I think this is essentially correct. However, it won't do anymore to convince Bryan than my shorter comments to the same effect because the real crux of the disagreement isn't over what you explained but about what 'mental illness' means.
Bryan gets himself into trouble because he tends to assume there are clear facts about the one right meaning of a word that reflect his intuitions about the principled distinctions in the neighborhood. In the case of mental illness, he seems committed to thinking that a mental illness somehow must mean a condition sufficient to excuse you (completely) from legal/moral responsibility for your actions and substitute in as an excuse where we'd accept a physical illness.
He doesn't seem willing to accept that the ascription of illness has multiple meanings depending on context ranging from: something we think should be fixed, to valid excuse for prescribing/subsidizing drugs, to a condition which justifies making allowances.
This is the same problem he runs into with his stuff on feminism. Sure, he's right that most people don't fully apply the definition the claim to accept about feminism being just the belief that genders deserve equal/fair treatment. But if he wasn't so stuck on the idea that words have a single true meaning he could just accept that (re) definition and make the same points rephrased as claims about how true feminism therefore requires equal focus on male mistreatment.
It's logically equivalent but he'd be a whole lot more likely to convince people like his daughter if he just accepted that many people simply don't want to have to say feminism is bad anymore than they want to say patriotism is and will change the meaning as needed to allow that.
Following the feminism discourse, I will note that Bryan seems to reach for not a "one true meaning" so much as for "what do people *actually* mean when they say it"? To the extent people have a meaning beyond "it sounds nice", I find his conclusion fairly convincing. I think if he were to apply the same microscope to the "mental illness" question, he would find that people do NOT use it to mean "a condition sufficient to excuse you (completely) from legal/moral responsibility".
Of course people tend to have a lower standard for mentally ill people, depending on the severity of the illness, but it gives far from total absolution. And the extra leeway people give someone for merely being on antidepressants / anti-anxiety / ritalin, etc, is really small.
I'll be curious to hear his response at some point.
I think that's a good way to put the point and I've tried to make something like that point to him but not very well. I think ultimately people are more committed to the fact that skizophrenia and other archetypal mental illnesses qualify as such that they are in any particular definition.
And I think that might be a better way of putting my disagreement with Caplain about word meaning. He seems to think that the way people understand a word has to be something like a definition. That might be how they explain it but it's more a kind of Quinean holistic web of links.
And when it comes to a term like feminism, I agree that people sure as hell don't really understand it to be what they claim the definition is -- but nor do most people understand it as anything like the definition he gives.
I think if we want to understand how people actually use the term they use it to mean something like: a virtuous concern for stopping the unequal/unfair treatment of women on account of (or for essential aspects of) their gender. And that virtous part really is one of the strongest links in their understanding. For most people you are far more likely to be able to convince them lots of things that are called feminism now aren't feminism than that it's bad.
More preciscly, I think what people are really committed to is something like femists were the side back in the 60s and 70s fighting to let women into the workforce, get their own bank accounts (w/o husband auth) etc etc (especially the people who were alive then).
And indeed, I've met a number of people who say they are feminists because they supported that and who largely agree that now it's men who are in the worse position.
Plus the fact that every issue-identity wants to sneak "virtuous" into their own self-definitions.
It seems to me that your logic would also have us speaking to pro-life people (who no doubt see that as "virtuous concern tracing back to [blah blah]" about what the *real* pro-life policy is. And indeed some do try this, and that's fine I guess; especially for someone aimed at political change. It's an empirical question about what is most effective.
But I also think there's room for doing the analysis Caplan does. Regarding your view about the 60s and 70s, perhaps that's true of older feminists, but I don't get that sense talking to younger ones; they seem focused on what they see as current relative unfairness. My observations track the definition Caplan wants to use, so I'm sympathetic to it.
Regarding sympathy for the definition, the reason I personally wouldn't adopt it is because it's too belief focused. Someone out there trying to oppress women surely isn't a feminist (even if they think men have it better...and deserve to) and someone fighting for women's rights in Iran is even if they think at a global level women have it better.
