Tag: mental-health

Caroline Furlong on Men Expressing Emotions

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized1 Comment

I came across this very interesting post by Caroline Furlong when I noticed that she had linked to my post Women Want Men To Show Emotion. I recommend reading her post in full, it’s very interesting:

Writerly Sound Bites, Number 18: A Look at the Male Psyche as Presented in Fiction

The one thing I would note about her description of how men deal with anger is that—for very understandable reasons, given that her primary focus is writing fiction—she is mostly describing how young men deal with anger. (Oversimplifying: finding a legitimate target for aggression like a punching bad or wood that needs to be chopped.)

Turning into an adult greatly amplifies the intensity of the feelings one experiences (this is one reason why it’s so hard to be a teenager) and young men aren’t used to this yet. Also, if they’ve been raised at all well they’ve been taught self control, but it’s still a relatively new skill. So finding a legitimate target for aggression serves a purpose they mostly don’t realize it does: physical exhaustion. When an angry man hits a legitimate target over and over until he’s exhausted, this doesn’t directly help him to process the emotions. What it does is physically exhaust him. This counteracts the physical arousal that comes with anger, giving him the ability to think clearly—at least until he recovers his energy. Which is why it’s so important for him to actually do some thinking once he’s tired. This is also why this is where you usually see the older man come talk to him and he’s somewhat receptive. Once he’s tired, he can think, and the older man gets him to do it. Then he leaves and gives the young man time to think about what was just said. But very frequently the scene ends with the young man, who is now somewhat physically recovered, hitting things again. That’s because the physical arousal that returns as his exhaustion dissipates is clouding his ability to think again.

As men get older and more experienced, the physical arousal diminishes slightly but more importantly it’s familiar. In the same way that older men tolerate pain better than younger men do because it doesn’t scare them, older men deal with anger better because it doesn’t distract them so much. This allows them to get to the part that actually helps with the feelings more directly: thinking about the problem. Thinking it through, thinking about whether it was perceived correctly, thinking about how to handle it, thinking about how to handle all of the possible outcomes, etc. This is what actually helps a man deal with the emotion of anger: understanding what caused it and how to deal with it; having a plan for dealing with it.

It is possible that there’s too much to think through for a short time, of course, in which case one needs to think about it in the back of one’s mind while doing other things. When this is the case, thinking about it in the foreground of one’s thoughts is helpful occasionally—almost to check in on one’s progress in figuring it out—but it’s unhelpful or even counter-productive most of the time. In these cases a man will need to distract himself, and will usually do so with some kind of problem solving. Preferably, by doing something useful, but things like video games can also work. The critical thing to understand about this is that it’s not the man refusing to deal with his problems. It is, in fact, the man dealing with this problems. It’s just him dealing with the problems slowly, because that’s the only way that will work. It’s a bit like sleeping on a big decision like buying a house or a car. It’s not that your internal monologue is all about the purchase, but you are none the less doing something useful; if no objections occur to you in that time period it is much more likely to be a good decision. In like manner, when there’s some really big problem making a man angry, shoving it to the back of his consciousness and focusing on other things helps his mind to sort it out. Sometimes what you need are to make connections to things you don’t remember, but over time will think of and then see the connection. But the critical thing to realize is that this is actually quite constructive. If you force to him only think in the foreground of his mind about the thing making him angry, he won’t be able to pull together the various threads of his knowledge and thoughts necessary to really understand his problem and formulate a plan to deal with it. And he will feel awful until he does that. This is why a man talking about his feelings is often not just unhelpful but outright counter-productive. It’s getting in the way of doing the thing that will make him feel better, and emphasizing all of the stuff that makes him feel bad.

Anyway, that’s just an addendum to what Ms. Furlong said. Go read the post, it’s very much worth the time.

Women Want Men To Show Emotion

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized3 Comments

A few days ago a tweet went viral about men showing emotion:

wish men understood how attractive it is when they can feel & openly show their emotions instead of acting like a sociopathic brick wall

A great many people objected to this because, if a man follows this simply as described, the results are pretty much always a disaster. That’s because there’s a communication gap going on. What she wants is not, in fact, men “openly showing their emotions.” Men have very big emotions and many of them women would find terrifying if exposed to the full force of them. Also, if you’re speaking in the context of people who are merely dating, a man blubbering, out of control, will probably kill any attraction that the woman felt to him.

