I was recently asked to write a critique of atheism, so here it is. This post applies to atheism in the Anglophone world. I don't think I have enough understanding of global atheism to say anything meaningful about it.
There are two major problems with atheism in the English-speaking world that I can see - the first is that it is a club run for and by middle-class white people, mostly men, who are wedded to a very trivial view of scientific reductionism and the second is that there isn't much of a difference in attitude and action between atheists and religious people.
That atheism is a club for middle class white boys is almost transparently obvious. Almost all the big shot atheist writers - Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens - are well-to-do white men. When I was in Miami, almost all of the people who belonged to the atheist group I briefly attended were white men - and that's really saying something in Miami - and I saw a grand total of zero non-white people in the seven events I attended in Freethought Dayton. In Freethought Dayton, seven of the eight board members were white men with one white woman. It is my understanding this is pretty generally true.
And why not! All the "serious" atheist thinkers from Diderot forward are well-to-do white men! It is a culture that was created and has been fostered by the most privileged sector of humans that has ever existed! While there are other brands of atheism - Marx springs to mind - it is the atheism of white prestige and privilege that is the foundation of modern atheism, I think.
They don't generally think this. They give lip service to various liberal platitudes, but they are about as serious as the dudes who wrote The Bell Curve. They are almost entirely wedded to a culture of material acquisition that is shocking in its breadth - but that's the well-to-do white person thing, right? It's no different than any other group of rich white people from college frats to the World Bank, regardless of religious affiliation.
They also have a kind of profound love of scientific reductionism that rationalizes everything they say and do. So, in Freethought Dayton, when they were initially writing their statement about inclusion, it was littered with phrases like, "Scientific research shows that racism isn't real" and "Current scientific understanding about gender issues . . ." I'm pretty sure that kind of language would have made it into the final draft if I hadn't said that I would be against racism even if a bunch of scientists were for it, and ditto discrimination on gender issues. I also pointed out that scientific racism is totally a thing.
The last meeting I was at in a Freethought Dayton group, likewise, included a long and grueling conversation where people were really digging into me saying "science says this" and "science says that", which seems to me to ignore two of the things about "science" - first is that science does not often speak with one voice. So what a quantum physicist says about gravity is currently totally different than what an astrophysicist says about gravity. And what an environmentalist says about the world has little to do with anything either of those other dudes say. Science is a rambling, often chaotic enterprise and while there is sometimes a unified theory within a field to guide it, often there is not, and there is little to no unification of theories between fields. No one can really speak for "science" and the field is so vast that I would seriously question anyone's qualifications for doing so. Yet it is my experience that atheists are very quick to say what "science" says.
Second in this regard is that science speaks about matters of science alone. Science tells us very little about ethics or beauty, though both are very important to us. Many very important fields - government and law, for example - are not scientific. Attempts to jam these fields into scientific reasoning exhibits a faith in science I find frankly religious in dimensions. It is just as bizarre, to me, as when Bible-believing Christians say that the answers to all questions are found in a book compiled 1600 years ago. I think that science is a highly productive epistemology, but it doesn't even try to answer all questions and to believe it does is where the religious canard that "science is like religion" becomes true.
(As I have said elsewhere, science isn't much like religion, but I'm not talking about science, here, but the crazy way many atheists believe in science.)
The second big problem with religion is that the attitudes and believes of atheists aren't different than religious people of their race and class, really. There is this atheist saw: the difference between an atheist and a Christian is that the atheist believes in one fewer god than the Christian. Yes. Exactly. It isn't much of a difference at all!
So the behavior of atheists is almost identical to that of rich white men. Part of this - and you see it all the time with assholes like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris - is that they feel very free to attack in grotesque terms the same people that Christians in their society attack in the same ways.
So Richard Dawkins is this sexist pig. Sam Harris can go on a TV show and say, seriously, that Muslims are extra special kinds of murderers and liberals need to really crack down on them. This gets reflected on down, so at Freethought Dayton they were equally comfortable saying grotesque, racist crap about Muslims - they only study technology to murder Americans, they stopped thinking after 1500, stuff like that. And going hand-in-hand with the first point, the only thing that mattered was their developments in science and technology. I can find this kind of talk in after church social in America.
I contend that atheist culture is broadly like this. They might have rejected the existence of supernatural entities like gods and devils, but their attitudes about many, many things are the exact same as religious people and driven by our culture of religion. If the only thing you've abandoned is the belief in a supernatural god, that isn't such a big deal if you continue to perpetrate the patterns of thought and behavior created by religion. I contend that atheists do precisely that. They don't hate Muslims, all Muslims, for any reason - it is easy to tear apart the idea that Muslims are somehow more irrationally violent than people in the West, as I've done again and again on this very blog - but because people in the Christian West have hated Muslims for 1400 years. As a result, they do precisely what Christians do - rather than trying to build bridges between the West and the Middle East, they attack them as backwards and needing a brutal lesson in violence for their own good.
Specifically on terms of race, atheists merely perpetrate the cultural misconceptions of our society, and from the same religious sources. So, for instance, almost all atheists believe in a radical kind of free will - that we are absolutely free. This isn't scientific. Almost no one in psychiatry, psychology or neurology believes in a strong free will - many don't believe in free will at all. Yet, I have met blessed few atheists that don't believe in an extreme form of free will - which has its origins in Christian dogma. Christianity requires an extreme definition of free will in order to rationalize their beliefs about sin, heaven and hell. I could go on about this, but I hope to have made my point - much of what atheists believe derives almost entirely from religion.
I also think that atheists who are in groups and sitting next to atheists who say these things are no different than Christians or Muslims who sit next to their coreligionists and tolerate their racist, sexist bullshit in church. I understand the need to belong to something is very strong, but you're doing exactly what Christopher Hitchens said that moderate Christians do when they don't stand up to their racist and sexist peers - they give tacit support and approval to the atheists who do think and say such things.
One of the net results of this is it makes it very hard for religious people, particularly if they're not rich or white, to take atheism seriously. If I'm a poor black person and I'm listening to that racist fuckwit Sam Harris talk about how liberals need to attack Muslims more, and I'm looking down at the local mosque and how they spend a bunch of their time improving the self-image of black people, doing community service and creating a safe space for black culture to flourish, I'm not likely to be very impressed. Wearing a headscarf doesn't seem so unreasonable in the face of all that empowerment. Harris is going to sound a whole lot like another self-indulgent rich white racist telling non-white people how they should act and behave . . . which is precisely what he is! So I guess that's okay!
And if I'm some poor white person, it's the same thing! Rich white people don't give a damn about the social and culture aspects of religion - how when people like Sam Harris either contemptuously dismiss or flatly ignore the poor, it's often the churches that are there to pick up the slack. A sermon seems a small price to pay for the kind of cultural interconnectedness that churches in poor communities bring!
This isn't me saying that religion is good, broadly speaking. I think there are a lot of problems with religion. That teaching children that they'll go to hell unless they behave a certain way is psychological abuse, that religion teaches an inability to correctly determine what is true and what is not that has multifaceted and serious consequences for everyone, everywhere (climate change deniers are at the top of this list). I think religion normalizes racism and sexism, it creates an us-against-them attitude that is unhealthy for the body politic and a bunch of stuff besides. Unfortunately, atheists have inherited a lot of that, often wedded to the arrogant superiority of rich white people looking down at everyone else.
