Afternoon roundup

The worthies on a very much belated closing of the tabs:

• Nice roundup in Nature on psychology's problems in social priming

  A promising field of research on social behaviour struggled after investigators couldn’t repeat key findings. Now researchers are trying to establish what’s worth saving.

• Somebody is gluing miniature cowboy hats to pigeons in Los Vegas.

  “They look like happy pigeons to me. It is hard to know, of course, because they will not talk to us.”

• This one's more depressing. The Dean of the University of Virginia's School of Education writes a column for the Washington Post on education and education funding. You'd expect the column would be decent, right? The Washington Post is one of the newspapers that seems to be doing well on subscriptions; heck, I pay for a subscription there. And he's the Dean of the School of Education at one of the top universities in the US. But he claims that real per-student education expenditures have been dropping. Corey DeAngelis points to the actual data showing a 36% real increase over the period. This was a couple days ago, and there's as yet no correction at the Post.


• Average is over: geographic segregation edition. An ultra-Catholic community in Kansas. Excellent long-read; the kind of thing I'd have pointed to Denis for Arts & Letters Daily, back in the day.


• Randy Holcombe on Gordon Tullock on inequality and redistribution. Self-recommending. We might note, though, that New Zealand's overall system has been one of the more targeted ones - I wonder how that ranking's been affected by sillier policies like extra free years of tertiary study.

  People can afford to be charitable with their votes when they know their one vote will have no effect on the outcome of an election. This may be Tullock’s most important contribution to the literature on redistribution and inequality—the observation that because of incentives inherent in the political process, people are likely to vote for redistribution programs they would not choose if the choice were theirs alone.
  
  Tullock (1971) anticipates the arguments made by Brennan and Lomasky (1993) and Caplan (2007), explaining how people can vote expressively and even irrationally for outcomes that redistribute more than they privately prefer. This adds a wrinkle to Tullock’s analysis of motives and justifications for redistribution. Tullock (1997) dismisses justifications for redistribution and looks at motives—the desire to receive transfers, the wish to help the poor, and envy—to conclude that government redistribution will not be very effective at helping the poor. But he suggests government redistribution is larger than the median voter would prefer because of the incentives in the democratic political process that cause people to be more charitable in their voting behavior than when considering private charitable giving done individually (Tullock 1971). Perhaps this unintended consequence of democratic decision making renders democratic government a better mechanism for helping the poor than Tullock (1997) recognized.

• When New Zealand's declining PISA scores were released, we heard a lot about how PISA scores don't matter. I rather prefer Australia Labor MP Andrew Leigh's take on Oz's declining scores.

  Forget how we’ve slid relative to other countries -- it’s enough to compare our own students with their predecessors. Year 9 students today score worse than year 8 students would have done at the turn of the century. If this was a sporting contest, we’d be running slower, dropping the ball more often, and missing more goals.
  
  The PISA tests matter because they are designed to capture the skills that young people will need in the workplace. These tests don’t measure memorisation and rote learning -- they aim to capture the essential talents that will be needed in the labour market.

• Kudos Doc Nolan!


• Phil Twyford continues to provide speeches showing he gets housing better than anyone in Parliament. I don't agree with everything in here, but it's good. And we finally now have the infrastructure financing legislation coming through - the Bill has been introduced, and they're expecting to have it done mid 2020. About three years after they came into office. New Zealand's electoral cycles are too darned short given the length of time it takes to get substantial legislation ready.

  I now want to look in a little more depth at housing and land markets, and transport.
  
  I started by saying urban planning has lacked an economic underpinning. An example of this is the use of the urban growth boundary which is a common planning tool ostensibly to stop cities growing outwards, often described pejoratively as sprawl.
  
  Sprawl is often meant as development on the fringes of a city, far from the centre. But I want to make the point that the better way to think of it is in relation to the time value of travel.
  
  If you are building homes let us say in Pukekohe in the south of Auckland, where people who work in the city centre might face a drive of 90 minutes on a bad day, that might be characterised as sprawl. But when we electrify the rail line to Pukekohe, and build an additional line on the main north-south corridor, as we are about to do, those people will have a 30 min express commuter ride into the city, is it sprawl then? I don’t think so.
  
