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.

Link Post for June

Tags

disability, effective altruism, not like other ideologies, ozy blog post, rationality, wild animals

Social Justice

“Being taught by Milton Friedman makes you less likely to give long sentences on certain kinds of criminal activity, particularly around like drug crimes.”

Simultaneously “I understand why this was your best choice in this situation” and “aaaawkward”: “To top it all off, reports that Disney had been “browning up” some actors on set… drew a swift response from Disney, noting… that “diversity of our cast and background performers was a requirement and only in a handful of instances when it was a matter of specialty skills, safety and control (special effects rigs, stunt performers and handling of animals) were crew made up to blend in.””

A man whose mother has a severe intellectual disability discusses his relationship with her.

[cw: child sexual abuse] Why Honduran women are being driven to the US border. (Sample excerpt: “When doctors told [12-year-old] Sofia she was pregnant and explained that pregnancy meant she was going to have a baby, Sofia, in her soft, small voice, asked whether she could have a doll instead.”)

From the ‘social model of disability’ files: “In theory, a social definition of infertility—one laid out in terms of intentions and identities rather than diseases and disabilities—circumvents these problems. But it creates complexities of its own. Last year, researchers from Yale and the University of Haifa, in Israel, shared the results of a study in which they asked a hundred and fifty women who have frozen their eggs to explain their motivations. The overwhelming majority of the women cited what might be called “man problems,” including divorces, breakups, and male partners who weren’t yet ready to have children. It takes a conceptual leap to see a recent divorcée and a woman with endometriosis as equally infertile, but Campo-Engelstein argues that they are “similar enough that they should be treated the same.””

Effective Altruism

Is effective altruism growing? “Overall, the decline in people first discovering EA (reading) and the growth of donations / career changes (doing) makes sense, as it is likely the result of the intentional effort across several groups and individuals in EA over the past few years to focus on high-fidelity messaging and growing the impact of pre-existing EAs and deliberate decisions to stop mass marketing, Facebook advertising, etc. The hope is that while this may bring in fewer total people, the people it does bring in will be much higher quality on average.”

The uses of life history classification in understanding wild animal welfare. A thoughtful and nuanced review. (I’m cited!)

A foundational result on the question of how much wild animals suffer is wrong. I am mentioning this 10% because it’s cool and 90% to brag about my role as a catalyst here. (I complained at everyone I could find that this result didn’t make any sense because I was bad at math, and then it turned out to not make any sense because it was wrong.)

Rethink Priorities has an excellent in-depth summary of the evidence that invertebrates suffer, which incidentally explains a lot of really foundational issues related to animal consciousnes in general. Check it out!

Rationality (Practice)

Visualizations of different meanings of probability.

This LW post makes an interesting point about the difference between the norms and goals of science, but I’m mostly linking for the worldbuilding about ALIEN SCIENCE.

People view things as abstractions rather than as atoms, which causes them to miss ways they can interact with things to reach their goals. My summary is boring but the list of examples is very interesting and I really do recommend checking it out.

Subtle errors people make with the concept of conservation of expected evidence.

Weird situations with reasonable explanations, or “why 90% sure is way less sure than you think it is.”

List of examples where one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. Again, the list of examples is incredibly interesting and much better than my summary.

The uses of divination.

Moral realism and moral nonrealism lead to very similar behavior for different reasons.

Rationality (Community)

I don’t agree with everything Ray Arnold wrote about the village versus the mission, but I think he crystallizes for me some important distinctions about the rationality community and moves the interminable conversations about rationalist community norms forward.

Again mostly of interest to rationality community people: rabbit hunts and stag hunts as a metaphor for community participation.

Parenting

Why you should sometimes change your mind after saying ‘no’. I follow this advice personally. My son Viktor only knows a few words and therefore has a hard time expressing preferences without crying. A strict ‘no giving in to crying’ rule would basically mean I couldn’t reassess my decision based on the strength of Viktor’s desires. I am probably going to enforce a ‘no giving in to tantrums’ rule once he’s old enough to express preferences with words, but until then ignoring his communication just seems unethical.

Just Plain Neat

Overzealous cleaner ruins artwork worth 690,000 pounds.

Types of loneliness.

