11 in 13

Plus two straight NCAA and an Olympic gold, so, maybe 14 out of 16 possible championships is the real number.

There is a sequence showing repeated blocks against Wilt.  One can hardly believe it is possible.

A Persistent Anthropological Myth

The idea that early hunter-gatherers were egalitarian and shared all or most of their resources with each other is remarkably persistent, despite the enormous counter-evidence.  Razib interviewed the anthropologist Manvir Singh, and even though only subscribers can get the transcript of that, links to two Aeon articles by him were included.: 

Primitive communism: Marx’s idea that societies were naturally egalitarian and communal before farming is widely influential and quite wrong

 and

Beyond the !Kung: A grand research project created our origin myth that early human societies were all egalitarian, mobile and small-scale.

A sample of Singh: 

Today, many writers and academics still treat primitive communism as a historical fact. To take an influential example, the economists Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi have argued for 20 years that property rights coevolved with farming. For them, the question is less whether private property predated farming, but rather why it appeared at that time. In 2017, an article in The Atlantic covering their work asserted plainly: ‘For most of human history, there was no such thing as private property.’ A leading anthropology textbook captures the supposed consensus when it states: ‘The concept of private property is far from universal and tends to occur only in complex societies with social inequality.’

Historical narratives matter. In his bestseller Humankind (2019), Rutger Bregman took the fact that ‘our ancestors had scarcely any notion of private property’ as evidence of fundamental human goodness. In Civilized to Death (2019), Christopher Ryan wrote that pre-agricultural societies were defined by ‘obligatory sharing of minimal property, open access to the necessities of life, and a sense of gratitude toward an environment that provided what was needed.’ As a result, he concluded: ‘The future I imagine (on a good day) looks a lot like the world inhabited by our ancestors…’

But it's just not true.  You can see that these are not outdated texts with ideas already on their way out, being kicked as they exit ashamedly by the back door. These are still believed, and even insisted upon.  They are similar to the myth of the peaceful savage, which Lawrence Keeley exploded 25 years in War Before Civilization, yet still persists.  Because people want it to be true, not because it is. It fits their picture of the nature of mankind, of what civilization has done, what colonization has done, not least, their political stances of what we should do now.

CS Lewis pointed out decades ago that there is no cause to believe current hunter-gatherers are a stand-in for previous millennia of them.  The agriculturalists and the industrial societies have taken over niches of their own, consigning the hunter-gatherers to the leftover space.  What they are doing now is an adaptation to their environment, not necessarily their preferred mode. This is not mere theory and corrective, the tendency to recognise private property is far more common than the primitive communism that sends moderns into such rhapsodies. Worse, the extreme egalitarianism sometimes has its own very dark side in infanticide and other killings of tribe members who are going to be a permanent burden. 

The Aché had among the highest infanticide and child homicide rates ever reported. Of children born in the forest, 14 per cent of boys and 23 per cent of girls were killed before the age of 10, nearly all of them orphans. An infant who lost their mother during the first year of life was always killed.

Bill Burr

I have gotten into watching his videos since one went up over at Grim's Hall. I had heard of him but never watched him until this week. I picked this one for no particular reason.

Local-ish boy, comes from Canton and all of you know someone from there. Some of my Puritan ancestors, including most of my American Revolution ones, come from the towns around there.

Victims of Violence

Rafael Manguel over at City Journal is not telling us anything not already well-known here, he's just does it in a clear, well-supported fashion. On Criminal (In)Justice. He hits the key point very quickly.  Whenever you read the numbers about who is stopped, arrested, or incarcerated, make the immediate correction: Who are the victims of violent crime? You will read many times over the statistics about how many young black (and to a lesser extent, Hispanic) men are arrested before you see the ones about who the victims of violence are. They are also black (and to a lesser extent Hispanic). Do we care about them or don't we?  It seems like a simple question.  Apparently not.

