The simplest hypothesis that explains all this evidence is that Annie Altman is suffering from psychosis, and this would be obvious if we weren’t all caught up in the metoo world order.
E.g. the belief that all her devices, and her wifi were hacked, and that she has been shadowbanned from all internet platforms seems like the kind of thing that someone suffering from psychosis would believe. It’s not a rational belief. It’s called a persecutory delusion.
The idea that her mental health problems were caused by a sexual assault early in her life is topsy turvy; actually, she’s mentally ill which has caused her to have difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction and make the accusation, and irresponsible D-tier amateur journos are taking advantage of the situation.
This post is basically a perfect exemplar of how a psychotic person behaves. E.g.
Annie has moved more than 20 times in the past year.
The base rate for psychosis is about 1-3% and she’s at the most common age for it too.
This 1-3% is much higher than the probability that the abuse happened, and the total internet shadowbanning happened, that multiple family members are conspiring against her, and the part where she was illegally written out of the will happened, etc. OF course if there was hard evidence it would be different, but given what we have I think the psychosis hypothesis is favored.
Zoloft also seems to have some relation with psychosis, with a number of people saying it causes it, exacerbate it, etc. This is somewhat weaker evidence but it is interesting that it came up.
You’re assuming the two alternatives are that everything she’s said is true and accurate, or else nothing is. It does not require psychosis to make wrong interpretations or to have mild paranoia. It merely requires not being a dedicated rationalist, and/or having a hard life. I’m pretty sure that being abused would help cause paranoia, helping her to get some stuff wrong.
Unfortunately, it’s going to be impossible to disentangle this without more specific evidence. Psychology is complicated. Both real recovered memories and fabricated memories seem to be common.
You didn’t bother estimating the base rate of sexual abuse by siblings. While that’s very hard to figure out, it’s very likely in the same neighborhood as your 1-3% psychosis. And it’s even harder to study or estimate. So this isn’t going to help much in resolving the issue.
I’m disappointed you didn’t engage with Seth’s claim that you’re assuming all the claims made are either collectively true or collectively false.
Is it true that someone with psychosis (assuming your judgement is correct) making an allegation of sexual abuse is more likely to be lying/mistaken than not?
I.e someone with psychosis making a claim like the above is less likely than someone without psychosis to be accurately interpreting reality, but is their claim more likely to be false than not? Your argument leans heavily on her having psychosis. Do people with psychosis make more false allegations of sexual assault that true allegations?
Breiding et al., 2014 estimates that around 19.3% of women in the US have been sexually assaulted. Assuming the rate is similar for people with psychosis, more than 1 in 5 women with psychosis would need to make false allegations for the base assumption to be “person has psychosis therefore their sexual assault claim is more likely false than true”. On reflection this part wasn’t a good point.
I have done a check of about half an hour on all kinds of material published by herself and in conclusion I believe with a high degree of certainty that she says a lot of largely untrue things. Whether that’s due to utter brain malfunction or lying I cannot say.
The wholesale dismissal of her reality claims is a mistake. Comorbidities of abuse as well as having to perform the family deceit of not acknowledging it definitionaly decenter the abused as a reference point on reality. Even if her claims are proximally or partially true their complete invalidation is foolish.
Bayes can judge you now: your analysis is half-arsed, which is not a good look when discussing a matter as serious as this.
All you’ve done is provide one misleading statistic. The base rate of experiencing psychosis may be 1-3%, but the base rate of psychotic disorders is much lower, at 0.25% or so.
But the most important factor is one that is very hard to estimate, which is what percentage of people with psychosis manifest that psychosis as false memories of being groped by a sibling. If the psychosis had involved seeing space aliens, we would be having a different discussion.
We would then have to compare this with the rate of teenagers groping their toddler siblings. This is also very difficult. A few studies claim that somewhere around 20% of women are sexually abused as children, but I don’t have a breakdown of that by source of abuse and age, etc. Obviously the figure for our particular subset of assault cases will be significantly lower, but I don’t know by how much.
