Growing Crystals

Edit: Part of this is wrong, maybe! I have heard reports that some silicate minerals have been grown by the Czochralski process! Very exciting! Hopefully, my next post on this blog will be about which silicates minerals can be grown by the Czochralski process (or other non-hydrothermal processes) and which can't. And also why. Once I figure those things out. Learning!

I'm interested in minerals and rocks. They are super neat. A mineral is a chemical in one of seven crystal forms or crystal systems. For example, carbon in the hexagonal crystal system is called graphite, and carbon in the cubic crystal system is called diamond. Want to hear all seven crystal systems? Of course you do. There's even a song: ♫ Triclinic, monoclinic, orthorhombic, tetragonal, | trigonal, hexagonal, isometric/cubic! ♫ Pretty catchy, I'd say.

I want to make my own crystals. I want to make lots of different kinds. I want to be able to make any kind of crystal. What can I make?

Kids make crystals out of table salt, or alum, or borax, or epsom salts, by saturating hot water and letting it cool. These are fine. Kind of fragile. Table salt in the cubic system is called halite. I think it's always and only cubic. Kids make gypsum too. That's hydrated anhydrite. Basically the same as plaster of Paris. And um... you can grow aragonite (calcium carbonate in the orthorhombic system) from dolomite in vinegar, I think, which would be more impressive if dolomite were not just calcium carbonate with some extra magnesium. I haven't heard of kids doing it as a science fair project, but potassium chloride is one of the main water-soluble salts in wood ash (behind potassium carbonate and potassium sulfate, both of which can be converted into potassium chloride and some other stuff by treatment with hydrochloric acid) and crystals of it can be grown in the same way by cooling a supersaturated aqueous solution of potassium chloride. The mineral made that way is called sylvite, and it forms in the isometric crystal system, and like almost everything else in this paragraph, it's an evaporite, which means it can form naturally by the evaporation of water. Several evaporites are unfortunately deliquescent, which means they can absorb atmospheric moisture and then dissolve in it, so they have to be sealed in airtight containers. Or coated with something? It would be nice if you could just cover deliquescent evaporites in nail polish or polyurethane or something. Two other evaporites I kind of want to make someday are bischofite (a hydrate of magnesium chloride, which can be produced by combining magnesium hydroxide (milk of magnesia) with hydrochloric acid) and carnallite, which is like a cross between bischofite and sylvite (between hydrated magnesium chloride and potassium chloride). You can also grow deep, deep blue crystals from an aqueous solution of copper sulfate and it's only slightly poisonous. The powder is sold in gardening centers as a fungicide, and the hydrated mineral form is called Chalcanthite.

I also want to make more advanced crystals that don't spontaneously dissolve in air. How about gemstones? Can I make them in a melting furnace? Or even just non-precious crystals that are a little more solid?

Well, you can turn aragonite into calcite (you can polymorph it from the orthorhombic to the trigonal system) with heat, and that's on my to-do list. I like calcite a lot. Sometimes it's fluorescent. Sometimes you can use it to locate the sun in the sky when the sky is cloudy (Iceland spars have refraction that depends on the polarization of incoming light). I already mentioned growing aragonite from dolomite. Google Scholar says there are lots of ways to make whiskers of aragonite by simple chemistry in atmospheric conditions. So there are ways to make feedstock for synthetic calcite, if other sources of calcium carbonate like crushed eggshells or crushed limestone don't work.

What kind of heat do you need to polymorph aragonite into calcite? A kiln will do it after a couple of hours. You just need to hold the crystal at a couple hundred degrees celsius. I think I'm going to try a furnace though. A furnace is a thermally insulated box with a torch pointed at it. If you use it for pouring molten metal into a cast, then you can call it a melting furnace. If you use it to heat up metal and then whack it, you can call it a forge. But either way, it's just a box. The thermally insulating material the box is made from is called refractory. I've seen forges made of dirt. You can use fire bricks if you're fancy. You can make your own fire brick out of kaolin clay or refractory cement. Some people make their own refractory out of like a mixture of sand and perlite and plaster of Paris. Perlite is that foamy stuff in potting soil, which is actually a hydrated version of obsidian glass that puffed up when heated. Pretty cool. It's not a crystal; it's a glass, but still cool. Some clays puff up the same way when you get them really hot. That would be fun. When I've made a furnace, I'll puff things up too.

Let's talk a little bit about the history of making crystals with torches. The first torches used a mix of hydrogen gas and oxygen gas: oxy-hydrogen. It's a nice gas mixture. It burns very hot and it just makes water as a byproduct and you can get it by splitting water. Easy, abundant, clean, effective. Awesome.

Paracelsus (b 1493) was the first person to publish about producing hydrogen. He did it by mixing iron with sulfuric acid. Sendivogius (b 1566) was the first person to publish about producing oxygen. He did it by heating potassium nitrate to the thermal decomposition (around 600°C). Lavoisier was the first person to publish about using an oxy-hydrogen torch (in 1782), which he used to melt platinum. Volta made his voltaic pile in 1800, and people immediately began using it to make oxy-hydrogen at scale by water electrolysis. In 1837, Gaudin was the first person to use an oxy-hydrogen torch to synthesize gemstones - he made rubies by fusing alum and chromium. Apparently, he was trying to make glass and didn't realize they were crystals. Frémy was making small rubies at commercial quality and scale by 1877, and Verneuil worked with him and after him to develop the Verneuil furnace for crystal growth, published in 1902, which still just ran on oxy-hydrogen. The Verneuil process is still basically what we use to grow synthetic corundum crystals, including rubies, sapphires, and emery. They're all aluminum oxide (alumina) with impurities. The same process can be used for growing crystals of rutile, spinel, strontium titanate, and possibly chrysoberyl (also in the spinel group). (Not emerald. I accidentally said emerald instead of emery on twitter. Emerald is a color of beryl, like aquamarine is a color of beryl, and beryl is a special silicate mineral (a cyclosilicate) that has beryllium and aluminum. More on beryls later.)

All of this is to say that I should be able to grow cool crystals with a torch and some refractory cement and a ceramic or graphite crucible to hold the melt. Some minerals are industrially grown in different ways than this, like cooking under pressure in an autoclave for months, but for others, you basically just torch the right ingredients with easily obtained gasses and then drop or pull the melt. And if I can make cool crystals, then of course I will. And I can! So I will.

The Verneuil furnace involves dropping bits of melted mineral into a pile in order to grow crystals. It might work better if you drop them onto a slowly rotating pile. You can also pull the melt, instead of dropping it. Pulling the melt is a different method of crystal synthesis: the Czochralski process. "He made this discovery by accident: instead of dipping his pen into his inkwell, he dipped it in molten tin, and drew a tin filament, which later proved to be a single crystal." Start with a bath of your molten mineral, get a tiny crystal for a seed, drop it in and pull it out slowly, possibly rotating the seed while you pull. Verneuil and Czochralski: sometimes you twist the thing.

