This is awesome! I totally should have thought of it, thanks!
Sable
Karma: 1,288
That’s awesome that you’re doing that research!
My biggest question is probably what the distribution looks like for people who get TMS for depression—how many of them are “cured” in the sense that they never need TMS again? How many need it again after a year? Two years? And so on.
I do think there’s something to that idea—physical injury and pain is a very universal and visible experience, whereas mental illness is difficult to parse for those who’ve never experienced it. I also think there’s some sense in which ‘treatment’ and ‘cure’ are treated differently for mental and physical illness.
A doctor wouldn’t just prescribe painkillers for a broken arm and call it a day because your symptoms have been dealt with; they’d want to actually fix the problem. Depression, on the other hand, doctors seem perfectly fine with merely mitigating the symptoms. Perhaps because that’s all they’re confident they can do?
I didn’t, but I’m not surprised your sister had that experience. It’s a loud, repetitive noise going off next to your ear. My clinic offered me earplugs, which I didn’t need, but perhaps your sister could have used?
That would be useful.
I suppose their calibration might be cause for concern. You’re with yourself all the time, so you’ve been witness to your own highs and lows, but others might only see your highs (for example, if you only leave your house when you’re above 50%, their scale would bottom out at 50%).
I would love to try psilocybin, but can’t because of where I work. I have tried Ketamine and am now trying TMS, which are the two FDA-approved ‘nuclear options’, and have been seeing some success with them.
That’s really interesting! I’m no expert in neurology, so thanks for the heads up!
True. I just happen to have the ‘very hard to do anything’ kind, so that’s what I describe.
I haven’t thought much about how treatment fits in here. I’ve certainly felt both dimensions mentioned get better/reduced through treatment (having to solve less puzzles, having to solve puzzles for coarser/less granular actions).
Ultimately, ‘curing’ depression would be the equivalent of removing the app from your brain.
Interesting. I’m glad that this resonates, and like the idea that what I described was a generic experience, which can be caused by various issues in the brain.
The comments below do capture some of my thoughts. I also feel depression as a lack of motivation and general malaise and inability to care about things or feel pleasure.
But these are
difficult to explain to someone who’s never felt, and
subjective feelings, which don’t always translate well through language.
The metaphor is meant to invite someone to think about what their life would be like if, in order to do anything, they had to slog their way through tedious effort for little to no reward. I claim that the result looks, externally, very much like depression—it would cause a lack of motivate, a general malaise, and a hoarding of energy and caring.
Sudoku was chosen as something that doesn’t take much effort but gets mind-numbingly boring after enough time doing it; I emphasize that these aren’t challenging puzzles, only ones that require a bare minimum of effort. Solving a jigsaw puzzle or multiplying numbers may also qualify.
I want to support this; the initial motivation behind Georgism is, in fact, the exact question of why poverty still exists when so much progress has been made—and the answer is that when private actors are allowed to monopolize natural resources (most importantly land), all the gains accruing from productivity increases and technology eventually go to them.
A UBI, as Eliezer suggests, is a band-aid to the problem, addressing the symptom but not the disease, and so long as land rents (economic rent) are monopolized, the disease continues unabated.
I don’t know if the Georgist Paradise doesn’t have any poverty—land taxes don’t magically cure addiction or depression or any of the other reasons someone might become and stay poor. But I’d bet that it has substantially less of the ‘scrabbling in the dirt’ than our current economic equilibrium.
Yup. That’s where I learned about it. I was looking for the link too and couldn’t find it. Thanks!
I completely agree.
I have these moments every so often when I think to myself, “The entire MIT undergraduate curriculum is available for free online. …why do we need college, exactly?”
And so on.
I have another post on my substack (I’ll get around to posting it here at some point) about the kind of gains we should be making in educational technology, but haven’t been.
Thanks! I don’t know if I’m the person to write that book, but I do agree it’d be a good idea.
Thanks for the response!
I agree that the social services model is simultaneously good and bad. The issue stems from schools having to contend with two very different problems:
How do they deal with children from poor backgrounds who don’t want to learn? How do they deal with idiots, special needs students, assholes, troublemakers, etc.?
How do schools deal with gifted children? How do they deal with students who are smarter or learn faster than their peers?
These kinds of students need very different kinds of environments to thrive.
Paul Graham is representative of 2., and so the social services model is pretty useless to him. But there are plenty of children who can benefit enormously from it.
Future posts go into the school-as-education model, which is more suited for students from group 2.
As for designing from the outside in, it’s a cool idea, and I’d love to read someone’s attempt. I decided to try it from the inside out because I’d never seen it done before in the modern age.
I switched up my medications and I’m feeling a lot better now, although it being summer really helps. Everything is better when the world outside is warm and sunny!
I’ve been looking into trying Spravato (Ketamine) as well, although the bureaucracy to actually get to trying it is no joke.
Thanks for asking!
Thanks, it’s my first time linking to my own sequence. I fixed the link to the first post in it.
I like your approach! The only caveat I have is that the students taking these requirements could be anywhere from 9-17ish, so they won’t necessarily be able to investigate the tools and concepts in depth the way they might in a college course.
I’m really happy to hear that this helped! Remember, all models are wrong, but some are useful. This model is useful for me; use it as long as it is useful to you.