On Absurdly Poor Criticism And Advocate Misconduct, Part One

On September 14, 2013, exactly a month before I started writing this post, I was contacted by a colleague who expressed an interest in changes in behavioral practice since Lovaas's original methods and models of clinical treatment.

During the resulting exchange, I attempted to explain a variety of things related to behavior analysis, ranging from how ABA is not a treatment method to the relationship between ABA and PBS (the short version is that PBS is a brand-named philosophy regarding how to go about conducting and using ABA research). I also provided her with a number of assorted articles and writings on the subject, including a piece of my own work which acted as an overview.

I ended the exchange on something of a positive note, hoping that the information would help. The positive note, however, did not last.

This is what she wrote... or, at least, the currently-published version. There has been a rather spectacularly intellectually dishonest edit in the interim. It's, to put it mildly, an extraordinarily poor critique. The arguments are, by and large, spectacularly off-base, and her abuse of my writing is glaringly obvious (if not as much so as before the edits).

That said, I should probably discuss what this means and why it's a problem before I get into a detailed critique of the piece itself.

Contrary to what some people apparently believe, saying that a critique is poor does not mean that one disagrees with its conclusions or that the critique does not deal with real problems. It is saying that the critique misidentifies the issues involved and/or argues from a position of misunderstanding or prejudice.

In this case, the author is attempting to argue that all forms of applied behavior analysis are inherently unethical -- a very, very strong conclusion, one that simply does not follow from the evidence (such as it is) and arguments (such as they are) that she presents. Saying so isn't defending ABA, and certainly isn't excusing, justifying, or apologizing for the assorted abuses with which people have valid complaints.

This is important for several reasons -- not the least of which is that poor criticism serves to distract from real issues, detracts from good criticism, and confuses issues in ways that impair efforts to reform things.

To illustrate this, let's take a very different example, one that most of us can rapidly identify, easily understand, and generally make easy sense of: one of the more disgusting things which occurs whenever news story publishes a story about a black man raping a white woman.

Rape is obviously wrong: it's a gross violation of  a woman's bodily autonomy, a dehumanizing act which can easily (and often does) destroy her life. It is very difficult to think of a worse violation of someone's personhood... and the ethnicity and skin color of perpetrator and/or victim is utterly irrelevant to this.

Unfortunately, however, some people insist on making the moral issue here about race in a variety of ways. One of the simpler (and more vile) of these is to simply state that the act was wrong because a man like that (a black man, not a rapist) has no business sexually touching a White woman.

This is an absurdly poor (and racist) criticism of rape. It is one that needs -- urgently -- to be shouted down and combated whenever it pops up.

Referring to this sort of thing as poor discussion or off-base criticism is very much not excusing the heinous criminal act to which the alleged criticism was directed. It is simple truth.

The race thing serves to distract from the real problem. To the extent to which it gets attention, it's distracting people from paying that same attention to other, more relevant, criticisms.

But... let's say that some people actually took it seriously. Let's further say that they then tried to use it as the basis for political reform efforts.

These efforts would be useless at best and harmful at worst. In fact, that particular criticism can pretty much be considered a form of rape apology in and of itself: if the rape of a white woman by a black man is only heinous because of the race difference, what's wrong about a white man raping a white woman?

More, such "reform" efforts would likely target and harm completely innocent interracial couples. In fact, such prejudices and acts have historically caused very substantial harm in the form of blatantly racist legislation and various racial prejudices for just this reason.

Obviously, this has little directly to do with the ABA article which started this discussion, but does serve to illustrate a few very important points: 1) poor criticism is rarely helpful; 2) poor criticism is often harmful, even when its conclusions may be correct... and 3) stating that an argument is poor is not the same thing as stating that its conclusion is wrong.

In Part Two of this series, I will hopefully get to precisely why the specific critique that started this is poor and unlikely to be helpful. In Part Three, I will discuss just why I'm taking such pains to lay out these problems, why a simple blog post like that has lead to me starting an extended blog-rant, just what followed from the situation, and why it's taken me so long to post all of this.

On Bad Parents

Today is Autistics Speaking Day. To follow in the tradition of last year, I'm going to take the opportunity to talk about something that I wouldn't normally blog about. Be forewarned that this is not -- at all -- a pleasant topic. In fact, it's downright disturbing. If you are a parent to an autistic child, this will be particularly disturbing to you. If you are autistic yourself, it will be equally disturbing in a completely different way. Be forewarned.

