Quotulatiousness

April 12, 2023

Institutional Review Boards … trying to balance harm vs health, allegedly

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

At Astral Codex Ten Scott Alexander reviews From Oversight to Overkill by Simon N. Whitley, in light of his own experience with an Institutional Review Board’s demands:

Dr. Rob Knight studies how skin bacteria jump from person to person. In one 2009 study, meant to simulate human contact, he used a Q-tip to cotton swab first one subject’s mouth (or skin), then another’s, to see how many bacteria traveled over. On the consent forms, he said risks were near zero — it was the equivalent of kissing another person’s hand.

His IRB — ie Institutional Review Board, the committee charged with keeping experiments ethical — disagreed. They worried the study would give patients AIDS. Dr. Knight tried to explain that you can’t get AIDS from skin contact. The IRB refused to listen. Finally Dr. Knight found some kind of diversity coordinator person who offered to explain that claiming you can get AIDS from skin contact is offensive. The IRB backed down, and Dr. Knight completed his study successfully.

Just kidding! The IRB demanded that he give his patients consent forms warning that they could get smallpox. Dr. Knight tried to explain that smallpox had been extinct in the wild since the 1970s, the only remaining samples in US and Russian biosecurity labs. Here there was no diversity coordinator to swoop in and save him, although after months of delay and argument he did eventually get his study approved.

Most IRB experiences aren’t this bad, right? Mine was worse. When I worked in a psych ward, we used to use a short questionnaire to screen for bipolar disorder. I suspected the questionnaire didn’t work, and wanted to record how often the questionnaire’s opinion matched that of expert doctors. This didn’t require doing anything different — it just required keeping records of what we were already doing. “Of people who the questionnaire said had bipolar, 25%/50%/whatever later got full bipolar diagnoses” — that kind of thing. But because we were recording data, it qualified as a study; because it qualified as a study, we needed to go through the IRB. After about fifty hours of training, paperwork, and back and forth arguments — including one where the IRB demanded patients sign consent forms in pen (not pencil) but the psychiatric ward would only allow patients to have pencils (not pen) — what had originally been intended as a quick record-keeping had expanded into an additional part-time job for a team of ~4 doctors. We made a tiny bit of progress over a few months before the IRB decided to re-evaluate all projects including ours and told us to change twenty-seven things, including re-litigating the pen vs. pencil issue (they also told us that our project was unusually good; most got >27 demands). Our team of four doctors considered the hundreds of hours it would take to document compliance and agreed to give up. As far as I know that hospital is still using the same bipolar questionnaire. They still don’t know if it works.

Most IRB experiences can’t be that bad, right? Maybe not, but a lot of people have horror stories. A survey of how researchers feel about IRBs did include one person who said “I hope all those at OHRP [the bureaucracy in charge of IRBs] and the ethicists die of diseases that we could have made significant progress on if we had [the research materials IRBs are banning us from using]”.

Dr. Simon Whitney, author of From Oversight To Overkill, doesn’t wish death upon IRBs. He’s a former Stanford IRB member himself, with impeccable research-ethicist credentials — MD + JD, bioethics fellowship, served on the Stanford IRB for two years. He thought he was doing good work at Stanford; he did do good work. Still, his worldview gradually started to crack:

    In 1999, I moved to Houston and joined the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine, where my new colleagues were scientists. I began going to medical conferences, where people in the hallways told stories about IRBs they considered arrogant that were abusing scientists who were powerless. As I listened, I knew the defenses the IRBs themselves would offer: Scientists cannot judge their own research objectively, and there is no better second opinion than a thoughtful committee of their peers. But these rationales began to feel flimsy as I gradually discovered how often IRB review hobbles low-risk research. I saw how IRBs inflate the hazards of research in bizarre ways, and how they insist on consent processes that appear designed to help the institution dodge liability or litigation. The committees’ admirable goals, in short, have become disconnected from their actual operations. A system that began as a noble defense of the vulnerable is now an ignoble defense of the powerful.

So Oversight is a mix of attacking and defending IRBs. It attacks them insofar as it admits they do a bad job; the stricter IRB system in place since the ‘90s probably only prevents a single-digit number of deaths per decade, but causes tens of thousands more by preventing life-saving studies. It defends them insofar as it argues this isn’t the fault of the board members themselves. They’re caught up in a network of lawyers, regulators, cynical Congressmen, sensationalist reporters, and hospital administrators gone out of control. Oversight is Whitney’s attempt to demystify this network, explain how we got here, and plan our escape.

April 4, 2023

QotD: We used to have this concept of “healthy socialization” for kids

Filed under: Education, Health, Quotations, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Back when there were still a few grownups in charge, it was understood that kids are, in fact, kids, and that a major part of healthy socialization is performing a kind of differential diagnosis on your identity — if I’m not this, then I must be that, until you finally realize that you’re more than any of them, or all of them put together. Younger readers will have to take it on faith that this was possible, but I myself was, at one point, a preppie, a jock, a skater, a Goth, a burnout, and I think I’m forgetting a few. If that seems dubious, then this will really blow your circuits: I went out for, and made, the baseball team even though I didn’t particularly like baseball and wasn’t particularly good at it.

30 years ago, that kind of thing wasn’t just possible, it was pretty easy, since Little League was still about silly stuff like having fun, and when high school coaches gave you the speech about teamwork and character building, he — get this — actually meant it. I know how crazy this sounds, but it was pretty much expected of us benchwarmers to take the piss out of the kid who carried on like he was some kind of Big League prospect. Nobody but parents came to the games, anyway, and wearing a letter jacket didn’t help you get girls (I tested this hypothesis extensively). Nowadays, of course, Little League squads are ruthlessly culled, and if you make the team, you’d better be ready to be put on a nutrition plan and workout schedule, to attend summer skills camps, to be no-shit scouted, by professionals, at an age where you’re still not really sure what girls are for.

