Why Anti-Authoritarians Are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Why Anti-Authoritarians Are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill (2012)

madinamerica.com

382 pointskushti290 comments

This comment below the article triggered something deep inside me: "So a 7 year old who refuses to read or practice reading is healthy anti-authority individual?". Let me tell you that when I was a kid I loved to read, I read voraciously everything I could find, and I did because nobody made me do it. I can assure you that if a teacher had sat me down and forced me to read something boring at that young age, I would have hated the teacher, hated reading, and hated school and I would hated anyone who tried to get me to do it again, forever. Believe me, some kids just love freedom! Please, if there are any teachers out here reading this, do not kill the fragile thing in your kids that loves to learn by forcing them to read or do something boring with no explanation except, do it because you said so!

You definitely have a point.

I imagine there is no good, scientific method to determining how someone should be motivated that we can train teachers with. Just have to trust they're human enough to see our inspirations before they apply their method. We can't all be amazing psychiatrists, and adults have a lot of influence on us at that age. I too benefited from a stand-offish approach to learning.

I wish the better teachers were paid more to be in our schools - I had a teacher that completely ruined my love for animation.

Largely I think schools exhaust kids to get them to change/conform.

> I imagine there is no good, scientific method to determining how someone should be motivated that we can train teachers with.

http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp...

http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Pra...

The Montessori method pretty much nails it.

I recall reading a study about how school destroys creativity. IIRC, they found that 70% of children entering school exhibited some form of creativity. By the time they finished 6 years of primary school, that number had fallen to 1%.

We train ourselves to become mindless drones, and then put anyone who doesn't on medication.

Whenever I hear about studies like that, I wonder what the control group was. As in, how many children that did not enter school exhibited creativity 6 years later?

I'd have to dig up a reference to the study, but I won't be able to do that for the next few days. Google scholar returns various results for "school and creativity decline" if you have access to the relevant journals.

So you have no clue? I suggest to you that part of not being a mindless drone is recognizing that correlation is not causation. And part of helping others not be mindless drones is not quoting small parts of studies and then making wild claims that the study may or may not have shown, counting on the fact that the vast majority of "mindless drones" are going to take your statement at face value.

Self-replying because I cannot edit: see [1] for a link.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11360290

They might use home-school or other programs (small class sizes, private schools, tutors, etc) as controls.

If their assertion is that the current form of primary school is causing creativity to decline, they only need to demonstrate that it causes more decline than alternatives.

I still remember the shock of entering first grade, how structured everything was, how the teacher used a false high-pitched voice with exaggerated expressions to sound friendlier, how everyone thought that was normal and how she used that rapport to teach us to stand in lines for everything, agree with the group. When we were asked to work on the simplest math problems in a group, it was hard to reason with anyone because they would always go with the majority opinion instead of listening to arguments. I did end up getting a lot of respect when the teacher validated me.

We definitely infantilize our children in schools, teach them to act stupidly in order to get them to behave. Then we wonder why we have problems like youth gang violence.

I volunteered quite a bit in my child's school. I hear and acknowledge you. I would only point out that group activities and socialization in the capable hands of a talented teacher are a wonder to behold. Some of my happiest memories are watching my child and his classmates lock in, help each other, having fun learning. Empowering.

Alas, those talents aren't common.

I think you have hit an important point: forced infantilization as a result of the group-based teaching environment in modern schools.

maybe what you are referring to:

https://youtu.be/zDZFcDGpL4U?t=536

which is a delightfully digestible, abridged, version of this talk:

https://www.thersa.org/discover/videos/event-videos/2008/06/...

whose transcript you can find here:

https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/videos/2010/10/rsa-...

whose figures are drawn from this book:

    Break Point and Beyond, by George Land

relevant bit:

    So my question to you is what
    percentage of the people tested of the 1,500
    scored at genius level for divergent thinking.
    Now you need to know one more thing about
    them - these were kindergarten children. So
    what do you think? What percentage at genius
    level? 80? 98%. Now the thing about this was
    it was a longitudinal study, so they retested the
    same children five years later aged 8 to 10.
    What do you think? 50? They retested them
    again five years later, ages 13 to 15. You can
    see a trend here can't you?

Thanks, this was what I was referring to!

Is that caused by schooling itself or by being exposed to other people [living in a society]?

Can we expect societies with low school enrollment to have greater percentages of people exhibiting creativity? Or do we also we a decline in this creativity despite not going to school?

I remember how much I detested being told to be "creative" in school, and how many of my peers seemed to have no problem with it. I enjoyed learning, even if I was sometimes bored by routine in school, but "creativity" was an unpleasant requirement.

Don't think that it's so easy to find an alternative version of school that won't be a pain for some students.

That's right, and that's why one of the most harmful qualities of current schools is the pervasive uniformity. If all students were valued, all students would be taught in the manner most appropriate to the individual student. Instead we favor those students with the good fortune to fit like keys into the Procrustean lock of this year's ed-school fad.

Entering a new-entrant class is like coming across a recently bombed $2 shop. The colour, noise and tat cause some sort of visceral reaction. I can't understand how anyone can learn in that environment. This special snowflake went to a Steiner school which was like authoritarian east European orphanage in comparison. I liked it.

As avian points out, this is seriously confounded by the age of the children. How many of them, after six years of primary school, were the same age they had been when they started?

I hated reading anything to do with school assignments, but loved reading.

I was a consistent B student, but when I got to do more AP and similar, more independent classes, I was able to really apply that knowledge I picked up through independent study. For a section on the Boer war, the teacher actually let me do the lecture!

I don't think we're even close to understanding the hows and whys of rebellion, motivation.

I don't feel peer pressure, even though I'm an extrovert. I fight for the underdog. I challenge unfair rules. Whereas I have very clever friends who observe, analyze, and find a way to move forward, I storm the castle.

The result of abuse, neglect, innate traits, nature, nurture, birth order, luck of the draw? Who knows.

In contrast to you, my reading and exploring were escapes, outlets, coping mechanisms. I was discouraged, coerced to be more like the other kids. Every person has their own way out.

What's magical to me is that for many kids, there can be 2 or 3 "angels" (mentors) to help them find their way. Instead of expecting every authority figure and their subjects to behave in some idealized manner, I wish that every kid has a chance to meet their "uncle" or "granny" figure role that makes life bearable.

As an American going to school in Canada, I've wondered how American this idea is of "being your own man" and "don't tell me what to do."

I certainly feel the same, but many of my peers seem to only do something if an authority spurs them on.

Merging the discussion of kids and adults is a fallacy anyways since authority figures in a child's life hopefully know about preparing for the future and have the child's interests at heart to some extent.

As people grow up though authority figures have more of their own incentives and the people they are commanding have the figure things out for themselves which makes for a much larger grey area.

> authority figures in a child's life hopefully know about preparing for the future and have the child's interests at heart to some extent

The immense popularity of Roald Dahl books which continually portray a lot of adult authority figures as not having the children's best interest at heart but rather their own, speaks against the idea that children agree with you.

Anti-authoritarianism, as the article points out, is not against all authority; it's against authority which is thrust upon you and not by your own choosing. This is an immense part of the experience of many or most children. It doesn't necessarily have to be that way, indeed most children are very good at choosing who to trust and who to invest authority in and who not to. Taking that choice away is immensely frustrating for children.

> Let me tell you that when I was a kid I loved to read, I read voraciously everything I could find, and I did because nobody made me do it.

Completely agreed, and this has been argued since antiquity. In Plato's Republic:

Socrates: Therefore, calculation, geometry, and all the preliminary education required for dialectic must be offered to the future rulers in childhood, and not in the shape of compulsory learning either.

Glaucon: Why's that?

Socrates: Because no free person should learn anything like a slave. Forced bodily labor does no harm to the body, but nothing taught by force stays in the soul.

Glaucon: That's true.

Socrates: Then don't use force to train the children in these subjects; use play instead. That way you'll also see better what each of them is naturally fitted for.

As a rule of thumb I tend to intensely dislike Plato, but that is surprisingly modern.

Disliking Plato because he's not "modern" is a little silly. His teachings are obviously old, but they were also a huge stepping stone in philosophy.

Socrates/Plato and Aristotle's writings remain highly relevant today in regards to the origins of democracy, western civilization, alphabetical language, and the "market economy" of uniform pricing systems.

I do not dislike Plato because he is "not modern". I am sorry if I gave you that impression.

And I do not debate his influence on European philosophy, which is hard to underestimate.

Mostly, the reason I dislike Plato is because in school I had a teacher who practically worshipped Plato and acted as if he was the pinnacle of philosophy or human thinking in general.

Also, a few years later, I was unfortunate enough to read an introduction to European philosophy written by somebody who literally said that European philosophers could be divided into two groups - those who agreed with Plato, and those who were wrong.

So when it comes to Plato, I am kind of "traumatized".

What I meant to say was that it took us surprisingly long to rediscover that particular piece of wisdom expressed by Plato, and that given my attitude towards him, I was pleasantly surprised to see him express such a thought.

It's unfortunate that you are "traumatized" in regards to Plato, or anything, for that matter. Even though you consider yourself "traumatized", Plato still has good ideas, and likely some not so good ideas as well. I would encourage judging the ideas on their own merit, and not to immediately dismiss them simply because you don't like Plato.

I don't think an appeal to authority is gonna work in this thread.

Have an upvote. While I find your comment humorous, it's also insightful. I don't see why others would downvote it.

Yeah, GP is making a clever allusion to TFA, not actually accusing me of appeal to authority :)

Exactly and thanks.

While Plato is something of an authority (and thus the best target for the joke), he does show his work. HN is pretty good about avoiding appeal to authority.

But it is a frightfully common logical fallacy, and the perhaps the only one we spend so much time educating our children to use. Largely by example.

>But it is a frightfully common logical fallacy, and the perhaps the only one we spend so much time educating our children to use. Largely by example.

All logical fallacies are actually valid ways of thinking about things.

It's good to avoid them (or use them) but only in moderation.

The idea that avoiding logical fallacies all the time is OK, is actually illogical.

Sure, something might not be true just because an authority on the matter said it, but it's more likely to be true than what some random person said about the subject. E.g. one would rather trust Einstein than the guy who says they invented perpetual motion. The idea of the burden-of-proof (which is totally valid) is against total adhesion to "appeal to authority".

And given finite lifetimes, and other interests, we're not gonna all learn medicine and evaluate any claim on a medical issue we have from our street cleaner and our doctor alike. We'll trust the doctor, appeal to authority be damned -- and it's the smart thing to do, even if it's not 100% accurate (the doctor might be wrong).

Indeed!

I too read for the freedom and power it brought me. So many of us, I imagine...

Spotting "fallacies" is a guideline -- and a crude and incomplete one at that, and mostly useful for judging propaganda pieces and things like that. Not something that is actually useful in casual conversation.

In fact conversation would be 100% impossible without "appeal to authority" of some sort, except if you expect anyone to prove everything from first principles.

The quote is a quote from a well regarded (for millennia) piece of thinking on pedagogy. You're not asked to take it as truth because Plato said it, but it's worth to ponder what he had to say, especially since it's a foundational part of western civilization.

You can read it as "hey, millennia of people though this has a good point -- maybe there's something into it?". Or at least at "hmm, here's what many people used to think is a valid point about pedagogy".

I think you're missing the intent here.

But it you're turning off your logic in casual conversation, expect to get burned. Detecting fallacies should be an always-on feature, like HTTPS. Most of the time you're not going to have a MITM attack... until you do.

I think you've also missed the point of TFA, which says that anti-authoritarians can accept authority, if it proves to be a legitimate authority. And it still requires you to use logic, because no authority is perfect. I may be a Lutheran, but that in no way makes me a creationist like Martin Luther.

>But it you're turning off your logic in casual conversation, expect to get burned. Detecting fallacies should be an always-on feature, like HTTPS.

I don't suggest turning off logic in casual conversation. Rather I suggest that one doesn't put it in autopilot -- as if fallacies (or their lack thereof) are the ultimate judgement of an argument.

I think it is more an appeal to classics, which is different from an appeal to authority.

Is that your paraphrase or a quotation from a particular translation? I don't think I've seen Plato translated into this kind of colloquial modern English before. It works really well.

I transcribed it (with added speakers' names) from my hard copy of Grube's 1974 translation, 2nd edition revised by Reeve in 1992. Agreed, I like the modern English fluency, and supposedly it's quite accurate, though I don't know enough Attic Greek to say myself.

Edit: Book VII, starting at 536d. You can compare against the public domain Jowett translation at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.8.vii.html (search in the page for "slave")

Tolstoy, after he became an anarchist, believed that education should be devoid of coercion, and inspired many anarchist inspired education experiments around the turn of the century (1900).

From Tolstoy's Wikipedia page: "Fired by enthusiasm, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana and founded 13 schools for children of Russia's peasants, who had just been emancipated from serfdom in 1861. Tolstoy described the school's principles in his 1862 essay 'The School at Yasnaya Polyana'. Tolstoy's educational experiments were short-lived, partly due to harassment by the Tsarist secret police. However, as a direct forerunner to A. S. Neill's Summerhill School, the school at Yasnaya Polyana can justifiably be claimed the first example of a coherent theory of democratic education."

Politics and Culture in Anarchist Education: The Modern School of New York and Stelton, 1911-1915: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1179429?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...

The Unlikely History of Tolstoy College: http://news.infoshop.org/education/unlikely-history-tolstoy-...

Interesting, didn't know that; thanks! I wonder what Tolstoy and Montessori would have thought of each other's schools :)

> I can assure you that if a teacher had sat me down and forced me to read something boring at that young age

I added emphasis on an important word here. Of course kids don't like to be made to read something boring. Where things get serious is when a kid refuses to read AT ALL, or worse, is demonstrably incapable of focusing long enough to read.

While I think that ADD is over-diagnosed in kids, I also know from personal experience that some people (not just kids) really do have ADD and benefit from therapeutic intervention. To me it seems just as dangerous to over-diagnose political anti-authoritarianism as it is to over-diagnose medical ADD.

Anyway, 7-year-olds do not actually have an anti-authoritarian streak; they crave the attention, acceptance, and approval of their parents and teachers. But they are in the process of establishing an independent mental model of themselves, which means they experiment to find out where the boundaries are. Kids don't employ political thinking to reject authority, they are still stuck in the process of discovering and defining what authority actually is.

I think that things you are forced to read are generally more boring. Even things in college that I was interested in became monotonous when I was forced to read the subject material, whereas things that I decided to research organically were always entertaining and I could spend hours looking into the subject without feeling fatigued.

Thinking that kids are different or incapable of learning on their own is just people wanting kids to go through the same meat grinder of education that they did. My partner was unschooled, and after talking to her and getting over the initial reaction of "that's nuts" I feel like it actually makes a ton of sense. The data support it. I don't care if you're kid can't read at 7 -- if it's not due to a disability such as dyslexia -- and neither does their future education.