Prominent athletes - not coincidentally young and male - make much of the unfairness of who is bothered by the police. They seldom mention who the victims are. One would think that was an automatic other side of the coin, as they have mothers, aunties, friends, and siblings who have heightened risk of being victims. Yet it is not commonly noted. Why it's almost as if it is them and their friends who really matter...

Group Prayer

 Yeah...

Neuroscience Advice

I remain suspicious of #1 Habit!!, self-help, SCIENCE-has-discovered personal advice - skeptical, if you will. Even the best ones seem to sell themselves with one-weird-trick style advertising, which puts me off. But I have liked Huberman and am thinking of putting up a couple of his. The PTSD one, if it holds up, would be along the lines of where my own thinking had taken me over the years, though with more clarity and definitely more supporting evidence. 

He's the real deal for credentials.  So I thought I'd start with this one, which seems innocent enough even if it's wrong, and tells me I've been doing things right all along, which always pleases me.

Undecided Whale

Ethan Strauss, sports journalist turned cultural disrupter over at his Substack* site House of Strauss, coined the phrase Undecided Whale to describe the marketing change from appealing to your core customers to a larger group that seems to be hovering nearby, just waiting for you to sell it things. The NBA, we are all noticing the last few years, cares more about China than the US even though the bulk of its revenue comes from American TV rights.  Nike built its brand on alpha masculinity and still has two-thirds of its sales from men, but sees that women's market, just sitting there nearby, larger than the male clothing market by a considerable margin. 

He doesn't think it will be good for culture or Nike. 

*Of course.

Skeptical!

 James just put up a post about The Line, with comments of his own which are preliminary but sharp.

This fits my idea of being skeptical.  Not only am I not opposed to people discovering new ways to organise their lives, I am positively in favor of it. Multiple tries. Lots of people should take a shot at it. I'm not going to laugh at any of them or criticise them. Like those floating cities that belong to no country or those islands attempting to be self-sufficient, I love this stuff.  Go for it. Send me reports weekly.  Write if you get work and all that.

But the better the sci-fi graphics and the denser the cliches, the more worried I am that these people are not among those who have done the simple everyday human things known for thousands of years, like raising children, being stuck in a sucky job, organising a two-car funeral, or wandering into another tribe's territory.

But go for it, guys. Best of luck. We may learn a great deal even if it's a failure.

Please comment there, not here. CWCID.

Calendrical Stonehenge

Tim Darvill, OBE, who we have met here before, has a new paper about the possible calendrical intents of Stonehenge. We have long known about the solstice identifying stones, but he has a good deal more detail offered. This one is not just a 365-day calendar, but a 365.25-day one, with additional counters counting off the four years for the additional day. Indigenous, or copped from the Eastern Mediterranean? 

Calendrical speculation is easy whenever there are stones standing up and you can count them. There is a lunar cycle of 18.6 years, so anytime you find 9 stones in a pattern, or 19, you can say "Voila! It must be representing the lunar cycle! They counted off the years." Anything around 28 days you can say is the other lunar cycle. Four stones and it's solstices and equinoxes somehow. 13 stones is moons in a year. It gets to be like p-hacking, so that whatever number of stones you have, you can make them into some sort of calendar, especially if you start breaking them into groups. 

Another problem arises when it turns out the various stones at a site were put up in different eras, as is the case at Stonehenge. It makes the explanations harder to square. As the several eras of original builders of the site were all uh, replaced by other tribes moving in, we also lost some continuity of what things might mean to them.  Remember making grandfather into a flute, still one of my favorite stories.

And yet when you have 30 stones, and they have these gaps that arrange them into 1-10, 11-20, and 21-30, you get nicely into the 12 months of 30 days territory, with 36 ten-day weeks.  Need five more days? The Egyptians had a major festival every year of five days, celebrating five gods, a little before this. And at Stonehenge...we have the five sarsen trilithons arranged in a horseshoe shape in the interior.  Nice big ones, appropriate to represent gods...Was there communication at such a distance between those cultures at times that might possibly provide explanation.  Opinions have differed sharply over the years, as the article explains.

