The circus freaks of open source
drewdevault.com
drewdevault.com
That would help Drew, but not Terry. Terry would remain on his own to struggle in silence, but Drew could sleep soundly without noticing him.
There've been many outsider artists over the years ("Artistry of the Mentally Ill", (c) 1922) whose schizophrenia has led them to lead tragic lives. But they also created amazing art that is celebrated around the world. I do wish Terry had gotten better treatment, and I'm also glad he gifted us with his art.
> The press and fan attention was deeply harmful to Terry and likely exacerbated his mental illness.
I don't know if that's true, if Terry would be better off, had the internet not found him entertaining. I also don't know if this is an internet phenomenon, or if we haven't always poked and prodded at the "different".
What I do know is that Drew thinks Terry had it worse because of this attention.
The article writer turned his normative beliefs about the situation into prescriptive mental health advice.
Isn't it so interesting how bans are deserved based on the form of a communication rather than its content
If I were to invite you into my space, I get to tell you to fuck off if you behave in ways other guests find hostile.
People have various degrees of ability to stomach vile language based on special circumstances like his illness, and it would have been incredibly unfair to a lot of people if those rants were imposed on everyone and would have seriously negatively affected the discourse here.
If anything, HN was exceedingly tolerant of Terry's outbursts because of his illness - while he was shadowbanned, it was clear a quite significant number of people read his comments despite the language, and while his comments did come up on threads about TempleOS etc., there was almost always plenty of people defending him.
It's also worth adding that while I do believe a lot of it was down to his illness, most schizophrenic people don't behave like that, so it feels like assuming it was all down to his illness also goes too far in relieving him of responsibility.
For my part, I feel mostly sad for him, while I'm also impressed by what he did. Yet I'm not at all upset that he was shadow-banned here.
I don't understand how to tell the difference, other than what society and the media collectively judges to be genius versus disordered, and where the money accrues.
The people and their personalities are not all that different, other than how palatable/sellable they are.
That's not to say this isn't a real problem; I think the scale of it is much larger than people realize, because society often sees these same personality disorders as something to be rewarded.
I like to compare the treatment of the extremely wealthy with extreme hoarders. Someone who fills their house with piles of e.g. magazines/newspapers, will be recognised as having mental problems. Meanwhile if someone keeps pursuing the gain of more wealth after they have far more money than can ever be spent, then typically society will fawn over them and respect their opinions, no matter how distasteful or outright wrong they are.
This paragraph tickles me. Superficially, someone who I respect but for the humiliation, harassment and voyeurism is maybe not someone I would consider myself a kindred spirit with. Particularly once the word harassment starts becoming appropriate. Respecting them or making them an ally of convenience, perhaps.
But communities have a minimum standard of behaviour. People who fall below that standard need to be ostracised, people who meet the standard have to be tolerated. The dynamic requires people with mental health problems to be ostracised with some regularity otherwise the community would collapse. There isn't much of an alternative. Before they are ostracised they need to be subjected to humiliation rituals and a certain level of voyeurism as the community affirms where the social boundaries are. If there are bad actors (which there inevitably are) it may be necessary to harass them.
So I suppose I'm more comfortable with the paragraph than a superficial read of it would suggest, but it contains a delicate sentiment. Especially harassment, which is one of those socially nuclear options that should be used in truly rare and exceptional cases with appropriate concern for the second order effects on behaviour. It is better to just not associate with people who use it with enthusiasm.
> This is a difficult topic to write about. By writing about these specific examples, am I sensationalizing them? Disrespecting the privacy of the people I’m writing about? Participating in the circus myself?
Yeah, absolutely. It is part of the urge to help set the community standard of what behaviour is and isn't acceptable and to decide when various defence mechanisms to protect the community should be used. That impulse is at its core exactly where the voyeurism is coming from. How else will the community come to understand what the otherwise vague boundaries are? People are intensely interested in what the mob will do to them when angered and what the exact boundary line is to trigger that response.
The way to actually fight the circus is to have clear boundaries established beforehand. It isn't ever going to completely tamp down on the phenomenon, but there isn't much spectacle if there is a predictable response to a predictable action. English common law does an excellent job in this regard (not perfect, but as far as I know best of class). Notably it strives to avoid harassment and humiliation as tactics with frequent success.
In my opinion this is a much greater variable than lions for our fight, flight, fawn response that is used to explain stress.
The explanation is that we are evolved to stress about lions, but there are no lions (in most of our lives) so the stress is irrational and should be ignored or sidestepped.
My theory is that we are more stressed and struggle more with mental health because we, in our modern societies, are part of many more groups. And the rules for inclusion are stricter since every group has to define themselves against all the other groups.
So what really happens is that our bodies react as intended to the available stimulus of all the groups we instinctively want to be part of.
There are just too many groups.
I don't have any solutions, just a theory that helps me navigate my life.
We should not equate mental health problems in a general sense with outright anti-social behavior, these are very different issues. Moreover, the appropriate way of addressing anti-social behavior does not involve harassing the supposed bad actor; such harassment is counterproductive, since it tends to drive away the very best contributors while having the opposite effect on the worst (since they now have a ready-made excuse for behaving badly). 'Calling out' bad behavior sometimes happens, but this should be done in a polite and restrained way.
(As far as the example in the OP goes, my guess is that people feel free to poke fun at Kent's seeming AI psychosis because they interpret it as a case of intentional trolling; they don't really think Kent is expressing sincere, actually held beliefs about his AI girlfriend.)
I've posted code and research - that's how you know they're trolls, they make stuff up anyways :)
Sometimes leave Britney alone means actually leave her alone.
Most people already understand and empathize with people going through a mental health crisis and dont provoke them.
1) : 'circus freaks of open source' isn't some clever pun or double entendre; it's just a jab.
and
2) : "Hey everyone , this list of folks have troubles, let's talk about them by name and make a gentleman's pact not to bother them while we analyze the meta situation of 'people with troubles' more broadly!"
"Let's not bother this <full name of person>, internet!" is about the most naive net take one could imagine. If you need to make an example, or use a person as an example, at least try to anonymize the premise and identity.
If your doctor got an ig nobel for his pioneering technique for removing cucumbers from patients' rectums you'd be damned sure you'd prefer a Bob and Jane style anecdote rather than full name credit and a press interview as a frontier patient.
Yeah, Terry is long gone. Other folks aren't. Let's not pretend we're all just unwitting spectators here, and let's not ascribe fault or reasons behind Terry's tragic end.
What are you basing this on? Did you know him? This person you call a "circus freak?"
> Whenever TempleOS or Terry came up online
Which was often because Terry himself made an effort to live stream his work and his opinions on computing. Which this author seems to have missed is those strong opinions were shared by a large segment of his fanbase. What made Terry unique is that he put his effort where his rhetoric was. He was out to prove something, and, largely, he did.
> voyeuristic sensation of witnessing his mental illness through TempleOS.
Terry famously refused help. A large number of people over the years reached out in an effort to improve his situation and give him the help they thought he might need. He didn't want it.
> I wish we had just left Terry well enough alone.
I just wish Terry had gotten some help and I wish he was still with us. He died alone and that makes me incredibly sad. I cannot appreciate anything this author is trying to say. It seems to me he's the voyeur and is using this opportunity to stand on a grave to chastise the crowd. I find _that_ sick.
There's no non-coercive way to treat a mentally ill person who doesn't want to be treated. I am in favor of treating some mentally ill people coercively regardless, in cases where the mental illness puts other people at risk of harm. But I don't claim that this is primarily for their benefit.