I thinks it’s highly likely that the number of women groped as a toddler by a sibling is much higher than the number of women who falsely claim to be groped as a toddler by a sibling as a result of psychosis or other mental illness, although again there is high uncertainty. This certainly makes intuitive sense: absent any other information, the most likely explanation for someone being accused of a specific crime is that they committed the crime.
All the further evidence seems at least consistent with either scenario
The sudden onset of the memory could be due to onset of psychosis… or it could be a repressed memory, which can also trigger at any time.
Suppose the claim about shadowbanning is false. That could be due to psychosis, or it could be a combination of misunderstanding technology and being fearful of an abusive sibling in the tech sector. I don’t think it’s strong evidence of psychosis in particular.
Is moving 20 times evidence of psychosis? The claimed reason is that she’s broke and had to rely on sex work for money. This seems orthogonal to psychosis.
Is using Zoloft evidence for being psychotic? Only weakly, since she was taking Zoloft for non-psychotic reasons since her teen years.
The claim about her dads money being withheld is only evidence for psychosis if it is false. This would be easy for sam altman to prove, and he hasn’t yet.
I don’t think there’s enough information to be truly certain of either side, but there is more than enough information to be concerned, and to want further investigation and evidence.
Is moving 20 times evidence of psychosis? The claimed reason is that she’s broke and had to rely on sex work for money. This seems orthogonal to psychosis.
it sounds like you don’t know how evidence works.
The claim about her dads money being withheld is only evidence for psychosis if it is false
Based on your style of communication, I think it’s unlikely many people would feel comfortable telling you about these experiences, ergo the true number may be multiples higher than expected.
The wifi hacking also immediately struck me as reminiscent of paranoid psychosis. Though a significant amount of psychosis-like things are apparently downstream of childhood trauma, including sexual abuse, but I forget the numbers on this.
She could also have some real trauma. Note that it doesn’t have to be the thing that is claimed. Once we are in the realm of a mentally ill person’s delusions (and I have seen this up close), the sky really is the limit.
We are being Bayesian. It’s a hypothesis that explains the visible evidence very well. It also has a relatively high prior probability (a few percent).
Can you show what priors you used, how you calculated the posteriors, what numbers you got and where the input numbers came from? I highly doubt that hypothesis has a higher posterior probability.
Assuming Sam was an abuser, what would hacking wifi signals do that the level of shadowbanning described not do? It strikes me as unlikely because it doesn’t seem to have much reward in the world where Sam is the abuser.
I think you make multiple valid points which are similar to the points I’ve made in my post, but I do think our stances differ in a few ways.
I think that you are certainly correct that psychosis, or a similar type of mental illness / disorder, is a plausible explanatory hypothesis for Annie making the claims that she has.
However, though I do recognize that the simplicity of a hypothesis is a boon to its plausibility, I do not share your belief that we have been unknowingly subsumed by the “MeToo world order”, which has damaged our rationalism and obstructed our ability to recognize this as being obviously the simplest hypothesis. (Though perhaps this is a overly dramatic / inaccurate representation of your assertion.)
While I do agree that this post may encapsulate behavior representative of a person suffering from psychosis, or a similar mental illness, I see the hypothesis space as primarily dual, where mental illness / misrepresentation-of-reality-type hypotheses form one primary subspace, but there exists another primary subspace wherein the behavior detailed in this post is indeed representative of a person who has gone through the things which Annie has claimed she has.
I do appreciate your inclusion of quantitative rates; I think your analysis benefits from it.
I do not share your belief that we have been unknowingly subsumed by the “MeToo world order”
Why not?
A priori when a person makes a bunch of unlikely accusations in public, it would have been reasonable to first consider this as evidence of them not being truthful and sane. Since people are often not sane and/or liars, this is an important epistemic subroutine to have otherwise you are vulnerable to manipulation.
I don’t really want to make this into a huge battle; you almost certainly don’t have anything to change my mind (because I’m right) and I almost certainly won’t change your mind (because your position is good for signaling/popular). I’ve mostly given up on these kind of battles because the supply of mindkilled virtue signaling is essentially limitless—but if you are going to disagree and take the epistemic high ground on LW I think you should have to justify yourself or retract the point.
