In appreciation of Tom Vadakkan

The former Congress spokesperson had said on national TV that ‘a tweet is a very lonely man who needs counselling’. While he might have been misinformed on that count, I do think that social media nowadays overindexes on spreading mental illness. 

Let me get the most controversial statement out of the way right upfront – most activism relies on creating anxiety. Yes, I just said it. I must mention that creating anxiety may not be the express intention of the activism. However, it is an inevitable effect.

I had written about this a long time ago, specifically in the context of environmental activism. Basically, things like carbon taxes (and other Pigouian taxes) and other price-based measures of environment regulation mean that things have been priced in by the time an ordinary person comes across it.

“Should I take the plastic cup from the coffee shop?”. Has already been priced in in the price of plastic.

“Can I take shower for another 15 minutes extra today?”. If I’m paying fair price for the water this ceases to be a moral question.

“Is it okay to drive across the city each day by my own car? Wouldn’t it result in extra emissions?”. If the price of the extra emissions has been included in the price of fuel, again don’t need to worry.

On the contrary, you might see that a lot of activism (and left-wing activists are generally against the price mechanism) is about creating guilt. It’s about making you think at every point in time because the price mechanism doesn’t account for it. And it is not just about environmental activism.

Take political correctness for example. A lot of jokes from my childhood (and even from a few years ago) are not kosher any more because they hurt the sentiments of some minority or another. So, while we’ve been conditioned to make these jokes as if they are normal, now there is an extra layer of thought, leading to anxiety.

And activists won’t let you be in peace either. For example, one rational response to things being shit all around us (like it is right now, as covid cases are raging, and bodies have to wait for days together to get cremated) is to just ignore it all, get into our little bubbles and move on. Activists don’t let you do that. It’s not uncommon to see tweets of the nature of “how can you sleep soundly when <some unknown person you wouldn’t normally care about> is dying on the street?”. It’s about creating guilt.

A few days back, I put this tweet (of late, all my blogposts seem to be expansions of random thoughts I would’ve thrown around on twitter):

I guess this deserves an explanation. I keep quitting social media, and while I’m on it, I keep unfollowing (and muting, and blocking) people who post too much negative or “outrage-y” stuff. The reason I go on social media is to have some nice discussions, see some ideas and so on. For news, I have my morning bundle of The Times of India, The Business Standard and The Economic Times.

“Why do people outrage so much on social media”, I was wondering aloud to my wife the other day. I wasn’t talking about people giving their opinions on what is wrong or how it should be done (that at least adds SOME value). I was talking about tautologies of the like of “oh, Kumbh Mela is being allowed to go on”. Or “migrants are dying due to the sudden lockdown”. No opinion. No value addition. Just selective amplification of news that people will get from the next morning’s papers anyways.

My wife and I had a long discussion. One of the points that came out of the discussion is that people seek some solidarity on social media. People are anxious, have nobody around them to share their anxieties with, and if they can find like-minded people on social media who share their anxieties and empathise with them, it is rational to rant on social media. The downside, of course, is that you might lose the people who don’t share your anxieties.

One of my links above refers to Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life (another source of anxiety that activism creates – “what will people think of me given that I’m quoting someone they’ve ‘cancelled’?”. It results in self-censorship. And by not expressing your thoughts your mental health becomes worse). I think that was his Rule 11. I want to now bring up his Rule 1 (later on I might bring up his Rule 12. Most of the rest are not worth quoting).

In the first chapter of his book, he talks about anxiety and depression, taking the case of lobsters. The thing about anxiety (I’ve just about gotten off another round of medication for it) is that you get into a situation of heightened defences.

This is a natural reaction. If you are walking in the jungle and hear a lion roar, you better have heightened defences. The problem with chronic anxiety is that you are always in a state of heightened defences. You are always worried that something might go wrong. This means you have less mental and physical energy for more productive stuff. And so it hampers your life.

Being in a state of anxiety means you want to get early information of anything that might go wrong. This makes you an ideal candidate for “24×7 news” – since that sets you up and prepares you well in time for anything that might go wrong. Depending on your persuasion, you either get your news from television, or from social media. Thus, on the margin, mentally ill people are MORE LIKELY to be on social media all the time, and be on it for the sake of news.

Let’s put things together.

  • Anxious people are more likely to be on social media for news
  • They are more likely to get triggered by news, and become anxious about it.
  • They want some release from the anxiety, and that can come by way of empathy from people with similar anxieties. This means they tweet (or post) their anxieties. Sometimes it could just be tweeting tautologies.
  • At other times it is retweeting activism from people they empathise with. And activism fundamentally causes more anxiety (as explained above)
  • Thus, anxious people end up spreading their anxieties through social media. And when someone says they don’t care about these anxieties, the privilege card gets brought out.
  • And so, on the margin, spending more time on social media can make you anxious, by increasing your exposure to tweets that create anxiety.

