On Middles (Borderline Personality for Bayesians)

a personal reflection on why i have a knee jerk negative reaction to any mention of "balance"

My high school political science/economics teacher once spoke of the benefits of psychotherapy, saying it led him to many realizations about himself and his family members. He was much more open with his personal life than the other teachers, and his students respected him more for it.

I once asked him if cereal is soup. He said it’s not. He says he thinks this way because he has the habit of dividing situations and people into binary categories like good or bad. I responded (amusingly in hindsight) that I was often the opposite. I was not. (Even the act of thinking of myself in terms of “opposite to” the tendency was ironically symptomatic of the very same tendency.)

I eventually realized I was also in the habit of dividing all concepts into good or bad. This psychological tendency has a name: “splitting”. I like it when things have names, it makes abstract ideas feel like concrete “things.” This process has a name as well. “Reification.” I like the word so much I made a kandi bracelet that says “reification.” I literally reified the kandi bracelet!

He went on to say that this type of thinking was because of his childhood experiences. Something about growing up in a dysfunctional family with an abusive alcoholic father and a brother who got addicted to substances very young, and a mother who let all of this happen, somehow made him think this way. He proposed that he did it because it gave him a sense of control but said he didn’t really know why. In this essay I want to expand upon this notion of “having control” and form connections between it and the concepts of balance, moderation, and splitting.

I hate myself. I have for a long time. A while back I googled a list of negative characteristics and listed the ones that apply to me in a blank google doc. Twenty words separated by commas. In a dishonest attempt to “balance” my view of myself, I then googled a list of positive characteristics that might ““balance”” out the negative characteristics. A measly two more words added to this google doc. Clearly I must be an objectively bad person!

I continued writing this google doc because I’m self obsessed and love describing myself. I showed it to my friend because I’m self obsessed and love other people describing me. My friend Sofia was put off by how negative my list of character traits were and tried to change all of them to something positive. All of them felt like euphemisms for the bad thing instead of good things, but that was probably because I was comparing them to what I originally wrote.

I’ve always had a knee-jerk reaction to any mention of the concept of “balance” without understanding why. It seemed like a principle that amounted to nothing, gave no advice about how one should live. It just sounds like a pointless platitude. You walk into the women’s section at Macy’s and it’s plastered in feathery script across a tie-dye shirt, and then you go on your phone in the checkout line and you open Instagram and the first infographic you see is “how to achieve work-life balance” in some garish neon display font accompanied by a misshapen figure drawn in corporate memphis.

Remember Sofia from earlier, the friend who insisted I replace the negative traits in my self-description with more positive ones. I met her through a mutual friend, let’s call him Andrew, who has cut her off because she is both clueless about social norms and unwilling to follow them. To be more specific, Sofia is very curious about people, but she did not know that going up to a near stranger and asking if he is gay was not only against the social rules but was likely to cause social harm in the form of outing someone who is in the closet to some people but not others.

Andrew has a habit of suddenly cutting off many people he was previously close with. I have survived The Cut because I am abnormally agreeable and pretend to have or actually have no convictions whatsoever, and also, having grown up with few friends, I am eager to keep all of them. This makes me a controversial friend among many of my friends, because many of my friends seem to hate each other. I am caught in the crossfire.

I personally suspect Andrew has Borderline Personality Disorder, or at least some symptoms of it, although I’m not a psychiatrist. One of the main symptom criteria most characteristic of BPD is relationships categorized by cycling through extremes of idealization and devaluation, also called “splitting” as mentioned earlier.

BPD is unique in that its symptom criteria seem so varied on the surface as opposed to other DSM criteria like depression or anxiety, whose criteria seem so obvious that they’re almost tautological. I have two favorite models uniting all of the facets of BPD and one of them I stole from my favorite psychiatrist blogger Scott Alexander, who I’ve mentioned in a previous post in the context of autism and schizophrenia. This is the Bayesian brain hypothesis, or the idea that the brain can be modeled as an algorithm running something analogous to Bayes’ Theorem for predictions. The Bayesian model of BPD suggests an overreliance on new evidence and a corresponding over-updating of prior beliefs.

One of my other friends who absorbed the lexicon of rationalist online circles through me, once remarked that Andrew is “trapped in past priors” because of his prior traumatic experiences of abuse, neglect, and ACE score of 9 or 10. This could not be further from what the model suggests. In this model, someone with borderline personality can’t rely on their priors. This happens because someone has had experiences that have repeatedly shattered their view of the world, to the extent that they can’t trust the predictions they will make about it.

This is why black and white thinking is a symptom of BPD, because to form beliefs about the world, we must make predictions about it. If the world around you is unpredictable, your predictions must become generalizable across all possible contexts, which leads them to be black and white. To answer my government teacher, this is also why it’s a symptom of childhood trauma in general, because under this framework trauma is definitionally an experience that disrupts one’s predictive model of the world.

It is often said in philosophy of science that the value of a theory is its ability to make predictions. If we were to apply this to frameworks for morality, we might evaluate the predictions that various moral systems would make. One of the oldest frameworks for morality is the virtue ethics of Aristotle, which relied on a concept he called the “golden mean.” Aristotle admitted that the predictive value of his theory relied on taking the individual context into account. This still provides no concrete direction in one’s life.

I think one problem with it is that now people have fewer mentors, or none at all. Real life mentorship offers what ancient Greek philosophers and internet shills don’t. My dad recently asked me if I had any mentors. I didn’t say anything. The question itself felt like it oozed with distaste. When you hate yourself, you also hate the reflection of yourself in other people’s eyes. Everything is a secret allusion to your failure at being a functional person.

What should I do? The most important question anyone will answer. All balances are extremes in the context of other extremes. All grey is white next to black and black next to white. Ask the shadow illusion or any other optical illusion that changes the perception of color based on its environment. Mental space is a landscape of attractor basins, and the slopes are all too slippery. It could all just go down the drain.

What should I do? One thing people manage to do is place what Scott Alexander called a Schelling fence, after the economist Thomas Schelling’s notion of a “schelling point.” I’m writing this on Christmas after gorging myself on chicken wings, as one does, instead of pre-studying for the data structures and algorithms class I failed last quarter and am retaking this quarter. Not studying and gorging oneself on holidays is a pretty common-sensible and socially entrenched Schelling fence. Not studying is also a slippery slope to failing your data structures and algorithms class because the marginal loss of slightly less understanding of the difficult material is eclipsed by the marginal benefit doing things you actually like, until marginal losses become major losses, like a non-optimal greedy algorithm. Each decision not to study tips my self-image just a little more towards someone who can’t get themselves to study especially if your self-image is already tippy. (another symptom of BPD!)

I once called my friend while pacing around a 7-11 as he told me that I should become more “golden-mean-pilled.” I had qualms about this which I did not articulate correctly in the moment. If you plot the set of possible responses to a certain situation along an axis of opposite virtues that become vices at the extremes (classic example is cowardice vs. recklessness) the set becomes so expansive that almost every response is in the middle and the distinction between middle and extreme falls apart. It still relies on another faculty of reason, practical reason or common sense to determine what is the most “““balanced””” response.

I suspect the problem with this is that we both are plotting everything on just one axis. A ““““balanced”””” response to a situation is modeled as the solution to a highly dimensional optimisation problem, trying to maximize so many and minimize so many variables that to name them all would not fit in pithy infographics and Hollister T-shirts. The question remains, which of these countably infinite dimensions should we consider, which of course, as mentioned earlier, depends on context.

Therefore, this confusion about balance is yet another manifestation of one of the central themes of this blog, the contextual collapse which is fractally reflected at every scale, on an individual and psychopathological level, and on a societal level.