None of this is structural in believing there are no gods. There are plenty of skeptical traditions from antiquity to the modern day that have little or no overlap with modern Anglophone atheism. I think one of the reasons I'm relatively sympathetic to critique of atheism, for instance, is that I got into it through Marx. To me, criticism of religion is inextricably bound up with that of class - and the bigger problem is and always has been that a certain group of people have cheated, lied and killed in order to command other people. To me, that's atheism. Most Anglophone atheists are far more in tune with Ayn Rand and Adam Smith than Karl Marx, though. Still, that's where I think this comes from, even though I no longer regard myself as a socialist. Religion is a way that a certain segment of the ruling class keeps everyone else in line; modern Anglophone atheists are almost uniformly from that class, they just think that neo-liberal capitalist democracy and a scientific bureaucracy are better at it than religion.
I give the caveats that I am not condemning everyone who is an atheist or religious. Many atheists are good people; so are many religious people. But insofar as I'm talking about broad cultural trends, I think what I've said is true.
For my own part, while I do not believe in god, I am finding it increasingly hard to call myself an atheist because it identifies me with a social movement I find increasing abhorrent. And not just some of the talking heads on TV, but that the whole movement - in my experience - does reflect those values. I prefer secular humanist, these days, with an emphasis on the humanist. In the end, I'd rather spend time with a Muslim, Christian, Buddhist or whatever that believes in reducing the misery in the world with an bunch of fucking sexist, racist assholes who happen to agree with me that gods don't exist.
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Monday, October 6, 2014
Monday, September 8, 2014
My Visit to Aldi and Some Thoughts on Choices
Yesterday, the wife and I went down to the grocery store, Aldi, here in Xenia, and shopped. For those of you who don't know, Aldi is a European-style (yea, Germany-based) chain of grocery stories which offer a greatly reduced number of items compared to the big grocery stores we're used to seeing in America. In addition to having a smaller number of products, they have less selection in products, though they claim this gives them sufficient cost savings to give high quality goods. Additionally, they don't bag your items - though they provide shelf space so you can - or provide bags. To use a cart, you have to put a quarter into a gadget, though you get the quarter back when you return the cart. This is another cost saving tool, meaning they don't have to have dudes wandering around collecting carts. Nowadays, they market this as the greener alternative to big box supermarkets that most Americans shop at, though my understanding is the impetus is more pecuniary than environmental . . . but that's a trivial point!
For us, the upshot was, we really liked it. The store here in Xenia has the right items, broadly speaking. And given that the store is much smaller than a regular supermarket, we were in and out in half an hour. Broadly speaking, we didn't feel the supposed lack of choice. Even the big box supermarkets fail to have things I want, like spices for Asian cuisine. Broadly, what we can't get at Aldi we can get online or by stopping, now and then, at specialty stores (like liquor stores for beer).
But this made me think about choices. Recently, when Adrienne was at a convention up in Minneapolis, she spoke to a Danish collegue of hers, Jesper. He'd been down at FIU and we had hung out a little, he's a nice guy. At the conference, he mentioned he had forgotten how exhausting being in the United States was - that he had to translate everything in his head and then, surprisingly, to Adrienne and then to me, was the "number of choices". Being an American has a lot of choices.
Jesper told a story about how he went into a burrito joint because he wanted to try this crazy American foodstuff about which he's heard, so he goes up to the counter and asked for a burrito. He was then asked what he wanted on his burrito . . .
He had no idea. He's Danish! Their main exposure to burritos is, and I'm quoting Yona, who is my main source of all things Denmark, "Middle Eastern-owned fast food places that make them from store-bought components and have no real idea what they're supposed to be like." The question drew nothing from him so he said, and I can see Jesper in my mind saying this, "A little bit of everything. Which was not the right choice."
Everything in America is like this. Once I started seeing it, I saw it everywhere. Soda aisles with dozens and dozens of choices. You want toothpaste? There are a dozen brands and each brand has several different products! There are forty linear feet of beer shelves at the local Kroger's . . . and that's not even a liquor store! Americans are constantly asking other Americans what we want with that - do you want onion rings, house chips, French fries or steak fries with that? What kind of cheese do you want on your hamburger? It's everywhere!
And it is exhausting. A supermarket is the precise kind of place that we hate and I'm sure part of it is all the damn choices. And they're so identical! How do you know which brand of toothpaste is actually better?! Worse, most of the brands are functionally identical.
So you're in this supermarket and you're surrounded by choices and most of them are false choices. But because there is this farcical illusion of choice, the store is goddamn enormous! It's huge! You can land aircraft in there, play football games! So you wander around aisle after aisle, being forced to make false choices, searching around for the lowest price, or the price point you want, surrounded by other sullen faced people doing the same thing, trudging along, back and forth, making these same false choices.
Which is to say shopping in a store where there were many fewer choices was a great relief to me. Jesper is right. We have too many choices in America.
For us, the upshot was, we really liked it. The store here in Xenia has the right items, broadly speaking. And given that the store is much smaller than a regular supermarket, we were in and out in half an hour. Broadly speaking, we didn't feel the supposed lack of choice. Even the big box supermarkets fail to have things I want, like spices for Asian cuisine. Broadly, what we can't get at Aldi we can get online or by stopping, now and then, at specialty stores (like liquor stores for beer).
But this made me think about choices. Recently, when Adrienne was at a convention up in Minneapolis, she spoke to a Danish collegue of hers, Jesper. He'd been down at FIU and we had hung out a little, he's a nice guy. At the conference, he mentioned he had forgotten how exhausting being in the United States was - that he had to translate everything in his head and then, surprisingly, to Adrienne and then to me, was the "number of choices". Being an American has a lot of choices.
Jesper told a story about how he went into a burrito joint because he wanted to try this crazy American foodstuff about which he's heard, so he goes up to the counter and asked for a burrito. He was then asked what he wanted on his burrito . . .
He had no idea. He's Danish! Their main exposure to burritos is, and I'm quoting Yona, who is my main source of all things Denmark, "Middle Eastern-owned fast food places that make them from store-bought components and have no real idea what they're supposed to be like." The question drew nothing from him so he said, and I can see Jesper in my mind saying this, "A little bit of everything. Which was not the right choice."
Everything in America is like this. Once I started seeing it, I saw it everywhere. Soda aisles with dozens and dozens of choices. You want toothpaste? There are a dozen brands and each brand has several different products! There are forty linear feet of beer shelves at the local Kroger's . . . and that's not even a liquor store! Americans are constantly asking other Americans what we want with that - do you want onion rings, house chips, French fries or steak fries with that? What kind of cheese do you want on your hamburger? It's everywhere!
And it is exhausting. A supermarket is the precise kind of place that we hate and I'm sure part of it is all the damn choices. And they're so identical! How do you know which brand of toothpaste is actually better?! Worse, most of the brands are functionally identical.
So you're in this supermarket and you're surrounded by choices and most of them are false choices. But because there is this farcical illusion of choice, the store is goddamn enormous! It's huge! You can land aircraft in there, play football games! So you wander around aisle after aisle, being forced to make false choices, searching around for the lowest price, or the price point you want, surrounded by other sullen faced people doing the same thing, trudging along, back and forth, making these same false choices.
Which is to say shopping in a store where there were many fewer choices was a great relief to me. Jesper is right. We have too many choices in America.
