The problem with cynics

A man I know is one of the most cynical people I've ever met.

He said to me on more than one occasion, "I hate people."  Despite the fact that the designation "people" includes his wife, children, the person he was talking to at the time (me)... and himself.  He distrusts just about everyone, badmouths them incessantly behind their backs, and in his business micromanages everything to a fare-thee-well.  As a result, he's lost customers, his staff might as well be processed through a revolving door, and has developed a well-deserved reputation in the industry as someone to be avoided both by potential clients and by employees.

His cynicism has, in fact, become his reality.

[Image credit: Andy Lendzion]

It's an awfully common phenomenon.  My own mom was a fearful, suspicious person who thought the world was a deeply dangerous place, full of people waiting to take advantage of you, or even hurt you or kill you.  While watching television she gravitated toward "true crime" shows -- Cops and CSI, that sort of thing -- which of course show you the seediest, most violent slices of humanity.  This further reinforced her opinion about the horrible risks of stepping outside your own front door.  I'll never forget the last phone call between us before I left on a month-long walking tour of the north of England, my first-ever trip overseas, when I was about thirty years old.  I was ridiculously excited about it, but she was full of cautions about all the terrible things that could, and probably would, happen to me.

Her final words to me before we hung up were, "Remember, don't trust anyone."

In England.  I mean, for cryin' in the sink, it wasn't like I was going to Turkmenistan or North Korea or something.

And, of course, I had a perfectly lovely time, met some wonderful people (several of whom are still friends, three decades later), and told her so when I got back.  Didn't change her outlook; her attitude seems to have been that I'd simply gotten lucky, and don't count on it happening ever again.

It's not that I'm immune to this sort of thinking myself.  I've written Skeptophilia for over twelve years, and the focus is frequently on pseudoscience.  I've had to be on guard to stop my attitude going from "this person believes this particular piece of pseudoscientific rubbish" to "wow, everyone is really dumb."  It's why I try to split my posts between pseudoscience and actual science; to say "look at the amazing things the human mind can achieve" at least as often as I say "look at where we've stumbled."

I used to tell my Critical Thinking students something that I still believe to this day is an essential truth: cynicism is as inaccurate as, and as lazy as, gullibility.  We laugh at gullible people, call them fools, stooges, suckers, chumps, and a variety of other unflattering names.  But there's nothing inherently smarter about disbelieving everything.  Both gullibility and cynicism are excuses to stop thinking, to avoid doing the hard work of evaluating the facts and evidence and coming to a justified conclusion.

And yet, cynics have acquired an undeserved air of erudition and wisdom, as if they're the only ones smart enough to have "seen through" everyone.  People are stupid and/or evil, the world sucks, everyone is dishonest, the government is hopelessly and thoroughly corrupt.  End of story.  No need to think about it any further than that.

The problem is, the actual facts and evidence don't support that conclusion at all.

The topic comes up because I'm currently reading Jamil Zaki's wonderful book Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, which I heard about through the amazing podcast Hidden Brain a few weeks ago, and which should be required reading.  Zaki's point, which he supports with tons of data from his own studies and those of other psychologists, is that not only is the default condition of humanity to be cooperative, kind, and compassionate, but that trusting others usually generates trust in return.  Companies where the bosses trust their employees to work hard, be creative, and collaborate are not only happier places, they're far more productive than autocratic, micromanaged, competitive, factory-model sweatshops.  Just like the examples I started with, of the nasty-tempered cynical business owner and my own frightened, suspicious mom, you create the reality you live in.  If you look for ugliness, you're sure to find it.

What we often ignore, though, is the deeper truth that if you look for goodness, you'll find that, too.  What we choose to cultivate in ourselves is what we ultimately find ourselves surrounded with.

Understand that I'm not recommending adopting a Panglossian attitude of "everything's for the best in the best of all possible worlds."  There is injustice, dishonesty, exploitation, bigotry, and true evil out there.  It's just that defaulting to "everything sucks" is not only incorrect, it's lazy -- and it gives us a convenient excuse not to work toward fixing what is wrong about our society.  Part of the problem, of course, is media; we're fed a continuous diet of bad news because it keeps our attention.  (There's a reason it's called "doomscrolling.")  As just one of many examples in Zaki's book, how many of you have accepted without question that violent crime in the United States is escalating?  It's a major talking point, especially by one particular political party, and we accept it because it fits our mental model that everything is going to hell.

