Incentives Matter

Tags

advice tag, ozy blog post, sex positivity

This is a rule I’ve generally found useful for interpersonal interactions:

Consider the incentives you’re giving people. Behave in a way that rewards people for giving you things you want and punishes people for harming you, instead of the other way around.

For example, let’s say you want people to email you with your requests, so you can process them all at once and they don’t interrupt you. But when someone calls you on the phone, you handle the request immediately so you can get back to what you were doing. In this case, people who call you on the phone get their request handled faster than people who email you. A better policy would be to firmly inform people who call you that the appropriate way to contact you is through email, and that you will be happy to assist them as soon as they email you.

Or maybe you want a person you love to tell you when your behavior is hurting them, so you can stop. But every time they tell you that, you start crying and apologize a dozen times and beat yourself up for being such a terrible person and they have to spend two or three hours comforting you about the fact that you hurt them. Often, you get mad at them, because if they’re saying you hurt them they must be saying you’re bad, and you’re not bad, and it is very unfair of them to accuse you of being bad. They’re only going to bring up ways that you’re hurting them if it’s worth the cost of spending hours comforting you, and you might end up hurting them in lots of ways you don’t know about. A better approach would be to thank them for telling you and say that you’ll think about it, then do your processing with someone else where they can’t see it.

Or maybe you want your romantic partner to spend lots of time with you. But when they’re with you, you spend all of your time talking about how much you miss them when they’re gone, how jealous you are of all the time they spend with other people, how they have a moral obligation to spend more time with you than they’re currently spending, how miserable you are, and how much them not spending more time with you is ruining your entire life. A better approach would be to talk with them about their day.

Or maybe you would prefer that your child not have tantrums. But when they ask nicely for a cookie, you never give them a cookie. When they throw a tantrum, you give them a cookie every time in order to get them to shut up. A better approach would be to give them a cookie sometimes when they ask nicely for it and never give a cookie to a tantruming child.

In general, you should put yourself into other people’s shoes and figure out what’s the best way for them to get what they want, whether it’s a cookie, a pleasant afternoon, or a speedily fulfilled request. Some people are going to do the thing you want them to do, out of altruism or a desire to follow the rules or because they care about you. But lots of people are going to do the thing that helps them reach their own goals the best. So you’re more likely to get the things you want if getting you the things you want helps other people get the things they want.

This seems like a really simple rule but I think a lot of relationships would be improved by putting it into practice.

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Scrupulosity Sequence #6: Intuitive Eating

Tags

diets cw, food cw, ozy blog post, scrupulosity sequence, \Tere

[content warning for discussion of food, dieting, and moralizing around food]

To the best of my knowledge, the only place that my approach to scrupulosity has been independently worked out (by a person who is not an effective altruist) is food/dieting, under the name “intuitive eating.” It makes sense that that would be the case: food and dieting are something a lot of people have dysregulated shame and guilt about. So in this post I’m going to write about intuitive eating as a case study, and then expand it in a later post.

Many people have a very, very unhealthy relationship with food. They might try diet after diet after diet, searching for the one that will cause them to finally lose weight, or they might stick to a single rigid diet, or they might feel constantly guilty about how they should be on a diet (but somehow that never actually stops them from getting the second slice of cake). They might restrict food for weeks or months, but then it’s a holiday or a vacation, or they feel like they “deserve it,” or they’ve given in and had one cookie and now their diet is Ruined. They might not feel able to refuse food that they don’t want; they might feel guilty about eating the food they don’t want, especially if it’s “unhealthy.” They might eat without intending to, or feel like they have to clean their plates. The very thought of a diet might make them eat until they’re stuffed; after all, they might diet tomorrow and then they won’t get any of this again!

Diet is a very personal matter and lots of different things work for different people. I don’t mean to say that the thing I describe is right for everyone. I have no particular expertise in eating disorders; if you have a history of anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating, talk to someone who knows more than me before deciding to eat intuitively. But one thing that works for many people is intuitive eating.

The core of intuitive eating is unconditional permission to eat. If you want to, you can have ice cream for dinner. You can eat a six-course meal and clean your plate every time. You can have whatever your forbidden food is: Twinkies, hot chocolate, cheese, bread, fettucine alfredo. And you can have salads, steamed broccoli, tofu stir-fry, and boneless skinless chicken breast.  You can turn down Aunt Ida’s disgusting meatloaf even if it will make Aunt Ida sad. You can have a bite of dinner and decide actually you’re still full from lunch.

If you’re good at intuitive eating, you can do some things that look a little bit like restriction: for example, I notice I compulsively eat certain kinds of candy when I keep them in the house, so I walk to the store when I want them. But if your relationship with food is a batshit mess, people who practice intuitive eating usually recommend you go to pretty extreme lengths to communicate to yourself that food is actually unrestricted. Buy the foods you used to not let yourself eat in enormous quantities, far more than you could actually eat, and whenever you run low restock. Carry a bag of foods you like around with you so that you can eat whenever you’re hungry. If you want fried rice for breakfast, pull out the wok and make some.

Now, maybe you’re the sort of person who, if you’re granted unconditional permission to eat, will proceed to eat nothing but brownies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don’t mean to argue with people’s experiences of themselves; I’m just describing one strategy that works for many people.

But many people will eat enormous quantities of brownies for a while– maybe a few days, maybe a few weeks. And then they will finally understand, on a gut level, that the brownies are always going to be there. This is not the last hurrah of brownies; there is not going to be a diet and then no more brownies ever again. You don’t have to save up brownie-eating experiences because someday you will never get to have another brownie. You will always get to have another brownie.

And once you’ve left the Brownie Scarcity Mindset, you can notice things. Like… eating until you’re stuffed actually doesn’t feel very good, it actually makes you feel kind of sick. And “brownies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner” leaves you feeling kind of shaky and unsatisfied. And maybe you’re never going to be a big fan of kale, but you find yourself eyeing the cucumbers and going “you know, what would really hit the spot right now? A big salad with a bunch of different vegetables, drizzled with olive oil and covered in nuts and cheese.”

The question a lot of people are going to ask at this point is “but do you lose weight?” In my anecdotal experience and the experience of people I know who practice intuitive eating… sometimes? If you have been eating past the point of hunger for a long time, or eating on autopilot when you’re not full, then you might find yourself losing weight when you stop doing that. If you have been ignoring your hunger signals and undereating for a long time, then you might find yourself gaining weight. But most people seem to settle at a stable equilibrium which may shift permanently after medical events such as pregnancy or serious illness.

On the other hand, that is exactly the result most diets give people too. And intuitive eating has a lot of other advantages. You get to have brownies, which is important. The diet you’ll wind up eating is probably healthier. You’ll enjoy your food more. And most importantly of all you get to take all the shame and guilt and self-hatred you’ve associated with food, all the emotional energy you have wrapped up in your diet, and just… stop. You can do something else with it.

There’s a common framing around food where everyone is constantly tempted to make the worst diet choices possible. If left to their own devices, everyone would eat nothing but pizza topped with cheesy chicken nuggets topped with pasta with alfredo sauce. The only way to have a healthy diet is a constant effort of will where you nobly resist even having a bite of donuts, and whenever you do eat a donut you self-flagellate appropriately. (Be sure to comment a lot about how bad the food is and how fat you are while you eat it: punishing yourself for eating “bad” food is the only way to make sure you don’t do something horrible like enjoy it.)

And, in fact, you can just… not? There is no Food Police who will arrest you for having a hamburger. The food you eat doesn’t have to mean anything about your worth as a human being, unless you decide it does. You don’t have to feel shame or guilt about what you eat. And if you choose not to beat yourself up about food choices, you will probably not have some pizza/chicken nugget/pasta chimera for dinner every night, because… that’s kind of gross actually?

It is actually just okay to eat the food you want and that makes you feel good. Maybe that will cause you to eat more chocolate than is best for ideal health, but over time it will probably result in a reasonable and balanced diet. You don’t have to hate yourself.

Scrupulosity Sequence #5: Restorative Justice

Tags

all cops are bastards, ozy blog post, scrupulosity sequence

I am, in many ways, an unusually a bad person.

I have a personality disorder, it comes with the territory. If anyone who has been diagnosed with a cluster B personality disorder tries to tell you they haven’t ever done anything really really wrong, they probably aren’t self-aware enough to be safe being around.

So it is important to me to come up with a system that handles people who have done unusually wrong things well.

