site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Some of you may have read Scott Alexander’s recent post, Book Review: The Geography of Madness. The couple of paragraph summary is:

A culture-bound mental illness is one that only affects people who know about it, and especially people who believe in it. Often it doesn’t make sense from a scientific point of view (there’s no such thing as witches, and the penis can’t retract into the body). It sometimes spreads contagiously: someone gets a first case, the rest of the village panics, and now everyone knows about it / believes in it / is thinking about it, and so many other people get it too.

Different cultures have their own set of culture-bound illnesses. Sometimes there are commonalities - many cultures have something related to the penis or witches - but the details vary, and a victim almost always gets a case that matches the way their own culture understands it.

THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT MAKING IT UP. I cannot stress this enough. There are plenty of examples of people driving metal objects through their penis to pull it out of their body or prevent the witches from getting it or something like that. There is no amount of commitment to the bit that will make people drive metal objects through their penis. People have died from these conditions - not the illness itself, which is fake, but from wasting away worrying about it, or taking dangerous sham treatments, or getting into fights with people they think caused it. If you think of it as “their unconscious mind must be doing something like making it up, but their conscious mind believes it 100%,” you will be closer to the truth, though there are various reasons I don’t like that framing.



The thrust of Scott’s argument is that humans have an amazing propensity to change their subjective experience based on their beliefs. Here, I'm not talking about rationally held or carefully reasoned beliefs, but deep-seated beliefs that aren’t easy to change, even if you know for a fact they're irrational. Typically, these beliefs seem to be formed through social or cultural channels, and once formed, they can be very difficult to change unless your cultural narrative also changes.

This idea ties into other work on the placebo effect and the ways it shaped our culture, for instance, John Vervaeke’s take on shamanism. The basic idea being that shamanism was highly advantageous from an evolutionary perspective because it allowed groups of humans to harness the placebo effect to overcome illness and manage social problems.

In short, despite the rational pretensions our culture has, our irrational beliefs have extremely strong effects on our perception of pain and other subjective experiences. However, an important nuance is that no cultural disorder is 100% ‘in your head;’ on the contrary, these disorders are very real and can have strong physical effects.

Some of the big examples that Scott gives, and some I think might be (mostly) culturally mediated, are:

  • Anorexia

  • Post-traumatic stress disorder

  • Anxiety

  • Depression

  • Gender dysphoria

  • Chronic pain

  • TikTok Tourettes

  • Long Covid

Now, based on the bent of this forum, many people might be tempted to jump on the gender dysphoria issue. While it’s certainly a loud and vibrant battle in the culture war, I’d ask that we instead focus on other problems. In my opinion, if this thesis holds true, then gender dysphoria is a red herring.

The evidence clearly suggests that we are inflicting massive amounts of pain and suffering on ourselves through our cultural beliefs and practices. The fact that so many of our cultural problems - from overdose deaths and suicides to chronic pain and crippling anxiety - are unforced errors is truly shocking.

Think about it - one fourth of the adult U.S. population experiencing chronic pain? That's a staggering number, and it seems largely due to the fact that we have been conditioned to believe that our pain must have an acute physical cause. We've been taught to view pain as something that must be cured with medication or surgery, when in fact many cases of chronic pain can be alleviated by simply changing our beliefs about it.

The truly shocking revelation here is that so many of our cultural problems - massive amounts of overdose deaths, suicides, one fourth of the adult population experiencing chronic pain, crippling anxiety causing young people to retreat from society, and many more issues - are clear unforced errors. We are inflicting this pain on ourselves.

If this theory is true it may very well be one of the most important and impactful frameworks with which to view the issues of post modernity. We wouldn’t need endless medications or miraculous scientific breakthroughs - we could already have the power to end massive amounts of truly pointless suffering.

ETA: is another perfect example of this type of illness.