  The most harmful effect of the urban growth boundary where there is rising demand is to create an artificial scarcity of land driving section prices up.
  
  The boundary is much loved by land bankers whose business model is to buy up rural land and sit on it until the local council shifts the boundary in response to growth pressures, changing the zoning from rural to urban, and then sell it sometimes at ten times its former value.
  
  My intention is not to vilify land bankers. Their behaviour is a rational response to bad policy.
  
  If the urban growth boundary wasn’t bad enough, restrictions on height and density, often justified as protecting the amenity of the low-rise garden suburb, ration floor space, stopping the city growing up and restricting the supply of apartments, and of course driving up prices across the market.
  
  Urban planning has too often failed to grasp that whenever rules stop people building or living in places they want to (typically close to amenity, jobs or transport interchanges) they deny people housing choices, restrict supply and drive prices up.
  
  As Ed Glaeser says, every time you place a restriction on intensification you deny a family access to the city.

• More evidence against Sachs's Millennium Villages. Small or null results on core indicators, no spillover benefits.

Never put salt in your eyes: social psych edition

Scott Alexander takes on social psychology's just-so stories:

Most people are not consequentialists, but most people feel implicitly uncomfortable making moral arguments on non-consequentialist grounds. “Stop what you’re doing, it disgusts and offends me” is less noble than “stop what you’re doing, it will hurt people who can’t stand up for themselves”. This tempts people who are disgusted and offended by things to come up with just-so stories from social psychology for why the disgusting and offensive thing will also hurt people.

I tried writing a post arguing against several of these just-so stories, but it ended up being unbearably long and boring (if you’re ever stuck with insomnia, ask me to give you a trenchant analysis of every study that’s ever been written about stereotype threat). So I’m going to try something different. I’m going to write up some just-so stories using social psychology for the opposite side. I’m going to try to use well-established social psych results to prove that we should have more violence in the media, and be more tolerant of offending women and minorities.

I think some of the arguments below will be completely correct, others correct only in certain senses and situations, and still others intriguing but wrong. I think that modern pop social psychology probably contains the same three categories in about the same breakdown, so I don’t feel too bad about this.

I enjoyed his take on how fighting stereotypes risks reinforcing them.

I can’t find the link for this, but negatively phrased information can sometimes reinforce the positive version of that information. For example, if you tell people “President Obama is not a Muslim”, then a year later, all someone will remember is “blah Obama blah blah blah Muslim”, and eventually “Ohmigod, President Obama is a Muslim!”, even if they didn’t believe that before they heard that fact “corrected”.

Read the whole thing. Old Kids in the Hall played in my head...


The Christmas break now being over, we soon resume normal transmission. Paul Walker was very active over the holidays; catch up with the backlog there if you've been yearning for content.

Cryonics

Kerry Howley's piece in the New York Times Magazine is lovely.

Robin Hanson wants to be cryogenically preserved on death; his wife, Peggy, works in a hospice helping folks deal with death and is no fan of cryogenics.

Among cryonicists, Peggy’s reaction might be referred to as an instance of the “hostile-wife phenomenon,” as discussed in a 2008 paper by Aschwin de Wolf, Chana de Wolf and Mike Federowicz.“From its inception in 1964,” they write, “cryonics has been known to frequently produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists.” The opposition of romantic partners, Aschwin told me last year, is something that “everyone” involved in cryonics knows about but that he and Chana, his wife, find difficult to understand. To someone who believes that low-temperature preservation offers a legitimate chance at extending life, obstructionism can seem as willfully cruel as withholding medical treatment. Even if you don’t want to join your husband in storage, ask believers, what is to be lost by respecting a man’s wishes with regard to the treatment of his own remains? Would-be cryonicists forced to give it all up, the de Wolfs and Federowicz write, “face certain death.”

I'm not opposed to cryonics, but I've not signed up. It's a form of Pascal's wager that offers far better odds than heaven, but still odds that seem vanishingly slim. I'd put non-trivial odds on a future mapping of a frozen brain being sufficient to generate whole brain simulation, but lower odds that the frozen brain can be revived. As Alcor puts it:

Cryonics is not a belief that the dead can be revived. Cryonics is a belief that no one is really dead until the information content of the brain is lost, and that low temperatures can prevent this loss.

