Who cares whether a fire is caused by an arsonist, electrical equipment failure, or lightning? The response is the same, scramble the firetrucks and evacuate the area!

Mind you, I think that pH changes in the ocean (and blood) from increased concentrations of CO2 might be more threatening than weather changes in the long term, but then I’ve done much more biochem than geochem!

According to Dave Britton, a press officer at the Met Office, the security breach occurred a couple of days ago. “We don’t know yet whether the data that was stolen is authentic, but a thorough investigation is underway,” he says. (New Scientist)

The volume of the information is too large to “currently confirm that all of this material is genuine”, Dunford says, adding that the university will undertake an internal investigation and has already involved the police in the enquiry. (Nature)

Now we DO know the hacking was criminal, falling foul of more laws than mere dicking with documents. There is a lot of data to validate, the source server is of course offline for forensic and prophylactic purposes, and police are investigating.

If the published documents are unmodified, then it feeds into the general discussion and the weight of evidence. If the published documents were unrepresentative, then that feeds into the general discussion of how science is represented in the media.

Even then, there seems to be some interesting context, with the debate about methodologies ongoing (and by a couple of authors, finding their own mistakes since).

Academic bitchiness? Old news… whether warranted or not.

The thing that is surprising is that given how stunning a coup it would be to publish a rock-solid showstopping peer-reviewed paper, that such a paper would probably have turned up (a bit like a video of a senior politician bonking a member of the opposition on in the chambers would be a coup for whoever published it).

So… as it does seem to something where reliable data on accuracy and representativeness can come in a short time, I can wait. To my mind, it doesn’t alter the weight of opinion very much, if at all. I’ll go the same way as I would deciding on medical treatment and diagnoses… fully aware of how public minds are hacked by $$$ interests in THAT field by selective quoting.

I will say no more, unless invited to. Don’t worry, I fully appreciate the physical reality of mental illnesses in the modern world, but when someone says “fifty years of depression treatment” eyebrows are justifiably raised pending more data.

Given the SS/NRIs have been around for nearly twenty years, along with Lithium much longer, the much-improved ECT, trans-cranial massage, various types of effective psychotherapeutic bullets, insights into exercise, diet, hormone treatments (DHEA, testosterone), and so on, for BCWA to have suffered unremitting depression during that entire 5 decades strongly suggests one – or both – of two things.

1. At birth, BCWA was dealt the most abominable neurotransmitter hand ever dealt, and my god, does my heart go out to him/her.

2. His/her treatment professionals really, really, REALLY suck.

It’s a bit hard to “treat” depression when environmental factors are involved in the causal chain, and those environmental factors aren’t changed.

I’m gonna give it to straight, m’dear. You have been MIStreated for depression for over 5 decades.

I get the feeling that you don’t hate the libertarian approach except for a concern about unequal outcomes to the extent that someone is severely disadvantaged. You have expressed a dislike of capitalism and a desire to replace it with a managed economy, but what if I was to propose some sort of safety net with a libertarian alternative?

I’m not claiming for a minute that things won’t be unequal. There will always be rich people. There will always be alpha males. There will always be supermodels raking in loads of cash for standing in front of a camera. I’m not proposing any effort to socially engineer these things out of existence, and they will definitely exist in the society I’m describing. But what if I was to suggest that every able bodied citizen of working age had a basic wage (let’s say in the order of 12-15K per year), access to accommodation that would at least be a single private room with a shared bathroom, access to education to final year secondary school, access to legal aid and access to healthcare to a standard roughly equivalent to the public system now. Children, the disabled and the elderly would be handled under a different system.

But that would be all. The would be a sustained effort to ensure that calls for increases in benefits were shutdown and not able to progress, and every effort was made to keep the tax take as low as possible. This welfare option is only intended to be a hand-up – although some people would use it for most of their lives, and they wouldn’t be required to justify it – and recipients are still expected to use the opportunities of the free market to improve their circumstances. Every effort is made to make the market accessible to all, including through things such as low minimum wages and other deregulation in everything but employee safety.

Would this be satisfactory to you? Is providing a basic but solid safety net – with lots of opportunities and freedom to live your life – enough to negate your lefty fears?

No, I’m not tickled pink for a couple of reasons.

