Hawthorne effect

Never mind the fashionable accusations: this article from McGill is interesting.

From 1927 to 1932 the Hawthorne Works tried varying conditions in its factories to see what would improve morale and increase productivity. They found that any sort of changes made for brief increases in productivity, presumably (so said our textbook) because workers felt that somebody was taking an interest in them.

So goes the story. Or one variant thereof. It turns out that "A 1989 study of 86 studies that tried to isolate this Hawthorne effect found no evidence for it." That I hadn't heard before.

The raw data were found on fiche not long ago, and re-analyzed. There were several different studies, most quite sloppy. One tidbit: lighting changes were done on Sunday when nobody was at work. Was the Monday productivity increase similar on other Mondays? Not noted.

One study involved women taken off the main factory floor for study in a smaller and more easily modified room.

They were less supervised than the women in the main room and they were consulted with regards to how their conditions would be changed. Some of them were interviewed fifty years later: they had been working so hard because they did not want to be returned to their former department, where their supervisor was said to be very harsh. Also, when asked what they had liked about being in the test room, one of them immediately said, “We made more money in the Test Room.”

If it sounds like something your grandmother would agree with

The psychology study is more likely to be reproducible--be right. "Most intriguingly, they found that papers which received more media attention were less likely to replicate. News outlets tend to favor counterintuitive and eye-catching findings." In other words, probably wrong.

The best field for successful replication was personality studies, at about 50:50, while social psychology or behavioral studies were about twice as likely to be wrong (irreproducible) as right.

I don't recall who coined the "grandmother test" (it sounds like something AVI would say), but it goes like this: If she'd say "I could have told you that!" the study is probably right, and if not, be very skeptical.

18 months

Quilette reviews a rather grim memoir of what happened to a marriage when a man decided he was a woman. It's her telling, of course, but I've no reason to believe it isn't largely true. "You’re polished like a doll, now veiled like a widow, perfumed like a corpse."

I'll probably not look for the book. Reading about it is hard enough.

more wendigo

Following up a bit on the wendigo aspect of the Walam Olum post: Nathan Carlson wrote an analysis of witiko=wendigo phenomena with several cases described. There were often physical symptoms, notably swelling, associated with the condition--sometimes at the onset, sometimes later. He asked rhetorically if mental illnesses could be contagious.

Can they be? I don't mean meme-contagious, I mean in the traditional microbe or virus sense. To be clear, I probably have a number of pathogenic organisms living in and on me now, but without some opportunity or stress they won't do much.

Clearly some of the symptoms are culturally shaped, but swelling and cold (testified to by others)? This wendigo-ness isn't something shared by other tribes, as far as I can find, so either the physical symptoms are culturally shaped too, or the tribe is more susceptible genetically than other tribes. So suppose one had an endemic infection that susceptible individuals succombed to in times of starvation or panic, that left the brain in a confused state that the culture gave a name and shape to--cannibal wendigo. I assume it's possible--I don't know if it is either remotely likely or possible to prove or disprove.

Alternatively, the disease isn't very contagious except when the victim is heavily afflicted, so the victim becomes doubly dangerous, as an attacker and as a vector.

On the "disprove" side, there are other sources of stress besides starvation and panic--the infection should come forward at other times as well, though possibly the madness would be given a different cultural shape. I haven't heard of anything. AmerIndians have high rates of mental illness, but given the general stresses involved you can't conclude anything about that except that feeling poor and useless is really bad for your health.

Modularity

Psilocybin treating depression? Apparently yes--at least short term. A little, although with only 16 patients it's not something I'd bank on. But it's the mechanism and their proposed further applications that I don't quite follow. They seem to imply that depression is locked in somehow by "modularity" in the brain. Some pathways can't change. The psilocybin reduces the "modularity" and allows more generic thinking--or something like that. I'd think "modularity" would help with concentration, but this is way out of my area of expertise.

One of the authors is quoted (here) as predicting that this therapy might also be useful for anorexia or addiction. That seems like a bit of a leap, though maybe addiction problems might benefit from learning to avoid "near occasions."

Is this legit, or a lot of wishful thinking around a chemical variety of percussive maintenance?

Looney Tunes

AVI noted how the Looney Tunes used a variety of music in sophisticated ways, and Aggie commented that their humor was often aimed more at adults than children. I liked it, and I'm still fond of Rocky and Bullwinkle too.