In fact, violent crime in the United States has fallen drastically in the last five years, with overall totals declining in 54 of the 69 largest cities, and rates for certain categories of crime going down between twelve and twenty percent.

But that fits neither with the political agenda -- "you're in danger" drives people to the polls, so they can vote for the person who says they can fix what they just now made you scared of -- nor with our self-congratulatory sense that maybe some people are stupid enough to get fooled by pollyanna-ish optimists, but at least we are smart and well-informed and admit the harsh reality.

Zaki points out, and I wholeheartedly agree, that the best approach is to split the difference between cynicism and gullibility.  Neither trust everyone immediately nor reject everyone out of hand; base your opinions, and your actions, on facts.  (And, it must be said, don't determine your "facts" with a three-minute Google search to locate a couple of websites that agree with what you already believed.)  It's better to default to trust than to suspicion -- and, significantly, you're no more likely to be wrong if you do so.  One of the more surprising studies in Zaki's book is about whether cynical people are better at recognizing when they're being lied to.  Since they're inherently suspicious, you'd think so, wouldn't you?  It turns out that both cynical and gullible people are bad at discerning liars from truth-tellers.  It's the skeptics -- the ones who base their answers on careful consideration of what the person actually said -- who score the best.

All in all, cynicism not only poisons your own joy, it feeds you an inaccurate view of the world.  And, like the people I started with, it creates a small, mean, toxic world in reality, which reinforces the cynic that they were right all along.  It's like the quote by Ken Keyes: "A loving person lives in a loving world.  A hostile person lives in a hostile world.  Everyone you meet is your mirror."

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Quantum homeopathy

In response to a post I did a while back about the tendency of people to believe loony ideas if they're couched in ten-dollar vocabulary, a loyal reader of Skeptophillia sent me a link to a paper by one Lionel Milgrom, of Imperial College (London), that has turned this phenomenon into an art form.

The name of the paper?

"'Torque-Like' Action of Remedies and Diseases on the Vital Force and Their Consequences for Homeopathic Treatment."

ln it, we witness something pretty spectacular: an attempt to explain homeopathy based on quantum mechanics.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I'm not making this up, and it doesn't seem like a spoof; in fact, the paper appeared in the open-access Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.  Here's the opening paragraph:

Within the developing theoretical context of quantum macroentanglement, a mathematical model of the Vital Force (Vf) has recently been formulated.  It describes the Vf in terms of a hypothetical gyroscope with quantized angular momentum.  This enables the Vf's state of health to be represented in terms of a "wave function" derived solely from secondary symptom observables produced in response to disease or homeopathic remedies.  So far, this approach has illustrated the biphasal action of remedies, resonance phenomena arising out of homeopathic provings, and aspects of the therapeutic encounter.

So right out of the starting gate, he's talking about using the quantum interactions of a force no one has ever detected to explain a treatment modality that has been repeatedly found to be completely worthless.  This by itself is pretty impressive, but it gets better as it goes along:

According to this model, symptom expression corresponds to precession of the Vf "gyroscope."  Conversely, complete removal of symptoms is equivalent to cessation of Vf "precession."  However, if overprescribed or given in unsuitable potency, the curative remedy (which may also be formulated as a wave function but this time derived solely from changes in Vf secondary symptom observables) may cause the Vf to express proving symptoms.  Thus, with only observation of symptoms and changes in them to indicate, indirectly, the state of a patient's Vf, the safest treatment strategy might be for the practitioner to proceed via gradual removal of the symptoms.

When I read the last line, I was lucky that I wasn't drinking anything, because it would have ended up splattered all over my computer.  Yes!  By all means, if a sick person comes in to visit a health professional, the health professional should proceed by removing the sick person's symptoms!

Because proceeding by making the symptoms worse is kind of counterproductive, you know?

His talk about "overprescription" made me chuckle, too.  Because if you'll recall, the late James Randi demonstrated dozens of times that the result of consuming a whole bottle of a homeopathic remedy is... nothing.  On the other hand, since the homeopaths believe that the more dilute a substance is, the stronger it gets, maybe "overprescribing" means "prescribing less."

