Psychology – Page 11 – a sibilant intake of breath

Workload, timelines, advisors, funding, pressure

A very good blog post on what to expect from a PhD program (and especially what the university itself won’t tell you): So You Want To Go To Grad School (in the Academic Humanities)?

Two paragraphs which are especially informative for people who don’t have recent personal experience in a PhD program:

The most important person in the process is your advisor, who is generally a senior member of the faculty in your department who shares your specialization. I struggle to find words to communicate how important this person will be during your graduate experience.. Graduate study at this level is effectively an apprenticeship system; the advisor is the master and the graduate student is the apprentice and so in theory at least the advisor is going to help guide the student through each stage of this process. To give a sense of the importance of this relationship, it is fairly common to talk about other academics’ advisors as forming a sort of ‘family tree’ (sometimes over multiple ‘generations’). Indeed, the German term for an advisor is a doktorvater, your ‘doctor-father’ (or doktormutter, of course) and this is in common use among English-language academics as well and the notion it suggests, that your advisor is a sort of third parent, isn’t so far from the truth.

If you are considering graduate school with an eye towards continuing in academia who you choose as your advisor will be very important: academia is a snooty, prestige conscious place and your advisor’s name and prestige will travel with you. But there’s more than that: your advisor, because they need to check off on every step of your journey and you will need their effusive letter of recommendation to pursue any kind of academic job has tremendous power over you as a graduate student. You, by contrast, have functionally no power in that relationship; you are reliant on the good graces of your advisor.

Covid in fall 2021

It has been sad and frustrating to see so many Torontonians putting their personal enjoyment before public health and ahead of suppressing the viral reproduction rate of the pandemic.

A reckless and deluded few are ‘protesting’ by pushing into mall food courts without wearing masks or providing proof of vaccination. Far more are eating unmasked inside restaurants, traveling to and through crowded places for the sake of recreation, abusing staff and public servants who try to enforce the rules, and generally asserting the importance of their own preferences over the public welfare.

Many Torontonians have followed the recommended precautions and gone further. These splits within our society seem demonstrative of a culture that emphasizes individual consumer choice as the chief influence on behaviour and which accepts a huge degree of entitlement about what people are allowed to do regardless of the ongoing conditions or likely consequences. It’s scary to ask whether we have the culture or the sensibilities necessary to overcome the most threatening challenges to humanity as a whole.

When memories become stories

I have heard the theory that every time we remember something it is influenced by our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs at the time of remembering. That implies that the memories we think most about are the ones that have been most distorted from their original form.

An exaggerated version is in effect for stories recounted to others. They always need to be selective in detail to make the account manageable in length, and simple tweaks to make it more comprehensible and straightforward have a tendency to persist in later retellings. In particular, I find in myself a tendency to combine the most memorable features of multiple events into a single recollection/story — not, for example, as two or more different parties at distinct semi-remembered places, but one party which sets up a subsequent part of the story.

I suppose the phenomenon demonstrates the value of contemporaneous records and accounts like journaling. Doubtless our interpretations of those records are influenced by subsequent context, but at least the record itself is immutable.

Climate anxiety is widespread among young people

Back in 2008, I wrote about the Future Leaders Survey and the gloomy views it uncovered among young people about the future of the planet.

Recently, The Lancet published a study based on a survey of 10,000 people aged 16–25 in 10 countries. It demonstrates that apocalyptic psychology is a broad-based phenomenon, not exclusively concentrated among climate change or environmental activists.

83% of those surveyed said people have failed to care for the planet; 75% that the future is frightening; 65% that governments are failing young people; and that just 31% think governments can be trusted.

Texas’ bounty-based heartbeat law

America’s unravelling continues, with the Supreme Court declining 5-4 to hear an emergency appeal of Texas’ bizarre and cruel fetal heartbeat anti-abortion law.

Laurence Tribe has written about what the law’s bounty system will do:

It wasn’t just Roe that died at midnight on 1 September with barely a whimper, let alone a bang. It was the principle that nobody’s constitutional rights should be put on sale for purchase by anyone who can find an informant or helper to turn in whoever might be trying to exercise those rights.