In the standard practice of the Czochralski method, some minerals are pulled and twisted very, very slowly - too slowly to do by hand. Not a big impediment to my growing crystals: I think I'd just need a leadscrew linear actuator. In addition to tin crystals, the Czochralski process can be used to make crystals of corundum, spinel, chrysoberyl, garnet, lithium niobate, scheelite, fluorite, silicon, germanium, and apatite I think. Ooh, and bismuth telluride! So there are a few more options than Verneuil. Silicon and germanium crystals are important for electronic semiconductor manufacturing. Fluorite is worth making not least because it's fluorescent; it glows under UV radiation. Wonderful! I like fluorite a lot. Artificial garnets are useful for making lasers, in addition to being gemstones. Lithium niobate isn't even made by nature, but it's a cool mineral with weird properties that engineers (especially communications engineers) have put into lots of things. And bismuth telluride is a sort-of alloy of the metal bismuth and the metalloid tellurium. Bi2Te3 crystals are used as semiconductors in those ceramic plate thermoelectric modules that you ... probably haven't played with unless you build your own computers or you're an electrical engineer, but trust me, they're cool. The Czochralski process: it gets shit done.

Pure elemental metals are technically crystals. For example, native copper forms in either the isometric/cubic system or the octahedral system. But they're mostly not geometric and colorful and sometmes transparent, and those are the crystals I'm after. Not sure why that's less common for plain metal than for metal+sulfur or metal+carbonate, but that's the case. Oh well. There are also amorphous metal alloys or glassy metals. Kind of cool, but they're not for me. There's at least one metal that doesn't suck for making crystals: bismuth. Bismuth crystals are beautiful: geometric and colorful. And bismuth crystals are super easy to make. Take an ingot of bismuth, melt it in a pot on the stove, and slowly lift up the top layer when it starts to cool and solidify. Don't like the colors? Remelt and do it again. The color of a region on the crystal depends on the temperature of the melt as the region enters the air. Bismuth is in Pepto-Bismol, and you could do a chemical extraction, but the metal is pretty cheap compared to how awesome it is and if you want to play with bismuth crystals, it's probably a better use of your resources to just buy an ingot. For sulfides of metals, pyrite is pretty. It's iron sulfide in the cubic system. Iron sulfide also exists in the orthorhombic system, where it's called marcasite. So maybe I'll sulfidate iron some day. And there are other nice sulfides. Sphalerite is okay: ZnS. The metalloid arsenic has very pretty sulfides that are transparent and faceted and colorful: realgar and orpiment. But I don't have arsenic. Antimony sulfide is cool, but I don't have antimony. I'll just focus on iron sulfides first.

Now, these are good projects and I intend to do them. But let's take stock for a second. None of these are silicates! Not one of the minerals I've mentioned has silica (SiO2) groups or orthosilicate (SiO4) grroups or any of the many other silicon oxide groups. We have pure elemental silicon crystals from Czochralksi, but no silicon oxides! This is a huge glaring hole. Let me explain.

Edit: Wait! Am I completely wrong? You can make garnets with Czochralski! Aren't garnets silicates?! Let's take a moment to look at the chemical formulas for the minerals most famously synthesized by the Czochralski method. Corundum is an aluminum oxide, [Al2 O3], better known as alumina in chemistry and metallurgy when we're not considering the crystal system. Spinel and chrysoberyl are also oxides with aluminum: they're [Mg Al2 O4] and [Be Al2 O4] respectively. Garnets are, depending on usage, either a simple group of minerals that are all silicates or huge a super-group of minerals containing normal silicate garnets but also some non-silicates and some non-sense. They all have a common structure in their ratios of metal ions, basically. Here's the structure: minerals in the simple garnet group look like this: [X3 Y2 (SiO4)3]. They have three metal ions with valence +2 (divalent cations), and they have two metal ions with valence +3 (trivalent cations), and then they have three silicate anions. Almandine is a famous garnet, and it's [Fe3 Al2 (SiO4)3], with iron in the +2 oxidation state. In the garnet super-group, the Xs might not all be the same metal, the Ys might not all be the same metal, and the silicon could be anything else that will bind to four oxygens, and again, the silicon stand-ins don't all have to be the same element. *Throws hands up in frustration*. The Czochralski method is famous for making yttrium aluminum garnets, [Y3 Al2 (AlO4)3], and gadolinium gallium garnets, [Gd3 Ga2 (GaO4)3] as laser media.  Obviously they're not silicates. I'm still not sure if Czochralski can grow normal silicate garnets, but I've heard that it can grow silicates of some kind, which is why I'm adding formulas into the post in case I missed something. Let's cover the rest of them just for safety: Lithium niobate is [Li Nb O3]. Scheelite is a tungstate, [Ca W O4]. Fluorite is a halide mineral, [Ca F2] (whose name comes from halogen, whose name comes from the pseudo-greek for "salt-forming"). Bismuth telluride is still [Bi2 Te3]. Apatite is a phosphate mineral group with just three members, and every member of the group has calcium phosphate with a little ion hanging off the end, either a fluorine, a chlorine, or a hydroxide (OH). So I haven't lied yet! But more research is necessary.

Post-edit segue: Why is it a glaring hole that I can't make silicates?

Silicon and oxygen are the most abundant elements in the earth's crust, and they're also the main ingredients in the most abundant minerals in the earth's crust: quartz and feldspars. Quartz is silica in either a trigonal or a hexagonal crystal system. Feldspars are alumino-silicates with small bits of other stuff, arranged in the monoclinic crystal system or in the triclinic crystal system. If I can't make those in my back yard, I can't make much. Can I though? And also can I make clays? Clay minerals are super common, and they're also silicates: clays are hydrated aluminosilicate minerals that arrange in microscopic sheets. I'm not sure I want to make clays; they're not exactly gemstones, but I would be sad if I couldn't.

Let's talk about how quartz is made industrially: the hydrothermal process. Quartz crystals are made under moderately high heat (at one end of the container, so that the crystal is under a thermal gradient) and high pressure in autoclaves by the hydrothermal process. It takes months. It's slow, expensive, kind of dangerous, and kind of ridiculous when you consider that natural quartz is absolutely everywhere. But sometimes you just need a really pure single quartz crystal the size of a spoiled cat. I'm not here to judge. I'm here to make crystals. These are my people. I don't have an autoclave. I have a pressure cooker, but I like to not experiment with it. I'm not scared of high pressures, and I'm not scared of high temperatures, but I've never dealt with both at the same time, you see. Maybe in a decade I'll have forty acres where I can blow stuff up in the pursuit of worthless quartz crystals, but not today. Let's keep learning about how other gems are synthesized and we'll come back to quartz and feldspar later.

