Morning Ed: Mindspace {2018.08.01.W}
[Ms1] Well, duh!
[Ms2] In all likelihood, those in positions of authority would probably rather these people just be depressed.
[Ms3] Whew. Nothing good comes from any alternative.
[Ms4] James Suzman writes about some bushmen, the hidden hand of envy, and what we can learn about ourselves from them.
[Ms5] We may be self-absorbed, but we’ve got our reasons.
[Ms6] Ahhh, the universal bias of bias.
[Ms7] Check out the CIA’s report on French Post-Modern philosophers.
[Ms8] There is nothing so obviously and unambiguously good for us and necessary as sleep, and we know this as well as we can scientifically know anything and yet we still order our society in the direction of deprivation.
[Ms9] Okay, but who do we talk to about increasing our hard drive space?
Ms9: The existence of individuals with hyperthymesia suggests it’s not the disk, it’s the operating system.Report
Hell, tech support, I’d like to defrag my brain. Is there an app for that? What do you mean I should just reformat my disk and use ext4?
ETA This should be threaded as a reply to Mr. Cain’s comment here.Report
[Ms3] … good more Truffles for us
{Not sure if the Truffle will surface for everyone… but it did for me when I clicked the Ms3 link.}Report
In the words of Ian Malcolm: Life uh finds a wayReport
Ms6: Nothing makes me happier than someone named Ditto doing meta-analysis (which is sometimes accused of not being sufficiently original as to count as research).Report
Ms4 is interesting, but should probably be presented within some context. There is currently a pretty big debate over just how ideal the life of hunter gatherers were/are and how much or how little hierarchy their societies involve. And there is even a more narrow debate specifically about Kalahari bushmen, with some folks believing that they lived a completely separate existence until very recently and others arguing that the bushmen were actually somewhat integrated into the larger world of the Kalahari. In the latter view, the bushmen’s sparse lifestyle was largely the result of occupying the bottom rung of a larger society.
I don’t know enough about the topic to have an informed opinion, but I am very skeptical about presenting this ideal picture of a society almost completely without hierarchy.Report
I find that piece interesting from the perspective of social hierarchy. It seems such a powerful and natural part of humanity, I’m interested in seeing what purposes it serves, and what happens if it is absent in a society.
Obviously, this isn’t a full answer, just a data point.
It’s clear that human beings aren’t lobsters, with an unthinking drive to exercise dominance. Humans are capable of holding all drive in meta consciousness, and exercise some direction and control. And I feel that dominance behavior is critical to larger society’s ability to organize and direct itself toward goals that smaller groups or individuals could not manage.Report
So I should stop cleaning my room and standing up straight?
Here I thought that was the trick to getting the chicks to dig me.Report
Some day I might right a book titled, “How to get paid a lot of money to say things that are both true, incomplete, and kind of pat.”
There’s more than one person who could be the cover photo for this book.Report
And when that day comes, I might also write a book.Report
Yeah, I guess that Peterson is easy enough to mock and I don’t really care for the reactionary politics that surround his ideas. But if I understand his basic observation correctly, it’s that there are an awful lot of people who have a combination of a great desire to change the world, but who have very little efficacy in their own lives, and that combination is a recipe for deep unhappiness accompanied by general feelings of inadequacy.
Maybe that’s pat, but it also happens to be one of the most profound things that I’ve heard from any so-called public intellectual in recent memory. The idea that people who are routinely ineffectual in their own lives have the requisite knowledge or ability to go out and transform the world anew into something better may be the most destructive animating myth of the contemporary world.
Also, as someone who spends an inordinate amount of time doing therapeutic things for my aching lower back, I can say that learning to stand up straight is one of the most useful things that you will ever do.Report
Yes, the whole, “I want to change the world! Right after I finish watching this Kardashians marathon…”.Report
If Peterson just stays within modern therapy techniques he is pretty standard and fine i think. His self help stuff seems useful to some people and isn’t controversial. It’s his ego and complete lack of understanding when he has no clue what he is talking about that leads him bad places. And his Jung stuff…..geez.Report
I’ve found that a lot of people who are experts in one field (or even part of one field), or otherwise really grok one subject, tend to have a really high opinion of their competence in another.
They tend to want to jump to top-level ideas, bypass fundamentals, and often badly re-invent wheels already discarded for inefficiency.Report
Two thoughts. Seems to me a lot of that can be attributed to a “one tool” mindset, where the tool which allowed a person to become an expert is (mis)used in fields which require a different tool set*. I also think the property of being an expert is something a community of people determine rather than an individual via subjective evaluation, but if their expertise is self-proclaimed or becomes part of their identity they’re more likely to fall into the “one tool” mindset.
