[HN Gopher] Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stem...
___________________________________________________________________
Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from
psychological issues
Author : SkyMarshal
Score : 159 points
Date : 2021-06-23 17:24 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (unherd.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (unherd.com)
| Y_Y wrote:
| They are missing the wood for the trees. Online behaviour in
| general is rooted in psychological issues. Well-adjusted mentally
| healthy people just participate in society normally, they don't
| sit in front of a terminal for a year inventing some amazing new
| way of communicating over computer networks, or expounding the
| modern equivalent of Athenian philosophy on message boards, or
| obsessing over entries in distributed databases.
| sva_ wrote:
| So what are the psychological issues that led you to write this
| comment?
| Y_Y wrote:
| DSM-IV or real? I have a number of (diagnosed and otherwise)
| mental illnesses. I also write Haskell for enjoyment, and
| help people with Linux on the internet even though it
| benefits me in no way. I care about mathematics and
| computation more than climate change and the feelings of
| people close to me. Is that ok?
| jchw wrote:
| Out of curiosity, have you _read_ any of DSM? I 've read
| some portions of DSM-V and found it to be, on the whole,
| more reasonable than it is typically given credit. Perhaps
| some of that is owing to improvements made over the years,
| but nonetheless.
| jmcgough wrote:
| I think there's some truth to this, but the trans community is a
| really awkward group to try to fit into your argument.
|
| As a trans person, I think there's a lot of toxicity to the
| online trans community, and there's certainly more prevalent
| mental illness (not surprising when you deal with frequent
| harassment, discrimination, being disowned by family). But trans
| people act like that because they feel like they're constantly
| under attack, and they have good reason to feel that way, given
| the flood of anti-trans legislation. That constant vigilance is
| exhausting, and as awful as it is, many of them (especially
| younger people) have limited power to protect themselves so they
| lash out at any perceived threat against trans people. It's
| toxic, and probably creates more enemies than allies, but I
| understand it.
|
| A more interesting example would be toxic league of legends
| players. There's a few very popular, very toxic streamers (e.g.
| Tarzaned) who seem like they're struggling with depression or
| other issues.
| loopz wrote:
| Many online forums are incredibly toxic, or infested with a few
| regulars that get off always being negative and bullying other
| people.
|
| The only thing that works with bullies, is ignoring them.
|
| Trying to find reasons, psychological reasons, childhood
| traumas or gender identity issues, seems to be a way to focus
| on the behaviour and drama, instead of moving on.
| tomp wrote:
| Are "telling the truth" and "finding trolling humorous" also
| redefined to be psychological issues? Well, then the conclusion
| easily follows...
| 5cott0 wrote:
| What if the people acting out are actually the healthy ones?
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Maybe it's just that they're normal (is 'healthy' an ableist
| term?).
|
| You can make the argument that 'normal' people have been held
| down by jus' reg'lar dudes for millennia. This is their chance
| to shine.
|
| Have an upvote ya 'rebel.
| 5cott0 wrote:
| My meaning was along the lines of family dynamics. Teenager
| starts acting out at school not because they're a bad kid but
| because their is some unhealthy dynamic in the school or home
| environment. The kid's behavior is just a symptom of
| something unacknowledged and in that case the kid is the
| healthy one bringing attention to the problem. Pain is your
| body telling you something needs attention.
|
| Mild trolling and shitposting is mostly harmless and perhaps
| an appropriate response to being very online and maybe a
| measure of the health of an online community.
|
| One of the big problems though is that trolling and
| shitposting can easily be weaponized into coordinated
| harassment on ideological grounds (gamergate, cancelling,
| etc) which can be construed as a symptom of the current
| culture war and perhaps social media companies should pay
| more attention to the problem.
| wpietri wrote:
| I"m glad to see this point made:
|
| > I'm not saying that all online bad behaviour is because of
| mental health issues or personality disorders: lots of people are
| just dickheads, and there's no need to pathologise them.
|
| One of the important lessons I took away from a milestone book on
| abuse, "Why Does He Do That?" is that people really want to
| excuse harmful behaviors as illness. When often, repeated bad
| behavior happens because it works for the person in question.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Yes, there's a feedback loop, same as with alcoholism. It's
| nice and good to consider alcoholism a disease, but there's a
| point where the not yet completely dependent person should say
| "It's not even 4 o'clock yet and there's no social reason, what
| am I doing with this can of beer?"
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I'd like to second "Why Does He Do That?". Pointing out that
| abusive husbands often only break their wives' stuff was a real
| eye opener for me in examining other people who harm others or
| lash out and then claim that they weren't in control. If they
| don't ever harm their own things or lash out at themselves then
| they're not as out of control as they claim...
| wpietri wrote:
| It's an incredible book, one of the most astute things I've
| ever read. And the patterns apply widely. I've found it very
| useful in diagnosing bad bosses.
|
| Once my boss's boss fired my boss and suddenly took over
| managing me. After my first meeting with him, where a nominal
| 30-minute chat turned into 90 minutes of berating, I walked
| out wondering what the hell happened. I grabbed my copy of
| "Why Does He Do That?" and quickly found him described as
| abuser subtype "Mr Right".
|
| It was a huge relief just to be able to put the head-spinning
| experience in perspective. And it let me really prepare for
| the rest of my (short) tenure there.
| mcguire wrote:
| I would agree; "homophobes" are not _afraid_ of homosexuality.
| krapp wrote:
| I kind of disagree. To me, there does seem to be an element
| of fear behind homophobia, and homophobes often act as if
| "the gay" is something they can catch like a disease, or be
| talked or tricked into. It's practically a stereotype for
| homophobes to present as hypermasculine in order to avoid
| doing or saying anything that might be perceived as "gay."
| Some men won't even wipe themselves out of fear that the
| sensation of toilet paper on their buttocks will turn them
| gay.
|
| And that's not even getting into political and culture fears
| like male-to-female transgender people "trapping" men into
| having sex with them, or using the "wrong" bathrooms, or the
| extreme right-wing fears of a "gay agenda" to undermine
| traditional Christian-oriented culture, or "feminizing
| chemicals" being added to the water (the whole "gay frogs"
| thing) to increase the homosexual population and emasculate
| male aggression and military readiness. People even argue
| that homosexuality presents a threat to human evolution
| itself, despite being present in many known (and not extinct)
| animal species and likely humanity's own evolutionary
| ancestors as well as humanity itself.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _" feminizing chemicals" being added to the water (the
| whole "gay frogs" thing) to increase the homosexual
| population and emasculate male aggression and military
| readiness..._"
|
| Actually that part is kinda true. A fair bit of the
| effluent from paper mills, say, are estrogen analogs.
| taneq wrote:
| This whole trope of recasting "anti-X" as "X-phobic" is
| something that really irks me. Maybe there's a group of
| closeted X who doth protest too much, but there's generally a
| much larger group of people who are just assholes to X, and
| trying to spin it as "they're just _afraid_ of you " smacks
| too much of the old "the bullies are _just jealous_ ". No,
| often it's not jealousy, it's just people being assholes to
| targets they think can't fight back.
| verytrivial wrote:
| Trolls create anger and conflict and conflict drives engagement.
| But that is as nothing compared to the engagement you get from
| public spectacles of righteous indignation. Social media breeds a
| special sort narcissistic positive feedback loop and it turns out
| a very small amount of validation is all that is required to set
| people off.
|
| But trolls usually know they're trolls. On the other hand take
| for example Twitter user Oli London [1]. I can no longer tell
| parody from sincere in this "influencers" persona, but wow, does
| it drive engagement. Is this guy ok? There are thousands of
| accounts cheering him/them and many others on.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV
| [deleted]
| techrat wrote:
| To say it succinctly...
|
| Psychopaths like psychopaths.
|
| https://www.psypost.org/2018/10/study-psychopaths-are-attrac...
| gverrilla wrote:
| that's a very positive and progressive profile imho
| shoto_io wrote:
| This is... I don't know. I lack words to describe it.