That, after all, is how the new Texas law works. Its perverse structure, which delegates to private individuals anywhere a power the state of Texas is forbidden to exercise itself until Roe is overruled, punishes even the slightest form of assistance to desperate pregnant women. Doctors, family members, insurance companies, even Uber drivers, are all at risk if they help a woman in need. And the risk is magnified by the offer of a big fat financial reward for whoever successfully nabs a person guilty of facilitating an abortion once a heartbeat can be detected, typically six weeks after a woman’s last period, well before most women even know they are pregnant. There is not even an exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. No law remotely like this has ever been allowed to go into effect.

The prospect of hefty bounties will breed a system of profit-seeking, Soviet-style informing on friends and neighbors. These vigilantes will sue medical distributors of IUDs and morning-after pills, as well as insurance companies. These companies, in turn, will stop offering reproductive healthcare in Texas. As of a minute before midnight on 31 August, clinics in Texas were already turning patients away out of fear. Even if the law is eventually struck down, many will probably close anyway.

Worse still, if women try to escape the state to access abortion services, their families will be on the hook for offering even the smallest aid. If friends or family of a woman hoping to terminate her pregnancy drive her across state lines, or help her organize money for a plane or bus ticket, they could be liable for “aiding and abetting” a now-banned abortion, even if the procedure itself takes place outside Texas.

Adding insult to injury, if a young woman asks for money for a bus ticket, or a ride to the airport, friends and parents fearful of liability might vigorously interrogate her about her intentions. This nightmarish state of affairs burdens yet another fundamental constitutional privilege: the right to interstate travel, recognized by the supreme court in 1999 as a core privilege of federal citizenship.

It’s a heartless and unfeeling religious morality that sees this kind of harassment as desirable. The Supreme Court’s conduct will also further erode its own position as a unifying public institution and legitimate arbiter of constitutional grievances. When people lose faith in unifying institutions — and in the perception that there are legitimate avenues for pursuing their interests — it threatens complete breakdown in the country’s self-understanding as one polity, and further progression into settling questions of policy and law by force rather than through reason and democratic debate.

Cognitive benefits of walking

In fact, there’s one activity that is almost tailor-made to work [at helping you distance yourself from a problem you’re working on]. And it is a simple one indeed: walking (the very thing that Holmes was doing when he had his insight in “The Lion’s Mane”). Walks have been shown repeatedly to stimulate creative thought and problem solving, especially if these walks take place in natural surroundings, like the woods, rather than in more urbanized environments (but both types are better than none—and even walking along a tree-lined street can help). After a walk, people become better at solving problems; they persist longer at difficult tasks; and they become more likely to grasp an insightful solution… And all from walking past some trees and some sky.

Konnikova, Maria. Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Penguin; New York. 2013. p.134

Knowing how to look something up isn’t comparable to knowing it

There’s a voguish argument that in an era of easy information availability there is less cause to have any substantial body of knowledge memorized. I have seen articles arguing that the crucial cognitive skills for young people today are the ability to find what they are looking for, given access to the internet.

I think there is a huge and obvious shortcoming with this perspective. Knowing that I can look up the Wikipedia article on the Lutheran Revolution, for example, is just a one way mental link that stops there. If you know nothing about the history of Catholicism, or of religious conflict in Europe, or of the precepts of Christianity then knowing where to find someone else’s writing about the Reformation doesn’t give you any meaningful understanding of what it was or why it mattered. Someone asked a narrow question about the event will be able to find it through an online search, but without internalized knowledge they won’t be able to see the implications and connections to other phenomena. Knowing that you can look up thermodynamics or Carnot efficiency doesn’t give you the ability to apply those concepts when thinking about an application like heating or cooling or the efficiency of an engine.

The ongoing COVID pandemic is demonstrating the extent of scientific and medical ignorance even within rich industrialized societies. That manifests in people falsely believing that they can make health choices for themselves with no consideration of others, and of course in the enormous amount of nonsense that is circulating about vaccines. It’s strange to observe how society has become technological to an unprecedented degree — with technology literally making life as humanity is experiencing it possible — and yet culturally an interest in and knowledge about science is treated as an optional personal curiosity, like fly fishing or following a soccer team. Broadly speaking, I hold the view that to understand anything well requires knowing at least the basics about many other issues (nobody can sensibly evaluate public health policy without knowing the rudiments of medicine, statistics, and epidemiology for example). That concept of knowledge as an interconnected web demonstrates how the ability to pluck out a narrow fact with the help of technology may not translate into much real understanding.

