The saying goes: all models are wrong, some models are useful. I don’t think existing psychiatric diagnosis is particularly accurate, but I think it’s the most useful thing we have right now. And I don’t think talking about how each condition is probably made up of many root causes is a particularly damaging objection to it. We should keep the likely heterogeneity in mind and pull it out when we need it, but we shouldn’t use that as an excuse to abandon the whole nosology.
Tag: psychology
Under the Weather
As psychiatrists and philosophers begin to define a pervasive mental health crisis triggered by climate change, they ask who is really sick: the individual or society?
Autism And Intelligence
Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. But studies show autistic people generally have lower intelligence than neurotypical controls, often much lower. What is going on?
Dopamine fasting
The name — dopamine fasting — is a bit of a misnomer. It’s more of a stimulation fast. The purpose is so that subsequent pleasures are all the more potent and meaningful. “Any kind of fasting exists on a spectrum,” Mr. Sinka said as he slowly moved through sun salutations, careful not to get his heart racing too much, already worried he was talking too much that morning.
Pleasure & Pain Log Scales
Based on: the characteristic distribution of neural activity, personal accounts of intense pleasure and pain, the way various pain scales have been described by their creators, and the results of a pilot study we conducted which ranks, rates, and compares the hedonic quality of extreme experiences, we suggest that the best way to interpret pleasure and pain scales is by thinking of them as logarithmic compressions of what is truly a long-tail. The most intense pains are orders of magnitude more awful than mild pains (and symmetrically for pleasure).
5-Star Mecca
Everything in Mecca Earns a 5-Star Review
We determined that the ratings for holy sites are so high because they primarily reflect the contributor’s spiritual experience—not their experience of more mundane, practical details like the crowds, the weather or souvenir sellers.
Emotional reasoning
People are often unmoved by dispassionate logic, peer-reviewed research and statistics, but in fact are swayed by ego, emotion, self-interest and identity. If we want our public discourse to succeed in changing attitudes, Gordon-Smith insists, we have to ditch our idealized, sterile picture of persuasion and be more sensitive to how people behave in real life. Gordon-Smith’s silence on what rationality requires of us – might seem like a shortcoming, but in the end it is strategic. She debunks easy answers while shrewdly adopting a position of intellectual humility. She thinks we are ignorant of rationality’s demands, and “very close to the edge of what we know how to talk about at all sensibly”. It is sometimes held that rationality defines us as human, a claim written into our species name, Homo sapiens. If this is right, it follows from Gordon-Smith’s witty, intelligent book that, like the people she profiles, we do not really know who, or even what, we are.
Everything is correlated
everything is correlated: “Can Psychological Traits Be Inferred From Spending? Evidence From Transaction Data”, Gladstone et al 2019 (specific items/personality trait correlations); “Behavioral Patterns in Smartphone Usage Predict Big 5 Personality Traits”, Stachl et al 2019
Chain Letter Evolution
Apocryphal letters claiming divine origin circulated for centuries in Europe. After 1900, shorter more secular letters appeared in the US that promised good luck if copies were distributed and bad luck if not. Billions of these “luck chain letters” circulated in the next 100 years. As they replicated through the decades, some accumulated copying errors, offhand comments, and calculated innovations that helped them prevail in the competition with other chain letters.
Positive creativity
people are more likely to maintain broader attention and solve problems when they’re in a positive mood. “The basic idea is that a positive mood loosens the grip of attention, so that stimuli and ideas that used to get filtered out can now have a greater impact on mental processing. Stress and anxiety have the opposite effect, narrowing attention, which can be good for focused analytic thinking—as long as you keep focus on the right information—but bad for broader creative thinking.”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 