August Links
Stuff I found interesting this past month.
1:
In "Why Is It Hard For Severely Mentally Ill People To Get Mental Health Care?" , Ozy Brennan writes:
"“Severely mentally ill” is a fake category, even for psychiatry, which is unusually full of fake categories. But it still gets at a real difference in experience. There are people who hear voices and see things and have delusions, who can’t hold down a job, who get involuntarily hospitalized, who can’t usually leave the house or maybe the bed, who starve themselves, who are violent, who can’t live independently without a caregiver, who are incapable of things that everyone considers normal parts of adult life like managing money or running errands or having friends. […]
there is a systematic problem. Treating severely mentally ill people sucks. They miss appointments constantly. They hurl false accusations at you or curse you out or yell at you or even physically attack you. One minute they love you, the next minute they hate you. They might be totally incoherent. They refuse to tell you important facts for no apparent reason. When they get better, it looks less like “they’re okay now” and more like “they are no longer going to the mental hospital once a month.” You don’t even get paid more for dealing with all this shit, because severely mentally ill people don’t have any money.
On the other hand, people who aren’t severely mentally ill are more likely to have money, and show up on time to appointments, and will tell you about what’s going on in their lives, and have fixable problems, and don’t physically attack you even a little bit.
So, obviously, a lot of therapists are going to look at this and go “…actually I would rather help the neurotypical people who are sad about their divorces and not the psychotic or personality-disordered people.” And so it is incredibly hard to get mental health care if you’re severely mentally ill.
2:
This is from years ago, but Dutch police trained eagles to take down drones:
3:
"the nicest place on the internet”. Made me smile involuntarily.
4:
In this episode of philosophy podcast this episode of philosophy podcast "Elucidations" , philosopher Miranda Fricker argues that contrary to a lot of current attitudes to communication, blaming people is actually often fine and productive. She acknowledges that it’s a problem when you blame someone disproportionately, or let blame build up over time into generalised resentment, but argues that usually when you express proportional blame in a timely manner about a specific thing, the other person can just acknowledge they did something wrong, or disagree and you can talk about it, and that actually that’s often an effective and productive way to get you feeling back on the same page. This interview blew my mind just a tiny bit, because I’m very anti-blame and she has maybe changed my mind about that? Or at least made me a lot more open to it not always being blanket bad.
5:
Another thing that had a big impact on me this last month was the post "Kicking an addiction to self-loathing" , in which Holly Elmore writes:
"Even though self-loathing feels awful-- indeed, it is the main source of suffering in my life most of the time-- in the moment, I am more afraid of not doing it than doing it.
[…] In the moment I realized I'd be scrambling just to get to my appointment very late, I saw a fork in the road ahead of me. For one of the first times I can recall, I felt like I could choose to go down my usual path of self-loathing and panic OR I could simply do all the same actions to get there quickly without feeling bad about myself. You would think not having to feel bad about yourself is the obvious choice, but the idea of not scourging myself was scary. Every step of the way-- texting that I'd be very late, getting ready, getting to the T stop, etc.-- I had to be brave and remind myself that I didn't have to spur myself along with self-hatred. Choosing not to feel abject panic and flat-out run to the T stop, even though I knew it would only save me about 30 seconds, was hard. Not ruminating over the situation on the T was difficult, even though it couldn't possibly have affected has fast the train went. I felt vulnerable, like the person I was meeting would see that I hadn't killed myself to get there as fast as possible and hold my insouciance in contempt.
Not pummeling myself made me feel sure that the blows would still come, just from someone else. They'd see how cavalier I was being after failing to be a decent human being and just let loose on me. I feel that I'm supposed to punish myself, that it undoes the damage I do by not being diligent or conscientious. To be a friend to myself when I fucked up felt like getting away with something bad.
Most of all, being kind to myself when I screwed up made me feel like I was settling for a flawed version of myself, making it real, saying it was okay for that to be the real me. Hating myself and punishing myself for my imperfections is a way of convincing myself that I'm better than I actually am, because I don't just let myself be a normal person-- whatever actually happened is an aberration from my "true," perfect self. Through some barely conscious, superstitious reasoning process, I believed that by abusing myself I was paying the price to expunge my record. If I'm not perfect, at least I persist in holding the stakes impossibly high! I'm still better than others because I don't let myself off the hook for being human. And that's the perverse reward I'm addicted to. […]
When self-loathing feels perversely safe and comforting, the cure is the courage to let go of that protective cover and embrace your perfectly imperfect self."
