In real life, when people are as tormented by schizophrenia and PTSD as Mr. Robot is, their talents are of no use and of no threat to anyone. We're surrounded by such people in every city, and the only threat they pose is to themselves.
I'm sure everyone here remembers the term 'suspension of disbelief' or related.
The reason a Hollywood virus or universal decryption key doesn't allow technical people to suspend disbelief is because both are immediately absurd in multiple ways, often to the point of being unintentionally funny.
It isn't hard for me, at least, to suspend disbelief that people with psychological challenges can do big things, because there are examples in which people with psychological challenges have accomplished big things.
Suspension of disbelief is tricky when approaching domain-specific knowledge. Really, the "hacker's complaint" is no different than lawyers complaining about, well, every courtroom drama ever.
I won't argue whether "Elliot's" PTSD is so severe that he couldn't function. It is fiction, and arguing about personal investment in fiction is a mug's game, outside of friendly bar talk.
I will simply note that you're vastly overgeneralizing the range effects of both PTSD and schizophrenia. PTSD, for instance, has in fact led to horrific violence, and, well, go google 'famous schizophrenics' if you'd like to see what people have accomplished.
So when the movies and television shows portray mad geniuses who threaten to destroy life as we know it, it covers up the sad reality, which is severe schizophrenics are only a challenge to our sense of decency, and little else.
I don't think it is anywhere nearly so simple as "dumb people believe fiction is real." There is a complicated interplay between lived experience, class, personality, education, desires and other priors driving how people process both fiction and nonfiction.
Or as a brief counterfactual, sure is nice how the murder rate has dropped now that we've banned violent video games, amirite?
And it is a real problem wrt applying such acquired "knowledge" to the real world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect is a well-documented instance, and there are numerous reports by lawyers of juries making unreasonable assumptions (e.g. about the accuracy of DNA matches), or giving undue weight to "expert" evidence like bite mark analysis (which is fraudulent pseudoscience: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/09/07/...). All this stuff has effect on outcomes of real world criminal cases, sometimes literally with people's lives at stake.
As Cory points out in this piece, the same is true for information security. It all ultimately translates to a very skewed public picture of what the threats are and how they can be mitigated, and that, in turn, affects public policy and laws. That is a real problem.
Bite mark analysis is a great example. It isn't just that CSI: Market Segmentation Unit convinces people science can do something it can't. The legal world (outside of some lonely voices to which nobody listened until pretty recently) was telling juries it was valid. Defense attorneys might have taken the odd run at expert testimony in a particular case if it looked promising, but their job is to win particular cases, not take principled stands in general. Meanwhile, the rest of the attorneys in the room (people with reputations for being serious, whom you might expect to have carefully considered the value of different types of evidence, given their careers) were taking bite mark analysis seriously. What, exactly, is a juror in that situation to do?
It is worth asking if the CSI effect is just a cultural feedback loop. Criminal law[1] has always wanted magic unassailable evidence. It just makes everything so much easier. Fiction sometimes still portrays fingerprint evidence as close to infallible, but who has spent generations treating it as such in the context it for which it matters most?
So at the risk of sounding cynical, I'll note that doubts about bite marks, fiber analysis, and now even fingerprints are legally acceptable now that a new magic guilt-certifier is available.
[1] I'm being somewhat flip with language. All of these topics are much more complicated than portrayed. Please take my broad generalities about legal topics in the spirit offered.
But the same applies here! The general public wants to believe, for example, that if terrorists use encryption, some really smart guys from NSA or wherever can "hack" it somehow (but nobody else). Or at least that we could regulate encryption such that only the "hackable" varieties are available to terrorists. It makes them feel safer. And so you have 44% supporting legislation to mandate backdoors.
In this case, no, they aren't. A better comparison would be to a general contractor hiring an electrician. A prosecutor is likely to have no more formal education or hands-on experience with forensic science. But, as professional "consumers" of expert testimony, and a motivation (professional duty) to win, you can't evaluate their scientific ignorance the same way you'd evaluate a juror's. I don't think the reason bite mark analysis lasted so long is because Judge Goodsense watched cop shows, any more than you can say a GC can't be blamed for shoddy wiring because they weren't a member of the Electrician's Local.
To swap contexts, nontechnical people who work with programmers may not be able to give you the big-O cost of a loop, but they tend to know when a programmer is bullshitting about something.