Unfortunately I’m unable to find the video (it seems to have been removed from YouTube). So I’ll just link to this blogpost by Vadakkan’s then co-panelist Amit Varma.

And how do I plan to deal with all the shit happening around? By following Jordan Peterson’s 12th rule. I spend half an hour in the morning reading newspapers. Given what’s happening around, I feel depressed and worried. And then by the time I have moved to the business newspapers I am feeling better. And then I get on with life. And work. And keeping my family and myself safe. And I only use twitter one day a week.

PS: I learnt while researching this post that Tom Vadakkan is with the BJP now.

Podcasts to replace books

Yesterday I listened to an excellent podcast episode with Steven Pinker at Amit Varma’s Seen and Unseen podcast. In this, they discuss concepts from Pinker’s latest book Enlightenment Now.

Pinker is an author I’ve found difficult to read. Based on glowing recommendations, I bought his books The Stuff of Thought  and The Language Instinct a decade ago, but couldn’t get beyond the first ten pages of both, despite trying several times. As a consequence, I’ve declared that his writing style is not suited for me, and I won’t bother reading his books any more.

However, since I’ve heard good things about the book, listening to a podcast episode which covered the major concepts in the book was damn useful.

It is similar with poker player and author of Thinking in Bets Annie Duke. She’s highly regarded by the “finance twitter circlejerk” that I follow (I follow her as well), and she appears on several podcasts with members of this circlejerk. However, a friend whose opinions I trust told me that the book itself isn’t particularly great, and that there wasn’t that much in the book about thinking in bets per se.

A quick reading of the Kindle sample confirmed this hypothesis, so I didn’t bother with the rest of the book. Instead, I substituted for it by listening to a couple of podcasts that Duke has recorded, to get the best of her insights. This combined with following her on twitter, I don’t think I’ve done too badly.

I’ve found this “podcast trumping book” concept work in other cases and other ways as well. Beyond the first chapter, I found Ray Dalio’s Principles unreadable, but then I realised that I had got most of the concepts in the book from his podcast recording with Shane Parrish of Farnam Street.

Jordan Peterson’s 12 rules for life again is extremely insightful, but a very boring read. So for someone who doesn’t have the patience to plough through all his philosophy and religion stuff (which are weak compared to his psychology stuff which is incredible), I would just recommend that they listen to his podcast recording with Russ Roberts.

In some ways this takes me back to my old concept of how a lot of non-fiction books simply don’t have that much information content and just keep repeating the same points over and over. The antidote to this, I’ve argued, is to pack the book with a sufficient number of “side stories” so that there is more information packed in it. I think, and hope, that I’ve done this with my own book.

When an author records a podcast to promote a book, the intent is to get a potential reader to be attracted to the book, and hence the best concepts in the book get put out there. Also, as long as the podcast interviewer is good (Amit Varma, Russ Roberts and Shane Parrish are all very good podcast hosts), the podcast will never be boring and you’ll be able to get the information content in an easy way. So unless you want depth (I’m glad I ploughed through Jordan Peterson’s book since I found it has some depth, but not everyone would feel the same), just listening to the book-related podcasts should serve you well.

Oh, and I’ve recorded some five or six podcast episodes with Amit Varma’s seen and unseen podcast to discuss the book. I guess a lot of those listeners thought like me, so they didn’t bother buying my book!

Carbon taxes and mental health

The beautiful thing about mid-term elections in the USA is that apart from the “main elections” for senators, congresspersons and governors, there were also votes on “auxiliary issues” – referenda, basically, on issues such as legalisation of marijuana.

One such issue that went to the polls was in Washington State, where there was a proposal for imposition of carbon taxes, which sought to tax carbon dioxide emissions at $15 a tonne. The voters rejected the proposal, with the proposal getting only 44% of the polled votes in favour.

The defeat meant that another attempt at pricing in environmental costs, which could have offered significant benefits to ordinary people in terms of superior mental health, went down the drain.

Chapter 11 of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life is both the best and the worst chapter of the book. It is the best for the reasons I’ve mentioned in this blog post earlier – about its discussions of risk, and about relationships and marriage in the United States. It is the worst because Peterson unnecessarily lengthens the chapter by using it to put forward his own views on several controversial issues – such as political correctness and masculinity – issues which only have a tenuous relationship with the meat of the chapter, and which only give an opportunity for Peterson’s zillion critics to downplay the book.