Throughout this particular post, I am talking about relatively serious wrongdoing– violations of common-sense morality, things that will make your wisest and most ethical friends go “what the fuck?” Much of the advice in this post is overkill for ordinary-scale wrongdoing that people do every day, and you shouldn’t apply it for that. Wait until later in the series.

This post is not going to be relevant to most of the people reading this. Most people don’t do things that are really really wrong. But I feel it would be irresponsible to address the issue of dysregulated guilt and shame without addressing the issue of feeling dysregulated guilt and shame because you actually did something awful.

A few years ago, I was coming to terms with the fact that I did The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done In My Entire Life. Although I’m not going to share the details here, for obvious reasons, this is not a scrupulosity thing; I’ve run it by several sane friends with upright moralities and they’re like “wow, Ozy, that is in fact exceptionally bad. Don’t… don’t do that again.”

Naturally, I struggled with a lot of guilt and suicidality at the time. I’m naturally a pretty guilt-ridden and suicidal person, but I think pretty much everyone feels guilty when they have done a Very Wrong Thing, and perhaps has a passing thought of suicidality.

At the time, I read a Tumblr post by my longtime Internet friend Cliff Pervocracy. (Sadly, his blog was lost to the great Tumblr purge, so I have to reconstruct the post from memory.) Someone had asked him what to do: they’d discovered their friend had committed a rape a few decades ago, and they didn’t know the victim, and as far as the person could tell the friend hadn’t committed any rapes since and he had multiple exes who had nothing but positive things to say about him and so on. Should they stop talking to their friend because he was a rapist?

Cliff’s response was that he felt it was okay to decide not to be friends with someone because they committed a rape. It’s a normal preference, one that’s widely shared among many people, and one of the consequences of committing rape is that sometimes people don’t want to be your friend. But he said that he thought that you don’t have to. Solitary confinement is torture for a reason; people need friends. The ex-rapist doesn’t have the right to make people interact with him, but we as a society should say that it is okay to interact with him if you choose.

And, god, at the time that meant a lot to me, because I am less bad than a rapist, and if rapists deserved to be able to have friends and enjoy themselves and not self-flagellate for eternity, then by extension I must also deserve to be able to have friends and enjoy myself and not self-flagellate for eternity.

So I think that is the first part of a humane approach to people who have done really wrong things. There are some things you are entitled to that are completely non-negotiable, no matter how bad a person you are, no matter what you have done, no matter if you are Ted Bundy or Pol Pot or Thomas Midgley Jr. You have a right not to be tortured. You have a right not to be assaulted or killed, except when necessary to defend others. You have a right to food and water and shelter. You have a right to human interaction (but not to force unwilling people to interact with you, and that sometimes means sufficiently disliked people are doomed to loneliness– but it is a tragedy, every time). You have a right to fun and pleasure and recreation. You have a right to learn things if you want to, to make things if you want to, to exercise if you want to, to see the sun if you want to.

(Guess, from these beliefs, my opinion on the US prison system.)

And this means there are some things that ethics cannot demand from you. It cannot demand that you kill yourself. It cannot demand that you cut yourself. It cannot demand that you isolate yourself from everyone (although it can demand that you communicate honestly with other people and let them make their own choices about whether to interact with you). It cannot demand that you never watch a movie again.

All of those rights are important. But there is one right that I think is the most important right of all.

You have a right to a life that isn’t all about the worst thing you ever did.

Restorative justice is a big topic, and I’m only going to be able to glance at it here. For example, I’m not going to have the space to talk about restorative-justice alternatives to the prison system, or about the roles of community members and victims. I highly recommend The Little Book of Restorative Justice for a readable introduction, if what I’m saying whets your interest.

Restorative justice is a system that has three principles:

1. Crime (or, as I’m using the concepts here, wrongdoing more broadly) is fundamentally a harm to people, as opposed to a violation of a law or rule.
2. This harm creates certain obligations on the part of offenders and communities.
3. Justice should seek to heal people and put right what went wrong, as opposed to determining blame and inflicting pain on the guilty.

The Little Book of Restorative Justice says our system of justice should provide the following things to offenders:

1. Accountability that addresses the resulting harms, encourages empathy and responsibility, and transforms shame.
2. Encouragement to experience personal transformation, including healing for the harms that contributed to their offending behavior, opportunities for treatment for addictions and/or other problems, and enhancement of personal competencies.
3. Encouragement and support for integration into the community.
4. For some, at least temporary restraint.

I think this is a good framework with which to approach serious wrongdoing that one has committed.

Of course, there are some ways in which a restorative justice approach applied to oneself is different than a restorative justice approach applied to society. For example, outside of a restorative justice system, it is often not possible to arrange to speak face-to-face with one’s victim and come to an agreement about appropriate means of restitution. (Indeed, for many sorts of wrongdoing, the victim would find an attempt to do so frightening or upsetting. Do not try to talk to victims of your actions against their will.)

But I think a broad framework of accountability, personal transformation, and reintegration is a useful tool for thinking about how to deal with having done wrong.

There are many ways to take accountability. A single sincere apology (ONLY IF YOUR VICTIM WANTS TO TALK TO YOU) is often appropriate. You should almost certainly tell at least one person what you did, honestly and completely, without leaving out any details or trying to make yourself look better than you are. In some cases, it may be appropriate to write a public confession.

If you have committed a violent felony against another person, in my opinion, accountability generally requires turning yourself in to the police. In countries outside the United States, accountability may also require turning yourself in for lesser crimes, but the United States prison system is batshit enough that I’m not willing to say that here.

I realize among some of my readers this recommendation may be controversial, since the US prison system violates the human rights of its inmates. I myself lean towards prison abolitionism. However, abolishing prisons would involve a fundamental restructuring of society that has not happened yet; it cannot happen willy-nilly by individual people choosing not to go to prison. In the meantime, the justice system has options for restraining people that everyday people do not. Taking accountability for a violent crime means putting yourself in a position where you actually can’t do the violent crime again.

Another important aspect of accountability is trying to repair what you’ve done wrong, as best you can. For example, if you have stolen something from someone, you should give back the value of what you stole, with interest. If you have destroyed someone’s reputation, you should set the record straight. It is usually not possible to repair the harm entirely, but it is often possible to do something. Repairing the harm may require significant emotional or material sacrifice, but it is absolutely necessary.

In actual restorative justice procedures, the victim and the offender often agree on a symbolic means of repairing the harm, such as community service. That can help victims feel like their emotional needs are being taken into account. This seems like not a very good course of action to recommend outside of an actual restorative justice procedure. Scrupulous people may end up using this as a reason to self-flagellate. If the victim is consulted, it may scare or upset them or make them feel like they’re being contacted against their will. If the victim is not consulted, they may never learn about it, and the symbolic means may not be something they find emotionally satisfying. Without an independent mediator, victims may demand an unreasonable amount, perhaps for revenge reasons. Nevertheless, as an offender, if you think a symbolic attempt to repair the harm is appropriate, it may be.

Personal transformation is another aspect of restorative justice. In essence, personal transformation means becoming the sort of person who would not do that particular sort of wrongdoing again. Reflect as honestly as possible about what caused you to hurt other people, and then think about how you could change it. For example, if you did wrong because of an addiction, you might think about how to get clean or sober. If you had a mismanaged mental illness, you might take medication or change your medications, go to therapy, or practice self-help techniques. If particular friends influenced you to hurt others, you might stop talking to them and seek out friends that will help you make better choices. If a particular circumstance tempted you, you might avoid it in the future. If your job involves committing atrocities, quit.

There are two circumstances that commonly come up with regards to personal transformation. First, personal transformation is sometimes really really hard. Some of the concrete steps I listed– quitting drinking, recovering from a mental illness, finding new friends, leaving a job or often a career– are extremely fucking hard. You need support from friends, loved ones, or your community. You need to expect to fail sometimes: addicts, alcoholics, and mentally ill people relapse.

Second, sometimes you discover that you are already transformed. The self-awareness to admit that you did something very very wrong without an outside prompt is often the product of a long process of personal growth, and sometimes the other product of that process of personal growth is that you’re no longer the sort of person who did that thing. That can lead to a sense of emptiness and of useless energy; what are you supposed to do now? There’s an urge to make up for what you’ve done when you’ve done wrong, and it can be frustrating when there’s nothing to channel it into.

