Deception and Self-Deception

Update:  I did not mention that the test of your own courage and the Mean Girl exclusionary nature of your group is to go against its tenets in just one area.  Be down-the-line AOC woke Democrat except expressing some mild sympathy and understanding of the pro-life perspective, or gun rights or something - provided you do not immediately undo it entirely by saying, "But of course I...and of course I..." and the like. There are conservative equivalents but they usually don't have this problem.  They have the opposite problem of being entirely too willing to take an unpopular stand.  Grumbling, irritable bastards who will stay home rather than vote for someone who doesn't meet their standard. 

 But test yourself and your friends that way.  See if you start being disinvited, quietly.

Even single exceptions can be disqualifiers because you are demonstrating that you are willing to look objectively at the Spirit of the Age.  Tom Friedman will go against the tide - and then spend the next six months backtracking with obsequious gesture to get back in good graces. So let's see what you're made of. Make a full-throated defense of strict border control, or (to borrow from other posts) the profound important of marital commitment and vows. Just one thing. I dare ya. No, really I should warn you.  Quillette is loaded with writers who were respectably in one camp until a single incident cast them into the abyss. Then you can begin to fathom the depth of the effect this culture has had on you. Before that you are just dismissing these ideas as something you never heard of and is ridiculous.

*****

"Nothing can deceive unless it bears a plausible resemblance to reality." C S Lewis  An Experiment in Criticism Chapter 6 "The Meaning of Fantasy." Note that this is in one of his secular works, not a Christian one.

Not deceiving oneself is one of the strongest themes in CS Lewis. He regarded his own conversion as resulting from clearing away an accumulation of false beliefs and convenient excuses. This may be why I took to him so readily early in my Christianity, as I was deeply aware of my self-deception and how that spilled over into deceiving others - indeed, all others. These are different from hypocrisy - though we increase our likelihood of being hypocrites before others - these are lies which we tell ourselves, and believe them. I have long been told that if we tell ourselves a lie long enough we will come to believe it, but I am unsure about this. I think self-deception is almost instantaneous, with significantly less awareness that we kid ourselves. She left me because I didn't make enough money for her extravagant lifestyle, rather than She left me because I beat her. We don't have to tell ourselves that a thousand times, though that may strengthen it, because we embrace it so readily straight out of the gate. 

On the other hand, the Scriptures do make reference to a conscience being "seared" because the will ignores it so often that scar tissue is formed.

I tend to the belief that the Unforgivable Sin, the sin "against the Holy Spirit" means something like this, a sin that cannot be confessed and forgiven because we have talked ourselves into believing it is no sin at all. They deserved it. If I don't take it, someone else will. It's only real adultery if, if, if... 

This is the meaning of Polonius's "To thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man."  To modern ears we immediately think of an Oprah-like encouragement to "be your true self," because that is a more ambiguous morality by which we can excuse self-indulgence, cooperativeness, and a host of other sins. (It can also be a very good thing. Just not always.) But Shakespeare's meaning is that we should not deceive ourselves.

When we are quite certain what the genuine article is, we also see quickly the inadequacy of the imitations. But mostly, we live in the world of imitations, thinking them real and looking down on those who are not as wise as us.

Religions

"...founder-led companies, in particular, are very missionary-esque in their mission, [laughs] if you can say missionary-esque in their mission. They’re true believers, and they have a story that they’ve told themselves about why this company exists and why it’s successful.

It usually has very little to do with the stuff that I write about, which is business models and moats and network effects and that sort of thing. No, “We are connecting the world” or “We are organizing all the world’s information” — very lofty sort of goals. I think the more founder is there, the more that sense of mission is felt deep within the organization.

But that creates blind spots where you can’t even . . . It’s not that they’re bad at public relations. It’s that they can’t even imagine the possibility of anyone thinking about them poorly because they know their own intentions, and their intentions, they feel, are good." Ben Thompson of the "Stratechery" newsletter.

I thought of churches and parachurch groups, as that is what we were supposed to be noticing - that these tech firms are like religions in a way, at least in their assurance of their own pure motives. Yet I thought of academics as well, starting from the rather simple idea that "Well, education is good. It's better than ignorance. So teaching people knowledge and thinking is good, because it's better than nescience and not thinking. So everything we do here must be some sort of public service and we should be admired accordingly." There is the same type of blind spots, of not noticing many things. 

Unlearning false things is very hard, much harder than learning something new.  We grow attached to what we know, and it usually ties in together as a sort of network, with each sector being used to prove the others. In an upcoming post about polygamy, I will be referencing research that has a hard time being heard, because so many people are so sure that it just can't be true, there must be something wrong with it even if we can't see it right off. In Joe Cesario's research showing there is no racial bias in police shootings he has to keep answering the same objections over and over.  It's like a game of whack-a-mole. Or perhaps like looking for a missing remote. Did you look under the seat cushions? (Yes, of course they did.) Did you bring it with you to the bathroom?eventually ending with Sometimes people leave them in the refrigerator.  Did you look in the refrigerator? Standardised testing researchers have the same problem.  An enormous amount of energy is wasted because people need to unlearn what they know, because it isn't true.  Ignorance would actually have been better in that sense, because you could teach the information quickly to a visitor from Mars who had no preconceptions.

There are people who are very good at answering the same question over and over, but I am not one of them. I can in one way do this well and in one way not.  To give someone a first explanation is a joy, even if they don't quite get it right away. But I have no patience for people who try to mock-patiently explain to me what they think is just obvious but I know is wrong. There is little that is more dangerous than things that "everyone knows," because those are precisely where the unquestioned assumptions are hiding. 

They believe that because they know many things that others do not know, what they know must be true - which does not follow. When I started in mental health, the psychologists were either behaviorists or Freudian/dynamic therapists. Both of them knew an enormous amount that I did not know.  They would reference Donald Winnicott or Harry Stack Sullivan and I would try not to look too obviously stupid. I could not have held my own for five minutes in a debate with them.  But they were wrong, partially or almost entirely, and could not see it.  Why, all the other psychologists and the people who had taught them were brilliant people! This was true, but that truth did not matter.  Brilliance will not save you from self-deception. 