It’s true that a hundred years ago, women making such allegations were dismissid as being psychotic. This doesn’t mean that these dissmissed women were indeed psychotic and/or wrong in their allegitions. Pre-me-too perception of the world is at least not necessarily more accurate.
If anything, happening of Me-Too movement is an evidence in favor of base rates of sexual assault being highter. You can’t use it existence to lower the probability estimate of this particular allegation being true, without contradicting conservation of expected evidence.
Similarly, with mental health issues. They can be downstream of sexual abuse or they can lead to falsly believing that you were abused. Priviledging one hypothesis over the other requires some kind of evidence. What are the rates of abused person developping mental health issues, similar to what can be observed of Annie Altman? What are the rates of people with similar to Annie Altman issues having delusions about sexual assault?
The base rate for psychosis is about 1-3% and she’s at the most common age for it too.
This 1-3% is much higher than the probability that the abuse happened, and the total internet shadowbanning happened, that multiple family members are conspiring against her, and the part where she was illegally written out of the will happened, etc.
You are comparing wrong numbers. As I’ve already said what we need to compare is the rate of this kind of mental health symptoms among people who were not sexually abused in their childhood and then developped delusions about sexual assualt with the probability of people being sexually abused in their childhood and then developping this kind of simptoms. This will give us a prior to distinguish between two hypothesis.
All the other complications like shadowbanning, family members conspiring, being written out of the will, etc. are not relevant to the main issue. A scenario where a girl was sexually abused as by her brothers, which resulted in her devolopping mental health issues, which lead her to inaccurately believe that she is shadowbanned in the internet isn’t absolving for the brothers. Of course if the other allegations are also true/partially true it makes the situation even more severe. But they have to be examined on their own and not dissmissed all together.
I agree, although I’m not sure it’s entirely due to the “metoo world order.”
It’s probably partly that, but it’s also partly that it’s considered impolite to point out when someone is mentally ill. In part this is because unfortunately doing so can strengthen a paranoid person’s feeling of persecution.
When a friend of mine suffered a psychotic break, she had many technology related delusions, and she reached out to me for advice because I work in technology. I wasn’t sure how to handle it so I consulted a professional. Under their advice, I gave her general advice on how to protect herself from breaches (strong passwords, HTTPS everywhere extension, etc.) and didn’t otherwise try to disillusion her. My role as a friend was to stay her friend, not try to break her delusions. Paranoid people already have enough enemies, imaginary though they may be.
Of course, once delusions have been put into print, it’s now a public forum. (One might question the ethics of publishing such an article). But politeness norms often extend into public forums.
Well, imagine if it was the brother making these claims and everything else was the same. Would there only be one comment suggesting that maybe the cause is mental illness?
This hypothesis seems like it should be at or near the top of the list. It explains a lot of Sam’s alleged behavior. If she’s exhibiting signs of psychosis then he might be trying to get her to get care, which would explain the strings-attached access to resources. Possibly she is either altering the story or misunderstanding about her inheritance being conditional on Zoloft, it might have been an antipsychotic instead.
On the other hand, while psychosis can manifest in subtle ways, I’m skeptical that someone whose psychosis is severe enough that they’d be unable to maintain stable employment or housing would be able to host a podcast where their psychosis isn’t clearly visible. (I haven’t listened to it yet, but I would expect it to be obvious enough that others would have pointed it out)
A variation on this hypothesis that I find more likely is that Annie is psychologically unwell in exactly the ways she says she is, and out of some mixture of concern for her wellbeing and fear that her instability could hurt his own reputation or business interests, Sam has used some amount of coercion to get her to seek psychiatric care. She then justifiably got upset about her rich and powerful family members using their financial power to coerce her into taking drugs she knows she doesn’t want to take. You don’t have to be psychotic to develop some paranoia in a situation like that.
