Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues | Hacker News Reader

Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

unherd.com

219 pointsSkyMarshal217 comments

I don't buy it.

I think there is simple statistical/neurological explanation.

Part 1:

We are exposed to much more information and interaction that we have evolved for. Our brains have very biased/impractical approach to understanding the world: if you hear about something happening many times in large number then it automatically gives large weight to it and treats it as normal/prevalent/dangerous etc.

This is also what somebody might mean when they say "a lie repeated frequently enough becomes truth". That's how our brains are built.

Part 2:

We tend to notice things that are out of ordinary more than normal. Nobody spends time revisiting "normal" comments, but people will notice and spend their focus disproportionately more on mean behavior.

Part 3:

Internet amplifies things, but mostly things we focus on. This means an extremely mean comment will tend to be amplified more and get more visibility than a perfectly normal comment.

Part 4:

Even if 1 percent of 1 percent of people write an extremely mean comment just once that is still deluge of meanness that your biased brain will understand as "mean" being frequent behavior on the internet, something that is done by many people and probably frequently.

I think your four points are all absolutely true. However, I cannot plausibly think of a reason why we _wouldn't_ have a disproportionate amount of online bad behavior from the mentally ill. There's really almost nothing in the online environment to prevent it, and quite a lot of mental conditions result in manic phases of some sort that would cause them to spew a lot of it online.

I can think of a reason, in two parts: lots of people are motivated by things other than mental health to behave negatively online; most people with mental illness are already afraid of being blamed and targeted.

Certainly not every, perhaps not even most, people with mental health issues spew venom online. However, a disproportionate amount of the invective which I hear when walking downtown in a city, comes from people with obvious mental health issues. There may be many others who are silently struggling with mental health issues who walk by me on the sidewalk, but even a few people who are very much not silent can numerically overwhelm the amount of invective said by the rest of the population. Given that the online environment gives the online equivalent of these few people a bullhorn to broadcast at a much greater scale, the problem is likely disproportionately worse online.

So I had a whole bunch of questions but I couldn’t get around this one: why is the choice for people with mental illness invective or struggling in silence? Don’t you realize that’s incentivizing invective?

What do you want us to do, just die and be a “curious” story you read about after the fact?

>>most people with mental illness are already afraid of being blamed and targeted.

On what evidence do you base this on?

Being a person with mental illness in a community of people with mental illness and routinely talking about this all day long every day

It could be that the people who have the type of mental illnesses that are associated with fear of social persecution/rejection are the kind that seek a community of people with a similar affliction, while those with anti-social mental illnesses, like sociopathy, do not.

It could be that the people who don't understand mental illness characterize it in harmful ways and people with mental illness who associate together are readily familiar with that.

How do you know I don't mental illness? And how was the way I characterized it harmful?

I didn’t say either of those things. But in the interest of being candid, I think it’s harmful to categorize mental illness as socially bad versus socially good. My ADHD and Autism are both often characterized as socially bad, and I’m just a person who struggles to take care of myself or maintain communication with my friends and family.

> My ADHD and Autism

I can understand if you feel bad about the article, then. Autism is a bit often discussed here at HN, is it?

At the same time, the article focuses on borderline (BPD), which is very different from autism or ADHD, is it?

I had a mental illness too (something else than BPD, autism and ADHD). Like you, I didn't write or say anything bad to others. Still, I appreciate the article, I think it's a small step for me towards understanding the Internet even better:

I know a borderline person, and I'm not the slightest surprised if in some cases, such a person can write extremely mean things to others on the internet. The person I know, does this in real life to people s/he loves, when too stressed up (about minor things others wouldn't think much about). It's not her fault; instead, s/he had a bad childhood.

(At the same time, there're also, of course, many other reasons for bad behavior on the net.)

I know several people who are borderline. Some I know or have known quite closely. I don’t think it’s fair to characterize their contribution to harmful internet behavior as disproportionate without also quantifying their proportion of internet behavior (it’s small).

And I definitely don’t think it’s fair to qualitatively describe the relative level of bad internet behavior of people with mental illness based on the behavior of people with personality disorders, which is just a subset of mental illness.

Edit: and not all people with personality disorders just go around the world/internet acting harmfully.

> Part 3:

>Internet amplifies things, but mostly things we focus on. This means an extremely mean comment will tend to be amplified more and get more visibility than a perfectly normal comment.

It's not "the internet". It's social media and news. Which is funded by advertising, so optimises for "engagement" (emotional content). A mean comment in Usenet will die unread. A mean comment on Facebook/Twitter will get algorithmically amplified because it causes others to interact with it.

This is interesting, but it's missing the parts around the amplification and institutionalization processes.

Imagine if all of the world's troubling content were in the 'comments section'. Would anyone care? No. The 'comments section' doesn't get widely distributed, it's not backed by institutions or influential individuals etc..

In order for these kerfluffles to have impact they need to be picked up on by supposedly credible institutions, with a wide reach.

If the 'Cancel This Person' Tweet were to stay entirely on Twitter among regular people - nobody would care that much.

But when the media gets hold, backs it, propagates it, institutions start to adjust possibly by making statements, withholding funding etc. - that's what causes major concern and material influence.

More powerful systems and forces use statements made by individuals (often decontextualized) as fodder in their wars over attention, money and ideology.

I never made the connection to part 2 in the abstract before, that makes total sense. If you're walking down the street and see someone with two noses, you're going to notice, not the 20 other "normal" people you passed at the same time. Why wouldn't the same carry over to reading text or watching videos?

This is an interesting idea, feel free to ignore this comment :)

Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 35 years ago when discussing online forums:

>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.

This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.

That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people of the type this post discusses, those with actual mental illness; think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.

[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here

The spam problem started in 1993 w/ Robert McElwaine spamming all of the groups relentlessly with crackpot content from WUSTL. WUSTL did nothing for a long time because he sued them (and won) when they stopped him putting ads in the campus paper.

I developed a zero day email amplification attack and launched it on a Friday; it worked better than expected and filled the disk on their VAX and the whole campus was down until the next Tuesday.

They couldn’t prove I did it but the central computing facility found a pretence, deleted my account and gave me an empty suntape that allegedly held my files. I still had accounts at the physics and EE departments so it was not a big loss.

McElwaine was out.

The recorded history of USENET spam started in April 1994 with the law firm of Canter and Siegel and their Green Card Lottery scam. I was involved in that too and did not get in trouble for that one but anti-spam activism got me a date with the JA, trips to the Dominican Republic and Brazil, other misadventures and a lot more spam.

Are you talking about Washington University in Saint Louis?

Did not expect to hear wustl in this thread.

Yep.

Sorry, just finally went back to research this lore. Are you sure you're right? It seems he went to University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire https://www.popmartian.com/popnut/mcelwaine/7th-coming/obit....

You know, you're right. I got that detail wrong. Must have been confused by the "W" and midwest.

> completely delete posts

This could be done by sending special "cancel" messages; it was then up to individual Usenet servers to figure out whether to honor these cancel requests, through unspecified criteria. The feature was somewhat hidden away in some Usenet clients to discourage pointless abuse, but it was there.

> A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people of the type this post discusses, those with actual mental illness; think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism".

IME, these people were mostly entertaining as opposed to genuinely problematic. With killfiles being in common use and 'plonking' being discussed routinely as the standard way of dealing with annoyances, users were meaningfully incented to always be on their best behavior as judged by other forum denizens.

>This could be done by sending special "cancel" messages; it was then up to individual Usenet servers to figure out whether to honor these cancel requests, through unspecified criteria. The feature was somewhat hidden away in some Usenet clients to discourage pointless abuse, but it was there.

In practice the cancel/supersede messages were and are never universally honored.

