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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Something similar, though not as grim, happened to my childhood best friend; physics PhD, assistant professorship at a regional university, a wife and a house. Something early in the pandemic fucked him up, and he went off into a long series of paranoid delusions about nanotech, a Zionist conspiracy, vaccines, and 5G. He started sleeping in his basement "grounded" to electrical outlets. He went off on weird racist rants on Twitter. He gave a plandemic-style lecture on a faculty Zoom call, and lost his job. His wife left. He's a short-order cook now.

Like the people in this story, the signs were there before the pandemic. A decade before, I watched him give a eulogy at his father's funeral, which dipped weirdly into a conspiracy in the Chicago Police Department. He was at the time otherwise completely rational-seeming; it seems to have taken the pandemic (and pandemic conspiracy culture) to completely derail him.

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That's classic paranoid schizophrenia. The degree is no insulation against it.

The conspiracy theories are, well, irrelevant. He would have come up with ones on his own, had the world been devoid of them. I think the progression over the centuries has been witches, air looms and influencing machines, then microelectronics.

Even so, all the comparatively recent meming about secret overlord cabals of blood-drinking child abusers in this or that part of government has effectively turned paranoid schizophrenia into a communicable disease. That's a rather unexpected development.

There's nothing new about this stuff, and I'd hesitate before declaring it more widespread than it ever was before. The Satanic Panic was worse in this vein by far, and there was no internet.

The scary thing in the current age is the re-mainstreaming of political-party allied all-encompassing conspiracy theories, like Q/Pizzagate and Russiagate. America has become John Birchers vs. Joe McCarthyites while the environment is dying, infrastructure is crumbling, the wealth gap is absurd and constantly widening, and the vendors of arms and services are trying to provoke us into a nuclear war as a flowery garnish on our half-dozen forever wars.

That's just bringing back the 50s, though.

Except in the 50s everything was going to be better. (Except for possible nuclear holocaust.)

I'm pretty sure reading a week's worth of papers from the 50s would show us a long list of grim things that were not _obviously_ going to be better.

(At least my country was in the middle of decolonization wars that are still leaving their trace today - so I doubt people were assuming "oh, sure, it's going to be fine in X years.")

But it did not really get "better" or "worse" in absolute terms.

Everything just... Passed, I guess ?

This sounds similar to a close relative of mine who, over the course of a few months, became more and more manic (as in, actual, diagnosed manic-depressive disorder). Eventually it was blindingly obvious to everyone who knew him that he was not at all in his right mind. Lost his job, wife, house, and came close to being homeless.

As you mention, in hindsight there were definitely signs, just not nearly as obvious.

I've met several people like this who have a scientific background and seem to be good at their job, but also have an insane paranoid worldview. They make me question my own sanity.

This is a sad story. Do you think it would make a difference if you could sit him down with someone who would patiently listen to his claims, provide (counter) evidence, and point out when a claim is too vague or falsifiable to even check? I can imagine this a kind of AI patiently working through big chunks of a huge decision tree with the user, allowing itself to be lead through it as slowly or quickly as needed, a many times as needed. You would either get agreement, or be able to isolate with great precision those assertions of fact and/or assumptions that seem to undermine the user's reason.

From my experience with a friend who went off the conspiracy deep end quite a bit before the pandemic already, I can't see it helping at all. I deeply care about the friend and I tried to engage with him in many ways, assuming that he would somehow be accessible to reason. The reality is, he was not. Every argument/fact I brought to counter a claim was dismissed, because it was mainstream media/science/... At the same time he would happily use the same sources if they supported his point of view.

I also tried the opposite trying to push e.g. the lizard people conspiracies, to show the fallacy of his arguments. He would completely dismiss those, because "everyone knows that is rubbish", while arguing for a conspiracy which has hidden the true laws of physics for financial gain.

Unfortunately I do not have an answer how to talk with people like that, but it needs a much more serious intervention than rational talk.

Yeah, I don't know. In a related vein, I assign a great deal of blame for this situation to two groups of people: first, his employer, which was confronted with crystal-clear signs of severe mental illness (his termination was the culmination of a series of deep-dive student newspaper articles that revealed all sorts of disturbing stuff) and chose to cut him loose, and second --- and much more significantly --- to para-"normie" activists like RFK Jr who know full well they're capitalizing on serious pathology to build their followings.

I'd like to believe that I could help bring my friend out of it, but I'm in no way qualified, and then there's all the guns.

I think you are right to also worry about your safety and would likely need some help and advice if you are trying to help him.

I haven't extensively read Freddie de Boer, but in what I read, he comes across as empathetic, perceptive, highly articulate and probably rather more sane than most people.

He also posted a very personal video a while ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKB6F_VYuZY ), to vent his anger at a recent glamorization of mental illness by a NYT writer. In it he explains how the only thing that prevented him from murdering a former love during a psychotic episode (for supposedly secretly putting glass into his food) was that he didn't even know where she lived. He realized he needed to be on permanent medication.