Beryls are also grown in autoclaves by the hydrothermal process. Emeralds and aquamarine are colors of beryl, and they're all aluminosilicates, just like feldspars and clays. Also beryls can be grown by the flux-growth method. I don't know enough about that, but I've read that it's also expensive and it also takes months or years to make small crystals. Sad. I've read that General Electric once made jadeite-jade under pressure, presumably by the hydrothermal method. Jadite is an aluminosilicate with a little sodium. GE doesn't make jadeite crystals anymore, but it's nice to know that it can be done. I don't know of any other minerals that people have synthesized which also need high pressures, but there are probably others. Other silicates presumably. I really like olivine, which is a silicate with some variable amount of magnesium and iron. Maybe people grow it in autoclaves. Who knows. Someone knows. Not me.

Instead of looking at synthesis methods, I've also just looked up individual gemstones to see if and how they can be synthesized, with mostly negative results. A french guy named Gilson claims to have made synthetic turquoise and lapis lazuli (and opals, which are amorphous/glass/mineraloids rather than minerals), but almost everyone except Gilson agrees that his synthetics are actually imitations, and contain at least some of the wrong stuff. It doesn't really matter either way to me, because the process isn't something I can replicate: it's a secret, bought and owned by some Japanese manufacturer. Another negative result: people on the internet seem very adamant that humans have never produced synthetic tourmaline. Okay. I believe you. Calm down. Tourmaline is a group of silicates with lots of boron, and I have never seen two people give the same formula that generalizes the group, because like garnets, there's a core group that's simple and then a wider group of rare minerals that don't matter at all in practice, and you'll need a different formula to cover your particular choice of included rare minerals. But it's a silicate, and it hasn't been grown. Sad.

I mentioned that apatite can be made by the Czochralski method. It's a calcium phosphate mineral, and it's the main mineral in bones and tooth enamel. Natural apatite crystals are very pretty to me, and they're sometimes striped with colors like a candy cane. We know that the body can make tiny apatite crystals without heating up to furnace or kiln temperatures, and I find that encouraging. Maybe there's an even easier way for me to make it than Czochralski. What other minerals can bodies make? Similar to apatite, there's another calcium phosphate mineral called brushite and it's part of kidney stones. You're probably more familiar with calcium oxalate as a component of kindey stones, which goes by the name Whewellite as a mineral. If bodies can make these things, that seems like a strong hint that I can make them too. So I will! One day! Somehow! With my hands and my ingenuity I mean, not with my kidneys. The general term for these processes is bio-mineralization and I don't know much about it. Wikipedia says some algae and diatoms make silicates! Relevant to my interests! Also, goethite is listed on the page. That's another fun ore, an iron hydroxide in the orthorhombic system. One more to do!

Okay, back to quartz. A guy claims to have made it at standard atmospheric conditions back in the 1970s. Is he a dirty liar? I don't know. Let's talk about it.

The processes that turn sediment into sedimentary rocks are called diagenesis (= across-generations). They're the opposite of weathering. Diagenesis includes stuff that follows deposition/sedimentation, like compaction, deformation, dissolution, hydration, kerogen cracking, post-depositional mobilization (stuff moving after it stopped moving), chemical replacements and alterations including dolomitization (magnesium ions replace calcium ions), cementation, and lithification. The usual way to synthesize quartz is not diagenetic - it doesn't happen at atmospheric conditions. Rather, it's hydrothermal or magmatic.

Werner Flehmig said he made feldspar and quartz diagenetically back in the 70s (here and here) and Harding said he made clay minerals using basically the same diagenetic process (here and here). The method, I think just from looking at the abstracts, is to take a hydroxide of the right metal, like brucite [Mg(OH)2] (milk of magnesia) or gibbsite [Al(OH)3], make an aqueous solution, add in some amorphous silica, but very little or it doesn't work, and then you let it sit and age and nucleate and adsorb for three weeks. I think that's it. Also, they mention iron(III) hydroxide several times. Iron(III) hydroxide is basically limonite, a common ore used as a pigment since antiquity, also called yellow ochre.

I don't get it. These crystals must be microscopic, if no one figured out by accident before the 1970s that any of these hydroxides can be used to make quartz diagenetically. And I'm not sure I care about microscopic crystals. They don't make for a good display case. Or maybe the crystals made by this method are not microscopic. After all, no one figured out until 1915 that you can make large single tin crystals by dipping a pen nib into molten tin. Paracelsus didn't know about electrolysis. Sometimes people just don't know easy ways of making cool things. And if algae and diatoms can make silicate crystals, then what's so strange about Flehmig and Harding doing it? I'll keep reading. Maybe it'll be another case like Gilson. Maybe I'll actually learn to make felsic crystals. Maybe I can just be happy sitting on a mountain of rubies and garnets and halite and kidney stones and rainbow bismuth. Maybe I'll get my forty acres and set up a lab. Maybe I'll figure out a way to devitrify glass intro cristobalite silica and then polymorph it into quartz at low pressures.

Happy synthesizing!

Inflammatory Cytokine Dysregulation

There are lots of different models of depression. One of them is sickness behavior, i.e. the way that you act when your immune system is fighting off particularly foul bacteria or viruses. Symptoms of sickness behavior include anhedonia, anorexia, fever, sleep changes, and decreased social interaction. In depression that looks like sickness behavior, presumably, your body's immune response is over-active for some reason to the detriment of other mental and behavioral faculties.

What causes sickness behavior? Dysregulation of inflammatory cytokines maybe.

What's that? Your body produces both inflammatory cytokines and anti-inflammatory cytokines. They fight each other a bit. When there's an infection in your body, inflammatory cytokines cause local inflammation, like swelling and redness, and pain, and elevated temperature of the body part. If a bacterial colony colonizes a person's body, the person can have low-grade peripheral inflammation all the time without obvious redness or swelling. The same immune processes are still going on. in the blood and tissues, involving cytokines and lots of other chemicals that have longs names full of numbers.

People with depression that looks like sickness behavior generally don't have swollen, red, infected body parts, so why are inflammatory cytokines relevant to depression? In addition to peripheral inflammation, there's also central inflammation: neuroinflammation.

Neuroinflammation? Isn't the brain immunologically privileged? Isn't there a barrier of immuno-competent cells (astrocytes and endothelial cells) surrounding the brain and preventing infectious agents from crossing into the cerebrospinal fluid via the blood? Yes, and there are like a hundred guesses about how neuro-inflammation happens despite the blood-brain barrier, and honestly, a bunch of them might be right. The main thing to know is that it's not the infectious agents that are passing over the blood-brain barrier, it's the inflammatory cytokines (and other chemicals that are downstream of cytokines in chemical reaction pathways) that get into the brain. Or they at least trigger the brain to produce its own cytokines.

