Notable Links & Miscellanea - Sep 10, 2024
Notable Links & Miscellanea - Sep 10, 2024
Substack edition
I highly recommend:
Twin heritability models can tell you whatever you want to hear
Gene-environment interactions: ubiquitous yet undetectable. Polygenic models have revealed widespread GxE hiding under the surface of trait heritability
“The gap between low molecular heritability estimates and high twin heritability estimates could thus be explained by (a) rare and other genetic variants missed by the former (“missing heritability”); or (b) GxC interactions incorrectly assigned to genetics by the latter (“missing environments”). Could it be that twin studies have been estimating gene-environment interactions this whole time?”
(Complement Gusev’s post on polygenic embryo selection with my discussion of polygenic embryo screening for schizophrenia.)
In case you didn’t know, Eric Turkheimer (
) is on Substack:“The Nature of Nature,” a piece originally published in 2015 volume on philosophy of psychiatry, is provocative and worth-reading:
… the hallmark of genetic variation that does not play a specific mechanistic role is that the multivariate structure of the genetic variability is indistinguishable from the structure of the phenotype. We build the case that human personality is the first well-documented example of a well-defined domain of behavior that is demonstrably heritable in the Galtonian sense but has nevertheless resisted all forms of genetic explanation for so long that the time has arrived to declare it “phenotypic.”
In “Aftab on Brain Disorders,” Turkheimer kindly commented on earlier post of mine: Mental Disorders Both Are and Are Not Brain Diseases
Every post by
these days on is a treat!Why do people believe true things? Ignorance and misperceptions are not puzzling. The challenge is to explain why some people see reality accurately.
“Once you appreciate that the truth is not the default—that it is an exceptional, fragile, improbable achievement—it should shift how you approach social epistemology.”
Scott Alexander on
:“Lehman’s problem is that he doesn’t like it when he encounters an unkempt, smelly person behaving in an unpredictable and scary way.”
Pair this with a passage from my post on Jordan Neely:
“We have no societal response to madness, no therapeutic program, no system of care that honors the fundamental humanity and dignity of the mad. We treat them as a social nuisance. We do not care about the horrors and traumas of their lives, about the dreams and aspirations they have, about what they are capable of if they are provided the right supports. All we care about is that they are out of dangerous situations, medicated, off the streets and the subways, and off our minds.”
“Most of the time, when you find a therapist, the service you’re getting is an hour a week of talking to a kind, sympathetic, wise person who has seen many problems like yours before and might have some good advice.
Abigail Shrier repeatedly makes this criticism of therapy: that many therapists are nothing more than a “really expensive friend.” I agree, and potential therapy clients should be more aware of this fact.
Where I disagree with Shrier is that I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with most therapists being expensive friends. Many, many people—including many, many people with diagnosable mental illnesses—have problems best solvable by a kind, sympathetic, wise person listening to them and giving them advice.”
“They reported good efficacy after a 5-day treatment course in measures of depression and anxiety. On the main MADRS scale, at 4-week follow-up, 70% of the n = 21 sample met criteria for response and 55% for remission.
An obvious question is whether the open-label design is substantially inflating these results. This study raises questions about whether the SAINT protocol truly requires fMRI-guided targeting, or if both this version and the original might be benefiting from placebo effects due to the intensive nature of the treatment…
After this RCT, either the treatment revolutionizes psychiatry or we better understand the placebo benefits of this type of intensive outpatient treatment.”
I’m intrigued by the latter possibility… we desperately need a research program dedicated to understanding and harnessing the power of “placebo” as a clinical treatment in psychiatry.
(See also: Is ketamine as good as placebo or as good as ECT?)
“To be a sovereign individual now-a-days usually requires being shameless, for shame is the main weapon of the mob. But a funny side effect is that you cannot satirize the shameless. The shameless are immune to it. I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you. Our culture is being filled up with exaggerated caricatures because they are the only ones who can combat the tidal surges of opinion and sentiment and resentment that is the mob-based starting thesis of our century. Expect more of that.
So if you want to predict the future, just think about whatever outcome will leave you unable to top it in any satirical form. A process that looks to continue until satire itself is dead, forgotten, atrophied into nothingness.”
“… the late UCLA anthropologist Robert Edgerton set out to make in Sick Societies: that some primitive societies are not actually happy and fulfilled, that some of their beliefs and institutions are inadequate or actively harmful to their people, and that some of them are frankly on their way to cultural suicide. The mere fact that people keep doing something doesn’t mean it’s actually working well for them, but just as the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, your society can stay dysfunctional longer than you can stay alive.”
“… fundamentally, if I had to pick just one factor that I think is holding biology back, I would say “long feedback loops”… Baked into this assertion is the premise that we cannot simply “understand” biology from first principles, in the same way we do for physics, and all we can hope for is iterative cycles of experimentation. Thus, the faster these cycles, the more surface area we will cover. In a domain like biology, we should expect diminishing returns from extra intelligence and better predictions, with a much bigger bottleneck being the speed with which we can test these predictions.”