Someone has probably done a thesis applying Myers-Briggs to cartoon characters and drawing deep conclusions from the frequency with which certain traits appear. Maybe certain personality traits just don't lend themselves to types of humor. Academic tool meets pop culture--and maybe says something interesting/useful?

Pop culture meets pop culture might be a bridge too far, for a thesis on D&D classifications of Looney Tune characters. Bugs Bunny as a Chaotic Good Bard?

LWA

"The doors of the library were nuzzled open and a white horse walked in. ... The historians paid him no attention. Horses did not walk into libraries." Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett

“I think I have not found any authoritarians on the left because if there ever were any, most of them have dried up and blown away….” wrote Bob Altemeyer.

The nail

I saw the It's not about the nail video a few months ago, and chuckled.

Curious about a detail, I searched for it again and found sombre expositions explaining that it really wasn't about the nail; that she never once said she wanted help or any kind of resolution; she just wanted to be heard. Roger that. I think. Although suggesting a solution does seem to acknowledge your problem, doesn't it? You were just more efficient at communicating it than you expected.

Suppose I take a different approach: "What Would Jesus Do?"

Hmm. I find Him asking questions. "Do you want to get well?" and "What do you want Me to do for you?"

And... "And He did not do many miracles there because of their unbelief."

Of course, I'm not Jesus, nor (at least so far) one of those deputized to say "Get up, pick up your pallet and walk." And when I hear a problem, most of the time the most obvious cause is a symptom of something I know nothing about. So it makes good sense for me to listen a lot.

Sometimes just listening isn't easy, especially when the sufferer wants to sling blame around. Or seems (to me) to have a history of loving to complain. I have a finite reserve of patience...

Which probably means I'd make a lousy therapist.

Antifa trans

Andy Ngo has been reporting from Portland for months, and posting about the catch-and-release of the rioters.

One feature jumps out at me--the disproportionate number of rioters who identify as "non-binary" or "trans." Why? Maybe Ngo picks them for effect--in which case the number of arrests must be an order of magnitude or two bigger than he is reporting. I'll assume the reports are real.

I'd not noticed that body dysphorias made people more violent. Maybe sufferers are more likely to blame society these days for the fact that their new identity doesn't bring joy. Maybe there's some other psychological problem that is more likely to be violent, that the current fashions map that problem onto body dysphoria.

Maybe its a founder effect--the recruiters wound up with a lot of them once, and frontline street enforcer got to be known as a "trans" thing, and it has been like that ever since.

Or maybe the enforcers who come from the priviledged class have poorer street smarts than the rest, and get caught more often.

I'm not inclined to hang out with them to try to find out. I'm not a good liar, and I'd get beaten up for my pains.

Personality and beliefs

AVI often writes that our beliefs often precede our justification of them.

I think I can supply an example each way.

I was talking with Middle Daughter yesterday and mentioned that I had lived my life on the principle that it was OK to leave some money on the table. The obvious citation for that is Leviticus 19:9. But I've been like that before I was a Christian, and well before I cared much about details of the old law.

To grab for every last penny in a free-for-all demands a kind of pushy personality (not me), and it seemed rather tasteless to concentrate so much on "relative stuff." When I was young I'd jump for every lost coin on the sidewalk, and when we were squeezing each nickel to make it act like a dime I was thankful for each coin I found. One day I asked myself(*)--"If I don't pick this up, some kid will. Which of us will get more joy out of the discovery?"(**) I haven't picked up lost change since then. I haven't gone so far as to deliberately drop any, though.

I don't like the kind of people or organizations who try to monetize every little detail of your interactions with them. Have you been to a baseball park lately? Any day now I'm expecting an ad offering an (extra-cost) ad-free section. And if pay toilets weren't often illegal... (I get it with ads in online stuff--I'm not explicitly paying for it and they have to earn a living somehow. But I paid for a ticket to the game!)

Realizing that the Leviticus passage held a principle that pertained today simply validated my existing habits of thought.

On the other hand, I remember thinking about immigration issues years ago, and being willing to defend a 2-tier system of natives and non-natives. Then somebody pointed out Leviticus 19:34, and my reaction was "Oh crud, I was wrong."

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(*) I remember where I was at the time: a back street in a small Wisconsin town- my wife admiring the gardens and the houses- a bill blew along the sidewalk.

(**) And of course: who knows--the owner might come looking for it.