Desperado

Yeah, I know Don Henley is Ann Coulter's  "shut up and sing" guy with his politics, but these are still great lyrics, and good use of harmony.

Compared To...?

Considering while riding in the car the teenagers and damned-kids-today-can't-even-shoe-a-horse attitude we seem to always take in the world (and I just wrote about), I wryly compared what I was listening to compared to what I listened to while driving, oh, 1970-2010. I listened to Top 40, then Christian music cassettes, then sporting events and sports talk, then oldies, then talk radio, then sports talk again. I did a few Great Courses and a few audio books.

On walks I listened to the radio station that plays in my head, which I still like.

I now listen to podcasts - information-dense podcasts, about 1/3 sports and entertainment, 2/3 serious subjects. I'm not seeing this as a serious deterioration.

Chain of Fools

 

Sometimes I just post what comes into my head as I am driving.

Is It The Phones?

The Studies Show - Stuart Ritchie in the sidebar - just discussed the mental health crisis and the rise of social media. I signed on big for Jonathan Haidt on this topic years ago, and his book with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, the premise of which is that we have a mental health crisis among our youth, caused largely by social media and omnipresent smartphones. Well if you believe the mental health numbers, which I 75% did until hearing the podcast, and you see kids focused on their phones and know that you yourself are using the things more than you would even have predicted, it seems a reasonable conclusion. So reasonable, in fact, that both conservatives and liberals are all up in arms about it, wanting them limited or even banned for children younger than a particular age, and all sorts of regulations put in place to stop Bad Things From Happening.

I had previously signed on medium big on Haidt's moral foundations theory right from the start, though I also noticed early that there was some failure of imagination that led to him overstating his conclusions.* But later I backed off even more, in the face of other criticisms.  So I guess I should be more suspicious.  Ritchie and Chivers like some of Haidt's other work, and they are almost apologetic about going after him on this one. But it all rests on two premises: that there is a current mental health crisis, and that it is caused by something, something, in the area of screen time or social media. They are not convinced of either.  They still believe both are possible, but the initial evidence has holes in it, and the newer evidence based on stricter studies shows less effect or none at all.  If fact, the better the study - more participants, better blinding, preregistered, etc, the less the effect. Also, Haidt has doubled down (though with all the proper demurrers) that it is no longer possible to assert that it is correlational only, the studies now show that it is causal.  That is a much higher standard, and when researchers go there as the evidence is questioned, it is not a good sign. To be responsible as the numbers are going down, one has to say something more like "Okay, we are still seeing a significant effect, but something else is happening as well, let's figure out what that is."

I will give you the very brief synopsis of the evidence weakening, but I have an observation of my own that is why you come here. The mental health (anxiety/depression/suicide) crisis among teens is not happening in other countries that have ubiquitous phone use. Much of the increase in suicide is among middle-aged males, and the suicide rate is still 4x higher among males, despite our continuing focus on how this is just killing our teen girls on social media. They are actually among the lowest suicide groups, and their increase, though real, could be do to other factors. Doctors report things differently on the ICD-10 vs the ICD-9. We used to protect families from the stigma of suicide, but now some are more likely to want to "raise awareness." (There's more on the podcast.)

So the doubt is there, and you can do what you want with that.

I find it interesting that here we have another iteration, very noticeable in the Reviving Ophelia era but which I recall at least as far back as my own school days, that there is a panic because the young fertile females are all upset. This is often paired with a panic that the healthy young males are becoming less fit and more crazy, as in Otaku, internet porn, video games, Dungeons& Dragons, watching TV, reading sensational dime novels,  and the like. I'm not saying there is no problem there.  Birth rates and especially marriage rates are down, way down. It puts the whole tribe in a panic.  It probably has real evolutionary significance. We are probably hardwired for this. Someone tell those girls We Care!  Pay them money to have babies! Tell them to suck it up, life has always been hard and look what your great-grandmother went through! There is more sexism now!You look fine, stop worrying about it! When the girls are sad, we have this urge to Do Something.  And this pairs with our solution of trying to fix the boys by doing Something Else. They need to get off their asses and get a job! Well what do you expect the way those girls are acting? Those porn sites make it too easy. It's all those negative messages in the schools/movies/commercials! 

