Petrov Day Ritual: Coronavirus Edition

This is the text of the Petrov Day ritual I will be using this year. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet. I hope this provides inspiration for how other people’s Petrov Day rituals can incorporate the coronavirus pandemic.

This day, September 26, is Petrov Day. In 1983, the story of humanity nearly ended. We’re gathered here to remember that moment, and others like it. 

When I wrote this ritual last year, I said to myself, “I’m really happy with this! Next year I am not going to have to spend the month of September hastily rewriting it on deadline.” So, uh, that worked out well. 

Today, there are no candles. Today, there are no songs. Today, instead of meeting in my house, we are meeting over Google Hangouts, and there is going to be at least one technological snafu before it ends– hopefully a less fatal one than Stanislav Petrov’s. And today, instead of taking a moment to reflect on something we far too often forget, we are taking a moment to join in community about something which has affected us all. 

—

In some ways, this ritual may seem unnecessary this year. Most years, we celebrate Petrov Day to remember that, in spite of our great prosperity and the many reasons for hope, we balance on the edge of a knife. This year, there has been no shortage of apocalyptic signs and portents. A pandemic. Massive lockdowns. Protests of long-standing racial injustice which sometimes erupt into riots. Air that’s not safe to breathe. A sepia-toned world under an orange sky. Murder hornets.

The last thing we need is another reminder of the apocalypse.

—

But Petrov Day is not just about the apocalypse. Petrov Day is about hope.

Petrov Day is not just about the fear that someone someday might press a button and destroy the world. Petrov Day is about remembering the time that someone didn’t. 

—

As always, let us begin at the beginning.

—

“By the aid of a telescope any one may behold this in a manner which so distinctly appeals to the senses that all the disputes which have tormented philosophers through so many ages are exploded at once by the indisputable evidence of our eyes, and we are freed from wordy disputes upon this subject, for the Galaxy is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.” — Galileo, The Starry Messenger (1610)

—

“Matters that vexed the minds of ancient seers,
And for our learned doctors often led
To loud and vain contention, now are seen
In reason’s light, the clouds of ignorance
Dispelled at last by science. Those on whom
Delusion cast its gloomy pall of doubt,
Upborne now on the wings that genius lends,
May penetrate the mansions of the gods
And scale the heights of heaven. O mortal men,
Arise! And, casting off your earthly cares,
Learn ye the potency of heaven-born mind,
Its thought and life far from the herd withdrawn!” 

— Edmund Halley, preface to Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687)

—

“By calculations similar to these may be determined universally, what expectations are warranted by any experiments, according to the different number of times in which they have succeeded and failed; or what should be thought of the probability that any particular cause in nature, with which we have any acquaintance, will or will not, in any single trial, produce an effect that has been conjoined with it.” — Rev. Thomas Bayes, An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances (1763)

—

“I was thinking upon the engine at the time, and had gone as far as the herd’s house, when the idea came into my mind that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication were made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel it would rush into it, and might be there condensed without cooling the cylinder. I then saw that I must get rid of the condensed steam and injection-water if I used a jet as in Newcomen’s engine. Two ways of doing this occurred to me. … I had not walked farther than the golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.” — James Watt (1765)

—

“I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary.” — Dmitri Mendeleev (1864)

—

“I then shouted into the mouthpiece the following sentence: Mr. Watson, Come here, I want to see you. To my delight he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said. I asked him to repeat the words. He answered, “You said, Mr. Watson come here I want to see you.”” — Alexander Graham Bell (1876)

—

“I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament. … Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.” — Thomas Edison (1890)

—

Understanding the world gave us the power to change it.

In 1712, Thomas Newcomen invented the first commercially successful steam engine. It was the first significant power source other than wind, water, and life. In 1769, James Watt designed a more efficient steam engine, paving the way for its use in trains, steamboats, and factories. The Industrial Revolution began.

—

“Modern economic growth is the increase of income per head by a factor of 15 or 20 since the 18th century in places like Britain—and a factor of 8.5 worldwide even including the places that have not had the luck or skill to let it happen fully. It is certainly the most important event in the history of humanity since the domestication of animals and plants, perhaps the most important since the invention of language.” –Deirdre McCloskey (2004)

—

“If we continually sample from the urn of possible technological discoveries before implementing effective means of global coordination, surveillance, and/or restriction of potentially hazardous information, then we risk eventually drawing a black ball: an easy-to-make intervention that causes extremely widespread harm and against which effective defense is infeasible” — Nick Bostrom (2013)

—

“Moore’s Law of Mad Science: Every 18 months, the IQ required to destroy the world drops by 1 point.”
— Source unknown (2005)

—

The story of how humanity gained the ability to destroy itself begins a little more than a third of the way through the twentieth century. 

—

Starting in 1939 and continuing until 1945, World War II killed about 60 million people. Seventeen million people died in the Holocaust, including a third of the world’s Jews. The Japanese government perpetrated the Nanking Massacre, the Bataan Death March, the Manila Massacre, and many other atrocities. 