The simplest hypothesis that explains all this evidence is that Annie Altman is suffering from psychosis, and this would be obvious if we weren’t all caught up in the metoo world order.
E.g. the belief that all her devices, and her wifi were hacked, and that she has been shadowbanned from all internet platforms seems like the kind of thing that someone suffering from psychosis would believe. It’s not a rational belief. It’s called a persecutory delusion.
The idea that her mental health problems were caused by a sexual assault early in her life is topsy turvy; actually, she’s mentally ill which has caused her to have difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction and make the accusation, and irresponsible D-tier amateur journos are taking advantage of the situation.
This post is basically a perfect exemplar of how a psychotic person behaves. E.g.
The base rate for psychosis is about 1-3% and she’s at the most common age for it too.
This 1-3% is much higher than the probability that the abuse happened, and the total internet shadowbanning happened, that multiple family members are conspiring against her, and the part where she was illegally written out of the will happened, etc. OF course if there was hard evidence it would be different, but given what we have I think the psychosis hypothesis is favored.
Zoloft also seems to have some relation with psychosis, with a number of people saying it causes it, exacerbate it, etc. This is somewhat weaker evidence but it is interesting that it came up.
I rest my case, may Bayes judge me.
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/understanding-psychosis
You’re assuming the two alternatives are that everything she’s said is true and accurate, or else nothing is. It does not require psychosis to make wrong interpretations or to have mild paranoia. It merely requires not being a dedicated rationalist, and/or having a hard life. I’m pretty sure that being abused would help cause paranoia, helping her to get some stuff wrong.
Unfortunately, it’s going to be impossible to disentangle this without more specific evidence. Psychology is complicated. Both real recovered memories and fabricated memories seem to be common.
You didn’t bother estimating the base rate of sexual abuse by siblings. While that’s very hard to figure out, it’s very likely in the same neighborhood as your 1-3% psychosis. And it’s even harder to study or estimate. So this isn’t going to help much in resolving the issue.
I disagree, that seems extraordinarily high to me.
I’m disappointed you didn’t engage with Seth’s claim that you’re assuming all the claims made are either collectively true or collectively false.
Is it true that someone with psychosis (assuming your judgement is correct) making an allegation of sexual abuse is more likely to be lying/mistaken than not?
I.e someone with psychosis making a claim like the above is less likely than someone without psychosis to be accurately interpreting reality, but is their claim more likely to be false than not? Your argument leans heavily on her having psychosis. Do people with psychosis make more false allegations of sexual assault that true allegations?
Breiding et al., 2014 estimates that around 19.3% of women in the US have been sexually assaulted. Assuming the rate is similar for people with psychosis, more than 1 in 5 women with psychosis would need to make false allegations for the base assumption to be “person has psychosis therefore their sexual assault claim is more likely false than true”.On reflection this part wasn’t a good point.I have done a check of about half an hour on all kinds of material published by herself and in conclusion I believe with a high degree of certainty that she says a lot of largely untrue things. Whether that’s due to utter brain malfunction or lying I cannot say.
The wholesale dismissal of her reality claims is a mistake. Comorbidities of abuse as well as having to perform the family deceit of not acknowledging it definitionaly decenter the abused as a reference point on reality. Even if her claims are proximally or partially true their complete invalidation is foolish.
Bayes can judge you now: your analysis is half-arsed, which is not a good look when discussing a matter as serious as this.
All you’ve done is provide one misleading statistic. The base rate of experiencing psychosis may be 1-3%, but the base rate of psychotic disorders is much lower, at 0.25% or so.
But the most important factor is one that is very hard to estimate, which is what percentage of people with psychosis manifest that psychosis as false memories of being groped by a sibling. If the psychosis had involved seeing space aliens, we would be having a different discussion.
We would then have to compare this with the rate of teenagers groping their toddler siblings. This is also very difficult. A few studies claim that somewhere around 20% of women are sexually abused as children, but I don’t have a breakdown of that by source of abuse and age, etc. Obviously the figure for our particular subset of assault cases will be significantly lower, but I don’t know by how much.