You don’t get to be “a jock” for a semester, in other words. You are one, and that’s all you are, starting before puberty, and woe to the kid who only made the team because his hormonal clock was set a little ahead of the other boys’. The kid who can throw 75 at age ten, as we all know, is 99.8% certain to still be throwing 75 at age sixteen, when everyone on the JV team can catch up to it. In my day, that’s when the coach pulled you aside and explained a few things to you, gently but firmly pointing you towards the Model UN Club. He was good at it, and since he was good at giving those “teamwork and character” speeches, too, he’d tell you that this, right here, is one of those situations, so man up and accept your limitations.

Ah well. So much for being a jock. Cross it off the list, and try not to notice the relief in Mom’s eyes — and, yeah, the little bit of sadness in Dad’s — when they realize they don’t have to schlep you all over the goddamn place on summer evenings, sitting in the bleachers watching you ride the pine. Time to find something else …

Severian, “Alienation”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-29.

April 3, 2023

QotD: An odd habit of some owners of used books

Filed under: Books, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the technique was not suitable to the acres of human skin now routinely disfigured as a means of individual self-expression, and those who had inscribed on themselves the name of their beloved, usually on a scroll wrapped around a heart, had to content themselves with a tattooed erasure of that name when it no longer corresponded to that of the current beloved, usually by blue lines. The names of children, by contrast, even when no longer seen or visited, let alone supported financially, were not crossed off or inked out. That would have been cruelty toward them in the same way that having their names tattooed in the first place was undying love for them. One didn’t just wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve; one’s sleeve was one’s heart.

When it comes to erasing from their skin names from the past, however, the tattooed are as nothing compared with some owners of secondhand books. They score through the names of previous owners inscribed on fly-leaves with something approaching vengeance, so that they are no longer legible. They are like Stalin in his desire to expunge a purged person, such as Yagoda, not only from the written record but also from the photographic record. The new owners of secondhand books not only do not want the name of the previous owners to be legible, it is as if they wanted them never to have existed. In the days before black felt-tipped pens, which can erase all trace of a person’s name at a stroke, or in effect throw him into an unmarked grave, the name was often scratched over repeatedly, with a strange assiduity, until no letter of it was legible. I have examples of this peculiar conduct dating back to the 18th century.

What does it mean, this fury against previous owners? I suspect that it indicates an attempted denial of mortality, an assertion that the book has now fallen into the hands of its rightful and final owner, that it will remain his (I think this is an almost exclusively male phenomenon) till the end of time. The evidence of previous ownership is thus a reminder of how futile such a wish is — a reminder that one does not own anything, certainly nothing of any value such as a book that one wishes to preserve, by more than temporary leasehold. We are keepers of our valuables rather than owners of them, at least if we feel it wrong to destroy them.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Tattoo Much”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-06-10.

March 31, 2023

QotD: The education racket

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… one of “capitalism’s” great ironies is that it creates several different breeding grounds for the ideology-addled idiot parasites that eventually destroy it. Politics is the most obvious example, but there are lots of others. The “education” business, for instance, is little more than make-work for idiots. You’ll never get rich as a teacher, of course, but a nice middle-class salary, great bennies, a nuclear-armed union, guaranteed lifetime employment, and fucking summers off is a very sweet gig indeed. The red tape and routines and meetings, endless meetings, are infuriating to anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together, but for a certain type of person — the kind of dull, vapid, lazily malicious person who would volunteer to be a Block Warden in the USSR — it’s heaven.

Indeed, it’s not going too far to say that these types of institutions are designed to chase off anyone brighter, more honest, or more hardworking than the average member. If you haven’t had any experience with teachers or school boards lately (you lucky bastards), think back to your last encounter with Human Resources, or your neighborhood’s Homeowners’ Association. The only person who can stand to work for HR or be part of the HOA is … well, is the kind of person who works in HR or is part of the HOA — dull, vapid, lazily malicious busybodies. They’re as lazy as they are dumb, as dumb as they are malicious. The key to dealing with them, like the Sovietologist’s key to predicting the Politburo, is figuring out which of their lovely personality traits is likely to come to the fore in a given situation.

Severian, “How Dumb Are Liberals?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-07-31.

March 30, 2023

QotD: Revealed preference in the teenage hellscape of high school

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

This demonization of masculinity conflicts with the reality that any boy can see with his own two eyes: The cutest girls in school are attracted to the most masculine boys, and masculine not just in terms of physical traits, but also in terms of personality traits — confidence, assertiveness, “swagger”. Here we see a problem with what Rational Male author Rollo Tomassi calls the feminine-primary social order. Every observant man knows that there is a yawning chasm between (a) what women say they value most in a man and (b) the kind of man women actually go for. Listen to what women say, and you’d think they are magnetically attracted to “sensitive” guys. Watch what women actually do, and you can see that women obviously don’t actually care about “sensitivity”. Women want men who are tall and muscular and, ceteris parabus, rich, although no amount of money is going to make a short chubby guy sexy. As for the claim that women go for “sensitive” guys, anyone with two eyes and a brain knows this is nonsense. You don’t see throngs of lovestruck college girls chasing after guys who major in sociology or English literature (unless, of course, these guys are also tall, muscular and rich). No, it’s the jocks and frat boys who get the best action on campus, and if you pay attention to the choices women make, you’ll begin to suspect that their professed preference for “sensitive” men is the exact opposite of truth. That girl who was lecturing you about your need to be more “sensitive” will, with surprising regularity, end up falling head-over-heels for some selfish creep or dimwit brute who can’t even spell the word “sensitivity”.