Saturday, June 14, 2014
Talkin' to a communist - haven't done that in a while!
Friday night, I spoke with a self-described communist.
I have done considerably more than flirt with communism, socialism and anarchism. I often describe myself as an anarcho-syndicalist, tho' I suspect that is much less true than when I was in college and had these kinds of conversations quite frequently. See, nowadays, I don't let ideological purity get in the way of the practical nuts and bolts of human society.
My fall-out with communism occurred, for instance, when I noticed that every attempt at a communist government had collapsed into a cult-of-personality military dictatorship and never really left it in a way that could be described as communist. Mostly, they stay military dictatorships, or become regular capitalist democracies.
So the socialist lacuna between the people's revolution and the withering of the state became troubling for me. It seemed to me that on one side you had the worker's revolution and on the other side, across a bottomless pit, you had this wonderful utopia but no one knew how to build the bridge attaching the two. So the primary question became, for me, "How do we fill the chasm or build the bridge?"
I have considered the question, off and on, for years . . . and no solution is forthcoming. No one seems to know. The practical nuts and bolts of building a better society don't seem to be very interesting to most people - the utopian fantasy seems to move them.
(Of course, this is just as true of radical capitalism. Anarcho-capitalist fantasies are splendid but to get there we're just supposed to trust that megacorporations are going to let their power go to fit the ideology of Miltonian economics? Preposterous. Just as preposterous as imagining a communist dictatorship will cede its power to some ideal stateless society. The reality of power and control make this nearly impossible to imagine.)
Which as both a writer and a sausage maker is unsatisfying. Books are great, but they aren't the creative frenzy that, well, artists sell as the artistic process. There's a lot of stuff that isn't obsessed dudes at typewriters spilling their heart and soul. There's a lot of research and then a lot of editing. The finished product is the result of a lot of hard work.
The same with sausage. We all love sausage, but to get there requires pushing meat through a grinder. It's sticky, messy, cold work. The end results are great, but there are practical issues in sausage making that need to be performed before you sink your teeth into its utopian pleasures.
Finishing a big project is best accomplished with a solid, concrete plan. If you don't have that plan, you'll end up with a shoddy product (the USSR), nothing at all (any failed revolution the world over) or you'll never start (dreamy eyed middle-class communists). Without that concrete plan, don't expect most people to get worked up over your ideology. Don't expect the revolution to happen if you don't know what that even means.
I have done considerably more than flirt with communism, socialism and anarchism. I often describe myself as an anarcho-syndicalist, tho' I suspect that is much less true than when I was in college and had these kinds of conversations quite frequently. See, nowadays, I don't let ideological purity get in the way of the practical nuts and bolts of human society.
My fall-out with communism occurred, for instance, when I noticed that every attempt at a communist government had collapsed into a cult-of-personality military dictatorship and never really left it in a way that could be described as communist. Mostly, they stay military dictatorships, or become regular capitalist democracies.
So the socialist lacuna between the people's revolution and the withering of the state became troubling for me. It seemed to me that on one side you had the worker's revolution and on the other side, across a bottomless pit, you had this wonderful utopia but no one knew how to build the bridge attaching the two. So the primary question became, for me, "How do we fill the chasm or build the bridge?"
I have considered the question, off and on, for years . . . and no solution is forthcoming. No one seems to know. The practical nuts and bolts of building a better society don't seem to be very interesting to most people - the utopian fantasy seems to move them.
(Of course, this is just as true of radical capitalism. Anarcho-capitalist fantasies are splendid but to get there we're just supposed to trust that megacorporations are going to let their power go to fit the ideology of Miltonian economics? Preposterous. Just as preposterous as imagining a communist dictatorship will cede its power to some ideal stateless society. The reality of power and control make this nearly impossible to imagine.)
Which as both a writer and a sausage maker is unsatisfying. Books are great, but they aren't the creative frenzy that, well, artists sell as the artistic process. There's a lot of stuff that isn't obsessed dudes at typewriters spilling their heart and soul. There's a lot of research and then a lot of editing. The finished product is the result of a lot of hard work.
The same with sausage. We all love sausage, but to get there requires pushing meat through a grinder. It's sticky, messy, cold work. The end results are great, but there are practical issues in sausage making that need to be performed before you sink your teeth into its utopian pleasures.
Finishing a big project is best accomplished with a solid, concrete plan. If you don't have that plan, you'll end up with a shoddy product (the USSR), nothing at all (any failed revolution the world over) or you'll never start (dreamy eyed middle-class communists). Without that concrete plan, don't expect most people to get worked up over your ideology. Don't expect the revolution to happen if you don't know what that even means.
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Stanislaw Lem and the the possibility of communicating with aliens - a brief critique
I suspect everyone finds some writers to be beyond serious reproach. I suppose for some people, that's quite a lot of writers. For me, there are only a few. Stanislaw Lem is one of them. Lem is the writer I sometimes want to be - but only sometimes. There is a bleak cynicism to his writing that I don't care to emulate and I know that he became a technophobe - I have a feeling that his life in some ways mirrored his fiction with the impossibility of real communication between people. In Solaris, he wrote, "If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently." I believe that could be adapted. "If Lem had more of a sense of humor, his books might have turned out differently." Even where his books are funny, they're not fun. He wasn't that kind of writer. I don't hold this against him, not by any means, however. Fun wasn't important to him as a writer.
He is almost unique in sci-fi writers in having come up with an idea that actually bears scrutiny. Unlike almost all sci-fi writers, who are generally an ideal of the moment kind of guys, writing about whatever techno-philosophical idea is in vogue at the moment, Lem really has legs. He writes about the difficulties in communication between humans and aliens. In his books, first contact fails. We just don't have anything to say to one another, nor a vocabulary to describe it. I have no idea if Lem was influenced by Wittgenstein, but all of his characters violate the final words of The Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus - "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." The characters speak, but there is no content, because of the lack of shared experiences between species.
Moreover, I find in his work this very Orwellian idea that communication between humans is fraught with peril. Between people who don't mean what they say because they're lying, people who don't say what they mean because they're ignorant, and people who don't say what they mean because they're incompetent . . . how do we talk to each other, again?
I also find all of this a backhanded critique of Master Kong's assertion that the first question is always the rectification of names. Before we speak, we've got to be sure our words mean the same thing. In Lem, they often do not.
In other words, what Lem addresses is well-worn ground. People from the ancient days to our own have questioned the efficacy of communication and the uses of communication. And we think we can talk to aliens? It is to laugh.
That said, I think I found a weakness in Lem's work and it is in the rectification of names. What do we mean by communication? I think it's possible that we will never share stories around a campfire, but I don't see the impossibility of successful feedback driven modes of informational exchange. I think it's possible that we'll do something and, based on what we do, the aliens will do something and we'll be able to learn about the aliens thereby - if nothing else, what they do when we do what we do.
I think, furthermore, that we have a fair bit of experience dealing with things that have non-human forms of communication - like fire. No, hear me out. Fire has many of the characteristics of life. It can grow, it eats, it produces waste, it can expand itself, diminish, all kinds of very life-like traits. It is not sentient but we can engage fire. We can lessen it's fuel and see what it does, change its fuel, cut it off altogether or rekindle it. This kind of engagement is not considered communication merely because we have a predisposition to imagine that fire isn't alive because it doesn't bear sufficient similarity to ourselves.