What she’s actually talking about but not saying clearly is that she wants communication. There’s an old saying in writing fiction that when people give feedback about your story, they’re usually right in what the problem is and wrong about what the solution is. This is a good example of that. If you ignore the suggested solution and focus on the problem, you can see that it’s a real problem.

instead of acting like a sociopathic brick wall

If you focus on this part, you can see that this is a legitimate problem. If a man does not communicate anything about his emotional state, at any time, to any degree, his wife will have no idea what’s going on, where he stands, where they stand, whether she can support him, whether it’s a good time to ask for things that eventually need to be done, etc. etc. etc.

And bear in mind that when I talk about her supporting him, I’m not primarily talking about giving him a shoulder to cry on so he can “get it out.” Men mostly don’t work that way. We don’t “get it out.” Talking about feelings does not exhaust them, or reduce them, or put them in perspective. If anything, it amplifies them and makes them harder to deal with. But within a marriage, there are many things each spouse does to support the other. This can range from things like getting the other one a food they particularly like to spending time with them in a way that’s relaxing or fun to letting them know that you’re fine with any outcome. (“Even if it doesn’t work out, we’ll be fine” can take a lot of stress out of many situations.)

For this and other reasons, reliable communication about how the man is doing, emotionally, is extremely helpful to his wife. (I’m talking about wives; all of this is merely prospective when it’s about a girlfriend because she is subconsciously evaluating what life will be like as a wife.) But the key things about this communication is that it is reliable and intelligible. None of this requires it to be performative. You do not need to cry to tell a woman that you’re feeling sad. You do not need to shout to tell her that you’re angry or laugh giddily to tell her that you’re happy. There is substantial individual variation, of course, but it is, in general, quite sufficient to simply describe your feelings in kind and magnitude. Things such as, “I’m not looking forward to work today. Nothing’s wrong, I’m just tired and I haven’t had a break in a while,” and “This problem at work is really stressing me. We’re going to be fine, but the customer is losing $1000 a day and calls us like every hour to see how it’s going” are usually quite sufficient, so long as they’re said with an intonation consonant with the meaning. (All bets are off if you sound like an android when you speak.)

This communicates what she needs to know in order to be a loving wife who works with you to try to make a happy household in which you are raising happy children. However much you deal with your own problems, doing so will inevitably use some of the resources you have for dealing with other problems such as family members making mistakes and being annoying or hurtful or whatever; when they know that you’re dealing with something big they can take extra trouble to not bother you and be extra tolerant if you snap. This is exactly the same as how you treat a person who has a headache or a cold with extra care and are more tolerant—which is why it’s important to tell people when you have a headache or a cold.

But that’s the thing—you want to tell them. The goal is not to simply give up all control and show people exactly how you’re feeling. You want to communicate like a rational human being who trusts the people to whom he is communicating.

And, indeed, this is attractive to women. If you communicate in a controlled way, she will feel that she is able to actually bond with you and form a relationship with you but will not feel that you are weak. Indeed; by letting her know how you feel, she is better able to gauge your strength. Weak people need to conceal their weakness for fear that it will be exploited, just as injured animals like to curl up in a place where no one can get at them and snarl viciously at anything that comes near so it doesn’t get closer. If you do not communicate at all, that can come across as being afraid of her getting close to you, which is weakness. Which is fair, because it often is. It is only strong people who are willing to be vulnerable. The key to the whole thing is: vulnerable in a rational, self-controlled way. What women want is communication, not emotional incontinence.

Online Acrimony

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

It is much commented on that there is far more anger, acrimony, and ascerbic speech online than in real life. There is, of course, more than one reason for this. Anonymity reducing people’s normal inhibitions is a commonly cited one, and there is, no doubt, some truth to it. Sometimes a lot of truth. But I think that an often under-appreciated aspect to this is the non-interactive nature of online interaction. The people we interact with online don’t react like we’re build to expect them to, and that screws with our social instincts.

In normal human interaction, that is, interactions that take place face-to-face with people in the same place, the person listening reacts to what the other person is saying through body language. But they don’t wait to react; they react while the other person is speaking. And we look for this while we’re speaking. In the normal course of events, the other person’s reactions as we’re talking may well change how we finish our sentences, to say nothing of what the next sentences are. If we are saying something important to us, we look to see that the other person is giving us their full attention—a sign that they understand the importance of what we’re saying. And here’s the crucial part: if we don’t see that they get how important this is, we amplify our intensity.

That might mean using greater volume, or it might mean using intensifiers like “dirty words”, or it might mean intensifying the thing being said. A person might go from “there’s a problem” to “There’s a !@#$ problem” or they might go to “This is a catastrophe.”