Dosing people up on the drugs you mention, except where the reason for the medication is primarily endogenous and would be needed regardless of however pleasant the environment is, is only suitable as a stop-gap measure while better treatment methods are brought into play and can take effect. Those treatment methods involve treating the root cause of the distress…. sticking your finger in a severed artery is fine in the short term, but the real treatment is surgery.

In the case of psychological distress, for the majority people, changing the environment, and/or modes of thinking about circumstances, are the only effective treatments, and indeed, the only cost-effective treatment in the long run. Chronic use of drugs affecting the nervous system only leads to problems, including the need for more drugs to deal with side-effects. (I should know, the anticonvulsants I need have done a fair bit of damage over the years – the alternatives are either illegal or a ketogenic diet guaranteed to lead to a rapid heart attack and/or type 2 diabetes. My neuro when first diagnosed said “You can take drug A and fry your brain in 10 years, or drug B and fry your liver in 30… take your pick”. Even in my case, lower stress means fewer seizures, so a better society would do wonders for my overall health.

Unfortunately, the Howard government changed the structure of the committees deciding what gets money from the government: power of medical professionals was shifted to representatives of the drug companies.

But this is getting off-topic (my own fault here a bit, but you raised the red herring, and not the first one, the first one being what the system or policies might be, rather than concentrating on the fact that KPIs can and should be used to assess and consequently manage issues, and that mental health indicators reflect the sum total of all the other things in the environment, from the economic circumstances, to social harmony, to fear of crime… you name it).

Again, you’ve missed my point: while I may have mentioned some screening methods as candidates, an obvious tweak to the screening questionnaire is “are you being treated for any psych issue”, then, if so, “go directly to black mark on whoever is in power and/or their policies”.

On this post, the issues of particular systems of government, or particular policies, are closed. Moderation scissors will be wielded ruthlessly.

If you want to comment on the RELEVANCE of KPIs that involve mental health indicators as indicators of total policy success or failure, how those KPIs and the means of calculating them might be made better, how the figures could be “gamed” (pointing to weaknesses of the indicator and the need for tweaking) or the obvious (remember the “one-in-five” from the Victorian Auditor General) significance of the issue and the facts that such KPIs would doubtless reflect poorly on our current system of government and the policies that have been pursued, then that’s on topic and go for it.

Obviously, if you are on an antidepressant or other medication, that’s an unequivocal big black mark on the KPIs. Go to black mark, go directly to black mark, do not pass Go, do not collect brownie points.

And long-term Ritalin on developing brains just causes more misery down the track, as anyone could have guessed, but the papers are only now starting to come out with the horrifying numbers on what Ritalin-like drugs have done to so many who were maltreated during the fad.

Note too that many drug “abusers” are to some extent self-medicating… the body is choosing a somewhat appropriate poison. Many of those using “uppers” for example have an underlying depression, for example.

No!! No!! No!! I am NOT talking about cause.

Surely the libertarians who think meddling states cause misery would want the misery/happiness indicators reported, hoping to see direct misery indicators rise soon after increased state control of things, and lowering when states become smaller. If “hands off” on a particular thing, or in general, leads to better figures, then more hands off I say. If “hands on” in one way or another leads to better figures, then more hands on I say.

CAN ANYONE POINT TO ANYTHING IN MY POST THAT ADVOCATES ANY PARTICULAR ACTION, OTHER THAN MEASUREMENT AND REPORTING OF A KEY INDICATOR????

When I said something like “if a government is doing it’s job perfectly”, that could mean ANYTHING, including doing a perfect job by doing nothing…. or everything.

CAN ANYONE TELL ME A BETTER KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATOR THAT CAN GO UP AND DOWN IN 3 MONTHS? ONE THAT BETTER REFLECTS THE TOTAL IMPACT OF ALL POLICIES ON THE CITIZENRY AS A WHOLE WITH RESPECT TO THE REASON WHY STATES SHOULD (OR SHOULDN’T) EXIST? WHAT ELSE SHOULD BE THE END OF A SOCIETY THAN HAVING SUSTAINABLY HAPPY CITIZENS?

Pretty darn basic I’d have thought.

My guess is that I’ve put up a kind of political Rorschach test…. and the political equivalent of Sigmund Freud would have a field day nutting out why you are projecting so much onto null statements about the efficacy of any particular political philosophy.

