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The unsettling truth about the ‘Mostly Harmless’ hiker

wired.com

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Re: The unsettling truth about the ‘Mostly Harmless’ hiker

#131

Post by ksdale »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #37

The article talks about his ability to be friendly to strangers but abusive to his long term acquaintances. I have observed this pattern and curious if anyone knows what drives this? My personal theory is that you have some sort of obligations to long term acquaintances but you owe nothing to strangers on the trail. It's this feeling of obligation that leads you to resent people over time.

I think there may be an element of survivorship bias at play. There's kind of a 2x2 you can draw where people can be publicly/privately kind/abusive. People who are kind all the time (or at least, not abusive all the time) are unremarkable, I'm not sure there are many people who are publicly abusive and privately kind, and people who are both publicly and privately abusive are way more likely to end up in prison, or homeless, or otherwise away from people. So that leaves us noticing the strange pattern of people who are publicly kind and privately abusive. It's like, the most remarkable pattern that's actually present for us to remark upon.

Re: The unsettling truth about the ‘Mostly Harmless’ hiker

#132

Post by jasonv »

dragonwriter wrote: post #123
bart_spoon wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps its about the DnD kid? I vaguely remember hearing about that, in the early days of DnD there was a college kid in Michigan who disappeared, and it was thought he had been in the steam tunnels under the campus as part of a DnD campaign or something. I don't remember all of the details, or if it ended up being true, but I think it kind of became a trope surrounding DnD for a while, and there was a Tom Hanks mov…

> I don’t remember all of the details, or if it ended up being true Not as far as any link between the disappearance and D&D, no: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dallas_Egbert_III#Disapp... > and there was a Tom Hanks movie about it. Mazes and Monsters , the novel and the movie, were inspired by the (false) story of the event.

Thanks! This sounds like what I had in mind.

Had no idea the movie even existed.

Re: The unsettling truth about the ‘Mostly Harmless’ hiker

#133

Post by tiborsaas »

suzzer99 wrote: post #121
johnnyb9 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote stood out for me as well, for the reason that my own depiction of a "good coder" has evolved into someone who codes a solution in the simplest way possible using the best tools, not the "hardest" or most "lit" way.

I was planning to post exactly this. Reminds me of that famous anecdote about the guy who was using different branches in the same source control repo for different functions - who everyone said was a genius but no one could figure out how to touch his code.

I have a similar story, a friend of mine had (and still has) a webdev shop and he said he has a slightly autistic programmer who is his best employee and he's a genius, nobody can understand his code.

One day they called me because at 8PM they were still at the office trying to crack a problem. After a short discussion, I suggested to use a (.*) regex to solve it, without seeing the code, that was the best I could do. Another call 30 min later, I suggested the same but on a different level. At the third call I told them that if they need to keep doing that, something is deeply flawed and they should rewrite it. No more calls came :)

I kinda see where this sentiment is coming from and it's really hard to convince people otherwise. People see movies like Rain Man and they see scientists with huge blackboards and they can't understand a thing so it must be a work of a genius.

Re: The unsettling truth about the ‘Mostly Harmless’ hiker

#134

Post by stuckindider »

deeeeplearning wrote: post #102

This stuff is disturbing. These articles read like hit pieces. The guy can't even defend himself and you have all these wild claims from supposed ex-girlfriends. It's just bizarre. Let the guy lie in peace.

It's honestly disgusting how people have made it into a game of trying to figure out who he was. Cutting him open for bone fragments. He died alone in the woods. Was there any reason to think it was caused by malace? No. Then fuck off and let him be.

Re: The unsettling truth about the ‘Mostly Harmless’ hiker

#136

Post by stuckindider »

thefurman wrote: post #52

Was he abused by his father or something? Sounds like it should be investigated further. People usually don't just become like this without a good reason.

Sounds like it none of your business. Speculating about the metal state of others and playing internet doctor is insulting.

Re: The unsettling truth about the ‘Mostly Harmless’ hiker

#137

Post by dspillett »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #37

The article talks about his ability to be friendly to strangers but abusive to his long term acquaintances. I have observed this pattern and curious if anyone knows what drives this? My personal theory is that you have some sort of obligations to long term acquaintances but you owe nothing to strangers on the trail. It's this feeling of obligation that leads you to resent people over time.

Or it could be novelty in the new people overpowering any more negative thoughts. The novelty falls off leaving the other to show through.

Re: The unsettling truth about the ‘Mostly Harmless’ hiker

#138

Post by 99_00 »

I see this story as extremely positive. Technology can bring closure to unknown number of families. Many cold cases will be solved. This is just the start.

>A genomics company, Othram, had taken his DNA and started to do cutting-edge genetic analysis to identify him. Collier County had sent them a bone fragment; they had extracted the hiker’s DNA and then begun searching for genetic similarities among people in a database called GEDmatch to build a tree of potential relatives. They learned that the hiker had Cajun roots; that his family had come from Assumption Parish, Louisiana; and that there were family members with the name Rodriguez. The founder of the company, David Mittelman, went on Facebook to talk about the case. I bought Facebook ads on my personal page to promote my story in the region of Louisiana where I thought his relatives likely lived.

Re: The unsettling truth about the ‘Mostly Harmless’ hiker

#139

Post by adamc »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #126
adamc wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might just be an HSP: https://www.amazon.com/Highly-Sensitive-Person-Thrive-Overwh... I've had this problem in many contexts. Some of it stems from childhood circumstances, but it's also that I often read people better than they seemingly know themselves, i.e., noticing anger that they don't think they have. This can cause a lot of stress.

From the about portion of that, it mostly reads like symptoms of people with Schizoid Personality Disorder or Avoidant Personality Disorder. While it can be a good survival trait in the grand scheme of things, culturally in the US it's as useful as being born poor.

It's pretty different. My kid had it, and there were some things we did early to help him study, but nothing like either of those disorders. It's more tied to very high empathy.

However, you do have to learn how to avoid taking on other people's emotional burdens.

Re: The unsettling truth about the ‘Mostly Harmless’ hiker

#140

Post by renewiltord »

throwaway56745 wrote: post #89
zerocrates wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's any indication this person was murdered, nor that there's anybody to seek justice against.

Ah, I guess that's on me for only skimming the article. Still, death is death. We shouldn't trivialize it just because the person in question wasn't a good person, which is what it felt like the GP was suggesting.

This is wholly platitudinous. There are individuals whose death is of near zero utility to me and individuals whose death is of positive utility to me even accounting for any knock-on effects of considering any human death trivial.

I know one is usually meant to just nod when people say things like "all human life matters" and "no death is anything but horrible" and all that, but it's really not true.

In fact, if I model people's actions I find that nearly everyone will nod along with those things but few people act in a manner that is consistent with that action.

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