towards a gentler world

First, I would recommend you be really careful about how you think about things. There’s a lot of talk about “productivity”, and words like “NPC” can be pretty scary, but you’re under no obligation to treat your life as some giant quest towards a particular goal, or even to have “projects”. If you are happy hanging out, doing your job, and helping your family, this is exactly what you should be doing and there’s no reason to insist on more. If you really want to help, donate 10% to charity.

If you have some kind of feeling that you should be doing more, try interrogating that feeling until you find a specific shortcoming. For example, if you feel like it’s sad you’re not doing more things with your family, then instead of saying “I feel like an NPC”, say “I feel like I should do more things with my family”. Then sit down and see if you can think of an easy way to solve this - like making a list of ten things it would be fun to do with your family and doing one per month.

I propose: “the assumption that women are the powerless sex, so a woman is inherently incapable of harming others.”

Just as men who buy into toxic masculinity are at risk of becoming abusers, women who buy into toxic femininity are at risk of becoming abusers.  

“I couldn’t possibly be hurting you, I’m just a woman, I can’t be held responsible for my actions, no matter what I do I’m inherently harmless!!” is the kind of insane troll logic that rationalizes genuinely scary and violent behavior.

Hmmm, so -

Personally, for me, spaces where I’m treated better for acting more feminine suck, and they warp me in undesirable directions (like thinking more about my self-presentation than about my ideas or my goals), and the thing for me to do is to avoid them and hang out with people who reward things I actually valuable about myself. But that’s not an option for everyone, and it’s definitely not the best option for everyone. 

I think the big things to pay attention to are probably:

Does acting more feminine feel like ‘having to do extra work’ - in which case “is it worth doing this extra work for these benefits?” is the right question, and the answer might vary day to day, and you can vary your presentation accordingly?

Or does it feel like ‘having to pretend to be someone I’m not’, in which case you should probably not do it unless you’re currently in an extremely precarious situation where that makes a huge difference.

Or does it feel like ‘gradually shifting what I care about and what I think about towards something that I don’t want to be’, in which case, yeah, don’t do that to yourself.

It might be a little bit of each, and individual situations can get so complicated and specific that there’s no advice that covers all of them. But in general - you want to be around people who reward you for the traits you value about yourself. It’s really hard to have entirely intrinsic motivations to cultivate the traits you care about - it’s way easier for those traits to grow when they’re valued by everyone around you. It’s fundamentally kind of stifling to surround yourself with people who reward things you don’t like in yourself and who don’t care about the things you’re most proud of. 

When communicating to someone about a sensitive topic, I’ve found it’s helpful to explain why you want to talk about it. If you say you’re worried, or hurt, or just needed to get it off your chest, it can help the other person not get defensive and then more completely process what you’re saying. 

Many relationships die by a thousand little cuts. Little problems that on their surface are penny-ante. But the real offense, the hurt, is unresolved. And the little hurts pile up and the resentment builds until things fall apart.

It’s very easy for people to read a bad intent when you’re communicating a problem. Sometimes it’s a natural defense mechanism, if you think someone is just being shitty then you don’t have to really hear them. But it can just as often simply be an incorrect assumption. Communicating your intent can stop that from happening and help the conversation come to a more fruitful resolution.

Or “I suspect it’s just my anxiety, but I’m worried that you’re angry with me because you’ve been kind of quiet.” is better than just “Why are you so distant?”

you don’t have to be emotionless or conciliatory. it’s ok to express anger. just be mature about it, and respect the other person. don’t go on a power trip, don’t leverage your legitimate gripes to make them grovel. keep your eyes on the prize. if you don’t know what the prize is, the next step is to tell them so and invite them to help you figure it out, not to moan until they miraculously do the right thing at random. even when you’re super upset you can still apply these skills.

wrong: “this place is a damn landfill because nobody but me does any housework!”

right: “there is some serious housekeeping fail going on around here. it’s kinda driving me bugfuck. i want to sit down and take a look at how we do the housework, because how we’re doing it right now sucks.”

see how the second one doesn’t blame? blame’s not important. responsibility is important, but that has to be worked out calmly or it’s not going to be functional. the first person is picking a fight; the second person is trying to solve a problem. you’ll notice they’re not smoothing ruffled feathers or acting apologetic, they’re clearly quite annoyed. but they’re aiming their anger at the situation, not the person.

A couple months ago I left Friday evening, after work, for a trip up the coast with my girlfriend @suspected-spinozist. We drove up to Mendocino and spent the weekend hiking along the coast and exploring botanical gardens and having a lovely time, and then drove back down for work Monday.