Well a problem remains, in that there doesn't seem to be anything counting those 12 months.  That is not dispositive, as they could have been far outside the circle and still functional, but it does remain that we haven't got 'em, or not yet.

Although archaeological accounts often rehearse the notion that early farmers needed time-reckoning systems to know when to plant and when to harvest, no self-respecting farmer needs to be told these things—their skill and experience dictates how they work the land. Where farmers do need guidance, however, is in knowing when to celebrate the harvest festival for best effect, or when to please the gods with their presence at key ceremonies. Hutton (Reference Hutton1996: 427) reviewed 40 festivals recorded in Britain over recent centuries, and while many were modern inventions, he found a vigorous seasonal, festive culture surviving from ancient times. These are not so much calendar festivals as festivals whose timing has been calendarised: important events that serve as landmarks in time (Nilsson Reference Nilsson1920: 83)...time-reckoning systems bring communities closer to their gods by ensuring that events occur at propitious moments.

 

Stonehenge Tunnel

There is a controversy about the preservation of the Stonehenge site that seems so obvious to me that I must not quite understand one side (of at least three) of it. 

"Since 1991, 51 proposals have been considered for improving the A303 in the area and to remove it from the Stonehenge site." So, as I recently just wrote, there's your first problem right there. Everyone agrees it needs to be fixed, no one agrees on what the fit should look like. 

There is the opinion of the archaeologists looking long term.  There is the opinion of the people who live in the area, for whom these roads are "the route that I take to work," or to shopping, or to check in on Gramps every day. I think I get both of these.  The former says "there is not just one site, there is an array of sites in the area, and they are irreplaceable.  Take the course, no matter how expensive and inconvenient, that maximises flexibility for learning about the people who lived in these places over thousands of years. The latter group takes the position that history and prehistory are just fine, but we live here right now. Why should the lives of the living matter less than the lives of the dead? As an excellent example of this, many decisions were made during WWII about where to place military bases or how to move troops or materiel across the landscape.  That seems distant, unimportant and unnecessary now.  Yet at the time it was very legitimate arguement "We aren't going to even have a nation, and our conquerors are going to destroy everything of our history.  So don't tell me how important this pile of stones or pots or bones is.  They are only important in the context of everyone living in peace and sending the daughters of rich parents to Oxbridge to study this. Other Englishmen, though less important in your eyes, don't much care about the details.  They want their England to survive for another generation for their children. Stonehenge nice, but England better. And why is this costing two billion pounds when the original estimate was one-tenth that? This group seldom articulates its position well, and therefore gets made fun of as boors who don't care about science or history or Quality Things in general. 

They therefore get thrown in with what we might call the shallow conservationists, whose position is not much defensible at all, but often have strong feelings, an ability to conjure, and some influence. They want things to look like Merrie Olde England, dammit, and be able to march right up and see Stonehenge whenever they damn well please without interference from government or uni people with their (possibly anti-England and anti-traditional) ideas. They want thatched roofs and canal boats and you can't even get a pint of Watney's Red Barrel anymore. We actually do know this sort in every country in the world. In America one version is the people who want the old traditional hymns that are actually 100-200 years old, no more, no less, because that just seems holy to them. (Look, I like a lot of those hymns and sing them with gusto, but you have to know what you're saying before spouting off.)  Traditional means grandparent. There are versions in every town. This gets humorous only when you are something of an outsider, noticing that traditional foods for Passover means Egypt only for the purely ceremonial parts, but mostly means Delancey Street. If you are actually inside on one side of the controversy it's not so funny.

Satire and sendups are funnier when they are meant affectionately (see my posts on earlier Keillor vs later Keillor. The first two tell you much, no need to scrape the barrel in my other posts.), and I don't think Pete's intentions are kindly here. Yet I think Arlo's are, so we will give the song a pass.