Robert Stacy McCain, “Conflicting Signals”, The Other McCain, 2019-05-23.

March 28, 2023

WEIRD World – basing all our “assumptions about human nature on psych lab experiments starring American undergraduates”

Filed under: Books, Government, History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jane Psmith reviews The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich:

Until 2002, diplomats at the United Nations didn’t have to pay their parking tickets. Double-parking, blocking a fire hydrant, blocking a driveway, blocking an entire midtown Manhattan street — it didn’t matter; when you have diplomatic plates, they let you do it. In the five years before State Department policy changed in November 2002, UN diplomats racked up a whopping 150,000 unpaid parking tickets worth $18 million in fines. (Among other things, the new policy allowed the city to have 110% of the amount due deducted from the US foreign aid budget to the offending diplomats’ country. Can you believe they never actually did it? Lame.) Anyway, I hope you’re not going to be surprised when I say that the tickets weren’t distributed evenly: the nine members of Kuwait’s UN mission averaged almost 250 unpaid tickets apiece per year (followed by Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria, and Mozambique, each between 100 and 150; the rest of the top ten were Albania, Angola, Senegal, and Pakistan). The UK, Canada, Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway had none at all. The rest of the rankings are more or less what you’d expect: for example, Italy averaged three times as many unpaid tickets per diplomat as France and fifteen times as many as Germany.

What did the countries with the fewest unpaid parking tickets have in common? Well, they generally scored low on various country corruption indexes, but that’s just another way of saying something about their culture. And the important thing about their culture is that these countries are WEIRD: western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. But they’re also, in the grand scheme of human history, weird: their inhabitants think differently, behave differently, and value different things than most humans. Among other things, WEIRD people are individualistic, nonconformist, and analytical. They — okay, fine, we — are particularly hard-working, exhibit low time preference, prefer impersonal rules we apply universally, and elevate abstract principles over contextual and relationship-based standards of behavior. In other words, WEIRD people (as Joseph Henrich and his colleagues pointed out in the influential 2010 paper where they coined the phrase) are outliers on almost every measure of human behavior. Wouldn’t it be silly for an entire academic discipline (and therefore an entire society ideologically committed to Trusting The Experts) to base all its assumptions about human nature on psych lab experiments starring American undergraduates? That would give us a wildly distorted picture of what humans are generally like! We might even do something really dumb like assume that the social and political structures that work in WEIRD countries — impersonal markets, constitutional government, democratic politics — can be transplanted wholesale somewhere else to produce the same peace and prosperity we enjoy.

Ever since he pointed out the weirdness of the WEIRD, Henrich has been trying to explain how we got this way. His argument really begins in his 2015 The Secret of Our Success, which I reviewed here and won’t rehash. If you find yourself skeptical that material circumstances can drive the development of culture and psychology (unfortunately the term “cultural Marxism” is already taken), you should start there. Here I’m going to summarize the rest of Henrich’s argument fairly briefly: first, because I don’t find it entirely convincing (more on that below), and second, because I’m less interested in how we got WEIRD than in whether we’re staying WEIRD. The forces that Henrich cites as critical to the forging of WEIRD psychology are no longer present, and many of the core presuppositions of WEIRD culture are no longer taken for granted, which raises some thought-provoking questions. But first, the summary.

Henrich argues that the critical event setting the West on the path to Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic was the early medieval western Church’s ban on cousin marriage. That might seem a little odd, but bear in mind that most of the humans who’ve ever lived have been enmeshed in incredibly dense kin networks that dictate obligations, responsibilities, and privileges: your identity is given from birth, based simply on your role as a node in an interdependent network. When societies grow beyond the scale of a family, it’s by metaphorically extending and intensifying these kinship bonds (go read our review of The Ancient City for more on this). These kinship networks perpetuate themselves through marriage, and particularly through marriage to relatives, whether blood or in-laws, to strengthen existing connections. Familial or tribal identities come first, before even the claims of universal religions, as when Wali Khan, a Pakistani politician, phrased his personal allegiances as “I have been a Pashtun for six thousand years, a Muslim for thirteen hundred years, and a Pakistani for twenty-five.” You could imagine Edwin of Northumbria or Childeric saying something pretty similar.

Then, beginning in the 4th century, the western Church began to forbid marriages to relatives or in-laws, the kinship networks began to wither away, and alternative social technologies evolved to take their place. In place of the cousin-marriers’ strong tight bonds, conformity, deference to traditional authority, and orientation toward the collective, you get unmoored individuals who have to (or get to, depending on your vantage point) create their own mutually beneficial relationships with strangers. This promotes a psychological emphasis on personal attributes and achievements, greater personal independence, and the development of universalist social norms. Intensive kinship creates a strong in-group/out-group distinction (there’s kin and there’s not-kin): people from societies with strong kinship bonds, for instance, are dramatically more willing to lie for a friend on the witness stand. WEIRD people are almost never willing to do that, and would be horrified to even be asked. Similarly, in societies with intensive kinship norms, you’d be considered immoral and irresponsible if you didn’t use a position of power and influence to benefit your family or tribe; WEIRD people call that nepotism or corruption and think it’s wrong.

March 26, 2023

Plandemic? Manufactured crisis? Mass formation psychosis?