In fact, if you are brilliant and motivated but start from a wrong theory, you will make yourself more and more stupid as you go further, as you will just naturally acquire more information, and tend to remember those things that reinforce your existing ideas. In history, you will have legitimate discussions and debates about looking at the record and examining who is privileged to speak.  Who wrote it, who paid them, what group did they originate from, what were their cultural roles...all excellent questions. Yet there is an rather obvious time period and set of texts that is treated differently.  Who gets to write the histories now?  Who pays them?  What groups do they come from? These are examined only in part - these days in order to seek to discredit others on the basis of identity - and the very great question who is not privileged to speak? is only dimly recognised.

Uptalk and Punctuation

The phenomenon of uptalk was deplored when it first came in, as all language changes initiated by young women usually are until young men, then slightly older women, then middle-aged women in entertainment adopt the new words, syntax, pronunciation, or form. Then the old people who don't switch to this die off, grumbling, and the change is complete. I should find out if people who work with young women are early adopters or more likely to be rearguard defenders.  My guess is the former. There was, and likely still is, a prejudice against it as sounding unserious and tentative. Declaratives are preferred and young women were - and in many places still are - encouraged to switch to declaratives "or you sound like a little girl." Not great for an attorney or negotiator. But uptalk has already spread out into our expressiveness, and it will become standard.  It is more nuanced than mere uncertainty, as it signals "I would like to still keep the floor.  But if you need to break in, this would be a good spot." To signal that one has finished and invites others to speak, the standard declarative is used, giving that piece of speech a finality.

I have an anecdote about young women and language change that I will come back to in an update. Queen Elizabeth I factors in prominently.

There is also a change in punctuation that has showed up first in texting, of leaving off a final period. As hitting "send" does even more dramatically signal that the thought has ended, there is an efficiency to that. A young friend who manages a Chik-Fil-A and works with teenagers has learned to leave the period off the end of texts, because they perceive that he, their boss, is yelling at them and get nervous and defensive.  That's just how it looks to them now.  To those of us raised differently it just looks wrong and incomplete, even in a text. I have taken to intentionally leaving it off in texting, just to observe myself and my own responses to change.  Should be fun.

I wonder if the two are related? They both pertain to the end of sentences that would be declarative, and both are softeners of that. They might combine in some way going forward.

QE1 update.  Henry VIII used thee and thou, not "you."  But his daughter, the well-educated Elizabeth used "you" increasingly in her correspondence, starting as a young woman. She won, he is a dinosaur.  Young women lead language change.  I fancy that at the time a baron went to London to meet the important people, including the Pricess Elizbeth, and when he came home the Baroness asked him "So what is she like? What are we in for, here, if she becomes queen?"  "Well, she seems quite smart and determined, I think she might actually suit.  But there is one thing that bothers me.  She's one of those girrls who uses "you" instead of "thee."

The baronness is appalled.  "Someone needs to speak to these fluffy young women about how childish this sounds.  If she wants to be queen, she should try not to sound like a ten-year old!"

But Elizabeth won and they lost. Uptalk will win. Indeed, it may already have won.

Why Is Marriage Important? - Part I

Backstory. (Rewritten) I have been in correspondence with an old friend. It is unlikely, but possible she will read this, which is difficult, as there are hard things that I say here. I think a very hard thing is true. I have the recognition I should be as kind as possible about that, and am at least a little ashamed that I am not well able to. Or rather, my experience is that when I try to I achieve neither goal:  I do not make my point clearly and I irritate the other person anyway. 

I do better live. (So if you are reading, maybe this is not you, but only a fancy of mine based on your situation. And I am surprised you actually did come over.)

She has been in a relationship but unmarried for 30 years. I will not give her reason for not marrying, as it takes away from the general discussion. Also, she may have just been giving an automatic or light answer anyway and should not be held to the words.  From my POV, while she started as very straitlaced and conventional - my dictionary illustration of "puritan girl" over the years - she has made her living and her social life in a culture that slowly makes people into what it wants. (That could be said of any culture and I am perhaps fortunate living in two cultures, so that I am always in practice not going along with the crowd.) Her current culture does not much value marriage or traditional morality.  It in fact has many members who make it a point to disparage traditional morality.  Few are religious. It feels on the inside that one is making the choices and growing or learning more, but this is an illusion. The culture eventually won, and made her into its handmaid.

I don't get much upset at people's conduct as by their thinking.  We have many reasons for doing things, always with mixed motives. I may have misread her motives, and be wildly wrong on this situation.  There is a great deal of information I am missing, and some of it might flip the situation entirely.  I might have it backwards.  This is why I move it to the general situation, even though I will start from this example. What I will claim is that the unfortunate change in her is at minimum a change in some other person that encountering this situation set me thinking about.

So in that sense she is still following the conventional morality, just a new one, in a new group. I think I expected a little more fight in her, but it is many years, and we all become like our surroundings. I may be more concerned because it is a whole culture whose members do not see themselves,and eventually not even want to see themselves. I could almost fancy that the culture itself is an aware thing and does see the changes it brings on its children, and delights in it.

 Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything. ― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1945)

Also, whether she or he is imposing the decision not to marry on the other- not harshly but quietly over time, making her/himself the center of all - is not visible to me. She or he may just think it is their right to have their way and the other wants to please.  It does often happen that one mostly exercises the right to have their way and the other goes along. They seldom apprehend this. None of my business, really, either. Fortunately the general questions intrigue me more anyway.

I will not be attempting to convince her that marriage is the correct thing to do, largely because we will not be in much contact. Though even if we were I might not say anything further. 

But it does put before me, what would I say to a secular person to convince them that this decision is quietly but very deeply, even profoundly wrong? The practical argument that it provides a more stable place for children does not apply in this case. That should figure in to the general discussion, but not all individual discussions. That marriage provides some greater assurance of commitment to the partner is a bit tricky.  While this is true and much to be desired, many people may feel that they are giving and receiving "enough" assurance as things stand and balance that against other factors, such as having had a bad marriage previously and being gun-shy. If we love them, we may pray that they are not among those who later find to their horror that they have miscalculated. 

