The things you write are not at all in line with my experiences. And I don't say this in the sense "you are probably wrong" but "my experiences are probably weird".
First I didn't recognize your description of children as half-crazy. My kids are not. The one of my kids who is crazy always seemed crazy. I hoped she wasn't crazy for real, but from the age of five or so she always seemed to be. The other kids seem equally un-crazy. I can't tell about the one-year-old, but I'm feeling convinced that the 3-year-old is sane. They are not always doing everything right and making the right priorities, but they often strike me as surprisingly sane (not only intelligent, but sensible).
And I didn't recognize myself as a teenager in your description of teenagers. I was mentally unhealthy as a teenager, but definitely not in that way. No magical thinking there - I did my best to be rational (with varying results). Your description told me with full force why I had such enormous problems to fit in with teenagers when I was a teenager myself. I yearned for nothing more than the company of other teenagers - but I just couldn't understand them. They seemed to think in strange patterns that I couldn't follow. Your text above gives me the idea that maybe my impression was right after all: people were actually as crazy as they seemed to be.
yes, and it may be more that children behave strangely but because 'they are young' we do not judge them as mad, certainly this happened with friends of mine. Their strangeness did not go away. Thus the appearance of madness in late teenagerdom, the prodromal contexts. (rational thinking is magical in its own way). Recently my early 20s daughter have noted how strange and dangerous teenagers seem, and they don't get them, and they were a box of chocolates at the time. Apple pie is writing a folk tail, but not for young, but for the oldies, (see also to read with tis in mind https://thyrathen.substack.com/p/the-story-of-trisevgeni-the-three? )
Actually I'm really, really hoping some teenagers read this and it helps to give them perspective. My elders were always telling me that I was "foolish" or "lacked experience" in what now looks like an attempt to browbeat or gaslight me into accepting their own screwed up views of reality. Old people are not smarter than young people, and they're often stuck with fossilized worldviews that make it difficult for them to pivot as reality changes, so they're not necessarily more right than teenagers about things.
But knowing that, OK, young people *are* prone to a certain amount of craziness, is pretty good if you're having trouble being young. I'd hope teens would find it reassuring to know that the light does get brighter as you keep walking forward.
I'm glad you found this interesting! I will say, though, that the things I've seen from you gave a consistent picture of you having *always* been on the eccentric side, developing an eating disorder in young adulthood and being admittedly apophenic in later life:
I remembering thinking "...What?" when you were excited about being an apopheniac, because apophenia is known to be a marker of, if not a root cause of mental illness:
Mladenović, A., Živojinović, F., Žagar, A., Stojiljković, A., & Jovanović, Đ. (2020). Disintegration and Apophenia. EMPIRICAL STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY, 29.
"Disintegration is the most robust personality correlate of apophenia, the tendency to see patterns in randomness. These results are consistent with the Disintegration model, postulating that the perceptual/cognitive tasks that capture both apophenia and disintegrative tendencies are rooted in a common neural mechanism predisposing individuals to illusory pattern perception, i.e., false positives."
This is what I was getting at when I said your ideas are often interesting. I agree that apophenia can be a useful source of ideas and inspiration; even though most people live at the boring, sane, "totally square" and "predictable" low-Disintegration end of the scale... https://thingstoread.substack.com/i/150237200/except-that-tove-says-being-crazy-isnt-all-bad ...you spend a lot of time at "getting interesting" and occasionally veer into "screw loose" in a way that supports a stream of popular blog posts.
Now obviously I don't *really* know. I've never seen you in real life, and it's easy to get a lopsided picture of someone from online interactions. Maybe you were an extremely level-headed teenager who just stood there blinking at the craziness around you. But the impression you give makes me think that, in your adolescence, you were probably crazy in a different way from others that couldn't see the humor, aesthetic value, or possibly even sexual and romantic aspects of the social world around you.
You are touching something that I find very interesting: That being (or at least feeling) very sane and being clearly insane seems to lie closely to each other. I interprete my apophenia as an important feature of my very robust sanity. I totally believe you when you say that for many people, apophenia is a sign of beginning madness. But I'm convinced that in my case, it is a sign of the opposite.
It it the same with my family. It contains an unusual percentage of that I believe are unusually crazy people and unusually uncrazy people. It seems to me that being an apopheniac equipped with self-distance makes a person unusually uncrazy, but being an apopheniac without self-distance makes a person crazy.
(When it comes to the eating disorder I blame environmental factors. I still lose much of my interest in food when I'm forced to eat alone for extended times. In a normal social environment I very much do not have an eating disorder.)