> The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts

Notice that HN mods can completely delete posts, but never do so (or at least, not without the target’s permission). Flag, yes, delete, no.

I think it’s a cool distinction, and hopefully future social networks will take a cue from it. Being able to see what’s going on (showdead) felt like an important diff from Reddit, and avoided much of the “un-edit Reddit” wars. (There are sites dedicated to tracking deletions by moderators.)

>I think it’s a cool distinction, and hopefully future social networks will take a cue from it. Being able to see what’s going on (showdead) felt like an important diff from Reddit, and avoided much of the “un-edit Reddit” wars.

I did not know this and am glad to hear it. Yes, I've wished for a long time that Reddit would make all mod actions visible in diff form. Not being able to tell without opening a post/comment while logged out whether it has been hidden by a mod without any notification is maddening.

Yeah, if you go to your profile and turn on “showdead”, you’ll see a lot more stuff. There are some mod actions that aren’t explicitly visible — they can boot comments to the bottom, for example, despite upvote count. But it’s a good compromise.

And I don’t think it would be a good idea for every action to be public. Maybe. It’s one of those things that requires some thought. There are a surprising number of “behind the scenes” actions, and all of them being public would just ignite a lot of “why would you do such a thing” type debate, which is both a distraction and usually mistaken.

Sometimes it’s not mistaken, though, so your idea isn’t without merit.

As someone who was on Usenet regularly until the mid 2000's, I don't think it was the trolls that killed Usenet. They were easy enough to ignore. The younger generations simply never found it, as the WWW forums were much easier to find and grew more popular. For the two dozen or so groups I visited regularly, over time they became the playground of only the old guards, and conversation slowly died out.

> They were easy enough to ignore

not the skilled ones [0], who though rare are, unlike the usenet days, now able to command their own private upvote brigade to amplify their powers significantly beyond the scope of whatever particular forum or network they call home. trolling has gone pro.

" The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. "

[0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/troll.html

Ok FINE. They were easy enough to ignore in Usenet the 2 dozen or so groups I frequented. There were no noticeable brigades in the groups I used, and upvotes are not a thing in Usenet.

Absolutely. I loved Usenet in the mid 90s. Message boards just seemed like a cool upgrade to Usenet and I didn't have to bother with a reader. I doubt I even had a reader installed by 2002ish.

Usenet Trolls operated individually and were easy to ignore.

The article discusses virtue signaling mobs, which are much harder or even impossible to ignore, especially once they have infiltrated whole organizations.

The novelty here is that the article calls the mobs mentally ill, not the grumpy individual (who will also be persecuted by mobs these days).

> This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.

Should have been forked into a version with only *.edu allowed.

>>Should have been forked into a version with only *.edu allowed.

That's what the Internet/NSFNET and Gopher were until the mid-90s

> This is what killed Usenet,

Nah. If you've actually have used the (non-binary) Usenet, you have certainly come across plonks [1] and killfiles.

And how do I wish for a killfile for web discussion forums...

> This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.

What killed Usenet is that the shiny new WWW was more attractive for new users (and easier to use than a newsreader).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plonk_%28Usenet%29

>Nah. If you've actually have used the (non-binary) Usenet, you have certainly come across plonks [1] and killfiles.

As I said in my initial comment, I am well aware of killfiling (And why are you distinguishing between "plonks" and killfiles? At most, a plonk is a public announcement of putting someone in one's killfile.)—i.e., client-side anti-spam/anti-bad behavior tools—and server-side tools for similar purpose.

>What killed Usenet is that the shiny new WWW was more attractive for new users (and easier to use than a newsreader).

I don't disagree that WWW is more attractive and easier to use than Usenet; the resulting flood of individual forums of course seriously affected Usenet traffic. (In turn Twitter, Facebook, and especially Reddit have mostly killed off the individual forums.)

I nonetheless believe that misbehavior—quite possibly because of mental illness—and not spam is the major problem for Usenet today. Spam is, while still a problem, something both familiar and impersonal. But when entire newsgroups are taken up by mentally deranged individuals fighting their imagined grievances against others, participating in on-topic discussion is that much more difficult, and because said individuals often change their From: lines on the fly killfiling them is all the more difficult as well.

This is a paper I wrote on this topic and a proposed solution based on the work of Hal Finney. You might find it interesting:

https://www.stampchat.io/whitepaper.pdf

What killed Usenet, IRC, etc is new technology/platforms not "irritation from a handful of people". If that was the case, facebook, reddit, twitter, etc would have died a long time ago.

This is one of the main reasons I feel like the current culture of never disagreeing with anyone so you can never possibly offend anyone is ultimately toxic.

As a person with (currently treated and doing fine) psychological issues I don’t expect any single comment to get through to you, but if there are never any negative indicators that you are the problem, rather than everyone else… there is a mathematically insignificant chance you will ever realize something might be wrong.

Particularly so in the case of the unfortunate stereotype of lonely loser who lives in his mother’s basement and spends all his time on the computer.

I like your point, but I think you take it too far here:

> if there are never any negative indicators that you are the problem, rather than everyone else… there is a mathematically insignificant chance you will ever realize something might be wrong

A lot of my self-improvement has come not because of explicit negative feedback, but through paying attention to people and reflecting on who I want to be in the world. That's not to say that any approach is generally superior. People have all sorts of ways of dealing with the world.

What you may not realize is, some people literally don't know how to do that, or that it's even something anyone would ever do. If you dropped into an alien culture, you'd need to learn a new raft of different signals all over again.

A lot of the bad in the world comes from leaving people unequipped of certain basic "soft skills". It's not the same thing as mental illness, but it has similar effects.

And, for some reason, people become seemingly completely unwilling to learn-by-example any new-to-them soft skills, once they reach adulthood.

Or perhaps "lifelong learning of soft skills" is itself a soft skill that people aren't being taught.

-----

Anecdote: I was diagnosed/treated for ADHD as an adult, whereupon the "social soft skills" part of my brain suddenly started working like it never did through my childhood.

I went from thinking I was on the autistic spectrum, to noticing all sorts of new patterns while observing social interactions. I quickly realized that my capacity for social-skill learning had never been missing; but rather, the learning itself had just sort of been "paused", for lack of "voltage" in the right brain areas.

I did / am still doing a lot of delayed soft-skill learning as an adult. And it's really starkly obvious how much other people with me in the same situations, aren't deriving the same learning I do from those situations — even when those people are sorely lacking in the relevant social skill, but aren't otherwise socially unskilled. It seems like they just aren't bothering to look at the situation under the right "lens" to see the pattern, even though it's a "lens" they clearly possess.

You've piqued my interest. Do you mind sharing a few of the things you have observed and/or learned in this process?

Hi, immigrant here. I'm literally an "alien" from/in this planet.

Canadians are very nice, but their famous agreeableness (and passive-agressiveness) often prevents me from realizing when I've committed a transgression, and makes it so much harder to integrate into the culture.

Negative feedback is very useful and I would be grateful to get it instead of receiving a veiled response.

As a canadian, sorry about that ;)

You mean aboot that?

Sure! Everybody's born not knowing how to do that. Or understanding most social signals. Some of us learn. As I said, people have all sorts of ways of dealing with the world.

When they blocked you, there was issue. When your messages get deleted or you are shadowbanned, there is issue.

people give feedback online.

> the current culture of never disagreeing with anyone so you can never possibly offend anyone

I'm not sure what you're talking about--I wonder if this is just your extremely subjective experience of the internet? Because I thought that the internet lately has been nothing but disagreement.

Agreed, I think this sentiment is along the lines of "political correctness run amok" which is a completely subjective interpretation of changing social norms. Whereas I think the article is discussing how some use the impersonal void of social media as an outlet for their anxiety, etc.

