Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) - Marginal Relief [except for rape which shows Moderate Relief]
Sexual Orientation—Probably Unchangeable [*]
Sexual Identity—Unchangeable [*]
From ‘What You Can Change and What You Can’t*’ by Seligman pg. 244 of the reviewed (‘vintage’) edition of 2006, explicitly confirmed to be still state of the art.
Just read the book and thought this table to be quite quote-worthy even though it isn’t prosaic.
* These terms have specific and possibly somewhat non-standard definitions in the book. Seligman gives a convincing theory for formation of aspects of sexuality of different ‘depth’ (a core concept of Seligman) based on biological facts around expression of genes and hormones. See chapter 11.
Alas, no. I just saw the bottom half of that list and my physicist instincts said “ah, some nice person has provided a list of interesting and difficult unsolved problems”.
Meanwhile (in the sense of meanwhile which means a month later), my physicist instincts said, ‘Aha, conserved quantities!’ and then, ‘can we apply Noether’s theorem?’
Those studies show improvement with MDMA, but they have small sample sizes and their control groups (which get similarly unusually intense/long therapy sessions without MDMA) show some improvement too. The “apparently miraculous” effect size is at least a good part hype.
Also, lots of people take MDMA in non-therapeutic contexts and lie about it, so it isn’t like you’re going to find a control group of people you can be definitely sure haven’t taken MDMA since they got PTSD—especially if they’ve heard of said hype.
I’m not saying MDMA doesn’t help with PTSD (I even grant that it could help in the treatment of Antisocial Personality, Postpartum Depression and especially Couples Therapy), I’m just saying I wouldn’t be surprised if more than half of the measured effect was due to the length/intensity of the therapeutic sessions these studies use, rather than due to the drug.
This is an excellent concept and I am interested in reviewing the evidence further but Seligman’s conclusions in positive psychology are notoriously...ah....unfounded by evidence so I am skeptical of this scale.
I have difficulties confirming your point. I can’t say anything about his positive psychology though that sees to be OK but Seligman’s evaluation of ‘what you can/can’t change’ seems to be very well established.
Could you point me to your contrary evidence?
Fair enough: if there is evidence for that scale itself, then the author’s credibility is far less relevant.
Thank you for prompting me to look for the actual instances of evidence-lacing for the author. Turns out, I’m wrong. I was too quick to challenge his credibility.
It is actually Martin Seligman, one of his contemporaries that allegedly churned out an empirically un-validated theories:
Please see this Wiki page. The last line in that paragraph is a disappointing ‘These theories have not been empirically validated.’
Addiction is a good example: Although beset by selection problems, it looks like many (possibly most) substance-dependent people will eventually recover, despite poor evidence for any specific intervention (relative to just encouraging someone to quit), and the low odds of recovery for a single attempt. But you wouldn’t say that these recoveries were somehow accidental or not self-directed! Slatestarcodex had an interesting review of this for alcoholism here.
Also note that several of the other areas will tend to change regardless of a specific intervention:
Many (major) depressive episodes will resolve themselves over time. So a positive effect due to treatment could mean several different things: Faster recovery; increased odds of recovery; greater magnitude of recovery; less chance of relapse; or even something like less functional impairment despite no subjective relief. I’ve read less about other conditions.
Weight tends to flatten out and later decrease in mid-life.
Absolute personality trait measures drift with aggregate predictability over time. (Relatives measures are more stable, but it’s not shocking to see large a large percentile change in an individual.)
Finally: When people talk about weight-loss, they’re usually talking about dieting. But bariatric surgery has good evidence for large, long-term weight loss, and is not a rare procedure, (~100,000 a year: link)
I agree with your points but I’m don’t think they address the same time horizon. Whats common among your points is that they show that personality traits change (slowly) over time. They do. There are thorough longitudinal studies that analyse and support this (e.g. the Grant Study). An inspirational read about this is Aging Well. But are these ‘Intended’ treatments or planned change? I don’t think so.
I agree that the time frame for personality change is probably quite long, outside of pathological causes. And at least sometimes, social problems, depression, and anxiety can occur in more stable, quasi-personality forms. That said, sometimes a specific issue will present itself as a more personality trait (e.g. social phobia or shame presenting as introversion), with the possibility of more rapid adjustment.
The time frame for resolving addiction without third party intervention seems more mixed. I suspect selection effects cause us to greatly overestimate the odds that an addiction will usually “burn itself out” to whatever ends, but I’m not too confident.
Weight loss in older age is probably not the sole result of psychological change. Older people are more conscientious and have lower time preference, so that might play a role. But for elderly people, it’s almost certainly mostly a non-physiological effect of aging.
Are long-term personality changes that occur in the absence of a discrete intervention unplanned or accidental? Unclear. People normally recognize their own problems and seek their own solutions, albeit somewhat imprecisely, and these could be the cause of the long-term, (often positive), changes we see in personality. I used addiction as an example, because some of the corrective actions are easy to identity. To take anger as an example: Anger management probably improves over time as a combination of biological changes (lower hormones), social changes (taking on a social role less compatible with displays of anger), as well as self-directed psychosocial changes (learning how to relax, how to stay calm, how to maintain perspective, learning more skilled and effective ways to bring about some desired effect). If you can resolve a change into these types of parts, there’s no longer much use in asking about general intentionality.
