I have lots of strong and compelling evidence that my self-control is unusually low. Doctors have said that since I was very young, so if anybody was making an excuse, it was the adults around me more than myself and I simply internalised those excuses later.
It's extremely humiliating, and I've gone a lot further than listening to the daily stoic, there's an entire body of scientific literature on how to improve self-control in general and for people like me who seem to have literal neurological abnormalities. I've spent the last few weeks miserable from medication side-effects for instance.
IQ tests being invalid is more politics than science. Among other things, rejecting the existence of cognitive inequality is necessary to justify systemic racism via the continued existence of Asian quotas (Affirmative Action). Since lots of people benefit from this racism, there’s a huge interest in denial. In western countries, when there’s a few billion people in Asia, and you let a tiny amount in gatekeeping them on the basis of education/wealth/skills, it isn’t really all that much of a shock that they and their children are smarter then average. The only way this could NOT happen is if Asians were LESS intelligent than other groups on average.
IQ tests are hilariously predictive of success if you’re doing a task which is similar to taking an IQ test like academics. They strongly indicate certain mental disorders. Low IQ is more predictive of success than High IQ. Maybe people take the difference between scoring a FSIQ of 110 vs 140 entirely too seriously, but the difference between somebody with 60 vs 90 is staggering.
Avoiding situations in which I need to think on the fly. If I'm playing a game, I play a turn based game, not a real time game. Why do what you're bad at and will never be great at?
Sadly one of the places where quick wittedness is most essential is face to face social interaction so at some point you just have to bite the bullet and do things you're worse at than others.
No, I think I will stand by my position that the vaccines did in fact slow the spread, especially early on. I think there is LOTS of evidence about the vaccines effects on transmission which points to them being effective.
Also think back to before we had good evidence on transmissibility/infection. Myocarditis hit the young, who were the last to be vaccinated, and consequently among the last to be researched. So the evidence of the vaccinations effects on transmissibility/infection led the evidence about myocarditis. Before either of those bits of evidence came out, the vaccines were nevertheless VERY effective at reducing hospitalisations from COVID-19 caused by early strains in those initial trials. I've also only really heard of the Pfizer trial's being severely criticised after the fact.
So there was good cause to get vaccinated the entire time, although the value of vaccination kept dropping as new strains kept cropping up which were seemingly less impaired by vaccination, and after omicron I saw a huge amount of people start to skip vaccination.
I was in a private discussion group during the pandemic that "did their own research"
First off, this was genuinely valuable during the first few months. Gigantic medical institutions were moving at a glacial pace and were making proclamations literally months behind the state of the research. In order to conserve masks, propaganda was put out that masks were only effective if you were a medical professional, and the most common way I saw this rationalised was that the general public was simply too stupid to wear a mask in a sanitary way. So I proceeded to wear a mask in a sanitary way. Then after a few months mask stocks started to pile up so propagandists THEN pronounced that more science was conducted and masks were actually effective for everybody!
That positive outcome aside, what other people saw was that the younger people got, the lower the risks of COVID, and the higher the risks of getting vaccinated. In fact, it seemed from the numbers (This is for the earlier strains of COVID), that for certain populations (young people who lived like hermits, in other words, hacker news readers) it could be on a selfish individual basis, be irrational to get the COVID vaccine. The risk from myocarditis could actually outweigh the risk of COVID itself. It was however, always in the collective interest for as many people to get vaccinated as possible, to reduce the transmission of COVID, and reduce the consequent strain on medical resources and the direct/indirect deaths this caused. Public health institutions did not get into this nuance, because it wasn't in the collective interest, so they just told everybody the vaccine was good for you. I proceeded to get vaccinated, and the main person I held discussions with did not, after both drawing the exact same scientific conclusion. Not every anti-vaccer was stupid, some of them were just massive civil libertarians.
What I saw from people who DIDN'T do their own research is that they were UNIFORMLY misinformed because they tended to either believe institutions who would lie to them whenever it served their purposes (2 weeks to flatten the curve!), or believed whatever podcaster told them about Ivermectin.
I'm not dismissive of education. I learn on the job. I learn in my free time. I learn to further my career. I learn to help myself out. I learn for fun.