But those are mostly quibbles and preferences of mine. If he was addressing people like me (contrarians who live in progressive America) or conservative america it wouldn't be much of a problem in communication.
However, he claims his desired audience are people like his daughters: young elites who, though perhaps not liberal themselves, are in a predominantly progressive social environment (children of academics at elite schools are playing at houses with BLM signs who watch Madow). They will be exposed to very strong positive associations with the word of the kind I described (could have been clear those won't be universal).
More importantly, the social price they would pay for agreeing with a thesis phrases that way is just too high for them to do it.
No you don't have to use the definition the group prefers. Bryan could have simply said: by 'gender inequality feminism I mean' and used his preferred definition. But if you want to persuade don't pick terminology which would get your target audience socially exiled if they agreed.
You make one of the more compelling arguments I've seen on this.
I struggle a bit with weighing this social exile factor you mention -- there's a lot of game theory in play there, and it's largely beyond my intuition regarding how to weigh it.
"excuse you (completely) from legal/moral responsibility for your actions"
Bryan is very committed to a hyper individualist worldview where you are in control of everything (that matters). Someone not being in control chaffes against that.
This goes beyond mental illness. Anything that would lend credence to the idea that key outcomes are substantially beyond the individuals locus of control is anathema.
After writing an entire book about how parents don't matter much and shouldn't be tiger parents, now he's throwing off the idea that maybe they matter if you do 10x as much (like him).
Having an internal locus of control is often a good thing, but it isn't necessarily a factual statement about everything in life. I think Bryan identifies that having more of an internal locus of control is often a good thing for an individual and then decides that it must be absolutely objectively true and damn the evidence. He also links having an external locus of control with demand for government solutions, which he doesn't like. His stance may be more correct then not compared to some other standard(s), but its not absolutely true in all contexts.
I don't know about your feminism stuff though, seems shoehorned into the mental-illness debate.
It seems pretty relevant but I didn't explain it well. I don't mean the actual conclusion about what view he should take (yah that was shoehorned) but the observation that he seems to think that words have true meanings that look alot like a definition rather than a mish-mash of associations and attitudes with varying degrees of strength.
And that brings us to the bit about the locus of control etc. I don't necessarily agree with his view but why must that prevent there from being a mental illness? Maybe a mental illness is just be a certain kind of extreme tension between your meta-preferences (desiring not to be extremely afraid of spiders) and your short term prefs (extremely strong desire to get away).
And it relates to how people use words in that people are far more committed to the fact that certain specific things qualify as mental illnesses than any view about what that entails. People aren't going to stop calling skizophrenia a mental illness because you change their mind about what that implies about responsibility or etc. They might stop/start believing that mental illnesses excuse certain things or even start thinking of them as facts about relationships between various preferences but archetypal mental illnesses will stay mental illnesses because for most people the particular instances do more to pin down their word use than any theoretical commitments.
Fine from an individual point of view, but weaker from the societal. You said:
..It makes sense that, as society’s values have moved away from survival-and-reproduction focused concerns, towards more focus on individual autonomy and self-realization (as described by Robin Hanson’s farmer-vs-foragers model) we’ve seen a massive shift in how homosexuality and trans identities are perceived....
Ignore the costs and risks to other people with a hand-wave towards 'individual autonomy and self-realization'? You also say:
...t seems wrong to call people “mentally ill” if they themselves are happy with their indifference curves....
But that ignores that there are whole public institutions dedicated to catching, holding and treating people, against their wills, for mental illnesses that the person does not want treated.
During the Covid panic, people were chased and caught by police simply for walking outdoors on a deserted beach. It was socially acceptable to arrest and detain people who might spread communicable diseases. Sometimes you can read of a tuberculosis+ person being arrested and forced into quarantine. So our tolerant, liberal US society is apparently schizophrenic about disease-spreading behaviors. Coughing on someone to spread disease is bad, but sex that spreads disease is just a choice?
