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Comment by sersi | Hacker News Reader

One of the most surprising thing I remember is when I was a student, I met a lot of students in the deaf community (I was an exchange student at RIT which has interpreters in classes) and a few of them felt that the Cochlear implant was a threat to their culture. They were worried that it would signify the extinction of deaf culture.

It's similar to the worries of deaf parents having a hearing child and not being able to connect with them and have less shared experiences.

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It's very strange to me. People can and do bond and form a sense of community by overcoming struggles together, but that shouldn't mean preserving the struggle. Communities can also evolve and grow and tackle new types of struggles. It doesn't matter if you have a disability, a disease, or some other condition that requires you to overcome challenges most people never have to deal with, it's a risky thing to make those challenges into an identity or to define yourself or your limits on those terms.

I think you simplify the problem: cochlear implants are far from perfect and many users suffer from headaches while their hearing doesn't improve to the point that they can function like any other hearing person (eg typically they will have trouble discerning multiple voices speaking at the same time, hear anything in high background noise situations). So the choice for then is between being a disabled person in the hearing world, or a normal person in the smaller signing world. That's a hard choice, I'm glad I haven't had to make it. Sources: My linguist partner cooperates with many sign language researchers, so might be biased. But also, an acquaintance (also linguist) decided to not give their congenial deaf daughter a CI for this reason after considerable deliberation (please don't judge).

That's fair, cochlear implants may not be for everyone. I'd think it'd be worth a shot at least, but people should be still be free do decide against it or do whatever works best for them.

Yet here we are on hacker news...

People do that, tho. And the bigger the struggle, the more likely this is to happen.

Think you meant to say "extinction of deaf culture."

Speaking for my family, my normal-hearing brother connected just fine with our very deaf parents. He learned sign language and what he had to do to communicate well.

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