Filed under: Britain, China, Government, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Conservative Woman, James Delingpole lets his skeptic flag fly:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Tell me about your personal experiences of Covid 19. Actually, wait, don’t. I think I may have heard it already, about a million times. You lost all sense of smell or taste – and just how weird was that? It floored you for days. It gave you a funny dry cough, the dryness and ticklishness of which was unprecedented in your entire coughing career. You’ve had flu a couple of times and, boy, when you’ve got real flu do you know it. But this definitely wasn’t flu. It was so completely different from anything you’ve ever known, why you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it had been bioengineered in a lab with all manner of spike proteins and gain-of-function additives, perhaps even up to and including fragments of the Aids virus …

Yeah, right. Forgive me for treading on the sacred, personal domain of your lived experience. But might I cautiously suggest that none of what you went through necessarily validates lab-leak theory. Rather what it may demonstrate is the power of susceptibility, brainwashing and an overactive imagination. You lived – we all did – through a two-year period in which health-suffering anecdotes became valuable currency. Whereas in the years before the “pandemic”, no one had been much interested in the gory details of your nasty cold, suddenly everyone wanted to compare notes to see whether they’d had it as bad as you – or, preferably, for the sake of oneupmanship, even worse. This in turn created a self-reinforcing mechanism of Covid panic escalation: the more everyone talked about it, the more inconvertible the “pandemic” became.

Meanwhile, in the real world, hard evidence – as opposed to anecdotal evidence – for this “pandemic” remained stubbornly non-existent. The clincher for me was a landmark article published in January 2021 by Simon Elmer at his website Architects For Social Housing. It was titled “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Manufacturing the Crisis”.

In it Elmer asked the question every journalist should have asked but which almost none did: is this “pandemic” really as serious as all the experts, and government ministers and media outlets and medics are telling us it is? The answer was a very obvious No. As the Office for National Statistics data cited by Elmer clearly showed, 2020 – Year Zero for supposedly the biggest public health threat since “Spanish Flu” a century earlier – was one of the milder years for death in the lives of most people.

Let’s be clear about this point, because something you often hear people on the sceptical side of the argument say is, “Of course, no one is suggesting that Covid didn’t cause a horrific number of deaths.” But that’s exactly what they should be suggesting: because it’s true. Elmer was quoting the Age Standardised Mortality statistics for England and Wales dating back to 1941. What these show is that in every year up to and including 2008, more people died per head of population than in the deadly Covid outbreak year of 2020. Of the previous 79 years, 2020 had the 12th lowest mortality rate.

Covid, in other words, was a pandemic of the imagination, of anecdote, of emotion rather than of measured ill-health and death. Yet even now, when I draw someone’s attention to that ONS data, I find that the most common response I get is one of denial. That is, when presented with the clearest, most untainted (this was before ONS got politicised and began cooking the books), impossible-to-refute evidence that there was NO Covid pandemic in 2020, most people, even intelligent ones, still choose to go with their feelings rather with the hard data.

This natural tendency many of us have to choose emotive narratives over cool evidence makes us ripe for exploitation by the cynical and unscrupulous. We saw this during the pandemic when the majority fell for the exciting but mendacious story that they were living through a new Great Plague, and that only by observing bizarre rituals – putting strips of cloth over one’s face, dancing round one another in supermarkets, injecting unknown substances into one’s body – could one hope to save oneself and granny. And we’re seeing it now, in a slightly different variant, in which lots of people – even many who ought to know better – are falling for some similarly thrilling but erroneous nonsense about lab-leaked viruses.

It’s such a sexy story that I fell for it myself. In those early days when all the papers were still dutifully trotting out World Health Organisation-approved propaganda about pangolins and bats and the apparently notorious wet market (whatever the hell that is) in Wuhan, I was already well ahead of the game. I knew, I just knew, as all the edgy, fearless seekers of truth did that it was a lab leak wot done it. If you knew where to dig, there was a clear evidence trail to support it.

We edgy, fearless truth seekers knew all the names and facts. Dodgy Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was in it up to the neck; so too, obviously, was the loathsomely chipper and smugly deceitful Anthony Fauci. We knew that all this crazy, Frankenvirus research had initially been conducted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but had been outsourced to China after President Obama changed the regulations and it became too much of a hot potato for US-based labs. And let’s not forget Ukraine – all those secret bio-research labs run on behalf of the US Deep State, but then exposed as the Russians unhelpfully overran territory such as Mariupol.

March 24, 2023

From “railway spine” to “shell shock” to PTSD

Filed under: Health, History, Military, Railways, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Founding Questions, Severian discusses how our understanding of what we now label “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” evolved from how doctors visualized bodily ailments over a century ago:

A shell-shocked and physically wounded soldier in the First World War.

I mentioned “shell shock” yesterday, so let’s start there. Medicine in 1914 was still devoted to the “Paris School,” which assumed nothing but organic etiology for all syndromes. Sort of a reverse Descartes — as Descartes (implicitly) “solved” the mind-body problem by disregarding the body, so the “Paris School” of medicine solved it by disregarding the mind. So when soldiers started coming back from the front with these bizarre illnesses, naturally doctors began searching for an organic cause. (That’s hardly unique to the Paris School, of course; I’m giving you the context to be fair to the 1914 medical establishment, whose resistance to psychological explanations otherwise seems so mulish to us).
They’d noticed something similar in the late 19th century, with industrial accidents and especially train crashes. When a train crashed, the people in the first few cars were killed outright, those in the next few wounded, but the ones in the back were often physically fine. But within a few hours to weeks, they started exhibiting all kinds of odd symptoms. Hopefully you’ve never been in a train crash, but if you’ve ever been in a fender-bender you’ve no doubt experienced a minor league version of this.