From a personal perspective, I can attest that this theory confirms my priors. I’ve dealt with chronic pain for a decade and have long suspected that it was mostly psychosomatic. Even with this realization, it is a difficult battle to fight. Ironically, support groups where people confirm and commiserate seem to make the issue worse. In fact, many modern studies on pain recommend not even using the word "pain" and replacing it with something else to trick your mind into understanding that your pain doesn’t have an acute physical cause.

So many of us in the rationalist community focus on object-level reasons as to why our society may be stagnating or why we have so many cultural problems. At the end of the day, it turns out that our beliefs themselves may be throwing us into a twisted, absurd, and horrific self-fulfilling prophecy.

It may be time to stop assuming that the causes of our problems originate directly from the outside world and update to a view that many more major problems could be solved if we simply change our cultural beliefs.

Highly recommend reading Ian Hacking's Making Up People which was a decade ahead of The Geography of Madness in describing this phenomenon.

Around 1970, there arose a few paradigm cases of strange behaviour similar to phenomena discussed a century earlier and largely forgotten. A few psychiatrists began to diagnose multiple personality. It was rather sensational. More and more unhappy people started manifesting these symptoms. At first they had the symptoms they were expected to have, but then they became more and more bizarre. First, a person had two or three personalities. Within a decade the mean number was 17. This fed back into the diagnoses, and became part of the standard set of symptoms. It became part of the therapy to elicit more and more alters. Psychiatrists cast around for causes, and created a primitive, easily understood pseudo-Freudian aetiology of early sexual abuse, coupled with repressed memories. Knowing this was the cause, the patients obligingly retrieved the memories. More than that, this became a way to be a person. In 1986, I wrote that there could never be ‘split’ bars, analogous to gay bars. In 1991 I went to my first split bar.

This story can be placed in a five-part framework. We have (a) a classification, multiple personality, associated with what at the time was called a ‘disorder’. This kind of person is now a moving target. We have (b) the people, those I call ‘unhappy’, ‘unable to cope’, or whatever relatively non-judgmental term you might prefer. There are (c) institutions, which include clinics, annual meetings of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation, afternoon talkshows on television (Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera made a big thing of multiples, once upon a time), and weekend training programmes for therapists, some of which I attended. There is (d) the knowledge: not justified true belief, once the mantra of analytic philosophers, but knowledge in Popper’s sense of conjectural knowledge, and, more specifically, the presumptions that are taught, disseminated and refined within the context of the institutions. Especially the basic facts (not ‘so-called facts’, or ‘facts’ in scare-quotes): for example, that multiple personality is caused by early sexual abuse, that 5 per cent of the population suffer from it, and the like. There is expert knowledge, the knowledge of the professionals, and there is popular knowledge, shared by a significant part of the interested population. There was a time, partly thanks to those talkshows and other media, when ‘everyone’ believed that multiple personality was caused by early sexual abuse. Finally, there are (e) the experts or professionals who generate (d) the knowledge, judge its validity, and use it in their practice. They work within (c) institutions that guarantee their legitimacy, authenticity and status as experts. They study, try to help, or advise on the control of (b) the people who are (a) classified as of a given kind.

This banal framework can be used for many examples, but roles and weights will be different in every case. There is no reason to suppose that we shall ever tell two identical stories of two different instances of making up people. There is also an obvious complication: there are different schools of thought. In this first instance, there was the multiple movement, a loose alliance of patients, therapists and psychiatric theorists, on the one hand, who believed in this diagnosis and in a certain kind of person, the multiple. There was the larger psychiatric establishment that rejected the diagnosis altogether: a doctor in Ontario, for example, who, when a patient arrives announcing she has multiple personality, demands to be shown her Ontario Health Insurance card (which has a photograph and a name on it) and says: ‘This is the person I am treating, nobody else.’ Thus there are rival frameworks, and reactions and counter-actions between them further contribute to the working out of this kind of person, the multiple personality. If my sceptical colleague convinces his potential patient, she will very probably become a very different kind of person from the one she would have been had she been treated for multiple personality by a believer.