| [deleted]
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Hah, if he's willing to get botox in his lips he's probably
| being sincere. Or, maybe it's just some sort of video editing
| magic?
|
| A lot of online interaction is based on "If I can prove how
| this person is terrible, then I can be happy because I've
| proven to myself that I'm a better person.". Well, a glance at
| this Twitter account makes me feel better, because I'm certain
| he's a very unhappy troll, because people looking for offense
| wherever they turn surely will find them, and he's probably a
| very unhappy person because he feels he's been offended every
| day. Ah, that sweet persecution complex!
| gnull wrote:
| You don't even have to look at extremes like Oli London (thanks
| for the link, them/they/kor/ean are awesome!) for an example.
| In the past few years, whenever I hear about something new
| American wokes are suggesting or something Trump said, most of
| the time I can't guess whether I'm being trolled or not.
| [deleted]
| exolymph wrote:
| Relevant classic post: Most of What You Read on the Internet is
| Written by Insane People,
| https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
|
| ^ previously on HN twice,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600274
| jchw wrote:
| "Insane" is mostly meant in jest here, not to imply that heavy
| contributors are mentally ill. The examples they picked out are
| pretty ridiculous but are also the biggest outliers. The real
| point here is that <1% of the users account for ~99% or so of
| the consumed content. Which is interesting in its own right.
| exolymph wrote:
| I think "insane" in both contexts mainly denotes being a
| cognitive outlier.
| jchw wrote:
| Ah, but "insane" is not used by the article - the term
| "psychological issues" is, to imply some kind of mental
| unwellness.
|
| OTOH, the Reddit post explicitly clarifies:
|
| > Edit: I guess my tone-projection is off. A lot of people
| seem to be put-off by my usage of the word "insane." I
| intended that as tongue-in-cheek and did not mean to imply
| that any of them literally have diagnosable mental
| illnesses. I have a lot of respect for all of the
| individuals I listed and they seem like nice people, I was
| just trying to make a point about how unusual their
| behavior is.
|
| Unusual behavior? Yes. However, I think you can see how
| that would not fall into the same bucket as the implication
| of "psychological issues." This nuance is likely why people
| have grown to dislike words like "insane" and "psychopath,"
| since these unintentional connections might warp people's
| perspectives.
| mioasndo wrote:
| Psychology is pseudo-science, and the term 'psychological issues'
| has about as much meaning as 'brain ghosts'.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to
| HN.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| mioasndo wrote:
| Sorry mister. I must have brain ghosts.
| derefr wrote:
| Just because you can't identify what's going wrong to make
| someone's car have unresponsive steering (the _etiology_ ),
| doesn't mean you can't precisely identify the car as having
| unresponsive steering (the _symptoms_.)
|
| Psychology is just fine at recognizing _symptoms_ (and
| complexes of symptoms that go together, a.k.a. "syndromes") --
| and also very good at treating symptoms/syndromes, such that
| they go away.
|
| Often, an understanding of the etiology isn't involved, but
| also isn't needed, because it's the symptoms/syndrome that are
| the problem, and the underlying pathology is otherwise benign.
| There're very few psychological diseases that have an organic
| origin, where treating the symptoms but _not_ the disease will
| lead to the disease progressing and killing you. And those
| diseases get treated carefully and separately, with workflows
| that get you referred on any sign of such diseases to a
| neurologist.
| mioasndo wrote:
| > Just because you can't identify what's going wrong to make
| someone's car have unresponsive steering (the etiology),
| doesn't mean you can't precisely identify the car as having
| unresponsive steering (the symptoms.)
|
| Except in this case there is a (vague) diagnosis - something
| is wrong with the car's computer (psychological issues).
|
| > Psychology is just fine at recognizing symptoms (and
| complexes of symptoms that go together, a.k.a. "syndromes")
|
| You don't need psychology to recognise symptoms. Unless
| you're saying psychology has it's own set of symptoms and
| it's own terminology - which is just a truism.
|
| > and also very good at treating symptoms/syndromes, such
| that they go away.
|
| Very debatable, and very provably false for most of
| psychology's existence.
|
| > Often, an understanding of the etiology isn't involved,
|
| How often?
|
| > but also isn't needed, because it's the symptoms/syndrome
| that are the problem, and the underlying pathology is
| otherwise benign.
|
| So,the symptoms are a problem, but the causes of the symptoms
| are not? How could you claim that the 'underlying pathology
| is benign' without even knowing what it is? Imagine if this
| level of rigour was applied to cancer - 'here take these
| sedatives and painkillers to get rid of your symptoms...
| don't worry the causes are totally benign'. It's absurd.
|
| > There're very few psychological diseases that have an
| organic origin, where treating the symptoms but not the
| disease will lead to the disease progressing and killing you.
|
| Except you really have no idea how many 'psychological
| diseases' could be progressing and/or affecting you while you
| mask the symptoms. How do you know such a disease isn't
| present and progressing, if, as you said, you aren't even
| able to identify the disease if it existed.
| derefr wrote:
| > You don't need psychology to recognise symptoms. Unless
| you're saying psychology has it's own set of symptoms and
| it's own terminology - which is just a truism.
|
| Psychology precisely defines syndromes (clusters of
| symptoms), and then, in terms of syndromes, provides both:
|
| * tests qualifying patients into those syndromes (usually
| in the form of various rating scales)
|
| * specific flowcharts for known-effective treatments for
| patients qualified into a given syndrome
|
| It's not the rigor of physics, but rather the rigor of
| engineering or civic planning: making rules for doctors to
| follow that have been found in clinical practice to
| optimize for population-wide outcomes.
|
| > How could you claim that the 'underlying pathology is
| benign' without even knowing what it is?
|
| Because we _have_ figured out what the underlying pathology
| is in many (not the majority, but many) cases, and almost
| every underlying pathology we 've discovered _is_ something
| benign: e.g. a genetic mutation that causes your synapses
| to produce less of some messenger-chemical. Such mutations
| have no long-term effect on your health, _other than_
| affecting your psychology. (And most of the cases we don't
| understand present the same, are treated the same, and have
| the same long-term health outcomes if treated or ignored,
| and so are very likely to be _similar_ in etiology to known
| diseases, despite not having yet been specifically
| researched.)
|
| Also, as I said, psychiatrists pre-screen for non-benign
| pathologies first, often _too_ widely. You can 't get
| diagnosed with clinical depression (by a psychiatrist who's
| doing their job) until you've been checked for vitamin
| deficiencies, hypothyroidism, anemia, diabetes, etc. Even
| in cases where you have 100% of the symptoms of clinical
| depression, including ones that have no organic basis.
| They'll still do the pre-screen, just to be sure you don't
| have clinical depression _and_ one of those things.
|
| But _once you 're known to not have any of the known-
| malignant pathologies_, then they can and will treat the
| symptoms, because at that point the only problem they have
| left to treat _is_ the symptoms. (What else would you
| expect them to do? Drill a hole in your skull to biopsy
| your brain tissue, to figure out what step in amine
| metabolism is failing--just to end up with the _same
| treatment_ they'd get to from looking at the symptoms?)
|
| > Except you really have no idea how many 'psychological
| diseases' could be progressing and/or affecting you
|
| There is the simple observation that these syndromes aren't
| _degenerative_. People can have e.g. untreated ADHD all
| their lives, and they won 't live less long or end up in
| the hospital more often than people without ADHD. That's
| _despite_ ADHD being a syndrome with potentially dozens of
| etiologies. Everything that causes that cluster of
| symptoms, and _only_ that cluster of symptoms, is _equally_
| non-degenerative, because it's all _equally_ being
| expressed solely as the same kind of non-long-term-harmful
| down-line effect.
|
| A degenerative neurological disease makes itself pretty
| obvious. Neurosyphilis is easy to recognize the symptoms
| of, to the point that even doctors in the 1700s could make
| the correlation that patients with that set of symptoms at
| age 60, were the same people having a lot of casual sex at
| age 20.