I hit a deer on the highway once. Fortunately I was at highway speed, and hit it more or less dead on (it jumped out as if it were committing suicide), so it got thrown away from the car instead of coming through the windshield. The car’s front end was wrecked, naturally, but I was totally fine. I don’t think the seatbelt lock even engaged, much less the airbag, since I didn’t even have time to hit the brakes.

The next few hours to days were interesting, physiologically. It felt like my body was playing catch up. I had an “oh shit, I’m gonna crash!!!” reaction about 45 minutes after I’d pulled off to the side of the road, duct-taped the bumper back on as best I could, and continued to my destination. All the stuff I would have felt had I seen the deer coming came flooding in. Had I not already been where I was going, I would’ve needed to pull over, because that out of the blue adrenaline hit had my hands shaking, and my vision fuzzed out briefly.

The next morning I was sore. I had all kinds of weird aches, as if I’d just played a game of basketball or something. I assume part of it actually was the impact — it didn’t feel like much in the moment, but if it’s enough to crumple your car’s front end (and it was trashed), it’s enough to give you a pretty good jolt. That would explain soreness in the arms, elbows, and shoulders — a stiff-armed, white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel, followed by a big boom. But I was also just kinda sore all over, plus this generalized malaise. I felt not-quite-right for the next few days. Nothing big, no one symptom I can really put my finger on, but definitely off somehow — a little twitchy, a little jumpy, and really tired.

Having done my WWI reading, I knew what it was, and that’s when I really understood the doctors’ thought processes. I really did take some physical damage, because I really did receive a pretty good full-body whack. It just wasn’t obvious to the naked eye. And since everyone has experienced odd physical symptoms from being rattled around, or even sleeping on a couch or sprung mattress, it makes sense — the impact obviously jiggled my spine, which probably accounts for a great many of the physical symptoms. Hence, “railway spine”. And from there, “shell shock” — nothing rattles your back like standing in a trench or crouching in a dugout as thousands of pounds of high explosive go off around you. It must be like going through my car crash all day, every day.

Skip forward a few decades, and we now have a much better physiological understanding of what we now call (and I will henceforth call) Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). There’s a hypothesis that I personally believe, that “shell shock” is also a whole bunch of micro-concussions as well as “classic” PTSD, but let’s leave that aside for now. The modern understanding of PTSD is largely about chemistry. Cortisol and other stress chemicals really fuck you up. They have systemic physical and mental effects. If those chemicals don’t get a chance to flush out of your system — if you’re in a trench for weeks on end, let’s say — the effects are cumulative, indeed exponential.

Returning to my car crash: I was “off” for a few days because my body got a huge jolt of stress chemicals. That odd not-quite-right thing I felt was those chemicals flushing through. Had I gone to a shrink at that moment, he probably would’ve diagnosed me with PTSD. But I didn’t have PTSD. I had a perfectly normal physiological reaction to a big shot of stress chemicals. If I’d gotten into car crash after car crash, though, day in and day out, that would’ve been PTSD. I’d be having nightmares about that deer every night, instead of just the once. And all that would have cumulative, indeed exponential, effects.

He then goes on to cover similar physical reactions to stimuli in modern life, so I do recommend you RTWT.

March 21, 2023

Few professions are as “optimism biased” as primary school teachers

Filed under: Books, Education, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Freddie deBoer was commissioned to write this for a professional publication for teachers, but it was “too hot” for the editors, so he’s posted it to his Substack instead:

There’s a bias that runs throughout our educational discourse, coming from our media, academia, and the think tanks and foundations that have such sway in education policy. It’s a bias that exists both because of a natural human desire to see every child succeed and because the structural incentives in the field make rejecting that bias professionally risky. The bias I’m talking about is optimism bias, the insistence that all problems in education are solvable and that we can fix them if only we want to badly enough. At least a half-century of research, spending, policy experimentation, and dogged effort has utterly failed to close the gaps that so vex our political class. But still we hear the same old song about how we could close those gaps tomorrow if we really wanted to, an attitude that has distorted education policy and analysis for decades.

My first book, The Cult of Smart, was a commercial failure. It was released during the height of the pandemic and thus my ability to promote it was limited, but by any measure the market rejected it. It’s tough to produce a labor of love like that and find that few people were interested in it.

But there was a silver lining: since publication in 2020 I’ve heard from dozens and dozens of teachers, thanking me for putting their thoughts to print. These educators come from public, private, and charter schools, from schools with affluent study bodies and schools that are mired in poverty, from big city school districts and from low-population regional rural schools. And again and again, these teachers shared the same perspective: they agreed with the book’s overall argument, and often had thought similar things themselves for years, but felt they could not express them publicly for fear of professional consequences.

The essential argument of the book is that overwhelming empirical evidence shows that students sort themselves into academic ability bands in the performance spectrum early in life, with remarkable consistency; that the most natural and simplest explanation for this tendency is that there is such a thing as individual academic potential; and that the most likely source of this individual academic potential is likely influenced by genes. When we look at academic performance, what we see again and again is that students perform at a given level relative to peers early in schooling and maintain that level throughout formal education. (I make that case at considerable length here.) A vast number of interventions thought to influence relative performance have been revealed to make no difference in rigorous research, including truly dramatic changes to schooling and environment. Meta-analyses and literature reviews that assess the strength of many different educational interventions find effect sizes in the range of .01 to .3 standard deviations, small by any standards and subject to all sorts of questions about research quality and randomization. Even the most optimistic reading of the research literature suggests that almost nothing moves the needle in academic outcomes. Almost nothing we try works.