Relatedly, many people will point to their own good relationship and contrast it to the many bad marriages and ask in all sincerity why anyone would think it made any difference?  There is abundant evidence that it does as a simply practical matter, but people who have already decided they are just fine and no one should dare question them are unlikely to be convinced by any practical evidence. We all make excuses to ourselves exactly as powerful as need be, as if we were playing chess against ourselves.  Intelligent people will make very good excuses, and those with great experience with moral questions will devise the most remarkable excuses for justifying what they want to do.

It's a good point to do a refresher on the concept of overlapping Gaussian distributions - what we call the Bell Curve - because we have used it often over the years. In this diagram, consider the x-axis to be the quality of relationship, with those on the far right have the most satisfying. The two curves are those who are unmarried on the left and those who are married on the right.  There is indeed an area right in the middle where some of the unmarried have better relationships than the married. It may even be that the two curves are closer together. But use this for illustration. It is fair to note that some unmarried relationships are superior to married ones in at least some ways, often the only ways that people care about on a day-to-day basis.

The people who have been both married and unmarried tend strongly to say that the former is superior. The majority of the time they will even say that when the marriage is over and was bad. After divorce, most still prefer to marry again. Though not all, and among the relationships where there is no marriage, it is common that one had a previous bad experience that still haunts.

For a Christian, marriage is not merely a symbol but an echo and reenactment of the union of Christ and the Church. That may prove in the end to be the only durable reason to marry. When all things pass away, that will remain. But this can mean nothing to the nonbeliever.  It is opaque, and not likely a fruitful possibility for persuading. It might have some power for believers who have kidded themselves into thinking their avoidance of marriage is no big deal.  I don't know.  I have never used the point in discussion.

But I have other reasons, and I'll move to that in Part II.

40% Lied

Four out of every 10 Americans lied about their COVID-19 diagnosis or whether or not they complied with preventive measures during the height of the pandemic, a new nationwide study purports.

This does not mean that 40% of Americans were lying about themselves and the disease at any given time, only that they lied at some point. People will draw whatever conclusions they had drawn before knowing this.  We are at the point where no one is changing their minds - everyone believes that each new fact proves what they already believed.

I suppose what I am going to point out shows that I am no different. I thought a couple of things were not mentioned often enough during all the arguing: an unmeasured variable was how much interaction people normally had. Countries that had low rates of interaction before tended to have fewer, sometimes many fewer cases of covid. They were more comfortable with not being out and in contact, and regardless of what governments mandated, they had less contact anyway. In the face of such changes, all of us are trying to revert to a previous baseline, often without noticing it. As with gun control, what the laws are matters much less than what the people are. 

Such deception also figures strongly into measuring how effective masks or distancing or closings are. It screws up the numbers. This is why studies that used "what the rules are" as a proxy for "what people are really doing" will not tell us much. What does a mandate that is 20% ignored, 50% ignored, 80% ignored matter?  We can't tell. Utah may be different than Colorado. Studies that tried to get at actual contact numbers tended to be better predictors. 

The rates of lying are going to vary by location, by cultural groups, and likely by other things we don't yet know, like age or sex. And when high-contact people start to drop their guard, they are going to gradually move to a higher amount of contact than the introverts, just like before, even if both think they are making equivalent efforts.

Parables

Luke 12:15-21 — The Rich Fool
Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”
And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’
“Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” ’
“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
“This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”

 Luke 12:35-40 — Watchfulness
“Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning, like men waiting for their master to return from a wedding banquet, so that when he comes and knocks they can immediately open the door for him. It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes. I tell you the truth, he will dress himself to serve, will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on them. It will be good for those servants whose master finds them ready, even if he comes in the second or third watch of the night. But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.

Group Bias

"Our argument, and we're not the first to make this argument, although I think we have some unique takes on the data, our argument is that the population proportion is actually the wrong comparison standard or the wrong benchmark. In fact, I would argue that the population proportion is the wrong benchmark in virtually every study of group outcomes you are interested in: women in STEM, any kind or racial or ethnic group outcomes in income and health, whatever it might be comparing to a group's population level is almost always not going to tell you anything about bias in the decision-making process." Joe Cesario, Michigan State Social Psychology Professor.  (Italics mine) He is very big on pre-registration and showing your work.

This came up because of statistics such as blacks being 13% of the population but 35% of (fill in the blank), in this case police shootings. Manifold Podcast transcript.

Political Ads

 From Reason in election season 2020.

This is pertinent to NH in this election, as the negative side of this is spot on for the abortion rights ads against Senate candidate Don Bolduc.  I can't link to an example, but I get them about 50% of the time when I watch any video on ESPN. They are mostly comical to me they are so over-the-top.  Almost parody. Yet I reflect they may influence some people, and tremble.

Progression

I went over to Instapundit for the first time in a long time.

Sarah Hoyt has become first-class crazy at this point.

The Problem of Good

 It Is called the Problem of Evil, that the existence of evil - something we can all see and are familiar with - makes the existence of God impossible, or at least extremely unlikely.

A lot of very heavy thinking has been put into this, certainly, by philosophers attempting to define terms and see contingencies and answers. I don't want to claim that all people who cite the problem of evil are intellectually and morally lazy.

Yet most people who fall back on this argument against the existence of God are simply being intellectually and/or morally lazy. It amounts to nothing more than a feeling, or a fifth-grader's first thoughts about the world and how it works that goes no further than posing the difficult question and pretending there is no answer. It is not really even a question, but an evasion of questions. I have mentioned before that I consider self-deception to be the one great obstacle to belief in God.

The problem of good is more difficult, and more profound. If good exists, that is at least a mystical proof of the existence of God, though it is legitimately unsatisfying as an intellectual proof. Yet that problem is addressed far less often.  It generally does not occur to those who consider the mere reference to the problem of evil as a disproof of God that there even is a counter-question.

Seeing that good does obviously exist...

What then?

Pumpkin Beer

My sons assured me I would like this commercial, and they are correct.  It's Bill Burr, so it's language alert. 

