Quotulatiousness

May 22, 2024

Scott Alexander reviews The Others Within Us

Filed under: Books, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander discusses teh new hawtness in psychotherapy as expounded in Robert Falconer’s new book The Others Within Us:

Internal Family Systems, the hot new1 psychotherapy, has a secret.

“Hot new psychotherapy” might sound dismissive. It’s not. There’s always got to be one. The therapy that’s getting all the buzz, curing all the incurable patients, rocking those first few small studies. The therapy that was invented by a grizzled veteran therapist working with Patients Like You, not the out-of-touch elites behind all the other therapies. The therapy that Really Gets To The Root Of The Problem. There’s always got to be one, and now it’s IFS.

Sufficiently new and popular therapies are hard to get. Therapist training starts slow – the founder has to train the second generation of therapists, the second generation has to train the third generation, and so on. IFS says they have a 10,000 person wait list for their training program. So lots of people have heard great things about IFS, maybe read a manual or two, but never tried it or met anyone who has.

What I gather from the manuals: IFS is about working with “parts”. You treat your mind as containing a Self — a sort of perfect angelic intellect without any flaws or mental illnesses — and various Parts — little sub-minds with their own agendas who can sometimes occlude or overwhelm the Self. During therapy, you talk to the Parts, learn their motives, and bargain with them.

For example, you might identify a Part of you that wants to sabotage your relationships. You will visualize and name it — maybe you call her Sabby, and she looks like a snake. You talk to Sabby, and learn that after your first break-up, when you decided you never wanted to feel that level of pain again, you unconsciously created her and ordered her to make sure you never got close enough to anyone else to get hurt. Then you and the therapist come up with some plan to satisfy Sabby — maybe you convince her that you’re older now, and better able to deal with pain, and you won’t blame her if you get close to someone and have to break up again. Then you see a vision of Sabby stepping aside, maybe turning off the Windmill Of Relationship Sabotage or something like that, and then you never sabotage your relationships again. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the core.

All of this is the classic version everyone learns from the manual. Before we get to the secret, let’s examine two big assumptions in more detail.

First, this isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to discover — not invent, discover — that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to hear as in a trance — again, not invent — Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You learn — not decide — whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”.

(After reading the IFS manuals, I tried most of their tricks for initiating this sort of trance and meeting Sabby or whoever. I got nothing. I notice most of the patients with great results are severely traumatized borderlines, ie the same people who often get multiple personality disorder after the slightest hint from a therapist that this might happen. We’ll get back to this analogy later.)

The second assumption is that everything inside your mind is part of you, and everything inside your mind is good. You might think of Sabby as some kind of hostile interloper, ruining your relationships with people you love. But actually she’s a part of your unconscious, which you have in some sense willed into existence, looking out for your best interests. You neither can nor should fight her. If you try to excise her, you will psychically wound yourself. Instead, you should bargain with her the same way you would with any other friend or loved one, until either she convinces you that relationships are bad, or you and the therapist together convince her that they aren’t. This is one of the pillars of classical IFS.

The secret is: no, actually some of these things are literal demons.

    1. Some people object to me calling it “new” – it was developed in the 1980s, and has been popular since the early 2010s. Still, the therapy landscape shifts slowly, and even an exponentially-growing therapy takes a long time to get anywhere.

If you re-define it carefully, you can make any statistical measure look hopeful

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In his Substack, Tim Worstall jokingly called this piece “Larry Summers Explains Why Americans Hate Joe Biden”:

As a good Democrat of course Larry Summers would never put things in quite that headline way. But the implication of this latest paper with others is to explain why Americans really aren’t as happy as they should be given the economic numbers. The answer being that the economic numbers we all look at to explain how happy folk are aren’t the right economic numbers to explain how happy people are.

We can also make — possibly rightly, possibly wrongly, this might be me projecting more than is merited — a further claim. That Americans simply aren’t as rich as those standard economic numbers suggest either. Which would also neatly explain the general down in the dumps attitude toward the economy.

