Posted by redbell 9/14/2025
The core assumption (or insight?) of Cognitive Therapy (and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is that our thoughts shape the way we feel. In this model, repetitive negative thoughts are actually a main cause of depression, not a symptom.
If you're interested in this approach, I'd recommend the works of David Burns, for example his book "Feeling Great" or the Feeling Good Podcast.
Jokes aside, it should be noted that CBT might confuse cause and effect and the goal is to mold the behavior of people into something socially wanted or expected or just learn to live with something that cannot reasonably be changed.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-good/202503/... explicitly discusses the arrow of causality here
> and the goal is to mold the behavior of people into something socially wanted or expected or just learn to live with something that cannot reasonably be changed.
There are lots of crackpot approaches to psychotherapy, but I do believe that most therapists genuinely want to help patients/clients to recover, not just mold them into something socially accepted.
Wouldn‘t it be both? While the repeated negative thoughts are the cause, they‘re also the symptom how it show up and the reason why people seek out a diagnosis
I think if your depression is very deeply buried, it surely isn't enough to read it, but still it can open up quit some insights regarding the connection of what you think and how you feel. It makes it visible.
There can also be other causes for depression is course.
While studying and testing the exercises described in the book I discovered one other thing I'd like to share: to me it seems, to come out of a reappearing mental dip, you need to be very consistent in your efforts (mental / physical exercises and other habits you try to establish or change, to feel better). Anyone else?
"Things are only as bad as we perceive them to be" leading up to "have you tried reframing that and finding something positive in it", and "have you tried not thinking about that".
If I need dissociation and self-delusion, there are substances that are a far more impactful option.
My father was just diagnosed with Parkinson's a few months ago, and he already has trouble following any conversation, and knows it. If that didn't lead to depression, that's what would be notable. And any insight that he reaches that gives him comfort might be gone an hour later.
It just seems like a silly study.
When really it's "We've found an interesting association, and we are going to explore it more to see if there's an causation that we can influence"
It's really clickbait territory sometimes (IMO)
It really should be a shared responsibility to report and understand the meaning of statistically significant correlation. Unfortunately, few journalists seem to have much interest in understanding it. And given that their readership likely has about average (i.e poor) numeracy and iffy understanding of probability, it’s a bad combination. The widespread misunderstanding about the iterative way that science converges on truth also contributes to this problem.
That said, I would rather know about interesting findings such as this if for no other reason than to start digging for the original paper.
We used to think stress caused ulcers, based on a correlation. We now know the actual cause is a bacterium.
Having things that are wrong, but we don't know any better, or having things that are right, but we don't have the skills to prove it?
We often laugh how people in times before thought "crazy" things about health maintenance, but we're no better.
What helped the most wasn’t medicine. It was little things, like going for walks together or having simple conversations. Just giving the brain something new to pay attention to seemed to make a real difference.
Just yesterday I randomly came across a song we often heard in our shared apartment during University, and immediately I had 10 different memories from that time swirling around in my head.
After years of trying to push that person towards trying out new things and enriching their life, I kind of gave up. You simply cannot convince someone about a medicine if they don't feel there is a problem. Still it's hard to see believing the person could be enjoying life more, especially during their retirement.
This can be very sad. The person you love just fades away.
But now this! He has less time than I thought. I will have to forward it to him, and cross my fingers that he doesn't spiral. Thoughts and prayers, man. Before you suggest it, I can't tell him to just "think positive". He would physically explode. Implode? Something. Matter, antimatter.
To be honest, I don't think that line ever helped someone who sees himself in the middle of deep shit. There is nothing positive about being in shit. The only thing that can help people stuck in such a mindset is somehow change their perspective. And yes, maybe that study will help in a way.
Much more comfortable to think; (everything sucks, those in power are out to get me) than (wow I really had a high hope for what my life would be, and this sure isn't it).
This seems wrong. If "β" is the estimate here (not sure), it should be inside the confidence interval, but is way outside...
I just got inspired on an llm prompt, and got these three koans, that to me are the most amazing things I've been able to get out of llms so far: https://pastebin.com/tc9uMWuw
Thank you for the set up.
Bad and shocking headlines click way better than positive ones, negative feedback is occupying our attention more than positive feedback, we perceive losses way more important than gains, we perceive losses as way more impactful than gains of the same degree, etc.
I am 100% sure trauma can and does affect the negativity aspect of our thinking in a big way. But I do not think that negative thinking overtopping positive thinking is limited to trauma sufferers
Technological comfort just disguises it all.
