somervta:

nostalgebraist:

I would love to have a clear sense of exactly what it is E. T. Jaynes argues and where I disagree with it but that would take some real effort and I have other more things I’m more interested in doing with that effort, at least right now

From an “external view” it looks to me like Jaynes can’t possibly have resolved these issues in the clear-cut way people claim, because people who are clearly good at this kind of stuff don’t write as though he did.  There would almost have to be this conspiracy of ignorance going on where a bunch of philosophy-of-math people just decided to ignore a completely perfect argument and spend all their time talking about Dutch Books and “Teller’s P” and all this other stuff.  I don’t know where the flaw in Jaynes is, but if there is not one then something … unlikely is going on here

And that doesn’t make me want to put in the effort, but I’m pretty sure what I’d get out is “Jaynes doesn’t resolve the interpretation of probability once and for all” and that’s what all the experts on this stuff already seem to think, so for now I can just believe them because they’re experts

Well, Jaynes’ work is definitely mentioned a little, but not very much, among the phil. of math and sci folks I’ve frequented. Most of the ones that don’t have never put in the effort to understand him (My philsci lecturer heard I was using him in my essay and asked me to help him clear some thing up about his work). I’m not sure exactly what you hear people saying, but he himself admitted that his project was incomplete. Theres an odd disconnect regarding objective and subjective bayesianism in some philosophical circles, but Jaynes slots right in as a card carrying-objective bayesian (depending on which set of definitions you use, he may *also* be a subjective bayesian).

The thing is, Jaynes was primarily concerned with a very different debate - the semi-practical one of statistics, ‘frequentism’ vs bayesianism, not the related-but-distinct debates in philosophy, so his remarks tend to be a little tricky to slot neatly into the debate. Occasionally, he took purported problems for bayesianism, like the parameter invariance problems, and basically sad ‘yes, this is troubling, but [detailed examination of frequentist approach and why it has the same problem or worse]’.

Most of the substantive things Jaynes said just weren’t as directly related to the philosophical debates as they seem. I’m not saying they’re not relevant, but it’s work to repackage them as responses to the right questions when you can, and to be frank there just isn’t that many people doing work on objective bayesianism (at least in philsci, which is the field I’m passingly familiar with).

Having said all that… Look, I went through the relevant about 10% of PT:LOS and half a dozen other little papers of Jaynes’ for a paper in a philsci course. I’m not an expert in any of this yet, my math isn’t up to properly understand it at anywhere near the speed and depth other people (like, say scientiststhesis), but if you’ve got specific questions, I can *try* to help?

This is very interesting.

I guess I’m confused and a bit unnerved by the distinction you make between

“the semi-practical one of statistics, ‘frequentism’ vs bayesianism”

and

“the related-but-distinct debates in philosophy”

since I’ve been treating these as nearly indistinct and assuming others will do the same.  Of course in actual applications one runs often into the question of whether a “Bayesian” or “non-Bayesian” method will work better in a particular case, and this is distinct from the big philosophical debate about whether perfect Bayesianism (to which most methods are approximations) is a good ideal or not.

But positions on these questions seem highly related; people who are “philosophical Bayesians” usually seem to be highly in favor of approximate-Bayes methods in real problems, in my experience, and likewise the typical self-identified “Bayesian” seems to really believe in “philosophical” Bayesianism – that Bayes is the best ideal – not just that approximate-Bayes methods are neat and useful.  (As far as I can tell, self-describing as “a Bayesian” implies that one takes both of these positions)

The problem I’m running into here is that all the self-identified Bayesians in this conversation are directing me to Jaynes, and, as you say, it can be hard to translate Jaynes’ arguments into the philosophical terms I want to use.

For example, Jaynes is not very clear on synchronic vs. diachronic, and when reading him I have to constantly figure out whether I think what he’s saying is true diachronically, as a principle about response to new information, or only synchronically, as a principle about self-consistently tracing out the implications of your current beliefs.  

