Kevin Corcoran on Jeffrey Friedman on technocracy; Michael Tomasello on Social Cognition; Gurwinder Bhogal on individual cognition; Inquisitive Bird on mental disorders
> We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe.
This is why I am convinced of the importance of making students (both school and college) interact with the real world. A good physics lab course both grounds one's beliefs in this area and induces a bit of humility about one's own observations and conclusions. You relearn, at a hopefully more mature age than when you learned that fire hurts and bricks fall down, that reality exists and is not just all social constructionism and doxastic voluntarism. Or to take an example from a different area, which came up on Twitter last week, many key observations in biology made 100-150 years ago are now easy to repeat in a high school lab, for instance the existence of viruses (apparently a segment of anti-vaxxers does not believe in viruses). A lot of high school curriculum could be usefully replaced with such stuff. It has the additional advantages of being more concrete, hands-on and relatable than Algebra II or XIX century French and Russian novels, not to mention diversity studies. Many kids don't have the raw power of abstraction to do more than make the motions of learning calculus and most don't yet have the life experience to appreciate high literature, so they just tend to be turned off the subject. What if instead they were brought to appreciate Feynman's conclusion of the Challenger disaster report - "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"?
The best technocrats in the world are in Singapore. And the technocrats in Singapore appear to understand that limits of their knowledge in many ways. They don't over-regulate the economy for instance. They understand the importance of markets. For a country that exercises massive cultural control, they are OK with essentially cordoning off sections of the city to be regulated by the individual ethnicities as they see fit, like a "special cultural zone".
At the same time, we are talking about a state that owns nearly all the real estate on the island, assigns living space by race, forcibly conscripts people for two years of their lives, has a universal healthcare system with state regulated hospitals, has draconian social regulations, has extremely tight immigration control, etc. And all of it works really well!
I'm not saying that model can be exported, but at the end of the day if some entity is going to have power over others (the party, the leader, the democratic mob, the committee of midwits, the elite technocrat) they are either going to have a healthy respect for markets, choice, and the information problem or not.
If there are people who can't succeed no matter what their willpower its a blow to Bryan's philosophy. It's still a blow even if that number is much smaller than some people claim.
1 Isn't that definition of a technocrat a lot like saying all libertarians are anarchists?
2 I'd argue some things not categorized as disorders really are so, even if not nearly as debilitating as schizophrenia or substance abuse. Makes me curious what conditions labeled as disorders you think aren't so.
Michael Tomasello's 2008 book *Origins of Human Communication* is highly recommended. One of the best expositions on why language evolved and, in particular, why it has the structure it does.
"schizophrenia, for example, is best regarded as a real mental disorder."
My sister has been institutionalized, briefly, twice and has been diagnosed as being bi-polar. Some of her presentation doesn't necessarily fit neatly into a classic bi-polar diagnoses and demonstrates something that seems more like a schizoaffective disorder. The medication they would give her seem to be the same regardless and so the distinction between the two differing diagnoses is kind of immaterial. I have since learned from a somewhat shallow reading that the genes identified with schizophrenia, bi-polar, and autism have a pretty large amount of overlap.
It is unclear with our current understanding how much of each individual personality disorder, somewhat arbitrarily separate in classification from the mental illnesses listed above, are accounted for by genetics as well. At some point regardless of societal wealth we have to respond to things beyond an individual's control and say "sorry them's the genetic breaks," so on some level Szasz was correct and it is all where we draw the lines. Extending this all into the realm of non-mental issues contingent on genetics do we also make accommodations for height, eye color, hair color, skin color. It strikes me that the iron law of sometimes it is this way and sometimes that way is incredibly appropriate and on some dimensions some people are getting too much accommodation and looking at certain parts of California some people are being given too much agency to their and everyone else's detriment.
I highly recommend Liah Greenfeld's Mind, Modernity, and Madness on functional mental illness (including depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia). She definitely regards them as real, but rooted in the anomie of modern socity (she is a neo-Durkheimian). Thus the recent adolescent mental health crisis, as documented by Haidt and Twenge, is simply an acceleration of a process that has been gradually accelerating for centuries, but now moving more rapidly. She sees identity formation in modernity as something that we need to address, ideally through education, as she sees malformed identities as the root cause of all of these.