Frankly, abuse and childhood trauma has always been a staple of human history. Even in the Bible, so at least a few thousand years ago, physical punishment against children is described. Sexual abuse was rampant as well, the Quran documents marriages at age 9. Wars and all the horrors that came with them were all too common - Europe only got actually peaceful after WW2.
Just ask in your own family if you still got really really old people left alive... they will all report from some uncle, aunt or godknowswhat that just went loony. Or tell horror stories about rape, beatings, bullying...
Nothing is new, the only thing that is new is that abuse gets called out and, at least in some cases, perps get punished.
I think always-on Internet devices both exposed latent difficulties in home/working life that already existed for many and amplified those same vulnerabilities. You can observe a single person on their phone for 8 hours a day and call it "problematic usage", but this alone does not give enough information about what underlying forces drive so much usage. If it's boredom, then why are they bored all the time? If it's stress, then where does so much stress originate from?
The introduction of smartphones has raised the stakes since a huge number of people are now confronted with the same problem in a highly talked-about way, some of which could have been activated by latent mental vulnerability that may not have been brought to light in a past age. And sometimes this does result in a discussion of sometimes completely unrelated personal issues, but by their nature I would imagine not many would be willing to open up about them in public, compared to complaints about social media. Problems related to tech get a lot of social advocacy, but I find it hard to imagine a national "organization for adults abused by <type of guardian>". What is there to advocate for when the issue at hand already opened and shut itself decades ago and the people involved are either dead or incapable of admitting fault? Not to mention that the causes for each trauma are wildly diverse, and sometimes there is not enough information to be able to find a concrete meaning in the events at all?
Sadly, even regulation of technology seems to be a workable issue compared to that of preventing future abuse. Each upbringing is distinct, and most effort seems to be put towards recovering from abuse long in the past knowing that (when dealing with certain personality types) there will never be hope for reconciliation. Knowing how intractable a problem intergenerational trauma is is enough to make me lean antinatalist at times, even though I say I am recovering.
I think there are patterns to abuse regardless of the cause. Abuse is essentially addiction to control or anger (the seven deadly sins are all forms of addiction). The patterns I can see give me hope that it is entirely possible to stop the cycle.
That's an interesting formulation. I have someone in my family who could be described by these words.
Is this your own description or does this come from somewhere?
Less fighting, more opportunity, more food, more clean water, less disease than ever.
What we do have now is 24 hour news and social media screaming how bad it is so we watch ads.
I also observed things only getting worse in my life. So I really don't buy this narrative that things keep getting better. IMO, the only people who think things got better are billionaires and multi-millionaires; of course it got better for them but it didn't get better for the average-luck person. For the average ambitious person who worked hard to improve their situation, things got MUCH worse; there are all these artificial barriers preventing them from succeeding, depriving them of opportunities and then constant gaslighting to blame them for systemic issues (including their own failure to thrive). Low birth rates, high rates of depression, high rates of homelessness, high suicide rates speak for themselves.
The fact that it all gets covered up by social media echo chambers to the extent that some people think life got better, makes it MUCH, MUCH worse, not better. People just don't seem to notice the tent cities, the increased immigration (due to worsening conditions in poor countries), the political division (again, driven by poverty).
Of course maybe your grandma like my grandma ignored all the cases of people that had abjectly terrible lives back then because that wouldnt fit her world view of 'make the present the past again'. Birthrates dropped in the US long before we were born. Homelessness was very high in the US before the postwar 'irregularity'.
All those poor countries are still richer than ever historically, it's just that first world nations are that much better.
Just stop the billionaires from sucking up everything and it's not really too bad at all.
And things that add to entropy are favored by nature, undoing human labor & endeavor. Related?
People forget that nature only optimizes for sexual reproduction and that’s pretty much it
In this case for example, it doesn’t really give a shit about your psychological well being or shaving years off your life because of some negative thought pattern
If being on your toes, anxious, paranoid, and always looking over your shoulder keeps you alive and making babies - then as far as the developer that nature is, it’s a feature not a bug
Common misunderstanding.
Evolution optimizes for system success. Not individual gene propagation. Genomes are not agents with individual goals.