—

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.” –Hannah Arendt

—

And so the world’s greatest minds believed they had no choice. They had to gather in secret, and create the atomic bomb – a weapon to destroy cities, or the whole world.

—

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer

—

“I shall write peace upon your wings, and you shall fly around the world so that children will no longer have to die this way.” –Sadako Sasaki, victim of the bombing at Hiroshima

Pause for a moment of silence.

—

In 1962, the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union reached a crisis. US destroyers under orders to enforce a naval quarantine off Cuba did not know that the submarines the Soviets had sent to protect their ships were carrying nuclear weapons. So the Americans began firing depth charges to force the submarines to the surface, a move the Soviets on board interpreted as the start of World War III. 

—

“[Savitsky, a submarine captain,] summoned the officer who was assigned to the nuclear torpedo, and ordered him to assemble it to battle readiness. ‘Maybe the war has already started up there, while we are doing summersaults here’ – screamed agitated [Savitsky, justifying his order. ‘We’re gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all – we will not become the shame of the fleet’. But we did not fire the nuclear torpedo – Savitsky was able to rein in his wrath. After consulting with Second Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov and his deputy political officer Ivan Semenovich Maslennikov, he made the decision to come to the surface.” –Vadim Orlov (2007)

—

We now reach the historical event that is today’s namesake: the Petrov incident. On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer at the Oko nuclear early warning system.

—

“An alarm at the command and control post went off with red lights blinking on the terminal. It was a nasty shock. Everyone jumped from their seats, looking at me. What could I do? There was an operations procedure that I had written myself. We did what we had to do. We checked the operation of all systems – on 30 levels, one after another. Reports kept coming in: All is correct; the probability factor is two. … The highest.” — Stanislav Petrov

—

“I imagined if I’d assume the responsibility for unleashing the third World War – and I said, no, I wouldn’t. … I always thought of it. Whenever I came on duty, I always refreshed it in my memory.” — Stanislav Petrov

—

Had he followed procedure, and reported up the chain of command that the Americans had launched missiles, this could have set off a nuclear war. So instead of telling his superiors what the system was saying, Petrov told his superiors that it was a false alarm – despite not really knowing this was the case.

—

At the time, he received no award. The incident embarrassed his superiors and the scientists responsible for the system, so if he had been rewarded, they would have to be punished. (He received the International Peace Price thirty years later, in 2013.) 

Things eventually calmed down. The Soviet Union dissolved. Safeguards were put on most of the bombs, to prevent the risk of accidental (or deliberate but unauthorized) detonation.

—

The story of Stanislav Petrov is a story of individual heroism, but it is also a story of institutional failure. 

Petrov was a hero, but Petrov never should have had to be a hero. Mistake after mistake, piece of reckless negligence after piece of reckless negligence, on the part of both the USA and the USSR, for decades, caused humanity’s fate to be decided by a single finger on a single button. 

—

2020 is the year where we learned that, instead of trusting non-credible sources about epidemiology such as the WHO and the CDC, we should only trust reliable sources, like random people with anime avatars on Twitter.

—

The level of institutional failure related to coronavirus on every level and from every major institution of the United States is staggering. Prominent journalists told people it made more sense to worry about the flu. Major health organizations lied about whether masks made you less safe. Local governments reopened restaurants even while the coronavirus raged. 

It didn’t have to be this way. We could have controlled the pandemic. We didn’t.

—

This is not the first pandemic that, for assorted political reasons, the US government failed to control.

We have not yet reached the stage of the coronavirus pandemic where we grieve, so I am letting their words stand in for ours.

—

The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that when a 36-year-old writer is asked on a network news show about the Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community particularly in regard to the Well-Known Preponderance of Homosexuals in the Arts she replies that if you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with ”Let’s Make a Deal.”

The interviewer’s lack of response compels her to conclude that he has no idea what she is talking about and she realizes that soon many of those who do know what she is talking about will be what is generally regarded as dead…

—

The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that an aspiring little avant-garde movie director approaches a fairly famous actor in a restaurant and attempts to make social hay out of the fact that they met each other at Antonio’s and will undoubtedly see each other at Charles’s and Antonio’s and Charles’s are not parties and Antonio’s and Charles’s are not bars and Antonio’s and Charles’s are not summer houses in chic Tuscan towns– Antonio’s and Charles’s are funerals…

—

The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 36-year-old writer is on the phone with a 38-year-old art director making arrangements to go together to the funeral of a 27-year-old architect and the art director says to the writer, “If you get there first, sit near the front where you usually sit, and save me the seat on the aisle”…

—

The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 36-year-old writer runs into a 34-year-old painter at a party and the painter says to the writer that he’s just back from Los Angeles and he says with some surprise that he had a really good time there and he asks why does she think that happened and says it’s because New York is so boring now that Los Angeles is fun in comparison and that’s true and it’s one reason but the real reason is that they don’t know the people who are dying there…

—

The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that a 36-year-old writer trying to make plans to go out of town flips through her appointment book and hears herself say “well, I have a funeral on Tuesday, lunch with my editor on Wednesday, a memorial service on Thursday, so I guess I could come on Friday, unless of course Robert dies.” — The Impact of Aids on the Artistic Community, Fran Lebowitz, 1987

—

Unfinished Painting, by Keith Haring, completed a few months before he died of HIV.