Personally, I try to limit the amount of time I spend on such websites, and HN is really the only place I read the comments (in moderation). Consuming everyone else's anxiety is unproductive, because it skews how I view the world (and the people in it), and raises my blood pressure. :)

I actively avoid Twitter, but still get force fed Twitter opinions via most news websites. I wish they would stop producing headlines about the latest "backlash" or "outrage" on there.

But, how would they make money otherwise?! /s

I think fucking social butterfly Arianna Huffington [1]'s website Huffington Post is the one that started the trend of headlines like "X {destroys,obliterates} Y" to report on 140 Twitter outbursts. Thanks, lady, for your contribution in destroying the media landscape.

https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1994/11/ariannas-virt...

I recommend not spending much time on those types of news sites :)

But political corectness run amok is literally about people being too eager to tell you when they think you do something wrong.

It is about people being more active in pushing when they disagree.

I thought that the internet lately has been nothing but disagreement.

Perhaps it's disagreement across tribes, but mandatory agreement within each tribe?

> but mandatory agreement within each tribe?

There's seems to be a decent market for contrarian opinions within each tribe though. Such as "Conservatives against Trump" [0] and "Liberals against Cancel Culture" [1]

[0] e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-24/disaffect...

[1] e.g. https://medium.com/arc-digital/the-whispered-left-wing-disse...

Both of your examples, I think, counter rather than support your point, because neither of those arr particularly welcomed in the tribe they notionally dissent within, but are trumpeted by the opposing tribe (but only for their dissent, not for the views that mark them as in the tribe thet dissent from.)

Unless by “...against cancel culture” you mean “...who deny thr existence of ‘cancel culture’ as a significant new or especially liberal/left phenomenon”, but then, those arent dissenters at all.

> neither of those arr particularly welcomed in the tribe they notionally dissent within

I don't think anti-Trump conservatives are particularly unwelcome in mainstream American conservatism though. Take someone like the Orthodox Christian journalist Rod Dreher, who says very negative things about Trump ("Donald Trump is flat-out lying to manipulate the political process", [0]), but who has also written a book (Live Not By Lies) claiming that American progressivism is evolving into Soviet-style totalitarianism. Getting invited on to Tucker Carlson's show is a pretty clear sign of being welcome by mainstream American conservatism, and Carlson has invited Dreher (in September last year) on to promote his book, and I'm sure the Fox News audience loved it. Carlson just avoided asking Dreher about his opinions on Trump, he knows what his audience likes and he didn't get where he is by upsetting them.

[0] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/donald-trump-...

> Carlson just avoided asking Dreher about his opinions on Trump,

Right, there's no market for dissent, only for the tribal-conformist views.

It could be worse though – in a more polarized environment, Tucker Carlson would feel unable to invite someone anti-Trump on to his show, even to talk about some topic unrelated to Trump. It is interesting to contemplate, that no matter how bad America's political polarization has become, it could be worse.

Actually I do wonder whether centre-left media outlets have the same freedom that Carlson has, to platform dissenters to talk about matters unrelated to their dissent.

I think people disagree with each other all the time right now, but rarely ever actually listen. You can't update your view of the world based on feedback if you refuse to take the feedback seriously in the first place or think critically about opposing points of view.

I'd say it's a little more rational. People have different life experiences and have reached different conclusions. When they see other people making claims which they "know" from experience to be wrong, they point them out and explain why. As a metaphor, imagine someone who doesn't live in your country making insulting and incorrect statements about it based on a combination of ignorant stereotypes and misinterpreted facts, long-disproven rumors, etc. You go correct them from a position of knowing more. It's the "someone is wrong on the internet" effect, cycling forever.

Also, yes, mentally ill people. I'm sure of it...

Its just a way people whine about others disagreeing with them when they can't back themselves up.

The statement seems a priori false, since people cant both be disagreeing with you, and also be against people disagreeing.

I totally agree. In my friendships, I highly value people that will tell me when they disagree, and I try to avoid people who are hard to disagree with. Some of my favorite people are stereotypical “New York” types.

I continue to believe that downvotes would make Twitter and Facebook a healthier and happier place.

> if there are never any negative indicators that you are the problem, rather than everyone else… there is a mathematically insignificant chance you will ever realize something might be wrong.

Then again, depending on the psychological issues it doesn't matter how many negative indicators there are that you are the problem. Some people just seem unable to accept they have issues, or unable to correctly process that people's reaction to them is in fact negative.

There's just such a wide range of things here.

Narcissists consider both positive and negative interactions to be positive, and narcissism has been on the rise for years owed primarily to social media.

> ….I feel like the current culture of never disagreeing with anyone…

I’m not sure I follow. Do you see a culture where no one disagrees with each other? From my perspective it would appear that the opposite is true. Particularly in social media which is jam packed full of people who disagree with each other very very often.

Where are you seeing a culture where people aren’t constantly disagreeing with each other?

This sounds like you want feedback that you behaved badly. And I have hard time to map that on first paragraph that is about disagreement or offense.

The internet though is a terrible place to take personal advice to heart.

Imagine taking the youtube comments on a video to heart. shudder

I"m glad to see this point made:

> I’m not saying that all online bad behaviour is because of mental health issues or personality disorders: lots of people are just dickheads, and there’s no need to pathologise them.

One of the important lessons I took away from a milestone book on abuse, "Why Does He Do That?" is that people really want to excuse harmful behaviors as illness. When often, repeated bad behavior happens because it works for the person in question.

I’d like to second “Why Does He Do That?”. Pointing out that abusive husbands often only break their wives’ stuff was a real eye opener for me in examining other people who harm others or lash out and then claim that they weren’t in control. If they don’t ever harm their own things or lash out at themselves then they’re not as out of control as they claim…

It's an incredible book, one of the most astute things I've ever read. And the patterns apply widely. I've found it very useful in diagnosing bad bosses.

Once my boss's boss fired my boss and suddenly took over managing me. After my first meeting with him, where a nominal 30-minute chat turned into 90 minutes of berating, I walked out wondering what the hell happened. I grabbed my copy of "Why Does He Do That?" and quickly found him described as abuser subtype "Mr Right".

It was a huge relief just to be able to put the head-spinning experience in perspective. And it let me really prepare for the rest of my (short) tenure there.

Yes, there's a feedback loop, same as with alcoholism. It's nice and good to consider alcoholism a disease, but there's a point where the not yet completely dependent person should say "It's not even 4 o'clock yet and there's no social reason, what am I doing with this can of beer?"

> but there's a point where the not yet completely dependent person should say "It's not even 4 o'clock yet and there's no social reason, what am I doing with this can of beer?"

Alcoholism is a mental illness and can have comorbidity with other mental issues. For many the answer to your "why am I holding this beer" is "I don't want to feel". But the alcoholic (not in any sort of recovery) never gets to the self reflection where they ask themselves why they have the beer.

Like many mental illnesses, the inability to have agency over certain thoughts or thought process is what make it an illness. Alcoholism and other addictions are not typically something people reason themselves into with compelling arguments and a cost-benefit analysis.

Sure, many people self-medicate with alcohol, it's a GABA agonist and works for anxiety. But people don't live in a vacuum, there'll be reactions from family members and friends to their excessive consumption. It's not that people reason themselves into alcoholism, but a good number do recognize that they have a problem by the time the wife has had enough.

It's the same thing with intrusive thoughts - medication plus cognitive-behavioural therapy works best, that condition is something that you can reason yourself out of when you recognize the signs quickly enough.

> there'll be reactions from family members and friends to their excessive consumption

This happens far less than you think. Alcoholics and other addicts will seek out or only socialize with enablers. They will also seek out codependent relationships. They'll do it subconsciously because they don't want pushback against their actions.