OK, here’s where I ask a question.  In this post I talk about how it’s not very clear to me when, in Chs. 2-4 of PT:LOS, Jaynes is talking synchronically and when he’s talking diachronically.  Both of the Bayesians who have argued against me here claim that Jaynes’ presentation of Cox’s theorem in Ch. 2 is convincing if you interpret it as diachronic rather than synchronic, so that e.g. P(B|A) is not just a term in your current belief system, but what you should update if you observe A.  This would require all of the postulates behind the theorem to be consistent with the diachronic interpretation, and intuitive given that interpretation.

I thought about this idea – “diachronic Cox” as a justification for conditionalization – for maybe 30-60 minutes when it was first mentioned to me and I couldn’t find anything wrong with it.  However, this feels very strange to me because Cox’s theorem is usually cited as a purely synchronic result; if just making it diachronic gets us conditionalization, many people should have noticed that, when instead no one in the philosophy/statistics community seems to have done so.  (In fact, close reading of Jaynes suggests to me that he thinks of his result in Ch. 2 as a synchronic result, which would make “diachronic Cox” a simple and extremely effective argument that has gone unnoticed by everyone including the author of the only text that even looks like it might be supporting it.)

So my question is: is there a flaw in “diachronic Cox” as a justification for conditionalization, and if not, why is it not usually listed as one of the justifications for conditionalization?  (I haven’t been able to figure this out yet and am wary of putting more effort into it; please only put effort into it yourself if you actually want to, and don’t treat this as a responsibility to me.)

(P.S.: there are people, like Earman, who dislike Cox even synchronically because they don’t find the postulates intuitive even synchronically, but let’s bracket that for now)

(P.P.S. Just to make this explicit, there do exist writers who defend something like “frequentism” as an actual ideal that they claim is superior to Bayesianism, like Deborah Mayo in the book reviewed here.  I’m sure you know that already, but I just want to make sure it gets mentioned in this post for completeness)

(via somervta)

nostalgebraist.tumblr.com →

blowhards

I’ve been reading a lot of stuff online about the Hugo awards and it’s pretty much what you’d expect.  Lots of “I oppose these guys because of their politics” vs. “but why can’t you just focus on the work” which gets the well-deserved response “politics and the work are not inseparable,” etc. etc.

But something seems like it’s missing in all of this.  The charge against Vox Day and Larry Correia (particularly the former) is that they hold abhorrent views.  This unfortunately contains a trapdoor into the too-familiar rabbit hole of “but why can’t you just focus on the work” – and I think there’s actually a little bit of something to that.  I can’t in good faith say that “homophobes can’t write good books” because I’ve read and enjoyed lots of books with no gay characters by authors I knew nothing about.  In every one of those cases, the author might have been a homophobe.  How would I have known, really, realistically?

(Never forgot what Nabokov thought of his gay brother.)

What’s missing here is that Vox Day sucks in a way that goes beyond his views, even though it’s inseparable from them.  He’s not just a right-wing homophobe, he’s a right-wing homophobic pompous blowhard.  Maybe it’s in poor taste to even point this out – isn’t that merely a matter of personal style, while being a right-wing homophobe is a matter of actual consequence?

This angle on the story, however seemingly trivial, does have the advantage of short-circuiting "but why can’t you just focus on the work.“  There are some people who are nice, clever, funny, likable, and just happen to hold abhorrent views that you might not find out until after years of knowing (or reading) them, if ever.  Vox Day is not that sort of guy.  He’s swaggering, pretentious, tactless, rhetorically clumsy, Dunning-Kruger-prone.  He’s the kind of guy I can’t imagine not being obnoxious to talk to, about any subject, even one that seemed to have as little as possible (however little that is!) to do with politics.

Or look at John C. Wright – not on the Hugo ballot, but a member of the same clique, lauded by Day, idolized by Correia.  These guys think of Wright as some sort of linguistic wizard, a master of the kind of baroque, learned rhetoric that has become, they say, too rare in our ignorant age.  Here is a fully representative passage from Wright’s blog (indeed, from a post Correia likes so much he’s linked it several times):

I will use the example of the non-discussion on the sensitive matter of Women’s role in a post-gendered, post-Christian and post-rational society. If the gentle reader recalls from our last episode, your gentle but innocent host (me) was taken unawares, elbows and knees jerking in angular yet antic surprise, eyebrows aloft, to discover a respectable lady of the science fiction persuasion expressing discontent with the way strong female characters are portrayed in genre writing.

