The Rational Side Of Mental Illness

As Lisa Bartolotti notes, some psychological disorders make people less prone to cognitive biases:

Madness and irrationality may seem inextricably related. “You are crazy!” we say, when someone tells us about their risk-taking behavior or their self-defeating actions. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) describe people with depression, autism, schizophrenia, dementia, and personality disorders as people who infringe norms of rationality. But not all people diagnosed with a mental disorder behave irrationally, and not all people who behave irrationally are diagnosed with a mental disorder.

There is evidence that people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, depression, or autism are, in some contexts, more epistemically rational, that is, more responsive to evidence and more likely to form true beliefs, than people without any psychiatric diagnosis. People make more accurate predictions when they are depressed, because the statistically normal way to make predictions is characterized by excessive optimism. People with autism score higher in social interaction games (such as Prisoner’s Dilemma) and are more logically consistent than control participants when making decisions involving possible financial gain, by not responding to emotional contextual cues in the same way as controls. People with schizophrenia are also less vulnerable to a statistically normal but irrational tendency to gamble when faced with a certain loss.

Map Of The Day II

Solar Time Map

Keating passes along a timezone map:

The map above, created by math blogger and Google engineer Stefano Maggiolo (click here for a full-size version), shows the difference between clock time and “solar time”—a schedule in which the sun is at its highest point in the sky at exactly 12 noon.

For whatever reason, more of the world seems to be a little bit like Spain—the sun rises and sets later in the day than it should—than the other way around. The “late” places are shown in red, the “early” places in green. The deeper the shade, the more off the time is.

Forget Governing, We Have Elections To Win

Alec MacGillis argues that both Christie’s Bridgegate and the maybe-scandal emerging around Scott Walker, whose aides did campaign work on government time, reflect the grip of the “permanent campaign” on our political culture:

This mindset has been with us for a long time, but it’s creeping ever outward, further back into the calendar and further down into lower and lower levels of office. It’s bipartisan—we know, for one thing, that the Obama administration all but shut down the rule-making process in late 2011 and all of 2012 so as not to cause any election-year troubles for itself, a decision that likely contributed to the bungled Obamacare rollout.

But it’s not hard to imagine why the mindset seems to have taken particular hold among Republicans, whether on the Hill or in Trenton or suburban Milwaukee. If you’re in government but philosophically anti-government, it’s all the more natural to let the governing be set aside for the sport of the permanent campaign. It’s easier, the goals are clearer, and it’s more fun.

Here’s the gist of the Walker story:

The release of 28,000 pages of documents connected with two criminal investigations involving former aides has put Governor Walker in an uncomfortable spot. … The documents, released Wednesday, showed how, in 2010, aides to then-Milwaukee County Executive Walker worked on his gubernatorial campaign while doing their government jobs, which is against the law. In all, six aides and allies were convicted, including two for doing campaign work on county time. Walker was never a target of investigation and has denied wrongdoing.

In addition, a new investigation launched by prosecutors in five Wisconsin counties is believed to be under way into whether his recall campaign in 2012 illegally coordinated with outside groups. In Wisconsin, people connected with such an inquiry – called a “John Doe investigation” – are generally not allowed to discuss it in public.

Philip Klein thinks the liberal press is grasping at straws:

Given that investigators who had access to these documents for years and heard testimony from hundreds of witnesses found no wrongdoing by Walker, it was unsurprising that the document release turned out to be a dud. Of course, this didn’t prevent headlines attempting to create the specter of scandal surrounding Walker where there is no evidence of one.

The Worst Place In America To Rent

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Forget the West Village. In Williston, North Dakota, a 700-square-foot one-bedroom will set you back $2,394, the highest rate in the US for such “entry level apartments”:

In Williston, a city on the edge of the Bakken Oil Fields, the population has doubled in the last five years, from 14,700 in the 2010 census to over 30,000 people today. The growth is akin to the way the Gold Rush quickly urbanized parts of California in mid-1800s. In fact, so many people are moving to the area to work for oil companies that so-called “man camps” made from temporary structures were built over the last few years to keep up with demand. … The housing shortage is so dire that people are living in their cars and the homeless population has swelled 200 percent over the last year. Since there are no official homeless shelters, churches apply for temporary permits to help house the thousands of workers who come seeking employment. A $35-million housing incentive fund was introduced in 2011 with the hope of subsidizing the cost of new, affordable housing. Unfortunately, the fund was depleted late last year.

Previous Dish on the Bakken boom here and here.

