Book Review: Crazy Like Us - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten
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Summary and commentary on Ethan Watters' "Crazy Like Us: The Globalization Of The American Psyche"
We talk a lot about falling biodiversity. Sometimes we apply the same metaphor to the human world, eg “falling linguistic biodiversity" when minority languages get replaced by English or whatever. In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters sounds the alarm about falling psychiatric biodiversity. Along with all the usual effects of globalization, everyone is starting to have the same mental illnesses, and to understand them in the same way. This is bad insofar as greater diversity of mental illness could teach us something about the process that generates them, and greater diversity of frameworks and…
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