The point I want to make here isn’t about what Wright is saying.  It’s about the fact that he sounds utterly ridiculous.  It’s bad on every level – rhetorical, aesthetic, all the way down to the basics of diction and syntax.  The plodding, bureaucratic-sounding opening ("the example of the non-discussion on the sensitive matter”); the repetition of “gentle”; the awkward “was taken unawares … to discover” (compare to the equally awkward “was taken by surprise to discover”); the weird opposition of “angular” and “antic” (as though one might ordinarily be thought to preclude the other?); the fumbled grasp at old-school gentility (“respectable lady”); the lack of confidence in that very grasp revealed in an attempt an mood-breaking humor (“of the science fiction persuasion”) that itself fumbles; the ominous and inexplicable capitalization of “Women,” not used anywhere else in the post except in the phrase “Women’s Liberation” … this is terrible writing.  Stylistically terrible, but not just stylistically.  The style sucks, the tone sucks, the humor sucks, the attempted erudition sucks.  The implied author is a guy who sucks – a guy you’d hate to be cornered by at a party or on a subway, a guy who’d manage to make even the blandest nice-weather-these-days conversation into something insufferable.

And I’ve gotten that far without even talking about what he’s actually saying!

I wonder how much of the widespread resentment for these guys is basically on this level.  As I said earlier, it’s tempting not to get into this at all, because it ends up sounding like you think matters of style are more important than beliefs about human beings.

But the fact of the matter is that I’ve read and enjoyed books by Vladimir Nabokov and have continued to do so even since I learned what he thought of his gay brother – not because that didn’t matter, but precisely because Nabokov’s writing is, for whatever reason, not the kind of writing you’d expect from the sort of guy you’d imagine would hold those views.  Whatever he believed, Nabokov did not write like a pompous, self-parodic right-wing blowhard.  And the thing about Day and Wright and their ilk is that they do.  They are the kinds of straight-from-central-casting right-wing blowhards that put left-wing satirists out of work.  Their writing is the writing of that prick from your high school newspaper who wore suits every day and never stopped talking about William F. Buckley, Jr.  It’s self-parodic, stereotypical, tone-deaf, mastery-obsessed jerkoff dude writing.  It is its own worst enemy.  These guys say "but why can’t you just focus on the work,“ and instead of saying "but politics inseparable blah blah blah” and getting lost in philosophical rabbit holes, what I really want to say is: “I’ve read your blog; do you really expect me to believe your work doesn’t fucking suck?”

hobbyhorse #23442 hasn’t been for a ride in a while

ozymandias271:

nostalgebraist:

Not sure if this is a good or worthwhile post but I spent too long typing it to not post it so here goes

My attitude toward David Foster Wallace is, in a way, kind of similar to my attitude to J Campbell of Pictures For Sad Children, in that they’re both people whose art is completely shaped and saturated by their depression.

Like, there are a lot of artists with depression, and it’s not at all correct to say that if you know an artist is depressed that gives you profound insight into their work.  But in those two cases it really does.

In particular — and I know this probably sounds like an objectionable claim in a number of senses — it calls into question a lot of the actual ideas that appear in their work.  A lot of the ideas Campbell puts forth seem to me like the kind of things that people think while in intensely negative mental states more than they seem like ideas that would hold up in the figurative light of day following a dark night of the soul.  (Those of you who have been following me for a while may remember when I wrote a really long post criticizing this one PFSC comic — that’s the kind of idea I’m thinking of.)  DFW’s ideas are very different, but have a similar link to their origin.  A lot of them seem like desperate attempts to cling to something that seems untainted — “sincerity,” “responsibility,” “mathematical truth” — in a world that, to his brain, seemed inevitably and thoroughly tainted.