If that doesn’t work, the next intensifier available is to indicate that the relationship between the speaker and the person listening is threatened. This will tend to take the form of insults, because a person is only willing to insult someone that they are willing to do without. This is true in theory much more than in practice, of course; a great deal of insulting is really an attempt to signal where things are headed rather than to indicate where they currently are.

If we consider the nature of online interactions, it should immediately jump out that they all lack real-time feedback. But unlike previous technologically-intermediated means of communication, such as books and letters, the online ones feel far more immediate. When you write a book or a letter, you know that, if you get a response, it will be days or weeks in the future. Online, you might receive a reply in the time it takes someone to type a sentence. This can kick our processing of what they say into real-time processing, as we prepare to immediately respond to them. But our real-time processing relies very heavily on the many aspects of communication apart from the words being spoken and it’s easy to forget how much of the person’s response we actually lack.

We lack it first because most of the time we’re using text so there is neither tone nor cadence nor facial expression nor volume conveyed, all of which are very important to understanding how to interpret the words. The other problem is that the space limitations of text mean that we have to pick and choose what we respond to in what the other person said. But this act of picking and choosing, coupled with the lack of facial expressions/body language as they were speaking, means that they got precisely zero feedback on everything else they said.

It is extremely easy, under these circumstances, for people who have shifted into real-time processing to take this as complete indifference to their attempts to communicate the importance of what they were saying. When this happens, their instinct is to do what they would do in person—amplify and exaggerate.

The instinct to exaggerate, here, is really about accuracy within a context. If a person who is hard of hearing doesn’t hear you, the polite thing to do is to repeat yourself. If you’ve ever had a loved one who suffered from hearing loss in the age before ubiquitous hearing aids, this might get to the point of almost shouting into the person’s ear so they can hear you. In like manner, if you say that a problem is a problem and the other person pays no attention, and you say it’s a catastrophe and they pay no attention, and finally you say that the world is about to end and they finally rouse themselves to listen to you, the intention is to clearly communicate that there is a problem, not to stimulate them into a panicked rush. (This is distinct from people who use exaggeration in order to achieve disproportionate effects, but these people usually start off exaggerating, they don’t start off reasonable. And even the approach meant to accurately calibrate to the insensitivity of the other is fraught with problems, and I’m only trying to describe it, not defend it.)

The other thing that people may do when they perceive that the importance of what they’re saying isn’t being appreciated, you will recall, is to start indicating that the relationship is in danger of being breached. That is, they may start insulting the other person to get their attention.

I suspect that this explains more than a little bit of the acrimony that we see online.

Clearing Plates at Family Gatherings

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized2 Comments

In America, Thanksgiving and Christmas tend to be occasions for family gatherings with a large meal. People often talk while they eat, and when people are done eating and only talking, it is extremely common to see the women of the family get up and start clearing the plates away while the males continue to talk. Around this time, a few unpleasant women who don’t understand human beings very well will write articles complaining about this. So for the sake of young people who might be taken in by one of those articles, I will explain what’s going on.

Unless you’re really into cooking, making thanksgiving dinner isn’t actually a lot of work. It takes perhaps fifteen minutes to put the turkey on a tray, season the skin, and put it in the oven at 325F for 3-5 hours (depending on size). Mashed potatoes or if you have better taste mashed sweet potatoes are another fifteen minutes of work. Bread, you can easily just buy at the store. If you’re not making it from scratch, add another fifteen minutes for the stuffing. Putting that all together, it’s an hour of work for a single person. That’s not trivial, but it’s not that much work. I’ve done significantly more work than that for minor dinner parties, and it’s not more work than one might do barbecuing food at a cookout. Cleaning up a dozen plates from a table is, if you’re doing it yourself, perhaps five minutes. If you have a dishwasher (as everyone who writes articles complaining that men talk instead of helping does), add another five minutes for scraping food off of plates and loading them into the dishwasher. If this is a major amount of work for you which might break you unless you get help, as the kids would say, you’re NGMI (not gonna make it).

Of course, that’s not what’s going on. Except for the occasional host with significant health problems—and the family member with significant health problems almost never hosts family gatherings—the host of family gatherings is not overwhelmed by the work involved and doesn’t need help. The reason why all the women help is because this is an expression of female social bonding. Identifying ways to help each other and helping unasked is a way that women reinforce their social bonds. When there’s nothing to do, asking, “what can I do to help” is a next best thing, which is why you will see it asked even when there’s obviously nothing to do to help. The point isn’t the actual work, but the affirmation of the social bond in the offer. This is also why the typical response is, “there’s nothing right now,” followed by a list of what’s going on. The point of this is not the actual inventory, but the affirmation of the bond by sharing concerns and implicitly inviting the other woman to help monitor them. (There’s actually a bit of an art to this because a woman can give offense by usurping some decision-making in her effort to help; young women generally watch their elders navigate this and learn the art by the time they’re old enough to take part as adults.) This is why when one woman gets up and starts to collect plates, the rest of the women jump up and start collecting plates too—they are affirming their social bonds by all working together.

