Skip to content

Mistakes — Going on Tilt

09-Feb-10

There’s something in Poker called “going on tilt.”

It’s what people do when they they suffer a serious loss, particular one that was unlikely given the odds. They will start to play much more aggressively, get sloppy, make mistakes, take silly risks, etc.

This is irrational, of course: the loss suffered is a sunk cost. While losing money can legitimately effect one’s play style, as one has to take into account the ratio of one’s chips to the minimum bet in poker in order to make proper betting decisions, the current ratio is all that matters — past losses shouldn’t factor into one’s play in any sort of psychological way.

People have this problem with more than Poker. A past problem in one area frequently either causes irrationalities in dealing with problems in that same area, or leaks into others.

Maybe someone decides that they wasted time and money going to school, so they get depressed and have trouble motivating themselves to find a job.

Maybe someone decides they’ve been financially irresponsible, and feel guilty about it, but continue to act irresponsibly because they feel like they’ve made such a mess of things it doesn’t matter anymore.

Maybe someone has acted meanly to their child, and decides that while maybe there’s better ways to act, the damage has already been done and there’s no point.

The problem with all of these is they treat past mistakes as if they matter. Of course, they matter in a certain sense — they can somewhat restrict the available resources and opportunities one has in the present, and they can also be learning opportunities.

But they’re hardly worth getting upset about. In fact, getting upset is counterproductive. Even if one thinks one has made unusually poor decisions, it’s far more productive to spend time figuring out how to avoid making more mistakes in the future, then it is to dwell on past ones.

Once one has identified something as a mistake, one has ceased to be the person who thinks making that mistake is ok. That is significant. One may continue having trouble acting consistently with the theory that one should avoid making that mistake (this happens a lot with overeating, drug abuse, alcohol, smoking, finances) but the acknowledgment of the mistake itself represents a serious development of moral knowledge. Instead of beating oneself up for past errors, one should spend one’s time creatively thinking up how to develop better habits and live up to one’s newly identified moral ideal.

Fantasies and Habits of Mind

25-Jan-10

Lots of people
1) do things in computer role-playing games they wouldn’t actually do, for moral reasons (example: murdering a village full of innocents with magical fire)
2) do things in sexual fantasies they wouldn’t actually do, for moral reasons (example: asserting control over another human being through physical violence)
3) imagine things in their daily lives they wouldn’t actually do (example: punching a cashier in the face for being obnoxious)

Some of these might actually be morally problematic, depending on the reason why they seem interesting.

Murdering a village full of innocents in an RPG might make getting money for better armor easier. If done for this utilitarian purpose, it seems fine, as the villagers aren’t actually people.
However, if it is done for the “thrill” of hurting things which seem similar to people, it is bad. It is not bad because it makes you more likely to commit murderous acts, necessarily (a silly inference often made by mainstream TV reporting on video games), but because it encourages a theory that says being a terrifying badass with the capacity to hurt people is a good/fun thing, which has implications for other areas.

Analogous might be dealing with insects. If you kill an insect for the utilitarian reason of its annoyance, there’s not an issue — insects are annoying and have no moral status. However, if you kill it and enjoy it because you enjoy imagining it as a sort of anthropomorphized creature upon whom you are inflicting great suffering … well, that’s pretty fucked up. (Additionally, there’s the possibility of testing out theories that are not strictly utilitarian nor bad that would be ok — like dissection)

Similarly, with sex stuff, there are similar issues raised. People should want to engage in sex with people who are confident, self-assured, assertive, thoughtful, calm, and happy, because that is the natural disposition of a healthy, productive human being. If you want to be a plaything, or have a plaything, there is some theory in your mind which deserves further investigation. These theories are not consequence-free, and can often cause you to act in non-autonomy-respecting or non-assertive ways (depending on which side you fall on) in other areas of your life, or at least make it seem like a good idea to do that. You’re encouraging a theory / developing a habit of mind which associates being dominant or submissive with extreme happiness and pleasure. It’s unsurprising that this might prove problematic.