The final step is reintegration into society. I discussed that step in greater detail above. Once you’ve made amends, repaired what you could of the harm, and stopped being the sort of person who would do that wrong, then you’re done. You have, as the phrase goes, paid your debt to society, and you don’t have to worry about it anymore.

You can have a life that is not about making up for the worst thing you have ever done.

The Irrationalfic Manifesto

Tags

ozy blog post, writing

Many of my friends write rationalfic, in the vein of such works as Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality or Luminosity. As described on the r/rational sidebar, rationalfic features “thoughtful behaviour of people in honest pursuit of their goals,” “realistic intellectual agency,” and a “focus on intelligent characters solving problems through creative applications of their knowledge and resources.”

Rationalfic is really cool and I’ve enjoyed a lot of it (recommending people read Silmaril feels somewhat anti-social, because it will eat two months of your life, but Silmaril is so good). However, I personally am not interested in writing rationalfic. I write irrationalfic: fiction where careful attention is paid to the intricacies and subtleties of human irrationality.

Perhaps irrationalfic can be best summed up through a quote from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essay on writing Level 1 intelligent characters:

The movie version goes like this: The thirteen dwarves and Bilbo Baggins have just spent one and a half movies fighting their way to the place where Thorin, leader of the dwarves, expects to find a secret entrance into the lost dwarven kingdom of Erebor. This entrance can only be opened on a particular day of the year (Durin’s Day), and they have a decoded map saying, Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks, and the last light of Durin’s day will shine upon the keyhole.

And then the sun sets behind a mountain, and they still haven’t found the keyhole. So Thorin… I find this painful to write… Thorin throws down the key in disgust and all the dwarves start to head back down the mountain, leaving only Bilbo behind to stare at the stone wall. And so Bilbo is the only one who sees when the light of the setting moon suddenly reveals the keyhole.

(Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O34oOCB_7Kk.)

That thing where movie!Thorin throws down the key in disgust and walks away?

I wouldn’t have done that.

You wouldn’t have done that.

We’d wait at least an hour in case there was some beam of sunlight about to shoot through the side of the mountain, and then we’d come back tomorrow, just in case. And if that still failed we’d try again a year later. We wouldn’t drop the key. We wouldn’t wander off the instant something went wrong…

We could say that these strange creatures lack a certain sort of awareness. The scriptwriter wants us to be yelling at movie!Thorin, “No! You fool! Don’t do that!” but it does not occur to the scriptwriter that Thorin might yell this at himself, that Thorin might detect his own idiocy the way we see it plain upon the screen. Movie!Thorin has no little voice in his own head to yell these things at him, the way that you or I are the little voices in our own heads. We could call movie!Thorin a Hollywood Zombie, or H-Zombie for short.

The rationalfic solution to the problem of Thorin is to write a Level 1 intelligent character who doesn’t do extremely obviously stupid things. The irrationalfic solution to the problem of Thorin is to justify why he is so extremely obviously stupid.

Perhaps Thorin is an impatient person, someone who gives up easily, who doesn’t put in the extra effort. Perhaps this is established throughout the movie series: he gets bored before they’ve checked that all the ponies’ bags are secure; he gives up when Bilbo tries to show him how to make some hobbit food and he doesn’t get it immediately; he decides on the kill-Smaug plan because he gets frustrated listening to all the potential plans there could possibly be. Sometimes it works for his benefit: he demands that the other dwarves hurry up and stop being so careful and they manage to leave just before a monster is about to attack them. Sometimes it bites him in the ass: maybe they leave the map at the campsite because Thorin didn’t double-check that they had it; maybe Thorin was in charge of preparing something for a fight and he only half-did it and some orcs they could have defeated easily almost kill them.

Once you have established all of that, Thorin is not an H-Zombie. Thorin is a person, an impatient and easily frustrated person, similar to many people you have met over the course of your life. And you might yell “aaa! You fool! Don’t do that!” at the screen, but your suspension of disbelief is not going to snap.

Following Eliezer’s convention, we can declare that an irrational character whose irrationality is always justified in some satisfying way and is of a piece with her entire character development in a Level 1 irrational character. A Level 2 irrational character is one where the character’s irrationality actually makes sense to the reader as a thing the reader would have done in the character’s shoes, perhaps to the point that the reader does not see the character as irrational until the full consequences of their actions are revealed. A Level 3 irrational character is one where the reader realizes some aspect of their own irrationality due to seeing it play out in the character’s life.

What makes an irrationalfic?

Irrationalfic protagonists are flawed. And they don’t just have grand, noble, heroic flaws either. Irrationalfic protagonists have the normal range of human flaws. They’re petty and careless and thoughtlessly cruel. They make big plans and don’t follow through with them. They suck at communicating with people they’re dating. They have anxiety and guilt issues. They don’t like doing things that are boring or involve a lot of hard work. They deceive themselves; they maintain intricate webs of denial of all their personality flaws and all the problems in their lives. They sell out their principles for financial gain; they stick to their principles even when it will cost other people’s lives. They make bad decisions when they’re hungry or tired or horny. They’re biased and prejudiced and xenophobic. They’re basically good people who fail to outperform the society they were raised in; they’re basically good people who try to outperform the society they were raised in and end up going off in a terrible direction and making everything worse. Obviously, I don’t mean that any character should have every one of those traits (…although if you manage to do it I want a link), just that these are the sorts of flaws irrationalfic protagonists should have.

Irrationalfic protagonists’ flaws make sense. Horror-movie characters splitting up and being picked off by the monster one by one is not an irrationalfic, it is just people behaving irrationally. At all times, the audience should be thinking “I understand why this character is behaving this way, even though I want to shake them.” One of the best ways to do this is by making the character get some sort of benefit from their flaws. This is realistic; people don’t usually do things that only hurt them and don’t have any good aspects at all. Try thinking about in what circumstances the character’s flaws are adaptive. What situation makes the irrational choice a good decision? For example:

• A character who ignores her problems and binge-watches Netflix doesn’t have to think about things that are scary or upsetting.
• A character who doesn’t do important but dull tasks isn’t bored as often.
• A character who doesn’t talk about their needs or set boundaries may have an easier time surviving certain abusive relationships.
• A character who agrees with her society’s prejudices is less likely to anger other people or make them feel guilty about their own prejudiced behavior.
• A character who never follows through on her plans doesn’t have to worry about failing.
• A character who practices self-deception doesn’t have to face uncomfortable truths about herself.
• A character who sells out their principles for financial gain gets money which she can use to buy things that make her life better.

Another way to add plausibility is by laying out the character’s reasoning process. Don’t just have Thorin stomp off; make us feel his despair about ever finding the keyhole, his anger that he’s come all this way for nothing, his shame that he got fourteen people to spend a year of their lives on this quest and failed because he believed some stupid map. Don’t just have a character decide not to ask about some important and incorrect assumption she’s making about her love interest; make us understand that her love interest clearly doesn’t want to talk about it, and she wants to respect his preferences, and she’s sure he’ll open up in his own time, and anyway from all the information she has it’s really obvious what the explanation is.

Irrationalfic protagonists have virtues. A person who is nothing but flaw is not a very interesting character, and it limits the field on which their flaws can play out. As C S Lewis wrote, “To be greatly and effectively wicked a man needs some virtue. What would Attila have been without his courage, or Shylock without self-denial as regards the flesh?” So give your character some redeeming qualities. Give her intelligence or compassion or a sincere and earnest desire to do good; make her witty or hard-working or good at people; make her brave or thoughtful.

Some virtues I think are particularly worth considering due to the interesting plot points they open up:

• Self-awareness. Most people who make bad decisions don’t know their decisions are bad. But scenes where the character goes “I recognize that this is a stupid decision and it is going to bite me in the ass” and then makes the decision anyway can be really interesting. Self-awareness can also allow the protagonist to explain why their decision is bad, which may be helpful for novice writers and increase the didactic potential of the story.
• A commitment to self-improvement. In irrationalfic, you basically don’t get a happy ending without this trait; I’ll talk about that more later in the post.
• Goals and agency. ‘Drifting through life without any particular intentions or plans’ is a perfectly cromulent flaw, but characters with goals make writing a lot easier. They spontaneously generate their own plots, whereas the other sort of character has to be forcibly dragged into a plot kicking and screaming. And there’s something particularly fun about watching a character destroy all the things they love and cherish because of their own poor coping mechanisms.
• Being a better person than she thinks she is. It’s true this is only on the list because it is one of my favorite tropes. But it is a really good trope! The character might identify as being selfish or cruel or mean, or she might share her society’s prejudices and flaws. But then she encounters a suffering person, or befriends someone from the oppressed group, or faces a problem that professionalism demands she solve… and suddenly, without really knowing what she’s doing, she finds herself rescuing slaves or hiding Jews from the Nazis or fighting the Big Bad. Maybe she thinks the good thing she’s doing is actually evil, maybe she’s baffled at her self-sacrifice for a cause, maybe she keeps thinking she’s going to quit but she never does. Anyway. It’s a good trope. There should be more of it.

