calling all of this trauma (that certainly seems - as some have mentioned here - offensive to people with real trauma). And I am definitely convinced that media in general is purposefully trying to wratchet up our levels of outrage for profit-seeking reasons (for which we should all be outraged!).
My attempt at a remedy for 2024: put the f***ing phone down and enjoy the real world more and try hard to believe that the other side means well, even when I think they are dead wrong. Lastly, deal with everyone around me (and myself) as an individual, not part of any group. See how it works out for me...
[epistemic status: weakly informed speculation] If we do accept that PTSD exists now but not in the past, could that just be because modern wars have all kinds of skull-rattling explosions going on and ancient wars didn't? Didn't PTSD used to be called "shell shock"? WWII was pretty valorized and I believe those soldiers still suffered from PTSD.
Shit like loss aversion, the brains conflation of psychic and physically traumatic pain, and Toni Morrison saying it doesn’t matter if u your fear is real, just if you really fear,
Has had me think similarly, and the exhaustion, and the initial turn to, fear-campaigning in major US elections is the kinda pattern I’d look to see this kinda society sick
Interesting approach, I agree there seems to be quite a strong fit between the psychology of political partisanship and this concept of trauma addiction. Thanks for introducing that this aspect of reenactment, btw, I don't think it's so well known.
Regarding section VI on the science of trauma, what I've read about trauma was mostly from Bessel Van Der Kolk, Deb Dana and associated figures, and IIRC the psychological description they give is a bit more detailed than just a system of trapped priors. The kind of trauma they talk about seems to be primarily a failure of integration; the stimulus is so strong, so overwhelming, that the parts of the brain that keep track of our "larger I", with its wider identity, history, self-narratives, etc., more or less shut down, and one is unable to integrate the event. The practical result is that the event never becomes part of normal memory, it remains in a kind of eternal present, so that recalling it literally amounts to reliving it, right here and now. This inhibits the whole regular way in which we normally allow events (even strikingly bad ones) to fade away with time, and to become subsumed into a larger self-story. I don't recall the exact details, but this probably maps pretty well to different areas of the brain suddenly switching off or disconnecting from each other, probably as an evolutionarily ancient response to overwhelming danger activated at the amygdala.
A close friend of mine (probably) has "complex PTSD" due to extremely incompetent parenting, and when it comes up, it's a kind of disconnection, a dissociation, which is barely perceptible from the outside because he has learned to hide it. Much of the therapy he has done has been about noticing how this internal shutdown happens, and how it seems to happen at a very low level of the nervous system. I don't know if the notion of priors even applies at such a level - maybe it does, but still, there is something qualitatively completely different between that and a relatively simple trapped cognitive prior that dogs or liberals or the Catholic Church or whatever are evil.
Maybe what I'm trying to talk about is trauma proper, and the craziness of politics is only trauma-adjacent, or trauma-lite. From your description, I'd say the shoe fits... at least from what I've seen at a distance, because personally I find myself rather incapable of being invested in politics of any kind!
I think in the future the acquiescence to the belief that “words and opinions can be violence, and people have a legitimate right to be protected from language they may find harmful” will be regarded as the gravest error Western societies have made culturally over the past 20 years
Have you considered comparing politics to OCD instead of trauma? A political person who is addicted to the news because being well-informed can somehow prevent their country from sliding into dictatorship does not seem too different from someone who obsessively washes their hands out of a fear of germs.
Cherrypicking some definitions from [this table](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK56452/), political thoughts (at least about the other side) could be viewed as obsessions ("persistent ideas, thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced as inappropriate or intrusive and that cause anxiety and distress. The content of the obsession is often perceived as alien and not under the person's control.") and getting into fruitless political debates seems to fit the criteria for compulsions ("repetitive behaviours or mental acts that are carried out to reduce or prevent anxiety or distress and are perceived to prevent a dreaded event or situation").
There are of course notable differences. Political thoughts and behavior can also be motivated by hope, whereas definitions of OCD revolve about negative things. In OCD people usually think they themselves are in some way contaminated, in politics the others are at fault, but that seems less awkward than relying on traumatic re-enactment, which I hope is more of a fringe phenomenon (it sounds awful).
I've written a speculative essay about trauma being the best way to understand the phenomena of ideology, political or otherwise - An ideology being the memetic coordination mechanism for culturally embodied stuckness. Wrote about it here: https://primatesofcosmos.substack.com/p/clenchings-of-body-and-mind
Ok hear me out: maybe the problem is caused by the political system and improving it will end the cycle of trauma...
It annoys me a lot that seemingly the vast majority of people will complain about a common problem but be either uninterested or even hostile towards discussing systemic solutions. Often they prefer individual solutions, i.e., people or groups who cause problems should be punished and that's that.
There is exists in this world more than just the United States. By studying other countries, that use other systems, it is possible to figure out what electoral and government systems tend to work the best. You can check with surveys of populaces about how satisfied they are with their system for example, and draw conclusions.
The least traumatised people will be those in countries that are most satisfied with their system.
Or, you know, just ask me: it's proportional parliamentarianism! Or for something more achievable in the short term: ranked choice voting, one state at a time.
It seems like you could start by looking for some countries with no really traumatic upheavals in their political order in the last 30 years or so, right? If you have some country where the coalition shifts periodically between being led by the center-left party or the center-right party, with few radical changes to policy, it seems like there wouldn't be a lot of trauma there.
Metrics I would start with are: voter turnout rate, how closely vote proportion matches seat proportion, average days to government formation, and surveys of voter satisfaction.
I don't know how you would begin to quantify "really traumatic upheavals"...
One thing I think is missing in this analysis is the *magnitude* of the trauma. If we're taking the DSM as a reference point, I note that for PTSD it requires "Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence". And yes, we can recognize that this is not an exhaustive list and that e.g. emotional abuse can qualify, but it would kind of have to be emotional abuse on par with (serious, non-hyperbolic) death threats.
Which doesn't seem to apply to the sorts of "trauma" we're talking about here. Particularly with regard to the hypothesis that the media is causing all of this in its relentless pursuit of eyeballs and clicks. Media, traditional or social, can't kill or injure you, can't sexually assault you, and rarely threatens to kill you in any serious way. It usually even cuts away from graphic images of death or serious injury, and in any event the DSM tells us that, get real, seeing this stuff on TV doesn't count. Unless it's for work-related purposes, somehow.
And I think it used to work this way. The media is just words and (usually tame) images, and we used to consider it at least aspirationally true that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me". Yeah, maybe the *first* time someone calls a white kid "racist" or a black kid the N-word, they go lock themselves in their room for a month. But we used to expect them to learn better, grow out of it, and come back as the sort of person who can e.g. stand up to the New York Times and come away bloody but unbowed.
Now, we've got lots of people experiencing almost crippling levels of "trauma", from things the DSM says don't make the cut for PTSD. And yes, when the media finds someone vulnerable to that sort of thing, they'll pounce on it for the profit they'll make selling those outrage-fixated eyeballs to their advertisers. But there has to be something else that's making so many people fragile enough that they are susceptible in the first place.
And there are some obvious theories as to what that could be, but I distrust obvious, easy answers to hard questions and I think this needs further exploration.
To respond seriously to your very good questions, I fully agree that this needs further exploration, but until that happens I might as well toss my two cents in. (I wonder how much of this is your "obvious theories".)
I think social bonds are a lot more important to most people than the DSM recognizes. I think that real-world social bonds are being replaced by online social bonds. The sheer scale and interconnectedness and online nature of the Internet not only means that we lose track of whose opinions it's important to care about, but also means that it's easier for the opinions of some random person to not only influence you, but more importantly to influence your friends, and so it can actually be important to care about what random people say about you, in a way that is simply not true when walking down the street.
I suspect that when faced with a locus of morality that is external and ever-shifting, people respond by increasing their actions that that bond them to their group, while eroding any internal structure that might get in the way. But that internal structure is also what allows resilience in the face of adversity, most especially when cut off from the group. That's a bit abstract, but I think it explains why people join witch-hunts, because they know that their safety comes from the group. No matter what kind of front they put up, they know deep down that they're not perfect, they could be singled out, and it's only luck that's kept them from being the one who's being burned - luck, and the good opinion of the group, which is why it's so important to passionately call for the burning of that witch over there. And if they've got enough empathy and intelligence, this is going to rip them apart inside. Or who knows, they may eventually come to truly believe that all and only the people accused of witchcraft are witches, updating their beliefs after every new accusation faster than you can replace "Eurasia" with "Eastasia".
Flippantly, this is the Internet. Who **hasn't** seen a few death threats to themselves or some group they're in? Didn't we just have a post that was talking about people advocating for the eradication of all humanity?
Social bonds are extremely important, and they're threatened both by cancelation from the left and by hostility to everyone who doesn't agree from the right.
When you think "death threat" you usually think of the opposition saying, you know, "hey i'm gonna kill you". And sure, most people don't have to deal with that kind of threat on social media. I think the real death threats are actually coming from the *ingroup* - the people reposting every deranged take they see about how [CURRENT ISSUE] is a literal existential threat, the enemy is at the gate, and their days are numbered. I can definitely see this forming a trauma response in some people, especially if they're too young to remember not getting killed by [PREVIOUS ISSUE].
Real death threats are fortunately rare in American civil and political discourse. And they almost never involve people posting or reposting anything, because they almost never happen on the internet. We all live in meatspace. Really. And in order for us to be threatened with death, that death will need to come at us in meatspace so most of the effective channels for delivering the threat are also meatspace.
It's not impossible to use the internet for this purpose. Swatting, for one terrifying example. But, again, a fortunately rare one. But people who are going to be seriously traumatized by "death threats" in the form of nasty emails, are part of the problem.
One of the points that Yoel Roth makes is that it is hard to tell which death threats are serious and which death threats are just people blowing off steam. I don't know whether Roth was traumatized by the death threats against him, but he did move to a new residence every time his home address was posted online. Most members of the online mobs attacking Roth would never consider attacking Roth in meatspace, but it would only take one.
Most of the people who would consider attacking Roth in meatspace, are not going to be so considerate as to send him an email warning him about the fact.
I humbly plead for you to change the post image, due to the following reason:
When I share a post, the image shows up in the embed. Thus, when I share this empathic and humanizing article, the image the recipient sees is the 2016-era "triggered" meme, which is (as the kids say) "right-coded".
Thank you, and yours truly,
- Nicholas Kross
PS: Yes, i can sometimes rdmove the default embed (yes on discord, not when texting). However, the embed makes people more likely to click (image! Yay!) as long as it's not actively turning them away (triggered meme! Boooo, an article I won't read because the image makes it look like a more-stereotypical conservative meme!).
As a result of this article, I've been thinking about Jews and holocaust material.
I know people who go to holocaust museums and watch holocaust movies. I don't do that, my feeling about holocaust museums is "Why would I do that to myself? I haven't even read Maus.
However, I do read a fair amount about the holocaust and I can feel the pull.
It's rather clearly not about learning in the cognitive sense. One holocaust museum (maybe two or three if you have regional interests) should be enough to grasp that the holocaust happened, it was extraordinarily bad, and one should do what one can to flee, fight, and/or prevent holocausts and to help others do so.
At this point, I'm just trying to understand what's going on. Perhaps there's a desire for the sort of learning which causes action combined with a lack of trust that cognitive learning will be enough.
"Very smart people lose basic reasoning abilities when the topic switches to politics. This isn’t just a truism, it’s been demonstrated in formal experiments."
Apart from replicability, the Kahan study doesn't show that politics is the mindkiller -- only that modern US politics is. See Andrew Marshalls comment about Canadian politics.
>Then they will forget to vote because they were tired on Election Day.
For any single individual, voting on election day doesn't make logical sense if their time is worth anything. A single vote has an infinitesimally small chance of changing an election. Even if the single vote does change the election, having one party rather than another in power is likely to have only a small effect on their life. Playing the lottery would a higher expected value.
Funny example. Doing my taxes has been mildly traumatic for me. I should probably pay someone to do them but (like the political news junky?) I feel there's value in being aware of the horrific details.
Great post! Most of the news and comment I read is by Catholics or First Things-style ecumenical conservatives. These folks aren't immune to triggering (John Zmirak got fraud-pilled, as did Ed Peters, Fr Z). Nevertheless I tend to think to the extent that people believe there are important social goals which exist independently of politics, politics just becomes less consequential and less triggering, and things can be discussed fairly rationally. David French vs Sohrab Ahmari on Drag Queens was a difficult debate to watch, but the debate wouldn't have even happened in most cases. Being Christian gave them an opportunity to debate and repair any bridges that got burned in the debate. But I get the feeling something similar is going on for rationalists too.
> imagine having to sit through a six-week diversity training workshop and give the answers the lecturer wants or else you’ll fail
I'm not sure why that's supposed to be a convincing comparison, between being forced to pretend you agree with discordant ideas for six weeks, and merely hearing a discordant opinion or knowing it exists.
At any rate, people will be as reasonable as they must, or as intolerant - as willing to work themselves up into a fanatic frenzy - as they can get away with, depending on which ideology holds power, and can send you into a six week reeducation, or lose you your job.
Another possible factor: if you're in a noisy environment, you have to get louder to be heard.
I'm reminded about a bit in _The Wisdom of Whores_ (a book about international charities trying to help prostitutes) about how a charity can't get attention for what is just a problem, it has to be amplified to sound like an emergency to be noticed.
One way to deescalate it is to stop straw manning. One way to prevent straw manning is a norm of requiring specific receipts whenever anyone makes a claim about what someone else has done or said or believed. Also, avoiding all hyperbole. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Some trauma gurus are now asserting that "capitalism" causes trauma. Others say, "Modern life" is traumatic. Talk about an ever expanding definition of trauma! It's a totalizing ideology that predisposes people to experiencing normal challenges as traumatic assaults.
It was so long substack crashed four times well I was trying to read it. I am now addicted to long posts that crash when I read them and will be expecting more from you
Wouldnt Kevin Simlers old article Crony Beliefs be a sufficient model to explain these behaviors? (except the addiction one, but that one I do not relate to) https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/
In there he writes you have some beliefs because you think they are true, and some because they are socially desirable. The more you use truth-seeking to root out the socially desirable ones, the more you protect them. And it lists behaviors like anger that seem to work exactly like what you describe. I more think when it comes to politics, peoples brain see "aha, this concern a socially desirable belief", not a truth-belief, and therefore runs that program and so sound a bit stupid. And if someone says, no that cannot be true, they get very defensive about it.
The solution Kevin suggests in the article is to create a community of truth-seekers around you
I have just noticed that Geoffrey Miller is very, very angry about those protestors who threw soup at the Mona Lisa; plus certain other protesters I shall avoid explicitly mentioning here.
Conjecture: those protestors are serving approximately the same function for the right as Trump does for the left.
Thank you for writing this. It's very informative.
Question: have you look into the crisis in family court from the same perspective, where a narcissistic/borderline/dark triad individual decompensates ina to persecutory delusion due to the divorce?
Most doctors working in family court do not seem to know any of this.
I have C-PTSD... it actually turned me into an activist and a politician from the age of five onward.
All I can say is that, maybe I'm lucky, my traumatic stimuli were from different political groupings, so I became more-focused on power and dishonesty (I literally describe my trigger as "Hypocrisy in the Face of Harm")... in that I've gone after both the [Not-Really] Left and the [Mythology over Commonsense] Right over all manner of different issues.
I think the most-important thing in terms of being able to make politics less-traumatizing is habituation. Engage with your political enemies, defend them when it comes to things you agree with, and try to respond as much as possible, outside the emotional part of your brain.
Politics is life-and-death... we don't need to add any more emotional up or down regulation to it... there's tonnes there already.
And yeah, listening to those narratives you tell me to turn-off has managed to help me find out who is and is not a good-faith actor. Max Igan trying to show people that transition is a plot to sterilize people was so thinly argued and so dependent on leveraging disgust, that he showed a trans man and a trans woman raising their newborn to 'prove' his point.
There's a guy either lost or hoping you will be or both.
Same with people who talk about immune injury from COVID but won't look at the Cleveland Clinic data...
Heck, to see masks on the faces of people chanting about genocide, when 30 million children died of malnutrition as a result of our response to COVID, and they'd rather focus on 15 thousand, replicates that trauma.
But increasingly, thorugh engagement, I'm habituated... and I think you're right about something else:
I now don't believe the mendacity of the people whose actions outrage me goes unpunished... and I feel better about taking it on as a result.
It seems to me that one factor in whether an experience is "traumatic" is whether it violates one's expectation of how the world is or ought to be. I.e., in an aristocratic warrior culture, aristocratic warriors aren't going to be traumatized by dreadful things happening in battle as those are expected and accepted as part of the structure of the world.
Within that framework, I notice the phrase "lots of people did experience feelings of fear and helplessness around Trump’s election". That's odd because of course one is relatively helpless vis a vis political trends that move away from one's preferences. "XYZ got elected and that's against my interests!" should be considered a *normal* event in life. But for some reason, people expect that they live in a world of people who have their best interests at heart.
This reminds me that Caitlin Flanagan once explained why teenagers are vulnerable: "... and most of all their innocent belief, so carefully nurtured by parents and teachers, that the world rewards kindness and fairness, that there is always someone in authority to appeal to if you are being treated cruelly or not included in something ..." That is, upper-middle-class parents work very hard to ensure their children never interact with people who *don't* have the child's best interests at heart. Needless to say, when the child starts dealing with the Real World, it's a shock.
I think my main update from this is that Scott's lived experience is that people who are really into politics are often actually scared and angered by the stuff they say they are scared and angered by, its not just some kind of performative signaling game about how your are so in-group-pure the out-group burns your mind like a vampire exposed to the sun. Most of my social circle isn't into this stuff, so I guess I wasn't quite sure whether to take these claims seriously.
So this article has me assigning more weight to the emotional distress people experience from politics and modern social media madness in general.
I am less sure that I buy the trauma framing. I am skeptical of the studies mentioned on general principle. They sound to me from the brief description like The Kind Of Thing That Does Not Replicate, never mind being actually correct, which is a higher bar. Every other symptom named seems pretty generic to me?
Is there some kind of actual difference in how you best help or not-hinder people who feel sad and angry and scared due to "trauma" compared to people who feel sad and angry and scared for other generic reasons? If not, I'm not sure if the diagnosis is helpful here, and I don't much buy that it carves reality at a joint in the description either.
Just wondering why you feel a need to argue with "people who believe that no pro-life conservative really cares about fetuses." Who knows whether they do or not, actually? What has become apparent is that they don't 't care at all about women. As evidenced by the many women who have been denied medically necessary abortions, sometimes being told to wait in the hospital parking lot until they go into sepsis or start hemorrhaging. Anti-abortion activists' behavior has given us a big clue about where their priorities lie.
Generally, they do care at least abstractly about women; they just don't believe that such things actually happen, or at least that they won't happen again. You are welcome to say that they are *wrong* about such beliefs, but ... disbelieving inconvenient facts is hardly rare.
A# I said, I'm really skeptical that much politicking can be explained as trauma.
Except, maybe, COViD related craziness. I don't mean trauma from actually getting covid (though I'm sure that exists), more trauma from fear of covid/lockdown isolation. Would seem, a priori, to be potentially traumatic. And we find, that yes, there is a bunch of conspiracist politics around covid.
There was a good post on one of the conspiracy groups in which the guy tells the story of how he came to be involuntarily committed in a psychiatric hospital, during which time he met some new friends, who had some very interesting ideas that he is now about to explain. (This completely breaks the usual model of psychiatry textbooks, that clinical psychosis and political conspiracy theories are entirely different phenomena.@)
This really makes a lot of things fall into place for me. One thing I'm really curious about is why do some people not seem to be susceptible to this pattern? I lean more left-wing (though technically, more anarcho-syndicalist), but don't feel constantly triggered by what strike me as crazy right-wing talking points. I just roll my eyes or feel concerned that this stuff is being distributed. But I don't feel personally triggered by it. What is different about me?
I'm curious about how different this take is from what the psychological/ psychiatric establishment think. As far as I can tell, the mental health profession seems pretty unanimous - the 24/7 news cycle and social media is really bad for you. The topic on politics specifically seems to have gotten a bump mid Jan, from a study from U Toronto.
Anecdotally, a lot of social movements implicitly or explicitly create cult-like conditions, especially on social media. When I was a friendless teenager, I fell prey to radical feminism, and only recovered to be a functioning adult after I somehow succeeded in making friends (despite how poorly I was behaving). The combination of convincing a victim of the hostility of wider society, that the only safe place is within the political movement, and then insane rules intended to foster control over the victims (radfeminism is really really weird about romantic relationships and sex). My radfem phase didn't last long, but I'm now always vigilant when a social or political movement does similar stuff.... And a lot of the fringe online ones do the exact same thing.
So my contribution: we know that cults are traumatizing to their members. Politics is increasingly using cult tactics, incidentally traumatizing people, but due to the reach and inescapability of politics, it's able to do this on a massive scale.
To me, it makes complete sense that people can become obsessed with a source of trauma, even if it is very harmful to their mental health. In fact, it is pretty surprising to me when someone *doesn't* have this reaction.
If you are an ancestral tetrapod and you are nearly killed by a predator, your survival odds go down if you bury your head in the sand and try to think about predators as little as possible. The better response is to become more vigilant against predators from now on. Jumping at shadows is a small price to pay for living another day.
It's a shame that we are prone to being traumatized by events that do not merit this reaction, but our trauma response likely evolved long before the complexities of modern civilization were a twinkle in an australopith's eye.
I searched for the word "identification" in the post and the comments and it did not appear once.
The discussion of the "psychopolitics of trauma" doesn't make sense without talking about identification first. When we just take for granted that people identify with either team red or team blue (or with wokeness or the countermovement, with gender as a spectrum or "two biological sexes", and so on), then we might as well take for granted how all those issues can give rise to trauma. Why not. It obviously affects people, thus it's just about finding an instance where some political issue affects me negatively to the right degree and there you have your trauma.
What is weird about it?
Well, why should some news about some abstract event affect me emotionally at all? People who got scared when Trump become president probably argue that he was about to enact policies that will affect them, eventually. However, it is quite telling to see how people in European countries were triggered, too. Less in number and intensity, but here we need an explanation.
And that explanation is identification. Humans have the tendency (maybe even the need) to become part of a group and make the concerns of the group their own, individual concerns. When he was 8 years old, a friend of mine heard about Germany exporting tanks to other countries and thought "we can't just sell those tanks to other countries, we have to keep these to be stronger then them!". This is a beautiful example of a somewhat naive identification with "team Germany".
Once I identify with some group, I opened the flood gates. All kind of remotely relevant, abstract issues that are being discussed in media, social media, books, and bars might affect me. When I identify with a local transgender activism group, the fact that my national ID card states my biological sex and doesn't leave space to put a gender, might feel like some existential threat. But see: It's because of identification. I worked hard towards this being true. While identification comes naturally and seems to be ubiquitous with humans, it involves a series of decisions and actions. I.e. I don't have to identify with the that local transgender activism group to the degree that I get triggered by my national ID card.
For someone who does not happen to identify with the same group as me, the whole thing just looks like some theater, in which I play a chosen role. And this is what identification really is: a chosen drama. An enactment.
There is no really good reason, why I should identify with "my country", either. When people shout "USA! USA! USA!" they just seem like absolute morons to me. I can't help but to think of the North Korean mass games, or some random football fan (that is soccer fan in American English) who cries when his team looses and feels aggression towards fans of some other club.
**When I identify with some group/cause/institution, I open up the possibility of arbitrary news items affecting me negatively.**
And this is why quite literally everything, can be traumatizing. Construct a traumatizing expression like this:
X = [arbitrary statement here]
I identify with a group that says *not X* and moreover, X is kind of worse than the holocaust.
Someone: X
Me: Someone made me suffer! Members of my identified group: look!
Astralcodexten: Interesting, politics seem to be traumatizing. How come?
So maybe we should talk about the need for identification. I would suggest that there is a fairly linear spectrum from strong/healthy to weak/sick where the on the strong/healthy side, the need for identification is controlled. When you are on the strong/healthy side, you might still choose to support a football club and you might even find yourself shouting "USA! USA! USA!", but once your team looses you will remind yourself that watching football is your leisure activity and any negative emotion is just part of the rollercoaster ride that you opted in to.
A less neurotic version of Jordan Peterson probably wouldn't have been scared to hell by the geopolitics that played out during his youth.
The same healthy distance can be applied to the politics of your country. People on the strong/healthy side of the spectrum differentiate between love for their home country and identification with the political system. This healthy differentiation, in principle, can go so far that people are can identify with team red or team blue (or with Atheism or Christianity, or ...) and even have a fair debate with some opponent. I can even have fun and jump into a debate just for the sake of it, and advocate the opposite of my personal believes.
So, how about rephrase the question "why are politics apparently traumatic" to "what makes people unhealthily seek identification with some group"?
I agree with Scott that the trauma is (probably) real. It's a subjective experience, anyway. But: Your traumatizing experiences are a matter of choice nowadays. You can believe that you were born this way or the other and thus have to identify with a certain group, because otherwise you are left completely disenfranchised and have to suffer or die because of how bad the world is. Interestingly enough, you can also stop believing that.
You would arguably be a better trans-rights activist, a better republican, a better atheist when you could keep the reins in your hand while playing your chosen role and engaging in the respective drama.
----
So a bit of a scope drift, but is there an actual answer to the question of "what makes people unhealthily seek identification with some group"?
I gave a partial answer already: I think there are healthy people who don't do that. Remains the question where the all sick people come from. Have they always been there? Isn't the whole triggering and polarizing a recent phenomenon?
There are plenty of ways to destroy the healthy self in an individual and there probably has been an army of neurotics during most of the history of mankind. Globalized communication, e.g. the sharing of ideas beyond your family dinner table and the monthly townhall meeting of your village of 5000 inhabitants gives the neurotics a new outlet.
A clickbaity title has quite literally viral characteristics: A virus is not a living organism. A virus is just barely enough to manipulate a living organism to reproduce the virus. Similarly, a clickbait article isn't actually a message or some shared knowledge. And like biological organisms live inside some balance with viruses and other parasites, communication in the modern society is a a balance between knowledge sharing and parasitic contents. And like with viruses, it's probably not a good idea to try to eliminate all parasitic content and cleanse modern, global communication. Rather we should rely on the resilience of actual communication (like we rely on the immune system of the human body).
Politics is in general a domain where it's both high stakes and low ability to control outcomes, which is bad for mental health, and when you combine it with a viewpoint that everything is out of your control and catastrophization is rewarded makes it even worse.
This is why I generally advocate for more depoliticization of our lives, and why it's so important to have an internal locus of control.
I stumbled across it and I want to share why it was meaningful to me,
A few weeks ago my wife were threatened at gun point, this was the first time it ever happened to us. An arrest was made and the DA releases the guys 2 days later. We were fine not knowing. A few days pass and my wife is driving home and sees the man taking out the trash from 5 feet away and she relives the trauma.
We were outraged and felt wronged and naturally I had some questions, due to the constraints of politics and the current justice system in California our voices remained unheard. To my wife and I this was a blow.
This week we have had our fair share of blow ups amongst each other with both is us so politically enraged that we felt helpless.
We had to choose to mentally accept defeat and move on a put in place a foundation to focus on the positive things we have control over and how we can positively affect our lives going forward without the jaded thoughts of injustice.
I agree with you and I do think that it takes a very well informed person to accept defeat and mentally block out the trauma. Sometimes the people who experience the trauma are able to make positive change but like you said, it is far too easily to become too consumed and let the traumatic event take over your life and affect your success in others.
I am really annoyed that "trauma" is such a vague word, basically it just means "damage".
>Ancient warriors apparently didn’t get PTSD.
A lot of people think a large part of trauma is partially about cultural stories, like people get raped in a Christian culture and now they are "defiled".
Our culture used to be religious, used to think suffering is normal, the religion centered on suffering on the cross, they thought it builds character, or divine punishment, Caths like Mother Theresa thought it atones for our sins so did not like painkillers, the Jewish stories revolved around waiting for the next persecution, wearing headgear so you don't have to look for it when the time to run comes again etc.
Today we expect happiness so much, we medicalize unhappiness. I am officially depressed, but really just unhappy. My parents entire life, like most of humankinds entire life revolved around trying to not be poor. I am not poor, so what should I do with my life? No goals and they did not teach me how to have other goals than this very obvious and self-evident one. I am like a lion in a zoo, well fed, comfortable, why do anything? So I am unhappy. Most people most of the time were doing things because poverty cracked the whip over them. Lacking that, not everybody can find goals.
Perhaps middle-income is a trap? If I had ten million in the bank, maybe I could find things to do. I want to write books but not after a 40 hour workweek. I could get into politics, join Péter Magyar and try to kick Viktor Orbán's ass, but don't want to give up my predictable income job.
And apparently it is an illness now. Because we expect happiness. So unhappiness is traumatizing.
"Persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others, or the world."
A problem with this is that if you study the condition and history of humanity, it becomes clear that cruelty, oppression, enslavement, and outright murder are more normal than unusual. I've been reading about slavery in antiquity, and it's a picture of mind-boggling cruelty that went on for centuries and was not really considered all that unusual or abnormal. Well, those people were human beings more or less like us, both slaves and owners and those who witlessly consented. Negative beliefs about the world seem largely justified. It might not look that way from an affluent part of San Francisco, which is why I like to visit affluent parts of San Francisco, but a visit to India or Africa or large parts of the rest of the world, or studying the history of just about any country, will convince you that this is about as relevant to the ordinary human being's prospects and experience as a Bollywood love scene. Study what the Japanese Empire did in Asia. It's astonishing. And it's not like they were hiding it. And after it was over, what do you get? Maoism. Ho Chi Minh. The Park dictatorships. The Guomindang dictatorship in Taiwan. Then in India, moving west, you have the caste system . . . this is what's "normal" in the world.
Regarding how politics doesn't really fit "persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event", I think people keep coming back to politics because they believe it matters, and we do have a system of popular elections, so power comes through mindset shaping, which isn't something you can participate in if you ignore it.
Maybe instil in them a great love and appreciation of the country they were lucky enough to be born into. Not entitled, but privileged? Absolutely
It's been somewhat corrupted now but this is exactly what the term "check your privilege" was meant for. To gain an emotional understanding of the luck of your birth and using that as a basis for empathy/compassion towards others.
FYI the Kahan et al study you’re indirectly referencing at the top doesn’t fully replicate https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027721001876
After reading that, I jumped down to ask about it. I'm not familiar with the literature, but it's _exactly_ the kind of study that I would expect to fall prey to the replication crisis. Ok, now to go back up and finish reading and see how much the rest depends upon that foundation.
hmmm that conclusion sounds plausible to me; maybe not stability but ive seen plenty of cases where poeple get different answers on math problems based on how you phrase it, I would expect being able to pull numbers out politically charge language word problem may just be a skill.
Why would it be replication crisis-y?
I don't know exactly how to describe it but "politics makes people dumber" is exactly the kind of thing I would expect to read in a headline and then find out that it either failed to replicate or was straight up fraud.
It's not as bad as the more nakedly partisan versions along the lines of "science proves conservatives are heartless bastards", but it sets of similar alarm bells in my brain.
I will admit that it certainly sounds plausible and makes some kind of sense (Scott certainly seems to agree from his own personal experience), but then again, _tons_ of the replication crisis findings seemed plausible and that they made sense according to your lived experience.
