[Question] LW resources on childhood experiences?

[nahir91595]

Does LW have a curated or tagged set of resources on childhood experiences including “trauma”? Personally I’m interested in perspectives from developing world countries (I belong to one), but I’m totally interested in different people coming at this topic from different angles.

I know Yudkowsky has written about his experience for example, so have a couple of other people, but I’m curious if there’s a well-organised list or tag or similar.

Reasons to study this on lesswrong should be obvious but I’ll list some of the main ones out:

1. Social dark matter—rest of society will study it poorly by default. LW members are sometimes privileged enough and brave enough to discuss such things on the internet, which has vast audience.

2. Good decision-making, managing motivation and executive function, etc—requires discussing pyschology, which often requires discussing childhood experiences.

3. Deconfusing your core values - requires discussing psychology, which often requires discussing childhood experiences.

4. Coordination—improving human coordination requires understanding each other’s core psychological differences and being able to find ways to bridge past them.

5. Fans—some people love the idea of solving childhood trauma. An idea that has people who love rather than just like it, is more likely to be worth discussing. Examples: [1] [2]

[ChristianKl]

I’m wary of the way you frame your post. Childhood experiences and memories of childhood experiences are not the same.

Veracity of memories of childhood experiences are not central to gaining benefits from techniques to resolve “childhood trauma”. Plenty of techniques that are intended resolve childhood trauma’s can also be used to gain psychological benefits through resolve trauma from past-life experiences where we have good reasons to belief that there’s no veracity in the relevant memories.

[Dagon]

Upvoted, but I worry that it’s not a good fit for LessWrong. Much of Social Dark Matter has pretty significant reasons for being dark, and LW is a public forum without much prior restraint on speech. For many of the same reasons we avoid politics (Politics is the Mind-Killer — LessWrong, summarized as “some otherwise-rational people go funny in the head on certain topics”), we should be very careful about making personal trauma and reactions to such a very visible topic here.

I very much hope you get a few good pointers, and that there aren’t many posts on LW on the topic.

[Viliam]

There is no reason to assume that people at LW are experts on psychology or trauma. (I mean, it may happen that we have an expert or two here by coincidence, but we are not a mental health expert community.) Or that their experience is representative for the population in general.

It would be tempting to generalize from one example, so that e.g. people who were bullied at school might say “for example, bullying at schools is the most frequent source of trauma in our society”, and the people who were not bullied might say “actually, bullying at schools is almost non-existent these days”, and everyone would pretend that their opinion is based on more than an anecdote.

You would get all kinds of selection bias. On one hand, people love to complain, especially if they sense a supportive audience. On the other hand, people don’t want to make their darkest stuff public knowledge.

It is also difficult to distinguish between a person who had a wonderful life with virtually no problems, and an abused person who is deeply in denial. Their reports may sound very similar: “everything OK”.

[RHollerith]

Even though I prefer the written word, I get most of my mental-health (and health) info from Youtube these years. These videos for example taught me important things about trauma, and I think I already knew a lot about it before watching them: https://​​youtu.be/​​QHUoSrCOBGE https://​​youtu.be/​​LAEB5DIPPX8.

Many hundreds of deep experts on health and mental health have made and uploaded to YT tens of thousands of hours of video, and it is significantly easier for me to find the deep experts on health and mental health on YT than it is on the textual web, but if you do not already know a lot about health and mental health, it might not possible for you to tell which YT creators are the deep experts.

The textual web is still superior for many queries /​ quests, e.g., what are the names of the active forms of vitamin B6? Do any of the experts who treat or research CFS consider disorders of oxalate metabolism and important component, cause or consequence of CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome)? But if the goal is to learn more about CFS or oxalates (rather than the connection or intersection of CFS and oxalates) or trauma disorder or a particular mental-health condition, I would search YT first.

Personally I’m interested in perspectives from developing world countries

I have nothing relevant here.

[ChristianKl]

How do you assess the expertise of those YT creators? How certain you are of their expertise?

[RHollerith]

I’ve been a heavy consumer of health services and health information since 1985, where “health” here definitely includes mental health (and specifically the effects of childhood trauma).

YT started being my main source of insights about my health and how I might make it better about 3 years ago. During that time I’ve managed to improve my health faster than the rate I managed in the decades before that.

How do you assess the expertise of those YT creators?

A person could write a book about that (which would tend to overlap a lot with a book about general rationality). I’ve probably changed some habit of mine (diet, exercise, etc) about ten times over the last 3 years in response to learnings from YT. I watch carefully for effects of those changes. This watching process involves taking voluminous notes. E.g., I write down everything I ingest every day. So, that is one way I assess experts: basically I experiment on myself.

[nahir91595]

Thanks a lot for this! I will check both your links. Getting overviews of concepts rather than deep research makes a lot of sense.

I was curious about a more balanced rationalist perspective that LW may be good at, if writers here took an interest.

Getting raw data about people’s experiences is difficult, getting the data into the public domain so common knowledge can be built over it is difficult, getting takes that are not polarised (to being either pro or anti solving trauma) is difficult, building spaces where this stuff can be discussed and debated is difficult.

I would for example be interested in reading a conversation where two psychologists actively debate each other because their raw data (different clients they see) is different and leading them to different conclusions, rather than just a psychologist repeating their textbook knowledge.