Now we have millions of players making micro decisions, none of which alone is as drastic as stripping the Earth of the Van Allen belts. Each one is simply making a micro-improvement in a browser, or a medical nanobot, or whatever. And together they raise the baseline level of technology in an irreversible way. Might as well call it Progress.

Seen from the outside, yeah, it looks like a virus-like self-replicating meme, followed possibly by virus-like self-replicating nanobots (gray goo theory), but there’s no central brain. This isn’t the type of fear of technology that I was writing about, but I do often wonder whether our technological development isn’t Nature’s way of protecting herself. We’ve clearly become cancerous to the planet — just fly over LA on a clear day and look at the sprawl — and we’ve also become overly specialized in one direction (our brains). There’s a parallel to the dinosaurs, whose evolutionary competition caused them to get bigger and more ecologically specialized until they became unstable. Add a trigger like a weather change and they go extinct because they’ve lost the ability to adapt.

Whether you believe in the meteor impact theory or not, the dinosaurs were ready to die out, with their strength becoming their own undoing. As a general principle I think people’s strengths and weaknesses are usually the exactly same attribute (e.g., in jiu-jitsu my strength gives me some advantages but it also makes me slower to learn technique as a consequence, and the muscle mass burns ATP faster than I can replenish it, which leads to cardio problems — one attribute translates into both a strength and a weakness). And I think the same was true of the dinosaurs (size) and of us (brains/technology). Our problem won’t be lack of adaptability but the fact that we’ve taken away ecological diversity (in a socio-cultural sense). The planet is now one cultural petri dish, and if one of those millions of people screw up their experiment, the whole dish will go. Meanwhile we’re creating hyper-specialized societies that weaken our mammalian adaptability in preference of an insect-like organization. (E.g., nobody on the first two World Trade Centre planes fought the terrorists because it wasn’t their job, they thought the experts would take care of it, etc.)

Still, as a species we’re incredibly adaptable, so it will take a major screw up to kill the petri dish. But with so many people working at it, it seems kind of inevitable, sooner or later.

What are your thoughts towards technology becoming it’s own entity and perhaps developing within itself to further its existence?? I mean, it is driven by human creativity. We continuously are seeking to make technology faster, more powerful, and more innovative. What is this need? The cell phone is already really really really good. But not good enough. What is this driving force behind technologies evolution? Capitalism? The ego? I don’t know. But there is no doubt that it is evolving at an exponential rate. This could get scary. So in conculsion, I agree.

what mere man would limit who we could have sex with!

Huh? Taliban is all about banning sexual morality, as is any man past his prime who already has a younger wife and is scared she might find someone better looking, better in bed, etc. We men have sperm the sole function of which is to kill the sperm of any other men they encounter rather, than to reach the egg. Our biological impulse is not just to procreate, but to beat out others in doing so — without that competitive function there’d be no evolution. Sexual morality is just a manifestation of that.

So, your argument here would allow a possibility other than divine inspiration: that the bible was written by sexually insecure men.

Let’s start with GOD DOES NOT EXIST – that means that the Bible was written by mere men.. i.e. they were not writing from God’s divine revelation, it was all made up stuff – myths, some stories, anecdotes, etc. enough stuff to start a religion – a club, so to speak. Therefore, Sexual morality doesn’t exist – i.e. there are no sexual morals from God, since we’ve agreed that he doesn’t exist.

Leviticus Chapter 18 (which I read today) does nothing but list all the people you can’t have sex with! (bummer) That got me thinking… what mere man would limit who we could have sex with! I mean if my sister in-law is hot.. I wanna do her.. yes, of course, her willing… same thing goes with my father’s new wife, or my father’s new wife’s daughter… etc etc. NO MERE MAN would have written Leviticus 18!

Ok, maybe some mere man who is a nut job… but remember, this mere man wants to start a religion… how many converts or new memberships do you think he’s gonna get!? Remember, since God does not exist — there are no sexual morals that we have to abide by… again, no mere man who wants to start a religion/club is going to write Leviticus 18!

hmmm… maybe a woman wrote it…. (I know how you atheists think!)

Where exactly do we end up when those who can see how fucked up the world is getting are so smart they deconstruct their own tongues before they can stick them out? What do they then let out? Opportunism? Excuses for cowering in an attic somewhere?

I don’t believe in a Neo Eden any more than you do. But I do believe in a vector that points away from where we are and towards that unattainable Neo Eden. Well, maybe not. But at least enough of one to act as a brake or counterpush to the direction we’re headed.

There’s a quote I like, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

Would you ever pick up an axe? Somehow I doubt it. You’re too smart for that.