What does "unschooled" mean? Did they just test into a GED/college, or have they never been in an educational institution? What do they do now (feel free not to answer that kind of personal question, but I honestly never really thought of "unschooled as a concept and this is sending me down a rabbit hole)?

Unschooling typically means avoiding traditional educational institutions, letting your kids learn the things that they want to learn -- in the effort to foster inquisitiveness -- by just interacting with the world. For instance, someone who believed in unschooling wouldn't tell their kids to learn how to read, but when they become interested in reading because they think that books are cool, they would help them learn, likely through something like a voluntary class.

My partner made her own decision to go to high school as she was interested in going on to college. A lot of her friends were interested in college and managed to get in because of their work that they'd been doing on their own/SAT scores. Now she's a developer at Amazon, and a number of her friends went to top tier universities.

Of course a small number of them did nothing with their lives and live at home with their parents, but so did a larger percentage of people that I went to school with.

(also, I hate that I can't edit out that I put you're instead of your in a sentence about reading. the shame)

> To me it seems just as dangerous to over-diagnose political anti-authoritarianism as it is to over-diagnose medical ADD.

We're not currently at risk of under-diagnosing ADD. We're at risk to further over-diagnose it. The article and parent post did not say nobody should be diagnosed ADD. The article's author is merely shocked how many people are misclassified as needing to be medicated.

> Anyway, 7-year-olds do not actually have an anti-authoritarian streak; they crave the attention, acceptance, and approval of their parents and teachers.

FUCK YOU.

This is the response you would have heard from 6 y.o. me, if only I wasn't scared that my parents would punish me for swearing. That's how far my respect for authority went :)

I had gone to preschool for one year. I remember it as being locked up for half a day with a bunch of infantile imbeciles under supervision of not much more serious adults. I despised all those alphabetes who didn't give a damn about anything farther than 1 meter away from their nose and equally despised the teachers who acted surprised that I didn't care to socialize with the former. I think they suspected me of autism, but this was clearly just psychological defense to cope with my rejection :)

Caring about the teachers attention and acceptance would have meant behaving like a little dumb shit running around screaming and quarreling with others such. Not an exciting perspective.

I remember how at one time the teachers complained to parents that I never greeted them (which means I probably did, ha ha). My parents had to enter the class with me after having threatened that they'd make a scene if I didn't greet the teacher :)

Actual school was only barely better. At least the other kids were forbidden screaming. Still boring as hell.

> Where things get serious is when a kid refuses to read AT ALL, or worse, is demonstrably incapable of focusing long enough to read.

Why would anyone focus on something he/she doesn't care about?

I strongly feel that the reason behind most of those learning disabilities is keeping kids in an environment where ability to read is completely unimportant except for those few unfortunate hours they spend at this asinine place called "school", hours they'd like to forget as soon as they end. I hated school for being childish and boring, but other kids apparently had their own reasons too. I don't think many kids there actually cared about school. Especially in the first few years.

BTW, regarding reading being unimportant, I wonder if the rising popularity of computers won't suddenly provide a magic decrease in "reading disabilities". I was raised in the age of TV, but I feel like nowadays it's harder to obtain entertainment with no ability to read at all.

The only reading disability I've noticed lingering has been dyslexia. I've done quite a few linux conversions where I also needed to install the OpenDyslexic font to help them read.

Otherwise, I bet you're likely correct.

I have a very strong memory from that time.

My sense of "me" was forming, and I was aware it was incomplete, and I didn't understand it. I had many authority problems, having rejected most of the school.

This went on for long enough, they eventually were wanting to intervene with drugs and a psychologist. Age 11 ish...

This, being the late 70s, scared me, and I remember a cold resolve to resist the entirety of it, for fear of losing that self before I even had a chance to understand and grow strong.

It did not go well. I did manage to convince the shrink the drugs were a non starter. Friends who went down that path changed. I could see it.

Never have quite got past that basic wrong.

Interestingly, the issues went away as soon as I managed to get some autonomy.

Aren't there also a whole lot of kids who no one is forcing to read and also never feel like reading (mainly because they never see their parents or adult role models reading)? How do they fit into the picture you paint?

Well, I would say that they might benefit from somebody reading things to them, or telling a story from a book, and if that doesn't work, I can guarantee that if it isn't reading there is definitely something that lights up this kids face, and maybe our role as adults is more to allow the child to explore what that might be than to force them to practice the skill of our choosing. And then you can show the kid how reading can be a doorway to that skill in turn.

I know an 87yo man who did not learn to read until his 40's. He is off the charts intelligent, a very accomplished business man and a widely recognized/awarded artisan. Times were different in his adolescence, and he has done plenty of reading in his latter life(classics, technical) but he professes his depth of success would not have been possible if he were distracted by "fairy tales" & the daily assault on our senses of modern(pre-digital) media & marketing. As a result, I sometimes question my thousands of hours reading fiction as a kid instead of honing my historical knowledge or technical skills. Ultimately however, I do not regret the multitude of stories I have experienced & cherish the imaginitive depths I experience in my mind's eye, I won't ever be the "best of the best of the best" of anything, but I will be good and I will be the best I can be while I enjoy life's distractions. He respects that attitude & has expressed his envy, too. The grass really is greener on every other side, I guess.

edit: added last two sentences, needed a point to the post. I am flighty, but I digress...

My father knew this about me, and forbid me to read too many programming books (but instead had to concetrate on real literature). Later he told me, that by doing this he actually made me read (in secret) lots of programming books (and damn... he knew about it :)).

I am currently doing this with my son with just reading in general. I'll tell him he has to goto bed, and he'll ask if he can read, and I'll say no and turn out the light. Even though I know he has a flashlight in his room and stays up about 45 minutes after I close the door.

But how did you teach him to be antiauthoritative first?

My mum has done similar tricks to me and still does now that I'm grown up and out of her hair. But what if I just folded over and said "Okay" and went to bed when she told me to?

It's purely natural. All life strives to push the boundaries laid by former life. For kids it's a game to see who can get away with the most without getting in trouble

The brilliance is knowing that you would disobey. If you were the type that folded over she would have just asked you to read more.

What if you are kidnapped by a secret band of Kumite fighters and they demand you learn Karate? Also preparing for the olympics is boring. Learning to do boring things has really paid off. I'm not sure any teacher should take your advice just because you "love freedom". Aren't the authoritarians the very people who make you (!) love freedom in the first place?

This was my experience with learning Mandarin Chinese. I loved learning it when I was a teenager. I got out all the books in the library, and was practicing flash cards with our Chinese friends. Then I decided that I may as well do it at school, so I started taking lessons, and they started giving me homework. And so then it became a chore, and I gave it up at the end of the year. Same for piano lessons, actually.

Same experience here. Programming was boring in high school. More fun before and after.

I have not read the original article but I think the context matters. Growing up in India, "English medium education" was a big thing. I had learned mathematical tables in my local language prior going to school and when I entered an English school I had to learn everything again which teacher taught to us as "Two Two Za Four". I was very curious about the "Za" and with my mother's help figured out that it is in fact "Two Twoes are Four". When in class I started saying tables in the same fashion with more clearer pronunciation my teacher branded me "stupid" for not conforming to the usual pronunciation. It only made me realize the teacher is stupid.

A child refusing to read is not necessary refusing to read everything. May be the child is refusing to read what teacher prescribed to read. May be the child hates the specific content. A good and empathetic teacher must see what is wrong here and help the child develop curiosity about reading instead of branding the child stupid.

In another story in my childhood in India: "elocution competitions" were very popular and all mothers wanted their kids to win the first prize. "Experts" had selected few stories that "built character" and we were supposed to memorize it and then reproduce it with acting. (You must bring tears in your eyes when describing the mother's pain in the story- teacher said).

Despite being a crazy reader I never excelled in this and my mother was very upset. Today I am author of several children's story books which are popular too. The reason why I failed to tell a story on stage is because I could never relate to the "character building story" that someone else selected for me. I wanted to tell a story from Alif Laila or some Bollywood movie not the "character building story" meant to instill value.

Even though your point that a "child refusing to read is not necessarily anti-authority" is correct, I think there is a good chance that the child's individuality and individual preferences are at play.

American liberalism is moving very fast towards "everyone must be like everyone else and have same opinions" and probably affecting public education system too.

You assume Schools and Teachers have the desire, the goal of Education.

They do not.

They have the desire the goal to create a work force, soldiers, and compliant citizens for society,.

Not to create educated free thinking persons

I don't know. For most of then it's just a job. It's rewarding sometimes and sometimes not.

A few of then really burn for it and make wonders. Others burned out.

I think a surprisingly large percentage are not particularly suited to be a teacher,and they suffer as they are not in control of the situation.

A few are probably really bad apples and should not be allowed to work with children since they are paedophiles or sadists.

But I doubt that even more than a few teachers are thinking in the terms of creating a 'compliant' workforce.

>But I doubt that even more than a few teachers are thinking in the terms of creating a 'compliant' workforce.

Consciously, no probably not. They probably genuinely believe they are educating.. That is the by design.. After all the Students and Parents are not aware most of the time of the manipulation being done upon them either. After all students do learn things... They have to in order to be a use as workers, soldiers, etc. They however must learn not question authority, not question their masters, must not have critical thinking skills, or skills that lesson their dependency on Corporations or Government.

The Underground History of American Education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWRqZrCMqbA&list=PL8v6e5jkrm...

You're confusing the motivations of individuals (Teachers) with the emergent properties of systems (Schools). It's entirely possible to have systems where all actors' motivations are positive, yet the outcomes are not.

It may be true that some teachers actually want to educate, it may also be true that many even most teachers start their career with that motivation but the system of schooling quickly and permanently removes that motivation and replaces it with Institutional Conformity and replaces any motivation the individual may have had with the motivation of the system.. the school

Some teachers are soo brain washed by this replacement that they do not even recognize the replacement occurred, so insidious is schooling that the teachers still believe they have the same motivation, and same goal of education.

The problem here is that there are no one-size-fits-all approaches. Autodidacts will train themselves, but most people aren't autodidacts.

It's not the teachers per se, it's the school system that turns them into henchmen. Institutionalized oppression.

Still haven't figured out that forcing kids to do things against their will does not make them love doing it.

Another level of perversion is singling out kids who stand up for themselves and refuse to (or just cannot) fit in the extremely unnatural and unhealthy environment that school is, often labeling them abnormal and often pushing for medicating them. Atrocious.

A great book on the topic is "Punished by Rewards" by Alfie Kohn. Lots and lots of research showing how attempts for extrinsic motivation kill intrinsic motivation.

For parents reading this:

Praise kills motivation. Encouragement kills motivation. Rewards kill motivation (it shifts onto the rewards). Punishment destroys trust and creates motivation to not be caught.

;)

Wait til we see the first generation of kids forced to code in school.

As much as politicians want tomtreat programming as the 'new literacy' i can think of no better strategy to destroy an entire generation's intrinsic passion to learn technology.

Not to mention, the vast majority of teachers are woefully incapable of effectively teaching a subject they they, themselves don't begin to grasp.

There's no money in teaching so those with the background required to be 'good' teachers will inevitably pursue other, better opportunities.

This is very interesting to me. I went to a psychiatrist last week and she told me I have "delusional thoughts about the government." She asked me what gives me anxiety, and I told her that it freaks me out that the government collects all of our data and wants to take away encryption. She told me I am nuts and that the government doesn't do that. ce le vie!

This is the creepiest story I have heard in a while. I wouldn't be surprised if many psychiatrist would diagnose the average HN reader this way.

Also makes me think of Terminator 2.

I think you overestimate how many of us agree with you.

It seems like many people on this forum would be considered by many psychiatric professionals to be suffering from delusions about the government, but perhaps there is a silent majority of HackerNews readers who are not as overtly paranoid about government surveillance. I doubt the actual levels of paranoia as well. These are Internet comment boards. There's a lot of huffing and puffing and general stage theatrics.

> It seems like many people on this forum would be considered by many psychiatric professionals to be suffering from delusions about the government,

The way the OP framed the therapist's response, sure. Of course, they're telling their perspective on what the therapist responded.

Having worked with therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and studied it to some degree in my early college including internships the more typical concern of a therapist is not the veracity of your beliefs (they're largely irrelevant), but the degree to which they are causing distress and if that distress is to a level that it interferes with your ability to function in society and form meaningful relationships With 'meaningful' defined by your personal satisfaction with the relationships and the satisfaction of those you have relationships with.

This is the criteria for all behaviors in the DSM that causes a spectrum of behaviors or beliefs to shift on the continuum of 'normal' to 'abnormal' for the purpose of diagnosis.

In practice, that means they could care less if you think the government (or God, or FSM, or Xenu) is watching your every move...but only if that keeps you from leaving your house or causes you significant distress. Or kept you from forming relationships because you thought they were government agents.

For example, here is the definition of delusion from the DSM V

Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture* (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.*

Emphasis mine. The point is by virtue of most people in the subculture of hackers believe this way means that, by definition, it is not delusional.

But again, if it keeps you from getting to the grocery store it would likely be worth considering medication. ;)

That the government collects all of our data and wants to take away encryption that it can't break? You also agree with that, or you are in radical opposition to the government's opinion on its own positions.

Maybe this is too fine a point for this discussion, but "the government" is not a single entity. It's many different entities, often with differing points of view on any given topic. Some parts of the government want to backdoor all encryption. Others state publicly that that would be a horrible idea.

When people say "the government", they mean the specific institution or individuals that this applies to and form part of the government. When it comes to the powers of "government institutions", it seldom makes a difference that only "parts" of the government believe/do what is being discussed.

To say otherwise, I believe, is to try detract from the actual implications and make them seem more benign and less dangerous. I.e. "Oh, don't worry that the CIA is spying on you, the 'supreme court' will make sure your rights are upheld!"

it seldom makes a difference that only "parts" of the government believe/do what is being discussed

If you believe that, then it doesn't seem like you understand the basic concept of checks and balances very well. The fact that checks and balances can be perverted and subverted and are imperfect doesn't imply they are completely ineffective and irrelevant. The fact that the FBI is fighting in court for the ability to command Apple to hack the iPhone is a perfect example of this. "The government" wants to force Apple. O..K... "the government" isn't going to let "the government" do that. This is a useful way to talk about things to you?

Let's take the whole sentence of mine that you decided to quote, because the sentence in full puts it in context.

"When it comes to the powers of "government institutions", it seldom makes a difference that only "parts" of the government believe/do what is being discussed."

You point out an example where "checks and balances" somehow reigned in the FBI from decrypting a phone. While at the same time, hundreds of other acts have occurred that were not stopped by either public-outcry, private institution defiance or a "check" by another portion of the government. The point I was making is that when a government entity decides to do something towards a private individual, more often than not, other parts of the government don't have a say (at first definitely not, arguably still not long after the fact). To back that, you could use countless examples of every single failing part of government, or an injustice caused by it.

