Indulge my curiosity, part 2

[lederhosen]

First off, if you haven't looked at the Reading Exercise and Poll I posted earlier, you might want to try your hand at that before reading past the cut.



Naturally, it was a trick question. Some of you may have hit upon the correct answer without realising it was within the scope of the question (in which case, feel free to stick your hands up now). I was interested not so much in what people thought about the idea of using drugs to modify human behaviour (as worthwhile a topic as that is), but in the meta- level: how people evaluate stories like this.

In my ideal world, you see, people's first reaction to such an article would be something like this:

"I wonder whether this description of the proposed program is actually accurate? I'd like to check the CCLE article it lists as its upstream source, before I pass judgement on the idea."

(Ideally one would go upstream from that, and read the Independent article on which the CCLE piece is based - but as that's a pay-site, it's a bit more of an obstacle than the single click needed to view the CCLE page.)

Partial-credit answers, losing marks only because the above one trumps them both:

"I notice lederhosen has snipped some of the article. I'd like to look at the article and see whether there's any context I need to know about, before passing judgement."

"lederhosen hasn't said where this article comes from - for all I know, it could be the Weekly World News. I'd like to find its pedigree, or at least examine the URL, to help decide whether this is plausible."

Checking the CCLE article, we find that the post I quoted is a rather misleading representation of its source. Chaston refers to "the vaccination of children against particular behaviours", and plans to "innoculate [sic] children against a host of behaviours". His addition of 'blogging' to the list of antisocial behaviours is presumably intended as a joke, but it furthers the misleading impression that we're talking about "vaccinating against behaviours" in the first place - as if, by sticking a needle in somebody's arm, you could make them mentally incapable of shoplifting or driving SUVs.

In fact, the CCLE article isn't about vaccination against behaviours - the word 'behaviour' isn't used at all. It talks about vaccinating people against the effects of drugs - looking at another page on the same site, the idea is to make drug use less pleasurable by blocking/reducing the "high".

Obviously, the aim of this is to discourage a specific kind of behaviour - but it's vastly different from vaccinating people against that behaviour directly. Before we can make a sensible decision about whether such a program is justifiable, we have to know what the program actually *is*, and you don't get that by taking the material I quoted at face value.

One of the less delightful aspects of my PhD work was discovering that when half a dozen different scientists quote the same figure for something, they may all have taken it from the same source, and that source may have got it wrong. Even if (as was the case) that source was my co-supervisor and future employer...

Comments

[ex-cerebrate131.livejournal.com]

Alternatively, one might conclude that while they're mechanically unequal, they're effectually equal.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

But they're *not* effectually equal. A method that actually allows one to vaccinate against a form of behaviour (supposing such were even possible) has *very* different effects to one that merely interferes with a drug high.

For one, the former is much more easily generalisable to non-drug forms of behaviour (I very deliberately included an option for vaccination against 'violence' because it's *not* something that could be affected this way).

This has much bearing on whether the slippery-slope argument is applicable - assenting to a technique that can only really be used against drugs is 'safer' than assenting to a technique that can be adapted to 'antisocial behaviour' in general.

It also has bearing on whether vaccination is likely to work, even against drugs, because it's not always about the high. Take drinking - a lot of people will drink out of peer pressure and custom, not just for the alcohol buzz, and taking the buzz out of the equation won't necessarily change the behaviour. Vaccinating against the buzz does *not* give the same results as vaccinating against the behaviour.

(Making it an actively nasty experience, as with Antabuse, might be more effective - but from what I read on the vaccination, that's not what's being proposed here.)

It also has bearing on the question of whether we're infringing on free will, which a lot of respondents have indicated as important here. Taking the fun out of an activity may be obnoxious, but it's *not* preventing people from exercising their will. If I post plot spoilers for the next Harry Potter book I'm a bastard, not an oppressor.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Conditioning works, therefore inflicting pain or pleasure on someone (or preventing such) is interfering with their free will.