*As an example, there are experts in the subject of sovereign citizenship who you may believe** are completely nuts, but viewed as experts in that field nonetheless. Tool selection and use and so on seems relevant here.
**Or not. How would I know?Report
Shorter way of saying that: only people who self-define as an expert in one field will believe they are therefore an expert in another. Lots and lots of experts actually stay in their lane. The vast majority, in fact.Report
@doctor-jay
Clear hierarchy and chains of command can sometimes or often make things run as smoother organizations.
I’ve done some work at small-d democratic organizations. It takes forever for things to get done and decisions to get made because everyone needs to have their say. If factions develop, it can destroy the organization because there are strongly held views, often bad faith and mistrust between factions, and competing visions to move forward. I’m generally for consensus but sometimes you need someone or a small group of people to make an executive decision.
There is plenty of disorganization and disfunction in many hierarchal organizations as well though.Report
All humans are born into a social hierarchy of parenting, whether it be by an individual parent or a group, with or without gender assumptions. To survive, the infant must be fed, sheltered and kept safe from predators. This seems like a basic building block of any social order and I didn’t see any mention of it other than a reference to the risk of a small kin-group breaking-up.
At least in pastoral-nomadic cultures families are connected by kinship relationships that they can call on for support and assistance; the degree of kinship between groups is known and in some cases even a fictitious connection is given substance.Report
Absolutely, and the need for dominance from parent to child is seldom disputed. What’s interesting is how humans scale up these relationships past kinship, and past even fictitious kinship (which I take to be adoption) into a sort of “pseudo kinship”, or even a fully instrumental dominance relationship. For instance, my boss gets to tell me what to work on when I’m at my job, but has no say in what I do on my own time.Report
I wasn’t particularly thinking of adoption, but more the situation where the Tribe of Jay and the Tribe of Shaw have long had fair relations and accommodations, and this situation is ascribed to a common descent from beyond living memory. It’s not clear whether the described relationship is real or notional. But for many pastoral nomads, the difference between some relation and none can be whether raiding and plundering is acceptable. So scaling the idea of family to others is mostly likely to keep the peace and may not necessarily sharing of resources or mutual defense.Report
[Ms4]
For all the author’s desire to pump up the “success” of this system, it’s flaws are absurdly extreme. They’ve eliminated inequality at the cost of making everyone grindingly poor. If no one can get ahead, no one gets ahead.Report
@dark-matter
This is why I specifically said that the claim needs context. Because the pro-hunter-gatherer crowd would argue that our perception of them as “grindingly poor” is inaccurate. Their contention is that hunter-gatherers manage to have fairly successful lives and high levels of reported happiness while working only about four hours a day for their necessities and without any formal system of hierarchy or private property.
I am skeptical of that claim, but like I said too uninformed to have a strong opinion.Report
Survivorship bias and/or setting a very low bar for what “success” needs to mean.
I wear glasses. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve benefited substantially from modern medicine. I’m sure various family members would be dead without that.
I could go on in other fields. War with other cultures would be grim. I’m not sure what individual/minority rights look like in that sort of situation.
My expectation is if we lose the happy talk and start measuring things objectively, it’d get bad.Report
Ms9: You joke, but neuroprosthetics is an active field of research. Mostly to compensate for acquired deficits due to injury or illness, but the idea of an implant that can improve memory capacity isn’t that far-fetched.Report
Anecdotally, the bigger problem seems to be indexing, not bulk memory. When my wife was singing regularly, she often remarked that she knew the first verse of hundreds of songs, but could remember the second line only by going through the first line. Myself, I’ve often found that I have trouble remembering a particular event until I’m given the right prompt. Not an original thought, of course. In Heinlein’s Howard Families stories, there are several references to the long-lived members of the Families learning techniques for organizing and indexing memories.Report
That was also part of the mentat thing from Dune.
There are real world precedents, of course.Report
Ms2: Ah, nicotine.
I am reminded of an essay at SSC (and I can’t find it! It’s ticking me off!) that talked about how it was weird that drug abusers who went to raves were able to figure out that X and Ketamine were effective depression treatments but Science still had no real idea how to treat depression in general.
Nicotine is one hell of a self-medication. Pity that tobacco smoke is so noxious.Report
Found it.
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I think the headline is a bit off. Conventional pharmaceutical research isn’t “worse than chance” – it’s just has a slower timeline than the pleasure-puritanism-prohibition event chain.
Things that get you high clearly are effective at something relevant to the mind’s functioning. What exactly and how all the effects pan out aren’t clear yet, but if the thing is also reasonably safe as far as users not dropping dead on the regular or having their kidneys fail after a year or two of use, people will gravitate toward taking it to get high.