That's not the point you were making, actually. At least, it's not the interesting one. I admitted checks and balances are imperfect, and that's not really controversial.

To say otherwise, I believe, is to try detract from the actual implications and make them seem more benign and less dangerous

That's your point. And I think it's a bit silly. Saying "the FBI wants to break into the iPhone" instead of "the government wants to break into the iPhone" is just more precise. It doesn't imply there's any less of a problem. The fact that you have other parts of the government to appeal to, and which may disagree with the first part of the government, is important! If you're involved it gives you a hint as to how you might proceed. It tells us which parts of the government we might have to restrict or promote.

What, pray tell, is the advantage of thinking of all these different and differing institutions as one monolithic entity, or of calling them "the government" as if they were?

Actually, it does imply there is less of a problem.

Calling it "The Government" exaggerates the strength of the forces for or against something. It becomes a dystopian 1984-esque war.

When instead it is described as "some strategists at the FBI", or even, "some of the upper-brass at the FBI and DOJ" it becomes clearer that this isn't a problem that a revolution will have to solve. We could probably handle it with everyday boring old politicking.

There are 4,185,000 members of the Federal government. According to the Bureau of Labor, there are 22 million people on the payroll of government nationally.

That's like saying it makes sense to say that all Muslims are terrorists just because 1 in 4 Muslims believe terrorism is justifiable. XD [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_attitudes_towards_terro...]

I'm not saying that we generalize to all government employees/institutions based on a subset, as you seem to have taken from my post. I'm saying that with the type of power most government institutions/entities wield, it very much matters if even one small part of the government believes something is "ok" to do against an individual.

It is a fact though, you disagree with it and you disagree with the statements and actions of our government.

The question is how existentially frightening you think that fact is.

You can't tell that sort of stuff to a psychiatrist/psychologist!

Move on. In my experience, as a patient, most in the profession are nuts.

During the aughts, I was labeled a "sweaty paranoid kook", in the local press, for daring to explain our loss of privacy.

I get the denial. The truth is scary, uncomfortable. The arcana is difficult to grasp for non-geeks. But it's not for a care provider to nark on their patients.

What did you expect, going to a psychiatrist? They are drones programmed to tell you something, anything, about what's "wrong with you." Because of course if you're going to a psychiatrist something must be wrong with you.

If she said "nope you're perfectly fine," you would never come back!

Psychiatrists are disturbingly incentivized to overdiagnose.

Well they do have to take the hippocratic oath, and they're not all bad. But the OP's thoughts on privacy are definitely grounded in the real world and not made up. This scenario isn't too surprising given that about half the country still thinks the government should be allowed to write the rules on how software engineers design encryption protocols.

I like to think the number of psychiatrists who consciously make stuff up are few, but yeah at the end of the day, even when you visit a doctor, you are the one who is most responsible for your own health. You alone decide whether to get a second opinion or ignore the doc altogether.

I have personally had the opposite problem. Multiple mental health professionals have told me there's nothing wrong with me. Yet I'm still desperately unhappy, completely beholden to my anxiety, and utterly unable to organize my thoughts, to the detriment of my career and personal life.

In my experience it's difficult to find a professional who takes me seriously. I feel like I've been treated like a drug-seeker. It's all very demoralizing.

I'm sorry you've had that experience. It sucks.

Traditional medication used for anxiety include stuff like diazepam, lorazepam, tamazepam, etc. These all have some abuse potential, and some potential for addiction.

If you decide that you still want to seek treatment here's some information from the UK "NICE" (the organisation that looks at cost-effectiveness of treatment and makes evidence based recommendations).

http://pathways.nice.org.uk/pathways/generalised-anxiety-dis...

https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/qs53

https://www.nice.org.uk/news/article/offer-psychological-int...

https://www.nice.org.uk/news/press-and-media/new-nice-qualit...

Hopefully this gives you some information that you can use if you decide to seek help in future.

What is the difference between a drug-seeker, and a patient aware of his options? It's too bad that the more logical you are with your psychiatrist, the more they find reason to diagnose you.

But I'm just commenting on an Internet forum.

That's... quite literally what they do. So. At least if you're crazy you have friends there. :)

This line in the OP says it all:

"I have found that most psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals are not only extraordinarily compliant with authorities but also unaware of the magnitude of their obedience."

Anyone who has taken a psychology course can understand why this is the case: the only people who stay in psych are the ones that actually believe the bullshit that psychology teaches without questioning it. The entire psychology curriculum for years was (and still in many ways) is based on memorizing results from received authority, and not based on method like it is in the real sciences. Even biology, which is heavy on memorization explicitly deals with methods at every turn.

Psychology has always struck me as mostly boulder dash, but psychiatry is supposedly better. On the other hand medicine seems to be a very authorian discipline in general.

She has a point. You might actually have delusional thoughts about the government if you spend too much time on the Internet, especially on forums like this. I mean, look at the support you're getting here! Pretty much every commenter is on your side with this. HackerNews isn't really known for being able to cater to outside opinions.

What do you mean by "the government collects all of our data". What do you mean by "the government"? Do they come in to your house and go through your private photographs? Do they break in to your house and read your journal while you're at work?

Or do you mean that the NSA intercepts electrical signals that you publicly broadcast from your house?

Did you talk about the details of how the government collects all of our data? Perhaps you were both unable to disassociate your paranoid thoughts about a totalizing outside power from the reality of the situation.

The reality is that the government is not collecting all of our data. It is collecting most of the data that we publicly broadcast. The politics of this are a totally separate concern from your feelings of anxiety.

Maybe the problem is you spend too much time publicly broadcasting electrical signals and too little time dealing with your actual private thoughts and effects.

Maybe write a poem that no one will ever hear outside of being recited in your own living room! Maybe keep a physical journal that you keep safely stored under your pillow! There are plenty of things you can be doing to convince yourself that the government is not collecting all of our data.

Edit: facepalm...

I think this comment is not very compassionate/overly harsh. But you have some good nuggets in here ...

> The reality is that the government is not collecting all of our data. It is collecting most of the data that we publicly broadcast.

There are some recent troubling moves towards collecting "telemetry" about offline user actions in operating environments like Windows 10, but this observation largely rings true. Where I think you need some empathy is understanding how some people wrestle with the knowledge that "stuff I/family/friends broadcast is stored, indexed, and could be used against me/family/friends."

The knowledge that to broadcast one's thoughts exposes one to possible tyranny can only squelch discussion, and that drives people apart. We're social creatures, so that's not healthy.

Techies are especially cognizant of what "broadcasting" means in today's landscape. Celphones broadcast one's movements, audio, images, and store personal information that could be secretly stolen. Yeah, I can see why some people are anxious.

You're absolutely right that people need to write down private thoughts on paper and keep journals that they don't share. That's good for mental health in any case.

> I think this comment is not very compassionate/overly harsh. But you have some good nuggets in here ...

What parts? I'm not trying to be harsh but nor am I trying to be compassionate.

I think what may be considered "not very compassionate/overly harsh" is nothing more than a subjective reaction to the vast difference in political opinion that I express compared to the rest of the HackerNews community.

> The knowledge that to broadcast one's thoughts exposes one to possible tyranny can only squelch discussion, and that drives people apart. We're social creatures, so that's not healthy.

Yes, we are indeed social creatures, which is why we should all spend more time offline. There is a world outside of the Internet and I think a lot of techies forget that. The government is not listening in on our conversations down at the local pub. The government is not taking minutes on Kiwanis and Rotary Club meetings.

This perceived totalizing nature of the "surveillance machine" is mainly experienced by people who mainly interact with the outside world on the Internet. It's like a Greek tragedy!

I posit that too much cellphone and Internet use can cause many kinds of mental health issues.

Go outside more! You're totally free! The streets are yours for the taking! Go hand out pamphlets in the town square! Grab a guitar and sing for an audience in a public park! Go to the beach and make new friends! There are no gatekeepers!

Choosing to have your entire life thinly channeled through a certain kind of electrical signal that you constantly broadcast from your person and then suffering under the consequences is quite maddening.

Mom?

Seriously though, you are not at all free offline. Playing a guitar and making friends are safe activities that you can do online just as fine and not worry about government. But try crossing a border. (Pamphlets are a special case since a pamphlet can have much greater impact if "handed out" online)

Our frustration comes not from a delusion that Internet made us less free but from losing the hopes for liberation we once placed on it.

I think everyone's mother need to spend time moderating these forums. It would lead to a much more productive atmosphere.

Here's me and my wife playing music on the streets of San Francisco last year:

https://youtu.be/73lpAL6gvfY?t=148

It's a John Prine song called "Crazy as a Loon". I changed it a little bit and added my own verse:

So I packed up my computer

San Francisco was the place

I'd go build us a new future

Before we blasted off to space

Wrote a billion dollar software

You could see it on my face

But someone spilled on my hardware

And all my data was erased

That town will make you crazy

Just give it a little time

You'll be walking 'round in circles

Writing C code line by line

You'll be waitin' on a phone call

At the wrong end of a broom

Yes, that town'll make you crazy

Crazy as a loon

> What parts?

Stuff like how you were calling into question the parent's perception of what the NSA does with "electrical signals" coming from their house. I got the impression that you were framing the parent as a crackpot. It's just ... there's better ways of making your points than to call people out like that, whether they really are a crackpot or (most likely) NOT.

You may not have tried to be harsh, but you were. And you have no empathy for the parent, which is a bummer.

You made and are making good points in this retort, but they're mostly lost in the negativity. I'll get off your lawn now.

First off, I'm not calling the guy a crackpot, and you're not even claiming that I did either!

I was using a rhetorical device to show that OP's statements can very well be perceived as crackpot ideas to almost everyone outside of forums like this.

I don't think you know what the word empathy means. It isn't related to some sugar-coating process. It just refers to a capability to relate to another individual.

I used to have all of these same paranoid delusions about the government/the system/the man... and then you know what? I got older, I met a lot of people who care a lot about civil order, and I realized the world is full of nice and friendly people and there are plenty of ways for me to get involved to make sure the world keeps getting better!

I feel like I can empathize very well with people like OP. And since I don't think of myself as a crackpot when I shared these same thoughts, I don't think of OP as a crackpot. I now know that many of my beliefs were juvenile and undeveloped and I think OP's are as well. I'm sure OP is fine. He just needs to grow up a bit and stop trying to blame "the man" for his problems.

This makes me guilty of being patronizing but not lacking in empathy. Is there a better way to go about trying to help OP grow as an individual? Sure, but it's not going to happen on some Internet forum, which is why I mainly avoid this place! Layers upon layers of irony!

I just think you kids spend too much time on your phones and you don't really know how things work out there.

You're fine to hang out on my lawn whenever you want, but I would appreciate it if you didn't check your phone every 30 seconds while you're a guest on my property, it's very rude.

And also, seriously, just go outside more. You're looking too pale these days. You're like a ghost.

Ya'll need some outside perspective.

Everything you say here is extremely condescending and assumes that you are more mature and experienced than the reader.

I'm not going to toot my own horn, but I will say this about the aged elders I have met who were fantastic and respectable people, and from whom I learned the most: their main feature was humility, and knowing that they did not in fact know everything.

Not everyone likes paper books. Some people like trees, but also using a laptop under one. Some people are growing up gay or trans in a hard-right reactionary community and their only outlet is the Internet. Others simply prefer the company of they know online to those they happen to meet on the street.

I'm glad you have experienced personal growth in your own life. You think the views you used to hold were underdeveloped - fine! But don't pattern match other people you meet to those views and assume they just need to get past them and think like you do now. That's rude and presumptuous.

> Everything you say here is extremely condescending and assumes that you are more mature and experienced than the reader.

That's just your interpretation. Other people are entitled to their own interpretation of what I'm saying.

I don't feel like I'm being condescending, I feel like I am being patronizing. Those are related concepts but they're not the same thing. Also, if you didn't notice, and this could just be my fault, but I was trying to be comical! I was playing the patronizing character who shouts "NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!"

> I'm not going to toot my own horn, but I will say this about the aged elders I have met who were fantastic and respectable people, and from whom I learned the most: their main feature was humility, and knowing that they did not in fact know everything.

You have no idea who I am nor what I'm like. How about you offer up some of your personal opinions and you let me take a crack at judging you? I'm willing to have a very open and honest talk about some very real instances of paranoid delusions that seem to dominate the conversation in our forums. I think these are destructive and unnecessary fixations.

This is what makes me patronizing. I'm telling you that if you think that "the government is watching everything that we all do, all the time" and that if this makes you unhappy, well, there's a reason for that. It's a matter of perspective. I'm offering a paternal perspective. I've been there, I've done that, and I'm here to tell you that you're being a bunch of doofuses.

NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!

> Not everyone likes paper books. Some people like trees, but also using a laptop under one.

Ok, but that doesn't change the political and legal realities of what it means to have a paper book and what it means to use a laptop connected to the Internet.

> Some people are growing up gay or trans in a hard-right reactionary community and their only outlet is the Internet.

They have many more outlets than the Internet! I would argue that there are much more productive and healthy outlets than those found on Internet forums. It is at least unhealthy to think of the Internet as being someone's only outlet. Growing up and being a teenager is difficult anywhere and I definitely found a lot of support on the Internet when I was a teenager in the mid 90s but shying away from the real world was never a long term solution. If there are hard-right reactionary communities that are oppressing teenagers then we need to figure out how to fix the root cause of those issues, and not just paper over them by avoiding the confrontation!

> Others simply prefer the company of they know online to those they happen to meet on the street.

And just like conversations on the street, you should expect people to be able to hear your conversations when you're publicly broadcasting information from your physical location!

NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!

You're not so clever. You read like a book.

If a psychiatrist wants to treat a computer like a magic box which can construct images from mere wishes and happy thoughts then that psychiatrist should turn in their computer ASAP. That person doesn't need to know every part of how it works to be considered competent to judge the ramifications of it's abuse, but they should have the basic knowledge of what happens when we use devices that effectively creates a panopticon without even trying. Call it delusional, paranoid, or otherwise wrong (as in not factual) is lazy thinking on their part. And it's worse when it comes from a psychiatrist who probably had more exposure to statistics, logic, and critical thinking than myself with only a smattering of grad school and undergrad computer science. If they can't be bothered to ask why their patient thinks these things or even do a bit of reading even from the New York Times then they should to kindly STFU about their uninformed opinions on matters which they are clearly ill equipped to judge.

And BTW, I've actually had to educate at least two mental health professionals on the basics of even stuff that is within their field (specifically Gender Dysphoria). The magnitude of ignorance among mental health professionals, especially psychiatrists, frightens me. It's like having a surgeon who still thinks there's bodily humours. -shudder-

>Stuff like how you were calling into question the parent's perception of what the NSA does with "electrical signals" coming from their house. I got the impression that you were framing the parent as a crackpot. It's just ... there's better ways of making your points than to call people out like that, whether they really are a crackpot or (most likely) NOT.