I admit, this is Marxist inspired. We learn about things according to what we can do with them - but I will add as we shape them, they shape us.
For instance, the domestication of dogs. The current theory holds that humans and dogs sorta . . . grew together. Unlike almost any other animal, humans didn't decide to tame wolves and turn them into dogs. A symbiotic, language-less relationship developed between wolves and humans - humans followed wolves to find game, the wolves fed off of our leavings, and this became a successful mode of behavior that created a positive feedback loop. It was a kind of communication, wordless and inhuman, but substantial and real - each side learned from the other, though they certainly learned different lessons.
I don't see why this isn't possible with even very alien aliens. (Though I will hold that it could be extraordinarily dangerous. Wolves don't have planet destroying technologies and there's a fifty-fifty chance that the first aliens we meet will have such technologies, I feel.) Through our mutual interactions, no matter what they are, because what we do effects the aliens and what they do effects us, that is a kind of communication. Even if, as in Solaris, there is no set pattern of repetition - if we do A, B does not follow - even that teaches us.
I also reject the idea that we can't think non-human thoughts - or at least approximations of non-human thoughts. This came to me, specifically, today. I was laying down, thinking, and I started thinking about the way that computers use fuzzy logic.
To a human, fuzzy logic is, well, fuzzy. It involves the participation of a set in multiple values. In many ways, it is the native human method of thinking. We understand that a person with an average height is somewhere between short and tall, that a thousand dollars is somewhere between being broke and being rich, in a unity of thought.
Computers, on the other hand, can't really do this. By their design, all computers do nothing more than boolean operations. Our native understanding of in-between states is not boolean. Most people don't have any real experience with boolean algebra, after all! Likewise, the specific interactions of human brains do not appear to be boolean logic gates. There is simply no reason to imagine that human brains operate according to the mechanisms of boolean operations.
Yet, computers can approximate this knowing-ness that we humans possess organically through fuzzy logic databases interpreted by those boolean operations. The process contextless data according to the programmed dictates of logic gates. That's it. Yet . . . there is communication.
It is fair, at this point, to point out that computers are human tools invented by humans for humans. Absolutely. I'm not saying that talking to an alien will be so simple, but use this to illustrate the point that naive human intuition can in some ways be understood by the quite non-human reasoning of boolean operations. While admitting it's an approximation, and admitting all language is an approximation, I continue to assert it's better than nothing. Which is, I think, the point of divergence from Lem.
In short, I think that the people studying Solaris learned quite a bit.
However, this is a very . . . nuanced criticism of Lem's work. Mostly the guy just blows me out of the water.
He is almost unique in sci-fi writers in having come up with an idea that actually bears scrutiny. Unlike almost all sci-fi writers, who are generally an ideal of the moment kind of guys, writing about whatever techno-philosophical idea is in vogue at the moment, Lem really has legs. He writes about the difficulties in communication between humans and aliens. In his books, first contact fails. We just don't have anything to say to one another, nor a vocabulary to describe it. I have no idea if Lem was influenced by Wittgenstein, but all of his characters violate the final words of The Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus - "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." The characters speak, but there is no content, because of the lack of shared experiences between species.
Moreover, I find in his work this very Orwellian idea that communication between humans is fraught with peril. Between people who don't mean what they say because they're lying, people who don't say what they mean because they're ignorant, and people who don't say what they mean because they're incompetent . . . how do we talk to each other, again?
I also find all of this a backhanded critique of Master Kong's assertion that the first question is always the rectification of names. Before we speak, we've got to be sure our words mean the same thing. In Lem, they often do not.
In other words, what Lem addresses is well-worn ground. People from the ancient days to our own have questioned the efficacy of communication and the uses of communication. And we think we can talk to aliens? It is to laugh.
That said, I think I found a weakness in Lem's work and it is in the rectification of names. What do we mean by communication? I think it's possible that we will never share stories around a campfire, but I don't see the impossibility of successful feedback driven modes of informational exchange. I think it's possible that we'll do something and, based on what we do, the aliens will do something and we'll be able to learn about the aliens thereby - if nothing else, what they do when we do what we do.
I think, furthermore, that we have a fair bit of experience dealing with things that have non-human forms of communication - like fire. No, hear me out. Fire has many of the characteristics of life. It can grow, it eats, it produces waste, it can expand itself, diminish, all kinds of very life-like traits. It is not sentient but we can engage fire. We can lessen it's fuel and see what it does, change its fuel, cut it off altogether or rekindle it. This kind of engagement is not considered communication merely because we have a predisposition to imagine that fire isn't alive because it doesn't bear sufficient similarity to ourselves.
I admit, this is Marxist inspired. We learn about things according to what we can do with them - but I will add as we shape them, they shape us.
For instance, the domestication of dogs. The current theory holds that humans and dogs sorta . . . grew together. Unlike almost any other animal, humans didn't decide to tame wolves and turn them into dogs. A symbiotic, language-less relationship developed between wolves and humans - humans followed wolves to find game, the wolves fed off of our leavings, and this became a successful mode of behavior that created a positive feedback loop. It was a kind of communication, wordless and inhuman, but substantial and real - each side learned from the other, though they certainly learned different lessons.
I don't see why this isn't possible with even very alien aliens. (Though I will hold that it could be extraordinarily dangerous. Wolves don't have planet destroying technologies and there's a fifty-fifty chance that the first aliens we meet will have such technologies, I feel.) Through our mutual interactions, no matter what they are, because what we do effects the aliens and what they do effects us, that is a kind of communication. Even if, as in Solaris, there is no set pattern of repetition - if we do A, B does not follow - even that teaches us.
I also reject the idea that we can't think non-human thoughts - or at least approximations of non-human thoughts. This came to me, specifically, today. I was laying down, thinking, and I started thinking about the way that computers use fuzzy logic.
To a human, fuzzy logic is, well, fuzzy. It involves the participation of a set in multiple values. In many ways, it is the native human method of thinking. We understand that a person with an average height is somewhere between short and tall, that a thousand dollars is somewhere between being broke and being rich, in a unity of thought.
Computers, on the other hand, can't really do this. By their design, all computers do nothing more than boolean operations. Our native understanding of in-between states is not boolean. Most people don't have any real experience with boolean algebra, after all! Likewise, the specific interactions of human brains do not appear to be boolean logic gates. There is simply no reason to imagine that human brains operate according to the mechanisms of boolean operations.
Yet, computers can approximate this knowing-ness that we humans possess organically through fuzzy logic databases interpreted by those boolean operations. The process contextless data according to the programmed dictates of logic gates. That's it. Yet . . . there is communication.
It is fair, at this point, to point out that computers are human tools invented by humans for humans. Absolutely. I'm not saying that talking to an alien will be so simple, but use this to illustrate the point that naive human intuition can in some ways be understood by the quite non-human reasoning of boolean operations. While admitting it's an approximation, and admitting all language is an approximation, I continue to assert it's better than nothing. Which is, I think, the point of divergence from Lem.
In short, I think that the people studying Solaris learned quite a bit.
However, this is a very . . . nuanced criticism of Lem's work. Mostly the guy just blows me out of the water.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
We need a new word for people who work against the public trust within the boundaries of law; criticism of dismissing conspiracy theorists
To me, conspiracy theorizing is pretty weird because when you look at the definition of a conspiracy it's obvious we're surrounded by them once you strip out the risible language. But it's hard to do because the risible language is built in.