Personality problems and pattern ordered by difficulty to change according to Seligman:
From ‘What You Can Change and What You Can’t*’ by Seligman pg. 244 of the reviewed (‘vintage’) edition of 2006, explicitly confirmed to be still state of the art.
Just read the book and thought this table to be quite quote-worthy even though it isn’t prosaic.
* These terms have specific and possibly somewhat non-standard definitions in the book. Seligman gives a convincing theory for formation of aspects of sexuality of different ‘depth’ (a core concept of Seligman) based on biological facts around expression of genes and hormones. See chapter 11.
Someone should write a post called “Open Problems in Self-Improvement”.
Maybe you? Apparently you have some specific Open Problems in mind—I don’t. Could you spell them out?
Alas, no. I just saw the bottom half of that list and my physicist instincts said “ah, some nice person has provided a list of interesting and difficult unsolved problems”.
Meanwhile (in the sense of meanwhile which means a month later), my physicist instincts said, ‘Aha, conserved quantities!’ and then, ‘can we apply Noether’s theorem?’
I wonder whether the classification of PTSD takes account of the apparently miraculous effects of MDMA shown in some studies.
Those studies show improvement with MDMA, but they have small sample sizes and their control groups (which get similarly unusually intense/long therapy sessions without MDMA) show some improvement too. The “apparently miraculous” effect size is at least a good part hype.
Also, lots of people take MDMA in non-therapeutic contexts and lie about it, so it isn’t like you’re going to find a control group of people you can be definitely sure haven’t taken MDMA since they got PTSD—especially if they’ve heard of said hype.
I’m not saying MDMA doesn’t help with PTSD (I even grant that it could help in the treatment of Antisocial Personality, Postpartum Depression and especially Couples Therapy), I’m just saying I wouldn’t be surprised if more than half of the measured effect was due to the length/intensity of the therapeutic sessions these studies use, rather than due to the drug.
This is an excellent concept and I am interested in reviewing the evidence further but Seligman’s conclusions in positive psychology are notoriously...ah....unfounded by evidence so I am skeptical of this scale.
I have difficulties confirming your point. I can’t say anything about his positive psychology though that sees to be OK but Seligman’s evaluation of ‘what you can/can’t change’ seems to be very well established. Could you point me to your contrary evidence?
Fair enough: if there is evidence for that scale itself, then the author’s credibility is far less relevant.
Thank you for prompting me to look for the actual instances of evidence-lacing for the author. Turns out, I’m wrong. I was too quick to challenge his credibility.
It is actually Martin Seligman, one of his contemporaries that allegedly churned out an empirically un-validated theories:
Please see this Wiki page. The last line in that paragraph is a disappointing ‘These theories have not been empirically validated.’
Be careful about interpreting these estimates.
Addiction is a good example: Although beset by selection problems, it looks like many (possibly most) substance-dependent people will eventually recover, despite poor evidence for any specific intervention (relative to just encouraging someone to quit), and the low odds of recovery for a single attempt. But you wouldn’t say that these recoveries were somehow accidental or not self-directed! Slatestarcodex had an interesting review of this for alcoholism here.
Also note that several of the other areas will tend to change regardless of a specific intervention:
Many (major) depressive episodes will resolve themselves over time. So a positive effect due to treatment could mean several different things: Faster recovery; increased odds of recovery; greater magnitude of recovery; less chance of relapse; or even something like less functional impairment despite no subjective relief. I’ve read less about other conditions.
Weight tends to flatten out and later decrease in mid-life.
Absolute personality trait measures drift with aggregate predictability over time. (Relatives measures are more stable, but it’s not shocking to see large a large percentile change in an individual.)
Finally: When people talk about weight-loss, they’re usually talking about dieting. But bariatric surgery has good evidence for large, long-term weight loss, and is not a rare procedure, (~100,000 a year: link)
I agree with your points but I’m don’t think they address the same time horizon. Whats common among your points is that they show that personality traits change (slowly) over time. They do. There are thorough longitudinal studies that analyse and support this (e.g. the Grant Study). An inspirational read about this is Aging Well. But are these ‘Intended’ treatments or planned change? I don’t think so.
I agree that the time frame for personality change is probably quite long, outside of pathological causes. And at least sometimes, social problems, depression, and anxiety can occur in more stable, quasi-personality forms. That said, sometimes a specific issue will present itself as a more personality trait (e.g. social phobia or shame presenting as introversion), with the possibility of more rapid adjustment.
The time frame for resolving addiction without third party intervention seems more mixed. I suspect selection effects cause us to greatly overestimate the odds that an addiction will usually “burn itself out” to whatever ends, but I’m not too confident.
Weight loss in older age is probably not the sole result of psychological change. Older people are more conscientious and have lower time preference, so that might play a role. But for elderly people, it’s almost certainly mostly a non-physiological effect of aging.
Are long-term personality changes that occur in the absence of a discrete intervention unplanned or accidental? Unclear. People normally recognize their own problems and seek their own solutions, albeit somewhat imprecisely, and these could be the cause of the long-term, (often positive), changes we see in personality. I used addiction as an example, because some of the corrective actions are easy to identity. To take anger as an example: Anger management probably improves over time as a combination of biological changes (lower hormones), social changes (taking on a social role less compatible with displays of anger), as well as self-directed psychosocial changes (learning how to relax, how to stay calm, how to maintain perspective, learning more skilled and effective ways to bring about some desired effect). If you can resolve a change into these types of parts, there’s no longer much use in asking about general intentionality.