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Recently on LessWrong: Estrogen: A trip report
(Yes, he's treating estrogen HRT as the type of psychedelic drug that might necessitate a "trip report".)
There's a lot to sift through here, but the most interesting part of the post to me was being introduced to the concept of the schizotypy spectrum, a related-but-distinct counterpart to the autism spectrum. Autistic traits and schizotypal traits both have similar outward manifestations (e.g. introversion and difficulties with social interaction), but they have different root causes and different internal subjective manifestations (principally, autistic types are higher in detail-orientation, and schizotypes are more prone to disorganized and delusional thinking):
The author of the post then goes on to claim that, subjectively, estrogen caused him to experience a shift away from autistic traits and towards schizotypal traits:
Obviously this all has to be taken with a grain of salt, because the risk of confounding factors and psychosomatic/placebo effects in this case is high. Nonetheless, I'm curious whether pre-existing schizotypal traits in an individual (contrary to the author's experience in which HRT induced these traits) might play a causal role in explaining the abnormally high incidence rate of MTF transsexuality among so-called "terminally online" young men. By "terminally online" I mean the prototypical image of this demographic: likely to be in a STEM field, likely to have had little romantic success with women, likely to have obsessive "nerdy" interests like anime and video games, etc. This demographic is often stereotyped as "autistic", although that label may potentially conflict with the fact that MTF transsexuals are disproportionately drawn from this demographic as well, since it's not clear a priori why a disorder that allegedly gives you a "hyper male brain" would also make you more likely to want to be a woman. But if some of these "autistic" men actually belong to other personality clusters that have a tendency to masquerade as autism, it could help us build a higher resolution mapping of this region of cognitive space and provide more accurate explanations of the trajectories of different individuals (especially because one of the schizotypal traits is, as mentioned previously, a predisposition towards delusional thinking).
Regardless of which theory ultimately turns out to be correct, I think the biological basis of LGBT traits (or at least, which intrinsic traits increase one's predisposition towards being LGBT) is a subject that deserves further study. In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories (and in particular, the "social contagion" theory for transsexuality). Wokes are the opposite, heavily opposing biological explanations for race and sex differences but somewhat warmer towards biological explanations for LGBT (although they may not allow themselves to present it in exactly those terms). I prefer the simple, consistent position: it's all (at least partially) biological! Social contagion is undoubtedly a part of why the incidence rate of transsexuality has skyrocketed in the last several decades, although I think it's clear that only some people are susceptible to "catching" the contagion in the first place, and one's individual susceptibility is biologically mediated.
Is this an accurate description? I mean, obviously there are a lot of strands of anti-woke. But it seems to me that a slightly more nuanced read on this might be more like this, and I'm going to dip into analogies here...
Teenage girls being prone to anorexia in the 90s, or teenage girls being prone to cutting, were not biologically determined in the sense that there was a specific "I want to cut" gene that was being triggered, exactly, and cutting was those girls "true self". BUT it was almost certainly the case that many of the girls prone to cutting, or to anorexia, did have some other, background biological traits that made them more likely like to be susceptible to those manifestations of whatever else was going on with them on a deeper level. They had their own hardware, but the social ways it manifest were absolutely a kind of social software, and broader culture played a deeply important role in making those behaviors manifest the way they did... and different broader cultures could absolutely dampen or accentuate harmful behaviors.
Likewise, it is very likely that most school shooters have some biological things going on internally that worked against them. But it was obviously the massive coverage of Columbine that put a giant spotlight on "school shooting" as the cultural pattern that that kind of biology got channeled through subsequently.
I am no expert on HBD and black people, so I'm going to just sort of shrug on this topic. But I will say, because it's quite an interesting detail, that violent, destructive riots by black people in the 20th century has been a largely northern phenomenon in the U.S. Southern law-and-order has been much less coddling of such things, in general, but also, at least historically, Southern blacks were much less successfully targeted by radical activists with immigrant backgrounds from continental Europe that spread a radical culture of violent rioting as a way to force social change and try to spark revolution. Whatever is organically, biologically wrong black people (I will be rhetorically agnostic here, as it's not my point), clearly certain cultural strands can serve to make it far, far worse.
I could do this all day, of course. I don't think most anti-woke types would disagree with me too sharply, or maybe that's just a guess. This is a way of saying "it's nature AND nurture!", I suppose, but I don't think that quite gets at the deeper orientation, which is more something like, "nature is real, a lot of nature is pretty bad, healthy cultures cut with the grain of nature and try to steer it towards better, more pro-civilizational ends, there are absolutely limits about how far this can be taken because of the reality of nature, and certain ideologies work as arsonists in the face of these facts and are anti-civilizational to the core". And even accepting these tenants in broad strokes, different people could come down on different sides about how much culture can actually achieve, versus how much nature cannot be evaded.