And while I place positive value on there being some simulated version of me existing a couple of centuries from now, I still probably irrationally place undue weight on that it's this instance of this consciousness that wakes up rather than a copy. If cryonics were available at low cost, I'd sign up. But it isn't exactly cheap. Then again, lots of medical treatments are far more expensive. As Howley notes:

Robin’s expertise extends to the economics of health care, a domain in which enormous amounts of money are spent on experimental procedures with only a small chance of extending life. Like many cryonicists, he says he thinks of bodily preservation as experimental end-of-life medical care, and it is within a medical context that he typically introduces the subject of cryonics to his health economics class at George Mason. His students rarely accept this framing. “We spend most of the semester talking about how people are obsessed with taking any small chance at living longer,” Robin says. “And then when we get to cryonics, it’s: Well, who needs to live longer? What’s the point of living anyway? Why can’t we solve global hunger?”

In other words, while his wife says that medical technology has an unfortunate stranglehold on the way we die, Robin longs to claim the mantle of medical science for his attempt to avoid death altogether. But here he doesn’t expect to succeed, and as with most societal attitudes that contradict his intuitions, he’s got a theory as to why. “Cryonics,” Robin says, “has the problem of looking like you’re buying a one-way ticket to a foreign land.” To spend a family fortune in the quest to defeat cancer is not taken, in the American context, to be an act of selfishness. But to plan to be rocketed into the future — a future your family either has no interest in seeing, or believes we’ll never see anyway — is to begin to plot a life in which your current relationships have little meaning. Those who seek immortality are plotting an act of leaving, an act, as Robin puts it, “of betrayal and abandonment.”

None of this forms a binding constraint in our house. It's rather that, given low odds of successful recovery from cryonics, paying off the mortgage gets higher priority.

If I'm ever able to get over my irrationalities about prioritizing this instance of me over potential alternatives, I suppose I'd have to upweight cryonics.

For folks excessively interested in this sort of thing, check this mindbending piece of science fiction philosophy by Daniel Dennett.

And Robin comments on the article here.

Biology isn't destiny, but it affects your saving throws

James Fallon, UC Irvine neuroscientist, found he had the genetic predisposition for violent behaviour combined with ominous PET scan results:

Fallon says nobody in his family has real problems with those behaviors. But he wanted to be sure. Conveniently, he had everything he needed: Previously, he had persuaded 10 of his close relatives to submit to a PET brain scan and give a blood sample as part of a project to see whether his family had a risk for developing Alzheimer's disease.

After learning his violent family history, he examined the images and compared them with the brains of psychopaths. His wife's scan was normal. His mother: normal. His siblings: normal. His children: normal.

"And I took a look at my own PET scan and saw something disturbing that I did not talk about," he says.

What he didn't want to reveal was that his orbital cortex looks inactive.

"If you look at the PET scan, I look just like one of those killers."

...

Fallon calls up another slide on his computer. It has a list of family members' names, and next to them, the results of the genotyping. Everyone in his family has the low-aggression variant of the MAO-A gene, except for one person.

"You see that? I'm 100 percent. I have the pattern, the risky pattern," he says, then pauses. "In a sense, I'm a born killer."

...

Jim Fallon says he had a terrific childhood; he was doted on by his parents and had loving relationships with his brothers and sisters and entire extended family. Significantly, he says this journey through his brain has changed the way he thinks about nature and nurture. He once believed that genes and brain function could determine everything about us. But now he thinks his childhood may have made all the difference.

"We'll never know, but the way these patterns are looking in general population, had I been abused, we might not be sitting here today," he says.

As for the psychopaths he studies, Fallon feels some compassion for these people who, he says, got "a bad roll of the dice."

Discover comments here; Geeks are Sexy here.

I tend to think of these sorts of things in D&D terms. Fallon made his saving throw against a bad childhood, which meant he had a helpful adjustment to his save versus MAO-A, which he also made. Had he failed that throw, he would have had a strong penalty on willpower checks. If you know you have the propensity, you get an extra "self awareness" check that lets you evaluate whether your course of action really makes sense.

