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Comment by LifeLiverTransp | Hacker News Reader

Yes, why should a shizophreniac who wildly connects everyday experiences to form strange conspiracy theories would have a natural advantage when it comes to wildly recombining seemingly unconnected ideas, to leap over boundaries every 100 recombination?

Of course, if there is a birth advantage there- all the meritocratic idealism and work wont get you or your kids there.

So its very very anti-equalizism. Its okay, though, if that "benefit" messes up someone elses life and strands him/her living in a box. That is just how the world is supossed to work. Sick people must suffer, if they do not fit into the world tailored for average people by average people. No sense in protesting gods wanted order. Move along.

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Have you ever experienced or met someone with schizophrenia?

It is hell.

Not only for them but often for those who care about them. It's not about a rosy, whacky persons that the society whimsically outcasts. It's often legitimately tortured people that almost always need serious treatment and constant care, otherwise they risk falling into a very dark abyss.

They often wind up hobos or sometimes in prisons/asylums because they don't have treatment and a very supportive family available, falling in disrepair, not because an evil plot of society.

If this condition were the price to pay for breakthroughs, I'd consider the price too high. But indeed it isn't -- there are no examples of seriously ill paranoid schizophrenics that put out meaningful work. It's a massive hindrance, fogging your view of the world and yourself. Often cited cases like John Nash actually stopped being able to conduct any good work once the disease got hold of them. There are countless examples of extremely brilliant people productive through their lives that never showed signs of delusion, and almost no cases of delusional persons doing good work.

This disease largely embodies the obscurantism, mysticism, fear, distrust, that scientific enlightenment was idealized to fight against. I can't wait for its root causes to be found and it completely eradicated (along with MS, Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia, please).

> there are no examples of seriously ill paranoid schizophrenics that put out meaningful work.

I daresay Adolf Wölfli is one counterexample. Institutionalized for most of his life, beleaguered by paranoid delusions (some of which found their expression in his work) but it was under the circumstances of that illness that he produced the art he is so acclaimed for.

> there are no examples of seriously ill paranoid schizophrenics that put out meaningful work.

Utter hogwash. There are countless artists who struggled with schizophrenia and bipolar and produced beautiful, amazing work -- Syd Barrett, Brian Wilson, and Daniel Johnston spring to mind.

I can't discern your point. Are you saying that there is some kind of "equality" since the geniuses are doomed to suffer from mental illness?

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