I think it’s probably the future of relationships, just because most non-religious people can’t produce a coherent case for monogamy except “think of the children”, and most people will very reasonably say “well, I’m not planning on having children for a while so I’ll be poly for now”. It also seems like nonstandard relationships getting more accepted is a trend (gays, interracial marriage, etc) so I guess I should bet on the trend continuing. I’m not sure there’s a real dichotomy between “genuinely in love with many people” and “wants to be promiscuous”. For example, I became poly because my girlfriend at the time was poly and it would have been weird to have a mono person in a relationship with a poly person. Then I continued because why not.

I would say Mormonism, because it doesn’t count if it’s not in a community, and Utah seems nicer than Dearborn Heights.

Also, a couple of rationalists legitimately converted to Mormonism and it went exactly as well as they hoped, so that’s a proof-of-concept that I haven’t seen with Islamic conversion.

Also, realistically there’s like a 5% chance it’s going to stick, and I understand Muslims get kind of angry when you deconvert.

Not really. I don’t believe in anything supernatural. I think “we can’t disprove it” is somewhere between “technically true” and “meaningless”. In a Bayesian framework, no claim (other than purely logical ones) can ever reach 100% proof, but we can get arbitrarily close with more evidence. I don’t think we can ever be literally 100% sure there’s no God, but at that level the same is true of Bigfoot.

(I think there’s probably more chance of God existing than Bigfoot existing, but I don’t think the philosophy and math we would use to think about the two problems is different)

Fun fact - clinical depression used to be called “melancholia”, but that was (became?) the vernacular for normal sadness. So they changed it to “depression” in order to make it sound more like a separate disease, and then the vernacular shifted to call normal sadness “depression”.

I think this is like the thing where any word meaning “not metaphorically” ends up as a generic intensifier that can be applied to metaphors. We’re seeing it now with “literally”, but it happened before with “really”, “truly”, and even “very” which used to be related to “verily” eg truthfully, actually.

Also, at some point psychiatrists started using “melancholia” again to mean a super-severe form of depression that nobody could ever confuse with ordinary sadness. I don’t know. People are weird.

I know everyone always makes fun of people who say “if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide”, but since I’m not doing anything wrong it’s at least hard for me to become really worked up about this.

I think it’s sort of that…emotions and pragmatism and fear should at least by guiding my judgment here? And since I don’t have any emotional or pragmatic issues I don’t know what to think. Like I assume the NSA reads all my emails right now. And if there’s some bill to make the NSA and the CIA read all my emails, is that a horrible assault on freedom and we should all die nobly fighting for our liberty? Or does it just mean two computer programs will be auto-scanning my emails for the phrase “Allahu akbar” instead of one, and even Edward Snowden wouldn’t really get worked up about it? I dunno.

I don’t know if I have permission to tell their stories here. If any of them are reading this, they’re welcome to chime in.

I know you’re joking, but the real answer is “metis”, ie the trial-and-error experience you can’t get from books. For me, that involved things like:

- Knowing how to react when people tell you about how they’re bankrupt and they hate their life and they were sexually abused as a child and they want to die. Not that there’s a *great* way to react, but just not staring open-mouthed or saying something embarrassing.

- Learning actual risk-levels for things. Books will say things like “It’s dangerous to take two SSRIs at the same time” and “it’s dangerous to take MAOIs with clomipramine”, but it’s helpful to learn that the former is a silly theoretical risk that might bother 1 in 1000 people a little bit, and the second will very likely kill you.

- Getting a feel for mentally ill people. If you see enough depressed people, you start to recognize them even if they’re not outright telling you that they’re depressed. If you see enough severely depressed suicidal people, you start to recognize when somebody’s approaching that level.

- Learning how to take a history/interview, including such pitfalls as “do I really have to do the whole cognitive exam?” and “frick frick frick my patient started crying now what do I do?”

- Learning mistrust. My first year of psychiatry I was *so* willing to trust people, just because everyone I knew in real life was a basically trustworthy person and my priors for anyone I met being trustworthy were high. After working with lots of dysfunctional people and getting burned again and again, I no longer have that problem. It’s not that I mistrust people, per se, it’s more that I…have a broader view on what kinds of relationships to the truth people consider acceptable, and try to take that into account and meet them on their own terms.

- Learning which parts of the textbooks were subtly influenced by pharmaceutical companies/lawyers/morality police/SJWs/The Establishment and shouldn’t be taken 100% at face value.

- Figuring out how much deviation from the textbooks is to be expected, versus how much means your diagnosis is wrong/your medication isn’t working/your patient is lying/you are hopelessly confused in your entire paradigm.

- Related: knowing the best things to do when nothing makes sense and there are no good options.

(I’m still in training and can’t claim to have actually mastered any of these yet, but I’m working on them)

Any spam comments on Unsong are to be interpreted as part of the text and mined for hidden wisdom.

Wearing a suit.

Also, I’ve never understood why people don’t make cars that look exactly like sports cars but only cost as much as a normal car. Is there something about that shape that makes them necessarily expensive?

I’m not sure I have this thing. Or, I mean, my eye has a corner, and it itches sometimes, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a specific thing there that can be cut out. Am I missing something?