|
| > while you mask the symptoms
|
| When we treat a syndrome, what we're treating for usually
| _is_ our best understanding of the etiology. Sometimes we
| 're "sawing off one leg to make it even with the other"
| (e.g. you have too few dopamine receptors, so instead of
| telling your brain to make more -- which we don't know how
| to do -- we tell your brain to make less dopamine), but the
| treatment chosen is still putting the upstream system into
| a new (and beneficial!) equilibrium state, rather than
| "masking" down-line symptoms in the way that e.g.
| painkillers do.
|
| (Though I would note that even painkillers are therapeutic
| in some cases -- as often pain itself can have negative
| short- or long-term consequences, e.g. acute inflammation
| or acute increase in blood pressure in response to the
| pain. A non-negligible part of the reason that people are
| given opioids when they're in severe pain, is to decrease
| the risk of them having a heart attack or going into
| shock.)
| mioasndo wrote:
| > It's not the rigor of physics, but rather the rigor of
| engineering or civic planning:
|
| I would say engineering has more rigour because almost
| everything that really matters is based on rigorous
| science. Engineering also includes a certain amount of
| artistry, but that's generally within a rigorous
| framework that allows this. But, yeah, as I said,
| psychology is pseudo-science.
|
| > Because we've figured out what the underlying pathology
| is many (not the majority, but many) cases
|
| Again, how many cases? If you've figured out the
| underlying pathology for 1% of cases (which is still
| many), how can you claim that underlying pathology is
| 'almost always benign'?
|
| > and almost every underlying pathology we've discovered
| is something benign: e.g. a genetic mutation that causes
| your synapses to produce less of some messenger-chemical.
| Such mutations have no long-term effect on your health,
| other than affecting your psychology.
|
| First of all I would question the accuracy of these
| diagnoses. Second, I would question the classification of
| these pathologies as benign - a more accurate statement
| is probably 'we don't know'. Third, you say 'other than
| affecting your psychology' - so they often do actually
| have long term effects on the person?
|
| > Like I said, psychiatrists pre-screen for non-benign
| pathologies first, often too widely. You can't get
| diagnosed with clinical depression (by a psychiatrist
| who's doing their job) until you've been checked for
| vitamin deficiencies, hypothyroidism, anemia, diabetes,
| etc. Even in cases where you have 100% of the symptoms of
| clinical depression, including ones that have no organic
| basis. They'll still do the pre-screen, just to be sure.
|
| This is the only reason why psychology is even able to
| exist - because all of the heavy lifting is done in the
| realm of real science, and once real, understood
| pathologies are excluded the psychologists/psychiatrists
| can do their thing. That is, until yet another real
| pathology is discovered and the guidelines have to be
| updated such that psychologists don't end up mistreating
| people with the condition as they were up until then.
|
| > But once you're known to not have any of the known-
| malignant pathologies, then they can and will treat the
| symptoms, because at that point the only problem they
| have left to treat is the symptoms.
|
| So, basically, once the real medicine and science find
| they cannot solve the problem, the patient is left with
| the psychologist, who drugs the patient to mask the
| symptoms?
|
| > (What else would you expect them to do? Biopsy your
| brain?)
|
| Well, I don't expect a psychologist to have enough
| expertise for a biopsy, but could I expect to at least
| have a couple holes drilled in my skull, or maybe some
| electroshock therapy?
|
| > There's also just by the simple observation that these
| syndromes aren't degenerative. People can have e.g.
| untreated ADHD all their lives, and they won't live less
| long or end up in the hospital more often than people
| without ADHD.
|
| ADHD isn't a pathology, and 'live less long & end up in
| the hospital more' are not the only criteria I would
| consider required to label a disease as benign - they
| must have ongoing issues affecting their qualify of life
| in order to be diagnosed with ADHD in the first place.
| That being said, your statement is a pretty good argument
| for why psychology is irrelevant.
|
| > When we treat a syndrome, what we're treating for
| usually is our best understanding of the etiology.
|
| When you say 'our best understanding' you mean a
| psychologists best understanding? The question is how
| good is this 'best understanding' really?
|
| There are many different fields involved in modern
| medicine - biology, chemistry, neuroscience, physics,
| statistics, etc. What does psychology add? From where I'm
| sitting it adds absolutely nothing, and is far less
| rigorous.
| derefr wrote:
| > But, yeah, as I said, psychology is pseudo-science.
|
| _Science_ is about doing experiments to get data that
| allow you to create+refine models of reality that make
| predictions on what further data will look like.
|
| Psychology is a science. People may argue whether it is a
| _hard_ science, but it's doing all the _science_ things.
|
| What is the difference between an RCT on how a drug
| affects cancer (given some formal rating scale for
| cancer), vs. an RCT on how a drug affects ability to
| concentrate (given some formal rating scale for ability-
| to-concentrate)? The former is considered medical
| research. The latter is considered psychological
| research.
|
| > Well, I don't expect a psychologist to have enough
| expertise for a biopsy, but could I expect to at least
| have a couple holes drilled in my skull, or maybe some
| electroshock therapy?
|
| Uhhh... _why_? Both of those treatments are almost-always
| worse /higher-risk than just putting up with whatever was
| wrong with you before.
|
| Also, I don't _want_ people to drill holes in my skull.
| Most people don't. It is, in fact, considered unethical
| by most medical boards to drill holes in a patient's
| skull, if what you're treating for would not be worse
| than a hole in the skull. (And a hole in the skull is
| _very_ risky, in terms of liability to infection, stroke,
| etc.)
|
| This is my point: psychiatrists are people who, like IT
| help desk techs, try to diagnose a thing by hearing it
| described over the phone, with no ability to touch or
| interact with it. Psychology is the model, the best set
| of predictions we're been able to attain, for how the
| mind works, given that we can only interact with it this
| way.
|
| Psychologists try _very hard_ , using a _lot_ of rigor
| and _very powerful_ statistical methods, in an attempt to
| extract signal from the super-noisy clinical input of the
| practice of clinical psychiatry and of human psychiatric
| research. (Plus animal psychological studies, where we
| have the alternate problem of trying to model a mind we
| _can_ probe directly but _can't_ communicate with.)
|
| "Unethical psychology" would be a hard science indeed.
|
| > When you say 'our best understanding' you mean a
| psychologists best understanding?
|
| I mean humanity's best understanding. The academic-
| scientific 'us' -- everyone working together to advance
| the frontier of knowledge.
|
| ----------
|
| Addressing your comments as a whole, you seem to have
| conflated the practice of clinical psychiatry, with the
| medical science of psychology.
|
| "Psychology" is just what neuroscientists call their
| neurological behaviour studies, when the study doesn't
| involve or rely on a white-box model for what's
| happening, only a black-box behavioural model.
|
| In modern practice, there are no psychologists who aren't
| neurologists; no psychology paper is being written by
| someone who isn't a neuroscientist. "Psychology" is to
| "neuroscience" as "ML" is to "Computer Science" -- i.e. a
| specific sub-discipline that some researchers might focus
| on, but not because they lack the skills outside of that
| discipline; rather only because they enjoy the process of
| doing that particular type of research more.
|
| _Psychiatry_ is the practice of using psychological
| findings in a clinical, medical context. Psychiatrists
| _are doctors_ , who have then further _specialized_ by
| learning deeply+broadly about the various models-of-
| understanding that psychologists have developed. They
| know as much about _medicine_ as any other doctor; they
| just have the additional understanding that e.g.
| "depressed people aren't just sad." (Which is, y'know,
| something we had to _prove_ , and all the papers that do
| that are _psychology_ papers.)