Realizing they have a problem isn't helpful for most alcoholics. Realizing they have a problem is just another thing driving them to drink. An alcoholic's family falling apart is often just the first in a series of shitty events on their descent to their rock bottom point.

One of the big differences between alcoholism and other mental illnesses is drinking is viewed as a "normal" behavior. Unless you're counting their drinks or actively tracking their visits to a bar most people aren't going to realize the alcoholic is drinking more and more often than they think.

I know several recovering alcoholics. When they were drinking simply knowing they had a problem was useless. That's like an asthmatic knowing they have asthma and someone just expecting them to breathe better. It just doesn't work that way.

Well, most people aren't alcoholics, so I presume most people are able to reason that out and control themselves. But for those who do become alcoholics, I suspect it's because the question "what am I doing with this can of beer?" has an answer along the lines of "because being sober hurts more." That is to say, they are self-medicating for problems that seem even worse.

So the PDF is broadly available on Google.

It's section on mental illness says that abusers are too "selfish" to put up with a medications side-effects and that they overdose on medication to strike out at his partner dramatically. The guy isn't really an expert on mental illness at all, pushes the hypothesis that abusive behavior and mental illness are distinct things, and that abuse by and large is rational behavior. The book in general defines abuse so broadly that anybody could meet the criteria if they're blunt, sarcastic, career-oriented, or simply discontinue medication. The author denies rehabilitation is possible because he deemed almost all the men he met to still be abusers when he was done treating them.

I generally don't see this book as examining the link between mental illness and abuse in any sort of balanced way, it's more a tome to persuade women that they're in an abusive relationship and their partner only abuses them because they think they can get away with it and would stop otherwise.

Well that's certainly one take.

I strongly disagree with your notion that the book defines abuse so broadly that anybody could meet the criteria. As I read it, the book doesn't apply to most people; I'd say it only matches a handful of people I've met in my life.

I think the rest of your characterizations are also basically incorrect and unfair, and in ways that I don't see it as worth my time to dispute in detail. If others aren't sure, I'd encourage them to read the book to find out.

I certainly did, it's the top result searching for <book name> pdf.

You can interpret the book as to deeming virtually anybody you think as either meeting or not meeting the criteria similar to a horoscope. The star signs being "Mr. Right" or "Mr. Sensitive" and "Drill Sargent" etc etc.

I could very trivially make the case that the author very clearly meets his own "Mr. Right" stereotype and thus is an abuser. He considers himself an authority on mental illness and substance abuse with no relevant training, sees the world as a huge classroom, he twists others statements to make them sound absurd, he switches to his voice of truth and speaks definitively, he seems to enjoy straightening out people in front of others to the point of remarking on constant conversations where he outwitted various men, and he says bad things about men to other people.

In fact by disagreeing with me you're a little "Mr. Right". I'm also "Mr. Right". None of us can ever be rehabilitated and all of us just need to be escaped from. We're all doing this because we think we can get away with it.

I agree that somebody who wants to misinterpret something can certainly manage if they try. But I disagree that's what most people do with it. I've talked with literally dozens of people about the book. You're the only one so far who has been unable to apply it carefully and usefully.

What's not to like about a book that can frame anybody you dislike as an abuser beyond rehabilitation and yourself as a hapless victim? It's a book for the times!

I prefer Machiavelli's work because at least that framed the reader as being no better than anybody else. This is Machiavelli with a victim complex. My issue with the book isn't misunderstanding it's disgust at the black and white ethics.

Gosh, it's weird that some people see abuse as bad and want to end it. How very black and white of them. If they keep on like that, they might oppose all sorts of harm to people. Quelle horreur!

The weirder part to me is the number of people who end up caping for abusers and abuse. Usually they're more subtle than you, though.

I would agree; "homophobes" are not afraid of homosexuality.

When I've looked into the research they tend to be mostly disgusted by homosexuality. Disgust sensitivity and Homophobia correlate whereas neuroticism and homophobia don't which you would predict if homophobes were literally afraid of gay people.

Homophobia is just a nice spin though. For the most part I couldn't care less about who people are dating or boning.

And hydrophobic substances do not express the emotion of fear against water.

Hydrophobic dogs do fear water though.

(Hydrophobia is another name for rabies. Rabies often induces a fear of water.)

Many of them are afraid of a spectrum of things between being thought of as gay to actually being gay, to being afraid that their kids are/will be gay.

It wasn't that long ago that they were claiming that gay marriage and acceptance would cause society to collapse, and believing that God would punish everyone for it. I had a neighbor who claimed that hurricane devastation is God's doing because gay marriage was legalized.

I kind of disagree. To me, there does seem to be an element of fear behind homophobia, and homophobes often act as if "the gay" is something they can catch like a disease, or be talked or tricked into. It's practically a stereotype for homophobes to present as hypermasculine in order to avoid doing or saying anything that might be perceived as "gay." Some men won't even wipe themselves out of fear that the sensation of toilet paper on their buttocks will turn them gay.

And that's not even getting into political and culture fears like male-to-female transgender people "trapping" men into having sex with them, or using the "wrong" bathrooms, or the extreme right-wing fears of a "gay agenda" to undermine traditional Christian-oriented culture, or "feminizing chemicals" being added to the water (the whole "gay frogs" thing) to increase the homosexual population and emasculate male aggression and military readiness. People even argue that homosexuality presents a threat to human evolution itself, despite being present in many known (and not extinct) animal species and likely humanity's own evolutionary ancestors as well as humanity itself.

""feminizing chemicals" being added to the water (the whole "gay frogs" thing) to increase the homosexual population and emasculate male aggression and military readiness..."

Actually that part is kinda true. A fair bit of the effluent from paper mills, say, are estrogen analogs.

It's disgust not fear, which explains the disease analogy. Although I suppose we do call people germophobic.

I think it's often specifically the fear that condoning homosexuality will somehow undermine your masculinity (or that of your nation or whatever).

This whole trope of recasting "anti-X" as "X-phobic" is something that really irks me. Maybe there's a group of closeted X who doth protest too much, but there's generally a much larger group of people who are just assholes to X, and trying to spin it as "they're just afraid of you" smacks too much of the old "the bullies are just jealous". No, often it's not jealousy, it's just people being assholes to targets they think can't fight back.

Phobic doesn't just mean afraid. Hydrophobic molecules for example.

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

> Specific phobia is an anxiety disorder, characterized by an extreme, unreasonable, and irrational fear associated with a specific object or situation.[1][2] Specific phobia can lead to avoidance of the object or situation, persistence of the fear, and significant distress or problems functioning associated with the fear. A phobia can be the fear of anything.

Whatever the term originally meant to the greeks, it does seem to be knit with the concept of fear today.

The suffix has more than 1 meaning.[1]

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phobic

Phobic literally means fear, from the ancient Greek 'phobos', meaning... fear.

It's used for things (like hydrophobic molecules) that avoid other things (in this case water) as if they fear them.

Unless we're doing one of those "literally literally means figuratively" things here in which case... meh?

Just to be crystal clear here, I'm not saying we don't have groups who are anti-X for whatever value of X. I'm saying that recasting (and often miscasting) that antipathy as (maybe masked) fear is counterproductive.

That's the etymological fallacy. Phobic literally means having an intolerance or aversion for.[1]

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phobic

There's still a chasm between "having an intolerance of or aversion for" and "being mean to".

Being mean to people because they belong to a group is intolerant of that group.

Having worked in the publishing industry, my experiences support the conclusions of this article.

About ~40% of authors I worked with had diagnosed mental health issues, and were quite open about their struggles. Most were a delight to work with--I strongly admire people who can be open and honest about their struggles.

But about ~15% were... not so delightful. Working with them was hell, because they'd flip-flop constantly between treating me as sworn enemy or best friend.