Many species, but especially social animals, have numerous behaviors and traits designed to prompt communal success rather than individual survival and reproduction
Even saying it optimizes for system success is an oversimplification it just depends how far down the rabbit hole you want to go
My only intention was to communicate and stress that we aren’t “designed” in the way a lot of people think
But thanks for the clarification
Perhaps this translates into a tendency to dwell on the negatives of a situation rather than the potential benefits?
OTOH the human mind seems to fail in common ways when old age and dementia sets in, perhaps with no benefit, so this may just be one of those things. Old people tend to have bad joints. News at 11.
Humans all being generally in a state of cognitive decline doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary perspective because natural selection will weed out degraded cognitive performance. So most people won’t be in this state. Anecdotally, you likely don’t see all your friends in cognitive decline so likely most of them don’t have a negative bias.
So your conclusion is likely to not be true. In fact I’m being generous here. Your conclusion is startling and obviously wrong both from a scientific perspective and an anecdotal one.
In fact the logic from this experiment and additionally many many other psychological studies points to the opposite. Humans naturally have a positive bias for things. People lie to themselves to stay sane.
Anecdotally what I observed is people don’t like to be told they are wrong. They don’t like to be told they are fat and overweight slobs. Additionally stupid people by all objective standards exist but practically every culture on earth has rules about directly calling someone a dumbass even if it’s the truth.
Like this is not a minor thing if I violate these positive cognitive biases with hard truths it will indeed cause a visceral and possibly violent reaction from most people who want to maintain that positive cognitive bias.
For example racial equality. Black people in America are in general taller and stronger than say Asians. It’s a general truth. You can’t deny this. Strength and height has an obvious genetic basis putting equality from a physical standpoint to be untrue. It is objective reality that genetics makes Asians weaker and smaller than black people in America.
So genetics effects things like size between races, it even effects things like size between species… black people are bigger than mouses. But you know what else? it affects intelligence between species. So mice genetically are less intelligent than black people and also black people are genetically more intelligent than fish. So what am I getting at here?
Genetics affects hair color, physicality, height, skin color between races. Genetics also effects intelligence between species (you are more intelligent than a squirrel) but by some black magic this narrow area of intelligence between races say Asians and black people… it doesn’t exist. Does this make sense to you? Is this logical? Genetics changes literally everything between species and races but it just tip toes around intelligence leaving it completely equal? Is all intelligence really just from the environment when everything else isn’t?
I mean at the very least the logic points to something that can be debated and discussed but this is not an open topic because it violates our cognitive biases.
Some of you are thinking you’re above it. Like you see what I’m getting at and you think you can escape the positive bias. I assure you that you can’t escape it, likely you’re only able to escape it because you’re not black. If you were black there’s no way what I said is acceptable.
But I’m Asian. How come I can accept the fact that I’m shorter and weaker than black people? Maybe it’s because height is too obvious of a metric that we can’t escape it and intelligence isn’t as obvious in the sense that I can’t just look at someone and know how smart he is.
But let’s avoid the off topic tangent here about racial intelligence and get back to my point. I know this post will be attacked but this was not my intention. I need to trigger a visceral reaction in order for people to realize how powerful positive cognitive bias is. That’s my point. It is frighteningly powerful and it’s also frighteningly evident but mass delusion causes us to be blind to it. Seriously don’t start a debate on racial intelligence. Stick to the point: positive cognitive bias.
Humans as a species that viscerally and violently bias in the cognitively positive direction.
Parent poster could not be more wrong. We are delusional and we lie to ourselves to shield ourselves from the horrors of the real world. It is so powerful that we will resort to attacks and even violence to maintain our cognitively positive delusions.
And to be clear, IQ itself is very much inheritable. But the _variation_ in IQ in a population is not explained by genetics.
https://www.scribbr.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Normal-dis...
So yes you can very much find black people who are smarter than Asians and vice versa but the generality (aka the mean, aka the center of the bell curve) will be different for races.
>But the _variation_ in IQ in a population is not explained by genetics.
This is not proven to be true. The most likely explanation is that variation in a population can be explained by both environment and genetics.
The current observed gap is much smaller than gains than have been observed within racial communities over time as a result of environmental changes.
So… no. You don’t have a lot of credible evidence for what you claim is a delusion to doubt. And even the observed effect size disregarding confounding effects is less than individual variation.
If we see huge variation in intelligence scores intra group, that strongly suggests that there are social/cultural/environmental factors in play driving a large part of this.
It may be true that some racial backgrounds offer an advantage; but there is no evidence to suggest that this advantage is materially large relative to many of the social structural drivers that are obvious.