Towards the end of September, the blog The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism hosted a series of exchanges referred to on-site as the Self-Advocate/Parent Dialogues. If you haven't read it, I strongly recommend you do so -- including the comments. Yes, I know that's ten-eleven (depending on how you count) blog entries, many of which have an inordinate number of comments. I make this recommendation anyway -- and recommend it strongly.

During that exchange, a lot of issues -- many of which are very important -- relating to the parent/self-advocate divide in the modern autism world were discussed. By and large, the parents present were interested in helping their child and were willing to respect and try to understand the viewpoints and interests of autistic people. And, while I can't directly confirm this, I strongly suspect (and have no reason to disbelieve) that those parents love their children and wanted to do what they could to help them. I believe (and have no reason to disbelieve) that, to those parents, their involvement in autism issues was not primarily about themselves or their personal interests and desires, but rather about trying to raise their children.

One fact, however, was not mentioned during that dialogue, and it's a simple fact that while the above can almost certainly be said about the parents who participated in the Dialogues, it certainly cannot be said about all parents. Put another way, not every parent of an autistic child is a good parent.

"Good" and "bad" are relative, of course, and everyone makes mistakes. I'm not trying to demonize or stereotype the parents of autistic children here.

Still, there's an attitude among parents' groups characterized by the presumption that each parent loves their child and is generally trying to raise their child as best they can. There are three real problems with this -- and I've already discussed the first one. Specifically, parents are human and thus fallible. Even if a parent is trying to raise their child as best they can, this doesn't mean that they are.

The second problem with that presumption is far simpler. It simply isn't true.

I know I've repeated myself here. This was deliberate. The point needs to be driven in -- preferably with a metaphorical sledgehammer.

For years, I've been reading coverage of parents doing truly awful things to their children. Take for instance, Marguerite Famolare, as quoted in this article about the Judge Rotenberg Center. According to her, the center's systematic torture of her child is great -- after all, if she shows him the remote control to his shock harness:

He'll automatically comply to whatever my signal command may be, whether it is 'Put on your seatbelt,' or 'Hand me that apple,' or 'Sit appropriately and eat your food,'" she says. "It's made him a human being, a civilized human being.

I have to rather strongly disagree with her definition of humanity. Beyond this, I think that the quote speaks for itself.

Then there's the case of Karen McCarron, who I recently learned is trying to appeal her well-deserved sentence and get a new trial. Her story is, in a way, much simpler to explain -- she murdered her daughter and blamed her actions on said child's reified neurology. According to her lawyer, McCarron believed that Jesus would bring her child back, sans certain reified aspects of how she learned and experienced the world.

I did not select these two cases at random. While I could have picked from a lot more, including many not on that list (which is rather outdated at this point), they serve as illustrations of the fact that there are some phenomenally bad parents out there. Some of said parents have autistic children.

More importantly, however, they serve to illustrate another factor -- the ways in which certain attitudes prevalent in the autism world can be used as justifications for truly monstrous acts towards autistic people. When I object to, for instance, the reification of autism, I am doing so for damned good reason. When I talk about psychosocial stigma, I am not talking about something even remotely close to trivial.

Finally, these cases are public -- they have public documentation which I can link to. Trust me, I have a lot of examples from personal experience. I've spent a surprisingly large amount of my professional life trying to clean up the messes that bad parents and poor parenting decisions (of various sorts) have left behind.

The third problem with the attitude I referenced is central to the attitude itself and not the underlying beliefs. There is an old saying that "sympathy for the guilty is treason to the innocent." The saying -- and the underlying meaning behind it -- apply here. Yes, parents of autistic children often function without adequate support, are stressed, are under incredible pressures, etc. If, however, we choose to allow this to detract even one iota from our condemnation of this sort of parent's inexcusable actions, if we say that Karen McCaron's actions were "really about a lack of support" or some such, we are essentially arguing that the act of torturing or murdering an innocent child is excusable.

I disagree with this in the strongest terms possible.

Such actions need to be condemned. We, as a community, owe that duty to Karen McCaron's and Marguerite Famolare's victims.

I have, at this point, been writing this blog entry all day -- essentially dropping everything else in my life to do so. It is, however, phenomenally difficult for me to do so. As I type this sentence, it is 6:17 in the evening. I have been writing this almost since I finished breakfast.