The Secret Rebellion Of Amelia Bedelia, The Bartleby Of Domestic Work.

This is so profoundly my shit that I honestly can’t believe it’s a real article: Georgette Heyer’s crossdressing novels as forced masculinization sexual fantasies.

Why AO3 is one of the best-organized sites on the Internet. “One wrangler, who goes by the handle spacegandalf, pointed me to the example of a character from an audio drama called The Penumbra Podcast who didn’t have an official name in text for several episodes after he was introduced. Yet people were writing fanfic—and trying to tag it by character—before they had any name to tag it with. Because spacegandalf had listened to this podcast—AO3 deliberately recruits and assigns tag wranglers who are members of the fandoms that they wrangle for—they had the necessary context to know that “Big Guy Jacket Man Or Whatever His Name Is” referred to the same person as his slightly more official moniker “the Man In the Brown Jacket” and his later, official name, Jet Sikuliaq (and that none of these names should be confused with a different mysteriously named character from a different audio drama, the Man in the Tan Jacket from Welcome to Night Vale).”

This was recommended to me as one of the best profiles ever written, and it really is: the story of Ricky Jay, one of the greatest living magicians.

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.

Link Post for January

Tags

effective altruism, ozy blog post, rationality

Rationality

“A ball and a bat together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” A fascinating article about why everyone gets this question wrong.

The media signal-boosts weird occurrences, which makes you think that very strange things happen more often than they actually do.

To learn a skill, read one book that explains the what of the skill, one that explains the why, and one that explains the how. I think this article could have used more examples of reference books, but I really enjoyed the author saying what you should look for in the negative reviews.

Effective Altruism

A guide to careers that don’t require a college degree for effective altruists.

Twelve pieces of general consensus about global poverty.

Many people claim that women reinvest ninety percent of their income into their family. However, further research suggests that this statistic doesn’t come from anywhere.

Social Justice

Content warning for drugs, suicide, abortion, miscarriage, pregnancy, corpse desecration, and probably a dozen other things I’m forgetting: how the concept of fetal personhood winds up trading off against women’s rights. Three things that hit home particularly hard for me: if you attempt suicide while pregnant you can be charged with attempted murder; if you die while pregnant you can be kept on life support against your previously stated wishes in order to keep the fetus alive; many doctors and CPS workers disapprove of pregnant people taking Suboxone, so pregnant people go off it and wind up relapsing and sometimes overdosing.

Gay escorts offer a service helping men get used to having sex without drugs. This is the sort of thing that warms my heart.

Cop apologizes for arresting people for trading in drugs. This is the sort of story that always warms my heart.

Just Plain Neat

A cable tech talks about the weird people she saw on the job, feat. Dick Cheney.

Meet the woman who invented cosplay.

Fake nude of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez debunked by foot fetishists.  “”I’ve sucked enough toes in my life to recognize when something doesn’t look right… Because we can’t dorsi- or plantarflex our 2nd-5th toes independently I knew it wasn’t a matter of the toe being bent. I thought that maybe she has some form of brachydactyly but her Wikifeet page has clear evidence to the contrary.”

Poker player locks himself in solitary confinement for 20 days for $62,400.

Secret music composed by medieval nuns.

Put MSG In Everything You Cowards. Recommending partially for the cooking advice and partially for the delightfully belligerant tone.

The Stranger Regrets These Errors.

Scrupulosity Sequence #3: Load-Bearing Things

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, rationality, scrupulosity sequence

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

—Bertrand Russell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality, scrupulosity sequence

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

Unfortunately, we live in this world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you can do empiricism about your own psychological problems.

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

You should expect to be depressed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Post for October

Tags

not like other ideologies, ozy blog post, rationality, star wars, this is a prussian education system hateblog

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark: Not particularly interesting as a work of skepticism, unless you happen to have an interest in space aliens particularly for some reason. Fascinating as a look into the pre-New-Atheist skepticism movement.

Sagan pays a truly baffling amount of attention to what seem to me to be relatively unimportant kinds of woo, like psychic powers and alien abductions. Of course, neither psychic powers nor alien abductions are real, and it is better to not believe in them. But from my perspective there are far more important false beliefs that actually destroy lives. Sagan mentions false memories of abuse; equally important are certain incorrect medical beliefs (such as fraudulent cancer cures and anti-vaccine sentiment) and, of course, religion.

