5 ms·

Not a psychiatrist, but I'm pretty skeptical of the approach of trying to sort things according to a few dimensions. I understand the appeal -- There is a reaso

Not a psychiatrist, but I'm pretty skeptical of the approach of trying to sort things according to a few dimensions. I understand the appeal -- There is a reason why memes like sanguine vs melancholic or The Political Spectrum are popular -- but I don't see why it should be likely to cleave reality at its joints. I'd naively think we're more likely to get a useful theory by trying to push a Predictive Processing approach too far for a while and then find a way to incorporate the signaling impact of hormones & ambient levels of neurotransmitters on various feedback loops. I certainly found https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/12/toward-a-predictive-theory-of-depression/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/12/toward-a-predictive-th... useful for overcoming my writing anxiety and issues with motivation.

Oekeai 6y ago
Abstraction does not happen at 3D or higher dimensions. Abstraction happens in the second dimension. The Greeks made lifelike marble sculptures during the Hellenistic era (300 B.C.) but it took almost 2,000 more years before artists could make lifelike 2D pictures.
- mkl 6y ago
  I'm not sure that's true. Marble sculptures last much longer than paintings (case in point: the paint that used to cover the sculptures is gone), and Roman artists were able to paint well not much later. Most Roman paintings are gone too, but some have been uncovered in Pompeii, Herculaneum, etc.
throwlaplace 6y ago
>Not a psychiatrist, but I'm pretty skeptical i don't understand why people do this - if you're not an expert why are you pontificating? if a psychiatrist decided to pronounce on OOP vs FP or raft vs paxos or whatever would you give absolutely any credence to their opinion? this is an article on nature about a nature paper for god's sake - i trust them over my own opinion on the matter let alone your opinion. edit: lest we forget a psychiatrist is an MD plus a 4 year residency. that's a total of 8 years of domain specific education.
- sojournerc 6y ago
  I don't understand why you think it takes credentials to pontificate about this on an internet forum. Intellectual curiosity doesn't end at the boundaries of our credentials. GP comment is relevant and thought provoking. Isn't that enough?
  - throwlaplace 6y ago
    >pontificate about this on an internet forum it's not about "on an internet forum" it's in general - why don't we all reserve judgement more? we all know the answer of course: because we're arrogant and believe that our abilities to write software translate into abilities to do xyz. >Intellectual curiosity intellectual curiosity is much much more than reading a couple of online articles and making declarations
    - sojournerc 6y ago
      > GP comment is relevant and thought provoking. Isn't that enough?
      - throwlaplace 6y ago
        there's nothing in the least bit thought provoking about it because it have any substance only claims (vague allusion to "memes" and undefined "Predictive Processing"). i wonder why that is? might it be because GP admits they aren't actually expert enough to substantiate any of the claims? and that's my point. i see claims all the time from people not entitled to make claims. i see substance very rarely. why? because claims are easy.
        s1artibartfast 6y ago
        Every human being is entitled to make claims. Some claims have more merit and some have less. You can choose to engage or not based on the merit of their argument.
trombonechamp 6y ago
> Not a psychiatrist, but I'm pretty skeptical of the approach of trying to sort things according to a few dimensions. ... I don't see why it should be likely to cleave reality at its joints. One thing to understand about this is that they're not making up these dimensions from thin air. The dimensions are found in a data-driven manner using one of several techniques, most of which fall under the umbrella of factor analysis[1]. If you're familiar with principal component analysis or singular value decomposition, it's a pretty similar idea: you find the dimensions that explain as much variance as possible. Then, once you have the dimensions, you try to make sense of them in some way. You may do something called factor rotation, which will change what these dimensions are, but you always have the same information among those five factors. Next, you have to give the factors arbitrary names. The names are usually given for the purpose of making it easy to discuss the factors. (This is the same way that the "Big 5" personality scale [2] was developed.) For instance, if you had a factor which included the survey questions "Do you have trouble sleeping at night?" "Does it take you a long time to fall asleep?" and "Do you wake up not feeling refreshed?", you might name this an "insomnia" dimension. Really, it's just making it easier to discuss the math and data (though the names do end up having a big impact on how people think about the factors). You can do this with survey data, brain imaging data, genetic data, etc. There are many different ways to find these. That means you can look at how they line up with each other. There are many theories and structures, but a popular one is about the "p factor" mentioned in the article which boils it down to a single dimension. I haven't read the literature for a few years, though, so I can't comment on current thinking about factor structures beyond what the article discusses. But in the end, the idea is trying to find statistics which are useful and meaningful, either in the clinic or else for guiding future basic research. So when they say "how many dimensions are there?", what they really mean is "how many dimensions can we find that are useful?". It's not a perfect solution, but it is a good start. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_analysis [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
ubertoop 6y ago
I'm trying to read this, but a lot of it is way over my head. Would you mind explaining it?
- meowface 6y ago
  The blog he linked, Slate Star Codex, has a lot of good posts on predictive processing theory. I'd recommend checking them out. (The author is a psychiatrist, and in my opinion a semi-polymath.) Basically a theory positing that the brain fundamentally works, at least in part, by continuously updating a model of the environment and the self based on successful and unsuccessful predictions. Although this may not seem like a crazy idea, some proponents suggest that essentially everything the brain does works in this way. For example, that the cause of schizophrenic symptoms may be due to them holding a very loose predictive model with weak priors; basically that they don't have pre-existing high-confidence predictions about anything, on every level. You and me likely would predict with very high confidence that we are not and can't be a god, but someone with schizophrenia may not predict that with as much certainty due to a general issue with neural prediction. I am oversimplifying it and may be partially wrong, but I think that's the general. I'd highly recommend reading that blog's series on predictive processing for a much better explanation. The linked post also discusses schizophrenia.
  - ubertoop 6y ago
    Thank you! I appreciate the summary. That actually helped a lot... I'm reading through some of the articles on this website, but feel like I'm lacking some prerequisite knowledge. I find this stuff very interesting just, a bit out of my league. Must keep reading I suppose :) If this theory is correct then one could use it to guide one's own life? Here's something I don't understand when trying to look at it through the lens of this theory: I've had mostly success when it comes to software development. Whether it be new languages, new projects, what have you... If I sit down, focus, and do the work, it comes out well and succeeds. This is in stark contrast to other areas of my life btw, where I've worked very hard at things but made minimal progress. So if I understand correctly, my internal prediction machine should be predicting success, and thereby providing a jolt of motivation, whenever I think about a new cool project. Take VR development. I really want to learn Unity and make a cool VR game. But every time I start, I putter out. I get distracted, I don't make progress fast enough, I just.... end up stopping, and doing something else. Why?
didibus 6y ago
The article did end with: > All such sweeping hypotheses are premature, says Hyman. “I think it’s a time for much more empirical research rather than grand theorization So I think it is best to consider this a theory that we all hope is true, which has a slight chance of being true.
Barrin92 6y ago
>There is a reason why memes like sanguine vs melancholic or The Political Spectrum are popular -- but I don't see why it should be likely to cleave reality at its joints. The point of models such at this isn't to 'cleave reality at its joints', it's to provide useful frameworks to reason about disease (or politics). High level concepts such as schizophrenia attempt to given a human understandable account of what Schizophrenia is, why it emerges, and what treatments we may form. Reductionism of the sort of, "we've looked at every neuron and figured out that 12301231723 of your 3782328372832 brain cells are out of whack" has no explanatory power. The goal of inquiry into mental illness is not to give some physical account of what is wrong with the brain, it is to give an account of what is wrong with the mind. These brain chemistry accounts of psychological illness really have glaring problems. By definition they exclude all ecological or cultural factors by focussing on some individual's brain. But this is almost tautological, all psychological illness manifests in some sense in the brain. When some local company pours lead into the river and everyone loses 20 IQ points then that manifests in the brain, like anything else does. However the right framework in that case is ecological.

