It's interesting that all that presents depression as FUNDAMENTALLY, at least on some level, reactive, or at least inter-active with the environment, rather than focusing on "fairly random disruption in neurochemistry that MIGHT "have a reason" but often doesn't" -- which is a narrative that seems to dominate current mainstream framing of depression.
It all goes back to your thesis on the reference point / expectations and the tension between coasting (low expectations leading to a "wasted" life by some account and probably leading to boredom and depression) and pushing too hard (unrealistic expectations leading to stress and depression). I think you adjudicate this tension by saying that we are evolutionarily built to push too hard and change the goal post b/c this is how we have the most success. And furthermore we cannot help but be unhappy in the service of achieving our potential. Depression as deep unhappiness would be the logical consequence of that process on one tail of the population distribution?
While this normative description makes sense to me, I propose that this tension is solved differently - which is by developing and cultivating a value system that brings joy in ones life because it is meaningful intrinsically not because it leads to external validation/accomplishments. The Stoics whom you quote have a lot of useful stuff to say about this - control, virtues, impermanence etc.
I am curious to know how many people educated in the main Stoic teachings consider themselves depressed. And how many people that had been depressed came out of it or have reduced symptoms after they read the Stoics. I assume that all the true religious (even the socially religious) would score well given the meaning they get from their practice, community etc. In other words, I am curious to know if deep depression (as a biological heritable trait) can be overcome with developing a moral theory of what it is to live a good life .
I don't have an answer to your last question. I will write on a life satisfaction in one of the incoming posts. I think these will provide (possible) answers to the questions you raise.
Hi Cip, thanks for finishing the book. I am glad you liked it! I am not sure how Popper and Deutsch would be antidotes (I know the former, not the latter). I know Taleb's critique which is interesting. In my view, the main problem with Bayesianism is the one I lay out in the epilogue. As Binmore says it is a bit of a mystery how we change our mind when we are surprised (well at least if you start from a Bayesian point of view).
I read too much into your critique of Bayes then. I have deeper problems with Bayes. The 2 main ones are its naive application to Extremistan or ludic fallacy (both Taleb terms which are pretty good) - Bayes is dangerous applies to fat tails; second is the epistemology implied by Bayes which is that one can incrementally get to the truth by updating their views based on evidence (in contrast with Popper's falsification); again this is more relevant in Extremistan.
David Deutsch is one of the brilliant minds outthere and his book "Beginning of Infinity" nothing short of exceptional. He is a Popperian but makes progress on Popper.
I think Taleb's critique is related to Binmore's. The fat-tail problem can be interpreted as reflecting surprises. Surprises arise from the fact that your model of the world does not account for all possible events (e.g., US intelligence did not consider the 9/11 scenario as a possibility). The solution may be to adopt a Bayesian approach but allocate some weight to the possibility of unknown events. This leads to different decision-making rules, such as the 'Precautionary Principle.' This recommendation aligns with Taleb's criticism. My colleague Quiggin has written on this: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/149847/?v=pdf
This is likely a different discussion, perhaps you can write a post about the Bayes misapplication / ludic fallacy / precautionary principle & we can engage there. Taleb has a nuanced view on the precautionary principle which he calls the "non-naive" precautionary principle. For any innovation / "surprise", it distinguishes between thin and fat tails domains & local and systemic risks. It allows for local-bounded/thin tailed domain errors even if the problem is not well understood or complex.