I don't see how this frames anyone as a crackpot. Collecting electrical signals is exactly one of the things the NSA does, and there aren't many other simpler ways to describe it.

Even General Hayden talks publicly about such collections and how he would "jump on the comms of anyone that is interesting" (may be a very slight paraphrasing).

>And you have no empathy for the parent, which is a bummer.

It would be hilarious everytime someone says something like this, if it didn't indicate that someone out there actually believes things like this. You are really judging someone's empathy through text on HN and claiming they lack it?

Even just responding to someone's post is an act of some empathy.

> Even just responding to someone's post is an act of some empathy.

You sound like a precious snowflake when you talk like this. You don't dignify anyone simply by responding to them.

Yes, I was judging @williamcotton for lacking empathy for the grandparent. Read some of his responses, and you'll see I was right. @williamcotton thought grandparent needed some tough love advice from a benevolent sage - NO THANKS!

Empathy, not sympathy and certainly not scorn, is what grandparent deserves. And real empathy requires applying the Platinum Rule, not the Golden one. Look it up.

>Go outside more! You're totally free! The streets are yours for the taking! Go hand out pamphlets in the town square! Grab a guitar and sing for an audience in a public park! Go to the beach and make new friends! There are no gatekeepers!

Just make sure you are in a free Speech zone, cant just hand out pamphlets anywhere, and depending what is on the pamphlets you may be charges with a Felony for passing them out (Jury Nullification)

While outside you will be tracked by Facial Recognition and Automate Plate Readers that record your movements even if you do not have a cell phone, if you have a cell phone they just use the mandated GPS ....

>There are no gatekeepers!

ROFL. that is funny right there... Yes there are gatekeepers, there are 100000000's of rules and regulation governing your behavior outside, any more saying a rude word to someone could likely get you beaten by the police...

It is laughable you think that anywhere on this earth exists a free society...

It you think that it is you who is delusional

sometimes paranoia is the only way to copying with isolation and loneliness. If nobody is caring and watching out for me - at least the government does.

All of that aside- there are no paranoid people after snowden. Just realists and delusional ones.

You use the phrase "publicly broadcast" three times. Yet the stuff we're talking about is typically sent out over a wired connection with a single destination. It's neither public nor broadcast.

See my other comment pertaining to the third-party doctrine.

You make a good point with that, but it's not even remotely the same thing. Just because the third party doctrine exists does not mean our activity is a "public broadcast," nor does it somehow mean that we're not allowed to be upset at these activities.

Your original post basically said that we shouldn't be upset when the government collects our data because we're just shouting it to the world anyway.

With the new post, you're saying that the government can legally collect our data without a warrant if we first give it to someone else. That's a very different point to make!

> You make a good point with that, but it's not even remotely the same thing

I'm sorry, I was just being a little lazy and trying to address both points, but you're right, I didn't take the time to make the association.

> Just because the third party doctrine exists does not mean our activity is a "public broadcast,"

The Internet is nothing but public infrastructure with a commitment to route a packet to an intended destination. A datagram has to publicly state where it came from and where it is going in order for it to be properly routed. It is totally legal for anyone to run something like Wireshark and see how these packets are being routed around.

You clearly don't own all of the wiring and fiber optic cables that your packet travels on so you're always reliant on either public or third-party infrastructure.

> nor does it somehow mean that we're not allowed to be upset at these activities.

You shouldn't be upset when you use the radio in your cellphone to broadcast electro-magnetic signals from your physical location on earth. You should be aware of the repercussions of your activities. Anyone can see that you're broadcasting!

> Your original post basically said that we shouldn't be upset when the government collects our data because we're just shouting it to the world anyway.

Yes, by using the Internet we are literally broadcasting datagrams out on to a vast public network of routers and physical connections. Anyone can easily read this and track the physical location.

> With the new post, you're saying that the government can legally collect our data without a warrant if we first give it to someone else. That's a very different point to make!

Yeah, that's the extreme end of the legal argument. Because you are literally broadcasting information out in to public, the government doesn't need to invade your personal properties in order to search or seize. Therefore they don't need a warrant in order to read through your trash. The reason is because this is impossible to enforce.

Using Twitter is pretty damn close to just writing little notes and throwing them promptly in the trash when you think about it in a certain light! :D

> ...electrical signals that you publicly broadcast from your house...

If you want to maintain your position on the matter, you're going to have to broaden that even further.

You know about residential power monitoring [0] right? Sewage systems have already been used to sample drug usage for entire cities, but the BONAS project [1] takes it to a new level.

How far are you willing to twist the logic? Would you consider the gravitational disturbance caused by the mass of my body within my home as a public broadcast open to government data collection?

[0] http://www.leagle.com/decision/199917586CalRptr2d89_1161/PEO...

[1] https://www.bonas-fp7.eu

The third-party doctrine is a United States legal theory that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have "no reasonable expectation of privacy." A lack of privacy protection allows the United States government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant. Libertarians and liberals typically call this government activity unjustified spying and a violation of individual and privacy rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

As far as the Supreme Court's interpretation of the U.S. Constitution is concerned, every electrical signal that leaves your private property or private person is considered to be publicly broadcast.

Don't shoot the messenger! I'm just telling you the facts. The U.S. Constitution is a real piece of paper and the Supreme Court justices are real men and women with real power. This is how they see the world and you should carefully engage with the arguments that they make. You should at least learn to appreciate their arguments whether or not you agree with them.

You might not like conservative thought but that doesn't mean that it is wrong or that it isn't influential and legally valid in a democratic republic.

How far are you willing to distort your paranoia in order to keep thinking that there isn't a very reasonable and balanced conversation taking place in the third-party doctrine about individual rights weighed against the public good?

If anything, the Supreme Court is duty bound to follow the constitution. If we have reached some sort of internal contradiction with the U.S. Constitution then we're going to have to make some amendments. These amendments will need a lot of political consensus to be enacted and people are going to have to accept some compromises.

The 4th amendment clearly states the government is allowed under certain circumstances to partake in search and seizure of private property. Why is that? It's because we want the government to be able to deny certain individual rights in cases where it could best serve the public good. Why does this forum tend to abandon these philosophical first principles in exchange for virtualized mathematical first principles that seem blind to the physical political conditions of mankind?

How, exactly, are you supposed to stop anyone from figuring out your draw on the power grid? Any outside private interest could go about collecting this information. Why and how do you specifically stop the government from doing so? If you want to install your own Tesla battery packs and your own Solar City solar panels, then you don't have to worry about your power draw on a publicly sponsored electrical grid, and I guarantee even the most ardent supporters of the third-party doctrine will fully support your rights to keeping your own information from leaving your own property and requiring the government to get a warrant in order to inspect your own internal records on power usage. I'm sure the government, or anyone else who is allowed to pilot their own aircraft in public airspace could get a pretty good estimate from other measures. Or do we need air police to protect us from other people spying on us from above?

The government has consistently supported the individual protections of the 4th amendment for private property. The police need a warrant in order to attach a GPS device to a car. They don't need a warrant to go through your trash. Anyone can go through anyone's trash. How else would you police that? Do you want the police making sure that people aren't going through other people's trash? Should we have a special police force that just makes sure the regular police forces doesn't go through your trash? Who watches the watchmen? We all do. We just consider it all to be public knowledge if it leaves your private properties. It's the easiest, least contradictory solution. If you want something to be private, you need to be very careful with it!

Or is it that you do disagree with the government's right to warranted search and seizure in principle?

I see that I accidentally sent you down the path of addressing the problem of 'should' vs 'can and does' with my last question: "...open to government data collection?" I'd like to point out that the original topic was that of paranoia in government monitoring. I read your initial response to be a suggestion that an individual is only monitored to the extent of what information they "publicly broadcast", so I responded with examples of government monitoring extending far beyond "electrical signals that you publicly broadcast from your house". It seems strange to me, with all the historical examples that say otherwise, that anybody would suggest that the government only collects publicly broadcast information.

> How far are you willing to distort your paranoia in order to keep thinking that there isn't a very reasonable and balanced conversation taking place in the third-party doctrine about individual rights weighed against the public good?

Well first you're going to have to effectively demonstrate that I'm being paranoid, all you've done so far is provide justifications for the very thing I'm supposedly paranoid about. You are also going to have to define "public good", because I seriously doubt that we share the same definition. I don't think the public good involves individual rights being trumped by majority tyranny or deference to whoever the king is that day, so we probably won't find middle ground on that issue.

> ...to be able to deny certain individual rights in cases where it could best serve the public good. Why does this forum tend to abandon...

I can't speak for the entire forum, but for me the problem is in defining "individual rights". I don't include murder or destruction of property (or the utility there of) as an individual right. So that leaves very little else to justify the state's forceful curtailment of individual rights. The raiding of a farmer's market to protect the public from scourge of raw milk is an example of what results when you overburden the term "public good".

> How, exactly, are you supposed to stop anyone from figuring out your draw on the power grid?

I'm not concerned with that. I am concerned about those that have the capability, inclination and authority to collect and then act on that information. For example: if the Mothers of America had a direct feed on my power usage data - I'd be pretty bewildered but otherwise unconcerned, because they can't raid me. I'm not a fan of the USG having that same data, because they can raid me for unknowable reasons at some point in the future. I imagine the justification for such action would be as equally ridiculous as the raw milk raids - energy star compliance violation under Executive order 2023.082-ProtectMotherGaiaFromEwaste.

> We just consider it all to be public knowledge if it leaves your private properties.

I totally agree. But the break down occurs at the definition of "it". We really have very little idea of what information we are broadcasting that is of government interest because they not only have a monopoly on violence, but they enjoy a one way flow of information due to the concept of state secrets. Until the state is subject to that same policy, citizens cannot make informed decisions about what constitutes a public information disclosure.

> I see that I accidentally sent you down the path of addressing the problem of 'should' vs 'can and does' with my last question

If people can legally do something, they will, and it really doesn't matter if they should or not. If they really shouldn't be able to do it, make it so they legally can't do it! They'll probably do it anyways, but then it would be illegal. That's a whole other conversation.

> I don't think the public good involves individual rights being trumped by majority tyranny or deference to whoever the king is that day, so we probably won't find middle ground on that issue.

Good, we don't actually have to find any middle ground! I'm perfectly fine with how the Supreme Court is handling their interpretations! I think that our common law courts and the judicial oversights that continue to define "the public good" are doing a pretty good job of it. Are you?

> I can't speak for the entire forum, but for me the problem is in defining "individual rights".

Good, again, I'm generally fine with the status quo definition! Are you?

> I'm not concerned with that. I am concerned about those that have the capability, inclination and authority to collect and then act on that information.

Everyone and anyone has the capability, inclination and authority to collect and then act on that information. It is not only a waste of time trying to figure out who does or doesn't but also a clear violation of one's rights to be told that they don't have the right to collect public information. I want a world filled with dumpster divers and phone phreaks!

There's no such thing as "the government". It's just a bunch of people and a shit ton of paperwork. You can't just start denying some people the right to do something just because their name is written down on a piece of paper somewhere saying that they work for "the government".

These are all reasonable considerations, which is why our current government and legal infrastructure works this way! Do you like that it works this way?

> For example: if the Mothers of America had a direct feed on my power usage data - I'd be pretty bewildered but otherwise unconcerned, because they can't raid me. I'm not a fan of the USG having that same data, because they can raid me for unknowable reasons at some point in the future.

Why are they going to raid you? And even if you do, you have legal protections, and they know this as well! They still need a very good reason to get a search warrant.

By the way, who the hell is "they"? Who are these people we are referring to!?!

> I totally agree. But the break down occurs at the definition of "it". We really have very little idea of what information we are broadcasting that is of government interest because they not only have a monopoly on violence, but they enjoy a one way flow of information due to the concept of state secrets. Until the state is subject to that same policy, citizens cannot make informed decisions about what constitutes a public information disclosure.

I totally agree as well! Everything that I'm talking about really depends on an even playing field. Information asymmetries are incredibly toxic. I feel like this applies equally to private corporations like Facebook and Google. We all stand to benefit from having equal access and equal privileges to our public information.

There are of course times where there need to be state secrets but I agree, there are WAY too many state secrets. We should slash the budgets of the NSA and the CIA. State secrets make a lot of sense for the Armed Forces. What's the point of a submarine if you know where it is?

The problem isn't that the NSA and CIA are legally allowed to exist. It's that their budgets are too opaque and bloated. I doubt they're getting much effective information from the incredible volumes of noise they have to sift through. Even when they do find "bad stuff", they'd still need to pass the information along to someone who has to get a warrant. If they don't find anything or the information was wrong somehow, well, sue the fuckers who kicked in your door!

There's a whole wide world of manicured office parks filled with lawyers just waiting to represent someone just like you! ;)

> That's a whole other conversation.

It is, we were talking about whether or not believing that the government goes beyond public data collection in the pursuit of large scale monitoring is paranoid. You originally said that it was, but given your subsequent statements I'm confident that if pressed you'd define "public" as the space found just outside of your skull. So the original question is meaningless.

> I'm generally fine with the status quo definition! Are you?

Nope, I'm not a big fan of the resulting laws that thinking enables - the outlawing of interracial marriage, war on drugs, etc.

> Everyone and anyone has the ... authority to collect and then act on that information.

Some have authority to a greater number of actions than others, I thought I made my point obvious with the phrase "monopoly on violence". If you're suggesting that Nabisco is equal to the USG in range of authority and action... well you're just being thick.

> There's no such thing as "the government". It's just a bunch of people and a shit ton of paperwork.

No, it isn't paperwork - it is a monopoly on violence over a geographic area. It is the ability to define one killing as murder and the other as capital punishment. By your logic: if all the paperwork in DC were to instantly vaporize then so to would the state's authority to use deadly force. The state's power is not derived from paperwork.

> Do you like that it works this way?

Nope, the logic for it does not follow and the unsound foundation has led a huge number of convoluted rules and exceptions.

> Why are they going to raid you?

I already said that it is impossible to know, I can't predict future laws - I even provided a silly example. So again, lets not be thick.

> I feel like this applies equally to private corporations...

I don't feel that I have a right to any information held by another private individual or corporation, just as I have no right to the fruit of their labor. But I do have that right in the case of the government - the very definition of a public resource. I think the cost of maintaining state secrets of all kinds, to include submarine locations, far outweighs the benefit - the concept itself needs to go the way of "the divine right of kings".

For what it's worth I have been prevented from going through other people's trash by the police.

I am concerned about the social and political implications of how the government is collecting more and more data, and trying to break encryption.

I am not concerned that the government has taken a special interest in me, specifically, and is using these techniques to manipulate or harm me, specifically.

It is the latter that starts to lean toward delusional thoughts. Some people, lik Edward Snowden or Glenn Greenwald, do have a reason to think that way. Most people do not.

And I make a difference between concern and anxiety/freaking out. I have an anxiety disorder that is triggered by specific things. Government doesn't trigger it, but if it did, I would agree with a therapist it is a problem that needs addressing. Panic attacks are debilitating.