A conspiracy is, according to thefreedictionary.com, 1. an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful or subversive act, 2. a group of conspirators, 3. Law an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action and 4. a joining or acting together, as if by sinister design.
That's . . . a pretty loaded definition because it leaves out of the realms of conspiracy anything that isn't illegal and even by the fourth definition, “as if by sinister design”. Conspiracy is, by a common dictionary, by definition at least sinister and usually illegal.
Going to thesaurus.com, I tried to find a word that was like conspiracy but accounted for things that were not illegal – like the word whose definition is “people working together inside the law but against the public welfare”. In a note to the entry “collusion”, they note that “cooperation is always positive, collaboration is positive except in wartime (working with the enemy) and collusion is always negative (working together in secret for a dishonest purpose)”. Conspiracy is a synonym with collude. There didn't seem to be anything like I was looking for.
Yet, I find that unsatisfying, too, because there are all kinds of behaviors that are legal but nevertheless highly manipulative, such as advertising and propaganda (which is just advertising with a political message we don't like, really – how is the manipulations of North Korea propaganda but what comes out of our smear-happy, negative campaigning, lie-athon that we call an electoral process NOT propaganda?). There just seems to be no word, other than conspiracy, to describe when a group of people, often totally legally and with legal ends, nevertheless engage in unethical behavior to achieve their ends.
So what do we call a group of people who legally lie (and often their lies form the very basis of law) to achieve their ends that are destructive and terrible yet totally legal?
To take a fairly extreme example, how does one talk about the lies and distortions used to start the Crusades. A letter from the Byzantine Emperor asking for mercenaries was turned into a lurid account of Turks murdering Christians and desecrating the tomb of Jesus. None of it was illegal. One could argue that the Catholic Church and various governments that supported the narrative of the Crusades were simply interpreting a complex political situation in terms that could be understood by their illiterate and uncultured knights and peasants. Sure, it's specious reasoning, but you could make it and just barely not be laughably wrong.
Yet, somehow, the lies spread by Pope Urban II and the kings of Europe do not fit the definition of “conspiracy” because it wasn't illegal or subversive. What was it, then? Just religion?
But a lot of politics and business is like that. What they do is not technically illegal and, honest, there was no malice of intent. Even with the credit default swap stuff that tanked the economy in 2008. Not a conspiracy. Sure, there was a coordinated effort by every top bank in the world to sell as many credit default swaps as possible all to increase their own personal fortunes, but that's not a conspiracy! That's just business.
But it happens again and again. Every bubble in the history of the modern world has been engineered to benefit a few. Every war has it's winners, usually the guys who sell guns. Yet when a military contractor uses political influence to shape an aggressive foreign policy, it's not a conspiracy. Nothing either illegal nor subversive is going on. It's just politics.
There is a lacuna in our language then. If we use the word conspiracy to talk about political, religious and economic manipulation, we're called paranoid because the events we describe aren't illegal or subversive. There is no well-round word with which we can describe the legal forms of manipulation of our culture, business and politics that also describes the profundity with which the system is controlled by small cabals of like-minded individuals. Legally. Openly.
This really benefits the, oh, let's call them special interest groups that control our government. We can't really refer to their multifaceted, yet legal, manipulations of the public trust in language that does justice to the seriousness of their actions. And we can't talk about something unless we have words that substantially describe what it is we're talking about. In this lacuna of words, a lot of manipulation is not discussed. Worse, when people dare call it conspiracy – because the behavior resembles a conspiracy save for it's legality – the very idea that this kind of collusion occurs at all is attacked. People who bring up the concentration of power in a tiny group of people's hands are just crazy conspiracy theorists.
We need a word to describe the legal manipulations of the system against the public trust, one that conveys the seriousness of the issue but does not bring to mind the specter of conspiracy. Until we have such a word, the people out there who are acting together, within the system, but against the public trust will have an easy go at it because we can't even TALK about them.
A conspiracy is, according to thefreedictionary.com, 1. an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful or subversive act, 2. a group of conspirators, 3. Law an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action and 4. a joining or acting together, as if by sinister design.
That's . . . a pretty loaded definition because it leaves out of the realms of conspiracy anything that isn't illegal and even by the fourth definition, “as if by sinister design”. Conspiracy is, by a common dictionary, by definition at least sinister and usually illegal.
Going to thesaurus.com, I tried to find a word that was like conspiracy but accounted for things that were not illegal – like the word whose definition is “people working together inside the law but against the public welfare”. In a note to the entry “collusion”, they note that “cooperation is always positive, collaboration is positive except in wartime (working with the enemy) and collusion is always negative (working together in secret for a dishonest purpose)”. Conspiracy is a synonym with collude. There didn't seem to be anything like I was looking for.
Yet, I find that unsatisfying, too, because there are all kinds of behaviors that are legal but nevertheless highly manipulative, such as advertising and propaganda (which is just advertising with a political message we don't like, really – how is the manipulations of North Korea propaganda but what comes out of our smear-happy, negative campaigning, lie-athon that we call an electoral process NOT propaganda?). There just seems to be no word, other than conspiracy, to describe when a group of people, often totally legally and with legal ends, nevertheless engage in unethical behavior to achieve their ends.
So what do we call a group of people who legally lie (and often their lies form the very basis of law) to achieve their ends that are destructive and terrible yet totally legal?
To take a fairly extreme example, how does one talk about the lies and distortions used to start the Crusades. A letter from the Byzantine Emperor asking for mercenaries was turned into a lurid account of Turks murdering Christians and desecrating the tomb of Jesus. None of it was illegal. One could argue that the Catholic Church and various governments that supported the narrative of the Crusades were simply interpreting a complex political situation in terms that could be understood by their illiterate and uncultured knights and peasants. Sure, it's specious reasoning, but you could make it and just barely not be laughably wrong.
Yet, somehow, the lies spread by Pope Urban II and the kings of Europe do not fit the definition of “conspiracy” because it wasn't illegal or subversive. What was it, then? Just religion?
But a lot of politics and business is like that. What they do is not technically illegal and, honest, there was no malice of intent. Even with the credit default swap stuff that tanked the economy in 2008. Not a conspiracy. Sure, there was a coordinated effort by every top bank in the world to sell as many credit default swaps as possible all to increase their own personal fortunes, but that's not a conspiracy! That's just business.
But it happens again and again. Every bubble in the history of the modern world has been engineered to benefit a few. Every war has it's winners, usually the guys who sell guns. Yet when a military contractor uses political influence to shape an aggressive foreign policy, it's not a conspiracy. Nothing either illegal nor subversive is going on. It's just politics.
There is a lacuna in our language then. If we use the word conspiracy to talk about political, religious and economic manipulation, we're called paranoid because the events we describe aren't illegal or subversive. There is no well-round word with which we can describe the legal forms of manipulation of our culture, business and politics that also describes the profundity with which the system is controlled by small cabals of like-minded individuals. Legally. Openly.
This really benefits the, oh, let's call them special interest groups that control our government. We can't really refer to their multifaceted, yet legal, manipulations of the public trust in language that does justice to the seriousness of their actions. And we can't talk about something unless we have words that substantially describe what it is we're talking about. In this lacuna of words, a lot of manipulation is not discussed. Worse, when people dare call it conspiracy – because the behavior resembles a conspiracy save for it's legality – the very idea that this kind of collusion occurs at all is attacked. People who bring up the concentration of power in a tiny group of people's hands are just crazy conspiracy theorists.