As someone who came of age as a skeptic around New Atheists, I am struck by Sagan’s restraint as regards religion. He several times makes arguments the logical implication of which is atheism, and then backtracks that there are many liberal religious believers who of course are very rational and accept evolution and support science. I don’t agree with all of Sam Harris’s excesses, but I think it is much more intellectually honest to say that the logical implication of skepticism is atheism.

Most interesting fact: quasars were originally believed to be aliens!

The Core: Teaching Your Child The Foundations of Classical Education: This is the worst homeschooling book I have ever read.

The author literally looked at the modern education system and said to herself, “what we really need is MORE pointless memorization and meaningless execution of rote techniques.” In the standard classical-education system, memorization is most of your education from first to fourth grade. After fourth grade education concentrates on logical reasoning and clear communication. The Core eliminates that frivolous “logical reasoning” and “clear communication” part of education and replaces it with more memorization.

It’s hard to say what the worst advice in this book is, because there are so many options. The Core advises requiring your child to do literally every math problem in their textbook, even if they have mastered the material and are complaining about being bored. (I literally cannot think of a better strategy to teach children to hate math.) History consists solely of memorization: memorizing the dates of 204 world events, memorizing the US presidents, memorizing “six stories of twelve sentences each” that summarize a major era, and copying and rewriting paragraphs from histories. (You do, also, get to read historical fiction.) Writing education consists of copying out sentences and paragraphs assigned by the teacher, memorizing a bunch of rules of grammar, and learning to write five-paragraph essays.

Star Wars: Thrawn: The greatest villain in Star Wars history has returned to his proper place in the canon. With the benefit of almost thirty years of hindsight, Zahn understands exactly what the reader wants out of a Thrawn book, which is more Thrawn. It was an absolute pleasure to open to a new chapter and realize that I didn’t have to return to reading about Luke or Leia or someone boring like that.

It is difficult to write a genius character; all too often, writers rely on technobabble or unjustified leaps of logic. Not so Thrawn. Zahn plays fair with the reader; Thrawn rarely has more information than the reader does, and in theory you could often figure out what his plan is before it is revealed, even though you rarely do. Nothing is left mysterious. Star Wars: Thrawn is wonderful and I am eager about starting the sequels.

[Here are spoilers for the Dark Lord’s Answer.]

Dark Lord’s Answer: A very cool premise, poorly executed. An economist 24/7 submissive is transported into a medieval fantasy world. Because sound economic advice is often counterintuitive or even evil-sounding, in order to get anyone to take her advice she had to set up shop as a Dark Lord. Because she’s an 24/7 submissive, she sets up a puppet Dark Lord whom she submits to while also being the power behind the throne.

Inexplicably, instead of choosing to explore this incredibly interesting character and teach the reader some economics along the way, Dark Lord’s Answer chooses to leave this as a ‘mystery’ the entire time and make it a big reveal.

Scrupulosity Sequence #1: Don’t Listen To Me

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, rationality, scrupulosity

[Related to: Beware of Other-Optimizing; Generalizing From One Example; What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?]

This post does not contain new material; everything I say in this post is said in the above-linked posts. But it’s important, and particularly important at the beginning of a sequence that gives advice, so I’m going to say it anyway. Bear with me, people who have been around here for a while.

Everyone is different. This is a platitude. You hear it in elementary school classrooms and workplace presentations about diversity, and for that reason it can be hard to understand how important it is.

Everyone is different. There are lots and lots of ways in which everyone can be different. Some people are extroverts; some people are introverts. Some people worry constantly; other people shrug off a cancer diagnosis. Some people can get along with anyone; other people refuse to give anyone a second chance because they already know they dislike the person so why would they give that person another opportunity to be disappointing? Some people have studyblrs full of beautiful photographs of their neatly color-coded notes for all twelve of the college classes they’re taking; some people made a studyblr, got distracted by discourse and memes, and haven’t posted anything to it except a list of the fancy pens they fully intended to buy from Amazon. Some people love beautiful things and museums and daydreaming and poetry; other people… actually I have no idea what low-openness-to-experience people do all day, sorry guys.