I’m not saying that depressed people can’t have good ideas, or anything like that.  I’m saying that there is a certain kind of idea we could call a typical “depressed idea,” and DFW and Campbell advocate a lot of these ideas.  Appreciating the extent of their depression entails appreciating that these ideas are tainted by their source.  I think, and sometimes say, a lot of strange things because of my anxiety, and I try not to conflate these momentarily compelling ideas with actual enduring beliefs.  There is such a thing as recognizing when it’s just the disease talking, and I don’t think it’s incompatible with respecting people who have the disease.

Anyway, what I’m building up to is this: I like DFW as an artist.  I think he’s especially good at depicting awful mental states, of the kind that result from depression, anxiety and/or addiction.  That is what most of his writing is about, more or less.  In that sense he’s similar to Campbell, but I think he’s more talented, and seems to have been at least somewhat less of a jerk.

However, I think DFW’s reputation is almost irreparably broken, because it’s latched on to his most codifiable “ideas” — themselves, basically, waste products of depression — rather than his actual art.  It’s like what would have happened if Campbell had become internationally famous for that post about not using money, and people who knew nothing else about her thought of her as “that anti-money person.”  This results in lots of confusion.  In particular, because DFW’s ideas tend to be so touchy-feely and positive — the result of reaching for the strongest ideological opiates while in a state of extreme pain — he tends to get caricatured as some sort of insufferably nice, smarmy, sentimental person — like a highbrow John Green — which is hilariously incompatible with his actual work.

(I owe the original DFW/Campbell to tumblr user kadathinthecoldwaste)

I really like David Foster Wallace’s ideas, at least those I’ve read of them: maybe because I am also a depressed person who is reaching for the cheeriest ideas possible to make myself feel better. (I’ve read Infinite Jest and a handful of his essays, I’m hardly a Wallace expert, so maybe he says other things I hate.) But I am totally into the sincerity thing as, like, an aesthetic. But they are also very clearly… depressed-person ideas? Which doesn’t mean they’re wrong just that his writing is clearly coming from A Position here. 

I guess a lot of what I’m thinking of is how attached he was sometimes to a vision of some sort of old-fashioned honesty and sense of duty that had been lost by the wayward youth of today.  He wrote a long essay about John McCain’s 2000 campaign where he talked about how McCain seemed so honest and real and such an unpretentious man of quiet responsibility etc. etc. and in general he was very impressed with American conservative rhetoric when it started talking about these kinds of things.  He was so into this “be an old-fashioned upstanding man” thing at times that I’m surprised I’ve never seen him photoshopped into a fedora.

(In The Pale King there’s a 100-page monologue by a guy who talks about how he was once a slacker in college who sat around doing drugs and mocking soap operas, but then he stumbled in on the opening lecture of an accounting class by mistake, and the professor was talking about how working for the IRS was this great civic duty, and this was so inspiring that it spiritually transformed him and he now understood the importance of responsibility.)

This kind of thinking is very recognizable to me, because in my own worst moments (disclaimer: not due to depression) I tend to feel like everything is sort of sick and diseased, like the whole world is one huge festering tumor, and in these moments it's very appealing to think that this was once not the case, and that the reason for the change is that people like me are not acting responsibly.  For one thing, this fits the sense of intense guilt that tends to accompany these moments – the world is a festering tumor because I and people like me are irresponsible – and also provides hope in the form of a proof of concept, because if the world was once not a festering tumor it might once again not be one, and there might be something I can do to help (first by recognizing how much I suck, which, as I said, fits right in with this kind of emotional state).

And I think the way DFW tends to describe depression (feeling sick to the point that every atom in your body is somehow sick, nothing untainted even at the smallest level, etc.) suggests that the state of mind I described in the previous paragraph is very similar to one he felt a lot.

And, to get to the punchline, none of this means that we should accept this conservative view about kids-these-days, or that we should view DFW as any sort of garden variety conservative (which tends to be tumblr’s response whenever a relevant, out-of-context DFW quote starts floating around).  These thoughts were direct products of depression and should be treated as such, whatever that happens to mean.

(via bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190)

hobbyhorse #23442 hasn’t been for a ride in a while

Not sure if this is a good or worthwhile post but I spent too long typing it to not post it so here goes

My attitude toward David Foster Wallace is, in a way, kind of similar to my attitude to J Campbell of Pictures For Sad Children, in that they’re both people whose art is completely shaped and saturated by their depression.