This type of social bonding is markedly different from male social bonding, which can be readily observed at a cookout, where it’s traditionally the males who do most of the work. Males can, without giving offense, make a perfunctory offer of assistance to the male host, but mostly they don’t because assuming that another man can handle everything is a sign of respect. Further letting the male host do whatever grilling and other work is involved in hosting without interference is also an implicit sign of respect. Males will, however, make a point of hanging out with and talking to the host, because conversation about interesting subjects is a primary way adult males affirm social bonds.

So at the big family meal, when the women clean the plates together and the males keep talking, both are engaging in their sex’s typical form of social bonding. The two groups bond with each other by the men showing appreciation for the (in truth, quite small) labor of the women, and the women bond with the males by enabling the conversation which is maintained. The males can be rude by taking the generosity of the women for granted, the women can be rude by interrupting the conversation with work that can easily be left for after people are done talking.

The unpleasant women who write articles complaining about this dynamic at social gatherings are people with poorly developed social skills that don’t know how male social dynamics work and who assume that female social dynamics are the only social dynamics and so regard males as dysfunctional women. So they’re trying to guilt them into being functional women. (They’re also trying to parasocially bond with other women with poor social skills who don’t understand the full range of social dynamics by communal complaining.)

What Makes an Expert

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized1 Comment

I was recently re-watching the 2009 documentary Fat Head, mostly for nostalgia because I enjoyed it and it did me a lot of good back when I watched it circa 2010.

If you haven’t seen it and are curious, it’s available (officially, from its distributor) on YouTube. (Weirdly, it’s age-restricted so I can’t embed it.)

This was back when the documentary Super Size Me blaming McDonalds for people being fat was only five years old and people still remembered it. Fat Head was a response-documentary criticizing Super Size Me, but it actually spent more of its time discussing the lipid hypothesis (the idea that fat and especially saturated fat causes heart disease) and the problems with it. Throughout the documentary, Tom Naughton (the filmmaker and narrator) continually refers to “the experts,” by which he mostly means the people who give official advice, such as the USDA giving food recommendations or various medical organizations telling everyone to reduce their saturated fat intake as much as possible.

“Expert,” of course, ordinarily means a person who is extremely knowledgeable in a subject or very good at it. But “expert” is also a social designation for special people to whom ordinary people are supposed to defer, generally with the assumption that they are expert in the first sense. But this introduces a problem: how do you know that someone is an expert in the first sense?

The easy way to do this is to be an expert yourself. Expertise will generally be good at recognizing expertise, as well as recognizing what is not expertise. That’s great, but if you’re an expert yourself you don’t need to know who else is an expert so you can defer to them.

So what if you’re not an expert?

Well, it gets a lot harder.

You can, of course, punt the problem to someone that you trust, but that is a general solution: it works for literally every question. How do you calculate the circumference of a circle given its diameter? Ask someone you trust.

But let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that you want to find an expert and aren’t going to just have someone else do the work. How can you do this—again, assuming that you, yourself, are not an expert?

It certainly cannot be in the same way that an expert would, that is, by evaluating how the person does what they do. There is something left, though it’s not nearly so efficient: you can see whether the person can achieve what only an expert could achieve.

In most of the places where this is possible, it’s fairly obvious. If you want to know if a man is an expert archer, you ask him to shoot at a few things which are very difficult to hit. If you want to know if a man is an expert lock pick, you ask him to pick a difficult lock.

There are some intermediate situations, which do not admit of demonstrations which only take a moment. If you want to know if a man is an expert painter, it is not practical to ask him to go to all of the trouble of painting a painting in your sight. But you can ask him to show you paintings which he has painted, and then after he shows you some impressive paintings you have only the ordinary problem of finding out whether he’s an honest man and really is the one who painted them.