While people shouldn’t repress their sexual desires (conservative/traditional morality is bad in this sense), neither should they treat all desires as equivalent morally (modern/progressive/liberal morality is bad in this sense). If one has certain desires, like being in a dominant role relative to other human beings, then one should question why this is the case, for the reasons discussed above. Sometimes, engaging in the sex act itself (or in the playing of an RPG in order to test out theories about hurting NPC villagers, as in the above example) can be useful in figuring out what is appealing about something — the reasons why things are appealing are difficult to figure out, and direct emotional experience can be one helpful avenue. But one has to actually subject one’s theories to criticism, and not fall into the pitfall of avoiding criticism due to the irrational fear that one is fundamentally “bad” because one’s values, sexual or otherwise, may have some problems.

The last example is likely the most common. Most have experienced imaginary rage-violence at some perceived slight of social niceness. And again, the overwhelming majority will never actually engage in violence as a result of such fantasy. But what they will do is encourage the theory, which is itself giving rise to the fantasy in the first place and can be further entrenched by emotional reinforcement and repetition, that imaginary rage-induced-violence is a useful coping device for stress. This is fundamentally flawed — one should care less about social slights, and develop better theories for dealing with emotions.

Emotional Nazis (or Bad Emotions and the Growth of Knowledge)

18-Jan-10

A common argument is that feeling bad is a warning sign of moral error, without which you might not be aware something is wrong. This is often described as a “twinge of conscience” –

Imagine two individuals. One is a Dedicated Nazi, who is sure Jews are vermin. The other is a Conflicted Nazi, who has some doubts.

Suppose the Dedicated Nazi experiences some negative emotions — maybe he feels guilty about not killing enough Jews. In thinking about this, he realizes that he has a slight aversion to blood which is hindering his jew-murdering. His guilt helps him see this conflict in his value system, and his values cause him to work towards the elimination of the conflict, and thus, greater and more efficient immorality. Some might argue that a different result might occur — perhaps the aversion to blood triggers a profound reflection on the value of human life and the evils of being a Nazi. This might occur. But the emotions themselves don’t really have a role other than pointing out the existence of a conflict — whether the end result is an adoption of better moral values, worse ones, or just a continuance of the conflicted state is entirely dependent on the moral ideas the person has.

Suppose the Conflicted Nazi also has an aversion to blood. He has better ideas, so in his thinking about the issue, he’s more likely to take seriously the conjecture that his aversion to blood is somehow connected to the inhumane treatment of Jews under the Nazi regime. Maybe he takes this idea seriously. “Ah-ha,” you say, “guilt has led someone to moral truth.” Maybe. Or maybe there is some other overriding idea with an emotional manifestation — guilt at the thought of disappointing his proud Nazi parents, or of failing the State, or whatever — that causes the Nazi to suppress his thoughts and try and be more Dedicated. With practice, he succeeds. This is possible as well. In either case, guilt again has merely pointed out the conflict in values; it’s the quality of ideas and the courageous dedication to rationality that decide the battle for the person’s soul.

From this it seems that guilt is unproductive and useless. At best, it’s like a radar system that doesn’t distinguish between friendly and enemy craft — it flags where interesting stuff might be, but doesn’t help you at all in figuring out what to do with it.

Being A Rich Man Triggers an Evolutionarily-Developed Sexual Response In Woman, Say Scientists

28-Dec-09

Came across this article a while ago, which claims that women have more orgasms if partners are wealthier according to an analysis they did of a survey.