If I installed a chip in someone that would shock them every time they did something I didn't like, that'd be oppression.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Under that interpretation, though, it's impossible to get through life without interfering with others' free will on a regular basis - in which case the "free will is sacrosanct" response no longer holds water, because we're accepting free-will violations all over the place.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Just like everything else, you have to draw a line, and altering brain chemistry seems like it would clearly be on the oppressive side.

But garden-variety harassment, and other things that have a 'chilling effect' on peoples' behavior, are bad for the same reason.

[texas-tiger.livejournal.com]

Or one might assume that this was an intellectual exercise along the line of "If you had the power to do X, would you?" in which case all considerations over whether this is actually something possible or something proposed fall by the wayside.

Which is how I approached it.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Same here, really.

Although what I was assuming it was talking about (vaccinating against behavior by making it not fun -- how else would a vaccination change behavior?) is what Jazz said it was actually about. }:P

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

how else would a vaccination change behavior?

There are several ways it might be done, because behaviour isn't just determined by a cost/reward function. People often do irrational stuff even though they *know* it will make them unhappy.

Grossly simplifying neurology: neurons are connected to one another, and when one fires it can trigger - or suppress - others. If you hear a loud noise, that sets off the neurons involved in hearing, and a chain reaction results that leads to the neurons controlling your eyelids, and you blink. Higher-level thought processes are much more complicated, with things like feedback loops and competing processes involved, but it's the same sort of idea, a chain-reaction of neurons firing.

If you can interfere with that chain, you can modify behaviour. For instance, you can damp or amplify things like the blink reflex by manipulating how easily each neuron triggers the next (alter the concentration of neurotransmitters, alter sensitivity of the receptors to those transmitters, alter the speed at which they're metabolized, and so on). If you can target specific pathways or specific areas of the brain, you can probably selectively influence behaviours.

Doing that to the degree of precision necessary to block one specific activity without affecting others would be a very complicated task, which is part of why I was sceptical about this article. But we can already target all sorts of neurological disorders by pharmaceutical means - vaccination methods should in theory be able to replicate at least some of those treatments.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

'Behavior isn't just determined by a cost/reward function' is why it might not *work*. At least, not reliably.

But it's the glaringly obvious way to go about it, especially when you're talking about something like drugs.

I do remember seeing something (was it from you?) about parasites that made some pretty sophisticated alterations to their hosts behavior. And speculation that the same thing happened to people, and that many of what we thought were our own ideas were parasite-generated. }:P

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Don't think it was me, but I vaguely remember hearing about that. IIRC some microbes also influence behaviour to improve their chances of being passed on (certain STDs boost sex drive, and rabies is an obvious one), but it's not quite as finely targeted as the parasites.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I had trouble figuring out how to signal the scope of the question without giving away what I was looking for. But it's why I asked "what was your first reaction on reading the above quote?" rather than something like "what do you think of this idea?"

[malada.livejournal.com]

From the second page:

"These pharmacotherapy medications are designed to block or significantly reduce the “highs” elicited by illegal drugs."

Ha.

I'm an ex-pot head. Not a very big pot head but I did smoke it on a regular (weekly) basis. First, you'd have to block the specific pathways to the brain that cause the "high" elicited by marijuana. Not likely. Pot is complex and you might end up blocking the signals for simple pain or neutralizing *legal* pain killers.

Other drugs might have simpler chemical keys but this may start an 'arms race' between 'illicit' drug makers and those making the vaccines. Once one drug becomes 'ineffictive' another will be hacked together.

Blocking the 'high' from drugs will not stop drug use. Drug use has biological, social and psychological roots. When potheads can't get weed they drink alcohol. I tended to smoke more in social circumstances and when I was depressed. When I did smoke alone it tended to be a small bong hit. It eased my stomach too. When these factors changed - a change in my psychological state, I stopping visiting my druggie friends - my pot use dropped steeply.

That is my basic stand on broadly based 'vaccinations' against drugs. It makes very little sense.

Oh, I think it's not ethical either.

Continuing the quote:

"Used as part of a drug treatment program, pharmacotherapy medications may provide a valuable aid for people seeking a chemical aid in limiting or eliminating problem drug use."