Again, like Michael, you seem to have projected your own assumptions onto my piece. All I’m talking about it the collection of direct metrics to assess how things are going. I did /not/ mention any means a state might use, or whether it might happen in an anarchy.

Anyway, on BNW (1) the alphas were NOT evil … the gammas were probably happier doing their work than people doing the same work in our world. (2) If we handed out soma (assuming something so harmless could be found, read Huxley and you’ll see he thought we may have already discovered it), then what the hell is wrong with that? There might be even less conspicious consumption or other energy-expensive ways of seeking self satisfaction and maybe this would help limit carbon emissions

Huxley’s own review of the issues (“Brave New World Revisited” is a series of essays written in the 50s/60s on his book) points out that the alphas were being both well-intentioned and competent. The object of their work was to create a society full of happy people, and they succeeded, although it wasn’t a perfect solution. Thus BNW was not, strictly speaking, a dystopia in the 1984 sense. The BNW version of “Room 101″ wouldn’t have had a big book listing the fears of each individual, and a storeroom of all the scary stuff, but more like store of nice trinkets, moderately healthy snack foods even if they did taste a bit bland, and inoffensive DVDs.

Bottom line: the happiness (or at least, lack of misery) of a population should be the aim of a society, and we should be measuring it directly, and reporting regularly. The only reason for objecting to this is if you are either an arsehole, or if your favorite political system (or lack of a system) has no hope of leading to better figures.

DB is not talking about that state as “saviour”. After all, we already have that through Medicare and the mental health system. Dave is advocating the state as active causal agent!

There’s a really great work of literature pertinent to your scary ideas about the relationship between the state, utopia, and happiness: It is called Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. You would do well to read it.

Oops, and my mistake. Theodora’s father was not the “tamer” of the bears, but the “keeper”. What good are “tame” bears??

On s.116 you might be right. But I think you might be being hypervigilant. We don’t have significant state/religion problems in this country. Why start them by legislating a positive right to religion?

Also, what you wrote above about Hypatia really, really, REALLY overstates her status as a mathematician. I’ve studied the history of Mathematics, and have an interest in HPSC. In neither does Hypatia rate even a footnote.

Also, you are way, way, way simplifying and tabloiding the evolution of the relationship between Xianity, the decaying western Roman empire (though not the East), and the ultimate emergence of “Europe” out of that crumbling.

As a personal philosophy, I think everyone should make pursuing happiness their prime objective. In fact, I think it’s the moral purpose of human existence.

Hmmm… the equivalent domestically sounds like a justice system versus vigilates.

And more importantly…. I didn’t talk about what KIND of state.

If, as Herodotos argued, the psychology of different groups is affected by geography, then the means of achieving a lack of misery will differ from one place to the next.

So, whatever keeps a low incidence of mental health disorders (and I’d imagine that if many people are chronically ill, or dying of malnutrition, or indeed, if people really valued freedom and felt too enslaved to be happy, then stress and depression in the population would rise considerably), then I’d be all for it. Why should I object if the state is run on libertarian, socialist, or indeed monarchical means, as long as people aren’t unhappy?

Why should I care HOW the cat is skinned, as long as it ends up skinned? Assuming that I’m neutral about how much pain the cat goes thru… ;-)

All I’m talking about is having lots of use of measures of the happiness of the population by as direct a set of indicators as we can get, and using those as a kpi for those in power (or even an anarchical system without no-one in power).

Now… if self-identifying libertarians OBJECT to direct measures of happiness/unhappiness as a means of assessing a system of government, or a particular implementation of government… then I must ask WHY such indicators are considered inappropriate. Don’t you think Libertarianism can achieve a population of happy people? Or is human happiness (or at least the lack of unhappiness) on a population-wide level NOT the aim of libertarians, the aim merely being the ability of SOME people, the chosen few, to be happy and to hell with the rest?

(No… not saying you in particular, nor many of your mates, are that uncaring…. but sure as hell we lefties think many of the robber barons and uber-capitalists ARE, merely using libertarian arguments not from principle, but merely because they are already in a privileged position).

Be sure to mention this comment… I think you missed the focus on outcomes, and the measurement of those outcomes directly.

I don’t know much about press freedom in Athens or Rome. And I don’t imagine there was universal happiness under the Pharaoh.