Notable Links - Substack Roundup - Oct 15, 2023
The following is a selection of some notable posts I’ve come across on other Substack newsletters in recent weeks that I suspect would also be of interest to readers of Psychiatry at the Margins.
1)
interviewed for in a very thoughtful exploration of themes from her book Touched Out.
Amanda Montei: “Motherhood, capital M is an institution. A set of cultural and economic ideals and assumptions, a set of gendered expectations and aspirations for bodies socialized as girls. As I emphasize in the book, Motherhood is also a set of labors— domestic work, housework, caregiving work, emotional work. We bundle all of that together and call it Motherhood! Which conveniently normalizes and naturalizes all these ways in which women’s bodies are policed and disciplined into the gender category woman (of which Mother is supposedly the highest form) from a young age. By attributing that work and those ways of being and behaving to the feminine condition, it creates a number of pressures felt by all women, but also by men, and by anyone who refuses the gender binary.
That may be uncomfortable for some people to acknowledge, especially people who identify with motherhood, or the really creative, intellectual, skilled work of caring for children. It has been uncomfortable at times for me, as I write in the book, to acknowledge how much of my identity and behavior and life is rooted in these roles we are coerced into playing out. It was especially uncomfortable for me when I realized how hard it was to liberate myself or extricate myself from the institution of motherhood, such that I could even really see the forest for the trees– where did I stop and where did this inherited institution start?
It’s kind of a futile question on the surface, but for me, it’s still a question worth continually asking ourselves, even if there is no such thing as a self that exists outside of, you know, patriarchal control and a misogynist culture. I write in the book about how, as a parent, there is a process of mourning that comes for many with realizing that our children, despite our best efforts, will be socialized into this patriarchal culture. We have to accept that we are all products of this world, while also holding space to resist that world, and that’s some of the hardest, and most valuable, work of parenting, to my mind.
Part of why I think it’s still important to ask that question of where the line might be between experience and institution– I’m drawing on Adrienne Rich’s crucial distinction there—is because many of us carry a lot of shame for what we’ve done to ourselves, what we’ve been convinced we’ve done to ourselves, and what others have done to us as a result of these social and cultural and political scripts that live inside all of us. It’s not just the institution of motherhood, in other words, that I explore in the book, but also this culture of violence against women that we all live with. I think becoming more aware of how a misogynist culture shapes our early sexual experiences, for example, and therefore our deepest senses of desire and pleasure, can help us find inroads to make those experiences more consensual, and more pleasurable.”
2) Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature, passed away on Oct 13, 2023.
shared a beautiful selection of poems by Glück on
3) Scott Alexander reviewed Njal’s Saga (a thirteenth-century Icelandic saga about blood feuds in the Icelandic Commonwealth) for
— it is a very memorable and unique book review. (The author of the review was initially anonymous and was later revealed to be Scott Alexander himself on the conclusion of the book review contest.)
“If there’s a timeless theme in Njal’s Saga, it’s justice. Protesters like to say “no justice, no peace”. It’s great as a slogan, but not so good as a life philosophy. There will never be perfect justice. Even Njal, ablest of arbiters, cannot always make both sides of a conflict completely happy with his settlements. So either one side has to accept a proposal they consider slightly unjust, in order to keep the peace - or everyone has to continue killing each other forever, feud without end.
There can’t be an infinite exchange rate between peace and justice. But what is the exchange rate? Do you, like Hobbes, accept any amount of oppression to keep society running? Or, like the most radical of protesters, do you think that any day that the front page NYT headline isn’t EVERYTHING FINE, DON’T WORRY is a good day to burn cities?
Njal, kindest and wisest of men, represents the pro-peace extreme. The other Icelanders mock him incessantly for not being able to grow a beard. He takes this in stride, of course, but even his body is designed to scream “lone civilized person in a world of unshaven barbarians”. When Christianity comes to Iceland halfway through the saga, Njal accepts it instantly, no explanation given - I originally found this jarring, but in retrospect of course he has to accept it, “mouthpiece for the civilized Christian worldview” is his whole character role. The saga authors take Njal’s side - at least this is what I gather from the constant, grating focus on all his virtues and how wonderful he is. And we, as members of a state much more civilized and Christian than 11th-century Iceland, naturally tend towards his side as well.
But take a moment to consider the alternate perspective. Ragnar Of The Bloody Axe murders your father, mocks you as you kneel crying over his body, then rapes your wife on his way out. And here comes Njal - kindest and wisest of men - arguing that instead of thrusting a spear through his brain, you should trust to the courts - courts which half the time get bogged down in insane technicalities, or decree that the plaintiff should be put to death for incomprehensible infractions. Courts where even if you win, Ragnar just has to pay you some weregild, then walks free. The justice of God is “an eye for an eye”. The justice of Man is “a weregild for an eye, or maybe getting confused and failing to award any punishment at all.” Why ever go with the justice of Man?