—

Every year, this Petrov day ritual has three readings about the three existential risks that currently pose the greatest threat to humanity: nuclear war, AI, and biological threats. Every year, I have been unhappy about my reading about biological threat. I had a very vivid quote about AI risk, and I had a very vivid quote about nuclear war, but my quote about biorisk was boring. 

I don’t think it’s boring this year. 

—

“The biological threat carries with it the possibility of millions of fatalities and billions of dollars in economic losses. The federal government has acknowledged the seriousness of this threat and provided billions in funding for a wide spectrum of activities across many departments and agencies to meet it. These efforts demonstrate recognition of the problem and a distributed attempt to find solutions. Still, the Nation does not afford the biological threat the same level of attention as it does other threats: There is no centralized leader for biodefense. There is no comprehensive national strategic plan for biodefense. There is no all-inclusive dedicated budget for biodefense… 

The biological threat has not abated. At some point, we will likely be attacked with a biological weapon, and will certainly be subjected to deadly naturally occurring infectious diseases and accidental exposures, for which our response will likely be insufficient.”– Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense (2004)

—

We knew sixteen years ago that covid could happen. Coronavirus was a predictable disease that was at the top of biosecurity people’s list of things to worry about. We were warned that we were unprepared. We had time to prepare for it. 

—

We failed.

— 

Nine hundred and thirty-six thousand, nine hundred and five people are dead because we failed.

—

Coronavirus was a test run. It was going to kill hundreds of thousands of people; it was never going to wipe out humanity. It was a way to figure out in a lower-stakes way, whether we have the ability to prepare for biological and perhaps other threats.

We don’t. 

—

Think, for a moment, about other subjects for which our response will likely be insufficient.

Pause for a moment of silence. 

—

Many of the people here live in San Francisco. This is a particularly appropriate place, given our next topic, as San Francisco is the place where two of the most iconic institutions related to human coordination were founded: the United Nations and Starfleet. 

—

It is easy to think of human coordination as a thing that happens between governments and big institutions, something extraordinarily difficult and rare. As rationalists, we often think about coordination problems: about defection on Prisoner’s Dilemmas, the tragedy of the commons, inadequate equilibria. 

But now we will think about the many times when we succeed.

—

I am a lead pencil…

My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involve the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!

Observe the labeling. That’s a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?

My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain…

Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me? 

–Leonard Read, I, Pencil

—

It is often easy to miss the signs of a solved coordination problem. 

It is easy to miss the rivers that don’t catch on fire, the fish species on our plate that aren’t extinct, the medical waste that doesn’t wash up on a beach, the ozone layer that isn’t destroyed. It is easy to forget about smallpox and hookworm, polio and congenital iodine deficiency syndrome. It is easy to get used to pencils and laptop computers, blueberries and Avengers: Endgame, without thinking about the extraordinary human effort that brings these items into being. 

—

On any given day, about forty percent of Americans mostly or completely isolated themselves from nonhousehold members. 

On any given day, about three-quarters of Americans always or very often practiced social distancing.

—

We cannot let the institutional failures blind us to the success of individual coordination. As weeks of lockdown stretched into months, people– not everyone all of the time, but most people most of the time– continued to be locked down. Corporations shifted all their employees to work-from-home. Parents formed pods to share childcare. People spent hours in stressful negotiations about risk levels with their housemates and friends. 

We stopped going to theaters and movies, restaurants and bars, libraries and church, classes and the gym. We went months without seeing our friends. We rescheduled weddings. We held birthday parties over Zoom. We put on masks and spent time together in parks six feet apart.

We made sacrifice after thankless sacrifice, in situations where no one except us would know whether we cheated. In the great prisoner’s dilemma of covid, we pressed “cooperate.”

We never should have been in this position. But we rose to the occasion. 

—

In the early days of the pandemic, people hoarded food, because they were afraid that the supply lines would fall through and we wouldn’t have enough to eat. 

But they never did. After the initial hoarding was over, there were occasional shortages of some items, but no one in the United States went hungry because coronavirus had disrupted the factories and ships and trucks that brought them food.

No one person knows how to make a pencil. But even a pandemic can’t stop them from getting made. 

—

Health organizations lied about masks for fear of shortages. But once people knew that masks prevented the coronavirus, hundreds of Etsy stores sprung up with handmade fabric masks to cater to the demand. In the longer term, production of surgical masks rose, and now I can get a pack of fifty on Amazon for fourteen dollars. 