Which reminds me of the story about the guy who forgot to take his homeopathic remedy, and as a result died of an overdose.

*rimshot*

And if this isn't enough, Dr. Milgrom (yes, he has a Ph.D., astonishingly enough) has also published other papers, including "The Thermodynamics of Health, Healing, and Love" and "Toward a Topological Description of the Therapeutic Process."

What's next, "The Three-Body Problem: A Classical Mechanics Approach to Handling Love Affairs?"

I have to admit, though, that there's something almost charming about this guy's attempt to bring pseudoscience under the lens of physics.  His blathering on about imaginary "vital forces" and the precession of microscopic gyroscopes as a mechanism for disease is, if nothing else, creative.  While what he's claiming is complete bollocks, Dr. Milgrom's determination to keep soldiering on is kind of adorable.

The good news, of course, is that his papers are unlikely to convince anyone who isn't already convinced.  The only danger is the undeserved veneer of credibility that this sort of thing gives homeopathy in people whose minds aren't yet made up.  One can only hope that the thorough debunking of this fraudulent practice that has been done by actual scientific researchers will prove, in the end, to be more persuasive.

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Borley Rectory, and the problem with anecdote

There's a reason skeptics have a problem with anecdotal evidence and eyewitness testimony.

It's not that that it's impossible that you saw a ghost, or Bigfoot, or an extraterrestrial spacecraft.  What we're saying is that we need more than your assurance that you did.  Not only do we have the potential for outright lies and hoaxes -- some of them very subtle and clever -- we have the fact that the human sensory apparatus more or less sucks.

To put not too fine a point on it.

I mean, it works well enough.  It keeps us sufficiently aware of our surroundings to stay alive.  But we're easily tricked, we miss things, we misinterpret what we see and hear.  As astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "The human perceptual system is rife with all sorts of ways of getting it wrong."

As an illustration, let's consider one of the most famous "haunted house" stories in the world -- the infamous Borley Rectory, of Borley, Essex, England.

Borley Rectory always shows up on those websites with names like, "Ten Most Terrifying Real Ghost Stories!", usually somewhere near the top of the list.  So here are the bare bones of the story, just in case you don't know it.

Borley Rectory was built in 1862 by Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull, Rector of Borley Parish.  He designed the building to replace an earlier rectory that had burned down in 1841, and also to accommodate his wife and family of fourteen children, which indicates that Reverend Bull put a lot of stock in the "be fruitful and multiply" thing from the Book of Genesis.

Be that as it may, the parish was certainly steeped in history.  The parish church is thought to date to the twelfth century, and the town was the site of Borley Hall, the ancestral seat of the Waldegrave family.  But here's where truth starts twisting in with fabrication; because the additional claim that the rectory had been built on the site of an old Benedictine monastery appears to have no basis in reality.

Which means that the tale that is the basis of the haunting also is of dubious provenance.  Because the story goes that a monk in the (almost certainly non-existent) monastery was having an affair with a nun from a nearby convent.  They made plans to elope, and had in fact arranged a coach driven by a friend of the monk's in order to get away, but the plan was discovered.

Sexual indiscretion by the clergy was a major no-no back then.  The coachman was beheaded, the monk hanged, and the nun bricked up in a wall inside the convent.

Except... none of them existed, remember?  Because there's no evidence there ever was a monastery on the rectory grounds.

But that didn't stop the tale from growing. Here's one account of what Reverend Bull et al. saw:

On July 28th, 1900, three Bull daughters reportedly saw a figure on a path, which later became known as the "Nuns Walk", to the rear of the rectory.  They were joined by a fourth sister to help greet the stranger, but the apparition disappeared.  Harry also told of seeing the nun, together with the phantom coach in which she had eloped.

 
She was also seen wandering the grounds around the Rectory, in and out of the bushes, dressed in grey.  There are reports of the Monk and Nun passing across the grounds.  Several people said they observed "A lady in grey cloak" and "A gentleman with a sort of bald head, dressed in a long black gown."