It’s oversimplistic to apply a ‘deficit model’ to what people know about an issue like COVID or climate change, assuming that there is an empty void where knowledge ought to be and that filling it is the solution. For issues tied up in politics, and thus in questions about what people will be free to do, the desire to undertake particular behaviours can create the motivation to believe what’s necessary to keep doing them. Just as someone operating under motivated reasoning can never be swayed by facts or arguments, more education alone won’t combat the problem of people choosing to believe factually what supports their behaviours or ideological positions.

100 years ago, someone could have been appropriately laughed at for saying they know about Pitt the Elder or the Peloponnesian War because they know they can go to a library and find books about them. The instant availability of information online doesn’t really change that.

Elite overproduction and the superfluous man

My friends Patrick and Margot gave me a paperback of Mikhail Lermontov’s 1840 novel A Hero of Our Time, translated by Paul Foote.

Reading the introduction, I was struck by the similarity between the idea of the protagonists of Russian novels from this period as “superfluous men” “set apart by their superior talents from the mediocre society in which they were born, but doomed to waste their lives, partly through lack of opportunity to fulfil themselves, though also, in most cases, because they themselves lacked any real sense of purpose or strength of will” and the notion of “elite overproduction” recently discussed in The Economist and elsewhere.

The introduction quotes the Russian literary critic Belinsky explaining how the Byronic protagonists of the novels of this period must be “characterized either by decisive inaction, or else by futile activity.”

Defining their term, The Economist says:

Elite overproduction can also help explain the malaise gripping the rich world of late. It has become extraordinarily difficult for a young person to achieve elite status, even if she works hard and goes to the best university. House prices are so high that only inheritors stand a chance of emulating the living conditions of their parents. The power of a few “superstar” firms means that there are few genuinely prestigious jobs around. Mr Turchin reckons that each year America produces some 25,000 “surplus” lawyers. Over 30% of British graduates are “overeducated” relative to their jobs.

These two related concepts seem to illustrate some of the pathologies of our partly-meritocratic but also increasingly oligarchic society, where one-time educational status markers are being eroded through a race for credentials which democratizes participation but leaves everyone who succeeds with less distinction. People who generations ago would have ended their educational careers bored out of their brains and doing the absolute minimum in high school now seem to frequently add on four more years of the same in college, hoping for but less and less in a position to expect social status and economic security as a result.

Sorting v. teaching in universities

Health and climate change

I was surprised just now to see that I don’t think I have a general thread on climate change and human health.

I’d say there are at least two big relevant dimensions to it.

First, because fossil fuel use causes so many bad health impacts, phasing out fossil fuels brings major co-benefits in terms of avoiding disease.

Second — whereas people seem to find environmental problems generally abstract and of low salience — people seem to have a much more consistent willingness to prioritize health related items. Thus, emphasizing the health impacts of climate change may help to motivate those presently unmoved or hostile to climate action.

There are certainly other important links, including how climate change will alter the distribution of mosquito-borne and other diseases and of course the intersectional ways in which health connects with public policy, economic justice, race, and global equity.

I did for a while host a Canadian government report on human health and climate change, which the Harper government decided to make available to the public only through the mail on a CD.

Health was also an important part of the case we made for divestment at U of T (PDF page 50 / printed page 44-7).

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs)

One element of a science fiction future which I expect to see in my lifetime is the ability to directly connect human brains with computers and share instructions back and forth.

That seems especially plausible now that Neuralink has demonstrated a high bandwidth BCI with two tetraplegic people.

This evokes the idea of a Ghost in the Shell future where people can use their disembodied minds to control computer systems, robots, and prosthetics. Even just being able to control a computer with the rapidity of thought is essentially a superpower, since it would allow people to perform calculations and other tasks which their unaided brains could not manage. Beyond that, a transhuman future beckons.

Open thread: can life be simulated?