This implies that common sense is correct and that individual students have their own natural or intrinsic level of academic potential, which we have no reason to believe we can dramatically change. I believe that we can change large group disparities in education (such as the racial achievement gap) by addressing major socioeconomic inequalities through government policy. But even after we eliminate racial or gender gaps, there will be wide differences between individual students, regardless of pedagogy or policy. When Black students as a group score at parity with white students, there will still be large gaps within the population of Black students or white or any other group you can name, and we have no reliable interventions to make the weakest perform like the strongest.

My book’s argument is attractive to teachers because they’ve lived under an educational ideology that insists that every student is a budding genius whose potential waits to be unlocked by a dedicated teacher – and which holds teachers to that unachievable standard. From the right, they’re subject to “no excuses” culture, the constant insistence from the education reform movement that student failures are the result of lazy and feckless teachers; from the left, they’re subject to a misguided egalitarianism that mistakes the fact that every child is important and deserves to be nurtured for the idea that every child has perfectly equal potential. The result is a system that presses teachers to deliver learning outcomes in their classrooms that they can’t possibly achieve. But many of them feel that they can’t push back, for fear of professional consequences. If they speak frankly about the fact that different students have different levels of individual potential, they’ll likely be accused of shirking their duty.

February 27, 2023

The instinct to protect

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

Rob Henderson on the way that women react to men who demonstrate protective instincts toward them:

Human psychology evolved in environments far more violent than even the most dangerous modern U.S. cities. Overall, in the U.S., the average death rates from interpersonal violence are less than 1 in 10,000.

In contrast, in hunter-gatherer societies, 15 percent of deaths were the result of physical violence.

Our violent evolutionary past has shaped our minds. Even peaceable people in developed countries who have never even been in a fight can still readily estimate men’s physical strength from their face, body, and voice. These estimations tightly correlate with men’s actual physical strength.

A 2022 paper (preprint link here) investigated whether people prefer romantic partners who are willing and able to protect them from violence.

Considering the frequency and intensity of violence in the human ancestral environment, affiliating with people who were able to protect you would have been advantageous. The authors of the paper suggest such preferences have shaped human mating psychology.

The authors (Barlev, Arai, Tooby, and Cosmides) explore the question of whether a potential partner’s ability to protect you from violence is valued. It seems obvious that the answer (especially for women) is almost certainly yes.

However, they also explore whether a potential partner’s willingness (independent of ability) is also considered attractive.

When a woman judges a man, does learning that he is willing to protect her from violence make him more attractive, even if he isn’t particularly effective at doing so?

What about when a woman learns that a man is able but unwilling to protect her? Imagine a muscular guy who, upon seeing his date get mugged, just stands there and does nothing, or runs away.

Is he still more attractive than a guy who is unable but willing to protect her? Picture a scrawny guy who, upon seeing his date get mugged, physically tries but is unsuccessful in his attempt to stop the mugger.

The paper explores these questions.

[…]

Here you see that women rate male dates (described in this particular version of the study as average in physical strength and average in physical attractiveness) who make no attempt to protect them as a 2 out of 10 in attractiveness. Women rate a man who attempts to protect them but fails as a 7.5 out of 10. And a man who attempts to protect them and succeeds is an 8 out of 10.

So the major bump in attractiveness comes from willingness, rather than ability.

QotD: Sigmund Freud’s insights

Filed under: Health, History, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Sigmund Freud was a perverted old cokehead, but he had some useful insights. One of them is that anxiety works like a spring (my paraphrase). You need a spring to have a certain tension in order to work, but if you compress it too tightly, it breaks. Anxiety that can’t be discharged (his term) in healthy, socially beneficial ways instead gets discharged in unhealthy, neurotic ways.

That’s what happened with Anna O., history’s most famous psychiatric patient. She had a very turbulent love/hate relationship with her father, as tightly wound girls do. When he became deathly ill on a family vacation, the unresolvable tension caused a whole host of physical symptoms, including hysterical paralysis. Pioneering psychologist Josef Breuer “talked her through” it, finally resolving the emotional conflict and “curing” the patient.

All this would’ve been interesting, but largely irrelevant, were it not for World War I. The world at large didn’t care about the problems of overprivileged Jewish girls, but they did care about their soldiers suddenly going crazy in the trenches. Once military doctors finally ruled out a physical cause, they were left with Freudian explanations: A soldier can’t stop fighting, because he’s an honorable, dutiful soldier. Yet that soldier must stop fighting. The only honorable way out is a wound. If the enemy doesn’t wound him, then, his subconscious will. Hence the bizarre “conversion disorders” — hysterical blindness, paralysis, mutism, etc. — characteristic of “shell shock.”

But a funny thing happened. While everyone now acknowledged the real power of the subconscious mind, we sort of … forgot … about it. Psychology, particularly psychotherapy, went back to being a ghetto Jewish preoccupation. Bored, over-privileged housewives might go to a shrink to talk through their “issues”, but as for the rest of us, well, if we weren’t going into combat anytime soon, why bother? Outside of a few crusty old reactionaries (like yours truly) making fun of SJWs, when was the last time you heard the word “neurotic”?

But that’s the thing: either the subconscious is real, or it isn’t. When we say “neurotic” (the few of us who still do), we usually mean people like Anna O. — rich, cosseted, politically active human toothaches who try to force the entire world into the all-encompassing drama of their Daddy Issues (see also: Virginia Woolf). But that’s not how Freud meant it. According to him, we’re all neurotic to some degree or another, because that’s just how anxiety works.

We all have strong emotional impulses that run counter our self-image. Hence the entire panoply of pop-Freudianism: The preacher who constantly rails against homosexuality from the pulpit is secretly gay (“projection”). The strict, controlling, everything-in-its-place type is a sadist (“anal-retentive”). The player who can’t settle down with any woman is actually trying to find a Mommy figure (“Oedipus complex”). And, of course, the — ahem — daddy of them all, the crippling Daddy Issues that make feminists such fun.