The link between enjoyment of sex and partner’s wealth was statistically significant even when they took into account other factors such as age, education, happiness, the length of relationship and health. The scientists say the findings could be explained by bias in the study – that women who have frequent orgasms tend to overestimate their partner’s income, or that women with ‘high powered’ partners exaggerate how much they enjoy sex. ‘While we cannot rule out reporting bias, we note that the interviews took place away from the respondents’ home, without their partner present and with the respondents able to input their responses directly into the computer if they so wished,’ Dr Pollet said. It is also possible that women who are highly susceptible to orgasms select partners who are wealthy, he said. He added: ‘The third interpretation is that more desirable mates cause women to experience more orgasms,’ he said. If this is true, a woman’s ‘capacity for orgasm’ could have evolved to help her discriminate between males on the basis of their quality, he added. The link between enjoyment of sex and wealth has also been found in studies in Germany and America. Evolutionary biologists argue that every aspect of sex – from courtship to the quality of orgasms – is influenced by millions of years of evolution. Although many people find the idea that women enjoy sex more with rich partners offensive, some biologists argue that the instinct makes evolutionary sense. Women have to invest so much time and personal risk into each baby, it is crucial that they get the most successful and healthy partner so they can to improve the chances of their own DNA being passed on. A man, in contrast, can father hundreds, or even thousands, of babies in a lifetime and so invests less in each child. That means they do not have to be so choosy about whether their partner is socially successful. The result of this battle of the sexes is that women are more influenced by the social status, intelligence, quick wits and success of a partner than men are, scientists argue. Wealth is usually an obvious indicator of success.

Question: suppose I demonstrate that a woman exists who thinks anyone who “hoards excess wealth” is immoral, and finds sex with them repulsive. Does this refute a theory of biologically-driven sexual attraction which (somehow?) discriminates for wealth, while still being compatible with a theory that explains sexual attraction through memes? If not, why?

Another question: how would the hypothesized “instinct” even work? When one is rich, does one emit a pheromone of some kind?

The War with Japan

22-Dec-09

Lots of people say aspects of the war with Japan in WW2 were immoral.

Issues they raise include:

1. The United States provoked the attack.

2. The United States knew about the attack but didn’t take defensive actions in order to maximize casualties and civilian response.

3. The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was immoral because killing innocent civilians is wrong.

Provocation

Let’s start with the first reason. Many, including those on the left and libertarians, say that Roosevelt basically provoked the Japanese into war by cutting them off from necessary resources. Here’s an explanation of the argument by a non-interventionist libertarian:

the Roosevelt administration, while curtly dismissing Japanese diplomatic overtures to harmonize relations, imposed a series of increasingly stringent economic sanctions on Japan. In 1939 the United States terminated the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. “On July 2, 1940, Roosevelt signed the Export Control Act, authorizing the President to license or prohibit the export of essential defense materials.” Under this authority, “[o]n July 31, exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants and No. 1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap were restricted.” Next, in a move aimed at Japan, Roosevelt slapped an embargo, effective October 16, “on all exports of scrap iron and steel to destinations other than Britain and the nations of the Western Hemisphere.” Finally, on July 26, 1941, Roosevelt “froze Japanese assets in the United States, thus bringing commercial relations between the nations to an effective end. One week later Roosevelt embargoed the export of such grades of oil as still were in commercial flow to Japan.” The British and the Dutch followed suit, embargoing exports to Japan from their colonies in southeast Asia.

Roosevelt and his subordinates knew they were putting Japan in an untenable position and that the Japanese government might well try to escape the stranglehold by going to war. Having broken the Japanese diplomatic code, the Americans knew, among many other things, what Foreign Minister Teijiro Toyoda had communicated to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura on July 31: “Commercial and economic relations between Japan and third countries, led by England and the United States, are gradually becoming so horribly strained that we cannot endure it much longer. Consequently, our Empire, to save its very life, must take measures to secure the raw materials of the South Seas.”

So, through the force of economic power, the US and UK were able to threaten to grind Japan’s warmongering capacity to a halt — a warmongering capacity which had thus far inflicted brutal oppression on the Korean and Chinese peoples in order to serve the interests of Japanese imperial expansion — and a warmongering capacity in a nation moving resolutely towards cooperation with the Third Reich.

Also, are we to surmise that those who critique the morality of US actions towards Japan think that military attack is an appropriate response to concerted efforts at economic coercion? Somehow I doubt that they would have supported a US-led invasion of the middle east in response to the OPEC embargo in the 1970’s.