I'm not sure we really disagree. It's true, my post doesn't really consider at all what society should value -- it leaves that up to the reader.
You have different thoughts about what society should value than does the "maximal individual autonomy as long as you are double-masked" crowd. And that seems reasonable.
I'm afraid this doesn't clarify things, and it ultimately suffers the similar fate of Bryan's case. You say that people who suffer from depression due to hypothyroidism is constrained because their depression was caused by a physical illness. You say:
> Then, when the person spends all day sitting in their room, one could say “well they’re actually hitting the highest indifference curve available to them, so they’re doing fine!”
You rightly note that this doesn't make sense at all. However, you say that genetically-caused depression does make sense to be called a preference. But all you have to do is modify the scenario:
> "Well, due to genetics, they’re actually hitting the highest indifference curve available to them, so they’re doing fine!”
This is also absurd. It also doesn't make sense to analyze genetic mental illness as a want-to-not-want something because there is no first order want. The person with genetic depression obviously doesn't want to lay around in their room all day either, so they don't *want to not want to* lay around in their room all day. This only makes sense in a metaphorical way.
Maybe it's hard for people without mental disorders to understand. Before I knew I had anxiety (both social and general), I had panic attacks before I knew what they were really like. I had no idea they were panic attacks, because I didn't really know I was "anxious" and they often happened when I didn't feel anxious or embarrassed and didn't have a reason to. When I had panic attacks, I would just pretend like nothing was happening.
Also, I didn't understand why I couldn't have a casual conversation like others without anxiety. I had no wit or ability to follow the flow of a conversation, and I would embarrass myself a lot.
There was no preference to be anxious or quiet or embarrassed. I just was and I didn't really understand what was going on or why I was different from others. Being diagnosed with both anxieties and ADHD clarified a lot of things for me. Unlike my ADHD, I was lucky with pill treatments and basically all the symptoms went away. (Btw, what I have is definitely genetic)
Your definition also suffers from several problems. First of all, it implies that if everyone except depressed people disappeared, then depression wouldn't be a mental illness because it would then be the median indifference curve. Also, some people want to want to go to their 9-5 job as much as the median person, and would pay a lot to enjoy it as much because the sheer time suck that is. But it's not a mental disorder to want to want the median indifference curve.
It sounds like your situation feels like not your own preferences, but rather more like an imposition from the outside -- a constraint -- despite it being genetic.
It seems to me, ultimately, that it doesn't really matter if it is modeled as the preference or the constraint, because with the "meta" preference model, you clearly didn't want to have that anxiety, so it would be considered an illness.
Regarding your two critiques of the definition, I think it's possible to "bite the bullet" on them:
>> First of all, it implies that if everyone except depressed people disappeared, then depression wouldn't be a mental illness because it would then be the median indifference curve.
I think this is kind of true. It is certainly possible for such a society to exist -- maybe there even have been tribes in human history where the median person was naturally "depressed" by modern standards. In such a society, that wouldn't seem like a disorder, it would seem normal -- that society certainly wouldn't classify it as a disorder.
We can also imagine a genetically super happy society, in which *we* would be considered depressed for not laughing and smiling all the time like they do. Would I want to get medicated to become "normal" in that society? It's not obvious -- I'd want to know a lot about the tradeoffs.
>> Also, some people want to want to go to their 9-5 job as much as the median person, and would pay a lot to enjoy it as much because the sheer time suck that is. But it's not a mental disorder
If a person is paying a therapist $200/session in order to learn how to like a 9-5 job, it seems to me that we could consider them to have a condition. At least, it seems that they have a condition when judged by their own society, which apparently has no routes for success beyond 9-5 jobs (if it did, presumably they wouldn't seek therapy for not being able to stand one.) I do think that if a large portion of people start getting labelled as "mentally ill" (e.g., the 10% of American kids with "ADHD") one should start considering whether it is society that has the real problem... and maybe that society should start allowing non 9-5 work.