This goes to my contention that the CSI effect isn't just 'I believe it 'cause I saw it on the toob'. Education, lived experience, class, personality and other priors play in to it. In the case of criminal evidence admissibility, I think there is at least motivated reasoning as there is true belief in methods. The motivation is in part the same as with how plea deals have evolved - the current criminal justice system would collapse if trials were needed for more than a tiny fraction of cases. Magic evidence is a performance hack.
I don't disagree that ambient falsehoods matter. I am saying that comparing motivated professionals in a field with random MOPs misses a lot of the picture, and that even your MOP is going to react to ambient falsehoods they can't evaluate differently, based on priors.
I don't think that is the case in general, either.
The problem is that "I saw it on the toob" has secondary effects, that attenuate as they propagate, but can still go a long way. Basically, you might not believe that DNA testing is 100% correct because you saw it on TV; but you you believe it to be 100% correct because "everybody knows it", and the reason why they do is because "everybody knows it", and so on, until you actually get to a much smaller minority who believe it because they personally saw it on TV.
(In general, it's amazing how many popular "common sense" things are blatantly false, but they keep getting repeated and propagated as part of ambient noise of society, because "everybody knows it".)
Except, oddly enough, My Cousin Vinny, which lawyers apparently love [1]. The fact that I can name one movie known for this probably proves your general point, though.
[1] http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/entertainment/movies/New-...
It is very dumb to argue it has no usefulness because it does not work with modern dev tools or environments
Learning C or asm gives you no insight into what the microcode under the hood is doing.
Some people learn well through certain methods than others. Some people stick with the first thing that they find and make it work for their needs. Never discovering the "better tools".
Richard Feynman, often regarded as one of the best teachers of physics to have ever lived, when asked how to teach, said he didn't know. He just tried to bring as many views to the table as possible. Some people learn from simple high-level descriptions, others need more details to build up to high-level understanding.
Pretty sure you're just being contrarian to be contrarian. Because it seems you're suggesting your way and the things you find the most value in are the only way. Which is a nonsense counter-argument to the question "Why does this thing exist."
Your criterion feels more like "I don't get why it exists. Thus it's useless."
Self-aggrandizing nonsense.
As it happens, I tend to agree that utility is where you find it. But that's not at all the same as saying that TempleOS is a good teaching tool. Perhaps it is. But thus far I see nothing save repeated assertion to support that claim, and it would be nice to see a bit more by way of substantiation.
For example, someone claimed that, because you can draw circles at the command line with TempleOS, it is simple. But I can do that too, with a terminal and a gnuplot build that include sixel graphics support. (I did it the other day for grins.) Does that mean my setup is simple? Obviously not. Why does it mean that TempleOS is? What does the existence of the capability say about TempleOS's suitability for teaching? Does it say anything? If it does, no one has seen fit to explain how. The same goes for the fact that TempleOS is written in C and assembly. Lots of things are written in C and assembly. Are they all good teaching tools?
(Also: A throwaway, for this? Why?)
And is it so strange for a lead character in a movie or TV series to represent an outlier?
John Forbes Nash Jr. ?
After his first hospitalization in 1959 Nash only wrote two more papers in the 60s. Nash's schizophrenia definitely put a stop to his work.
Mediocre source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5pggDCnt5M
I don't claim you are wrong, but be very careful about the Barnum/Forer effect when reading such descriptions:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect
BTW: I'm personally rather immune to this effect, since I'm not a person who fits "the profile of a typical citizen".
Depression is a (very common) mental disorder. I highly recommend talking to your doctor/a therapist about this if you're self-identifying as such.
I watched such a disorder do its stuff to my ex-husband. He always showed signs of it, but neither of us knew. It was more like a slew of personality quirks. Stress would get to him and he developed quite a temper. It got fairly bad before the diagnosis. I thought he had a drug problem (partially true, but you know).
And then one night he was convinced his spit melted concrete. And so on. Finally a diagnosis: A few years later he couldn't work. Sometimes, even while medicated, he had a flimsy grasp on reality, but most of the voices stopped, which helped tremendously.
The suffering after it takes hold can be a beast of suffering, which was so much differnt than before it really 'took hold'. The hardest period was the time between it becoming serious and the diagnosis.
As far as I know, it's not something your born with, it's something your born more likely to develop.