I was basically useless the whole next week. I’d predicted that would happen, and I thought it’d be worth it (and it was absolutely worth it.) When I do things, I am spending my ability to do things. If I do things all weekend, I will find it nearly impossible to get anything done all week. I know exactly how much energy for extraneous tasks I have, and if I spend it I will start failing at my non-extraneous tasks, and if I push that I will start failing to eat. 

Because this is my experience of the world, resource conservation models of disability are super relatable to me. I experience really sharp tradeoffs between all of the things I care about. I frequently say no to doing something cool or fun or interesting because I need to save the energy. I have limited ability to do stuff, it regenerates slowly, and having to do stuff when I’m out of ability-to-do-stuff will set me back for even longer. For that reason, I spend lots of my energy on resource conservation - thinking and planning how to do as little stuff as possible while staying on top of my life.

The most common conservation model of disability is the ‘spoons’ one that originated in the chronic illness community. There’s been a lot of arguing over who gets to lay claim to ‘spoons’, but certainly anyone can lay claim to a resource conservation model in general. 

I talked recently to someone whose brain works very differently from mine. If they have the structures in place that they need to succeed, they will just keep on being able to do stuff until one of those structures breaks down. They can pack their weekend and then work all week; they can have something after work every single night. But if a structure crumbles on them, suddenly they can’t do much of anything.  The person I talked to was familiar with resource conservation models, and this really harmed them when their structures crumbled. They found advice to cut back on the stuff they were doing, save energy, commit to the minimum necessary, cancel plans. And none of that helped, plus it’s actually really depressing and isolating to do the absolute minimum you need to survive every day, so they ended up just as stuck and now without any of the things that made them happy. 

So I think there are people who, instead of a conservation model, benefit from a momentum model - they have a state in which they can get stuff done, and once they’ve built up the structures they’ve need they can just stay there and add stuff to the structure. If they lose their ability to do things there’s a structure that needs replacing - cutting back in general won’t help.

In practice, almost everyone is probably a mixture of these things. Even people who mostly run on momentum would probably hit the point where their ability to do stuff traded off against their ability to do other stuff if, say, they were cutting back on their sleep to crowd more things into their day. Even people who have to shepherd their resources really carefully sometimes have things (like blogging, for me) which are easy and effortless as long as it’s part of their daily routine. And I bet there are people who need to resource-conserve for physical activity but whose socialization or intellectual output is best modeled as a momentum thing, or conversely people who can exercise every day as long as it’s part of their routine but need to carefully plan when they’ll have to expend willpower on tasks like writing.

Even that, though, varies depending on where I am in my bipolar cycle. You mentioned people who need to resource-conserve for some activities but maintain momentum for other activities. I think I need to resource-conserve more when I’m hypomanic but maintain momentum more when I’m depressed.

When I’m *really* depressed, “momentum” might just mean keeping to a bare minimum of daily tasks: taking meds, going outside once, having one conversation over any medium with another person. What won’t really help is classic self-care activities like taking a bath or spending time with a good friend.

That said, this is how I define abuse:

Abuse is a persistent pattern of behavior that makes it hard for the abused person to set boundaries. This could be because the abused person expects to be physically attacked when they try to say "no", or it could be that they expect to be subjected to emotional stress that they can't deal with (like someone screaming at them, threatening suicide, or repeatedly begging them until they feel worn down and give in), or it could be that they no longer believe that they deserve to set boundaries at all (as a result of repeated shaming or gaslighting). The psychological effects of being abused can last long after the abusive relationship ends, making it hard for the abused person to set boundaries in similar situations in the future. 

Different behavior patterns can be abusive to different people: some people may find themselves unable to say no in the face of their friend/partner/etc threatening self-harm, and others might still be able to enforce their boundaries in this situation.

This also means that people who abuse aren't necessarily evil, nor do they always even know that they're being abusive. If your default way of processing emotional pain is to rage and throw things, then that's certainly unhealthy, but if your friend doesn't feel pressured to give in to your demands when you're raging, then your friend is not being abused. If your default method of dealing with emotional stress is to cry uncontrollably and ask for many hours of emotional support, and your partner finds that they can't refuse you even in cases where they're really not up for providing multiple hours of emotional support, then this could be a potentially abusive situation for your partner, but it's also not clear that anyone is really at fault.

(This also means that some potentially-abusive situations are fixable by identifying situations where you find it hard to set boundaries, communicating that to your partner, and working together to come up with solutions or workarounds. If you try this and your partner is dismissive, or thinks that it's not important for you to always be able to say no to them, then this is a very huge red flag.)

If you can’t deal with lots of noise, touch, and people in general, obviously you aren’t going to like public transit.