Costless Gesture

 

Spices

Skin In The Game

Also NNT, discussing the doctrine of the Trinity with Tyler Cowan, in reference to Taleb's book Skin In The Game. The reality of the Trinity is God's way of demonstrating that He has skin in the game WRT human beings.  We don't believe those who stay aloof really care about us. Unitarians eventually become Deists. But those who have marched with us, endured with us, worked with us, suffered with us, eaten with us - those we believe and trust. Yet it is not merely a show for our benefit, that we might be moved to follow this god and not some other.  It is in the very nature of God to have skin in the game.

I had trouble figuring out why is it that the Christian religion, we have that Trinity, which makes absolutely no sense to Muslims and makes no sense to anybody who’s not Christian. It makes so much sense to you if you are Christian.

Why is it that it makes so much sense to have a Trinity? Then the Christ, is he God? Well, he’s sort of like God, but he’s not God. Then you figure it out. If I go to the circus and I have a fellow walking on a tightrope with a parachute, I ask for my money back.

That’s not how it works. The Christ was sufficiently man to have skin in the game and sufficiently God to be God, so it worked. For that, we had to concoct a story that appears to be absurd, but is necessary. It kept coming back to the Trinity, no matter what they tried.

The Irish

Nicholas Nassim Taleb, discussing how religious divisions are not likely doctrinal: "If the English had stayed Catholic in the the 16th C, I guarantee you the Irish would have become Protestant." He used it as a humorous reference while he was discussing the various splits in the Levant.  He is Greek Orthodox and was explaining Maronite division, attributing it more to language differences, urban versus rural and other regional differences, and cultural competition rather than distinctive doctrines of the Trinity.

If you see the religion schisms, they map to Aramaic speakers versus Greek speakers. The Maronites were one of the lines of the first schism. Earlier, of course, you have the Nestorians as a schism. You look at the line of how people have the schism in Asian Minor, and you see that these schisms were entirely driven by ethnicity, like the English Protestant versus Irish Catholic.

We can't go back and replay such things, but I take his point. Religious wars are seldom religious wars, they are tribal wars in which one or both sides drags religion in for further justification. Religious persecution of other countries does occur, but for Christians, persecuting those within the country who don't line up and present the unified front that they are supposed to is the more common problem. You may remember in "Chariots of Fire" the member of the British Olympic Committee talking about the runner who refused to compete on the Sabbath. "God and country.  In my day it was country first, God after." One can see this illustrated in Westminster Abbey, where the works of man are on display, both in the sense of "not women" and "not God."

Thinking about that English Catholic/Protestant split in the 1500s and how it played out, the consequences were profound. As long as Elizabeth, rather than Mary Queen of Scots was Catholic and ruler, she would be expected to abide by the Treaty of Tordesillas, which was not created by a pope as is popularly supposed, but validated by Pope Julius II in the early 1500s. The treaty was between Spain and Portugal and everyone else tried to ignore it as best they could, but it increasingly became insisted upon by the Roman Church. Yet once Elizabeth was excommunicated, rather than just an uncomfortable thorn in the side of the continental Catholics, England was free to colonise in the New World, and did.

Malaphors

You can catch more flies with honey than a stick.

We'll burn that bridge when we get to it.

We have to get all our ducks on the same page.

That's no shirt off my nose.

She didn't fall far from the turnip truck.

Don't shoot the gift horse that feeds you.

We're not sure he's cheating, but it quacks like a smoking duck.

Freddie deBoer on Kanye West

This is a spot where I have years of first-hand experience, and those claiming that Kanye West's mental illness has absolutely no effect on his views - he is actually just an evil person - are just flat out wrong. We can get into why they are wrong later, but the first thing you need to know is that they have no idea what they are talking about.

DeBoer's points are quite good. They desire greatly to go straight to good vs. evil rather than anything complicated.  "Complicated" as in "above fifth grade level", doncha know. They may think they are being nice to mentally ill people in some way.  I don't know that for certain, but let us grant that they have a sort of framing that says "There are evil racist people in the world. Mentally ill people get picked on and blamed for lots of things, but they are all fine, really.  So they can't be part of that evil racist group, or if they are, they got there completely independently of their illness." These are indeed convenient rather than scientific beliefs. It would be better for their ascension to power if this were true, therefore it is true, because it is clearly a good thing that they ascend to power.

It is hard to imagine what such people believe the effect of mental illness on thinking is.  If paranoia does not impact one's politics, if impulsivity does not affect one's approach, if grandiosity does not change one's perceptions, if anxiety has nothing to do with ones' cultural beliefs, then what, exactly, does it do? When people are manic they feel much the same as antisocial personality disorders, and i have many times heard line staff declare "Yeah, when we get his affect under control I'll bet we find that he's also go ASP going on as well," only to find that the patient in question is sweet and engaging when treated, with no hint of a personality disorder.

At a much smaller level, if you are over-caffeinated are you more likely to say something unpleasant to a person who irritates you?  Are you in fact likely to find more people , and more types of people, irritating at all? How about when taking depressants, like oh, I don't know, alcohol?

It is almost a cliche for family or friends to be tolerant or forgiving of those with mental illness who are offending them and ruining aspects of their lives to say "I know that's not him.  That's the illness talking."  In fact, those who are claiming to understand these conditions so well have it exactly backwards.  The problem is that very decent people find themselves doing indecent things, which they are ashamed and humiliated about later.  To insist that one can only say offensive things if that is part of one's core personality is to make such sufferers feel even worse.  They now dare not ever be in a situation where they might encounter you when ill, because you will judge them to be bigots or promiscuous or violent or whatever.

I will guess that what is actually going on is that West absolutely destroys their definition of what a "white supremacist" is, and they have to defend this rather than reality.

Full Moon

 

Think About Things

 "Iceland" is the answer to your question.

The Neural Basis of Sex Differences in Depression

I finally got back to this with my comments based on what I heard.

Steve and Corey interview researcher AJ Robison over at Manifold podcast. There is a transcript at the link as well, for those of you who prefer that. I got bogged down about halfway through with the details of the excitability of a circuit in a mouse brain, but it picks up near the end as well. I will add my own comments in the next day or two, but I wanted to get this out there for those who like this stuff.  Some very interesting remarks about depression in humans, research in general, and pitfalls of oversimplifying.