But that’s just the thing: Either anxiety works that way or it doesn’t. Just because we don’t see a specific syndrome in ourselves doesn’t mean we don’t have a whole bunch of anxiety we need to discharge. Just because it’s subclinical, in other words, doesn’t mean it’s not real, or unimportant. See for example the legions of keyboard commandos who show up in the comments of any blog with more than fourteen readers. Yeah, sure, it’s possible that those guys all got kicked out of SEAL Team 6 for being too badass … but it’s probably classic identification. They’re deeply uneasy about the world and their place in it, so they construct themselves an identity as the Rambo of Evergreen Terrace.

Severian, “High Anxiety”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-03-16.

February 26, 2023

QotD: Scientology versus psychiatry

Filed under: Health, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Scientology has a long-standing feud with psychiatry, with the psychiatrists alleging that Scientology is a malicious cult, and the Scientologists alleging that psychiatry is an evil pseudoscience that denies the truth of dianetics. And that psychiatrists helped inspire Hitler. And that the 9/11 was masterminded by Osama bin Laden’s psychiatrist. And that psychiatrists are plotting to institute a one-world government. And that psychiatrists are malevolent aliens from a planet called Farsec. Really they have a lot of allegations.

Scott Alexander, “The APA Meeting: A Photo-Essay”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-05-22.

February 24, 2023

You may call it “interest cycling”, but I call it “normality”

Filed under: Books, Personal, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tom Knighton on what is apparently called “interest cycling” in hobbies and other leisure-time activities:

An article from a late 1950s issue of Model Railroader magazine showing a very small HO scale layout plan. The author later admitted that it’s really too small to do much with after it’s built — without some expansion — but the building can take more time than you might expect and you’d need to develop some new skills to do it properly.

Something many ADHD people do — and maybe others, I don’t know — is what I call “interest cycling”.

Basically, I get insanely hyperfocused on one thing, devoting almost all of my time to this One Thing for weeks at a time, then suddenly stop for whatever reason and then jump onto something else.

As a result, I never become truly great at anything. What’s more, since many of these areas of hyperfocus — one article called them obsessions, and with plenty of cause — require money, I end up needing to spend large quantities of money that I really can’t afford to spend.

But, it’s a need.

And it’s a problem. For a lot of us.

See, I have obligations that surround some of my interests. I’m a group leader for the local chapter of an organization I’m part of, for example, that requires not just me to teach a class once per week, but also to advance my own knowledge.

I still teach the class because others are counting on me to do so, but I haven’t been devoting much time to the rest of it, and I should since there are some tangential benefits to what I’m trying to accomplish here at The Knighton Experiment. Sure, some of it isn’t, but that’s just part of the game, so to speak.

What’s worse is that, so far as I’ve been able to find, there aren’t a lot of ways to combat this.

Which suggests that I’m kind of doomed to go through this cycle for the rest of my life.

Now, there are upsides. I mean, there aren’t many people who could detail both how to build a chest of drawers and a 14th-century transitional plate harness, for example. While I can’t necessarily build either with a high degree of proficiency, I at least know what’s involved.

In my own case, those sound like perfectly normal interests — I share both of them — although since my income dropped precipitously several years ago, I don’t spend money as Tom still does. What I have done, however, is to accumulate future stocks of books on those topics I typically cycle through over time so that when the urge strikes I can at least ameliorate some of the need by reading about rather than actively engaging in the hobby/interest/activity. That might be the difference between Tom’s concern and my experience … I cycle among a number of interests, but not brand new ones all the time.

February 23, 2023

QotD: Academic types

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

Let’s […] circle back to that list of school shooters. Actually they’re university shooters — a crucial distinction. [He] points out that most of them were grad students, and all of them were too damn old to still be hanging around in college. There’s a bit of chicken-and-egg going on here, but the point’s still valid. Even if you claim that every single grad school outside STEM is utterly worthless — and you’ll get no argument from me, buddy — the fact remains that grad students are functionally much closer to the aeronautical engineers and their 50-nerd slap fight than they are to the homies in the inner city. If a solution can’t be found in a very tight-knit environment, by a bunch of very concerned people who are constantly on the lookout for Oppressed People to champion, what chance do we normals have to even diagnose, let alone solve, the problems of half the fucking country?

You do acknowledge, of course, that it’s in the nature of math that 50% of the population are below average?

Our default “solution” for university shooters […] is psychiatry. More access to better “mental health care”, we say, would’ve prevented this. Maybe, maybe not, but at least it’s something. The problem, though, is that the only diagnostic criterion you can realistically use is “So-and-So is a twitchy, weird loner”, which — trust me — exactly describes 99% of grad students and 100% of professors. Do we force feed all of them powerful prescription psychotropics on the off-chance?

Before you jump to agree — and yes, I fully acknowledge how awesome that would be, if you put it on Pay-per-View I’d be the first to sign up […] I’d ask you to consider two things:

First, it’s the government doing this. The same stupid motherfuckers who can’t manage to rig a poll where only a handful of addled old farmers vote. Do you really want to bet America’s future social stability on them loading the right drug into the sprayers? Given the federal bureaucracy’s sterling reputation for basic competence, they’d probably crop-dust the ‘hood with meth.

Severian, “The Scientific Management of Populations”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-15.