It will be interesting to see how this work plays out in court decisions over the next few decades. We can reasonably model folks with particular gene variants as having higher costs of avoiding illegal behaviour: their supply of illegal behaviour is more inelastic. So it will be more costly to deter them from engaging in any particular act. Recall Friedman's argument in Law's Order:

Net damage = damage to victim - gain to criminal.

For the marginal offence, the one that will be deterred if we raise the punishment just a little more,

Gain to criminal = expected punishment

hence

Net damage = damage to victim - expected punishment.

For the optimal punishment,

Cost of deterring one more offense = Net damage = damage to victim - expected punishment.

Rearranging gives us

Expected punishment = damage to victim - cost of deterring one more offense,

or, in the more compact notation of mathematics,

(P) = D - MC

Suppose we have two groups of individuals sorted by genes: the first whose supply of criminal activity is relatively elastic, the second whose supply is relatively inelastic (warrior gene or other predispositions). A fixed penalty across both groups won't be efficient: it's cheap to deter the former and very expensive to deter the latter and so we'll be overpunishing some of the latter and underpunishing some of the former relative to an efficiency norm. If penalty schedules varied by genotype, we'd have harsher penalties for folks without the genetic predisposition to crime as their supply of criminal activity is elastic and lighter penalties for folks with the genetic predisposition. Yes, it takes a stronger penalty to deter the inelastic; but, because it's more expensive to deter folks with the higher crime genotype, we should spend less on deterring them, not more.

This of course leaves to one side the potential benefits of incapacitation, which could tilt things towards longer punishments for folks whose genetic predisposition makes it likely that they'd re-offend.

But, I rather expect that the political debate will be framed more around (US) liberals arguing for treatment programmes rather than jail for folks with genetic predispositions to crime (regardless of any evidence of effectiveness) and (US) conservatives arguing for harsher punishments for criminal monsters (regardless of whether the incapacitation benefits outweigh the higher deterrence costs).

Check also parts two and three of the NPR series. Part 3 suggests juries are finding the genetic evidence to be exculpatory rather than incriminating: murder turns to manslaughter.

Malleability of Memory: Update

I'd last week posted a rather nice piece by Saletan talking about the ease with which false memories can be implanted if accompanied by a doctored picture. He noted that the Chinese seemed to be trying this to adjust folks' recollections of Tiananmen.

And here's the variant used during the Cultural Revolution, thanks to Robert Fulford:

Mao advocated making the past serve the present, which meant rewriting the past to improve his image. Where Stalin elevated his own role with doctored photographs, Mao relied on falsified paintings.

Two pictures discussed in Art in Turmoil make the point. Liu Shaoqi and the Anyuan Coal Miners depicted Liu, who was considered a potential successor to Mao, leading a 1922 miners’ strike that in legend began the overthrow of capitalism. Liu apparently made the mistake of criticizing his master and in 1967 a government-backed magazine, Art Storm, devoted much of its first issue to denouncing Liu’s portraits. Art Storm said that 172,077 poster-size copies of the Anyuan painting had been published. The original was demolished and another painting appeared, Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan, showing that it was young Mao who led the miners.

Note also how celebrity tobacco use seems to be falling through the memory hole. How long until nobody ever smoked, or until they start taking the cigars from the Churchill pictures and adding them into the Hitler pictures?

I Love Robot 1-X!

David Eagleman's lecture on neuroscience and law is fascinating. But I can't help but thinking about Bender's upgrade to be compatible with Robot 1-X.



About a half-hour in, he starts talking about neuro-based aversion techniques to train folks to dislike smoking, or to improve criminals' impulse control problems. I favour this kind of thing where it's a voluntary self-constraint mechanism. But it's not hard to imagine a healthist line that drug users shouldn't be put in prison but should rather be forced to undergo brain modification. I'm somewhat comforted by Eagleman's noting that none of these techniques work on people who don't want to change. But only somewhat.

