Posted by Anon84 6 days ago
... Okay, but you already acknowledged that
> The process will be slow, but it will happen (this is not the same as saying schizophrenia itself can be eliminated, since it is highly polygenic and the pool of risk genes is not static).
So how do we know that modern-day schizophrenia isn't caused by a different set of genes? Maybe the Neolithic ones have been dying out from the gene pool, but new ones have consistently managed to keep replacing them. New genes can start contributing to the incidence of schizophrenia right away; even if they're otherwise neutral, they but won't die out due to the marginal effect on schizophrenia incidence for a very long time (much longer than the calculation above - since each one is, as we already established, causing only part of the loss in reproductive fitness). They don't need to be under positive selection, unless I've misunderstood something.
It also does not take into account the huge amount of human relocation that’s taken place over the last 200 years. For example, we have a large number of Africans that are now living in climate that are much colder than what they evolved to live in. The same as truth for northern Europeans, who lived in cold, cloudy climate now living in sunny, warm climates. Does anyone hear really think that that wouldn’t affect the populations mental health?
We know schizophrenia genes are almost always risk genes, meaning their polygenic, or they don’t cause schizophrenia, and everyone who carries the genetics. There are a very few number of cases of people who carry genes that directly caused schizophrenia.
So it’s quite possible that schizophrenia did not exist as frequently as it does in the modern world, a world filled with pollution, stress, drugs, aldehydes, bad food, and on and on and on.
But let’s just take migration. It is a well-known risk factor for schizophrenia. See the paper below.
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.1176/appi.ajp.162.1....
So no schizophrenia is not the price we pay for mine poison near the edge of a cliff, it’s the price we pay for technology. The technology that enabled not only all the wonderful things to get, but also all the horrible things that come with it.
I had schizoaffective disorder, and I have essentially cured it. But I really can’t say it’s a cure because what was happening was there was a Mitch match between my genetics in my environment. It’s like curing yourself from celiac by not eating wheat. Celiac is only a disease if you eat wheat.
So I am one of these involuntarily relocated people because of capitalism. My great great grandparents on my mother side were Sami and I still carry those genetics. Changing my environment and changing my diet changed my life. Frankly, I’m tired of these articles saying that there’s no cure for mental illnesses and it’s just a price we pay.
We also have a lot of mental health issues in my family since the switch to "civilization", not sure that any one of us is totally sane.
In fact the gay uncle is behaviorally driven to do things that are evolutionarily detrimental. Like spending time mating, flirting and being with other gay men. I don't really see gay men abandoning all of that to care for a nephew or something like that.
Take Sam Altman for example. He's not spending time caring for other kids in his immediately family. He's sinking time into getting rich from openAI and snogging his current partner.
The gay uncle gives about as much of a shit about nephews in the family as the straight uncle which is virtually for all intents and purposes: zilch.
I'm saying capitalism forces our hand to the maximum extent such that it eats away all time involving free favors to other people. The ladder is unlimited in height.
So if I have 8 hours or 16 hours available for productive work it doesn't matter, I'm going to allocate all of it to capitalism because that's a never ending hole.
I am not an expert by any means, but this analysis only makes sense if we assume there is a strictly linear relationship between alleles. It will not capture nonlinear relationships.
I wonder if schizophrenia (or perhaps psychosis) could be in some way analogous to the LLM temperature function becoming disregulated?
I mean, what is the extreme opposite of psychosis? If it is matter of degree, which it seems to be, then there is probably a tuning mechanism. Perhaps too little and you fail to account for factors that might not be apparent but might be guessed or inferred, too much, and too much seems plausible.
If so it would be possible to have a great deal of different “causes” given the tight and complex coupling of biological mechanisms.
I think it is possible to be diagnosed with both schizophrenia and autism which is why the theory is not considered anymore.
One Youtuber Jreg used a breadth-first search (schizophrenia) vs depth-first search (autism) analogy when comparing the the two, but I think your temperature analogy is more apt. Higher temperature results in more disorganized thoughts like schizophrenia. And if you buy into the idea that the root of most schizophrenia is thought disorders, then this analogy implies that dialing up temperature corresponds to more signs of psychosis through speech
My experience with many friends on the autism spectrum is that their speech tends to be more scripted, but I certainly don't think autism and psychosis are mutually exclusive.
Psychosis can also be caused by a lack of sleep (like not sleeping for days) and in this case sleep can end the psychosis.
Which is to say that schizophrenia and psychosis have an intersecting relationship.
I know I have unconventional beliefs, but the reason is the opposite of what people describe here. There are no patterns and commonly accepted beliefs seem unjustified, and crazy. So I need to find my own answers, but it's difficult. I think that people used to be more like this until recently, and people messed it up because iron is toxic, and heavy metals belong in the brain. I become more and more like this as I keep taking them, and it's better. I admit my IQ has probably dropped, but it's better this way.
All schizophrenics I know didn’t start as obvious psychopaths, but rather have their personal „cliff“ usually around an age associated with hormonal changes (eg early twenties, menopause).
So in other words the negative selection effects aren’t there until after reproduction.
Much the same could be said for gayness. If it were genetic, it should have been eliminated by evolution by now. Which suggests that it's not.
There are some differences in incidence of schizophrenia in populations.[1] Birth order matters, slightly, with prevalence higher for firstborns. (This is the reverse of homosexuality and left-handedness.) Migrants have higher rates of schizophrenia than non-migrants. Women vs. men, about the same. Rural vs. urban, about the same.
What the original paper suggests is that they didn't discover anything significant. It's more like a discussion of feedback control problems near a cliff, but by people who don't know about that part of control theory.
The title is overly dramatic for the results.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
There are very plausible explanations for the genetic basis of gayness. One is that being gay is essentially a "byproduct" of higher fecundity in women - I'd have to search for the study, but gay men with sisters tend to have sisters with more kids than the norm.
The other is the "guncle" hypothesis (which is related to the previous one). While gay men and women do not have their own biological children (at least through gay relationships), they are able to spend additional resources on their nieces and nephews. Anecdotal obviously, but it certainly worked this way in my family. As a guncle I helped pay for my niece's education (and was happy to do so because I don't have to care for children of my own ).