Mass psychogenic illness and the social network (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Mass psychogenic illness and the social network (2012)

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

42 pointsJeremyNT17 comments

The proliferation and propagation of memes is probably some kind of mechanism of societal information processing and storage, which is of course maladapted to a hyperconnected world. Mechanisms that were developed and optimised over thousands of years for double or low triple digit groups of humans do not scale well in 4-5 orders of magnitude increases.

Completely out of my ass, I would imagine that mass psychogenic illnesses could be an unfortunate application of these mechanisms that has additional effects and has gone out of hand, so it would make sense that these effects are also greatly exacerbated by a hyperconnected world.

Yes, indeed, I am in complete agreement, but what is being amplified depends on the culture's norms. That is why negative subcultures suffer the worst when they are sequestered from more sensible folks, not that wisefolk are thick on the ground. That said, those leading this technocracy are not the folks like Bezos' ex-wife who is doing so much good in the world with her wealth, in counterbalance to the horrors her ex-husband's companies are spraying everywhere.

As with all things human, we can choose to point our moral compass in any direction, for good or ill, for greater compassion or greater indifference. Taking an apathetic culture and then feeding them vapid, ungenerous, sensual, fakeass drivel is just what chimps would choose if they had the remote.

We must rise above our mammalian natures and embrace humanitarianism as our aspirational ethos, instead of techbros and popstars with their trappings of wealth and pleasure in their IG stories. We must develop a love of truth, and focus our energies upon the salve that is compassion, individually and collectively.

"And so castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually." --Jimi Hendrix

Perhaps an extension to the Gaia hypothesis is that the system is all out of whack and these are emergent hallucinations.

It's very tempting to be a layperson out of ones depth and apply MPI to a shit-tonne of things we're seeing. But I suspect the superficial "looks like it" of mass hysteria about things (pizzagate, drones, bank failures, Gamestop & cryptos in general) isn't actually the same as this.

I am also interested in how strongly real MPI aligns to "mostly women" because I don't want to believe there are these kinds of gendered differences in response to things, but the evidence looks to be there. It's unfortunate to get back to a somewhat paternalistic "victorian" sense of Hysteria as a fundamentally young female disease.

A very long time ago I was caught up in what was probably a mass psychogenic break out in primary school. It only takes a small trigger and suddenly the teachers are dealing with a shitload of vomit. There is a compounding quality that in sufficient volume, vomit is a bit of a chemical warfare agent but still: hell to pay and a lot of cleaning. The problem is that most of the good cleaning agents smell, and the smell is enough to trigger "GAS GAS GAS WE'RE BEING GASSED" panic attacks and there you are, back at the front door (I exaggerate, this was a small school and a handful of collapsed kids, but it does happen. Out of nowhere.)

I've also experienced (as a kid, and young adult) panic attacks and I know how very real central chest pain is, when you're caught up in your own imminent demise. On the plus side thats not a gendered problem: any and all young things including martians can get panic attacks.

This was a very interesting read.

I wonder what role things like sympathy and theory of mind would have in spreading MPI.

That could potentially explain why there appears to be a gender effect

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_student_poisoning (more than one theory exists)

> because I don't want to believe there are these kinds of gendered differences in response to things,

100% HN, feelings over truth [1]

> pizzagate, drones, bank failures, Gamestop & cryptos in general

None of these are mass hysteria except drones.

Drones are also a crossover, HN is pizzagate, the people on the ground are mass hysteria.

> "GAS"

Yes, there are 100s of mass hysteria gas attacks in schools each year. Google news. Many don't get reported. Trigger warning the facts will show it's more girl/schools if you check, so perhaps don't.

[1] also another 'man' denying a proven female illness

The phrase raises two questions. Let's grant that there's such a thing as a 'psychogenic' (non-physical) event. But then: is it a 'disorder', or an 'illness'? When population A starts using such a label on population B, that in itself can lead to dangers for population B. (Much of history has resulted from this kind of labelling. (Witch-hunts, for one easy example. Disagreements of differing religions for another.)

'Disorder' is a very vague label ... as is 'sick'. The parameters need careful definition; what guarantees that happens?

I don’t see that this distinction even needs to be made. Whichever word you choose, the focus should be on the fact that a person’s {mental, physical} health is suboptimal in some way. And the question then is: what sort of intervention will help — psychological or physiological?

Disorder has a clear clinical definition.

Which is mostly soft-science made up, and changes when the politics/ideology changes...

Tell me you don't understand science without saying you don't understand science

You keep using this term "science". I don't think it means what you think it means.

If you think the DSM is science the way Physics and Chemistry are sciences, I have a bridge to sell you...

Perhaps in the 50s you'd be onboard with lobotomy too, because 'yay, science' (and after all "they corrected it, didn't they?").

"Psychogenic" doesn't mean non-physical, it means "caused by the mind". That doesn't make the effects not real: they, at the minimum, affect the subjective experience of the person suffering from them, and in a lot of cases more than that. The main difference is in how one should try to treat the problem (just saying "it's all in your head" isn't usually effective)

Wow, it's been 12 years.

This is what caused me to start calling the asocial corporate platform: twerk tic

You can watch twerking videos and see fake Tourettes victims displaying their fake tic spasms.

The disease is spread primarily by being out of touch with physical reality, and identifying as having the symptoms.

It's better to have no community than to be a member of a negative community.

It's always helpful to understand the importance of compassion for one's fellow human beings as being the single most important characteristic of the members of any healthy community.

Compassion and positivity lead to peace and happiness and better outcomes.

Selfishness and negativity lead to strife and misery and worsening outcomes.

There is a polarity to everything in the universe, including and especially human ideals, attitudes, and behaviors.

Every community and culture has a multidimensionally moral center of mass and orientation and velocity. Technology has been shown to be a rather brutal accelerator of the negative, but that's just a reflection of our current cultures of origin and use, which are mired in willful ignorance and stubborn overconfidence.

  What are their ideals?
  What are their resulting attitudes?
  What are their resulting behaviors?

Those dimensions of analysis encompasses the complete description of every single person, ever. Group like minded and hearted folks together, and you just more of the same. Much, much more.

Any person and group can always choose to evolve their way out of their morass, but stubborn ignorance resists us all in making progress.

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