The subtext of the claim is not that a statistically significant effect exists. It’s that there is a big important difference in intelligence across races intrinsically derived from genetics. And there’s no compelling evidence to support that.
Correlation does not equal causation. Variation in genetics in a group can realistically be a factor as well. Three probable possibilities here: Only environment, Only genetics, both genetics and environment. Common sense says it's both genetics and environment.
>It may be true that some racial backgrounds offer an advantage; but there is no evidence to suggest that this advantage is materially large relative to many of the social structural drivers that are obvious.
I never commented how large this advantage was relative to the social driver. I agree with you... the social structure likely the greater driver. But the genetic driver is not insignificant.
>The subtext of the claim is not that a statistically significant effect exists. It’s that there is a big important difference in intelligence across races intrinsically derived from genetics. And there’s no compelling evidence to support that.
There is evidence. But there is huge political debate and attacks around the evidence. There are many studies that study IQ among races independent of environment and many of those studies show there is a statistically significant difference. Those studies suffer from the replication crisis, but so do all conflicting studies within psychology as well.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
This would be the fault of the moderators for not directly putting it in the rules if that was the case.
Though I doubt they'd be ok with this entire thread as it's heated and the topic is flamewar-like even though I tried to direct it in a different direction initially. It already went off the rails with the other guy once he told me I was dumb and trying to establish race superiority among asians. Too late. I think I'll get warned or banned.
Anyway, I'm not disguising the content human generated. Additionally All I'm doing is asking the LLM to cite and summarize citations which you asked for. Manually finding those citations are tedious.
My opinions and thoughts are still human written and not AI generated.
What I find incredulous is that you have some problem with content that's AI generated even if it's actually true and even it's just flat summaries of citations. Like I told the LLM to find specific resources and summarize studies I have already seen so you don't have to go through the entire paper and you have a huge problem with that? Fine. You can just refuse to engage. Commenting on it is also "against the rules" per your link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808351
I mean if you want you can flag my post and vote it down. I think it's extreme and an ass hole move so I don't do that to people I have different opinions with. It's up to you.
I literally said to you that chatGPT is JUST citations. My comments are my own, you can respond to my comments can you not? What if I used AI to spell check and repair grammar? End of the world and you can't respond? Are people so against AI that they lose all common sense?
>"Please don't post AI-generated comments, or any generated comments" seems pretty clear to me.
Did he say please don't post AI-generated citations? Is he referring to the entire post or all comments? Why not make it an official rule on the rules page. What does Dang say about this? Seems unclear. I think you're just being deliberate.
Bro. You don't need to respond if you don't want to. My citations are still there. You asked for it, you got it. You don't like it? I'm not going to manually do what chatgpt ALREADY did so conversation is over if you don't want to continue.
Good thing I used AI to assist me. I knew you'd leave. Mainly because there's really no solid evidence so a lot of this will go in circles. Good day sir.
Common sense says nothing about the weight of these factors nor does it say anything about “genetics” being archetypally delineated by race. Genetics for sure plays a role in intelligence.
You are appealing to non cognizance as a premise to support your biases. But that’s… dumb.
You are welcome to point to specific studies if you wish but the general consensus is that there is no statistical evidence of what you’re claiming to be obvious.
Most studies that attempt to normalize against socio cultural features recognize that it’s basically impossible to do. That’s why the best available premise is that since we broadly observe huge gains in population intelligence based on economic development within racial groups; it is most likely that economic and cultural differences occupy the lions share of any observable difference between racial groups currently as they’re all in different places.
Common sense says many things about genetics. In fact it’s the basis behind my entire premise which you didn’t even address. Genetics plays a role in the physicality and even temperament of a race (testosterone is measurably different across races). What black magic makes intelligence the only factor that is independent of race? Common sense says it’s a factor.
Common sense also says environment is the greater factor. If a person lacks practice or education vs. a person who practices math puzzles everyday. Obviously that is the bigger causal factor by common sense.
Both are factors by common sense. Environment is the bigger factor also by common sense but by that same reasoning genetics is not insignificant. The best way to put it is that environment influences IQ but genetics influences potential.
Why appeal to common sense? Because there’s lack of solid causal evidence. Evidence exists, but the replication crisis and the lack of causal experimentation makes all the tests not as solid as the correlative tests.