Why does this matter again? Because acute administration of inflammatory cytokines in healthy people produces sickness behavior: anhedonia, anorexia, fever, sleep changes, and decreased social interaction. Also, cytokines are found at elevated levels in people with some types of depression, like depression with anhedonia, anorexia, fever, sleep changes, and decreased social interaction. There's a consensus that those sickness behaviors are adaptations of the immune system. How they are all individually adaptive, I don't know. The consensus is that jointly they help a sick person to conserve energy and allocate internal resources to either combat infection or to repair tissues that have been damaged by injuries. And maybe they help you to limit contact with other people? I think I've heard that too.

So cytokines = sickness behavior = depression? No, not all depression is thought to involve cytokines: post-partum depression and depression which follows drug withdrawal, for example, are thought not to involve elevated inflammatory cytokines in the brain or the blood. But if you're depressed and your depression doesn't look like those, then yeah, maybe. Maybe the topic of inflammatory cytokines is worth some of your attention.

What does neuroinflammation even mean? Is it redness and swelling in the brain, or is it the low-level kind of inflammation that isn't necessarily visible? As near as I can tell, neuroinflammation does not involve swelling in the brain, at least not in the normal case where infectious agents haven't crossed the blood-brain barrier. The normal non-infectious version of neuroinflammation is just a continuation of the production of chemicals like cytokines and their less easily pronounced relatives, but now in the brain. In the brain, those chemicals do different things than in the rest of the body. Fevers, as a component of sickness behavior, are the result of cytokines acting on the hypothalamus. The other symptoms of sickness behavior (anhedonia, anorexia, sleep changes, and decreased social interaction) aren't as well linked to the action of cytokines on brain regions, so far as I know, but I don't know much. Less behaviorally direct, lots of things are known about how the chronic production of cytokines in the brain messes up other chemical processes, like the production of neurotransmitters and neural growth factors. I keep saying just "cytokines", but it's the inflammatory ones specifically.

So these chemicals are important for immune function, but their chronic production has bad effects, and they're found in elevated levels in people with some kinds of chronic neuropathology: especially depression that looks like being sick, without the swelling, but also other pathologies like multiple sclerosis.

What can be done about it? Probably we first want to figure out why it's there in the first place: why is there is a background level of inflammatory response? That would be the ideal things to treat. I don't know enough about that. We could call it inflammatory cytokine dysregulation for short. Other than figuring out why it's happening, we could also just treat the symptoms: anti-inflammatories are the treatment for inflammation, and these are generally NSAIDs or anti-cytokines.

I don't know much of anything about anti-cytokines, or cytokine inhibitors, except that they increase the risk of infections, which makes sense, given that they're suppressing an immune response.

There is mixed-to-positive support in drug trials for the antidepressant effect of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, NSAIDS, generally usually used in conjunction with regular anti-depressants that directly target neurotransmitter production. NSAIDs are a drug class that includes aspirin and ibuprofen among others. They target chemicals called COX1 or COX2, which I think are like downstream messengers of cytokines, but don't trust me on that. I've heard that selective-COX2 inhibitors do much better as anti-inflammatories and anti-depressants than other NSAIDs. Celebrex is a COX2-selective NSAID. It's mainly advertised and indicated for arthritis. I don't know whether aspirin hits COX1 or COX2 or both, but you shouldn't be taking it in large regular doses for depression, even though it seems like a cheap readily available solution to inflammation. It's got all sorts of terrible side effects, not limited to intestinal bleeding. Also, if taking lots of aspirin could fix a big class of depression, wouldn't people have figured that out by now? They would have. For every analgesic on the market, there are already people taking unsafe amounts, and they would have figured it out.

But it's interesting, right? Inflammatory cytokines: not yet a target of any depression treatment, but maybe one day.

Glucocorticoids and Hippocampal Neurodegeneration

:: Chronic Cortisol Damages The Hippocampus
Stress increases glucocorticoids in the brain (cortisol in humans, corticosterone in rodents). Long exposure neurodegenerative effects include mitochondrial dysfunction, cell atrophy & death, and hyperphosphorylation of cytoskeletal Tau protein (which is important for dendrite remodeling). No, I don't know what those words mean either. So chronic levels of cortisol in the brain can cause cellular damage, and they are known to do particular damage to cells in the hippocampus. Where does cortisol come from? When is it produced?

:: Serotonin Increases Cortisol Via The PVN
When there is an elevated level of serotonin in the cerebrospinal fluid around the hypothalamus (a midbrain structure) and in particular, the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus, somehow that causes the production of glucocorticoids (cortisol) in the adrenal cortex by the kidneys. Weird right? That's super far away from the hypothalamus. But that's the pathway. Where did that elevated serotonin come from? In the brain, serotonin is mostly produced in the Raphe Nuclei in the brain stem, and no one really knows why or when. Maybe serotonin production is increased in response to stress, like threats or physical over-exertion or starvation or I don't know what else. It's as good an answer as any. Regardless of what starts the chain, the rest of the chain goes Serotonin -> PVN of Thalamus -> Adrenal Cortex -> Cortisol. It's a dynamically simple pathway as I've sketched it: more of this, more of that. Let's talk about the root of the pathway - serotonin - and how serotonin-selective reuptake inhibitors (SSRIS) alter serotonin levels.

:: Acute use of SSRIs Increases Serotonin while Chronic use of SSRIs Decreases Serotonin
Elevated serotonin, not underproduction, seems to be the bigger problem of mood disorders, although we're really bad at measuring it in the CNS. Acute (=short term) administration of SSRIs makes serotonin levels higher and worse. If elevated serotonin is associated with mood disorders, and short term administration of antidepressant SSRIs increases serotonin, shouldn't SSRIs make mood disorders worse when you first start taking them? They don't, so far as I know: the usual short-term response to SSRI antidepressants is no change for a few weeks, and then things start to improve. We imagine that after chronic (=long term) administration of SSRIs, some compensatory mechanisms in the brain must reduce serotonin levels. That is the predominant theory. I don't know what compensatory mechanism that might be. I should read up on it. There's another thing that gets worse during short term administration of SSRIs: short term administration of SSRIs interferes with the production of neural growth factors (little hormones which are especially important for healing cell damage in the hippocampus). Let's talk about them.

:: BDNF Counteracts Cortisol's Damage on The Hippocampus
BDNF is a peptide hormone which acts as a growth factor for neurons. Acute (= short term) administration of SSRIs like fluoxetine reduces BDNF. That's bad: it means that the brain can't heal as well when there's cell damage to the hippocampus following sustained exposure to cortisol. And what about long term use of SSRIs? Apparently, based on this, chronic (=long term) SSRI administration increases BDNF transcription. Nice! Biphasic differential transcription, huh? I don't fully know what those words mean in context, but that sounds cool.