But then we come to problems which are far more difficult. How can you tell if a man is an expert teacher? The only practical effect of a good teacher is a learned student. If you have access to the students to test them, you mostly can only tell in the negative—a student who obviously knows nothing—since the whole reason to seek out a teacher is to be taught. (There are exceptions for things such as being an expert in Greek but not in teaching Greek, and you want to find an excellent teacher for your child. Let us set that aside as a special case which is easier than the one we’re trying to deal with.) However, even in the best case this is not a pure evaluation of the teacher because the end results also depends upon the quality of the student. This is clear in the case of athletics. Some people have bodies which are proportioned exceedingly well for the sport and when this is married to a disposition which finds physical activities intuitive, they would come to be very good in their sport regardless of who their teacher is; an excellent teacher will make them better but a bad teacher will still make them good (unless he gets them injured).

Medicine is an interesting hybrid of this. It is possible to evaluate a trauma surgeon mostly based on results because how well one patches up a man after a knife would or a gun shot or a bear mauling does not depend very much on the constitution of the victim. It does depend on the wound, of course, but it’s not that hard to evaluate wounds based on criteria such as their rate of blood flow or the amount of the victim which is missing.

It is nowhere near as possible to evaluate an internal medicine doctor’s treatment of chronic conditions. The human body is an unbelievably complex thing—I mean that literally; most people can’t believe the complexity involved. Biology keeps on making new discoveries that things are more complex than previous believed. All of this complexity can go wrong, and there are far fewer kinds of symptoms. In short, we have no way of evaluating what is actually wrong with a patient or how bad it actually is. Not everything is fixable; how much that doesn’t get better is the fault of the doctor and how much is the fault of the disease? We have no way of knowing, certainly not for the purpose of evaluating the doctor.

So what about the kinds of experts who give health and nutrition advice?

The first thing to notice is that the time scales are not favorable. Being healthy over decades is a thing that takes decades, and that’s a really long time over which to evaluate someone’s advice in order to determine whether their advice is worth following. And we’ve also got a problem much like in evaluating internal medicine doctors: we’re talking about how to optimize an unbelievably complex system (the human body). Worse, though, is that this kind of advice is general, and the population itself varies. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that the same dietary advice is equally good advice for all members of the population. For all we know, Frenchmen do better eating baguettes than Germans do and Germans are healthier eating sausages than Frenchmen are. For all we know, there might be two brothers and one does well on pasta while the other will get fat and sick on it. At least internal medicine doctors treat individual patients; experts who give general advice on health and nutrition give the same advice to everyone. That might be fine—no one should eat uranium, for example—but it’s not obviously fine. For all we know (without be experts ourselves) universal dietary guidelines are intrinsically a bad idea that no true expert would do, just as no true fencing expert fences with reverse grip or by holding the tip and trying to thrust the hilt into his opponent.

But even if we grant the idea, for some reason, that a true expert would give general dietary advice, how do we evaluate the expertise of a particular expert giving it? The effect that we could measure would be the superior health and fitness of the people who follow this advice to what they would have had if they didn’t follow this advice.

OK, but how on earth do you measure that? How do you identify the people who follow the advice. How do you figure out how healthy they would have been had they not followed the advice?

That last part is important because it’s extremely easy for advice which does nothing to select for people who are generally superior. To give a silly but clear example: if you give advice on how to grow taller and it’s to dunk a basketball ten times a day, every day, and then measure the average height of the adherents and the average height of the non-adherents, you’ll find that the adherents are, in fact, taller. No taller than they would have been otherwise, but certainly taller than the non-adherents. Or if your advice for strength is to pick up a three hundred pound rock and carry it five hundred feet each day, you’ll certainly find that the adherents are stronger than the non-adherents, since only very strong people will even try to follow this advice. In like manner, if you recommend that people eat a pound of arugula a day, it’s quite possible that only people who are very healthy would even consider putting the stuff in their mouth given how much (if you don’t disguise its flavor with oil or sugar) it tastes like poison. (Because it is; the bitter taste of many plants come from natural pesticides they make in order to dissuade bugs from eating them. These are just poisons that have little to no effect on us since we’re mammals and not insects.)

The basic answer is that you can’t. Not to any important degree.

There’s a related issue to the question of “how can you tell if someone is an expert?” and that’s “how does someone become an expert?” It’s related because, oversimplifying, the way you become an expert is to evaluate whether you can do what an expert can do and then change what you’re doing until you can do those things. If there’s no way to evaluate whether you’re getting better at the things an expert could do, there’s no way to tell whether the things that you’re doing are making you any better, which means that there’s no way to actually become an expert. (I’ve oversimplified quite a bit; this really deserves its own blog post.)

So what does that mean for fields where it’s not possible to tell who’s an expert?

Effectively, it means that there are no experts in that field.