Anyway, Stonehenge is ground zero for that sort of argument in England, with more archaeologists per capita than elsewhere, more non-archaeolgoists opinionated about the topic, and more protected sites, leading to more people living and driving in and amongst them. And being Stonehenge, there is a full contingent of people getting exercised about fanciful history or what should be true, but isn't, in science and archaeology. So there is debate about the proposed Tunnel under Stonehenge. There. Are. Protests. 

If you put the visitor center bang up against the stone circle then lots of people can bus out there, go to the gift shop, and see the stones easily.  But then when you stand back to contemplate the ancient site...it's got a visitor center in it.  Same for nice roadways going by. As for the tunnel, people are worried that it will destroy future archaeology. Well, but the immediate site has been worked over quite a bit and we aren't likely to find gripping new things. The new things, like the discovery of Durrington Walls, came about because a road was being built. Archaeologists are much more interested in the less-explored areas in the wider area, especially to the west of Stonehenge. 

Taking the entirety of the ritually-used landscape, suspicion is growing that Avebury may turn out to be the bigger deal and tell us more going forward. (We are very pro-Avebury around here.) The shallow conservationist position is based on the idea that there are very few important things out there and they are deeply endangered, so we have to basically Not Touch Anything. Yet if we have learned anything in the last hundred years it is that there are lots of new things being discovered all the time that we have barely studied at all. Most of the discoveries arise because of construction - of roads, golf courses, shopping districts, apartments. The Amesbury Archer was discovered because they were building a school.

The Semi-Rich

Via the excellent Rob Henderson, who just finished a session teaching "Forbidden Courses" at University of Austin, is this Vox article about the semi-rich. It does indeed identify an important group culturally and economically, and even dimly senses what they are all about. Yet it is mostly an excellent exercise for those looking for "unproven assertions and unwarranted assumptions which lead to the conclusions that were clearly hoped for by the author." Take your blood pressure medication first.

Skeptical

We have moved into using the word "skeptical" in an unfortunate way, when we actually mean "disbelieving."  I am skeptical of political claims by Republicans, but I am disbelieving of those by Democrats. I don't approach the latter with an attitude of "Well, this could be true, but I will reserve judgement until I know more." I begin by rejecting the claim. It takes a lot for me to admit "Huh. Well that turned out to be true after all." With Republican claims, I could go either way.

I think the distinction is important because skeptical feels like an intellectually superior position to take about many things. We are thoughtful, we have high standards for being convinced, we are a skeptic, not easily taken in, doncha know. Not gullible like the hoi polloi. But reflexively disbelieving any religious claim does not make one a religious skeptic who regards claims of miracles with suspicion, but an unbeliever who simply rejects them. There are people who are skeptical of the efficacy of one vaccine or another, but most people who proudly bear the title of skeptic are just anti-vaxxers.

We are seldom skeptical about a topic for long. It takes intellectual effort, and we all prefer efficiency. We like to come down on one side or the other, having a ready belief about what is probably happening.

It came up today with someone noting a link about long covid and saying they are skeptical.  No, they aren't skeptical at all. Skeptics think about a subject. This particular person is not regarding such claims warily, he is simply rejecting them because he is now certain that all such claims are bunk. He might be convinced, I suppose, by sustained and mounting evidence reported, but I am not even sure of that.  He might simply be a disbeliever forever, congratulating himself on how wise he is. You can't take us in.  the Dwarves are for the dwarves.  

I don't think it is unreasonable to be a disbeliever about many things. Many ideas circulate for years even though they are ridiculous. But be careful not to give yourself credit for a wise attitude when one is not in evidence.

I am skeptical of your claim to be a skeptic - and with some people I am disbelieving of that claim, right out of the chute.