Oekeai 6y ago

Abstraction does not happen at 3D or higher dimensions. Abstraction happens in the second dimension. The Greeks made lifelike marble sculptures during the Hellenistic era (300 B.C.) but it took almost 2,000 more years before artists could make lifelike 2D pictures.

mkl 6y ago
I'm not sure that's true. Marble sculptures last much longer than paintings (case in point: the paint that used to cover the sculptures is gone), and Roman artists were able to paint well not much later. Most Roman paintings are gone too, but some have been uncovered in Pompeii, Herculaneum, etc.

throwlaplace 6y ago

>Not a psychiatrist, but I'm pretty skeptical i don't understand why people do this - if you're not an expert why are you pontificating? if a psychiatrist decided to pronounce on OOP vs FP or raft vs paxos or whatever would you give absolutely any credence to their opinion? this is an article on nature about a nature paper for god's sake - i trust them over my own opinion on the matter let alone your opinion. edit: lest we forget a psychiatrist is an MD plus a 4 year residency. that's a total of 8 years of domain specific education.

sojournerc 6y ago
I don't understand why you think it takes credentials to pontificate about this on an internet forum. Intellectual curiosity doesn't end at the boundaries of our credentials. GP comment is relevant and thought provoking. Isn't that enough?
- throwlaplace 6y ago
  >pontificate about this on an internet forum it's not about "on an internet forum" it's in general - why don't we all reserve judgement more? we all know the answer of course: because we're arrogant and believe that our abilities to write software translate into abilities to do xyz. >Intellectual curiosity intellectual curiosity is much much more than reading a couple of online articles and making declarations
  - sojournerc 6y ago
    > GP comment is relevant and thought provoking. Isn't that enough?
    - throwlaplace 6y ago
      there's nothing in the least bit thought provoking about it because it have any substance only claims (vague allusion to "memes" and undefined "Predictive Processing"). i wonder why that is? might it be because GP admits they aren't actually expert enough to substantiate any of the claims? and that's my point. i see claims all the time from people not entitled to make claims. i see substance very rarely. why? because claims are easy.
      - s1artibartfast 6y ago
        Every human being is entitled to make claims. Some claims have more merit and some have less. You can choose to engage or not based on the merit of their argument.