> but then again, _tons_ of the replication crisis findings seemed plausible and that they made sense according to your lived experience.
I have the opposite experience; pop science reaches me when its surprising(if not just straight up politically contentious, "everyones racists look we made a racism test everyone fails")
+1
I have a hard time putting into words why, but this is the kind of study my brain distrusts extra hard compared to a generic psychology paper. I think I have learned pattern-matching heuristics for what kind of technical papers I can trust, and they were sounding alarms when I read Scott's brief description of them.
Yeah my experience as a maths teacher is that even very innocuous changes in the wording of a question have a dramatic impact on student understanding.
You might find research by Gigerenzer to be interesting, he studied in quite a lot of detail how different wordings change how people perform ond logical and statistical tasks, among other things. But in short, it's not just your personal experience.
Politics makes people angry and anger makes people dumb.
I had the same feeling. The best way explanation I can give for that feeling is that Kahan's findings sound too Malcolm Gladwell.
So I looked at the Vox article Scott linked, which is summarizes Kahan's findings and also includes quotes from a conversation he had with Kahan. And I had that same feeling of sleaze in the air. Kahan said a couple disingenuous things -- gave examples that appeared to support his ideas, but that really weren't fair tests. One was that people usually pay good attention to data about subjects where their ideological convictions are not relevant, but ignore it when ideology is involved. His example of this was "there’s a lot of disagreement about climate change and gun control, for instance, but almost none over whether antibiotics work, or whether heavy drinking impairs people’s ability to drive." Well, yeah, but there are other factors at work here influencing people's view. The data about the effects of antibiotics and heavy drinking are easy to see in everyday life. The data about climate change and gun control cannot be gleaned the same way -- you have to look up statistics.
Also looked around for attempts to replicate Kahan. Found one -- am not sure whether there are others. It's a 2021 article called "A Preregistered Replication of Motivated Numeracy" (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104768).
From their abstract: "We conducted a large-scale replication of Kahan, Peters, Dawson, and Slovic (2017), using a pre-specified analysis plan with strict evaluation criteria. We did not find good evidence for motivated numeracy; there are distinct patterns in our data at odds with the core predictions of the theory, most notably (i) there is ideologically congruent responding that is not moderated by numeracy, and (ii) when there is moderation, ideologically congruent responding occurs only at the highest levels of numeracy. Our findings suggest that the cumulative evidence for motivated numeracy is weaker than previously thought, and that caution is warranted when this feature of human cognition is leveraged to improve science communication on contested topics such as climate change or immigration."
https://i.imgur.com/khIxnMG.png
https://i.imgur.com/VWx50qb.png
Here are links to a couple of graphs where you can see how their findings differed from Kahan's
Polymaths they are. Or is it Poorly-Maths: One of their questions “Imagine that we roll a fair, six-sided dice 1,000 times. Out of 1,000 rolls, how many times do you think the dice would come up as an even number?” - Whatever single number you say - I bet my 1000$ to 100$ you are wrong. Let's roll.
Do you mean Kahan's a Poorly Math or the people who did the replication? I only skimmed the latter. The people who did the replication duplicated Kahan's procedure. And what are you saying about the dice question? Did the researchers make a mistake about what's the right answer? I think the answer's approx 500. Am I overlooking some complication I should have thought of?
It appears in the replication-study as one example of how they assessed the math skill. page 3 "Numeracy was assessed with nine questions, where the first six were
conventional word problems measuring mathematical ability. For
example, one of the questions read: “Imagine .... "" - With no answer. - Well, obviously "500" is the least unlikely result, and the averages of many 1k dice rolls will tend to be closer to "500" the more often one does 1k dice rolls. On one specific 1k rolls, however, it is very likely that "even" happens 450-550 times, but highly unlikely to get exactly "500" times an even result. (Similar as in having a son, a daughter, then a son, then a daughter is as un-likely as having 4 daughters in a row - or better: While imprisoned by the Germans during World War II, the South African statistician John Kerrich tossed a coin 10,000 times. Result: 5,067 heads. ) It is not trivial or obvious. The guy who wrote that up (we had a few tasks like 1k dice rolls) , seems to think it is. Did they really expect people to answer: "500 - with a likelihood of approx. 2.5%. Any other number less likely."
Oh, so what you're objecting is their asking "how many times would the dice come up an even number?" rather than "what's the likeliest # of even results over 1000 throws," or "if you had to estimate, in round numbers, how many of the 1000 throws would be an even number, what would you say"? I mean, I see what you're saying, and the researchers do look a little silly if you understand probability and think about it their question as a probability question. Still, I doubt this little piece of sloppiness distorted their results. People who grasp the basics of the situation would answer 500, and it would not occur to them that the real answer's not that simple. And people with a deeper grasp of probability, etc., like you, would understand what answer they expected from laymen and just write 500 -- don't you think?
500 is simultaneously the mean, median and mode of the distribution. That's obviously the intended answer. If the mean and mode were different you would have a case for ambiguity
How could I disagree? - What about asking it, then? "What's the mean, median and mode of the distribution for "even result" if you throw a legit dice 1k times?" (or so, non native speaker here - but I suppose some in the US would struggle to understand this clear question). My claim was and is: Those authors seem to lack intuition what math-questions (and answers) are clear/hard/(dis)ambiguous or bearing any resemblance to real (!) life. The dice-throw question should have been: If you throw a dice ONE time, what are the chances it shows an odd number? - Rest assured, a big part would have gotten that wrong, too. - If I had been part of that 'study', I'd have switched to mechanical problem solving. Without thinking politics. The study claims, they did not - great for the authors - claim did not replicate; little surprise. (I suppose there is a bias as postulated. I doubt those "tasks" are good enough to prove the bias.)
Honestly, this may be a case where you and I use our greater (not numeracy, exactly) to demonstrate the problem.
I have seen plenty of evidence for climate change in my everyday life; I only need statistics to assure myself that my own perceptions and experience are not anomalous. The same applies to at least a subset of gun control issues.
On the other hand, my experience with antibiotics is sufficiently mixed that I can't (from personal experience alone) rule out a placebo effect, and my experience around drunk drivers is sufficiently slim that relying strictly on personal experience makes me far more confident of climate change.
And again from personal experience, I can confirm that:
lots of people who can do arithmetic have difficulty with word problems,
slight wording changes can make a huge difference for some students, and
a problem that makes them think too strongly of a real world situation will prevent them from concentrating on math well enough to even set up the equations. I wouldn't be surprised if political questions did that for many people.
Do the tasks in the original study make sense, at least? The way Ezra Klein presents the skin-cream-task does not. Scott's link: https://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid - The numbers as presented means both: ppl who used the cream were both more likely to improve their skin conditions as to worsen their rash. Or? - I doubt journalists make us stupid, but I strongly feel most journalists have numeracy-skills too low to be allowed to publish about numbers/statistics/economy/math.
Apparently you're supposed to find the percentage of people who got rashes out of the total number of test subjects, and the people who used the cream have a higher percentage than the people who didn't use the cream, so using the cream is actually (counter-intuitively) worse than not using it.
He then goes on to expand on how even the 'good at maths' people get the politically phrased question wrong (which he doesn't tell us what the question was) and the 'dumb at maths' people get it right when it fits with their biases.
Then he goes on to demonstrate his own bias.
Oh, I finally got it! ALL (fictional) participants had their condition CHANGE. None had "stayed the same, more or less". That is such a crazy idea, I did not even consider it! Thus N1 is 298 and N2 is 128. 75% - or so - of N1 got "better" and 25% worse. While no cream (N2): only ca. 1/6 got worse and 5/6 got better. Ok. 6th grader math. Most adult can not do. - Well, we still lack any information by HOW MUCH skins got better or worse. Don't expect journalists to know math, or math-guys to know medical studies.
A more charitable reading might be that when you're reading a new story, it's almost always a secondary source. The journalist has done research and talked to people and then wrote up his understanding of the issue. So you're relying on the primary source being understood and communicated to the journalist and then the journalist understanding and communicating to you.
Even with impeccable numeracy, there's still more links in the chain that can fail.
True. - Then again, many stories (esp those with numbers) seem to be done by a news-agency (in Germany dpa or Reuters, mostly) then adjusted (shortened) to fit the paper's needs. Not all journalism is investigative. - Re-reported without much understanding. Possibly with misunderstood numbers to begin with. A few years ago, there was widely printed news-piece about some ice (arctic/antarctic?) melting significantly (30% ?) "faster than expected". It even appeared in The Economist! - And none bothered about: Who "expected" (Greta? IPCC? Manifold?) or how much was "expected" or how fast the actual melting was. Information value: zero. Did not subscribe to TE again.
Not this one though. It was written by Ezra Klein, who's well-known, and Klein both read the article and interviewed Kahah.
(Comment thread seems to mix up.) Yep, name was familiar. In this case, I am more disappointed by the design "p-makes-dumb-study" - if their other "tasks" were the same level of slightly silly, then biases had it too easy to take over, I suspect. Also: enough time, premium on correctness and a math-centered setting might do much do make the bias-effect disappear. - Still, a fine idea, possibly true to some extent.
A redo of the study did not support original study's results: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma?r=3d8y5&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=48131078
Are you assuming that most real-life questions are carefully phrased with mathematical precision? Or that most questions (as opposed to a few of the most important) have enough time, premium on correctness, or a math-centered setting? Or that political survey questions (or honestly, even most voting decisions in a typical US election with dozens of choices to make) are often among the few questions that people consider so important that they will put in extra work before answering? Or even that people who do say "I need some time to research first" will be heard in the polling results and/or conversations?
Ezra Klein is very smart, but in a non-numerical way I think.
FWIW, it absolutely make me "slower". I used to be able to speed-read, and I can still suck down familiar, safe fiction rather quickly. But I've tried to read "The Gift of Fear" a few times, and I don't think I've gotten past page 50 before I realize that I only read one sentence in the last hour, and I'm already so strung out I might not be able to sleep that night.
I find this is true of podcasts. I'm fine with listening to "straight" history or even difficult science (Mindscape!) but not economics. I'll deficiently think there is something just a little wrong and I'll want to talk back to the presenter which is impossible. With text, even if the source does not allow comments (annoyingly frequent) I have the option to link or copy and paste to create a rebuttal/clarification.
I find podcasts and videos to be much slower to convey information and much less searchable than text. So they are generally less useful.
The one friend I have who likes podcasts uses them on his (long) daily bus commute. So he's not paying a whole lot of attention.
But they get more clicks and it's easier to put ads over them, so they get more money.
The thing with podcasts and videos is that when I zone out, they keep going, and it can be hard to get back to exactly where I was. Books stay open to the same page.
Nice find! Though to be fair to Kahan et al I don't think the numeracy finding itself is very central to their politically motivated reasoning model.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2703011
I suspect a big part of the issue is applying emotional standards for interpersonal conflict to a situation they can't hope to handle.
When we get in a dispute with someone usually we either get told by our friends nope sorry you're in the wrong and we forget it or they side with us and we feel supported and cared for by our community.
The nature of politics in the modern age is the constant feeling we are the victims of genuine harm and that a.largw fraction of what we still see as part of our community doesn't care. That is deeply hurtful. Before social media we didn't feel personally wronged in the same way because we didn't feel the same clear sense of others saying such hurtful things about us.
It's like in a relationship, if your spouse doesn't back you on something and you eventually realize you were wrong and they shouldn't have it goes away, if they back you it's fine. If there is a persistent sense you were genuinely injured and they aren't willing to be on your side it can fester.
I wonder of the consolidation of different internet fori into bigger platforms has enhanced the sense of internal community strife
Yes, I think that's important and also particular aspects of how they work. Facebook has the unfortunate feature of bridging different aspects of one's life -- in real life you show off how edgy and woke/anti-woke you are to your college friends while being polite/respectful to your family/coworkers/etc who might feel differently.
It's kinda the equivalent of having your aunt show up at the wild party your throwing. You suddenly have to choose the persona you present and it will shock someone.
Twitter may have less of that but it's likes but no dislikes system is the political equivalent of a room chanting "chug chug" or the girls gone wild production team. It's going to bring out your worst behavior -- and then cut you off so you can't give full context.
I'm not one of those people who sees it as somehow malicious or something. But as a society we've just started college and we haven't yet learned to drink, party and use drugs in moderation and the internet companies are just giving us what we think we want.
Interesting. It may be like (pre-internet) living in a village vs. living in a city.
In a village you could even tell who someone is at a fair distance just by their gait. Because you almost certainly know them quite well.
In a city you encountered strangers all the time. You had to learn that they don't know you and don't care about you, so you avoid or are cautious of them.
With the internet, you are in a village, but the village covers the whole world (at least the part that speaks the same language). If some stranger doesn't like what you said, he's in your face and it's quite difficult to avoid him.
We're also wired to care somewhat about anyone we can talk to. When you can talk to perfect strangers (I don't know who you are, or where you live, or anything about you other than you are interested in the subject of the article), you tend to feel that there should be a community feeling. When it isn't there, you feel offended.
So in some ways it's the worst of both worlds.
Well, we used to have a healthier internet that primarily lived on forums and IRC chats. Now "the internet" is giant social media platforms which have the flaws you describe (even Discord is a fair distance from the old model). Peter Gerdes makes this point above.
Politics is the mind killer, not just in creating feelings of outrage but in creating feelings of safety. My mantra for these circumstances: Believing the politician might help you is like believing the stripper really likes you.
No, believing the politician might help you is like believing the stripper might throw their underwear at you. It's perfectly possible, but there are so many other people they might throw their underwear at. Strippers do in fact take off their underwear all the time, but only so many people in the room get it thrown at them. Similarly, politicians do things all the time that make real differences to the world, but there's only so many people who get helped by those changes. You may well luck out, but you may not.
Believing the stripper really likes you is like believing the politician really cares about you. That is vanishingly unlikely. They might *pretend* to do it while doing the thing that actually affects your material condition.
To quote "The WIre", "they all disappoint". Even if it's only by quitting politics and joining the Jesuits because he thinks that's a better way to help the world. Not that I'm disappointed **in** that guy, just in the world that caused him to make that probably-accurate assessment. :-/
"Believing the stripper really likes you is like believing the politician really cares about you. That is vanishingly unlikely."
This seems just cynic to me, and I strongly disagree. In fact, it's exactly the kind of polarization that Scott tries to fight.
Unless you mean it in the way "cares more about you personally than they care about millions of other voters". But that's not what I want from a politician, it's obvious that I have to sort out my individual issues myself. Politicians are there for issues that affect me and millions of others as well. Do you think that only vanishingly few politicians deep in their heart care about the people who elected them? How would you even know that? How could you tell apart a world where they do from a world where they don't?
Politicians are also human, they have goals, dreams and desires. I strongly believe that many of them (not all) went into politics out of a desire to create a better world and to help other people. Sure, they quickly learn that it's not as easy as they thought, and they have to learn to work with the cogs and wheels of politics. This does distract from great goals, and a lot of them (have to) become occupied with the small political fights. But do you really think they are just pretending when in their speeches they say that they want to help the uneducated single mother who is struggling, or the gun owner whose rights are threatened to be taken away, and that they care for these people? Do you really believe that the politicians only pretend this sentiment? All politicians, or almost all?
The key is to remember that we're discussing *successful* [politicians, strippers] only. Any ultra-competitive industry where there's a lot of power, status and money on the table, and relatively little scrutiny of day-to-day operations, will attract a starting mix of people who genuinely care about the work and steely sociopaths who mostly want to win the game. Which type of person would you expect to be most effective at navigating the inevitable compromises, at telling the right people what they want to hear, at concealing their distaste at bending the rules when necessary to get ahead?
The principled idealist stays up all night carefully researching the bill they're discussing tomorrow; the sociopath puts in a few more hours of calls to donors so they can afford more Facebook ads, or calls around to arrange the favor for the guy who can fix the situation with the mistress of that party leader whose endorsement really matters. Which one do you think is getting rewarded by the voters in November?
I don't know US politicians very well, but if I look at key politicians in Germany (Scholz, Merz, Habeck, Baerbock, Lindner, Wagenknecht), then I certainly don't have the impression that they don't care about the people they make politics for. Of course, they could all be Sociopaths who deceive me, but I don't think they left obvious traces. So again the question: why do you believe that they are all deceptive sociopaths? Frankly, I find this claim rather absurd.
Same for other European politicians, though I know them less well: how would I know that Macron or Meloni or von der Leyen don't care about the people? Or that Orban truly deep down is not concerned at all about traditional families and does not really believe that people will suffer if that concept is watered down?
For the US, I am much more likely to make some obvious blunder with names. But why are you so certain that all of Obama, Mike Pence, Al Gore truly do not care for the people they make/made politics for? Even for more extreme figures, like Ben Shapiro and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, what makes you so convinced that both of them (especially the one on your own political side) deep down do not believe that transitioning is bad/good for children with gender dysmorphism, and that they really both don't care about these children at all?
It's not about the people -- it's about the system. When you create a system where some people get to make rules that they exempt themselves from, and get to use violence to enforce, no good can come from it (on average -- clearly governments can do good things, but the bad things outweigh them).
I'm not sure the phrase "some people get to make rules that they exempt themselves from" is quite right. The fact is, a lot of those rules aren't (or aren't just) decided by politicians for arbitrary or self-interested or whimsical reasons, but because they have constituencies, including "ordinary" people, that want them. I suspect a lot of people like bank regulations, consumer protections, work safety rules, rules on medical insurance (e.g., requiring medical insurance companies to pay for at least some psychiatric treatment), police, roads that last at least a while and get repaired, cars that don't universally wear out after three years, etc., etc. It may be that some of these rules, as written or enforced, have negative consequences, or can be a pain to comply with (forms, forms, forms). But I get the impression a lot of "ordinary" non-politician folks like rules *in principle.* They just disagree about what rules they want.
I guess we're just under-defining what it would mean to "care" in this context. If you mean that politicians may have vague feelings of warmth and benevolence toward their party-aligned interest groups or values, then... sure? Could be, who knows? Everyone is a hero in their own story; for a politician whose daily life is far removed from most of their constituency, I'd imagine it's easy enough to select one's sympathies and adjust one's information intake so that the best career move for them is also conveniently the one they believe to be most caring to the vulnerable groups who really matter. Put another way, Orban probably does "care" about traditional families, but also I suspect that he arranges to find (and chooses staffers who will help him to find) that the very best projects to defend traditional families are also the ones that would benefit his cronies, harm his enemies and consolidate his power.
On the other hand, if you mean that top-tier national politicians will likely have a deep personal commitment to open-mindedly figuring out what policies would genuinely improve the lives of every part of their citizenry, and to pursuing those policies even at the cost of personal effort and self-sacrifice... then I guess I'd ask, do you have any reason to believe that such a person would succeed in politics? Does the system seem set up to reward and promote them? Why would they not consistently get beaten out the very first time they came up against a sociopath who made the same impassioned professions of caring, but also made it a practical priority to win the game?
"a deep personal commitment to open-mindedly figuring out what policies would genuinely improve the lives of every part of their citizenry, and to pursuing those policies even at the cost of personal effort and self-sacrifice"
You have high standards for caring. I am not sure whether my friends would pass that bar for caring about me, and I probably won't pass that bar for caring about my friends. So yes, there are bars of caring that I don't expect politicians to pass.
I think it's worth looking at business executives for comparison here. Sociopaths are strongly overrepresented among top business executives, but *not* a majority according to any evidence I've been able to pin down. I think it's likely that sociopathic tendencies also become more strongly represented higher up the political ladder, but unlikely that politics filters more strongly for sociopathy than business. After all, business offers significantly greater avenues for self-enrichment than politics does.
>After all, business offers significantly greater avenues for self-enrichment than politics does.
In the words of the sage, [citation needed]
It may be important that the US is one of the most strongly 2-party systems. In Germany, if a politician is a terrible person, you can probably instead vote for someone from a different party that would likely ally with your preferred party in the end. In most of the US, it really is a binary choice. That means demonizing the (only) opponent is at least as effective as (and often easier than) demonstrating that you have good judgment or competence. Since those attacks can be outsourced to anonymous groups, it will happen in any race with enough funding that a typical voter will know anything about any of the candidates. (Why yes, this does affect who even runs in the first place.) And so it is distressingly common to vote for someone you know is terrible, because the only actual alternative is worse.
I think you're right that most politicians actually care about helping society in the ways their policies do. But they often make it feel like they care about *you* personally (Bill Clinton was famously good at this), even though they've never met you.
Ok, that's fair, that is an illusion.
I think it's probable that that's mostly illusory. But, regular non-politician people often do get deeply invested in issues affecting people they don't actually know based on group identity dynamics. So I think it's reasonable to assume that politicians do the same to some degree as well.
Politicians were early to the parasocial relationship game
Yeah, I think good politicians are masters of the parasocial relationship. They make you feel like they're on your side, have your back, care about you personally, etc. But at best, they wish you well in an abstract way, and will try to keep the people (broadly) from getting shafted too badly. They don't know you personally, and can't know very many of their constituents personally.
I think Obama's tears over the school shooting were real.
You may be right, but how would anyone outside of his closest circle really know? Presidents have enough resources to script just about any response that is visible to the public.
He cried during a televised speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijFPMrptrwE
There was a live group present as well. I don't see how that could have been faked. In movie scenes where males cry there's usually a little cut before the first welling of tears and during that somebody either puts drops of liquid in the actor's eyes or some irritating thing like onion juice under his eyes. If Obama had had onion juice or something under his eyes they would have been watering from the beginning.
He didn't write "care," he wrote "help."
Kenny you're making me think about Trump throwing his panties at me and I really don't like that.
If you know the name of your local politician, you've already lost "the game", unless you have a business reason to know them. The best policy is total and complete ignorance of politics.
For many people around the world it's worse:
They know the names of plenty of American politicians, because US politics is a prime driver of outrage entertainment.
But they don't really know their local politicians all that well.
As long as your local politicians are not involved on the outrage machine, it's fairly save to know about them.
> It’s a plot by STEM people to feel self-satisfied about their own intelligence and superior to more well-rounded types.
I mean, it's not exactly a "plot", but...
From what I understand, one of the reasons why people get caught up in conspiracy theories is the feeling of being special. The sheeple go on about their daily lives, unaware of the perils they face, but you -- you're smarter than that. You know the real truth that is hidden from the rest. You can expose it, and in doing so, perhaps save the world.
I think it would be weird if the AI-risk community was somehow immune from this impulse; they're human after all. This does not automatically imply that believers in AI-risk are wrong (just like it does not necessarily imply that believers in Illuminati-risk are wrong), but still, it's a potential source of bias that should at least be acknowledged.
This is kind of my understanding as well
Also, when there is a really bad outcome, there seems to be a "need" to believe that someone or something vary large, hypercompetent and malicious is in charge. It is too distressing to believe that one crazy guy like Lee Harvey Oswald could have such a huge impact on the course of human history. Or a handful of terrorists flying planes into buildings. It offers a wierdly satisfying, almost calming effect to believe its not just random chance. Even if the machine is evil, at least the world is orderly.
Try to get three people to keep a secret. Yet, somehow thousands of people have been keeping the real culprits of 9-11 under wraps.
I think this is an area where AI risk departs from the conventions of conspiracy theory, rather than conforming to it. In my experience, almost everyone who's really worried about AI risk doesn't think it's the result of a conspiracy of hypercompetent evil people, but that it's something that'll most likely come about by accident, caused by people who don't adequately recognize the risks of their own actions, or haven't taken sufficient measures to safeguard against them. If they do believe the risks are primarily driven by a few powerful actors, they don't usually believe this is because they're driven by destructive motives, but that they're driven by incentives which would motivate other people to take their places if they were simply removed without institutional barriers being put in place.
This is actually a good point, and the truth is I am part of those concerned. And for the same reasons you mention.
I think the conspiracy theories happen because if the real reason is "we're afraid of being killed by robots", most people will go "but killer robots aren't real, that's dumb, you're not dumb, that can't be the real reason" and they make their own reason up instead.
Right, I was talking about conspiracy theories in general -- e,g, Pizzagate, 9-11 truthers, Flat Earth, etc. -- not about the robots specifically.
Epstein’s island, WMD in Iraq.
pizzagate real, there are random pedopiles who have "90,000$ pictures of pizza", if q or whatever made it about a spefic pizzashop Id see that as epstains friends trying to discredit the infomation that information human trafficking rings and heres some of their code words
I think the defining feature of a conspiracy theory isn't the exclusivity, but rather that you end up trapped by your beliefs so that evidence against the conspiracy either has no effect or gets morphed somehow into more evidence for the conspiracy.
I mean, being moderately familiar with any weird branch of knowledge gets you all the exclusivity you can want. (This is just as true if your weird branch of knowledge is about microprocessor design or astrology.) But that doesn't make it a conspiracy theory.
Right, but knowledge about microprocessor design doesn't make you special, it just makes you the guy who can design microprocessors. You won't be saving any sheeple from imminent doom with that (not unless they're in dire need of a microrprocessor, I guess).
Hah! All these sheeple around me think their computer is executing the steps of their programs in the order they appear and that when their program reads from memory, it comes from off-chip memory rather than usually getting supplied from one of the levels of cache.
Oh no ! I have been deceived, but now my eyes are open ! MOV AX,BX is just an illusion, people ! The assembler is lying to you ! :-)
> you end up trapped by your beliefs so that evidence against the conspiracy either has no effect or gets morphed somehow into more evidence for the conspiracy.
As an AI-risk skeptic, this is exactly the feeling I've had regarding some AI-risk responses to things that I interpreted as evidence against AI-risk (i.e. LLM's didn't respond to these instructions b/c they're dumber than we thought, ergo the singularity is even farther away than we thought), that AI-risk proponents interpreted as evidence for even *more* AI risk (i.e. LLM's didn't respond to these intructions so AI is even harder to align than we thought). This may be an unfair correlation, and maybe the fault in response is even on my side, but I have had this experience multiple times. It makes me feel like some people manage to interpret every result as "you should adjust your p(doom) even higher!)"
Loved this part --- "Suppose that outrage addiction is, in fact, trauma addiction. That means the media ecosystem is a giant machine trying to traumatize as many people as possible in order to create repeat customers, ie trauma addicts'
I think we're going to look back and think about cable news as "Cigarettes for your mind" --- small doses probably fine, but as a daily practice will kill you.
I think of social media as like processed food.
Processed food starts with food but then arranges it in structures that you can't stop eating and are bad for the systems that process it.
Social media starts with information but then then turns it into structures that you can't stop scrolling and are bad for the systems that process it.
Funny you should create that analogy with cigarettes.
We need a warning label before you load your facebook / Instagram / xyz just like we do on cigarette packs - "May cause addiction and feelings of self hatred"
I'm not sure those warning labels on cigarettes ever did much?
I think they are a good idea even if they're consequentially irrelevant, as punishment to the tobacco companies for claiming strong evidence of zero health risks, and as an expensive signal that the government is doing its job in forcing the sellers of goods to accurately describe those goods to consumers
Sounds like all punishment for some sense of moral righteousness, but no mention of any benefits for the people it's pretending to help, the (would-be) smokers?
How can a good idea be consequentially irrelevant? How can that be anything but a completely benign idea if not a waste of resources?
err, i mean, even if it doesn't have the *specific* consequence of reducing smoking, or making people less likely to try smoking, or whatever
i tend to be extremely anti-state, indeed upon reading this post it's pretty clear i am traumatized by the state lol
but i do think one of the very few roles the state ought to have is in punishing fraud and ensuring that the sellers of products can't lie about those products
if the state only did this when the effect was large, or if the measure were positive-value, that would create horrible incentives
this seems obvious to me and i'm surprised anyone disagrees? some random bed and breakfast in iowa shouldn't be allowed to claim they serve dinosaur eggs, and if they do the state should stop them, even if literally not a single person has ever stayed there
I agree that one of the
>roles the state ought to have is in punishing fraud and ensuring that the sellers of products can't lie about those products
Could you elaborate on why
>if the state only did this when the effect was large, or if the measure were positive-value, that would create horrible incentives
If the effect that a seller's lies have is very small, why do those lies matter? ( The "positive-value" question is stickier, since sometimes one needs to deter a damaging lie, even if the cost to enforce it in that particular instance outweighs the immediate reduction in damage. Deterrence has to be credible etc. )
May cause unjustified hatred of self and others.
Extremely likely to cause you to look up in two hours and say "Crap, what happened to my evening? Now it's bedtime!"
Agreed it's a good observation; one that Scott Adams (from his less-precise post-rationalist perspective) has been making for a while.
It's interesting to imagine holding media companies financially accountable for their negative public health impacts in the same way we did cigarette companies. Chronic stress has serious physical consequences that impose huge costs on our healthcare systems (not to mention the individual sufferers), and today's metrics-based journalism makes huge amounts of money by peddling products deliberately designed to produce addictive stress responses that destroy your body. If there's a difference between that business model and Big Tobacco's, I certainly don't see it.
At very least, they should be made to fund anti-clickbait public health campaigns for elementary schoolers, the way they did anti-smoking ads back in the day.
"holding media companies financially accountable for their negative public health impacts in the same way we did cigarette companies. "
As far as I know, the impact of the tobacco settlements was to entrench the tobacco companies in their niche. It didn't cause any of them to go under, or even get smaller. The requirement to pay into the settlement fund meant that no new companies will enter the market, but the existing ones will be there as long as people smoke tobacco.
So I don't think this will work the way I think you think it will work. If that's coherent.
Makes sense, just depressing if true.
I knew somebody who became paranoid in old age, with his paranoia directed at a family member, which caused a lot of distress. The family tried to get the oldster to redirect his paranoia outward toward more distant concerns, such as the President, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy, the other political party, the CIA, the IRS, the Russians, etc., But he remained frustratingly level-headed and realistic about politics.
Eventually, after an adjustment in his blood pressure medicine, his paranoia declined overall and became focused instead on the supermarket checkers union spying on him rather than on his own family, which caused many fewer problems for all concerned. (The checkers never noticed.) The last half decade of his long life was happier than the preceding half decade had been.
In general, there is a lot of mental illness out there all the time. What type of mental illness it manifests itself as (e.g., paranoia) and what sub-type (e.g., political paranoia vs. personal paranoia) and what sub-sub-type (e.g., grocery store checkers) seems pretty contingent and hard to predict.
Can you recall the specific medication?
I would guess it's more likely that customers don't notice what retail workers are or aren't noticing. They could all be talking about that guy behind his back.
Fascinating argument! Pretty compelling.
The questions to me then become:
1) Why now? Is it about technology? Overall degradation of civil society? Increased polarization (a la Ezra Klein) reaching some sort of inflection point?
2) How do we get out of it? For individual trauma, there’s therapy. For societal trauma? Perhaps a matter of fixing whatever the causes are, I suppose.
Thanks for sharing. And I’m sorry about your experience in college. That sounds really upsetting and unfair.
The traditional way this kind of "societal trauma" is healed is with blood. If there is a better way, history is silent.
What is an example of a society healing from societal trauma with blood? Whose blood was it?
Chicken blood? He’s saying that political divisions of the type seen in America have led to civil war in the past, including the past in America.
This isn’t true however, it’s a selection bias. There are plenty of examples of very divided societies that healed without civil war and the US isn’t as divided as the ones that did.