I don’t have the depth of knowledge in this field to win an argument with you, but I have read some of the more influential books that shaped psychotherapy, and they are, frankly, a bit nuts. The Case of Schreber is fascinating, but how Freud read the poor appellate judge’s memoir (having never even talked to the man himself) and concluded that Schreber wanted to be turned into a woman so that he could be God’s only object of sexual desire, and that God here represented Schreber’s father, etc., is mindboggling to anyone who prizes logic. Or the whole matchbox bit in The Case of Dora, where noticing a matchbox on Freud’s table, or failing to notice it (I forget which), proved Dora was a bed-wetter (because of the proverb that “He who plays with fire will wet the bed”), and bed-wetting, in turn, proved Dora masturbated. Freud had a dozen (mostly sexual) conclusions, and he actively worked to channel his reading, er, psychotherapy, to arrive at them. Down to placing matchboxes on his table ahead of the session (GW‑V:233/­SE:VII:71).

The other leading light of the field, Jung, is again, great for a fiction writer. But he was also the man who coined the term “synchronicity,” and reading Memories, Dreams, Reflections it becomes clear that his “science” was driven by his own emotional conclusions to nearly the same extent as Freud. I know that I’m referring to lay writings rather than their medical stuff, but the lay writing is informative because it cuts through some of the jargon-armour through which they defend their beliefs. Both of these early leaders of the field are perfect illustrations of Shermer’s quote that “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”

And these two guys are the foundations of psychology as a “science.” If you compare the foundational works of a social science like economics, you also have arguments that are no longer applicable — there are nearly no atomistic markets in the Adam Smith sense, and no economy actually follows Ricardian comparative-advantage trade patterns — but you’d never look at Adam Smith or Ricardo and say that their logic is loopy.

As to psychotherapy having helped lots of people, I have no doubt. But social support of all sorts has huge benefits, both psychological and psychoneuroimmunological. [E.g., Friedman, Hofer, and Mason, "Relationship between psychological defenses and mean urinary 17-hydroxycorticosteroid exretion rates. I. A predictive study of parents of fatally ill children." Psychosomatic Medicine 26 (1964)]. And if someone can’t get their social support from friends or the bartender, then by all means they should go to a psychologist.

Though even that is far from clear. One of the main reasons women suffer so much more unipolar depression than men is (now theorized by some cognitive psychologists to be) that they ruminate rather than getting drunk, climbing a mountain, getting some exercise, etc. Each time you relive a bad experience in psychotherapy or simple memory, you strengthen it. Our modern psychotherapeutic society prizes rumination and frowns upon repression — no wonder so many are depressed. A bowling league, unlike a psychologist, would offer social support without this rumination effect.

And in terms of solving behavioural problems, I wonder how many psychologists are willing to lose the patient by telling them hard truths. It’s far easier to validate someone’s emotions than forcing them to confront the fact that their emotions and intellect point in different directions, and perhaps they should try following their intellect for a change. I suspect that in most such cases the only thing that would change is therapists.

Just to be clear, I’m talking about psychologists here. There are clearly psychoses that require chemical intervention and a psychiatrist with a medical background and an understanding of neurochemistry is a crucial doctor for many people. But I’ve seen a loved one avoid a psychiatrist like the plague in favour of continued regular and useless visits to a psychologist, simply because the psychologist was emotionally easier.

Finally, however, I’m clearly citing psychologists here several times, many of whom have added a tremendous wealth of knowledge to our understanding of ourselves as human beings. I don’t have a dislike of the field as a whole. But I do think that it is far less scientific than it makes itself out to be and has a lot more tarot-card-like quackery among its practitioners, and significantly fewer self-correcting mechanisms, than other social sciences. A gifted psychologist is far closer in nature to a gifted artist than she is to a gifted scientist.

As an endnote, since I started by bashing Freud and Jung, I’d like to add that the single most intelligent book I’ve ever read (if I had to pick one) was written by a psychiatrist, Robert Musil.

This is manifestly untrue. There are many thousands of empirical studies in psychology (and a smaller but still signifiant number in the sub-field of personality psychology, which was my point on the NYT blog). Richard Feynman will be frustrated if he seeks the precision of physics in the social sciences. Nonetheless, psychology, economics, anthropology, criminology, etc., have some degree of empirical grounding. For example, they have hypotheses that can be disconfirmed by evidence. Tarot cards (and Chinese aphorisms about happiness) do not.

I’d hate to imagine that you’d generalize from a single visit with one psychologist. Most practitioners of any field — psychology, law, writing, take your pick — are lackluster. The potential of such fields lies not in the average but in the exceptional. Many, many people are helped by psychotherapy, as shown both by empirical studies and consumer surveys. Many, I’m sure, are not.

Psychology is a big field, encompassing clinical practice, animal and human research, psychological assessment, academic teaching and writing, and so forth. The very Barnum effect you write about has been studied in detail by psychologists. Even though I’m not a psychologist myself, I hope you reconsider your stance toward the field.