trombonechamp 6y ago

> Not a psychiatrist, but I'm pretty skeptical of the approach of trying to sort things according to a few dimensions. ... I don't see why it should be likely to cleave reality at its joints. One thing to understand about this is that they're not making up these dimensions from thin air. The dimensions are found in a data-driven manner using one of several techniques, most of which fall under the umbrella of factor analysis[1]. If you're familiar with principal component analysis or singular value decomposition, it's a pretty similar idea: you find the dimensions that explain as much variance as possible. Then, once you have the dimensions, you try to make sense of them in some way. You may do something called factor rotation, which will change what these dimensions are, but you always have the same information among those five factors. Next, you have to give the factors arbitrary names. The names are usually given for the purpose of making it easy to discuss the factors. (This is the same way that the "Big 5" personality scale [2] was developed.) For instance, if you had a factor which included the survey questions "Do you have trouble sleeping at night?" "Does it take you a long time to fall asleep?" and "Do you wake up not feeling refreshed?", you might name this an "insomnia" dimension. Really, it's just making it easier to discuss the math and data (though the names do end up having a big impact on how people think about the factors). You can do this with survey data, brain imaging data, genetic data, etc. There are many different ways to find these. That means you can look at how they line up with each other. There are many theories and structures, but a popular one is about the "p factor" mentioned in the article which boils it down to a single dimension. I haven't read the literature for a few years, though, so I can't comment on current thinking about factor structures beyond what the article discusses. But in the end, the idea is trying to find statistics which are useful and meaningful, either in the clinic or else for guiding future basic research. So when they say "how many dimensions are there?", what they really mean is "how many dimensions can we find that are useful?". It's not a perfect solution, but it is a good start. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_analysis [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

ubertoop 6y ago

I'm trying to read this, but a lot of it is way over my head. Would you mind explaining it?

meowface 6y ago
The blog he linked, Slate Star Codex, has a lot of good posts on predictive processing theory. I'd recommend checking them out. (The author is a psychiatrist, and in my opinion a semi-polymath.) Basically a theory positing that the brain fundamentally works, at least in part, by continuously updating a model of the environment and the self based on successful and unsuccessful predictions. Although this may not seem like a crazy idea, some proponents suggest that essentially everything the brain does works in this way. For example, that the cause of schizophrenic symptoms may be due to them holding a very loose predictive model with weak priors; basically that they don't have pre-existing high-confidence predictions about anything, on every level. You and me likely would predict with very high confidence that we are not and can't be a god, but someone with schizophrenia may not predict that with as much certainty due to a general issue with neural prediction. I am oversimplifying it and may be partially wrong, but I think that's the general. I'd highly recommend reading that blog's series on predictive processing for a much better explanation. The linked post also discusses schizophrenia.
- ubertoop 6y ago
  Thank you! I appreciate the summary. That actually helped a lot... I'm reading through some of the articles on this website, but feel like I'm lacking some prerequisite knowledge. I find this stuff very interesting just, a bit out of my league. Must keep reading I suppose :) If this theory is correct then one could use it to guide one's own life? Here's something I don't understand when trying to look at it through the lens of this theory: I've had mostly success when it comes to software development. Whether it be new languages, new projects, what have you... If I sit down, focus, and do the work, it comes out well and succeeds. This is in stark contrast to other areas of my life btw, where I've worked very hard at things but made minimal progress. So if I understand correctly, my internal prediction machine should be predicting success, and thereby providing a jolt of motivation, whenever I think about a new cool project. Take VR development. I really want to learn Unity and make a cool VR game. But every time I start, I putter out. I get distracted, I don't make progress fast enough, I just.... end up stopping, and doing something else. Why?

didibus 6y ago

The article did end with: > All such sweeping hypotheses are premature, says Hyman. “I think it’s a time for much more empirical research rather than grand theorization So I think it is best to consider this a theory that we all hope is true, which has a slight chance of being true.

Barrin92 6y ago

>There is a reason why memes like sanguine vs melancholic or The Political Spectrum are popular -- but I don't see why it should be likely to cleave reality at its joints. The point of models such at this isn't to 'cleave reality at its joints', it's to provide useful frameworks to reason about disease (or politics). High level concepts such as schizophrenia attempt to given a human understandable account of what Schizophrenia is, why it emerges, and what treatments we may form. Reductionism of the sort of, "we've looked at every neuron and figured out that 12301231723 of your 3782328372832 brain cells are out of whack" has no explanatory power. The goal of inquiry into mental illness is not to give some physical account of what is wrong with the brain, it is to give an account of what is wrong with the mind. These brain chemistry accounts of psychological illness really have glaring problems. By definition they exclude all ecological or cultural factors by focussing on some individual's brain. But this is almost tautological, all psychological illness manifests in some sense in the brain. When some local company pours lead into the river and everyone loses 20 IQ points then that manifests in the brain, like anything else does. However the right framework in that case is ecological.