Once the story of the haunting began to spread, others reported seeing spectral nuns and monks.  But then events accelerated.  A later rector of the parish, one Lionel Foyster, moved in in 1930 with his wife Marianne, and they began to experience poltergeist activity in addition to the continuing presence of ghostly figures loping about.  Marianne began to receive messages written on walls and scraps of paper, such as the following:

Both of the Foysters reported having peculiar experiences:

During the first year of their tenancy, Lionel described many unexplained happenings including; bell ringing, the appearance of Harry Bull [son of the first rector of Borley], glass objects appearing out of nowhere and being dashed to the floor, books appearing, and many items being thrown, including pebbles and an iron.  After an attempt at exorcism, Marianne was thrown out of bed several times.

The Foysters eventually moved out, apparently because of Lionel Foyster's declining health, and afterwards no one could be found who was willing to live in the rectory, almost certainly because of its reputation.

And then Harry Price got involved.

Price was a psychic investigator of significant fame, who had founded the National Laboratory of Psychic Research as a rival to the far more reputable Society for Psychical Research.  Price himself was a strange mixture of skeptic and sketchy.  He was instrumental in unmasking outright hoaxers such as Helen Duncan, who used cheesecloth and paper soaked in egg white to simulate "ectoplasm."  But his investigation of Borley Rectory, leading to the publication of a book in 1940, was unequivocally in support of its having been haunted -- despite a stinging critique by researchers for the SPR who said that Price himself was a trained conjuror (which was true), and had "salted the mine" by faking some of the evidence from Borley, in collusion with Marianne Foyster, who "was actively engaged in fraudulently creating [haunted] phenomena."

Price, of course, denied any such thing, but further inquiries by the SPR left his role in the alleged haunting in serious question.  And the matter came to an unexpected close when the rectory burned in 1939 because of an accident with an oil lamp.

The remnants of the building were demolished in 1944.  But people still visit the site and the adjacent cemetery, and still report ghostly appearances, lo unto this very day.

See what I mean about anecdote?  We have a story that started out with a most-likely-false claim of three executions on the rectory grounds, followed by what many believe was an outright hoax perpetrated by Harry Price and Marianne Foyster.  Blend that together with overactive imaginations, and the rather dubious quality of the human perceptual systems, and you have a mishmash out of which any kernel of truth -- if there is one there -- becomes impossible to discern.

So is Borley haunted?  The most honest answer is "there's no way to know for sure," with a strong corollary of "... but probably not."  There's nothing here that any unbiased individual would consider hard evidence, just tall tale piled upon unsubstantiated claim, mixed with "I heard that people saw ghosts there."

If this is "one of the best-authenticated haunted sites in Britain," as one website claimed, we've got some serious problems.

To return to my initial point, it's not that I'm saying that any of the claims of the paranormal are impossible.  What I'm saying is that thus far, no evidence I've seen has been convincing, at least not to someone who wasn't already convinced.  But despite all that, I'm hoping to visit Borley next time I'm in the UK, and if I do, I'll definitely report back with anything I happen to see.

Not that it should make a difference.  Because eyewitness testimony is still subject to all of the caveats I've mentioned -- even if it comes from yours truly.

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A matter of truth

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The treadmill

I've mentioned before how my difficulties with math short-circuited my goal of becoming a researcher in physics, but the truth is, there's more to the story than that.

Even after I realized that I didn't have the mathematical ability -- nor, honestly, enough interest and focus to overcome my challenges -- I still had every intention of pursuing a career in science.  I spent some time in the graduate school of oceanography at the University of Washington, and from there switched to biology, but I found neither to be a good fit.  It wasn't a lack of interest in the disciplines; biology, in fact, is still a deep and abiding fascination to this day, and I ultimately spent over three decades teaching the subject to high schoolers.  What bothered me was the publish-or-perish atmosphere that permeated all of research science.  I still recall my shock when one of our professors said, "Scientists spend 25% of their time doing the research they're interested in, and 75% of their time trying to beat everyone else in the field to grant money so they don't starve to death."

It's hard to pinpoint an exact moment that brought me to the realization that the career I'd always dreamed of wasn't for me -- but this was certainly one of the times I said, "Okay, now, just hang on a moment."