—

In the United States today, there are tens of millions of quiet heroes. Tens of millions of people risked their lives, often for very little money, to make sure we have food and water and electricity, to take care of the elderly and the sick, to take away our garbage and our sewage, to bring us the packages we order online that enable us to stay locked down.

Many of them did not choose to be heroes. Many of them would very much prefer not to be. Heroism is always much more appealing when you’re not the one who might end up in the hospital. But our society is functioning because, in the face of apocalypse, millions of ordinary people got up and went to their ordinary jobs and carried out their ordinary tasks. 

Because it is so ordinary, it is often easy to miss courage. 

—

An idea began to take hold: Perhaps the ancient god could be killed.

A whisper became a voice; a voice became a call; a call became a battle cry, sweeping across villages, cities, nations. Humanity began to cooperate, spreading the protective power across the globe, dispatching masters of the craft to protect whole populations. People who had once been sworn enemies joined in common cause for this one battle. Governments mandated that all citizens protect themselves, for giving the ancient enemy a single life would put millions in danger.

And, inch by inch, humanity drove its enemy back. Fewer friends wept; Fewer neighbors were crippled; Fewer parents had to bury their children…

35 years ago, on December 9th, 1979, humanity declared victory.

This one evil, the horror from beyond memory, the monster that took 500 million people from this world – was destroyed.

— Jai Dhyani, 500 Million, But Not A Single One More

—

In 1976, scientific consensus first arose that chlorofluorocarbon pollution depleted atmospheric ozone. If it led to a “hole in the ozone layer”, the effects on human and animal health and food production would likely be severe.

—

By 1978, when a law was passed in the US banning CFCs in aerosol cans, sales of aerosols had dropped fifty percent. 

—

The hole in the ozone layer was proven to exist in 1985. Just two years later a treaty was written to ban the use of CFCs worldwide, and two years after that, in 1989, it was in effect. As of today, every country in the United Nations has ratified the Montreal protocol.

—

“The hole in the ozone layer is a kind of skywriting. At first it seemed to spell out our continuing complacency before a witch’s brew of deadly perils. But perhaps it really tells of a newfound talent to work together to protect the global environment.” –Carl Sagan (1998)

—

Today, the hole in the ozone layer is the smallest it’s been since 1982. By 2075, if current trends continue, the Earth’s ozone layer will have repaired itself completely. 

Our response was sufficient. 

We won.

—

“Everybody lives! Just this once– everybody lives!”– The Doctor

—

Five hundred million but not a single one more.

—

Read three paragraphs, then pass to the next person.

There is a button. Bright red.

The button is on a phone.

There is a screen.

There are rules.

Everyone knows them.

You look at the screen again. It still shows one Minuteman-III intercontinental ballistic missile bearing down on your country. You remember that American Minutemen ICBMs carry three warheads of up to 500 kilotons each. You think of your family.

You’re a just a lieutenant colonel. You’re a software engineer. This was supposed to be a boring post. It’s 12:30 am and this is just another night shift. Two minutes ago your biggest decision was whether to shave tonight or tomorrow. THIS SHOULD NOT BE YOUR DECISION TO MAKE.

Time refuses to stop.

You think about the software. The satellites. Could it be a glitch?

Three weeks ago your government shot down a Korean civilian airliner and no one knows why. The United States is in an anti-Soviet fervor. Maybe Reagan really is that crazy. Maybe one missile got launched early by accident. Maybe you only have a short window before they realize their mistake. Every second you wait, the opportunity to strike back and stop the missiles before they destroy your home slips further away.

But…one? How could there be only one? The Americans aren’t that incompetent. A real attack would be hundreds, thousands of missiles. Even if they accidentally fired one early, they wouldn’t wait this long to fire the rest.

You breathe. Oko is about ten years old now – there was bound to be a glitch sooner or later. There will be no war. Everything is fine.

BEEP.

Four more missiles appear on the screen, all heading towards your homeland. Fifteen warheads. Seven megatons. Are they launching in waves?

You think about your career. You think about duty. You know exactly what you are supposed to do in this situation.

The button waits.

Even if it is a glitch, disobeying orders will ruin any chance of promotion. You might need to leave the army. You don’t know where else you could go. You wouldn’t know what to do when you got up in the morning.

Five missiles. Still doesn’t make sense. Could be a glitch. Americans still aren’t that dumb, to make the same mistake twice.

You’re not sure. But you have your orders. Your job is not to make decisions. Your job is to press the button and let someone else make the decision.

You know that your government’s stated policy is “launch on warning”.

You look at the glowing warning on the screen again.

Not your decision – except you know what the decision will be.

You think about how to deal with life after the army. You think about your home in ruins. You think about your cousins, screaming. Why are these thoughts even in the same mind at the same time? No sane world would allow that.

You do not live in a sane world.

Five lights, glowing in the night.

One button.

Five billion people.

All your comrades know what the right thing to do here is. Everyone knows. It’s simple.

There are procedures in place.