I'd be shocked if any disease wasn't both under and overdiagnoised. Seems like a rephrasing of banal fact that diagnosis is imperfect (with type 1 and 2 errors).
Perhaps the United States is an example of your super happy society, though not genetically so. I have read that Norman Vincent Peale's How to Win Friends and Influence People popularized the idea that you should always smile at people, and it became a widespread custom to do so, where previously such smiles were rare. Indeed we now have jokes about things like "resting bitch face" for people who don't habitually smile.
To me the fundamental problem that Bryan has is that he tries to fit everything into an econ model. I'm an econ imperialist myself - econ is insanely useful and we can (and should!) use it to analyze lots of human behavior.
However, just because you can squeeze mental illness into an econ model, it doesn't follow that an econ model is best positioned to explain mental illness.
Things like drug addiction and mental illness can both be shoehorned into an econ model, but there is a richness associated with these issues that you miss in a simple econ model.
I highly liked this post . I have struggled a ton with BC and SA conflict here. I have autism adhd and am gay, but im not clasicslly disabled or mentally ill. But i have also struggled to the degree with all of those that i got depressed, and BC description of those just feels unreal
Great post, best summary I have seen so far. Although I would add that there is quite alot of variation outside of WEIRD populations with respects to the relevant social values. And also that if Hanson is right about our current cultural moment being some sort of dreamtime, then perhaps we ought to consider what future humans might think, with their views probably being similar to say Kirkegaard or Gregory Cochran.
I think deafness is an interesting thing to consider in your model. Like deaf people perfering deaf children. The deaf preferences are real but they are staring at the cave wall.
Yeah, interesting. There's this tricky thing were people are predisposed to like whatever our identity is, so we might gain a lot of satisfaction from *not changing* even if we'd be happier in the long run if we changed and just adopted a new identity (non-deaf.)
That potentially applies to pretty much any identity, not just disabilities. Ideally you want to consider what would be better across all time-slices, from behind the "veil of ignorance".
The ideal for happiness is pretty clear -- but many may not always be able to do that, and outsiders may also mess up that decision. So not much to do besides share that general model, I guess.
One problem you will run into is the human capacity for deception -- both in terms of deceiving others and in self-deception. So when some people say some form of 'I am happy with my indifference curve', what they are doing is lying to themselves and you. Many people really do say that they like to self-harm, and what they need is for society to accept their desire to attack themselves with razor blades as an eccentric hobby. Should we believe them?
Yes. We should. And we already do: see the whole world of body mods and BDSM. Whilst some masochists wish they weren't so, many are happy with that preference. I don't think they all, or even mostly, lying to themselves.
True. I see no easy solution to that, though I'd think that even many people who currently like to self-harm would "want to want" something else, if it were feasible to switch mindsets. For the others? No easy answer ...
And then you get the schizophrenics who, while taking medication, assert that they never want to be the person they are without the medication -- but also, when not taking medication, assert that they never want to be the medicated person ever again. Now what do you do?
I think I see a problem with your idea of meta indifference curves, though my view's basis is only anecdotal. I know well a woman who is subject to major depression. One of the things I had to learn was that if I said to her, "If you do X, it will make you happier," that didn't motivate her to do X. Her response might be based on "that's too much effort, I can't bear to do it" or "it's not worth it, I'll just be unhappy again" or "I'm a terrible person, I don't deserve to be happy"---but in any case, I've seen many responses that don't look anything like having a meta-level preference not to be depressed. I wonder if part of major depression is precisely NOT having such a meta-level preference.
I think this is essentially correct. However, it won't do anymore to convince Bryan than my shorter comments to the same effect because the real crux of the disagreement isn't over what you explained but about what 'mental illness' means.
Bryan gets himself into trouble because he tends to assume there are clear facts about the one right meaning of a word that reflect his intuitions about the principled distinctions in the neighborhood. In the case of mental illness, he seems committed to thinking that a mental illness somehow must mean a condition sufficient to excuse you (completely) from legal/moral responsibility for your actions and substitute in as an excuse where we'd accept a physical illness.