Their twitter feeds reflected this attitude. They were quick to pick fights with bewildered victims, to scream to the skies how evil X person was, how they were the victim of X's behavior.

Having worked with them, I knew they were unstable and to ignore their online shrieking. But to an outsider....

All outsiders see is an award-winning author, touted as a genius, with that little blue check mark declaring that they're a respected member of their field. So of course they're going to listen when that author screams that they've been victimized.

Of course, pointing out that this person is mentally ill isn't an option--for one, it's confidential information. For two, you'll be fired for being "disability-phobic".

So there's no choice but to sit back and watch the unstable troll rip apart other people.

It's horrible. And it's one of the reasons I left the publishing industry. It's slowly and steadily being overrun by mentally unstable trolls, and it's starting to have a serious impact on which books get published and which don't. (Hint: anything that might possibly trigger the trolls will NOT get a publishing contract.)

If you wouldn't mind my asking how does someone get in contact with a publisher to write a book? Not to sound condescending, but if someone with mental health issues can get a good deal, what makes this industry difficult for most others to break into?

The difficulty is in writing a publishable manuscript. Most authors spend about a decade and several practice manuscripts honing their craft before they are published.

Publishing doesn't require working 9-5, or daily check ins, or other things that generally handicap people with mental health issues. So you'll see a lot more authors with serious mental health issue than, say, software programmers (and personally, I think this is an amazing and positive thing, in many ways. Like I said, most of these mentally ill authors are just fantastic human beings who I loved working with).

Of course, their mental illness doesn't make them any less talented or brilliant. Actually, I observed the opposite--the authors I worked with who were truly genius generally struggled with some variety of mental illness.

To get in contact with a publisher, generally you need to first be represented by a literary agent. This is another faucet of publishing that enables more people with mental illness to thrive in the industry. Agents can act as the professional, polished barrier between the publisher and author, which makes a publisher less likely to even realize the author has mental health issues until the contract is done and signed. Again, this has pros and cons. The pros is that a lot of amazing people with mental health struggles manage to get contracts, without publishers having the chance to discriminate. The con is that some trolls get contracts as well, without the publisher realizing what kind of person they're signing on.

To me, the interesting question here is whether symptoms of BPD (or mental illness more generally) might confer an advantage when it comes to building a following on social media. For example, catastrophizing seems to be a staple on the many popular social media accounts.

Having dated people with BPD, it certainly created an emotional roller coaster that makes the highs really high; normal relations can even seem boringly stable after that.

I don’t think BPD would be an advantage due to instability. There is nothing quite like a neurotypical person being dramatic. They can keep it up and keep going. It’s a stable “crazy” that doesn’t have other problems getting in the way of being dramatic.

No it does not. The most successful people on social media, i have found to be pretty cool and collected. The mental illness symptoms i think are more likely to come from having no following and feeling ignored. That will drive some ppl mad.

The article's actual title is "Are Twitter trolls mentally ill?"

It makes me want to talk about how the concept of the troll has evolved from something specific to something very general. I glanced through the article and none of the behaviors it listed are what I'd consider troll behaviors. They're just the patterns of mild mental illness.

Trolls, in my old-man's definition, are almost a type of hunter, looking to bait and confuse their victims.

Trolls wouldn't be the hoards suffering from "sanctimony, emotional aridity and ideological orthodoxy", and exhibiting BPD/DID behaviors. Trolls would be the people trying to provoke the above.

I'd agree with that. I view a troll as having no ideals they cling to. They have a goal to provoke and incite with the least amount of effort and that usually involves taking a controversial stance for that given audience. It's what makes arguing with trolls, or feeding trolls, so pointless.

Exactly.

The troll is someone who notices someone who is vulnerable and triggers them.

I do wonder though if there isn't more than a little reinforcement between the groups. Someone with BPD leaning behavior doesn't need someone giving a push to keep their emotional roller coaster going but someone provoking them can't help.

And, of course, trolls are in it for the reaction and the least well adjusted people give a rather strong reaction.

A troll is it doing it for fun and as an art form, I'd say that the horrid people on twitter are another thing.

As mentioned in an earlier thread, I see a close relationship between the Twitter People and That Guy who goes to all the city council meetings to yell. They don't make up a majority of the population, but they sure can burn up some bandwidth.

I've seen news articles about "internet trolls" who followed a neighbor around and sat outside of her window but also looked at her Facebook page. The term has already lost its meaning.

Would you call Sacha Baron Cohen a troll?

Speaking for myself and not @droopyEyelids, absolutely.

Absolutely

Article: "diagnosing people from afar is a bad idea" (diagnoses people from afar)

Reason that diagnosis from afar is illegitimate isn't just that you don't have enough information (but there's that). Just as important is that "real", official, mental health diagnoses generally don't make sense without the context that a given person isn't functioning in society, has violated some institutional norm, etc.

The role of mental health basically is to look at someone who's considered non-functional and classify how they're non-functional. If someone, mental health professional or otherwise, looks at someone in society and doesn't like how they're functioning but society is OK with this, that person can say society or some part of it is insane but collective insanity is a manifestly different phenomena than an individual diagnosis.

Edit: Behavior some consider bad, that some people get away with and that is actually prized by some other section of society (whether it be hitting on women or taking ultra-moralist stances or trolling generally or whatever) can't be official, institutionally defined insanity, even I don't might informally various actions "crazy" (which indeed occasionally offends people in the present context).

Edit2: Another I'd put is that the specific tools of the mental health professional aren't tools for understanding people in general and aren't tools for understanding bad behavior outside a context where it's debilitating bad behavior. In those contexts, sociologists, maybe, something specific to say but to a large extent, specialized knowledge by itself may given an advantage and someone tossing around psychiatric terms in this is kind of engaging in pseudo-science.

>But one of them had publicly declared a few months earlier that they have “dissociative identity disorder”, DID.

The specific person they are talking about declared the diagnosis they received.

How fast can an algorithm be put together to find evidence of mental health issues via social media posts and then trigger a waterfall of rights removals?

It could be easy to argue that society may be better off without those folks having rights.

Flagged as mental - - loose free speech - blocked from posting on networks, email capabilities removed via isps, library and cell phone companies. - Flagged so can not purchase firearms - soldiers may now be sent to watch over you in your place or residence/work - things you have said in the past and things you know can be studied - search history, alexa/assistant stuff - you can not hide what you know. - You could wait for a jury trial but never be able to see your accuser, it's a bot written by a very good professor/doctor - a jury of your 'peers' would be people who have never been red-flagged as problematic social media posters. - civil trials would be auto-lost because the bot would know you are bad. - would it be cruel punishment to be cut off from all things digital? no dating, friends, family, food orders, rides..

It seems you can slay the bill of rights pretty quickly simply using a digital footprint.

I read a submarine article today pushing for the expansion of background checks for rights that did not include a bunch of 'other side info' that should be discussed.. it can be easy for something to be right and be used for the wrong reasons or in the wrong way.

I've also seen news where 'they' are asking social media companies to hand over info to try to prevent offline violence as one solution to things -

at what scale does this become weaponized mass destruction? a thousand people? ten thousand?

Of course people will lose their right to vote, maybe parenting rights and all sorts of others.

All from a twitter rant.

This is actually where we are right now I guess.

The goldwater rule mentioned in the article may need to be codified into national law to prevent these kinds of things from running amok.

People who express thoughts of self-harm or suicide on social media can experience something very close to this.

Just reading that, my skin crawls and I can feel the nucleation of an icy fear in the back of my mind. Not just no, but Hell Fucking No.

I argue that those genuinely arguing for such a system fail to realize just how quickly it can and will be weaponized against themselves.

It wouldn't happen because it would not serve any establishment, elite, or entrenched group's interests.