There are children in bed.

The world balances on a stupid, cheap, red plastic button.

Could be a glitch.

Five missiles wouldn’t destroy the entire Soviet Union. In strategic terms, it would be barely a blip.

You imagine thousands of mothers crying. A blip.

You imagine the world screaming in its final hours, a cacophony of hopeless wishes echoing until they’re silenced. “If only…!”

You decide.

You will not play your assigned role in the end of the world. You will probably be scorned, laughed at, even if you’re right. If you’re wrong, you will be the hapless fool who let his countrymen burn out of cowardice.

You don’t press the button.

The world doesn’t end that night.

It turns out to have been a false alarm – sunlight glinting off clouds. The sunlight that almost ended the world.

The questioning and interrogations go on for weeks. Endless paperwork, and you’re reprimanded whenever you miss a single slip. You receive no reward. The failure of the early warning system is embarrassing, and to recognize that you were right to distrust it is to invite scrutiny and blame. You are quietly reassigned to a post of absolutely no importance where you can’t make any trouble. With no hope of advancing your career, you retire from the army.

Sometimes you still think about that night. You can’t talk about it with anyone. No one knows that you…did nothing.

You suffer a nervous breakdown for a while, but you get better.

You wonder if you’ll ever be able to save up to buy a vacuum cleaner.

The world keeps going. For now.

–Jai Dhyani, There Is A Button

Don’t Goodhart Yourself

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

[content warning: some non-explicit discussion of self-harm]

Goodhart’s Law is a concept used in data science which goes like this:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Goodhart’s Law is usually applied to the behavior of other people. For example, attendance is a good way of measuring how diligent your employees are, but if you start firing people for missing days then you’ll get people coming in with colds, infecting everyone, and playing Candy Crush all day because they’re too tired to get any work done. How many papers a scientist publishes is a good way of measuring how much they work, but if you make tenure dependent on how many papers a scientist publishes they’ll start breaking everything up into the smallest units of paper possible. How many nails a factory produces is a good way of measuring its success as a factory, but if you are a Soviet planner who requires the factory to produce as many nails as possible it will make tiny nails that aren’t useful for anything.

(There are other ways that Goodhart’s Law can end up working– for example, ice cream sales are a good way of measuring how hot it is, but setting a goal of selling a large amount of ice cream each day will not make the weather nicer– but these are not relevant for my post.)

However, Goodhart’s Law can also be applied to yourself.

People often set self-improvement goals, and when they do they often think of some way to measure what they care about. For example, if you want to exercise more, you might set a goal to go to the gym three days a week. If you want to finish a novel, you might set a goal to write five hundred words a day. If you want to have a better relationship with your husband, you might set a goal to have less than four fights per month.

Sometimes, the thing you’re measuring is directly the thing you care about. For example, if you are chronically sleep-deprived and decide to track how tired you feel in the morning, you aren’t going to encounter Goodhart’s Law problems, because tiredness is actually the thing you care about.

Often, however, the thing you’re measuring is different from the thing you care about. If you want to exercise more, you don’t want to fuck around at the gym on your phone, you want to take a class or use the treadmill or lift up heavy things and put them down.

Some of the ways Goodhart’s Law operates with people’s goals can be really obvious. For example, some people finishing NaNoWriMo will name their characters things like “Lady Mary von Grackle the Fourth” and then use the entire thing every time she comes up, or include the entire lyrics of every song their character is listening to, or edit every line of dialogue to include “X said” even if it is perfectly obvious who’s talking. If you are doing this stuff, it’s pretty obvious that you’re Goodharting your goal of writing a 50,000-word novel.

On the other hand, sometimes it’s not obvious at all, and that’s where you run into real trouble. You might be really proud of yourself for not getting into fights with your husband anymore– but instead you’re walking on eggshells avoiding every topic that might upset him and failing to bring up topics which you really ought to bring up, which actually makes your relationship worse.

And sometimes things can be Goodharting for some people and not for others. Let’s say your goal is to stop self-harming. For some people, the goal is actually to stop self-harming: maybe they’re tired of getting scars or it frightens other people. For other people, the goal is to avoid getting into situations where you’re so emotionally fucked up that self-harming seems like a good idea. If your goal is that second thing, white-knuckling through your self-harm urges by drawing red lines on yourself is actually useless– it achieves your target but does nothing about your goal.

Similarly, let’s say you set a target to do three things off your to do list each day. For many people– perhaps most– the real goal would be to accomplish things, and the worries about Goodharting would mostly be related to putting unnecessary things on your to do list so you can check them off. But if you have depression, your goal might be to recover from depression. You might drag your brain over metaphorical rocks getting yourself to do some dishes and cook dinner and achieve your target, but you’re still depressed.

Goodharting can get you into trouble in two ways. First, as in the arguments case, your target might be so poorly specified that it gets you to do things that are actively counterproductive to your goal– like not bringing up problems in your relationship.