Among all these unnecessary digressions in Chapter Eleven, one stood out, possibly because of the strength of the argument and my own relationship with it – Peterson bullshits climate change and environmentalism, claiming that it only seeks to worsen the mental health of ordinary people. As a clinical psychologist, he can be trusted to tell us what affects people’s mental health. However, dismissing something just because it affects people negatively is wrong.

The reason environmentalism and climate change play a negative impact on people’s mental health, in my opinion, is that there is no market based pricing in these aspects. From childhood, we are told that we should “not waste water” or “not cut trees”, because activities like this will have an adverse effect on the environment.

Such arguments are always moral, about telling people to think of their descendants and the impact it will have. The reason these arguments are hard to make is because they need to persuade people to act contrary to their self-interest. For example, one may ask me to forego my self-interest of the enjoyment in bursting fireworks in favour of better air quality (which I may not necessarily care about). Someone else might ask me to forego my self-interest of a long shower, because of “water shortages”.

And this imposition of moral arguments that make us undertake activities that violate our self-interset is what imposes a mental cost. We are fundamentally selfish creatures, only indulging in activities that benefit us (either immediately or much later). And when people force us to think outside this self-interest, it comes with the cost of increased mental strain, which is reason enough for Jordan Peterson to bullshit environmentalism itself.

If you think about this, the reason we need to use moral arguments and make people act against their self-interest for environmental causes is because the market system fails in these cases. If we were able to put a price on environmental costs of activities, and make entities that indulge in such activities pay these costs, then the moral argument could be replaced by a price argument, and our natural self-interest maximising selves would get aligned with what is good for the world.

And while narrowly concerned with the issue of climate change and global warming, carbon taxes are one way to internalise the externality of environmental damage of our activities. And by putting a price on it, it means that we don’t need to think in terms of our everyday activities and thus saves us a “mental cost”. And this can lead to superior overall mental health.

In that sense, the rejection of the carbon tax proposal in Washington State is a regressive move.

Gods, Demons and Superheroes

Rule 12 Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

That is the last of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life (I have earlier written about Rule 11). In that chapter, he talks about why suffering exists, and what we can do to get around it. Taking the example of his daughter’s arthritis, which which she has been affected since a young age,  he explains how one should draw boundaries around the time one deals with the suffering, and learn to enjoy the little joys of life (hence the cat and the petting).

In the lead up to this rule, Peterson philosophises about why there exists suffering in this world. To illustrate, he takes the example of the time when Marvel Comics and DC Comics decided to bring together their superheroes, to create stories such as “Batman versus Superman”. The two superheroes, he explains, were so mismatched that DC’s superheroes, who had a bit of a grey background, had to be given massive additional superpowers in order to match up to Superman, and even then, Superman had a huge advantage. And this made those superhero matchup stories not fun.

From this, he draws the analogy to religion (he frequently references the Bible in his book – which for me was one of the more irritating things about it) and talks about how if there was no suffering or negativity, there would be no point of life, since there would be no challenges. And so he says that god wills to bring in some suffering, that is randomly (but not evenly) distributed, which makes life challenging and gives it a purpose.

In some ways, Peterson’s view of why suffering exists in the world is remarkably similar to the Hindu philosophical view. An excellent point to understand the latter is this post by Shrikanth Krishnamachary.  Shrikanth writes:

So to summarize, it is fair to conclude that Indian ideas on the “Problem of evil” are unique and their exceptionalism derives from the ideas of an Agnostic, even playful God, championed in the foundational texts of the tradition, including the Rig Veda and the Brahma Sutras.

Earlier in the post, Shrikanth elaborates about the concept of “Leela” in Hindu philosophy which is sometimes translated as “god’s play”. It is like the gods, in their “play” created evil because otherwise the world would be too one-sided and not fun.

Speaking of superheroes and “fun”, one thing that makes Hindu mythological stories fascinating and fun is that it is not just the good guys that have superpowers – the antagonists have them as well. In fact, a common motif in Hindu myth is of a character performing immense sacrifices and penances, and being rewarded with a boon in the form of a superpower. And then the character proceeds to get arrogant about this boon and starts misusing it, at which point a god with a neutralising superpower is sent to deal with the situation.

So the fact that the antagonist in Hindu myth usually has a superpower means that the task of annihilating them becomes a non-trivial task, and this makes the story fun. In fact, with most Hindu myth stories having evolved over several millennia, it is not surprising that these stories conform to the “Leela model” (god’s play) of evil in myth – both sides get superpowers and the gods have fun watching them face off.