What I resent is the absurd idea that going to a brick and mortar institutions for 4, 6, maybe 10 years, following a track the teacher and administration considered best, with the vast majority of those being educated getting an outdated curriculum, is an effective means of learning. This entire attitude is portrayed as pro-education but it's really just pro-institution. It's only an effective means of learning insofar that the credential you get at the end can open doors to opportunities to learn, a point I will readily concede.
I also have done amateur medical research in my spare time and literally printed out some papers and taken them to my doctor and said "let's do this". This ended up being very successful and very productive. It's not what the OP did is something people who did fancy book lernin' through a SCHOOL can do only after years of toil. You can just pick up the skills you need as you go and get reasonable results.
I suppose they figured, quite reasonably, that things written in the 60's would be updated by 2038 and to address this problem was premature optimisation. In the 2000s 64-bit went mainstream which gave us a solid ~30 years to tackle this issue. 32-bit time was introduced in a time where there was a very real argument for it in terms of performance, simplicity, and cost.
I'm not even sure if in hindsight the wrong decision was made.
Adblock Plus is already like this and everybody technical quickly realised the reality of an advertising "Whitelist" instantly creates a de facto protection racket where getting an exclusion from the adblocker becomes a valuable commodity. It's worth paying WHATEVER the adblock operator is asking to get on the whitelist. Adblock Plus got big bucks from Google who in turn have saved billions from striking a deal with them. The small guys - well they got screwed - you need to go through certain well financed ad networks to deliver "Acceptable ads". Adblock Plus is still popular for some reason but I don't know any technical people who still use it because well it's corrupt and hostile to its own users and has a clear drop-in replacement.
In the opinion of the vast majority of adblocker users, agree with it or not, ALL advertisers are bad actors. So they will never voluntarily choose filter lists which allow "good ads" the vast majority of the time. As such this will only happen if you get the adblocker to set allowing "acceptable ads" as a default, which makes what you're talking about INTRINSICALLY corrupt and paternalistic. If you want people to actually do this, show up at the houses of Adblock developers with suitcases of money, plenty of drugs, and beautiful prostitutes and whisper sweet stories into their ears about how they can help small businesses find markets for their products. Sadly ublock origin's developers appear to be incorruptible.
Google has figured out trying to push "acceptable ads" any harder is pointless and has instead moved to simply make adblocking technically harder to do by taking control of web standards.
So I think there's lots of examples of diagnosis's helping individuals, my specific concern is why it is if all this diagnosis is apparently just helping everybody, why is the general population getting more mentally sick over time? I can think of only two reasons -
1: That the mental health system is actively harmful at the population level.
or
2: That the mental health system is impotent to address mental health issues (more keen on this idea honestly, but I can't even rule out 1)
The latter case means that the mental health system could be helping, but at the very least, the mental health system is a distraction from the bigger issue of mental health. I believe declines in mental health are driven by things like increasing inequality, scarcity, competitiveness, loneliness, and so on which we can't nessecarily solve by telling people you are disordered with such and such so live in such and such a way and you can maybe be better adapted to a society which has their collective mental health in freefall which I dunno is something but it's pretty depressing.
P.S. I specifically resent the label of "disorder" in general and think that label is part of the problem, because no matter how you spin it, somebody saying you are "disordered" is an insult, and as we call more and more of the population disordered I think the adjective will become untenable to keep using. I'm more keen on the concept of neurotypes, because neurotypes CAN be negative, and CAN require accommodation, and CAN require treatment, but none of those things are NECESSARILY true becuase "neurotype" isn't loaded in the same way "disorder" is. If you discover your "neurotype" you can try tools and techniques that helped others with that same neurotype. Whereas the word "disorder" sort of has an intrinsically negative connotation, and I don't think it's medically necessary for psychiatrists to regularly insult their patients.
The mental health system is so condescending and some of the shitty things they do don't really get examined or critically looked at that much. Like why don't we ask, is telling millions of people they are "disordered" likely to improve their mental health and confidence and self-esteem? Probably not and it's totally viable to avoid doing this.
I'm drawing a distinction between "mental illness" and "mental illness diagnosis" that I maybe didn't make entirely clear. I think the former is increasing, but the latter is increasing faster than the former.
Generally I think mental illness will remain in the dark ages so long as there is a divide between neurologists and psychiatrists, and so long as the ICD and DSM are the gold standard of diagnosis. Mental illness is mostly defined based on others perception of you, and is rarely defined based on any sort of psychological testing. There are a few which can be objectively tested for like Alzheimers but they're in the minority.