Letting It Happen

The article continues:

Because American cryptographers had also broken the Japanese naval code, the leaders in Washington knew as well that Japan’s “measures” would include an attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet they withheld this critical information from the commanders in Hawaii, who might have headed off the attack or prepared themselves to defend against it. That Roosevelt and his chieftains did not ring the tocsin makes perfect sense: after all, the impending attack constituted precisely what they had been seeking for a long time. As Stimson confided to his diary after a meeting of the war cabinet on November 25, “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” After the attack, Stimson confessed that “my first feeling was of relief … that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people.


A NYTimes article on Day of Deceit, a major book amongst the Roosevelt knew crowd, points out that:

Mr. Stinnett’s strongest and most disturbing argument relates to one of the standard explanations for Japan’s success in keeping the impending Pearl Harbor attack a secret: namely that the aircraft carrier task force that unleashed it maintained strict radio silence for the entire three weeks leading up to Dec. 7 and thus avoided detection. In truth, Mr. Stinnett writes, the Japanese continuously broke radio silence even as the Americans, using radio direction finding techniques, were able to follow the Japanese fleet as it made its way toward Hawaii.
Among the Japanese who made radio broadcasts were Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Imperial Navy, and Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo, commander of the leading element in the Japanese Pearl Harbor strike force. Mr. Stinnett writes that their messages were intercepted, deciphered and provided to Washington by a coded transmission procedure known as TESTM. Roosevelt, Mr. Stinnett says, would have been provided the TESTM documents, but they were not given to Kimmel or Short.

It is possible that Mr. Stinnett might be right about this; certainly the material he has unearthed ought to be reviewed by other historians. Yet the mere existence of intelligence does not prove that that intelligence made its way into the proper hands or that it would have been speedily and correctly interpreted.
Gaddis Smith, the Yale University historian, remarks in this connection on the failure to protect the Philippines against Japanese attack, even though there was a great deal of information indicating that such an attack was coming. Nobody, not even Mr. Stinnett, believes that there was any intentional withholding of information from the American commander in the Philippines, Douglas MacArthur. The information available was for some reason just not put to use.

In her 1962 book, ”Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision,” the historian Roberta Wohlstetter used the word static to identify the confusion, the inconsistencies, the overall uncertainty that affected intelligence gathering before the war. While Mr. Stinnett assumes that most information that now seems important would have gotten speedy attention at the time, the Wohlstetter view is that there was a great avalanche of such evidence, thousands of documents every day, and that the understaffed and overworked intelligence bureaus may simply not have interpreted it correctly at the time.

This article was written in 1999, before 9/11, but its point is applicable to that situation as well. A common problem which plagues many individual’s historical analyses is to look with the benefit of hindsight and see “clearly” what must have seemed at the time a messy and confusing morass of intelligence — people suppose that the implications of all intelligence will be immediately self-evident, and then simultaneously imagine that there’s no bureaucratic friction as to the sharing of this information up the informational hierarchy. Then, when people fail to act according to this model, a conspiracy is born!
To sum up, the best that Stinnett has proven is that some intelligence existed as to the Japanese attack existed. This is hardly damning.

Killing Innocents

Finally, there’s the issue of the nukes. Either we were going to take the Japanese home islands by force of arms, force a total surrender through some other means, or negotiate a peace treaty while not bringing about significant social change in a militaristic imperial society that had imposed its will by brute force on much of Asia and had directly attacked us.

The third would have been extremely perverse — leaving a hostile, fascistic society simmering after total defeat is not a good strategy for building a better world.

The first was considered. The Army anticipated so many casualties from what was codenamed Operation Downfall, that they manufactured 500,000 Purple Heart Awards — they still haven’t used them all up. And depending on how vigorous the defense of the Japanese home islands was, the casualties on the Japanese side, including civilians, could have run into the millions. It’s a counterfactual scenario, so there is of course no way to really know — but it seems quite likely that significantly more than the 100,000+ plus Japanese that died immediately (or the additional 100,000 that died as a result of the lingering effects of atomic bombs) would have died had we invaded the home islands. That’s not even including the Americans who would have died.

Honestly, the moral blame should be assigned to the Japanese leadership for not surrendering when the writing was on the wall. Some of the reasons they were holding out included maintaining the Imperial Throne, trying to dodge serious war crimes tribunals, and trying to avoid an occupation. Perhaps they misjudged the West’s fortitude, but they were certainly on the hook for the consequences of that misjudgment for their civilian populace, since they were the initial aggressors.

