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Comment by miros_love | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone looked at similar studies from, say, five years ago? I worry that half of what was labeled “delusional” back then is now a widely accepted opinion.

Feels like we're one step away from a follow-up paper titled "We regret to inform you: The paranoid were just early."

Not saying everything turns out to be true - just that social consensus tends to shift a lot faster than clinical definitions.

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The clinical definition of delusion includes social consensus. From DSM-5:

"Delusions are deemed bizarre if they are clearly implausible and not understandable to same-culture peers and do not derive from ordinary life experiences. […] The distinction between a delusion and a strongly held idea is sometimes difficult to make and depends in part on the degree of conviction with which the belief is held despite clear or reasonable contradictory evidence regarding its veracity."

That's an escape hatch for religion.

I always wondered if there was a clinical basis for that escape hatch or if the drafting committee felt it was just too contentious to go there.

Probably the latter. Homosexuality was removed from the DSM as a diagnosis in 1973, by a vote of 5,854 to 3,810. Gender identity disorder was removed from the DSM in 2017.

It seems like there is a continuum between being oblivious and delusional. You need to notice things, recognize their meaning, make connections and then make conclusions. Being oblivious can mean missing important signs and making bad choices due to not realizing what is happening. Being delusional can mean jumping to conclusions by "connecting the dots" in one particular way that leads to one conclusion even though that may not be the truth. A sane perspective would mean evaluating different hypotheses to come to a reasonable conclusion. Someone who is paranoid may be right about some things much earlier than others, but they may also be wrong about many other things.

I think in many circumstances certain outcomes emerged because the paranoid willed it into existence. I get the feeling there are a lot doomsayers who secretly want the end of civilization to occur so that they can finally act out their fantasies, delusions, say they were right, etc.

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