I would argue that the multiple personality of the 1980s was a kind of person previously unknown in the history of the human race. This is a simple idea familiar to novelists, but careful philosophical language is not prepared for it. Pedantry is in order. Distinguish two sentences:

A. There were no multiple personalities in 1955; there were many in 1985.

B. In 1955 this was not a way to be a person, people did not experience themselves in this way, they did not interact with their friends, their families, their employers, their counsellors, in this way; but in 1985 this was a way to be a person, to experience oneself, to live in society.

As I see it, both A and B are true. An enthusiast for what is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder will say, however, that A is false, because people with several ‘alter personalities’ undoubtedly existed in 1955, but were not diagnosed. A sceptic will also say that A is false, but for exactly the opposite reason: namely, that multiple personality has always been a specious diagnosis, and there were no real multiples in 1985 either. Statement A leads to heated but pointless debates about the reality of multiple personality, but in my opinion both sceptics and enthusiasts can peacefully agree to B. When I speak of making up people, it is B that I have in mind, and it is through B that the looping effect occurs.

Multiple personality was renamed Dissociative Identity Disorder. But that was more than an act of diagnostic house-cleaning. Symptoms evolve, patients are no longer expected to come with a roster of altogether distinct personalities, and they don’t. This disorder is an example of what in my book Mad Travellers (1998) I called a ‘transient mental illness’. ‘Transient’ not in the sense of affecting a single person for a while and then going away, but in the sense of existing only at a certain time and place. Transient mental illnesses can best be looked at in terms of the ecological niches in which they can appear and thrive. They are easy cases for making up people, precisely because their very transience leads cynics to suspect they are not really real, and so could plausibly be said to be made up.

MPD makes sense to me. People already engage in various forms of "mask-wearing": if you're a performer, you're consciously putting on a very elaborate mask of the character you're portraying. But even outside the world of theatre, consciously or unconsciously, you're wearing one mask in front of your parents, the other in front of your partner, the third one in front of your friends, the fourth one in front of your coworkers, the fifth one in front of a cop, the sixth one on The Motte and so on. Some people narrate their internal monologue as a dialogue.

It's not a huge leap to get from putting a mask on unconsciously, to putting one on consciously, to deliberately crafting and enhancing such a mask, to treating an advanced mask as a person, especially when you have learned that treating masks as separate people is something people do.

There’s a bit of motte and bailey going on. Or maybe sanewashing, I don’t know.

The defensible example is what you’re saying—everyone does social adaptation, some probably do it via dialogue, the long tails of that distribution could look like multiple personalities. There’s long-standing rationalist blogposts about having such dialogue, fiction with characters who use it, along with a general credulousness when talking about weird mental states. It’s also what Scott defends in his post:

For example, the person might be kind of a pushover, and then one time after they watched Star Wars ten times in a row, someone bossed them around particularly badly, and they imagined Darth Vader telling them to give into their anger and fight back…They emphasize that it really feels like Vader is in their head giving them advice, or that they sometimes “become” Vader - and in particular they emphasize that this is different from just asking themselves “what would Darth Vader do in this situation?”. They understand that most people learning about their situation would expect that they’re exaggerating a much more boring “just ask yourself what Vader would do” situation, and they’re fine with people believing that if they want, but insist that it’s actually something different and more interesting than that.

Something weird but comprehensible, plausibly an exaggeration, plausibly as “real” as anything else going on in one’s head. More importantly, it’s easy to empathize if one can relate it to the very normal dynamics of acting, role playing, whatever.

Now start adding accommodations.

This is the spicier claim: that the other personalities are, on their own, valid persons. That they may (or should) be addressed separately. That memories may not be shared, and any inconsistencies are framed as personality differences rather than a mercurial disposition. Perhaps that different pronouns are appropriate, since communities which buy into this dynamic are much, much more likely to be deeply and passionately aware of gender.

I don’t mean this as an attack. I’m really conflicted about the phenomenon, in part because it has such a reasonable motte. Also in part because one of my best friends has been diving headfirst into this community, and I’m worried about her. There is clearly a complex of social obligations which entangles the community with trans issues and transhumanist issues alike.