All this is to say that the details matter, when it comes to diagnosing mental health.

Well, being anxious about it is certainly not healthy. But it's denying the reality of mass surveillance and encryption ban attempts that fits the definition of the word "delusion" perfectly.

I agree with most of your premises and do agree that, unless you have real reason to believe so (a la Snowden) that the government is unlikely to be targeting you (or me specifically).

Have said that, some degree of angst about inadvertently become a target, despite my relative unremarkable public presence, is warranted. Consider the following...

On Facebook, I post a comment for my friends that says something like, "My kid walked an entire mile to the park and back all by himself, too! A good haul for a 10 year old!" The government comes and collects that semi-public posting. Some in the government may consider that abuse (there are cases where overzealous government officials have indeed made that determination). Guess what? If data collection and analytics are sufficient, I may well be referred to the local child protective services. While it's not the same as the directed anger of the United States government against Snowden, it would potentially cause irreparable harm to my family nonetheless. Technology has the potential to enable economies of scale in bringing unwarranted intrusions to the least of us. Connect that with an increasingly paternalistic government and even mere mortals like myself have real reason to be deeply concerned.

TL;DR Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me :-)

[Editted for spelling and minor clarity]

You being insignificant to the government does not mean the government collecting data about you is not a threat to you.

Maybe one day you cut off the wrong FBI agent on the way to work, or may be a friend of a friend knows someone with access to the government database.

There are countless ways, outside of a Edward Snowden, scenario where the information may harm you but would not raise to the level of a National Security Investigation

We know for a fact the agents have used the databases to keep tabs on Friends, Family, wives girlfriends,etc. Even for their own Amusement, looking and passing around intimate photos... After all these are just insignificant citizens, not a threat to anyone, so who cares if they pass around your dick pics right...

The fact that your are insignificant means they probably would not think twice about using their access to look up info on you, why is irrelevant.

Then there is the Ever Present data leak, look at OPM, at any point one of these databases can be compromised and your data simply uploaded to Paste Bin...

People that marginalize the risk of their personal data "because I am not a terrorist" are just as bad as the "I have nothing to fear so I have nothing to hide" people...

They do a disservice to everyone attempting to fight the government overreach... you sir are part of the problem.

Databases of Ruin my friend... Databases of Ruin

Life's so much easier when you are plugged into The Matrix. Now take your drugs and return to complacency. Ahem.

Were those her exact words? I thought therapists weren't supposed to be directly confrontational? It sounds like the satirical doctor who when a patient says "It hurts when I do this." responds, "Then don't do that." If a psychiatrist trivialized my feelings like that I'd be asking for a new doctor, and perhaps who I can complain to about her poor performance.

Or is not acquiescing to a physician considered unhealthy anti-authoritarian behavior?

Yes, I quoted her verbatim. I was quite surprised myself. It was my first time seeing a psychiatrist.

Your anxiety is actually quite reasonable; feeling comfortable with authorities having access to all your communications actually seems absurd to me. How can you be sure that one person won't abuse their power to entrap, blackmail, imprison, you even though you have done nothing "wrong?"

Don't let that put you off. My experience was that I had to try several therapists before I found one that I connected well with. (The same was true with my normal medical doctor and my business lawyer; it's just hard to find good professionals that you can work well with.)

I should also add that the psychiatrist could be wrong about the thoughts, but still might be correct about the feelings that flow from the thoughts.

As I progressed in my treatment for social anxiety, I realized the more appropriate emotional reaction to generalized government data collection was not personal anxiety, in that nobody was actually likely to look at my data or use it against me. I still have my recognition that it's a political danger and my anger about government overreach, but in retrospect I see my anxiety about surveillance as inappropriate, and related to my generally excessive anxiety reactions.

That doesn't surprise me. At all. Psychiatrists are trained to diagnose (and tools like the DSM and psychological testing) largely in terms of deviation from the norm. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as the evidence suggests the majority of patients can often see significant improvements in quality of life through treatment and therapy, but it does predispose practicioners to believe that deviation itself represents disorder. That approach makes some significant errors in understanding statistics (no one says that the mean of a set of numbers is the "correct" number, for instance), but for most of the patients seen by psychiatrists, it doesn't negatively affect them. A more reasonable approach might be to ask whether that deviation is negatively impacting a patient's quality of life, such as you'll often get with depression.

That would acknowledge the normal diversity of human moods, behavior, and minds while viewing psychiatric treatment as a means of empowering patients to improve their lives rather than just a means of "fixing" what a practicioner perceives to be broken. A lot of people, far more than those who actually seek treatment, could benefit from psychiatric tools, therapies, and treatments. That's not the same as saying they're broken or that they should be medicated.

Anyhow, your experience would be a good example of how the normal approach can fail. With set theory, psychologists refer to something called a "perceptual set," which is just a series of predispositions that shape how we perceive external stimuli. Psychiatrists look back to past cases when they're diagnosing new patients, and they all draw parallels to them the same as others draw on past experience. It's a huge part of how we learn.

Unfortunately for you, that means they're thinking of cases where the patient was anxious about various conspiracy theories. You managed to get lumped into that category because she's heard it before, and lacks the specific education to understand the difference between concerns about encryption/internet surveillance and conspiracy theories about NASA and the moon landing. Congratulations, you've been stereotyped and likely mis-diagnosed as having some (minor? major?) paranoid tendencies. If the root causes of your anxiety are misunderstood, it becomes more likely that th misunderstanding will negatively affect how it's treated.

That's actually a huge part of the problem with the political fight over encryption. People don't understand it, so they fall back on analogies and ideas that they do understand and attempt to apply them to this new, unknown stimuli. It's a powerful method of learning, but when it fails, it can do so spectacularly. People see encryption like a lock on a safe or a sealed letter, not realizing the differences or the universality and negative consequences of things like backdoors.

That said, don't give up on psychiatric help and therapy because of this one experience. Finding a psychatrist you connect well with isn't easy, and they understand perfectly well that there might be better options for their patients out there. It's possible that this experience has undermined your ability to work well together in the future. You never should have walked out of the room feeling like she's labeled you as "nuts" and that that was the end of it. In that respect, she failed you. Maybe it was word choice, or maybe she didn't explain certain things to you. Whatever the case, you might be better off seeing someone else.

If it makes any easier for you, you should know that this is what all governments do. Some governemnts are better at it than others. This is going to continue as long as governments are around. I'm not pro nor against. Just stating the fact.

I think it's interesting to look at how psychiatric disorders are invented. For example, is homosexuality a mental disorder? It's basically just a bunch of psychiatrists getting together, suggesting stuff and voting on it. It is not science.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/the-real-p...

To be functional in an inherently dysfunctional system that is the nature of hierarchical society. It is made for certain personalities to thrive at the cost of others who may or may not be economically as important, but then why should personality and behavior be judged by the economic and social ability of an individual, but that's what psychology is really for... for enforcing, disciplining and punishing people that don't conform to the economic or social norms, who are therefore not functional in conventional settings. Who are hunter gatherers by their nature and not corporate drones, for instance.

Even hunter gatherer societies had social structure and norms. And in those societies people far outside the norm were probably treated much worse than they are in today's society.

Nothing as it is today. If you could hunt or gather you had a place. And you were related to everyone in your tribe by blood. So it is a similar relationship to the one that you have with your family or extended family.

So yes to an extent you are right, but at the same time the social cohesion was much greater. In modern society if you are out you are out, you have no recourse at all. Hunter gatherer societies probably not as much. But I am sure if you did certain things in some of those groups that were out of the social norm they would kill you.

But lots of things that you would get in trouble for today would not raise a brow in their societies. There are lots of trivial things that you can get in trouble for in mass societies that are of no concern to someone living in a tribal setting today for instance.

I suspect (I don't have evidence I will admit, I'd be interested in any real evidence that exists!) that you have far too rosy a view of hunter / gather lifestyle.

Mostly, it was more important for people to follow the rules, or people die. You (for example) couldn't keep quiet when you had to (while hunting, or hiding)? Food would escape, people would die. You felt some days you couldn't face going outside to hunt or gather? There wasn't a safety net for people to keep bringing you food until you felt up to it again.

Hunter-gatherer societies were much more egalitarian than today's, this much is agreed upon by the anthropological community. It's just a result of small group size and homogeneity, along with a lack of specialization. What you're talking about is real, that if you couldn't fit into the norms of the group you would be shunned. Typically you wouldn't have trouble fitting into those rules, because they would have been all you were ever exposed to. You would have no reason to ever doubt them. Some people would be better than others at various tasks, for example, keeping quiet on a hunt, but then they would just do something else. Maybe you're worse than useless on a hunt, but instead you have a good eye and can spot and identify a mushroom better than anyone else.

There wasn't a safety net for people to keep bringing you food until you felt up to it again.

These small societies were built on reciprocity. In the short term you would be supported by general human goodness. If you simply couldn't contribute to collecting food, there were other things you could do as well. If you were too fond of animals to kill them, you might be coralled into some kind of medicinal role. If you were afraid to leave the settlement, you might find yourself weaving ropes, or maybe building weapons, fixing roofs.

That's incorrect. See e.g.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/39730301_Food_Distr...

Societies which operate purely on self-interest tend to be very bad at survival. Altruism and compromise are essential for evolutionary success.

Not directly to your point, but I feel it's relevant: there's a hypothesis that ADHD is a remnant feature (not a bug!) from hunter-gatherer times. So actually the hyperfocus of ADHD would actually make quiet hunting easier (if that's what the hunter is hyperfocused on).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_vs._farmer_hypothesis

> but that's what psychology is really for... for enforcing, disciplining and punishing people that don't conform to the economic or social norms...

This is quite fallacious. You are essentially describing fundamental peer/societal pressures, not psychology, in some sophomoric attempt at wit. There are individuals who truly suffer from deep psychosis and other troubling issues. Let's not be so callous with our broad brush strokes.

> There are individuals who truly suffer from deep psychosis and other troubling issues. Let's not be so callous with our broad brush strokes.

As Foucault pointed out (and even Sapolsky) these people used to have a job, we called them Oracles or Shaman or Prophets.

Instead Psychologists and Psychiatry either wishes to fix them when in many cases they can't be "fixed", by giving them drugs to mess with their already fragile minds or through other means and therapies. Where the humane thing would be to simply give them autonomy and some sort of social way of acquiring food and resources. Many of their problems are caused by the inability of society to accommodate things which are not machines, for instance anxiety problems and depression caused by interaction with the economy itself.

We have a a whole set of treatments to make them conform. Rather than accepting them for who they are, and giving them some sort of role to play. Because as I said they are not good corporate drones that follow the logic of production and consumption in the modern economy. If they wish to have any sort of autonomy they must do it through the economy, which has made making a living as a quack more and more difficult through this sort of societal logic.

Sure there are minor and major ailments, but don't go around telling me treatment for those ailments is not inspired by making people into tools that are then asked to perform on command.

If anything your attempt is sophomoric and completely tone deaf to the larger picture of how these systems fit into our society and what they actually say about it, rather than just trying to "help", it's trying to make them into tools that can be economically exploited so that they are integrated into the system in a very specific, ordered, logical way.

Just like religion was trying to "help" those that could not properly be possessed by imaginary things and mental illness. This attempts to do the opposite for those that fit into the mentally-ill religious category. Oh how things change.

If you talk about illness, it's not about importance, it's about detriment. It's a matter of perspective and an agent can only consider one perspective. Altruism can impose unsolvable constraints on that perspective.

You can't say in the same paragraph that a system is dysfunctional and that the personalities thrive, who enforce the system. One functioning part of the system is enforcing the convention. A dysfunctional system is an oxymoron. Enforcing altruism is a different matter. Altruism is inhibited by differing conventions, that preclude cooperation.

A mental disorder means a stable cluster of symptoms in a population such that it is (1) statistically abnormal, (2) distressful to a degree (clinical significance), and (3) not ameliorated by a reasonable change in environment.

Statistical abnormality is one point that is debated among professionals today because some might say that if obesity becomes pandemic, it's still a disorder. Deafness is also an interesting discussion because there are deaf communities now, so a reasonable change in environment is possible.

One does not use science to determine if a cluster of symptoms warrants classification as a disorder. There is no inherency in the universe which demands that. Science can set arbitrary statistical brightlines, study the etiology of a stable cluster of symptoms, if it can be found, and then study a range of possible interventions to the distress.

Perhaps in the future, mental decline at age 90 will be considered a disorder, because everyone is mentally sharp even at age 100, the mental decline causes a lot of financial and social distress, and it's not ameliorated by a reasonable change in environment. In the past, it's comprehensible how homosexuality was (1) statistically abnormal, (2) distressful to a degree, and (3) not ameliorated by a reasonable change in environment.

People want a concept of mental disorder that is "objective". That's not possible. Disorder is absolutely context-bound.

> People want a concept of mental disorder that is "objective". That's not possible.

With a bit of effort, I think it is.

I disagree with your definition of a disorder.

A disorder is anything that negatively impacts an individual when compared to the mean. With a bit of effort, you can statistically measure that based on fecundity.

Mental classifications are purely subjective by default.

Not true. We're starting to identify the mutations responsible. There's nothing subjective about that.

"A disorder is anything that negatively impacts an individual when compared to the mean."

Not every deviation from the mean has only negative impacts (e.g. A person with OCD probably makes a better air traffic controller.) and the definition of what is "negative" can actually change over time.

Last but not least we should look at why they are negatively impacted. The impact often comes from society and maybe society should be more tolerant instead of medicating everyone who is deviating from the mean.

> (e.g. A person with OCD probably makes a better air traffic controller.

I very much doubt that is the case

Your point - that mental illnesses aren't always seen as entirely negative by the people who have them is a good point. And this point is excellent:

>The impact often comes from society and maybe society should be more tolerant

However

> A person with OCD probably makes a better air traffic controller.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is often a severely debilitating[1] illness. It's marked by intrusive thoughts, and rituals to cope with those intrusive thoughts.

I can't see how those could help someone be a better air-traffic controller.

Here's some information from a UK charity: http://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-h...

The most important part from that link is probably this, which talks about the difference between the normal anxieties that everyone has, and what happens in OCD.

> Although many people experience minor obsessions (e.g. worrying about leaving the gas on, or if the door is locked) and compulsions (e.g. rituals, like avoiding the cracks in the pavement), these don’t significantly interfere with their daily lives, or are short-lived.

> If you experience OCD, your obsessions and compulsions will cause you considerable fear and distress. They will also take up a significant amount of time, and disrupt your ability to carry on with your day-to-day to life, including doing daily chores, going to work, or maintaining relationships with friends and family.

OCD is probably not going to help someone be a better air traffic controller.

OCD is a much misunderstood illness, and there's some stigma around it, so I hope you don't mind me dumping some information here.