Non-bayesean anecdote of the day

In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. The early meetings were stormy. "You oughta worship me, I'll tell you that!" one of the Christs yelled. "I will not worship you! You're a creature! You better live your own life and wake up to the facts!" another snapped back. "No two men are Jesus Christs. … I am the Good Lord!" the third interjected, barely concealing his anger.
...
In hindsight, the Three Christs study looks less like a promising experiment than the absurd plan of a psychologist who suffered the triumph of passion over good sense. The men's delusions barely shifted over the two years, and from an academic perspective, Rokeach did not make any grand discoveries concerning the psychology of identity and belief.

In Slate, via ALD.

I'm not sure the plan was so crazy, even in hindsight, despite it having not worked. Surely that it didn't work also tells us something; it just might be something that we already knew. Rational Bayeseans with common priors cannot disagree, so we know that these folks either are irrational or aren't Bayesean truth seekers. Given that they know that they're in a psychiatric hospital, each might expect that the others are not rational truth seekers and consequently wouldn't update their priors adequately based on each others' information; however, they ought also give the same weight to the chances that they're in the hospital for the same reason as the others. On the other hand, plenty of people not in mental hospitals have radically different beliefs about just who god is; it's just the ones that identify themselves as god that wind up in the hospital - they may consequently reasonably question whether those putting them in hospital were rational Bayesean truth seekers.

Cowen and Hanson, linked above, conclude that very few people indeed are meta-rational truth seekers.

If you and the people you disagree with completely ignored each other’s opinions, then you might tend to be right more if you had greater intelligence and information. And if you were sure that you were meta-rational, the fact that most people were not might embolden you to disagree with them. But for a truth-seeker, the key question must be how sure you can be that you, at the moment, are substantially more likely to have a truth-seeking, in-control, rational core than the people you now disagree with. This is because if either of you have some substantial degree of meta-rationality, then your relative intelligence and information are largely irrelevant except as they may indicate which of you is more likely to be self-deceived about being meta-rational.

One approach would be to try to never assume that you are more meta-rational than anyone else. But this cannot mean that you should agree with everyone, because you simply cannot do so when other people disagree among themselves.

Rational truth-seeking is hard, even for the folks who don't think they're god....

Update: I really should have titled this one "We've got the Non-Bayesian Jesus(es)"...

First Gollum, now Anakin

We previously noted Gollum's conflicting psychiatric diagnoses, which seemed to point more to the problems of diagnosing and categorizing mental illnesses than to anything in particular about Gollum (who I still think was just twisted by the Ring - Alberich's curse or Sauron's...).

Now we find that Anakin Skywalker may have suffered from borderline personality disorder.

"I had watched the two prequel movies ["Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith"], and it was during my residency in psychiatry while trying to explain borderline personality disorder to medical students that I thought of Anakin," said Eric Bui, a psychiatrist at Toulouse University Hospital in France.

Bui and his colleagues first presented their diagnosis at the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association in 2007. Now, their letter to the editor titled "Is Anakin Skywalker suffering from borderline personality disorder?" is slated to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychiatry Research.

Skywalker hit six out of the nine borderline personality disorder criteria as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV). He only needed to meet five criteria to qualify as suffering from the disorder.

...
Two displays of dissociative episodes took place when Skywalker tried to distance himself from stressful events. The first episode took place after he slaughtered a local tribe of Tuskens responsible for his mother's death. A second episode occurred following his murderous rampage among young Jedi trainees, as he voiced paranoid thoughts about Obi-Wan Kenobi and his wife.

Leaving aside my general anti-Tusken prejudices, I'd have diagnosed Anakin first with gross stupidity. The evil guys tell you that the only way to make sure that your pregnant wife survives childbirth is to join up with the evil guys, and you don't even think to get her checked out by a medical droid first? Stupid stupid stupid. Incomprehensibly stupid, unless he was just looking for an excuse to join up with the bad guys all along. Or, unless Lucas was just fobbing stuff off in the first three episodes and expecting any of it to make sense is hopeless. Red Letter Media nailed it.

I wonder if the Bui letter will generate the same storm of competing diagnoses that followed the initial Gollum diagnosis.