If you can’t deal with sitting still and putting continuous boring low-level effort into keeping control of something, you’re not going to enjoy driving.

The Chronicle of Higher Education article

Google Drive link with all the papers and the review comments

Here’s the trio’s essay about it. At times, I think they’re deliberately vague about which ridiculous papers were accepted and which weren’t. Here’s a paragraph of theirs:

We used other methods too, like, “I wonder if that ‘progressive stack’ in the news could be written into a paper that says white males in college shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can ‘experience reparations.’” That was our “Progressive Stack” paper. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it. Another tough one for us was, “I wonder if they’d publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The answer to that question also turns out to be “yes,” given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it.

The parallel structure of the paragraph, with ‘The answer to that question also turns out to be “yes”’ elides the very different fates of the two papers. Hypatia didn’t publish the Progressive Stack paper, and in fact they rejected it three times. But phrasing it this way, you can describe in the same paragraph as an accepted paper, and many people won’t remember the difference. (Here’s a Harvard lecturer’s thread, with 10,000 Twitter Likes, describing the Progressive Stack paper as accepted.)

The coverage has been even worse. Here’s a Quillette piece on it, with a part that a Facebook friend quoted:

[Hypatia] invited resubmission of a paper arguing that “privileged students shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class at all and should just listen and learn in silence,” and that they would benefit from “experiential reparations” that include “sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or intentionally being spoken over.” The reviewers complained that this hoax paper took an overly compassionate stance toward the “privileged” students who would be subjected to this humiliation, and recommended that they be subjected to harsher treatment.

This isn’t just wrong; if anything, the reviewers opposed the shaming technique. Here are the full review comments for all three rejections of the paper. I don’t see any concern for an overly compassionate stance, or any recommendation of harsher treatment. When a reviewer does mention it, their concern is that it might be ineffective, and they’re uncomfortable with it. Here’s a quote from the second rejection:

What are experiential reparations? Say more about this. Also, some of your suggestions strike me as “shaming.” I’ve never had much success with shaming pedagogies, they seem to foment more resistance by members of dominant groups.

And from the same reviewer in the third rejection:

Find a place for the experiential reparations. This still makes me feel uncomfortable, because it’s shame-y and I’m not sure that student can see it otherwise.

After reading the reviewer comments, I’m very sympathetic to the reviewers, and I update toward thinking that their field is not a made-up illegible jargon-fest. They say things like:

“There are dozens of claims that are asserted and never argued for.”

“The author promises to explore key terms and explain why they are applicable to the classroom. They introduce: epistemic violence, epistemic oppression, epistemic violence, testimonial smothering, privilege-evasive epistemic pushback, epistemic exploitation, testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, willful ignorance, virtuous listening, and strategic ignorance. This is too much ground to cover!!”

“The scholarship is not as sound as it could be; that is, the basic structure of the argument is plausible and interesting, but the submission has far too many issues that get in the way of a clear and sound presentation of the author’s argument.”

“I think these are basically good insights, they need to be argued for more clearly and not just asserted as true. They are interesting claims, say more, say how, say why, and don’t just assert…Explain.”

These aren’t possible comments from a field full of fashionable nonsense that doesn’t mean anything. I’m sad to contemplate the reviewers trying to help someone fix the mistakes in their paper, while the authors’ intention is to slip through as many mistakes as possible. As the editor wrote in an encouraging cover letter:

At the same time ref #1 is encouraging about your revisions. You’ll note that ref #1 says, for example, that it’s your earlier improvements that have generated some of the new problems that need attention!

See also this Twitter thread by one of the reviewers for the Masturbation is Rape paper (which was rejected). It’s sad - he rejected the paper, but wrote some encouraging things, and the hoaxers quoted the positive parts in their essay.

I haven’t looked at all the papers in detail; this isn’t a thorough investigation of all of it. Maybe I happened across the least-bad papers and the most-misleading coverage first. I think the “fat bodybuilding” paper is just as bad as it sounds: “fat bodybuilding” would be unhealthy, unpopular, and no sport has ever been started by someone proposing it in a paper to an obscure journal.

But other accepted papers, I think, use a trick: invent some fake data of interest to the journal, and include a discussion section with some silly digressions. The journal accepts the paper because the core is the interesting data, and then the hoax coverage says that the paper is about the silly digressions. For example, the core of the dog park paper is a fake observational study showing that humans, especially males, are faster to stop male-on-male dog sexual encounters than male-on-female sexual encounters. I think that’s fine; it is actually indicative of heteronormativity or homophobia or whatever. The paper also has an angle about canine rape culture, and that is indeed silly, but the paper is not best described, as The Chronicle of Higher Education did, as being “about canine rape culture in dog parks in Portland”.