The Problem With Stopping Bullying

On By Christopher LansdownIn Bullying, Uncategorized2 Comments

A little while ago, I was watching a Chris Williamson podcast with a guest who studies bullying. One interesting thing about it was the finding that bullying is primarily among popular people. Which makes sense, if you think about it, because they are actually a threat to the status of others and so putting them down can actually accomplish something. But the thing I found really curious was the discussion of how to get people to stop bullying, because both of them didn’t seem to notice that within a secular framework, this is basically impossible.

It’s impossible for the simple reason that bullying works. When you are vying for social status with other people, bullying can discourage them and get them to stop trying to be popular too, paving the way for you to be popular. This isn’t the thing one typically sees in movies where a big guy picks on some small kid. It’s not that that never happens, but it doesn’t usually happen like in the movies. That kind of thing really is just simple theft—you don’t threaten to beat a kid up for his lunch money because it brings you a warm glow of satisfaction or makes you popular with others, you do it because you want more money and don’t want to put in the effort to get it honestly. In movies, mostly the bullies are just externalized versions of a person’s own conscience, and pick on him for his vices or at least the things he doesn’t like about himself because Hollywood writers are bad people and their consciences frequently bother them so they want to externalize their conscience so that they can eventually beat it up to the cheers of onlookers.

In real life, bullying is primarily done among popular kids because they have something of value—social status. Bullying them makes them feel bad and retreat from the things that make them popular. This kind of bullying is covert—in real life you don’t get crowds cheering for you when you bully someone, so you have to do your best to keep anyone from knowing what you’re doing. (Or else tell them stories which justify what you’re doing as protecting yourself or, at the worst, justice for what was done to you.)

In this context, bullying works. You can, through bullying people, make them feel bad. People who feel bad are not as charismatic. They don’t always show up to parties. People stop liking them as much. When you’re around and as charismatic as ever, your popularity goes up.

Worse for the people who want to stop bullying, bullying is one of the more subtle activities human beings engage in. If you try to have any kind of official anti-bullying campaign, some of the first people to use it will be the bullies. They will accuse their victims of bullying them, or the more sophisticated ones will provoke their victims into some kind of retaliation then bring that retaliation to the anti-bullying authority to get the victim punished.

All of this is especially true of female bullies, since females tend to take advantage of other females’ extreme sensitivity to rejection by females. Skilled girls and women can be artists with this kind of subtle signaling which is virtually undetectable to anyone else.

For these and other reasons, bullying is something that authorities (for the most part) can’t directly stop. But what you can’t directly stop you may be able to indirectly stop—you can try to persuade people to not bully others. The problem with this is that bullying works. Asking people to not bully others amounts to asking them to forgo a benefit. Why should they do this?

Within a secular context, now that quasi-religious feelings for nations have been discredited and no one cares, the only viable way of getting people to change their behavior is to show them why it’s to their own benefit to do or not do whatever it is you want them to do or not do. Hence, with drugs, you clearly communicate all of the many side-effects of drug abuse. To try to stop kids from having children out of wedlock, you try to persuade them that having children will suck and tell them in detail about every STD you can think of.

But bullying works and, if the bully isn’t caught, it has no immediate side-effects for the bully. All you can do is to ask them to forgo a benefit to themselves for the sake of another. But the idea that you should love people who can’t give you anything is a religious proposition; it stands or falls on the truth of metaphysical propositions such as God loving us and creating us to love each other (where love is defined as willing the good of the other for his sake). That’s not exclusively a Christian idea, but it is very far from a universal idea.

Feelings and Facts Can Be the Same Conversation

On By Christopher LansdownIn Life Skills, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Conversations about feelings have something of a low reputation and not entirely undeservedly. People who are bad at emotional regulation will talk about little else besides feelings and generally in a very unproductive way. Further, self-control is an important skill which has been rightly lauded by religions and philosophical systems alike. If you want to do something which takes precision, such as building a bridge or disinfecting surgical equipment, “facts not feels” will lead to more success.

All of this is true, and I very much prefer conversations about facts, even if personal facts, to conversations about feelings. But all this misses something.

Conversations about facts and conversations about feelings can be the same conversation in different languages.

The reason for this is that emotions are, in their essence, a kind of sense perception. They’re not a bodily sense perception like sight, smell, etc. but they are a kind of sense perception. Fear is the perception of danger. Anger is the perception of injustice. Gratitude is the perception of received benefit. And so on.