The stupidest thing here is that we are not in disagreement on what the evidence points too. It’s just I’m able to rely on induction and logic to predict conclusions where scientific evidence is lacking while you’re entire model of the world is essentially “if the science doesn’t exist then it must not be true“
If the science doesn’t exist, it means it’s unknown. I hope this was educational for you.
I’ll point to some resources when I have time. Im currently not able to cite them atm.
Does genetics influence intelligence? Yes. Does genetics influence race? Yes.
Does that mean that race is a _material_ driver of differences in intelligence? No. That just doesn’t follow at all. Every difference between groups is statistically significant at some obscene sample size but the claim in question here is about whether it is _material_ and important. That is not at all clear. Nor is intelligence the only thing that this applies to. There’s a basically infinite list of human traits, competencies, and capabilities for which race-affiliated genetic advantages alone is pointlessly small in terms of effect.
The word I used is “significant”which I will specify here as a different mean value.
It applies because among top countries of different races with extremely high wealth, gdp and education standards there are clear differences in IQ. You can still attribute this to environment but it starts to lean towards genetics once you match wealthy countries.
None of this is solid but neither is your conclusion that genetics doesn’t influence racial intelligence in any significant way. If your conclusion is “we don’t know” then my counter is common sense and evidence suggests otherwise.
> The word I used is “significant”which I will specify here as a different mean value.
There are statistically significant differences between any two populations where randomness is included provided your sample size is big enough. Your thinking here is novice and misinformed. If an effect size is immaterial and unimportant then it definitionally does not matter. You win no points for saying HA! Technically there is an immaterial advantage for Asians! If it’s immaterial, it doesn’t matter.
> It applies because among top countries of different races with extremely high wealth, gdp and education standards there are clear differences in IQ. You can still attribute this to environment but it starts to lean towards genetics once you match wealthy countries.
Wealth is one of many things that matters. It’s not the only thing. As I have said before, culture is a huge one.
> None of this is solid but neither is your conclusion that genetics doesn’t influence racial intelligence in any significant way. If your conclusion is “we don’t know” then my counter is common sense and evidence suggests otherwise.
You need to learn how to interpret statistical effect sizes. The basic 101 conclusion of failure to reject null hypotheses is that you cannot conclude that population A is different from population B. But “different” doesn’t mean much. The important takeaway is much rather that there’s no evidence of a strong effect size showing that one race is materially intrinsically smarter than another. If there were a big gap, it would be visible in available statistics. It’s not, so we can largely conclude that there’s no material difference.
You’re talking a big talk about people being biased by trying to be equitable but ultimately you’re just saying “well I can’t provide it but my common sense biases say my race must be superior, even if it’s by a meaninglessly small margin”. Yeah, ok buddy. Take a lap.
Realistically Both are factors.
>The current observed gap is much smaller than gains than have been observed within racial communities over time as a result of environmental changes.
Yes environment is a factor but given a prime environment to foster intelligence, you can see that among races there are still differences in intelligence.
Additionally the logic is inescapable. If genetics is what causes something like down syndrome then of course it can cause the opposite of down syndrome.
>So… no. You don’t have a lot of credible evidence for what you claim is a delusion to doubt. And even the observed effect size disregarding confounding effects is less than individual variation.
Either way can you stick to the main topic. Tired of this off tangent bs. The intelligence thing was just an example.
You cannot. And the smoking gun is, again, that we have seen massive rises in intelligence scores within racial subgroups over time correlating with environmental changes that are much larger than current spreads and still unevenly distributed.
Obviously a starving, stressed out person is going to have a much lower IQ score then someone who is happy and well fed. You think because that obvious fact is true it completely eliminates genetics? No.
This is what I'm talking about. The mass delusion. The positive cognitive bias. You grasp for evidence that supports the conclusion you want.
The claim is not that genetics has nothing to do with intelligence. The claim is that race is a material, important driver of intelligence. There is no rigorous evidence of this.
Please read what I wrote and respond to what I wrote and don’t make random assumptions.
I don’t give a shit if you believe yourself to be part of the (immaterially) superior race.
It's not about race, it's about facts. Like I said in another comment, Jewish people have the highest measurable average IQ, and they are "White".
I think you should walk away. You brought racism into the conversation while I'm just arguing facts. I never made a claim asians were "superior" and I'm NOT from an asian country with the highest IQ either.
Just another fundamental asymmetry in existence.
Can someone who works in this field explain to me how this study is anything other than evidence of one exam being a proxy for another?
The "Repetitive Negative Thinking" is then just, like, a marketing term for their questionnaire?