He doesn't seem willing to accept that the ascription of illness has multiple meanings depending on context ranging from: something we think should be fixed, to valid excuse for prescribing/subsidizing drugs, to a condition which justifies making allowances.
This is the same problem he runs into with his stuff on feminism. Sure, he's right that most people don't fully apply the definition the claim to accept about feminism being just the belief that genders deserve equal/fair treatment. But if he wasn't so stuck on the idea that words have a single true meaning he could just accept that (re) definition and make the same points rephrased as claims about how true feminism therefore requires equal focus on male mistreatment.
It's logically equivalent but he'd be a whole lot more likely to convince people like his daughter if he just accepted that many people simply don't want to have to say feminism is bad anymore than they want to say patriotism is and will change the meaning as needed to allow that.
Interesting theory.
Following the feminism discourse, I will note that Bryan seems to reach for not a "one true meaning" so much as for "what do people *actually* mean when they say it"? To the extent people have a meaning beyond "it sounds nice", I find his conclusion fairly convincing. I think if he were to apply the same microscope to the "mental illness" question, he would find that people do NOT use it to mean "a condition sufficient to excuse you (completely) from legal/moral responsibility".
Of course people tend to have a lower standard for mentally ill people, depending on the severity of the illness, but it gives far from total absolution. And the extra leeway people give someone for merely being on antidepressants / anti-anxiety / ritalin, etc, is really small.
I'll be curious to hear his response at some point.
I think that's a good way to put the point and I've tried to make something like that point to him but not very well. I think ultimately people are more committed to the fact that skizophrenia and other archetypal mental illnesses qualify as such that they are in any particular definition.
And I think that might be a better way of putting my disagreement with Caplain about word meaning. He seems to think that the way people understand a word has to be something like a definition. That might be how they explain it but it's more a kind of Quinean holistic web of links.
And when it comes to a term like feminism, I agree that people sure as hell don't really understand it to be what they claim the definition is -- but nor do most people understand it as anything like the definition he gives.
I think if we want to understand how people actually use the term they use it to mean something like: a virtuous concern for stopping the unequal/unfair treatment of women on account of (or for essential aspects of) their gender. And that virtous part really is one of the strongest links in their understanding. For most people you are far more likely to be able to convince them lots of things that are called feminism now aren't feminism than that it's bad.
More preciscly, I think what people are really committed to is something like femists were the side back in the 60s and 70s fighting to let women into the workforce, get their own bank accounts (w/o husband auth) etc etc (especially the people who were alive then).
And indeed, I've met a number of people who say they are feminists because they supported that and who largely agree that now it's men who are in the worse position.
We're a bit off-topic now, but what about Caplan's point that the vast majority of people don't identify as feminist? https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/american-women-and-feminism
Plus the fact that every issue-identity wants to sneak "virtuous" into their own self-definitions.
It seems to me that your logic would also have us speaking to pro-life people (who no doubt see that as "virtuous concern tracing back to [blah blah]" about what the *real* pro-life policy is. And indeed some do try this, and that's fine I guess; especially for someone aimed at political change. It's an empirical question about what is most effective.
But I also think there's room for doing the analysis Caplan does. Regarding your view about the 60s and 70s, perhaps that's true of older feminists, but I don't get that sense talking to younger ones; they seem focused on what they see as current relative unfairness. My observations track the definition Caplan wants to use, so I'm sympathetic to it.
Regarding sympathy for the definition, the reason I personally wouldn't adopt it is because it's too belief focused. Someone out there trying to oppress women surely isn't a feminist (even if they think men have it better...and deserve to) and someone fighting for women's rights in Iran is even if they think at a global level women have it better.
But those are mostly quibbles and preferences of mine. If he was addressing people like me (contrarians who live in progressive America) or conservative america it wouldn't be much of a problem in communication.