|
| As such, psychiatrists are probably the doctors it'd be
| most beneficial to talk to, if you have a problem that is
| potentially psychologically rooted. A regular GP, who
| never touched any of that specialty while getting their
| degree, _will_ be able to recognize organic diseases, but
| _won't_ necessarily recognize psychiatric syndromes, and
| so will be very likely to _mis-_ diagnose a purely-
| psychiatric syndrome _as_ an organic disease.
| s5300 wrote:
| >And those diseases get treated carefully and separately,
| with workflows that get you referred on any sign of such
| diseases to a neurologist.
|
| No they don't. Are they _supposed to?_ Yes. But, at least in
| the US, things just don 't go as smoothly as they should with
| regards to this because our healthcare system is
| incomprehensibly worthless.
| sli wrote:
| Your complaint seems to be with the US healthcare system
| and not psychology.
| brudgers wrote:
| An even larger number proportion is people being assholes because
| they can...just like offline bad behavior.
|
| Mental illness reduces culpability.
|
| Attributing _most_ bad behavior to mental illness excuses it. It
| treats Twitter trolls as if they have no agenda.
|
| But Twitter is what we celebrated in the Arab Spring. An
| effective propaganda platform. That's how trolls use it...to
| promote ideologies. That's why the article leads with LGBT
| hotness; to define the victim perpetrator roles.
| callesgg wrote:
| Anyone that says anything that is meant to hurt people has
| psychological problems.
|
| But reading intent is impossible.
| [deleted]
| bingidingi wrote:
| >About 70% of DID patients are also diagnosed with BPD, and the
| two conditions are often considered part of the same spectrum.
|
| >I'm certainly not saying that all trans people have personality
| disorders or that being trans is a mental illness.
|
| A little bit of whiplash on this one. Despite the sentence or two
| claiming what the author is purportedly not doing, the rest of
| the article seems to indicate otherwise. If you don't want an
| article that makes you look like you're conflating trans people
| and mental illness... don't use a trans person as a springboard
| to talk about mental illness.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > A little bit of whiplash on this one. Despite the sentence or
| two claiming what the author is purportedly not doing, the rest
| of the article seems to indicate otherwise.
|
| Trans people _who actively post online about their trans
| status_ are a narrowly selected subset of trans people as a
| whole, and those _who act obnoxious enough to be a foremost
| example of OP 's point_ even more peculiarly so. One should
| never try to derive generalized descriptive statements from
| such narrow anecdata.
| falldmg wrote:
| To say there is no issues with irrational behavior in the LGBT
| community online would be criminal dishonesty. This is not a
| personal indictment against trans people or LGBT people as a
| whole, who have existed before Twitter, before Tumblr, and
| before Live Journal. The author, IMO, should not have to jump
| through Olympic hoops in order to distance themselves from the
| transphobic conclusion being pushed on them. They said that
| wasn't their intent, and the article doesn't appear to draw
| that conclusion. That really ought to be the end of it.
|
| This is exactly one of the problems with modern internet
| discourse. And I know someone is reading this comment wondering
| if I'm "one of the good ones". This mindset is, in itself,
| toxic and irrational. While bad intent matters, the absense of
| evidence of bad intent should be good enough ground to stand
| on.
| slver wrote:
| So we can't discuss trans people as a category and their
| correlations?
|
| There's a line between avoiding harmful stereotypes that lead
| to unfair discrimination and willful ignorance or
| misrepresentation of facts in service of political correctness.
|
| It's extremely hard to say where this line is.
|
| But we still have to be aware of its existence.
| bingidingi wrote:
| I'm not saying it can't or shouldn't be discussed, but the
| author was so conscious of the correlations made in the
| article that they felt the need to literally write that
| they're _not_ trying to make those correlations.
|
| There's no shortage of people linking transgendered people
| and mental illness, just as there's no shortage of people
| linking homosexuality to mental illness. If you're not trying
| to strengthen those assumptions, then use different
| examples... it seems lazy to just try to hand-wave it away in
| a sentence rather than using a different example.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Considering the amount of discrimination, harassment, and
| hostility these people endure every single day, I would be
| surprised if they remained perfectly sane.
| zepto wrote:
| Lots of trans people in fact _are_ mentally ill.
|
| Given the additional stresses and oppresive social experiences
| trans people face _and are outspoken about_ , this is entirely
| unsurprising.
| bingidingi wrote:
| Sure, but this isn't an article about the mental health
| issues faced by trans people, it's an article about mental
| illness' role on the internet that uses DID, BPD, and trans
| people as the primary example of mental illness.
| jandrese wrote:
| Mental health in relation to sexual identity is a massive
| minefield in online discussion. As soon as you go down that
| path you are in the realm of "curing" trans people of their
| mental illnesses, aka literally Hitler. It doesn't matter
| what you're actually saying, the only thing very online
| people are going to read is how you want to eliminate deviant
| sexual identity with medicine.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| amznthrwaway: If you read this, know you are shadowbanned -
| only certain people can see your content. I can only guess
| it has something to do with being a bigot and not just
| wishing for people to die, but directly wishing for the
| parents of fellow posters here to die.
|
| You claim to have been shadow-banned before (I know I was,
| many years ago) but somehow, you don't know you've been
| banned for the past two months. And somehow you don't
| realize how unacceptable it is to criticize and insult
| racial groups and all members within it simply because of
| their skin color, no matter the color.
| dang wrote:
| You've broken the site guidelines, which say: " _Don 't
| feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead._"
| a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls. Obviously that
| should go double, at least, when the user is already
| banned and the comment is killed. Turning a dead comment
| by a banned user into an off-topic distraction and even
| starting a flamewar about it as you've basically done
| here, is an abuse in its own right. Please don't do
| anything like that on HN again.
|
| It's also a bad bet to assume that a trollish account
| isn't aware that they're banned here; the majority are
| perfectly well aware, and most have created many accounts
| and been banned many times. They continue to post with
| banned accounts as a way of continuing to spew into the
| forum and troll the minority of users who have 'showdead'
| turned on.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I suppose I'll follow the rules, but I think
| shadowbanning is really tacky to do except in the case of
| actual spam.
|
| Note my name. I was shadow-banned for one sarcastic
| comment eight years ago, despite being an otherwise good-
| faith, decent contributor. Maybe things are different
| now, but I've never gotten over the feeling of wasting my
| time putting thoughts together and responding to a
| conversation and finding out I muted.
|
| Hell, I'm a mod of a city subreddit, and one of the other
| mods has shadowbanned a complete asshat of a person. I
| don't have ban powers, otherwise I would ban them
| outright. It makes me uncomfortable to be a party to
| disrespect like that.
| dang wrote:
| We don't shadowban established accounts--we tell people
| we're banning them and why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateR
| ange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... That's been the case
| for many years. I wrote about this the other day:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27573675.
|
| The exceptions are spammers and serial trolls. Those we
| continue to shadowban, for different reasons. In the case
| of spammers, telling them they're banned would just
| invite more spam, and in the case of serial trolls, would
| invite more trolling--besides which, serial trolls know
| perfectly well that they're banned. That's what "serial
| troll" means. The account you thought you were helping by
| telling them they were banned is one of the latter, and
| if you saw the shockingly abusive things they'd posted in
| the past I'm pretty sure you would think twice before
| casting them as an innocent victim.
|
| Don't you think it would be fair to update your views
| after 8 years? HN moderation has changed massively since
| then. When pg was the sole moderator of HN, it was
| completely impossible for him to put the kind of
| attention into moderation that we've been doing since we
| took over in 2014. That's the primary difference.
|
| If you look through my comment history you'll see that
| I've posted tens of thousands of comments and spent
| thousands of hours exhorting users to follow HN's rules,
| cajoling them and coaxing them and warning and scolding
| and coaching and helping and teaching. We cut people an
| incredible amount of slack before banning them. It's
| repetitive work and frequently meets with aggressive
| attacks and the most incredible sorts of imaginary
| accusation. I think it's reasonable to expect a decade-
| long user like yourself to cut us a little slack as well.
