This is an impressive blog! So far I've read two posts and found information I've been unable to locate on my own.
Much though I appreciated this post, I will say that I'm skeptical of the conclusion, though not because I'm particularly credulous about the accuracy of retrospective accounts of past events. Rather, I'm *also* skeptical about the accuracy of official findings. From where I sit in the admitted comfort and safety of my home, neither child protective services, therapy, nor the legal process seem optimized for investigative discovery.
It's also hard to avoid extremely obvious pathways by which negative events would cause some kind of harm: External stress --> cortisol, adrenaline, etc --> behaviors & physiological adaptations optimized for short term survival in a harsh environment. It's one thing to point out that people have an emotional predisposition to presume "trauma is harmful," but people also have a motivation to understand basic causality in the world around them. Denying that trauma has any significant effect leaves us baffled as we consider how the human organism:
1. Goes to such great lengths to avoid psychological pain, even enduring physical discomfort and danger to avoid it,
2. Experiences moral outrage at the sight of traumatic mistreatment of others, and
3. Commits suicide in response to trauma.
Indeed, this last factor gives the clearest evidence that trauma really is damaging; were there many individuals in the above prospective/retrospective studies who were dead at the time the study was carried out?
The obvious conclusion here is straightforward: "there is about a d=0.2, r=0.1 relationship between abused and non-abused college students in terms of mental health, which is statistically significant but not big..." This is the kind of signal one expects from genuine causal factors which may neither be necessary nor sufficient to give rise to an outcome on their own, as Scott Alexander has posted about elsewhere: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/19/beware-summary-statistics/
In other words, r = .1 from trauma is *exactly* what we would expect if trauma really were traumatic, but psychological factors made the difference between overcoming the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or being thereby destroyed:
I agree that r=0.1 is about a typical psychological effect size and that small effects matter but please note that 1) this is the charitable number based on a bad design (retrospectively asking people if they had trauma - those will problems are more likely to say yes), 2) these findings were considered so scandalous that Congress denounced them! I can get be reasoned into a "trauma has a genuine small long-term effect" position but this is already very, very far from the mainstream position. Why we avoid and abhor trauma: this is very simple, because it IS a very bad thing, it's not what we are debating, what we are debating if it has LONG-term psychological consequences. There I'm skeptical: it wouldn't make evolutionary sense to make an organism which is automatically permanently scarred by what must have been quite common events in our history. You avoid pain and you don't want to break your arm because if you do it's bad, even though with the right care it will heal fully in a year or so. There is actually some evidence (which I cited in my first post) from MZ twin comparisons that trauma has short-term but not long-term consequence on well-being. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-46538-001
Do you disagree that trauma can precipitate suicide in the short term, and that suicide has long-term consequences? I ask because unless you do disagree with at least one of those things, then, it isn't easy to make the argument that trauma has no long-term consequence on well-being.
I think there is a wording issue here. "Loss" as in recent loss of a partner, a job etc. is indeed a major predisposing factor for suicide. Calling this 'trauma' would be a bit odd though. Maybe I wasn't explicit enough about this but this post is generally about bad things that happen to you in your childhood and the likelihood of these things causing problems for you (or even being correctly remembered) once you grow up. Actually I would consider suicide to be a short-term consequence of trauma (granted, you stay dead until a loss-related suicide, but you typically commit it not long after), and I do think trauma has short-term consequences beyond this. So a good point and an important qualification but I don't think it contradicts the main point that there is no good evidence that trauma is a major cause of psychiatric problems in the future.
Wording isn't really your problem. Post replication crisis, you're attempting to build your case based on psychological studies. Pointing to problems in people's memory, or moral biases on the part of your opponents may help you establish that they're muddled, but it doesn't show you have good evidence to support your own position. It isn't plausible to deny that people exposed to a variety of stressors face declines to subjective well-being (a topic you ignore), or that they learn long-term habits and make permanent decisions in the face of this.
Backpedaling to say that "there is no good evidence that trauma is a major cause of psychiatric problems in the future" is wise. I never argued with that, and that's why I liked your post. I do realize that you're focused on arguing with politically correct sophomores who try to use trauma as a catch-all explanation for someone's current diagnosis, but you're too focused on such people when you continue to write that you consider suicide to be "a short-term effect of trauma." This is hilarious. I know people who commit suicide; years have passed, and dead is still dead.
The rule of debate on the Internet is straightforward: If you can prove 10, argue for 8. You walked off a rhetorical cliff by trying to push for 11.
Another popsci meme bites the dust.
This is an impressive blog! So far I've read two posts and found information I've been unable to locate on my own.