:: All Together Now
Supposedly astrocytes synthesize BDNF, GDNF, and NGF. Maybe damage to astrocytes from cortisol is enough to explain the reduction in BDNF following acute administration of SSRIs. So the pathway would be acute (= short term) SSRIs -> higher serotonin -> PVN thalamus activation -> more cortisol production -> cell damage to astrocytes -> less synthesis of BDNF and other growth factors. And how might chronic (= long term) administration of SSRIs counteract hippocampal neurodegeneration? Well, perhaps chronic administration of SSRIs reduces hippocampal neurodegeneration by triggering the mysterious compensatory mechanism that eventually reduces serotonin, which eventually leads to less cortisol, which means astrocytes can produce growth factors and repair cell damage. In this model, it's like there's a threshold concentration of cerebrospinal serotonin required before the compensatory mechanisms trigger, and SSRIs cross that level. It's a guess anyway. Alternatively, that biphasic differential transcription thing in the link. Maybe that's the mechanism. I don't know. I just thought you might like to know what I read about tonight: glucocorticoids and hippocampal neurodegeneration.

Too Many Whats? Part II. Attending To The Wrong Stressors

I'm interested in sources and varieties of executive dysfunction. I'm starting out by examining maladaptive biases of attention through simple concept analysis. Here's the starting point: What words or phrases make sense in place of X in these sentences?

• I'm facing too many X at once.
• I've been dealing with X for too long without a break.
• I perceive the presence of important X too readily.
• I find myself systematically dealing with the wrong X.

I introduced this problem in my last post and didn't make much conceptual progress besides listing a bunch of Xs. Well now I've got a bigger list of Xs broken into clusters and the clusters have descriptive labels.

There are lots of words that fit, and I think they can all be called difficult situations or stressors. The situations and the stressors can both be perplexing, embarrassing, threatening, worrying, or otherwise producing pain or unpleasant emotions. Synonyms for "situations" like events, developments, and incidents also fit in for X. "Issues" and "matters" both fit in for X, and maybe those are kind of like synonyms for stressors?

If a situation is only a little bad, then we focus on the small things that are wrong and we talk of complications, tricky details, and intricacies. When situations are moderately bad, we call them predicaments, problems, troubles, and quandaries. When situations are pretty bad, we call them crises, disasters, and emergencies. There are situations worse than those, like catastrophes, but they don't stand in for X in all of the above sentences, because they're not ever going to be the wrong situations to focus on.

Now we've touched on difficult situations. How about stressors? These can also be situations, but they're categorized by the emotions that we have in response to them.

Stressors producing annoyance are called annoyances, disturbances, nuisances, messes, and inconveniences. Annoyance is sometimes a reaction to low-level pain and sometimes it's a reaction to being interrupted (and if psychologist/behavioral economist George Ainslie is right, being interrupted from appreciating one's baseline utility level is the very mechanism of pain, though I doubt it). If we internally use a decision process, like a POMDP, as a model of the cause of our annoyance, then the stressor is called a pest, among other names.

Stressors producing anger or fear are called dangers, hazards, threats, attacks, personal offenses, harassments, and torments. If we model the stressor with a decision process, it's called an enemy. If we throw disgust into the mix of anger and fear, we've got terrors, horrors, and good old fashioned offenses against god and nature. If we model these with a decision process, they might be called monsters. These things with a disgust component, the horrors and monsters, they make me think of varieties of moral outrage, like conservative puritanism and liberal social justice.

Actually, fear comes in a few forms, doesn't it? There's angry fear, like the response to threats and offenses and horrors that we just mentioned, and there's surprised fear, like when someone says boo (the causes of which probably won't fit in for X above, since they're surprises and not things we could focus too readily on in anticipation), and there's sad fear, like dread from a painful situation you can't escape, and there's anxious fear. Anxious stressors might be called perils or risks. I'm not sure about the names of stressors that produce dread. Maybe dread is just fear without anger when you can't fight back, and the causes of dread are the same dangers, hazards, threats, et cetera.

Stressors producing perplexity are questions, doubts, and confusions. Perplexity is one of those epistemic emotions like surprise and credence that's much less visceral and hedonic than other social emotions, but it's still the sort of thing you can focus on too much, to the detriment of your executive function.

Stressors producing shame are self-doubts and embarrassments. It's interesting that this cluster has the word doubt in it also, no? I don't think perplexity is like shame at all. There's a puzzle for you. What are the doubts that produce perplexity about, if doubts about self-adequacy produce shame? Maybe perplexity doubts are about how to perform, rather than whether to risk performing.

Alongside things that produce emotions, names for emotion-like things fit pretty well in place of X also: pains, negative feelings, and intrusive thoughts.

I don't have names for the emotions produced by the next three stressor groups. What emotions do you feel when you're impeded, conflicted, or burdened?

1. When we're prevented from doing one thing that we want, the stressors are obstacles, difficulties, defeaters, drawbacks, hindrances, impediments. Maybe that's sadness? Or anxiety? Or a second class of annoyance.

2. When we're prevented from doing either of two contrary things, the stressors are called binds, constraints, and dilemmas. When these stressors are non-physical, we call them conflicting desiderata, conflicting deontological prescriptions, conflicting social expectations, and informal contradictions. Maybe that's anxiety? It also sounds like sadness.

3. Sometimes our stressors are specifications of necessary work that come to us from conscience or external social authority. These are burdens, obligations, demands, onuses, and hard jobs. If annoyance is a response to low-level pain or interruptions, what do you call the response to being chronically interrupted or chronically in moderate pain? I don't know. Maybe burnout. I know that's not a standard emotion. It could just be sadness or anxiety again.

If there's not a super obvious associated emotion, maybe they should just be called difficult situations and not stressors.

I've got just a few more clusters of things that can fit in for X. Each of these clusters seems to refer regularly to two classes of stressor: the situations are differently stressful if they're directly affecting you or if it's just your job to fix broken situations that otherwise wouldn't directly affect you.

You can deal with defects, errors, failures, faults, mistakes, and malfunctions. 

You can deal with wrongdoings, infractions, and sins. 

You can deal with scheduling conflicts, time constraints, resource shortages, and resource demands. 

You can deal with interpersonal conflicts, disputes, controversies, misunderstandings, bad arguments, altercations, and disagreements.

When these directly affect you, maybe the associated emotions are sadness, shame, burnout, and anger, respectively.

But you've already named the stressors associated with those, Preinfarction! What's the difference between these stressors and the previous ones? Where's your rigor, Pre? Where's your ontological commitment to categorizing concepts per genus et differentiam?

Now I am all done and completely satisfied with the product of my efforts.

Too Many Whats? Part I. An Investigation Of Problem-Like Concepts

There's a method of Concept Analysis I sometimes use when I have a big list of words (like an English spelling dictionary) and I want to sort it into narrower clusters: I come up with a sentence that has a blank spot which can be filled by some of the words on the list (maybe two or three select words to start the process) but not some of the others, and I use the sentence as a binary classifier. "Does this sentence scan naturally when I let its variable equal this value"? Often it works better to start with a few blanked-sentences which all fit well with the seed words: a cluster of tests to point your attention toward a cluster of concepts.

