Crémieux Profile picture
Dec 20, 2024 17 tweets 6 min read Read on X
Psychotic people follow scripts.

Let's talk about the glass delusion, the Middle Ages' bout with a mass psychogenic illness marked by people believing they were made of glass. Image
Glass was a valuable commodity in Europe. It was primarily owned by the noble and well-to-do, and it had a notable purpose in alchemy.

Its perception as the technology of the time was as one that's both fragile and valuable, like the nobility. Image
Glass was the relatively novel technology people knew, and they knew things could be transmuted into glass. Delusional people also thought transmutation could affect them.

Take King Charles VI.

He truly believed his body was made of glass. Image
This delusion was such that Charles felt he had to build his life around it.

He had iron rods fastened into his clothing to hold him up, and he didn't allow his advisors to approach him, lest they accidentally shatter him.

This illness set in during his twenties. Image
The age when his psychotic bouts started is remarkably consistent with when the illness starts today.

Were he alive today, he probably would have been prescribed antipsychotics for his condition. Image
But Charles was alive long before his condition was understood.

He also wasn't its only sufferer. As alchemy's popularity grew, more people started to suffer the glass delusion.

They understood glass as fragile, and themselves as fragile, and they acted out that script. Image
For the well-off, the delusion was treated as legitimate. Many nobles came to wear padded buttocks.

But in one case, in Saint Germain, a doctor took a man who thought his butt was made of glass and beat him until he stopped believing in the delusion.

Apparently that worked. Image
Amusingly, in Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, he remarked on the glass delusion and used it as an example of how people can see the world in totally different ways.

Of course, he did say that the perception was insane.Image
Fast forward to the 19th century and factories are beginning to dot the landscape of Europe.

With the change in popular technology, people's delusions followed suit.

With industry, the delusions became industrial. People imagined they were being influenced by vast machines. Image
Patients who presented with this belief in intricate, far off machines that controlled their actions and influenced their lives could never explain how they worked.

Just as people didn't know how they became glass, they didn't get how machines were affecting them. Image
Factories influenced the world, machines could obviously influence us, thus...

Schizophrenics' delusions are tailored to what they vaguely know, and they learn about those half-baked delusions from others, the times, etc.

Consider exorcism. Its modern script came from a movie! Image
People today know about parasites, chronic pain, post-viral conditions, toxic poisoning, and more, and they have an amazing tool for finding and promoting related scripts:

The internet! Image
Thousands of people today believe they have a skin condition called Morgellons.

It's not real.

They just believe they're developing sores and lesions, and hairs are sprouting from them, but they're really picking themselves raw and getting freaked out by cotton fibers. Image
The sufferers from this condition are deeply unwell, and they spread their unwellness to other people through posting about their condition online.

People know about all the requisite concepts, and they see something on themselves and imagine it's a real symptom.

But it's not.
There are no demons, there's no Morgellons, people cannot be made of glass, and there's no big machine out there influencing people and miraculously disappearing the moment those concepts go out of fashion and get replaced by other ones with nary a cure invented.
And this keeps happening!

People are always inventing new conditions or imagining they're afflicted by something real when they're not, by reading into symptoms and gaslighting themselves.

And they sometimes act incredibly mad in these bouts of belief. Image
A subset of people today seem vulnerable to scripts, and some seem to have always been vulnerable to it.

It makes you wonder: must psychotic people always be like this? And what can we do to cure them of their delusions?

I suggest we don't give in with padded buttocks.

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More from @cremieuxrecueil

Jul 2
I've seen people mentioning that Europe's heat-related death issue is larger than American gun violence—true!

But people neglect saying how many heat-related deaths America has.

Approximately 1% of what Europe does even though America is hotter and Americans are less healthy! Image
Those factors mean Americans are more at-risk for heat-related deaths, even after accounting for Europe being a little older than America.

So let's be clear:

Europeans die from heat at relatively high rates; Americans survive it with technology. Image
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What technology?

It's the terraforming technology of air conditioning.

Install A/C and the heat-related deaths will mostly disappear, if Europe can keep their grid operational. Image
Read 7 tweets
Jul 2
What happens when scholars get canceled?

They end up publishing fewer papers and they receive fewer citations.

In other words, scientific productivity falls🧵 Image
Tons of scholars have been cancelled in recent years.

That is, they've received professional backlash for expressing views that people deem "controversial, unpopular, or misaligned with prevailing norms." Image
Cancellations happen outside of academia, but it's very bad in it.

Large portions of the academy dislike the freedom of speech. Many of those free speech opponents have high agency and the clout to cause material harm to people they dislike = particularly bad cancel culture. Image
Read 13 tweets
Jun 28
You must pick one:

Double the productivity of the bottom 20% or double the productivity of the top 1%:
Double the productivity of the bottom 40% or double the productivity of the top 1%:
Double the productivity of the bottom 60% or double the productivity of the top 1%:
Read 7 tweets
Jun 27
Phenotyping is the vast, minimally-explored frontier in genome-wide association studies.

Important thread🧵

Briefly, phenotyping is how you measure people's traits. Measure poorly, get bad results; measure well, get good results.

Example? Janky knees. Image
The janky knee example refers to osteoarthritis, the most common form of arthritis, which occurs when the cartilage between bones is worn down, so bones start rubbing against each other.

This ends up being very painful. Image
Everyone with this condition isn't necessarily diagnosed with it.

This is especially true for men, who tend to just ignore this (and many other conditions) more often than women do.

This is, in a word, annoying, because it means that if you study it, sampling is likely biased. Image
Read 35 tweets
Jun 25
ADHD is a condition that's suffered from diagnostic drift: it's been defined more leniently over time, so more people are getting diagnosed.

One way to see this is to look at the benefits of taking ADHD medication. As prescription rates increased, the benefits have declined. Image
Another way to understand diagnostic drift is to look at the factors that promote it.

For example, school accountability laws lead to more diagnoses and, as a result, more psychoactive drug prescriptions.

Schools are pressured by law into making this happen. Image
An even more direct way to understand ADHD's diagnostic drift is to look at what types of diagnoses happen over time.

The increase has been more about non-severe ADHD than clinical ADHD. In other words, people with less and lesser symptoms are getting diagnosed. Image
Read 4 tweets
Jun 24
I have a story to break.

Columbia is still practicing racially discriminatory admissions in defiance of the Supreme Court's ruling in SFFA v. Harvard.

Newly-leaked data shows they still prefer less-qualified Blacks and Hispanics over more-qualified Asians🧵Image
Columbia has made a big show of "complying" with SFFA v. Harvard by noting that their 2024 batch of admits involved slightly less discrimination:

Fewer Black and Hispanic students, more Asian students.

That's what should happen, because Asian students tend to perform better.Image
But, with this leaked admissions data, we can see that race still predicts admissions.

With fair admissions, race should not have a significant effect, and it should not be directionally consistent.

And yet, in this data, it's clear Columbia still discriminates against Asians. Image
Read 14 tweets

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