(see link for more)
6:
And a tweet from Holly that I relate to a LOT
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(I’ve just picked out a few tweets from this thread)
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10:
In "A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures" , Scott Alexander proposes a theory of four stages that subcultures and social movements go through as they start off ‘just for the love of it’, grow, get taken over by infighting, and then stabilise. (see link)
11:
In a reinforcement learning result that is super surprising and impressive to me, Laura Smith, Ilya Kostrikov, and Sergey Levine got a physical quadruped robot to learn to walk in under 20 minutes of training time — all training on the physical robot, no simulation, from scratch (though with a “reset”" function to immediately get the robot back on its feet each time it falls, to continue training). Training RL with a physical robot has traditionally been prohibitively time costly.
12:
In an old post I just read this month, "Privileging the Question" , Qiaochu Yuan writes:
Here are some political questions that seem to commonly get discussed in US media: should gay marriage be legal? Should Congress pass stricter gun control laws? Should immigration policy be tightened or relaxed?
These are all examples of what I'll call privileged questions (if there's an existing term for this, let me know): questions that someone has unjustifiably brought to your attention in the same way that a privileged hypothesis unjustifiably gets brought to your attention. The questions above are probably not the most important questions we could be answering right now […]
Why has the media privileged these questions? I'd guess that the media is incentivized to ask whatever questions will get them the most views. That's a very different goal from asking the most important questions, and is one reason to stop paying attention to the media.
The problem with privileged questions is that you only have so much attention to spare. Attention paid to a question that has been privileged funges against attention you could be paying to better questions. Even worse, it may not feel from the inside like anything is wrong: you can apply all of the epistemic rationality in the world to answering a question like "should Congress pass stricter gun control laws?" and never once ask yourself where that question came from and whether there are better questions you could be answering instead.
You can be a good critical thinker dilligently looking at balanced views on both sides of an issue, and never pause to ask yourself why this is the thing you’re spending your time looking at balanced views on, out of all the things in the world.
13:
In "When Giving People Money Doesn’t Help" , Zvi Mowshowitz writes about a recent randomized controlled trial on direct cash transfers, which gave $500 or $2000 (or $0 for the control group) to poor people in Chicago (n=5000 participants), no strings attached. The study very surprisingly found that getting the money didn’t have a positive impact on any of the outcomes they checked (a bunch of different objective and subjective things from savings to anxiety). Zvi speculates on why.
14:
In "Survey advice" , Katja Grace shares a bunch of neat things she’s learned about running surveys, such as :
If you ask people very similar questions in different sounding ways, you can get very different answers
15:
Not sure I agree with the premise of the problem, but a potentially fun solution nevertheless: In "I Want to Hold Your Hand" , Bryan Caplan claims that there’s a big problem with modern dating, that people often don’t know whether something is a date, or whether the other person is interested in them, and they can’t just ask because that would ruin things (that part’s what I’m skeptical about). So Bryan proposes:
This is a perennial problem, but given modern hypersensitivity, the shortage is now worse than ever. Classic moves like, “I’ll put my arm around her in the middle of the movie and see what happens” now seem foolhardy or creepy. How can long-suffering singles find love in this information desert?
I am convinced that I have a practical remedy. Not a solution, for there are no solutions here, but a great tactic nonetheless. I’m not in a position to try it myself, but I offer it to my single readers in the hope that they will take advantage of it. I offer a signal that is highly informative, yet even in today’s dating environment, is almost as safe as dying alone.
The signal: Always ask to hold hands on a first date.
How it works: Holding hands is the mildest, lowest-commitment form of romantic behavior. As long as you wait for an opportune time to ask, almost no one will condemn you for the request. If someone did condemn you, even their friends would minimize the incident: “He just asked to hold hands, right?”
At the same time, the act of hand-holding is almost free of ambiguity. At least in the U.S., mere friends virtually never hold hands. If you see two adults holding hands, they are ipso facto romantically connected.
The upshot: If a person accepts your offer to hold hands, this dramatically raises the odds that (a) you are currently on a date, and (b) are out of the Friend Zone already. Contrarily, if a person declines to hold your hand, however politely, this dramatically increases the odds that (a) you are not currently on a date, and (b) are permanently stuck in the Friend Zone. If they don’t even want to hold your hand, it was never meant to be.