In his post, Shrikanth also mentions about how the concept of evil has changed since the Bhakti movement. He writes:

However in the past 1000 years, the Karmic orthodoxy of the Mahabharata has been challenged by the emergence of the Bhakti movement. This movement, with its roots in Southern India, has traditionally placed a great emphasis on the extolling of divine grace. God’s grace is spontaneous and is as much a part of his Leela as the act of creation itself. Hence Karma does not always have a deterministic linkage with Phala, which is the reason why often evil things can befall the most virtuous of men.

Perhaps not coincidentally, it is also notable that Bhakti movement era stories have a vastly different model of superhero battles compared to longer evolved Hindu myth. Over the last few days I’ve accompanied the daughter in watching a few episodes of “Little Krishna”, a cartoon series based on the stories of Krishna as a child (produced by Big Entertainment an ISKCON). While the battles in that might fascinate a child, they are hardly engaging.

And this is because Little Krishna has superpowers that far exceed that of the various demons sent by his uncle Kamsa to kill him. The demons do have some superpowers, but all it takes is brute force on the part of Little Krishna to destroy them. This is quite in contrast with traditional myth, where both sides have comparable superpowers, which means that the “good guys” need to engage in some clever solutions, including the odd episode of cheating, in order to win their battles.

PS: Apart from Jordan Peterson’s analogy, one other connection of this post with superheroes is one reason I find superhero movies boring – just like in Bhakti-based stories, or stories from the Bible, or even Superman vs Batman, I find that superhero stories have superheroes possessing superpowers vastly in excess of the “bad guy”, making these stories not fun.

 

Jordan Peterson’s Chapter Eleven

So I read Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life last month. It took a bit of an effort, and there were a couple of occasions when I did wonder if I should abandon the book. However, my stated aim of reading at least 50 books this year made me soldier on, and in the end I’m glad I finished it. Especially for Chapter Eleven of the book (Do not bother children when they are skateboarding).

Now, this is a long chapter, and Peterson spends considerable time rambling about various controversies he has got involved in over the last few years – such as his stand on political correctness, or his stand on environmentalism (in fact, he has an interesting take on the latter – that environmentalism and climate change worries have an adverse impact on mental health of people, so I didn’t mind reading him on that!).

The chapter is about risk – one thought (which has also been expressed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in one of his books – which one I can’t remember), is that people have a “natural level of risk”. And if you, for whatever reason, prevent them from taking that risk, they will find other ways to take risk, perhaps indulging in riskier activities.

And in order to explain why we are fundamentally wired to take risk, Peterson talks about gender, and relationships. He talks about friend-zoning, for example:

Girls aren’t attracted to boys who are their friends, even though they might like them, whatever that means. They are attracted to boys who win status contests with other boys.

And winning these status contests involves taking risk! Peterson goes on about relationships, about the crisis in the United States nowadays where women are more educated than men (on average), and then choose to remain single rather than “marrying down”.

This is the bit which really caught my attention – the apparent contradiction between the desire for women to do well, and this desire resulting in their not being able to find partners for themselves. And there are no easy solutions here. The desire for a woman to “marry up” is biological, and nobody can be faulted for being ambitious and wanting to do well for themselves in life.

Now, it is easy to go all ad hominem about this argument, calling Peterson a chauvinist and a traditionalist (as his opponents, mostly on the political left, have done), but the problem he mentions is real, and as the father of a (rather young) daughter, it hit hard for me – obviously I want her to do really well in life and make a mark professionally; but I also want her to propagate my genes, and do a good job of that.

I’m hopeful that as the daughter of Marriage Broker Auntie, she’ll be able to sort things out. But them, she may not want to listen to her mother – at least in these matters!

There were other places where the book was really inspirational. Chapter Twelve had a simple message – that there are times when you go through shit, and a way to get through them is to appreciate the smaller joys of life. In fact, Peterson is at his best when he talks about clinical psychology – which is the topic of his everyday research.

He does a fantastic job in Chapter One as well, and I may not be exaggerating by saying that the chapter was thought-provoking enough to make me analyse how I might have ended up with depression, and then make a conscious effort to avoid those actions that either betrayed depression, or made me feel more depressed. And that makes me get why people contribute so much to him on Patreon. Some of his advice can indeed be life changing.

However, I have no plans to pay him anything more than the £9.99 I paid Amazon for the book. And that is partly because the psychology parts of the book are indeed brilliant, he frequently goes on long rambling thoughts on religion (Christianity in particular, since that is the religion most familiar to him) and philosophy. And in those parts (there’s an especially long sequence between chapters 7 to 10 of the book), the book gets incredibly laboured and boring.

I recommend you read the book. The clinical psychology parts of it are nothing short of brilliant. There’s a lot of religion and psychology you will need to go through as well, and I hope you find more insight there than I managed to!

Here are the notes and highlights I made from the book.