Feelings can be mistaken, of course, but so can bodily senses. We can think we felt something small touch us but when we look there’s nothing there. We can think we heard somebody say something but when we ask them what it was they said that they didn’t make a sound. There’s an entire field of making things that we see incorrectly called “optical illusions.” Our emotions are not infallible, but neither are any of our other senses. All of life requires the humility to acknowledge our fallibility.

When you consider a discussion of feelings in this light, as long as the discussion is between two people with enough humility to admit they could be mistaken, a discussion of feelings is really a discussion of the things that the feelings are perceptions of. If an object caused high amplitude sound waves in the air, among non-narcissists, “a high-energy sound was just produced” and “I heard a loud noise” is saying essentially the same thing. It is true that the latter involves the first person singular pronoun, but that’s merely giving you the added information of what instrument registered the high-energy sound. This can actually be quite useful because every instrument has its strengths and weaknesses and knowing which instrument produced the measurement described allows the other person to calibrate accordingly.

This is true of feelings, too. “In the last month, you washed the dishes three quarters of one time and swept the floors one quarter of one time” and “I’m feeling alone with the housework” differ somewhat in their precision, but they are describing the same thing. (And before you get any ideas, I do most of the housework in my house.)

It is possible, then, when someone initiates a conversation about feelings, to have an actual conversation with them. That won’t work if they have no humility, but no conversations really work with the proud, since pride tends towards solipsism and conversation requires acknowledging the existence of the other person. But most people have at least some humility, and it just takes practice to recognize it in people who are talking about their feelings. In some cases people will even talk about their feelings in order to present their observations more gently; to continue with the above example, they would consider the recitation of facts about the frequency of housework to be likely to come across like a personal attack, whereas if they instead focus the conversation on their feelings they expect it to come across like less of a personal attack. This can work very badly when done with someone else whose conversational style takes facts as non-aggressive and discussions of feelings as nebulous and dire. (This kind of mismatch can happen between anyone, though it is most stereotypically between two people where one has a higher-than-average number of X chromosomes and the other a higher-than-average number of Y chromosomes. (Bear in mind that, across the entire population, the average number of X chromosomes is, roughly, 1.5 and the average number of Y chromosomes is, roughly, 0.5))

The good news is that, like all differences in language, it is possible to become “bi-lingual.” It takes practice and discipline, not to mention humility, but a person who tends to either communication style can learn to understand the other one, and even learn to communicate in that style. It’s ideal if both people learn it, of course, but if one isn’t strong enough to do it it will still work pretty well if the stronger one learns how to do it and condescends to the weaker one. (I mean condescend in the etymological sense, “to come down to be with”.)

Psycho-Analysis Began in Hypnosis

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

In my (low-key) quest to understand how on earth Freud’s theories were ever respected, I’ve recently read Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. It’s definitely been interesting. (If you don’t know, this is the transcript of five lectures he gave on five consecutive days at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1909 which were meant to give a concise summary of Psycho-Analysis.)

Something I did not realize, but which makes perfect sense in retrospect, is that Psycho-Analysis began in hypnosis. A tiny bit of background is necessary, here: In the 1800s and early 1900s, the term “hysteria” seems to refer to any idiopathic problem in women with severe physical symptoms. Basically, when a woman developed bad symptoms and called in a doctor and he could find no physical cause, the diagnosis was “hysteria,” which basically meant “I don’t know, in a woman.” At this point, since the symptoms don’t have physical causes it is assumed that they must have mental causes and so doctors of the mind would step in to try to help, supposing, of course, that the patient or her family could afford it.

Freud begins with an interesting story about a patient that a colleague of his, Dr. Breuer, was treating. It was a young woman under great stress (nursing her dying father) who started developing a bunch of really bad symptoms that sound, to my ear, like a series of small strokes. She couldn’t use her right arm or leg for a while, sometimes she couldn’t use her left side, she forgot her native language (German) and could only speak English, etc. She also developed a severe inability to drink water and survived fro several weeks on melons and other high-water foods. And here’s where it gets interesting. Dr. Breuer hypnotized her and in a hypnotic state she related the story of having gone into a companion’s room and seen the woman’s dog drinking from a glass. This disgusted her terribly but she gave no indication of it because she didn’t want to offend the woman. He then gave the young woman a glass of water, brought her out of hypnosis, and she was able to drink normally from then on.

Freud moved away from hypnosis for several reasons, but the big one seems to be that most people can’t be hypnotized, which makes it a therapeutic tool of dubious value. The particulars of how he moved away is interesting, but I’ll get to that in a little bit. Before that, I want to focus on the hypnosis.

