How to Win Friends and Hustle People
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Not a line you expect to see in the NYT. But looks like they've amassed enough evidence to stand up in court, and of course the fact that Deshmukh clearly has no money helps.
He's a smart charming hardworking entrepreneur expert at marketing who is eager to take risks (which is such a 'type' https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/bipolar/energy/index that you should already be thinking 'bipolar?'); but he is not gaslighting people to deny his scams or immune to shame and feels bad about the fraud & scamming people, so it's not narcissism or psychopathy.
The rather pointed but otherwise unexplained mentions of his lack of showering & smelling is a dogwhistle: the smelling is from the manic cycles where he stops bothering with such wastes of time meant for the little people; other manic cycle symptoms like sleeplessness would generally go unnoticed in the normal frenetic lifestyle of a up-all-night nightlife promoter (which of course is a great way to get the sleeplessness that would often trigger a manic cycle in the first place). And then when he disappears for a while or ghosts people, those are the depressive cycles.
Edited BPD to Bipolar
BPD:
- Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined emotional abandonment.
- Unstable and chaotic interpersonal relationships, often characterized by a pattern of alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation, also known as 'splitting'.
- Inappropriate, intense anger that can be difficult to control.
- Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.
The first two are incredibly common with BPD and really are the defining characteristics.
That's a romantic myth of the public imagination.
The most successful ones avoid risk as much as possible.
Edit: HN really is going to shit.
Have you been on the internet?
Not really, no.
What we're talking about here is someone confidently giving an armchair psychiatric diagnosis. It's made of holes, speculations, assertions, and based entirely on a single print media article. In general, that's always bad.
I don't even diagnose my friends who I know well with ADD. The notion that it is "better" - or even remotely acceptable - to make claims about far more sensitive conditions, of a total stranger, based on a newspaper article, is unhinged.
Not to mention the fact that the NYT famously doesn't vet its writers any more, and seems comfortable with articles that make lurid explosive claims based on near-zero actual evidence; even failing to retract stories when key quotes are found to have been fabricated...
But that is beside the point. The casual armchair psychiatry demonstrated above is very much not ok, and really quite uncool.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I don’t know what’s served by pretending otherwise. If mental health challenges are real and important, and they are, then they’ll have observable effects outside a doctor’s office, and we should be able to talk about that.
Plenty of us are bipolar, do regrettable things when we're manic, and then own up to them and pay what's due when we're not manic.