Irrationalfic protagonists cause many of their own problems. How much this is the case depends on the irrationalfic in question. For some stories, the primary conflict is external, but the protagonist makes their situation worse. For other stories, literally the entire story would be over in two pages if not for the protagonist constantly fucking things up all the time.

Regardless, the character’s flaws must fuck them over. None of this shit where a character is an alcoholic but as soon as the plot starts they mysteriously never take a drink. If a character is an alcoholic, they should be drunk during an important fight scene, and it means their aim is wildly off and they end up hitting a little girl instead of the person who took her hostage.

Think about the most obvious and boring ways that a character’s flaws would create problems for her. If she makes cutting, snarky remarks that make the reader laugh, her victims probably shouldn’t also laugh– a lot of the time, they should hate her. If she is chronically sleep-deprived because she superheroes at night and goes to school during the day, she should make bad impulsive decisions and fail to think through the implications of her actions. If she skips important meetings, decisions she doesn’t like should happen at those meetings.

If irrationalfic protagonists grow, it takes work. If you have an epiphany that causes your character to realize that they’ve made some horrible mistake, it should take place in chapter three, and the rest of the book should be devoted to the slow and switchbacky process of putting that epiphany into action. Ignored epiphanies [cw: tvtropes] are also allowed. But the point is that in irrationalfic it never ever ever happens that a character has a sudden epiphany and it completely changes everything about their lives forever. I don’t want to say that sudden epiphanies never happen in real life but they’re definitely overrepresented in fiction and irrationalfic should push back against that.

A character in irrationalfic may decide that they’re going to stop being irrational. If they do, they might start off with a burst of good intentions and then a month later fall back into old patterns. They might give into temptation at exactly the wrong moment. They might half-change. They might start doing the new thing and halfway through just… stop. They might trick themselves into believing they’ve changed when they haven’t. They might have to come up with strategies to get around their own irrationality: a Facebook blocker, the Pomodoro method, bribing themselves with chocolate, locking away a tempting object and giving someone else the key, avoiding people who make them angry, taking deep breaths and counting to ten. They might try strategies and they don’t work. They might take medication or go to therapy. Regardless, it will take a lot of work and they will spend a lot of time aware of their flaws, trying to improve on their flaws, and being flawed anyway.

Irrationalfic pays close attention to character. You may notice the first five points in my irrationalfic manifesto happen to do with what the protagonists are like. My irrationalfic definition is different from rationalfic definitions, which typically include non-character things such as thoughtful worldbuilding and the fact that the plots can be resolved through intelligent decision-making. This is not an accident.

Irrationalfic, as a genre, is marked by its concern for character. In Orson Scott Card’s MICE system, they’re character stories: they’re concerned with who the character is, what she does, and why she does it. That is not to say that there can’t be world-spanning plot events or rich and detailed societies, but ultimately an irrationalfic is about people.

For this reason, I’ve found romance is a particularly good genre for irrationalfic, since romance focuses intensely on specific characters and the ways they interact with each other, and the conflict in romance often springs from the characters’ personalities rather than from some external force.

Unreliable narrators. In general, when you’re writing an irrationalfic, your viewpoint character should not be 100% reliable. She might misremember a scene that happened earlier in the story. She might incorrectly report what other characters’ feelings are. She might describe herself in a way that contradicts her own behavior. She might mention offhandedly as part of a list of six things something that the reader recognizes as extremely important. She might report the incorrect beliefs of her society as if they are actually true. Using an unreliable narrator requires a certain level of trust in the reader’s ability to realize that the narrator is not a completely accurate and objective reporter of events, but I think making the reader do that interpretive labor adds a lot to their experience.

Dramatic irony. Dramatic irony goes along with unreliable narrators, but can also come from other sources. If you have a character who is not particularly self-aware– as most irrationalfic characters are not– there’s a lot of opportunity for the audience to know something the characters don’t.

Every character’s actions make sense to that character. Expanding our focus beyond the protagonist, how do other characters in irrationalfic behave? Ideally, every character should be treated like the protagonist: they should have virtues, behave in a way that makes sense, and be someone the audience can understand and sympathize with, but they should have flaws that cause them to hurt themselves or others.

It is particularly important to pay attention to antagonists. Many stories will not have an antagonist: the protagonist is the cause of all their own problems, or the conflict is with some sympathetic person, such as a love interest. If you choose to have a villain, the villain should be characterized as carefully as the protagonist. In particular, since people don’t usually forget to give their villains huge flaws, it’s important to make sure that your villain is sympathetic and has redeeming qualities and that the audience can understand her point of view and why she’s making the mistakes she’s making. Give her the opportunity to speak for herself.

Irrationalfic characters have unhappy or ambiguous endings or earn their happy ending. This isn’t going to be true 100% of the time: sometimes, the most satisfying way for a story to work out is that the character gets the thing that they want, even though they do not deserve it at all. But if that happens in more than, say, one in twenty of your irrationalfic stories, I’d take it as a red flag that you should be meaner to your characters.

If the character is exactly as flawed at the end of the book as at the beginning of the book, then you have two options. You can write an all-out tragedy where their fatal flaws destroy them. (More books should be tragedies. I bet it would do great things for the prevalence of the just-world hypothesis.) But you can also write a story with an ambiguous ending: they get some of the things they want, but not all of them; they get the things they want, but at a high cost; they don’t get what they want, but they get something else that’s also okay; everything is terrible, but at least they’re alive, which was not a given at the climax.

If a character works hard on the process of personal growth and overcoming their flaws (even if they’re still imperfect), then they can earn a happy ending. However, you should strongly consider the possibility that the character should not earn their happy ending: even after a lot of hard work, the mistakes they made early in the story were large enough that they realistically should wind up with a tragic or ambiguous ending.

Careful attention to irrationality. Irrationalfic is, fundamentally, about human irrationality— about the ways that people come to have false beliefs or take actions that don’t advance their goals. Therefore, writing irrationalfic requires paying a lot of careful attention to the exact details of how irrationality works. The thought process must be plausible, the way that people making a particular mistake actually think. And a significant chunk of the story must be devoted to exploring the ways that characters are irrational, why they are irrational, and the consequences of their own irrationality. This point is the core of irrationalfic. If you have nothing else, but you have this, you have written an irrationalfic.

What are some good examples of irrationalfic? (My own writing is, sadly, too often unedited for me to in good conscience call it ‘good.’) Many tragedies are irrationalfic; so are many comedies. Many of the best characters in Amentumblr, such as healthesick and tidalwave-shiningsky, were excellent irrationalfic characters. A Song of Ice and Fire has some lovely irrationalfic moments, such as the death of Ned Stark and the fact that almost every character is ignoring the literal zombie apocalypse while they fight over who gets to sit on the Iron Throne. Amends by Eve Tushnet, a novel about an alcoholism treatment reality show, is a good earthfic example full of richly observed (and funny!) detail about alcoholics. I haven’t watched it personally, but from what I’ve read It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is a good example. Do other people have good examples?

PSA: Intrusive Thoughts

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post

[content warning: descriptions of common intrusive thoughts, including sexual violence, suicide, abuse, harm to children, child sexual abuse, etc]

Nearly everyone experiences intrusive thoughts.

An intrusive thought is a random unwanted and unpleasant thought, usually with violent, sexual, or blasphemous themes. A mother might be walking along the stairs carrying her infant and think “I could just throw my infant off the stairs.” A person waiting for the train might have an image of throwing himself in front of the train. A person praying might find “God is evil, God is evil” going through the back of their head. Someone might sometimes experience flashes of what it would be like to have sex with people– even people they don’t otherwise find attractive or even beings they would be horrified to have sex with, such as animals, family members, or children.