Second, as in the self-harm, depression, and NaNoWriMo cases, reaching your target won’t directly harm your goal. You can search-and-replace “Lady Mary von Grackle the Fourth” with “Mary” and get a readable book. Doing more things off your to do list might even make you less depressed, if you’re the sort of person who tends to get less depressed if you’re more active. (Or more depressed, if you’re drawing on emotional reserves that you really shouldn’t be drawing on. It can go either way.)

The problem is that Goodharting misleads you about whether you’ve met your goal. You think you’ve written a novel, but when you cut out all the padding it’s a novelette at best. You think you’ve fixed your depression, but actually you’re just willpowering your way through doing the dishes. You think you’ve learned how to regulate your emotions better, but actually you’ve learned that if you self-harm by holding ice instead of by cutting you can pass it off to your therapists as a healthy coping mechanism. You’re putting a lot of work in– but you’re not going to have the outcomes you want.

How do you avoid Goodharting? It can help to explicitly distinguish “goal” and “target”: your goal isn’t to go to the gym three times a week unless you’d be just as happy if you spent the entire time at the gym reading a nice novel. That way, you can notice when you’re meeting your targets but not your goals. If your relationship with your husband is getting worse, you can step back and reassess.

It can also help to deliberately avoid doing things that help you reach your targets but not your goals. This is one way that single-person Goodharting is much easier to solve than multi-person Goodharting: you can just decide that you’re not going to Goodhart, once you’re aware that this is an issue. For example, if you’re depressed, you might commit to never using willpower to get yourself to do things. If you’re writing a novel, you might decide not to use cheap tricks to pad your word count.

In other cases, that isn’t realistic. For example, you might not want to commit to self-harming every time you feel like self-harming, and if you’re depressed you might ever need to force yourself to do the dishes so you have something clean to eat off of. In those cases, you might want to count Goodharted things separately. For example, as a depressed person, you might want to separately track things you did without willpower and things you did with willpower; if you’re trying to recover from self-harming, you might want to track both self-harm instances and strong urges to self-harm.

Ray Blanchard Lied To Try To Get A Condition Included In The DSM Out Of Political Correctness

Tags

ozy blog post, ray blanchard callout post, speshul snowflake trans

[content note: rape apologism]

In 2013, Ray Blanchard– head of the paraphilia working group for the DSM-5 and originator of the controversial ‘two-type’ theory of transness— gave an interview about his work as part of the paraphilia working group, which included the following passage:

[Interviewer:] Do you think autoandrophilia, where a woman is aroused by the thought of herself as a man, is a real paraphilia?

[Blanchard:] No, I proposed it simply in order not to be accused of sexism, because there are all these women who want to say, “women can rape too, women can be pedophiles too, women can be exhibitionists too.” It’s a perverse expression of feminism, and so, I thought, let me jump the gun on this. I don’t think the phenomenon even exists.

Quite frankly, I am flabbergasted.

Ray Blanchard openly admitted, in a publicly available interview, to attempting to include a condition that he does not think exists in the DSM. Why? Because feminists might get angry at him if he didn’t.

In the published version of the DSM-5, Transvestic Disorder does not include a “with autoandrophilia” specification; it existed only in the draft version. One hopes that someone read this interview, talked to Blanchard, and explained to him that the DSM should include conditions that exist and should not include conditions that don’t exist. One would hope that that was a fact a psychologist would be aware of once he has his PhD, or gets tenure, or is involved in writing the DSM, or is literally the head of a DSM-related working group. But I suppose we all miss minor details now and again.

Perhaps there should be some sort of training or orientation for people joining a DSM working group. I imagine, ten years from now:

“It is important,” the trainer might say, “that the DSM reflect reality as best it can. Psychologists and psychiatrists will use it to guide their treatment; insurance companies will allow or deny coverage based on it; drug companies will develop medications for the diagnoses we create; journalists and self-help writers will take inclusion in the DSM as a sign that a disorder wasn’t made up by crackpots. Human psychology is messy and it’s hard to create categories that aren’t at least a little bit arbitrary; we’re not expecting perfection, just do your best. A good-faith effort is fine.”

A member of the sleep disorders working group raises her hand. “So, if we’re just supposed to make a good-faith effort, what does this actually rule out?”

“Well, for example,” the trainer says, “if you would describe a phenomenon with the words ‘I don’t think it even exists,’ you should not put it in the DSM.”

“Who would do that?” the head of the depression working group says. “This is absurd. This is worse than the ‘instead of being a Nazi, consider not being a Nazi’ trainings we have to do every time we do research.”

“Yes, well,” the trainer says, “you’d think, but unfortunately Ray Blanchard fucked it all up for everyone. Please turn to page twenty of your booklets for the quiz entitled ‘In What Circumstances Is It Okay To Put A Disorder In The DSM Even Though You Don’t Think It Accurately Describes Reality At All’.”

The room is silent except for the scribbling of pens. A hand is raised.

The trainer sights. “Yes, Ray?”