1966

The Sixties-ness seems a bit contrived, forced.  But I always liked the song all those years when I had no idea of any video that might be put to it. just the Spoonful

Stonehenge

I have short Stonehenge post that has gotten completely out of control.  I am in some manicky tangential phase intellectually. As Snoopy said, years ago

“It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.” Then Snoopy types the words “Part 2” and tells us, “In Part 2 I’ll tie all of this together.”

There's Your First Problem Right There

 Grim has linked to a UC Davis study about political violence. The Introduction

Recent events in the United States (US)—mass shootings, Supreme Court decisions, hearings of the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and others—have reminded Americans of the daily presence of violence in their nation’s public life. This study is motivated by 5 recent trends that, in their apparent convergence, create the potential for even greater violence that could put at risk the future of the US as a free and democratic society.

So we know - or at least I know, and Grim picked up on immediately - that they have a biased view of the topic, right out of the gate. This is important, because if they are designing questions, they will just naturally be drawn to phrasings that give away the game; they will unconsciously select the data around them that confirms their bias and will interpret that information in ways that accentuate that. (Grim drew his conclusion from their funding sources, noting that this does not disprove or even undermine their conclusions, but should be a red flag about where it might go wrong.)

And in fact, this is exactly what happens, beginning with the next paragraph, which outlines the limitations of previous attempts to define and measure support for violence and the difficulty of discerning exactly what is being said - and then immediately ignores that, going straight to naive interpretations of data and selective statistics about violence. One might almost think it was a "spot the bias" exercise specifically designed to instruct journalists and researchers, but alas, I have every reason to believe this is intended for straight. Worse, I have every reason to believe that if the researchers were informed there were a couple of minor blogs which detected bias in their work, they would be unable to pick out what that is, even when cued.

So I will point it out, futilely for them and likely unnecessarily for my audience and thus likely only for my own enjoyment. Except I'm not enjoying it, so "exercise" might be a better word.

Mass shootings...are not up over time, and thus are not to be counted as recent events in the sense of a trend, as said events have occurred both remotely and recently. Yet the intent is clear that we are to think so, to get activated to our danger immediately, as it they are the first thing mentioned.

Supreme Court decisions...define your terms, please. Do you mean that previous SCOTUS decisions have not tended to remind Americans of "the daily presence of violence" but recent ones have?  Which decisions, exactly, and in what way do they remind us of violence? I will stretch a bit and offer there is a feeling, not quite clear in their own minds, that there is increased danger of violence as evidenced by the fact that "our side is losing." If they mean something else, I would like to know what that is, for after it was stripped of the initial explanation of "trust in institutions" and "feelings of powerlessness" what we will have is some actual violence from the left, against buildings, against people, and yes, the sense that "our side is losing." 

Hearings investigating...but those are events from 18 months ago, so however concerning they might be, they aren't a reminder of a daily presence of violence, they are more a daily reminder of previous violence. Tricksy. Or not. The frightening thing is that they are not trying to intentionally reword things to trick us and make us think of violence. They likely just think this way on their own, are getting nervous, and are expressing why, knowing that their audience largely shares their bias and thus are among friends.

...and others.  What others? Please, do tell.  Otherwise we will have to give you no credit for anything except puffery.

Others might include increased riots  over the last two years, but those go strangely unmentioned. And others might include digging into the later statistics about the alarming increase in homicides - they are careful to tie that to GUNS! GUNS! Do you hear me, they've got GUNS! - but not so careful to tell us exactly where these increases are occurring, whether it relates to changes in policing, and who is doing it. Why, you would think it was just this troubling increase in people* being willing to be violent because of their attitudes. Or maybe the Supreme Court is making us do this.