Banks, Lending, and Pay-caps, oh my!

18-Dec-09

Several banks are repaying their government bailout money, partially so they don’t have to abide by executive pay limits which they say reduces their competitiveness. The President is telling banks that having benefited from the help of U.S. taxpayers, they have to lend more.

Article in pertinent part:

President Obama told some of the nation’s top bankers Monday that they need to explore “every responsible way” to make more loans.

BARACK OBAMA: “America’s banks received extraordinary assistance from American taxpayers to rebuild their industry. And now that they’re back on their feet, we expect extraordinary commitment from them to help rebuild the economy.”

Earlier, he criticized what he called “fat-cat bankers on Wall Street.”

Major banks have been doing well since the worst of the financial crisis shook Wall Street more than a year ago. Banks including Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo have recently announced plans to repay government rescue money.

First, does the President think he knows more about the optimal rate of lending then the banks? His statement that they need to explore “every responsible way” to make more loans suggests this interpretation. As profit-making enterprises, wouldn’t we assume that they were already doing this, and that the current diminution in lending is merely the most “responsible” reaction to a time of great economic uncertainty? If Obama believes he has a better handle on the responsible rate of lending than the banks, that would be pretty extraordinary arrogance, considering the example of the massive, systematic failure to ascertain the appropriate rate of lending in the housing market by pretty much every market actor in the past few years. Banks, consumers, and investors failed to adequately gauge the risk of home lending for the better part of a decade — obviously, this indicates that accurate risk assessments of lending are an easy problem which the President should be able to do better than everybody! Obama would hardly be the first political leader who thinks he is smarter than and can do better than every market actor combined, of course. It is still disturbing.

On the other hand, perhaps he is not that arrogant, and just sees the banks as an extension of social welfare policy, which should engage in certain lending practices without worrying about whether they are optimally profitable. Discussing banks as having an extraordinary commitment to help rebuild the economy would cut towards this interpretation. Banks have no such commitments — they have a commitment to profit. Perhaps the President thinks accepting the bailout money has imposed a moral obligation on the banks where one did not necessarily exist before, or enhanced the moral weight of a pre-existing obligation. Note to private enterprises: this is precisely the hazard of accepting government assistance. Of course, if the government expected a certain level of lending activity as part of the TARP loan “bargain,” it should have put that in the initial terms, rather than trying to effect a post-hoc bargain via altruistic moral pressure.

Finally, by tying the restrictions on CEO pay to the companies’ outstanding TARP loan obligations, the government made this result pretty inevitable. Once the government establishes that it will back up banks using taxpayer money, it makes those banks a much less risky asset, both by the actual present-moment transfer of wealth and by establishing a bad precedent for the future (in the form of a market expectation that if anything goes really bad, the government will come in and rescue).

As a result of this decrease in risk, the banks will have a much easier time raising capital in the private market. Any restrictions imposed by the terms of the initial government assistance itself, which are conditioned on having outstanding loan obligations to the government, can be gotten around by simply selling what is equity in a now very secure enterprise. This is what they are now doing. To do otherwise would be foolish. To expect otherwise would be to expect banks to act against their interests. To avoid this outcome, the solution is to either draft better regulations (for instance, making the executive compensation limits a permanent or long-lasting condition of accepting the loan initially, which endures even after repayment) or, and this would be my solution, simply stop meddling in the market to begin with. But whether you subscribe to the idea of government regulation or not, it’s clearly not the banks fault that the government can’t see 90 seconds into the future in drafting their market-meddling regulations.

Things to Give Thanks For: Awesome Quotes from Presidents and Nice Youtube Videos

27-Nov-09

Someone made a John Galt Speaking youtube series. He stopped in the middle and is going back to do it again. This is the last video from the first series.
Also, I came across this quote today and really liked it:

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.

Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.

Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.

Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.

Persistence and determination are omnipotent.

The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

–Calvin Coolidge

Rand and Hickman

26-Nov-09

Update 11/28 : A reader made several relevant points.