However, he claims his desired audience are people like his daughters: young elites who, though perhaps not liberal themselves, are in a predominantly progressive social environment (children of academics at elite schools are playing at houses with BLM signs who watch Madow). They will be exposed to very strong positive associations with the word of the kind I described (could have been clear those won't be universal).
More importantly, the social price they would pay for agreeing with a thesis phrases that way is just too high for them to do it.
No you don't have to use the definition the group prefers. Bryan could have simply said: by 'gender inequality feminism I mean' and used his preferred definition. But if you want to persuade don't pick terminology which would get your target audience socially exiled if they agreed.
You make one of the more compelling arguments I've seen on this.
I struggle a bit with weighing this social exile factor you mention -- there's a lot of game theory in play there, and it's largely beyond my intuition regarding how to weigh it.
+1
"excuse you (completely) from legal/moral responsibility for your actions"
Bryan is very committed to a hyper individualist worldview where you are in control of everything (that matters). Someone not being in control chaffes against that.
This goes beyond mental illness. Anything that would lend credence to the idea that key outcomes are substantially beyond the individuals locus of control is anathema.
After writing an entire book about how parents don't matter much and shouldn't be tiger parents, now he's throwing off the idea that maybe they matter if you do 10x as much (like him).
Having an internal locus of control is often a good thing, but it isn't necessarily a factual statement about everything in life. I think Bryan identifies that having more of an internal locus of control is often a good thing for an individual and then decides that it must be absolutely objectively true and damn the evidence. He also links having an external locus of control with demand for government solutions, which he doesn't like. His stance may be more correct then not compared to some other standard(s), but its not absolutely true in all contexts.
I don't know about your feminism stuff though, seems shoehorned into the mental-illness debate.
It seems pretty relevant but I didn't explain it well. I don't mean the actual conclusion about what view he should take (yah that was shoehorned) but the observation that he seems to think that words have true meanings that look alot like a definition rather than a mish-mash of associations and attitudes with varying degrees of strength.
And that brings us to the bit about the locus of control etc. I don't necessarily agree with his view but why must that prevent there from being a mental illness? Maybe a mental illness is just be a certain kind of extreme tension between your meta-preferences (desiring not to be extremely afraid of spiders) and your short term prefs (extremely strong desire to get away).
And it relates to how people use words in that people are far more committed to the fact that certain specific things qualify as mental illnesses than any view about what that entails. People aren't going to stop calling skizophrenia a mental illness because you change their mind about what that implies about responsibility or etc. They might stop/start believing that mental illnesses excuse certain things or even start thinking of them as facts about relationships between various preferences but archetypal mental illnesses will stay mental illnesses because for most people the particular instances do more to pin down their word use than any theoretical commitments.
Fine from an individual point of view, but weaker from the societal. You said:
..It makes sense that, as society’s values have moved away from survival-and-reproduction focused concerns, towards more focus on individual autonomy and self-realization (as described by Robin Hanson’s farmer-vs-foragers model) we’ve seen a massive shift in how homosexuality and trans identities are perceived....
Ignore the costs and risks to other people with a hand-wave towards 'individual autonomy and self-realization'? You also say:
...t seems wrong to call people “mentally ill” if they themselves are happy with their indifference curves....
But that ignores that there are whole public institutions dedicated to catching, holding and treating people, against their wills, for mental illnesses that the person does not want treated.
During the Covid panic, people were chased and caught by police simply for walking outdoors on a deserted beach. It was socially acceptable to arrest and detain people who might spread communicable diseases. Sometimes you can read of a tuberculosis+ person being arrested and forced into quarantine. So our tolerant, liberal US society is apparently schizophrenic about disease-spreading behaviors. Coughing on someone to spread disease is bad, but sex that spreads disease is just a choice?
I'm not sure we really disagree. It's true, my post doesn't really consider at all what society should value -- it leaves that up to the reader.
You have different thoughts about what society should value than does the "maximal individual autonomy as long as you are double-masked" crowd. And that seems reasonable.