I think you’re right & I like the way you represent heuristics as decision strategies that either correlate with the scope of the possible - or don’t. But I would like to suggest some additional elements for consideration. I volunteer that the scope of the possible is not fixed but itself subject to adaptive forces. This introduces uncertainty - which is an enormous factor in anxiety / depressive symptoms. If the scope of the possible suddenly narrows - ie there is less variation in the adaptive landscape, then more people will be poorly calibrated. Fortunately, evolution has given us tools for the 20% context where we find ourselves outside the ‘good enough’ pattern & we can usually still respond to these small perturbations with new pathways. We will be considerably aided in responding to narrow adaptive pathways if we have resources (family, social capital, financial capital) that can sustain us in the narrow adaptive landscape until we find a way out. If we do not have these resources, we are more likely to become trapped on a ‘low hill’. Sometimes there’s a rapid transition shift / tipping point & we find ourselves trapped in an impossibly narrow adaptive landscape over which we have no control. This might be a war - or the sudden appearance of an oligarchy or authoritarian leader. Or at the level of the individual, it may be a painful upbringing or experience of a terrorist incident. The second element which I think is important is signalling. If we have a sensory impression that a better ‘scope of possible’ exists, we will be less likely to habituate & return to our former emotional baseline & more likely to keep chasing it. (Like a dog finding a scent). But if we’re ’all in it together’ (less exposed to other outcome distributions) then we can be very Stoic & accept our fate. When we live in societies that bombard us with sensory signals that a better scope of the possible is out there, then we may find ourselves hopelessly miscalibrated & unable to habituate leading to the higher levels of depression we see in the West. At first, our sensation that a better possible exists will lead to hyper vigilance / anxiety etc not depression. As this is a psychologically arousing experience (albeit horrible) it is possible for the hyper vigilance to be channelled into individual or collective action - essentially restless, often fruitless search for a new pathway. BUT this sensory process is itself, subject to adaptive behaviour. Our senses are modulated by hormone production. Depressed people have dopamine processing deficiencies which leads to miscalibration of the scope of the possible. They over emphasise errors & under emphasise success. This is the ‘learned helplessness’ of caged dogs that no longer recognise that a new pathway has opened up for them. This dopamine miscalibration works in both directions - over confident people are bad at recognising errors - or relating those errors to their individual scope of the possible. (I always felt that Seligman’s 3 Ps, if applied religiously, describe a really annoying, unaccountable narcissist.) The finance industry is full of people chemically interfering with their dopamine regulation to artificially induce poorly calibrated decisions. It is no surprise that the 0.01% is populated by individuals who are also poorly calibrated to the scope of the possible. But if you exist in a context of power law distributions, then your hopeless miscalibration will be enormously adaptive. If you’re the one getting a huge investment for your ‘winner takes all’ AI innovation, or your hedge fund strategy based on some tiny arbitrage with a huge pay-off, then you need your sensory signals to be miscalibrated. Or you’d be back with the suckers happy with their 7% pay rise. Anyway, none of this contradicts your model but I would suggest that it’s too simplistic to describe depression as someone wanting more than they can get. I also note that like today’s influencers, the Stoics were very good at telling others to suck it up after they had achieved a higher level of fitness in their own lives.
Thank you, Claire, for your thoughtful comment. I agree that external factors, like changes in the "scope of the possible" and societal signals, can significantly influence how we calibrate our expectations and moods. In the post, I aimed to highlight how depression can arise when aspirations are misaligned with what's achievable. But it is not the whole story.
Thanks - what did you think about the power law point? Could this explain why it's adaptive to be non-calibrated in certain contexts? For example where there is vast variability in the surrounding context or paradigm shift in the system? Most of the time, being non-calibrated is a recipe for misery but in chaotic systems undergoing a huge amount of change, non-calibration might be highly adaptive? If you put a power law distribution behind your rewards chart just as e.g. financial markets were deregulated, you'd see all the over-confident people reaching higher level of fitness?
I think it is hard to nail down what is depression, because it depends on ones expectation of what level of good mood would be normal. I have the textbook Eastern European mindset - life is suffering, it is about survival and not about pursuing happiness, and one has to get drunk to be able to laugh. Now depression is either an episode where it gets even worse, or the mindset itself is depression.
Or look at that typical British mindset that revolves either around moaning about everything or heroically keeping a stiff upper lip and suffering in silence.
I've certainly heard, at least as an anecdote, that the average, normal score on Beck's inventory in Hungary in the late 1980s/90s would be categorised as "moderate clinical depression" in the US at the time.
Of course some of it will be about the socially acceptable, conventional level of expressed mood. It's like the scales used nowadays by orgs and businesses: I give 6 or 7 and j get worried messages of "we're sorry you were unhappy". Cmon, 7 is GOOD.
