It boggles my mind how anyone can write such nonsensical rambling comments while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch.
We know he's there, he surely knows he's hellbanned, and he knows we know he's there. He's both the best and worst argument about hellbanning as an effective form of moderation.
Long, but worth the read.
Actually just go through the his submission history and randomly click a few links: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=losethos
You can actually see his condition gradually getting worse over months and years. I wonder if he would have turned out differently had we embraced him - and helped him?
This is one of the reasons why hellbanning is such a bad idea, leaving the poster to believe that everybody is actively ignoring him instead of just not being able to see him/interact with him.
Making regular healthy people waste a lot of their time posting content and feeling totally ignored is bad enough, subjecting people with mental health issues to that is even more unethical.
I'm offended by the thought and the idea that we should just ignore our ill. What if the person suffering from the mental illness was your brother or sister? Think about if it was you, and no-one reached out to you - how would you feel?
If a person does not go out of their way to do the things you listed, I do not consider that a moral failing on their part. Especially if the cost to them is more than the benefit to the other person.
If you keep jumping on bullets, sooner or later you run out of flesh.
It should be blatantly obvious that, were the situation different, I'd feel differently.
Not everything is a moral crusade, Internet warrior.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ramble. I have no criticism or suggestions to offer, just vague frustration and helplessness. But it does frustrate me, it's something that's been on my mind a lot of times, so thanks for the opportunity to say it, FWIW.
read it.
I think people are taking this the wrong way. A psychopath is not someone who is suffering a heavy mental disability who you should hug and comfort. Whether the personality type is a disorder or an innate talent/ability is up for debate.
A psychopath is a cold calculating personality type unburdened by empathy and certain emotions. These types of people are generally portrayed as super human by hollywood. Classic example: James Bond.
> Whether the personality type is a disorder or an innate talent/ability is up for debate.
Well, if it's the inability to feel empathy, remorse, and other things, shouldn't that be obvious? For me it's not a special talent of a dead person that they don't have to eat, or of Eliza that it's not really sentient. That lack in one area can lead to overcompensation in other areas still doesn't make it a special talent, it's just the expected result of practice. Everybody can be cold or calculating - to my understanding the the difference between that and a psychopath is the ability to NOT be cold and calculating. If being calculating is all that's on your palette, you get real good at it. This is my non-educated guess, anyway.
At any rate, you misread my comment, read it again, taking the post it's in reply to into account :)
When people stop providing value and start requiring value instead, their perceived societal value drops dramatically. In a way it's completely logical, but it's also really heartless.
AFAIK some of his comments are auto-generated. Markov chains from the bible.
To me, that seems to be the hallmark difference between hypomania and "real" mania, and what makes the latter more dangerous and scary-- the loss of insight into the condition, or that there even is anything amiss.
It hasn't reoccurred, but i'm now very aware that what I experience as reality is completely subjective to how my brain is functioning. Anything I experience right now could be a different version of reality. But at the same time, now that i'm aware it has happened, I can keep that in mind and consider it in the future. I have to believe that different forms of mental illness allow for the same kind of self-awareness, but it depends entirely on what parts of their brain are functioning (like if they can control their emotions and think clearly, which is hard enough for "sane" individuals already)
This is a big part of why schizophrenia is so hard to treat. With other disorders like OCD, patients generally do know they are unwell and are willing to accept treatment to improve it. With schizophrenia, patients are often rigidly convinced they are already healthy and refuse to be treated. They are incapable of understanding that they have an illness.
There's a big difference between the three. The first, the ones who know and care about it - you probably won't even notice he/she is suffering from it, unless they tell you. The others.. yeah.
Source: used to be a med student and a trained hospital sitter.
I had a schizophrenic guy send me regular e-mails for about two months. For reasons still unknown to me, he decided that I was the one person in the world that he could trust.
The first e-mail was very short and looked like spam. It was a brief note about how the death of some professional wrestler wasn't an accident. Then they got longer and longer, and finally he started writing his messages out by hand, scanning them, and e-mailing me the scans.
This revealed something really interesting. He was scanning these things at work. He had what appeared to be a regular 9-5 office job at a large company, and he managed to keep a lid on things enough to hold down that job while writing pages and pages of paranoia to me and scanning them on the office multifunction machine.
The most interesting/amusing/sad part of all of this was a single handwritten page sent a day or two after one of the multi-page manifestos. It said, paraphrased, "I screwed up when I sent you that last e-mail. After I scanned the note, I tore it up as I always do, but this time I wore my glasses. I believe they read it." Evidently, this fellow believed he was under such pervasive surveillance that they (whoever they were) could see things through his own glasses. The elaborate procedures he went through to send me notes were apparently worked out to circumvent this stuff, but they required good operational discipline which he couldn't always handle. Or something like that! It clearly made perfect sense to him.
After a couple of months, I tracked the guy down with the help of some friends and got in touch with the local police so they could check on the guy, as he was clearly getting worse and I didn't think he'd be safe. I didn't hear anything after that until a couple of months later when a brief e-mail arrived from a relative that basically said, "Sorry about him hassling you, he's back on his meds now."
So, a happy ending, I guess. And certainly one of the most interesting things that's happened to me online.
This story makes me think of the portrayal of John Nash in a beautiful mind.
>"Sorry about him hassling you, he's back on his meds now."
and not
>"Sorry about me hassling you, I'm back on my meds now."
And maybe you shouldn't be so offhandedly judgmental. I actually called a suicide hotline in the area first (the only mental health service I could come up with) and, after I convinced them that I wasn't suicidal, it was their suggestion to contact the police.
But yes, I guess it was terrible that this poor guy got help and got his life back on track.
Comments like this show exactly how poorly our culture handles mental illness. Imagine if someone had said, "It boggles my mind how anyone can be deaf while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch."
He isn't stupid, he's schizophrenic. Aside from his disease, all of his other faculties are as fine as yours and mine.
Schizoprenia on the other hand impacts the exact same faculty that is the most important one for programming, the brain. I don't think it's ignorant to be fascinated over how his illness so severly impacts his though processes while writing (and living), but apparently not while coding.
This is especially true when he is in racist mode, unfortunately.
I hope there is some way he can get help.
Like many other mental disorders, schizophrenics alternate between total detachment and relative sanity. Also, many schizophrenics maintain their full intellectual horsepower even when affected.
Schizophrenics can also go into remission late in life (after 50) and reach a point where, at least with medication, they're relatively unaffected. Spontaneous remission isn't common with SZ but it does happen.