| If you think that we're beheading people without
| consideration, or treating them in any way
| disrespectfully, let alone unethically, I would invite
| you to observe more closely. I slip up sometimes and am
| happy to make corrections when people point that out, but
| I don't think charges of systemic malpractice are
| justified.
| amznthrwaway wrote:
| And very online people like you whine and cry about how
| you're the real victims if anybody critiques any aspects of
| your ideas, or probes your motives.
|
| Because very online white male people are so ensconced in
| privilege that they not only demand to be able to say any
| thought that comes into their head; you are such entitled
| little princesses that you must be able to say it without
| anybody ever being even slightly mean to you in reply.
|
| And then, comically, whiny, thin-skinned little losers like
| yourself call other people snowflakes and characterize them
| poorly, without ever realizing what an absolute hypocrite
| you are.
| chrismeller wrote:
| This is one of the main reasons I feel like the current culture
| of never disagreeing with anyone so you can never possibly offend
| anyone is ultimately toxic.
|
| As a person with (currently treated and doing fine) psychological
| issues I don't expect any single comment to get through to you,
| but if there are never any negative indicators that you are the
| problem, rather than everyone else... there is a mathematically
| insignificant chance you will ever realize something might be
| wrong.
|
| Particularly so in the case of the unfortunate stereotype of
| lonely loser who lives in his mother's basement and spends all
| his time on the computer.
| news_to_me wrote:
| I totally agree. In my friendships, I highly value people that
| will tell me when they disagree, and I try to avoid people who
| are hard to disagree with. Some of my favorite people are
| stereotypical "New York" types.
| 3grdlurker wrote:
| > the current culture of never disagreeing with anyone so you
| can never possibly offend anyone
|
| I'm not sure what you're talking about--I wonder if this is
| just your extremely subjective experience of the internet?
| Because I thought that the internet lately has been nothing but
| disagreement.
| sreque wrote:
| I think people disagree with each other all the time right
| now, but rarely ever actually listen. You can't update your
| view of the world based on feedback if you refuse to take the
| feedback seriously in the first place or think critically
| about opposing points of view.
| [deleted]
| cmckn wrote:
| Agreed, I think this sentiment is along the lines of
| "political correctness run amok" which is a completely
| subjective interpretation of changing social norms. Whereas I
| think the article is discussing how some use the impersonal
| void of social media as an outlet for their anxiety, etc.
|
| Personally, I try to limit the amount of time I spend on such
| websites, and HN is really the only place I read the comments
| (in moderation). Consuming everyone else's anxiety is
| unproductive, because it skews how I view the world (and the
| people in it), and raises my blood pressure. :)
| navbaker wrote:
| I actively avoid Twitter, but still get force fed Twitter
| opinions via most news websites. I wish they would stop
| producing headlines about the latest "backlash" or
| "outrage" on there.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| I recommend not spending much time on those types of news
| sites :)
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| But, how would they make money otherwise?! /s
|
| I think fucking social butterfly Arianna Huffington [1]'s
| website Huffington Post is the one that started the trend
| of headlines like "X {destroys,obliterates} Y" to report
| on 140 Twitter outbursts. Thanks, lady, for your
| contribution in destroying the media landscape.
|
| https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1994/11/ariannas-
| virt...
| nitrogen wrote:
| _I thought that the internet lately has been nothing but
| disagreement._
|
| Perhaps it's disagreement across tribes, but mandatory
| agreement within each tribe?
| wpietri wrote:
| I like your point, but I think you take it too far here:
|
| > if there are never any negative indicators that you are the
| problem, rather than everyone else... there is a mathematically
| insignificant chance you will ever realize something might be
| wrong
|
| A lot of my self-improvement has come not because of explicit
| negative feedback, but through paying attention to people and
| reflecting on who I want to be in the world. That's not to say
| that any approach is generally superior. People have all sorts
| of ways of dealing with the world.
| darkerside wrote:
| What you may not realize is, some people literally don't know
| how to do that, or that it's even something anyone would ever
| do. If you dropped into an alien culture, you'd need to learn
| a new raft of different signals all over again.
| rmellow wrote:
| Hi, immigrant here. I'm literally an "alien" from/in this
| planet.
|
| Canadians are very nice, but their famous agreeableness
| (and passive-agressiveness) often prevents me from
| realizing when I've committed a transgression, and makes it
| so much harder to integrate into the culture.
|
| Negative feedback is very useful and I would be grateful to
| get it instead of receiving a veiled response.
| derefr wrote:
| A lot of the bad in the world comes from leaving people
| unequipped of certain basic "soft skills". It's not the
| same thing as mental illness, but it has similar effects.
|
| And, for some reason, people become seemingly completely
| unwilling to learn-by-example any new-to-them soft skills,
| once they reach adulthood.
|
| Or perhaps "lifelong learning of soft skills" _is itself_ a
| soft skill that people aren 't being taught.
|
| -----
|
| Anecdote: I was diagnosed/treated for ADHD as an adult,
| whereupon the "social soft skills" part of my brain
| suddenly started working like it never did through my
| childhood.
|
| I went from thinking I was on the autistic spectrum, to
| noticing all sorts of new patterns while observing social
| interactions. I quickly realized that my _capacity_ for
| social-skill learning had never been missing; but rather,
| the learning itself had just sort of been "paused", for
| lack of "voltage" in the right brain areas.
|
| I did / am still doing a lot of delayed soft-skill learning
| as an adult. And it's really starkly obvious how much other
| people with me in the same situations, _aren 't_ deriving
| the same learning I do from those situations -- even when
| those people are sorely lacking in the relevant social
| skill, but aren't _otherwise_ socially unskilled. It seems
| like they just aren 't _bothering_ to look at the situation
| under the right "lens" to see the pattern, even though
| it's a "lens" they clearly possess.
| wpietri wrote:
| Sure! Everybody's born not knowing how to do that. Or
| understanding most social signals. Some of us learn. As I
| said, people have all sorts of ways of dealing with the
| world.
| amznthrwaway wrote:
| > This is one of the main reasons I feel like the current
| culture of never disagreeing with anyone so you can never
| possibly offend anyone is ultimately toxic.
|
| This culture doesn't exist in the real world.
|
| A bigger problem is people like who who soak themselves in
| hyper-partisan media and ideas, lose the ability to engage in
| critical thought and analysis, and whose brains turn to mush.
|
| So let me be clear: you're a moronic idiot who is completely
| and totally fucking wrong both on the facts and your (dull-
| headed) interpretation of your invented reality.
| darkerside wrote:
| I continue to believe that downvotes would make Twitter and
| Facebook a healthier and happier place.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > if there are never any negative indicators that you are the
| problem, rather than everyone else... there is a mathematically
| insignificant chance you will ever realize something might be
| wrong.
|
| Then again, depending on the psychological issues it doesn't
| matter how many negative indicators there are that you are the
| problem. Some people just seem unable to accept they have
| issues, or unable to correctly process that people's reaction
| to them is in fact negative.
|
| There's just such a wide range of things here.
| emerged wrote:
| Narcissists consider both positive and negative interactions
| to be positive, and narcissism has been on the rise for years
| owed primarily to social media.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| This sort of wishy washy argument (seemingly accepted by
| generally educated/reasonable people on HN) is the reason that
| society is so scientifically illiterate. It has nice sounding
| arguments that embed themselves into your thought patterns but
| zero real substance. Articles like this are how you get hordes of
| people to believe something without cause. The next time you see
| someone act "bad" online, you'll be able to excuse yourself for
| thinking, "that person has 'psychological issues'" instead of
| thinking any deeper. You saw an article about that, after all.
|
| The plural of anecdote is not evidence.
| falldmg wrote:
| Unfortunately, your critique has even less substantiation than
| the article, and therefore it would be even sillier to draw
| conclusions from it...