I’m slightly sceptical of Daniel Nettle there, because we don’t live in the ancestral environment or anything resembling it— possibly long-term is adaptive in situations that resemble the modern world in some ways but not others, out on the Savannah in the past.
My not-scientific guess is that depression triggers when we subconsciously believe we cannot attain status in our environment, and we have no way to escape it. Possibly shutting down and believing in our own worthlessness was an adaptive thing to do, once— you’re not going to try and actively escape, then die, or challenge the status heirarchy when you can’t succeed, then die. Your body makes you low status until you can gain it again.
I think this basically explains everything about depression and so believe it in the absence of anything better, but I have no actual evidence for it at all; it is effectively just a story I tell myself. But it’s more useful than the other stories I’ve heard, which seem even worse
I've made this observation about attempts to link depression among teens to causes like phones and social networks. The alternative explanation is that the world is going very badly in all sorts of ways. To the extent that young people are motivated to change this (for example, the sharp move to the left among young women) this is adaptive.
Hi Isha, you are right it does not design "consciously" anything. However, as a process it generates things that look designed. Here is what Dawkins said in the Blind Watchmaker (1986): Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
And here is what two important contributors to this field of research, Robson and Samuelson, said in an article in 2011 in a more formal way:
"we should be clear on our view of evolution. We adopt throughout the language of principal–agent theory, viewing evolution as a principal who “designs” an incentive scheme so as to induce (constrained) optimal behavior from an agent. However, we do not believe that evolution literally or deliberately solves a maximization problem. We have in mind an underlying model in which utility functions are the heritable feature that defines an agent. These utility functions give rise to frequency-independent fitnesses. [...] If the mutation process that generates types is sufficiently rich, the outcome of the evolutionary process can then be approximated by examining the utility function that maximizes expected fitness, allowing our inquiry to focus on the latter."
It's interesting that all that presents depression as FUNDAMENTALLY, at least on some level, reactive, or at least inter-active with the environment, rather than focusing on "fairly random disruption in neurochemistry that MIGHT "have a reason" but often doesn't" -- which is a narrative that seems to dominate current mainstream framing of depression.
It all goes back to your thesis on the reference point / expectations and the tension between coasting (low expectations leading to a "wasted" life by some account and probably leading to boredom and depression) and pushing too hard (unrealistic expectations leading to stress and depression). I think you adjudicate this tension by saying that we are evolutionarily built to push too hard and change the goal post b/c this is how we have the most success. And furthermore we cannot help but be unhappy in the service of achieving our potential. Depression as deep unhappiness would be the logical consequence of that process on one tail of the population distribution?
While this normative description makes sense to me, I propose that this tension is solved differently - which is by developing and cultivating a value system that brings joy in ones life because it is meaningful intrinsically not because it leads to external validation/accomplishments. The Stoics whom you quote have a lot of useful stuff to say about this - control, virtues, impermanence etc.
I am curious to know how many people educated in the main Stoic teachings consider themselves depressed. And how many people that had been depressed came out of it or have reduced symptoms after they read the Stoics. I assume that all the true religious (even the socially religious) would score well given the meaning they get from their practice, community etc. In other words, I am curious to know if deep depression (as a biological heritable trait) can be overcome with developing a moral theory of what it is to live a good life .
I don't have an answer to your last question. I will write on a life satisfaction in one of the incoming posts. I think these will provide (possible) answers to the questions you raise.
The
Just finished your book. Well researched and wide ranging. Great stuff.
While I have it fresh in my head - I agree with your analysis on rationality but I would suggest Popper and Deutsch (& Taleb) as an antidote to Bayes.
Hi Cip, thanks for finishing the book. I am glad you liked it! I am not sure how Popper and Deutsch would be antidotes (I know the former, not the latter). I know Taleb's critique which is interesting. In my view, the main problem with Bayesianism is the one I lay out in the epilogue. As Binmore says it is a bit of a mystery how we change our mind when we are surprised (well at least if you start from a Bayesian point of view).