As with the environmentalism, below, it's not that we shouldn't do anything, it's that we should have some clear idea of what to do.  UNESCO wants to ban smartphones for those under 16. The evidence is...? As for the MH crisis to begin with, how much of it is self-fulfilling in an artifactual way.  If you were sixteen and deeply unhappy in 1954 you might think it was transitory, related to school work or that redhead who wouldn't give you the time of day. You might actually have been depressed then and benefited from some sort of attention, but we've done pretty well at "raising awareness" and sometimes we get false positives on this.  Scott Alexander at ACX, a psychiatrist who I deeply respect, has advocated for a Mental Health Unawareness Day. We are in danger of falling off the other side of the horse now.  And it's not doing kids any favors to convince them that their problems are worse than they are.

We have always had bullying, including girls bullying girls, but it now has a different form.  Is it worse?  Is ther more of it?  How would we know? We are in a panic that girls compare themselves to other girls on Instagram and get discouraged. Ummm...my junior prom date in 1970, stunningly pretty, thought she was unattractive because one eyelid drooped when she got tired, which I never noticed. You want to talk bullies, let me tell you about Ray Hudon at my school, who was a Mike Tyson type sent away to YDC and became a Golden Glove boxer quite young (died of drug overdose later). Jeezum Crow he had everyone's lunch money. Kids don't how to work now? My sons all worked harder than I ever did. 

Keep your eye on this tribal panic - and you can see it in a lot of history as well.  Oh my god, the girls are all upset!  Oh my god, the boys are being irresponsible! Well, those are problems, yeah, in every generation and we are right get be hyperalert about it. But try to put some thought into this before passing laws about it. And as I noted above, I was one of the ones who started screaming about this one first, so I'm not talking down to anyone here.

*He posited that conservatives operated from five (now six) moral axes, while liberals thought most of those unimportant and applied only two. On purity/degradation he noted that conservatives were much more bothered about using an American flag to clean the toilet even if it was all you had, and tended to follow authority more. But I claimed that liberals had their own purity bugaboos, like a newspaper with an MLK photo when you were out of TP, and a lot of environmentalism, vegetarianism, anti-hunting, while they also could be strongly influenced by authority - just different from the older authorities like the church or the local police.

Censorship

Cancel Culture Dominates Children's Literature from the WSJ

My wife and DIL are both children's librarians, and they far more often fielded the attempts at censorship from the conservative, local end. One only hears about the upstream censorship if one follows publishing, and awards, and national media - rather than local (or religious or partisan) media. Those censors stand right in front of you or complain about you in person at budget hearings, rather than fairly anonymously depth-charging you with your NYC publisher. If you don't like to hear it, you can turn the page for the one, and pretend that your people don't do this if you are dealing with one group, but you are stuck with angry people in your face for the other.

I have been on it for years that the ALA's Banned Books Week contains a lot of deception.  If you look at the titles in the picture, they have all been published, right? So they aren't completely banned.  Some of them were not banned at all, only challenged when they were assigned as required, or allowed in the public library. Some that were banned were banned in other countries, not here.  Some were banned decades ago, or only in a few places. Enough with the high dudgeon.

I have also mentioned that my wife quickly discovered that a lot of challenged material could be dealt with by moving it up in age, from the elementary school shelves to the middle school, or the middle school to the high school - and that was not merely an evasion.  It was often entirely appropriate. 

In a previous censorship post I quoted YA author Sherman Alexie  "...As I've written elsewhere, the right-wing are censorship vikings and the left wing are censorship ninjas." Full context at that link.

An Environmentalist Gets Lunch

The concept of food-miles and the idea that eating locally is better for the environment is subjected to actual research?  Who would have thought?

An Environmentalist Gets Lunch by Hannah Ritchie over at Works in Progress

I know that my way of eating is low-carbon. I’ve spent years poring over the data. Microwaves are the most efficient way to cook. Local food is often no better than food shipped from continents away. Organic food often has a higher carbon footprint. And packaging is a tiny fraction of a food’s environmental footprint, and often lengthens its shelf-life.

