Silly Jilly: I told you so

• You should accept your life and be happy from within
• You should change your life so it makes you happy from without

I’m not going to cite any of them by name because the debate isn’t over and I can’t give any of their perspectives a fair summary. But hopefully I can give proper credit in future posts.

Today I came across the Pleasant Events Schedule, a list of events that some people find pleasurable. Psychologists use it for studying mood, depression, drug addiction, aging, etc. (eg: Are you unhappy because you never get out of the nursing home, or because they won’t let you do heroin?)

For each item on the list, give it two scores from 0 – 2:

For each question, multiply the two values together (if you didn’t do something or you didn’t like it, that event will get 0) and then sum all multiples to get your total pleasantness score. Compare your pleasantness over time to your mood journal.

Some of my favourite events:
18. Going naked
34. Talking to myself
97. Shoplifting
168. Taking revenge on someone
171. Protesting social, political or environmental conditions
188. Crying
222. Shocking people, swearing, making obscene gestures, etc.

Maté was very careful to distinguish between “ayahuasca” as a ceremony that includes the use of naturally-occurring DMT and the drug itself. He doesn’t really care about experimental design or even the legality of importing psychotria plants into Canada. Much like a safe injection site, he thinks the treatment should be done because there have been positive results.

Someone asked the really interesting question of whether these ceremonies count as cultural appropriation, particularly in light of the popularity of Ayahuasca Tourism. The ceremonies are performed by residents of BC who have apprenticed under Peruvian shamans but Maté mentioned at least one that included BC First Nations ritual elements. Given that many addicts in BC are First Nations and the significant of First Nations in our province’s spiritual culture, I think it would make sense if these evolve into a hybrid ritual.

Maté only briefly compared ayahuasca with ibogaine, another hallucinogenic used in the treatment of addiction in Vancouver. From what I gather, ibogaine cures physical addiction but has less impact on the psychological cause of drug use in the first place. Although patients who participate in ayahuasca still have relapses without a follow-up support structure. Maté mentioned that he would like to try combining ibogaine and ayahausca.

Interestingly, Maté has participated in these ceremonies a number of times, which made me question his distinction between medical treatment, spiritual work and recreational drug use.

Doblin had some interesting things to say about strategy. He pictures a progression in treatment groups from the most politically valuable to the least:

• Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, police and firefighters
• Sexual assault victims
• Terminal cancer patients
• Couples therapy (the original therapeutic use of MDMA)
• Individuals doing self-therapy for emotional issues or spiritual enlightenment (this will effectively require full legalization)

Doblin thinks MDMA is cognitively simpler than hallucinogens and therefore easier to use in therapy. The idea is to get it accepted by the therapeutic community and then introduce other psychedelics. And then once drugs have a history of safe therapeutic use we can start talking about legalization.

The DrugMonkey blog had a lot of criticism of the lack of rigor in MAPS’ initial exploratory testing. Now that they’re seeking US Food & Drug Administration approval, their experimental design has been beefed up:

• MAPS has developed a specific talk therapy protocol to be used with the MDMA. Therapy sessions are recorded and then scored by observers for adherence to the protocol.
• They’re comparing between patients who randomly receive one of three different doses: 25 mg, 75 mg and 120 mg. And then giving low-dose patients the opportunity to repeat the intervention with a higher dose.

It reminded me of this Tyee article from last spring complaining that men in Vancouver don’t approach women often enough. Of course women suffer from a cognitive bias: when a “creep” tries interacting with them, it’s not counted as a case of a “man” giving them attention, it’s counted as a case of “there sure are a lot of creeps in this town”. They’re only going to count the cases when an interaction went pretty well.

Other biases that make it hard to get a clear picture of the dating scene:

• We mostly hear about dating success stories. No couple ever says “we met in a bar after we both had tried online dating for 6 months”.
• Only single people comment on the single scene. Nobody says “the single scene in Vancouver is great: I started sleeping with my current boyfriend before I had even broken up with the previous one”.
• The most chronically single people will comment on it the most.

Even if we’re generous and don’t say “there’s one person that all your failed relationships had in common”, if peoples’ lives are randomly distributed then some of them will be outliers of shittiness. As a result, it’s impossible to get dating statistics from anecdotes.

Of course the Tyee article is actually about a researcher who has found that people complain about the single scene in every city, although it appears that perhaps people complain about different issues in each one.

I’ve decided to make this blog about what I think not about what I feel. Perhaps that doesn’t provide as much value to myself or to others as a deeply personal account, but I have yet to be convinced of that.

So I find it easiest to write critical posts. I try to do one of these things:

• Find a unique, irreverent angle;
• Record information that might help people who randomly find the post in Google; or,
• Offer suggestions for improvement that I have a faint hope will make it back to someone who has the power to implement them.

Is the third one a cop-out from being the change I want to see in the world? Sure, but it’s more fun. And my interests are diverse enough that if I started trying to enact change I would have to tragically narrow my scope.