I'm not alone in having issues with this.  The brilliant theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder did a video on her YouTube channel called "My Dream Died, and Now I'm Here" that's a blistering indictment of the entire edifice of research science.  Hossenfelder has the following to say about how science is currently done:

It was a rude awakening to realize that this institute [where she had her first job in physics research] wasn't about knowledge discovery, it was about money-making.  And the more I saw of academia, the more I realized it wasn't just this particular institute and this particular professor.  It was generally the case.  The moment you put people into big institutions, the goal shifts from knowledge discovery to money-making.  Here's how this works:

If a researcher gets a scholarship or research grant, the institution gets part of that money.  It's called the "overhead."  Technically, that's meant to pay for offices and equipment and administration.  But academic institutions pay part of their staff from this overhead, so they need to keep that overhead coming.  Small scholarships don't make much money, but big research grants can be tens of millions of dollars.  And the overhead can be anything between fifteen and fifty percent.  This is why research institutions exert loads of pressure on researchers to bring in grant money.  And partly, they do this by keeping the researchers on temporary contracts so that they need grants to get paid themselves...  And the overhead isn't even the real problem.  The real problem is that the easiest way to grow in academia is to pay other people to produce papers on which you, as the grant holder, can put your name.  That's how academia works.  Grants pay students and postdocs to produce research papers for the grant holder.  And those papers are what the supervisor then uses to apply for more grants.  The result is a paper-production machine in which students and postdocs are burnt through to bring in money for the institution...

I began to understand what you need to do to get a grant or to get hired.  You have to work on topics that are mainstream enough but not too mainstream.  You want them to be a little bit edgy, but not too edgy.  It needs to be something that fits into the existing machinery.  And since most grants are three years, or five years at most, it also needs to be something that can be wrapped up quickly...

The more I saw of the foundations of physics, the more I became convinced that the research there wasn't based upon sound scientific principles...  [Most researchers today] are only interested in writing more papers...  To get grants.  To get postdocs.  To write more papers.  To get more grants.  And round and round it goes.

The topic comes up today because of two separate studies that came out in the last two weeks that illustrate a hard truth that the scientific establishment as a whole has yet to acknowledge; there's a real human cost to putting talented, creative, bright people on the kind of treadmill Hossenfelder describes.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Doenertier82, Phodopus sungorus - Hamsterkraftwerk, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The first study, from a group in Sweden, found that simply pursuing a Ph.D. takes a tremendous toll on mental health, and instead of there being a "light at the end of the tunnel," the toll worsens as the end of the work approaches.  By the fifth year of doctoral study, the likelihood of a student using mental-health medications rises by forty percent.  It's no surprise why; once the Ph.D. is achieved, there's the looming stress of finding a postdoc position, and then after that the savage competition for the few stable, tenure-track research positions out there in academia.  "You need to generate data as quickly as possible, and the feeling of competition for funding and jobs can be very strong, even early in your PhD.," said Rituja Bisen, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in neurobiology at the University of Würzburg.  "Afterward, many of us have to move long distances, even out of the country, to find a worthwhile position.  And even then, there's no guarantee.  It doesn’t matter how good a lab is; if it’s coming out of a toxic work culture, it isn’t worth it in the long run."

The other study, out of Poland (but involving worldwide data), is perhaps even more damning; over fifty percent of researchers leave science entirely in under ten years after publishing their first academic paper.

You spend huge amounts of money on graduate school, work your ass off to get a Ph.D, and then a position as a researcher, and after all that -- you find that (1) the stress isn't worth it, (2) you're barely making enough money to get by, and (3) the competition for grants is only going to get worse over time.  It's not surprising that people decide to leave research for other career options.

But how heartbreaking is it that we're doing this to the best and brightest minds on the planet?

And the problem is even more drastic for women and minorities; for them, the number still left publishing after ten years is more like thirty percent of the ones who started.

How far would we have advanced in our understanding of how the universe works if the system itself wasn't strangling the scientists?

Back when modern science got its start, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, science was the province of the rich; only the people who were already independently wealthy had the wherewithal to (1) get a college education, and afterward (2) spend their time messing about in laboratories.  There are exceptions -- Michael Faraday comes to mind -- but by and large, scientific inquiry was confined to the gentry.