1. It’s a dangerous game whenever one starts making inferences from unpublished notes. Clear communication of ideas is incredibly difficult even when one is putting in the effort to make something publishable and generally accessible. In private notes, one’s only audience is oneself — as such, one may write in a shorthand manner which may have a very different meaning when read by somebody else.

2. These quotations were selected by the author for being the most damning that could be found, and are pretty ambiguous (as I pointed out in the discussion below). They’re especially ambiguous in light of point one.

3. I failed to challenge sufficiently the framing of the author’s discussion — this whole frame of whether or not Rand discarded the “Nietzscheanism’” of her youth actually reveals some biases and false assumptions of the author.

Arguably (and this is my analysis now, building off the reader’s comment), the point of contention is *whether* Rand’s philosophy is a faux, watery Nietzscheanism (the mask allegedly slipping off in the quotes discussed below) or something altogether different which was created by someone who happened to have a passing interest in Nietzsche. By not challenging the author’s framing, I conceded too much.

Thanks reader!

Original article follows:

This article was brought to my attention…

In her journal circa 1928 Rand quoted the statement, “What is good for me is right,” a credo attributed to a prominent figure of the day, William Edward Hickman. Her response was enthusiastic. “The best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I have heard,” she exulted.
At the time, she was planning a novel that was to be titled The Little Street, the projected hero of which was named Danny Renahan. According to Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled Renahan – intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man – after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, “is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness — [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people … Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.” (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)
“A wonderful, free, light consciousness” born of the utter absence of any understanding of “the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people.” Obviously, Ayn Rand was most favorably impressed with Mr. Hickman. He was, at least at that stage of Rand’s life, her kind of man.
So the question is, who exactly was he?
William Edward Hickman was one of the most famous men in America in 1928. But he came by his fame in a way that perhaps should have given pause to Ayn Rand before she decided that he was a “real man” worthy of enshrinement in her pantheon of fictional heroes.
You see, Hickman was a forger, an armed robber, a child kidnapper, and a multiple murderer.

Apparently Rand wrote various positive thing about this guy (see the article for more).

My first reaction was, so what? Rand thought silly things when she was in her Nietzschean phase. She hardly was the first person to wrongfully admire a heinous criminal at some point in their lives (see, e.g., the fascination many people have had with Che Guevara)

The author, to his credit, tries to address this:

No doubt defenders of Ayn Rand, and there are still a few left, would reply that the journal entry in question was written when she was only in her early twenties and still under the spell of Nietzsche, that as her thinking developed she discarded such Nietzschean elements and evolved a more rational outlook, and that the mature Rand should not be judged by the mistakes of her youth. And this might be a perfectly reasonable position to take. Unquestionably Rand’s outlook did change, and her point of view did become at least somewhat less hostile to what the average, normal person would regard as healthy values.
But before we assume that her admiration of Mr. Hickman was merely a quirk of her salad days, let’s consider a few other quotes from Ayn Rand cited in Scott Ryan’s book.
In her early notes for The Fountainhead: “One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself. Fine!” (Journals, p. 78.)

This could just be referring to obstacles, not other humans. “Above all” and “everyTHING” in one’s way don’t point towards a terribly damning conclusion.

Of The Fountainhead’s hero, Howard Roark: He “has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world.” (Journals, p. 93.)

This admittedly sounds bad. The world isn’t worthless, and if Rand thought it was, she was wrong.

In the original version of her first novel We the Living: “What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?” (This declaration is made by the heroine Kira, Rand’s stand-in; it is quoted in The Ideas of Ayn Rand by Ronald Merrill, pp. 38 – 39; the passage was altered when the book was reissued years after its original publication.)

I’m not sure who Kira is addressing in this early edition quote, but it sounds like the context could be sarcastic (if she is addressing one of the Communists, say). Rand was against sacrifice, and this sounds like a pretty sacrificial idea.

On the value of human life: Man “is man only so long as he functions in accordance with the nature of a rational being. When he chooses to function otherwise, he is no longer man. There is no proper name for the thing which he then becomes … When a man chooses to act in a sub-human manner, it is no longer proper for him to survive nor to be happy.” (Journals, pp. 253-254, 288.)