There are things to learn from this whole thing. I have a lower opinion of fat studies than I did before. But I have a higher opinion of the various fields that correctly objected to ideology-pleasing buzzword-filled digressions, and I wish the coverage noted that in equal measure. I get the impression you have to fake some interesting data to get much Sokal-style fashionable nonsense through, and even then, they’ll catch most of it.

(Maybe I’m minimizing the ridiculousness of what did get past the reviewers. I think a younger, more idealistic version of me would have been more shocked by it, like the commenters at Hacker News who think that peer review should be able to detect fabricated data. My mild reaction is partly due to not expecting Idealized Science-level rigor of these fields to start with.)

So there are at least two important roles that need to be filled when an accusation of a serious wrongdoing comes out. 

Firstly, you need people who are capable both of being impartial and of seeming impartial, in order to create confidence that they’re looking into the issue with an absolute commitment to the truth. You need them to be able to avoid getting overwhelmed by the horrifying details of horrifying cases, to listen and pay attention and reason and notice discrepancies. This role is not incompatible with compassion and empathy for people who’ve been through awful things - in fact, it absolutely requires it, because you need to be able to create the conditions under which they feel comfortable sharing complicated stories with you. But it’s incompatible with a lot of ways that many people need compassion and empathy actually demonstrated.

So you also need people who will just see someone who needs it and commit themselves to being the strongest possible advocate for that person. This is formalized in our actual legal system, obviously, but it’s needed in communities too. This is what ‘I believe survivors’ is all about, of course - it’s not a claim that cases should be decided in favor of the person who first files a report, it’s saying ‘I’m taking the role where, if you tell me something awful happened to you, I will be your advocate’. This doesn’t require believing everything someone says, and can still involve a lot of investigation and fact-seeking, but it’s centered on being someone who they don’t regret telling their story. 

A community that is all advocates is going to have problems. Being an advocate doesn’t have to make it impossible to figure out the truth, and it’s completely possible to figure out the truth from a neutral position and then become an advocate, but I think it does substantially complicate truth-seeking. And advocates for different people are likely to end up yelling at each other, and this only gets resolved by who has more energy for yelling. And there’s no one to look to for a clear, honest picture of the situation.

I think it’s almost always appropriate to call out racism on Facebook but it’s often a bad use of your time and energy. For example, if a post floats onto your news feed that’s mostly a bunch of strangers yelling about how the Mexicans are taking our jobs, you’re not acting inappropriately if you call that out but you are very likely to spend a lot of time, change no minds, and reward Facebook’s algorithms for showing you (and your friends, once you get into the argument) a lot of horribleness that’s not worth your time. 

This sounds different; a group you joined that discusses topics you care about is much more likely to be one where it’s worth your time to point out problems. 

My impression of the most productive way to do callouts is this:

1) Think about what your desired outcome is. Is there a specific, factual point that people are wrong about and that you’d like to correct? Are people framing true things in a distorted or misleading way, and you want to call out the distortions? Are people having an honest conversation in which one party is using a lot of racist and white nationalist buzzwords, such that you want to make everyone aware that they’re likely not arguing in good faith? Are they having a good faith argument that happens to be premised on a racist assumption because society contains lots and lots of those? 

The more clearly you understand what you want, the clearer it’ll be to other people, and the easier it’ll be to get your point across. 

2) Assume good faith as much as is reasonable (and possibly more than is reasonable). 

To be clear, if someone says something racist to you and you say ‘fuck you’, you’re not doing anything wrong. No one has an obligation to put all of their time and energy into being able to be charming towards people who mistreat them. But if you’re engaging with someone as activism - that is because you want to make the world better - then you should do what works, and I really think that what works to change minds is starting discussions honestly, optimistically and in good faith. That way, if this is a genuine misunderstanding or lack of being informed, it gets resolved civilly and everyone learns from it. If it’s a bad actor, then they don’t get to look like the victim. It’s a win either way. 

I would open by asking ‘what do you mean by that?’ ‘it sounds like you’re saying that you think some people are of more value than others, is that what you’re claiming?’ ‘I usually hear people say what you just said when they think that X, is that where you’re coming from, here?’

3) Dispute both factual claims and framings/implications, but differently. 

You can’t win an argument over racism just by winning all of the sub arguments that are about factual claims; lots of racism is about tacking a specific framing to true facts like ‘America arrests black and brown people more’ or ‘conservative Islam has misogynistic teachings’. You should definitely make a point of arguing false factual things someone is saying, but you should also dispute statements like the above, saying ‘America has incredibly selective enforcement of its laws, and also criminalizes things because marginalized groups do them’ or ‘conservative Christianity and conservative Hinduism and conservative Judaism also have misogynistic teachings’ or whatever.4) If you don’t have the energy to do all of that, it’s totally okay to just register disagreement. 