As the amount of time I've spent on this text implies, this is not an easy topic for me to write about. I don't even like to think about parents such as those two. I originally intended to write far more about them than I did... but gave up on several (actually rather important) points simply because I couldn't bring myself to write them. In fact, I even dropped one major and prominent example of bad parenting from my list -- simply because I didn't think I could stand writing out another paragraph detailing such behavior. I know for a fact that I will regret that decision.

I would love to think that every parent was a good one, that (all) parents could be trusted to act in their child's best interests, and that we could count on parental love to ensure that our parents would be our allies.

Unfortunately, I know all too well that this is simply not true.

On Mental Disorders, Part One

One of the major errors that people make when thinking of DSM mental disorders and the like is to think of them as diseases. While this is undoubtedly true for some diagnoses in the DSM, the fact of the matter is that "mental disorder" and "disease" are really very different concepts.

While disease categories are abstractions based on etiology, mental disorders... well, aren't. That isn't even the ideal anymore.

As I discussed in an earlier post, certain conditions must be met for something to be called a disease:

• It must be an impairment of the normal state of the living animal or plant body or one of its parts.
• It must interrupt or modify the performance of the organism's vital functions.
• It must be typically manifested by distinguishing signs and symptoms.
• It must have a distinguishing etiology (which may be simple or complex).
  

The conditions for something being called a mental disorder, however, are very different. Unlike with the concept of "disease", however, these are anything but straightforward.

Going to MedLine Plus, for instance, yields the following definition: "a mental or bodily condition marked primarily by sufficient disorganization of personality, mind, and emotions to seriously impair the normal psychological functioning of the individual—called also mental illness."

In other words, while a disease is an abstraction based on etiology, a mental disorder is an abstraction based on symptoms. While a disease is a process which causes its symptoms, a mental disorder is a label which describes them or a description of them. Classification of mental disorders makes no reference to the why, only to the what. They have no explanatory value whatsoever; to say that a psychiatric diagnosis has any explanatory value whatsoever is to commit nominal fallacy.

Even this, however, isn't really satisfying. What, for instance, does "disorganization" mean? How do you decide whether or not something "impair[s] the normal psychological functioning of the individual"? Heck, just what does "normal psychological functioning" mean?

These questions are important because of the "wiggle room" built into these terms. In the DSM-I and II, for instance, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder -- homosexuals were considered "broken" heterosexuals whose attraction to members of their own sex represented an impairment to their functioning qua members of their gender. Another infamous example of this problem featured a doctor who pathologized the desire of slaves to flee their masters (he considered whipping to be curative).

My abnormal psychology textbook provides a somewhat more clear answer: it defines one as "a psychological dysfunction within an individual that is associated with distress or impairment in functioning and a response that is not typical or culturally expected." (p. 2)

This, in turn, breaks down into four parts. To qualify as a mental disorder, a set of symptoms must:

• Constitute a "psychological dysfunction".
• Be within the individual.
• Be associated with distress and/or impairment in functioning.
• Be associated with (at least one) response that is not typical or culturally expected.

Unfortunately, none of these is quite what it seems. I'll write more on this later, but for now... just keep in mind: a mental disorder is not a disease.

Edit: Corrected an embarassing typo.

"Words to the Wise"

As I write this, I am sitting in a computer lab with a copy of Thomas Szasz's "Words to the Wise". It's an utterly fascinating collection of quotes and sound-bites on a wide-ranging collection of topics by one of the most controversial authors in the field of clinical psychology. Some of the quotes I agree with; others I don't. All, however, are thoughts worth considering. Despite the format, it's one of the most thought-provoking books I've seen in a long time.

Ten of the quotes more relevant to today's autism issues:

If a person ingests a drug prohibited by legislators and claims that it makes him feel better, that proves that he's an addict.

If he ingests a drug prescribed by psychiatrists and claims that it makes him feel better, that proves that mental illness is a biomedical disease.

When and why do we say that a behavior is caused rather than willed?

We say that chemicals in the brain cause depression and suicide; but we don't say that chemicals in the ovaries or testicles cause lust and marriage.

The child cannot match the adult in most accomplishments. Hence, we reward him for effort as well as achievement. Yet, the child must learn that what counts in life is not effort but achievement. The child over-rewarded for effort may grow up to seek approval for trying instead of for succeeding. This dooms him to failure. If he succeeds, he succeeds only at trying hard. If he fails, he fails miserably.

When a woman finds having a fetus in her body annoying, she can abort it by taking an abortifacient drug or having a surgical abortion.

When a woman finds having a child in her home annoying, she can abort his persona by having a child psychiatrist give him a chemical straitjacket.