I agree with your assessment of Shankar’s statement and with the observation that divided societies have healed on their own; the only thing I would add to that is I’m skeptical a civil war has ever healed a society’s collective trauma. Except perhaps, very cynically, when the result was a war of eradication that left no-one to carry on one side of the grievance.
I think he was being that cynical, and I kind of agree. I think we, today, in WEIRD countries, are historically unusually unlikely to engage in genocide, and so we are facing problems that are historically unprecedented.
Honestly, I think foreign wars are better for trauma-healing. Nothing unites people like having a common enemy.
Wars helpfully substitute the weird political trauma for trauma from actually getting shot at or bombed or whatever while at war.
Sounds like something René Girard would have a lot to say about. I.E. ancient societies relieved trauma via scapegoats, and Jesus was the last and best. (See Ephesians 2, Jews and Gentiles can now be reconciled with each other and God through Christ.)
1) My model of what he is getting at it somewhat of a combination of 'this is actually an available option' (ala school shooters becoming more common because unwell people feeling like it is an option in the toolbox) and 'cultural tropes' (like stereotypical manager; or stereotypical rich girl. They have their own individual personalities but they have tended towards the trope)
There's also so many people (larger population), reading and writing (better education), all around the world (modern communications), that it makes it far easier for inciting changes in available options & cultural tropes to form and spread.
Ex: if you're a renaissance nobleman, you're raised on classics. This benefits certain parts of your education, as it encourages some ways of behaving. And if you are deathly insulted by someone, settling that formally via a duel is the option that feels available and like it fits in your own mental trope for yourself.
However we don't teach in the same way (for a variety of good reasons and bad), and the culture / discussions are just larger and more varied. If in a subculture it gets more common to punch people for disagreements, then it has an easier time spreading and hiding itself until there's a lot who follow that subculture's rules. (ex: the circulation of trigger warnings as a thing growing until there's enough of a group who expect it as a matter of fact in discussions that it becomes harder to discuss with everyone else due to different norms)
2) There's the classic societal expectation of toughing out some pains. Or like the example Scott gives where war is treated as heroic and inspiring. It is expected to be affected by people you know dying; but if someone punches you then tough it out (rather than becoming flinchy) and maybe get revenge later.
I think we kinda need some of this, but I also want better methods too. It is good to help others feel less down or flinchy from things they've faced, but it is also very bad if we end up with everyone feeling very commonly flinchy. I view it as 'invest some amount of pain early on to avoid a larger more chronic sort of pain later', but I'm not sure that's the right frame for everyone.
(this post was kinda rambly)
In addition to learning how to take a punch, fasting is pretty good? And there's all sort of other medieval "mortification of the flesh" techniques that I haven't investigated yet.
This is helpful! I like where you're going re: "choice option space" -- in different cultures different behaviors are within the available option space. I guess my question is how you shift out of that -- with e.g. duels my impression is that at some point they turned a corner and started being less acceptable, plus new laws were passed/they actually started enforcing existing duels. My guess would be this was a result of overall societal trends where "honor" was a less important and legible concept? But when you start thinking on such a broad level it's hard to see where the room for individual agency to change the tide is.
I'll just point out that Scott's awful college cancellation trauma took place (slightly) _prior_ to the public launches of Facebook etc.
I am a full generation older than Scott and witnessed a couple of such episodes when I was in college. Also, though I did not particularly grasp it in the moment, I narrowly dodged such a cancellation myself related to my role one school year as opinion columnist for the college newspaper.
During the 1990s and early 2000s I resided with my young family in one of the bluest of blue towns in the US and also spent time in the very-similar city neighborhood of my childhood. The strands of thought/practice now summarized as "wokeness" were increasingly clear in those places during that period and by around 2002 were causing serious social conflict for me. Meanwhile my cousins living in the rural/working-class Midwest that our extended family originated from were becoming increasingly alarmed at rising levels of what we would now call "MAGAism" among our extended clan.
All of which is offered as anecdotal pushback against the widespread idea that social media is the cause of the national cultural/intellectual death spiral that we've since fallen into. Social media arguably gave the existing trends new momentum, definitely made them more apparent, and also made them easier for politicians to exploit. But those tides of collective bile were already rising before anybody'd ever heard of Twitter.
So the "why now?" question -- to which far too many Americans nowadays assume the answer is obviously social media/duh/everybody knows that/etc -- is in fact still unanswered.
Possibly those sorts of cultural trends have always occurred and:
-Social media changed the equilibrium? Which trends spread more than locally, how quickly, and so on?
Or
-Sometimes things just get this bad, and this isn't even a historical outlier?
Or any other explanation, including some complex combination of factors.
>those tides of collective bile
Wonderful phrase! Many Thanks!
I've got a friend who saw social justice pathology in college in the 80s. It wasn't invented recently, it escaped.
Also, I've seen an early version in Howard Fast's memoir, _Being Red_ which was about being a communist in the US-- as I recall, a lot of it was in the 50s.
For the easily amused, they were hassling Fast about a description of a black character having a wolfish expression. (This is from memory.) and Fast was arguing that the character had a wolfish expression and besides, Fast was the only best-selling author the Party had.
The interesting question might not be how did this happen-- the memeplex has been around for a long time-- but how did it escape into the general public?
My observation, from the 1990s onwards and on both sides of the woke/MAGA firefight, has been that a particular generation of native-born Americans has been the beating heart of the growing pathology. It is the demographic cohort that I, barely, fit into myself and having two elder siblings I know it firsthand quite well.
These are both great questions! I think about them a lot. I wonder if Scott will do a follow up.
At an individual level, people are only able to heal from trauma if they accept discomfort. The unhealthy cognitive-behavioural pathway that develops as a response to trauma can manifest in a lot of different ways - addiction to substances, for example - which is actually a defense mechanism against unpleasant emotions. Often it makes some sense at the time of the traumatic experience, but continues out years past until the coping behaviour becomes the problem.
To break out of this cycle requires real effort, self honesty and the willingness to face up to our real issues.
How do we do this at a societal level? Maybe have honest conversations with each other, and don’t shy away from people who challenge our beliefs or make us feel uncomfortable. I think there are a few people doing that (Scott, for example, or Lex Fridman, or Piers Morgan.) Increasingly, though, I feel these people only exist on podcasts or Substack and not in mainstream institutions.
I've seen it reported that people in colleges have noted that the students are "less emotionally resilient" than they used to be. There seems to be a general pattern over the past decades that children are raised and supported much more intensively, and conversely are trained far less in the idea that there's a lot of danger in the world that one should watch out for and/or endure. Camille Paglia once said "I was raised in the Italian working-class way, which is "watch out!" The world is a dangerous place. It's up to you to protect yourself, not just from rape, but from anything." And Helen Gurley Brown in 1963 started a sentence of advice "Of course, if he has you pinned in a hammerlock [kick him or something] but if he's just being intellectually persistent ...". It seems people were trained with a much more realistic sense of the dangers out there and (less overtly) with an understanding of the limits of their own control. Compare to the number of mentions in this article of "a sense of helplessness" when some political faction comes to power that you expect to do something that is to your disadvantage -- as if, before that, you didn't emotionally grasp that you are largely helpless in the face of large political movements and the harm they might do to you.
In addition to the points made by MissingMinus and Worley in their responses to you, I think the way we have been raising people in this century is partly responsible.
It starts young with helicopter parenting - the implicit message of that parenting style is that it's dangerous to go alone for even an hour.
Then in school from an early age all the way thru university students are taught that the world is full of dangers: Racism and sexism are all around us (including "internalized" so nowhere is safe). The environment is poison and climate change is gonna bake and drown us like a casserole. Active shooter drills are a traumatizing preparation for something that is extremely unlikely to happen even in the USA. Meanwhile you will see kids physically bullied, or be victimized yourself, and the authorities will fail the victims - this despite all the surveillance cameras that have popped up in the school halls and on the doorbells of every suburb and apartment complex. As a teen you *might* get taught safe sex but you will *definitely* be taught that it can kill you, even while your libido tries to tempt you. You'll get your first job in food service or warehousing or retail, and you will get just enough safety training (that isn't followed) to be ominous, while HR will remind you to be hypervigilant about that racism and sexism stuff you learned in school (plus some that will be new to you).
At some point you will hear about things kids used to do, like trick-or-treating, and be told about how we are now enlightened and we don't do that because can you imagine? What if they poison your candy or hide razors in it? (Sure this has never happened but it's the principle of the thing right?) Besides, candy will kill you diabetically and rot your teeth, and maybe it'll make you fat but also maybe it's fatphobic to say that? (There are no right answers but be vigilant anyway!) And the danger strangers might abduct you. No, no Halloween - we'll just fill the world with spooks and fright year-round. You know, for the children.
I have a weird notion that there might be a physical cause. Maybe some piece of physics or biochemistry we haven't noticed yet. Really, why not?
Maybe emotional side effects of common prescription drugs making people worse-tempered and/or more anxious.
Boring normal explanations are that hostility builds hostility. As the brakes are taken off expressions of anger, they become more common on both sides.
Another one could be sleep deficiency-- a combination of longer work hours and the temptation to miss sleep because online is so entrancing.
That's an interesting question, which brings this to mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA
(In this video, the lead-crime data correlation is explained at the 18:00 mark. At 18:30 that data is compared across several large nations.)
Cremieux shows that most of the highly touted effects of lead exposure are actually just artifacts of selection, and that the actual effects are much smaller: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead.
That blog post would be more relevant to the conversation here if it dealt with the fact that the lead-crime data correlation persists so strongly across multiple large nations, including ones having no significant Black population.
The post was mostly about the lead-IQ link, so it didn't devote much space to lead-crime. The former would be a very good explanation of the latter, given the strong link between IQ and criminality (even within sibling pairs, which largely controls for confounders). Showing that the former is exaggerated at best, would lessen the reason to assume the latter, but wouldn't disprove it.
The fact that it shows that lead levels that used to be prevalent in the US ultimately had little role on IQ, as the subsequent radical reduction of levels had no measurable impact on IQ, doesn't preclude, I suppose, that much higher levels of lead that could be present in some other countries that do indeed substantially impact IQ.
Additionally, similar selection effects regarding who gets exposed to lead could be at play in other countries, as in the US. These effects aren't a priori linked to the US Black population, in particular. And the blogpost notes (in footnote 2) this study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2666777 from New Zealand, which found that "when socioeconomic confounding is removed from the picture, the effect of lead on criminal perpetration adds little to the effect of being male." (description in the blog post).
I also didn't see references in your wiki article to studies on multiple large nations showing that lead abatement efforts correlated with decrease in crime (which I'm guessing is the correlation you refer to), but as with the selection confounding the effects of blood lead levels on individuals' criminal propensity, it's not hard to imagine national lead abatement efforts correlating with other factors that would be linked to decreased criminal perpetration, even if the link isn't causal, such as increased state capacity, or development.
But again, I didn't actually see the studies that find such a link.
See
https://pic.plover.com/Nevin/Nevin2007.pdf
specifically figure 3.
And within the US, here is a recent study which took advantage of some early-20C "natural experiment" type conditions to test the lead-crime hypothesis across different major metros:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014498316300109
During the period that US cities were putting in lead drinking-water pipes, a city was far from the nearest lead refinery would likely have pipes made from another material. Also, lead only seeps into water when the water is acidic. This sets up a nice natural experiment. Cities with lead pipes and acidic water are the treatment group (their populations were exposed to lead in the drinking water). Cities with lead pipes but non-acidic water, and cities with acidic water but non-lead pipes, are the control groups. The authors measure the effect of childhood lead exposure on homicide rates 20 years later. They find that exposing populations to lead in their drinking water causes much higher homicide rates 20 years later, relative to similar places where kids avoided such exposure.
One possible reason for 'why now?': Society has become increasingly wealthy allowing us to solve most of our immediate material problems, and now the remaining problems can take our focus.
I don't think I'm trauma addicted to politics. I read a lot of political news, but mostly when I'm bored or when it's on an interesting topic. For the most part I don't have strong emotions about it.
Occasionally I do go and read through the opinions of people who outrage me though, which might be extreme sexists, extreme feminists, anti-rationalists, or some other group I strongly disagree with. I might do this once every few months on average when a link to some outrageous subreddit is shared with me, or I'm feeling- so not something I'm compulsively check like an addiction. I do think I get some sort of chemical rush in my system although I don't know if it's endorphins, if nothing else it makes me feel pretty outraged and I'm sure there must be some sort of neurochemical associated with outrage.
This really does have the same energy as "I can stop any time I want!"
I've had trouble with other addiction, specifically sugary food and video games that I very much could not stop any time I wanted to. I still can't completely. Politics does feel different.
You can't stop being ruled by politicians, and any choice you might have about the people ruling you just changes the person, not the ruling. "There are men, in all ages, who mean to exercise power usefully; but who mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters." -- Daniel Webster
I dunno, to me they feel similar. There's a sort of pull, an insatiable nibbling urge, to engage with the mind-blanking activity, to wipe out my current web of thought with a known, predictable, "comforting" web.
I just meant for me personally. Giving an anecdote that not all outrage consumption was the result of trauma addiction.
Hey, all I've really got is one anecdote, too. ;-)
Don't have anything smart to add but wanna say that "Bitch Eating Crackers Syndrome" is the best description of anything I've heard in a while
Also think the whole brightline for "trauma" discussion at the start has a neat workaround even in the context of discussions of physical trauma - chronic traumatic encephalopathy is an example of what I'm talking about. The conventionally-understood brightline for "brain injury" is generally getting concussed or knocked out, but football players have brains like swiss cheese partly because it's exacerbated by smaller collisions *all the time*. In fighting, the showings that make you concerned for brain trauma aren't as much "guy gets smoked in 30 seconds", more stuff like Gaethje/Ferguson - where an insanely tough guy is taking a bunch of cumulative damage but none of it is "someone stop the damn fight", but after a point, every jab is getting to him badly til he's never the same again
I think you can understand some part of this through that lens. "Normally" politically-engaged people go into the machine, hang out there taking "traumas" that none of us would consider trauma in isolation, and eventually you hit the brightline with no obvious inciting incident. And then the mechanisms you described make it worse by making the feedback loop practically impossible to bail out of
And yet you have many many people who have spent a lot of time in the political trenches (knocking on doors and handing out leaflets etc.) without indicators of trauma.
I think that posting stuff on the internet may be uniquely bad for some personalities.
Rather like addiction in that sense, at least as we use the term. Some people apparently can have one drink and immediately become an alcoholic; others will drink heavily, but can actually stop dead and suffer no ill effects.
Yeah, some people seem to be able to compartmentalize a bit - at least when it comes to friend-of-a-friend microtraumas - where others are a lot more susceptible to it building up. I think there is something about the Internet that makes this specific thing worse - I'm just not sure whether it's that the nature of Internet encounters leads to more "trauma" inherently, or that the fact that the Internet rewards the most dramatic, "traumatized" reactions with the most exposure just makes it impossible to accurately measure.
Not a psychologist or anything to present conjectures on why some people seem more prone than others, but it also does kinda feel (anecdotally) like an inverted-U curve in terms of "exposure to the political machine" vs. "risk of trauma". Actual politicians, people in the system, seem a bit numbed by political realities to the point where they're able to keep an accurate finger on the pulse for the purposes of self-preservation - and obviously people with no political engagement aren't directly traumatized in this way. The kind of trauma that just makes you wronger and wronger kinda seems reserved for those with enough exposure to hear about what's happening, but not enough exposure to stop being surprised by it. But yeah, realistically it's probably as simple as "some people are this way, some people aren't, and it's just their personalities".
As someone who has spent a fair bit of time knocking on doors and handing out leaflets lately, the overwhelming experience from this is actually fine and positive (I live in New Zealand, I don't know to what extent this might differ in the US or other countries). It puts you in front of a lot of basically normal people you would otherwise not have met or not have talked about politics with and what you discover is that the vast, vast majority of them are reasonable and helpful. This experience made me update away from 'the world is getting more polarised' type arguments.
I suspect that people who do a lot of posting on the internet are not particularly normal.
I have a theory that part of it is a matter of your ability to do (or feel like you are doing) something. Going door to door and canvassing feels productive and like you’re doing something. Screaming into the void online feels increasingly hopeless, especially as the algorithms and your own desires to fix the people who are wrong on the internet drive you deeper and deeper into the fray.
You cannot fix people who are wrong - this is true on the internet, or in real life. This is something that I've learned over the decades of my life.
At most you can present information, that people can take in - or not. Many people have not yet learned this; some never will.
Going door to door sorts for people who are willing to listen, at least in a neighborhood where you don't get chased down the street for your views. Posting something on the internet doesn't sort nearly as much.
great writeup! given the ceaseless 24/7 media complex, our shortened attention spans, and the sorta 'clickbait culture,' you know our collective neurochemistry HAS to be outta wack :/
I also think about the many subliminal and subconscious manipulation tactics employed... https://eccentrik.substack.com/p/protecting-your-head-and-heart-in
Yeah. Our sympathetic system is in hyperdrive, we are stressed and always on high alert
So...what action would you take based on "politics is trauma" vs "news is dumb and makes you angy"?
I mean, I get it, I catch the vibe, news is bad, don't watch, I'm down but...is the trauma angle a rhetorical tool to help convince people or is there something specifically actionable about casting this as trauma?
For example, and I imagine it's the easiest point of concern, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you." By which I mean, even if you avoid news and political media, it will directly impact your personal life in ways that are unavoidable; the difference in Covid policy between California and Florida had dramatic and obvious differences that directly impacted people's lives even if they ignored the news.
So is there some guidance from psychology on how to manage this. Like, a rape victim might be irrationally afraid of rape and that's detrimental but it's not completely irrational, rape is totally a thing that happens, it's more of a large miscalibration of threat levels and likelihood. How do you maneuver that in a productive way?
Most news is not actually useful to you. You can avoid the daily noise and just read summaries later once there has been time to erase the erroneous "first drafts of history".
I myself prefer the
https://www.baseratetimes.com/
A wonderful publication! I appreciate people spreading the word.
Delayed gratification quarterly - https://www.slow-journalism.com/
I suppose there is a niche between the "news" (as contrasted with "olds") and history (or archeology).
You could say the same thing about comments here -- don't read them, just wait for Scott to summarize and point out the interesting ones, and if he doesn't do that, there weren't any truly interesting comments.
The comments are for discussion, and so if you appreciate discussion then join in. Otherwise, skipping may in fact be a good idea!
There's some more selection for quality here compared to twitter, and so I'm more likely to get something out of discussing a topic in the comment sections here or on the subreddit. (Though I think there should be better moderation policies, LessWrong manages very well, though you'd want something weaker than that for r/slatestarcodex and here)
If you legitimately get something out of the news, like if you're reading tech news and you're a programmer, then that can be a reason to pay attention... but also most of the time you still don't need to. There's just a lot of it, which is why for example in ML I often read Zvi's posts because following & reading a bunch of people on twitter who post about every minor piece of AI news wouldn't be helpful.
Seriously, if only there were some kind of publication that came out once or twice a day, and presented the news of the past 12-24 hours.
>the difference in Covid policy between California and Florida had dramatic and obvious differences that directly impacted people's lives even if they ignored the news.
And didn't impact the bottom line death totals even more than a smidgen, as near as we can tell from the after-action reports. There's a learning there.
There’s a learning for Florida which may not have applied to other parts of the US.
vaccination rates made a huge difference , if lockdowns didn't.and
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/red-blue-america-glaring-divide-covid-19-death/story?id=83649085
I'd say that given a particular situation, there's a difference between a healthy, rational, well-measured response, and a trauma-fueled response. So we should be engaging with news sources that promote the first response, and not with ones that promote the second response.
Alas, that's as far as my reasoning gets, because I don't know the mechanism. But I suspect that it's healthy to avoid the Facebook/Twitter style Algorithm that creates a Feed out of what it predicts will capture and bind your attention most tightly. There's probably a Bayesian formulation for this, actually. Something to do with it distorting our sense of base rates? (That also probably applies to traditional news, but less so.)
>So...what action would you take based on "politics is trauma" vs "news is dumb and makes you angy"?
Don't ever read the news. Don't ever vote. Avoid all knowledge related to politics. Focus on your own life, ignore everything else.
It's not precisely what you're looking for, but here's an example of someone making a first stab at using Bayesian statistics to make accurate assessments about areas of the world where there's social pressure to conceal information:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting
Thanks, that was interesting. It's...nice to see a reasonable attempt at modeling.
> is there something specifically actionable about casting this as trauma
When talking about Scott, specifically, casting it as trauma, I think the takeaway is:
These people aren't faking it. They really do experience it as trauma and have traumatic reactions, even if in some sense they're "doing it to themselves". And so any viable solution can't be based on the theory that "they're faking it" or that "it doesn't count because they're doing it to themselves". If we're ever going to get past this, we need to stop doing whatever's creating the trauma, and work on healing the people already affected (assuming we don't want them in charge for a few decades before they all die).
It's a call for more investigation along a particular line that he thinks is promising, but the first step is convincing other people that the line is promising.
Sorry if that comes off as too basic. I just felt like there was a question there that no one was really answering, although perhaps it was just too obvious.
You write, "I find this phenomenon fascinating, and analogizing it to trauma addiction is the only way I’ve been able to make sense of it."
Is there a sense in which this is just simulating understanding by taking a phenomenon we don't understand and lumping it with another phenomenon we don't understand, and calling them the same?
I found this post interesting, but I had that worry throughout, that it's collapsing two poorly-understood behaviors into one in the name of understanding. I find the move to describing everything in terms of trauma both confusing and concerning, and I also find the change in our political behavior confusing and concerning. Come to think of it, maybe this is a reason to believe you're right and they're really the same phenomenon.
Anyway, interesting and something to think over. Thank you.
A whole lot of psychology/psychiatry strikes me as coming up with names for phenomena we don't really understand. A field with more "experts" than experts.
I linked this in the Open Thread from before the most recent one, but long enough after that thread started I doubt many read it, so this is relevant to the state of the field:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/01/17/scientific-misconduct-and-fraud-the-final-nail-in-psychiatrys-antidepressant-coffin/
...Well, you have to start by giving them a name. It's pretty hard to study concepts that don't have names.
I think it was Eliezer who observed that there's a temptation to think that, in naming a phenomenon, you've explained it. But you haven't: you've just named it.
The classic example is when a doctor says a patient's illness has an "idiopathic cause". Sounds very medical and technical - thanks for the diagnosis, doc! But all "idiopathic" means is "we don't know why the patient is sick".
Conversely, there's the temptation to think that, if you haven't solved a problem (or explained a phenomenon), then you haven't made any progress.
But, in fact, identifying a bunch of separate examples as possible instances of the same concept is the first step in understanding that common concept.
(Obviously, "idiopathic cause" is a completely separate situation, and the term exists entirely to protect doctors from the possibility that their patients would realize that they don't know anything.)
>I think it was Eliezer who observed that there's a temptation to think that, in naming a phenomenon, you've explained it. But you haven't: you've just named it.
True, _purely_ naming it isn't progress. Distinguishing it from other phenomena _can_ sometimes be progress. If one successfully cuts nature at the joints, that can be useful.
Like everything, there are names that are useful, and useless (or even less than useless, actively misleading, grouping things that should not be grouped or separating things that should be similar). The hypothesis is that these "experts" have made much more useless names than useful ones.
There is power in naming things. My wife had a TGA. They don't know what causes it, don't know how to prevent it, don't know how to fix it (it goes away in 24 hours, but you never get the memories back while you had it), but hey, it has a name, and it gets diagnosed simply because it ain't anything else they can test for and this is a run-on sentence and I tricked you into reading the entire thing.
The name defines a cluster of observations - even though it’s poorly understood at eg a physiological level, it’s important to diagnose that it’s not a stroke and you can expect to fully recover and not have it come back. Building understanding on that comes later - neuro researchers are working on the hypothesis that it has something to do with blood flow abnormalities within the hippocampus
Excellent observations. I think what has made me stop imbibing has been the queasy similarity of feeling after I’ve doomscrolled a few hours of cable news - very reminiscent of other addictions I’ve experienced. It made me instinctively step away after awhile, beginning in 2022 and even moreso last year. I don’t watch any domestic news anymore. I focus my efforts on being close with my neighbors while avoiding discussing politics at all costs.
I do work hard for ranked choice voting in my state though.
I work hard to getting the government to do less, so I don't have to care about the latest infringements on my rights. I live in NY, so this is a constant task.
I might just give up and move to NH.
I think the things you're naming "politics" and "trauma" would, for a large majority of human history, have been called "life."
I don't mean that sarcastically or dismissively. I mean it literally.
In Paleolithic societies (i.e., the large majority of human history), when people lived in small clans and tribes, it was a baseline, normal, and accurate expectation that people outside of your clan or tribe would, often enough, try to kill you. Experiencing a trauma reaction to many interactions with outsiders would be common. "Conspiratorial" reasoning that maybe they will try to kill you would also be common (because it was often correct).
I think the resulting emotional and cognitive patterns, however unpleasant we might find them, are a human norm. It precisely the strong default expectation of peaceable interaction that is WEIRD, in Henrich's sense.
How would trauma have been an adaptive reaction back then?
How is fear or aversion adaptive? By inducing movement (whether physical or social) away from agents that pattern-match onto past threats.
Fear/aversion is one thing, trauma another. As was discussed above, ancient warriors didn't seem to get PTSD.
Right, but it's not really PTSD in the clinical sense that Scott is discussing –– unless you think people literally got PTSD from merely hearing that Trump was elected, in which case *shrug emoticon*?
I'm expressing skepticism about the broader concept of PTSD.
Ah, fair enough.
ancient warriors would have been the ones who ate enough to be 6 feet tall and carrying weapons
Guns, snipers, bombs and nukes changed the nature of threats drasticly
Perhaps PTSD initially emerged from some kind of explosions-inflicted TBI or the continuous anxiety-ridden environment ("hurry up and wait") that emerged only with modern warfare beginning ~WW1.
However, its symptoms are now noted to occur in cases of (e.g.) individuals who were the victims of physical abuse as a child, which was also overwhelmingly common in the ancient world yet you do not see much in the way of Romans commenting on having flashbacks to their father beating them.
I don't think cPTSD (the kind you get from prolonged childhood abuse--PTSD is generally caused by a singular event) is thought to cause flashbacks. Symptoms attributed to cPTSD are less specific than PTSD symptoms so I'm not surprised we don't have accounts connecting childhood abuse to PTSD. Not to say there's nothing to the other possible explanations.
history nerd here with a nitpick
"hurry up and wait", and everything that comes with it and all the little accompanying details and annoyances, is definitely at least as old as the romans
i think i remember literally translating the phrase out of latin at some point and having a chuckle, although i can't remember what primary source it might have been
i think the main thing that made WW1 different was the fact that there was *visibly and obviously* almost no connection between your own actions and your chances of survival; trenches + constant unending staccato artillery barrages doesn't just make death random, it makes it arbitrary
i think that's a different kind of anxiety from the roman legionnaire who believes that his skill with the gladius can give him a better chance at survival (even if it can't)
In many places, ancient warriors would have been any able bodied male.
What do you mean, back then? They're still adaptive reactions now. If something hurts you today, it's probably going to hurt you again. And again. And again. Fear is necessary for survival. Cowards are the ones that end up surviving in the end.
As I said in response to Stephen, fear is one thing and trauma another. If you're walking across the street and you notice a car is speeding at you, it's rational to be afraid and get out of the way as fast as you can. But then afterward you can proceed as normal, just reminding yourself to look both ways next time. It's not adaptive to then get fixated on cars endangering pedestrians.
Perhaps trauma is just fear turned up to eleven? It's easy to imagine a sufficiently strong fear response being so intense that your brain starts to fear cars every time you approach a street. Given that trapped priors also update on just the feeling of fear, it's not hard to see how a single really bad incident with a car could self-reinforce.
"Cowards are the ones that end up surviving in the end."
I really doubt this is true. Many situations are only survivable through violence of action, if not through violence itself.
It may not be adaptive, there may only be so much capacity for handling stress.
We have skeletons. We need them to be of a certain rather effective size as land animals. Bones are adaptive. Broken bones aren't adaptive, though having some ability to heal broken bones is adaptive.
Evolution can only do what's possible, though it may have some ability to expand what's possible.
The analogy between physical & mental is another thing I'm skeptical of. We made great progress on physical illness once we discovered the germ theory of disease and were able to use better sanitation, vaccines & antibiotics. "Mental health" seems to be closer to the pre-scientific era of physical medicine where people sought treatment even though it doesn't seem to have done them much good.
I'll posit that "trauma" is what we call it when you don't feel able to go out and kill as many of your enemies as you can, until either you're dead or they're all dead. One way or another, that would take care of the problem.
That would explain why revenge fantasys are so common
Yep. The movie "Taken" is a fairly pure distillation of that attitude. Sarcastically, I'd love to see a version where Liam Neeson didn't have that "very particular set of skills", and instead we get to see 2 hours of him and his ex-wife "processing trauma" with a therapist, perhaps interspersed with brief scenes from his daughter's new life.
The human brain is far from a perfect Bayesian reasoner. Adaptive only means that it's better than the next viable alternative, and I don't find it too hard to believe that the trapped-prior, hyper-vigilant operating mode leads to better survival than does the mode we would recognise as a standard operating mode today, in a high-threat environment.
I do find it hard to believe. Do we find that in other species of animal?
I've heard a lot about early males being likely to have been killed by other males, but nothing, literally nothing, about the risks from members of other tribes compared to risks from within the tribe. I don't even know whether there's a way to tell which risk was higher.
Either risk, if sufficiently high, would be sufficient to produce the effects Scott is discussing.
Yes, but your comment was about fear of other tribes.
And I've just pointed out that my point would remain valid even if the threat came from within one's own tribe.
And Nancy is just asking an interesting follow-up question!
Not everything is an attack. Suffering from internet-argument-related trauma, maybe?
Nah, man, I'm chill. Loving the discussion here!
U mad?
This is a cute story, but elides just how complex pre-history could be.
Some peoples appeared to live in small clans and tribes, some in large tribal confederations. Some migrated constantly, some settled near reliable sources of food. Some maintained linkages with neighboring people by marriages, some had giant yearly festivals and some raided their neighbours for wives. Some avoided conflict fairly successfully, some fought in ritualised combat and some killed genocidally.
Many switched between these modes as needed, probably more quickly than modern societies can because things can be completely forgotten in two generations or so.
Different levels of trust and paranoia would be more or less appropriate depending on the era, environment and who your neigbours were.
I'm making no claim whatsoever about the homogeneity or simplicity of early societies. I fully recognize how varied they could be.
My claim is simply that levels of physical violence far in excess of those usually encountered by most living in contemporary Western countries were common.
Fair enough, although I think the pendulum has now swung a bit too far from the 'edenic pacifist' trope to the 'everyone got murdered all the time' end of things. My guess is that the average inter-group warfare rate was much higher than we would be comfortable with, because an average rate of warfare for modern societies (around 20 currently ongoing conflicts, 195 countries) ends up looking like a fairly spectacular 'murder' rate when you have more like 50-100 000 little societies all warring with each other at the same frequency.
That said, my point was that, given the diversity of the past, we should instead think about a lot of these cognitive biases as tools in a tool-box. In times and places where inter-group warfare was common, then being paranoid and ready to hate outsiders became common. In times and places where it was rare, then people were more trusting of strangers (or perhaps more trusting of strangers like them, less trusting of obviously foreign people, or perhaps the opposite, or...).