We like to get all worked up about stuff and then do mostly symbolic things to treat our anxiety, and this has been true of environmentalism for years. That doesn't mean that we should do nothing about the environment, or education, or drug addiction, but it does mean we should be alert not to put our energy into things that only make us feel better, not do any actual good.

Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity

Brought Forward From August 2006, unedited.  I had nothing worth bringing forward from July 2006, which is rather embarrassing. 

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The crimes of the few American terrorists have sparked discussion whether insanity is a reasonable explanation for their actions. The attorneys for the defendant often inject that possibility into the mix, prompting outrage on blogs and call-in shows.

It is a complicated question. This is an area where I actually have enough knowledge to offer more than a layman’s opinion. People who have pled NGRI have populated my working life for 30 years, including several high-profile cases. There are a few cases which made local headlines and national mention that I happen to know the real story on, though of course I can’t give away which ones they are because of confidentiality. Two cases which were regarded as absolutely political by the media and the general public were in fact absolutely psychiatric. In both cases political or prejudicial factors were completely absent from the patient’s state of mind, though that would seem frankly incredible to anyone reading the outlines of the stories. One case spawned candlelight vigils two thousand miles away, the other a raft of tasteless internet jokes. Both were just paranoid schizophrenics, tormented by thoughts unrelated to the stuff that gets the nation worked up.

“Anyone who uses the insanity defense must be crazy” is the old saw, and there’s a lot of truth in it. I’ve got guys who are still in the hospital or living in group homes who would have been out years ago if they’d just pled guilty and served their time. Now the burden of proof is pretty much on them, and they have to show that they are safe, rather than the state showing that they’re dangerous. Big difference.

We get more than our share in New Hampshire because of the presidential primaries every four years. I’m gearing up for having to explain to the Secret Service yet again what procedures they have to go through to get information. Which they know, by the way, better than I do, but they hope that intimidation and knowing that they’re going to win in the end anyway will prompt me to just say “The hell with it” and tell them what they’re asking.

Yet I have the same response that most of the general public does when I read about people in other places who commit these obviously political crimes and the papers mumble mentally ill…off his medications…history of psychiatric problems. Yeah right. Naveed Afzal Haq shoots Jews in Seattle because of Israeli actions. I think: He’s not crazy, he’s just a terrorist. Omeed Aziz Popal, just back from Afghanistan, is likewise troubled. The guy with the SUV in North Carolina, Mohammed Reza Taheriazar, yeah, sure, don’t try to tell me he’s crazy. And yet the thought nags at me: there may be a social worker in North Carolina whose opinion I would respect, who knows the case even though she can’t tell me, who would say “David, trust me on this. It’s not political. He’s just crazy.”

The argument could be advanced But he comes from a culture which encourages this kind of thinking. They use guys like this, but the ideology of twenty non-psychotic bastards behind him isn’t that different. And that could also be true. Paranoid schizophrenics develop their explanations from whatever is in the air at the time they are growing ill. When I started in psych in the 1970’s, the new paranoids were all wrapped up in CIA plots. Then The Godfather came out and suddenly the mafia was supposedly following all these young people for no obvious reason. The older paranoids were still insistent that radio waves were being beamed in. My 46 y/o paranoid friend is sure that her information is unsafe on all these computer networks, so she won’t let me fax things about her or apply for food stamps on her behalf. Her first break was in the 1990’s. Then satellite broadcasts were big for awhile. Ex-hippies believe that Led Zeppelin stole their songs. Religious people have religious delusions. Granolas have delusions about agribiz poisons. Women at home with TV all day develop whatever problem Oprah is talking about. So an Islamic guy who is becoming paranoid goes to Afghanistan and comes back wanting to kill people and saying it’s part of jihad – yeah, that could be true.

The issue came up years ago around Catholics and Evangelicals when nutcases started stalking and shooting abortion doctors or bombing clinics. What is the responsibility of sane people to watch what they say because of the insane among them?