We have barely begun to map out the number of ways that people can be different.

What this means is that the advice that works for one person often utterly fails for another person.

We see this in all areas of human endeavor. One person writes in the morning; another in the evening; another gets a hotel room and churns out a novel in a single feverish week. One person finds that running lets them be alone with their thoughts; another likes how yoga connects them to their body; a third finds the social aspect of sports very motivating. One baby thrives with cosleeping, while another needs to cry-it-out, and a third does well with no-cry sleep training.

A further complication is that we don’t have words for all the ways that people can be different. Sometimes scientists have the word but laypeople don’t: many people who have no sense of smell have never heard the word “anosmia.” Other very real distinctions are ones no one has learned to make yet. (There has been little study about what factors cause a person to prefer writing in hotel rooms.) If we don’t know how people differ, then we can’t have any sense about for whom the advice works.

Depression is a condition about which there has been a good deal of research. There are accepted evidence-based therapies (CBT) and medications (SSRIs, MAOIs, tricyclics). But you’ll find formerly depressed people swearing by mindfulness, CBT, DBT, behavioral activation, SSRIs, antipsychotics, MDMA, LSD, nootropics, exercise, yoga, vitamins, finding a partner, breaking up with a partner, cuddling a pet, walking outside in nature, acupuncture, green smoothies, and lighting herbs on fire near your toes. All of these treatments likely alleviate depression for some people. (…Maybe not lighting herbs on fire near your toes.) All of these treatments will likely fail to treat depression for other people. And for none of them do we have a good sense of what populations they are likely to work for. All you can do is keep trying things which seem likely to work and have an acceptable risk profile until you aren’t depressed anymore, and try to avoid the “my depression was caused by a vitamin deficiency, therefore SSRIs are a LIE and everyone should take Vitamin D” assholery.

There has been almost no research into scrupulosity and dysregulated guilt and shame, and there are no best practices which I am aware of. Therefore, when I write about my scrupulosity, it is merely one person’s description of what worked for me. It is as credible as one depressed person saying “I became less depressed when I started taking regular walks in nature.” Certainly a useful anecdote; perhaps helpful to some depressed people trying to narrow down the enormous list of things they could theoretically do about depression; absolutely not a universal cure.

Although I hope this is not the case, it is possible my recovery was entirely due to the beneficial effects of time, that I am attributing causality where there is none and this series is the equivalent of the depressed person writing that lighting herbs on fire near their toes cured their depression. That is always a possibility when a person is describing what worked for them.

I believe that what I write will be useful for some people; I believe it will be useless for others, and perhaps harmful. But if the things that work for me don’t work for you, that’s okay. That’s normal. That’s how brains work. People are different. Test everything yourself, and if something doesn’t work, toss it away without a further thought.

On Laziness

Tags

I have "respond to the rest of the values difference stuff" on my to do list but that is THREE posts and this is ONE post so it happens faster, neurodivergence, ozy blog post, rationality

When I was a teenager, I was lazy.

When I was at home during the summer, I didn’t do my chores; instead, I read books all day. My parents were deeply frustrated. They tried everything they could think of to deal with my laziness. They explained in great detail that I needed to contribute to the household. They yelled at me. They punished me for not doing chores. They rewarded me for doing chores.

Eventually, my mom happened to write down the chores she wanted me to do on a list. When she came home that night all the chores were done.

Turns out I can’t process auditory information very well.

Whoops.

—

I once had a partner who was lazy. I told him “it’s only fair that we both contribute fifty percent to the household,” and he agreed, and we decided that he would sweep the floor when it was dirty. However, the floor just got dirtier and dirtier. Even when I nagged him to sweep the floor, he’d say “it looks clean enough to me” or– even more frustrating– he’d sweep half the floor and leave the other equally dirty half undone.

Goddamn male-privileged assholes who expect other people to do all the chores while they laze around in their underwear and play video games, this is the 21st century, we believe in equality!

One day I took him and pointed to a pile of dirt and said “do you see this dirt?” He responded with “holy shit! Our floor is extremely dirty!” and immediately got a broom and swept it.