There was a lot of kerfuffle when evidence was put forward that serotonin levels were not the key to depression. Robison's team's research focuses instead on the possibility that the antidepressants contribute to neurogenesis. This is immediately controversial because it is not agreed up that neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons in the brain, occurs at all, never mind whether antidepressants cause or facilitate it. It can be shown to happen in animals, and behavioral changes are observed subsequently, but the possibility in humans is only a majority, not a universal opinion. That multiple categories of antidepressants create the effect in animals (and improve depression in humans) would argue in support of the neurogenesis idea, as it would not be particular chemicals, but some deeper mechanism which several categories of chemicals might affect.

Depression is twice as common among human females than males, even after accounting for their greater willingness to cop to having a difficulty and showing up at a clinicians office. The counterintuitive piece, which has been known for 20 years but still denied in some circles, is that this is even more pronounced in countries with greater gender equity. The theories that might occur to you why that is are already being fought about, yes.  It's not supposed to be that way.  The correct answer is supposed to be that women have additional burdens because of sexism, increasing their vulnerability to depression. (My own guess is the mismatch theory, that the greater opportunity for advancement in what society considers the main or important areas does not replace the biological and social aspirations, only adds to them.*  Women's media has much more written by women about "having it all." But that's just my favorite theory at the moment.) 

But it's never good to want a particular answer before you have your data.

Interesting bit is that you will notice carefully worded research involving mice or other animals will not use the word "depression" in mice.  It is not artificial to refrain from that and only focus on the component parts that go into such a diagnosis in humans, such as anhedonia or change in appetite. Jumping to the conclusion that of course they are depressed because they are acting like depressed humans is unwarranted, because "depression" may be how we put disparate symptoms into a larger category in order to deal with it. It is we who tie the cues together and treat others differently in protective fashion, or resolve to take some action on ourselves. We might make long-term and short term plans differently if we think of ourselves or a loved one as depressed. Animals cannot connect the various strands in their brains.

You can't ask mice if they are depressed. Well, you can ask, but they don't answer.

I had never heard a credible defense of why until twenty years ago, mole depression research was on males, even though more females experience depression. The reasoning was that "depression is depression," not really different in men and women, and the important this was to learn to understand it.  In order to do research, one eliminates as many variables as possible, and hormones the estrus cycle, which do have an influence on depression, make it harder to see what is happening in the pure situation. Once the simple version could be treated in everyone - men, women, children, geriatrics - refinements could be added.  We don't do it that way anymore, but I did at least see the point.

On that score, the positive effect that testosterone has on depression is intriguing. It does not reliably lighten mood, but it may have a protective factor the binding of some chemicals onto neural receptors. It seems to have more effect three weeks or more down the road than in the moment of depression. The "high" feeling is reel, but temporary.

Regarding social withdrawal as a cause of depression my be confusing the cart with the horse.  "People who get out and see others more are less depressed.  So make yourself go out and see people." Except it may be that people who feel better are just more likely to go out, and making yourself do that may have no effect, or even sap valuable energy.  Blondes have more individual hairs, but lightening your hair won't give you more follicles. Patients and families used to complain at us that the sufferer used to have a decent life with friends and a job before they came to us, but had been psychotic/depressed/anxious ever since. Yeah, and your boy used to run happily in a field all day until we treated him for that broken leg, too. It's a type of error we make in social programs as well.

*GK Chesterton thought what were the victories of women a hundred years ago were in fact their final defeat.  Since the beginning of humanity, women had been putting forth their energy into convincing men that people and the family were more important than jobs and tools. For women to take up jobs and tools was their capitualtion, not their conquering.  Edith Stein's thinking in the same era has some similarity in the absolute necessity of specifically female gifts in the operation of society.

Aspies

I still think in the discarded category of Asperger's Syndrome, which seems gentler to me than anything that includes the word "autism." In my generation, getting a diagnosis in anything was suspect, even for such things as Severe Depression (you're just sad, you'll get over it) or Anxiety Disorder (you're just high-strung, you should get over it). I absorbed a good deal of this, and well into my career would still be trying to reason with psychotic people, believing that if I could just find a better analogy or more persuasive argument, the skies would clear and all would be well.

I wasted a lot of time in that way, and in the end, I was actually almost abusive to my patients doing that.  Yes, it is a positive that I treated them as a regular human being rather than some less-than-normal reasoner. That is weak tea. I was asking of them what they could not do. I find a tendency in myself to do the same to old friends with an unacknowledged autistic streak. I keep thinking that if I only present the idea winsomely and with solid persuasive examples...

Aspies is the colloquial, already old-fashioned after only becoming common in the 2000s, term. Asperger's Syndrome was the European term - an of course they were just wrong, not being American. OTOH, lots of Europeans are ignorant and abusive about the condition still. To me, it sounds more pleasant. But I have learned that it doesn't help people accept the idea, as such terms as "Ah, it's just my OCD nature," sort of like the even older and out-of-date Type A personality, have been accepted. You might as well go full out and say "autism," even if it conjures up images of Rain Man. Rip that band-aid off, apparently. I can seldom bring myself to do it.

There are objections, even beyond resistance to labeling that make acceptance difficult. There are times when the whole concept seems hopelessly vague, because it can include many different behaviors. While people can accept the idea of the histogram approach intellectually, when one does the hard work of trying to describe something to others there is a sense of "Am I talking about anything solid here? It seems to include all the vegetables in the garden." But the effect is temporary, a result of seldom discussing these behavioral traits generally and thus getting lazy about it, using the shortcuts rather than the longer, more precise, but therefore more tedious descriptions.  This is particularly ironic when discussing autism, as shortcuts, hints, nuances, and understood exceptions are what they often miss. Well, it's just there, as I have noted before. But worse, it is an area where psychologists have done damage - largely becaue they followed Bettelheim, who followed Freud. (Freud set psychology back a hundred years and is one of my nominees for most damaging intellectual ever).

Oh heck, I have written repeatedly about the topic.  Go and get lost there for a bit on a Sunday afternoon. I can't even keep track of everything I have said at this point.

So the symptoms can be highly variable, but that should not be surprising.  Among women who were molested as children, there is an increase in asexuality, lesbianism, and promiscuity, but that makes entire intuitive sense to people. Going to war can make men gung-ho or pacifist. Failure makes some folks bold and others cautious. I'll stop complaining about it now.