Advice From 2006

 Never Say You Have Seen It All. I applied this specifically to mental health, but I have to suspect that Christians shouldn't show that weary arrogance in any profession. They put newbie angels in charge of teaching you a lesson on that. From the link:

At Wednesday's staffing we met a woman who is deeply involved in political causes. She volunteers for the American Indian Movement and freeing Leonard Peltier; she also volunteers for NOW and the Libertarian Party. There can't be many with that particular constellation.

Susan Carol

Last night's Grammy Award winner in the Traditional R&B category.  This is the contemporary worship band at First Methodist Houston, where my son is director of communications.

Not just a voice, either.  Effortless styling.

The Answer Is Seven

When my son did math team as a sophomore in HS, someone came up with the idea of getting t-shirts that said "The Answer Is Seven" because it came up enough to be a good guess.  I agreed, and told him why this is, about which he cared not a whit. He is more geeky/Aspie than I am in many ways, but in math, and specifically what is a fair answer on a competitive math problem, I chase even relatives away. I told him the second possibility was -1, because they are testing whether you kept track of the signs, or Did you keep track of the signs even when we threw a bunch of them into the problem? In one way this is not good teaching, because reality does not favor that rule over a dozen others. On the other hand, it is one of the things you are most likely to screw up, even in real life, so teaching you to be more alert for that one is good. I told him that if there was a circle in the problem somewhere, the answer was going to be 2π, especially if revolutions were going to be involved.

When my wife told me today that worldwide, people's favorite number is seven (second place is 3), my first thought was "Gee, there are more autistic people in the world than I thought." It's sort of the first really cool prime number. But it is considered the Lucky Number in our society, probably from English or Northern European roots, so there's that.

It's going to be a low number, less than ten, because most people don't think of high numbers day-to-day, and those that are willing to think out there are going to wash out between them whether it's 103, 104, or 105. Some numbers will be disproportionately popular in their region, but still not get up over the rise of the first ten.  17 is going to be big among math-y people, as are 111 and 1001.  And those are all very cool numbers, I agree, for reasons not immediately apparent.

But answers on a team math test to be answered on the spot, even if quick written computation is allowed, are going to be designed to not reward "mere" calculation. We want to see more than just arithmetic, Caleb.  We all like arithmetic, but we want to see you do MATH. Yet they also want to see you struggle for it just a bit. Low multiples of 2 and 3 are likely to be too easy at a glance, as are 5 , 10, and 11.  12's not bad, but 13 is getting to be a tougher compute in your head. It's good because you won't intuit 13's in numbers over 80, certainly 100, but we are starting to get into the territory of rewarding mere computational skill again.  It's okay to favor the arithmetic nerds a bit, but frankly, they've got a leg up to begin with.

7 is the sweet spot, a prime porridge that is neither too hot nor too cold.

You can just feel it.

Jealousy

Aporia magazine likes to link to what they call "classic" articles from social psychology, presumably because they believe those ideas are less-known than they should be. From this morning's email

Sex Differences in Jealousy In a classic article from 1992, David Buss and colleagues examine sex differences in sexual jealousy. Consistent with predictions from evolutionary psychology, they find that women are more jealous when their romantic partner becomes emotionally involved with another woman, while men are more jealous when their romantic partner has sex with another man...

I have two takeaways from this:

1. This is a great example of social psychology discovering things your grandmother could have told you, except

    A. I cannot imagine having this conversation with either of my grandmothers (or grandfathers, for that matter) My mother or father, maybe.

    B. It might actually be a useful thing to give such evidence for obvious ideas, because human beings, perhaps even especially in modern times, are fond of convincing themselves of non-obvious things, usually because they are making excuses for themselves.

2. I don't want to even be part of research that asks me to think about these things.

Praying For Your Enemies

But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you Matthew 5:44, NKJV  

I was taught years ago that praying for your enemies essentially means wishing for them what you wish for yourself. So yes, you make special exemptions for the safety of people who are in dangerous places when you are in a safe one, or people who are poor when you are rich, but you look to yourself, and what is in your own secret heart.