It turns out that while I am constantly low-level stressed by mess, my partner literally just did not see it unless it was explicitly pointed out to him.

Whoops.

—

For most of my life, I’ve been lazy.

I’ve flunked classes and lost jobs and let dishes pile up in the sink until they make towers. My resume has so many holes it looks like it’s made out of Swiss cheese. When I was in college, I was so lazy I flunked a class it was supposed to be literally impossible to flunk, and the only reason I didn’t have to repeat the year was that my adviser pulled strings to get me to graduate because she didn’t want to deal with me anymore. I spent a lot of time hating myself about how lazy I was. My inner monologue usually resembled the following comic:

[Source: Allie Brosh’s book Hyperbole and a Half.]

I talked a good game about knowing I had depression, but secretly I was pretty suspicious that this was all a coverup for my innate lack of moral fiber.

Then I took Zoloft.

Magically, the pill caused my moral fiber to grow in.

Whoops.

—

Last week, I was lazy.

I had been lazy for more than a month. I was too lazy to take my infant son to the library, or to play with him, or to sing to him, or to do anything other than the bare minimum to keep him alive and not crying. I was too lazy to write. I was too lazy to read books. I was certainly too lazy to do work for my job. I spent all my time thinking about how much I wanted to sleep, which was pretty much the laziest thing I could imagine. I spent a lot of time breaking into tears about how miserable being so lazy made me and how I wished I could just willpower myself into wanting to do more things.

Then, I extremely lazily took a nap for three hours last weekend, instead of doing work that I absolutely needed to do because there was a deadline and I had procrastinated on it. I think we can all agree that was the absolute laziest thing I have done in this entire anecdote so far.

I woke up, wrapped up the thing I needed to do in a couple hours, and have been astonishingly productive for the past few days, a fact that is no doubt related to the fact that since then I’ve been making sure to stay in bed for at least eleven hours a day.

It turns out that what I was calling “laziness” was, in fact, chronic sleep deprivation.

Whoops.

—

Scott Alexander recently wrote a post called The Whole City is Center, which has a very extended bit about laziness in it:

Simplicio: I think we’re treating the word “laziness” differently. I’m thinking of “lazy” as a way to communicate a true fact about the world. You agree that the true fact should be communicated by some word, but you’re interpreting “lazy” to mean some sort of awful concept like “a person who avoids responsibilities in a way not caused by anything whatsoever except being bad, and so we should hurt them and make them suffer”. Are you sure this isn’t kind of dumb? Given that we need a word for the first thing, and everyone currently uses “lazy” for it, and we don’t need a word for the second thing because it’s awful, and most people would deny that “lazy” means that, why don’t we just use “lazy” for the very useful purpose it’s served thus far?

Here is my thought. I agree that “a person who avoids responsibilities in a way not caused by anything whatsoever except being bad, and so we should hurt them and make them suffer” is a terrible concept. “Lazy” is how I personally express that concept (well, actually my concept replaces the “and so we should hurt them and make them suffer” with “and so we should be resentful about them forever,” but close enough). That is why I am trying to avoid using the word “lazy”.

Look, if you personally use the word “lazy,” and it doesn’t come along with the connotation of “this person is bad and horrible and I should spend lots of time and energy feeling resentful and bitter about how bad and horrible they are,” and it doesn’t impair your ability to think thoughts like “maybe the reason that I, the person who does all of the nighttime parenting for a six-month-old, can’t do anything and keep fantasizing about sleep is because I am sleep-deprived,” then please keep using the word “lazy.” I encourage you to do so. My one caution is that you should take care about calling other people “lazy” unless you’re really certain that they won’t interpret you as meaning the “bad and horrible” meaning, because it is good to make sure that when you insult people it is deliberate.

Maybe you’re able to voluntarily shift the definitions of words that you use as soon as someone points out to you that the word definition is kind of stupid, no matter how many emotions you have wrapped up in the definition of the word you were originally using. That’s a useful skill. Unfortunately, like many useful skills, such as obstetrics or car repair or leaving the house promptly, I don’t have it. My brain just keeps using the word definition it’s always had.

