Luke Ford

It's Easy To Dismiss Information You Don't Understand (9-3-21) by Luke Ford

There is not usually a religious answer to a biological problem just as there is not usually a psychological answer to a mechanical problem. Religion and psychology don't automatically work against addiction.

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Ed West writes: Life is a status game, and Storr identifies three methods by which we reach the top: dominance, competence and virtue (although most people use a combination of two or all three). It is the last of these which is the most interesting, and sometimes the most dangerous, inspiring immense cruelty.

Status is extremely important to wellbeing, so much so that it can have a profound effect on our health. People more successful in their careers tend to live longer, even taking into account confounders like smoking. The demoralising feeling of lower social status can send our bodies into a sort of crisis mode which in the long term puts us at higher risk of neurodegenerative disease, heart disease and cancer.

Being a loser can be fatal, and people who feel low status are also more likely to become ungenerous towards others and pick up destructive personal habits such as eating more sugary food — unsurprisingly, being overweight is an obvious status signal in rich countries. They are also more likely to kill themselves, with loss of job or divorce being the biggest risk factors for male suicide in middle age, for men who find themselves no longer provider or patriarch. Some people find the status game so stressful they simply drop out, most notoriously in Japan where more than half a million hikikomori have “social withdrawal syndrome”, locked in their bedroom doing God-knows-what. https://unherd.com/2021/09/life-is-one-big-status-game/

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https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli

"News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what's relevant. It's much easier to recognise what's new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Media organisations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we're cut off from the flow of news. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.

News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists' radar but have a transforming effect. The more "news factoids" you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. If more information leads to higher economic success, we'd expect journalists to be at the top of the pyramid. That's not the case.

News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation."

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https://unherd.com/2021/08/is-this-the-end-of-white-america/ Eric Kaufman: "But the big demographic story of the 2010s wasn’t about White Americans, but the big drop in Hispanic fertility, which is rapidly converging with the more stable white rate. So even while the share of “unmixed” whites will probably dip below 50% by 2050, the share who are considered socially white is likely to be a majority into the foreseeable future."

"One of the few seeking to dispel such illusions is leading American sociologist of ethnicity, Richard Alba. However, his important book The Great Demographic Illusion failed to garner reviews because it doesn’t fit the prevailing narrative. Instead, the media are attracted to demographic stories which heighten white threat perceptions, gratifying progressives while increasing support for Trumpism."

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691201634/the-great-demographic-illusion

https://www.wsj.com/articles/census-misleads-race-ethnicity-mixed-hispanic-asian-white-black-diversity-index-11630250185?mod=opinion_lead_pos8 John B. Judis writes: "Over time, social mobility and intermarriage will likely further weaken the distinction between Americans identified as white and those with Asian and Hispanic ancestry. As sociologist Richard Alba has argued, census projections that the U.S. will become a “majority minority” nation by 2045 are likely to prove false.

To confuse matters more, the census introduced in 2020 a “diversity index” that filtered out Hispanics who considered themselves “white” by creating a quasiracial category of 57.8% “non-Hispanic whites.” This was the percentage most commentators reported as “whites.” It eliminated the 20.3% of people of Hispanic origin who still checked off only “white.” The authors of the census appear determined to fuel nativist fears that whites are being “replaced” and liberal hopes of a growing minority-based Democratic majority.

As for politics, Democrats may become the majority party, but not through demographics alone. Like earlier first- and second-generation Americans, many Hispanics and Asians initially found a home in the Democratic Party, but later (like the Irish or Poles) have begun making their political choices based on class, interest and values. If later-generation Hispanics and Asian-Americans still vote Democratic, it probably won’t be out of ethnic identification. There was some evidence of that in the 2016 and 2020 elections, in rising support among these groups for Donald Trump and other Republicans."

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The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder, https://www.amazon.com/Loss-Sadness-Psychiatry-Transformed-Depressive-ebook/dp/B001CHRHHO/

"Nonhuman primates show a clear resemblance to humans in the way they respond to loss—that is, in their observable features of expression, behavior, and brain functioning. As Darwin noted, apes and humans show similar facial expressions in situations that are associated with sadness, including elevated eyebrows, drooping eyelids, horizontal wrinkles across the forehead, and outward extension and drawing down of the lips. In addition, displays of sadness among apes, like human responses, include decreased locomotor activity, agitation, slouched or fetal-like posture, cessation of play behavior, and social withdrawal. Most important, the loss situations that commonly lead to depressive responses are similar in primates and in humans. Nonhuman primates react to separations from intimates—for example, an infant monkey separating from its mother—with physiological responses similar to those that correlate with sadness in humans, including elevated levels of cortisol and ACTH hormones and impairments of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Adult nonhuman primates that are separated from sexual partners or peers show similar reactions.

Primate studies also show that symptoms of depression that develop after separations rapidly disappear when the situation of loss is resolved, such as when an infant monkey is reunited with its mother. Also, primates in environments that feature readily available mother substitutes rarely exhibit severe or enduring reactions in response to maternal separations. Such transient sadness responses to separation are part of innate coping mechanisms among many species. However, prolonged separations and separations marked by profound

isolation can produce neuroanatomical changes that permanently affect nonhuman primate brain functioning, analogous to the triggering of genuine depressive disorder in humans."