So, the new paper:

    Unemployment is low and inflation is falling, but consumer sentiment remains depressed. This has confounded economists, who historically rely on these two variables to gauge how consumers feel about the economy. We propose that borrowing costs, which have grown at rates they had not reached in decades, do much to explain this gap. The cost of money is not currently included in traditional price indexes, indicating a disconnect between the measures favored by economists and the effective costs borne by consumers. We show that the lows in US consumer sentiment that cannot be explained by unemployment and official inflation are strongly correlated with borrowing costs and consumer credit supply. Concerns over borrowing costs, which have historically tracked the cost of money, are at their highest levels since the Volcker-era. We then develop alternative measures of inflation that include borrowing costs and can account for almost three quarters of the gap in US consumer sentiment in 2023. Global evidence shows that consumer sentiment gaps across countries are also strongly correlated with changes in interest rates. Proposed U.S.-specific factors do not find much supportive evidence abroad.

OK, or as explained by the Telegraph:

    In it, the authors made a shocking claim: if inflation was measured in the same way that it was measured during the last bout of price rises in the 1970s, data showed that it peaked at 18pc in November 2022. This is far higher than the 9.1pc peak inflation shown by the official data.

    The reason for this discrepancy is that, since the 1970s, economists have removed the cost of borrowing from the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The motivations here were not nefarious. The reasoning of the statisticians had something to it.

And, OK, if inflation peaked at 18%, not 9%, then that would explain why folk are pissed. Sure it would.

[…]

OK. But that means that if inflation was higher than we’ve been using then the deflation of nominal to real GDP is also wrong. Just that one year of 9% recorded but 18% by this new measure is damn near a 10% difference. That’s how much we’re over-estimating real GDP by right now. Add in a couple of years of lower levels of that and being 20% out wouldn’t surprise.

Which would mean that — if this were true and I might be overegging it — Americans are in fact 20% poorer than the Biden Admin keeps saying they are. And yes, that would piss the voters off, wouldn’t it?

Gaslighting has been a staple of the legacy media for quite some time now, going into high gear during the 2016 US Presidential elections and then into overdrive during the pandemic. They probably don’t even realize they’re doing it any more, because it feels “normal” to them. Yet they wonder why their popularity and public trust in their pronouncements continues to drop.

The new queen of the AWFLs

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Elizabeth Nickson on the rise of new NPR CEO, Katherine Maher:

Banner for Christopher Rufo’s article on Katherine Maher at City Journal.
https://christopherrufo.com/p/katherine-mahers-color-revolution

The polite world was fascinated last month when long-time NPR editor Uri Berliner confessed to the Stalinist suicide pact the public broadcaster, like all public broadcasters, seems to be on. Formerly it was a place of differing views, he claimed, but now it has sold as truth some genuine falsehoods like, for instance, the Russia hoax, after which it covered up the Hunter Biden laptop. And let’s not forget our censor-like behaviour regarding Covid and the vaccine. NPR bleated that they were still diverse in political opinion, but researchers found that all 87 reporters at NPR were Democrats. Berliner was immediately put on leave and a few days later resigned, no doubt under pressure.

Even more interesting was the reveal of the genesis of NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, a 41-year-old with a distinctly odd CV. Maher had put in stints at a CIA cutout, the National Democratic Institute, and trotted onto the World Bank, UNICEF, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Technology and Democracy, the Digital Public Library of America, and finally the famous disinfo site Wikipedia. That same week, Tunisia accused her of working for the CIA during the so-called Arab Spring. And, of course, she is a WEF young global leader.