| nickysielicki wrote:
| That's only really a fair criticism if I had written an
| entire article about why this article is bad. Of course a
| comment about an article will have less substance than an
| article, that doesn't excuse this article from failing to
| meet the higher bar that ought to exist for an article.
| falldmg wrote:
| No, I disagree. Your critique is shallow even for it's
| relative prominence. The article literally opens with a
| counterpoint that you _shouldn 't_ generally use this as an
| excuse. What you said in your comment acts almost as
| perfect critique for itself: it sounds right, but it has
| zero substance. Why should anyone value a critique that
| says almost zero actual things about the article and
| instead draws a general conclusion that sounds like it came
| from purely reading the headline?
| slingnow wrote:
| Having the article state that you "shouldn't use it as an
| excuse" is probably about as effective as the surgeon
| generals warning on the side of a pack of cigarettes.
|
| What makes you believe that quick disclaimer would
| discredit the claim the OP is making?
| okareaman wrote:
| You don't say what is wishy washy or give any supporting
| evidence to your assertion that HN users seemingly fall for
| such arguments or how "nice sounding" arguments embed
| themselves into our thought patterns to control us or how these
| wishy washy nice sounding arguments lead us to dismiss people.
| You sound like you may have psychological issues and I say this
| as a non-neurotypical (bipolar)
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| That's a little ad hominem to diagnose them from one
| paragraph.
|
| There's actually a well known term for what they're
| describing.
|
| It's called pop science and is a very real thing.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| I'm _pretty_ sure they 're joking.
| okareaman wrote:
| Yes, I made myself laugh. As a bipolar, I often find
| things funny that other people don't.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| The article's actual title is "Are Twitter trolls mentally ill?"
|
| It makes me want to talk about how the concept of the troll has
| evolved from something specific to something very general. I
| glanced through the article and none of the behaviors it listed
| are what I'd consider troll behaviors. They're just the patterns
| of mild mental illness.
|
| Trolls, in my old-man's definition, are almost a type of hunter,
| looking to bait and confuse their victims.
|
| Trolls wouldn't be the hoards suffering from "sanctimony,
| emotional aridity and ideological orthodoxy", and exhibiting
| BPD/DID behaviors. Trolls would be the people trying to provoke
| the above.
| jandrese wrote:
| I've seen news articles about "internet trolls" who followed a
| neighbor around and sat outside of her window but also looked
| at her Facebook page. The term has already lost its meaning.
| hogFeast wrote:
| Would you call Sacha Baron Cohen a troll?
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| Absolutely
| ben_w wrote:
| Speaking for myself and not @droopyEyelids, absolutely.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| A troll is it doing it for fun and as an art form, I'd say that
| the horrid people on twitter are another thing.
|
| As mentioned in an earlier thread, I see a close relationship
| between the Twitter People and That Guy who goes to all the
| city council meetings to yell. They don't make up a majority of
| the population, but they sure can burn up some bandwidth.
| frumper wrote:
| I'd agree with that. I view a troll as having no ideals they
| cling to. They have a goal to provoke and incite with the least
| amount of effort and that usually involves taking a
| controversial stance for that given audience. It's what makes
| arguing with trolls, or feeding trolls, so pointless.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Interesting discussion, but on second thought I'm not sure what
| to make of it. Personality is a continuum and personality
| disorders are not clearly defined illnesses, like the flu or
| Parkinson's. They are just areas of the continuum that are deemed
| troublesome for the person or their surroundings. One of the
| diagnostic criteria for BPD is "Inappropriate, intense anger or
| difficulty controlling anger". So saying that people with BPD are
| overrepresented among people who display anger online is a bit
| like saying red cars are overrepresented among red objects. Yes
| they are, by definition.
| slackfan wrote:
| I for one, will be looking forward to the mandatory psychoactive
| chemicals in the water due to these studies.
| taneq wrote:
| 2) Bad behaviour stems from psychological issues.
|
| 1) Psychological issues are things that cause bad behaviour.
| ylee wrote:
| Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 35 years ago when
| discussing online forums:
|
| >I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful
| of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore
| them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's
| not always easy to do.
|
| This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of
| the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design
| has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central
| authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups
| can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's
| designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to
| participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior.
| Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network
| declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative
| proportion of the overall traffic grew.
|
| That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of
| varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is
| people of the type this post discusses, those with actual mental
| illness; think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is
| such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful
| motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere
| interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be
| people with very troubled personal lives which their online
| behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their
| relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is
| what has mostly killed Usenet.
|
| [1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| > The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no
| way for any central authority to completely delete posts
|
| Notice that HN mods can completely delete posts, but never do
| so (or at least, not without the target's permission). Flag,
| yes, delete, no.
|
| I think it's a cool distinction, and hopefully future social
| networks will take a cue from it. Being able to see what's
| going on (showdead) felt like an important diff from Reddit,
| and avoided much of the "un-edit Reddit" wars. (There are sites
| dedicated to tracking deletions by moderators.)
| TMWNN wrote:
| >I think it's a cool distinction, and hopefully future social
| networks will take a cue from it. Being able to see what's
| going on (showdead) felt like an important diff from Reddit,
| and avoided much of the "un-edit Reddit" wars.
|
| I did not know this and am glad to hear it. Yes, I've wished
| for a long time that Reddit would make all mod actions
| visible in diff form. Not being able to tell without opening
| a post/comment while logged out whether it has been hidden by
| a mod without any notification is maddening.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Yeah, if you go to your profile and turn on "showdead",
| you'll see a lot more stuff. There are some mod actions
| that aren't explicitly visible -- they can boot comments to
| the bottom, for example, despite upvote count. But it's a
| good compromise.
|
| And I don't think it would be a good idea for _every_
| action to be public. Maybe. It's one of those things that
| requires some thought. There are a surprising number of
| "behind the scenes" actions, and all of them being public
| would just ignite a lot of "why would you do such a thing"
| type debate, which is both a distraction and usually
| mistaken.
|
| Sometimes it's not mistaken, though, so your idea isn't
| without merit.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > completely delete posts
|
| This could be done by sending special "cancel" messages; it was
| then up to individual Usenet servers to figure out whether to
| honor these cancel requests, through unspecified criteria. The
| feature was somewhat hidden away in some Usenet clients to
| discourage pointless abuse, but it was there.
|
| > A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people of the type
| this post discusses, those with actual mental illness; think
| "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism".
|
| IME, these people were mostly entertaining as opposed to
| genuinely problematic. With killfiles being in common use and
| 'plonking' being discussed routinely as the standard way of
| dealing with annoyances, users were meaningfully incented to
| always be on their best behavior as judged by other forum
| denizens.
| ylee wrote:
| >This could be done by sending special "cancel" messages; it
| was then up to individual Usenet servers to figure out
| whether to honor these cancel requests, through unspecified
| criteria. The feature was somewhat hidden away in some Usenet
| clients to discourage pointless abuse, but it was there.
|
| In practice the cancel/supersede messages were and are never
| universally honored.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Personally, the main reason I dislike Twitter / Reddit /
| sometimes even HN, isn't the trolling or toxic posts. It's just
| that most of the posts are - not interesting. Like dumb memes,
| popular "unpopular" opinions, or "hot takes" that are the same
| stuff over and over.
|
| Even on HN, post after post is: crypto sucks, advertisements
| suck, cancel culture sucks, Amazon making $300 billion sucks,
| "bring back the old internet!" And I agree with all of that (heck
| sometimes I repeat it myself), but I don't need to hear it over
| and over.
| theknocker wrote:
| Cool now we can all talk about how anything we personally find
| abrasive must be a mental illness.
| sva_ wrote:
| I'm just glad that there finally seems to be a backlash against
| all this nonsensical internet-hate-mob stuff. Like a big wave in
| the ocean that finally recedes. Hopefully.
| [deleted]
| paperwasp42 wrote:
| Having worked in the publishing industry, my experiences support
| the conclusions of this article.