Now, we have the appearance of a more open, egalitarian model, but at its basis, the whole enterprise still depends on institutions competing for money, and the people actually doing the research (i.e. the scientists) being worked to the bone to keep the whole superstructure running.

It's a horrible problem, and one I don't see changing until our attitudes shift -- until we start prioritizing the advancement of knowledge over academia-for-profit.  Or, perhaps, until our governments recognize how absolutely critical science is, and fund that over the current goals of fostering corporate capitalism to benefit the extremely wealthy and developing newer and better ways to kill those we perceive as our enemies.

I've heard a lot of talk about how prescient Star Trek was -- we now have something very like their communicators and supercomputers, and aren't far away from tricorders.  But we won't actually get there until we develop one other thing, and I'm not talking about warp drives or holodecks.

I'm talking about valuing science, and scientists, as being the pinnacle of what we as a species can achieve, and creating a system to provide the resources to support them instead of doing everything humanly possible to drive them away.

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The science of beauty

I got a curious response to my post a couple of days ago, about magical and/or supernatural explanations not actually being explanations at all, but a way to stop thinking.

Here's the email:

Dear Mr. Skepto,

You sound pretty worried that you don't have an explanation for everything.  People aren't always explainable!  They do things because they do them.  That's it.  Some people believe weird stuff and some people like the explanations from science.  Just like some people like the Beatles and some people like Beethoven.  It's silly to wear yourself out trying to figure why.

Do you worry about why your loved ones love you?  Maybe it's some chemical thing in their brain, right?  Do you tell your wife that's what love means?  Maybe it's a gene or something that's why I think flowers are pretty.  If so, the explanation is uglier than the flowers are.  I'd rather look at the flowers.

All your scientific explanations do is turn all the good things in life into a chemistry class.  I think they're worth more than calling them brain chemicals.  I'll take religion over science any day.  At least it leaves us with our souls.

Think about it.

L. D.

Well, L. D., thanks for the response.  I find your views interesting -- mostly because they're just about as opposite to the way I see the world as they could be.

But you probably already knew that.

There is a reason why musical tastes exist.  We're nowhere near the point in brain research where we could discern the explanation; but an explanation does exist for why Shostakovich's Prelude & Fugue in E-flat Minor gives me goosebumps (especially in this recording, played by the composer himself!), while Brahms's symphonies might send someone else into raptures but do nothing for me whatsoever.  Nothing just "is because it is."

And I can't fathom how knowing the explanation devalues your appreciation of the thing itself.  Me, I would love to know what's happening in my brain when I hear a piece of music I enjoy.  We're beginning to get some perspective on this, starting with a 2011 study that found that the neurological response to hearing a piece of music we love is similar to the brain's response to sex.

Cool, yes?  I think that's awesome.  How would knowing that make me appreciate music less?

Or sex either?

I find flowers even more beautiful knowing that their shapes and colors evolved to attract pollinators, and understanding a bit about the chemistry of photosynthesis.

Understanding light refraction doesn't make me shrug my shoulders at a rainbow.  And even love -- which L. D. evidently thinks lies entirely in the mystical realm -- is made no less by my knowledge that its underpinning has to do with brain chemistry.  It's like that old song with the verse:

Tell me why the stars do shine
And tell me why the ivy twines
And tell me why the sky is blue,
And I will say why I love you.

A more scientific type added a verse, to wit:

Nuclear fusion is why the stars do shine.
Thigmotropism is why the ivy twines.
Rayleigh scattering is why the sky's so blue,
And testicular hormones are why I love you.

Which I think is not only hilarious, it's a good deal more realistic than attributing it all to souls and people "doing things because they do them."

In short: science itself is beautiful.  Understanding how the world works should do nothing but increase our sense of wonder.  If scientific inquiry isn't accompanied by a sense of "Wow, this is amazing!", you're doing it wrong.  I'll end with a quote from Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, who in his 1988 book What Do You Care What Other People Think? had the following to say:

I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with.  He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree.  But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is.  But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull."  I think he's kind of nutty…  There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower.  It only adds.  I don't understand how it subtracts.

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Attitude conversion

Here's a hypothetical for you.