This pulls us away from high-sounding prayers to the low levels that we actually live in ourselves. Are we secretly hoping for vindication, or admiration? When we hope that they see themselves clearly, do we mean that in the same way that we hope to see ourselves clearly, by coming to the realisation ourselves, or do we want it shoved down their throats while we look on? When we pray for their health, shouldn't we be zipping in our own medical issues, our sleep disturbances and anxieties and foot pain - things that we actually care about and will remember with sincerity - rather than vague and general health? Who knows, that may be exactly what they are themselves hoping for at this moment, and you are brothers in worldly things even as you are distant spiritually.

May he have the admiration of his children.

May her resentments not rule her.

May those who wish her ill not come near her.

If he has been treated unjustly, may he live to see vindication. 

It is impossibly hard, and I would not say it to your face as it would be too confrontative. Introspection is a technique, not a virtue, but self-honesty is sometimes the first thing that is necessary.

Lutefisk Hotline

 The whole idea of a lutefisk hotline just slays me.

Psych Testing Hall of Shame

Reposted from 2006.  If anything, I look on this with more astonishment now than I did then.  McLean is a good hospital, and my experience with them was very good. But this...

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The following report was sent to us by McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. Affiliated with Harvard Medical, currently costing $2500/day, and considered to be one of if not the best psychiatric hospital in the world.

The report was done in the 1990's - names of both patient, tester, and supervisor are left out. The report was generated on the basis of the following tests: Bender-Gestalt; Draw a Person; Rorschach; Thematic Apperception Test; and a WAIS-R. Conspicuously absent is the MMPI. Hmm.

Those of you who know these tests might well wonder how the psychologist discovered this deep insight into the patient from the above tests. I don't hold much with the Rorschach, but I admit that many of the psychologists I most respect use it. It seems to be at its best when there is a specific question, such as "is there an affective component to this presentation?" My own diagnosis is at the bottom.

Mr. S is struggling to overcome a deeply ingrained myth of his patriarchal lineage, which concerns the inheritance of the son from the father and the rivalry played out between them. While he believes that a child, and above all a son, inherently supports and redeems the father, validating and rewarding a father's traditional role, he also fears that a child may overpower or disappoint his father destructively, and that a child will inevitably undermine a parent's authority and autonomy by hindering their freedom. A father is latently a fallen leader. Mr. S tries to sustain the idealize image of his father as invincible, fearless, and forbidding, but he fears he will undermine his father. By acting out his ambivalence about subscribing to his father's modeling of the male role, by his passive surrender to instictual impulses, and by his valuation and admiration of his own children as more promising and resilient than himself, he feels he may endanger paternal authority.

Mr. S is chronically and helplessly depressed, caught in an unthinkable wish to kill the father already dead, and still haunts him intimidatingly and commands a meek and unquestioning reverence. He is painfully introspective and emotionally conflicted, without being able to focus an issue to his conflict, doubting and disgusted by his own life-solutions while faithful to the family ideology of presumptive masculine pride. His need to distance himself from an obsolete and inappropriate myth is internalized and becomes translated into a wish to do away with parts of himself he attempts to minimize and disown as flawed and faulty "outcroppings" like dead branches of a family tree useful only as firewood on the family hearth.

Frankly, I can't bear to type any more of this. If there is a groundswell of enthusiasm for wanting to see the rest, I will oblige. That was about 25% of the report. I think we know a great deal about the psychologist at this point, but precious little about the patient.

The patient was a depressed father with teenage sons. He drank a little too much, to "try and relax" so he could get to sleep, and had sleep apnea, which we discovered in the hospital. He elevated the head of his bed, reduced his drinking, and went off the energizing anti-depressant we put him on about three months after leaving the hospital. I ran into him a year later, a quiet but cheerful and pleasant man. In retrospect, he thought it was the sleep disorder that had overstressed him.

Two From 2006

Diffuse Power  Is it more comfortable to believe that there are just a few forces, or even a few individuals, that are controlling it all, so that if we just could get at them and rein them in we'd be fine? It ain't so, which is why at the end of the day it might be more important to just do your job, raise your family, and help your neighbors than worry about who you're voting for.

No One is Minding The Store  No, really. Maybe it's lots of people minding lots of different parts of the store.  Or maybe there's no store, just some store-like signs to make us think so.