You can even see it in the subject of this article - it's not politics that drives people crazy, it's specifically US politics. In my society, we have other things to be paranoid and tribalist about. Politics isn't one of them.
He explictly tackles this in the post, section VII. "Ancient warriors apparently didn’t get PTSD."
Yes, but I don't think most of the examples of trauma he discusses (e.g., someone learning that Trump won the election in 2016) are PTSD either.
This is the thrust of my thought as well. Instead of making connections with contemporary mental illness diagnoses (in people who are otherwise well adjusted), we should be asking why these modules and effects are a ready part of an ordinary, healthy person's mental apparatus. I don't think you can do that without consideration of the kind of small-scale factional politics that would have likely been going on in the EEA. (I think a constant violent threat from outside your group explains things like demonization of the out-group better than it does paranoia or conspiratorial reasoning, which I'd guess are triggered by within-group threats to the power of yourself, your faction, or your chosen leader.) As epistemically problematic as it can be, normal human political behavior is normal. I do think it's worth asking how the contemporary environment is interacting with our natural tendencies to create new and special forms of wrongness and mental maladjustment, though.
> As epistemically problematic as it can be, normal human political behavior is normal.
You have perfectly captured my core point, which most of those responding have missed.
Even assuming that to be true, there's still the question of why this *wasn't* much of an issue in developed nations during the mid-to-late 20th century, but suddenly became an issue again in the 21st.
I would hypothesize that the expression of these psychological phenomena closely tracks the ethnic heterogeneity of these nations as increased via immigration. The timing fits.
It does, indeed. But it also tracks the Strauss-Howe generational timetable, which tries to explain why sometimes we have strong consensus optimism as in the Era of Good Feelings or mid-20th Century and sometimes everything seems existentially fraught as in the Civil War and WWII.
Yup, given the scale of government massacres during the 20th century (early as well as mid-to-late, remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide), that would seem to be the period when it would have been the _most_ rational to look at politics through the lens of "Are my rulers about to kill me?". Having political trauma rare then, but common in the 21st is puzzling timing.
I think analogizing this to trauma is a very apt and good idea. Just reading the post makes me feel relieved. The whole political miasma is a discrete phenomenon that everyone can agree is not healthy. Seems promising
I initially liked to describe Trump as the male Rosie O'Donnell, with apologies to her. But catharsis was looming. Suddenly as he became relevant all these people and organizations I felt traumatized by were very very unhappy. I loved it. I still love it
If we hold hands in hostile co-trapped priors there will be more and more trauma like experiences. This is a very memeable concept that could be popular for getting off the outrage treadmill
Good gosh golly, this is an important article.
Agreed. Scott's been working up to this for awhile (his previous post on trapped priors definitely pointed the way to this), but this is the article that feels like it _explains_ the political divide.
There's a compelling argument in here but I fear the genuine threat to people's livelihoods that bad actors (fascists) in politics pose is undersold.
Even giving that there exists a clearly defined group of deliberately bad actors, the chances that any given person has both correctly identified who they are and thought of a solution that actually makes things better is very low (definitionally so, as the space of people who have conflicting views is very large). And further, I think that entropic thinking applies in that it is often easier to make complex systems worse than better. Combining these two arguments, I think that unless you have very good reason to think you are right on some issue (something that would pass strict external muster, like "I am a leading nuclear physicist who disagrees with govt safety regulations), you should opt to do nothing. Then again, in practice anyone who actually follows this reasoning probably has better general epistemics than the wider population and therefore causes an adverse effect on average discussion by self-selecting out.
Do you vote in elections?
Everyone reading this in the US is orders of magnitude more likely to be canceled by the left-wing/"woke"/"SJWs" than by so-called "fascists." If you're actually concerned about threats to people's livelihoods, that's what you'd combat.
i did a double-take like four times while reading this, and now i am deep in googling a bunch of stuff i never would have dreamed could possibly exist
it sounds like something a paranoid conservative in the 90s would predict as the inevitable outcome of the 'gay agenda' or whatever, only to be ridiculed as a crazy nutjob. "don't you see that if we let gays get married, eventually they'll be using state resources to indoctrinate our children into their political agenda!" is literally like... the go-to example of a crazy and nonsensical worst case scenario that conservatives dreamt up to argue against gay marriage
i feel like if i were to actually examine the object-level issue, i'd probably come down in favor of drag story hour at the local public library. showing kids that people are just people, giving them tangible examples of noncishet individuals so they can get over any discomfort they might feel at the whole idea, or just prevent them from ever feeling that discomfort in the first place by making it clear that drag is normal. also, the trump card argument is that you don't have to bring your kids to drag story time if you don't want to, and the bigots have no right to stop other parents from raising their children however they want
but i can't get over the fact that, well, it feels like i have now lived through two separate cycles of this thing where
1) progressives propose a societal change to help a marginalized group
2) conservatives protest and claim there's a slippery slope which will eventually lead to much more extreme societal change xyz
3) progressives relentlessly mock those on the right for being so ludicrously paranoid, as it is obvious to all that xyz would be horrible and so nobody would ever seriously propose it
4) time passes
5) xyz is seriously proposed by progressives
6) conservatives fight back
7) progressives treat conservatives being opposed to xyz as indicative of serious evil because xyz is obviously morally correct
and this cycle is BAD and SCARY even if in this case i happen to agree with xyz. twenty years ago, if you'd told me that, as a consequence of the pro-gay-rights movmeent, in 2023 there would be individuals dressed in drag reading stories to children in public libraries, and that this was a well-known phenomenon with a googleable label "drag story hour", and that it was part of a deliberate attempt to normalize noncishet gender identities in the eyes of those very children... i mean. i would have laughed in your face and assumed you were a crazy conservative troll. maybe even a leftist doing a false-flag as a paranoid conservative, because nobody could possibly actually be this crazy
i can't quite remember why i would have thought the idea of drag story time for children was so bad... right now it just seems like, yeah, if we want the next generation to stop feeling discomfort with anything outside of the cishet normative range, this is how we do it, and that's a desirable outcome. but i feel very confident that 20 years ago, i would have been shocked and horrified at this outcome
this makes me very worried that at least some of the crazy-sounding worst-case-scenario nonsense slippery slope arguments that conservatives are currently employing might very well be true, and that some of our relentless mocking of their paranoia is probably not going to age well
but it's even scarier to think that something i'd be shocked and horrified over, some outcome that sounds like rush limbaugh nightmare, will seem perfectly normal and sane to 2043!John
and all i can do is hope that progressivism really is trending towards a better world, rather than, say, a random walk through politics-space
User banned for this comment.
I personally do not think cancel culture is the dominant threat to the median individual's livelihood. I believe fascist attitudes exist in political movements coded far-left and far-right, but my assessment is that those elements have penetrated the mainstream right wing as well. Notice I did not say right wing or left wing in my original comment yet you assumed I meant right wing. Unfortunately I think its likely we have irreconcilable views on this issue. Thanks for your reply.
You're being disingenuous: it's obvious what you meant, and pretending otherwise insults us both. But you're right, "politics is distinguishing friend and enemy," and discussion serves no end.
The particular word “fascist” is overwhelmingly more likely to be used by people on the left trying to whip up hatred against people on the right than vice-versa. You are correct that there are people with worrying authoritarian tendencies on both sides of the aisle, but the f-word is still a bad choice, especially if used without any hedging clarification.
I think there was a decent argument that the term "fascist", as used today, is basically a creation of the mid-20th-century communist movement, lumping together all the political movements that used violence to suppress communism.
While it's true that most non-communists (and a chunk of fellow communists) have at one point or another in the 20th century been called fascists by communists, I don't think e.g. the Weimar SPD or Kerensky's liberals would fit the definition as used today.
Anyway, fascism is more centrally anti-egalitarian and nationalist/racial-identitarian than authoritarian. This fits the right while failing to fit the left, which tends to be egalitarian and internationalist even when it advocates authoritarian or violent means to enforce egalitarian policies.
I got into ancient history before I got into modern politics, so my personal definition of "fascism" derives from the sticks bound together into a bundle. "Stronger Together", as Supergirl and Hillary Clinton put it. Unite behind one leader, one party, one nation, one ideal. People who can't or won't unite will be discarded as useless. Stick out, and you'll be chopped down to size. Become a mechanized, standardized part in the giant machine of the state.
I admit, it's quite idiosyncratic, but even without the name, as an internal category it does seem helpful in making sense of the world.
Something I left out is hierarchy. Fascism seems very big on hierarchies for some reason. Not just on a personal level, but also by classifying people into groups and then ordering those groups somehow. Maybe the personal level stuff is just a side-effect of trying to do top-down coordination of a lot of people, but the group stuff makes me think that fascists really like hierarchies for some reason.
Twitter user Covfefe Anon (who used to be a regular commenter on SSC under a different username) has a maxim to that same effect, that “anything that opposes communist” is the only definition of “fascism” that was ever real.
I don't recall running across that name, and I don't use Twitter much, but perhaps I picked it up from SSC comments. Although that maxim sounds just different enough that I suspect we either got it from the same place, or I got it from someone who expanded it from their maxim. There was definitely a bit more history involved.
Except for the fascists who unironically called themselves fascist.
You're right that authoritarian impulse is what I should have said, however I maintain that legit fascism (not just anti-communism) as you've hinted at below is swelling under the surface, and at times bursts out into the open, of right-wing US politics. My belief that similar attitudes are shared by movements coded as far-left is mostly informed by observations of the Twitter activity of the so-called "Tankie-left." Either way, you're probably right I could've been more precise. Thanks for yout comment.
What decade did you time travel in from? Here in the US politics is dominated by elderly dotards with no military/combat experience who ramble a lot but have no big ideas for actually changing anything.
I saw an analysis recently that made me ever-so-slightly more happy about the gerontocracy. I forget where it was, but I'll try to sum it up.
Pelosi hung on because Ocasio-Cortez primaried her chosen successor, McConnell hangs on because there is no good successor, Biden was picked because everyone else was too extreme and would lose to Trump, and Trump is just ... Trump. Other than that, most politicians are in the normal age range. The problem in these cases seems to be a lack of a good successor, as we're seeing on the House Republican side right now.
More generally, and depressingly, they hypothesized that the new generation was raised on hyper-partisanship and actually bought into it, whereas the old generation knew it was a rhetorical maneuver and just another way of playing politics. So in that sense, "Après moi, le déluge." Let's enjoy the relatively sane leadership while we can. Soon, all politics will look like the House Republicans.
The median age of voting House lawmakers is 57.9 years, down from 58.9 in the 117th Congress (2021-22), 58.0 in the 116th (2019-20) and 58.4 in the 115th (2017-18). The new Senate's median age, on the other hand, is 65.3 years, up from 64.8 in the 117th Congress, 63.6 in the 116th... what do you mean by normal age range? Median age in the US is 38.8...
Normal age range for politicians, that is. Which, especially on the national level, is older than that of the population in general, and older the "higher" the position, and older the healthier and more long-lived Americans become. To be clear, I don't know if this is accurate. But I'd want to look at trends going back to at least WWII if not WWI.
That's what gerontocracy means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerontocracy
In a literal sense, sure. But in common usage it refers to a situation beyond the norm. Just like how, if we set salaries for elected government officials higher than the median, that doesn't automatically make us a plutocracy all by itself.
On Jan 6, 2021 armed groups attacked the US Capitol in order to prevent the peaceful transition of power. They constructed gallows and shouted "Hang Mike Pence." A sitting Republican Representative texted the President's Chief of Staff suggesting the President declare Martial law and use the military for similar ends.
This is truly a fascinating comment given the topic of the article under which it is posted.
Armed with what? Flags?
Deploying the military to clear the riot would have been fine. Riots rely on large numbers of people overwhelming the small number of police in an area. The military is available to tip the scales back when that happens.
Armed? Only one person was shot and she was a protestor.
So what? If the people want fascism, that's what the people get. That's how democracy works. What the hell are you going to do about it? If you die, you die. No big deal.
Democracy has never been like that, not since 1776 at least (not sure about ancient Greece). There have always been limits on the majority's ability to do arbitrary/criminal things.
No, there are democracies which try to defend against fascist takeover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy
Emphasis on "try." Even an authoritarian regime has a hard time getting things done if everyone hates them. How long can a "democracy" realistically hold out against the will of the people?
Well yes, sure, if everybody wants the old Kaiser Wilhelm back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWIH9ix8zgM then the question is moot. But if 70% want absolute monarchy and 30% democracy, the 30% have the right to resistance https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Right_to_resistance (article 20 of the constitution), and then it gets interesting. Note that even in the rigged 1933 elections, the nazis didn't get a majority.
It really only works from a perspective of affluence and assured dignity in which nebulous 'cancellation' is the worst threat imaginable (as opposed to, say, whether the dole will be cut and not enough to live on, or whether the death penalty is on the books, or whether abortion will be criminalised, or whether a fed contractor will or will not be allowed to fire for identity). Sometimes a trauma-like response to the prospect of specific legislation is – well, rational is the wrong word, but certainly sane, because that specific legislation will physically hurt.
I do agree that it isn't healthy to obsess over these things if you can't do anything about them, beyond the votes, the donation to the relevant party/activist group, the odd march. But sequestration from the doomscroll comes at a cost in awareness and willingness to do something more when the right Schelling point comes along.
I agree. Politics is substantive and can have dire consequences.
<i>It really only works from a perspective of affluence and assured dignity in which nebulous 'cancellation' is the worst threat imaginable (as opposed to, say, whether the dole will be cut and not enough to live on, or whether the death penalty is on the books, or whether abortion will be criminalised, or whether a fed contractor will or will not be allowed to fire for identity).</i>
Cancellation normally involves getting somebody fired (or at least trying to), which is if anything even more of a threat to non-affluent, non-assuredly dignified people.
I can't remember ever hearing of someone getting fired from a working-class job on account of having been called out on social media. I doubt it happens very often.
If they broadcast their intention to start a union, or something, I could see it.
How often do you hear about individuals doing working-class jobs for any reason?
Often enough. It may sound astonishing, but sometimes I even set aside the pipe and port, put on my pith helmet, venture forth into the untamed wasteland, and talk to one or two.
I get what you mean, though, and you're right when you specify 'individuals'. In the media, apart from the fluffy faux-compassionate intro blurb ("Janine is not alone. Every year, across the country, over twenty-seven thousand...") they tend to be treated as a blob - striking, marching in yellow vests, rejecting immigration and defecting to the GOP/RN/AfD, pissing into bottles in the warehouses, enduring class contempt behind retail counters. Which is one of the factors that shield them from reputational damage. Even acknowledging kwh's example above, there's no way that a social media call for dismissal is in the top five threats to an ordinary worker's well-being and livelihood.
One of the striking things about politics is that usually the bad actors are convinced they are the good guys, and millions of supporters agree that they are the good guys. A lot of harm has been done in the world by people who meant well. I think this comes down to the fact that political ideas are usually not testable until their adherents get into power, so you can have a compelling story that your ideas will make a heaven on Earth, even if your actual regime will make piles of skulls and wreck the country.
And what would the alternative be? Do you think these "bad actors" are just doing everything for the evulz? Obviously everyone thinks they're in the moral right, even the ones who are completely selfish. Ayn Rand is a good example.
Great post. It's helped me look more clearly at a topic that's been puzzling me, and which is political, albeit not in a classic partisan way.
This is a bit niche, but here we go.
I follow some forums that focus on me/cfs, a chronic disease. The disease has a big problem, which is that people use the lack of clear somatic etiology to argue it is psychosomatic. That has led to a cycle of underfunding which has left the etiology unclear.
A subset of sufferers set up a forum called s4me, which is supposed to be the pre-eminent place for people to discuss Science, for the illness. However by far the most popular kind of post there is one where some dodgy researcher has a hypothesis paper arguing ME is psychosomatic. Such posts quickly garner 100,000 views and 90+ pages of comments, while a good proper expensive study from an Ivy League uni on cytokine patterns in the illness will be lucky to collect 2 pages of comments.
I've long been confused by why the people who perceive themselves as the biggest fans of serious science give most of their attention to the worst science. Your post has helped me understand that these people are traumatised - by not being believed. For these people, this is a political issue and the psychosomatic researchers are *the other side*. Looking at it like this makes me more forgiving of their apparent inability to actually focus much on the science that is trying to help them.
"I've long been confused by why the people who perceive themselves as the biggest fans of serious science give most of their attention to the worst science."
You're got a point, but I think there's also a matter of looking for low-effort opportunities to feel superior. It's easy to see that bad science is bad, and work to evaluate good science to see how plausible or important it might be.
That's actually a pretty good point, I hadn't thought of it that way. Basically [bikeshedding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality).
I take quite a different lesson from "ancient warriors didn't get PTSD." As Greg Cochran says, the obvious explanation is that the proliferation of weapons that cause concussive blasts made soldiers into boxers -- their brains got all screwed up, and more screwed up the more combat they saw. Physical damage, not psychic damage.
Tying into that, I find the medicalization of what I'd call quite reasonable responses to American political trends annoying. This cycle of polarization has happened before and it ended in lots of deaths, and the domination of one faction by the other on a very deep level - the total annihilation of one side's core value system and way of life - forevermore. Stakes are high. You probably should be pretty worried about it. If a bunch of people are feeling a certain way about something, and they aren't a cohort whose brains have been constantly pulverized by pressure waves, the first thought should be -- there might be something to it!
"Everyone agrees we’re “addicted to outrage”. I find this phenomenon fascinating, and analogizing it to trauma addiction is the only way I’ve been able to make sense of it."
If you saw a bunch of ants or baboons line up to slaughter each other would you say they got infected by a rage virus, or they are addicted to outrage, or any other thing you could grab out of that hat, or would you just say -- yeah, looks right, it's happened before about a billion times and it makes perfect sense?
Sorry if I come off harsh here. After October 7th I went on a history binge and the overwhelming theme I noticed is that basically the same thing has been happening in the levant over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over since at least the 1920s, yet the overwhelming effort by is always to "move past it" - it's like a horror movie where people keep splitting off even after the first three people to do so were found disassembled. Conflict mindset -- tribe-centric mindset -- is not some sort of delusion or disease. Lately I feel that accusation lands far closer to home on the liberal peacenik camp. Maybe those delusions are in need of the medicalizing frame.
<gallows humor>
Has Willie McBride aka Green Fields of France https://genius.com/The-fureys-green-fields-of-france-lyrics , particularly
>Ah, young Willie McBride, I can't help wonder why:
>Do those that lie here know, why did they die?
>And did they believe when they answered the call
>Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
>Well, the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
>The killing and dying were all done in vain
>For young Willie McBride, it all happened again
>And again and again and again and again
been translated into Hebrew and Arabic?
</gallows humor>
I used to have an mp3 of a version of that, which I can't find on the Internet anymore. I think it was of a live performance by June Tabor. It was wonderful and sad.
Many Thanks! There are versions available, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkSAlnCRFew
This may be June Tabor's version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWhOO9Q323Y
I found it! Sort of; the mp3 I had was only the first 5:10, which now that I listen to the rest, I kind of understand as an editing choice.
https://archive.org/details/18-no-mans-land-june-tabor/18+No+Man's+Land+%5BJune+Tabor%5D.mp3
Many Thanks! Glad you found it!
Maybe it wasn't your intent, but the implicit message that comes across here is "tribal violence is simply a part of human existence and nothing can be done to prevent it or even understand it." But that seems like an overly bleak view to take.
I think we can understand it. Part of that understanding is that you can't totally prevent it, but you can make it unlikely through deterrence. Heedlessly trampling through your own side's lines to deliver a utopian plea for peace can actually provoke an attack. Also, trying to make sure you win any likely conflict should get at least as much priority as avoiding conflict. It's very hard to effectively deter the potential foe any other way. And, frankly, better that the other tribe suffers than your own.
> And, frankly, better that the other tribe suffers than your own.
That’s not really being anti tribal. Your solution to tribalism is the bigger tribe bashes the smaller.
Of course we can do something to prevent it. We can just get rid of humanity.
Or at least the Other Tribe
Oh please, people will always find a reason to kill each other. Power struggles don't suddenly end the moment one group takes power.
When you say
>We can just get rid of humanity.
do you mean in the sense of eliminating all intelligence, or in the sense of replacement with AI?
If replaced with (non-monolithic) AI, it isn't clear if tribal violence would diminish. Some of that is from our specific evolutionary history and our physiology. But part of it may be game theoretic, inherent in alliances and factions and prisoners' dilemmas. That might well remain, even if LLMs inherit the world.
That view as stated would be a contradiction in terms; if tribal violence is indeed a part of human existence and impossible to prevent, then the fact we can know that implies we can at least somewhat understand it.
I kinda believe it, though. Assuming that we need to get rid of the mass polarization in America, the non-murder method looks like "get deeply traumatized bitter enemies who number in the hundreds of millions apiece to get together and work it out". I really don't think this is possible.
I wonder if the reality is just that almost everyone had PTSD because the world was really terrible. Or maybe PTSD is what our evolved trauma response looks like in a WEIRD low-threat environment, like the way widespread food allergies are what our evolved anti-parasite defenses look like in a WEIRD low-threat environment.
We have lots of documents from the past, including documents written by, about, and for highly militarised societies (or sections of societies), and none of them suggest that what we'd consider PTSD symptoms were widespread.
Sure, but I for one understood the hypothesis explaining it like
Long term traumatic (pathogen, parasite rich) environment -> encounters WEIRD-level traumatic event (pollen) -> no PTSD (nothing special happens)
WEIRD low trauma environment (low amount of pathogens, parasites) -> encounters WEIRD-level traumatic event (pollen) -> PTSD (allergic reaction).
Comparison is not necessarily exact, considering the qualitative differences between ancient traumatic events that got written about and the WEIRD traumatic events.
Yeah, my comment was meant to be in reference to the first possibility ("that almost everyone had PTSD because the world was really terrible").
One interesting piece of research would be to compare recorded rates of PTSD in the First World War, and see if the WEIRD-er sections of society had higher rates than the less WEIRD.
Yeah. There would not have been anything like spending weeks hiding in a hole while artillery shells fell around you in the ancient world, but there would have been plenty of seeing peoples' throats cut at close range, getting knocked ass-over-teakettle as a horse slammed into you, sitting in a walled city as the food ran out and the army outside kept tossing stones over your walls and you waited for the impending sack. You'd think those things would have been about as PTSD-causing as modern warfare, but who knows? I think a common cause of trauma in soldiers is having killed kids in wartime, but I don't think that was at all uncommon in ancient warfare.
Also, just normal daily life--half your kids die before they turn five, a lot of very dangerous daily work by modern standards (low-tech farming with animals, sailing, logging, etc.), lots of crime because there's nothing like an organized police force to stop it, women pretty regularly dying in childbirth--seems pretty damned traumatic. I knew a couple who had a child born with major health problems, who died before her first birthday. It sure looked to me like this massively screwed both of them up as well as ultimately destroying their marriage. But that's basically just a normal part of having a family anytime before modern sanitation and medicine came along--you have six kids and sit with three of them as they crap themselves to death or lie there listlessly with a 104 fever cooking their brain or whatever.
> Stakes are high. You probably should be pretty worried about it.
I agree that you should be worried about politics and how cycles like this often lead to genocide. But there's one thing that I think a lot of people miss (maybe Scott could write a post about it?)
The standard human fear response is really badly suited to this task. Fight-or-flight exists for the ancestral environment, when you had to flee or fight angry animals or murderous tribes. In the modern world of complex people with bad values we don't want to kill, the standard fear response is a very poor match to this problem.
If learning about what your political enemies are doing makes you feel physically bad, afraid, makes your heart beat fast or gives you other somatic symptoms, your body is using the standard fear response.
Some things definitely work to fight your political enemies! Voting, canvassing, writing policy, calling your legislators, running for office, keeping an eye on fringe groups, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting.
But some things feel like they should work when they really, really don't. Doomscrolling/doomwatching, insulting the other side directly or indirectly, heck, I might even throw protesting into the mix. It's relieving, certainly, and I don't begrudge anyone emotional relief, but it alone isn't enough to fix the problem - and oftentimes exacerbates it.
So, by all means, pay attention to politics. Fight what you fear. Just be aware that fear tells you both what to be afraid of and also how to fight it, and that second part hasn't been updated in many millennia.
>In the modern world of complex people with bad values we don't want to kill, the standard fear response is a very poor match to this problem.
True!
<gallows irony>
Even when there are people we _do_ want to kill, the standard fear response is a bad match. Modern warfare involves a great deal of precision. Trembling hands do not craft symmetrically imploding plutonium spheres.
</gallows irony>
Sadly accurate. I don't follow true crime that much, but I would guess that history's most effective serial killers probably had a blunted fear response.
Many Thanks!
>I would guess that history's most effective serial killers probably had a blunted fear response
That does indeed sound plausible.
The bit where PTSD is supposedly just TBI is presently trendy, and it was trendy a bit over a hundred years ago for similar reasons - it makes it easier to get the afflicted proper treatment, as opposed to stigmatization for cowardice and/or mental illness. But it didn't hold up to close examination then, and it doesn't now. There are too many soldiers exposed almost exclusively to e.g. small-arms fire, who develop PTSD. A quick google suggests that 15-20% of US police officers suffer from PTSD, and no matter what the action movies tell you, nobody is shooting artillery at the police here.
Additionally, in a technologically advanced democracy (in which votes bring power, and attention brings votes) we have to reckon with supernormal stimulus. A fake parasitic stimulus can afford the resources to be much more triggering than the genuine article. Like how the moth prefers the orchid that camouflages itself as a moth to actual moths. An invented threat can super stimulate fear, not having to worry about pesky facts. An invented persecution can super stimulate anger, not having to spend any resources on actually existing.
And, in a democracy, you have a civic duty to expose yourself to all these stimuli.
"As a eusocial ant, you have a duty to the colony to expose yourself to cordyceps." No, you don't.
If that's somehow helps the colony to develop immune response - you absolutely do.
You're assuming lamarckian evolution here.
What would actually happen is that all the stupid ants that expose themselves to cordyceps would die. New ants would be "protected" from the fungus by avoiding it.
Not really. I'm talking about something close to immune response of a human where an example of a pathogen can inoculate the body from further infection.
Not that I claim that real life ants work this way. But the point was not about ants in the first place.
Fair. It seems we disagree on what metaphor best fits, which is not a productive line of debate.
I'd say our crux is whether exposing yourself to politics makes you more resilient or just more dysfunctional.
I lean towards the latter.
The crux should be not whether exposing yourself to all kind of ideas makes you more resilient but whether it's benefiting the society as a whole.
My bad, that last "No, you don't," was my denying the existence of any putative civic duty to expose yourself to unpleasant stimuli. I retract any claims I may have implied about the "duties" of eusocial insects.
It depends on the unpleasant stimulus. Many people find going to work every day unpleasant, but society depends on them doing it
Yeah, you shouldn't always do your civic duty.
Eh, it doesn't **need** to be invented. Social media is a way of crowd-sourcing content, and the algorithms filter up whatever the most "interesting" thing is, where by "interesting" they mean "keeps people glued to the screen and interacting more", like some behaviorist motivating rats. Whatever the most outrage-provoking thing that happens is, it's going to be filtered in, not out, and spread to the maximum audience possible.
Of course, there will also be fake stuff, and embellishments, and all that. And you're right that it will spread more. Jussie Smollett comes to mind. But I think all the fakery is organic, and that even without the fakery there'd be plenty to cause outrage.
I'm saying that being fake makes it a more effective provocation to outrage than it would be if it was real. So the algorithmic filter you're talking about (in a certain way) can actually select for fakeness.
I agree. It's always a worry when I see a story that's "too good".
> orchid that camouflages itself as a moth
It took me a bit to understand your true meaning. Camouflage is the wrong word. You mean something more like "orchid that masquerades as a moth" or "orchid that mimics a moth" etc.
You're right. I was trying to give the sense of a biological principle, and mimicry is a specific form of camouflage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camouflage has a sub-heading for mimesis. The orchid and the evening news aren't *trying* to trick the moth and the citizen; they're enacting a mimetic camouflage strategy in response to pressure.
I took a class with Sheila Jeffreys - the radical feminist - at university. It was a pretty good basic intro to feminism and quite eye-opening. Later she got cancelled though for not being pro-trans. I think her perspective on society would be even more valuable now but of course we don't get to hear it.
I’m hoping he also reads some Janice Raymond.
While I think it's always worthwhile to hear from your enemies, I always wonder about guys who get really into radical feminism. It's like these Jews who get too close to the alt-right--even if they're right about stuff (and they often are), they still hate you and want to destroy you, *no matter what you do*. The taint is in the blood, and you can't remove it without suicide.
If it comes down to trans people versus radfems, I'm siding with the trans people--at least they don't *all* hate me.
Was there actually much of a scientific basis for the concept of PTSD? My understanding is that there was a political push for it in the wake of Vietnam. And a priori we should expect typical humans of the EEA were more like those ancient warriors https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/ptsd/
> For example, it has been found that women who were sexually abused as children are more likely to be sexually or physically abused in their marriages.
I'm guessing those studies make something like "the nurture assumption" and don't attempt to control for genetic confounds.
As I understand it, PTSD first showed up as "Shell Shock" in WWI.
We're adapted for pre-modern warfare, which tended to be short, purposeful, cathartic, and firewalled by ritual, context and ingroup/outgroup distinctions.
In contrast, modern warfare has an "always on" aspect. Objectives are often intangible. You can't see the person trying to kill you. We're mostly missing the public going to war/coming back from war rituals (thought he modern military does its best to recreate them). The context of combat is often civilian, and the apparent civilians may suddenly try to kill you. We (thankfully) no longer have the cultural apparatus to consistently regard the enemy as not counting as people.
The actual shells in shellshock were indeed relatively new and not part of the EEA.
I think pre-modern war was more "always on" than you may believe. It's harder to be decisive when you have very primitive tribes with equal technology up against each other. That's part of why places like Papua New Guinea have so many languages: nobody was successful enough to make theirs dominant over a wide area.
Likewise in patches of historical Europe where raiding and feuding were almost a hobby. However, I think that's different from the sensory overload of spending weeks on end in a combat zone, with indirect fire a constant threat and - again - being attacked by people you can't strike back at - that was one of the things WWI soldiers complained about.
I suspect that pre-modern combatants were traumatised at a lower rate, but that the effects are obfuscated to us by the religious framing which helped manage it. Maybe that's why Greeks liked their mystery cults, and Medievals endowed chantries and went on pilgrimage.
It used to be impossible to fight at night, and impractical to fight during harvest and sowing. Modern warfare is much more continuous.
Also, exposure to noise is hard on people, and of course more so when the noise might be a deadly explosion.
The craze of politics seems similar to the craze of religion vis-à-vis mental illness diagnosis. The DSM / diagnostic criteria (or at least an older version of them) carved out an exemption from delusions, for common ones, such as those which are parts of religions:
>The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith) (APA 2000: 821).
It's not really an exemption in the sense of getting a pass from judgment it would otherwise incur. Having the same beliefs as people of your cultural milieu is reflective of a healthy brain, even if those beliefs are weird. "Everyone around me thinks this" is the ordinary way to arrive at a weird belief and isn't indicative of psychopathology, just garden-variety human irrationality. If you have arrived at a strange belief, and it isn't shared by people in your culture, and you hold it with unshakable fixity, the problem isn't just the fact that you have a weird belief. That you wandered into one of those all on your own and got stuck there is a sign of larger, usually pathological issues afoot.