These thoughts are totally normal. Nearly everyone experiences them sometimes. In case you’re wondering “hey, what’s up with the thing where I sometimes think about throwing myself in front of the train even though I don’t actually have any desire to throw myself in front of a train and actually it’s kind of weird and upsetting?”, that’s what’s up with it.

I don’t think anyone knows for certain why people have intrusive thoughts. I’ve heard some people claim it’s the “think of a white bear” effect. Normally, you hardly ever think about white bears, unless you are a zoologist, but if you try to avoid thinking about a white bear, then suddenly everything reminds you of white bears. Normal people try to avoid thinking about attempting suicide or throwing their infants off stairs, and sometimes their brains get confused and are like “maybe that means we SHOULD think about throwing infants off stairs?” I don’t know if this is actually true but it seems like a reasonably plausible explanation.

Most people shrug off their intrusive thoughts. However, some people pay a lot of attention to their intrusive thoughts. They worry that having intrusive thoughts may make them bad people. They try to suppress them or perform rituals to get them to go away, which actually only makes them more common. In some cases, this can result in OCD.

The most widely known form of OCD is contamination OCD, OCD about getting contaminated with germs or getting sick. But in fact any of the common subjects of intrusive thoughts can result in OCD, including:

• Suicidal OCD (killing yourself)
• Responsibility OCD (failing to prevent harm to others, accidentally putting someone in danger)
• Sexual orientation OCD (being a different sexual orientation than the one you identify as)
• Harm OCD (doing violence, hurting other people)
• Pedophile OCD (sex with children)
• Religious OCD (blasphemy, failure to follow religious rules)

If you have a bunch of thoughts about hurting yourself or other people or disobeying God, and they’re really scary and distressing, and you’re worried that it makes you a bad person, and sometimes you do things to check whether you’re a bad person or to stop yourself from doing bad things, you might have OCD.

Here are some important things to know if you have OCD:

• Intrusive thoughts are normal and almost everyone has them.
• Having intrusive thoughts does not mean anything about you as a person. Intrusive thoughts about wanting to kill yourself don’t make you suicidal. Intrusive thoughts about hurting other people don’t make you violent. Intrusive thoughts about sex with children don’t make you a pedophile.
• Under some theories, intrusive thoughts actually mean you’re particularly concerned about not doing those things– that’s why your brain is trying to suppress them!
• Pedophiles and violent people do not find their thoughts and urges about the subject distressing.
• Suicidal people generally find something appealing about the concept of suicide, even if they’re also distressed by being suicidal.
• Trying to suppress the thoughts will not help.
• Trying to test whether you are violent, suicidal, pedophilic, etc will not help.
• Avoiding situations where you might be violent, suicidal, pedophilic, etc. also will not help.
• Accepting the thoughts as a normal part of life and allowing them to pass through your brain without judgment will help.

Getting treatment for OCD can improve your quality of life. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to obtain treatment for OCD if you suffer from certain kinds of intrusive thoughts, particularly suicide-related, violent, or pedophilic. Try to seek out care from a therapist who specializes in OCD. If you suffer from suicide-related or violent thoughts, you will generally be safe from hospitalization if you don’t go to a mental hospital and if you are clear that you would never act on your thoughts and that you have many good reasons not to act on them.

I do not know how to avoid triggering mandatory-reporter status if you have pedophile OCD and spend time around children, but I will update this post if any mental health professionals have any advice.

Some Things Are Not Coordination Problems

Tags

not like other ideologies, ozy blog post

A coordination problem is a situation where, in order to get the best outcome, everyone needs to be doing the same thing. For example, which side of the road you drive on is a coordination problem: if everyone drives on the same side of the road, it’s okay, but if some people drive on the left and some people drive on the right, there will be car crashes everywhere. Global climate change is another example of a coordination problem. You can’t fix global climate change by deciding that you yourself will stop polluting; everyone has to cut back on their carbon emissions to prevent climate change. Lots of the problems in the world are coordination problems.

Unfortunately, some people I know claim that things are coordination problems when really they aren’t. Often, they don’t bother to try to establish that the thing is a coordination problem first; they just skip ahead to the part where they morally exhort people about the importance of not participating in coordination problems and/or complain about how the rationalist community is supposed to be full of people who are rational and yet here we are all irrationally having coordination problems.

I’m going to take social network use as my example, but I think the error occurs more generally.

In many ways, Facebook is bad. It invades your privacy. Hundreds of very smart people make very high salaries to try to figure out how to get you to keep clicking on Facebook, even when it doesn’t make you happy and you’d rather be doing literally anything else. Its algorithms often favor clickbait-y news over thoughtful longreads that give you a deep understanding of a particular issue.

If Facebook is bad, some people might wonder, why do people still use it? The “coordination problem” answer is that everyone else is on Facebook. A social network isn’t very much fun if no one is on it, so everyone has to use Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook, even though it is a bad website.

I don’t think this is true. I have personally observed a very successful shift away from a social networking website in 2007. In the Strikethrough and Boldthrough events, LiveJournal deleted a number of journals for expressing interest in sex-related topics such as BDSM, sex work, pedophilia, and rape. Infamously, this included communities that supported rape survivors; infamously, it also included a bunch of fanfiction porn communities.

In the wake of Strikethrough and Boldthrough, Archive of Our Own was founded as a free-speech alternative to LiveJournal and other ways that people commonly hosted fanfic. Today, it is one of the world’s most popular fanfiction archives, and the only known case of a free-speech alternative to something that didn’t become immediately overrun with Nazis.

By the “coordination problem” argument, there should have been a lot of trouble in getting everyone to use Archive of Our Own instead of LiveJournal. But there really wasn’t. Fanfiction writers genuinely care about Harry Potter porn free speech, and so when a site proved itself unreliable at hosting Harry Potter porn free speech, they quickly switched to a different website.

(Tumblr is unfortunately doing a similar attack on Harry Potter porn free speech, but moving seems to be going poorly due to the lack of an adequate substitute for Tumblr. I think you can get people to switch to a good substitute, but of course if the grossly inadequate website is the best you can get then people aren’t going to move.)

That places a lower bound on how hard it is to get people to move. In order to get people en masse to change from one social networking site to another, they have to care about the problems with the first site at least as much as fanfiction writers care about Harry Potter porn free speech. That’s it.

For any social network, there are three kinds of users. There are people who prefer the social network in question to any other social networks available. There are people who are kind of meh about it– this social network is fine, but there are others that are just as good. And there are people who hate the social network but can’t move because all their friends are there.

The “coordination problem” argument requires that most people are in the second or third groups, with only a small number of people in the first group. And I don’t think that’s actually true. If, say, forty percent of your users are “this social network sucks” and sixty percent are “meh, whatever, I’ll go where everyone else is going,” the forty percent can post about it, create common knowledge of the fact that they think it sucks, move to a different social networking site, and drag the apathetic sixty percent along with them.

The situation with Facebook is that there are lots of people in the first group– people who actively like Facebook. They like getting in political arguments and getting tagged in selfies and looking at pictures of other people’s babies. They don’t really care about privacy, don’t necessarily mind spending an evening on Facebook when they meant to be doing something else, and enjoy reading clickbait about which Game of Thrones character looks most like your cat. These people would continue to use Facebook even if it halved in size, as long as the Game of Thrones quizzes kept coming. In fact, I’m pretty sure the “uses Facebook, actively likes Facebook” group outnumbers the “uses Facebook, hates Facebook, wants to switch to something else” group.

Now, you can argue that those people’s preferences are stupid preferences. Probably they should care more about their privacy and being hacked into compulsive behavior they don’t endorse and should prefer reading Dostoyevsky to taking quizzes about cats. But that’s not a coordination problem. That’s a “the things people care about are bad and they should care about different things” problem. You do not fix that problem through moral exhortation to avoid coordination problems or informing people that the entire point of the rationalist community is avoiding coordination problems. And once you have fixed people’s preferences, I think the coordination problem will actually take care of itself.

Scrupulosity Sequence #4: Common-Sense Morality

Tags

effective altruism, ozy blog post

There’s a particular kind of morality most people seem to have, which you can call common-sense morality.

Common-sense morality works like this: there is a short list of things that you should do. If you do those things, you have earned your official Good Person Badge. You don’t have to feel guilty. In fact, if someone tries to make you feel guilty when you already have your Good Person Badge, they’re the ones violating common-sense morality. If you’ve followed common-sense morality, then you don’t have to think about morality any more or put any effort into becoming a better person.