You can find lists of symptoms and brief explanations in many places. Socially

Cast: Anne, Mary Bea, Pat, Tina Byrd, Amy Kerc, Denise Richard, Carolyn White, Holly Wajenberg, Kathy Henry,

Less convincing, Cindy Frink, Eugenie Boutin, Linda Agresta, Carol Greenstreet, Evan Eyler,

Tracy, Bethany,  

We

****

WRT sex, women with Autistic Spectrum Disorder have, according to various studies less sexual interest, more homosexuality, higher sexual anxiety, lower sexual arousabiiity, lower sexual desire, less positive sexual cognition, higher rates of asexuality, less sexual consciousness, sexual assertiveness, and sex-appeal consciousness. They are more likely to report unpleasant sexual experiences, both lifetime and within a recent period, and fewer sexual experiences in general.

When one runs across a list like that you could be forgiven for despairing about your friend's, or daughter's, or partner's, or even own sexual future. Remember what you know about averages and variation. There are plenty of women who have high-functioning autism who report fulfilling sex lives.  It's just that many will have to develop abilities to ignore reticence or disinterest if they are in a relationship, recognising that they may be responsible for a bit more adjustment than their partner.

Autism - reduced ability to generalise, especially about emotional and social; reduced Theory of Mind, reciprocity; over-literal; could describe as not introspective;

repetitive and stereotyped (self-scripted, self-imposed) interest

the social interaction and communication deficits and difficulties in seeing the perspective of others and intuitively understanding nonverbal social cues constitute hidden barriers to the development of romantic and sexual relationships

 difficulties in understanding nonverbal or subtle interactional cues and with mentalization (meaning being able to understand one's own and others' mental states, eg, emotions, desires, cognitions experienced by such individuals

women with ASD seem to apply coping strategies, such as imitating the social skills of their non-ASD peers, therefore being more socially unobtrusive.

(Notice that this quote assumes environment entirely.  While imitation is likely the final piece, it may also be that women have other social skills installed - or activated during gestation. 

You also need to know that you should imitate other women, and employ a feedback mechanism to see if it is working.  This part is in fact one of the things that may be weakened or missing in autistic women. They may rely on a few rules or conventions of what women should be like and use those exclusively. I am thinking of Pat and politics/culture, where whe would be stereotypical feminist but unable to sustain that because other personal rules would interfere with it.  I think there is also a reluctance/inability to adapt to new politics once the rules are set. It is the opposite of "wokeness," attention to others, though new rules of fairness might be fairly easily installed?)

 restricted and repetitive interests, which may be nonsexual in childhood but can transform into and result in sexualized and sexual behaviors in adulthood. (Was this about men, or all autistics? I looked at this and my own sexual symptoms long and hard trying to recall pre-sexual equivalents)

 ASD women are more often in a romantic and sexual relationship (than ASD Men). ^(11,31 This could be due to the ASD women's ability to call on more advanced coping strategies (eg, imitating the social skills of their non-ASD peers), leading to less impairment in social functioning (see above)

 Claire Jack - has books (Women and Autism), writes for Psychology Today, seems good.

 However, autistic people may be slower in processing others’ emotions and may find it more challenging to do so under pressure.     ( This was interesting WRT Tracy, who freezes and does not take in info when she thinks I am angry. Trying to appear less angry doesn't seem to fix this (though it may help).  Writing to her may have been a better strategy than notetaking all along. Remember the discussion at Blakes after the conference where she tearfully said she could feel the thought ebbing away, disappearing, even as we spoke. Boy, that should have been a clue for me.  )

Claire: But I do know that there are certain stressful situations where I’ve missed how upset or nervous someone else was until later. And recent research bears this out, finding that autistic emotional awareness tends to be lower when tension is running high. 

 the longer processing time appeared due to the fact that autistic people tended to be more cautious in their interpretation of others' emotions, rather than to slower processing speed.

Need for routine (!) Executive functioning, communication problems, restricted interests, Anxiety, Stimming,* Meltdowns, Eye contact, Social issues, sensitivity to texture 

*Self-stim.  shooting hoops, repetitive performance of certain physical movements or vocalizations, as a form of behavior by persons with autism or other neurodevelopmental conditions; self-stimulation 

 I haven't really looked at self-stim activities across my lifetime in an ASD context. 

Auditory: humming, whistling, repeating words/phrases

Olfactory: sniffing or licking (doesn't sound familiar)

Tactile: Hand flapping, finger tapping, skin rubbing, hand movements - stretching, clenching/unclenching. (Drumming?)

Visual: Blinking, eye-roling, staring at lights, lining up objects

Movement: Rocking, spinning, twirling, pacing

  people with ASD had a larger total brain volume and cortical thickness, and smaller volumes of specific brain structures including the amygdala and parts of the basal ganglia (nucleus accumbens, putamen). The ASD group also showed increased thickness of the frontal cortex, and decreased thickness of the temporal cortex.

Silent Treatment - Anne, Mary, Pat. Amy K & Tina were more like withdrawal, but that is similar. The first three may have regarded their hostility as withdrawal.  "You think of it as withdrawal, of removing yourself from an unhealthy or upsetting situation or relationship.  But you should know that nearly everyone else will view it as hostil and insulting, not passive." (This is a great example of ASD imposing its impression of what is happening as a fact, which is hard to dislodge.  Such impressions trump new info coming in.)

No need to explain, even regarding it as an advancement.

It is the increase in power - you can get away with no explaining now, unlike children who are still held accountable by adults.

Not mean but oblivious

Flirting underdone

Separating from the person you used to be, even if close to family 

Self-examination a=in and of itself, no introspection, so they resent you doing it.. Push measurable accomplishments (degrees, papers, invitations) more than informal. It is a way to favor reliability over the fickleness of people's opinions, right?

Not the same as their childhood self - even when they are.  But what about overidentification with family of origin?  Real, accidental? Not taking serious boyfriend until father dies, favoring older partners, fewer children. Mistrust and avoidance of emotionality. Volatile mistrust and trust based on snap decisions.