Here's an example: What words can stand in for X in all of these phrases?:

• I'm facing too many X at once.
• I've been dealing with X for too long without a break.
• I perceive the presence of important X too readily.
• I find myself systematically dealing with the wrong X.

The word "problems" fits in each sentence well, while "loaves of bread" makes for some really weird sentences. If you'd like to try your hand at finding other words or phrases that fit, before I share mine down below, now's the time.

It could be fun. .... All right.

I don't know a name for this technique. I've seen it operationalized in the lexicosemantics literature where, for example, a word is judged to have passed the test if the filled-in sentence returns a threshold number of search results when used as a Google search query. Maybe the lexicosemanticians have a name for it and I've just forgotten. It's a little bit like type checking, isn't it? "Error, line 1: "loaves of bread". Problem-Like entity expected. Received Unvalenced Material Object."

I once used this technique to sort a big list of random abstract concepts into categories for use in a natural language Context-Free Grammar of wise sentences. The categories of Virtue, Vice, Reward, and Punishment towards the bottom of my MoralityBot's CFG source JSON here, while not particularly narrow, are each fairly semantically regular, and this is hard to accomplish just by thinking about concepts without any blank-sentence tests.

Let's get back to the example. I was thinking about those Things that can overwhelm a person's attention. Terms that are fit include: problems, tricky details, threats, obstacles, messes, informal contradictions, hard jobs, defeaters, disasters, conflicts, shortages, emotional triggers, self-doubts, social expectations, deontological prescriptions, obligations, emergencies, and hazards.

Some terms that are less abstractly cognitive and more specific to a physical domain also pass, but I don't like them as much: epidemics, acts of god, droughts, and famines.

The terms "people" and "gods" (thank you for the entry, Grace), pass all of the tests, but they seem very different from the other terms and very similar to each other. I think other terms like "demons" could also go here, while "inner demons" fits better with the previous words.

Here are some words that pass some of the tests, but I'd say not all: duties (which is interesting, because the very similar word "obligations" does pass), distractions, addictions, changes, omens, and reminders of my dead loves. The same way that the semantically-fit "inner demons" is similar to less-fit "demons", and "obligations" is similar to the less-fit "duties", I think the other almost-fit examples are evidence of yet-undiscovered concepts that are similar and fully fit.

Anyway, now we've got a cluster: problems, tricky details, threats, obstacles, messes, informal contradictions, hard jobs, defeaters, disasters, conflicts, shortages, emotional triggers, self-doubts, social expectations, deontological prescriptions, obligations, emergencies, hazards, and inner demons. What are they? What do they have in common? What is their semantic type? Some of them seem necessarily internal to the mind, while threats, obstacles, messes, disasters, conflicts, and shortages don't. They're bad things, but I think you'll agree that "diseases" are bad and yet the word only passes some of the tests.

I have no good second method here to take care of the products of the first method. Clustering by similarity, making up more test sentences, examining guesses that are true of some list members to see if they're true of all, thinking about where the concepts fall among ontological categories like Top Types, Formal Roles, and Phased Sortals. I have no good second method, but I still have work before me, because this is the kind of thing my mind does in its off hours. Also, this is partly trying to get at an insight which I think will help me to compress a bunch of thoughts that I want to include in a future post on varieties and sources of executive dysfunction. Or a bunch of posts. There's nothing wrong with incremental installments. One post on serotonin, one on anhedonia, one on ambiguity aversion, one on effort discounting or whatever. It'll be grand. And they will feature a unified understanding of the features of problem-like concepts. Do let me know if you see that they have something in common.

Some Light Mineralogy and Petrology

Feldspars and quartz are the most abundant rock-forming minerals on earth. Granite, basalt, & sandstone are mostly feldspar & quartz. Feldspars (alongside mafic minerals & micas) get weathered into clay minerals, while quartz (alongside limestone) gets weathered into sand & silt.

That makes me think of soil components. What's left in soil after those is lots of water and air, and a little bit of organic material, and tiny bits of other minerals. Or, that's what's in the lower layers anyway: the regolith, the saprolite, and the bedrock. The top layer is humus - organic materials in soil that have been decomposed enough to lose their cellular structure are called humus. And humus is a mess, chemically. There are big random molecules like damaged chain-link fences full of rings with random bits hanging off, which is fitting because that's what plenty of non-decomposed organic molecules like lignin also look like. There are also organic acids like fatty acids and phenolic acids and hydroxy acids, and other organic things like terpenoids and alcohols, and ugh. Let's get back to rocks and minerals.

Other rocks: Marble is metamorphosed limestone, which is made of calcite, which is an arrangement of calcium carbonate arranged in the trigonal system, which is a little laborious to describe, but basically the unit cell has a nice little three-dimensional diamond shape with equal side length and some special symmetries. Let's talk about it some other time. Chalk is also a limestone, formed under the ocean from calcium carbonate shells, also having bits of flint, which is quartz. Although sidewalk chalk is usually a different mineral these days, gypsum. We'll talk about that later. The calcium carbonate in shells is mostly tiny crystal of the mineral aragonite: it's the same chemical as calcite, but it's in a different crystal arrangement from calcite; aragonite has in the orthorhombic arrangement, which has a rectangular prism as its unit cell. There's another famous limestone, travertine, which is formed in hot springs. It's a limestone rock made of calcium carbonate minerals, like how marble and chalk are limestone rocks made of calcium carbonate minerals.

Slate, schist, and phyllite are all metamorphosed shale, I think? Probably in different stages of increasing metamorphism. In some other order. Anyway, the base rock, shale is a sedimentary rock made of mud and clay. A mudstone. We don't ask what mud is. Okay, you win, it's humus soil. And clay. But that doesn't make it any less taboo. Humus soil is scary stuff to an inorganic chemist. When the organics in mud become fossilized, they're called kerogen, and kerogen in shale is where a lot of the carbon on earth is located. Petroleum, coal, natural gas, it's all kerogen. And that's why people drill into shale to get fossil fuels. What about less organic rocks? Soapstone is a metamorphic schist (a metamorphized shale) but the shale it comes from is almost all talc, a nice inorganic clay mineral. There's a continuum of sedimentary rocks from mudstones (with mud and clay) to sandstones (with feldspar and quartz and mica and some other stuff). A sandstone that's rich in quartz can be metamorphosed into quartzite, where tiny bits of sand get merged together into larger grains, I think. 

Let's talk about gems. They're mostly pure minerals and those are easier to think about. Just a chemical formula and sometimes a crystal arrangement. Amethyst and citrine are colorful impurities in quartz. Alabaster is made of gypsum, which is a new mineral! It's calcium sulfate. It's also called plaster of Paris and drywall. Outside of geology, especially in the ancient middle east and north Africa, alabaster can also refer to calcite. They look very similar. Aquamarine and emeralds are colorful impurities in beryls, another new mineral. It's a beryllium aluminum silicate. And it's a cyclosilicate, which is cool. It's got six silica tetrahedra arranged in a ring, kind of looking like a star of David. There aren't a lot of famous cyclosilicates. Tourmaline is another one.