Diagnoses are not diseases.
Diagnoses are names, human fabrications.
Diseases are phenomena, facts of nature.

Demonstrable bodily lesion is the gold standard of medical diagnosis. Without practical convertability into gold, the value of paper money rests only on faith. Without conceptual convertability into bodily lesion, the diagnosis of disease rests only on faith.

A patient with cancer says: "If I had refused my surgeon's suggestion that I have my tumor removed, the cancer would have killed me."
A patient with depression says: "If my psychiatrist had let me refuse the electroshock treatment he recommended, I would have killed myself."
The difference between these two sentences sums up the difference between bodily illness and mental illness.

Three principal rules of conduct:

1. The Golden Rule: Do onto others as you want them to do unto you.

2. The Rule of Respect: Do unto others as they want you to do unto them.

3. The Rule of Paternalism: Do unto others as you in your superior wisdom know ought to be done unto them in their own best interests.

Formerly, debasing the Other by calling him a "nigger" was considered politically correct: the speaker was viewed as a protector of the race or nation from those bent on defiling it.
Today, debasing the Other by calling him "sick" is considered politically correct: the speaker is viewed as a protector of the debased person's best mental health interests and of the nation from a danger to the public health.
Replacing the former rhetoric by the latter is considered moral progress.

Today, everyone claims to be working for the patient's best interests. No wonder the patient is in deep trouble.

Note that I selected these quotes based on relevance, not agreement. I don't, as a matter of fact, agree with a lot of Szasz's thinking. This said, he's an incredibly thought-provoking author. In this blog post, I'm not going to take a stance on any of these. Instead, I'm going to give an "assignment" of sorts to each of my readers.

Read these quotes. Think about them. What does each of them mean? What do they imply? Is this statement -- or implication -- accurate? Is Szasz right or wrong? Why?

Then post an explanation here, answering at least one of these questions for at least one of these quotes. Feel free to do so anonymously or pseudonymously. I don't care about that (although I will delete SPAM posts or personal attacks). If you aren't the first to reply to this, also reply to at least one of the previous replies.

My own replies here will be mostly playing "devil's advocate", issuing responses also intended to make people think and facilitating discussion. Unless I state specifically that a position is my own personal belief, please don't think that it is. I will likely issue arguments against your position even if I agree with it.

The point, after all, is to get people thinking about this sort of thing.

In addition to the obvious, this exercise should give you a pretty good idea of why I highly reccommend this book. It has nothing to do with agreement (although I strongly agree with both the contents and sentiments of many of the quotes, this cannot be said about many others). It has everything to do with the way the book makes you think.

Oh, and it's a treasure mine for anyone who wants quotes for articles, the beginnings of book chapters, and the like. Lots of grade-A quotes here... which is the entire point of the book.

Edit: Added a link.

On Disease

As I've mentioned before, "disease" is defined: "an impairment of the normal state of the living animal or plant body or one of its parts that interrupts or modifies the performance of the vital functions, is typically manifested by distinguishing signs and symptoms, and is a response to environmental factors (as malnutrition, industrial hazards, or climate), to specific infective agents (as worms, bacteria, or viruses), to inherent defects of the organism (as genetic anomalies), or to combinations of these factors".

This seems rather straightforward, but it's decidedly not the conceptualization most people have of disease. Most people think of "disease" as equivalent to "infectious disease" -- the cold, the flu, and so on. The concept of disease, however, is much more expansive than this, covering such diverse conditions as broken bones, cancers, malnutrition, radiation poisoning, and countless other things.

Any good description of a disease has at least three key elements: etiology, symptomatology, and course. Some other commentators will add a fourth, prognosis, but I consider this a part of the course. Others may disagree, caveat lector, etc.

In other words, diseases are defined by what causes them, how you tell someone has them, and what happens to the people who have them. Many times, each of these factors can be incredibly complex or variable. Often, the lines between them are blurred. Medicine is anything but simple.

Very frequently, we don't know the course of a disease. This is especially true for a while after a disease process has been discovered: until the disease runs its course in someone, we don't know what to expect. For instance, we didn't know that Ebola hemorrhagic fever was fatal until people started dying from it (although, given some of the symptoms, we certainly had reason to suspect!). We know that it's not universally fatal because people have survived.

From here, discussions of the study of diseases' courses and prognoses rapidly get a great deal more complex (with discussions of prognostic factors, modified courses, and the like). While interesting and useful, further discussion really isn't needed to address the core issue of this essay -- which is just what makes something a disease.