Much though I appreciated this post, I will say that I'm skeptical of the conclusion, though not because I'm particularly credulous about the accuracy of retrospective accounts of past events. Rather, I'm *also* skeptical about the accuracy of official findings. From where I sit in the admitted comfort and safety of my home, neither child protective services, therapy, nor the legal process seem optimized for investigative discovery.
It's also hard to avoid extremely obvious pathways by which negative events would cause some kind of harm: External stress --> cortisol, adrenaline, etc --> behaviors & physiological adaptations optimized for short term survival in a harsh environment. It's one thing to point out that people have an emotional predisposition to presume "trauma is harmful," but people also have a motivation to understand basic causality in the world around them. Denying that trauma has any significant effect leaves us baffled as we consider how the human organism:
1. Goes to such great lengths to avoid psychological pain, even enduring physical discomfort and danger to avoid it,
2. Experiences moral outrage at the sight of traumatic mistreatment of others, and
3. Commits suicide in response to trauma.
Indeed, this last factor gives the clearest evidence that trauma really is damaging; were there many individuals in the above prospective/retrospective studies who were dead at the time the study was carried out?
The obvious conclusion here is straightforward: "there is about a d=0.2, r=0.1 relationship between abused and non-abused college students in terms of mental health, which is statistically significant but not big..." This is the kind of signal one expects from genuine causal factors which may neither be necessary nor sufficient to give rise to an outcome on their own, as Scott Alexander has posted about elsewhere: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/19/beware-summary-statistics/
In other words, r = .1 from trauma is *exactly* what we would expect if trauma really were traumatic, but psychological factors made the difference between overcoming the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or being thereby destroyed:
Steel can weather hammer blows, and
Brass endure ages of rust
Willow bends to the howling winds, but
Glass shatters into the dust
I agree that r=0.1 is about a typical psychological effect size and that small effects matter but please note that 1) this is the charitable number based on a bad design (retrospectively asking people if they had trauma - those will problems are more likely to say yes), 2) these findings were considered so scandalous that Congress denounced them! I can get be reasoned into a "trauma has a genuine small long-term effect" position but this is already very, very far from the mainstream position. Why we avoid and abhor trauma: this is very simple, because it IS a very bad thing, it's not what we are debating, what we are debating if it has LONG-term psychological consequences. There I'm skeptical: it wouldn't make evolutionary sense to make an organism which is automatically permanently scarred by what must have been quite common events in our history. You avoid pain and you don't want to break your arm because if you do it's bad, even though with the right care it will heal fully in a year or so. There is actually some evidence (which I cited in my first post) from MZ twin comparisons that trauma has short-term but not long-term consequence on well-being. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-46538-001
Do you disagree that trauma can precipitate suicide in the short term, and that suicide has long-term consequences? I ask because unless you do disagree with at least one of those things, then, it isn't easy to make the argument that trauma has no long-term consequence on well-being.
I think there is a wording issue here. "Loss" as in recent loss of a partner, a job etc. is indeed a major predisposing factor for suicide. Calling this 'trauma' would be a bit odd though. Maybe I wasn't explicit enough about this but this post is generally about bad things that happen to you in your childhood and the likelihood of these things causing problems for you (or even being correctly remembered) once you grow up. Actually I would consider suicide to be a short-term consequence of trauma (granted, you stay dead until a loss-related suicide, but you typically commit it not long after), and I do think trauma has short-term consequences beyond this. So a good point and an important qualification but I don't think it contradicts the main point that there is no good evidence that trauma is a major cause of psychiatric problems in the future.
Wording isn't really your problem. Post replication crisis, you're attempting to build your case based on psychological studies. Pointing to problems in people's memory, or moral biases on the part of your opponents may help you establish that they're muddled, but it doesn't show you have good evidence to support your own position. It isn't plausible to deny that people exposed to a variety of stressors face declines to subjective well-being (a topic you ignore), or that they learn long-term habits and make permanent decisions in the face of this.
Backpedaling to say that "there is no good evidence that trauma is a major cause of psychiatric problems in the future" is wise. I never argued with that, and that's why I liked your post. I do realize that you're focused on arguing with politically correct sophomores who try to use trauma as a catch-all explanation for someone's current diagnosis, but you're too focused on such people when you continue to write that you consider suicide to be "a short-term effect of trauma." This is hilarious. I know people who commit suicide; years have passed, and dead is still dead.
The rule of debate on the Internet is straightforward: If you can prove 10, argue for 8. You walked off a rhetorical cliff by trying to push for 11.