|
| About ~40% of authors I worked with had diagnosed mental health
| issues, and were quite open about their struggles. Most were a
| delight to work with--I strongly admire people who can be open
| and honest about their struggles.
|
| But about ~15% were... not so delightful. Working with them was
| hell, because they'd flip-flop constantly between treating me as
| sworn enemy or best friend.
|
| Their twitter feeds reflected this attitude. They were quick to
| pick fights with bewildered victims, to scream to the skies how
| evil X person was, how they were the victim of X's behavior.
|
| Having worked with them, I knew they were unstable and to ignore
| their online shrieking. But to an outsider....
|
| All outsiders see is an award-winning author, touted as a genius,
| with that little blue check mark declaring that they're a
| respected member of their field. So of course they're going to
| listen when that author screams that they've been victimized.
|
| Of course, pointing out that this person is mentally ill isn't an
| option--for one, it's confidential information. For two, you'll
| be fired for being "disability-phobic".
|
| So there's no choice but to sit back and watch the unstable troll
| rip apart other people.
|
| It's horrible. And it's one of the reasons I left the publishing
| industry. It's slowly and steadily being overrun by mentally
| unstable trolls, and it's starting to have a serious impact on
| which books get published and which don't. (Hint: anything that
| might possibly trigger the trolls will NOT get a publishing
| contract.)
| lmilcin wrote:
| I don't buy it.
|
| I think there is simple statistical/neurological explanation.
|
| Part 1:
|
| We are exposed to much more information and interaction that we
| have evolved for. Our brains have very biased/impractical
| approach to understanding the world: if you hear about something
| happening many times in large number then it automatically gives
| large weight to it and treats it as normal/prevalent/dangerous
| etc.
|
| This is also what somebody might mean when they say "a lie
| repeated frequently enough becomes truth". That's how our brains
| are built.
|
| Part 2:
|
| We tend to notice things that are out of ordinary more than
| normal. Nobody spends time revisiting "normal" comments, but
| people will notice and spend their focus disproportionately more
| on mean behavior.
|
| Part 3:
|
| Internet amplifies things, but mostly things we focus on. This
| means an extremely mean comment will tend to be amplified more
| and get more visibility than a perfectly normal comment.
|
| Part 4:
|
| Even if 1 percent of 1 percent of people write an extremely mean
| comment _just once_ that is still deluge of meanness that your
| biased brain will understand as "mean" being frequent behavior
| on the internet, something that is done by many people and
| probably frequently.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| > Part 3:
|
| >Internet amplifies things, but mostly things we focus on. This
| means an extremely mean comment will tend to be amplified more
| and get more visibility than a perfectly normal comment.
|
| It's not "the internet". It's social media and news. Which is
| funded by advertising, so optimises for "engagement" (emotional
| content). A mean comment in Usenet will die unread. A mean
| comment on Facebook/Twitter will get algorithmically amplified
| because it causes others to interact with it.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I think your four points are all absolutely true. However, I
| cannot plausibly think of a reason why we _wouldn't_ have a
| disproportionate amount of online bad behavior from the
| mentally ill. There's really almost nothing in the online
| environment to prevent it, and quite a lot of mental conditions
| result in manic phases of some sort that would cause them to
| spew a lot of it online.
| distributedsean wrote:
| This is an interesting idea, feel free to ignore this comment
| :)
| jollybean wrote:
| This is interesting, but it's missing the parts around the
| amplification and institutionalization processes.
|
| Imagine if all of the world's troubling content were in the
| 'comments section'. Would anyone care? No. The 'comments
| section' doesn't get widely distributed, it's not backed by
| institutions or influential individuals etc..
|
| In order for these kerfluffles to have impact they need to be
| picked up on by supposedly credible institutions, with a wide
| reach.
|
| If the 'Cancel This Person' Tweet were to stay entirely on
| Twitter among regular people - nobody would care that much.
|
| But when the media gets hold, backs it, propagates it,
| institutions start to adjust possibly by making statements,
| withholding funding etc. - that's what causes major concern and
| material influence.
|
| More powerful systems and forces use statements made by
| individuals (often decontextualized) as fodder in their wars
| over attention, money and ideology.
| mysterydip wrote:
| I never made the connection to part 2 in the abstract before,
| that makes total sense. If you're walking down the street and
| see someone with two noses, you're going to notice, not the 20
| other "normal" people you passed at the same time. Why wouldn't
| the same carry over to reading text or watching videos?
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Article: "diagnosing people from afar is a bad idea" ( _diagnoses
| people from afar_ )
|
| Reason that diagnosis from afar is illegitimate isn't just that
| you don't have enough information (but there's that). Just as
| important is that "real", official, mental health diagnoses
| generally don't make sense without the context that a given
| person isn't functioning in society, has violated some
| institutional norm, etc.
|
| The role of mental health basically is to look at someone who's
| considered non-functional and classify _how_ they 're non-
| functional. If someone, mental health professional or otherwise,
| looks at someone in society and doesn't like how they're
| functioning but society is OK with this, that person can say
| society or some part of it is insane but collective insanity is a
| manifestly different phenomena than an individual diagnosis.
|
| Edit: Behavior some consider bad, that some people get away with
| and that is actually prized by some other section of society
| (whether it be hitting on women or taking ultra-moralist stances
| or trolling generally or whatever) can't be official,
| institutionally defined insanity, even I don't might informally
| various actions "crazy" (which indeed occasionally offends people
| in the present context).
|
| Edit2: Another I'd put is that the specific tools of the mental
| health professional aren't tools for understanding people in
| general and aren't tools for understanding bad behavior outside a
| context where it's debilitating bad behavior. In those contexts,
| sociologists, maybe, something specific to say but to a large
| extent, specialized knowledge by itself may given an advantage
| and someone tossing around psychiatric terms in this is kind of
| engaging in pseudo-science.
| stevenicr wrote:
| How fast can an algorithm be put together to find evidence of
| mental health issues via social media posts and then trigger a
| waterfall of rights removals?
|
| It could be easy to argue that society may be better off without
| those folks having rights.
|
| Flagged as mental - - loose free speech - blocked from posting on
| networks, email capabilities removed via isps, library and cell
| phone companies. - Flagged so can not purchase firearms -
| soldiers may now be sent to watch over you in your place or
| residence/work - things you have said in the past and things you
| know can be studied - search history, alexa/assistant stuff - you
| can not hide what you know. - You could wait for a jury trial but
| never be able to see your accuser, it's a bot written by a very
| good professor/doctor - a jury of your 'peers' would be people
| who have never been red-flagged as problematic social media
| posters. - civil trials would be auto-lost because the bot would
| know you are bad. - would it be cruel punishment to be cut off
| from all things digital? no dating, friends, family, food orders,
| rides..
|
| It seems you can slay the bill of rights pretty quickly simply
| using a digital footprint.
|
| I read a submarine article today pushing for the expansion of
| background checks for rights that did not include a bunch of
| 'other side info' that should be discussed.. it can be easy for
| something to be right and be used for the wrong reasons or in the
| wrong way.
|
| I've also seen news where 'they' are asking social media
| companies to hand over info to try to prevent offline violence as
| one solution to things -
|
| at what scale does this become weaponized mass destruction? a
| thousand people? ten thousand?
|
| Of course people will lose their right to vote, maybe parenting
| rights and all sorts of others.
|
| All from a twitter rant.
|
| This is actually where we are right now I guess.
|
| The goldwater rule mentioned in the article may need to be
| codified into national law to prevent these kinds of things from
| running amok.
| korethr wrote:
| Just reading that, my skin crawls and I can feel the nucleation
| of an icy fear in the back of my mind. Not just no, but Hell
| Fucking No.
|
| I argue that those genuinely arguing for such a system fail to
| realize just how quickly it can and will be weaponized against
| themselves.
| slibhb wrote:
| To me, the interesting question here is whether symptoms of BPD
| (or mental illness more generally) might confer an advantage when
| it comes to building a following on social media. For example,
| catastrophizing seems to be a staple on the many popular social
| media accounts.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I don't think BPD would be an advantage due to instability.