(Photo by Flickr user Karendesuyo)

Crystal Myth

Sullum flags a new report debunking some drug-war hyperbole about methamphetamine:

Despite all the talk of a “meth epidemic,” the drug has never been very popular. “At the height of methamphetamine’s popularity,” [Columbia neuropsychopharmacologist Carl] Hart et al. write, “there were never more than a million current users of the drug in the United States. This number is considerably lower than the 2.5 million cocaine users, the 4.4 million illegal prescription opioid users, or the 15 million marijuana smokers during the same period.” Furthermore, illicit methamphetamine use had been waning for years at the point when Newsweek identified “The Meth Epidemic” as “America’s New Drug Crisis.”

Although methamphetamine is commonly portrayed as irresistible and inescapable, it does not look that way when you examine data on patterns of use. Of the 12.3 million or so Americans who have tried it, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), about 1.2 million (9.4 percent) have consumed it in the last year, while less than half a million (3.6 percent) have consumed it in the last month (the standard definition of “current” use). In other words, more than 96 percent of the people who have tried “the most addictive drug known to mankind” are not currently using it even as often as once a month. A 2009 study based on NSDUH data found that 5 percent of nonmedical methamphetamine consumers become “dependent” within two years. Over a lifetime, Hart et al. say, “less than 15 percent” do.

The Modern Way To Kill Freedom

Steinglass wants us to “understand the nature of the threat to freedom we’re seeing these days, in Ukraine and around the world”:

Viktor Yanukovich is a democratically elected president who has used his powers to eliminate liberal-rights safeguards and jail political opponents on dubious charges. He has reinforced his political position by building cronyistic relationships with powerful business figures. In this system the state creates economic rents and awards them to favoured business interests, who in turn buttress the state’s political power, all while maintaining the trappings of democracy. In other words, Ukraine looks a lot like Russia or Egypt; more significantly, it looks like other states that are in the early stages of similar threats to liberal democracy, such as Turkey and Hungary. The enemy of liberal democracy today is more often kleptocracy, or “illiberal democracy” (as tiger-mom Amy Chua put it in her book “World on Fire“), than ideological totalitarianism. The threat is less obvious than in the days of single-party states and military dictators. But it ends up in the same place: economic stagnation, a corrupt elite of businessmen and politicians, censored media, and riot police shooting demonstrators.

A Historic Douche

No, not Thomas Edison. This:

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Robert Sorokanich explains:

Chrysalis Archaeology, an intrepid team of NYC archaeologists we spoke with last year, discovered the hygiene device in late 2010 on the north side of City Hall. But the hollow cylinder with small holes at the top made of some kind of animal bone wasn’t immediately recognized. It was only recently that archaeologist Lisa Geiger discovered the device’s actual intended use, as she told DNAinfo:

“I was working as a docent at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, and came across a back archive of what they called vaginal syringes,” said Geiger, 28. “These were glass or brass, and from later in the 1800s, but all of a sudden, I made the connection.”

Chrysalis Archaeology’s got a phenomenal blog post discussing the discovery and its place in feminine hygiene history.

Rubio’s Fall From Grace

Chait reflects on it:

Everything Rubio touches has turned to shit. The cumulative humiliations have transformed the former party savior into a figure himself in need of saving. How did it all go so badly? The Rubio Plan had sounded clever in the abstract. The premise, as Krauthammer had explicitly laid out, was that the party could jettison a single-issue position [on immigration] while holding fast to its cherished anti-government bromides. (“No reinvention when none is needed,” urged Krauthammer. “Do conservatism but do it better.”) Krauthammer may have been right that Republican elites would more willingly, or even eagerly, toss aside their fear of illegal immigration than revise their cherished anti-­tax, anti-spending dogma. But broadening the party’s economic message has turned out to be easier.

Republicans have delivered a series of well-received speeches advocating new proposals for health care, tax reform, and the like, softening the harsh plutocratic message they projected with Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney. None of this has prevented them from continuing to wage a campaign to immiserate the poor by cutting food stamps, ending unemployment benefits, and denying Medicaid to the uninsured. When you don’t need to grapple with specifics or difficult trade-offs, writing speeches with uplifting themes is extremely easy.

Passing immigration reform, on the other hand, is hard. It requires writing bills. Conservatives liked the sound of Rubio’s immigration plan, but it could not survive legislative contact with the enemy. Compromising on immigration means handing a legislative accomplishment to Obama, a taboo that dwarfs any ideological commitments. And so Rubio was cast in a role nobody could play. The party elders who thought they were enlisting him as the Republican savior were instead making him its martyr.