Jasper and chalcedony are both quartz aggregates. So they're rocks with lots of tiny crystals, rather than one big crystal. Bloodstone and carnelian are both quartz stones with hematite for color, which is iron rust. Cinnabar rocks are their own mineral! Mercury sulfide! Blood red, beautiful, toxic. Where we get our elemental mercury from.

Ruby and sapphire are colored impure versions of corundum, which is aluminum oxide. I don't know what garnets are, and I'm afraid to learn. Jacinth in colored zircon, which is its own mineral: zirconium silicate. Opals are hydrated silica, which is not quite quartz.

I think you've heard of diamonds. Topaz and turquoise are their own minerals. Topaz is a silicate with aluminum and fluorine while turquoise is a hydrated copper aluminum phosphate. Pretty cool. Peridot is gem-quality olivine, which is in the category of magnesium and iron-rich minerals (mafic!) that also includes pyroxenes and amphiboles. The mafic minerals form a sequence of increasing complexity: olivine/peridot have solitary silica tetrahedra, then pyroxenes have single changes of silica tetrahedra, and amphiboles have doubles chains. I remember the order by saying "Opa!" in the Greek fashion. Olivine, pyroxene, amphibole. Some other minerals besides the olivines also have just one or two silica tetrahedra, like garnets and epidote. But they're weird and confusing. There are also silicate minerals that form in sheets like clay and mica. And there are silicate minerals that form three-dimensional frameworks, like quartz and feldspar and weird zeolites. There's a pretty nice orderly system of arranging them.

But back to gems. How about jade? That's a gem, right? Jade can refer to rocks made of either of two silicate minerals: nephrite jade is a silicate with calcium and magnesium, closely related to asbestos, and jadeite jade is a silicate with sodium and aluminum, and it's a pyroxene (a one-chain silicate). Pyroxenes are common in the earth's mantle (between the core and the crust), so they show up in lots of igneous and metamorphic rocks. Most of them are kind of heavy, and contain more magnesium and iron than light minerals which contain more sodium, potassium, and calcium. Jadeite doesn't have iron or magnesium, but oh well.

That is the extent of my knowledge.

Romanceless Men And Mistreated Women

After re-reading SlateStarCodex's "Radicalizing The Romanceless", I looked at the comments, because I thought something particular was missing from the analysis.

Before I go any further, please note that this is a high-context post, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't read it if you haven't first read the linked post. If you're not going to click the link anyway, let me at least say for context that Scott makes a case - a case which is interesting but only partly compelling to me - that when feminist writers complain about "Nice Guys" as distinct from guys who are nice, the capitalization isn't doing any denotative work. Scott makes the case that the many feminist writers he cites are really just complaining about guys who are nice, and the Title Case Capitalization is serving as a very weak way to hide the fact. He also responds to feminist writers saying that yes, the capitalization is doing denotative work, and Nice Guys are a different category. It's a very thorough post with lots of reasoned arguments. When I say "Scott makes a case", it's more than just him stating an opinion and moving on. Anyway, the complaints in the many feminist blog posts that Scott cites mostly say that Nice Guys (or nice guys without capitalization, if Scott's analysis is to be taken seriously) are pathetic and deserving of mockery, and they complain too much about being lonely, and they feel entitled to sex from women, and they don't care about women as people, and they think that their lack of romance stems from women being mean or inconsiderate to them, and they might be rapists or terrorists.

It's quite a list of complaints, and it gets repeated from lots of different feminist writers. You might have noticed a split, where the first three symptoms were about Nice Guys being merely pathetic
(patheticness being that which elicits pity in the normal observer, like a starving puppy does) and the next four were about them being immoral and misogynistic. Scott doesn't mention the split explicitly, but he does talk about how feminists like to mock lonely men, and how this mockery is making men bitter. So that's sort of an explanation of the two clusters of complaints. Possibly not right, but it's something.

Let's get back to Scott's claim that the capitalization in "Nice Guys" isn't actually being used to point to a different group of people. It's partly compelling: I think it's plausible that heterosexual women, generally, aren't looking to date men who are nice. The statistics Scott presents in section VII of his post (Yes, section 7. It's a long post with lots of well-thought arguments.) make that point pretty clear. I don't know why criminality, drug consumption, violence, and disagreeableness of personality, among other factors, predict the number of sex partners for men, but those are the facts. Whether men with fewer sexual partners who aren't violent, disagreeable, criminal, et cetera, are viewed by women as pathetic or deserving of shame is not addressed by the statistics.

Scott's analysis is also partly not compelling: I think women who talk about Nice Guys, generally, do indeed make a mental distinction between Nice Guys and nice guys. To the extent that the Title Case Capitalization is a thin veneer used to hide the (embarrassing?) fact that they want nice guys to keep their distance in the domain of romance and sex and pair-bonding and reproduction, then this fact must also be hidden to them. It's entirely possible to be mistaken about your true beliefs, especially when the beliefs are embarrassing: believing a strategic lie is an unconscious evolutionarily selected-for method of convincing other people of the strategic lie. But it's not enough to say, "Women hate nice guys, and they know it, and the fact that they sometimes use a frustratingly similar but slightly different term can be ignored as malicious trickery". It's not malice, it's a real psychological distinction that they defend earnestly. So we can recognize that Nice Guys are a different group from nice guys, and it's the former group that feminist blogs insult for being bad, or we can recognize that women generally aren't looking to date guys who are nice and they don't know it: they're honestly mistaken and don't realize that the Nice Guys they hate deep in the hearts are the same nice guys they can't publicly endorse hating. If Nice Guys and nice guys are different groups, then it's of course also possible that women wish that both groups would keep their distance.

That's one thing I was looking for in the comments section of Scott's post: an analysis that takes seriously the fact that women believe Nice Guys are different from nice guys, whether or not women are correct in this. I didn't get far enough to find that. Instead, I found ... Joe. Joe was talking about how he's a nice guy. Joe has recently - sometime after he wrote these old comments on an old blog post I was rereading - he's recently been accused of abusing his girlfriends and disrespecting their consent in ways that look a lot like rape. I don't know Joe, and I don't think I know anyone he's dated, and I'd never heard anyone talk about spending time with him before the rape accusations, so I feel a little out of my element talking about him, which is why I'm giving him a pseudonym. But he is in my Online community, and I had heard his name before, and some people on the internet whom I consider friends are friends with him on Facebook. Which means he's Here: he's nearby in social cyberspace, and I can't ignore him.