The fallibility and malleability of memory

Arts & Letters Daily points to William Saletan's worrying piece on the work of Elizabeth Loftus. She began as the researcher pointing out the fallibility and malleability of memory, showing how eyewitness accounts were unreliable and how therapists could implant false memories of childhood abuse. But she's moved on a bit from there, now suggesting memory therapy as a way of planting false memories of childhood aversions to fatty foods as a useful way of achieving a healthy diet.

When Loftus saw the results, an idea came to her. What if you could produce similar aversions to fattening foods? Could false memories help people eat a healthier diet? She tried the experiment again, first with potato chips, then with chocolate chip cookies and strawberry ice cream. The potato-chip version failed, apparently because potato chips were too familiar as a tasty snack. But the ice-cream version worked. More than 40 percent of subjects were persuaded that they had gotten sick eating strawberry ice cream, and these subjects were significantly more likely to say they would avoid it.

In February 2005, Loftus and her coauthors published the egg study, concluding that "humans can be trained to avoid food." Four months later, they published the ice-cream study under the title, "False Beliefs About Fattening Foods Can Have Healthy Consequences." The diet-improvement rationale, originally an afterthought, was now central. The bottom line, they wrote, was that "we can, through suggestion, manipulate nutritional selection and possibly even improve health."

In the food experiments, all the threads of Loftus' career came together. Instead oftraining a rat, she was training people. Instead of using a reward, she was using the techniques she had learned from the recovered-memory therapists. And instead of planting bad memories, she was planting healthy ones. She was a real-life memory doctor.

But she, too, was responding to behavioral reinforcement. The fattening-food experiment was the most widely celebrated study she had ever done. It made headlines all over the world and earned her a place on the New York Times Magazine's list of the year's most innovative ideas. She was being rewarded for doing something socially useful. She reveled in the attention and acclaim. She quoted her press clippings in speeches.

In reality, the work she had done on memories of sexual abuse was more important. But that work had hurt and angered people. It had brought condemnation and contempt on her. In diet therapy, she found no such punishment. Again, she was meeting people who desperately needed her. But this time, they were fighting obesity, not deluded daughters. "I wish I could be of more immediate help to these people, but I'm forced to tell them that the line of research is at its very earliest stages," she wrote in 2007. "Still, it is refreshing to be working on a topic that could indeed be of genuine help to people and one that is not as anger inspiring and dangerous as the topic of sex abuse."

All those years, Loftus had been vilified for attacking therapy. Now she was inventing a therapy of her own. But hers was different. It was good for people, and she could make it better. She began to think of ways to magnify its power: ratcheting up the false feedback, perhaps, or showing photos or videos of people being sickened by the designated foods. Soon she was convincing students that they had loved asparagus as children. "Healthier Eating Could Be Just a False Memory Away," said the published journal article.

Loftus talked about the food experiments the same way she had talked about EPS. The concept, she explained, was to "tap into people's imagination and mental thoughts to influence their food choices." But two crucial elements had changed. First, she was now trying to influence behavior through memory, not just through imagination. In EPS, memory modification had been a kind of collateral damage. In the food experiments, memory modification was the whole idea.

...

But would freedom of choice survive therapeutic deception? Would it survive social pressure to fix unhealthy memories and habits? Loftus and her colleagues were already presenting memory therapy as an alternative to coercion. In their article on fattening food, they warned that unless behavioral scientists stemmed the obesity crisis, laws might be imposed to induce healthier eating, just as "seatbelt laws were imposed upon us when people were not using them on their own." In their article on alcohol, they offered memory doctoring as an alternative to electric shock and other "invasive" aversion therapies.

So, the next nudge then. Public service announcements that don't browbeat us about behaviours but rather try to plant false memories of childhood experiences. Remember eating asparagus with your grandma and how happy that made you when you were five? How you helped her to pick the asparagus? Weren't you happy then? And don't you remember how your father beat your mother that time he drank too much? Weren't you sad seeing that? Doesn't asparagus make you feel warm and good all over while alcohol makes you feel a little sick?

Go read the whole Saletan piece, which has excellent discussion of Chinese mass propaganda trying to implant false memories of the Tiananmen Square protesters having attacked PRA soldiers first. Didn't you remember that Greedo shot first too?