Yes! Poverty is systemic. We all know this. But one of the fun things about growing up in poverty is that YOU DON’T LEARN HOW TO BUDGET OR SAVE MONEY. Nobody teaches you that shit when you grow up poor! Or, if they do, it’s a slapdash version of how to budget for poor people (so, like, groceries from the 99-cent store, getting the supersize meal because it’ll feed you for two meals) – not middle-class budgeting, obviously – so if/when you DO end up making more money, you have no idea what the fuck to do with it and a lot of unhealthy spending habits attached to/associated with never having steady sources of income before. So yeah, actually, piggy bank saving/simple budgeting instructions and honest personal finance advice (from third parties who won’t profit, not from banks looking to take advantage of people who don’t know what to do with their money) is actually hugely important. Teaching poor people how to budget is important, because it’s an adult skill you just don’t learn if you’re not specifically taught.

then there was The Dialectic of “poor people deserve nice things”/”a refrigerator or cell phone or car is not a nice thing if you need it to live” plus “being poor is expensive” and “here is a chart showing that people are poor because of health care and housing cost increases not petty budgeting problems.” and that was all great! and true and based on real data! 

but as this post rightfully points out, that response ossified into a kneejerk hostility toward any and all budgeting advice for the poor, which is terrifically unhelpful.

you know what it sounds like? tumblr’s mental health discourse.

start with mainstream concepts of mental health treatment: “exercise! meditate! have you tried kale smoothies! just stop stressing out so much!” all that nonsense. neurodivergent tumblr mocks those tropes to the skies, and in the process they find solidarity, erase shame, and create a better culture of mutual support and acceptance, which is an important first step toward real recovery. 

but then the mocking of any and all recovery advice became too ingrained in tumblr culture, to the point that setting any mental health goals at all becameindistinguishable from imposing ablist, unrealistic standards. an ADHD user who posted “isn’t it nice to just sit down and focus” about her new medication got dogpiled by people who thought they were defending the marginalized.

thus again there is a Dialectic, this time in the form of “why is tumblr so anti-recovery,” and “sometimes self-care is doing HARD things,” and “you CAN actually take productive charge of your thoughts using cognitive behavioral tactics,” and so on. which is great! but if you don’t keep your eye on why tumblr developed its anti-recovery attitude in the first place, you’ll end up recreating the conditions under which that attitude developed because you’ll start to sound just like the kale smoothie people.

anyway. I think OP got it more or less on the money with this particular response, but my dash definitely shows a lot of insensitivity to the great ongoing back-and-forth that is tumblr. 

These dialectic pendulums - which, by the way, are not unique to Tumblr, we can see them writ large in societies if we look at the oscillation of social norms - gradually seem to converge on better norms sometimes, but when they are nuanceless they inevitably create gaping cracks for countless people to fall though, spread oversimplified perspectives which ultimately harm people.

A more nuanced pendulum would swing far less violently and hurts less people in the process.

I don’t know if we as a species can actually hope for better any time soon, because this is how people are by default and it takes consistent individual effort for each of us to be better, and I myself have chosen to work at being concise at times knowing full well the costs in light of this.

My fiance (who was at the time between grad school and a job) paying $535 to file the petition for me to come to the US, and me thinking that if he didn’t have rich parents, we couldn’t do this

Waiting 6 months for k1 visa to be processed and sent to the embassy. 

While I wait, worrying about how my history of mental illness will affect my visa eligibility.

Looking up horror stories about the medical exam

Reflecting how relatively privileged I am, compared to most aspiring immigrants.

Being asked to pay £300 for a medical examination, plus the costs of travelling to London and stayong overnight, to check I am medically allowed to get a visa (and getting the money from Rob, and again realising that if he didn’t have rich parents I wouldn’t be able to jump through the legal hoops to marry him)

Going to the medical exam. Being asked to strip in front of a stranger, who loudly counts my scars

Bing told, because of my history of depression and suicide attempts, they will need more information about my medical history. Worrying I will be denied a visa.

Getting my GP to send the information.

Receving no response from the embassy doctors, because they gave my GP the wrong sddress to send the information to.

Having to make many, many stressful phone calls to my GP and the embassy doctors to find out this is the problem.

