Caplan-Critical Links

1. Scott Alexander is deeply unhappy with my latest piece on mental illness.

   Although he doesn’t answer my rebuttals, he does diligently respond to various unrelated posts of mine, explaining why they must mean I am secretly admitting he was right all along. When I wrote about the scourge of witches stealing people’s penises, Caplan spun it as me secretly admitting he was right all along about mental illness. Sometimes I feel like this has gone a bit too far - when I announced I had gotten married, Caplan spun it as me secretly admitting he was right all along about mental illness.

   Let it be known to all that I am never secretly admitting Bryan Caplan is right about mental illness. There is no further need to speculate that I am doing this. If you want to know my position vis-a-vis Bryan Caplan and mental illness, you are welcome to read my four thousand word essay on the subject, Contra Contra Contra Caplan On Psych. You will notice that the title clearly telegraphs that it is about Bryan Caplan and mental illness, and that (if you count up the contras) I am against him. If that ever changes, rest assured I will telegraph it in something titled equally clearly.

   I’m a great admirer of Scott, but I can’t help but feel like he’s being unfair to me. Of course, I would think that, wouldn’t I?

   

2. Maxim Lott, creator of Election Betting Odds, weighs in on my long-standing argument with Scott:

   Scott specified that the depression is due to hypothyroidism — which is typically caused “by the immune system attacking the thyroid gland and damaging it.” Surely the better way to model it is as part of the constraint. After all, the real person underneath their condition doesn’t want to sit in their room. It’s more that a broken body part is raising the cost of doing anything else.

   Modeled that way, if you draw the graphs, it become immediately clear that treating the hypothyroidism/depression will allow a person to rise to higher indifference/preference curves. This is in line with common sense. The condition here isn’t even inherently a “mental illness”, but rather just “illness” that had an impact on mental function. It should obviously be treated.

   But what if the depression were instead genetic, from birth? Where some abnormal piece of DNA caused a person’s brain to be wired in a way that produces low rewards for doing things?

   In that case, it becomes harder to justify considering depression as a constraint. Instead, it seems it really is inherent to the person — and has to be modeled as the person’s preferences — their indifference curve. For a depressed person, that’ll mean indifference curves that lean toward lying in bed and doing nothing.

3. Matthew Adelstein says I’m wrong about the ethical treatment of animals:

   I think most people have the abstract ethical intuition that you shouldn’t inflict unimaginable torture on insects for the sake of minor benefits. They just generally don’t think that driving does that. If you knew that every time you drove your car, you consigned 100,000 insects to the microwave, you probably wouldn’t drive, or you’d at least think there’s some decent reason not to unless you really need to. The reason the conclusion is surprising is not that the moral claim is counterintuitive but that the claim about the world is counterintuitive. When the world is weird, obvious moral claims will produce weird results.