Like, there are a lot of artists with depression, and it’s not at all correct to say that if you know an artist is depressed that gives you profound insight into their work.  But in those two cases it really does.

In particular – and I know this probably sounds like an objectionable claim in a number of senses – it calls into question a lot of the actual ideas that appear in their work.  A lot of the ideas Campbell puts forth seem to me like the kind of things that people think while in intensely negative mental states more than they seem like ideas that would hold up in the figurative light of day following a dark night of the soul.  (Those of you who have been following me for a while may remember when I wrote a really long post criticizing this one PFSC comic – that’s the kind of idea I’m thinking of.)  DFW’s ideas are very different, but have a similar link to their origin.  A lot of them seem like desperate attempts to cling to something that seems untainted – “sincerity,” “responsibility,” “mathematical truth” – in a world that, to his brain, seemed inevitably and thoroughly tainted.

I'm not saying that depressed people can’t have good ideas, or anything like that.  I’m saying that there is a certain kind of idea we could call a typical “depressed idea,” and DFW and Campbell advocate a lot of these ideas.  Appreciating the extent of their depression entails appreciating that these ideas are tainted by their source.  I think, and sometimes say, a lot of strange things because of my anxiety, and I try not to conflate these momentarily compelling ideas with actual enduring beliefs.  There is such a thing as recognizing when it’s just the disease talking, and I don’t think it’s incompatible with respecting people who have the disease.

Anyway, what I’m building up to is this: I like DFW as an artist.  I think he’s especially good at depicting awful mental states, of the kind that result from depression, anxiety and/or addiction.  That is what most of his writing is about, more or less.  In that sense he’s similar to Campbell, but I think he’s more talented, and seems to have been at least somewhat less of a jerk.

However, I think DFW’s reputation is almost irreparably broken, because it’s latched on to his most codifiable “ideas” – themselves, basically, waste products of depression – rather than his actual art.  It’s like what would have happened if Campbell had become internationally famous for that post about not using money, and people who knew nothing else about her thought of her as “that anti-money person.”  This results in lots of confusion.  In particular, because DFW’s ideas tend to be so touchy-feely and positive – the result of reaching for the strongest ideological opiates while in a state of extreme pain – he tends to get caricatured as some sort of insufferably nice, smarmy, sentimental person – like a highbrow John Green – which is hilariously incompatible with his actual work.

(I owe the original DFW/Campbell to tumblr user kadathinthecoldwaste)

I feel like riffing on that post I just linked.  Here is how I (as someone who only has a “likes to read Wikipedia articles about drugs” level of amateur bullshit neuro-pharmacology knowledge) currently think about serotonergic drugs and their effects:

As Scott Alexander says in that post, serotonin reuptake inhibitors tend to help with things like OCD and anxiety, while serotonin agonists like LSD, if anything, produce effects that are somewhat like those disorders (looping thoughts).

When you take an SSRI, there is more serotonin in the synaptic cleft all the time, and eventually this down-regulates your serotonin receptors.  SSRIs famously take days or weeks to take effect, and my understanding is that one possible explanation is that it’s actually the down-regulation that’s producing the clinically desired effect.

One could imagine that there is a signal being conveyed between serotonergic neurons encoded in patterns of firing and not-firing.  One could imagine that what the SSRI is doing is adding a bunch of serotonin to this signal so that your neurons say “wow, this signal is really loud, let’s become less sensitive to serotonin.”  The extra serotonin doesn’t convey any signal information in itself, but it causes desensitization (downregulation), which happens to make the signal itself feel quieter.  E.g. imagine the “signal” as a sequence of numbers like

[1 -3 5 2]

and imagine that the effect of the SSRI is to add a number like 20 to this

[21 17 25 22]

which makes your neurons say “whoa, those are big numbers, like at least ten times bigger than we expected, let’s get ten times less sensitive,” so now what’s felt, effectively, is

[2.1 1.7 2.5 2.2]

and one of the consequences of this is that the signal is now less strongly felt (e.g. that the difference between the first two numbers is now 0.4 where it was once 4).