So what the fuck? Usually, I shrug off comments I hear online that nice guys are abusive rapists because, you know, I have many of those risk factors for lack of sexual success (like not being a violent, criminal drunk) and yet I have very good evidence that I'm not an abusive rapist. But then here's Joe, and I can't ignore him. Is he perhaps not a rapist, and that's why people I think of as decent are friends with him? I hope so, but I doubt it. Is he a rapist who happens to be nice in some sense, like scoring highly on trait Agreeableness in personality tests? Maybe. Again, I've never met the guy. Is he unconsciously self-deceiving about being nice, in the way that the great evolutionary socio-biologist Robert Trivers theorized about? Could be. Is he consciously deceiving others into thinking he's nice because he needs victims for his evil desires? Could be that too. Sadly, I think "he's actually nice along some dimensions" is the best explanation of why he thinks he's nice, and maybe unconscious self-deception and conscious other-deception happen to be along for the ride in his head.

When I saw Joe's comments, I couldn't read any more. It felt like the mere example of his existence was lending great credibility to the claim "Guys who seem nice are secretly all immoral and misogynistic, and a step away from being rapists and terrorists". You know, the claim that Barrys are worse then Henrys. I couldn't shrug it off, even though no one has ever said any of these things directly to me, even though no one has ever called me a Nice Guy in a derisive tone, even though I've never really been dissatisfied with the amount of romantic attention I get, as these bitter entitled Nice Guys supposedly do. I don't date, but it's more because I don't want to. The fact that I don't date is also why I will be generalizing from kind of sparse evidence in this post.

The last time I felt overwhelmed by this topic was about a month ago, when, just like last night, I was worn out after a long day at work and I read something about relationships Online. Maybe I shouldn't be doing that? Anyway, a month ago I read a post in which a bunch of women said that nice guys are all pieces of shit. Feeling pretty bad about that, I started looking to into medications for reversible chemical castration, operating in a similar desperate impulsive headspace as a depressed person who looks into suicide methods. And don't you know it, the Wikipedia article on chemical castration starts out by saying "chemical castration is mainly used by the courts for rapists". Great. That's what I needed to hear. Not only am I a rapist for caring about niceness, I'm a rapist for briefly wanting to get out of the entire romance and sexuality game.

(In fact, chemical castration is not mainly used for rapists: the anti-androgens used for chemical castration are the exact same pills used for Male-to-Female transsexual Hormone Replacement Therapy, and they're also used for treating prostate cancer, and some other stuff. Instead of getting those pills, I went to a clinic and got a prescription for an anti-depressant, which I knew could also lower libido, though I ended up not getting the prescription filled for further reasons. But I'm fine. No worries.)

I couldn't bear to read any more comments after seeing Joe, but I could remember all sorts of other things, like that reddit post, that equally made me wonder whether, you know, everyone is incredibly terrible and we shouldn't be allowed near each other. In addition to remembering about * Joe the Rapist who thinks he's a nice guy, and * all the women on reddit who have been mistreated by Nice Guys, and * Barry, who is undoubtedly an actual nice guy with impeccable feminist credentials who's still going to die alone, and * Henry who beats his wives and extra-marital girlfriends but will never once be alone in all his adult life, I also thought about * a friend on twitter who dearly loves her boyfriend, also on twitter, who is a disagreeable insulting edgelord that drugs her, and * another friend on twitter who once wrote about the great time she had screaming in the back of a car while being violently fucked by a handsome sadist, who was "good for her", and finally I remembered, * that study which found that ugly men are judged as creepy while handsome criminals are not. I remembered all of this, all these horrible confusing facts, and I tried to draw them into a tidy theory. Usually when I try to explain things on this blog, I come up with like twenty candidate explanations and maybe one or two of them are good. I don't have a list like that today. I've got one guess:

Women like handsome disagreeable dominant men, regardless of whether they're abusive, and they don't like ugly submissive agreeable men, regardless of whether they're abusive. Women are more likely to see men as being abusive if they're not attracted to the men and they're less likely to see men as being abusive if they find the men attractive. Women still know when they're being hit, of course, even if it's a handsome dominant disagreeable man, but they don't come to the conclusion that it's wrong.

Points in favor of this: It explains the case of those two women I know on twitter, who are/were very happy with being abused by handsome dominant men. It kind of explains why some abusive men, like Joe The Agreeable Rapist, get rightly ostracized for being abusive, while the wives and girlfriends of the Henry The Dominant keep coming back to him for another round in the boxing ring. It explains why women on reddit would more readily call out nice men, i.e. submissive or agreeable men, for being abusive than the dominant men they're attracted to, who might well be abusive at the same or higher or lower rates - the theory doesn't distinguish. And it kind of explains why I, average looking and concerned about niceness, but also sometimes aloof in a way that reminds you of your father, find myself under an average amount of romantic interest.

It's also fucking horrifying. Abuse should make a bigger difference to women than it seems to. It's horrifying that abuse happens, and it's horrifying that it's accepted. I hope that I come up with twenty candidate explanations that are more compelling than this, and they're all less horrifying, but for now, this is what I've got.

One small point against the theory is another woman I know on twitter who likes to beat, cut, and gag submissive men in the bedroom - with their consent, is my understanding - but still, that's one counterexample to the generalization of women liking dominant men.

Let's bookend the post with an explicit summary of the distinction between Nice Guys and nice guys: Guys who are nice are not abusive, necessarily, among having other nicer behaviors. It's not a bad thing to be nice, but it's not what anyone is looking for. Hard to believe, but consistent with all the evidence. Nice Guys™, in contrast, are those not particularly handsome men who are also submissive or agreeable, which traits women generally don't want. This second group probably starts out being malicious toward women at base rates for men, but they get called out for malice more than other men with equally evidenced guilt, either because * women feel disgusted by their looks and sometimes attribute the disgust to the man's character, or because * insulting people you're not attracted to is as common among humans as giving a little higher-than-merited praise to the people you find attractive, or because * Nice Guys become jerks in response to being bitter about being undesirable or insulted, or because * women are less likely to forgive Nice Guys for their malice when they make mistakes, or because * Nice Guys are less experienced at being decent because they have fewer relationships because they don't get into knife fights with other men in bars, the way that women love deep down, as much as they love men with strong jaws, men who command respect, and men who give playful insults that ambiguously demonstrate depth of affection through counter-signalling in a way that reminds us of addictive variable-ratio reinforcement schedules. Alternatively, Nice Guys™ are guys who are merely claiming to be nice out of some combination of conscious deception and unconscious self-deception, not because it's positively attractive, but because it's better than what they really are.

Edit: A friend points out that shamefulness is reliably unattractive, while shamelessness is reliably attractive. Further, they point out that the variance in shame seems to be more driven by personality than by having things to be ashamed about. From this, we can guess that the dispreference for shame is probably not an evidential dispreference (wherein the display of shame is seen as a sign of a personal flaw), but rather shame is the flaw itself: it's instrumentally or terminally dispreferred in mates, perhaps because showing weakness invites attack from others or because shame reduces value-capturing assertiveness.