None of this is contradicted by the fact that there are genetic correlates; there are also genetic correlates for Type 2 diabetes, which is clearly also triggered by lifestyle choices (e.g. insulin resistence resulting from sugar consumption among those who are genetically predisposed).
Thus, as with Type 2 diabetes, functional mental illnesses may be seen as a form of evolutionary mismatch. In order to avoid an ongoing explosion in these conditions, we need to address the root causes.
"Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being."
This.
For most people, the goal of most intelligence, most of the time, is to increase their status and well-being. (Perhaps especially with their spouse, daily?)
In wider society, “Fashionably Irrational Beliefs” (FIBs) {<< very cute.}
Most Fantasy Intellectuals supported Biden over Trump - and are almost all still rationalizing why that was the smarter choice. [I'm really glad Arnold was against both, so only half wrong.]
Most even now would claim, if pressed, that censoring the truth about Hunter Biden's laptop was "not rigging the election."
Oh well. Biden is President.
My way of trying to avoid being too biased is to attempt thought experiment results that would falsify my predications.
So, on drug legalization, I support legal with limited taxation and higher regulation. But if such legalization resulted in "much higher" drug addiction, and far less employment due to addiction problems, I'd favor less legalization (or more regulation?).
Somewhere in the 10-30% higher. Then when I disagree with somebody, we can agree that we disagree on likely results of a policy. We both want low addiction and low crime and low criminal punishment for peaceful (& responsible?) drug use.
Our society should be emphasizing trade-offs more. Including in discussions of intelligence and biases.
The statement: "To be a technocrat is to deny that a problem is too complex for you to understand ..." is redefining the word "technocrat" (which has the implication of mathematical knowledge) into a straw man. Mathematics has proved that some statements can't be proved. Mathematics also shows that some well defined problems can be effectively unsolvable (even simple sounding problems like N bodies subject to gravity for all N>2). To be a real "technocrat" you must be literate in Mathematics and it appears that the person creating this statement may not understand the language of math.
If I use the word "socialist" or "bureaucrat" instead of "technocrat" the statements he made could be valid.
Re: The correlation between (a) homelessness and (b) schizophrenia and/or substance abuse.
That correlation doesn't establish that schizophrenia and substance abuse are "real" mental disorders (a species of medical disease?).
Empirical questions arise.
1) What fraction of persons who present schizophrenia and/or substance abuse aren't homeless?
2) Can persons who present schizophrenia and/or substance abuse change their behavior if they face what they deem cogent incentives? (Bryan Caplan calls this "the gun to the head" test.)
3) Among homeless persons, do there exist somewhat orderly communities?
On the one hand, homelessness in a rich society is a puzzle. On the other hand, contemporary society is so remote from hunter-gather society (our foundation in evolutionary psychology), contemporary culture is so complex, and technology shock (e.g., highly potent mind drugs) is so disruptive, that it comes as no surprise that a fraction of people can't or won't fit in.
An alternative approach—if one can establish trust—might ask homeless persons why they don't get with the program. There might be a wide range of answers. 'I'm my own boss.' 'I can't get along with mainstream people.' 'Mainstream people make me angry.' 'Mainstream people make me feel worthless.' 'I always want to escape.' 'It's too hard.' 'People think I'm crazy when I have urgent thoughts.' 'I made some bad choices and can't turn it around.' 'I can't establish trust.' And so on and so forth.
Thomas Szasz wrote, "The business of psychiatry is to provide society with excuses disguised as diagnoses, and with coercions justified as treatments.”—The Untamed Tongue (1990), p. 178
I share Arnold's view that, although Szasz surely is onto something, nonetheless some psychiatric diagnoses might be onto real mental illness. I'm agnostic about which "labels" identify real illness or disease. In any case, I doubt homelessness is a clear-cut marker.
On your final point; some mental disorders are 'situational.' That is, they are maladaptive under certain material or social conditions but bear no cost or are helpful under others. Hoarding is a great example; when material goods are scarce and space is effectively unlimited, creative reuse in the distant future makes sense as a household economic strategy. So is that mental disorder socially constructed? In so much as the real estate market is a product of society... and certain people seemingly can't adapt, or to varying degrees maintain a clean and workable home. If society is maladaptive for most people, then we blame the system (or should).
> We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe.