Rand is saying that our essential capacity is our capacity to think. If we give up that capacity, and lower ourselves to the level of animals, we won’t survive … I suppose the author of the article thinks that Rand is arguing it would thus be ok for a Randian Hero to come and extirpate such a sub-rational life, but I don’t think the text supports the reading.

In Atlas Shrugged, Dagny takes an interest in her brother’s wife, Cherryl, who Dagny can tell is good, but not quite good enough to be strong against the cruel people in the world. She asks her to stay at her apartment one night after Cherryl comes over in the midst of a moral crisis; but Cherryl returns to Dagny’s brother, and winds up killing herself later out of despair.

That, I think, is what Rand is getting at — if you aren’t rational and awake in life, then either your own hand or some cruel evil person or the universe will get to you; the Randian hero the author imagines to be so malevolent and antisocial might actually try and help you out, but they can’t save you from yourself.


As proof that her Nietzschean thinking persisted long after her admirers think she abandoned it, this journal entry from 1945, two years subsequent to the publication of The Fountainhead: “Perhaps we really are in the process of evolving from apes to Supermen — and the rational faculty is the dominant characteristic of the better species, the Superman.” (Journals, p. 285.)

I would argue that Rand’s interpretation of this statement is true: since she is defining what is evolving as our rational faculty, then of course we’re going to become better at reasoning as we go along and figure things out. Again, where’s the connection between this and the naive Nietzscheanism displayed in the Wild Bill Hickman discussion?

Psychiatry and Asperger’s

21-Nov-09

NYTimes has an interesting article on Asperger’s and psychiatric classification:

THE Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, is the bible of diagnosis in psychiatry, and is used not just by doctors around the world but also by health insurers.

Changing any such central document is complicated. It should therefore come as no surprise that a committee of experts charged with revising the manual has caused consternation by considering removing Asperger syndrome from the next edition, scheduled to appear in 2012. The committee argues that the syndrome should be deleted because there is no clear separation between it and its close neighbor, autism.

So Aspie diagnoses have no content? Who knew?
Also, it is humorous the writer sets up this document as their Bible and then discusses the changes they are considering to it …

The question of whether Asperger syndrome should be included or excluded is the latest example of dramatic changes in history of the diagnostic manual. The first manual, published in 1952, listed 106 “mental disorders.” The second (1968), listed 182, and famously removed homosexuality as a disorder in a later printing. The third (1980) listed 265 disorders, taking out “neurosis.” The revised third version (1987) listed 292 disorders, while the current fourth version cut the list of disorders back to 283.

So what a mental disorder is changes according to fashion and societal values? Again, who knew?

This history reminds us that psychiatric diagnoses are not set in stone. They are “manmade,” and different generations of doctors sit around the committee table and change how we think about “mental disorders.”

This in turn reminds us to set aside any assumption that the diagnostic manual is a taxonomic system. Maybe one day it will achieve this scientific value, but a classification system that can be changed so freely and so frequently can’t be close to following Plato’s recommendation of “carving nature at its joints.”

Urgh.

First, a good shake of the fist at Plato and his wretched Essentialism (capital E for irony). Nature has no joints. The taxonomic systems in biology are unavoidably arbitrary to a degree, and have changed over time, though they are useful for certain purposes.

The main issue is not that psychiatry isn’t carving nature at the joints, but that what it seeks to classify is itself dubious. The author is on to something: the fact that the classifications shift so often is an indicator of something. But it’s not an indicator of psychiatry not having gotten down the right methodology yet — it’s that what they’re trying to classify mostly isn’t there. Imagine some superstitious Dark Ages “scientist” being criticized due to his classifications of Demons shifting around all the time; it’d be far better, it is said, far more scientific, if he just adopted some objective principles, like number of horns or tails. This would be missing the point, to put it mildly.