Perhaps not so different. Just the hypocrisy (not by you) makes me grumpy. It's a 'rights for me but not for thee' attitude.
I'm afraid this doesn't clarify things, and it ultimately suffers the similar fate of Bryan's case. You say that people who suffer from depression due to hypothyroidism is constrained because their depression was caused by a physical illness. You say:
> Then, when the person spends all day sitting in their room, one could say “well they’re actually hitting the highest indifference curve available to them, so they’re doing fine!”
You rightly note that this doesn't make sense at all. However, you say that genetically-caused depression does make sense to be called a preference. But all you have to do is modify the scenario:
> "Well, due to genetics, they’re actually hitting the highest indifference curve available to them, so they’re doing fine!”
This is also absurd. It also doesn't make sense to analyze genetic mental illness as a want-to-not-want something because there is no first order want. The person with genetic depression obviously doesn't want to lay around in their room all day either, so they don't *want to not want to* lay around in their room all day. This only makes sense in a metaphorical way.
Maybe it's hard for people without mental disorders to understand. Before I knew I had anxiety (both social and general), I had panic attacks before I knew what they were really like. I had no idea they were panic attacks, because I didn't really know I was "anxious" and they often happened when I didn't feel anxious or embarrassed and didn't have a reason to. When I had panic attacks, I would just pretend like nothing was happening.
Also, I didn't understand why I couldn't have a casual conversation like others without anxiety. I had no wit or ability to follow the flow of a conversation, and I would embarrass myself a lot.
There was no preference to be anxious or quiet or embarrassed. I just was and I didn't really understand what was going on or why I was different from others. Being diagnosed with both anxieties and ADHD clarified a lot of things for me. Unlike my ADHD, I was lucky with pill treatments and basically all the symptoms went away. (Btw, what I have is definitely genetic)
Your definition also suffers from several problems. First of all, it implies that if everyone except depressed people disappeared, then depression wouldn't be a mental illness because it would then be the median indifference curve. Also, some people want to want to go to their 9-5 job as much as the median person, and would pay a lot to enjoy it as much because the sheer time suck that is. But it's not a mental disorder to want to want the median indifference curve.
Thank you for sharing!
It sounds like your situation feels like not your own preferences, but rather more like an imposition from the outside -- a constraint -- despite it being genetic.
It seems to me, ultimately, that it doesn't really matter if it is modeled as the preference or the constraint, because with the "meta" preference model, you clearly didn't want to have that anxiety, so it would be considered an illness.
Regarding your two critiques of the definition, I think it's possible to "bite the bullet" on them:
>> First of all, it implies that if everyone except depressed people disappeared, then depression wouldn't be a mental illness because it would then be the median indifference curve.
I think this is kind of true. It is certainly possible for such a society to exist -- maybe there even have been tribes in human history where the median person was naturally "depressed" by modern standards. In such a society, that wouldn't seem like a disorder, it would seem normal -- that society certainly wouldn't classify it as a disorder.
We can also imagine a genetically super happy society, in which *we* would be considered depressed for not laughing and smiling all the time like they do. Would I want to get medicated to become "normal" in that society? It's not obvious -- I'd want to know a lot about the tradeoffs.
>> Also, some people want to want to go to their 9-5 job as much as the median person, and would pay a lot to enjoy it as much because the sheer time suck that is. But it's not a mental disorder
If a person is paying a therapist $200/session in order to learn how to like a 9-5 job, it seems to me that we could consider them to have a condition. At least, it seems that they have a condition when judged by their own society, which apparently has no routes for success beyond 9-5 jobs (if it did, presumably they wouldn't seek therapy for not being able to stand one.) I do think that if a large portion of people start getting labelled as "mentally ill" (e.g., the 10% of American kids with "ADHD") one should start considering whether it is society that has the real problem... and maybe that society should start allowing non 9-5 work.
One thing I forgot to link:
Scott has an interesting older post arguing that ADHD is both under and over-diagnosed. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/17/joint-over-and-underdiagnosis/ I think he's probably correct.