“I’m stuck on number 12, ‘is it okay to put a disorder in the DSM, even though you don’t think it exists, if a feminist might get mad at you and write a mean article saying you’re wrong?'”

“That’s a no, Ray,” the trainer says.

“But what if it’s a really, really mean article? Like what if they call me a transphobe or something? Surely it’s okay if they might call me a transphobe.”

“We’ll cover that in Unit Four,” the trainer says, “where you learn about the exciting career opportunities available in pitching articles to Quillette.”

Sadly, this vision of the future would not come to be.

In fact, other than having “with autoandrophilia” removed as a specification, Ray Blanchard has faced zero negative consequences for his behavior whatsoever. There was no investigation; he was not censured; he was not removed as the head of the paraphilia working group; his previous research was not reviewed to see whether he has at other times engaged in academic dishonesty in the name of political correctness. This interview appears to have been entirely forgotten.

Indeed, Ray Blanchard has somehow gotten a reputation as a defender of science against political correctness. Presumably this is because his beliefs about transgender people are extraordinarily unpopular among trans advocates and he has faced various negative consequences, such as harsh criticism and Twitter suspension. It is easy to assume that a person facing a lot of criticism for their beliefs is a disinterested scientist following the data where it goes without regard for politics. As a recent example, Helen Joyce, an editor at the Economist, objected to Blanchard’s recent Twitter suspension by calling him “a world expert in the field… setting out his findings from a lifetime of research” and highlighting his work as head of the paraphilia working group.

Certainly, feminists and trans advocates have sometimes made arguments that contradict the best scientific evidence; certainly, it is important to pursue truth even when it goes against what you find politically palatable. But to the best of my knowledge no trans advocate or feminist has ever put a diagnosis into the DSM-5, which they sincerely believed did not exist, for the sake of political gain. Certainly, none of them have done so not because they think it would help people– which would be understandable, although morally wrong and academically dishonest– but because experiencing criticism from feminists is scary and they don’t want to.

That is literally all Ray Blanchard.

Have you considered that if you don’t like being criticized maybe you should be involved in writing the DSM?

Late in the interview, Blanchard says:

But I don’t think we should promulgate untruths for the sake of political agendas, even if they are worthwhile political agendas.

I believe this is excellent advice. Ray Blanchard should consider following it.

—

Two final notes:

In the interests of being more intellectually honest than Blanchard, I’d like to highlight that Blanchard appears to have changed his mind to some degree about autoandrophilia. He has recently argued that “autohomoeroticism”– a paraphilia in which female people are aroused by the concept of being gay men– may exist, although rarely. However, it is unclear to me whether Blanchard sincerely believes in autohomoeroticism, or merely has figured out that lying in order to keep feminists from yelling at you works better if you don’t openly admit to lying. It seems wise to me to view all his research with distrust.

Second, I have avoided discussing anything other than the object-level issue in this post. Although I am a trans advocate, I hope people of all political persuasions may find Blanchard’s behavior here objectionable; certainly, people who are against trans advocacy have made it very clear that they consider science to be more important than political correctness. I don’t want the conversation to be derailed by other, more controversial topics. Therefore, I have written my other thoughts in a separate post, which will be up on Wednesday.

The Life-Changing Magic Of To Do Lists

Tags

I sometimes know if I'm disabilityblogging, neurodivergence, ozy blog post

Executive functioning is your ability to engage in goal-directed behavior: it includes self-control, planning, intrinsic motivation, emotional regulation, working memory, and focus. Executive function impairments can really fuck up your entire life.

The good news is that, for many people, non-medication coping mechanisms for executive function impairments work really well. The bad news is that the list of non-medication coping mechanisms for executive function impairments looks something like this:

• Put your keys in the exact same place every time.
• Use a to-do list.
• Use a planner.
• Write down events in your calendar along with when they occur.
• Work in a place without distractions.
• Do pomodoros.
• Have a morning and afternoon routine.
• Schedule a specific time to do the thing.

That is, it’s literally all things adults lectured you about when you were a kid and forgot about an important form– again— or didn’t do your homework– again— or can’t find your shoes– again. (Pomodoros are an exception but I feel like they have a certain offputting spiritual similarity.)

It makes sense that that’d be true. Presumably non-medication coping mechanisms for executive dysfunction were independently discovered many times and spread until they became conventional wisdom. Many people have subclinical issues with executive functioning; for genetic reasons, people related to people with serious executive functioning problems are particularly likely to have subclinical issues. They’re trying to  give advice that actually does work.

But it also means that using those coping mechanisms feels like admitting to the people who lectured you as a kid that they were right and actually the problem is that you’re Insufficiently Virtuous and if you only acquired More Virtue then you would be able to solve the problem.

I’m not sure there’s a solution to this problem other than training parents in motivational interviewing, or at least convincing them to give advice at literally any time other than immediately after your child failed to do the thing when they are already full of shame and self-hatred. Seriously, guys. You’re going to give your children lifelong planner-related trauma and they’re going to miss way more doctors’ appointments than they would otherwise.