I fully admit that I am a deeply unreasonable person in this way as in many other ways. However, I observe that when I don’t use the word “lazy,” I am more likely to notice the actual causes of someone avoiding responsibilities, and I am less likely to spend lots of emotional energy seething about how they or I are/am a bad horrible person who deserves to be hated forever. No doubt this is an unreasonable coping mechanism. As an unreasonable person, I often use unreasonable coping mechanisms. But you reasonable people, with your reasonable-person privilege, should not go around saying I shouldn’t use my coping mechanism which I was using just because reasonable people don’t need it.

Now, it might be that I’m totally unique in my unreasonableness here (or perhaps that it’s genetic, because my parents share it). However, I think a similar unreasonableness is actually quite common. Exhibit A: people keep writing blog posts about it.

Scott Alexander later writes:

Simplicio: If you’re right, I worry you’re going up against the euphemism treadmill. If we invent another word to communicate the true fact, like “work-rarely-doer”, then anyone who believes that people who play video games instead of working deserve to suffer will quickly conclude that work-rarely-doers deserve to suffer.

Sophisticus: Then let’s not invent something like “work-rarely-doer”. Let’s just say things like “You shouldn’t have Larry as a dog-sitter, because due to some social or psychological issue he usually plays video games instead of doing difficult tasks.”

Simplicio: I think people are naturally going to try to compress that concept. You can try to stop them, but I think you’ll fail. And I think insofar as you can communicate the concept at all, people are going to think less of Larry because of it. It’s possible you can slightly decrease the degree to which people think less of Larry, but only by slightly decreasing their ability to communicate useful information.

This is true. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis doesn’t really work. I can prevent myself from using the concept “a person who avoids responsibilities in a way not caused by anything whatsoever except being bad” by not letting myself use the word “lazy” and– if I observe the concept attaching itself to another word– adding that word to the blacklist too. I can’t prevent everyone else from using that concept by blacklisting the word: anyone who doubts it should see the snarl some people can put on the word “transgender.” Nevertheless, I have two objections to Scott’s argument.

First, most people do not have a particularly sophisticated ontology of language, so when they say “laziness doesn’t exist” they mean “the concept we unreasonable people use the word ‘laziness’ to describe doesn’t exist”. Scott Alexander actually agrees with their point.

Second, even if it wouldn’t work that well if everyone adopted it, if I personally adopt it, then I am less likely to be chronically sleep deprived for several weeks because I think taking a nap would be Extremely Lazy and that if I am going to be lazy I should at least have the grace to be conscious so I can hate myself about it. This is a win. Since I am not a Kantian, I do not have to go “hmm, well, this works for me, but if I check it against the categorical imperative it probably wouldn’t work for everyone, guess I’m going to have to be sleep-deprived until I have a failure of willpower and take a nap anyway.”

Scott Alexander has talked a lot about the typical mind fallacy and how it’s a mistake to assume that everyone is the same as we are. Unfortunately, awareness of a fallacy doesn’t necessarily stop you from falling victim to it. (As I know very well, because as I said above I am a deeply unreasonable person.) Scott is a very reasonable person, with reasonable coping mechanisms; he should not in this way generalize to those of us who behave in stupid and counterproductive ways constantly and are desperately trying to figure out how not to.

Entitlement, Covert Contracts, Social Libertarianism, and Related Concepts

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

One of my most unpopular opinions is that “entitlement” is actually a useful concept.

It makes sense that people have a knee-jerk negative reaction to it. “Entitled” is one of those words (like “patriarchy” and “rational”) that it is useful to have in your mental toolkit but if you ever find yourself using it you need to rephrase your argument. More on this later; it ought to show up later in the essay but I wanted to put in “I know that there are good reasons for you to hate the word ‘entitled'” in the forlorn hope that this would keep people from writing angry comments before they read the post.

I think that entitlement is a useful concept when thinking about the interplay between these three concepts:

1. Basic rights and expectations for any relationship.
2. Boundaries and needs you have in some specific relationship.
3. Needs that are completely unreasonable.

