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Comment by StreetChief | Hacker News Reader

"Leading masses of conversations to become little more than titbits of information and data flung in solely as signifiers of knowledge and meaning, yet never actually adhereing to any form of practice or purpose," seems pretty accurate to me.

I am curious as to what purpose you went to your uni library for. Medical research? Curiosity? What writings did you find? Why is it a problem that people use schizophrenia in conversation and writing? Not all discussion is medical research, and is certainly not held to those standards.

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I’ll agree with this. Study language and lingual theory. Much of language is metaphor we apply to different lens. Language is mainly a process of trial and error. We continue saying something, refining that saying through different word usage until we come up with a term that fits our lens correctly. Words don’t have rules. Humanity makes those rules and then applies them.

The commenter below, mentioning “truth-seeking” would need to define what they mean by truth. Is this capital T truth that applies to everyone or lowercase truth that applies to the specific and differing lenses we use?

It's concerning because conversation has become just about talking and the pleasure of having a chat, rather than truth-seeking. Not that conversation should or must be about truth-seeking, but seeing conversations being idle chatter everywhere, with medical terms like "schizophrenia" being thrown about willy nilly is unsettling. One does not have to speak in the parlance of a medical researcher in order to find meaning and truth in a discussion around mental illness, and yet despite this, most information in this space is just noise.

Most information in most spaces is noise. Finding the signal in the noise is difficult in every area, and restricting colloquial (or philosophical) discussion because of overlap with a medical field seems rather harsh to me. We need to learn to understand things deeply, not just look at the surface of the issue: instead of "regular literature is mixed in with scientific literature, so this article is bad," maybe we could look at the what the article provides, and use it to draw new conclusions or support our understanding in addition ways. I see many problems in our society, our culture, that I would describe as schizophrenic, as a reflection of human predilections, and this article provides another lens for understanding.

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