Comment by sevenless | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sevenless | Hacker News Reader

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The section talking about contagion was interesting. What follows is pure speculation on my part and a bit of a ramble.

I believe many mental illnesses, depression, suicidal behavior and anorexia among them, can be characterized as contagious. And perhaps some other things that aren't usually described as mental illnesses. The border between belief, religion and mental illness seems a bit fuzzy (echoes of Snow Crash). Small isolated communities must be much more susceptible to contagion taking hold, as single events have a great sway over perceptions, and there are few connections with a larger world to normalize things.

Charles Stross said something about the internet that stuck with me: "the accidental invention of telepathy". Just like public water supplies opened up new vectors for diseases such as cholera, I wonder if the internet's ability to more or less put minds directly in touch can facilitate the spread of certain mental illnesses. Consuming unfiltered internet might be looked on in a few years like drinking unsterilized water. In particular, I wonder if certain "echo chamber" social websites that allow easy isolation from mainstream opinion (Tumblr and 4chan, I'm looking at you) might be analogous to these dangerous isolated communities.

This is a very interesting thought process. Tumblr and 4chan in my mind are extreme examples of the unsterilised Internet you refer to....

> Consuming unfiltered internet might be looked on in a few years like drinking unsterilized water

For the last year or so I've decided to avoid news outlets as much as possible. So I've updated my Reddit subscriptions to remove anything that might be a news channel, I no longer frequent the BBC news website, and avoid newspapers and TV news as best I can.

The constant fear mongering and general bad news is at times overwhelming but oftentimes just unnecessarily miserable (IMO). It's like being given a long list of problems you can't do anything about. So I've decided to simply switch it off.

I would much prefer your approach where my news could somehow be "sterilised", taking out anything that is overtly negative leaving only factual stories (e.g. business, technology and so on).

I have my very own opinion on people who refuse to perceive the reality of the human mind.

If one has trapped himself in such a bubble, he/she is unfit to really communicate with other human beings, lead endeavor of complex composed groups and manage endeavors going into crisis situations. Please, if you ever form a team, state your perception of the species ahead of time, so people know what they are in for. The negative is a building block of reality, it has to be seen, it has to be handled, worked with, contained and used. One should not work as director if one is unable to communicate and take the company of for example bipolar people. Please don't take this as a insult. I just think your way of not viewing the world is dangerous and should be made obvious via disclaimer. Which in a way you have made with this post, so please do this in future conversations.

Regards.

"I believe many mental illnesses ... can be characterized as contagious."

I can believe that.

Social cognition, attachment theory, mirror neurons, etc.

Swarm Intelligence has (for its time?) a great primer on social cognition, how our brains resonate with each other, how children use their parent's brains and emotions to regulate their own, etc. http://www.swarmintelligence.org/SIBook/SI.php

I lived with a paranoid schizophrenia. It started making me crazy too. Took months to shake that off.

And I can definitely confirm that anxiety is contagious, from personal experiences.

There are certainly communities that "explain" the behaviors of mental illnesses in a way that don't help people who are at risk but instead drives them even more into the illness - i.e. certain extreme conspiracy boards, esoterics sites or misguided bulimia "self-help" groups. For sites like that, I agree.

However, as for groups which just represent off-mainstream subculture I don't see it. Well, technically they are of course "contagious" - that's how transmitting culture and ideas work. But not every bad idea or weird subculture is already a mental illness. I would think "sterilizing" the internet by taking away all "contagious" sites would not just rob it one of its core identities, but would also present serious free-speech and censorship issues as the criteria for being "sterile" don't seem clear-cut at all to me.

Or to make an example, many opinions on HN aren't mainstream either. What would make HN a safe site to visit, but Tumblr not?

Let's say that magic is real, OK? Magic actually works. Science hasn't noticed it yet because psychologists don't get network effects and don't have the data sets. But let's say this is the case.

That means words have power. Certain words and phrases, repeated in the right way, perceived in the right way, will get people real sick. Names and labels have even more power. The right name can change people, give them a new identity. They change the way people see themselves, how they behave.

Some websites, some communities, are chronic incubators of the bad kind of magic. Enough exposure to it and you'll start having bad thoughts, you'll get depressed, withdraw from society, maybe start giving a harmful kind of name to yourself, maybe hurt yourself or other people. Sure, the boundary between mental illness and not-a-mental illness is vague, and maybe subject to abuse (just ask the Russians). But some stuff is unquestionably both contagious and harmful.

We just have to be careful not to get exposed to bad juju out there.

We don't have to sterilize every water source on the planet. Some people like drinking out of rivers. But we'd be crazy not to treat our water for obvious bugs.

But it does mean we should be prudent about what we're consuming, and what our families are taking in. And if you were a government, you'd be tempted to do some harm-benefit analysis. You could say that free speech isn't an absolute, and promoting, say, bulimia or terrorism carries great harm and should be minimized, as many governments do.

Well, good thing then that magic probably isn't real - and that we actually do have a lot of knowledge about the real effects of words and ideas on people.

But anyway, the usual counter-arguments to censorship "for your own safety" apply, whether you name it censorship or "sterilization" or anything else.

For example, what would be the "obvious bugs" in that case? As I agree that certain communities can be harmful to certain groups of people and I would agree to blocking - because there is an established body of psychological literature that can tell you why and how those things are doing harm. And even in those cases it's not always clear-cut.

(Such sites are already being blocked in a number of countries btw, for example germany.)

But the parent poster was talking about Tumblr and 4chan. They think those sites are "contagious", I think they are not. So who would decide? And what about other cultures? If you ask an iranian or chinese official, they would tell you that the western media are highly contagious and harmful. Shouldn't we block those as well then? Or whatabout showing Saw in our cinemas? Is that good for the mental health?

So far the western strategy in those matters was to give freedom priority and instead strengthen the immune system of the individuals (to keep using that metaphor). And I don't see a good reason to change that.

It's a really interesting idea.

A few years ago when my anxiety, depression and agoraphobia peaked one of the things that terrified me about talking about it to anyone was the way I'd managed to "logically rationalise" it to myself - I was literally scared of infecting friends with my ideas because even though a part of me knew it was stupid and broken beliefs, I was still capable of entirely justifying them. The fact I'm usually a strong minded person who's good at talking people round to my way of thinking only made this idea more troubling.

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