Edit: Even more than apophenia, I think it is an unusually high level of self-confidence that makes my family members either insane or unusually sane. Normal people believe what other people believe. Unusually self-confident people believe what they for some reason want to believe. Without self-distance that makes them insane. With self-distance that makes them independent thinkers.
Maybe! Ultimately this reads like most of the things you write, though, and who knows how accurate it is. Losing interest in food is at the very least unusual, and the idea that self-confidence makes some people very sane and other people very crazy is suspicious. It isn't that such things can't exist; there are quadratic effects around in psychology, but they're hard to detect even using moderate-sized samples in the hundreds, and I don't think you have samples like that. I think you're jumping to conclusions the way you usually do.
I work hard to check out the things I figure out. It isn't that there's absolutely no low-hanging fruit left, because there is, but it's almost all in realms that are very current, somewhat taboo, or uninteresting to most people. Since antiquity, people have been discovering a lot of things that turned out to be wrong; it's seductive to think we have some some insight about the world, but how do we know we're any different from all those other wrong people who went around being wrong about stuff?
The upshot is that when I have ideas, I turn them over and test them. Although this takes time and effort, I believe it's worth it to have something that's really likely to be true. Your more scattergun approach may have its place, but if it weren't for the way Substack consistently rewards you for putting your ideas out there as they come to you, I would seriously tell you to dial it back, lady!
On topic: Recently I have tried to find information on the content of delusions and hallucinations, since it seemed far from random. I would have preferred to read a book about it, but this article was all I found: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2167702620951553
It says that delusions are social to their nature. Or rather, anti-social. Normal people believe what other people believe. Delusional people uncritically believe what they believe themselves. I think that the most sane people are those who believe what they believe, but are self-critical.
And normal is not the same as mentally healthy. Most people would probably eat too much rather than too little when feeling lonely and miserable. But I think it is uncontroversial to say that the mentally healthy thing to do is to eat adequate amounts of what one believes is reasonably healthy food and to enjoy it. Which I do under normal circumstances, so I assume I'm mentally healthy on that point.
I think our differences mainly come down to our differing views of philosophy. You say that for any researcher, professional or amateur, there is little low-hanging fruit. I see surprising amounts of low-hanging fruit in various areas. And apparently, that is because while you largely accept the categories science is working with, I continuously challenge them.
For you, philosophy is something very powerful that can lead to new levels of enlightenment (I have to admit that I don't really understand it). For me, philosophy is the questioning and redefinitions of categories.
Also, I think the realm “uninteresting to most people” seems very big. People care about a few questions. Those questions become controversial and more people care about them because, obviously, those are the questions to care about. Outside of those hot topics there are tons of questions that people just don't get the idea to think about. Low-hanging fruit is all around.
I don't know to what degree you are aware of it, but you most definitely have a very unusual ability to handle data. Scott Alexander obviously has that ability too (I can't say which one of you is the very best but I could guess it is you). For you, checking your hypotheses must be a lot easier than it is for me to do the same thing. It is not that I can't read, but I don't swim in data with the same ease as you do.
That being said, I find it a bit problematic that I have put myself in a situation in which people expect me to say something interesting with a certain regularity. Sometimes (currently, for example), parts of me would prefer to shut up and read.
> I think our differences mainly come down to our differing views of philosophy. You say that for any researcher, professional or amateur, there is little low-hanging fruit. I see surprising amounts of low-hanging fruit in various areas. And apparently, that is because while you largely accept the categories science is working with, I continuously challenge them.
Ah... I don't really think this reflects what I think. It's probably easier just to say that I'm far more *skeptical* than you. That's a quick and clear way of expressing what seems to be a difference in the way we look at things.
My view on philosophy is not that there is low hanging fruit, but that philosophy so far has been a muddled waste of time; it's really more those areas I'd call scientific where there's still any low hanging fruit to bepicked. But even my view on science is that categories which separate disciplines are labels that don't necessarily mean anything real; I don't accept categories science is working with because the "categories" are really philosophical constructs. Maybe you mean something else when you talk about categories, but in general I would say any attempts at sorting things into types or kinds is a contentious philosophical enterprise; nobody even agrees on how many continents there are, let alone, say, genders, because you can't test philosophical claims empirically.
> I don't know to what degree you are aware of it, but you most definitely have a very unusual ability to handle data.
Well on the one hand it *is* true that smart people often underestimate how hard things can be for others, but Tove what's the intellectual barrior to carrying out a simple t-test? You don't even have to make the calculations by hand, you just arrange the data into two columns in Microsoft XL, type in "=t.test" and it spits out a p-value. It doesn't even waste time giving you the t-statistic; it just goes straight to p! Isn't it more likely that my personal skepticism makes it so that I'm stuck with no good options beyond taking the time to work things out, or else just shrugging and saying IDK about something I want to know the answer to? If I believed stuff people thought, well, I'd just believe them and that would be good enough.