[1] WHO list OCD in their top 20 debilitating illnesses.

http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/11/en/858.pdf

> Of the 10 leading causes of YLD in the world among individuals of all ages, four are psychiatric conditions, with unipolar depression being the leading cause (2). Among individuals between the ages of 15 and 44, panic disorder, drug use disorders, and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) were included in the top 20 disorders.

(YLD == Years lost to disability)

Life is distressful to a degree. That's a meaningless criterion devoid of all content which invites arbitrary judgement.

threatofrain is explaining, not defending.

I'm not attacking the parent, I'm attacking the definition being explained.

The colors of visible light form a continuous spectrum. "Red" vs. "blue" is a meaningless criterion devoid of all content which invites arbitrary judgement.

That's not a good comparison. Red and blue have very objective definitions given that we have three types of light receptors in our eyes, and a given kind of light can be measured to activate the "blue" or "red" kind without any subjective input.

It is sometimes speculated that Homer wrote about "wine-red seas" because the ancient Greeks considered blue and red "the same" color. Or, to take a more modern example, the Japanese consider blue and green the same color (there are words that can distinguish, of course, but we have words that can distinguish various shades of the same color too). Clearly the division into different colors involves some degree of subjectivity and yet it doesn't make sense to claim that, therefore, words for colors are meaningless.

> Deafness is also an interesting discussion because there are deaf communities now, so a reasonable change in environment is possible.

Not only that, but the "traditional" way of "treating" the Deaf was to force them to learn to vocalise, and to forbid them from learning sign language. The reasoning being that they should integrate with regular society as much as possible, and this was the best way to ensure that. Of course, in reality it is like forcing blind people to communicate exclusively via pictionary. Luckily this has been changing for a while now.

Science is objective. Psychiatry is not objective. Psychiatry is not science.

Do you believe that psychiatry provides us valid knowledge that allows us to identify, study, and treat individuals who have mental influences that cause them to be a danger to themselves or society? If not, by what means to propose that we do so?

Homosexuality was once considered a psychiatric disorder. That alone tells you that it is a reflection of social norms, not objective truth, and therefore, inherently unscientific.

This is different from medicine (which also had an interesting past as it evolved) in that there's broad, objective consensus as to what's harmful and what's not, and its work is detailed and reproducible and there's few questions how the mechanisms of action work - infectious particles harm the body and cause disease, and there's no debate on that matter.

Whether or not psychiatry can help those who are a danger to themselves or others (answer: of course it can.. one way or another) is orthogonal to whether it's scientific or not.

The idea of evidence-based medicine and using the scientific method in medicine came up in the 1960s. It took longer still for it to become widely used and there are still massive problems in that area today, take a look at drug testing as an example. You can't reasonably claim psychiatry to be significantly more or less scientific than medicine.

You're idea that there is an objective consensus on what's harmful and what's not is simply ridiculously wrong. Just look at discussions about making insecticides or pesticides illegal that come up quite regularly.

You're idea that there is an objective consensus on what's harmful and what's not is simply ridiculously wrong.

I didn't say for all things, but I did say broad. And most importantly, the results of the studies have nothing to do with what people think is harmful or wrong, only what actually can be measured and reproduced.

People argue over climate science too (and for the same reason as your counterexample). There's still broad consensus at the end of the day.

Meanwhile, the psych "science" is inherently anchored to whatever the social norms of the day are. Medical science and biology can define a healthy body with much more certainty and detail than psychiatry can define a healthy set of thoughts.

We know very little about how the brain and the mind actually work. Nevertheless we need to somehow people who have problems with these things. It makes sense to try things that might not be fully supported by science as has been done successfully in medicine. Of course mistakes happen when you do that but it doesn't make sense to abandon psychiatry as worthless because of that.

Nobody suggested abandoning it, merely that as a "science", it's woefully deficient. I have no doubts that we'll begin figuring it out soon enough.

In the meantime, I suggest treating all psychology with a few more grains of salt than usual, keeping in mind that the science is often based on opinion rather than fact.

..especially when a nontrivial amount of peer reviewed papers can't be reproduced.

Yeah, I agree that psychiatry's value rests less on its categorization as science or not but rather its ability to reliably reproduce valid and accurate knowledge of use to society and individuals.

I have began to push back against the position that the scientific method is the exclusive measure of valid and valuable knowledge, and I detected a bit of that in your assertion.

Personally I believe that psychiatry can be both a science and not a science, depending on how one practices it. And that some highly valid and valuable knowledge remains outside the reach of science, and always will. And other highly valid and valuable knowledge can only be produced by the scientific method and will remain outside the reach of subjective methods.

> Personally I believe that psychiatry can be both a science and not a science

Like alchemy, astrology or theology? Or medical sciences in middle ages?

Like all those "sciences", psychiatry lacks a solid base, a set of verifiable facts which entire science is based upon. Why those disorders happen? Which substance causes them? Anybody can answer that?

Medicine as practiced now has both scientific and non-scientific parts. Original research, as in bioinformatics, drug discovery, etc. constitutes the scientific part as it uses systematic experimentation, logic, statistics, etc. to deduce universal laws that can be independently verified.

However, the application of this knowledge to actual individuals in an doctor's office or hospital is an inherently subjective and non-scientific process, involving subjective inputs such as 'Rate your pain on a scale of 1-10.', 'How are you feeling after we upped your dose?', 'Is this treatment plan allowing you to get back on the job?' etc. The value a doctor provides is taking the vast corpus of medical knowledge (both scientific and not) and applying it to a single individual. This is not science, but is critical for the medical treatment process.

So what's the argument, that we should just wait a few centuries to help anyone who is mentally ill because we don't know enough about the underlying mechanisms?

> Do you believe that psychiatry provides us valid knowledge that allows us to

No, it really doesn't.

If someone comes into a clinic and ask psychiatrist for a help, he is gonna be diagnosed with some kind of a disorder 100% the time.

But if you think about it, it's not psychiatrist who determines if the person is healthy, it's the person himself. If you meet with a psychiatrist, you have a disorder. Period.

> treat individuals who have mental influences that cause them to be a danger to themselves or society?

It reminds me of an old Soviet practice to treat people who were under influence from Western countries. Quite obviously, it was considered a mental disorder which was dangerous to themselves and for the (Communist) society. So those were usually locked up in a psychiatric clinic and never heard from ever since.

The methods to determine if a person is "ill" never changed. "I think that person has disorder, so let's come up with a disorder that fits more or less." As mentioned in the article above, the response should be: where is your blood test?

> If not, by what means to propose that we do so?

Quite easy really. Whether a person is a danger to society or not, should be determined by a court jury based on his previous actions.

> If not, by what means to propose that we do so?

>> Quite easy really. Whether a person is a danger to society or not, should be determined by a court jury based on his previous actions.

A couple of problems with this solution come to mind. You say that the knowledge that psychiatry produces is invalid because it is non-scientific. The process by which the justice system produces knowledge is decidedly non-scientific and inherently subjective. Why do you hold the knowledge produced by the non-scientific process of justice above the non-scientifically produced knowledge of psychiatry?

Additionally, by the time the justice system gets involved, a crime against society has already occurred. Surely we can do better than waiting for tragedy before intervening?

> If you meet with a psychiatrist, you have a disorder. Period.

Whether or not that's true, it's irrelevant to the statement about providing valid knowledge. If a person goes to a family doctor, they have a health issue. If a person goes to a lawyer, they have a legal issue. To an accountant, they have a fiscal issue. Merely 'going to [professional]' does not mean that they have invalid knowledge.

> Whether a person is a danger to society or not, should be determined by a court jury based on his previous actions.

Not only is this is a huge waste of time and money (court officials, jury, legal teams...), but it's even more subjective that the system you want it to replace. And it's already well-known that courts deal with mentally ill people far worse than mental health services do.

> A mental disorder means a stable cluster of symptoms in a population such that it is (1) statistically abnormal, (2) distressful to a degree (clinical significance), and (3) not ameliorated by a reasonable change in environment.

1) Every individual is statistically abnormal. That's how they're identifiable. It's debated amongst professionals because there are absolutely no consistent criteria for behavioural normality that wouldn't include wide swaths of undistressed people.

2) is incoherent in practice. Mental disease is diagnosed in people because they are not distressed by things that "should" distress people. Mental disease is also diagnosed if people are distressed by the reaction of others to their symptoms, not by the symptoms themselves.

3) "reasonable change" is a hint that 3) is completely arbitrary.

The context that the concept of non-physical mental disorder is bound in is a historical accident, non-physical mental disease doesn't translate between cultures (entirely culturally-bound and fashion-following), and most of our current concepts of mental disease have origins dependent on things like the order in which we happened to discover certain neurotransmitters and superstitions about epileptic seizures making people sane.

Mental illness is defined as when you don't get your work done, or you make it difficult for other people to get their work done. All of the handwaving around it, and the fabricated physical theories applied to a wide range of "disorders" that largely amount to disobedience and differing opinions and values, corrupt our society and undermine democracy. You take the drugs and you do what you're told, or you will be medicated for your own protection. It's also class/race-based - the range of behaviors a suburban white girl would be medicated for are largely different than the ones an inner city black boy would be medicated for, even though they would get the same diagnosis (since diagnoses are based on "distress.")

This is not new. Every third rebellious kid I knew in high school 25 years ago was diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder or Bipolar Disorder, and had month-long stints in mental hospitals that began when they stayed out all night that one time, or flunked a semester, or got caught drinking or smoking pot. ADD wasn't quite as trendy then, and the range of products being sold to parents for it was narrower.

Do you believe that mental disorders exist? If so, how would you go about identifying and treating them? If not, what empirically verifiable means do you know of to identify people who are a danger to themselves or society, and treat them?

While I think there's something to the idea that mental illness is largely determined by consensus and probably some of the diseases shouldn't be treated as such, it's hard to say something like extreme paranoia, hallucinations, or depression with suicidal ideation wouldn't be a problem if not for our cultural beliefs.

Definition of mental illness is relying on whether a condition conflicts with society. Therefore, as a function of 19th century western society, it was a mental illness; thankfully, now it is not.

Without a context of environment a definition of mental illness can not possibly exist. For example, paranoid schizoprenia wouldn't be a mental illness in an environment where all paranoid fantasies turned out to be true.

>Definition of mental illness is relying on whether a condition conflicts with society.

This just sounds like a scientified social inquisition.

The definition of mental disorder is a permanently context-bound construct. There is no inherency in nature or physics which requires a classification of disorder. However, the construct is both useful and abusable.

That they want to exclude environmental factors does not mean "pick an arbitrary universe".

Abject incoherency is a symptom of some mental disorders that doesn't appear to rely on the context.

There are others I think: sudden lack of abilities without any corresponding [macroscopic] physical symptoms probably counts.

Your last sentence appears to rely on living in a Universe completely unlike our own.

Yes, paranoid schizophrenia would still be a mental illness in which the fantasies turned out true, if they turned out true by complete fluke.

That is to say, if some crazy nonsense for which you have absolutely no evidence turns out true by amazing coincidence, it was still crazy to have believed it.

Well it's only a matter of time before being a 'homophobe' is considered a mental disorder and will make the person liable to be sent to a mental 'hospital' until he recants his viewpoint.

This was a favourite strategy of Stalin, by the way. If somebody didn't like communism enough then surely he must be a loon.

Right, because people are so frequently sent for forced "re-education" when they hold unpopular opinions.

Isn't that what compulsory 'sensitivity training' is?

You might want to look at what re-education actually was before you try to imply equivalency with a chat at work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reeducation_camp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_North_Korea#Re...

Is there such a person, someone irrationally fearful of homosexuals?

1. This actually happened to homosexuals in the west during the twentieth century. The worst social ostracization faced by individuals who disapprove of homosexuality today really is not even noteworthy by comparison. Compare Brandon Eich to Alan Turing, for example.

More-over, pathologizing homosexuality continues to happen in many parts of the world and even, de facto, in some parts of the US (e.g., "gay camps", which often have some component of psuedo-psychology on top of their religiosity).

2. Popular presidential candidates and members of the party that controls congress openly and proudly express anti-homosexual views. The idea that society is on the verge of pathologizing people who disagree with homosexuality is absolutely absurd.

It worked for conservative society for horrible aeons. Pressure the queer into social services - reap "justice" and stability as reward for this. Its the first form of power pillars in check and balance. Religion wields the power of enforcing encoded "peoplepropertys" , believers wield the power of withdrawing "believe" from this pillar if that order is not enforced, the psychopaths- push against the restraints this setup puts them under. All those calls to purify sexual morality when corruption and injustice become obvious- maybe there is some sand and ugly truth to this behavior? Maybe that sad truth is not fixed by simply saying we looked at a optical illusion - and now we know them, and it will never ever deceive us. \n Maybe accepting constant mental deficits and diversity of the species is part of growing up, and working around those that creating suffering with tech is the only way to fix it for now.

Isn't absolutely all taxonomies created by just a bunch of people getting together and deciding what should be classified as what?

Exactly, which is why I support the National Institutes of Mental Health's (NIMH) efforts to move away from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), which is just a dictionary of subjective labels for collections of mental health symptoms, to the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), which is a matrix of measures that place patients along a variety of psychological spectrums to understand their mental illness [1]:

While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment.

In contrast with the vastly superior RDoC Matrix [2]:

The RDoC research framework can be considered as a matrix whose rows correspond to specified dimensions of function; these are explicitly termed “Constructs,” i.e., a concept summarizing data about a specified functional dimension of behavior (and implementing genes and circuits) that is subject to continual refinement with advances in science. Constructs represent the fundamental unit of analysis in this system, and it is anticipated that most studies would focus on one construct (or perhaps compare two constructs on relevant measures). Related constructs are grouped into major Domains of functioning, reflecting contemporary thinking about major aspects of motivation, cognition, and social behavior; the five domains are Negative Valence Systems (i.e., systems for aversive motivation), Positive Valence Systems, Cognitive Systems, Systems for Social Processes, and Arousal/Regulatory Systems. The columns of the matrix represent different classes of variables (or units of analysis) used to study the domains/constructs. Seven such classes have been specified; these are genes, molecules, cells, neural circuits, physiology (e.g. cortisol, heart rate, startle reflex), behaviors, and self-reports. Circuits represent the core aspect of these classes of variables – both because they are central to the various biological and behavioral levels of analysis, and because they are used to constrain the number of constructs that are defined. Investigators can select any level of analysis to be the independent variable for classification (or multiple levels in some cases, e.g., behavioral functioning stratified by a genetic polymorphism), and dependent variables can be selected from multiple columns. In addition, since constructs are typically studied in the context of particular scientific paradigms, a column for “paradigms” has been added; obviously, however, paradigms do not represent units of analysis.

[1] http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

[2] http://www.nimh.nih.gov/research-priorities/rdoc/index.shtml

"Disorder"...Dis-order...I think the word used is telling

Well yeah, its latin. Dis meaning not, order being a more recent english from old french ordre which was more religious order at the time.