Pat Darcy and rejecting general complaints, insisting on specific, which is good for precision, but creates an atomised relationship.  Hey!  Is their own sense of self atomised? Also divide and conquer against criticism. Find a shred to reject each individual complaint even if stil 80% justified.  Legalistic, thuys effective. Contrast if someone says I consistently do X I look at the reason and probably data.  If they don't do it, is that "Won't visit that emotional territory?" Poor Theory of Mind in general.Or is this just what everyone does to evade responsibility, no ASD required?  

Touch sensitivity, quick to politicise. (Or is this working the other way, trying to find politics in the concrete incidents or the known declared rules?)  Low bar for intrusiveness.

Pat was very openminded about some ideas about other people, though...

******

Me: I expect Reciprocal obligations and have resentment when people do not share them. Step family.  Skyview neighborhood.  8-12 grade church? Not so much. schools? Not so much. Maybe too many people? 50 in 8th, 424 HS.  Maybe it takes more than one connection.  Church plus school? Step family did have lots of semi-required events eating, presents. It seems evolutionary to build those.

Svante Pääbo

 Entirely deserved.  Pääbo is the main guy in the team that discovered Europeans have 2-4% Neanderthal ancestry in 2014 and East Asians have up to 6% Denisovan ancestry.  That is, the humans who lived around the world before the Out of Africa event about 60kya, dating back to 1 or even 2 million years out of Africa themselves, contributed some genes to our current makeup, even though they have been eliminated as a species by Homo sapiens. (We weren't smarter, we were probably just meaner and better able to work together in groups.) You can listen to John Hawks talk about him with Steve Hsu and Corey Washington or catch up with Quillette's (very good) take on the award. I would only note that the description of those who believed in the theories that he essentially disproved is oversimplified, and they deserve more credit for nuance and interpretation. Many others who study this material look at his work and say "Just as we always said.  If there is any Neanderthal genetic material, it didn't have any important effects and mostly vanished."  They're not wrong. The simplest Out of Africa models of 50 years ago are still 95% of the story.

Naming the Media

Legacy media, prestige media, elite media, drive-by media, standard media - you know, those people who never listened to Garth Brooks and have left him out of their histories even though he outsold everyone, not because they are ignoring him, but because they have forgotten he existed - none of the names for this group have caught on.  What do you use, and expand if you like.

Paleo, Keto, and the Good Old Days

We have a tendency to condense The Past into a single time in order to contrast it with the present, in things like how children were brought up or what we ate for diet. For thousands of years, children were instructed...or Our ancestors didn't have all the ultra-prepared foods... 

But they don't actually condense well.  The vague term hunter-gatherer neglects that they hunted and gathered very different things, place to place and even century to century. If you are eating paleo, you eat meat, but which meat? And vegetables, but those vary enormously.  No processed oils?  I dunno, heating olive oil before packing it into a ceramic jug to be sent hundreds of miles by boat, a practice that is millennia old, sounds like processing to me. We are doing new things with food, and such things as repeated reheatings of oil in the various steps of assembling a packaged cake is something unknown to our ancestors, sure. But your million ancestors from around 1400 ate things quite different from each other, even in the case of someone like me, where the whole group were within a few miles of the North Sea.

So our guts didn't evolve thousands of years ago to digest in a certain way, except that they perhaps evolved to run on lots of different types of fuel. Our guts have in fact taken repeated shocks over the centuries in terms of what is available and what they have to accomplish, and those guts that could should a few percent advantage moved on to the next generation more regularly. Culture always runs up against biology.

Big Lake, Small Lake

 One of the great charms of Lake Winnipesaukee in NH is that it is both a big lake and a small lake.

As you can see, the number of bays and islands makes the experience small lake for most people who have lake cottages, however one has immediate access to a bigger lake.  The large open section in the middle is called The Broads, and a few homes facing it do have a n unobstructed view of 2-3 miles to the other side.  Or, if you trace very carefully on the SE-NW access, such as where Mitt Romney's place is, you can get a narrow look that goes much longer, even ten miles.  But these are rare.  More commonly, you have every impression of being on a small lake wherever you are on the shore.

My family owned or stayed at several places around the lake, on Cow Island for the longest. I wrote about the Rte 28 experience over seventy years in several posts over a decade ago.

Institutionalising Social Justice

Via Rob Henderson, an article from the Heterodox blog Seizing the Means of Knowledge Production. It discusses a lot of material I see elsewhere, and is more thorough in some sections than anything i have seen to date.  I disagreed with a few points, and also thought that some points were over-emphasised.  But it's pretty good.  There's a lot in it.  It discusses how ideas of social justice and righting wrongs get put into practice, stressing that the people who contribute to institutionalising an idea are not only different people than the originators, but a different kind of people, from other professions and approaches. 

While academics in the social sciences and (especially) humanities are most frequently attributed with the rise of the concepts and approaches listed above – they may be getting way too much credit. In fact, most of the people listed on the chart, who created and established these innovations, were practitioners in fields like psychiatry and law (and occasionally, activists outside the university, such as in the example of the ‘safe zone project’ or with the mainstreaming of ‘trigger warnings.’).

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb explained in Black Swan, this is par for the course: rather than being a font of innovation themselves, academics tend to systematize, rationalize, extrapolate from various innovations that were produced by people outside their field, or outside of academia altogether.

Understanding this dynamic helps us better understand how these approaches were so effectively institutionalized: lawyers, practitioners and activists tend to be very oriented towards applying ideas in concrete and impactful ways – particularly through leveraging institutions. This is not so much the case with other scholars.

I dealt with this second type of person in my mental health career - the activists, mental health lawyers, the hired speakers brought in to explain how we were going to put new programs into practice.  I had continual frustration with challenging them whether their ideas were actually any good.  Whether there was an evidence base we could rely on that this large investment of energy and resources was likely to produce results.  They seldom could.  They treated that information as a given, and because they did not question it - it accorded with their explanations of how the world worked - they gave off an air of treating it as beyond question. But I was asking the wrong people, because those were the only ones who I could get access to, and the ones who were making us do things. By the time an idea had been delivered to them questioning was over.