This is why I am convinced of the importance of making students (both school and college) interact with the real world. A good physics lab course both grounds one's beliefs in this area and induces a bit of humility about one's own observations and conclusions. You relearn, at a hopefully more mature age than when you learned that fire hurts and bricks fall down, that reality exists and is not just all social constructionism and doxastic voluntarism. Or to take an example from a different area, which came up on Twitter last week, many key observations in biology made 100-150 years ago are now easy to repeat in a high school lab, for instance the existence of viruses (apparently a segment of anti-vaxxers does not believe in viruses). A lot of high school curriculum could be usefully replaced with such stuff. It has the additional advantages of being more concrete, hands-on and relatable than Algebra II or XIX century French and Russian novels, not to mention diversity studies. Many kids don't have the raw power of abstraction to do more than make the motions of learning calculus and most don't yet have the life experience to appreciate high literature, so they just tend to be turned off the subject. What if instead they were brought to appreciate Feynman's conclusion of the Challenger disaster report - "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"?
The best technocrats in the world are in Singapore. And the technocrats in Singapore appear to understand that limits of their knowledge in many ways. They don't over-regulate the economy for instance. They understand the importance of markets. For a country that exercises massive cultural control, they are OK with essentially cordoning off sections of the city to be regulated by the individual ethnicities as they see fit, like a "special cultural zone".
At the same time, we are talking about a state that owns nearly all the real estate on the island, assigns living space by race, forcibly conscripts people for two years of their lives, has a universal healthcare system with state regulated hospitals, has draconian social regulations, has extremely tight immigration control, etc. And all of it works really well!
I'm not saying that model can be exported, but at the end of the day if some entity is going to have power over others (the party, the leader, the democratic mob, the committee of midwits, the elite technocrat) they are either going to have a healthy respect for markets, choice, and the information problem or not.
If there are people who can't succeed no matter what their willpower its a blow to Bryan's philosophy. It's still a blow even if that number is much smaller than some people claim.
1 Isn't that definition of a technocrat a lot like saying all libertarians are anarchists?
2 I'd argue some things not categorized as disorders really are so, even if not nearly as debilitating as schizophrenia or substance abuse. Makes me curious what conditions labeled as disorders you think aren't so.
Michael Tomasello's 2008 book *Origins of Human Communication* is highly recommended. One of the best expositions on why language evolved and, in particular, why it has the structure it does.
"schizophrenia, for example, is best regarded as a real mental disorder."
My sister has been institutionalized, briefly, twice and has been diagnosed as being bi-polar. Some of her presentation doesn't necessarily fit neatly into a classic bi-polar diagnoses and demonstrates something that seems more like a schizoaffective disorder. The medication they would give her seem to be the same regardless and so the distinction between the two differing diagnoses is kind of immaterial. I have since learned from a somewhat shallow reading that the genes identified with schizophrenia, bi-polar, and autism have a pretty large amount of overlap.
It is unclear with our current understanding how much of each individual personality disorder, somewhat arbitrarily separate in classification from the mental illnesses listed above, are accounted for by genetics as well. At some point regardless of societal wealth we have to respond to things beyond an individual's control and say "sorry them's the genetic breaks," so on some level Szasz was correct and it is all where we draw the lines. Extending this all into the realm of non-mental issues contingent on genetics do we also make accommodations for height, eye color, hair color, skin color. It strikes me that the iron law of sometimes it is this way and sometimes that way is incredibly appropriate and on some dimensions some people are getting too much accommodation and looking at certain parts of California some people are being given too much agency to their and everyone else's detriment.
I highly recommend Liah Greenfeld's Mind, Modernity, and Madness on functional mental illness (including depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia). She definitely regards them as real, but rooted in the anomie of modern socity (she is a neo-Durkheimian). Thus the recent adolescent mental health crisis, as documented by Haidt and Twenge, is simply an acceleration of a process that has been gradually accelerating for centuries, but now moving more rapidly. She sees identity formation in modernity as something that we need to address, ideally through education, as she sees malformed identities as the root cause of all of these.
None of this is contradicted by the fact that there are genetic correlates; there are also genetic correlates for Type 2 diabetes, which is clearly also triggered by lifestyle choices (e.g. insulin resistence resulting from sugar consumption among those who are genetically predisposed).
