Scott Alexander (host, Astral Codex Ten)

And it's harmless enough, with Fido.

He really is a good boy.

But I've had patients with ADHD ask me to certify their snake.

Still, some patients argue very eloquently, taking care of the snake helps me keep to a routine and makes me feel more confident, and she's my only friend in the world, and I feel like I'd be stressed and lost without her.

It's a little weird, but do you really want your patient to lose their beloved Nagini just because you refuse to write a letter and that has no legal requirements and no downsides?

Probably it's bad that society is so hostile to pets.

Probably it's bad that we've reached the level of housing shortage where landlords don't have to compete for tenants, and they might as well ban all pets if it makes their lives even slightly easier.

Probably the emotional support animal loophole makes things better rather than worse.

But the process runs into the same failure mode as Adderall prescriptions.

It combines an insistence on gatekeepers with a total lack of interest over whether they actually gatekeep.

The end result is a gatekeeping cargo cult, where you have to go through the expensive, exhausting motions of asking someone's permission without the process really filtering out good from bad applicants.

And the end result of that is a disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly restrictive rules.

I have no solution to this.

I just feel like I incur a little spiritual damage every time I approve someone's ADHD snake or autism iguana or anorexia pangolin or whatever.

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Thanks for listening, and I'll speak to you next time.