Words evolve, its useful to know their etymology.

Also BDSM, polyamory and others.

The former is no longer a mental illness in of itself since it formed the basis of a popular movie. (Said representation was piss poor, but the point stands.)

I don't know, I found "Secretary" to be quite all right. Isn't that the big movie with the lawyer named Grey that everybody was talking about last year? :-)

Ah yes..The Secretary was more than quite all right!

I find it interesting that if you have odd/unusual sexual preferences, then you are often considered mentally ill, but if you have some odd/unusual preferences for other things (like operating systems, for example), then that is in most cases not considered a mental problem.

What's so special about sex? I guess psychiatry basically took over and continued the old Christian religious prejudices.

Even outside of psychiatry, sex is widely held to occupy a special place in the psyche. This is why forcing somebody to have sex with you is a very serious crime, but forcing somebody to use Windows is not.

Sexual preferences that psychiatry considers mental disorders, like BDSM, fetishism and transvestism, or previously homosexuality and masturbation, usually have nothing to do with forcing anybody. Seems like much of psychiatry basically boils down to "we don't like this, so we consider it a mental disorder". As for the sexual stuff, I guess it comes from the old Christian idea that sex that is not for procreation is wrong, which is probably a result of agriculture. In an agricultural society, you want the maximum amount of children, I guess.

I find it fascinating that so many people are holding on to these obsolete beliefs (I mean, there are probably already too many people on this planet from an environmental point of view), although these beliefs do seem to gradually crumble as we speak.

To be fair, it's mostly an attempt to classify and not "invent." A large part of this is trying to understand things that genuinely bother people, e.g. visual and auditory hallucinations, anxiety, suicidal thoughts. Why wouldn't you want some naming convention so that clinicians can have a conversation about it? But of course there are abuses as well, like your example of homosexuality, though it don't think that's the same as something like schizophrenia, which is a horrible experience regardless of what society calls it.

"It's basically just a bunch of [group self-designated experts] getting together, suggesting stuff and voting on it. It is not science."

That is science.

You don't vote on science. You vote to gauge degree of consensus.

Science would be a bunch of experts getting together, suggesting stuff, and systematically invalidating each incorrect suggestion with rigorously controlled experimentation until the remaining suggestions can be presumed to be correct at a certain degree of precision.

It functions as a moderatly effective way to match treatments to people who might get good milage out of them.

In the broadest sense, Psychiatric disorders are internal mental conditions that prevent a person from being a happy productive member of society. If you live in a society that demonizes homosexuality, then it kind of makes sense to call it a psychiatric disorder. In this case however the solution wasn't to cure the homosexuals, but to cure society.

The definition of "Authority":

the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience.

We're all free-willed individuals. Accepting orders, accepting other's decisions, and obeying others are voluntary actions. As soon as we refuse to follow an order, refuse to obey, the "authority", by definition, returns its power back to ourselves. Authorities are only authorities because by our grace, we allow them to be authorities.

The crazy ones are those who would voluntary give up their own initiative to the stupid, to the power obsessed, to the egocentric, to the selfish.

And yet this giving up is the quintessential behavior of humans which makes mass society possible. If we did not cede power and allow ourselves to be made into essentially slaves to serve each other's desires, society and the economy would not be possible.

Yet I often feel that this was in fact a deal with the devil which has already reduced people to machines to be coerced at the whim of others and in the future will do more of that and continue to make life less autonomous, stable and pleasurable because of the continued decreased autonomy to be yourself and say what you want to say when you want to say it, and not be judged and discriminated against for having your own non-mainstream opinions.

I am more optimistic - the various revolts and revolutions, numerous events in the past of destruction of the aristocratic classes, the modern phenomenon of electing party insurgents (Trump, Sanders) shows people giving up power is, in the long run, a free choice. Authority must be at least somewhat benevolent to continue to be.

In what universe is electing Trump or Sanders a way to reclaim power?

I can't defend Sanders as a choice here, but Trump has gathered a group of supporters who believe he represents a well-placed high explosive that will detonate the current political system, whether deliberately or through his utter unsuitability for the Presidency.

Sanders describes campaign finance reform as a return to democracy as opposed to the oligarchy we currently live in; I'd suspect this is what he's referring to.

"reclaiming power" is essentially a paraphrase of his entire campaign if you take his "millionaires and billionaires" analysis to be accurate.

Sanders is literally running on a campaign to reclaim power from the wealthiest to everyone else.

We heard the same things about Obama 7 years ago.

Sanders is still part of the Democratic party and, like Obama, there's only so much he can stray from general party policies. Remember, this is the party that favors Hillary as a presidential candidate, a known liar, anti-encryption, for-surveillance hypocrite.

"Anything but the status quo".

Following orders isn't totally voluntary. You don't have time in a stressful instant to decide whether an order from your boss (colonel, coach) is correct.

People still argue about the milgram experiment and nuremberg trials but one conclusion you can draw -- it's 'abnormal' to reject orders on moral grounds.

You're defining authority as power and that ends up being circular; the two are synonyms. I think this issue is more complicated than you're making out. The opposite of slavery is freedom, but the opposite of leadership is anarchy and waste. I can't survive on my own so I work with groups of people.

You have to believe either you or society is going to be better off if you followed the order than you didn't, for you to follow it. A person who can force that situation on you so you would follow their orders have authority. A random person off the street can't order you around.

Depends on the situation; in the presence of danger, I trust the person with the most information (and use various heuristics to assess who that is). The analysis you're suggesting is right (am I better off following), but in general that's just 'what is optimal to do' -- and that takes time to know.

The implicit bargain in all power transactions is Sam Jackson's 'come with me if you want to live'. (where 'live' can be 'get rich', 'not go to jail', 'eat'). And there's never enough information or time to make a smart decision. Smart despots hoard information as much as guns, but even fair leaders have to choose what to say because of limited attention and TMI risks.

The man with a literal gun has very real authority. An authority often has the ability to threaten punishment for noncompliance. Resisting is a tradeoff. Not doing your math homework in middle school "cause it's dumb", for example, is kinda stupid, because the punishment doled out (bad grades, hostile teachers, extra work) are worse in the long run then just dealing with doing something pointless.

Resisting where you can actually do some good is useful. Always blindly resisting is at least suboptimal, but the word disorder might not be entirely off base.

If the teachers and parents can't convince you they're there for your own good despite the natural inclination for you to believe that is the case, then it's entirely unsurprising you'd refuse to follow their orders - they're bad teachers/ parents. If disorder arises because of that then that's only there were bad leaders to begin with, and order was never "deserved".

Tell that to the club cracking your skull..

People are often coerced into obedience of authority, via violence or other means.

"Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously."

But there also some individuals who think any authority is illegitimate. I have friends and close relatives who I would characterize as having this personality trait. I also observe that it has a negative impact on their quality of life. They have trouble holding jobs, staying in school, keeping friends, and building personal romantic relationships because they are so resistant to being accountable to any other person - accountability which translates in their mind to obedience to authority.

Authority isn't always illegitimate. That's why there is a such a thing as a pathological degree of anti-authoritarian sentiment.

OK, my father deals with people with ODD and Conduct disorder on a regular basis, and I think this article is really miss-characterizing the condition. You don't have ODD if you have a reason for defying authority, even a bad reason. ODD is defined as having problems with planning and inhibition. I was actually talking with my father just last night about ODD, and he described an experiment to me. Imagine you have a patient play a card game in which they have the chance to win money or lose money. Initially, the game is rigged in the patient's favor, but as the game goes on it gets harder and harder for them to win. Most people will figure out that the odds have changed and stop playing, but people with ODD or Conduct disorder will continue playing far longer than anyone else because they have poor planning skills. Describing people with ODD as simply anti-authority is really missing the crux of the condition.

EDIT: I shouldn't criticize the article, but rather the people who are doing the over diagnosing. Just thought I'd give some context to the condition, so people understand what ODD really is.

You're inverting the entire premise of the article: he isn't really talking about ADHD/ODD, he is talking about people who are anti-authoritarian and are misdiagnosed as ADHD/ODD as a result of it.

When he talks about famous people who would have been diagnosed as having these disorders in modern times, he's not saying that they have these disorders, but that the diagnosis is bogus.

It's as he's saying "these people who have the common cold are misdiagnosed as having the flu!" and you respond with "these common cold characteristics are nothing like the flu." Well, yes, that's part of the issue at hand.

You're absolutely right: I guess I just wanted to provide some context on what ODD really is. I didn't want people to think that all ODD diagnoses are like this, or that ODD is not a real disease. I'll edit my comment to reflect that

Then why call it Opposition Defiant Disorder? Why not call it Executive Planning Disorder or something else that refers to poor planning skills.

I like your dad's definition better, but I fear that there are institutional and cultural factors that allow ODD diagnoses to stigmatize anti-authoritarians.

Well, there are several conditions that would fall under issues with planning: including ADHD and garden variety mental retardation (which are often co-morbid with ODD). What separates ODD from those other conditions is it presents with a lot of hostility and aggression. So a proper name would be more like "Executive Planning Disorder with Aggression."

However, I think that over-diagnosis of ODD is somewhat less of an issue than ADHD or depression. Unlike those conditions, the treatment regiment for ODD is behavioral therapy and anger management training, as opposed to medication.

> Unlike those conditions, the treatment regiment for ODD is behavioral therapy and anger management training, as opposed to medication.

First line treatment for depression and ADD are behavioural therapies (including family therapy if the patient is a child with ADHD) rather than medication. At least, that's the case in the UK.

My (former) psychiatrist labeled me noncompliant for requesting modern studies on SSRIs not done by the selling company before taking them. I guess I fall in that category.

Medical professionals don't seem to like it much when patients do anything that might call their expertise into question, it seems. :/

If you advised a friend on cryptography/databases and they started pushing back and repeating some questionable cliches? There's two sides to this. I've heard it's quite frustrating to be a teacher or doctor nowadays...

There is a huge asymmetry in the consequences of not pushing back. While the expert might be frequently frustrated by having to explain away the same cliches, the patient/customer has a lot to lose by not pushing back. Especially when the topic in question is a person's health.

On the flip side, how many programmers still make mistakes in cryptography and databases when they are knowledgeable about them? Could any single programmer write a cryptographically secure 'anything' even as an expert in their field?

Now imagine the program they are writing is someone else's life and they are an expert, but the tools they use are unstable, have frequent revisions and don't notify you when something changes and have tons of undefined behavior. Testing also likes to return more or less random values and you can only kind of tell what the outcome has been.

Non-compliant or resistant? The former means "you don't do what I tell you to do" and the latter means "my attempts to fix you aren't working, but it isn't my fault". I hear a lot more of the latter in the literature. In fact, I don't think I recall ever hearing the former...

Non compliant by her words. She didn't care to explain or point me to a source I could use to research it properly, I didn't take the medication. I've never seen a doctor so irrationally angry before and probably never will again. She probably assumed I was antipsychiatry or something.

Sorry, I don't care how much depression costs America each year, that doesn't say anything about efficacy and side effects.

At the time, there were meta-analysis calling it into serious question. I'm still a bit suspect of the efficacy to be honest, but the research is improving somewhat and the conclusions look better. I'm fine now in any case (I got better).

People that have an unrelenting, almost worship-like devotion to authority scare the bejesus out of me. Imagine what a great society we would be if we were all free thinkers.

And nowhere is this more obvious than, Silicon Valley. Where the famous names are worshipped. Repeated as talismans in posts and blogs. Dropped in conversation at every turn. Studied and written about and hailed. Discussed in hushed tones at lunch. Baffles me.

With a lack of religion, people naturally seek idols to look up to and create a focus in their lives. That said, it can go too far and look like a cult. The more I read about behaviour, history and psychology, the more I realise just how specialised religions were at keeping civilisations sane.

>Imagine what a great society we would be if we were all free thinkers.

It's tough to herd cats.

Serious thought: Why do you have to or why would you try to herd (free thinking) cats?

Any deviant act or view is probably anti-authoritarian if by authoritarian you also include the "authority" with which mainstream views and regulations are imposed, sometimes by law, more often by majority pressure.

Yet everything mainstream isn't somehow bad. Humans survive only by cooperating and banding together. It's just that we need to strike a golden mean between listening to authority and being unique. It's a matter of intelligence, applied on a case-by-case basis, and will work only if the most people in a group practice it.

> Humans survive only by cooperating and banding together.

Or, more realistically - by enslavement, the threat of violence and killing off everyone who challenges your authority. It seems history is tirelessly cyclical.

Having experienced some of these things in my own life, I can honestly say that I do believe that being an anti-authoritarian is often mistaken as a mental problem.

I believe that authority is the wielding of power by an institution or individual, and power is only useful if you voluntarily cede control (this doesn't apply always, but does in 99% of cases). Refusal to cede control returns that power back to you. People who /believe/ that they have power over you, when proven that they don't, by your inability or denial of compliance get irrationally angry and tend to think that it makes you a terrible person. I consider this a selfish response, if perhaps a natural one.

To truly live in a free society we must be okay with having power over us when the situation requires (such as at work), while also being okay with rejecting power when our morals and ethics demand it of us. The issue seems to be that some people have the ability to do the latter, and other do not, always appealing to authority to base their arguments or guide their path. The fact that many of these people who are obsessed with authority end up in mental health professions is not really surprising, since the mental health professions largely base the current accepted practices on cults of personality rather than on scientific inquiry.

The fact that I chose a profession where it's basically impossible to BS to anyone who knows anything because the rules of mathematics drive things far more than how eloquently you speak is also not surprising. Anti-authoritarians love facts, facts are a good basis for deciding when to cede power and when to take it back and provide a guiding principle in your life that doesn't rely on another person being an authority over you, even if they are outside your control.

Anyway, that's kind of my reaction to reading the article. Definitely interesting to reflect back on some of my life experiences given this context and consider how things could have turned out differently, both for the worse or for the better.

In the Soviet Union, and I imagine the other Marxist–Leninist countries, people were sometimes diagnosed as mentally ill for not believing in socialism.

I get your point, but I do somewhat wonder about the sanity of people in the Soviet Union who would not, at least, pretend to believe in socialism.

>Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.

Dissidents and human right activists were sent for mental institution mostly by diagnosing schizophrenia as a means to discredit them and as message to others. We should applaud those brave souls and not doubt their sanity.

'Anti-authority' is not a well defined label. Independent thought and independent behavior are very different things. And unless your behavior is disruptive or destructive, generally nobody cares what you think.

Iconoclasm is a more specific label: independence of thought, or belief, or convention, without any mention of behavior. Presumably iconoclasts are what Levine is describing as positive examples of anti-authority, AKA mentally healthy folks who just think differently, but don't act on it, or who act on it in constructive ways.

But anyone who acts disruptively or destructively also qualifies as anti-authority. So I don't see where Levine draws the line between good and bad forms of anti-authority. Inactive belief is good? Disruptive or violent is bad? He doesn't say.