These are some of the precepts of common-sense morality among people of my particular class background and political affiliation:

• Don’t murder, rape, or assault people.
• Don’t steal things.
• Don’t tell racist jokes or say the n-word.
• Don’t be cruel to animals you personally interact with.
• Call your parents.
• Love your children; don’t spank them; try to make sure they get into a good college; vaccinate.
• Vote.
• Give a little bit of money to charity when a disaster happens and around Christmastime.

You can usually tell that something is part of common-sense morality because people will reach a hysterical fever pitch of guilt-tripping whenever they think about the concept that someone doesn’t do it. Effective altruists get a bad rap for saying things that trigger scrupulosity, but they have nothing on upper-middle-class white progressives thinking about the concept that someone somewhere might vote third-party or (gasp) not vote at all.

There’s a lot of debate about what should count as common-sense morality. Some people think you should be able to tell racist jokes as long as they’re really funny; other people argue that not sending your child to a non-integrated school should be part of common sense morality. There has been a massive generational shift in the acceptability of repeatedly asking out one’s coworkers or making comments about how attractive their butts are. Some effective altruists have attempted to add “give ten percent of your income to an effective charity” to the common-sense morality list.

There are a lot of advantages to common-sense morality, which is why it is so popular. For one thing, you do a couple of easy things that pretty much everyone can do, and you’re done. That’s morality sorted. You don’t have to worry about it anymore. You get to feel better than all the people who don’t manage common-sense morality. And you can have the most guilt-based, shame-ridden relationship to morality imaginable, and it’s not a problem as long as you don’t kill anyone.

I think a lot of people’s solution to scrupulosity problems is to convince scrupulous people that they should do common-sense morality like everyone else. (Certainly, that’s the majority of the advice I’ve ever gotten about scrupulosity.) I’m not going to rule out the possibility that this works for some people, but it works abominably terribly for me, for a couple reasons.

Most obviously, it doesn’t do anything for my anxiety. I can say “okay, the standard for ethical behavior is that I can’t tell racist jokes or kill anyone and I have to give ten percent of my income to charity,” but I will continue to be anxious about whether I’m a good person. I will worry endlessly that that joke I told is maybe a racist joke, or that I might get an impulse to kill someone. I will be frightened that maybe ten percent isn’t the right number, and maybe actually we should set the number at fifteen percent, or twenty percent, or five percent. Normal people might be able to go “welp, I’ve done the common-sense morality things, time to stop worrying about morality”, but I’m not a normal person.

Common-sense morality is also really bad at handling people who have utterly failed it. Well, it’s good at handling the people who have utterly failed it from the perspective of most people, who enjoy the pleasant sensations of righteousness and moral outrage, but it’s terrible at handling the people who have utterly failed it from the perspective of a person who has done seriously morally wrong things before and expects that they may do so in the future.

If you have done something seriously morally wrong, then your Good Person Badge has been taken away. Perhaps there is an amount of self-flagellation that will cause people to agree that you’re a good person, particularly for omissions or more minor crimes. But from a lot of people’s perspective if you say the N word or hurt a puppy or shoplift makeup then you are an N Word Sayer or an Animal Abuser or a Thief for the rest of time, no matter what you do. There’s no process for making amends and having your sins forgiven; you are just a target to elicit feelings of righteousness and moral outrage in others.

Finally, following common sense morality means you cannot significantly outperform your society. Many people cherish the belief that this is not so, because right now being a slaveowner or a Nazi goes against common-sense morality, and so of course they think they wouldn’t be a slaveowner or a Nazi. But in the past you would not have had present-day common-sense morality; you would have had the past’s common-sense morality. If you were a wealthy white person in the South two hundred years ago, you would have owned slaves. If you were a non-Jewish person in Germany in the 1940s, you would not have rescued any Jews from the Nazis. If you were a Chinese mother in the 1800s, you would have broken your daughter’s feet so that she could barely walk. In all cases, these people were following the ordinary common-sense morality of their societies.

Perhaps the slaveowner or the footbinding mother or the Nazi does not need to feel guilty about what they did, and certainly they’re not going to face social opprobrium. But my primary reason for caring about ethics is not that I will feel guilty if I don’t, or that I’m afraid that people will criticize me; my primary reason for caring about ethics is that I don’t like it when people suffer. I want to oppose the needless suffering that happens in my society, the same way that I would oppose slavery or Nazism or footbinding. For that reason, I want an ethical system that lets me do that.

Scrupulosity Sequence #3: Load-Bearing Things

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, rationality, scrupulosity sequence

Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion.

—Bertrand Russell

Kelsey Piper recently invented the concept of things being load-bearing, a concept so profoundly useful that I occasionally forget she only came up with it this May. She writes:

I think one thing that’s going on here is that there are a bunch of small parts of our daily routine which are doing really important work for our wellbeing. Our commute involves a ten-minute walk along the waterfront and the walking and fresh air are great for our wellbeing (or, alternately, our commute involves no walking and this makes it way more frictionless because walking sucks for us). Our water heater is really good and so we can take half-hour hot showers, which are a critical part of our decompression/recovery time. We sit with our back to the wall so we don’t have to worry about looking productive at work as long as the work all gets done. The store down the street is open really late so late runs for groceries are possible. Our roommate is a chef and so the kitchen is always clean and well-stocked.

It’s useful to think of these things as load-bearing. They’re not just nice – they’re part of your mental architecture, they’re part of what you’re using to thrive. And when they change, life can abruptly get much harder or sometimes just collapse on you entirely. And this is usually unexpected, because it’s hard to notice which parts of your environment and routine are load bearing. I often only notice in hindsight. “Oh,” I say to myself after months of fatigue, “having my own private space was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a scary drop in weight, “being able to keep nutrition shakes next to my bed and drink them in bed was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a sudden struggle to maintain my work productivity, “a quiet corner with my back to the wall was load-bearing.”

Examples of things that Kelsey thinks are commonly load-bearing are include things which affect your access to food you’ll reliably eat, aspects of the environments you spend the most time in (from the length of your commute to the light and ventilation of your bedroom), pets, cleanliness, and personal time when you’re alone and no one is making any demands on you. I’d add a few more. Other common load-bearing things include exercise, particular features of your diet like desserts or protein or vegetables, the ability to do something fun, time with your friends or loved ones, access to painkillers or other medications, and not taking heroic amounts of mind-altering drugs. Sleep is load-bearing for almost everyone. But load-bearing things can be incredibly idiosyncratic. For some people it’s load-bearing to ride on the train with headphones listening to soaring music about spaceflight.

Hyper-analytic people of the sort of people who read my blog fall into a particular sort of error when we think about philosophy. We’re sad for some reason totally unrelated to philosophy– because we don’t have any friends, or because we haven’t slept well for three months, or because we’re in an abusive relationship, or because we haven’t had alone time in weeks. But we think about philosophy, because we’re the sort of people who think about philosophy all the time. And suddenly we will decide that the problem is that there’s no such thing as objective morality. Or the heat death of the universe. Or existential risk. Or the existence of suffering in the universe. Or negative utilitarianism. Or the meaninglessness of life. Or the Drowning Child argument. Or atheism. Or the existence of Hell.

I don’t mean to be invalidating, but the problem is almost never negative utilitarianism. It’s true that negative utilitarians are often depressed, but I’m pretty sure that that’s just because negative utilitarianism is a philosophy that is very attractive to depressed people. Brian Tomasik is cheerful as hell and he spends a bunch of time worrying about the suffering electrons.

(Moderation side note: I disagree with 90% of what he believes but Brian Tomasik is one of my absolute favorite people in the entire world and comments about how much he sucks will be deleted with extreme prejudice.)

I don’t think that coming up with a more accurate and livable philosophical system is never relevant to fixing your mental health problems. This sequence is basically (spoiler alert!) “I Fixed My Mental Health Problems Through Moral Philosophy (And So Can You).” But if your issue is a well-known philosophical problem which many nondepressed people have grappled with over the course of their lives, your real issue is almost certainly not the philosophical problem. If it is, it would make everyone who thought about it depressed, and it doesn’t.

It is stupidly easy to forget to do the boring things that everyone knows you should do. I know so many people who, like, take n-acetylcystine to potentiate the effects of cleansing their chakras while in ketosis and who when asked “when is the last time you slept for eight hours and had a real meal?” will answer “…last week…?”