There's a therapeutic practice being proposed for widespread use.  It has the following drawbacks:

• its use is strongly correlated with long-term PTSD, depression, and suicidal ideation.
• over half of the patients recommended for this practice are referred not by medical professionals, but by religious leaders.
• it has been denounced by every major medical organization.
• it has very close to a zero percent success rate.

Would you support the approval of this practice?

I devoutly hope the answer is "no," but unfortunately, this is no hypothetical or "proposed practice," it's already being used.  It's "conversion therapy" -- an attempt to "convert" LGBTQ+ people, many of them teenagers, into a straight cis identity.

And the word "convert" softens the impact of what the practice actually consists of.  Because its advocates don't want to use more accurate words like "bully" and "cajole" and "harass" and "subject to emotional abuse."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bojan Cvetanović, Rainbow flag ("Progress" variant by Daniel Quasar) at EuroPride 2019 (Vienna), CC BY-SA 4.0]

The topic comes up because of a paper this week in The Lancet Psychiatry, which lays out in no uncertain terms the dangers of this practice.  "Our study found an association between recall of conversion practices and symptoms of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide," said study lead author Nguyen Tran, of Stanford University.  "In particular, we saw the greatest harms in people who had been exposed to both types of conversion practices — those addressing sexual orientation and gender identity.  This study highlights the need for policy changes at a federal, state and local level, and an understanding of the lasting mental health impacts related to conversion practices."

The whole thing rests on the old idea that sexual identity and orientation are things you can change -- i.e., the ridiculous idea that "it's a choice."  With the tacit part being that queerness is a bad choice, or (to take the religious approach) a sin.  As a trans student of mine said some years ago, "How does that even make sense?  Who the hell would choose this?  To face ridicule and non-acceptance on a daily basis, and in some places, be in danger of injury, imprisonment, or death?  You have to be an idiot to believe that we're choosing this."

And, of course, the people who are straight never seem to be able to answer the question of when and how they decided on their sexual orientation.  I'd bet you cold hard cash you couldn't find a single one who sat down at age fourteen and thought, "Hmmm... guys or girls?  Guys or girls?  How will I ever decide?"

Speaking as a queer man, all I can say is believe me, I tried to change who I was.  I grew up in not only a devoutly Roman Catholic household, but one so uptight it almost beggars belief, and in one of the most conservative, homophobic areas of the United States.  When I was growing up I can barely remember my parents ever saying the word "sex."  Sex, and sexual desire (of any kind), were not something to be enjoyed and celebrated, but were nothing but an embarrassed necessity for procreating.  When it was time for The Talk I was handed a book that explained the mechanics (a book which, by the way, labeled queerness as "a mental illness").  The result: I tried like hell to erase from my brain all the same-sex attraction I felt.  Didn't work, of course, because it never does.  So I simply hid, in shame and fear and self-loathing.

For almost fifty years.

So even though I was never put through the hell of conversion therapy, the Tran et al. research is hardly a surprise to me.  And the fact that we don't have a nationwide ban on this practice is downright criminal -- and provides yet more evidence of the stranglehold religion has on the United States, to the point that religious considerations trump evidence, data, and the health and safety of American citizens.

"The preponderance of evidence indicates that conversion practices are related to negative mental health effects," Tran said.  "There is a greater need for mental health support among survivors of conversion practices.  Other studies that have explored this suggest that helping LGBTQIA+ people find supportive LGBTQIA+ networks, access affirming mental health care, and rebuild their self-esteem and embrace their gender identity or sexual orientation are important for addressing the negative mental health related to conversion practice."

It's attitudes that need to be converted, not people's sexual identity.

People are enraged about the non-issue of children being given sex-change operations on a whim -- like Donald Trump's idiotic lie, "The transgender thing is incredible.  Think of it.  Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.  The school decides what’s going to happen with your child."  (I worked in a school for 32 years, and trust me, school nurses are not equipped to do surgery.  And nothing in a school happens apropos of a child's health without parental consent, unless it's a life-or-death emergency.  Nothing.)  

So if you want to be furious about something, how about choosing something real, something that actually does demonstrable and long-lasting harm?

And then take that fury and turn it into something useful -- working to ban forever a practice that does irreparable damage to the mental health of one of the most vulnerable minorities.

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