I read too much into your critique of Bayes then. I have deeper problems with Bayes. The 2 main ones are its naive application to Extremistan or ludic fallacy (both Taleb terms which are pretty good) - Bayes is dangerous applies to fat tails; second is the epistemology implied by Bayes which is that one can incrementally get to the truth by updating their views based on evidence (in contrast with Popper's falsification); again this is more relevant in Extremistan.
David Deutsch is one of the brilliant minds outthere and his book "Beginning of Infinity" nothing short of exceptional. He is a Popperian but makes progress on Popper.
I think Taleb's critique is related to Binmore's. The fat-tail problem can be interpreted as reflecting surprises. Surprises arise from the fact that your model of the world does not account for all possible events (e.g., US intelligence did not consider the 9/11 scenario as a possibility). The solution may be to adopt a Bayesian approach but allocate some weight to the possibility of unknown events. This leads to different decision-making rules, such as the 'Precautionary Principle.' This recommendation aligns with Taleb's criticism. My colleague Quiggin has written on this: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/149847/?v=pdf
This is likely a different discussion, perhaps you can write a post about the Bayes misapplication / ludic fallacy / precautionary principle & we can engage there. Taleb has a nuanced view on the precautionary principle which he calls the "non-naive" precautionary principle. For any innovation / "surprise", it distinguishes between thin and fat tails domains & local and systemic risks. It allows for local-bounded/thin tailed domain errors even if the problem is not well understood or complex.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5787
I think you’re right & I like the way you represent heuristics as decision strategies that either correlate with the scope of the possible - or don’t. But I would like to suggest some additional elements for consideration. I volunteer that the scope of the possible is not fixed but itself subject to adaptive forces. This introduces uncertainty - which is an enormous factor in anxiety / depressive symptoms. If the scope of the possible suddenly narrows - ie there is less variation in the adaptive landscape, then more people will be poorly calibrated. Fortunately, evolution has given us tools for the 20% context where we find ourselves outside the ‘good enough’ pattern & we can usually still respond to these small perturbations with new pathways. We will be considerably aided in responding to narrow adaptive pathways if we have resources (family, social capital, financial capital) that can sustain us in the narrow adaptive landscape until we find a way out. If we do not have these resources, we are more likely to become trapped on a ‘low hill’. Sometimes there’s a rapid transition shift / tipping point & we find ourselves trapped in an impossibly narrow adaptive landscape over which we have no control. This might be a war - or the sudden appearance of an oligarchy or authoritarian leader. Or at the level of the individual, it may be a painful upbringing or experience of a terrorist incident. The second element which I think is important is signalling. If we have a sensory impression that a better ‘scope of possible’ exists, we will be less likely to habituate & return to our former emotional baseline & more likely to keep chasing it. (Like a dog finding a scent). But if we’re ’all in it together’ (less exposed to other outcome distributions) then we can be very Stoic & accept our fate. When we live in societies that bombard us with sensory signals that a better scope of the possible is out there, then we may find ourselves hopelessly miscalibrated & unable to habituate leading to the higher levels of depression we see in the West. At first, our sensation that a better possible exists will lead to hyper vigilance / anxiety etc not depression. As this is a psychologically arousing experience (albeit horrible) it is possible for the hyper vigilance to be channelled into individual or collective action - essentially restless, often fruitless search for a new pathway. BUT this sensory process is itself, subject to adaptive behaviour. Our senses are modulated by hormone production. Depressed people have dopamine processing deficiencies which leads to miscalibration of the scope of the possible. They over emphasise errors & under emphasise success. This is the ‘learned helplessness’ of caged dogs that no longer recognise that a new pathway has opened up for them. This dopamine miscalibration works in both directions - over confident people are bad at recognising errors - or relating those errors to their individual scope of the possible. (I always felt that Seligman’s 3 Ps, if applied religiously, describe a really annoying, unaccountable narcissist.) The finance industry is full of people chemically interfering with their dopamine regulation to artificially induce poorly calibrated decisions. It is no surprise that the 0.01% is populated by individuals who are also poorly calibrated to the scope of the possible. But if you exist in a context of power law distributions, then your hopeless miscalibration will be enormously adaptive. If you’re the one getting a huge investment for your ‘winner takes all’ AI innovation, or your hedge fund strategy based on some tiny arbitrage with a huge pay-off, then you need your sensory signals to be miscalibrated. Or you’d be back with the suckers happy with their 7% pay rise. Anyway, none of this contradicts your model but I would suggest that it’s too simplistic to describe depression as someone wanting more than they can get. I also note that like today’s influencers, the Stoics were very good at telling others to suck it up after they had achieved a higher level of fitness in their own lives.
