This is awesome! I totally should have thought of it, thanks!
Sable
Karma: 1,261
The Way According To Zvi
What Ketamine Therapy Is Like
That’s awesome that you’re doing that research!
My biggest question is probably what the distribution looks like for people who get TMS for depression—how many of them are “cured” in the sense that they never need TMS again? How many need it again after a year? Two years? And so on.
I do think there’s something to that idea—physical injury and pain is a very universal and visible experience, whereas mental illness is difficult to parse for those who’ve never experienced it. I also think there’s some sense in which ‘treatment’ and ‘cure’ are treated differently for mental and physical illness.
A doctor wouldn’t just prescribe painkillers for a broken arm and call it a day because your symptoms have been dealt with; they’d want to actually fix the problem. Depression, on the other hand, doctors seem perfectly fine with merely mitigating the symptoms. Perhaps because that’s all they’re confident they can do?
I didn’t, but I’m not surprised your sister had that experience. It’s a loud, repetitive noise going off next to your ear. My clinic offered me earplugs, which I didn’t need, but perhaps your sister could have used?
What TMS is like
That would be useful.
I suppose their calibration might be cause for concern. You’re with yourself all the time, so you’ve been witness to your own highs and lows, but others might only see your highs (for example, if you only leave your house when you’re above 50%, their scale would bottom out at 50%).
A Percentage Model of a Person
I would love to try psilocybin, but can’t because of where I work. I have tried Ketamine and am now trying TMS, which are the two FDA-approved ‘nuclear options’, and have been seeing some success with them.
That’s really interesting! I’m no expert in neurology, so thanks for the heads up!
True. I just happen to have the ‘very hard to do anything’ kind, so that’s what I describe.
I haven’t thought much about how treatment fits in here. I’ve certainly felt both dimensions mentioned get better/reduced through treatment (having to solve less puzzles, having to solve puzzles for coarser/less granular actions).
Ultimately, ‘curing’ depression would be the equivalent of removing the app from your brain.
Interesting. I’m glad that this resonates, and like the idea that what I described was a generic experience, which can be caused by various issues in the brain.
The comments below do capture some of my thoughts. I also feel depression as a lack of motivation and general malaise and inability to care about things or feel pleasure.
But these are
difficult to explain to someone who’s never felt, and
subjective feelings, which don’t always translate well through language.
The metaphor is meant to invite someone to think about what their life would be like if, in order to do anything, they had to slog their way through tedious effort for little to no reward. I claim that the result looks, externally, very much like depression—it would cause a lack of motivate, a general malaise, and a hoarding of energy and caring.
Sudoku was chosen as something that doesn’t take much effort but gets mind-numbingly boring after enough time doing it; I emphasize that these aren’t challenging puzzles, only ones that require a bare minimum of effort. Solving a jigsaw puzzle or multiplying numbers may also qualify.
What Depression Is Like
I want to support this; the initial motivation behind Georgism is, in fact, the exact question of why poverty still exists when so much progress has been made—and the answer is that when private actors are allowed to monopolize natural resources (most importantly land), all the gains accruing from productivity increases and technology eventually go to them.
A UBI, as Eliezer suggests, is a band-aid to the problem, addressing the symptom but not the disease, and so long as land rents (economic rent) are monopolized, the disease continues unabated.
I don’t know if the Georgist Paradise doesn’t have any poverty—land taxes don’t magically cure addiction or depression or any of the other reasons someone might become and stay poor. But I’d bet that it has substantially less of the ‘scrabbling in the dirt’ than our current economic equilibrium.
Yup. That’s where I learned about it. I was looking for the link too and couldn’t find it. Thanks!
I’m really happy to hear that this helped! Remember, all models are wrong, but some are useful. This model is useful for me; use it as long as it is useful to you.