>>nobody even agrees on how many continents there are, let alone, say, genders, because you can't test philosophical claims empirically
And that is why I constantly "discover" new and untested hypotheses: because I find shifting perspectives worthwhile. I think that since definitions are always imprecise, altering them a little can improve thinking. Apparently you disagree that much of my tinkering with concepts is useful, but basically that is what I do. When I for example say that "parent shaming" is the cause behind the fertility crisis, I haven't launched a testable hypothesis, because there is no unit for measuring shame and I can't easily invent one. I have just defined "culture" more precisely. The concept might be redefined several times before anyone finds anything testable.
>>what's the intellectual barrior to carrying out a simple t-test?
For me there's a physical barrier: I don't use computers for physiological reasons.
I think almost every post you write is proof that you handle psychological scientific studies with an ease that very few other people do. And you memorize studies a way that I can't.
Instead, I read old anthropology books more easily than most people and find more meaning in them than most people (you say I'm mostly wrong when I'm doing it, but whatever).
And Anders reads history books with a patience that few people possess and can thereby discover interesting patterns in history that the rest of us are unaware of.
My point is that if other people, myself included, read few scientific studies, it is not solely because we don't value them. It is because we don't have your talent for reading them, finding meaning in them and memorizing them.
having gone through the eating disorder thing with one of mine, have to say that they think they are being very rational in the depths of it as they fight the voices off, or fail.
And then there is the question of what they eat because, surprise, surprise, your brain is part of your metabolism and if metabolic health is declining, then brain health is declining too.
Well, the Flynn Effect does rather belie that interpretation. Admittedly I think the secular rise in IQ scores probably has more to do with schooling and test familiarity than nutrition, but nutrition is bound to be involved. Has there been a rise in mental disorders over time that could be explained by Palmer's model?
The things you write are not at all in line with my experiences. And I don't say this in the sense "you are probably wrong" but "my experiences are probably weird".
First I didn't recognize your description of children as half-crazy. My kids are not. The one of my kids who is crazy always seemed crazy. I hoped she wasn't crazy for real, but from the age of five or so she always seemed to be. The other kids seem equally un-crazy. I can't tell about the one-year-old, but I'm feeling convinced that the 3-year-old is sane. They are not always doing everything right and making the right priorities, but they often strike me as surprisingly sane (not only intelligent, but sensible).
And I didn't recognize myself as a teenager in your description of teenagers. I was mentally unhealthy as a teenager, but definitely not in that way. No magical thinking there - I did my best to be rational (with varying results). Your description told me with full force why I had such enormous problems to fit in with teenagers when I was a teenager myself. I yearned for nothing more than the company of other teenagers - but I just couldn't understand them. They seemed to think in strange patterns that I couldn't follow. Your text above gives me the idea that maybe my impression was right after all: people were actually as crazy as they seemed to be.
yes, and it may be more that children behave strangely but because 'they are young' we do not judge them as mad, certainly this happened with friends of mine. Their strangeness did not go away. Thus the appearance of madness in late teenagerdom, the prodromal contexts. (rational thinking is magical in its own way). Recently my early 20s daughter have noted how strange and dangerous teenagers seem, and they don't get them, and they were a box of chocolates at the time. Apple pie is writing a folk tail, but not for young, but for the oldies, (see also to read with tis in mind https://thyrathen.substack.com/p/the-story-of-trisevgeni-the-three? )
Actually I'm really, really hoping some teenagers read this and it helps to give them perspective. My elders were always telling me that I was "foolish" or "lacked experience" in what now looks like an attempt to browbeat or gaslight me into accepting their own screwed up views of reality. Old people are not smarter than young people, and they're often stuck with fossilized worldviews that make it difficult for them to pivot as reality changes, so they're not necessarily more right than teenagers about things.
But knowing that, OK, young people *are* prone to a certain amount of craziness, is pretty good if you're having trouble being young. I'd hope teens would find it reassuring to know that the light does get brighter as you keep walking forward.
that is the truth, but forever unjustified
I'm glad you found this interesting! I will say, though, that the things I've seen from you gave a consistent picture of you having *always* been on the eccentric side, developing an eating disorder in young adulthood and being admittedly apophenic in later life:
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/confessions-of-an-everyday-apopheniac
I remembering thinking "...What?" when you were excited about being an apopheniac, because apophenia is known to be a marker of, if not a root cause of mental illness:
Mladenović, A., Živojinović, F., Žagar, A., Stojiljković, A., & Jovanović, Đ. (2020). Disintegration and Apophenia. EMPIRICAL STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY, 29.