One problem with non-medication coping mechanisms for executive dysfunction, at least as communicated via parental lecture, is that the things that work for people with moderate to severe executive function issues are usually very very specific. I know several people whose lives literally fell apart when Google shut down Google Inbox,  because they were using those features, and no you can’t just replace it with Gmail Gmail does a different thing. I know a person who can only use Habitica as a to-do list app, because the gamification aspect gives them the internal motivation they would otherwise lack.

I have several times attempted to find One Place Where My Keys And Wallet Live, Such That I Will No Longer Lose Them. However, my first attempts all failed, because I got clever and tried to put my keys and wallet in some place other than the counter next to the front door, which is literally the first flat surface I encounter when I enter the house. If I have to take more than three steps in order to put my keys and wallet in a place, I will not put them there.

People with executive function problems also often have to defend their coping mechanisms with a fervency that seems anal-retentive to people without executive function disorders. For example, many people have to enter a plan into Google Calendar immediately the second they think of it, because if they delay for even five minutes they will never enter it into Google Calendar and they will miss their appointment. Some people have to carry their planners around with them everywhere no matter what, and losing their planner is an emergency of a similar urgency to childbirth. Those who have a routine might have to do exactly the same routine in exactly the same order every day, because if they feed the dog before they drink their tea everything will fall apart and they’ll be in their underwear at 2pm.

(This is another subject on which the parents of children with executive function problems could improve. If your teenager finds something that works for them, things that disrupt it are emergencies and they cannot ‘just do it anyway’. Either prioritize getting them the things they need to handle their executive function problems or don’t lecture them when they forget to do their homework.)

Finally, unless you are very very lucky, non-medication treatments for executive function issues are not going to get you to a neurotypical level of functioning. This is often a grave disappointment to people with executive function problems and their loved ones; what’s the use of all that work if you’re just going to miss appointments and fail to run errands anyway? The answer is that successfully running nine out of ten errands is actually way better than successfully running two out of ten errands. It’s a tremendous improvement in your quality of life and your ability to do things, even if a normal person would be able to do all ten errands. It’s important to compare yourself to where you used to be, not to where other people are right now.

Consider Switching Productivity Systems Often

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, rationality

A lot of people decide to look for the best possible productivity system, which they’ll use for the rest of their lives. However, I think for many people it’s better to switch between several different productivity systems.

For me, a new productivity system– Habitica, Getting Things Done, Zen to One, Complice, a brand new planner– is shiny and exciting. I am motivated to check it every day. I am convinced that this time the system will solve all of my executive function problems. I will remember my appointments! I will check tasks off my to-do list! I will accomplish my goals! I will become a productive adult member of society!

Source: Hyperbole and a Half

Unfortunately, over time, the new productivity system grows stale. I’m used to it; I don’t get the rewards of novelty. I am familiar with all its quirks and don’t have any exciting new features to discover. It has, in a completely unpredictable turn of events, failed to solve all of my life problems.

What’s worse, I’ve fallen into a certain automatic routine for using my system. Switching to a new productivity system is often an opportunity to reflect on how I’ve been doing things poorly and in what ways I can do things better. Should I add ‘dishes’ as a daily task because I keep running out of plates? Do I really want to write a novel, or is it just on my to-do list because I feel like the sort of person who should be writing a novel? Should I consolidate these twelve different things I need to do every morning into a single ‘morning routine’ item?

But if I’ve been using the same productivity system for a year, I haven’t had an opportunity to reflect for a long time, and the list has gotten worse. I walk around in shoes with holes in them for the past three months because it never occurred to me that I should add ‘buy shoes’ to my list. The book I’ve been meaning to read for six months is still on my to do list even though I am pretty sure I am never going to get around to reading it. There are mysterious items labeled things like ‘investigate point B’. I follow the same routines even though they’re often now uncomfortable fits for my life.

(I am informed that high-level productivity system users do things called “weekly reviews” and “monthly reviews” to prevent this problem. This has literally never worked for me.)

Source: Hyperbole and a Half

In the past, I used to respond to this by redoubling my efforts to make the old productivity system work and recapture the magic. Right now, I take this as a sign to switch productivity systems. 

In fact, I explicitly accept and plan for the fact that I’m going to switch productivity systems every year to eighteen months.

The part of my brain that decides that THIS productivity system is going to FIX MY ENTIRE LIFE is really dumb and incapable of learning from experience. I feel excited about the new system I’m switching to, and I can harness that to build good habits and create positive feedback cycles. I take switching as an opportunity to reflect on my goals and tasks and see if they make sense. And– since I know that switching regularly is something I plan on doing– I can switch back to old systems that I know worked well for me. (No, that doesn’t stop my brain from believing it is going to fix my entire life. My brain is really dumb.)

I think this advice might work well for some other people who work similarly to me.

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.

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.