So, putting these analogies down, I have to imagine that there a lot of people who put a lot of LGBT pretty firmly in something like the above framework - it's no more real than cutting or being a Quaker (which is to say, it exists culturally, it's very important to some people, but it doesn't exist the way that helium does), it probably is a manifestation of something deeper biologically (like whatever it is that gets manifested in cutting or rioting), the fact that it has even those natural roots doesn't mean it's in any sense good (which is just the naturalism fallacy anyway), and the rise of Queer identification (or even the rise of "identity" as a conceptual orienting principle in the first place) is obviously cultural, political, and activist driven. And just like you can accept that some people choose to live as Orthodox Jews and can accept giving them space to do so (and giving them space to believe things about you that you wouldn't appreciate) while balking at having their belief system aggressively pushed by the state, media, and shared educational bodies, so likewise with the LGBTQ+ movement. In this view, the science and liberal tolerance might've supported something like decriminalization on normal liberal grounds (liberal society tolerates all sorts of things that aren't clearly good or bad that subgroups care about), but active promotion?
It seems to me, anyway, that the current pop progressive stance goes, much, much further than all of this. It's something like, Science shows that gayness is exactly like having brown eyes or being left handed, and it's totally natural, and Science also somehow proves the normative claims that it's entirely morally neutral or even good, and it has existed in exactly the form we now recognize throughout all of human history, but we've finally become enlightened enough, and made enough progress, to recognize this and encourage people be who they truly are, and all of this applies to all humans who have ever lived universally, past, present, and future - and all traditions or religions that have ever been wary about this were always emphatically both incorrect and immoral. And there are no possibilities, now that we have it all figured out, that there will ever be any negative consequences at all to our new progress. And anyone who dissents from this framing is a bigot and should be hounded out of polite society as an example. I'm being a hyperbolic, but to be honest, this does capture roughly how it often seems to me (although I suspect some people might admit a bit more nuance if really pressed on an individual level).
I think there are definitely external factors that contribute to mental illness. There are twin studies that show that in twin pairs where one has schizophrenia, there’s only a fifty percent chance of the other twin having it. So clearly it’s something beyond just base genetic predisposition. Nobody wants to admit that because the idea that madness is something you can catch is an extremely disturbing idea. Almost Lovecraftian.
Scott made a point years ago that I've been thinking about for years. The conventional wisdom in so much of psychiatry is that mental illnesses are "historicist" i.e. caused by a personal experience that the patient in question had. It's not common to hear people state "I have an anxiety disorder as a result of being in an abusive relationship", ascribing a direct causal relationship between a certain series of events and a certain constellation of symptoms. In the case of post-traumatic stress disorder, the historical framing is right there in the name - in order to be formally diagnosed with PTSD, one must have gone through a traumatic experience.
But of course, not everyone who goes through a traumatic experience (or experiences) exhibits PTSD-like symptoms, and many people develop said symptoms who have never gone through a traumatic experience. And it's not so long ago that the received wisdom in the psychiatric community was that autism was a direct result of a child having a cold, emotionally remote mother. Now We Know Better and autism is now understood as a condition primarily determined by genetics, but it's remarkable how little self-reflection the psychiatric community has engaged in when it comes to the historicist paradigm undergirding so many other psychiatric diagnoses. We might soon learn that there's a genetic basis for what we now call PTSD which is only activated in the case of profoundly elevated cortisol levels over an extended period of time, and the idea that someone might suffer from PTSD in the absence of said gene expression will seem as preposterous as the idea of children with emotionally remote mothers invariably developing autism as a result.
Per your twin studies example - because WEIRD people spend most of their time in hermetically sealed antiseptic environments, there's a tendency to conflate "environmental" with "social", and assume that anything which isn't caused by genetics must be caused by social influence in some nebulously defined fashion. But of course, that isn't the only thing that "environmental factors" can refer to. Maybe schizophrenia will eventually turn out to be caused by pesticides that only one twin was exposed to, or a pathogen of some kind (e.g. if one twin is more promiscuous than the other and catches an STD). Maybe the recent surge in PTSD diagnoses will turn out to be a side effect of the fact that we all have microplastics in our balls/breasts. Who can say?
I definitely would not be surprised if your theory turned out to be correct. Quite fittingly, the reason Lovecraft himself was so obsessed with madness and sanity slipping away is that he had to watch both his parents go insane from neuro-syphilis.
Regarding your last point. I suspect that many of the cases of war PTSD are actually caused by TBI from exposure to explosions. Ancient warriors didn’t seem to have much problem with it, and notice that the absolute worst cases of shell shock seem to come out of the Great War, in which indirect exposure to heavy artillery was most common.
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