Which then engages the mechanism of reflexive prohibition. Doesn’t matter if it’s not causing any particular demonstrable harms, people are deriving pleasure from the ingestion of a chemical so it must be banned.
And then it’s too late to find out the details of what else the substance does other than make you temporarily high – even though that high is a potent indicator that there is a there there, a promising research direction. So now pharmaceutical companies are stuck, as the article notes, trying to find something that works the same as ketamine but doesn’t get you high – even though there’s nothing inherently wrong with taking your weekly antidepressant also being fun in its own right.Report
Point is, that’s the opposite of random – “does it get me high” is a very efficient triage method for whether a substance is of interest for psychiatric benefit, and also an effective method to predict whether it’ll be banned before that interest can be investigated.
I mean, I could name a number of substances whose use, over the years, has been beneficial to my mental health. Most of them illegal, all taken because they get you high, all totally unsurprising and obvious when I subsequently read about their unfolding promise in psychiatry.Report
Occasionally, a tweet goes around that says, paraphrased, “shout out to all those guys who died figuring out which mushrooms killed you, which ones were good for supper, and which ones got you high.”
On one level, the hippies are a modern version of those guys.
Perhaps we’ll eventually shout out to the ravers.Report
I sometimes wonder about our distant ancestors. How desperate for calories do you have to be in order to figure out all the steps to render a cashew nut safe to eat?Report
Or shrimp. Who first looked at shrimp and thought “food.”? Report
Crunchy, salty, bite size……..it was stoners.Report
Oysters always struck me as something divinely revealed; else, what the heck?Report
Theory: Ancient Hebrews had a number of people (like, the greybeards) who were allergic to shellfish. The shellfish allergy made it into Leviticus.Report
Given the importance of corn in feeding the world — largest production by tonnage of all grains — I always think about teosinte. We’ll start with this weird-looking grass. Then we’ll breed it up to look really weird. Then we’ll take the seeds and we’ll boil ’em. With wood ashes! Then dry the suckers out, and grind ’em up, and mix that with water to make dough and get… tortillas! (If you skip the step where you boil/soak in an alkaline solution, the cornmeal won’t stick together to make dough.)
Sounds like Robin Williams’s routine about the Scottish inventing golf.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fui7yvebIdkReport
IIRC, also won’t contain usuable niacin and you can’t live off it exclusively anymore, as the conquistadors found out the hard way.Report
Charles McIlvaine, after serving as a Captain in the Union Army went on to become on of the foremost American mycologists. Much of his knowledge came from his ability to eat inedible and poisonous mushrooms with little or no ill effect. This earned him the nickname “Ol’ Ironguts”. He describes the origin of his interest in mushrooms in his book One Thousand American Fungi.
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Oh, that’s just lovely.Report
Sounds like a real fun guy.Report
Yep, it’s not the guys who died, it’s the ones who had ridiculously low saving throws versus poison.
That one is fine, that one’s good, that one gave me the runs for two days, you folks best avoid that one.Report
Wouldn’t having diarrhea for two days have been fatal in the ancestral environment anyway? I imagine that you can’t hunt or escape from predators very well if you’re weakened by water loss and constantly shitting yourself.Report
Diarrhea can still be fatal absent proper treatment. It kills about a million people per year, mostly children.Report
If you are by yourself, very dangerous.
As part of a tribe, you would probably survive two days given adequate access to drinkable water.Report
😀Report
(And now I’ve read the full article I see that was exactly the point)Report
Patch, gum, etc.Report
Smoking provides five distinct pleasures.
1. The taste. Not even just menthol or some of the wackier flavors. Just plain tobacco tasted *GOOD*. And smoking after brushing your teeth or after a really good meal. Mmmmm.
2. The nicotine itself. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
3. The hand thing.
4. The mouth thing.
5. The playing with fire thing.
All of these together created a wonderful pleasure that went on to leave you something just under “satisfied”.
The gum? The patch?
Meh.Report
Ex smoker, Jaybird?Report
10 years, now.Report
Good on ya!Report
For me there was also the act of rolling the cigarette. When I was quitting, I’d sometimes roll smokes for other people, just for the satisfaction of rolling a smoke.Report
Never rolled my own tobacco smokes, but I can see how that would be a distinct pleasure as well.Report
I have bad lungs, and am highly sensitive. I am apt to cough or vomit after taking a single drag. So smoking, per se, never interested me.
But rolling a cigarette fascinated me. Not just hand rolling either, but some relative of mine had a slim metal device that would do it automatically.Report