Getting my GP’s administrator (who works for the NHS, and who is taking time out of her day from helping people WHO ARE ACTUALLY CURRENTLY SICK, to comply with this stupid ableist gate-keeping bullshit) to send it all again to the right address. Feeling kinda guilty for wasting her time but not having another option that isn’t “break up with Rob” or “ask Rob to leave his family and his career because I didn’t want to waste a woman’s time”)

Not receiving any apology from the embassy doctors for giving the wrong address (but receiving lots of apologies from my GP’s administrator, even though it’s not her fault)

Being told by the embassy doctors that it is all fine, and now all I have to do is schedule a visa interview at the Embassy

Scheduling a visa interview at the embassy. Having to pay hundreds of pounds again (I can’t remeber how much, but it was just shy of £300) and reflecting, again, that if Rob had the same income as me and no rich parents this would all be impossible.

Being contacted by the embassy doctors again and being told, "Atually we made a mistake, you will need another assessment with a psychiatrist. Yes, you will have to come down to London to see our approved psychiatrist. You will have to pay another fee, but don’t worry, it’s only about £350.” Wanting to scream at the phrase “only about £350.” Telling myself it’s oky because I can get Rob to pay for it. Knowing that if Rob wasn’t a data scientist who comes from money, I would not be allowed to marry him and there must be so many poor people whose internet-born relationships die for this reason and being so angry and exhausted.

Trying not to be too mad because there are so many WORSE injustices in the US immigration system, because this system literally KILLS people and I am just being inconvenienced

Being very mad that this system literally kills people. Being so mad I am shaking physically. Deciding to think about nothing at all, curling in the fetal position and pretending I am a snail curled up in its shell and the whole universe has disappeared and there is only happy numb little snail!me safe in the shell which is now the limits of existence.

Wondering if I really want to move to a country that is too interested in “freedom” to provide a proper social safety net, but not interested enough in freedom to let me in if my self-harm is “likely to recur”. Deciding I do, because Rob is there. Also because one day I want to become a citizen and say “This is AMERICA! We have FREEDOM! If you look down on people who choose to cut their OWN ARMS with their OWN KNIVES, you are being UNPATRIOTIC!”

Also, reading the news, and remembering Britain is not much better.

Trying to schedule an appointment with their approved psychiatrist. Being told he is on holiday for two and a half months.

Calling the embassy doctors again, and finally getting the number of another approved psychiatrist. Scheduling an appointment the day before my interview at the embassy, so I only have to travel to London once. Refelcting that I might have been in huge trouble at work if that had been impossble and I’d had to take too much time off at short notice.

Wondering if the US applies these medical criteria to ALL potential immigrants. Wondering if refugees are ever denied asylum because their trauma makes them self-harm. Deciding NOT to google this because if the answer is yes I will turn into a ball of white-hot rage and cause the planet to explode.

Having my psychiatrist appointment. Having to re-live the worst experiences of my life in front of a stranger. Having to remain calm when I describe my suicide attempts because I don’t want to look like I am still crazy. Being asked invasive, medically irrelevant questions about my sex life. Having to explain the concept of mutual masturbation over Skype to a fifty-something stranger.

Wondering, briefly, if all this bullshit is worth it. Looking at a picture of Rob I have saved on my phone. Knowing it is worth it.

Going to the embassy interview. Being told they couldn’t issue a vis yet because even though I have had all the medical examinations done, they still need to read the reports from them. Being told my visa is not guaranteed until whoever reads the reports designates me as officially sane enough to be an American. Being told I will haveto wait for an email that will tell me this.

Briefly contemplating yelling “I AM A VERY STABLE GENIUS!” at the embassy official. Deciding against this course of action.

Reminding myself, for the zillionth time, that I am having a much better time than the vast majority of aspiring immigrants. Finding this horrifying rather than comforting.

Rage-donating to International Refugee Assistance Project.

Not being able to sleep properly for days while I wait for the email.

Getting the email. Feeling the second-greatest wave of relif in my life. (The greatest was when I realised that Hell is not real and death is truly the end.)

Revelling in being a VERY STABLE GENIUS

Thinking about all the people who did not get a good email. 

Thinking about all the people who are literally dead because of closed borders.

Thinking about how my own country (UK) de facto condemns people to death because of its hatred of refugees and economic migrants.

Thinking about all th people who died in the Holocaust because Britain and Amrica and many other countries dnied them asylum.

Thinking about how Einstein was very nearly denied escape from the Holocaust to America because of his left-wing views.

Thinking about how Ann Frank’s family died because they were denied refuge status in the US.

Thinking about how I have had to walk for a few months in a sewer of bullshit that comes up to my knees, but I’m fine now.