I agree. I should have used different words (I copied the citation from https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/pdfs/szasz.pdf, so the author's bias made it into the wording). That's all consistent with my point. Scott starts the post by showing the ways in which politics makes people crazy (people lose basic reasoning abilities, paranoia and conspiracy theories, etc.) which he uses to set the stage for his diagnosis of the politics-addled. But I was noting that when such thinking is shared by other members of the person's cultural milieu, it isn't considered a mental illness - and rightly so - as you point out.
Thinking your mailman is out to get you is probably a sign of more fundamental underlying problems, while thinking Satan is out to get you, which is seemingly more objectively delusional, as the entity doesn't actually exist, may simply be a reflection of regnant beliefs in certain communities.
Political delusions seem similar in that they reflect popular beliefs, rather than individually spawned delusions, so pathologizing them seems questionable.
Trump Jr, among others, started talking about “triggering the libs” long before libs started accusing conservatives of being triggered.
I am alarmed that you missed this, and also alarmed by your defense of students triggered by college courses--in that case because college is explicitly for broadening one’s knowledge base, let alone horizons and tastes, etc. Any person so legitimately triggered by hearing or witnessing college material has no place being in college--legitimate or real though their perceived trauma may be.
And as for the thrust of the article, I think you on one hand miss the forest for the trees (some of us, especially rape victims, saw and heard all of Trump’s speeches and were “triggered” by the familiar behavior of an entitled, power-grabbing bully who could and did respond to every accusation with “she’s lying” (or he or they or whatever it was in any given instance.)
On the other, almost every individual involved in the political and media apparatus is incentivized to make every single citizen feel as anxious and betrayed as possible. People are responding quite understandably, even predictably, to what they are being explicitly manipulated to respond to.
I think this last paragraph is very true. There are people who benefit from keeping your anxiety and outrage turned up to 11 all the time. And this can be about a business goal like getting more ad impressions or making your site stickier, but it can also be a kind of dynamic that arises in groups, where people encourage each other to keep focusing on/marinating in whatever keeps them engaged.
I feel like Trump is some kind of weird scissors-statement-made-flesh, because different people react so differently to him. I can observe that a lot of people find his speeches engaging and entertaining, and then I listen and it sounds like word salad to me. And other people find his speeches/statements super upsetting and disturbing.
Though it is not germaine to your point I think it is worth adding context that, when the diagnostic criteria add that carve-out for trauma from consuming media in a work context, what the authors probably have in mind are the social media censors whose duty is to trawl through thousands of pieces of media per day that were reported as depicting child abuse or pedophilia.
I too feel warm and fuzy when I see a well argued point. Thank you for this.
Trauma, as a word more so than a true understanding of the concept, gets thrown around more aggressively these days, presumably due to social media.
Just like a dish you've had far too much of that it eventually loses its appeal. Words like trauma has done the same for me. I can't take it seriously anymore.
I feel sorry for people with "real" trauma. Perhaps we need a new word.
...I don't think you got the point of the article. The trauma described here is just as real as the "real" trauma. Everyone is in pain. Just because you don't think it's justified doesn't make it any less real.
I wasn't trying to summarize the article in one sentence. Just made a personal comment on the word "trauma"
But thank you for informing me of my thoughts.
Your thought was that you find trauma unappealing?
I could be wrong but it seems to me like you're purposefully picking at my words just to make me look polarizing. I get that it's the internet, but it's unnecessary, unless you get a kick out of it.
Just in case it wasn't clear, this article seems to expand on what I apparently failed to say - https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22876522/trauma-covid-word-origin-mental-health
I think there's definitely a difference in category of trauma we think should occur (ex: we socially expect people to get sad from family members dying; we socially expect people to have a bad time if they have a huge fallout with their friends), versus trauma that we would like to see less of and causes harms that aren't useful even in a social sense (like being traumatized about politics, it would be far better if we managed to dissolve that; or by being traumatized into focusing more on rape than is healthy).
What I personally got from Scott's previous article(s) and this one, I think the cross-cultural comparison link he gave above is one of the ones I'm thinking of, is that
- We should be more careful about certain cultural 'tropes' forming
- The word trauma becomes less useful as we add more things to it. The weight of the word however keeps its inertia, which can cause problems. Like how people avoiding disagreements from the other side isn't healthy (though actively looking isn't healthy either), but if it got called trauma it would be far harder to go "maybe reading other people's viewpoints is good for your general understanding?". This has happened with the word mental disorder some, where it took some time before it became weaker.
- If culture is growing to fit more and more into the trauma category, what we should do is try to forestall that. It hurts, but also we should be encouraging a culture of controlling one's responses to things that hurt... because they makes things hurt less. There's probably better ways, but preventative medicine is better than just treating the symptoms.
Why do you think there's a such a thing as trauma that should occur? There's no real justification for feeling sad about things that are outside of your control. The distinction between "good" and "bad" trauma is completely arbitrary.
And on the topic of encouraging people to control their response to things, even assuming that most people are even capable of that... Not feeling anything in response to things is equivalent to not caring. Caring about things can only lead to pain, but apathy destroys any and all motivation. I know this from personal experience: I'm a nihilist myself, but I'm also self-aware enough to realize that if everyone was like me, society would collapse within a few hours. And I'm assuming the death of humanity isn't your goal.
There's negative-feelings that we (in the general culture sense) think should occur, and trauma that are considered expected to occur because they're about the weight of the feeling. I don't know all the sociocultural pieces of that, but 'being reminded of a lost family member when you see X thing related/important to them' is a common trauma. There's also plenty of trauma that occurs now that is expected, but aren't as entrenched or aren't meta-endorsed.
I consider it plausible that the optimal way is to deliberately avoid/remove all possible trauma. Perhaps we end up with a designed culture that leaves you to be sad for however long if someone you know dies (well, ideally not at all, because we solve aging and do all sorts of other ways to avoid death) that avoids longer-term trauma. But I also consider it plausible that we would end up going "yep that's normal and expected". I consider sadness as an emotion that mostly we shouldn't feel at all, but that sadness is hooked up to reality. I wouldn't press a button to get rid of sadness, but I would press a button that got rid of causes of sadness (modulo various edge case scenarios). Reasons outside your control for being sad happen quite a lot. I'm sad about people I know dying even if I couldn't do anything about it! I don't want to be *overly* sad, like becoming depressive for a month or worse, but I think some amount of sadness is just a part of how humans handle... sad events.
I don't really consider that the distinction between good/bad trauma being arbitrary to be much of a statement? Sure, it would be arbitrary in the generic, just like most social values. We do live within some culture with some values, and then have our own personal values which can disagree with the general culture background(s), but there are general shared tendencies that can be used to form a definition of "trauma we think is part of the general social fabric" / "trauma that is part of human's growing and experiencing bad things" versus "trauma that is too common, or damaging in certain notably negative ways, or would be better managed by some other response".
'Controlling response to things' doesn't mean feeling nothing at all. If someone punches you, you can be pissed off. It is the difference between getting attacked by someone and becoming flinchy about situations like that (trauma) and becoming annoyed/sad/pissed/scared. I'm trying to gesture at a thing where you experience the emotions but don't have a long-lasting ingrained response to it. I think a simple version of this happens a lot, especially when you haven't learned a cultural trope for how you should handle it.
I have real trauma (severely disordered childhood attachment, also was almost murdered along with a bunch of other people in my community in a high-profile incident). I also dislike how easily the word trauma is thrown around, but I think Scott's point is basically accurate. One could reasonably argue that trauma is an approximation of a more complex phenomena, which I think is described by schemas, autonomic nervous system states, and adaption: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip/p/i9xyZBS3qzA8nFXNQ
I'm sorry for what you've been through. Hope you found a way to live with it.
I don't disagree with Scott's point. I just emphasized how easily the word "trauma" gets thrown around, especially in social media contexts that don't really justify it, so much so that it's lost its severity, meaning.
> that in college a bunch of people tried to cancel me for something I’d intended to be an anti-racist joke
In Ireland? Seems odd. Irish universities have largely escaped the extreme wokeness of some US universities.
This all reminds me of that poor woman who joked about AIDS prior to getting her flight. It was clearly an anti-racist joke, and yet the pile on was incredible. It was just then that o became wary of social media and Twitter in particular - which up to then had been great.
In the USA, apparently they require you to get an undergraduate degree in some unrelated subject (in Scott’s case philosophy) before they let you into medical school.
He did his medical degree in Ireland though.
Yes. But if I remember rightly, this incident happened during his undergraduate degree in the USA.
This is correct. It was during his undergraduate degree (I'm blanking on which university he went to where this happened but used to know).
>Irish universities have largely escaped the extreme wokeness of some US universities.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/trinity-students-take-privilege-walk-to-highlight-access-issues-1.2599225
https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/trinity-college-begins-two-year-investigation-into-its-colonial-past/
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/ucd-students-union-to-introduce-mandatory-sexual-consent-classes/34438653.html - mandatory consent classes introduced in response to a "revenge porn" moral panic invented from whole cloth
https://www.ucd.ie/artshumanities/newsandevents/blmstatement/
https://www.tcd.ie/equality/policy/diversity-inclusion-strategy/
https://www.change.org/p/national-university-of-ireland-galway-nuig-issue-a-statement-against-anti-black-racism
Obviously these examples all occurred well after Scott studied in Ireland.
They were all part of the moral panic after 2020. Sure they are there but Scott was talking about being ostracised by peers.
(Also trinity looking into its colonial past isn’t really the same thing as a British university doing the same thing, as many Irish people see it as that).
The first and third examples happened prior to 2020.
I admire the research all the same. Lots of work there.
<3
This is a good analysis, and helps to explain two oddities that, as an outsider, I have when interacting with Americans.
The first is that Americans bang on about politics A LOT. It's all over media and your public discourse, to the point that I know about as much about your internal politics and political discourse as I do my own country's, despite having no interest in it at all and actively avoiding it whenever I can. And, invariably, the first thing that an American tries to do when a topic of conversation strays into anything that their politics has touched, is try to peg which side you are on (i.e. determine if you are a team Red or team Blue supporter). Being on neither side, because you are not an American, is not an acceptable answer and makes people angry.
The second is that, from the outside, a lot of the specific planks seem very strange and nonsensical. The ostensible party of (since a few years ago) free speech, economic liberty, gun rights, social conservatism and religion, for instance. Or the ostensible party of (until a few years ago) free speech, economic regulation, decriminalization of drug offences, environmentalism, freedom from religion, social justice and social programs. I get that the parties are big tents, and that there are social-historical reasons for these various stances, but from outside it seems even more arbitrary than our own political parties and their policies (and at least we have many to choose from). Yet it is treated as not just normal but right in a sort of cosmic sense that these should all fit together just so, and that such a system is not just normal but ordinary and true across time and space. And any suggestion that you might pick and choose between different planks is treated as heresy that puts you in the other team. At the outside, you're allowed to have one deviation only (a democrat who likes guns, for instance. Or a pro-union republican) and that's it.
So the idea that it's two groups huddling ever closer together as they traumatise and demonise each other makes complete sense to me.
This is why, as an American, I prefer getting my coverage of American politics from non-American sources. It helps me keep my perspective.
Unfortunately a lot of our local coverage of American politics ends up poisoned by... American politics. For instance, one of the newspapers I read is following the election saga, with all the reportage done by an American expat who used to be in government somewhere. So it ends up recapitulating a lot of the biases and suppositions for our local audience.
I think what helps provide perspective for me is to take the alien-eye view and look at the actions of the US government without seeing any of the personalities and internal struggles. At which point it becomes apparent that there's essentially no difference when one party or the other is in power. Stripped of rhetoric and personality, the Trump years (the first Trump years?), viewed from space, just seem like a continuation of business as usual. The Biden years look much the same.
> Unfortunately a lot of our local coverage of American politics ends up poisoned by... American politics.
Yeah, that is a problem.
I try not to talk about politics with my friends and family. Much healthier. I also try as much as possible to read from a wide variety of sources and (hopefully) to develop nuanced views on issues. I think this is a good post, but you overstate the pressure to conform, although I can certainly see why it appears that way from the outside
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean the New York Times isn't out to doxx you.
"Everyone agrees we’re 'addicted to outrage.' I find this phenomenon fascinating, and analogizing it to trauma addiction is the only way I’ve been able to make sense of it."
I think of it this way: What people are addicted to isn't outrage per se, but the feeling of moral certitude that comes with it. When you see someone you hate doing something outrageous, it reinforces how correct you are to oppose them. "See! I'm right! These people really *are* dumb/crazy/evil!" That's the part that feels so intoxicating, at least to me.
I don't disagree with the trauma analogy, though. Maybe it could be either, or some mix of both, depending on the person?
Considering "morality" ultimately boils down to whether someone feels good or bad about something, this does just seem like basic tribalism. I'm sure the trauma doesn't help though.
If a nihilist seems to make a lot of sense, that's a bad sign, right?
no, I think people are actually addicted to outrage. How else do you explain doomscrolling?
A good example of the addiction to trauma or distress is the reluctance of the more doomsterish adherents of climate change to accept relatively good news. You can be downvoted to oblivion on reddit by pointing out that the more extreme projections are crazy, even if you link to the ISPCC reports or to NASA‘s climate website.
For instance I’ve seen maps on how flooded certain cities will be by 2050, some showing these cities under metres, or several feet, of water while the official statistics show sea level increasing by 3.4mm a year. That rate is accelerating but not significantly.
Assuming some acceleration there will be maximum 100mm increase by 2050 (without acceleration it’s 88mm).
Anyway it’s about 4 inches in American. Most cities don’t flood at the very highest tide in any one year (absent a storm surge) - and the difference between the highest tide of the year and the average high tide is significant*.
Which means that cities will not be under water either at all, or at the most slightly more - and only during extreme conditions - by 2050. (2100 is a different story if acceleration continues but that’s an era that even teenagers can’t personally worry about).
Anyway pointing out that 2050 will be ok can get you downvoted on sites where people are traumatised by climate change.
Is it really trauma, then. Wouldn’t you like to get rid of trauma? Or is it the thrill of something like a roller coaster - something that feels scary but really isn’t.
* can be metres
> Or is it the thrill of something like a roller coaster - something that feels scary but really isn’t.
Interestingly, after getting PTSD, my adrenaline response to things like roller-coasters has completely gone away. In a strange way, I imagine this is similar to becoming addicted to heroin. Only the "good stuff" works for me now.
Interesting observation. My ability to get excited by rollercoasters or skydiving (or whatever near-death experience) has completely vanished. But in my case, I attribute it just to age.
Let's ramble a bit now!
It's really hard when I go skydiving with someone for the first time, to pretend it was exciting and crazy and boy we actually did that isn't that the wildest thing ever. For me, the biggest concerns I have as I plummet toward Earth are how wind blowing up my nose at terminal velocity is kind of uncomfortable and hurts my sinuses, and my ears aren't equalising nearly fast enough.
So why do I keep going skydiving? It's more a circumstantial thing. I don't do it on purpose. Just somehow I'm the only chaperone available whenever someone new wants to do it, and you can't do it alone so... Philo! Strap up and let's plummet.
I have the same reaction to skydiving! It's peaceful and beautiful and all I need to worry about is getting my limbs in the right position, except that since I'm not qualified to solo, I also have to deal with a tandem partner who's going "WOOOOOOOOO!" and acting like it's some sort of Xtreme Sport. :-)
There was some sort of fear reflex that made it difficult to get out of the plane the first time, but it was completely uncoupled from any actual emotion of "fear". My legs refused to move me forward, but since it was tandem, all I had to do was lift them off the floor and my partner moved us out. It was intellectually interesting to notice it happening, at least until I was out of the plane, and then it was all about looking at the planet below.
Kindred soul!
If you find yourself having to do it again, tell that tandem dude to flip and roll and do some interesting things. It adds a bit of novelty to the experience.
"You can be downvoted to oblivion on reddit by pointing out that the more extreme projections are crazy, "
True, but you can be downvoted for any opinion that is unpopular, which majority opinion of readers of the comment wants to suppress because they think the opinion is bad/dangerous. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with a trauma response.
In this particular example it does. Or a faked trauma response.
On reddit I choose my battles and don’t bother going against a sub‘s ideology , it’s pointless given the way the system works. Just unfollow.
In this case on a generic sub for a country, somebody said they were terrified of what is going to happen by 2050. responding to that with the facts I have above seemed safe enough but I believe I ended up with -100 karma.
So why do people want to believe the worst, and do they actually believe the worst?
I see no evidence that's a trauma response. More likely, I think, 100 people simply see themselves as keyboard activists who make the world better by promoting right ideas and suppressing wrong ideas. Your (supposedly) wrong, or inconvenient, idea was thus worth downvoting for the greater good.
> Former friends turned against me
My personal anecdote suggests that this is a major part of it. I wouldn't have minded a lot of the other stuff, but seeing people whom I had trusted, whom I had thought of as friends, say things which implied that my suffering was good and righteous, that was what got to me in the end. So to pick a not-me example, it wasn't just Trump being elected that caused the trauma, it was that half the country supported this **monster** , and were cheering him on, and celebrating that you were now **threatened and powerless** , and whenever you walked down the street you were passing people whom you **knew** would just as soon Thanos-snap you away to make the world a better place in their eyes.
> It was the worst experience of my life.
I hadn't heard this story before. I think I feel your pain.
> entirely new kinds of social technology
That's just plain brilliant!
> John Smith is a Nazi pedophile
After Rufus Sewell's wonderful performance playing Obergruppenführer John Smith in "The Man in the High Castle", both the name and the actor give me the creeps. Most particularly in the "Victoria" miniseries. (I don't recall him being pedophilic, though.)
> traumatic reenactment
I have not read the rest of the post yet, but in my experience, the thing I **really** want is to view the triggering event through a safe and supportive lens. So if I'm left-wing and traumatized by Trump, I'd look up sites where fellow left-wing people point out all the bad things about him, and condemn them and mock them. I'm feeling safer by finding a community where everyone feels the way I do. If my trauma is less common, and it's harder to find a community, there's still a sort of distance involved on the Internet. Or there would be, if I didn't have PTSD. So I constantly try to find examples so that I can calmly sit back and critique them from a distance, but then I come to and realize that I've been pounding my fists bloody on the floor for the last minute. (That's one of the rarer and more extreme examples, but I think it's illustrative enough.) Perhaps some of the re-enactment is similar, in that the traumatized person is looking to build new memories, to reassure themselves that "not all men who act like that are bad", but then...
> I feel like the attractive aspect of this was bonding with other people who were outraged by the event, and getting to retell the story in a way that ended with “and everyone agreed the woke cancellation mob was in the wrong, and the students apologized to the yoga instructor, and she was reinstated and lived happily ever after.”
Looks like I nailed it. :-)
> suppose you are so afraid of everyone that it is impossible to have a good experience with a new person
The most convincing explanation that I've heard is that, with normal memories, the emotional salience fades over time, and it gets "sepia-toned". But with PTSD memories, there's a malfunction somewhere (I've heard the amygdala), and the full, fresh emotional content gets dumped into our nervous system whenever the memory is recalled, thus leading to the creation of new memories with the same salience as the old. Possibly this relates to that thing where, unlike in a classical computer, in the human brain's neural network, memories are written each time they're accessed.
> you are absolutely sure your side is right
See, the thing for me (and possibly you?) is that the side that traumatized me **was** my side. I dunno how that fits into your model, but it feels very significant to me.
> On the other, it might be dangerous to create an expectation of traumatic consequences for minor wrongs.
Oh, yes, here we go.
> Ancient warriors apparently didn’t get PTSD.
They did, however, suffer episodes of possession, as well as whatever happened to poor Ajax. See above about pounding my fists bloody; I spend a lot of time alone because I don't want to see what happens if I'm around someone who triggers me personally. I used to try to "integrate" my PTSD with my old personality, but the desire for vengeance was stronger than anything else I felt. So then I started treating it as a separate thing, talking about how I felt and how my PTSD felt, and that seems to have worked better. But if I had to give it a name, I know exactly what it would be: Nemesi, pteroessa biou rhopa, kyanopi thea, thygater Dikas.
> they had a narrative in which war was heroic and inspiring, not traumatizing
So did we, in June 1914, and before Vietnam. Turned out we were wrong.
> this theory is dangerous even if it’s true
Heh, I was just discussing with Villiam the difference between "rationality as truth-seeking" and "rationality as systematized winning".
> making sure they replace their normal ability to update with a series of triggers that make them replace reality with pre-packaged stories about how the other side is innately evil
~~~But hey, it attracts eyeballs and sells ads! So if that's what the Algorithm determines that you want to see in your Feed, what could possibly be wrong with that!~~~ But seriously, I've been flippantly blaming Facebook (and later Twitter) for this shit, but the true culprit is ad-supported Internet hosting and crowd-sourced content combining with an algorithm that only measures "time spent viewing" and "interaction". I stopped using Facebook as soon as it started making it difficult to see all and only what I chose. I also made sure to make sure news sites never gave me personalized news or ads, just the generic stuff, because I didn't want them playing to my biases. Alas, it didn't magically protect me, but perhaps I am ever so slightly more aware because of it. **shrug**
Good point about Ancient warriors and alternative PTSD interpretations. Also wars in ancient times were generally less disempowering than now.
Yeah, "disempowering" is a good way to put it, thanks.
Magnificent piece. I'm not sure that our current media machine is maximally traumatic, though - media machines in the past have surely gone further in this direction. If your media consumption was German protestant pamphlets in the 16th century, for example. Or Soviet or Nazi propaganda in the 1930s. Or the tradition of martyrology - Foxe's Book Of Martyrs was surely more prominent in the media diet of the English in the late 16th/17th century than its equivalents are today, and its illustrations more traumatising to those at the time than modern day equivalents.
The modern media machine incorporates the profit motive; maybe that mitigates the drive to cause the maximum amount of trauma.
I think it might be worse now. I'd posit that we're also a lot better, in the WEIRD countries anyway, at not simply going around and genociding half our neighbors simply because they're evil monsters. (A handful of people revert every so often, and in America we have the 2nd Amendment.) So if our limit is higher, we can have worse trauma before everything collapses into a 30 Years War! Yay us!
I'm not sure we would be so restrained if a large part of our media was explicitly saying "yes, this group of people who you live alongside will torture you to death if they get the chance, look, here's proof of what they did when they were in control a few years ago, look, here are lots of big pictures of people like you screaming as they are tortured to death, pictures that are more realistic than any pictures you've ever seen".
And by a large part of our media I don't mean a large part of our media sometimes contained articles or posts like that, I mean a large part of our media was mostly that. I don't think we're there yet, or even close to being there yet.
I agree that we're not there yet, and that that might tip the scales. Your description reminds me of radio broadcasts in Rwanda.
My argument is that in other societies, the violence would have started sooner, and thus the type of media you describe would have started sooner. But because we delay the violence and thus the media, we have room for advanced forms of trauma the likes of which the world has never seen.
I don't think it's maximally traumatic. I do think it's pretty bad.
As human societies go, the calls to violence are relatively ineffective.
I have noticed a tendency for my friends to not be very political. Most of them are onto embodiment, meditation, and different experiences that plausably trigger memory reconsolidation.
Given the trapped prior model, I'm curious what the uptick in psychedelics will do to the political landscape.
I've seen it posited on libertarian fora that broadly legal psychedelics would be good for liberty.
Fascinating. Great article and many of the comments provide yet more insights. I feel passionately that psychologists should be working on this topic to provide new insights into human thinking. Something like an update to Jon Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", which for sure had its flaws but dug into aspects of this topic. If anyone can point me towards current psychology that does develop these ideas, please let me know.
This also fits with the theory of negative polarization (Nate Silver, Ezra Klein and others have written about). That basically a lot of the source of current political dysfunction is that people are very negatively polarized against the other side, but not strongly positive to their side. Which makes sense with the trauma analogy. Fear of dogs doesn't cause you to love cats
"Fear of dogs doesn't cause you to love cats"
This is a brilliant insight. I love this whole thread.
I was going to write something about tribalism and trauma not really being mental illnesses since they're just standard brain function, but... god damn it, what's even the point? It's not like we can fix any of this. Humanity is irredeemably flawed at its core. Knowing that doesn't mean we can suddenly solve it... We're still just human.
I find it interesting that most of these problems seem weirdly US specific.
I'm a European (living in Europe) with a lot of exposure to English-language media, and there's definitely a huge difference between our respective media environments. Not that there isn't politics here, but people seem far less outraged about it. Major news programs still find plenty of time for the "somebody had an accident, please drive safely" or "our national museum just bought some Rembrandt pictures nobody really cares about" kind of stories.
To give a few examples, "dogwhistles" and "triggers" don't have equivalents in my language, the latter are sometimes used by sources that identify themselves as far left, but that's about it. The "<x> are only doing <y> because they hate <z>" rhetoric seems to be entirely missing, I can't think of a single example here while I can think of a dozen in the US. Namecalling also seems to be a lot less common, the worst you hear is usually something along the lines of "are they insane or what?"
I can't figure out why this difference exists. Many people blame polarization on tech and social media, but yet we use almost exactly the same tech and social media (maybe with less X and more Facebook) and polarization is much smaller, so there must be more to it. The UK seems to be closer to the US than the rest of Europe in this regard, so language isolation probably plays a part here, I wonder how Australia and European countries with extremely high English proficiencies are doing at this.
Well, from what I'm hearing, Europe is on the precipice of a "far-right" sweep everywhere, so in case it isn't overzealous fearmongering, things might get more "interesting". A Trump-style candidate hasn't yet been in position to win in any respectable (non-post-communist) country, but they do seem to get ever more popular.
Well, from what I'm reading, Europe is in a "far-right" sweep everywhere. In Sweden the "Sweden Democrats" were for many years considered to be "un-voteable Racists/Nazis" and now part of the government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Democrats
In Italy Meloni won: "the first far-right-led coalition in Italy since WWII" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meloni_government
Denmark. Netherlands. Brexit. In France, LePen's Front national is just waiting to take over. In my ol' Germany the "fascist" AfD is strongest party in the East, and - in polls - number two in the west. Well, media tells us they are "rechts-extremistisch" - and I never heard how this is different from "racist" and/or "fascist" (one can be a racist without being fascist, sure). So, not that sure there is no dog-whistling - the AfD is "obviously" xenophobe, and also homophobe - while its leader is a lesbian who lives in Switzerland with her life-partner, a Sri-Lankan film-maker. They have two kids, it seems. https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/alice-weidel-und-die-schweiz-willkommen-immer-wieder-bedroht-und-jetzt-von-der-anti-terroreinheit-geschuetzt-400708115716 - The "dog-whistle" is probably more of an US thing as there are only two parties, who tend to have rather more centric candidates than in our multi-party system (median voter theorem). If neither Trump nor DeSantis is an anti-semitic dictator, you have to go for "whistles" to make a story. If neither Hillary nor even Bernie plan the nationalization of amazon: dito. While in Germany Mr Höcke (AfD) loves to play with Nazi-symbols and the JuSo (young Social-Democrats) write about nationalizing BMW.
One difficulty for me as an American is that lots of media will call a European politician far-right whether his platform is "take in fewer refugees and slightly cut social programs" or "invade the neighbors for liebenstraum." It's hard to tell from far away what a coalition government including AfD in Germany or Vox in Spain would actually do, or what a it would look like if Le Pen ended up as the next French president. I'm guessing none of these would be actual nightmarish disasters, but I could just be flat wrong.
Our European media is rather quick to call "far-right" ANY new party who says "take in fewer refugees and slightly cut social programs". I have not yet heard of one party (except Putin's) to call for "Lebensraum". - There might be some who go for "Liebes-Traum"/love-dream: The flying Yogis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOpbZC9Gk-U https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Law_Party (watch the video, unforgettable)
Germany now has one brand-new party that says: "take in fewer refugees and massively expand social programs for Germans", called Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. Far-left. Thus fine.
On the other hand, with only two parties, a candidate can be very terrible and still electable as the lesser of two evils. The quirks of our election system make it likely that you'll have to choose between _only_ AfD or JuSo in some races.
I suspect that it may be important whether you can create for yourself a bubble of people who share your political opinions. Within the bubble, the hysteria gets amplified. Meeting people outside your bubble may give you some sanity check. And it's probably better if you have more than two parties, so you often meet people who are neither "your side" nor the "enemy".
Even supporters of small parties can get fanatical and create a bubble, if that's what they want. But with a large party, this can happen also to moderate members. (I think Scott mentioned that almost everyone around him is a Democrat, without him actively trying to make it so.) Then the moderate members are regularly exposed to the hysteria that they... may think is exaggerated, but they are not entirely opposed to.
I have definitely seen people with batshit crazy political opinions in Slovakia. I think there is a difference between "this person is crazy by temperament, and they chose politics as their favorite topic" and "this person is crazy by contagion, because they happen to be surrounded by crazy people and gradually get used to their rhetoric". The former, well, crazy people exist everywhere. The latter are created by bubbles; for example could be a family member of a crazy person.
Being a libertarian in the US might protect my sanity a little.
Australia has a roughly similar culture to the US but much more muted; the news these days is all about the Australian Open happening down the road from me, with occasional stories about how the current Prime Minister Broke Election Promises about tax cuts, could have been written in any decade over the past hundred years.
But I do watch the US with interest; for one I am an American citizen who lived in Washington until 1999, for another the stuff that happens in your great country does tend to affect us down under. For example after George Floyd was killed we had the occasional riot here about Aboriginal rights and mistreatment by police and some activists revived an old case from 2015 about an Aboriginal man who died in police custody. And of course we have a large Arab population so the Free Palestine stuff happened in Sydney and Melbourne too.
Overall it sure seems less crazy than the US. The main threat to our Prime Ministers is being unexpectedly deposed by their own party which happens every couple of years. But no one gets mailed bombs or attacked with a hammer. Also we banned guns like 30 years ago and our schools are very safe.
Thanks for being vulnerable and describing your traumatic experience.
I feel like Scott has recently been publishing some very good and insightful posts in the spirit of the old slatestarcodex.
Yeah, this post in particular struck me as closest to some of the SSC "greatest hits," and one of, possibly the, best serious post of ACX (Bay Area Houseparty series holds the position for humorous posts).
I never understood why roughly half of the articles on the front page of msnbc.com are Trump-related.
This is a great post, thanks for writing it. I also suffer from the obsessive habit of engaging with written material that 'triggers' me in one way or another, and I have also begun to come around to the position that it's due to an unconscious wish to reenact certain events, but give them a better ending. Also agree 100% with disengaging (or at least strategically minimising) exposure to outrage/fear inducing media.
One book I've read recently included its own definition of trauma, which featured, in part, the subjective criteria "The person feels they are powerless to control the circumstance or event"
Looking through that lens at how many people approach politics - that seems to fit strongly. Even for a person with an superlatively internal locus of control, almost everything that goes on in politics - and especially the payload of political news - involves things that are objectively entirely outside one's power to influence.
The supreme court is deciding whether you're allowed to get gay-married? with the exception of a lawyer and a handful of plaintiffs, the rest of the country can do nothing but sit back and watch.
worried about what topics - and viewpoints - are getting taught in schools? Even if you're active in your own PTA, there's an entire nation out there shifting in ways you can hear about, but can't impact.
Political news is a never-ending stream of things that might be going wrong, things that might make your life worse, that you have effectively no power to stop.