Thus, as with Type 2 diabetes, functional mental illnesses may be seen as a form of evolutionary mismatch. In order to avoid an ongoing explosion in these conditions, we need to address the root causes.
For more see here,
https://flowidealism.medium.com/evolutionary-mismatch-as-a-causal-factor-in-adolescent-dysfunction-and-mental-illness-d235cc85584
"Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being."
This.
For most people, the goal of most intelligence, most of the time, is to increase their status and well-being. (Perhaps especially with their spouse, daily?)
In wider society, “Fashionably Irrational Beliefs” (FIBs) {<< very cute.}
Most Fantasy Intellectuals supported Biden over Trump - and are almost all still rationalizing why that was the smarter choice. [I'm really glad Arnold was against both, so only half wrong.]
Most even now would claim, if pressed, that censoring the truth about Hunter Biden's laptop was "not rigging the election."
Oh well. Biden is President.
My way of trying to avoid being too biased is to attempt thought experiment results that would falsify my predications.
So, on drug legalization, I support legal with limited taxation and higher regulation. But if such legalization resulted in "much higher" drug addiction, and far less employment due to addiction problems, I'd favor less legalization (or more regulation?).
Somewhere in the 10-30% higher. Then when I disagree with somebody, we can agree that we disagree on likely results of a policy. We both want low addiction and low crime and low criminal punishment for peaceful (& responsible?) drug use.
Our society should be emphasizing trade-offs more. Including in discussions of intelligence and biases.
The statement: "To be a technocrat is to deny that a problem is too complex for you to understand ..." is redefining the word "technocrat" (which has the implication of mathematical knowledge) into a straw man. Mathematics has proved that some statements can't be proved. Mathematics also shows that some well defined problems can be effectively unsolvable (even simple sounding problems like N bodies subject to gravity for all N>2). To be a real "technocrat" you must be literate in Mathematics and it appears that the person creating this statement may not understand the language of math.
If I use the word "socialist" or "bureaucrat" instead of "technocrat" the statements he made could be valid.
Re: The correlation between (a) homelessness and (b) schizophrenia and/or substance abuse.
That correlation doesn't establish that schizophrenia and substance abuse are "real" mental disorders (a species of medical disease?).
Empirical questions arise.
1) What fraction of persons who present schizophrenia and/or substance abuse aren't homeless?
2) Can persons who present schizophrenia and/or substance abuse change their behavior if they face what they deem cogent incentives? (Bryan Caplan calls this "the gun to the head" test.)
3) Among homeless persons, do there exist somewhat orderly communities?
On the one hand, homelessness in a rich society is a puzzle. On the other hand, contemporary society is so remote from hunter-gather society (our foundation in evolutionary psychology), contemporary culture is so complex, and technology shock (e.g., highly potent mind drugs) is so disruptive, that it comes as no surprise that a fraction of people can't or won't fit in.
An alternative approach—if one can establish trust—might ask homeless persons why they don't get with the program. There might be a wide range of answers. 'I'm my own boss.' 'I can't get along with mainstream people.' 'Mainstream people make me angry.' 'Mainstream people make me feel worthless.' 'I always want to escape.' 'It's too hard.' 'People think I'm crazy when I have urgent thoughts.' 'I made some bad choices and can't turn it around.' 'I can't establish trust.' And so on and so forth.
Thomas Szasz wrote, "The business of psychiatry is to provide society with excuses disguised as diagnoses, and with coercions justified as treatments.”—The Untamed Tongue (1990), p. 178
I share Arnold's view that, although Szasz surely is onto something, nonetheless some psychiatric diagnoses might be onto real mental illness. I'm agnostic about which "labels" identify real illness or disease. In any case, I doubt homelessness is a clear-cut marker.
I really enjoyed Gurwinder’s post, and am reminded of a great quote by a somewhat famous person: “Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.”
On your final point; some mental disorders are 'situational.' That is, they are maladaptive under certain material or social conditions but bear no cost or are helpful under others. Hoarding is a great example; when material goods are scarce and space is effectively unlimited, creative reuse in the distant future makes sense as a household economic strategy. So is that mental disorder socially constructed? In so much as the real estate market is a product of society... and certain people seemingly can't adapt, or to varying degrees maintain a clean and workable home. If society is maladaptive for most people, then we blame the system (or should).