I suspect that our railing against the additional college administrators and the HR staffs of companies is related. They swim in an aquarium where the water is not noticed, and larger questions about other aquariums or changing the existing ones don't especially occur to them. Their job is to get certain tasks accomplished, not to consider whether there are associated costs. They are not (necessarily) stupid. They may tend to be incurious and non-abstract in their thinking, as their type of work seldom requires it. But they may have even brilliance in their ability to plan and effectuate.

Hans Niemann Cheating

It is increasingly likely that Hans Niemann has been cheating at chess and Magnus Carlsen was entirely justified in his actions. Online chess is different from over-the-board chess, and the online host is very careful to note that its investigation is only of the former.  However, that is quite damning, as Niemann only copped to cheating twice, and it is now clear he cheated online over a hundred times. I don't think he should be made to give back any prizes or honors unless cheating is definitively proved, but I think anyone is justified in no longer believing him.  He has cheated in closely-related chess, he lied about it, and his rise is statistically unusual enough to arouse suspicion.

The line that keeps getting used, at least online, is "Let the chess speak for itself" by those defending Niemann because the allegations of cheating are unproven. I get the impression that this is some sort of catch-phrase among players for these situations. But that is not a logical defense.  If he is cheating successfully and undetectably, then his chess will be superior, but what it "speaks" will be a lie. 

Barry Bonds was an exceptional baseball player and would likely have made the Hall of Fame without steroids.  No one is saying he wasn't any good. No one is saying that Niemann isn't any good either.  You have to already be at a certain level to make use of advantages. In the unfortunate paradoxes of fame, Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Pete Rose are likely remembered more because they are not voted into the HOF, as it comes up every year.  Hans Niemann may get a similar legacy, of being shunned and banned, but remembered longer because of it.

Blow, Gabrielle, Blow

Once Ethel Merman did a song, she usually owned it for life.  But my friend Nancy McMahon did this better in 1974 at William and Mary.  Glenn Close was one of the angels for that production. I was stage manager, but the show was primarily memorable for an awkward romantic moment after the show. Social cowardice paid me back in embarrassment.

Hay Sickles

 A wonderful parody piece in National Review about cutting your foot off with a hay sickle. 

Arriving first to the hot-take punch, a Vox writer who has neither read the column nor watched Walsh’s video weighs in to explain with confidence that all opposition to cutting off your feet with a hay sickle is a “social construct” that “emerged” in about 2018. At Salon, Amanda Marcotte backs this theory but complains that, while this is probably true, she can’t help but notice that the discussion about cutting off your feet with a hay sickle is being conducted “mostly by white men.” At the Atlantic, Adam Serwer repudiates the Vox piece by proposing that the most racist people on the 1957 Little Rock School Board were against cutting off your feet with a hay sickle, and inviting his readers to “think hard” about what “that tells us” about the practice’s “contemporary critics — which include Republican Senator Tim Scott.”

Two Spirit

I see that on Quillette in the sidebar, there is an article about Two-Spirit controversies in Canada.

I wrote about the topic in 2014.  The focus seems to have changed a bit, but the lack of clarity of thinking seems to be the same. You might find my discussion to be useful background.

Slacker

Yeah, not so much intellectual content around her these days, is there? I should feel guilty and hop to it, but I'm not going to. Thinking about my children and grandchildren a lot these days, turning off the podcasts while driving or walking in order to pointlessly worry instead. Issues all around, but Son #2 is working for a UMC church in Houston where the comments and the tactics about whether to split and join the GMC  have been quite nasty. I am sympathetic to those who want to forbid gay marriage in the denomination, but at least in Texas, those are acting far worse.

I do believe that there are right answers to questions. Yet I believe even more strongly that how Christians treat each other in negotiating the conflicts matters far more. What if God tells us in the end "Many questions don't have good answers in a fallen world.  This was intentional on my part to give you opportunity to display kindness and grace." Son #5 has an important job interview coming up, and is trying not to let girlfriend problems distract him from this. It's good practice to learn to put even important things on the shelf for an hour or two (or even longer) in order to be hyperfocused on a goal.

Knight Of Pleasure

Comedian/Attorney Karen Morgan, from Georgia via Cumberland Maine, is hysterical. She has a series of more than a dozen of these judging books by their covers from two summers ago. 

Facebook

I listened to Tyler Cowan interview Dave Barry, and they spoke about humor in partisan divide. Barry is not the first I have heard mention it, but much current humor does not cause laughter, and not even a smile or chuckle, just the grim satisfaction of having said something mean about the other side that you know your people would approve of with a knowing look. Grim satisfaction  has replaced laughter. Oddly, it was traced back to SNL, and the idea that they had greatly improved humor by bringing in silliness to go with topicality (and really first-class silliness, I might add.  Killer Bees. Cheeseburger, cheeseburger...), but also sown the seeds for its destruction with their increasing political meanness.

Then I saw the FB pages of some relatives, who used to be funny people, and knew that it was true. I feel some guilt in the case of my younger brother, as it was I who originally taught him this.

I am trying to think of political humor from any side that is actually funny.  The closest I can get is people who go against type and play on that for humor.

They spoke highly of Robert Benchley for written humor, but allow that his short films are at least from a script.

Nostalgia

I shudder to think what the search term nostalgia would bring up on this blog. 10% of the total, likely. As I get together monthly with two friends (math/science) I went to summer studies with and one friend (arts and social science) I used to sing with in highschool - and I went to 50th reunion last October - this usually means grades 9-12. College friends recently came up, but that's another story.

Other common eras for nostalgia would be when the first two boys were young, from 1979-1990, possibly extending to the end of their years at Concord Christian HS. Or the first years the Romanians were here.  I don't usually think of the '10s as nostalgia.  But my practical experience is wistfulness whenever I have to go back through my archives.  It doesn't take much to bring a tear to my eyes these days.

And so, I give you December 2015, which includes much about Christmas, that Christmas, and family history, surprising trivia about CS Lewis, Jonathan Haidt's research, and a video of komodo dragons threatening Japanese schoolgirls wearing meat hats. No, really. They are screaming, of course, which I think is what the producers of this TV show had in mind.  2015 Was the year I blogged second-least, with the two around it being first and third.  I apparently had little to say then. However, the family was as amazingly charming then as one could imagine.

Yeah, Pretty Much