We need a word to describe the legal manipulations of the system against the public trust, one that conveys the seriousness of the issue but does not bring to mind the specter of conspiracy. Until we have such a word, the people out there who are acting together, within the system, but against the public trust will have an easy go at it because we can't even TALK about them.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Problems with Irving Kirsch's Critique of Antidepressants as Placebos
Recently, a FB pal posted an article run on 60 Minutes based on the work of Irving Kirsch. He's a psychologist who has been making the rounds saying antidepressants don't work - and, indeed, depression is not caused by a chemical inbalance at all. It's a pretty radical claim. The overwhelming medical belief is that antidepressants do more good than harm by a considerable margin. Kirsch believes otherwise. To quote him, "Depression is not a brain disease, and chemicals don’t cure it.”
(I'm not going to provide links, here, because linking is largely meaningless. You can find someone on the Internet to take virtually any position at all, so links that "prove" a given point do nothing of the sort - they merely show the person can search around for data that agrees with their conclusions. I encourage people to do independent and substantial research on any field that interests them and advise they read books to do it. The Internet has certainly broadened our knowledge, but it has also made much of it shallow and muddy.)
I've been following Kirsch's work for about a year, now. This is shortly after I started taking antidepressants and feeling considerably better - so I had some vested interest in the research. Was the effect I feeling a placebo effect?
For the record, I am extremely critical of psychological research for both historical and theoretical grounds. I think this bias is justified - psychology has not done a very good job of policing itself. The case of Cyril Burt is particularly significant. But was a psychologist who did twin studies. After his death, it was found he had massively falsified his information, lying about the sample size of the twins studies he did, inventing collaborators and their credentials - this has not prevented his work from continuing to be taught. This is unprecedented. I can't think of a single case where a person, caught committing fraud over the span of decades, would still be taught. The articles "known" to be fraudulent have been removed, but if there was no direct "proof" that a given paper was fraudulent it has remained in the academic canon. (Such proof is hard to get, because Burt burned all his notes before he died!) Furthermore, due to the vagaries of attribution inheritance, articles whose substance is based on Burt's findings are still part of the psychological data record - no effort was made to purge the effects of his fraudulent work from the data pool.
I wish I could say this was something that died with Burt. But you can find the continuation of such fraud in psychology in books like The Bell Curve, issues like gender studies and evolutionary psychology - not to mention, like I said, Burt's work has not been purged from the psychological canon; while those papers known to be fraudulent have been removed, the papers that source Burt's work were not and are themselves sourced by modern research.
(An interesting comparison between corrupt scientific fields and how they clean themselves up, or in psychology's case, fail to, is anthropology. Anthropology was, sadly, very much part of the early twentieth century's eugenics movement. After World War II, though, anthropologists, horrified at what they had helped to do, given intellectual weight to atrocity, purged eugenics from its discipline almost entirely. Psychology, whose IQ tests were also used to justify eugenics, who were equally guilty of giving intellectual force for the eugenics massacres of the early twentieth century, well . . . the Bell Curve is still influential. The eugenicists are still there in psychology, they were never purged or repudiated. In short, there is no psychology equivalent to Jane Goodall because the field never cleaned it's house after World War II.)
Theoretically, psychology is a mess. (And by theory, I'm talking about theory in the scientific jargon sense, which is an explanation for diverse phenomenon inside the field of study, demonstrated by considerable proof without substantial internal contradiction.) It is the only science that has no generally accepted theory regarding the field's object of study. This is a very simple statement, but the consequences are enormous. In short, psychologists are not in agreement, at all, as to what the mind actually is. When compared to chemistry's atomic model, astronomy's relativity, biology's natural selection, physics' mechanics and quantum mechanics, so forth and so on, this lacuna is enormous. If you don't agree about what it is you're studying, how on earth can you study it? What, precisely, are you studying? They literally cannot agree.
(This is in contradistinction to psychiatry, which has a very strong, stable theory of mind. Your mind is your brain, they are one in the same. It is a theory for which there is tremendous evidence, of course.)
So, when I read psychological research, I do so with a grain of salt. They have a lousy track record of policing themselves, the worst in science, and no unifying theory!
Well, when you look into Kirsch's work, it's actually pretty atrocious. Not the hypothesis, so much as his methodology and, indeed, his theoretical understanding of human consciousness.
I'm going to tack the methodological failures of his work. In particular, he cherry picked data. For instance, in the APA journal Prevention and Treatment, where much of his early work was published, the editor of that journal called Kirsch's statistical models "clearly arguable" and warned that his paper's subject-selection criteria were heterogenous. In particular, Kirsch only looked at short term studies.
Now, I do not doubt that antidepressants are overprescribed - but prescribing drugs is what doctors do. Most physicians take the attitude that it's better to ere on the side of caution. Because of the difficulties in communicating psychological conditions, when a patient comes in and says they've been depressed for a long time and nothing seems to pull them out of it - what is the psychiatrist to do? Ignore the suffering of their patient? No. They prescribe medication and usually suggest therapy. After all, antidepressants are generally safe.
In many of these cases, however, the depression wasn't clinical. It's not even that the medication acted as a placebo - it's that there was no illness in the first place. So when Kirsch argues, on the grounds of short term studies, that there is substantial placebo effect - he's wrong. It wasn't the medication or the placebo effect that halted the depression; it was just the normal passage of time in an unknown number of cases. How can this be construed as data at all?
For instance, you take a group of people with headaches. Half you give ibuprofin, half you give sugar pills. An hour later, you ask them how they feel and find that almost all of them, in both groups, now feel fine, most of them attributing their improvement to their medication. Out of these groups, how do you find the people whose headaches just stopped naturally, as most headaches do? It's the same with short term depression studies. It is impossible to determine how many of the people felt better not because of the medication or of the placebo.
In psychiatric and psychological studies, there is tremendous self-selection of subjects. People who feel bad tend to join. While in most medical science, they can perform an actual test to determine who has the condition for which they are testing (say, a virus), this is not generally possible in psychological and psychiatric cases in the short term. So it is known that many of the people who join psychological and psychiatric studies aren't sick in the first place, but it's impossible to know how many! How can you determine the efficacy of the placebo effect if you don't even know if they're clinically ill in the first place? The only good method of determining a person's psychological state is long term observation - something impossible to do with short term studies. By avoiding long-term studies, Kirsch is avoiding the very data that would counter his hypothesis. Ouch. That's a huge scientific no-no.
Additionally, the placebo effect is, itself, short term. The longest known placebo effect is two and a half years. Any study that goes over that is just assumed to be free of placebo effects. So, not only does Kirsch avoid the studies that select out the mentally ill from the temporarily distressed, he also avoids studies where the placebo effect is eliminated or minimized due to the long term nature of the studies. Double whammy.
Indeed, the very idea of the placebo effect is itself under fire - using methods similar to Kirsch's, but with larger data sets over longer periods of time, Asbjørn Hróbjartsson and Peter Gøtzsche have basically demonstrated that there is no clinically significant placebo effect. So, who's right? Kirsch who says that antidepressants are placebos or Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche who say that the placebo effect is clinicially insignificant?
