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Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

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Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#141

Post by PaulHoule »

ylee wrote: post #94

Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 35 years ago when discussing online forums: >I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do. This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The n…

The spam problem started in 1993 w/ Robert McElwaine spamming all of the groups relentlessly with crackpot content from WUSTL. WUSTL did nothing for a long time because he sued them (and won) when they stopped him putting ads in the campus paper.

I developed a zero day email amplification attack and launched it on a Friday; it worked better than expected and filled the disk on their VAX and the whole campus was down until the next Tuesday.

They couldn’t prove I did it but the central computing facility found a pretence, deleted my account and gave me an empty suntape that allegedly held my files. I still had accounts at the physics and EE departments so it was not a big loss.

McElwaine was out.

The recorded history of USENET spam started in April 1994 with the law firm of Canter and Siegel and their Green Card Lottery scam. I was involved in that too and did not get in trouble for that one but anti-spam activism got me a date with the JA, trips to the Dominican Republic and Brazil, other misadventures and a lot more spam.

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#142

Post by falldmg »

slingnow wrote: post #121
falldmg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I disagree. Your critique is shallow even for it's relative prominence. The article literally opens with a counterpoint that you shouldn't generally use this as an excuse. What you said in your comment acts almost as perfect critique for itself: it sounds right, but it has zero substance. Why should anyone value a critique that says almost zero actual things about the article and instead draws a general conclusio…

Having the article state that you "shouldn't use it as an excuse" is probably about as effective as the surgeon generals warning on the side of a pack of cigarettes. What makes you believe that quick disclaimer would discredit the claim the OP is making?

This is an invalid critique of the article. It is critiquing it for something it doesn't do, now justified by the idea that people might ignore what it actually says.

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#143

Post by pseudalopex »

zepto wrote: post #19
bingidingi wrote: post #9

>About 70% of DID patients are also diagnosed with BPD, and the two conditions are often considered part of the same spectrum. >I’m certainly not saying that all trans people have personality disorders or that being trans is a mental illness. A little bit of whiplash on this one. Despite the sentence or two claiming what the author is purportedly not doing, the rest of the article seems to indicate otherwise. If you…

Lots of trans people in fact are mentally ill. Given the additional stresses and oppresive social experiences trans people face and are outspoken about , this is entirely unsurprising.

Lots of trans people have depression or anxiety disorders. Not personality disorders.[1]

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-...

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#144

Post by nullc »

The comments immediately go in to decrying anonymity. This seems precisely backwards to me: Yes, even some mentally ill persons will be less hesitant to behave abusively under their legal name. But many will not, the examples given are people who are behaving abusively in part because they've adopted the abusive conduct as an identity. They aren't ashamed of it.

Worse, a lot of the damage these people can do depends on knowing their target's identity. If some internet nutbar gets overheated in an argument and starts slandering you with random accusations but you're only known as a pseudonym then at worst you can abandon the pseudonym. But you probably don't even have to go that far: without knowing more about you its hard to make accusations that are even credible enough for an internet hate mob.

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#145

Post by pseudalopex »

taneq wrote: post #129
mcguire wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree; "homophobes" are not afraid of homosexuality.

This whole trope of recasting "anti-X" as "X-phobic" is something that really irks me. Maybe there's a group of closeted X who doth protest too much, but there's generally a much larger group of people who are just assholes to X, and trying to spin it as "they're just afraid of you" smacks too much of the old "the bullies are just jealous ". No, often it's not jealousy, it's just people being assholes to targets they…

Phobic doesn't just mean afraid. Hydrophobic molecules for example.

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#146

Post by strbean »

Y_Y wrote: post #66
sva_ wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what are the psychological issues that led you to write this comment?

DSM-IV or real? I have a number of (diagnosed and otherwise) mental illnesses. I also write Haskell for enjoyment, and help people with Linux on the internet even though it benefits me in no way. I care about mathematics and computation more than climate change and the feelings of people close to me. Is that ok?

> I also write Haskell for enjoyment

Pretty sure there is an entry in DSM-IV for that :)

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#147

Post by dotcommand »

ylee wrote: post #94

Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 35 years ago when discussing online forums: >I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do. This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The n…

What killed Usenet, IRC, etc is new technology/platforms not "irritation from a handful of people". If that was the case, facebook, reddit, twitter, etc would have died a long time ago.

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#148

Post by faeriechangling »

wpietri wrote: post #25

I"m glad to see this point made: > I’m not saying that all online bad behaviour is because of mental health issues or personality disorders: lots of people are just dickheads, and there’s no need to pathologise them. One of the important lessons I took away from a milestone book on abuse, "Why Does He Do That?" is that people really want to excuse harmful behaviors as illness. When often, repeated bad behavior happen…

So the PDF is broadly available on Google.

It's section on mental illness says that abusers are too "selfish" to put up with a medications side-effects and that they overdose on medication to strike out at his partner dramatically. The guy isn't really an expert on mental illness at all, pushes the hypothesis that abusive behavior and mental illness are distinct things, and that abuse by and large is rational behavior. The book in general defines abuse so broadly that anybody could meet the criteria if they're blunt, sarcastic, career-oriented, or simply discontinue medication. The author denies rehabilitation is possible because he deemed almost all the men he met to still be abusers when he was done treating them.

I generally don't see this book as examining the link between mental illness and abuse in any sort of balanced way, it's more a tome to persuade women that they're in an abusive relationship and their partner only abuses them because they think they can get away with it and would stop otherwise.

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#149

Post by nullc »

dang wrote: post #134
unethical_ban wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose I'll follow the rules, but I think shadowbanning is really tacky to do except in the case of actual spam. Note my name. I was shadow-banned for one sarcastic comment eight years ago, despite being an otherwise good-faith, decent contributor. Maybe things are different now, but I've never gotten over the feeling of wasting my time putting thoughts together and responding to a conversation and finding out I m…

We don't shadowban established accounts—we tell people we're banning them and why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... . That's been the case for many years. I wrote about this the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27573675 . The exceptions are spammers and serial trolls. For those we continue to use shadowbanning, for different reasons. In the case of spammers, telling them…

Thanks for your work Dang, but also specifically thank you for writing a defense of your practices. I wasn't aware that HN didn't currently shadownban established accounts-- it's a practice I thought the site still engaged in (which like the prior poster I feel is somewhere between ill-advised and unethical) so I'm thrilled to learn otherwise.

I know it takes a lot to sit down and write out a response like this over and above the work you put in to making the site a usable venue. Doing so makes a difference.

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#150

Post by pseudalopex »

derefr wrote: post #106
mioasndo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because you can't identify what's going wrong to make someone's car have unresponsive steering (the etiology), doesn't mean you can't precisely identify the car as having unresponsive steering (the symptoms.) Except in this case there is a (vague) diagnosis - something is wrong with the car's computer (psychological issues). > Psychology is just fine at recognizing symptoms (and complexes of symptoms that go t…

> You don't need psychology to recognise symptoms. Unless you're saying psychology has it's own set of symptoms and it's own terminology - which is just a truism. Psychology precisely defines syndromes (clusters of symptoms), and then, in terms of syndromes, provides both: • tests qualifying patients into those syndromes (usually in the form of various rating scales) • specific flowcharts for known-effective treatmen…

> People can have e.g. untreated ADHD all their lives, and they won't live less long or end up in the hospital more often than people without ADHD.

They will.[1]

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

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