Who decides what is "disruptive"? Is it "bad" to disrupt society if that society is evil and corrupt? Was a German who sought to disrupt the Nazis in Germany mentally ill, or was he rightfully disruptive and anti-authoritarian?

The point here is that authority and society have no intrinsic worth. The issue is that those who reject authority and/or society are defined as mentally ill according to the psuedo-science of psychiatry, whether or not that authority and/or society is worthy of rejection.

That sounds like a resounding endorsement for anarchy. :-)

Game theorists will certainly disagree with you that there's no value in group cooperation. It's pretty obvious that any group that cooperates is more powerful toward almost any goal than any individual or group that does not cooperate.

But the question implied by Levine isn't whether cooperation is "worth" more than uncooperation. He's asking whether authority is always good, and hence, whether anti-authority is necessarily bad, or whether it's often a constructive alternative to group-think and submission, given that everyone is inevitably part of one or more groups and thus is obliged to choose a path: conform, change the rules, or quit the group. Levine's implication is that those who choose not to play by the rules, and disrupt the group destructively, are not necessarily pathological.

But I think Levine didn't succeed in making that case. He claimed only that some people are labeled as malefactors strictly because they refuse to conform to norms or authority. He doesn't say what fraction of those cases did so unhelpfully. In fact, I suspect all were disruptive to the group's normal conduct, and most in a destructive way.

That's not exactly a strong case for singing out, "Viva la difference!"

Reminds me of a Dr. King quote:

>But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?

"Crazy", "Nutjob", "Mentally Ill", "Extremist", "Heretic" - these are words used to write off ideas which are too difficult for one to even consider because they often threaten the most deeply held assumptions of a persons life. Social constructions can be very fragile.

I am an immigrant in America. I have had problems with my bosses(American) when I challenged some of their decisions at work. When I challenged their decision in every quantifiable metric, they could not defend it in any way and relented, but then I heard from HR about not following orders in general.

I think in American culture there is lot of emphasis on command hierarchy( may be military influenced?) and who wears the pants so to speak, compared to my home country in the east, and I think that may have something to do with it.

But I can attest to the the repulsiveness I feel to subtle authoritarianism where orders are sneaked in along with regular conversation.

It depends a lot on where you work.

I have worked at places where I have delivered what I thought were superior results compared to what they were asking but they were upset because it wasn't exactly what they asked for.

Other places give a lot more authority and a wide latitude.

Startups tend to be a lot more flexible in this regard and it is why I prefer working at startups vs enterprise companies.

Anti-Authoritarian sounds a lot like critical thinking. That's a disease now?

"Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not."

Critical thinking is heresy to group think.

I think once you realize the vast majority of authorities preach contribution and submission while merely taking for themselves -- you begin to see everyone around you who submits to them as a bit insane. This becomes really hard to rectify until you can figure out an equilibrium of physical submission to a unjust authority without psychological submission.

Police have been known to send people whom they have beaten up for mental examination in order to discredit them. This happened in Los Altos to a guy playing Ingress.

Telling how the people in the comments who disagree with the article also tend to appeal to authority (see the comments by Herb and Jaroon).

I have a friend whose 14-year-old daughter has been diagnosed with ODD. She frequently cuts herself with anything she can get her hands on and when she doesn't get her way she will literally spin around and around shouting and growling angrily for a quarter to a half hour like she's possessed, sometimes physically lashing out at her parents. It's terrifying to watch and is definitely not your garden variety skepticism of authority.

A implying B doesn't mean that B implies A.

That is, anti-authoritarians being diagnosed as mentally ill does not mean that mentally ill people are automatically anti-authoritarians.

You seem to believe that she is ill, but the only reason you provide is that she wants to take her life away. Proof.

Why did we invent that it's forbidden to take your life away? It's in all insurance contracts, in bank agreements, in many ToS; If a kid takes their life away then the parents are penaly responsible for not looking after; and if an elderly person becomes sick, then she's forever prevented from accessing the basic tools to end her life. For god's sake, and elderly person who lived 100 years, let her die when she thinks it's time to, even if it's messy.

As much as solitary confinement is a form of torture - as much as prison, actually (once again, we'll keep you forcefully alive while in prison, because you must endure the torture we've assigned to you), keeping people alive when they want to die is another form of torture.

So I'm very sorry but that 14-year-old girl might being tortured by the requirement of staying alive.

I don't see any mention in the parent post about suicidal ideation. Self-harm != desire to kill yourself.

Also lumping together wanting to kill yourself because you are experiencing severe physical pain (old people with terminal illness), psychological pain through torture (certain prison confinements), and mental disorders is a gross over simplification. This isn't a binary issue. We shouldn't say people are never allowed to commit suicide or people are always allowed to commit suicide without us trying to intervene to improve their quality of life.

On one hand, devotion to authority is kind of what makes society possible. We all work, are cogs in the machine, and as a reward we all get a more or less decent existence.

Of course, the downside is that when society is ill, or when our leaders are objectively wrong, we don't see it because we're used to just following authority, and can't see beyond our couches and screens.

I have to believe we as creatures can work together willingly. Consensus and order can be brought by understanding and communication without without force of authority.

It's not about the force of authority, but the willingness to defer authority to prevent having to be responsible for the consequences of our own decisions. If we go with popular consensus, we absolve ourselves of the guilt if anything goes wrong.

"Going with the crowd" is a survival instinct. This isn't controversial. It's observable with both humans, and in the natural world (flocks of birds, schools of fish, herds of whatever, etc...).

There are people who derive pleasure from destroying things. On the internet you may call them trolls (from the harmless garden variety, to the people swatting, making death/rape threats) - depending on the variant, you may eject them from the community, shadowban them, call the police, etc. All of which are applications of force and authority.

How do you deal with those people, when you go outside the safe confines of the internet, without using force or authority?

When you have a "diagnosis" from a "scientific discipline" that cannot be rigorously tested or diagnosed, it seems obvious it would be open to abuse in this manner.

If there were a blood test for crazy, it would be a little more difficult. Sadly, diagnosing illnesses of the mind is just educated guesswork, and will likely never rise to the level of science that most people assume.

There is evidence that MRI can be used to detect biological differences and that there is some genetic component as well. The two major challenges though are that these diseases are not "binary" but multivariate and that it's very difficult to collect enough data to explore that space. So it's certainly hard, but not impossible!

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920996401...

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v43/n10/full/ng.940.html

I thought it was particularly interesting when the author talked about differing reactions people had when taking psychiatric medication. It then seems that the effect of psychiatric medication has more to do with the person's frame of mind than any actual effect of the medication.

According to the author, if the patient rejects the doctor's authority, the patient can react even more violently when put on psychiatric medication. Even more interestingly, the author goes on to suggest that patients who do take the medication take it to placate authority, rather than for perceived effect. The author uses the example of someone in a highly stressful job taking Xanax instead of marijuana because while they might believe marijuana helps more, they don't take it due to employer drug tests.

It leads me to this question: when doctors think a medication is working, do they think so because of actual beneficial effects seen in the patient, or simply because the patient is complying with the treatment?

Prior discussions of this piece:

206 comments, 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5674438

138 comments, 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642570

This is the primary issue I have with our treatment of mental health.

Physical disabilities and illnesses come about due to clear actions, and are generally recognizable as universally bad.

These sorts of things either happen near-arbitrarily (birth abnormaility, blood clot) or via an accident (falling down the stairs). After the fact, you're less able, in general.

By contrast, many mental illnesses are triggered by society, and some make no sense without a societal structure.

People go to work, become stressed at the lack of reward or meaning in their employment and get depressed. Now they have an 'illness', because they no longer want to turn up for work. Cyclical reasoning.

There are certainly many mental illnesses that aren't covered by this, but I think that when comments are made about 'declining mental health in society' - it's really just throwing diagnoses at the fact that we're becoming more cut-throat....

Definitely. If people talked about physical illness the same way we did about mental illness, we'd diagnose anybody below than the 30th percentile in height with High Shelf Access Disorder and try giving them growth hormones. Mismatch to an artificial environment is not necessarily a disease.

This Philosophy Bites episode on "Categorizing Mental Disorders" has some good material on the topic: http://philosophybites.com/2016/01/steven-hyman-on-categoris...

And there's a lot of good work under the label "medicalization of deviance".

19th century schooling (which is still our current schooling system) is about preparing for conscription.

I read a bit on authors pages. I think he paints "anti-authoritarian" as young hippie who is against everything just because. That explains no mentions of psychiatry in soviet union, early 20th century and so on.

Authority of a math textbook or a biology textbook is not the same as authority of religious dogmatism, tradition or a state ideology.

Rejecting the former is an illness, rejecting the later is a right.

Sanity is defined relative to society and social norms. For example, homosexuality stopped being labelled as a disorder when society's attitudes started changing.

I don't think authority is the problem, what bothers me more, is how passive consensus somehow reinforces some ideas more than others, and that can make them difficult to challenge them.

So in a sense, I think that there is a transparent "consented" authority, which is harder to challenge. Of course most people are happier in such a society. That's true, you can't really tell if the person is insane or just having an opinion about something.

I have a friend who I've known since first grade. He would never just "obey orders"...he would always try to find out why he was being asked to do something and if the request seemed illegitimate he would refuse, sometimes in creative ways, to honor it. He was diagnosed with ADHD and labeled a "problem child".

As we grew older and his ethics and moral compass developed he would supply arguments to back up his actions - he would not rebel for rebellion's sake but because he truly believed his actions were reasonable and justified. In high school these took the form of successfully defying the school's no-hats-allowed policy and under the auspices of a Frank Zappa loving art teacher forming The Anarchist's Club (the tongue-in-cheek logo was a medieval spiked club weapon emblazoned with a circle-A symbol).

The Anarchist's Club biggest action was a boycott of a mandatory pep rally for the school's basketball team (we offered to study in the library instead) which earned its 13 or so members a suspension with readmission after a written apology and meeting with our parents. After three days only me, my friend and one other student remained defiant. (Our parents were supportive of our "cause".) We were readmitted after my friend and I went to the town's newspaper and told them our story and a subsequent meeting with the school board which, to our surprise, agreed the offer to study in lieu of attending the rally was reasonable and overruled the principal's authority.

After high school we both moved to the west coast to attend college and drifted apart. In the "real world", despite much rhetorical talk of freedom and liberty from all corners, obedience and conformity to an often rigid status quo are expected if one wants to be accepted by, and benefit from, mainstream society. There are exceptions, like entrepreneurship to some extent, and limited room to negotiate but generally defying the authority of supervisors, managers, professors, the law of the land and any number of "superior" people and institutions is met with the crack of a whip rather than an offer of dialog and compromise.

Most of us suppress our anti-authoritarian instincts and fall in line with the established order. The more we have to lose, the more we opt for security and predictability over principles and conscience. My friend says he cannot do this. Talking a decade after high school he says he was born without the "conformity gene" and that he can't will himself to do something he feels is unjust or infringes unreasonably on his liberty. He can't, for example, obey a micro-managing boss if his method of working is more productive than the bosses way. If the boss is truly concerned about productivity and the company's bottom line he or she will not force employees to do things one way and one way only. Every person has methods that work for them, but may not work for others, and a boss who does not respect this is, according to my friend, an ego-tripping asshole or a mindless drone in thrall to "management theory".

My friend argues that his anti-authoritarian nature has cost him many jobs and opportunities and has made climbing the middle-class career ladder all but impossible. He makes money by buying and selling things on Craigslist and E-bay, freelance graphic design jobs and the marijuana reselling industry. He claims to have no interest in a stable career, home ownership and a family. More than that, he says his disposition makes it impossible for him to submit to arbitrary authority and to shelve his reservations for the sake of a career. If I had just met him I might be tempted to call bullshit and think he's rationalizing his failure after the fact but I've known this guy almost my entire life and his behavior has been consistent since first grade.

He has been diagnosed with adult ADHD, an anxiety disorder, depression and other mood disorders. (The DSM even provides a handy "unspecified disorder" category.) One anecdotal tale proves nothing and there is a possible chicken/egg problem here but based on my friend's and, to a lesser extent, my own and other people's experiences I am convinced there are good reasons for the APA or similar group to do an in-depth, independent study investigating the links between mental illness diagnoses and anti-authoritarian personality traits. Given what is at stake, I doubt that will happen any time soon.

This overlooks an opportunity: We need a new disorder. Call it Control-seeking Disorder, or CSD. Cop gets in your face? Diagnose him with CSD and require treatment that lowers aggression. TSA bumming you out? Make sure they screen out CSD sufferers. Get them in treatment.

Site repeatedly crashes on mobile, thanks to Javascript ads.

And this is why I was made to disable my ad blocker by many sites. Thanks, f*ing ad industry. The least you could do is not crash my shit if I allow you in.

I find it quite alarming that the DSM has been wielded as a tool for hospitalizations and forced medication despite providing sparse forensic evidence of the diseases it attempts to diagnose.

The majority is always sane, Louis.

really? I thought they were called "Libertarians".

Many people are so desperate to convince themselves that they are very special snowflakes that they will use every opportunity to renounce the status quo. It doesn't matter if the status quo is very sensible and sound. They need, crave to be unique. So every crazy, poorly concocted conspiracy theory gets thousands, millions of devout followers. Convinced beyond belief in the most absurd of things. The funniest thing is that they all think everybody else is delusional and they got to the very special, elevated place, reserved only for the very enlightened.

It is very annoying, tbh.

No evidence - merely a rant.

You are absolutely right.

This is my opinion, not a rebuttal. I don't need to collect formal evidence to leave my comment. This is the Internet, not an academic panel.

This is not an academic panel, this is hacker news! I think on average the culture here tries to avoid wholly opinion based discussion. You don't need to collect formal evidence to leave your comment, but substantiated claims sure will be more popular than unsubstantiated ones.

Experience is evidence. Foot-stomping demands of evidence for things that are obvious from those without experience is tiring. It's like those kids whom start working at cafés as their first job, do everything by the book and are embarrassingly uncool.

"Different" does not mean "better" and "equal" does not mean "the same". I don't believe that I am any better than anyone else, but I am unique. Find me another identical copy of me and you can prove me wrong. And then you can go ahead and force me to conform to whatever it is you think is sensible and sound.

The status quo isn't sensible and sound. It also isn't insensible or unsound. It is simply the current state of things, the result of thousands of years of humans interacting with each other and their environments.

Smart people can often identify things that seem strange or sub-optimal (under some framework of thought) about the current state of things. They might be not be able to fully articulate what they are instinctually sensing, or have any idea about the best way to improve the situation. However, often they will express their ideas.

Yes, of course, some people will say anything for attention. But it would be quite a rash overreaction to assume that all or most seemingly unusual statements are simply cries for attention, or that they don't contain some sliver of wisdom or insight. The complexity of the universe results in no one having even a slice of the whole picture, and we will continue struggling to get by with incredibly rough, imperfect heuristics for centuries to come.

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