Unless the mental health algorithm was cover for flagging political opponents. But there wouldn't be any support for such a system. Mental health has a problem with having too low a profile, not too high. So there isn't motivation to do this.

Labeling opposing political groups as scary extremists is easy, gets public support, time tested.

I'm just glad that there finally seems to be a backlash against all this nonsensical internet-hate-mob stuff. Like a big wave in the ocean that finally recedes. Hopefully.

The comments immediately go in to decrying anonymity. This seems precisely backwards to me: Yes, even some mentally ill persons will be less hesitant to behave abusively under their legal name. But many will not, the examples given are people who are behaving abusively in part because they've adopted the abusive conduct as an identity. They aren't ashamed of it.

Worse, a lot of the damage these people can do depends on knowing their target's identity. If some internet nutbar gets overheated in an argument and starts slandering you with random accusations but you're only known as a pseudonym then at worst you can abandon the pseudonym. But you probably don't even have to go that far: without knowing more about you its hard to make accusations that are even credible enough for an internet hate mob.

Trolls create anger and conflict and conflict drives engagement. But that is as nothing compared to the engagement you get from public spectacles of righteous indignation. Social media breeds a special sort narcissistic positive feedback loop and it turns out a very small amount of validation is all that is required to set people off.

But trolls usually know they're trolls. On the other hand take for example Twitter user Oli London [1]. I can no longer tell parody from sincere in this "influencers" persona, but wow, does it drive engagement. Is this guy ok? There are thousands of accounts cheering him/them and many others on.

[1] https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV

Trolling can have social value. It can expose the absurdity of a prevailing social movement, as in the case of Oli London, whose parody account acts as a devastating critique of the mainstream trans rights movement and its demands that gender be redefined as a self-sensed property that is assigned through self-identification, and demands pronoun use in accordance with this new definition (which is why university courses now start with each student declaring their personal pronouns).

Non-conformity and conflict are not always bad things. They can be a symptom of disharmony, but the correct solution to the disharmony may be a shifting of the status quo, rather than a stamping out of the dissident voices. The path of least resistance to reducing conflict is to silence dissident voices, but that removes a valuable source of constructive change that reduces conflict in the long run.

To say it succinctly...

Psychopaths like psychopaths.

https://www.psypost.org/2018/10/study-psychopaths-are-attrac...

This is… I don’t know. I lack words to describe it.

You don't even have to look at extremes like Oli London (thanks for the link, them/they/kor/ean are awesome!) for an example. In the past few years, whenever I hear about something new American wokes are suggesting or something Trump said, most of the time I can't guess whether I'm being trolled or not.

that's a very positive and progressive profile imho

Hah, if he's willing to get botox in his lips he's probably being sincere. Or, maybe it's just some sort of video editing magic?

A lot of online interaction is based on "If I can prove how this person is terrible, then I can be happy because I've proven to myself that I'm a better person.". Well, a glance at this Twitter account makes me feel better, because I'm certain he's a very unhappy troll, because people looking for offense wherever they turn surely will find them, and he's probably a very unhappy person because he feels he's been offended every day. Ah, that sweet persecution complex!

I think there's some truth to this, but the trans community is a really awkward group to try to fit into your argument.

As a trans person, I think there's a lot of toxicity to the online trans community, and there's certainly more prevalent mental illness (not surprising when you deal with frequent harassment, discrimination, being disowned by family). But trans people act like that because they feel like they're constantly under attack, and they have good reason to feel that way, given the flood of anti-trans legislation. That constant vigilance is exhausting, and as awful as it is, many of them (especially younger people) have limited power to protect themselves so they lash out at any perceived threat against trans people. It's toxic, and probably creates more enemies than allies, but I understand it.

A more interesting example would be toxic league of legends players. There's a few very popular, very toxic streamers (e.g. Tarzaned) who seem like they're struggling with depression or other issues.

Thank you for sharing your experiences.

I think it's important to emphasise that having to live with the continuous fear of not being accepted as an equal part of society or worse can create a significant amount of stress. The same is true (albeit to a much lesser extent nowadays) for gay and lesbian individuals, and let's not forget that if you grew up, say, in the 90s, the world was still a significantly different place back then. As far as I know there have been studies showing increased stress levels in LGBT individuals even long after coming out.

In a sense, I often feel that trans people are now facing what gays and lesbians were facing a couple of decades ago. Let's hope that your road to acceptance will be as swift as it was for us.

Many online forums are incredibly toxic, or infested with a few regulars that get off always being negative and bullying other people.

The only thing that works with bullies, is ignoring them.

Trying to find reasons, psychological reasons, childhood traumas or gender identity issues, seems to be a way to focus on the behaviour and drama, instead of moving on.

Over 50% Of Liberal, White Women Under 30 Have A Mental Health Issue. Are We Worried Yet?

https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/over-50-percent-white-libe...

Personally, the main reason I dislike Twitter / Reddit / sometimes even HN, isn't the trolling or toxic posts. It's just that most of the posts are - not interesting. Like dumb memes, popular "unpopular" opinions, or "hot takes" that are the same stuff over and over.

Even on HN, post after post is: crypto sucks, advertisements suck, cancel culture sucks, Amazon making $300 billion sucks, "bring back the old internet!" And I agree with all of that (heck sometimes I repeat it myself), but I don't need to hear it over and over.

2) Bad behaviour stems from psychological issues.

1) Psychological issues are things that cause bad behaviour.

Interesting discussion, but on second thought I’m not sure what to make of it. Personality is a continuum and personality disorders are not clearly defined illnesses, like the flu or Parkinson’s. They are just areas of the continuum that are deemed troublesome for the person or their surroundings. One of the diagnostic criteria for BPD is “Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger”. So saying that people with BPD are overrepresented among people who display anger online is a bit like saying red cars are overrepresented among red objects. Yes they are, by definition.

Are "telling the truth" and "finding trolling humorous" also redefined to be psychological issues? Well, then the conclusion easily follows...

This claim is tautological; by definition """bad behavior""" is """mental illness""" and vice versa

One twist on this: exposure to online platforms exacerbates psychological issues for some portion of the population. That's the flywheel of rage.

An even larger number proportion is people being assholes because they can…just like offline bad behavior.

Mental illness reduces culpability.

Attributing most bad behavior to mental illness excuses it. It treats Twitter trolls as if they have no agenda.

But Twitter is what we celebrated in the Arab Spring. An effective propaganda platform. That’s how trolls use it…to promote ideologies. That’s why the article leads with LGBT hotness; to define the victim perpetrator roles.

I see a dearth of evidence for the authors actual hypothesis as stated.

What if the people acting out are actually the healthy ones?

Maybe it's just that they're normal (is 'healthy' an ableist term?).

You can make the argument that 'normal' people have been held down by jus' reg'lar dudes for millennia. This is their chance to shine.

Have an upvote ya 'rebel.

My meaning was along the lines of family dynamics. Teenager starts acting out at school not because they're a bad kid but because their is some unhealthy dynamic in the school or home environment. The kid's behavior is just a symptom of something unacknowledged and in that case the kid is the healthy one bringing attention to the problem. Pain is your body telling you something needs attention.

Mild trolling and shitposting is mostly harmless and perhaps an appropriate response to being very online and maybe a measure of the health of an online community.

One of the big problems though is that trolling and shitposting can easily be weaponized into coordinated harassment on ideological grounds (gamergate, cancelling, etc) which can be construed as a symptom of the current culture war and perhaps social media companies should pay more attention to the problem.

Relevant classic post: Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People, https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

^ previously on HN twice, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600274

“Insane” is mostly meant in jest here, not to imply that heavy contributors are mentally ill. The examples they picked out are pretty ridiculous but are also the biggest outliers. The real point here is that <1% of the users account for ~99% or so of the consumed content. Which is interesting in its own right.