So the first thing to check, if you’re having scrupulosity issues, is whether all your load-bearing things are in order.

1. Are you sleep-deprived for some reason like “I feel bad making my partner do morning parenting even though I do all the nighttime parenting” or “I procrastinate all day and get my work done at 2am” or “Adderall can TOTALLY replace sleep”? If so, stop reading this post immediately and GO TAKE A NAP.
   1. If you’re thinking longingly about how nice it would be to follow this advice, you’re sleep-deprived, go take a nap.
   2. If you’re sleep-deprived for an actual medical reason or a life reason that is not extremely stupid, you’re probably looking at me and going “I know sleep is important, it’s not my fault I do shift work and have insomnia.” I’m sorry about my lack of helpful advice for this situation. You should tell Scott Alexander to write Things That Sometimes Help When You Have Insomnia so I can link to it.
2. Scott has an excellent post called Things That Sometimes Help If You Have Depression. If you have depression, work through the list.
3. How are you doing on basic needs that most people have? Unfortunately, different people have different needs, and any advice I give is going to be wrong or counterproductive for some people, so take all the advice I give with a grain of salt. Things that are worth considering include:
   1. Are you sick or in pain?
   2. Do you do some sort of exercise on a regular basis? (Walks count.)
   3. Are you eating enough food?
   4. Are you getting enough protein? Vegetables?
   5. I said ‘sleep’ two bullet points ago but are you getting enough sleep?
   6. Are you going outside and getting fresh air and sunshine on a regular basis?
   7. Are you either not taking mind-altering drugs or taking a normal, responsible amount of mind-altering drugs that doesn’t make all your druggie friends go “please take fewer drugs”?
   8. Do you experience physical affection from a person or pet? (There is no shame in getting a stuffed animal or body pillow if the answer is ‘no’.)
   9. Does there exist someone who would notice if you were dead? Someone who will talk to you when you’re sad?
   10. Do you talk to a person face-to-face sometimes? Do you get enough introvert time?
   11. Do you do something you think is straightforwardly fun on a fairly regular basis?
   12. Do you have something to take care of, even if it’s just a plant?
4. Are there any parts of your life a normal person would end up screaming “aaaaaaaa” about? You may wish to recruit a normal person of your acquaintance and explain the situation to them to see if they say “aaaaa”. (The comment section here can be a good choice if you are uncertain whether you know any normal people!) Unfortunately, I cannot list out everything that is “aaaaaaa,” because people are continually inventing new and exciting horrible life decisions.
   1. Are you in relationships with any people who benefit from you being scrupulous? If the answer is “yes, I put enormous amounts of emotion work into this relationship with this person and they throw an enormous shitfit every time I try to set a boundary and they guilt-trip me whenever I don’t do what they want,” that is probably related to your scrupulosity.
   2. Are you part of a sick system?
5. Do you remember a time when you were less scrupulous? Think about what things might have changed since then. You might come up with several hypotheses: maybe your house is messy, maybe you’re overextending yourself, maybe your entire home state is on fire and you haven’t been able to leave the house or see anyone in person for two weeks. Test them systematically and empirically.

I have pretty much solved my scrupulosity, but I do sometimes have flareups, and it inevitably turns out that my flareups are related to losing one or more loadbearing things. Getting your loadbearing things in order– whatever that means to you– is an absolute necessity for recovering from scrupulosity.

Scrupulosity Sequence #2: Self-Experimentation and the Replication Crisis

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality, scrupulosity sequence

In a perfect world, if someone had a psychological problem, I’d be able to tell them all about the rich peer-reviewed psychological literature that has to do with specifically their problem, all of which has effect sizes of a billion and definitely and certainly applies to everyone.

Unfortunately, we live in this world.

For the past decade or so, the social sciences (particularly psychology) and medicine have been going through the replication crisis. Basically, when you repeat social scientific and medical experiments, many of the effects that existed the first time you did the experiment disappear. Some projects suggest that fewer than half of psychological studies show a reproducible effect.

Why is this a problem? Imagine if, when we repeated the experiment of dropping a feather and a bowling ball in a vacuum chamber, sometimes they fell at the same rate, but sometimes the feather fell faster, sometimes the bowling ball fell faster, and sometimes the bowling ball fell up and hit the experimenter in the face. It would be pretty clear that we don’t know anything about how gravity works, and all the physics that built on the idea that feathers and bowling balls fall at the same rate in a vacuum chamber was totally wrong.

It would also bring up the question of how nobody noticed that sometimes bowling balls fall up before. The answer for psychology is that many psychologists use questionable research practices: one survey suggests that more than half of psychologists have. Many psychologists check whether the data shows an effect; if it is, they publish, and if it isn’t, they recruit fifty more participants to see if it will show an effect. Other psychologists will write a paper that includes multiple studies and only report studies that showed an effect, even though they conducted other studies that showed no effect. Still other psychologists will decide whether or not to leave out outliers depending on which way shows an effect as existing. There are lots of other questionable research practices, many of which require more statistics to explain, but I hope that gives a sense of what people are doing.

The other problem is that humans behave much more inconsistently than bowling balls do. You’d expect that if you drop a bowling ball in a vacuum chamber, it’ll be exactly the same as every other bowling ball in every other vacuum chamber around the globe. You only need to drop one bowling ball in a vacuum chamber to find out how bowling balls in vacuum chambers work everywhere. But if you do a study with a hundred and fifty people, you might have happened to find a hundred and fifty really weird people. Even if the effect is real within your sample, it might not apply to any other group of a hundred and fifty people, because people are weird.

It is hard to overstate the implications of the replication crisis. I would go so far as to say that you should not read quantitative psychological research, because it will make you actively stupider and have more inaccurate beliefs. You should view quantitative social scientific research more generally with grave suspicion. (Qualitative social science research wasn’t ever really supposed to replicate in the first place; ethnographies are still likely to provide an accurate insight into what it’s like to be a person very different from you, although you might be well-advised to skip the chapter about the generalizable implications.)

Now, you might think we’re in a complete state of epistemic helplessness, unable to know what facts about people are true and what facts are false. But that’s not true.

People are actually very good at figuring out whether psychological results are true or false. I’d cite the research on this but I just finished explaining why that’s bad, so instead I’ll direct you to 80,000 Hours’s psychology replication quiz. If you don’t get better than half, I will write you a drabble on the subject of your choice.

Consider priming, one of the results that has most completely and utterly failed to replicate. It turns out that doing a bunch of anagrams of words related to old people does not actually make you walk slower, imagining doing something morally wrong does not make you want to buy cleaning products, and reading the word ‘stupid’ does not make you assume people you’re talking to are less intelligent. Ask yourself: have I ever in my life experienced reading a bunch of words related to old people and then walking more slowly? Have you ever been like “sorry I’m so slow walking, I was helping out at the nursing home this morning”? No?

Most people spend much of their time thinking about other people. The human brain is in many ways optimizing for understanding other people. (Compare the abilities of your laptop computer and a five-year-old child with regards to comforting you when you’re sad, then compare their abilities with regards to quantum physics.) We are, ourselves, people. We have natural expertise and tons of information about the subject. We can outperform science.

A lot of people think of knowledge as coming from science, and science as coming from people in white labcoats doing complicated things with numbers and publishing peer-reviewed journal articles. But science is just a particular kind of empiricism. Empiricism means going out into the world, looking at things, coming up with an idea about how they might work, trying it out, and seeing if you’re right. You do empiricism all the time– when you try a new recipe, when you see if a good night’s sleep will make you feel better, when you check whether this movie reviewer has any clue what she’s talking about.

And you can do empiricism about your own psychological problems.

There are a bunch of meta-analyses that suggest that SSRIs, in general, are just barely better than placebo. There are also a lot of people who take an antidepressant, go off their antidepressant, get depressed, get back on their antidepressant, stop being depressed, go off their antidepressant, get depressed, get back on their antidepressant, stop being depressed, go off their antidepressant, etc. If you are in that group of people, what should you expect to happen if you go off your antidepressant?

You should expect to be depressed.

In a certain sense, this is totally ignoring science– you’re looking at that peer-reviewed meta-analysis with a bunch of complicated statistics and a sample size larger than one and going “…nah.” In another sense, this is doing science of the sort that is most closely connected to the question. The thing you care about is what will happen if you go off your antidepressant, you have empirically investigated it, and the answer is that you will be depressed.