This is awful methodology. It's simply scientifically unethical to ignore the data that contradicts your conclusions, to study only those things that allow you to be right. To have scientific legitimacy, Kirsch must address long term studies that are free of the placebo effect and the growing body of evidence that the placebo effect is not clinically significant. He does not do this.
One might ask, then, why he can get these high falutin' jobs, like the University of Leeds and now, well, he works at Harvard. Remember what I said about Cyril Burt, The Bell Curve and evolutionary psychology - psychology is a field full of quacks, even at the highest levels of education and research.
Not to mention this is a highly politicized area. There are a lot of people who simply reject the idea that mental illness has a physical component. I'll talk more on that in a bit, but my point here is that there are a lot of people who actively reject the idea of mental illness, who believe that mentally ill people should "pull themselves up by their bootstraps", or seek solace in religion, or "just get over it". (Thomas Szasz published, in 1961, The Myth of Mental Illness - a book that was just reprinted last year and still has considerable influence; see also The Manufacture of Madness and more recently The Manufacture of Depression, which came out last year - and it goes back as far as the written language goes - there are always people who say mental illnesses don't really exist, you can read about it in medieval sources, in classical antiquity; Pythagoras said that depression was merely lack of self control, akin to laziness; Hippocrates believed that melancholia - what we call depression, nowadays - was an imbalance of the four humors, which is to say a medical problem. This argument is ongoing, but nowadays is largely farcical. The medical basis of mental illness is well understood.) They are emboldened by a researcher like Kirsch, who gives the air of legitimacy to their beliefs.
Science is not some purely intellectual field - it takes money to do it, and the people in charge of that money are not, by and large, scientists. They are corporations and political bodies, pursuing their own agendas. But no one brings it up that there are non-scientific social forces that reject mental illness for no good reason - but then use their status in order to support research in that area. As an example, the University of Oklahoma's geology department is the ConocoPhillips School of Geology and Geophysics. Guess what their position on global climate change is? This is as true in psychology as geology - people with social and political agenda control research funding and publication. And there have always been people who are swift to side with people who say that mental illness isn't physical, that it's a defect in will or character. It goes back at least as far as Pythagoras and Hippocrates!
Additionally, there's just the prima facie stupidity of asserting that you can effect mood with drugs. I mean, prima facie. There are a huge number of studies about the effects of drugs on mood, not to mention nearly every adult reading this has personal experience with alcohol lifting their spirits and lowering their social anxiety. Even more powerful are the opiates - it is impossible to be depressed when you're on Percocet. Unfortunately, these drugs have such dangerous side effects that it is unethical to administer them or they must be administered very carefully. But it's absurd to say that drugs can't effect mood and feelings. It's silly and juvenile! The only question is to what extent does a given drug effect our feeling of depression. That drugs can alter our feeling of depression is simply prima facie true.
The aquisition of funding and possession of high titles does not make a person right. It only means that someone in a position of power agrees with what you say and is willing to give you money to prove it. While it shapes all scientific endeavors to some degree, it is particular pernicious in a field where there is no theory. In psychology's theoretical void, their lack of agreement about what the mind is, anything goes. So you come up with racist crap justifying eugenics and people doubting the physiological origins of mental illness.
Which brings me to the theoretical problems I have with Kirsch's work and all work that supposes a mind/body dualism. Kirsch believes that depression isn't a brain disease. Well, for crying out loud, man, what kind of disease can it be, then? Because all the actual evidence suggests that the mind and the brain are the same thing. All mental activity - thought, reason, emotion, perception - they're all brain activity. If depression exists at all, it must exist as a brain disease because that's where the mind is located. To say that you believe that depression exists but isn't a brain disease makes as much sense as saying you believe in heart attacks but it's not a heart disease.
But we live in a world that is steeped in dualism - the belief that there is some sort of perfected, non-physical sense that exists independent of our flesh. Sometimes it's called the soul, but just as often it's called the mind and the two are mixed up in religion and culture all the time. Dualism is present in all the world's largest religions.
However, that's not science. Science has never been able to find a soul. It has never been able to find a mind separate from the brain. Meaning, Kirsch is proposing something preposterous, again: that you can have a mental illness that isn't in the brain.
I can't say it's short, but those are my main reasons for thinking Kirsch is a quack.
(I'm not going to provide links, here, because linking is largely meaningless. You can find someone on the Internet to take virtually any position at all, so links that "prove" a given point do nothing of the sort - they merely show the person can search around for data that agrees with their conclusions. I encourage people to do independent and substantial research on any field that interests them and advise they read books to do it. The Internet has certainly broadened our knowledge, but it has also made much of it shallow and muddy.)
I've been following Kirsch's work for about a year, now. This is shortly after I started taking antidepressants and feeling considerably better - so I had some vested interest in the research. Was the effect I feeling a placebo effect?
For the record, I am extremely critical of psychological research for both historical and theoretical grounds. I think this bias is justified - psychology has not done a very good job of policing itself. The case of Cyril Burt is particularly significant. But was a psychologist who did twin studies. After his death, it was found he had massively falsified his information, lying about the sample size of the twins studies he did, inventing collaborators and their credentials - this has not prevented his work from continuing to be taught. This is unprecedented. I can't think of a single case where a person, caught committing fraud over the span of decades, would still be taught. The articles "known" to be fraudulent have been removed, but if there was no direct "proof" that a given paper was fraudulent it has remained in the academic canon. (Such proof is hard to get, because Burt burned all his notes before he died!) Furthermore, due to the vagaries of attribution inheritance, articles whose substance is based on Burt's findings are still part of the psychological data record - no effort was made to purge the effects of his fraudulent work from the data pool.
I wish I could say this was something that died with Burt. But you can find the continuation of such fraud in psychology in books like The Bell Curve, issues like gender studies and evolutionary psychology - not to mention, like I said, Burt's work has not been purged from the psychological canon; while those papers known to be fraudulent have been removed, the papers that source Burt's work were not and are themselves sourced by modern research.
(An interesting comparison between corrupt scientific fields and how they clean themselves up, or in psychology's case, fail to, is anthropology. Anthropology was, sadly, very much part of the early twentieth century's eugenics movement. After World War II, though, anthropologists, horrified at what they had helped to do, given intellectual weight to atrocity, purged eugenics from its discipline almost entirely. Psychology, whose IQ tests were also used to justify eugenics, who were equally guilty of giving intellectual force for the eugenics massacres of the early twentieth century, well . . . the Bell Curve is still influential. The eugenicists are still there in psychology, they were never purged or repudiated. In short, there is no psychology equivalent to Jane Goodall because the field never cleaned it's house after World War II.)
Theoretically, psychology is a mess. (And by theory, I'm talking about theory in the scientific jargon sense, which is an explanation for diverse phenomenon inside the field of study, demonstrated by considerable proof without substantial internal contradiction.) It is the only science that has no generally accepted theory regarding the field's object of study. This is a very simple statement, but the consequences are enormous. In short, psychologists are not in agreement, at all, as to what the mind actually is. When compared to chemistry's atomic model, astronomy's relativity, biology's natural selection, physics' mechanics and quantum mechanics, so forth and so on, this lacuna is enormous. If you don't agree about what it is you're studying, how on earth can you study it? What, precisely, are you studying? They literally cannot agree.
(This is in contradistinction to psychiatry, which has a very strong, stable theory of mind. Your mind is your brain, they are one in the same. It is a theory for which there is tremendous evidence, of course.)