I think "insane" in both contexts mainly denotes being a cognitive outlier.

Ah, but "insane" is not used by the article - the term "psychological issues" is, to imply some kind of mental unwellness.

OTOH, the Reddit post explicitly clarifies:

> Edit: I guess my tone-projection is off. A lot of people seem to be put-off by my usage of the word "insane." I intended that as tongue-in-cheek and did not mean to imply that any of them literally have diagnosable mental illnesses. I have a lot of respect for all of the individuals I listed and they seem like nice people, I was just trying to make a point about how unusual their behavior is.

Unusual behavior? Yes. However, I think you can see how that would not fall into the same bucket as the implication of "psychological issues." This nuance is likely why people have grown to dislike words like "insane" and "psychopath," since these unintentional connections might warp people's perspectives.

I for one, will be looking forward to the mandatory psychoactive chemicals in the water due to these studies.

>About 70% of DID patients are also diagnosed with BPD, and the two conditions are often considered part of the same spectrum.

>I’m certainly not saying that all trans people have personality disorders or that being trans is a mental illness.

A little bit of whiplash on this one. Despite the sentence or two claiming what the author is purportedly not doing, the rest of the article seems to indicate otherwise. If you don't want an article that makes you look like you're conflating trans people and mental illness... don't use a trans person as a springboard to talk about mental illness.

Lots of trans people in fact are mentally ill.

Given the additional stresses and oppresive social experiences trans people face and are outspoken about, this is entirely unsurprising.

Sure, but this isn't an article about the mental health issues faced by trans people, it's an article about mental illness' role on the internet that uses DID, BPD, and trans people as the primary example of mental illness.

Lots of trans people have depression or anxiety disorders. Not personality disorders.[1]

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-...

I remember reading they are more likely on autistic spectrum. But that is not personalolity disorder either.

Right. Autism is classified a developmental disorder. Mental illness means a psychological disorder usually.

To say there is no issues with irrational behavior in the LGBT community online would be criminal dishonesty. This is not a personal indictment against trans people or LGBT people as a whole, who have existed before Twitter, before Tumblr, and before Live Journal. The author, IMO, should not have to jump through Olympic hoops in order to distance themselves from the transphobic conclusion being pushed on them. They said that wasn't their intent, and the article doesn't appear to draw that conclusion. That really ought to be the end of it.

This is exactly one of the problems with modern internet discourse. And I know someone is reading this comment wondering if I'm "one of the good ones". This mindset is, in itself, toxic and irrational. While bad intent matters, the absense of evidence of bad intent should be good enough ground to stand on.

There are "issues" with irrational behaviour within the LGBT community [1] online and offline,[2] just as there are such issues with any other community or group of individuals, including e.g. HackerNews. That said, I'm feeling that your comment is implying something rather specific and I'm not sure what it is, so I think it would enhance the quality of the discussion if you made some claims that were slightly less vague and therefore more amenable for debate.

That said, you'll find more LGBT people "online" on dating/hookup apps (or even just on Instagram) than on Twitter, Tumblr and co.

[1] The term is always a bit difficult, as obviously, LGBT people are not a monolithic bloc (and I think that, in particular, gay, lesbian, bi, inter and trans, each differ significantly from each other in terms not only of their challenges but also of their daily lives, interaction patterns, etc.). The term "LGBT community" also often fails to specify whether we're talking about political activists which are a very small subset of the "wider" community. It is true that LGBT people face similar challenges and have shared experiences that may lead them to share certain viewpoints, and it is true that there are certain venues and safe spots that many (though not all) LGBT people will frequent occasionally (some very often, others more rarely); also, just very naturally, LGBT members often interact e.g. through dating and friendship patterns. So I don't want to say that the term "LGBT community" is wrong or doesn't mean anything, as there is certainly something binding all these experiences together however loosely, but the term is certainly fraught with complications when used so broadly.

[2] Though which ones these are often differ between the different "sub-communities". E.g. the average attitude towards high-risk sex behaviour is definitely not the same for gay men as for lesbian women.

> A little bit of whiplash on this one. Despite the sentence or two claiming what the author is purportedly not doing, the rest of the article seems to indicate otherwise.

Trans people who actively post online about their trans status are a narrowly selected subset of trans people as a whole, and those who act obnoxious enough to be a foremost example of OP's point even more peculiarly so. One should never try to derive generalized descriptive statements from such narrow anecdata.

So we can't discuss trans people as a category and their correlations?

There's a line between avoiding harmful stereotypes that lead to unfair discrimination and willful ignorance or misrepresentation of facts in service of political correctness.

It's extremely hard to say where this line is.

But we still have to be aware of its existence.

I'm not saying it can't or shouldn't be discussed, but the author was so conscious of the correlations made in the article that they felt the need to literally write that they're not trying to make those correlations.

There's no shortage of people linking transgendered people and mental illness, just as there's no shortage of people linking homosexuality to mental illness. If you're not trying to strengthen those assumptions, then use different examples... it seems lazy to just try to hand-wave it away in a sentence rather than using a different example.

Considering the amount of discrimination, harassment, and hostility these people endure every single day, I would be surprised if they remained perfectly sane.

This sort of wishy washy argument (seemingly accepted by generally educated/reasonable people on HN) is the reason that society is so scientifically illiterate. It has nice sounding arguments that embed themselves into your thought patterns but zero real substance. Articles like this are how you get hordes of people to believe something without cause. The next time you see someone act "bad" online, you'll be able to excuse yourself for thinking, "that person has 'psychological issues'" instead of thinking any deeper. You saw an article about that, after all.

The plural of anecdote is not evidence.

Unfortunately, your critique has even less substantiation than the article, and therefore it would be even sillier to draw conclusions from it...

That's only really a fair criticism if I had written an entire article about why this article is bad. Of course a comment about an article will have less substance than an article, that doesn't excuse this article from failing to meet the higher bar that ought to exist for an article.

No, I disagree. Your critique is shallow even for it's relative prominence. The article literally opens with a counterpoint that you shouldn't generally use this as an excuse. What you said in your comment acts almost as perfect critique for itself: it sounds right, but it has zero substance. Why should anyone value a critique that says almost zero actual things about the article and instead draws a general conclusion that sounds like it came from purely reading the headline?

Having the article state that you "shouldn't use it as an excuse" is probably about as effective as the surgeon generals warning on the side of a pack of cigarettes.

What makes you believe that quick disclaimer would discredit the claim the OP is making?

This is an invalid critique of the article. It is critiquing it for something it doesn't do, now justified by the idea that people might ignore what it actually says.

You don't say what is wishy washy or give any supporting evidence to your assertion that HN users seemingly fall for such arguments or how "nice sounding" arguments embed themselves into our thought patterns to control us or how these wishy washy nice sounding arguments lead us to dismiss people. You sound like you may have psychological issues and I say this as a non-neurotypical (bipolar)

That's a little ad hominem to diagnose them from one paragraph.

There's actually a well known term for what they're describing.

It's called pop science and is a very real thing.

I'm pretty sure they're joking.

Yes, I made myself laugh. As a bipolar, I often find things funny that other people don't.

This is a old pre internet argument -

Are serial killers mentally ill?

Are people who are temporarily changed like black out drunk of a fit of rage responsible for their actions, like drink driving and murder?

Should homosexuality in the 50's been classed as mentally ill considering it could ruin you life and even get you killed.

But now it's gone fro Macro to Micro.

I know at an IQ level believing Pizzagate is as dumb as thinking unarmed people in a Capitol is an insurrection. But I also think QAnon has more mental illness than BlueAnon but I have no idea why I say that. I think Scientology or flat earthing is a dumb as Catholicism but in practice I think Scientology has more mental illness.

I do know Karen's is a name for mentally ill women and watching their videos will one day be a shameful stage of the internet. That's a predictable future.