There is a very common model of social interaction which you might call “social libertarianism,” beloved by poly people, sex-positive people, and assholes who don’t want to get called on being assholes. Under social libertarianism, people have sets of needs and boundaries, and the goal of social interaction is to find someone who can fulfill your needs and whose needs you can fulfill, without violating either side’s boundaries. The only misdeed is to deliberately violate another person’s stated boundaries. No set of needs or boundaries are right or wrong, but some may be incompatible with other people’s. If you enjoy screaming curse words at other people, then all you have to do is find someone else who likes having curse words screamed at them, and the problem is solved.

Social libertarianism often comes from a good impulse. Many people generalize from “I would be unhappy in this sort of relationship” to “everyone who is in this sort of relationship is unhappy and being exploited and a victim of Insert Cultural Boogeyman Here.” Social libertarianism has built into it the idea that people are different from each other, an insight which is all too often forgotten. If you’re the sort of person whose perfectly happy relationships get accused of being unhappy and exploitative and only existing because of Insert Cultural Boogeyman Here, there’s a natural tendency to embrace social libertarianism.

But I don’t think social libertarianism works as a model, because it is in fact actually possible to be an asshole.

For example, if I were friends with someone and they decided to tell me my hair was ugly, my blog is stupid, I would never fulfill any of my dreams, and all my friends secretly hate me, I would not say “I see I have not set the boundary with you that you don’t get to insult me at all my most vulnerable points; my mistake, in the future please don’t do that.” I would say “never darken my doorstep again.” This is because it is actually wrong to insult your friends. I don’t have to set the explicit “don’t insult me” boundary; it is understood. Similarly, I might specify that a car I’m selling is red, but I wouldn’t specify that it has wheels. All cars are supposed to have wheels. It’s a basic expectation.

There are actually quite a lot of these in relationships. “Don’t share people’s private information without their consent.” “Don’t forbid someone from being friends with someone else just because you don’t like them.” “Don’t tell people they are bad people for having a feeling.” Spend a few hours reading any advice column or relationship advice book and you will discover hundreds of basic rights you never knew you were respecting. (Years later, I remain boggled at More than Two spending at least a page patiently explaining why it is wrong to veto a partner’s relationship because it makes them too happy and that makes you jealous.)

I realize the concept of “unspoken rules that are wrong to break” is going to give some of my more socially phobic readers hives. To which I say, as reassurance: this is literally all stuff you learned in kindergarten, it’s “play fair” and “don’t hit people” and “be nice.” Most people get through life fine without ever being confused about this stuff. Some people are actually ignorant, particularly autistic people and people who grew up in abusive or fucked-up homes: I myself was confused until relatively recently about why I shouldn’t share other people’s private information. But if you are, most people will forgive you if you apologize, explain yourself, and don’t do it again. There’s a difference between a mistake and malice, and “don’t treat people’s mistakes like they’re deliberate attempts to hurt you” is one of the basic expectations for any relationship.

On the other end, sometimes people have expectations that are, in fact, completely unreasonable. For example, if I don’t watch myself, I tend to expect that if I just do everything right then everyone in the whole entire world will like me. So I feel a lot of social phobia: if someone dislikes me, it means I have done something wrong, and I need to self-flagellate about my wrongness and carefully search all of my actions until I determine what horribly wrong thing I have done.

I do think, in a sense, my social phobia is a form of entitlement. (Not everyone’s social phobia is entitlement, of course. Probably most people’s isn’t. But mine is.) You can tell, because sometimes I get fed up with the whole self-flagellating/navel-gazing business and instead start being unreasonably angry. “How dare you dislike me!” I think. “I am a good person and I deserve universal adoration! I should come up with the most cutting insult possible so that you will regret your decision to have any negative opinions about me whatsoever.”

Like most entitled thoughts, this line of thought is a reasonable thing to want. Being disliked feels bad; that’s why we have a bunch of social rules about not explicitly saying when you don’t dislike someone. It’s natural to want to avoid ever having to experience this unpleasant thing. The problem is when a natural desire turns to an expectation that the world should be this way.

Also like most entitled thoughts, when you actually explain it it is balls crazy. Like, pretty much the only way it would be justified to think this is how people work is if you lived on a desert island for your entire life and learned about people solely through your copy of the Sims 2. Everyone has flaws, which means that everyone is going to be disliked for their flaws by someone. Sometimes people dislike each other for silly reasons: some people are going to dislike me no matter what I do because my writing style grates on them, or I remind them of their horrible ex, or they think my name is pretentious. Even if I were absolutely perfect in every way and somehow managed to talk everyone out of disliking me for silly reasons, horrible people exist. I’m not going to get Homophobe McNazi to like me, which is okay, because Homophobe McNazi’s approval would fill me with shame.