So, when I read psychological research, I do so with a grain of salt. They have a lousy track record of policing themselves, the worst in science, and no unifying theory!
Well, when you look into Kirsch's work, it's actually pretty atrocious. Not the hypothesis, so much as his methodology and, indeed, his theoretical understanding of human consciousness.
I'm going to tack the methodological failures of his work. In particular, he cherry picked data. For instance, in the APA journal Prevention and Treatment, where much of his early work was published, the editor of that journal called Kirsch's statistical models "clearly arguable" and warned that his paper's subject-selection criteria were heterogenous. In particular, Kirsch only looked at short term studies.
Now, I do not doubt that antidepressants are overprescribed - but prescribing drugs is what doctors do. Most physicians take the attitude that it's better to ere on the side of caution. Because of the difficulties in communicating psychological conditions, when a patient comes in and says they've been depressed for a long time and nothing seems to pull them out of it - what is the psychiatrist to do? Ignore the suffering of their patient? No. They prescribe medication and usually suggest therapy. After all, antidepressants are generally safe.
In many of these cases, however, the depression wasn't clinical. It's not even that the medication acted as a placebo - it's that there was no illness in the first place. So when Kirsch argues, on the grounds of short term studies, that there is substantial placebo effect - he's wrong. It wasn't the medication or the placebo effect that halted the depression; it was just the normal passage of time in an unknown number of cases. How can this be construed as data at all?
For instance, you take a group of people with headaches. Half you give ibuprofin, half you give sugar pills. An hour later, you ask them how they feel and find that almost all of them, in both groups, now feel fine, most of them attributing their improvement to their medication. Out of these groups, how do you find the people whose headaches just stopped naturally, as most headaches do? It's the same with short term depression studies. It is impossible to determine how many of the people felt better not because of the medication or of the placebo.
In psychiatric and psychological studies, there is tremendous self-selection of subjects. People who feel bad tend to join. While in most medical science, they can perform an actual test to determine who has the condition for which they are testing (say, a virus), this is not generally possible in psychological and psychiatric cases in the short term. So it is known that many of the people who join psychological and psychiatric studies aren't sick in the first place, but it's impossible to know how many! How can you determine the efficacy of the placebo effect if you don't even know if they're clinically ill in the first place? The only good method of determining a person's psychological state is long term observation - something impossible to do with short term studies. By avoiding long-term studies, Kirsch is avoiding the very data that would counter his hypothesis. Ouch. That's a huge scientific no-no.
Additionally, the placebo effect is, itself, short term. The longest known placebo effect is two and a half years. Any study that goes over that is just assumed to be free of placebo effects. So, not only does Kirsch avoid the studies that select out the mentally ill from the temporarily distressed, he also avoids studies where the placebo effect is eliminated or minimized due to the long term nature of the studies. Double whammy.
Indeed, the very idea of the placebo effect is itself under fire - using methods similar to Kirsch's, but with larger data sets over longer periods of time, Asbjørn Hróbjartsson and Peter Gøtzsche have basically demonstrated that there is no clinically significant placebo effect. So, who's right? Kirsch who says that antidepressants are placebos or Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche who say that the placebo effect is clinicially insignificant?
This is awful methodology. It's simply scientifically unethical to ignore the data that contradicts your conclusions, to study only those things that allow you to be right. To have scientific legitimacy, Kirsch must address long term studies that are free of the placebo effect and the growing body of evidence that the placebo effect is not clinically significant. He does not do this.
One might ask, then, why he can get these high falutin' jobs, like the University of Leeds and now, well, he works at Harvard. Remember what I said about Cyril Burt, The Bell Curve and evolutionary psychology - psychology is a field full of quacks, even at the highest levels of education and research.
Not to mention this is a highly politicized area. There are a lot of people who simply reject the idea that mental illness has a physical component. I'll talk more on that in a bit, but my point here is that there are a lot of people who actively reject the idea of mental illness, who believe that mentally ill people should "pull themselves up by their bootstraps", or seek solace in religion, or "just get over it". (Thomas Szasz published, in 1961, The Myth of Mental Illness - a book that was just reprinted last year and still has considerable influence; see also The Manufacture of Madness and more recently The Manufacture of Depression, which came out last year - and it goes back as far as the written language goes - there are always people who say mental illnesses don't really exist, you can read about it in medieval sources, in classical antiquity; Pythagoras said that depression was merely lack of self control, akin to laziness; Hippocrates believed that melancholia - what we call depression, nowadays - was an imbalance of the four humors, which is to say a medical problem. This argument is ongoing, but nowadays is largely farcical. The medical basis of mental illness is well understood.) They are emboldened by a researcher like Kirsch, who gives the air of legitimacy to their beliefs.
Science is not some purely intellectual field - it takes money to do it, and the people in charge of that money are not, by and large, scientists. They are corporations and political bodies, pursuing their own agendas. But no one brings it up that there are non-scientific social forces that reject mental illness for no good reason - but then use their status in order to support research in that area. As an example, the University of Oklahoma's geology department is the ConocoPhillips School of Geology and Geophysics. Guess what their position on global climate change is? This is as true in psychology as geology - people with social and political agenda control research funding and publication. And there have always been people who are swift to side with people who say that mental illness isn't physical, that it's a defect in will or character. It goes back at least as far as Pythagoras and Hippocrates!
Additionally, there's just the prima facie stupidity of asserting that you can effect mood with drugs. I mean, prima facie. There are a huge number of studies about the effects of drugs on mood, not to mention nearly every adult reading this has personal experience with alcohol lifting their spirits and lowering their social anxiety. Even more powerful are the opiates - it is impossible to be depressed when you're on Percocet. Unfortunately, these drugs have such dangerous side effects that it is unethical to administer them or they must be administered very carefully. But it's absurd to say that drugs can't effect mood and feelings. It's silly and juvenile! The only question is to what extent does a given drug effect our feeling of depression. That drugs can alter our feeling of depression is simply prima facie true.
The aquisition of funding and possession of high titles does not make a person right. It only means that someone in a position of power agrees with what you say and is willing to give you money to prove it. While it shapes all scientific endeavors to some degree, it is particular pernicious in a field where there is no theory. In psychology's theoretical void, their lack of agreement about what the mind is, anything goes. So you come up with racist crap justifying eugenics and people doubting the physiological origins of mental illness.
Which brings me to the theoretical problems I have with Kirsch's work and all work that supposes a mind/body dualism. Kirsch believes that depression isn't a brain disease. Well, for crying out loud, man, what kind of disease can it be, then? Because all the actual evidence suggests that the mind and the brain are the same thing. All mental activity - thought, reason, emotion, perception - they're all brain activity. If depression exists at all, it must exist as a brain disease because that's where the mind is located. To say that you believe that depression exists but isn't a brain disease makes as much sense as saying you believe in heart attacks but it's not a heart disease.
But we live in a world that is steeped in dualism - the belief that there is some sort of perfected, non-physical sense that exists independent of our flesh. Sometimes it's called the soul, but just as often it's called the mind and the two are mixed up in religion and culture all the time. Dualism is present in all the world's largest religions.
However, that's not science. Science has never been able to find a soul. It has never been able to find a mind separate from the brain. Meaning, Kirsch is proposing something preposterous, again: that you can have a mental illness that isn't in the brain.
I can't say it's short, but those are my main reasons for thinking Kirsch is a quack.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)