I find myself genuinely caring about some things entirely outside my control more than I do about most things in my control, even many of the more important ones. For example, I'm more emotionally invested in the war in Ukraine than I am in my career success. In that context, is it surprising that I have unhealthy and counterproductive habits involving the news and social media? I can't just focus on the less important things, even if they're the only ones I can affect.
I know a few people who keep themselves reasonably well informed about world affairs but have no strong interest in or emotional response to things that they can't affect, especially when those things also can't affect them. These people do not talk about news and politics, either in person or on social media. I suppose that their attitude is the healthier one, but it's hard for me not to perceive them as myopic.
A couple of musings on this:
* rather than adding politics to the list of potential triggers, it might make more sense to slim down the list of 'mental illnesses' that has been so expanded in recent times. For example, much of what is now called depression used to be called that plain old thing.... unhappiness.
* One aspect of the post-60s 'revolution' that gets little attention is that it saw a retreat from the Christian conception of the individual as an intrinsically flawed being – prone to sin and prone to error. Now maximal 'self esteem' is valorised. People drunk on their own self esteem will have inflated expectations that they deserve never to be made 'unhappy' by anything so annoying as 'reality'.
<i>* One aspect of the post-60s 'revolution' that gets little attention is that it saw a retreat from the Christian conception of the individual as an intrinsically flawed being – prone to sin and prone to error. Now maximal 'self esteem' is valorised. People drunk on their own self esteem will have inflated expectations that they deserve never to be made 'unhappy' by anything so annoying as 'reality'.</i>
Not only that, but the Christian conception was that life is full of suffering and hardship -- "Man that is born of a woman has but a short time to live, and is full of heaviness," "In the midst of life we are in death," and all that. If you suffered, then, that was obviously bad, but it wasn't regarded as some kind of cosmic unfairness the way it tends to be now.
Minimal *physical* suffering, maybe. Assuming that Scott is right and large numbers of people are literally being traumatised by politics, it seems that plenty of people have rather a lot of suffering in their lives.
> Is this actually a good way to express a concept for public consumption?
The snag is that claims of trauma not directly related to violence and tragedy are themselves triggering because they feel like emotional blackmail, weaponised "hurt feelings", and narcissism.
If (big if!) religious thought and behavior deserves its exemption from pathologization, then why shouldn't politics?
regular religion and regular politics both deserve an exemption. The kind of ruminating, self-upsetting behaviour Scott talks about here can crop up in either sphere, and be equally traumatizing. I have definitely met laymen who refer to their "religious trauma"
"already maxed our our ability to feel" < s/our/out/
That cancellation experience as part of your experience to draw on has made you one of the most well-rounded thought leaders I'm aware of. Great for society and those who read you. Not great for you.
I've skirted the edges of cancellation (I've been, how do I say... micro-canceled?) and it's deeply unpleasant and unsettling. Finally understanding how shallow and fleeting is "friendship" is hard. Approval or even willingness-to-associate-with-you can be removed by the slightest whim.
Realising what you thought were deep and personal connections were in fact tenuous threads... a very disconcerting world-view adjustment.
I am very sorry you had to endure it.
I suppose, for those who are going through cancellation, or whatever, I should link two resources I found helpful. Warning: both of these are going to be from people who are probably your outgroup.
Struggle Sessions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4RE3RPI120 - Basic summary: it's a form of torture.
Jordan Peterson:
I was going to link a video, but now I can't find it. So I shall summarise. When you are canceled, or go through a struggle session, or whatever you want to call it, it is quite literally one of the worst things that can happen to you, and those who trivialise it saying things like "oh poor snowflake lost your job and now you have to find another one" or whatever are failing to grasp the level of pain those individuals are going through.
Now that I think about it, maybe avoiding trauma-inducing media is the opposite of what you want to do. The problem is that the triggering content is only consumed intermittently, reinforcing trapped priors. But there is a physical limit to how much distress a situation can cause. If you constantly consume the triggering content without pause, you will eventually grow completely numb to it. This is the idea behind Exposure Therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_therapy , and presumably the same thing that causes Stockholm Syndrome.
...You know, maybe this is why I was able stop caring about things. I used to have plenty of empathy, far too much of it, even. Reading about horrible things happening on the other side of the world was enough to make me suicidal. But I guess there's a limit to how bad you can feel about things, because I eventually just stopped being able to feel empathy. It's definitely better this way, but... I'm still so miserable. Am I still caring too much? Is it even possible for me to feel happy?
I’m very sorry you’re in this situation. It sounds familiar. I was there a long time too and found my way out by using ancient technology which has fallen into cultural disfavor.
For much of human history in most cultures there has been aculturally shared answer to this question: you can’t be happy without a personal relationship with the transcendent, ie to being itself. This is generally held to require a personal commitment and effort to develop this relationship over time, ie to see the good in things, to cultivate compassion for others, and to focus on changing the small things right in front of you.
Saying any more in detail is likely to trigger emotional responses that I would say are unhelpful. Pm me personally if you’d like. You can be happy if you want to, it is indeed possible.
But a lot of people spend tons and tons of time circling the political misery wells and never walk away with a maxed-out emotional response as they always keep coming back for more.
I think the heart of exposure therapy is not just exposing yourself to something fear-inducing, but also receiving evidence that the thing is not harmful. If your news source keeps saying "<outgroup> is bad!" in convincing and traumatic ways and never says "<outgroup> is good sometimes, actually", you'll never get that second part. It's why you can exposure-therapy with safe, friendly, sleepy dogs and get past cynophobia, but not so much with one-sided political news. Or, in other words, doing exposure therapy on a cynophobe by using big, angry, growling dogs probably won't work at all.
If it is of any help:
What I've found helpful, when looking at politics, is to take a deep breath, stand back, and think through: Am I really going to be personally affected by this? ( Or will any of the handful of people who I care about be affected? ) For the vast majority of "issues", the answer is either "no", or "only in very unlikely circumstances".
Admittedly I'm in a relatively favorable situation for this. I'm 65, and the youngest person who I care about is 63, so I can dismiss concerns about anything more than 20 years or so from now. There are also things which could harm me within that window, but they tend to be things over which I have no control (or so close to no control that it rounds off to zero), e.g. whether Putin finally does decide to use nukes. I tend to be fatalistic about those hazards.
Reality is that what I actually should focus on are potential medical issues, not political ones. Eventually some medical issue _will_ kill me, but no one avoids that.
Looking at many events and saying "This is not my problem." is a great comfort.
Perhaps you are running a hill-climbing algorithm, and you've gotten as high as you can go, but it's not high enough. To get somewhere higher, you'd have to go back down and then travel a bit, before going up again. But if the lower areas are covered in an ocean of pain, that's a problem.
Good luck, whatever you do.
A slight flaw in this theory is that politics has existed for literally the entire existence of humanity, but this love affair with political trauma has only showed up among the general population in the past 20 years or so, and has conspicuously coupled itself primarily with one political view of the world. Similarly, it's pretty suspicious that rates of mental illness are ludicrously high these days, and this leads to rates of medication being ludicrously high. And the rates are politically lopsided. Strangely, lopsided in favour of the side that broadly thinks about "systemic" things, and "alienation" and "group identity."
I believe Scott has talked about contrarians before, mostly negatively. Well, an obvious good thing about contrarians is they reject nonsense about belonging to groups, or believing school yard taunts. The more you hear it, the more you reject it. In this particular case we can call it being psychologically anti-fragile. Of course, back in my day we had sayings about sticks and stones, and talk being cheap, so it wasn't just contrarians who could ignore this stuff. Funny how I've seen modern young people outright and explicitly reject the sticks and stones theory, and now it's just a truism that "words have power."
I'm not saying the concept of trauma is a conspiracy to sell pills. I am saying this entire way of thinking is both dangerous and wrong. Very very obviously, nobody is being helped by psychology and therapy in this case, and the entire political discourse will obviously make everybody who believes it trauma victims. Or to more neutrally say it, it will awaken in them a true class consciousness. It's designed to do this. Nobody acted in a conspiracy to do it, it's just in the water.
The definition of mental health has consistently shifted with political tides, because there is immense political power in defining what “good” means.
I think “trapped prior” could easily explain this but I would add that “any prior about outcomes of the future that isn’t positive will likely get worse over time”. Hope is a virtue, ie it has to be cultivated intentionally. For a long time most western cultures kept saying this over and over, the gramscian cultural power being used to tell people “keep calm and carry on.” Then in the last few decades that shifts and the cultural powers tell us constantly how awful everything is. The people who disagree the most are, unsurprisingly, the happiest.
That said, lots of people on the right are indeed worrying. How do you approach this in an evidence based fashion when things like “this one historical event” can’t be drawn from a distribution? There’s no evidence-based way to predict whether or not, say, the robots will kill us all or whether the WEF will make us live in pods and eat bugs. It’s like the technological acceleration means we all get our priors trapped by whatever self-reinforcing media we consume. The traditional religions have answers here, but I don’t see how materialist rationality plus “maximizing QALY” can get anyone out of a trapped prior that now it’s different than the past and hope is foolish.
I feel like someone in 1929 saying, well, yeah this looks bad and to be honest it’ll probably get get nastier. But 70 years from now things will be way way way better! But there I go exposing my priors again.
I'm not sure if the entirety of the effect cannot be sufficiently explained by the rise of social media. The Noughties weren't a praticularly caring decade, as I recall.
The major shift, as I recall happened when Twitter became mainstream, with Justine Sacco possibly being the canary in the coalmine. (We could also point to the stuff happening around the Arab Spring, London riots of 2011, etc.) In short, suddenly there was a way to organize a globally reaching mob that had actual power to get stuff done - like getting a random woman none of them cared about in the slightest fired over a tasteless tweet.
The result was entirely predictable. Add thereto the fact that staying off social media became increasingly not done (and possibly suspicious in itself - what've you got to hide), and suddenly the norms of the internet started filtering back to the real world.
In the heady days of the 2000s we could jokingly talk about the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (GIFT). Turns out, you don't actually need anonymity, just a different set of incentives, and suddenly everyone's a Fuckwad offline, too.
Tim Pool basically says this all the time.
I think it's a perfectly acceptable material and efficient explanation, to use some Aristotle here, that social media has caused this. I'd personally put it to 2007 and the launch of the Iphone though. There was social media prior to this, but it was the Iphone that brought the idea of constant social media to the masses.
But I think there's also the formal and final explanation, that being awakened to class consciousness is the point. There's political power to be gained by convincing everyone they're horrifically oppressed at every instance of existence.
The smartphone multiplied social media for sure. If we still had just laptops there would be much less engagement.
No, I'd say that the big change came with Twitter. I was kinda there when it happened.
The earlier attempts at mainstream social media were mostly geared towards replicating offline social networks - like Facebook for personal stuff, or LinkedIn for professional connections. The big change Twitter brought was that tweets were broadcast to everyone (so to speak).
So, essentially, what you got was the ability to beam your half-backed 140 character snippets to the entire world. Back when I joined - within its first year of operations - it didn't really know what it was for (tweeting that you're eating soup so your mum doesn't worry was a suggested use-case). However, it turned out that journalists were a significant portion of the early adopters and evangelists (I happened to run in those circles back then), and that brought in the politicians. Suddenly, Twitter was Important in a way that no other social network was. Yes, smartphones played into that, mostly because you could easily tweet straight from your iPhone right in the thick of things.
Because of Twitter's specific architecture, it was suddenly a lot easier to amplify things. The standard mechanism being some celebrity retweeting a random thing, that gets picked up by their followers, some of whom are also celebrities, and before you know it, it's trending. All the while you have a bunch of journalists (who likely also have the follower numbers to participate in the amplification) watching for anything that could be made into a Story (because, concurrently, the economics of journalism have changed and you need to produce tons of low-effort material if you want to pay the bills).
The change happened slowly, then all at once, but by that time (ca. 2013) I'd left Twitter.
> There's political power to be gained by convincing everyone they're horrifically oppressed at every instance of existence.
There's some merit to the suggestion that it is to make sure Occupy Wall Street never happens again.
“Ever since then, when I read arguments promoting social justice and cancel culture, or saying that their victims are probably bad people and shouldn’t be allowed to defend themselves, I get all kinds of easily noticeable unpleasant bodily and emotional reactions.”
This is called a schema, and you can manually rewrite this belief/emotional response. After the rewrite, the autonomic nervous system activation won’t get triggered either.
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip/p/i9xyZBS3qzA8nFXNQ
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I got a 404.
Does this mean that if as a victim of sexual abuse I speak (outside therapy) about the abuse I am traumatizing others, that I should obtain consent before doing so? It seems like yes, it does mean that
is that not just the in-person version of trigger warnings
> I had my bad cancellation experience before “cancel culture” entered the national scene. But once it did, I found myself over-focusing on cancel culture stories, especially the most outrageous ones (“college students attack white yoga instructor for culturally appropriating ancient Indian practice!”) Looking back, I feel like the attractive aspect of this was bonding with other people who were outraged by the event, and getting to retell the story in a way that ended with “and everyone agreed the woke cancellation mob was in the wrong, and the students apologized to the yoga instructor, and she was reinstated and lived happily ever after.” Or, even if that didn’t happen, getting to retell it in a way that had moral clarity, where no reasonable person was on the side of the cancellers - even if things ended badly for the yoga instructor, I could tell it in a way that ended with “but she was clearly a misunderstood martyr, and this proves the rightness of the anti-woke cause.”
---
Scott, isn't the simplest psychological explanation that you got set upon by a mob, and that the best thing an individual facing a mob can do is get a crowd of their own to back them up?
Even if you aren't bonding and connecting directly, knowledge that the people who made you suffer are getting pushed back, so they aren't likely to make you suffer again, can provide relief, but if you don't know whether they're getting any pushback or not, your mind is free to submit the worst-case scenarios at its leisure.
To use war as an example, the fact that you were victimized by it is even more reason to keep constantly abreast of the state of the fighting, because that's the only way to know your side is winning. (And this is important, because if your side loses, you're gonna get victimized all over again.)
I don't think this speaks to what he's saying.
First, an underlying premise here is that psychic injuries are different from the physical ones. They're not 'fake' - they absolutely do matter - but they're affected by the victim's mindset. If a war causes you to lose your home, or even a limb, that is a very concrete form of victimization in a way that "having friends be mad at you" is not. There are forms of cancellation with more concrete impacts: losing your livelihood, being kicked out of school, etc. But when cancellation means "a bunch of people were shitty to me and made me feel bad," there's an inherent psychological aspect to it. That's not to say they don't matter, but that a part of the trauma involved comes from the victim's mindset and expectations, just as how a rape victim may be more traumatized by an emailed threat than someone else.
Second, it leads to a sense that you can define the world as "us" vs "them" in a way that doesn't always map clearly to reality. In a war, the two sides are usually pretty well defined. A given person is going to be your ally or your enemy. But applying that logic to complicated social situations breaks down - someone who might be your ally in one aspect could be your enemy in another. If you see that someone is your enemy in one aspect, and conclude that they're your enemy in _every_ aspect, then you will start to see everything they do as some kind of threat to you. Worse, you may assume that anyone who is allied with your enemy in any capacity is also thereby your enemy, and pretty quickly the world is divided in two.
I think that "my friends are mad at me" may be underselling the case a bit.
A much more useful framework to apply would be ostracism, in the OG sense of being "cut off from the people". In Scott's case, he received death threats and was subjected to a struggle session, whilst at the same time his friends turned away. In other words, people were out to get him, and he had nobody he could count on for support, let alone defense.
> But applying that logic to complicated social situations breaks down - someone who might be your ally in one aspect could be your enemy in another. If you see that someone is your enemy in one aspect, and conclude that they're your enemy in _every_ aspect, then you will start to see everything they do as some kind of threat to you. Worse, you may assume that anyone who is allied with your enemy in any capacity is also thereby your enemy, and pretty quickly the world is divided in two.
Welcome to 2024.
The funny thing is that a lot of it is a case of "what goes around comes around". Nevertheless, as the wisdom of Holocaust survivors helpfully informs us "When someone tells you they want to kill you, believe them!" If people are telling you, unprompted, that they hate your kind of folk and want them to suffer, you have zero reason to interpret such statements with any degree of charity.
The fact that someone could be your ally in some aspect is completely irrelevant if they don't want to be your ally, because they see you as irredeemably evil.
As an old white man, I had less motive to feel traumatized by Trump than most people. Of course am a Liberal and so could feel some threat. But I have a secret weapon. I am an economist and can write (then on facebook now on Substack https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com ) criticizing specific Trump policies like trade wars and tax cuts for the rich that create deficits. This means I'm not a HELPLESS victim. It also provided a reason to limit the range of issues I will pay attention to and potentially few outraged by.
Hasn’t the trade war become biden’s policy?
Somewhere else I have said that some of Biden's mistakes have been to continue Trump's.
Is a trade war with China a bad idea? The world isn’t just about economics - not that I fully accept that free ttade raises all boats, anyway - there’s also politics.
Thought of as a"war" yes it is a bad idea. Might there be reasons to have some restrictions on trade with China? Yes.
"ut I’m skipping entirely over the non-optional Section C: “persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event”. "
Um .... blocking people on Facebook and X. There are some people on X who use an automated blocking system. E.g. anybody who followed Andrew Tate got blocked by 3rd Wave Feminists, anybody who follows J.K.Rowling gets blocked by Transfolk.
Thank you for writing this; it really spoke to me and helps me understand the world a little bit better.
"Then you can change the wording from “five apples and eight oranges”, to “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” and these same people will flounder and say idiotic things."
If anybody ever asked me that, I would not assume it was "can you perform addition or subtraction, as it might be?" but that there was some opinion searching going on ("do you think Democrats ought to be shot dead and we need extra guns to make sure we get them all?") and yeah I'd go off on a tangent about "no shooty no gunz no Demz".
As for that article:
(1) It's from 2014, anyone remember what the Big Threat at that time was? I notice Klein pulls in Scalia as a Partisan Bogeyman to get Science Guy to agree with him on this, which probably proves Science Guy's point for him, but I can't remember what we were all supposed to clutch our pearls about back then
(2) Forget it, Jake, it's Vox
"If it costs five billion pounds a year to maintain Britain's nuclear defenses, and seventy-five pounds a year to feed a starving African child, how many African children could be saved from starvation if the Ministry of Defense abandoned nuclear weapons?"
- Yes, Prime Minister
Spectacularly interesting. I think I learned something invaluable here.
As a therapist, this is interesting, but I think the addiction framing is a lot more useful than the trauma framing in explaining why people seek to be outraged. I think people are more dopamine-seeking than ever before thanks to technology and optimized algorithms that are able to give us immediate stimulation (higher in both frequency and magnitude). And one of the most stimulating things is to be outraged.
That said, I do think the trauma analogy is useful when explaining the symptoms people experience after being exposed to the politically outraging material. Someone with military PTSD might experience heightened anxiety when in front of a window for example. Someone with political “PTSD” will experience higher vigilance around domains where the other party might be present.
Important, insightful, generous in human sympathy--I love this essay. I can think of three related sub-points that might be worth adding, all connected with history and especially the way history is often constructed and taught (I spent my working life as a college history teacher). First, history does seem to contain not a few moments in which political events led to dramatic, unpredictable, and often violent change, occasionally leading to things like war, reeducation camps, or major social reordering. Consider the French Revolution, or the 1860 US presidential election, or the Communist victory in China in 1949. That's not *at all* to say we are on the verge of such changes--just that the models are there to influence the way people think and, especially, fear. Second, the way historians teach and write about their subject tends to emphasize such dramatic changes, the strong beliefs and disagreements that led to them, and their consequences (=dangers, at least for some); and then we assign papers or tests to get students to think about these, etc. A European history survey is likely to spend two weeks on the French Revolution, with lots of dripping guillotine blades, etc., but little time at all on, say, the relatively tepid 1720s and 30s. So we emphasize the sudden change model and its risks. Third, history is often told according to a trope of trauma. Sometimes this means trauma followed by vindication (think about the ways the stories of Alfred the Great or Robert the Bruce have been told), or trauma followed by "we're still waiting for vindication," or trauma and "this may happen again at any time." I realize that many students are just trying to get through a course requirement and may not be paying that close attention--but I think all this may have some effect nevertheless.
To relate my possibly seemingly extraneous point to the essay's approach, it may be worthwhile considering the way cultural/intellectual/educational/official-institutional-type structures may affect--perhaps encourage in this case, perhaps discourage or repress in others--certain types of psychological phenomena. I would add I don't think this is some conspiracy to get students riled up and unhappy, or divide them, or whatever--although some teachers probably tell themselves getting students riled up is a good thing and admire themselves for doing so. I think a lot of it proceeds from more subtle ways people (not just teachers) are taught to construct narrative, or are led to to do so.
Why is almost everyone taking the "ancient warriors didn't get PTSD" claim at face value? The simplest explanation is that it's not true. They simply didn't have the language to describe PTSD, and in warrior cultures where combat was valorized, people would've been strongly incentivized to cover up symptoms of combat-related trauma. The really extreme cases that couldn't be covered up would just be attributed to individual "madness."
That's not to say that all of the other explanations are wrong: It's easy enough to believe that modern warfare is *more* traumatic for various reasons. But the idea that pre-modern combatants didn't get PTSD at all just seems like an erroneous assumption.
Because:
1. Basically every single person in the society would have been in combat, and thus implicitly there would be enormously high PTSD rates;
2. Ancient warriors shittalked each other so even if they were personally unwilling to admit to PTSD then they would mention it happening to their political enemies;
3. Herodotus, although he is unwilling to firmly protect the claim in a rare bout of skepticism, notes the existence of conversion disorder, which is an extremely rare condition, and would also be "cowardly" to have, but there is AFAIK no similar text about what should be much more common; and
4. "Shell shock" was basically a completely novel diagnosis at the time it came into existence, and looks like it in terms of how the medical establishment comes to terms with it.
The one actual study done in a traditional society (Turkana pastoralists) found endemic PTSD--indeed, rates of nightmares, flashbacks, and hypervigilance were higher than among modern combat veterans. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8054015/.
The only difference was that Turkana warriors didn't experience symptoms of guilt or depression.
You keep bringing up the racism = trauma thing and it keeps persuading me in the opposite direction. That seems like made-up bullshit in exactly the same way as "it's okay to ignore lockdowns to attend a thousand-person George Floyd protest": who benefits? And if one element of trauma is made-up, probably others are too.
You say the DSM exists to draw a boundary around what counts and what doesn't, why should we assume this boundary corresponds to what actually exists rather than what psychologists would prefer we gave our sympathy to?
If people can traumatize themselves over the wrong person being elected President, it seems obvious to me that they could also traumatize themselves over a history of slavery and racism and systematic disenfranchisement? In neither case is it necessary or an inherent fact about the world (i.e., it's what you describe as "made-up"), but that doesn't mean that the trauma reactions aren't genuine.
If everyone goes around chopping off their right hand as a show of political solidarity, that's bad on a whole bunch of levels, but at the end of the day they still only have one working hand. You can argue yourself blue about how they don't deserve sympathy for self-inflicted injuries, and I'm not unsympathetic to that point of view. But the damage is done, and I'd rather we investigate the mechanism by which it happened, so that we can keep it from happening in the future. There are still some kids out there with both hands. (Also, we should work on building or growing new hands.)
Scott, always love your thoughts, though I don't find this argument particularly persuasive.
The question is whether is provides a good explanation or is useful to frame politics as trauma. If the argument is essentially the principles of astrology (cherry picking and flexibly applying nebulous dimensional criteria), then it is not a useful for explanation. For example, zero-ing in on "avoidance" components of PTSD and "re-enactment" components as explanations of behavior - while real phenomena in PTSD - can obviously be used as a carte blanche for any type of behavior. In this framing, avoidance or engagement or anything in between (so all behavior) are seen as evidence of trauma. But this is about as useful as hearing from Geico that you could save up to 15% or more.
There are many other features of political engagement that are better explained by other threads - tribalism, meaning making, connection, motivated reasoning, appreciation of threat. Further, political engagement is a large enterprise that is going to involve the whole breadth of human cognition, and because of this complexity nothing is every going to reduce down to something like trauma psychology.
I agree there are underlying structures and organization to the brain that pervade all of our functioning, and something like predictive processing seems to have a lot of value. I don't suppose that DSM diagnoses represent categorically distinct processes - that the circuits and learning of trauma are just absent in people. But it is also a mistake to reify a DSM diagnosis, and use its ill defined margins to explain cognitive phenomena.
I am very disappointed that you just made up the Latvian pine slug. I don't know if I can trust you anymore, Scott.
I've long thought that political doomscrolling is similar to cutting--both forms of self-harm that are incomprehensible to me. There does seem to be that weird element of trauma addiction in both, but people seem to think they are doing something virtuous with the doomscrolling. "I'm staying informed!" As far as I know, cutters see it as something secret and shameful. But I could be easily mistaken here.
This is an excellent piece that I suspect people are going to nitpick the details of in order to avoid engaging with the central point, which strikes me as quite plausible. In fact, casting the discussion in terms of trauma and psychiatric disorder in general is likely to be a major distraction for a lot of people. Perhaps a slightly milder way of putting things is this: trauma represents a set of normal psychological processes under extreme conditions. Politics seems to engage those same normal psychological processes, often to a surprising degree.
From my own personal experience, I have noticed that my reaction to a lot of political issues can be surprisingly vibes-based, depending on my own personal interaction with that issue. For example, immigration is just not a hot-button for me. I have opinions about policy and I have opinions about the culture war aspects of immigration, but I can't pretend to have a ton of emotional energy around them. On the other hand, there are some issues related to identity politics where I personally have gotten enmeshed in arguments and accusations and find that I have emotional reactions that seem disconnected from my actual beliefs about those issues. I might find myself reacting defensively or with an internal eyeroll toward certain statements even if, objectively, I don't think those statements are invalid opinions to hold. (I might not agree with them, but there are lots of opinions I don't agree with that I'm respectful of.)
I wouldn't call my reactions here trauma per se, but they have convinced me that in general the right stance toward most political news and discussions is disengagement, the opposite of Scott's depiction of trauma addiction. That is, I've recognized that a lot of my experience of politics is a sort of low-key unpleasant emotional reactivity that seems at best pointless and at worst actively harmful.
> D3: Persistent distorted cognitions about the cause or consequences of the traumatic events that lead the individual to blame himself or others.
> As stated, this doesn’t really apply to politics.
Doesn't it? It seems to me that the political trauma syndrome includes plenty of distorted thinking about why the other side does the traumatizing thing, or the consequences thereof, and plenty of blaming. This very blog post cites an excellent example:
> I've had arguments with people who believe that no pro-life conservative really cares about fetuses, they just want to punish women for being sluts by denying them control over their bodies. And I've had arguments with people who believe that no pro-lockdown liberal really cares about COVID deaths, they just like the government being able to force people to wear masks as a sign of submission.
With posts like this and the trapped priors, I genuinely don't understand what people valued before and feel is missing now. (Thinking about complaints like this: https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1750349914490446297)
This kind of topic exploration shows an unparalleled ability to simulate the mind of another person, plus the ability to express the resulting exploration such that a third person can feel like they themselves understand the second person.
I regularly wish I could debate on one topic or another, and I don't love every post, but this feels a lot like "to whom shall we go" -- I've never found comparable insight elsewhere.
Sometimes I feel like he's writing directly to me. It's probably that, as we engage with his site, our thoughts are somewhat channeled in the same direction as his, and so something that pops up deep in a discussion in a comment thread in a previous week, is similar to something he's pondering himself which inspires him to write hist next post.
Over the past few years and especially months considering it’s an election year now, I’ve subconsciously drifted towards not talking about or engaging with political discussion... even going as far as muting my headset if I heard my friends bring up Trump or something.
Where’s the value? It doesn’t make sense. I’d rather talk about WoW. Seeing this post also made me think that maybe Scott saw something on social media or heard something that triggered him to write this too.
> The coastal elites/the patriarchy/the rich/the liberal media may all be real groups with agendas different from yours, but the way some people think about them actively plotting to dismantle everything good in the world shades into paranoia
This is not true. This is a dynamic that actually happens with authoritarian backsliding countries (e.g. Turkey); as governments turn authoritarian and consolidate power over elites (especially in journalism), elites race to cut deals with people in the security apparatus to be early investors/adopters of the winning side/team.
They don't actively plot to dismantle everything good in the world, but they sure do plot to dismantle what's left of democratic institutions in their particular country (or just continue market competition).
Also interesting: the authoritarian security apparatus people have limited bandwidth to cut deals with various elites, just like how the NYT didn't have infinite flunkies to handle mail.
If outrage-based political media can succeed brilliantly by using trauma addiction as a marketing principle, I worry that this suggests a scary vulnerability in consumer psychology in general.
It's common for products to use addiction dynamics to maintain high levels of consumer demand, but we tend to think about that as a manipulation of the customer's pleasure circuitry (putting small amounts of sugar in our bread and chips, putting addictive reward systems in our smartphone games, getting kids hooked on smoooth relaxing nicotine, etc.). If it 's just as easy to get someone addicted by traumatizing them, then that lays the groundwork for an entirely new level of consumer hellscape, because it's on average much easier and cheaper to frighten or hurt someone than to figure out how to please them.
Arguably some products work like this already, reaching out to make your life suddenly much worse in order to get you obsessively returning to them for solutions that never pan out. A lot of cosmetic marketing starts by highlighting how a previously-unnoticed feature of your body is actually horrifyingly gross and ugly, you should definitely buy something to fix it so that people don't sneer at you behind your back (as they are almost certainly already doing). Porn exposure in childhood can lead to sex addiction and compulsive porn habits in adulthood, so places like PornHub will definitely benefit from having graphic sexual content widely available to kids on the internet. It's not a new dynamic - trauma marketing is basically how Harold Hill sells trombones to the rubes in _The Music Man_ - but something about the individual's vulnerability to uninvited pop-up memes in an online environment makes it feel particularly threatening in the context of twenty-first century virtual life. In the old days, the protection racket had to actually move in and take over your neighborhood, but these days they can just blast out a scary link on Twitter and work on converting whoever clicks.
I've noticed that it seems like every sexual assault is about every other sexual assault. For example, when Kavanaugh was getting accused, the focus didn't really seem to be on "What actually happened in this case?". The focus was more on "Are we a society that takes sexual assault seriously?", with women had been victims in unrelated cases acting like the result of that case was a referendum on their situation.
This post gives me a framework to make sense of that phenomenon.
Oooh, that's a good connection! It's why less and less is about the object-level issue any more, and it's more and more about the broader context, the people who are on each side, and so forth.
> Each time they hear another outrage they’re somewhere between dejected and enraged. But they keep doing it. For hours a day. They will justify this with claims like “I need to stay informed so I can make a difference”. Then they will forget to vote because they were tired on Election Day.
This is actually what powers the motivation pyramid scheme that fuels the far-left (maybe the far right too). On some level, they feel they need to participate as much as possible maximize other people's motivation, in order to minimize the number of people on their side who end up not showing for election day.
This is a good piece, and it makes me want to be more charitable toward people who get triggered by politics (for whatever reason, I'm not one of them).
It also helps me understand how contemporary culture seems so effective in fostering a sort of learned helplessness (also a trauma cause and/or effect, yes?) in so many people. Part of it must also have to do with the diversion of people's social brains from local and irl toward more distant concerns.