While diseases are often grouped together by course in speech, this is almost always through adjectival modifiers (e.g. "fatal disease", "overnight bug", "crippling injury", etc.). Diseases are not defined in terms of their course, and the same disease can have drastically different courses depending on any number of factors (hence the complexity). This is fairly easy to intuitively grasp when illustrated: while some people survive pertussis infection without treatment, others die even with it. Some people recover completely from a simple fracture of the femur; some people never do. Either way, the disease is pertussis or a simple fracture of the femur, respectively.

So -- what about symptomatology? Again, the same illness can have different symptoms in different people (although this effect is less extreme than in the course). It's interesting to note that the symptoms of a disease often can be considered diseases in and of themselves (but they usually aren't thought of that way). Then there's the matter of complications of a disease... which, again, starts making things get really complex, really fast.

While symptomatology plays a huge role in diagnosis, it's not (usually) how we classify disease. Sure, we talk about symptoms a lot ("He has a fever","His stomach hurts", etc.), and we do occasionally group illnesses this way (e.g. chemical, thermal, and radiation burns -- which are grouped together because of large similarities in symptomatology and minor similarities in etiology)... but we mostly group things together in etiology.

In other words, etiology is the "most important" part of a disease -- what defines a disease and separates it from other diseases. Sure, there are diseases of unknown etiology. Keep this in mind for future discussions. It's important.

A Recent Blog Post

It's somewhat ironic, given my recent decision to post my discussion topic for the Autube.tv project, that the subject of that discussion would promptly come up in one of the autistic blogosphere's better blogs. This, however, is precisely what happened.

Amanda's post on the topic is (among other things) a highly eloquent and effective explanation of one aspect of what I felt -- and still feel -- needs much more exploration by everyone involved in the field of autism. I highly recommend reading it in its entirety.

A Discussion Topic

Around a year ago, I recorded a discussion topic for the Dan Marino Foundation's Autube.tv project. They have yet to use it, much to my disappointment... as I view it as a very important question that doesn't get asked enough.

Fortunately, I'd written out my question... and I still have the transcript. As such, I'm able to post it here.

Hi, I'm Alex Cheezem, a graduate student at Nova Southeastern University and an adult on the autism spectrum. One issue that surrounds any discussion of autism is the matter of language. Words often have different meanings depending on context -- for instance, the technical language of behavior analysis defines an aversive as anything that an organism moves to avoid, while the term often brings up images of ammonia squirts to the face, electrical shock, and other such painful and humiliating "treatments".

At the same time, the spoken languages of our cultures are often a second language of sorts to us. Countless accounts are available of our thought processes and the ways in which we think, but these ways are often alien to those people who think in a more typical manner. The underlying assumptions of these modes of thought are often different from those of what we call the English language.

Finally, much human communication is in the form of subtle implcations and connotations. While people on the spectrum often have difficulty perceiving these, people not on the spectrum often have trouble with correctly interpreting our statements in their absence. Many people on the spectrum have invested a considerable amount of effort into learning this language only to come across in a manner completely unlike what we'd intended.

Do these problems obstruct meaningful discussion of autism-related issues? If so, how can we go about opening a meaningful dialogue? Is there any way that we can keep important points from being "lost in translation"? Let's hear from some voices in our community that can help us frame this conversation.

While not everything in this remains true (specifically, I'm no longer a student at Nova), the question is no less important now then it was a year ago.

On Aversives, Punishment, and Language

One factor that complicates many of the debates surrounding applied behavior analysis is the fact that its technical language groups things together based mainly on their effects on specific (and usually observable) behaviors. While this makes it excellent for its intended purpose (analyzing behavior), it also makes said language extremely poor for use in an ethical debate.

To illustrate, let's take the hypothetical example of a boy -- let's call him "Chuck" -- who likes to act out in class. Let's also take three hypothetical teachers, "Jane", "Matt", and "Alletta", each of whom decided to take a different approach to making him behave.

Jane decided to assign Chuck additional homework on days when he misbehaved, gently informing him of her reasons whenever she did so. After a bit, Chuck realized that acting out in her class only led to more work and started paying attention more.

The second teacher, Matt, decided on a simpler course of action. He hooked a cattle prod to a remote control and strapped it to Chuck's back during class. Whenever Chuck acted out (or attempted to remove the cattle prod), Matt activated the device. After a few jolts, Chuck realized that both actions only resulted in terrible pain and stopped acting out, paying attention in a manner that only the truly terrified can.