We go with Man’s justice naturally, almost reflexively, because we’re cattle domesticated by the State. Ten thousand years ago, our ancestors would have gone with God’s justice, just as reflexively, because Hammurabi was still far in the future, and God’s justice was the only game on offer. Njal’s Saga takes place right on the fulcrum of these two world-views, the point where either the natural justice of vengeance or the artificial justice of courts seem like plausible options. All government is a hallucination on the part of the governed, but in medieval Iceland it was a flimsy hallucination, one that a second’s thought could see through immediately, one of those duck-rabbits where you can switch from seeing the thing to not seeing it at will.”
4)
, insightful as ever, on the illusion of explanatory depth.
“Psychologists have a name for this tendency to think we understand things better than we do: the “illusion of explanatory depth.”…
This, I think, explains the curious course of our scientific discovery. You might think that we discover things in order from most intuitive to least intuitive. No, thanks to the illusion of explanatory depth, it often goes the opposite way: we discover the least obvious things first, because those are things that we realize we don't understand.
That would fit with our incredible ancient progress in mathematics, because math is not obvious…. math, perhaps more so than any other intellectual pursuit, emits very strongly what we might call ignorance signals, signs that there's something you don't know. Maybe it's all the numbers and symbols, the funny shapes, the level of abstraction, the amount of stuff you have to hold in working memory, the heaviness you feel in your head when doing mental math—whatever it is, it seems to have helped us do a lot of good math very early in our intellectual history.
Other subjects, however, emit fewer ignorance signals. [My paraphrase: Compare the mathematical discovery from the second century of a method of evaluating polynomials and Galileo’s discovery discovery from 1586 that the rate of which things fall down is independent of weight.]
The first one is a method of evaluating polynomials, and I don't even know what it means to evaluate a polynomial (“Hey, nice polynomial you got there”?) The second one is an experiment showing that heavier things and lighter things fall at the same rate, which seems like the most obvious experiment in the world. So why did we only discover it 12 centuries later?
The answer, I believe, is that we had an illusion of explanatory depth for weight but not for polynomials. It makes perfect intuitive sense that heavier things should fall faster—after all, it's harder to hold them up!”
5)
on the significance of contemporary anti-Shakespearism
“The most astounding thing to me about both Hanania’s and Bankman-Fried’s conceit is that it betrays no awareness, at all, of the way genius accrues over the course of centuries. Genius is not simply an intrinsic feature of works of literature, given at the moment they appear and stable from that moment on. It results in part from the particular reception-history the work receives, which cannot ever be predicted. The beauty of a work is to a great extent taphonomical, a product of the way it gets knocked around after the author’s death, the way its turns of phrase enter into our language and our habits of thinking. This is a dimension of genius that it is literally impossible to conjure in one’s work over the course of a lifetime, let alone within a single year.
I mean, there might be someone writing today who is “better” than Shakespeare, whatever the hell that means. But no real meaning can attach to that claim for another 400 years or so. That’s just how it is. If you take a lump of coal to a jeweler he will have no basis for telling you it’s an unworthy lump of coal, but he will be within his rights to tell you to come back later, much later, if you wish to sell it to him as a diamond. Don’t you see how this works?
… the anti-Shakespearism of the present moment, and the larger anti-humanism of which it is representative, is in fact more serious than it may at first appear. The left, the right, and the “apolitical” stats-bro center are all happy to sweep away tradition, as if it meant nothing, as if it did not anchor us in the world, as if it did not invite us to construct ourselves through it. It is a big deal to arrive at such a moment.”
6) Eric Topol at
on GLP-1 family of drugs
“The G-agonists are moving to become the most successful drugs in medical history, eclipsing other widely used and transformative drugs like statins. Their salutary and what appears to be marked impact— beyond losing weight— is getting validated in ways not fully anticipated, affecting cardiovascular outcomes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and perhaps substance and behavioral addiction. In short, while there’s still so much that needs sorting out, we’ve got a breakthrough family of drugs that are already exceeding lofty expectations.”
7) Aella has more interesting data to share at
“My suspicion is that to at least some degree, we might be picking up on a phenomenon where women are more likely to interpret their past negatively. Maybe narratives of abuse are more salient to women; if women are more likely to go to therapy, maybe this encourages focusing on mistreatment by parents. Possibly women are more focused on financial inequality, which makes them view the average person as more wealthy than themselves - comparing themselves to wealthier people rather than noticing poorer.
Or maybe men are just more positive? Maybe they want to view themselves as strong, unabused, more successful, so they can compete better with their peers. Unclear.
But whatever’s going on, this has made me more skeptical of people self-reporting their past experiences.”
8) Paul Bloom, author of Psych: The Story of the Human Mind, has also recently joined Substack at
. A good post to start with is his response, titled Psychology is ok, to Adam Mastroianni’s post I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is (you should read it, if you haven’t).