Thinking about how many people have drowned in the vast, vast ocean of bullshit that I don’t have to experience as a culturally-Christian white Anglophone from the first world.

Knowing that the amount of bullshit I have had to deal with is basically inconsequential COMPARATIVELY, but it’s still not fair.

Knowing I could still, thoretically, be denied entry when my plane lands.

Knowing that I will be taxed without representation for years before I can apply for citizenship. Being kind of okay with this weird irony in my particular case (someone jokes that, as I am British, this is “revenge for the redcoats”.) Being less okay with this irony in the case of huge immigrant populations - LEGAL immigrant populations - who are treated very badly by the government and who are taxed and who have no vote because they can’t afford the fee for citizenship.

If depressive realism were real, what would that mean?

What things would depressed people be ‘right’ about more than non-depressed people? What would a message of ‘depressed people are more accurate’ be useful for?  what would the potential tradeoffs be? How certain do you want to be before you tell depressed people that their understanding of the world is accurate, and more so than non-depressed people?

There isn’t even a question mark in that headline. Really irresponsible.

there are two things we care about in this therapy: truth, and salience. sometimes, unhappy, unpleasant, or unflattering things are true. sometimes you do fuck up at work. sometimes people ARE irritated by you. this is a fact about living.

your brain might be predisposed to believe the unflattering or unpleasant things though, so we want to interrogate claims on two axes:

-is this true?

-how much time do I think is reasonable for me to be thinking about this? / how much bandwidth does it make sense for this to take up?

so yeah, it might be that you screwed up a big project at work. assuming that’s really true, and you checked, some other questions*:

-is your brain being accurate about how much other people are thinking about this in relation to you? -when is it useful to be thinking about this? will things be improved by thinking about this when you are with your partner? will things be improved by staying up all night feeling bad about it? if yes, why? what are the tradeoffs? has it worked before? -is your brain balancing this against your other experiences at work? -is your brain generalizing this to how you are As A Person? -would your life be improved by thinking about this less? if no, what’s your sense of what the limit of thinking about this is? 80% of the time? 90? How did you figure this out? How will you know when you reach that limit, and what will you do then?

Others have made this argument better than I can, but essentially we’ve created a dichotomy between consensual sex and bad sex, so that anything consensual must be good sex. That means that people who had bad but consensual experiences are left with little language to tell their stories and be taken seriously. And people who aren’t sure whether their experiences were consensual are essentially told they’ve got to pick a side (consensual or no) in order to even begin to understand the event.

If the woman who accused Aziz Ansari had had access to a paradigm besides “consensual vs non”, I think she would’ve had more success reaching people who empathized with rather than vehemently rejected her experiences. She felt like a piece of meat, she felt used, like she was on an assembly line of girls he fucked, she felt like her whole opinion about what was happening didn’t particularly matter… These are real and highly relatable experiences, strong and clear feelings, but they all got swallowed up and diminished in the question of Was It Consensual. That question would determine whether her story deserved any airing at all.

There are so many ways sex can be bad besides the consent issue. It can feel objectifying, dehumanizing, physically painful, emotionally distant, embarrassing, awkward, deceptive, or just plain dull. Those things actually do matter. If your sexual partners repeatedly leave feeling ashamed and dehumanized, even though they consented throughout, that is actively harmful! You should be told and should correct your behavior! If this is your problem, it will not help to tell you it’s enough to ask for and obtain consent.

That’s very interesting, but it strikes me as just one facet of a bigger issue with statistical controls which has always unsettled me.  There is something oddly backwards about the whole idea.

You, the scientist, want to publish an exciting new study about some variable of interest called Y.  Everyone knows about ten different variables that “obviously” affect Y; call these, collectively, X.  A study saying “X affects Y!” would not be new or exciting.  No, you want to say that some other variable, Z, affects Y.  No one has discovered that yet.

A problem arises: Z is also associated, in various ways, with various of the ten components of X.  What if the correlation between Z and Y (or nonzero regression coefficient, or whatever) is just due to the already known X-to-Y association?  How can you tell?

The usual answer is: make some sort of model predicting Y from both X and Z, and show that the model uses some information from Z to predict Y, even though it knows about X, too.  Success!  Now you can claim that Z is associated with Y.  You are now free to forget about your model, which was merely a tool you used to draw this conclusion.  You didn’t really care about predicting Y, and you don’t care whether your model is the best model for predicting Y, or even a good one.  It has served its purpose, and into the dumpster it goes.

As I said, there is something backwards about this.  Your claim about Z and Y depended entirely on Z helping some model predict Y.  Clearly, the strength of your argument must depend on the quality of this model.  If the model is a bad model of the relationship between X and Y, before Z is even added to the picture, then it’s hard to conclude anything from what happens when you add in Z; if your model doesn’t capture the relationships we think are there in the first place, its use of Z could just be an attempt to “put them back in.”