All of this not to say that there is nothing useful in their study.  It is just that it is tedious having to apply a discount to every statistic. They make much of an answer endorsed by 32% of Americans about "a group of people in this country [is] trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants." Well, replace isn't the word I would choose, as it carries an air of getting rid of those people, and that is an extremity of view held by few (I hope.) But there are unquestionably people, and they have NGO's who are tickled to tell you the projections that whites are decreasing in percentage of Americans ("and you'd better get used to it, bucko") and advocating we bring in more immigrants. And can I just say that "native-born" is a very accurate description of black people more than white in America, as they have generally been native for two centuries or more, while a lot of Swedes, Jews, and Irish came later. Yet I think the term was chosen to suggest whiteness without actually saying so.  That may be a reach on my part, At any rate, there is a group in this country who want to "replace" native-born by immigration (plus fertitlity, I suppose), and they will say it right out loud.  I might use phrasings about increasing the number of immigrants as less loaded.  But we don't get to choose the wording of poll questions.  We don't get to say "Yes, but..." to them.  We have to take what is offered and choose agree versus disagree.  When I am presented with a question like that I get annoyed, because I both know what is a correct answer and also what false conclusion they are going to draw.  As here. 

And here's the kicker on that last one: the original poll question, out of the University of Chicago, closed with the phrase "for electoral purposes."  Well, that's a different kettle of fish, isn't it? That actually does take us into the realm of flat dishonesty, of leaving out a key bit of information to make one thing look like another.  Also, from the line just before that reporting "...two-thirds of Americans feel the country’s diverse population makes the US stronger – less than 10% say diversity weakens the country." How are we to square that with the dire language of 32% of Americans believing in dark conspiracies to replace them?

This grows tiresome, as a favorite psychiatrist of mine used to say at team meetings. You can try to gather information from the study if you want.  There are valuable things there. But the signal to noise ratio is poor.

*And by this point you have a clear idea how those people are voting.

CS Lewis on Courage

All sorts of things will make a man brave for the time being: alcohol, ignorance of the danger, anger, self-respect, human loyalty, and love of God. But they are not equally good sources. ("The Anvil" a radio broadcast on the BBC with CS Lewis in 1943)

Mondo Again

 The record vault is just before the 3 minute mark.  He looks like he has more to go, as well.

He is from Louisiana, but vaults for Sweden.

I would rather watch the mile relay (now the 4X400 meters) at a track meet than anything else.  I would watch fifth-graders run that event.  The two US teams did incredibly well this time around, if you like following that stuff.

Internet Intermittent

Comcast encouraged us to upgrade our router for free, and we have had difficulties ever since. I love it when they improve my life by ruining it like that. I did all the restarts and diagnostics I knew they were going to run anyway, but they still wanted to do them themselves.  Sigh.  So would I, I guess, if I were on the other end of the line.  It really throws them that we don't have TV at all. I finally got through to a person, got cut off, got through to another person who eventually gave up and said they will send a technician Wednesday.

Faster Carmelised Onions

A YouTube cooking video mentioned using baking soda to carmelise onions more quickly, so I thought i would check it out.  The claims are that the cooking can be done in ten minutes, which sounded impossible to me.  It was about a decade ago I came across an article that gave me great comfort, reassuring me that those recipes calling for carmelised onions quickly were a lot of hooey.  In fifteen minutes, the best one could hope for was to burn them.  Carmelising took 45 minutes or more. As I love these little things dearly, whether in long thin crispy strips or mushy piles of tiny snakes, I resolved to start making them more often, now that I knew how, and knew that I was in for a longish time preparing.

No problem, really.  White wine goes well with  carmelising onions. In the cook, I mean. And that is the way it has been for a decade. I occasionally make a double batch and give some to my daughter-in-law, because the others in her family don't like onions.

I thought the experiment run by National Onion Association could be relied on for objectivity. They were skeptical but agreed that the carmelising was much quicker, from 45+ minutes to about 13.  Mine went almost 20 when I usually go an hour, so I thought it a success.  Flavor excellent. Texture a little mushy.  Sometimes that doesn't matter, sometimes it does.  It depends on what you are using them for. Site bookmarked. Key point: Very little baking soda, 1/8 tsp per pound.

