Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

Although the journalist will never say so unless he publicly announces a formal diagnosis, this sounds like bipolar disorder at work.

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.

If it's bipolar, then it's bipolar plus a lack of regard for other human beings.

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.

It could also be a personality type. Most Entrepreneurs are eager to take risks. Some have ADHD/Dyslexia and many others just have the personality. Doesn't have to mean Bipolar Disorder.

Edited BPD to Bipolar

BPD is most often used for "Borderline Personality Disorder" which is very different from Bipolar Disorder.

Quick note that it's different but not very different, to the point that one can be misidentified as the other. A key difference is in the mood cycle length. Days/weeks/months with bipolar but seconds/minutes/hours with BPD.

BPD is generally identifiable through relationship dynamics. It's sometimes summed as as "I hate you, don't leave me!". I believe it can be misidentified as bipolar, but the dynamics are very different to most people.

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.

Agreed. There are "strains" of ADHD that show some remarkable similarities to bipolar disorder that must be sussed out by a really skilled professional. My source on this is personal experience.

> Most Entrepreneurs are eager to take risks.

That's a romantic myth of the public imagination.

The most successful ones avoid risk as much as possible.

just use ChatGPT . >> Entrepreneurs are often characterized by their willingness to take risks. This trait is considered fundamental to entrepreneurship because starting and running a business involves navigating uncertainty and making decisions that could lead to either substantial success or failure.

I am a wistful entrepreneur. The reason i haventbeen able to go full force on anything and make anything work is because im risk averse. Starting your own business is a risk. Sure it may seem like they are risk averse compared to the other ones that flame out. But make no mistake you cant be an entrepreneur without taking a larger than average risk on. Otherwise you could just get a day job.

Stop diagnosing people on the internet especially with a complex sickness like bipolar. I am bipolar and your reasoning shows that you only have coffee table knowledge.

Edit: HN really is going to shit.

In general i think it's always better to have people express their opinions (may it be a wrong diagnosis) and be corrected. Especially on the internet, so people can learn.

> Especially in the internet, so people can learn.

Have you been on the internet?

Sure, but people tend to take that to an extreme. It’s more akin to a gish gallop than a reasoned and humble argument.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

'In general, always'?

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.

Maybe in general but it's not that great on HN and most messageboards.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Counterpoint from someone better informed about bipolar would be interesting and valuable. That said, it’s a discussion of an article asking “why is this guy like this?” One potential partial explanation is a mental health condition. Certainly it crosses my mind any time there’s a consistent and self-destructive pattern of behavior that it’s not clear the person involved can control.

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.

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