(For example, someone’s BMI is inversely proportional to the square of their height.  The electrostatic force between an electron on someone’s head and an electron on their heel is also inversely proportional to the square of their height.  Suppose, absurdly, that someone tries to model the relationship between height and BMI by doing linear regression on the two.  This will fare poorly, because the relationship is inverse-square, not linear.  But if they add in the electrostatic force as a regressor, it will of course have a nonzero coefficient, and predict BMI much better than the height term.  This does not show that this force is associated with BMI “even controlling for height”!)

This was brought forcefully to my attention recently when I was reading a recent study about alcohol consumption and mortality.  The big punchline was that, in a huge meta-analysis, it only took something like 7 standards drinks / week (not the 14 specified in the US guidelines) to negatively impact mortality.

There was a big problem with this claim that has nothing to do with this post, namely that the researchers meant “the confidence interval for 7 drinks / wk just barely excluded no effect” (it was nearly symmetric about a hazard ratio of 1.0).  This is the same old problem where people try to figure out when an effect “turns on” or “turns off” by noticing when they start being able to reject the null, which is the kind of thing you are taught not to do in Stats 101 but which is nonetheless endemic in the medical literature.

But anyway, even after facepalming over that, I was curious about how the study adjusted for confounders.  So many things are associated with mortality, and so many things are associated with alcohol consumption – how do you disentangle it all?  And the authors clearly tried to do their due diligence on this front.  My eyes started to glaze over as I read the list of confounders they controlled for:

HRs were adjusted for usual levels of available potential confounders or mediators, including body-mass index (BMI), systolic blood pressure, high-density-lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), low-density-lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), total cholesterol, fibrinogen, and baseline measures for smoking amount (in pack-years), level of education reached (no schooling or primary education only vs secondary education vs university), occupation (not working vs manual vs office vs other), self-reported physical activity level (inactive vs moderately inactive vs moderately active vs active), self-reported general health (scaled 0–1 where low scores indicate poorer health), self-reported red meat consumption, and self-reported use of anti-hypertensive drugs.

My first reaction upon reading this was to think, “okay, some of these may or may not have been poorly operationalized, and that may have affected their results in problematic ways not captured in the sensitivity analyses in their appendix, or maybe not, because how the fuck would I know when there’s so much going on in their mortality model?”

And then I was like, wait.  They have a “mortality model.”  They’re only focusing on the coefficients for one variable, but it’s got a zillion variables in it.  It sounds like it could be the sort of model used by the people who are actually interested in predicting mortality as accurately as possible – say, insurance companies – as opposed to people who are just interesting in making claims about alcohol.

But they aren’t telling me how good their model is.  I have no idea if it’s similar to the models the insurance company people use, or if the insurance company people would turn up their noses at it.  Their model was created on the spot to make some claims about alcohol, and even if I spent a day scratching my head and trying to understand it, the next day I might read a paper with another mortality model, and have to repeat the process.  There must be hundreds of models like this, invented on the spot for the purposes of statistical controls, and then discarded.

Things that are part of your access to food which you’ll reliably eat are often load-bearing. If you get a lot of your calories from the free food at work, you should expect changing jobs to one without free food will throw you off your game. If you rely on the corner store then you should expect that moving to a new place where you have to get in the car to get groceries will be a problem. Going vegetarian can screw up something load-bearing for a lot of people (and I say that as someone who believes that factory farming is morally horrible). Going on a diet is reasonably likely to fuck up something load bearing, and I suspect this is part of why statistically dieting doesn’t work at improving peoples’ lives or health.

Things that are part of the environments you spend the most time in are reasonably likely to be load-bearing.The length of your commute, the environment you work in, whether your bedroom is clean, well-ventilated, high-ceilinged, has natural light, whether you have any space that you don’t share with another person…. for some people ‘having a car’ is loadbearing because it’s a space that is theirs and will reliably have their stuff and get them places. For other people, living somewhere where they can get places without a car is load bearing. 

Cleanliness needs are often load-bearing. This one especially sucks because you can get into a trap where your space gets chaotic/cluttered/awful and this breaks your brain and makes it harder to keep your space clean.

Pets are often load-bearing.

This might be influenced by who I hang out with, but I think personal time when you’re alone and no one has any claims on you is load bearing for a lot of people. Some people have their own room and know they need their own room, but lots of other people make do with a long commute where they can quietly listen to the radio, and don’t even realize that this is filling their need for introvert time until it changes.