One very common form of entitled thoughts is “covert contracts,” a concept which I learned from the Red Pill and intend to rescue from the horrible misogynists who currently own it. A covert contract is when you make up a deal inside your head where if you do something, then in return someone else will do what you want, and then never tell the other person that this is the deal.

Examples of covert contracts: “if I never disagree with you then you will like me.” (This one I am annoyingly prone to.) “If I do the dishes then my housemate will sweep the floors.” “If I refer you to my company, then you’ll do really well on the interview and impress my boss with your good judgment.” “If I spend lots of time trying to solve your personal problems, then you will be my friend.”

The problems of covert contracts are many:

• The other person might not even want the thing you’re giving them. (Maybe your housemate doesn’t care about the dishes. Maybe your attempts to solve other people’s problems are actually busybody meddling.)
• The other person has literally no idea that this contract exists, and therefore will only fulfill it by coincidence or telepathy.
• You didn’t give the other person a chance to say “no” and they might not want to take this deal. (Maybe they aren’t sure if they’ll be able to do well on the interview. Maybe your housemate really fucking hates sweeping.)
• The other person thought they were getting a favor for free and is going to be really annoyed at you when they discover that you in fact made a deal with them under false pretenses of doing a favor.
• Sometimes the contracts are just balls crazy. (If someone likes you on the condition that you never disagree with them, you don’t want to be their friend.)

The solution here is twofold:

1. Do nice things when you want to do nice things for their own sake, not because you expect to get something out of it.
2. If you want to make some sort of exchange (dishes for sweeping, referral for good interview performance, therapy for friendship), tell people about it ahead of time and give them the chance to say no.

(In Guess Culture, exchanges are often not explicitly discussed, but instead negotiated some other way. I am not Guess Culture enough to give advice about how to negotiate this, but I would suggest that your implicit contracts should definitely avoid the pitfalls outlined above.)

So hopefully at this point you can see why I think “entitlement” is a useful concept which identifies a specific class of distorted thoughts that cause harm to oneself and others. Why, then, is the term “entitlement” so universally despised, at least by the non-asshole population?

Two reasons. First, some people say that people are “entitled” when the thing they are is “sad that they can’t have a desirable thing.” It is true that it’s very unreasonable to expect someone to date you even if they don’t want to, but you still get to be sad that they don’t want to date you! It is okay to be sad about the way the world is! This is an awful misuse of the term and people who do it should be hung up by their thumbs.

Second, and more perniciously, it is used to cover up arguments about which of the three categories– basic expectations, expectations that can be negotiated, and completely unreasonable expectations– something is in.

Recently I was watching an old John Oliver clip about the NCAA’s refusal to pay its players. An NCAA spokesperson characterized the student-athletes protesting not being paid as “entitled athletes”. You notice he didn’t say what the student-athletes felt they were entitled to, because saying that would immediately reveal that his position was bullshit. Student-athletes think they should get paid because they are destroying their bodies to earn other people millions of dollars. No fucking shit they’re entitled to it. This is one of those “basic expectation” things. If someone is profiting off your labor, then you are entitled to a cut of it, and you are certainly entitled to not have all of your possible employers form a cartel for the specific purpose of ensuring you don’t get paid.

But if he just says “entitled athletes,” then everyone is like “ah, yes, entitled athletes, hooking up with cheerleaders without condoms and getting drunk and vandalizing buildings” and they fail to notice the bit where the student-athletes’ complaint is actually totally reasonable.

This happens all the time.

So I would suggest never using the word “entitled” without following it with the word “to”. Very very few people think they are entitled to literally everything they want. “Entitled” by itself should sound to you as strange as saying “in love” by itself: in love with whom? Entitled to what? And given people’s perfectly reasonable objections to the term, even if you personally use it in your thinking, it might be best just to never use the word at all, instead replacing it with something like “so-and-so has a distorted thought that they deserve Thing.”