I thinks it’s highly likely that the number of women groped as a toddler by a sibling is much higher than the number of women who falsely claim to be groped as a toddler by a sibling as a result of psychosis or other mental illness, although again there is high uncertainty. This certainly makes intuitive sense: absent any other information, the most likely explanation for someone being accused of a specific crime is that they committed the crime.
All the further evidence seems at least consistent with either scenario
The sudden onset of the memory could be due to onset of psychosis… or it could be a repressed memory, which can also trigger at any time.
Suppose the claim about shadowbanning is false. That could be due to psychosis, or it could be a combination of misunderstanding technology and being fearful of an abusive sibling in the tech sector. I don’t think it’s strong evidence of psychosis in particular.
Is moving 20 times evidence of psychosis? The claimed reason is that she’s broke and had to rely on sex work for money. This seems orthogonal to psychosis.
Is using Zoloft evidence for being psychotic? Only weakly, since she was taking Zoloft for non-psychotic reasons since her teen years.
The claim about her dads money being withheld is only evidence for psychosis if it is false. This would be easy for sam altman to prove, and he hasn’t yet.
I don’t think there’s enough information to be truly certain of either side, but there is more than enough information to be concerned, and to want further investigation and evidence.
This is almost certainly not true.
why? I don’t think it’s misleading. Here’s another source.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2298236
it sounds like you don’t know how evidence works.
ok you definitely don’t know how evidence works.
I think Duncan Sabien’s Law of Prevalence is a good frame for explaining this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KpMNqA5BiCRozCwM3/social-dark-matter#III__The_Law_of_Prevalence
Based on your style of communication, I think it’s unlikely many people would feel comfortable telling you about these experiences, ergo the true number may be multiples higher than expected.
The wifi hacking also immediately struck me as reminiscent of paranoid psychosis. Though a significant amount of psychosis-like things are apparently downstream of childhood trauma, including sexual abuse, but I forget the numbers on this.
She could also have some real trauma. Note that it doesn’t have to be the thing that is claimed. Once we are in the realm of a mentally ill person’s delusions (and I have seen this up close), the sky really is the limit.
How hard is it to hack somebody’s wifi?
Also, a traumatized person attributing a seemingly hacked wifi to their serious abuser doesn’t need to mean any mental illness.
We are being Bayesian. It’s a hypothesis that explains the visible evidence very well. It also has a relatively high prior probability (a few percent).
Can you show what priors you used, how you calculated the posteriors, what numbers you got and where the input numbers came from? I highly doubt that hypothesis has a higher posterior probability.
Assuming Sam was an abuser, what would hacking wifi signals do that the level of shadowbanning described not do? It strikes me as unlikely because it doesn’t seem to have much reward in the world where Sam is the abuser.
I think you make multiple valid points which are similar to the points I’ve made in my post, but I do think our stances differ in a few ways.
I think that you are certainly correct that psychosis, or a similar type of mental illness / disorder, is a plausible explanatory hypothesis for Annie making the claims that she has.
However, though I do recognize that the simplicity of a hypothesis is a boon to its plausibility, I do not share your belief that we have been unknowingly subsumed by the “MeToo world order”, which has damaged our rationalism and obstructed our ability to recognize this as being obviously the simplest hypothesis. (Though perhaps this is a overly dramatic / inaccurate representation of your assertion.)
While I do agree that this post may encapsulate behavior representative of a person suffering from psychosis, or a similar mental illness, I see the hypothesis space as primarily dual, where mental illness / misrepresentation-of-reality-type hypotheses form one primary subspace, but there exists another primary subspace wherein the behavior detailed in this post is indeed representative of a person who has gone through the things which Annie has claimed she has.
I do appreciate your inclusion of quantitative rates; I think your analysis benefits from it.
Why not?
A priori when a person makes a bunch of unlikely accusations in public, it would have been reasonable to first consider this as evidence of them not being truthful and sane. Since people are often not sane and/or liars, this is an important epistemic subroutine to have otherwise you are vulnerable to manipulation.