The third teacher, Alletta, was an advocate of corporal punishment, but had promised Chuck's father that she wouldn't hurt him. As such, she instead called Chuck's best friend, Bill, to the front of the class and spent a few minutes torturing him whenever Chuck misbehaved, making sure that Chuck knew why she was doing so. Not wanting to see his friend hurt, Chuck quickly fell in line.

In the language of behavior analysis, all three of these teachers implemented the same basic strategy: punishment by contingent presentation of an aversive stimulus. All three strategies were punishment because they directly targetted and decreased an undesired behavior class (acting out), they were contingent because the strategy was only implemented when the behavior occurred, they were presentation of a stimulus because all three strategies involved giving Chuck something (be it extra homework, a painful shock, or a traumatizing emotional experience) and those stimuli were aversive because Chuck moved to avoid them (1).

This is not, however, to say that all three of those strategies were equally ethical. Very few people (outside school-age children, anyway) would have problems with what Jane did. Matt's actions were a somewhat exaggerated version of a highly controversial technique used in certain behavioral institutions (2). Alletta's actions, however, haven't been considered even remotely acceptable since the 1700s and even then, they were confined to punishing certain royals.

For those historians reading this, yes, I did name Chuck and the people in the third example after certain individuals. And while Matt's method may have prevented Ollie's eventual hissy fit, just imagine Jimmy's reaction!

To get to the point, however, I also don't mean that these strategies would all have the same effects. While all of them decreased the target behavior, Jane's strategy would have had the fewest unpleasant side effects.

The strategy closest to what commonly comes to mind when the term "aversive" is mentioned to people familiar with today's ABA establishment, however, is Matt's.

If this were an isolated case of misused or misunderstood terminology, it would be a fairly minor problem. Unfortunately, that isn't the case. The language of behavior analysis is -- perhaps unsurprisingly -- designed for analyzing behavior. As such, methods are categorized based on their effects on (usually specific and observable) behaviors and not their effects on the person who is behaving.

Ethical considerations, on the other hand, are almost always based on benefit and harm to people, something which the language of behavior analysis is decidedly poor at describing.

If this was widely understood, it wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, many people who use the techniques produced by ABA don't understand the distinction. The debates surrounding their use are often muddied by this.

As a general rule, people with postgraduate educations in behavior analysis understand its technical language and use it to talk about ABA's techniques. Everyone else... doesn't, although there are exceptions. Things get more complicated when terms used in ABA have or acquire different meanings outside of that language.

The debates surrounding aversives are, quite literally, a textbook example of this.



(1) According to Cooper, et al. (2007), the most influential textbook on behavior analysis used today, an aversive stimulus is defined as "a stimulus change or condition that functions (a) to evoke a behavior that has terminated it in the past; (b) as a punisher when presented following behavior, and/or (c) as a reinforcer when withdrawn following behavior." In this case, it's (b) that applies.

(2) While modern accounts usually don't involve literal cattle prods, instead involving a variety of other shock devices, there are accounts of literal cattle prods -- and improvised devices made from them -- being used as late as the early to mid-'90s.


References:

Cooper, J., Heron, T., & Heward, W. (2007). Applied Behavior Analysis (2nd Ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

Why I rarely write the way I think

My writings on this blog are rarely my actual thoughts. Oh, they share some parallels, but my experience has been that very few people understand me when I say what I'm actually thinking. I usually have to oversimplify a bit and find an efficient way to shoehorn them into the English language. I could, of course, simply translate, but that introduces its own share of problems.

To illustrate this, I'm going to write down a fairly simple thought in three ways. One is as close as I can approximate my actual thought processes in writing. Another is as close as I can approximate in English. The third is the way I would usually write it.

And if anyone can help me figure out why the formatting keeps getting shot to Hell, it would be greatly appreciated.

Way One

fisherman.OnCatch(tuna)
{

int tuna.centVal = val(tuna, fresh);

while(tuna.sold != 0)

{

wait(about one minute);

tuna.centVal *= (1 - percentLoss);

}

}

Way Two

The value of a caught tuna approaches zero with the passage of time, following a progression that approximates a hyperbola (the limit of the value as the time from catch approaches infinity being zero) that is implemented starting the moment it is caught and compounded approximately every minute.

Way Three

The value of a tuna decreases for every minute that passes between when the fisherman catches it and when he sells it.