Thank you, Claire, for your thoughtful comment. I agree that external factors, like changes in the "scope of the possible" and societal signals, can significantly influence how we calibrate our expectations and moods. In the post, I aimed to highlight how depression can arise when aspirations are misaligned with what's achievable. But it is not the whole story.
Thanks - what did you think about the power law point? Could this explain why it's adaptive to be non-calibrated in certain contexts? For example where there is vast variability in the surrounding context or paradigm shift in the system? Most of the time, being non-calibrated is a recipe for misery but in chaotic systems undergoing a huge amount of change, non-calibration might be highly adaptive? If you put a power law distribution behind your rewards chart just as e.g. financial markets were deregulated, you'd see all the over-confident people reaching higher level of fitness?
I think it is hard to nail down what is depression, because it depends on ones expectation of what level of good mood would be normal. I have the textbook Eastern European mindset - life is suffering, it is about survival and not about pursuing happiness, and one has to get drunk to be able to laugh. Now depression is either an episode where it gets even worse, or the mindset itself is depression.
Or look at that typical British mindset that revolves either around moaning about everything or heroically keeping a stiff upper lip and suffering in silence.
I've certainly heard, at least as an anecdote, that the average, normal score on Beck's inventory in Hungary in the late 1980s/90s would be categorised as "moderate clinical depression" in the US at the time.
Of course some of it will be about the socially acceptable, conventional level of expressed mood. It's like the scales used nowadays by orgs and businesses: I give 6 or 7 and j get worried messages of "we're sorry you were unhappy". Cmon, 7 is GOOD.
I’m slightly sceptical of Daniel Nettle there, because we don’t live in the ancestral environment or anything resembling it— possibly long-term is adaptive in situations that resemble the modern world in some ways but not others, out on the Savannah in the past.
My not-scientific guess is that depression triggers when we subconsciously believe we cannot attain status in our environment, and we have no way to escape it. Possibly shutting down and believing in our own worthlessness was an adaptive thing to do, once— you’re not going to try and actively escape, then die, or challenge the status heirarchy when you can’t succeed, then die. Your body makes you low status until you can gain it again.
I think this basically explains everything about depression and so believe it in the absence of anything better, but I have no actual evidence for it at all; it is effectively just a story I tell myself. But it’s more useful than the other stories I’ve heard, which seem even worse
I've made this observation about attempts to link depression among teens to causes like phones and social networks. The alternative explanation is that the world is going very badly in all sorts of ways. To the extent that young people are motivated to change this (for example, the sharp move to the left among young women) this is adaptive.
Evolution doesn't design things.
Hi Isha, you are right it does not design "consciously" anything. However, as a process it generates things that look designed. Here is what Dawkins said in the Blind Watchmaker (1986): Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
And here is what two important contributors to this field of research, Robson and Samuelson, said in an article in 2011 in a more formal way:
"we should be clear on our view of evolution. We adopt throughout the language of principal–agent theory, viewing evolution as a principal who “designs” an incentive scheme so as to induce (constrained) optimal behavior from an agent. However, we do not believe that evolution literally or deliberately solves a maximization problem. We have in mind an underlying model in which utility functions are the heritable feature that defines an agent. These utility functions give rise to frequency-independent fitnesses. [...] If the mutation process that generates types is sufficiently rich, the outcome of the evolutionary process can then be approximated by examining the utility function that maximizes expected fitness, allowing our inquiry to focus on the latter."