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Today:

At work, I finally finished a batch of system hardware upgrades that took considerably longer than I would've expected. (On the order of a month longer). In the process I learned more Debian internals than I wanted to, but still are useful for teh job.
I got home from work before 6pm for the first night in- I honestly don't remember how long. And the sun is up late enough that I got to walk the pooch in bright daylight, wonder of wonders. That made me feel great. And it'll only get better from now on. There's light at the end of the tunnel!
Thanks to walking in the daylight, I found my hat, which went missing some days ago before it got cold again. It was lying in a (now disolved) snowdrift a few blocks away, on one of Rover's and my usual walking routes.
Today at the U there was an excellent talk on Mac OS internals, which I hope to write up in a separate post. Much learning over lunch.
I won an Apple Nano teeshirt. It's black, with a white nano on the front (actual size), and a grey apple logo on the back. I've not decided if I'll wear it, but it's good fabric and it'll make a fine black undershirt.

Also, I listened to a really neat This American Life episode from 2002 called 81 Words, about the APA's decision in 1973 to remove homosexuality from its list of diseases. Of course I knew the broad story, but I think this detailed version was fascinating to me because it required psychiatrists of all stripes. From gay protesters on the outside who shut down meetings, to one brave gay psychiatrist who risked having his license removed by talking candidly on stage in front of a national convention of his peers, to Dr. Evelyn Hooker's research showing (for the first time) that scientifically gays were just as healthy as straights, to the many closeted "GayPA" members, to the even more closeted gay and lesbian psychiatrists part of the higher political layers of the APA, and finally to the president-elect of the APA, who was an extremely closeted gay man as well.

Apparently in 1970, 90% of psychologists believed homosexuality was a disease. That included many members of GayPA, who were closeted, ashamed, and afraid for their jobs. (But of course it's a disease; it's what they'd been taught; and nearly all gay people were sick, it's who they treated, weren't they?)

Then after Hooker's research, the balance shifted and some of these secret pockets could use their power to bring about change. Slowly. Such a weird story.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

As I recall, Hooker's research showed that gay folks were as psychologically healthy as straights, except that they suffered the consequences of being persecuted...

That makes sense. But according to the TAL episode, of 100 gay people who did the psychological tests, the double-blind results showed that 2/3 were "normal" and the normal batch included the same proportion of gay folks as straight.

Of course I don't know if their definition of "same proportion" is scientifically rigorous...

And I'm too lazy right now to do the wikipedia research on it. :)

Yeah, I think about this from time to time and I'm never quite sure what lesson I want to take away from it.

Were they simply wrong? If so, how did they get there and why should we rely on anything else they say? Or is "mental disease" simply a social construct and there's no fact of the matter to be wrong about? Either way, did the official change reflect a cultural one, or cause a cultural one, or simply constitute a coup with no deep popular support? Most importantly: what would it take for the direction to reverse?

I'm not usually this waffly about such things, but that one in particular strikes home. I suppose it's because I have only the most turbulent of grasps on my own self-identification as sane.

Anyway... yeah, weird.

Social construct. Most people don't talk to themselves in public; we consider those that do to be different. If they do it too much, we consider counseling.

I can't say whether the official change caused the cultural or the reverse, but if you held a gun to my head I'd say the reverse. The cultural changes made it more acceptable to do things like do a few studies and discover that hey, there are more gay people than we thought, so maybe it's not just a guy talking to himself in a room, it's 1/3 of the guys in that room talking to themselves. And Uncle Joe is gay, and we like Uncle Joe, so maybe it's not such a bad thing after all.

Or maybe I'm way out to lunch.

My favourite analogy is with handedness. For the longest time, left-handed people were beat until they'd use their proper hand dammit, and they were seen as lazy/stupid/willful for it. (even, evil/amoral, depending on your time-frame).

Something approximating 1/10 of people have a dominant left hand; and some larger fraction could have either dominant hand depending on cultural convention. And it took till- what, the 70s? for norms to change so it wasn't awful for people to keep their left-handedness.

Totally the same with differences between men and women; traditional (USian, at least) 50s-era norms have women and men separated by this wide gap, but in reality there is huge overlap and while there is a difference, it's much narrower than culture says it is.

But don't get me started about cultural norms.

No, I don't think you're out to lunch. :)

Your left-handed example is even better than mine, although I guess it's pretty clear that it's genetics (nature, not nurture). I don't know about when cultural norms changed; I know that certainly no comment was made in the mid-70s when I was in school learning to write, and preferred left hand to right. (Then I broke my left arm and learned to prefer right-handed writing, but that's another story.)

Heh.

...and I'm sure that if I wanted to, I could've learned to write (neatly) with my left. That is, it's easy enough for me to write sloppily with my left, and backwards with my right, that I shouldn't have a problem with the training for my left, I just never broke my right arm so I didn't have an excuse to try.

On the nature vs. nurture: I see it as there's the genetic... flexibility or lack thereof... and then there's the cultural construct layer on top that dictates the parameters of "normalcy".

Sure, but what I meant was that with left-handedness, I don't know anybody that claims it's a result of nurture (except maybe complete whackos): it's pretty well accepted that people are left or right handed as a result of their genetic structure.

It's a bit more controversial when it comes to things like homo/heterosexuality, or mental illnesses.

You might enjoy listening to this TAL episode (it's on their website, in real audio format; give me a shout if you want the illicit .mp3 version to listen to it on the move).

Anyway, the producers touch on this question near the end, and finally argue that this was a grey area between science and morality; and it was eye-opening to the psychiatrists to discover that they were biasing their science one way or the other depending on their own morality. And the question simply wasn't able to be decided purely by science.

I also waffle about social constructions of 'X' where X is anything from gender-presentation to homosexuality to religion to morality in general. Why do people (singularly or socially) behave against their best interests when they know they're doing so? Why do I?

Yeah. I think you'd like the episode.