Satel on Addiction

Wow. It's not just us crackpot rational choice economists who take choice seriously.

Now comes an important and provocative book called Addiction: A Disorder of Choice by the psychologist Gene Heyman, a research psychologist at McLean Hospital and a lecturer at Harvard. Heyman mounts a devastating assault on the brain-based model of addiction. Not that he views addiction as independent of the brain—no serious person could even entertain such a claim. What he rejects, however, is the notion that excessive drug or alcohol consumption is an irresistible act wholly beyond the user’s control, as the term “addiction,” commonly understood, implies. If anything, Heyman writes, “[a]ddiction … helps us understand voluntary behavior.” How so? “[B]ecause,” he explains, “it is not possible to understand addiction without understanding how we make choices.”

...

Good intentions aside, is the “brain disease” of addiction really beyond the control of the addict in the same that way that the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease or multiple sclerosis are beyond the control of the afflicted? Showing how the two differ is an important theme of the book. If, as Heyman says, “drug-induced brain change is not sufficient evidence that addiction is an involuntary disease state,” then how are we to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary behavior?

Heyman’s answer is that "voluntary activities vary systematically as a function of their consequences, where the consequences include benefits, costs, and values.” Take, for example, the case of addicted physicians and pilots. When they are reported to their oversight boards they are monitored closely for several long years; if they don’t fly right, they have a lot to lose (jobs, income, status). It is no coincidence that their recovery rates are high. Via entities called drug courts, the criminal justice system applies swift and certain sanctions to drug offenders who fail drug tests—the threat of jail time if tests are repeatedly failed is the stick—while the carrot is that charges are expunged if the program is completed. Participants in drug courts tend to fare significantly better than their counterparts who have been adjudicated as usual. In so-called contingency management experiments, subjects addicted to cocaine or heroin are rewarded with vouchers redeemable for cash, household goods, or clothes. Those randomized to the voucher arm routinely enjoy better results than those receiving treatment as usual.

Contingencies are the key to voluntariness. No amount of reinforcement or punishment can alter the course of an entirely autonomous biological condition. Imagine bribing an Alzheimer’s patient to keep her dementia from worsening, or threatening to impose a penalty on her if it did. This is where choice comes in: choosing an alternative to drug use. Heyman realizes how odd this might seem. How can otherwise rational people choose self-destruction unless they are diseased? This question was raised in colonial America. Dr. Benjamin Rush, also known as the father of American psychiatry, was among the first to promote the notion that alcoholism was a disease. And he did so not on the basis of medical evidence, Heyman reminds us, “but rather [upon] the assumption that voluntary behavior is not self-destructive.”

Sounds like a mix of Becker-Murphy on rational addiction and Szasz-Caplan on disorder as extreme preference; will have to add the book to the pile....

HT: Arts & Letters Daily.

Gollum in the DSM

NCBI ROFL usefully points to psychiatric discussion of Gollum's potential mental disorders. While the original article seems to present a solid diagnosis (schizoid personality disorder), at least to a non-psychiatrist, the range of potential disorders listed by discussants in the comments section suggests more art than science. Potential disorders there suggested include:

• Heavy metal poison from eating raw fish for decades in a cave in a goblin mine
• Vitamin B12 and iron deficiency from an all-fish diet
• Exclusion of said deficiencies because Gollum augmented his diet with occasional goblin; exclusion of said deficiencies because of lack of associated peripheral neuropathy
• Heavy metal / mercury / radiation poisoning from the One Ring
• Exclusion of heavy metal poisoning because of maintained high mobility and strength
• Addiction (to the Ring)
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder (ring related), comorbid with antisocial personality disorder
• Traditional Chinese Medicine diagnosis of Kidney Yin deficiency and liver-yang excess
• It's just symptoms of extreme old age
• Symbiotic parasite infection from the Ring
• Borderline personality disorder
• Chronic bacterial/fungal infection
• Psychopathy (murdered Deagol on sight of the Ring)

Obviously, accurate DSM assignation is difficult when simply presented with a list of fictional symptoms, but it does make me wonder about the arbitrariness of such assignations in real world cases.