| There is nothing quite like a neurotypical person being
| dramatic. They can keep it up and keep going. It's a stable
| "crazy" that doesn't have other problems getting in the way of
| being dramatic.
| paulpauper wrote:
| No it does not. The most successful people on social media, i
| have found to be pretty cool and collected. The mental illness
| symptoms i think are more likely to come from having no
| following and feeling ignored. That will drive some ppl mad.
| Daishiman wrote:
| Having dated people with BPD, it certainly created an emotional
| roller coaster that makes the highs really high; normal
| relations can even seem boringly stable after that.
| tus89 wrote:
| Did you know the background of unherd? If you did you might not
| have regard for this.
| dbrueck wrote:
| I don't know the background - tell me more.
|
| Also, your comment comes across as an ad hominem attack, not
| sure if I'm just misreading it though.
| tus89 wrote:
| It was created to promulgate extremist Christian-right
| propaganda - the kind that is "un-heard" in the mainstream
| media in the UK apparently.
|
| There are a lot of such organizations that don't openly
| declare their ideological background, and funding sources.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Can you cite that UnHerd was founded by and funded by
| "extremist Christian-right propaganda" forces? Considering
| that its executive editor has frequently featured
| commentators who are downright anti-religion (e.g. Richard
| Dawkins), and various commentators who subscribe to old-
| school 20th-century leftism including its antipathy to
| religion, that is a claim hard to believe.
| tus89 wrote:
| So I search google for "undherd Richard Dawkins", first
| link:
|
| https://unherd.com/2021/04/why-the-atheists-turned-on-
| richar...
|
| "Why the atheists turned on Dawkins - They care more
| about social justice than whether or not God exists"
|
| Written by: Ben Sixsmith is an English writer living in
| Poland. He has written for Quillette, Areo, The Catholic
| Herald....
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Yet at the same time, there is this [0] posted by a
| higher-ranking staff member. That you have found an
| article written by a contributor who has also written for
| a Catholic publication does not served as proof of your
| claim in the GP that UnHerd was founded to push
| "extremist Christian propaganda" - the whole point of
| UnHerd is that it draws on writers from a range of
| ideological outlooks.
|
| And FWIW, the idea mentioned in these links that early-
| millennium New Atheism eventually evolved into the
| current wave of social-justice activism, is something
| that has been often set forth by people here on HN and is
| not exclusive to any particular religious or anti-
| religious viewpoint.
|
| [0] https://unherd.com/thepost/richard-dawkins-scientism-
| is-a-di...
| tus89 wrote:
| > the whole point of UnHerd is that it is includes people
| from a range of ideological outlooks.
|
| You keep saying that. Let's like at some random headlines
| from their "contributors" page:
|
| > Ideology should not trump children's health (anti-
| trans)
|
| > France's mega-mosque problem
|
| > The emptiness of 'British values'
|
| > The death of American patriotism
|
| > The problem with male feminists
|
| > Universities have destroyed feminism
|
| > Can Labour be saved from the hard Left?
|
| > Labour isn't working
|
| > Why liberals are scared of football
|
| > Is Labour dead?
|
| > America attracts the wrong immigrants
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Again, the whole point of UnHerd is that it includes
| people from a range of ideological outlooks, who
| ordinarily would be opposed to one another, because they
| share some concerns and can forge a common cause in
| publishing.
|
| None of the headlines that you cite are specific to
| "extremist Christian-right propaganda", indeed these are
| themes are commonly discussed by those who identify as
| leftist and unreligious, but feel that certain things
| that are presently insisted on in leftism as de rigeur,
| are not part of the leftist tradition they recognize from
| a few decades back. For example, with regard to being
| "anti-trans", there are a _lot_ of soixante-huitards who
| find the current focus on trans activism on the left
| excessive and even problematic, because it was utterly
| foreign to their struggle against rightist forces.
|
| You have still not brought forth any proof of your claim
| above that UnHerd was founded and funded expressly for
| "extremist Christian-right propaganda" purposes. The
| gentlemanly thing to do would be to back up that claim,
| or retract it.
| tus89 wrote:
| > includes people from a range of ideological outlooks,
| who ordinarily would be opposed to one another, because
| they share some concerns and can forge a common cause in
| publishing
|
| LOL normally when people say "includes people from a
| range of ideological outlooks", they _usually_ mean so
| they present a range of ideological viewpoints. What you
| actually mean is so they can present a single ideological
| viewpoint, how counter-intuitive.
|
| > None of the headlines that you cite are specific to
| "extremist Christian-right propaganda"
|
| Anti-islmam, anti-feminist, anti-left, anti-immigrant,
| anti-trans...gosh what was I thinking! It's true the
| headlines are not overtly religious...but I never that
| was the case. Propaganda is often subtle so it can hide
| it's true nature and purpose and origin.
|
| > You have still not brought forth any proof of your
| claim above that UnHerd was founded and funded expressly
| for "extremist Christian-right propaganda" purposes
|
| Websites that take up the anti-trans cause are either
| secular radical feminist or Christian-right. Let's look
| up the founder of unherd shall we? (you probably guessed
| I already knew this).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Montgomerie
|
| > Montgomerie was born into an army family in Barnstaple
| in 1970.[7][8] He said in a Guardian interview[9] that
| "his teenage Thatcherism was tempered by discovering
| evangelical Christianity at sixteen".
|
| I guess it's not the radical feminist kind.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Ben Sixsmith is neither a leader or founder of UnHerd, so
| even if he's a Christian Right voice whose writing
| they've carried, that hardly cobtradicts the claim that
| they are diverse and that they don't focus on Christian
| Right content, carrying much from sides opposing thst
| viewpoint.
|
| Also, as Christian but pro-secular-politics left-leaning
| person, I think the statement you quote as an example of
| far right Christian propaganda is...just literal factual
| truth; the negative reactions to Dawkins in some parts of
| the atheist community is about social justice trumping
| shared identity around belief in the nonexistence of God.
| tus89 wrote:
| A current tactic of the Christian-right is to enter into
| alliances with people they would otherwise despise
| (radical feminists, "scienceologists" like Dawkins) on
| certain shared causes which are even more important to
| them - the bonding cause currently is opposing
| transgenderism. Dawkins happens to be transphobic - he
| even lost awards over it.
| version_five wrote:
| The article isn't a study or something that needs institutional
| credibility, it's just an opinion piece. Anyone interested can
| just read it and decide what they think of it.
| exolymph wrote:
| People are capable on judging an argument on its own merits.
| After all, if you don't think HN readers possess that
| capability, why bother associating with the commentariat on
| this website?
| defaultname wrote:
| A sizable number are never going to read the article or judge
| its merits. Instead they'll click an arrow based on whether
| the title matches their biases. "Yup, people I don't like
| have psychological issues..."
|
| For the few that might it is generally worth knowing whether
| it's actually worth the time. If the writer is someone
| considered and knowledgeable, on a credible venue, for
| instance. I know nothing about this site/writer so I'm not
| commenting on that, but generally that is an input before one
| spends the time on an essay.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| I guess it'd argue you can't judge an argument on its own
| merits unless it's a philosophical argument.
|
| For example the best published scientific studies can't be
| judged on their own merits because you have to trust that the
| scientists actually conducted the studies and didn't fake the
| data. So you basically have to fall back to some assumption
| over whether the scientist is honest, not on the merits of
| what they wrote in the study.
| jchw wrote:
| I Googled it and wasn't able to find anything terribly
| interesting. From a brief look at the Wikipedia page I can't
| find anything unusual, other than the most recent vandalism:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/102963491...
|
| ... which isn't exactly terribly substantiated on its own.
|
| Furthermore, unless this opinion piece is demonstrably in bad
| faith I dunno why that would detract from viewing it in a fair
| light.
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