"Disintegration is the most robust personality correlate of apophenia, the tendency to see patterns in randomness. These results are consistent with the Disintegration model, postulating that the perceptual/cognitive tasks that capture both apophenia and disintegrative tendencies are rooted in a common neural mechanism predisposing individuals to illusory pattern perception, i.e., false positives."
This is what I was getting at when I said your ideas are often interesting. I agree that apophenia can be a useful source of ideas and inspiration; even though most people live at the boring, sane, "totally square" and "predictable" low-Disintegration end of the scale... https://thingstoread.substack.com/i/150237200/except-that-tove-says-being-crazy-isnt-all-bad ...you spend a lot of time at "getting interesting" and occasionally veer into "screw loose" in a way that supports a stream of popular blog posts.
Now obviously I don't *really* know. I've never seen you in real life, and it's easy to get a lopsided picture of someone from online interactions. Maybe you were an extremely level-headed teenager who just stood there blinking at the craziness around you. But the impression you give makes me think that, in your adolescence, you were probably crazy in a different way from others that couldn't see the humor, aesthetic value, or possibly even sexual and romantic aspects of the social world around you.
You are touching something that I find very interesting: That being (or at least feeling) very sane and being clearly insane seems to lie closely to each other. I interprete my apophenia as an important feature of my very robust sanity. I totally believe you when you say that for many people, apophenia is a sign of beginning madness. But I'm convinced that in my case, it is a sign of the opposite.
It it the same with my family. It contains an unusual percentage of that I believe are unusually crazy people and unusually uncrazy people. It seems to me that being an apopheniac equipped with self-distance makes a person unusually uncrazy, but being an apopheniac without self-distance makes a person crazy.
(When it comes to the eating disorder I blame environmental factors. I still lose much of my interest in food when I'm forced to eat alone for extended times. In a normal social environment I very much do not have an eating disorder.)
Edit: Even more than apophenia, I think it is an unusually high level of self-confidence that makes my family members either insane or unusually sane. Normal people believe what other people believe. Unusually self-confident people believe what they for some reason want to believe. Without self-distance that makes them insane. With self-distance that makes them independent thinkers.
Maybe! Ultimately this reads like most of the things you write, though, and who knows how accurate it is. Losing interest in food is at the very least unusual, and the idea that self-confidence makes some people very sane and other people very crazy is suspicious. It isn't that such things can't exist; there are quadratic effects around in psychology, but they're hard to detect even using moderate-sized samples in the hundreds, and I don't think you have samples like that. I think you're jumping to conclusions the way you usually do.
I work hard to check out the things I figure out. It isn't that there's absolutely no low-hanging fruit left, because there is, but it's almost all in realms that are very current, somewhat taboo, or uninteresting to most people. Since antiquity, people have been discovering a lot of things that turned out to be wrong; it's seductive to think we have some some insight about the world, but how do we know we're any different from all those other wrong people who went around being wrong about stuff?
The upshot is that when I have ideas, I turn them over and test them. Although this takes time and effort, I believe it's worth it to have something that's really likely to be true. Your more scattergun approach may have its place, but if it weren't for the way Substack consistently rewards you for putting your ideas out there as they come to you, I would seriously tell you to dial it back, lady!
On topic: Recently I have tried to find information on the content of delusions and hallucinations, since it seemed far from random. I would have preferred to read a book about it, but this article was all I found: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2167702620951553
It says that delusions are social to their nature. Or rather, anti-social. Normal people believe what other people believe. Delusional people uncritically believe what they believe themselves. I think that the most sane people are those who believe what they believe, but are self-critical.
And normal is not the same as mentally healthy. Most people would probably eat too much rather than too little when feeling lonely and miserable. But I think it is uncontroversial to say that the mentally healthy thing to do is to eat adequate amounts of what one believes is reasonably healthy food and to enjoy it. Which I do under normal circumstances, so I assume I'm mentally healthy on that point.
Substack rewards entertainment.
I think our differences mainly come down to our differing views of philosophy. You say that for any researcher, professional or amateur, there is little low-hanging fruit. I see surprising amounts of low-hanging fruit in various areas. And apparently, that is because while you largely accept the categories science is working with, I continuously challenge them.
For you, philosophy is something very powerful that can lead to new levels of enlightenment (I have to admit that I don't really understand it). For me, philosophy is the questioning and redefinitions of categories.