I don't see the questionnaire itself in the study (maybe I'm missing it?). Without understanding what questions were answered in a questionnaire, how am I supposed to take anything away from this study?
Essentially letting go of controlling our lives in ways that cause suffering. Accepting that bad things can and do happen. Realising that life is temporary and we should focus ourselves on things in our power that make us a person of better character. Everything else is out of our control and should be accepted without judgement.
It's brought a lot of comfort to me over the years.
Weight lifting also helps with mentality in a million different ways.
This isn‘t really limited to weight lifting as to any kind of working out in general. Moving your body instead of only sitting at a desk constantly turns out to be healthy
In particular I'm not especially religious, but also think that the contemporary efforts of people to deny their mortality (singularity, consciousness transfer, medical immortality, etc) are irrational coping mechanisms, religion for atheists, that I refuse to adopt. So that leaves one in a rather uncomfortable existential place.
But since having children, it feels like every day I can see more of myself in them, and it provides an immense amount of comfort, like I've never had before in my life. This is about as close as I think we'll ever get to realistically transferring our consciousnesses, and I'm more than okay with that, and now hope to have many many grandchildren before my final day.
[1] - https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2005...
I couldn't read the full text of the second, but likewise the conclusion does not imply causation.
I'm a parent, and have experienced significant 'psychological distress' as a result of having children. Every time I read a comment from someone advising people to have children for happiness reasons, it triggers me.
There's a practical issue with social science. Very near to 100% of researchers (from the US at least) share a common ideology, frequently to a fairly radical degree, and it regularly leaks into their research. You can even see this in the abstract of the paper. They show data indicating that parents have dramatically lower rates of mental illness than the general population and their conclusion? "Serious psychological distress is fairly prevalent among parenting adults." So for these sort of papers, I generally find their discussion and conclusions quite irrelevant, but the data is generally sound, so long as it's not overtly cherry picked.
I'd also add that the fact that positive psychological effects (in the second study) were not observed in childless couples seems to largely falsify the hypothesis that the psychological benefits of parenting were simply an observation of people with psychological issues being unable to have children in the first place.
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And yeah, having a child can be terrifying at times. My youngest recently went through roseola and we spent days in the hospital with him after his fever briefly spiked just under 107F/41.6C. That is sheer terror - holding your child who's running so hot that he's literally uncomfortable to hold against your body. Yet they have also changed my life, worldview, and overall psychological state in an unbelievably positive way on the whole, and I would (and do) wholeheartedly recommend them to any and every person who can provide a reasonably stable household with two loving parents.
Not really. What struck me as odd was someone citing papers as evidence for their opinion that having children increases your happiness, when the papers drew no such conclusion.
It's great that it has worked out that way for you. Sadly, I have a different experience, but life happens. If this makes any difference to you, I don't know, but let's move on.
I know you said you'd prefer to move on, but if you could share when/how things went south for you, that could be beneficial others to learn from, myself not the least.
You've added your own opinion on what the results might mean, and the message you're conveying is that the results support your opinion and that the actual researchers opinion is "extremely questionable".
I'll leave it to other readers to decide on how they interpret this. I know this is a bit of a silly side-track discussion, but as I say, I get triggered when I see people advocating having children as a means to happiness. I think this is careless, because children deserve to be brought into the world for the right reasons, and would be parents should be fully informed.
As you asked for my perspective, now having children, I can 100% say I was happier at every stage of my life until my first child was born. Some people just aren't compatible with the extreme stress and hardship of raising children, sad as this is for me to say. I wish I was you, and posting happily online that children have actually made my life so much better. Please don't mistake that as a lack of love for my children. I have learned what unconditional love means, how I would literally die for them, and I work daily to be the best dad I can be. I sometimes come home from work when they're in bed, asleep and curl up with them because I missed them so much during the day. But overall, it hasn't been good for my mental health and happiness. About 8 months in I had to go to therapy, because I didn't understand why I was not feeling what the online dads told me I should be feeling (eg. you). I ended up nearly suicidal and was medicated in the end. I have never come anywhere close to anything like that in my life before (and I'm in my 40s).
But the context here is important. Six years on and I also understand that our experience may not have been typical. We know that our eldest has some form of neurodivergence. Probably ADHD, since I was medicated for ADHD as a child. Possibly more on the ASD spectrum. He has extreme anger, extreme sensory issues, defiance, non-stop extreme meltdowns, and more. My wife and I are always at the end of our tether and our relationship is in the pits trying to figure out how we each deal with it. The youngest child is suffering because he needs attention, but our eldest is all consuming.