And if this “signal” involves stuff like anxious loops, this is a good thing.

Psychedelics (at least the most famous ones), on the other hand, are serotonin agonists, so instead of putting more serotonin out there, they latch onto receptors and pretend to be serotonin.  But they only do this at certain types of serotonin receptors and not others.  Your brain has a bunch of different types of these receptors, probably because it’s in some way biochemically/developmentally convenient (?), and normally it doesn’t matter which is used in any part of the brain because they all receive serotonin.  But LSD or psilocin or whatever will only hit some of them.  The result is to produce a new signal based on which neurons have receptors hit by LSD and which don’t, so

[1 -3 5 2]

becomes say

[1 37 5 2]

and this is a totally new, weird signal that your brain isn’t used to dealing with in normal experience!  So you’ve got some new processing going on about loops or whatever, but it’s of a kind that you have no ordinary psychological defenses against, and these weird, not-based-on-reality loops can spin to their heart’s content.

This has always been my personal guess as to why psychedelics are so uniquely “weird,” because they’re revealing this hidden pattern of receptor subtypes that normally plays no role in brain function.  (Lots of other drugs like antipsychotics are selective in this way too, but many of them are antagonists rather than agonists, so maybe that explains why they aren’t “weird.”)

None of this, however, explains why MDMA is the way is it.  MDMA is a serotonin releasing agent.  An SSRI makes the serotonin that is already there stick around for longer, but MDMA makes your neurons release serotonin that they wouldn’t have otherwise.  In the language of this post I guess maybe that would correspond to adding really big numbers across the board, so

[1 -3 5 2]

becomes say

[101 97 105 102]

but it’s not clear why this would make people feel really happy and affectionate.  Of course serotonin does many, many things, so it’s not really a flaw of the “loop-related signal” idea that it doesn’t explain every single thing that serotonin can do.

I should also note that this stuff is complicated by the fact that some serotonin receptors are actually part of negative feedback loops – they tell neurons to release less serotonin if they’re seeing a lot of it, and vice versa – and affecting these is probably going to do the opposite (?) of whatever affecting the other ones does.

tourette’s talk

This is a post for tumblr user vastderp, who requested info about Tourette Syndrome (AKA Tourette’s or TS):

oh hey, thanks! i’m hoping to get people’s personal experience with medicating it in particular, what helps, how much you take, and what the side effects are like, and whether missing a day or two is enough to cause symptoms to worsen. 

the reason i’m looking for this is that i am thinking about writing about someone who has OCD and TS, but I only have OCD myself. also if you have any I Wish People Would Fucking Understand This issues, i would love to hear them too. I’m betting #1 on that list has got to be some variation of “no, we don’t all fucking curse uncontrollably!” but i figure there’s probably a lot more where that came from.

Okay, first of all, there are two misconceptions – not necessarily “common misconceptions,” but ones I’ve heard or seen before – that I want to mention:

1. People occasionally seem to get the impression that Tourette’s is in some fundamental way a linguistic disorder.  I’m thinking in particular of Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn, whose protagonist had TS, which was mostly depicted as something that made him uncontrollably utter words and phrases chosen or remixed from what he was thinking about or what he had just heard.  This bled over into a tendency to compulsively recombine and play with words in his head.  I guess this could be an accurate depiction of someone whose Tourette’s was very OCD-like or occurred together with OCD (though that’s a guess and I wouldn’t really know, not having OCD myself), but the idea that Tourette’s somehow inherently involves an unusual relationship to language is simply false.  To be diagnosed with Tourette’s, you need to have at least one vocal tic (in addition to at least one motor tic), but often those aren’t even verbal in nature.  The most common one is throat clearing; mine is a high-pitched squeaking noise.  More generally, I think the best way to think about TS is as a disorder of motion, where “noises” (including verbal noises) are a particular sub-type of “motions.”  To some extent I figure this is all pretty obvious to anyone who’s done any research about TS at all, but I feel like I need to mention it because it apparently wasn’t obvious to Lethem (?).  (I’m not dissing Lethem here, BTW, who I generally like, and whose character with TS I liked even if he wasn’t at all a representative TS case.)
   