Also, I think the realm “uninteresting to most people” seems very big. People care about a few questions. Those questions become controversial and more people care about them because, obviously, those are the questions to care about. Outside of those hot topics there are tons of questions that people just don't get the idea to think about. Low-hanging fruit is all around.
I don't know to what degree you are aware of it, but you most definitely have a very unusual ability to handle data. Scott Alexander obviously has that ability too (I can't say which one of you is the very best but I could guess it is you). For you, checking your hypotheses must be a lot easier than it is for me to do the same thing. It is not that I can't read, but I don't swim in data with the same ease as you do.
That being said, I find it a bit problematic that I have put myself in a situation in which people expect me to say something interesting with a certain regularity. Sometimes (currently, for example), parts of me would prefer to shut up and read.
> I think our differences mainly come down to our differing views of philosophy. You say that for any researcher, professional or amateur, there is little low-hanging fruit. I see surprising amounts of low-hanging fruit in various areas. And apparently, that is because while you largely accept the categories science is working with, I continuously challenge them.
Ah... I don't really think this reflects what I think. It's probably easier just to say that I'm far more *skeptical* than you. That's a quick and clear way of expressing what seems to be a difference in the way we look at things.
My view on philosophy is not that there is low hanging fruit, but that philosophy so far has been a muddled waste of time; it's really more those areas I'd call scientific where there's still any low hanging fruit to bepicked. But even my view on science is that categories which separate disciplines are labels that don't necessarily mean anything real; I don't accept categories science is working with because the "categories" are really philosophical constructs. Maybe you mean something else when you talk about categories, but in general I would say any attempts at sorting things into types or kinds is a contentious philosophical enterprise; nobody even agrees on how many continents there are, let alone, say, genders, because you can't test philosophical claims empirically.
> I don't know to what degree you are aware of it, but you most definitely have a very unusual ability to handle data.
Well on the one hand it *is* true that smart people often underestimate how hard things can be for others, but Tove what's the intellectual barrior to carrying out a simple t-test? You don't even have to make the calculations by hand, you just arrange the data into two columns in Microsoft XL, type in "=t.test" and it spits out a p-value. It doesn't even waste time giving you the t-statistic; it just goes straight to p! Isn't it more likely that my personal skepticism makes it so that I'm stuck with no good options beyond taking the time to work things out, or else just shrugging and saying IDK about something I want to know the answer to? If I believed stuff people thought, well, I'd just believe them and that would be good enough.
>>nobody even agrees on how many continents there are, let alone, say, genders, because you can't test philosophical claims empirically
And that is why I constantly "discover" new and untested hypotheses: because I find shifting perspectives worthwhile. I think that since definitions are always imprecise, altering them a little can improve thinking. Apparently you disagree that much of my tinkering with concepts is useful, but basically that is what I do. When I for example say that "parent shaming" is the cause behind the fertility crisis, I haven't launched a testable hypothesis, because there is no unit for measuring shame and I can't easily invent one. I have just defined "culture" more precisely. The concept might be redefined several times before anyone finds anything testable.
>>what's the intellectual barrior to carrying out a simple t-test?
For me there's a physical barrier: I don't use computers for physiological reasons.
I think almost every post you write is proof that you handle psychological scientific studies with an ease that very few other people do. And you memorize studies a way that I can't.
Instead, I read old anthropology books more easily than most people and find more meaning in them than most people (you say I'm mostly wrong when I'm doing it, but whatever).
And Anders reads history books with a patience that few people possess and can thereby discover interesting patterns in history that the rest of us are unaware of.
My point is that if other people, myself included, read few scientific studies, it is not solely because we don't value them. It is because we don't have your talent for reading them, finding meaning in them and memorizing them.
having gone through the eating disorder thing with one of mine, have to say that they think they are being very rational in the depths of it as they fight the voices off, or fail.
Adolescence is like a box of chocolates.
Assorted crazy chocolates. And school is a way of keeping them sequestered in the box.
If demi-gods is how they see themselves, then dangerous but beautiful nymphs and satyrs is how everyone else sees them https://classicstutor.substack.com/p/grco-roman-mythical-beings?publication_id=2657949&post_id=154291492&isFreemail=true&r=p7471&triedRedirect=true
(demi-gods, often born of nymphs of course, began as stories of moral warnings against teenager delinquency and unplanned pregnancy)
And then there is the question of what they eat because, surprise, surprise, your brain is part of your metabolism and if metabolic health is declining, then brain health is declining too.
https://brainenergy.com/
Well, the Flynn Effect does rather belie that interpretation. Admittedly I think the secular rise in IQ scores probably has more to do with schooling and test familiarity than nutrition, but nutrition is bound to be involved. Has there been a rise in mental disorders over time that could be explained by Palmer's model?