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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

#161

Post by taneq »

pseudalopex wrote: post #145
taneq wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Phobic literally means fear, from the ancient Greek 'phobos', meaning... fear.

It's used for things (like hydrophobic molecules) that avoid other things (in this case water) as if they fear them.

Unless we're doing one of those "literally literally means figuratively" things here in which case... meh?

Just to be crystal clear here, I'm not saying we don't have groups who are anti-X for whatever value of X. I'm saying that recasting (and often miscasting) that antipathy as (maybe masked) fear is counterproductive.

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

#162

Post by 99_00 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #128

Article: "diagnosing people from afar is a bad idea" ( diagnoses people from afar ) Reason that diagnosis from afar is illegitimate isn't just that you don't have enough information (but there's that). Just as important is that "real", official, mental health diagnoses generally don't make sense without the context that a given person isn't functioning in society, has violated some institutional norm, etc. The role o…

>But one of them had publicly declared a few months earlier that they have “dissociative identity disorder”, DID.

The specific person they are talking about declared the diagnosis they received.

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

#163

Post by giantrobot »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #75
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…

Yes, there's a feedback loop, same as with alcoholism. It's nice and good to consider alcoholism a disease, but there's a point where the not yet completely dependent person should say "It's not even 4 o'clock yet and there's no social reason, what am I doing with this can of beer?"

> but there's a point where the not yet completely dependent person should say "It's not even 4 o'clock yet and there's no social reason, what am I doing with this can of beer?"

Alcoholism is a mental illness and can have comorbidity with other mental issues. For many the answer to your "why am I holding this beer" is "I don't want to feel". But the alcoholic (not in any sort of recovery) never gets to the self reflection where they ask themselves why they have the beer.

Like many mental illnesses, the inability to have agency over certain thoughts or thought process is what make it an illness. Alcoholism and other addictions are not typically something people reason themselves into with compelling arguments and a cost-benefit analysis.

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

#164

Post by 99_00 »

stevenicr wrote: post #98

How fast can an algorithm be put together to find evidence of mental health issues via social media posts and then trigger a waterfall of rights removals? It could be easy to argue that society may be better off without those folks having rights. Flagged as mental - - loose free speech - blocked from posting on networks, email capabilities removed via isps, library and cell phone companies. - Flagged so can not purch…

It wouldn't happen because it would not serve any establishment, elite, or entrenched group's interests.

Unless the mental health algorithm was cover for flagging political opponents. But there wouldn't be any support for such a system. Mental health has a problem with having too low a profile, not too high. So there isn't motivation to do this.

Labeling opposing political groups as scary extremists is easy, gets public support, time tested.

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

#165

Post by bawolff »

chrismeller wrote: post #10

This is one of the main reasons I feel like the current culture of never disagreeing with anyone so you can never possibly offend anyone is ultimately toxic. As a person with (currently treated and doing fine) psychological issues I don’t expect any single comment to get through to you, but if there are never any negative indicators that you are the problem, rather than everyone else… there is a mathematically insign…

The internet though is a terrible place to take personal advice to heart.

Imagine taking the youtube comments on a video to heart. shudder

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

#166

Post by bawolff »

rmellow wrote: post #89
darkerside wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you may not realize is, some people literally don't know how to do that, or that it's even something anyone would ever do. If you dropped into an alien culture, you'd need to learn a new raft of different signals all over again.

Hi, immigrant here. I'm literally an "alien" from/in this planet. Canadians are very nice, but their famous agreeableness (and passive-agressiveness) often prevents me from realizing when I've committed a transgression, and makes it so much harder to integrate into the culture. Negative feedback is very useful and I would be grateful to get it instead of receiving a veiled response.

As a canadian, sorry about that ;)

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

#167

Post by ChainOfFools »

shard wrote: post #160
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…

As someone who was on Usenet regularly until the mid 2000's, I don't think it was the trolls that killed Usenet. They were easy enough to ignore. The younger generations simply never found it, as the WWW forums were much easier to find and grew more popular. For the two dozen or so groups I visited regularly, over time they became the playground of only the old guards, and conversation slowly died out.

> They were easy enough to ignore

not the skilled ones [0], who though rare are, unlike the usenet days, now able to command their own private upvote brigade to amplify their powers significantly beyond the scope of whatever particular forum or network they call home. trolling has gone pro.

" The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. "

[0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/troll.html

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

#168

Post by HarryHirsch »

giantrobot wrote: post #163
HarryHirsch wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there's a feedback loop, same as with alcoholism. It's nice and good to consider alcoholism a disease, but there's a point where the not yet completely dependent person should say "It's not even 4 o'clock yet and there's no social reason, what am I doing with this can of beer?"

> but there's a point where the not yet completely dependent person should say "It's not even 4 o'clock yet and there's no social reason, what am I doing with this can of beer?" Alcoholism is a mental illness and can have comorbidity with other mental issues. For many the answer to your "why am I holding this beer" is "I don't want to feel". But the alcoholic (not in any sort of recovery) never gets to the self refle…

Sure, many people self-medicate with alcohol, it's a GABA agonist and works for anxiety. But people don't live in a vacuum, there'll be reactions from family members and friends to their excessive consumption. It's not that people reason themselves into alcoholism, but a good number do recognize that they have a problem by the time the wife has had enough.

It's the same thing with intrusive thoughts - medication plus cognitive-behavioural therapy works best, that condition is something that you can reason yourself out of when you recognize the signs quickly enough.

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

#169

Post by bawolff »

3grdlurker wrote: post #28
chrismeller wrote: post #10

This is one of the main reasons I feel like the current culture of never disagreeing with anyone so you can never possibly offend anyone is ultimately toxic. As a person with (currently treated and doing fine) psychological issues I don’t expect any single comment to get through to you, but if there are never any negative indicators that you are the problem, rather than everyone else… there is a mathematically insign…

> the current culture of never disagreeing with anyone so you can never possibly offend anyone I'm not sure what you're talking about--I wonder if this is just your extremely subjective experience of the internet? Because I thought that the internet lately has been nothing but disagreement.

Its just a way people whine about others disagreeing with them when they can't back themselves up.

The statement seems a priori false, since people cant both be disagreeing with you, and also be against people disagreeing.

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

#170

Post by faeriechangling »

wpietri wrote: post #153
faeriechangling wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 behavio…

Well that's certainly one take. I strongly disagree with your notion that the book defines abuse so broadly that anybody could meet the criteria. As I read it, the book doesn't apply to most people; I'd say it only matches a handful of people I've met in my life. I think the rest of your characterizations are also basically incorrect and unfair, and in ways that I don't see it as worth my time to dispute in detail. I…

I certainly did, it's the top result searching for pdf.

You can interpret the book as to deeming virtually anybody you think as either meeting or not meeting the criteria similar to a horoscope. The star signs being "Mr. Right" or "Mr. Sensitive" and "Drill Sargent" etc etc.

I could very trivially make the case that the author very clearly meets his own "Mr. Right" stereotype and thus is an abuser. He considers himself an authority on mental illness and substance abuse with no relevant training, sees the world as a huge classroom, he twists others statements to make them sound absurd, he switches to his voice of truth and speaks definitively, he seems to enjoy straightening out people in front of others to the point of remarking on constant conversations where he outwitted various men, and he says bad things about men to other people.

In fact by disagreeing with me you're a little "Mr. Right". I'm also "Mr. Right". None of us can ever be rehabilitated and all of us just need to be escaped from. We're all doing this because we think we can get away with it.

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