The home page has lots of video display of onions being harvested, sorted, and moving along conveyor belts to be packaged in order to make their way to me. It warms the heart to see them.

Depression and "Chemical Imbalance"

An umbrella review of the evidence dismisses the idea that inadequate serotonin levels or a "chemical imbalance" are what causes depression.  Most simply, there is no level of serotonin that we are supposed to be getting to, and it has never been clear what "chemicals" are supposedly "imbalanced" in the brain. Not that serotonin is never involved, or that creating some chemical changes in the blood which affect the brain aren't part of effective treatment of depression, they often are. It's just that the description does not universally apply and the terms are so vague as to be meaningless. 

There is some discussion of the history of the controversy and the meaning of the review in a Psychology Today column that is helpful, and includes these quotes from the lead author 

We do not understand what antidepressants are doing to the brain exactly, and giving people this sort of misinformation and prevents them from making an informed decision about whether to take antidepressants or not.

And

It is high time to inform the public that this belief is not grounded in science.

I was informed of all this from a tweet by Pradheep J Shanker @ Neoavatara that includes considerable discussion itself.

I was frankly surprised by the controversy, as I had never used the chemical imbalance explanation in my career nor heard another clinician use it.  When the phrase came up, it was from a patient or a family member who had latched onto it as a description that satisfied them. We would usually not contradict this explanation so much as redirect it to the idea that depressions are different and the mechanism in the brain is unclear. However, the medications do help a fair number of people (relatively) quickly and a lot, and a further percentage are helped partially. The medications are designed to target particular receptors, and when that is done effectively people's moods often improve.

So usually, worth a try. Sometimes they do magic. But depressions are indeed different.  Medical conditions can cause depression.  Grief can cause it. We increasingly regard anxiety and depression as related or co-occuring. I have always thought there is a hard-wired baseline of mood, with some just naturally more sanguine and others more melancholic, to use historical terms. I used the analogy of a sponge, either absorbing water and riding lower in it versus not absorbing it and riding above it.  Buoyant, if you will. But I liked it because it was quite clearly a metaphor, not an explanation.  No one was going to confuse depression with actual water absorption. (I hope.)

Because of the speed of effect - anywhere from immediately to a few weeks out and increasing over the next months, versus weeks of therapy - and my personal experience I have long been pro-medicine. We always had very limited bed space and wanted to move people along as quickly as possible, contrary to the belief of many patients and some of the public that we like to hold people indefinitely for little reason. People went off their meds, became symptomatic, came to the hospital.  We would restart meds, they would quickly get better and go home.  I was a big part of what a psych hospital does, though not everything. I also had psychotherapy for OCD for 2.5 years and learned a lot about myself and felt very grateful to be able to share deep confessional information.  But my symptoms weren't any better.  But in a couple of weeks on Prozac (it became the gold standard for OCD but this was when it was only approved for depression - I had gotten myself into a study) my symptoms were greatly reduced. And, I noticed a lightening of mood that made me wonder whether I had been mildly depressed all along. We all weight our own experience, or that of our family, higher than is quite justified for a scientific understanding.  But hey, that's the head we live in, so it looms larger.

I always thought it was just something people used as a shorthand. "Well, they are chemicals. And they change the chemicals in the brain. So they must be raising some level or correcting some imbalance, right?" And yes, being balanced sounds like a good way to think of being mentally healthy, sure. But apparently the complaint is with the pharmaceutical companies, who embraced this pop-psych explanation as a marketing assist, and with doctors who don't spend the time on a better explanation. That makes sense.  Looking at the percentages of people who understand depression in terms of chemical balance or imbalance, I can see why people get exercised about the poor understanding to the point of calling it misinformation. Odd that I was not particularly aware of the controversy at all, except that not having a TV I was not exposed to sly pharma ads capitalising on the convenient misunderstandings.