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Destutt_de_Tracy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/08/caitlin-flanagan-secret-of-surviving-cancer/619844/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism_in_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Bell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hofstadter

Jews in the American Historical Profession, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=141689

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism

That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=138784

Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twentieth Century, https://www.amazon.com/Jews-American-Soul-Twentieth-Century/dp/0691117551

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds: https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=141783 "All the leading behaviorists were WASPs—a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by young people entering psychology in the 1950s. Looking back, a casual observer of the field at that time couldn’t help but wonder if there shouldn’t be two entirely unrelated disciplines: “WASP Psychology” and “Jewish Psychology.” The WASPs marched around in white lab coats carrying clipboards and thinking up new ways to torture rats and all the while avoided the great wet mess of human experience. The Jews embraced the mess—even the Jews who disdained Freud’s methods and longed for “objectivity” and wished to search for the kinds of truth that might be tested according to the rules of science.

Danny, for his part, longed for objectivity. The school of psychological thought that most charmed him was Gestalt psychology. Led by German Jews—its origins were in early twentieth-century Berlin—it sought to explore, scientifically, the mysteries of the human mind. The Gestalt psychologists had made careers uncovering interesting phenomena and demonstrating them with great flair: a light appeared brighter when it emerged from total darkness; the color gray looked green when it was surrounded by violet and yellow if surrounded by blue; if you said to a person, “Don’t step on that banana eel!,” he’d be sure that you had said not “eel” but “peel.” The Gestalists showed that there was no obvious relationship between any external stimulus and the sensation it created in people, as the mind intervened in many curious ways. Danny was especially struck by the way that the Gestalt psychologists, in their writings, put their readers through an experience, so that they might feel for themselves the mysterious inner workings of their own minds…"

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Judgment and understanding are different modes of life, just like work and play and worship and skepticism. No mode is inherently superior. Every mode comes with benefits and prices.

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https://www.amazon.com/Loss-Sadness-Psychiatry-Transformed-Depressive-ebook/dp/B001CHRHHO/r

"Depression has become the single most commonly treated mental disorder, amid claims that one out of ten Americans suffer from this disorder every year and 25% succumb at some point in their lives. Warnings that depressive disorder is a leading cause of worldwide disability have been accompanied by a massive upsurge in the consumption of antidepressant medication, widespread screening for depression in clinics and schools, and a push to diagnose depression early, on the basis of just a few symptoms, in order to prevent more severe conditions from developing.

In The Loss of Sadness, Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield argue that, while depressive disorder certainly exists and can be a devastating condition warranting medical attention, the apparent epidemic in fact reflects the way the psychiatric profession has understood and reclassified normal human sadness as largely an abnormal experience. With the 1980 publication of the landmark third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), mental health professionals began diagnosing depression based on symptoms--such as depressed mood, loss of appetite, and fatigue--that lasted for at least two weeks. This system is fundamentally flawed, the authors maintain, because it fails to take into account the context in which the symptoms occur. They stress the importance of distinguishing between abnormal reactions due to internal dysfunction and normal sadness brought on by external circumstances. Under the current DSM classification system, however, this distinction is impossible to make, so the expected emotional distress caused by upsetting events-for example, the loss of a job or the end of a relationship- could lead to a mistaken diagnosis of depressive disorder. Indeed, it is this very mistake that lies at the root of the presumed epidemic of major depression in our midst.

In telling the story behind this phenomenon, the authors draw on the 2,500-year history of writing about depression, including studies in both the medical and social sciences, to demonstrate why the DSM's diagnosis is so flawed. They also explore why it has achieved almost unshakable currency despite its limitations. Framed within an evolutionary account of human health and disease, The Loss of Sadness presents a fascinating dissection of depression as both a normal and disordered human emotion and a sweeping critique of current psychiatric diagnostic practices. The result is a potent challenge to the diagnostic revolution that began almost thirty years ago in psychiatry and a provocative analysis of one of the most significant mental health issues today."

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https://www.amazon.com/Loss-Sadness-Psychiatry-Transformed-Depressive-ebook/dp/B001CHRHHO/r

"Depression has become the single most commonly treated mental disorder, amid claims that one out of ten Americans suffer from this disorder every year and 25% succumb at some point in their lives. Warnings that depressive disorder is a leading cause of worldwide disability have been accompanied by a massive upsurge in the consumption of antidepressant medication, widespread screening for depression in clinics and schools, and a push to diagnose depression early, on the basis of just a few symptoms, in order to prevent more severe conditions from developing.

In The Loss of Sadness, Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield argue that, while depressive disorder certainly exists and can be a devastating condition warranting medical attention, the apparent epidemic in fact reflects the way the psychiatric profession has understood and reclassified normal human sadness as largely an abnormal experience."

"Intensely sad people experience decreased initiative, find less pleasure in life to motivate them, and tend to withdraw from everyday activities. Positive mood, in contrast, encourages activities required to obtain sexual partners, food, shelter, and other resources that increase survival and reproduction. Thus, under ordinary circumstances, consistent levels of negative mood should be selectively disadvantageous. For intense sadness responses to have been naturally selected, there must have been some special circumstances in which the benefits of temporarily experiencing such symptoms outweighed the obvious costs. In those particular contexts, and only in those contexts, states of low mood must have increased fitness precisely because they made people less active, less motivated, and so on. The best analogy is to acute pain from an injury, which stops activity but is adaptive because it helps people avoid further damage to tissue. In contrast, chronic pain unrelated to any underlying physiological damage would be harmful in the way that depressive disorder is certainly harmful."

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