Gollum himself weighs in in the comments:

Nasty psychiatrissstss! Hates them, my precious! They locks uss up in padded cell! They makes uss look at inkblotsss! Tricksy, sly inkblotsss! Nasty Elvish pills burnsss our throat!
...
Yesss We Hatesss themsss Evil oness yess my preciousss we hatess themsss

But They Helpsss us!

No they hurtsss usss, hurtsss usss sore!

Preference Falsification

Timur Kuran has done some nice work on preference falsification. Inside Higher Ed finds it plenty active on college campuses.

After talking about the expected topics, one student had said, “This is the first time I’ve felt comfortable saying what I really think about Israel.”

When I asked why that was, she said, “Because I always have to gauge, if I say what I think, whether that would impact a grade or a friendship.”

“Is this only about Israel that you find yourself repressing your views?” I asked. “No,” she said. Others agreed – this culture of double-checking one’s thoughts, they said, applied to many issues, and was experienced by non-Jewish students at Columbia, too, as well as by students they knew at other campuses.

How depressing that at an institution designed to shake up the thinking of smart young people, the message heard instead is the importance of self-censoring. Not because of harassment or intimidation, but because there was insufficient space created and cultivated for students to take intellectual risks. College should be the time when students receive encouragement to say things that others might find difficult or even offensive, as part of the learning process.

This is one reason I try to find topics for my Current Issues class where economists are likely to disagree with the comfortable consensus: it's a first step to breaking information cascades. But I also tell them that thoughtful essays, regardless of whether I agree with them, do better than ones that just parrot back what I've said in class - I don't want to generate a new cycle of falsification.

What BoingBoing taught me today

• There's now a database with service records of soldiers from the Hundred Years' War. Robert Fogel did awesome work using data from the US Civil War showing just how much economic growth has improved our lives since the 1850s; I wonder what will come of this new dataset.


• You may have heard of the experiment from the 30s where the researcher raised a chimp infant alongside his own son. You may not have heard the "what happened next".

  The real reason he abruptly halted the study, then, was likely because of results that Kellogg never anticipated: his son Donald started imitating the chimp.
  
  For example, though Donald had learned to walk before Gua joined the Kellogg family, he regressed and started crawling more, in tune with Gua. He'd bite people, fetch small objects with his mouth, and chewed up a shoe. More importantly, his language skills were delayed. At 19 months, Donald's vocabulary consisted of three words. Instead of talking he would grunt and make chimp sounds.
  
  Gua got sent back to the Yerkes center in Florida, where she promptly died. And Donald? Not much is known of his life, but, at 43, he committed suicide.
  
  This study got a lot of press when it was published, but Kellogg ended up deeply regreting it -- not because of what it did to his son, but because it prevented him from being taken seriously as a scientist.

• Another dodgy use of copyright: this time, to keep folks from fighting their traffic tickets in the UK. Are speed camera photos really what folks had in mind when trying to protect the returns to intellectual innovation? I hope not.


• Bat shark repellent exists and is effective

Embrace Neurodiversity

From Tyler Cowen's discussion of autism:

In many areas of human neurodiversity, including autism, we still don't know the answers to many basic questions. There is still not even agreement on the basic definitions of autism, Asperger's, and related concepts. In the meantime we are applying lots of stereotypes and negative descriptions to autistics that we would not dream of using to describe racial or ethnic groups. It's high time that colleges and universities got out in the lead to fight these common prejudices. The rhetoric coming out of higher education needs to match up to the reality of higher education as a common avocation for autistic people.

...
It's a little tricky to talk or write about the autistics who may work in your institution. If you work at a college or university, there is a good chance you are interacting with people on the autism spectrum on a very regular basis. Maybe the reaction of the reader is to draw up a mental list of people in the workplace and start applying various stereotypes to them. Maybe you'll be on the lookout at the next dean's meeting for people who exhibit "autistic traits" and then gossip about those perceptions to your friends.

That's human nature, but I'm suggesting an alternative tack. Embrace individualism. Question your stereotypes. Maybe even look in the mirror. When you're done, it's likely that you'll see far more talent, in far more unorthodox varieties, than you expected.

HT: Arts & Letters Daily