And we are not even having the worst time of it of the parents we know in our neighbourhood.
Please just remember, everyone is on their own journey, good or bad, but perhaps advocating children as a means to happiness is something to be more cautious about.
That said, amazing what it has done for your life, and best of luck with the journey!
We've definitely been fairly fortunate, or at least not unfortunate. Our youngest did go through a brief phase of colic and that was quite intense, moreso for the inability to help sooth him than for the effects itself. I can only imagine how it would have been if similar, let alone more intense, issues persisted. Thanks for sharing and I wish you and your family the best of luck going forward.
Whoa. Far out.
This strongly implies that changing negative thinking behavior might reduce cognitive impairment. But the study has no way to establish a cause-effect relationship -- that would require an entirely different kind of study, one that studies the brain, not the mind. In other words, a neuroscience study, one probably not possible at present.
Like many psychology papers, this one implies a cause-effect relationship that isn't supported by the evidence, but one that suggests a role for talk therapy.
It would be interesting to see a review of all modern psychological work, a hundred years from now, from the perspective of a neuroscience that doesn't yet exist, to see how often these articles turned out to be just-so stories with no connection to reality.
A similar finding is that kids who smoke marijuana are likely to experience serious mental health issues later on -- that's indisputable. The problem is the same as in this case -- people assume a cause-effect relationship that isn't supported by the evidence. Maybe kids predisposed to mental health issues are more likely to use marijuana -- that possibility can't be excluded because all the studies are retrospective.
Most people know I can be relied on to make this point, but until neuroscience matures, studies like this will suffer from a theory vacuum. One can only accomplish so much by studying symptoms, with no clue about root biological causes.
This is one of those topics where people will set an impossibly high standard for evidence and then use that to reject everything.
We do actually know that heavy marijuana use is associated with increases of mental health conditions. We know that discontinuing heavy use can result in improvements in depression scores over time (following the withdrawal periods which, yes, exists despite decades of people claiming it doesn’t). We know that the increased availability of high concentration THC products has made it worse.
Yet if you want to set your threshold for evidence so high that nothing short of a large scale RCT will answer the question you can ignore all of this, because such an RCT will never be produced for obvious ethical reasons.
This pattern is common in topics where people simple don’t want to believe a casual relationship might exist. I knew a guy who started believing that there isn’t any strong evidence that flossing or even twice-daily brushing were important because he didn’t think the science proved causation that flossing and brushing improved dental health. He believed it was just correlation and people who were healthier in general were also flossing and brushing, coincidentally. His breath was terrible and he later abandoned those ideas when the dental problems undeniably arrived.
Yes, but this means existing studies can't be relied on to justify a conclusion that would have required the impossible study. Saying that a study isn't practical can't be used to justify making a policy decision based on circumstantial evidence.
My use of marijuana studies is meant only to show how bad science steers public policy, not to advocate for its use. There are other, better reasons to avoid that drug.
> This pattern is common in topics where people simple don’t want to believe a casual relationship might exist.
This is why science exists. But if the science cannot be carried out, then we have no right to draw conclusions that would require actual science to be legitimate.
This is moving away from the original topic, which is the kind of sloppy science common in modern psychology, where people wave their hands instead of their scientific results.
> I knew a guy who ...
A red herring, but I think you knew that.
Exactly my point with this line of thinking: It’s used to argue that you can’t rely on any studies, therefore it becomes a free license to reject everything and inject your own desired conclusions.
> Exactly my point with this line of thinking: It’s used to argue that you can’t rely on any studies, therefore it becomes a free license to reject everything and inject your own desired conclusions.
The "therefore" section of your comment is your own interpretation, not the reality of a society steered by science. It's why uneducated people believe in Bigfoot. We can't disprove Bigfoot, therefore he exists. It makes a certain kind of pre-modern sense, but it fails to take scientific discipline into account.
I'm tempted to call it the Avi Loeb version of cosmology -- we can't disprove the alien provenance of a small distant glowing object, therefore it's an alien craft. And Loeb has a Harvard position on his side -- for those who believe in scientific authority.
When confronted by this kind of thinking, I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's remark: "Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion."
And finally, it's why psychology has the reputation it does -- many psychologists have no hesitation about leaping ahead of the evidence.