February 22, 2023

Toward a taxonomy of military bullshit

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Bruce Gudmundsson linked to this essay from “Shady Maples“, a serving officer in the Canadian Army, on the general topic of bullshit in the military:

Armies, as a rule, are quagmires of bullshit. The Canadian Army is no exception. We accept that bullshit is an occupational hazard in the Army, but it’s a hazard that we struggle to manage and it’s one that threatens our effectiveness as a force.

In order to understand bullshit we need a taxonomy, that is, a map of bullshit and the common varieties found in the wild. Using our taxonomy, we can develop diagnostic tools to detect bullshit and expose its corrosive effects on our integrity and professional culture. I assume that bullshit is also a hazard in other environments and government departments, but since my experience is in the land force I will be focusing my attention on that.

The subject of bullshit entered the mainstream in 2005 when Princeton University Press issued a hardcover edition of Harry G. Frankfurt’s 1988 essay “On Bullshit“. Frankfurt doesn’t mince words: “[one] of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share.” He argues that even though we treat bullshit as a lesser moral offence than lying, it’s actually more harmful to a culture of truth. I believe this wholeheartedly, for reasons which will become clear.

In Frankfurt’s view, even though a liar and a bullshitter both aim to deceive their targets, bullshitting and lying require different mental states. In order to lie, someone must believe that they know the truth and intentionally make a false account of it. For example, if you believe that today is Monday but today is in fact Tuesday, and somebody asks you what day it is, you’re not a liar if you say “today is Monday”. You’re not lying because you really do believe that today is Monday, even though this belief is incorrect. In order to lie, you have to intentionally make a statement that is contrary to the truth as you understand it. In this example, you would be lying if you said “today is Tuesday” while believing that today is actually Monday. You would be accidentally correct, but you would still be lying because you are providing a false account of what you believe is true.

This means that lying actually requires a tacit respect for the truth on the part of the liar. The liar has to at least acknowledge the existence of truth in order to avoid it. To provide a false account of the truth, the liar must first believe in the truth.

The bullshitter, by contrast, does not operate under this constraint. Bullshit according to Frankfurt is speech without any regard for the truth whatsoever. To Frankfurt, “[the bullshitter] does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” Bullshit, Frankfurt argues, is speech that is disconnected from a concern for truth. The bullshitter will say anything if it helps them achieve their desired ends.

[…]

Let’s move on to the topic of “bull”, which is discussed at length by British psychologist Norman F. Dixon, author of On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. Dixon beat Frankfurt to the punch by publishing his own theory of bullshit in 1976, twelve years before “On Bullshit”. Dixon is a Freudian psychologist writing in the 1970s, so I am skeptical of the scientific merit of his book. Nonetheless, he provides an interesting outsider’s perspective of British military culture from the Crimean War up to the Second World War and how that culture enabled terrible officers while punishing competent ones (spoiler: aristocrats and nepotism are bad for meritocracy).

There is an entire chapter of the book about bullshit as a contributing factor to military incompetence. Dixon attributes the origin of the word “bullshit” to Australian soldiers, who in 1916 “were evidently so struck by the excessive spit and polish of the British Army that they felt moved to give it a label”. His theory of the Australian origin of bullshit is supported by Australian philosopher David Stove, who believed that it’s a signature national expression.

[…]

Canadian political philosopher G. A. Cohen added some depth to the discourse when he responded to Frankfurt in “Deeper into Bullshit“. Cohen wasn’t satisfied that Frankfurt had explored full range of bullshit as a social phenomenon. Frankfurt anchors his definition of bullshit in the intention or mental state of the speaker (the bullshitter) whose lack of concern for truth is what makes their statements bullshit. Cohen responds to this by pointing out that there are many people who honestly profess their bullshit beliefs. Reading this brought me back to my undergrad days. I had a TA in a 300-level philosophy course who claimed that he doubted his own existence. Personally, I wondered whether he would still doubt his own existence if I punched him in the balls for spewing such performative bullshit in class. So I think that Cohen makes a good point: there are bullshitters who honestly believe their own bullshit.

Cohen’s argument is squarely aimed at a certain style of academic writing, which he calls “unclarifiable unclarity.” These are intentionally vague statements which cannot be clarified without distorting their apparent meaning or dropping the veil of profundity altogether. If you want an example, you can try reading Hegel or a postmodernist philosopher, or just save yourself the effort and click on this postmodern bullshit generator (trust me, it’s indistinguishable from the real thing). Pennycook et al. label statements of this type as “pseudo-profound bullshit“. Hilariously, they ran a series of experiments to see if test subjects would find the appearance of profound truth in both real and algorithmically-generated Deepak Chopra tweets. The result, disappointingly, was yes.

Cohen adds a fourth type of bullshit to our taxonomy: “irretrievably speculative comment”. Basically, when someone is arguing for a proposition which they have no way of knowing is true or false, or they put forward an argument that’s completely unsupported by readily available evidence, then that argument is bullshit.

[…]

Still with me? So far we’ve identified and defined four types of bullshit (BS):

BS1 (Frankfurt): propositions made without concern for truth.

BS2 (Dixon): ritualistic activity which doesn’t serve its stated aim or justification.

BS3 (Cohen/Pennycook): unclarifiable unclarity aka pseudo-profound bullshit.

BS4 (Cohen): speculation beyond what’s reasonably permitted by the evidence.

The common denominator of all four types of bullshit is their disconnection from reality. Bullshit statements don’t enhance our understanding and bullshit activity doesn’t get us any closer to achieving our goals in the real world. Bullshit doesn’t necessarily move us further away from truth, like lies do, but it certainly doesn’t get us any closer to it either. Essentially, bullshit lowers the signal-to-noise ratio of discourse.

The endless carousel of bullshit.

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