The history of hypnosis is interesting in itself, but a bit complex, and the relevant part is really how it was more popularly perceived than by what it was intended as. In its early stages, hypnosis was seem as something very different from normal waking life and, as a result, excited an enormous amount of interest from people who desired secret knowledge of the universe’s inner secrets. There were plenty of people who wanted to believe in a hidden world that they could access if only they had the key (spurred on, I suspect, by the many discoveries of the microscope in the late 1600s and the continued discoveries as a result of better and better microscopes). Hypnotism, where a man’s mind seemed to alter to a completely different state, and in particular where it could receive commands that it would obey without remembering in a subsequent waking state, was perfect for just such a belief. Here there seemed to be another behind, behind the mind we observe, which seemed to govern the observable mind’s operation. This is the sort of stuff out of which real power is based—if you can control the real source of the mind, you can control the mind!

This context really makes Pysho-Analysis’s model of the compartmentalized mind and further its insistence on the power of the sub-conscious mind make sense.

As I said, Freud abandoned hypnotism, and the means by which he did it really should have been a tip-off to his whole theory being wrong. What led him to discard hypnotism were some experiments he became aware of in which a person who could not remember what he did under hypnosis could be induced, without any further hypnosis, to remember. Freud only took this instrumentally rather than considering that it undermined the whole idea of the powerful subconscious and went about bringing up the “repressed” memories which were (putatively) causing physical symptoms by talking with the patient without hypnotism. I suppose that the idea of this secret knowledge was too attractive to give up.

How to Balance Gratitude With Ambition

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I was watching a Chris Williamson Q&A video recently and a question he was asked was how to balance gratitude with ambition (or aspiration for improvement, if you dislike the term ambition). The exact phrasing of the question was:

How do I manage the dichotomy between being grateful for how far I’ve come and wanting to become more? The dichotomy between working for my future and being present in the moment.

There are several answer to this, and the thing is, they’re all primarily religious. It’s actually kind of interesting how often hard-won, top-level secular wisdom is beginning religious education. The Jewish sabbath is exactly this. God created the heavens and the earth in six days, and on the seventh day God rested, so human beings will work for six days and rest on the seventh. (Bear in mind that rest implies contemplation, not merely sleeping.) There you go, there’s your management of the dichotomy between working and gratitude. (The Christian moving of the day of rest to Sunday is an interesting and rich topic, but all of that rich symbolism doesn’t materially affect the current subject.) To put this in secular terms, a regular 6-to-1 balance of time dedicated to work with time dedicated to contemplation will keep your balance. If you keep it regular (that is, according to a rule), it will ensure that the effects of contemplation do not wear off. And guess what: you need to impose rules on yourself to make yourself do it because human beings don’t perfectly auto-regulate. (Just don’t make the rules so rigid you can’t live; the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.)

Another answer, here, is to keep God always in mind. This will make you strive to be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect and also make you grateful for all that He’s already given you.

Here’s where Jordan Peterson’s language of “God is the highest good” falls a bit short, since keeping the highest good in mind will stimulate ambition, but it doesn’t tend nearly so much to gratitude. For gratitude you need to keep in mind the nothingness from which you came and which you could, apart from the positive action of The Good, become again. This requires a leap of faith that the world is not evil, though. If you can do this, you’re not going to be secular for long, and the whole exercise of trying to put this into secular language will be unnecessary. If you can’t take this leap of faith that the world exists because of good, then you’ll never actually be grateful anyway. People try to use “grateful” as an intransitive verb, but it’s not. It’s a transitive verb. You don’t have to conceive of God as a person to be grateful to Him, though it helps. But if the world is just a cruel joke with no punchline which no one told, gratitude is nonsensical. But here’s the thing: if you aren’t sure whether life is a cruel joke with no punchline that no one has told, that is equally paralyzing.

To see why, consider this thought experiment: you receive a text message from a friend which says something complementary about you, but there are enough odd word choices that you think it might just be his phone unlocked in his pocket interacting with auto-correct. Try to feel grateful for this message which you think might be a real compliment and might just be random noise that accidentally looks like a message. You will find that you can’t do it.

Nevertheless, it can still be interesting to say what is true, even if it will do no one any good: the way you keep perspective is by comparing, not to one thing, but to two things. If you want to keep perspective on your achievements, you must compare them both to the fullness of what you can achieve as well as to the nothing which is the least you could have achieved. Comparing to only one will not give you a proper perspective, because neither, on its own, is the full picture. Only by looking at the full picture will you have a correct perspective on where your achievements are within it. This is as true of metaphorical photographs as it is of literal photographs.