Psychiatry at the Margins
Article
Psychiatry at the Margins is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 08, 2024 and April 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “recently on Psychiatry at the Margins”; “Psychiatry At The Margins criticizes Mad In America”. It most often appears alongside Aaron Peskin, ACLU, AGI And The Efficient Market Hypothesis.
Metadata
- Category: Publications
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: February 08, 2024
- Last seen: April 04, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Aaron Peskin (1 shared issues)
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- ACLU (1 shared issues)
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- AGI And The Efficient Market Hypothesis (1 shared issues)
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- Algernon (1 shared issues)
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- alt-right (1 shared issues)
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- Amanda Askell (1 shared issues)
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- Andrew Sullivan (1 shared issues)
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- Anthropic (1 shared issues)
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- Antifa (1 shared issues)
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- Arabia (1 shared issues)
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- Aristotle (1 shared issues)
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- Ark Encounter (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Schizophrenia is bad for fitness, so if it were genetic, evolution would have eliminated those genes. In the comments of the Unintuitive Properties post, Michael Roe points out that one of these mysteries solves the other: If there were single gene polymorphisms with large negative effect, they would get selected out of the population ... eventually. Which suggests that there can't be high-frequency mutations with large negative effect, unless there is some compensating advantage (like, e.g. giving you resistance to malaria). Which leaves us with multiple mutations, each of which individually has a small effect, adding up to a large total effect. And mutation-selection balance, where random mutations are introducing harmful mutations at about the same rate the natural selection is removing them. If there were genes of large effect, evolution would have removed them. So all that can be left is genes of small effect. And the only way genes of small effect can cause a common and severe condition is if there are so many of them that they add up to a large effect. (Dr. Steven Hyman of NIMH made the same point recently on Psychiatry at the Margins) So many of the traits we’re most interested in - intelligence, strength, schizophrenia, etc - are necessarily massively polygenic, because one side of them is better for fitness than the other. If they were monogenic, evolution would have already selected for the good side, and there would be no remaining genetic variance. The remaining question is: why are there still even these genes of very small effect? Here are three possible answers: Evolution hasn’t had time to remove all of them yet. Because a gene that increases schizophrenia risk 0.001% barely changes fitness at all, it takes evolution forever to get rid of it. And by that time, maybe some new mildly-deleterious mutations have cropped up that need to be selected out.
Inline links: Michael Roe points out, made the same point
28: Psychiatry At The Margins criticizes Mad In America; I find MiA really deceptive and am happy to link people pushing back against them.
Inline links: Psychiatry At The Margins criticizes Mad In America