I don’t really want to make this into a huge battle; you almost certainly don’t have anything to change my mind (because I’m right) and I almost certainly won’t change your mind (because your position is good for signaling/popular). I’ve mostly given up on these kind of battles because the supply of mindkilled virtue signaling is essentially limitless—but if you are going to disagree and take the epistemic high ground on LW I think you should have to justify yourself or retract the point.
It’s true that a hundred years ago, women making such allegations were dismissid as being psychotic. This doesn’t mean that these dissmissed women were indeed psychotic and/or wrong in their allegitions. Pre-me-too perception of the world is at least not necessarily more accurate.
If anything, happening of Me-Too movement is an evidence in favor of base rates of sexual assault being highter. You can’t use it existence to lower the probability estimate of this particular allegation being true, without contradicting conservation of expected evidence.
Similarly, with mental health issues. They can be downstream of sexual abuse or they can lead to falsly believing that you were abused. Priviledging one hypothesis over the other requires some kind of evidence. What are the rates of abused person developping mental health issues, similar to what can be observed of Annie Altman? What are the rates of people with similar to Annie Altman issues having delusions about sexual assault?
You are comparing wrong numbers. As I’ve already said what we need to compare is the rate of this kind of mental health symptoms among people who were not sexually abused in their childhood and then developped delusions about sexual assualt with the probability of people being sexually abused in their childhood and then developping this kind of simptoms. This will give us a prior to distinguish between two hypothesis.
All the other complications like shadowbanning, family members conspiring, being written out of the will, etc. are not relevant to the main issue. A scenario where a girl was sexually abused as by her brothers, which resulted in her devolopping mental health issues, which lead her to inaccurately believe that she is shadowbanned in the internet isn’t absolving for the brothers. Of course if the other allegations are also true/partially true it makes the situation even more severe. But they have to be examined on their own and not dissmissed all together.
I agree, although I’m not sure it’s entirely due to the “metoo world order.”
It’s probably partly that, but it’s also partly that it’s considered impolite to point out when someone is mentally ill. In part this is because unfortunately doing so can strengthen a paranoid person’s feeling of persecution.
When a friend of mine suffered a psychotic break, she had many technology related delusions, and she reached out to me for advice because I work in technology. I wasn’t sure how to handle it so I consulted a professional. Under their advice, I gave her general advice on how to protect herself from breaches (strong passwords, HTTPS everywhere extension, etc.) and didn’t otherwise try to disillusion her. My role as a friend was to stay her friend, not try to break her delusions. Paranoid people already have enough enemies, imaginary though they may be.
Of course, once delusions have been put into print, it’s now a public forum. (One might question the ethics of publishing such an article). But politeness norms often extend into public forums.
Well, imagine if it was the brother making these claims and everything else was the same. Would there only be one comment suggesting that maybe the cause is mental illness?
metoo has broken our collective epistemology
There are several comments “suggesting that maybe the cause is mental illness”.
This hypothesis seems like it should be at or near the top of the list. It explains a lot of Sam’s alleged behavior. If she’s exhibiting signs of psychosis then he might be trying to get her to get care, which would explain the strings-attached access to resources. Possibly she is either altering the story or misunderstanding about her inheritance being conditional on Zoloft, it might have been an antipsychotic instead.
On the other hand, while psychosis can manifest in subtle ways, I’m skeptical that someone whose psychosis is severe enough that they’d be unable to maintain stable employment or housing would be able to host a podcast where their psychosis isn’t clearly visible. (I haven’t listened to it yet, but I would expect it to be obvious enough that others would have pointed it out)
A variation on this hypothesis that I find more likely is that Annie is psychologically unwell in exactly the ways she says she is, and out of some mixture of concern for her wellbeing and fear that her instability could hurt his own reputation or business interests, Sam has used some amount of coercion to get her to seek psychiatric care. She then justifiably got upset about her rich and powerful family members using their financial power to coerce her into taking drugs she knows she doesn’t want to take. You don’t have to be psychotic to develop some paranoia in a situation like that.