But it's all hard to quantify and the Goldwater Rule needs to die.

> believing Pizzagate is as dumb as thinking unarmed people in a Capitol is an insurrection.

There was zero evidence and zero existence of ANYTHING to substantiate "Pizzagate" while there was certainly some percentage of those "unarmed people" at the Capitol there to overthrow the election results.

I hope you realize how your efforts to "both sides" really distort both your message and reality.

They are missing the wood for the trees. Online behaviour in general is rooted in psychological issues. Well-adjusted mentally healthy people just participate in society normally, they don't sit in front of a terminal for a year inventing some amazing new way of communicating over computer networks, or expounding the modern equivalent of Athenian philosophy on message boards, or obsessing over entries in distributed databases.

So what are the psychological issues that led you to write this comment?

DSM-IV or real? I have a number of (diagnosed and otherwise) mental illnesses. I also write Haskell for enjoyment, and help people with Linux on the internet even though it benefits me in no way. I care about mathematics and computation more than climate change and the feelings of people close to me. Is that ok?

> I also write Haskell for enjoyment

Pretty sure there is an entry in DSM-IV for that :)

Out of curiosity, have you read any of DSM? I've read some portions of DSM-V and found it to be, on the whole, more reasonable than it is typically given credit. Perhaps some of that is owing to improvements made over the years, but nonetheless.

Did you know the background of unherd? If you did you might not have regard for this.

I Googled it and wasn’t able to find anything terribly interesting. From a brief look at the Wikipedia page I can’t find anything unusual, other than the most recent vandalism:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/102963491...

... which isn’t exactly terribly substantiated on its own.

Furthermore, unless this opinion piece is demonstrably in bad faith I dunno why that would detract from viewing it in a fair light.

The article isn't a study or something that needs institutional credibility, it's just an opinion piece. Anyone interested can just read it and decide what they think of it.

I don't know the background - tell me more.

Also, your comment comes across as an ad hominem attack, not sure if I'm just misreading it though.

It was created to promulgate extremist Christian-right propaganda - the kind that is "un-heard" in the mainstream media in the UK apparently.

There are a lot of such organizations that don't openly declare their ideological background, and funding sources.

Can you cite that UnHerd was founded by and funded by “extremist Christian-right propaganda” forces? Considering that its executive editor has frequently featured commentators who are downright anti-religion (e.g. Richard Dawkins), and various commentators who subscribe to old-school 20th-century leftism including its antipathy to religion, that is a claim hard to believe.

So I search google for "undherd Richard Dawkins", first link:

https://unherd.com/2021/04/why-the-atheists-turned-on-richar...

"Why the atheists turned on Dawkins - They care more about social justice than whether or not God exists"

Written by: Ben Sixsmith is an English writer living in Poland. He has written for Quillette, Areo, The Catholic Herald....

Ben Sixsmith is neither a leader or founder of UnHerd, so even if he’s a Christian Right voice whose writing they’ve carried, that hardly cobtradicts the claim that they are diverse and that they don’t focus on Christian Right content, carrying much from sides opposing thst viewpoint.

Also, as Christian but pro-secular-politics left-leaning person, I think the statement you quote as an example of far right Christian propaganda is...just literal factual truth; the negative reactions to Dawkins in some parts of the atheist community is about social justice trumping shared identity around belief in the nonexistence of God.

A current tactic of the Christian-right is to enter into alliances with people they would otherwise despise (radical feminists, "scienceologists" like Dawkins) on certain shared causes which are even more important to them - the bonding cause currently is opposing transgenderism. Dawkins happens to be transphobic - he even lost awards over it.

> A current tactic of the Christian-right is to enter into alliances with people they would otherwise despise (radical feminists, "scienceologists" like Dawkins) on certain shared causes which are even more important to them

Maybe this is just a story you've concocted to explain away evidence that contradicts your predetermined conclusions about who believes what?

Yet at the same time, there is this [0] posted by a higher-ranking staff member. That you have found an article written by a contributor who has also written for a Catholic publication does not served as proof of your claim in the GP that UnHerd was founded to push “extremist Christian propaganda” – the whole point of UnHerd is that it draws on writers from a range of ideological outlooks.

And FWIW, the idea mentioned in these links that early-millennium New Atheism eventually evolved into the current wave of social-justice activism, is something that has been often set forth by people here on HN and is not exclusive to any particular religious or anti-religious viewpoint.

[0] https://unherd.com/thepost/richard-dawkins-scientism-is-a-di...

> the whole point of UnHerd is that it is includes people from a range of ideological outlooks.

You keep saying that. Let's like at some random headlines from their "contributors" page:

> Ideology should not trump children’s health (anti-trans)

> France’s mega-mosque problem

> The emptiness of ‘British values’

> The death of American patriotism

> The problem with male feminists

> Universities have destroyed feminism

> Can Labour be saved from the hard Left?

> Labour isn’t working

> Why liberals are scared of football

> Is Labour dead?

> America attracts the wrong immigrants

Again, the whole point of UnHerd is that it includes people from a range of ideological outlooks, who ordinarily would be opposed to one another, because they share some concerns and can forge a common cause in publishing.

None of the headlines that you cite are specific to “extremist Christian-right propaganda”, indeed these are themes are commonly discussed by those who identify as leftist and unreligious, but feel that certain things that are presently insisted on in leftism as de rigeur, are not part of the leftist tradition they recognize from a few decades back. For example, with regard to being “anti-trans”, there are a lot of soixante-huitards who find the current focus on trans activism on the left excessive and even problematic, because it was utterly foreign to their struggle against rightist forces.

You have still not brought forth any proof of your claim above that UnHerd was founded and funded expressly for “extremist Christian-right propaganda” purposes. The gentlemanly thing to do would be to back up that claim, or retract it.

> includes people from a range of ideological outlooks, who ordinarily would be opposed to one another, because they share some concerns and can forge a common cause in publishing

LOL normally when people say "includes people from a range of ideological outlooks", they usually mean so they present a range of ideological viewpoints. What you actually mean is so they can present a single ideological viewpoint, how counter-intuitive.

> None of the headlines that you cite are specific to “extremist Christian-right propaganda”

Anti-islmam, anti-feminist, anti-left, anti-immigrant, anti-trans...gosh what was I thinking! It's true the headlines are not overtly religious...but I never that was the case. Propaganda is often subtle so it can hide it's true nature and purpose and origin.

> You have still not brought forth any proof of your claim above that UnHerd was founded and funded expressly for “extremist Christian-right propaganda” purposes

Websites that take up the anti-trans cause are either secular radical feminist or Christian-right. Let's look up the founder of unherd shall we? (you probably guessed I already knew this).

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

> Montgomerie was born into an army family in Barnstaple in 1970.[7][8] He said in a Guardian interview[9] that "his teenage Thatcherism was tempered by discovering evangelical Christianity at sixteen".

I guess it's not the radical feminist kind.

People are capable on judging an argument on its own merits. After all, if you don't think HN readers possess that capability, why bother associating with the commentariat on this website?

A sizable number are never going to read the article or judge its merits. Instead they'll click an arrow based on whether the title matches their biases. "Yup, people I don't like have psychological issues..."

For the few that might it is generally worth knowing whether it's actually worth the time. If the writer is someone considered and knowledgeable, on a credible venue, for instance. I know nothing about this site/writer so I'm not commenting on that, but generally that is an input before one spends the time on an essay.

I guess it'd argue you can't judge an argument on its own merits unless it's a philosophical argument.

For example the best published scientific studies can't be judged on their own merits because you have to trust that the scientists actually conducted the studies and didn't fake the data. So you basically have to fall back to some assumption over whether the scientist is honest, not on the merits of what they wrote in the study.

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