I was jarred listening to a fine and sensitive mind relating how it's only kept suspended over a chasm of homicidal delusion by a relatively crude and often debilitating pharmacological cocktail.

What do you think his employer should have done?

I recently had to terminate an employee who was becoming unhinged and a threat to his coworkers.

Maybe his employer is big enough to carry him on payroll while he gets treatment?

Put him on a long-term sabbatical and arranged mental health care. If they'd tried and my friend refused, or it didn't take, fair's fair. But I don't believe that's what happened. My friend essentially had a psychotic break while on the job. I'd expect a public university to be especially good at stuff like this, but I've worked in the private sector with people who had severe mental health issues that took them out of the lineup for years at a time and they were still taken care of.

It was a whole big media story at the time, and I thought it was remarkable how the university played it off as a morality story and not a medical crisis.

I’d expect that too. Perhaps paranoid-schizophrenia manifesting itself as racist rants collided with wokism in an unfortunate manner and really bad timing.

There was nothing "woke" about the disciplinary response to what he was saying; it was absolutely unacceptable. Ron DeSantis wouldn't have tolerated it either.

Regardless: most of my enmity is reserved for people like RFK Jr, who are literally building a movement in large part by mobilizing people with untreated mental illness.

Was referring to the part where you said he was dropped without consideration that it was an illness. Could be old-fashioned careless disregard, but we know the climate at Uni in 2020 where even the appearance of racism is a hot potato.

Once again: there was no mistaking what happened in this instance. I don't appreciate having culture war arguments shoehorned into this; I think you could have just taken my word for it.

Previously you implied you were surprised at the outcome. Now it is cut and dried. Got it.

I don’t watch TV so have no problem chatting about this stuff, relevant or not. Sorry if it rubbed you the wrong way.

> I don’t watch TV

How is that at all related to the discussion at hand?

Not overly sensitive to particular words. Most TV folks I know are in a state of low-level crisis due to regular helpings of FUD.

Sounds like his employer could have handled it better but I had to deal with this recently (someone close experiencing psychosis) and at the end of the day, it's about family members stepping up. The buck stops with them. If they won't take responsibility, there's not a lot you can do.

I think it's probably wrong to blame youtubers or disinformation. Pyschotics are going to find something to latch onto with or without internet access. If it's not covid, it's the Jews, or the government following them, or talking to God, and any of those things is enough to torpedo your career and relationships.

Like many people, they have no family members left. I don't think I'm at all wrong to assign blame to people like RFK Jr. for exploiting him.

> if you could sit him down with someone who would patiently listen to his claims, provide (counter) evidence, and point out when a claim is too vague or falsifiable to even check?

Clearly you haven't ever argued with someone about their beliefs. Let me give you a quick run-down:

- You can never provide counter evidence to every claim. Most of them are too vague or detached from reality to be refuted clearly. You predicted this, and you were right to.

- A claim - in the believer's mind - is never too vague. They are just failing to articulate it to you in the moment.

- Not being able to falsify a claim is exactly the point. You and I call that circular reasoning, but they call it faith. Yes, they see the logical fallacy. There is no way to prove for certain one way or the other; so it always comes down to emotion.

I've been on both sides of this dynamic.

When I was religious (Mormon), I was convinced that - if my religion were false - it would be just as convenient and straightforward to criticize and deconstruct it as you described. And in many ways, it is!

But somehow I, and most of the people I knew, was insulated both from the critical information that might have made me rethink my convictions, and from the very pattern of critical thinking itself. I understood the fallacy of circular reasoning. I was convinced that this was an exception.

The human mind has a lot of room for faith. Faith in ourselves. Faith in our hopes, our dreams, and our delusions. It's no wonder that we are able to stubbornly believe falsehoods; yet that very ability has us faithfully believing we are the exception - uniquely immune to all the pitfalls of faith.

We can all see the pattern. We can all deconstruct it. We never have to.

> and pandemic conspiracy culture

Not so conspiracy after all. The NYT article mentions "the military coming door to door" as a reason for one of the guys in the article going berserk, which is not exactly what happened in my European capital city, but we did have military guys with their Humvees operate the major city intersections earlier on during the pandemic (I'd say April-May 2020). Of course that it was all security theater, but the military was actually out in the streets, handling civilian assets.

Not to mention that later on during the same pandemic people lost their jobs and their livelihoods because they hadn't taken the vaccine shots (which the people from this article most probably also wouldn't have taken, so they would have been put in the same situation).

Looking backwards, and in the context of the media now totally avoiding Covid discussions (unless is related to China) after the same media had accused each and everyone of us of potentially wanting to kill our grandmothers, things were pretty well damn f.cked up.

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