2. People sometimes get the wrong impression about how voluntary or involuntary TS tics are.  This is understandable, because they’re at a weird border between the two that’s kind of hard to describe.  They’re not purely involuntary motions like reflexes – they’re more like very strong urges to make a particular motion.  On the other hand, calling them “urges” doesn’t quite do justice to just how hard they are to resist in practice.  Here’s a very close analogy for what they feel like (I came up with this to describe my own TS urges, but I’ve later heard it independently from other people with TS).  You know how, if you try to hold your breath for a long time, you eventually feel a strong urge or compulsion to stop holding your breath?  And this urge has certain special characteristics: it’s very intense, it consumes most or all of your attention, and it has this horrible feeling of acceleration, like you know it’s going to be far worse a few seconds from now, like by thinking about the next few seconds you’re staring into an onrushing, intolerable abyss?  That is almost exactly what the Tourette’s urges are like, if you replace “stop holding your breath” with “make a squeaking noise” or “tilt your head to the side” or whatever.  (Despite that dramatic description, they aren’t always that intense, though they can be at their worst.  But they have that sort of “intolerable onrushing abyss that must be stopped” quality to them, even when relatively mild.  If that makes any sense at all.)  The consequence of all this is that TS tics really can be avoided via willpower, but sometimes only temporarily, and it uses up all your attention and is extremely unpleasant and generally isn’t a practical solution in any real situation (unless the tic in question is “press the nuclear launch button and initiate WWIII” or some other silly special case).

Okay, with those out of the way, I can talk about medication.  Ideally, I’d recommend you ask someone else in addition to me about this issue, because it’s been a very long time since I’ve taken medication for TS, and also because my experience with it was somewhat extreme.

I think a rough estimate is that 1/3 of childhood TS cases disappear in adulthood, 1/3 persist unchanged, and 1/3 persist but are greatly diminished in severity.  I was in the last category; I still have TS, but it’s mild enough now that it mostly just looks like nervous fidgeting and doesn’t strike anyone as pathological if they don’t know what it is.  I took Risperdal (Risperidone) from, IIRC, age 11 to 16, when my TS was at its worst.  It didn’t fully eliminate my tics, but it made them less disruptive in the classroom and, most importantly, it prevented them from interfering with my sleep.  Before going on Risperdal I would have nights where I would lie in bed for many hours having constant tics that prevented me from relaxing enough to sleep.  (In retrospect, a hypnotic might have been a better way to deal with this particular problem than Risperdal – I’m not sure why this never occurred to my prescriber.)

One side effect of Risperdal was weight gain – my weight went from 50th percentile for my age and sex to 90th percentile.  The mental side effects were much, much more unpleasant: I had pretty much constant brain fog and could not concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes.  I loved to read before going on Risperdal (and love to read now) but I couldn’t read books from start to finish while on it (I managed to absorb some information from nonfiction books by flipping randomly through them and reading a few pages at a time; fiction was impossible).  School was very difficult and I needed a lot of tutoring and other help; it instantly became much easier when I stopped taking Risperdal.  (This all gave me a very confused and muddled self-concept, because I was a gifted child when very young and retained from that a sense that I was “smart,” yet was constantly confronted with situations where I could not perform intellectual tasks that were considered easy by most or all normal people.)

Thankfully, I never experienced any sexual side effects or gynecomastia/galactorrhea, although those can happen with some antipsychotics and I think Risperdal in particular is known for causing the latter two.

I tried to stop taking Risperdal a few times in the five years I was on it, and every time my tics returned to their original, severe state.  I don’t remember if this happened immediately or whether it took a few days, but I don’t think I ever lasted more than a week off of it.  I think the reason I was successful at finally going off of it at age 16 was that, by that time, my TS had started to subside of its own accord, so by that point my “natural,” unmedicated symptoms were bearable.

I don’t remember what my dosage of Risperdal was, but I do remember it was considered relatively low (I think it was between 1 mg and 2 mg).  There’s some discussion of doses here.

I hope that helps!  Some of it was probably more detail or personal than what you were looking for, but I wasn’t sure what to include and what not to include and it’s easiest for me to err on the side of inclusion.