It's not a contradiction, I'm saying that an underlying increase in mental illness plausibly explains some of the effect, but I'm unconvinced it explains the entire effect.
Why is more diagnosis better diagnosis? I hear this constantly, literally every time people point out we might be calling people mentally ill now that we wouldn't have called mentally ill 20 years ago people go "wow we must be diagnosing people better". To me better diagnosis would be reflected in things like the suicide rate dropping, drug abuse falling, general health metrics improving, and so on, not in simply increasing the amount of people we give labels and medicalise.
I am so incredibly unconvinced that labelling a bunch of people as mentally ill is "better" because the more we're diagnosed people as mentally ill, the more things like suicide have increased. Now obviously that can be due to an underlying increase in mental illness driving suicide, the thing is the diagnosis itself and the resulting differential treatment of society and your self-perception of yourself can be the cause of that mental illness. Making the diagnosis a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So far the increase in diagnosis over time has completely failed to actually improve peoples mental health. I am constantly perplexed at why nobody is worried about this. It seems how we diagnose people is totally unconnected from any empirical data on if a culture more willing to diagnose people is making people healthier on a population-wide level. To me it seems like most evidence points to the population-wide trend getting worse and the increase in diagnosis being a failure making people sicker, and I can't help but also notice many of those who advocate that the increase in diagnosis is a great thing have a conflict of interest and financially benefit from more people being labelled ill.
A lot of the stats cited are ultimately subjective assessments of things like mental health. Calling more people "bipolar" or "depressed" or "anxious" can just as easily be a change in language as to what those words mean, as easily as they can reflect a change in the underlying language and how people express things. Notably the definition of most mental illnesses in the country Haidt is pulling his data from changed in 2013 due to the release of the DSM-V, so I don't really think pre-2013 data is comparable to post-2013 data at all, as these words in question are not medically or socially defined in the same way that they were before. In fact one of the most common criticisms of the DSM-V when it was being drafted to the present day is the allegation that it leads to more mental illness diagnosis's.
Attempted suicide is one of the few stats I treat as grounded relatively firmly in reality because it's not nearly as subjective, but this measure seems to have started skyrocketing in the mid 2000's not in 2012.
If the conclusion is that the rise of the internet has caused more and more teens to label themselves as mentally ill, I would say that's a conclusion I'm firmly convinced of. The conclusion that mental illness is actually increasing population wide, I'm very very sceptical of. I could imagine that it's happening to an extent due to things like economic pressures and increased inequality, we are seeing things like declines in lifespans and increases in suicide, but I don't think mental illness is increasingly nearly as much as the stats would lead you to believe at face value.
Plus quite simply, using time series data about when mental illness increased in society doesn't really shed much light on WHAT caused the mental illness to rise even if you can establish such a rise was happening, but I'm not even convinced by the date "2012".
Or maybe posting all our creative output on large searchable databases actually amplifies creativity due to tools like AI whereas aimless boredom tends to result in local efforts such as scribbling?
An organization which runs an extremely useful non-for-profit business that runs the occasional nagging ad and flies some oversalaried executives around to ego-boosting events is hugely inoffensive to me. I mean honestly, I don't think say Microsoft goes a week without doing a dozen worse things to its users.
I’ve heard a lot of “data is the new oil” talk and the inevitability of google’s dominance yet I’m inclined to agree with you. Stable diffusion was a big wakeup call where it was clear how much value freedom and creativity really had.
The ethics problem is an artifact of googles model of trying to keep their AI under lock and key and carefully controlled and opaque to outsiders in how the sausage gets made and what it’s made out of. Ultimately I think many of these products will fail because there is a misalignment between what Google thinks you should be able to do with their AI and what people want to do with AI.
Whenever I see an AI ethicists speak I can’t help but think of priests attempting to control the printing press to prevent the spread of dangerous ideas completely sure of their own morality. History will remember them as villains.
It's extremely humiliating, and I've gone a lot further than listening to the daily stoic, there's an entire body of scientific literature on how to improve self-control in general and for people like me who seem to have literal neurological abnormalities. I've spent the last few weeks miserable from medication side-effects for instance.