*Individual* use, to break addition might be okay but I think other methods would be cheaper, easier and beter.

-m

What's in a name?

[jazzmasterson.livejournal.com]

Actually, the article is still misleading, probably because someone in the chain somewhere misunderstood based on the word "vaccine". Specifically: The posts lederhosen linked to are based on an article in the Independent, which says that the British Government is considering using the "vaccine" preventatively. Either the Independent got the story wrong, or someone in the B.G. has just embarassed himself. The article in question has gone behind a pay barrier, so it's not a call I can make.

The treatment is called a vaccine because it works technically in a manner similar to vaccination. However, it isn't a vaccine in the preventative sense: it's intended for use in treatment of people who are already addicted to a drug, and want to quit it.

That's why the people devloping it prefer the term "Immunotherapy", which is accurate but doesn't have the misleading connotations of "vaccine".

Here's the report on it:
http://books.nap.edu/catalog/10876.html

Here's a chapter on the benefits and costs:
http://www.sppsr.ucla.edu/ClassNet/Spring04/10101%20%20C/NRC%20immunotherpy.doc

And here's the guy who wrote that chapter, who is not happy because of this particular misunderstanding:

http://www.markarkleiman.com/archives/drug_policy_/2004/07/vaccines_against_drug_abuse_not.php

The technology seems to be within reach; a nicotine therapy is well along in human trials, and a cocaine therapy shows promise, though it has yet to be subjected to the double-blind acid test. (Alcohol is a no-go for technical reasons, and there are so many opiates and opioids out there that there might not be much use in making one or two of them unusable by a given patient; the new treatments are molecule-specific.)

The idea is either to teach the body's immune system to respond to the drug molecules as if they were pathogens (by making antibodies to them), or to make the antibodies in a factory and then inject them directly into the patient.

Since this is the same principle by which vaccination against infectious disease works, it seems natural to call the proposed therapies "vaccines." But calling them vaccines would be profoundly misleading, since vaccines are used prophylactically, to prevent disease, while the new anti-drug treatments would be used therapeutically, to treat already established cases of drug abuse (or, perhaps, as secondary prevention in individuals -- especially adolescents -- who had started to use an abusable drug but not yet become diagnosably drug-abusing or dependent).

I think that when used in conjunction with therapy, this is a very good idea. And that's what it's for: use in conjunction with therapy.

So, the reading exercise was more difficult than possibly intended, and illustrates Art's point maybe better: beware of many articles based on a single newspaper article. They don't count as multiple sources.

Re: What's in a name?

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Yup. I didn't mean to imply that the CCLE article was 100% accurate itself, only that the samizdata one obviously *wasn't*.

[jesusandrew.livejournal.com]

I don't think using a poll was really the best way to assess what you wanted to assess. It was pretty obvious that the science was rubbish, so I thought you were looking for people's assessment of the worthiness and morality of the concept itself, just as if it were an implausible idea raised in a science fiction novel. To my mind, phrasing your request in the form of a poll automatically limits the frame of the discussion to the options listed - as they all had a social context, the implication is that you're looking for information on people's opinions in a social context.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

It was pretty obvious that the science was rubbish

Obvious to some, no doubt. But I only posted it because I'd already seen far too many people responding to Chaston's article in ways that indicated they had uncritically accepted it as truth.

To my mind, phrasing your request in the form of a poll automatically limits the frame of the discussion to the options listed - as they all had a social context, the implication is that you're looking for information on people's opinions in a social context.

True - but explicitly offering 'question the article' as an option would have given it away. Closest I could get was to phrase it in meta-language ('what was your first reaction on reading the above quote?' rather than 'what do you think of this idea?')

What would the best way have been?

[jesusandrew.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to be dismissive in my opinion of the science - I can see what you were trying to do, and I applaud any attempt to promote critical thinking.

To be honest, I'm not sure what the best approach would've been. Possibly to stick with "what was your first reaction?" without listing any multiple choice options - it's less likely to channel the readers' thinking as much as a multiple choice question, but you may not have received as many replies in that case.