Helplessness can be seductive if you're living a depressing but comfortable life. You get to enjoy a sense of moral superiority without taking responsibility for anything. You're affirmed in taking refuge in whatever soothing or sedating amusements you're inclined to fill your time with, while admiring the impressive person you could and would be if it weren't for all those factors beyond your control. Maybe this plays a role in political trauma addiction?
> Ancient warriors apparently didn’t get PTSD.
I'm currently reading this post, but... where did PTSD come from, then? I thought that it was ~first recognized in veterans of WW1, so the reasons why that blog offers don't seem to hold up if that's the case.
"I tend to think the difference lies in part on the moral weight placed on warfare"
My understanding was that the countries and soldiers went into WW1 with tremendous gusto to protect/expand their country or allies. Nobody considered it a necessary evil, at least at the start.
"But I also suspect that the raw ubiquity of the experience mattered too."
War was still pretty common at that point, and WW1 itself was so all-encompassing that it seems like everyone they knew would either have died or understand it themself, and they would have known their comrades from before as well (I believe WW1 was the end of putting everyone from 1 town in the same unit, as some towns lost their entire young adult male population).
"Moreover, these societies tended to have rituals surrounding the transition out of war."
If this is the case, when did it stop and why? If medieval Europe had these rituals, why not the Europe of 1918, which was still very Christian?
Was WW1 just so overwhelmingly horrible, with so many deaths in such horrible and hopeless conditions (e.g. trench warfare and war of attrition), continued over such a long and continuous time period (ancient armies typically couldn't do much in winter or fight continuously for months), and at such a scale and death rate (maybe you observe literally every other man in your age group in your town and the surrounding towns die in the first few months), that it just completely overwhelmed all of these mechanisms? No placebo ritual, no pre-existing belief in the glory of war, could overcome such an experience? And there was nobody to talk to, because they were all dead?
"I'm currently reading this post, but... where did PTSD come from, then? I thought that it was ~first recognized in veterans of WW1, so the reasons why that blog offers don't seem to hold up if that's the case."
World War One was the first 24/7/365 war. If you study e.g. the American Civil War, it's all about the Battle of X and the Battle of Y and the Battle of Z, and when you look them up X and Y were over in an afternoon and Z was the Big One that lasted *three whole days*. Which makes for a very scary afternoon, or three days, but the rest of the time you're just marching or camping out in the woods or getting dysentery or whatever. Sieges could last longer, but they were mostly just tedium while they were happening.
Then you get to World War One, and you look up "Battle of the Somme" in wikipedia, and the first thing in the stat block is "date: 1 July 1916 – 18 November 1916 (140 days)". And the other 225 days of the year are spent hunkering down in a trench wondering when the nightly harassment by mortar fire is going to commence. Nobody had the industrial logistics to support anything like that until about the 20th century.
Things people can endure for an afternoon or three days, they may not be able to endure for months on end. Years is probably right out.
Probably also relevant that for most of human history, the danger in war was of a type that you could *do something about*. Yes, there's a man on a big scary horse riding towards you with a long pointy stick, but you've got a long pointy stick of your own and a good shield as well. You are the captain of your fate, or at least the lieutenant of your fate; there's things you can do that make a difference.
Then you get to the months leading up to the Somme, and every night a dozen mortar bombs fall around you, and maybe one of them will land right in your section of the trench and maybe it won't, but there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
All armies in WW1, as far as I'm aware, rotated troops out of combat regularly. Even if the battles could go on for 140 days, no individual soldier would fight for anywhere near that length of time.
WWI troop "rotations" were from front-line trenches to second-line trenches to nominal "reserve" trenches, and back. And even the reserve trenches were usually within artillery range.
If I recall "Storm of Steel" correctly, the only times Junger wasn't at the front were when he was recovering from wounds, or going to whatever the Germans called OCS. I think he got to visit his home town once, for two whole weeks out of four years of war; I don't recall whether that was coincident with a period of convalescence.
>>>[Part 4] does not apply to exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or pictures, unless this exposure is work-related.
>>>Did someone prove it was a natural law that you can only be traumatized by seeing a story on TV if it’s for work? Or is this another unprincipled compromise?
Great article, and good point, but here's some potentially useful anecdotal material:
In Google Search it used to be that you could go work in Zurich, which was attractive, but you'd work on the safe search team, and they'd retire you from it after a year, because they determined that any more than that caused serious damage.
Looking at the really bad stuff that Google filters out of search results directly causes observable PTSD. I think. And I think this is what they're getting at, not a natural law but an experientially determined special case.
A regular person with a regular breakable brain could and probably would look away when it felt like too much, but if it was your job, and you felt a moral obligation to do it because it was helping mitigate the problem for everyone else, you probably wouldn't look away when you should.
... And it seems like some of the problem here is that regular people have been convinced that doomscrolling is their job and moral obligation.
(Edit: I changed "regular people have decided" to "regular people have been convinced that")
Interesting point about the duty aspect.
This line of argument reminded me of a quote I keep in my quotes file:
"Outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but over time devour us from the inside out. And it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure. We prefer think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy involuntary reaction to negative stimuli thrust upon us by the world we live in, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it’s a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again.
"And, as with all vices, vast and lucrative industries are ready to supply the necessary material. It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulses to judge and punish and get us all riled up with righteous indignation.”
- Tim Kreider, "Isn't It Outrageous?" in the NYT
I know that's not quite the mechanism that Scott proposes here. In Kreider's essay, this behavior is about the "high" of righteous indignation; in Scott's, it's about trauma and re-enactment.
"thinking you’re supposed to feel traumatized is a risk factor for problematic trauma symptoms"
Sounds like a trapped prior.
I think the best formulation about the effect of politics is that it fucks people up.
My training in psychology was old-school, and I was taught that PTSD was essentially shell-shock, and that events that caused the same syndrome in people who were not in combat had the same characteristics as combat: violence & injury, or danger of injury or death far beyond what most people ever experience — suddenness & unexpectedness — situation in which you have virtually no power to protect yourself. PTSD symptoms were things that you mostly do not see in other disorders: nightmares, flashbacks, avoidance of innocuous things that were reminders of the trauma, desperate efforts to push the memory out of awareness, loss of the basic sense of everydayness and reasonable safety we walk around with, a weird sense of numbness and separateness. Had a training with famous psychologist Donald Meichenbaum who described some of his cases, and all were caused by events involving a combat-level of horrific violence: prisoners who had been tortured; a truck driver who had had to brake suddenly, and when he did a steel rod from his cargo broke through the back of his cab and went all the way through the skull of his hitchhiker; a woman who accidentally shot her daughter.
While I have no doubt that other sorts of bad experiences can do terrible damage to people that can last a lifetime, it seems to me that there really is something unique about the damage done by combat-like experiences. I myself have had 2 experiences that probably make it into the less severe end of that category, and both caused a unique cluster of symptoms. The first occurred when I was about 12. I witnessed a young guy who had had a motorcycle accident lying in the street with a terribly mangled leg, screaming like I did not know it was even possible to scream. For quite a long time afterwards I had dreams of the event, and also extremely vivid involuntary replays of the memory when I was awake. I did not like looking at the part of the road where the guy had lain. And I felt weird all the time . It was pretty much the way the Harry Potter dementors made people feel — like I would never be happy again. I couldn’t get away from the dark glimpse I’ve gotten of somebody’s agony, the knowledge that that could happen to anyone.
The second incident happened when I was an adult. The electricity was out, and I lit my little backpacking stove in the bathroom to make a cup of tea. Saw that the rubber ring on the tank was on fire, and realized that was going to lead to the pressurized gas exploding out of the tank. Started to reach for the knob that would shut off the tank, then changed my mind and yanked my hand back. A nanosecond later the ring burned through and stove turned into a giant blowtorch and lit parts of my bathroom on fire. I was unhurt and the fire department put out the fire quickly so that the damage was not too bad. But for about a week I could not sleep, and kept having involuntary replays of the incident, plus involuntary imaginings of what would have happened if I hadn’t yanked my hand back at the last moment. I had to leave work on a couple of afternoons because I simply could not pay attention to what people were saying — my mind was completely taken up by replays of the event, and of the event that had almost happened. And I had again that same feeling of no longer being in the land of the living.
These 2 events actually would not make it onto the list of the worst things I’ve been through. They were shocking and grisly, but unlike the things on the Really Bad list, they did not damage my self esteem, or my feeling of fellowship with other people, and they did not involve a loss. However, they caused a syndrome that the worst things in my life have not.
I really think there is a good case for reserving a special word for the syndrome some people get after sudden shocking, grisly life-or-death events. If you want to use the term PTSD for the effects of a much broader class of harmful events, that’s OK I guess, but then you need a new word for the special class of harmful events that get stuck on replay in the mind, and cause that dementor-bled feeling. I don’t think politics causes anything remotely like that experience. Politics just fucks us up
Thank you for describing those events. I'm sorry that you went through those. ( Blind luck has been kinder to me. I've had no equivalents. )
Eremolalos, I want you to know your comments are the most consistently insightful, unique and interesting of the ACX commentariat. If there were a subscribe function just for comment sections, you'd be on my shortlist.
“ So for example, in 1979 some psychologists asked partisans to read pairs of studies about capital punishment (a controversial issue at the time), then asked them to rate the methodologies on a scale from -8 to 8. Conservatives rated the pro-punishment study at about +2 and the anti-execution study as about -2; liberals gave an only slightly smaller difference the opposite direction.”
I know this is nitpicky, and doesn’t invalidate the broader point, but the above is actually a perfectly valid example of bayesian reasoning. Suppose I believe P(death penalty reduces crime) = 0.8, that 30% of studies on any given topic are flawed, and that all good studies will be accurate but flawed studies always return the wrong result. Thus, if a study agrees with me the probability that it is correct is 0.7*0.8/(0.7*0.8 + 0.3*0.2) = 0.9, so only a 10% chance that it is flawed, while my estimation that the death penalty is effective is also now 90%, because this is wrong if and only if the study is flawed.* On the other hand, if I encunter a study which contradicts my prior, I calculate the probaiblity of the study being flawed is 0.3*0.8/(0.3*0.8 + 0.7 * 0.2) = 0.63, meaning a 63% chance the study is flawed, but also only a 63% chance that I am right about the death penalty. So studies which contridict my priors are about 6 times more likely to be flawed than studies which don’t.
Of course, in practice I doubt the particpants updated their beliefs about the death penalty at all, but this was also rational. Given they were in a lab, and that they probablly rightly suspected relavent information about the studies was being withheld, the optimal strategy would be “evaluate studies based on my priors, because I lack a better way to do so, but don’t update in the way the studies would otherwise suggest.” Not that they were thinking this, but human behavior often comes closer to what the math would say is optimal than their concious thoughts would lead you to believe.
*this isn’t very realistic, which is why I orignally modeled flawed studies as random, but that makes the math harder to follow
I was thinking that something along those lines could explain trapped priors. It's our lizard brain's attempt to do Bayesian reasoning, pretty much getting it right (!) at each step, but getting the final assembly of the pieces wrong.
The step where it goes wrong is taking those evaluations of which study is right / which is flawed, and using *those* to update the priors. My slight existing confidence one way on the death penalty means that a pair of opposing studies looks like slight evidence in favor of my established position, and presto the feedback loop begins.
It's also tantalizingly close to being correct!
I overall agree with this - see https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/12/confirmation-bias-as-misfire-of-normal-bayesian-reasoning/ . I think the conclusion of the study should depend on the exact instructions (eg "assess the quality of this study's methodology" vs. "assess whether you believe its conclusion"), which I'm too lazy to look up right now.
> persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event
This is "safe spaces", I think? Not in the original sense, but in the sense of "anyone with possibly Republican-leaning views must be banished from the entire campus and all speakers vetted beforehand". Also, the kind of person that thrived in pre-Musk twitter but has now quit in disgust, because the previous owners had figured out that one way to maximise engagement/retention was to not confront you with people or ideas you don't want to hear.
Regarding PTSD before the era of Van der Kolk: an interesting data point comes from Kate Summerscale's book The Haunting of Alma Fielding. The setting is 1930s Britain, everyone knows that a catastrophic war is just round the corner, and people need outlets for their anxiety. No-one has heard of PTSD yet (shell shock maybe, but you don't get that from living in London). But, polite society does believe in the supernatural, and the title character expresses her trauma (as we'd call it in modern terms) in hauntings, apparitions and becoming a medium.
To quote one review: "Nandor Fodor - a Jewish-Hungarian refugee and chief ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical research - begins to investigate. In doing so he discovers a different and darker type of haunting: trauma, alienation, loss - and the foreshadowing of a nation's worst fears. As the spectre of Fascism lengthens over Europe, and as Fodor's obsession with the case deepens, Alma becomes ever more disturbed."
You bring up complex PTSD in passing, but at times approach political trauma in this post as if there is a discrete initial traumatic event that later symptoms and retraumatization stem from. I'd like to point out that societal and environmental sources of trauma often last over long periods of time. In my experience, the people who are most passionate about the discourse are currently in horrible situations, not responding to them after the fact. If I look at my own history I became more chill online about religion and gender-related issues after I moved out of the Bible Belt, and again after I stopped living with my mother. (There are a bunch of confounding factors there, of course, both moves also marked significant changes in my lifestyle.) The strategies for dealing with ongoing trauma look different from the response to trauma's aftermath.
Separately: you mention but don't go into self-harm as a cause of addiction to trauma. I am aware that I live in a bubble of mental illness but I do think self-harm accounts for some of the more dramatic cases of that condition known as Terminally Online Disorder. I don't know comorbidity rates but it isn't controversial that depression and trauma can go hand in hand, and if you want to make yourself miserable on purpose digging deep into the blogs of people who hate your in-group is a fantastic way to do it.
Yeah, I mention that briefly because I don't really understand self-harm, I feel nervous talking about it without understanding it, and lots of people think the textbook example of self-harm (cutting) involves getting literal pain endorphins, which doesn't apply as well to politics.
But the person I use as my example is probably the person you're thinking of too, and it's pretty striking!
I think self-harm is a variant of what's going on in some cultures where people who have lost a loved one rend their garments, scream & jump into the grave. It's an enactment of the unbearableness of what the mourner is feeling. In cultures where it is taken that way, it probably brings some relief to the mourner. They feel they have managed to communicate the depth of the anguish. They have let it out. Now the other mourners can share in the task of bearing the unbearable. People who cut themselves are doing the same enactment -- and perhaps feel that the universe at least gets it now, or that various imagined others, if they could see the cutting, would at last grasp the size of the cutter's pain. Many I have talked to about cutting describe it as a way of letting out the pain, and say they feel calmer afterwards.
Have you never used the intentional infliction of pain as a way to focus your mind? Not necessarily anything damaging, just stuff like pressing a fingernail into flesh. Or have you tried and found that it doesn't do anything for you?
I'm generally not a fan of Big Diagnostic turning every behavior at every standard deviation from the mean a diagnosable condition, but I think you're onto something here.
I think I had trauma around growing up gay (among other things). Being born in 1993 and realizing my orientation around 2003 I was old enough to where I guess it felt like there was a lot of ambient anti-gay sentiment. I'm aware many people clearly think this is absurd, and should objectively not be traumatizing.
Probably legalization of gay marriage 'cured' this trauma but also became a sort of obsession, and finding out someone voted against it (especially a younger person) would feel deeply violating in a way where it felt somewhat rape-adjacent in my mind. It was like they wanted to remove autonomy and dignity from me, in a very personal way and for no clear reason, and that was layered on top of the other stigma-related trauma I had around my sexual orientation. The trauma says “GET AWAY FROM THE HOMOPHOBIA! FIND SAFETY!!!” but it feels like you can’t do that if it’s the law of your country.
I think tho thankfully with legalization in Western countries and things settling down I've become center-left slightly anti-woke (I'm also a cis white man). The gay marriage thing, in terms of its psychic meaning, can easily be interpreted as "then society decided homophobia was bad", and I think this allowed me to move on. Maybe I’m fortunate.
I only seem to get traumatized around things that specifically affect me. I also consume ~no news or social media which seems to have palpably improved my mental health.
The Latvian pine slug (Album ashkeniger) is a large and rare species of slug that lives in the forests of Latvia, Pskov Oblast (formerly part of the Soviet Union). It is the largest land slug in Europe, reaching up to 30 cm in length; being slightly longer than the Turkish giant slug and Russian tundra snail. Male snails are slightly larger but with smaller nervous systems compared to females. It feeds exclusively on fresh and locally sourced organic matter. Its shell is dark grey with a distinct “cracked” texture, marked with white spots vaguely resembling the letter “Z”. It is also known as the grey cracker slug or the Latvian japper.
The life cycle of the Latvian pine slug is complex and intriguing. All individuals are born as males, with some transitioning to females as they mature. The trigger for this process is unclear; debate is ongoing whether this is genetically predetermined or influenced by the sex ratio of the population. The male slug aggressively pursues females and repeatedly attempts to initiate copulation. As the female is smaller in size, the male eventually corners her and deposits his sperm. She then lays up to 200 eggs in moist soil or under logs. The eggs hatch after a few weeks: slug parental care is infrequent and highly variable between subspecies, seemingly having substantial effects on the fitness of its offspring.
The slug is abundantly found, but may be threatened by climate change as increased drought spells would lead to desiccation of the eggs and massive population drops. However, some researchers suggest that the slugs would simply adapt by migrating and laying eggs in moister areas.
so woke
can't even talk about slugs without somehow involving Russia... males being less intelligent than females... transitioning... rape culture... climate change... migration...
why are the media paying so much attention to this perverted liberal mollusc that attacks our values and corrupts our children?
This resonated with me particularly given my experience with my dad and brother who got into Rush Limbaugh early. I remember being with my dad and hearing Limbaugh repeating over and over again "Liberals HATE YOU! They HATE YOU!" Like a mantra. It's forcing a trapped prior. Any disagreement if with them if you're not part of that isn't just a disagreement. It's reinforcing that "liberals hate you and don't respect you". It's not about facts anymore. It's about reliving that.
> they find listening a politically discordant opinion is as unpleasant as (let’s say) a claustrophobic person sitting in an enclosed space.
If only that was all of the problem. The problem is they find the knowledge that somebody, somewhere on campus (or even off campus) is listening to a discordant opinion is equally intolerable. It's like a claustrophobic person that thinks there should be no enclosed spaces in the universe, at all.
> imagine having to sit through a six-week diversity training workshop and give the answers the lecturer wants or else you’ll fail
The correct analogy would be "imagine somebody giving a diversity training where the participation is completely voluntary and you free to not go there at all, but you still are offended by the fact that somebody goes there". Which, admittedly, happens, but I think less frequently than the original one.
That sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Imagine it: you're standing with your friends and family, listening to Sorbin happily recounting the massacre of Huguenots in nearby cities, and calling on the people of Orleans to band together and go door-to-door killing every Huguenot family. People are cheering — even some people you called trusted friends.
Maybe you fear for yourself or someone you love, from this massacre or from later retaliation. Maybe you have no personal fear, but you hate murder and love peace, out of piety or humanistic principles or plain old kindness.
I have no trauma from the 16th-century French civil wars, but I find that awful to think about. I'm distressed by the thought that it happened in real life, and more distressed by analogues that are happening now rather than the distant past. In my opinion, that's a perfectly normal reaction to someone calling for, and others cheering for, a massacre.
Politically discordant opinions aren't just about what colours to put on campaign posters and whether "person of left-handedness" is more polite; they're very often matters of life and death for thousands or millions.
SSC post "Not just a mere political issue" (March 2013) discusses this in more detail: it's kind of odd that we can just set aside some of these disagreements. That's mostly a good thing — I don't want a civil war. But it's hardly surprising that we often won't.
> Ancient warriors apparently didn’t get PTSD. Everything about this claim is still controversial, but the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that they had a narrative in which war was heroic and inspiring, not traumatizing. I think this story is backed up by cross-cultural comparisons and research on depression: thinking you’re supposed to feel traumatized is a risk factor for problematic trauma symptoms.
Poverty in the US seems PTSD coded as well. I've never experienced poverty, so maybe this is my ignorance talking, but my parents and aunts and uncles all did. Like third-world, grim meathook poverty including death from preventable illnesses, not having enough to eat, and the random bout of horrific violence. When they escaped they lived as illegal immigrants in another country. Don't get me wrong, they weren't fleeing the Khmer Rouge or anything, but it was closer to that than US poverty. And... as far as I can tell, none of them have PTSD from it. They're not supposed to feel traumatized by this, because everyone went through this, so... they're fine?
Meanwhile a bunch of friends here in the US grew up in relatively cushy (but probably still bad) first-world poverty and they seem scarred for life from it. They're "supposed to" feel traumatized by it, so they are.
There’s a lot to this.
Psychologist here. Several decades ago, trauma was thought of as the modern term for shellshock -- the state some people fell into after combat. It was thought to occur outside of combat under conditions where someone had a shocking, terrifying experinece, one far worse than most people experience : Violent beatings and rapes, torture, being involved in some ghastly accident where you or the people you know are mutilated, etc. Anyhow, PTSD is common after combat, but way less than 50% of people develop it. So even PTSD defined very strictly is something that occurs to a minority of people.
Here's a theory: maybe the reason so many people feel traumatised is that society's just got much bigger than any human mind can track, meaning that we feel -- often accurately -- that our lives are at the mercy of impersonal forces we can't hope to control. Look at all the worry about AI taking our jobs, for example -- lots of people seem to agree that this is a worrying prospect, but nobody says "Well, let's just stop producing advanced AIs, problem solved." It's like technological development has gained a momentum of its own, and can't be stopped even if there's broad societal agreement that it's bad. (Aside: yes, I know not everybody thinks AI research is bad; my point is that, even among those who think it is, nobody seems to consider "don't develop AIs that will put people out of jobs" to be a feasible solution.) Or look at the economy. Even experts disagree on what is actually good for economic growth, or whether a given step to boost the economy will be good for actual people; from the perspective of an ordinary person, "the economy" might as well be some kind of capricious Lovecraftian god, which could choose to make you unemployed tomorrow for no reason whatsoever. As I understand it, perceived lack of control is a risk factor in being traumatised -- hence, for example, the theory that PTSD first became prevalent in the Great War because soldiers were spending so much time sitting in trenches getting shelled, without being able to make even token retaliation. So maybe a perceived lack of control over how our lives turn out is partly responsible for why everybody seems so crazy nowadays.
(Note 1: I'm aware that out-of-control events have always been a risk -- a medieval peasant might get his crops destroyed by the blight, or burnt by an invading army. But at the day-to-day level, most of his life would be lived among the same villagers he'd always known, people whom he'd know quite well, so there wouldn't have been this impersonal quality which we find in modern life. Even if he was a serf and only partially free, his lord was a specific individual whom he could appeal to, at least in principle, if he didn't like how his village was being run. You can't appeal to the global economy if you don't like how its affecting your community. Even appealing to your MP, or local equivalent, is unlikely to have much effect, and the chain between you writing to your MP and meaningful structural economic change occurring is going to be much longer and more convoluted than the chain between you petitioning your lord to do something and your lord doing it.)
(Note 2: This theory would also explain why things seem to have got so much crazier since the Covid lockdowns. "The government can and does repeatedly shut down society for indefinite amounts of time, at unpredictable intervals, with virtually no prior warning" is like a textbook case of a situation where ordinary people lack control over their own lives.)
Another, not necessarily exclusive, theory: Human beings evolved to live in small tribes, probably no larger than Dunbar's Number (150 or so) and quite possibly significantly smaller. We also evolved in a world where we didn't regularly get news from far away. The result is that, whenever we hear about anything happening, we subconsciously react as if it pertains to a tribe of 150 or so people, as opposed to a nation of 150 million. Consequently, bad news takes on much more salience than it objectively deserves. For example, say you read the newspapers regularly, and every week they report some new murder happening. Now, in a country of tens or hundreds of millions, one murder a week really isn't worth worrying about. In a tribe of 150 people, though, it very much is -- that's literally a third of the tribe being murdered within a year! And because our brains still think we're living in a small tribe, we instinctively react as if we're in the 1/3-of-the-tribe-murdered-by-this-time-next-year situation, rather than the tiny-murder-rate-not-worth-worrying-about situation. Keep this going for long enough, and it's no wonder everybody ends up paranoid and jumpy.
We also live in a world where many of the "people" we encounter are digital representations, some of real people, some of imaginary ones: TV, movies, video games, & now chatbots. t's likely that anyone who keeps the TV on a lot or games logs more time per day with virtual people than they do with real. I don't think we thrive in that setup.
True! On the bright side, Microsoft discontinued its "Clippy". We could have been in a world where an intrusive animated paperclip attempted (incompetently) to be "helpful" to everyone on Windows... At least we aren't forced into continuously interacting with _that_. :-)
A 150 person tribe sounds really lovely at the moment 😂
While it was a pretty minor one compared to what Scott personally experienced I actually did feel a period of secondhand trauma during the nyt incident.
The Latvian pine slug is apparently not a thing, or at least a little cursory Googling didn't find it.
However! It turns out you can buy a rainbow articulated 3d printed slug and more people should be aware of this: https://paradoxartistcollective.com/products/3d-printed-articulated-slug
Yeah! I stopped paying attention to the news several years ago, (sometime around Trumps first impeachment, I had TDS before that.) The news media now makes money by pushing your buttons so that tomorrow you'll come back for more. I encourage everyone to get off that tread mill, and pay attention to what is going on around you. (locally)
There’s a scene in the movie Dream Scenario (minimal spoilers) where Nicholas Cage’s students have to undergo a group cognitive behavioral session consisting of Cage standing on the other side of the gymnasium, and taking a few steps closer to them at a time - the goal being he can stand right in front of then without freaking them out.
I think this basically needs to happen with voters.
I suspect that this definition of trauma proves too much and that basically anything could be called trauma by these lights.
Take going to the grocery store (I work at a grocery store, so it's the first example that comes to mind). Anecdotally, people are worse at math in grocery stores than elsewhere, given some of the questions that I've been asked about people's receipts. The people whom I discuss politics with sound a good deal less paranoid than customers, who are sometimes convinced that we're trying to overcharge them or think that the credit card reader is stealing their information. Unlike political trauma, people physically experience going to a grocery store. Not everybody experiences being hypervigilant, irritable, and persistently negative as a result of grocery shopping, just like not everybody experiences that about politics, but a lot of people do. Some people avoid the trauma by doing Instacart, but others become unhealthily obsessed with comparison shopping.
Are grocery stores generally traumatic? I find the idea ridiculous, but many of Scott's reasons for politics being traumatic apply equally well or better to shopping. Maybe the people I know are just bizarrely well-behaved around politics, though. For that matter, I could make a similar argument about capitalism, communism, sleep (that one makes people really bad at math), school, having children, or loads of other common activities.
The most reasonable conclusion is to reject this redefinition of trauma as an overreach, and so politics aren't traumatic unless you want to hold that basically every activity is traumatic.
Jon Ronson recently had a related episode about trauma on “things fell apart”:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/things-fell-apart/id1592984136?i=1000640051663
I remember when Less Wrong had the policy, Politcs is the Mindkiller. I thought it was so obviously true of American politics (and perhaps one reason that Canadians, as an outside party, were so successful at comedy). But it wasn't true of Canadian politics! Canadians could talk about Conservative vs NDP vs Bloc without all the "all heat, no light" of American politics.
Now Canadian politics has the same mindkiller-ness as Americans. Even discussing American politics causes a lot of (most) Canadians to forget all rationality and go completely tribal.
Am I looking at my youth with rose-coloured (note the U in 'coloured') glasses? I don't think so, but I can't think of a good way to prove it one way or another.
Didn't need to wait for the "u" in "coloured", you had already given yourself away with the "gh" in "light"...
I read this, and I think to myself... what is the difference between "trauma" and "I don't like this."?
Between "I hate my job" and "I'm too mentally unwell to go in today."? I really don't know
There's a book by someone called Michael Nehls who thinks he understands how isolation and exposure to propaganda changes the brain:
https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/has-neuroscience-found-the-key-to
I haven't read it, but I've been curious about it. If correct, that would be another angle on Scott's point.
It's very tempting to assume that Nehls is just crazy, but we're all witnessing people around us being crazy, so something we don't understand is clearly going on.
So, by any chance, would anyone here have an educated opinion on Nehls' view? Obviously right, obviously wrong, sort of correct but completely wrong angle, professional, amateurish, sounds like nonsense for a certain reason - what is it?
Didn't find this post interesting as usual. Felt like I already believed something similar and didn't need to be convinced that many people are traumatized by politics or more generally that politics is overly emotional.
But of course, the topic of improving political discourse is important, so I'm not sure what I'd have preferred. I'm tempted to say a call to action, but IDK if that's Scott's thing. Maybe more speculative prescriptions, beyond consuming less outrage clickbait.
EDIT: Just remembered my speculation about dog whistles--mainstream media takes for granted that every message is optimized, and so any potential ambiguity is necessarily intentional. The average person thinks that's insane. Maybe subtext is real, but not everyone can or will make use of it, so it's wrong to assume.
I'm not convinced by this article; the usual political nonsense doesn't feel like trauma, emotionally.
It seems more lime: to demonstrate our allegiance to the in-group, we publicly denounce the outgroup. This is east to do when the outgroup is Trump.
=====
Those real life crime channels seem strange to me. What are we doing, watching these documentaries about horrible murders?
Maybe there's something of the same quality to Trump coverage. He's enough material for not just an episode, or a series, or a two season DVD boxed set, but an entire tv channel of his crazy criminal antics.
Yeah - it is just motivated reasoning, if being the victim brings you more cultural points than you try to present yourself as the victim. I’ve read that actually everything we say is formulated by a “press secretary”, everything is motivated, but in politics we have more need for the press secretary, because we have more divergent needs. It is rational to be paranoid in politics
First, some sources consulted:
J.G. Fraser, The Golden Bough
Marshall Sahlins, How "natives" think
René Girardeau, I see Satan fall like lightning
Robi Hardy (dirctor), The Wicker Man
The unfortunate Captain Cook failed to ask some obvious questions, beyond oh, how nice, they hunk I'm the God Lono. We may forgive his ignorance of Hawaiian religion. But even if you were only familiar with Christianity, some questions along the lines of, hey what happened to that Jesus guy at the end? Might come to mind.
.and so to Trump, who seems worryingly unconcerned with how the story ends.
So, he's competing to be elected as some kind of God-King, locally known as "The President". In his case, the role of the candidate seems to be to be as rituallly impure as possible, violating the sacred taboos of kingship. In the religion of the United States of America, intercourse with a young virgin girl is regarded as maximally ritually polluting.
So, you have this guy, you set him up to be as impure as possible, you elect him God-king ... then what? Does a large wicker Whitehouse lie ahead?
"And those who pacify with blood accursed
Savage Teutates, Hesus' horrid shrines,
And Taranis' altars cruel as were those
Loved by Diana, goddess of the north;" --Pharsalia, by Lucan
Anyway, we seem to have decided that Trump is That Guy.
Presumably, he ends up in jail, that being the modern equivalent of the fate of a priest of Nemi.
A formula I heard goes "found in a motel with a dead girl and a live boy".