She was marched out for a talk at the Carnegie Endowment where she was prayerfully interviewed and spouted mediatized language so anodyne, so meaningless, yet so filled with nods to her base the AWFULS (affluent white female urban liberals) one was amazed that she was able to get away with it. There was no acknowledgement that the criticism by this award-winning reporter/editor/producer, who had spent his life at NPR had any merit whatsoever, and in fact that he was wrong on every count. That this was a flagrant lie didn’t even ruffle her artfully disarranged short blonde hair.

Christopher Rufo did an intensive investigation of her career in City Journal. It is an instructive read and illustrative of a lot of peculiar yet stellar careers of American women. Working for Big Daddy is apparently something these ghastly creatures value. I strongly suggest reading Rufo’s piece linked here. It’s a riot of spooky confluences.

Intelligence has been embedded in media forever and a day. During my time at Time Magazine in London, the bureau chief, deputy bureau chief and no doubt the “war and diplomacy” correspondent all filed to Langley and each of them cruised social London ceaselessly for information. Tucker Carlson asserted on his interview with Aaron Rogers this week that intelligence operatives were laced through DC media and in fact, Mr. Watergate, Bob Woodward himself, had been naval intelligence a scant year before he cropped up at the Washington Post as “an intrepid fighter for the truth and freedom no matter where it led”. Watergate, of course, was yet another operation to bring down another inconvenient President; at this juncture, unless you are being puppeted by the CIA, you don’t get to stay in power. Refuse and bang bang or end up in court on insultingly stupid charges. As Carlson pointed out, all congressmen and senators are terrified by the security state, even and especially the ones on the intelligence committee who are supposed to be controlling them. They can install child porn on your laptop and you don’t even know it’s there until you are raided, said Carlson. The security state is that unethical, that power mad.

Now, it’s global. And feminine. Where is Norman Mailer when you need him?

Making a French Cleat | Paul Sellers

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published Sep 9, 2015

Have you been looking for a way to hang your wall shelf or clock? Ever wondered what a split cleat or french cleat is? Paul shares this traditional method that really works.

To see a beginner friendly version of how to make a Hanging Wall Shelf, see our sister site: https://commonwoodworking.com/courses…

This video first appeared on https://woodworkingmasterclasses.com

QotD: Are western democracies moving uniformly in the direction of “surface democracy”?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I joked before about refusing to tolerate speculation about the US being a surface democracy like Japan, but joking aside I think even the staunchest defender of the reality of popular rule would concede that things have moved in that direction on the margin. Compare the power of agency rulemaking, federal law enforcement, spy agencies, or ostensibly independent NGOs now to where they were even 10 years ago. It would be a stretch to say that the electorate didn’t have influence over the American state, but can they really be said to rule it? Regardless of exactly where you come down on that question, it’s probably safe to say that you’d give a different answer today than you would have twenty, fifty, or a hundred years ago. Moreover, the movement has been fairly monotonic in the direction of less direct popular control over the government. And in fact this phenomenon is not unique to the United States, but reappears in country after country.

Is there something deeper at work here? There’s a theory, popular among the sorts of people who staff the technocracy, that this is all a perfectly innocent outgrowth of modern states being more complex and demanding to run. The thinking goes that it was fine to leave the government in the hands of yeoman farmers and urban proles a century ago, when the government didn’t do very much, but today the technical details of governance are beyond any but the most specialized professionals, so we need to leave it all to them.

I think this explanation has something going for it, I admire the structure of its argument, but it also can’t be the whole story. For starters, it treats the scope and nature of the state’s responsibilities as a fixed law of nature. Another way to frame this objection is that you can easily take the story I just told and reverse the causality — the common people used to rule, and so they created a government simple enough for them to understand and command; whereas today unelected legions of technocrats rule, and so they’ve created a government that plays to their strengths. There’s no a priori reason to prefer one of these explanations over the other. There needs to be a higher principle, a superseding reason that results in selecting one compatible ruler-state dyad over another. I think there is such a principle, we just have to get darker and more cynical.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: MITI and the Japanese Miracle by Chalmers Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-04-03.

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