While I’m not quite willing to rule out that some people have something which we might reasonably call mental illness, a lot of the “mental illness” which we medicalize is either caused by really bad ideas (suicidal depression), or is merely a classification foisted on people who are outside of the mainstream (homosexuality as a mental illness, or Asperger’s, or ADHD). Maybe I should reject the whole kit-and-kaboodle, I dunno. But I’m certainly willing to junk most of it. The author, though:

science hasn’t had a proper chance to test if there is a biological difference between Asperger syndrome and classic autism. My colleagues and I recently published the first candidate gene study of Asperger syndrome, which identified 14 genes associated with the condition.

We don’t yet know if Asperger syndrome is genetically identical or distinct from classic autism, but surely it makes scientific sense to wait until these two subgroups have been thoroughly tested before lumping them together in the diagnostic manual. I am the first to agree with the concept of an autistic spectrum, but there may be important differences between subgroups that the psychiatric association should not blur too hastily.

In counterargument to the argument that the distinction doesn’t make sense, he wants to maintain the distinction so he can do tests to see if the distinction makes sense? Is that how it normally works?
If there’s some objectively measurable criteria of Aspieness (say high IQ plus low Emotional Intelligence or whatever), there’s nothing to stop him from doing tests to find what he thinks are Aspies and then doing his research studies. If there’s not, and he needs the diagnosis to exist so that psychiatrists can unscientifically create a pool of candidates for him to do his studies on via their off-the-cuff diagnoses, well, he shouldn’t want to do that research anyways.

The McDonald’s Analogy

18-Nov-09

A redditor is sad he got dumped and asks for an analogy that has been made before to be posted:

I know a girl who broke up with a guy and she told him she wanted to “still be friends.” He said, “No thanks.” She wondered why he couldn’t fall back to being just friends after they had a romantic relationship. I came up with the “McDonalds Analogy” to try and explain it in a simple way that would help all women understand this tough question.
Imagine if you went to McDonalds a lot and ordered a Big Mac Combo meal. A Big Mac, Large Fries and a Coke. You really like this meal. One day, you pull up to the drivethrough and order the Big Mac Combo meal and the girl tells you, “I’m sorry – you can have the Big Mac and the Coke, but you can’t get fries with that anymore.” You think about this for a moment, and sure – the Big Mac is the centerpiece of the meal, but McDonalds has some really good fries and you like their fries with your meal. So you say, “I’ve been able to get fries with that before, why can’t I have fries with my Big Mac combo anymore?” The girls says, “Well, I just think it is better if you only have the Big Mac and the Coke from here on out.”
At this point, a lot of guys are going to go to Wendy’s or BK and see if they can get fries with their combo at that drivethrough window. But there are some guys who REALLY like McDonalds Big Macs and they might think, “If I keep coming here and ordering the Big Mac and Coke, maybe she’ll change her mind and give me some fries with that later.” So they will keep on getting the combo without the fries until the deal breaker happens: One day that guy is going to order the Big Mac and Coke and then he’s going to pull up a little bit to pay, and someone else is going to pull up to the drivethrough speaker and order the “Big Mac Combo” and he is going to hear the girl say, “Would you like fries with that?”
That’s why guys don’t like to be friends with a girl who breaks up with them.

This example illustrates well why romance memes suck. The premise is that even though the person very much likes the friendship, he is going to end it because … because the other person finds sex with them uninteresting? How does this make sense?
One way it makes sense is if you see the other person’s sexual rejection of you as some kind of value judgment of your worthiness, which only makes sense if you partially define your worthiness by how sexually attracted some people are to you.
Because of this poor basis for self-esteem, people will often spend great energy trying to do things to make themselves more desirable to other particular people, as a kind of validation of their own purpose and worthiness. This is silly.
If a person who I enjoy playing Super Smash Brothers with decides they are no longer interested in battling me (because their skill level far exceeds mine or whatever), I shouldn’t try and improve my skill so that they will decide to start battling me again in the future; anchoring my self-esteem so closely to someone else’s desire to engage in a particular activity with me is silly. If being good at Smash is something I value, I should work on improving my skills because of that, because of its value to me; it may eventually be the case that, if I improve enough, the other person will want me to battle with them again. But that shouldn’t be the goal.