The problem with all this is that criticism doesn’t make people happy. Keeping a gratitude journal has been shown in psychological studies to be quite effective at raising happiness. I tried keeping a gratitude journal for a while in an iPhone app, but it felt like a chore so I stopped – maybe I’ll try it again now.

People like being around other positive people and so having a positive outlook on life is supposed to be quite good for your social (and love) life. I think I’m usually pretty positive in social situations, especially with people I just met, but I haven’t received feedback about that.

This post is a response to my friend Maya’s criticism of my ongoing Shambhala review series. I have no intention of going into my favourite personal moments (seeing as they’re personal). She has inspired me to consider whether I should try to make the tone of this blog more positive, but I don’t want to just turn it into my gratitude journal. (Although aren’t you happy about what I had for dinner?)

I’ve been struggling with waking up on time since I’ve had a 9-5 job. I tried different alarms (my latest one is an iPhone app that senses my vibrations on the mattress), but I concluded that I was too tired for any alarm to be really effective. So it seems like I need to go to bed earlier, but I just can’t bring myself to. Whether it’s my social life, housework, the Internet, a good book or shifting from my weekend schedule, I can’t seem to get to bed when I think I should.

When I heard about chronotypes, I noted that I generally wasn’t tired when I thought I “should” go to bed, and diagnosed myself as a night owl (which I’d always self-identified as in folk psychology). “Great,” I thought, “it’s not a lack of will power, I’m just incompatible with society!” But then I realized the powerlessness of that position. In theory, I could ask to start work a bit later, but that’s not going to shift the rest of the world later. The B Society might work as an advocate in the aggregate, but it doesn’t seem like a good position to personally take.

So right now I’m experimenting with taking zinc and magnesium before bed to get more quality of sleep with less quantity. Other things to try include showering before bed, configuring my Internet connection to break at certain times, and getting rid of all my friends.

As a society, our approach to autism is still primarily “How do we make autistic people behave more normally? How do we get them to increase eye contact and make small talk while suppressing hand-flapping and other stims?” The inventor of a well-known form of behavioral intervention for autism, Dr. Ivar Lovaas, who passed away recently, said that his goal was to make autistic kids indistinguishable from their peers. That goal has more to do with increasing the comfort of non-autistic people than with what autistic people really need.

…What if we asked instead, “How can we increase the quality of life for autistic people?” We wouldn’t lose anything by that paradigm shift. We’d still be searching for ways to help autistic people communicate, stop dangerous and self-injurious behaviors, and make it easier for autistic people to have friends.

But the current bias in treatment — which measures progress by how non-autistic a person looks — would be taken away. Instead of trying to make autistic people normal, society should be asking us what we need to be happy.

The interview also mentions Autreat – it’s like the opposite of Burning Man! (Although I find the background of that webpage to be “inescapable sensory bombardment”.)

The message curve looks like it’s been shifted to the right a constant amount. Because it’s so constant, it can’t be explained as women valuing personality/wealth over beauty. (OkTrends might be controlling for that somehow? They don’t really discuss their methodology.)

There’s a theory that women’s conscious and non-conscious desire is poorly linked. I’m thinking of research where women watch porn while their physical arousal is monitored and they report their psychological arousal. Women get physically aroused by mysoginistic porn. A recent result with animal porn led to the theory that women get physically aroused by the possibility of near-future sex whether it’s voluntary or not (ie: “you’re gonna get raped!”).

An alternate explanation is that women’s non-conscious mind likes to watch animal porn but culture has repressed that. Men are simpler creatures that have a direct connection between physical and psychological arousal. Or men don’t even have psychological arousal except caused when they observe their physical state.

This theory could explain the OkCupid graph by saying that women consciously claim all men are ugly but their non-conscious mind would still hit that.

The funny thing is that for the few men who are admittedly attractive, the messaging rate still drops. My theory is that attractive men can more easily cheat on a partner, so they’re best avoided in planned situations like online dating. This predicts that women would prefer more attractive men in unplanned situations like one-night stands.

I often suspect that people are using it as a uniform (flat) distribution. The subjects seem to be “9s” and “10s” more often than I would expect from a normal distribution with reasonable variance. And not surprisingly, the most common subjects below the middle are notably unattractive. I treat it as a normal distribution: chances are you’re a 5 or a 6.

OkCupid is an online dating site that I love for its four-factor Dating Persona Test. The site was built by four Harvard math grads. Kyla told me that they’ve started crunching numbers on users activity and publishing the results. (Statistical analysis is more legitimate than speed dating research, because they don’t pretend they’re in a laboratory where they can control all the variables.)

One of their best results is how men users rate the attractiveness of womens’ profile pictures and messages from men to women:

Men rate women on a normal distribution and disproportionately hit on attractive women. The old story about all the guys ignoring the most attractive woman because they assume she’s out of their league is confirmed.

Women, on the other hand, think all men are ugly:

But women will message ugly guys, as long as they’re not too ugly.