At this point I should take a moment to discuss the placebo effect. Unfortunately, many people use the phrase “placebo effect” in a sloppy way. In a broad sense, the placebo effect refers to the ways a disease or condition changes if you take a sugar pill instead of a pill with an active ingredient, or talk to a kind intelligent person with no therapeutic training instead of a therapist, or whatever. In a narrow sense, the placebo effect refers to a particular source of these effects: the mind-body effect where if you do something at all to help the condition then you feel better. (More precisely, the former is called the “placebo response” and the latter is called the “placebo effect.”)

Actually, there are lots of causes of the placebo response. For example, a lot of conditions like depression fluctuate: you feel worse for a time, then you feel better, then you feel worse, then you feel better again. People tend to seek out treatment when they feel really bad and stop treatment when they feel better, so it looks like the treatment works, but it’s actually just the natural course of the disease. Similarly, some diseases are time-limited: whether or not you drink orange juice, your cold is going to take about a week to get better. Another example is that some people feel bad that people have put all this effort into giving them medicine and then they don’t feel better, so they rate themselves as feeling better even though they really don’t.

Ideally, you would do a placebo-controlled study on yourself. The process is fairly simple for medications you expect to work within one day, and I think more people should consider doing it. However, there are lots of situations where placebo-controlled studies don’t work at all: it is very difficult to do, say, placebo self-therapy or placebo exercise, and many medications such as SSRIs have to be taken for weeks to work properly.

A more promising strategy is to think about whether your experiences are consistent with the response being a placebo response. For example, if you’ve been depressed for years, you can rule out “it was just the sort of thing that would get better in a week anyway” as an explanation. If you typically miss your antidepressant because of a snafu with the pharmacy, that suggests your post-antidepressant depression is a real effect; if you typically miss your antidepressant because you’re too sad to take it, that suggests it may be a placebo response. If you’ve tried six antidepressants and only the seventh worked (despite them all being similar-looking little pills with similar side effects), it’s unlikely to be a placebo response, since there’s no reason to believe pill #7 would have a placebo response the others didn’t.

How do you choose things to experiment with? I offer the following guidelines:

• Good safety profile; few to no side effects. SSRIs are widely used and if they caused sudden horrible death we would probably know. It is difficult to imagine pomodoros or Facebook blockers having health effects one way or the other. Exercise actually makes you live longer. Conversely, taking random research chemicals off Longecity has all kinds of possible horrible side effects, and antipsychotics are routinely rated as “the only thing worse than psychosis” or “actually, no, I think I would rather be psychotic”.
• Easy to figure out if it works. If an intervention promises to help you get more work done or be less anxious, it is easy to figure out whether your to-do list has fewer items on it or you’re able to talk to strangers instead of hiding in the corner out of fright. If an intervention promises to help you reach enlightenment, this is harder to determine.
• Easy to do. Installing Facebook-blocking software or using a pomodoro tracker is very easy; anyone can do it in about one minute. Exercise, dietary changes, meditating for an hour a day, and so on are very difficult.
• Quick to test. It takes one afternoon to check whether pomodoros work for you: if you didn’t get more work done that afternoon, it probably didn’t. It can take months or years of work to find out whether meditation works for you. The former is a better thing to experiment with.
• Explanation makes sense. Ask the person why it works. If the explanation is something like “when you do something you’re scared of and it isn’t a disaster you’re likely to be less scared,” then the thing is more likely to really work. If the explanation involves unscrambling anagrams about old people making you walk slower, then maybe don’t try that one.
• Good reviews. If it worked for someone else, maybe it’s worth trying. You can ask your friends, but it’s also worth mining historical figures for ideas (maybe Marcus Aurelius has some good tips) or, sigh, reading the psychological literature.

Solstice Picture Books: A Review

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ozy blog post, solstice

Ideally, Secular Solstice would be a holiday for families– one that teaches children humanist values. Unfortunately, it is at present celebrated by only a few hundred people, so we do not have picture books that explain Solstice-related concepts in an accessible fashion. We must appropriate picture books that were not written as Solstice books but which happen to address Solstice-related themes. I will review several here.

Many solstice themes appear to be entirely absent from picture books. For perhaps obvious reasons, few picture books appear to address existential risk, the fact that the universe doesn’t care, stoicism, or perseverence in the face of a harsh world. While many picture books do address the subject of death, few do it in a way anti-deathist atheists would find remotely satisfying. My selections also include a puzzling absence of books about trying to be good, building things together, or hope for the future, perhaps because I was mostly looking at humanist/atheist picture books and these topics are discussed more generally. I am interested in suggestions from readers for picture books that address each of these themes.

Older Than The Stars: A brief history of the universe. Excellent use of rhyme, rhythm, repetition, and alliteration make this book a delight to read out loud. The main text is relatively light on science, although it does touch on the Big Bang and how all atoms formed in stars; however, each page contains science facts for the older reader which are, as far as I know, accurate.

Solstice themes addressed: humans are built of meat and stardust; existence is neat.

Grandmother Fish: A Child’s First Book of Evolution: A lovely, reasonably scientifically accurate book about evolution. The book explains that we are descended from various kinds of animal, who evolved various abilities, and related to all different kinds of animals. The book is interactive, prompting the reader to wiggle and chomp just like Grandmother Fish. I worry somewhat that it promotes a teleological view of evolution: it talks about how Grandmother Reptile evolved the ability to breathe air, but does not mention that Grandmother Reptile also lost certain abilities that Grandmother Fish had. However, that’s a fairly minor flaw in an otherwise wonderful book.

Solstice themes addressed: humans are built of meat and stardust; existence is neat.

If…: A Mind-Bending New Way of Looking At Big Ideas and Numbers: Each page offers a concrete visualization of a big, complicated number: what if the Milky Way galaxy were the size of a dinner plate? what if all the wealth in the world were a hundred coins? what if the events of the past 3000 years were condensed into a single month? As such, this book does not address many Solstice themes. However, it can be a jumping-off point for a lot of Solstice-y discussions. Families who prioritize global poverty may find its visualizations of wealth inequality a way to spark a discussion about why the family donates the way they do. The section about history may prompt conversations about past human achievements and what we might do in the future.

Solstice themes addressed: existence is neat; building things together; tangentially, trying to be good and hope for the future.

If The World Were A Village: A Book About The World’s People: Similar to If…, and written by the same authors, If The World Were A Village focuses on a single concrete visualization of a big, complicated number: what if the entire world were a village of a hundred people? How many people would be Christian? What languages would they speak? How much money would each person have? How many people would have a computer? The book is intended to build “world-mindedness,” a sense of the diversity of the world and caring about people in other countries; this seems like a good rationalist/effective altruist virtue, but perhaps not a Solstice-y one. If read around the time of Solstice, then this book mostly seems useful as a jumping-off point for discussion, particularly among families who prioritize global poverty. It brings up questions about why some countries have more food than others; the parent might also bring up that a few hundred years ago all countries were more similar to the global poor than to the global rich. The book was published in 2011, so many statistics may be out of date; figuring out how to update the statistics might be a good project for a homeschool.

Solstice themes addressed: tangentially, building things together, trying to be good and hope for the future.

I Wonder: This is an adorable book and I definitely recommend getting it. Eva takes a walk with her mother and asks many questions, from why the moon stays close to us to where butterflies come from. She learns the answer to some of her questions, but also learns that there are a lot of questions even grownups don’t know the answer to. I think this is a good book that models curiosity about the unknown, but I’m not sure that it’s very Solstice-y. Not every rationalist virtue needs to be crammed into a single holiday. This might be one to keep on the shelves year-round.

Solstice themes addressed: existence is neat? building things together? trying to be good?

Annabelle & Aiden Presents: Oh The Things We Believed: Very much disrecommended. The book itself is flimsy and feels cheap. The author is attempting to write verse, but does not seem to at all understand the concept of scansion, and the rhymes are very forced. The story is all over the place. I am baffled by the author’s choice to have a bunch of magic things happen in a book the moral of which is that magic doesn’t happen. The cloud isn’t magic, but what about the talking fucking stegosaurus? Maybe that might be magic? Worst of all, the book contains several factual inaccuracies, such as that people used to believe the earth was on the back of infinite turtles. As far as I am aware, no culture believed this. Do not buy this book for your child; I would also probably avoid the rest of the Annabelle & Aiden series.

Solstice themes addressed: we can build things together; perseverance in the face of a harsh world.