I'd be shocked if any disease wasn't both under and overdiagnoised. Seems like a rephrasing of banal fact that diagnosis is imperfect (with type 1 and 2 errors).
Good point.
Perhaps the United States is an example of your super happy society, though not genetically so. I have read that Norman Vincent Peale's How to Win Friends and Influence People popularized the idea that you should always smile at people, and it became a widespread custom to do so, where previously such smiles were rare. Indeed we now have jokes about things like "resting bitch face" for people who don't habitually smile.
By "both anxieties" I mean social and general anxiety disorder.
To me the fundamental problem that Bryan has is that he tries to fit everything into an econ model. I'm an econ imperialist myself - econ is insanely useful and we can (and should!) use it to analyze lots of human behavior.
However, just because you can squeeze mental illness into an econ model, it doesn't follow that an econ model is best positioned to explain mental illness.
Things like drug addiction and mental illness can both be shoehorned into an econ model, but there is a richness associated with these issues that you miss in a simple econ model.
I highly liked this post . I have struggled a ton with BC and SA conflict here. I have autism adhd and am gay, but im not clasicslly disabled or mentally ill. But i have also struggled to the degree with all of those that i got depressed, and BC description of those just feels unreal
Great post, best summary I have seen so far. Although I would add that there is quite alot of variation outside of WEIRD populations with respects to the relevant social values. And also that if Hanson is right about our current cultural moment being some sort of dreamtime, then perhaps we ought to consider what future humans might think, with their views probably being similar to say Kirkegaard or Gregory Cochran.
Thank you! True -- interesting points.
I think deafness is an interesting thing to consider in your model. Like deaf people perfering deaf children. The deaf preferences are real but they are staring at the cave wall.
Yeah, interesting. There's this tricky thing were people are predisposed to like whatever our identity is, so we might gain a lot of satisfaction from *not changing* even if we'd be happier in the long run if we changed and just adopted a new identity (non-deaf.)
That potentially applies to pretty much any identity, not just disabilities. Ideally you want to consider what would be better across all time-slices, from behind the "veil of ignorance".
The ideal for happiness is pretty clear -- but many may not always be able to do that, and outsiders may also mess up that decision. So not much to do besides share that general model, I guess.
One problem you will run into is the human capacity for deception -- both in terms of deceiving others and in self-deception. So when some people say some form of 'I am happy with my indifference curve', what they are doing is lying to themselves and you. Many people really do say that they like to self-harm, and what they need is for society to accept their desire to attack themselves with razor blades as an eccentric hobby. Should we believe them?
Yes. We should. And we already do: see the whole world of body mods and BDSM. Whilst some masochists wish they weren't so, many are happy with that preference. I don't think they all, or even mostly, lying to themselves.
True. I see no easy solution to that, though I'd think that even many people who currently like to self-harm would "want to want" something else, if it were feasible to switch mindsets. For the others? No easy answer ...
And then you get the schizophrenics who, while taking medication, assert that they never want to be the person they are without the medication -- but also, when not taking medication, assert that they never want to be the medicated person ever again. Now what do you do?
http://www.paulgraham.com/want.html
Thanks for sharing, very relevant. Seems right.
I think I see a problem with your idea of meta indifference curves, though my view's basis is only anecdotal. I know well a woman who is subject to major depression. One of the things I had to learn was that if I said to her, "If you do X, it will make you happier," that didn't motivate her to do X. Her response might be based on "that's too much effort, I can't bear to do it" or "it's not worth it, I'll just be unhappy again" or "I'm a terrible person, I don't deserve to be happy"---but in any case, I've seen many responses that don't look anything like having a meta-level preference not to be depressed. I wonder if part of major depression is precisely NOT having such a meta-level preference.
Being an unknown Soundcloud rapper but not having "fire tracks" is generally a mental illness in my opinion.
You should see if the DSM-V steering commitee would be interested in this take.