I suffer a lot from this, especially since my latest smartphone now receives automatic news-feeds. I wish I could just stop reading them but they are addictive and I always fall prey to the (lame?) excuse of wanting to stay informed. So I end up getting worked up a lot (being a social conservative, but not a particularly economic one, I get the feeling - probably not wrong? - that I am part of a vanishing minority these days). I want to feel that my point of view is rational, that I am not the crazy one. Seeing a bunch of news articles which constantly disagree with you, "triggers" you because suddenly you are the crazy one! But I would stop short of calling all of this trauma (that certainly seems - as some have mentioned here - offensive to people with real trauma). And I am definitely convinced that media in general is purposefully trying to wratchet up our levels of outrage for profit-seeking reasons (for which we should all be outraged!).
My attempt at a remedy for 2024: put the f***ing phone down and enjoy the real world more and try hard to believe that the other side means well, even when I think they are dead wrong. Lastly, deal with everyone around me (and myself) as an individual, not part of any group. See how it works out for me...
[epistemic status: weakly informed speculation] If we do accept that PTSD exists now but not in the past, could that just be because modern wars have all kinds of skull-rattling explosions going on and ancient wars didn't? Didn't PTSD used to be called "shell shock"? WWII was pretty valorized and I believe those soldiers still suffered from PTSD.
Shit like loss aversion, the brains conflation of psychic and physically traumatic pain, and Toni Morrison saying it doesn’t matter if u your fear is real, just if you really fear,
Has had me think similarly, and the exhaustion, and the initial turn to, fear-campaigning in major US elections is the kinda pattern I’d look to see this kinda society sick
Interesting approach, I agree there seems to be quite a strong fit between the psychology of political partisanship and this concept of trauma addiction. Thanks for introducing that this aspect of reenactment, btw, I don't think it's so well known.
Regarding section VI on the science of trauma, what I've read about trauma was mostly from Bessel Van Der Kolk, Deb Dana and associated figures, and IIRC the psychological description they give is a bit more detailed than just a system of trapped priors. The kind of trauma they talk about seems to be primarily a failure of integration; the stimulus is so strong, so overwhelming, that the parts of the brain that keep track of our "larger I", with its wider identity, history, self-narratives, etc., more or less shut down, and one is unable to integrate the event. The practical result is that the event never becomes part of normal memory, it remains in a kind of eternal present, so that recalling it literally amounts to reliving it, right here and now. This inhibits the whole regular way in which we normally allow events (even strikingly bad ones) to fade away with time, and to become subsumed into a larger self-story. I don't recall the exact details, but this probably maps pretty well to different areas of the brain suddenly switching off or disconnecting from each other, probably as an evolutionarily ancient response to overwhelming danger activated at the amygdala.
A close friend of mine (probably) has "complex PTSD" due to extremely incompetent parenting, and when it comes up, it's a kind of disconnection, a dissociation, which is barely perceptible from the outside because he has learned to hide it. Much of the therapy he has done has been about noticing how this internal shutdown happens, and how it seems to happen at a very low level of the nervous system. I don't know if the notion of priors even applies at such a level - maybe it does, but still, there is something qualitatively completely different between that and a relatively simple trapped cognitive prior that dogs or liberals or the Catholic Church or whatever are evil.
Maybe what I'm trying to talk about is trauma proper, and the craziness of politics is only trauma-adjacent, or trauma-lite. From your description, I'd say the shoe fits... at least from what I've seen at a distance, because personally I find myself rather incapable of being invested in politics of any kind!
Well said. Internal Family Systems does a wonderful job taking it a step further.
I think in the future the acquiescence to the belief that “words and opinions can be violence, and people have a legitimate right to be protected from language they may find harmful” will be regarded as the gravest error Western societies have made culturally over the past 20 years
Have you considered comparing politics to OCD instead of trauma? A political person who is addicted to the news because being well-informed can somehow prevent their country from sliding into dictatorship does not seem too different from someone who obsessively washes their hands out of a fear of germs.
Cherrypicking some definitions from [this table](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK56452/), political thoughts (at least about the other side) could be viewed as obsessions ("persistent ideas, thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced as inappropriate or intrusive and that cause anxiety and distress. The content of the obsession is often perceived as alien and not under the person's control.") and getting into fruitless political debates seems to fit the criteria for compulsions ("repetitive behaviours or mental acts that are carried out to reduce or prevent anxiety or distress and are perceived to prevent a dreaded event or situation").
There are of course notable differences. Political thoughts and behavior can also be motivated by hope, whereas definitions of OCD revolve about negative things. In OCD people usually think they themselves are in some way contaminated, in politics the others are at fault, but that seems less awkward than relying on traumatic re-enactment, which I hope is more of a fringe phenomenon (it sounds awful).
OCD has some possibilities, but it could be both trauma and OCD.
I've written a speculative essay about trauma being the best way to understand the phenomena of ideology, political or otherwise - An ideology being the memetic coordination mechanism for culturally embodied stuckness. Wrote about it here: https://primatesofcosmos.substack.com/p/clenchings-of-body-and-mind
Ok hear me out: maybe the problem is caused by the political system and improving it will end the cycle of trauma...
It annoys me a lot that seemingly the vast majority of people will complain about a common problem but be either uninterested or even hostile towards discussing systemic solutions. Often they prefer individual solutions, i.e., people or groups who cause problems should be punished and that's that.
Where do we find the untraumatized or less traumatized people we can trust to make things better?
There is exists in this world more than just the United States. By studying other countries, that use other systems, it is possible to figure out what electoral and government systems tend to work the best. You can check with surveys of populaces about how satisfied they are with their system for example, and draw conclusions.
The least traumatised people will be those in countries that are most satisfied with their system.
Or, you know, just ask me: it's proportional parliamentarianism! Or for something more achievable in the short term: ranked choice voting, one state at a time.
It seems like you could start by looking for some countries with no really traumatic upheavals in their political order in the last 30 years or so, right? If you have some country where the coalition shifts periodically between being led by the center-left party or the center-right party, with few radical changes to policy, it seems like there wouldn't be a lot of trauma there.
Metrics I would start with are: voter turnout rate, how closely vote proportion matches seat proportion, average days to government formation, and surveys of voter satisfaction.
I don't know how you would begin to quantify "really traumatic upheavals"...
One thing I think is missing in this analysis is the *magnitude* of the trauma. If we're taking the DSM as a reference point, I note that for PTSD it requires "Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence". And yes, we can recognize that this is not an exhaustive list and that e.g. emotional abuse can qualify, but it would kind of have to be emotional abuse on par with (serious, non-hyperbolic) death threats.
Which doesn't seem to apply to the sorts of "trauma" we're talking about here. Particularly with regard to the hypothesis that the media is causing all of this in its relentless pursuit of eyeballs and clicks. Media, traditional or social, can't kill or injure you, can't sexually assault you, and rarely threatens to kill you in any serious way. It usually even cuts away from graphic images of death or serious injury, and in any event the DSM tells us that, get real, seeing this stuff on TV doesn't count. Unless it's for work-related purposes, somehow.
And I think it used to work this way. The media is just words and (usually tame) images, and we used to consider it at least aspirationally true that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me". Yeah, maybe the *first* time someone calls a white kid "racist" or a black kid the N-word, they go lock themselves in their room for a month. But we used to expect them to learn better, grow out of it, and come back as the sort of person who can e.g. stand up to the New York Times and come away bloody but unbowed.
Now, we've got lots of people experiencing almost crippling levels of "trauma", from things the DSM says don't make the cut for PTSD. And yes, when the media finds someone vulnerable to that sort of thing, they'll pounce on it for the profit they'll make selling those outrage-fixated eyeballs to their advertisers. But there has to be something else that's making so many people fragile enough that they are susceptible in the first place.
And there are some obvious theories as to what that could be, but I distrust obvious, easy answers to hard questions and I think this needs further exploration.
To respond seriously to your very good questions, I fully agree that this needs further exploration, but until that happens I might as well toss my two cents in. (I wonder how much of this is your "obvious theories".)
I think social bonds are a lot more important to most people than the DSM recognizes. I think that real-world social bonds are being replaced by online social bonds. The sheer scale and interconnectedness and online nature of the Internet not only means that we lose track of whose opinions it's important to care about, but also means that it's easier for the opinions of some random person to not only influence you, but more importantly to influence your friends, and so it can actually be important to care about what random people say about you, in a way that is simply not true when walking down the street.
I suspect that when faced with a locus of morality that is external and ever-shifting, people respond by increasing their actions that that bond them to their group, while eroding any internal structure that might get in the way. But that internal structure is also what allows resilience in the face of adversity, most especially when cut off from the group. That's a bit abstract, but I think it explains why people join witch-hunts, because they know that their safety comes from the group. No matter what kind of front they put up, they know deep down that they're not perfect, they could be singled out, and it's only luck that's kept them from being the one who's being burned - luck, and the good opinion of the group, which is why it's so important to passionately call for the burning of that witch over there. And if they've got enough empathy and intelligence, this is going to rip them apart inside. Or who knows, they may eventually come to truly believe that all and only the people accused of witchcraft are witches, updating their beliefs after every new accusation faster than you can replace "Eurasia" with "Eastasia".
Flippantly, this is the Internet. Who **hasn't** seen a few death threats to themselves or some group they're in? Didn't we just have a post that was talking about people advocating for the eradication of all humanity?
Social bonds are extremely important, and they're threatened both by cancelation from the left and by hostility to everyone who doesn't agree from the right.
When you think "death threat" you usually think of the opposition saying, you know, "hey i'm gonna kill you". And sure, most people don't have to deal with that kind of threat on social media. I think the real death threats are actually coming from the *ingroup* - the people reposting every deranged take they see about how [CURRENT ISSUE] is a literal existential threat, the enemy is at the gate, and their days are numbered. I can definitely see this forming a trauma response in some people, especially if they're too young to remember not getting killed by [PREVIOUS ISSUE].
Real death threats are fortunately rare in American civil and political discourse. And they almost never involve people posting or reposting anything, because they almost never happen on the internet. We all live in meatspace. Really. And in order for us to be threatened with death, that death will need to come at us in meatspace so most of the effective channels for delivering the threat are also meatspace.
It's not impossible to use the internet for this purpose. Swatting, for one terrifying example. But, again, a fortunately rare one. But people who are going to be seriously traumatized by "death threats" in the form of nasty emails, are part of the problem.
One of the points that Yoel Roth makes is that it is hard to tell which death threats are serious and which death threats are just people blowing off steam. I don't know whether Roth was traumatized by the death threats against him, but he did move to a new residence every time his home address was posted online. Most members of the online mobs attacking Roth would never consider attacking Roth in meatspace, but it would only take one.
Most of the people who would consider attacking Roth in meatspace, are not going to be so considerate as to send him an email warning him about the fact.
Dear Scott,
I humbly plead for you to change the post image, due to the following reason:
When I share a post, the image shows up in the embed. Thus, when I share this empathic and humanizing article, the image the recipient sees is the 2016-era "triggered" meme, which is (as the kids say) "right-coded".
Thank you, and yours truly,
- Nicholas Kross
PS: Yes, i can sometimes rdmove the default embed (yes on discord, not when texting). However, the embed makes people more likely to click (image! Yay!) as long as it's not actively turning them away (triggered meme! Boooo, an article I won't read because the image makes it look like a more-stereotypical conservative meme!).
As a result of this article, I've been thinking about Jews and holocaust material.
I know people who go to holocaust museums and watch holocaust movies. I don't do that, my feeling about holocaust museums is "Why would I do that to myself? I haven't even read Maus.
However, I do read a fair amount about the holocaust and I can feel the pull.
It's rather clearly not about learning in the cognitive sense. One holocaust museum (maybe two or three if you have regional interests) should be enough to grasp that the holocaust happened, it was extraordinarily bad, and one should do what one can to flee, fight, and/or prevent holocausts and to help others do so.
At this point, I'm just trying to understand what's going on. Perhaps there's a desire for the sort of learning which causes action combined with a lack of trust that cognitive learning will be enough.
"Very smart people lose basic reasoning abilities when the topic switches to politics. This isn’t just a truism, it’s been demonstrated in formal experiments."
Apart from replicability, the Kahan study doesn't show that politics is the mindkiller -- only that modern US politics is. See Andrew Marshalls comment about Canadian politics.
>Then they will forget to vote because they were tired on Election Day.
For any single individual, voting on election day doesn't make logical sense if their time is worth anything. A single vote has an infinitesimally small chance of changing an election. Even if the single vote does change the election, having one party rather than another in power is likely to have only a small effect on their life. Playing the lottery would a higher expected value.
> than I would on some boring topic like taxes.
Funny example. Doing my taxes has been mildly traumatic for me. I should probably pay someone to do them but (like the political news junky?) I feel there's value in being aware of the horrific details.
Great post! Most of the news and comment I read is by Catholics or First Things-style ecumenical conservatives. These folks aren't immune to triggering (John Zmirak got fraud-pilled, as did Ed Peters, Fr Z). Nevertheless I tend to think to the extent that people believe there are important social goals which exist independently of politics, politics just becomes less consequential and less triggering, and things can be discussed fairly rationally. David French vs Sohrab Ahmari on Drag Queens was a difficult debate to watch, but the debate wouldn't have even happened in most cases. Being Christian gave them an opportunity to debate and repair any bridges that got burned in the debate. But I get the feeling something similar is going on for rationalists too.
> imagine having to sit through a six-week diversity training workshop and give the answers the lecturer wants or else you’ll fail
I'm not sure why that's supposed to be a convincing comparison, between being forced to pretend you agree with discordant ideas for six weeks, and merely hearing a discordant opinion or knowing it exists.
At any rate, people will be as reasonable as they must, or as intolerant - as willing to work themselves up into a fanatic frenzy - as they can get away with, depending on which ideology holds power, and can send you into a six week reeducation, or lose you your job.
There have been a number of instances of
A) organisers of some event (e.g. vibecamp, science fiction convention) propose banning someone
B) argument is made that they might be innocent
C) substantial discussion is had, to the eventual conclusion that yes, they are indeed a bad guy
(E.g. Marion Zimmer Bradley and partner Walter Bremen; more recent vibecamp issue...)
Step (c) is kind of unedifying, but I guess it has to happen in order to achieve (a), kicking them out, given (b).
Another possible factor: if you're in a noisy environment, you have to get louder to be heard.
I'm reminded about a bit in _The Wisdom of Whores_ (a book about international charities trying to help prostitutes) about how a charity can't get attention for what is just a problem, it has to be amplified to sound like an emergency to be noticed.
One way to deescalate it is to stop straw manning. One way to prevent straw manning is a norm of requiring specific receipts whenever anyone makes a claim about what someone else has done or said or believed. Also, avoiding all hyperbole. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Some trauma gurus are now asserting that "capitalism" causes trauma. Others say, "Modern life" is traumatic. Talk about an ever expanding definition of trauma! It's a totalizing ideology that predisposes people to experiencing normal challenges as traumatic assaults.
This post was very good but it traumatized me.
It was so long substack crashed four times well I was trying to read it. I am now addicted to long posts that crash when I read them and will be expecting more from you
Wouldnt Kevin Simlers old article Crony Beliefs be a sufficient model to explain these behaviors? (except the addiction one, but that one I do not relate to) https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/
In there he writes you have some beliefs because you think they are true, and some because they are socially desirable. The more you use truth-seeking to root out the socially desirable ones, the more you protect them. And it lists behaviors like anger that seem to work exactly like what you describe. I more think when it comes to politics, peoples brain see "aha, this concern a socially desirable belief", not a truth-belief, and therefore runs that program and so sound a bit stupid. And if someone says, no that cannot be true, they get very defensive about it.
The solution Kevin suggests in the article is to create a community of truth-seekers around you
This is one of the best pieces you’ve written in a while Scott, really fascinating and convincing argument/concept. Nice work.
I have just noticed that Geoffrey Miller is very, very angry about those protestors who threw soup at the Mona Lisa; plus certain other protesters I shall avoid explicitly mentioning here.
Conjecture: those protestors are serving approximately the same function for the right as Trump does for the left.
Thank you for writing this. It's very informative.
Question: have you look into the crisis in family court from the same perspective, where a narcissistic/borderline/dark triad individual decompensates ina to persecutory delusion due to the divorce?
Most doctors working in family court do not seem to know any of this.
Thank you again.
I have C-PTSD... it actually turned me into an activist and a politician from the age of five onward.
All I can say is that, maybe I'm lucky, my traumatic stimuli were from different political groupings, so I became more-focused on power and dishonesty (I literally describe my trigger as "Hypocrisy in the Face of Harm")... in that I've gone after both the [Not-Really] Left and the [Mythology over Commonsense] Right over all manner of different issues.
I think the most-important thing in terms of being able to make politics less-traumatizing is habituation. Engage with your political enemies, defend them when it comes to things you agree with, and try to respond as much as possible, outside the emotional part of your brain.
Politics is life-and-death... we don't need to add any more emotional up or down regulation to it... there's tonnes there already.
And yeah, listening to those narratives you tell me to turn-off has managed to help me find out who is and is not a good-faith actor. Max Igan trying to show people that transition is a plot to sterilize people was so thinly argued and so dependent on leveraging disgust, that he showed a trans man and a trans woman raising their newborn to 'prove' his point.
There's a guy either lost or hoping you will be or both.
Same with people who talk about immune injury from COVID but won't look at the Cleveland Clinic data...
Heck, to see masks on the faces of people chanting about genocide, when 30 million children died of malnutrition as a result of our response to COVID, and they'd rather focus on 15 thousand, replicates that trauma.
But increasingly, thorugh engagement, I'm habituated... and I think you're right about something else:
I now don't believe the mendacity of the people whose actions outrage me goes unpunished... and I feel better about taking it on as a result.
It seems to me that one factor in whether an experience is "traumatic" is whether it violates one's expectation of how the world is or ought to be. I.e., in an aristocratic warrior culture, aristocratic warriors aren't going to be traumatized by dreadful things happening in battle as those are expected and accepted as part of the structure of the world.
Within that framework, I notice the phrase "lots of people did experience feelings of fear and helplessness around Trump’s election". That's odd because of course one is relatively helpless vis a vis political trends that move away from one's preferences. "XYZ got elected and that's against my interests!" should be considered a *normal* event in life. But for some reason, people expect that they live in a world of people who have their best interests at heart.
This reminds me that Caitlin Flanagan once explained why teenagers are vulnerable: "... and most of all their innocent belief, so carefully nurtured by parents and teachers, that the world rewards kindness and fairness, that there is always someone in authority to appeal to if you are being treated cruelly or not included in something ..." That is, upper-middle-class parents work very hard to ensure their children never interact with people who *don't* have the child's best interests at heart. Needless to say, when the child starts dealing with the Real World, it's a shock.
I think my main update from this is that Scott's lived experience is that people who are really into politics are often actually scared and angered by the stuff they say they are scared and angered by, its not just some kind of performative signaling game about how your are so in-group-pure the out-group burns your mind like a vampire exposed to the sun. Most of my social circle isn't into this stuff, so I guess I wasn't quite sure whether to take these claims seriously.
So this article has me assigning more weight to the emotional distress people experience from politics and modern social media madness in general.
I am less sure that I buy the trauma framing. I am skeptical of the studies mentioned on general principle. They sound to me from the brief description like The Kind Of Thing That Does Not Replicate, never mind being actually correct, which is a higher bar. Every other symptom named seems pretty generic to me?
Is there some kind of actual difference in how you best help or not-hinder people who feel sad and angry and scared due to "trauma" compared to people who feel sad and angry and scared for other generic reasons? If not, I'm not sure if the diagnosis is helpful here, and I don't much buy that it carves reality at a joint in the description either.
Just wondering why you feel a need to argue with "people who believe that no pro-life conservative really cares about fetuses." Who knows whether they do or not, actually? What has become apparent is that they don't 't care at all about women. As evidenced by the many women who have been denied medically necessary abortions, sometimes being told to wait in the hospital parking lot until they go into sepsis or start hemorrhaging. Anti-abortion activists' behavior has given us a big clue about where their priorities lie.
Generally, they do care at least abstractly about women; they just don't believe that such things actually happen, or at least that they won't happen again. You are welcome to say that they are *wrong* about such beliefs, but ... disbelieving inconvenient facts is hardly rare.
A# I said, I'm really skeptical that much politicking can be explained as trauma.
Except, maybe, COViD related craziness. I don't mean trauma from actually getting covid (though I'm sure that exists), more trauma from fear of covid/lockdown isolation. Would seem, a priori, to be potentially traumatic. And we find, that yes, there is a bunch of conspiracist politics around covid.
There was a good post on one of the conspiracy groups in which the guy tells the story of how he came to be involuntarily committed in a psychiatric hospital, during which time he met some new friends, who had some very interesting ideas that he is now about to explain. (This completely breaks the usual model of psychiatry textbooks, that clinical psychosis and political conspiracy theories are entirely different phenomena.@)
A correction: Ted Cruz said that *Donald Trump,* not Hillary Clinton, had New York values (during the brief period Cruz was opposing Trump outright)
This really makes a lot of things fall into place for me. One thing I'm really curious about is why do some people not seem to be susceptible to this pattern? I lean more left-wing (though technically, more anarcho-syndicalist), but don't feel constantly triggered by what strike me as crazy right-wing talking points. I just roll my eyes or feel concerned that this stuff is being distributed. But I don't feel personally triggered by it. What is different about me?
Is there a name for paranoia about paranoia existing? A meta-paranoia?
I'm curious about how different this take is from what the psychological/ psychiatric establishment think. As far as I can tell, the mental health profession seems pretty unanimous - the 24/7 news cycle and social media is really bad for you. The topic on politics specifically seems to have gotten a bump mid Jan, from a study from U Toronto.
Anecdotally, a lot of social movements implicitly or explicitly create cult-like conditions, especially on social media. When I was a friendless teenager, I fell prey to radical feminism, and only recovered to be a functioning adult after I somehow succeeded in making friends (despite how poorly I was behaving). The combination of convincing a victim of the hostility of wider society, that the only safe place is within the political movement, and then insane rules intended to foster control over the victims (radfeminism is really really weird about romantic relationships and sex). My radfem phase didn't last long, but I'm now always vigilant when a social or political movement does similar stuff.... And a lot of the fringe online ones do the exact same thing.
So my contribution: we know that cults are traumatizing to their members. Politics is increasingly using cult tactics, incidentally traumatizing people, but due to the reach and inescapability of politics, it's able to do this on a massive scale.
To me, it makes complete sense that people can become obsessed with a source of trauma, even if it is very harmful to their mental health. In fact, it is pretty surprising to me when someone *doesn't* have this reaction.
If you are an ancestral tetrapod and you are nearly killed by a predator, your survival odds go down if you bury your head in the sand and try to think about predators as little as possible. The better response is to become more vigilant against predators from now on. Jumping at shadows is a small price to pay for living another day.
It's a shame that we are prone to being traumatized by events that do not merit this reaction, but our trauma response likely evolved long before the complexities of modern civilization were a twinkle in an australopith's eye.
I searched for the word "identification" in the post and the comments and it did not appear once.
The discussion of the "psychopolitics of trauma" doesn't make sense without talking about identification first. When we just take for granted that people identify with either team red or team blue (or with wokeness or the countermovement, with gender as a spectrum or "two biological sexes", and so on), then we might as well take for granted how all those issues can give rise to trauma. Why not. It obviously affects people, thus it's just about finding an instance where some political issue affects me negatively to the right degree and there you have your trauma.
What is weird about it?
Well, why should some news about some abstract event affect me emotionally at all? People who got scared when Trump become president probably argue that he was about to enact policies that will affect them, eventually. However, it is quite telling to see how people in European countries were triggered, too. Less in number and intensity, but here we need an explanation.
And that explanation is identification. Humans have the tendency (maybe even the need) to become part of a group and make the concerns of the group their own, individual concerns. When he was 8 years old, a friend of mine heard about Germany exporting tanks to other countries and thought "we can't just sell those tanks to other countries, we have to keep these to be stronger then them!". This is a beautiful example of a somewhat naive identification with "team Germany".
Once I identify with some group, I opened the flood gates. All kind of remotely relevant, abstract issues that are being discussed in media, social media, books, and bars might affect me. When I identify with a local transgender activism group, the fact that my national ID card states my biological sex and doesn't leave space to put a gender, might feel like some existential threat. But see: It's because of identification. I worked hard towards this being true. While identification comes naturally and seems to be ubiquitous with humans, it involves a series of decisions and actions. I.e. I don't have to identify with the that local transgender activism group to the degree that I get triggered by my national ID card.
For someone who does not happen to identify with the same group as me, the whole thing just looks like some theater, in which I play a chosen role. And this is what identification really is: a chosen drama. An enactment.
There is no really good reason, why I should identify with "my country", either. When people shout "USA! USA! USA!" they just seem like absolute morons to me. I can't help but to think of the North Korean mass games, or some random football fan (that is soccer fan in American English) who cries when his team looses and feels aggression towards fans of some other club.
**When I identify with some group/cause/institution, I open up the possibility of arbitrary news items affecting me negatively.**
And this is why quite literally everything, can be traumatizing. Construct a traumatizing expression like this:
X = [arbitrary statement here]
I identify with a group that says *not X* and moreover, X is kind of worse than the holocaust.
Someone: X
Me: Someone made me suffer! Members of my identified group: look!
Astralcodexten: Interesting, politics seem to be traumatizing. How come?
So maybe we should talk about the need for identification. I would suggest that there is a fairly linear spectrum from strong/healthy to weak/sick where the on the strong/healthy side, the need for identification is controlled. When you are on the strong/healthy side, you might still choose to support a football club and you might even find yourself shouting "USA! USA! USA!", but once your team looses you will remind yourself that watching football is your leisure activity and any negative emotion is just part of the rollercoaster ride that you opted in to.
A less neurotic version of Jordan Peterson probably wouldn't have been scared to hell by the geopolitics that played out during his youth.
The same healthy distance can be applied to the politics of your country. People on the strong/healthy side of the spectrum differentiate between love for their home country and identification with the political system. This healthy differentiation, in principle, can go so far that people are can identify with team red or team blue (or with Atheism or Christianity, or ...) and even have a fair debate with some opponent. I can even have fun and jump into a debate just for the sake of it, and advocate the opposite of my personal believes.
So, how about rephrase the question "why are politics apparently traumatic" to "what makes people unhealthily seek identification with some group"?
I agree with Scott that the trauma is (probably) real. It's a subjective experience, anyway. But: Your traumatizing experiences are a matter of choice nowadays. You can believe that you were born this way or the other and thus have to identify with a certain group, because otherwise you are left completely disenfranchised and have to suffer or die because of how bad the world is. Interestingly enough, you can also stop believing that.
You would arguably be a better trans-rights activist, a better republican, a better atheist when you could keep the reins in your hand while playing your chosen role and engaging in the respective drama.
----
So a bit of a scope drift, but is there an actual answer to the question of "what makes people unhealthily seek identification with some group"?
I gave a partial answer already: I think there are healthy people who don't do that. Remains the question where the all sick people come from. Have they always been there? Isn't the whole triggering and polarizing a recent phenomenon?
There are plenty of ways to destroy the healthy self in an individual and there probably has been an army of neurotics during most of the history of mankind. Globalized communication, e.g. the sharing of ideas beyond your family dinner table and the monthly townhall meeting of your village of 5000 inhabitants gives the neurotics a new outlet.
A clickbaity title has quite literally viral characteristics: A virus is not a living organism. A virus is just barely enough to manipulate a living organism to reproduce the virus. Similarly, a clickbait article isn't actually a message or some shared knowledge. And like biological organisms live inside some balance with viruses and other parasites, communication in the modern society is a a balance between knowledge sharing and parasitic contents. And like with viruses, it's probably not a good idea to try to eliminate all parasitic content and cleanse modern, global communication. Rather we should rely on the resilience of actual communication (like we rely on the immune system of the human body).
Politics is in general a domain where it's both high stakes and low ability to control outcomes, which is bad for mental health, and when you combine it with a viewpoint that everything is out of your control and catastrophization is rewarded makes it even worse.
This is why I generally advocate for more depoliticization of our lives, and why it's so important to have an internal locus of control.
Thank you for the much needed read,
I stumbled across it and I want to share why it was meaningful to me,
A few weeks ago my wife were threatened at gun point, this was the first time it ever happened to us. An arrest was made and the DA releases the guys 2 days later. We were fine not knowing. A few days pass and my wife is driving home and sees the man taking out the trash from 5 feet away and she relives the trauma.
We were outraged and felt wronged and naturally I had some questions, due to the constraints of politics and the current justice system in California our voices remained unheard. To my wife and I this was a blow.
This week we have had our fair share of blow ups amongst each other with both is us so politically enraged that we felt helpless.
We had to choose to mentally accept defeat and move on a put in place a foundation to focus on the positive things we have control over and how we can positively affect our lives going forward without the jaded thoughts of injustice.
I agree with you and I do think that it takes a very well informed person to accept defeat and mentally block out the trauma. Sometimes the people who experience the trauma are able to make positive change but like you said, it is far too easily to become too consumed and let the traumatic event take over your life and affect your success in others.
Thank you for the wisdom
I am really annoyed that "trauma" is such a vague word, basically it just means "damage".
>Ancient warriors apparently didn’t get PTSD.
A lot of people think a large part of trauma is partially about cultural stories, like people get raped in a Christian culture and now they are "defiled".
Our culture used to be religious, used to think suffering is normal, the religion centered on suffering on the cross, they thought it builds character, or divine punishment, Caths like Mother Theresa thought it atones for our sins so did not like painkillers, the Jewish stories revolved around waiting for the next persecution, wearing headgear so you don't have to look for it when the time to run comes again etc.
Today we expect happiness so much, we medicalize unhappiness. I am officially depressed, but really just unhappy. My parents entire life, like most of humankinds entire life revolved around trying to not be poor. I am not poor, so what should I do with my life? No goals and they did not teach me how to have other goals than this very obvious and self-evident one. I am like a lion in a zoo, well fed, comfortable, why do anything? So I am unhappy. Most people most of the time were doing things because poverty cracked the whip over them. Lacking that, not everybody can find goals.
Perhaps middle-income is a trap? If I had ten million in the bank, maybe I could find things to do. I want to write books but not after a 40 hour workweek. I could get into politics, join Péter Magyar and try to kick Viktor Orbán's ass, but don't want to give up my predictable income job.
And apparently it is an illness now. Because we expect happiness. So unhappiness is traumatizing.
"Persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others, or the world."
A problem with this is that if you study the condition and history of humanity, it becomes clear that cruelty, oppression, enslavement, and outright murder are more normal than unusual. I've been reading about slavery in antiquity, and it's a picture of mind-boggling cruelty that went on for centuries and was not really considered all that unusual or abnormal. Well, those people were human beings more or less like us, both slaves and owners and those who witlessly consented. Negative beliefs about the world seem largely justified. It might not look that way from an affluent part of San Francisco, which is why I like to visit affluent parts of San Francisco, but a visit to India or Africa or large parts of the rest of the world, or studying the history of just about any country, will convince you that this is about as relevant to the ordinary human being's prospects and experience as a Bollywood love scene. Study what the Japanese Empire did in Asia. It's astonishing. And it's not like they were hiding it. And after it was over, what do you get? Maoism. Ho Chi Minh. The Park dictatorships. The Guomindang dictatorship in Taiwan. Then in India, moving west, you have the caste system . . . this is what's "normal" in the world.
Regarding how politics doesn't really fit "persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event", I think people keep coming back to politics because they believe it matters, and we do have a system of popular elections, so power comes through mindset shaping, which isn't something you can participate in if you ignore it.