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Comment by intrepidhero | Hacker News Reader

Hang on. Why is everyone talking about dirty Paris streets and not about the claim that unrealistic expectations can result in literal psychosis? Surely this kind of mind-body connection would suggest further investigation, inform policy on deceptive advertising, etc.

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Humans like to talk, so if we don't have anything to say about one topic, we'll change it to what we do have something to say about. All we need is a path of associations from A to B. The way to get there is first to switch to a generic superset of the topic (Paris Syndrome -> Paris), i.e. go to Central Station, and from there hop on a train to something you have opinions/feelings about (Paris -> Dirty streets in Paris). In this case the path was also plausible because the OP references tourism. But at least the comments here are talking from personal experience, rather than going into generic ideology, which is worse (and did flare up in a spot or two).

Hopping to more generic subjects makes threads less interesting, because the larger a topic is, the fewer unpredictable things there are to say about it. Even if one comment manages to say something unpredictable, the replies quickly revert to predictable things. The most-commonly-repeated arguments have accrued so much mass that no discussion can resist their pull. Therefore, one rule that has developed on HN over the years is to resist generic tangents: they are antithetical to curiosity. Curiosity likes to look around and see something new and specific; generic tangents are powered by emotional energy that wants to talk about something old and familiar.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Edit: This is a medium-is-the-message thing. A large, flat, open forum like HN can't discuss generic topics well, because of the mass effect I mentioned above. For such discussions to be interesting requires longer (for depth) and more individual (to stay on track) genres. An essay at least, if not a book.

IMO it's also really obscure, 20 in 6 million.

That's about 0.0000003 chance.

Isn't there a base rate? If anyone does something anything new that's as big as visiting Paris while coming from Japan, then I'd venture to guess that 1 in 6 million will get a psychiatric disorder. I mean, the chance is so low that I dare to guess that it might be the base rate.

It's probably limited to people who are only able to endure life because they entertain a fantasy of Paris as a heaven of sorts. You can endure almost anything if you have hope, and some people daydream about a better life elsewhere or a perfect place they will visit one day. Then they finally go on their voyage and realize their life in Paris is still shit but made up of higher percentage of dog shit, and they just crack.

But yeah this only justifies a wikipedia article because we have memed it because it is funny.

I suspect this started as an April 1st. joke.

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