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I would like closure, but I'll take honesty

freddiedeboer.substack.com

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Re: I would like closure, but I'll take honesty

#91

Post by pasabagi »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #85
pasabagi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if this is true. I've had a couple of friends go through manic episodes, and while I very much did not enjoy it, there's a world of difference between them in normal-mode, and manic-mode, and I don't think I trust them less as a result. Maybe it would be different if violence was involved - but I don't think that's very common.

The critical thing is that you're aware that your friend in normal-mode will do different things than your friend in manic-mode. The default assumption is that people have various levels of predictability and trustworthiness in normal mode; learning that someone made a terrible choice once means that their morality and wisdom is not what you thought it was, or at least the variance is extremely high. People with bipo…

I think the first time around, mania kind of creeped in - everybody got sort of frog-boiled by a set of progressively more weird ideas and behaviours that all built up on eachother so it wasn't totally obvious that it was all nuts, until it got really extreme. Now, though, I like to think I'd see it coming a mile off.

In general, I think trust is the wrong rubric for living with humans. It's better to have faith. In reality, people make horrible decisions and do monstrous things all the time, especially neurotypical people, and if you can only trust people who will not make terrible choices, you should trust no-one. History proves that the vast majority of people, in the right circumstances, will do astonishing and awful things.

It makes more sense to treat it as a moral good in and of itself to trust other people, no matter if they let you down or not. That's the key insight of having faith in the people around you. Maybe they will let you down, maybe they won't, but suffering for an overabundance of faith is a worthwhile kind of suffering.

Re: I would like closure, but I'll take honesty

#92

Post by johncolanduoni »

licebmi__at__ wrote: post #89
chrsig wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we as a society have determined that intent matters -- which is why we have the concept of manslaughter vs murder. It's a hard thing to accept, but if you're wronged by someone in a state of psychosis, there is no true malice. Does it change everything? Certainly not. Change in trust in particular is a hard thing to determine here. You should trust that they're experiencing what they say they are. You should…

I’m not talking about behavior nor judgment of him as a person, I know morality tends to equate this, but I don’t consider it to be the case. I just mean that I wouldn’t trust somebody who tends to lie because of mental illness, the same way I wouldn’t trust somebody without preparation to talk about theoretical physics.

The lies of a con man or an uninformed person are generally pretty distinguishable from the lies of a psychotic or manic person, especially in long form writing (isolated tweets are another matter). And for the type of writing deBoer does, which is quite well-sourced whenever he is making factual claims, I think dismissing it because he has a mental illness is kind of silly. Honestly I’ll take a bias of disorganized thought that is likely to be easier to detect over an ideologically motivated bias any day, and we certainly don’t prevent anyone from being published for the latter.

Re: I would like closure, but I'll take honesty

#93

Post by tptacek »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #86
tptacek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

deBoer isn't schizophrenic. Again: the counterfactual proposed here isn't useful.

The psychosis that schizophrenic people experience and that of bipolar people is not treated as two separate “kinds” of psychosis by medical professionals. They are treated with exact same medications. We even have a specific disorder name for people whose mental illness includes the overlapping features of both (schizoaffective). So I don’t think you can move the goalposts away from “schizophrenic people can’t inten…

I didn't say anything about what people with schizophrenia can or can't do. Please don't put quotes around things I didn't say when responding to me.

Re: I would like closure, but I'll take honesty

#94

Post by kayodelycaon »

tptacek wrote: post #82
johncolanduoni wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re woefully uninformed about the nature of psychosis. Schizophrenic people are fully capable of telling intentional lies to combat a perceived threat, even when they are imagining that threat due to psychosis. Even for someone schizophrenic, not all psychosis is so dissociative as to not have a goal-oriented thought process at all.

deBoer isn't schizophrenic. Again: the counterfactual proposed here isn't useful.

Bipolar mania often comes with psychosis. The paranoia the author writes about is a classic symptom of both mania and schizophrenia.

Re: I would like closure, but I'll take honesty

#95

Post by pdonis »

watwut wrote: post #81
unreal37 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, "To those of you who are not people I harmed in my psychotic episode in August 2017… what is it you think I owe you?" There seems to be this tendency that people who only learned about something 5 minutes ago get outrage and demand retribution. Like it's a reflex. The mob has vigilante tendencies. Let's go write an email to someone's employer and demand that they fire them. Millions of people band together and…

The original victim seems to be pissed on author for making himself victim now and for not going away from his life as he promised. Some of the angry people have been there whole time and are actually the ones having to deal with it.

> The original victim seems to be pissed

He does? I'm not seeing that in any of the posts by Malcolm Harris that have been referenced in this thread.

Re: I would like closure, but I'll take honesty

#96

Post by johncolanduoni »

tptacek wrote: post #93
johncolanduoni wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The psychosis that schizophrenic people experience and that of bipolar people is not treated as two separate “kinds” of psychosis by medical professionals. They are treated with exact same medications. We even have a specific disorder name for people whose mental illness includes the overlapping features of both (schizoaffective). So I don’t think you can move the goalposts away from “schizophrenic people can’t inten…

I didn't say anything about what people with schizophrenia can or can't do. Please don't put quotes around things I didn't say when responding to me.

Perhaps I misunderstood you, but I think the claims you made were quite clear. In response to the suggestion of the schizophrenia counterfactual, you wrote precisely:

> I don't have to consider that counterfactual, since deBoer himself stated clearly that he knew the accusations he was making were false at the time he made them

My understanding of that was that you saw the fact that “ clearly that he knew the accusations he was making were false at the time he made them” as a reason to disregard the counterfactual. Can you explain what you meant by that other than the suggestion that the latter half of that sentence was sufficiently inconsistent with schizophrenia as to render the comparison meaningless?

I apologize for using quotes to distinguish the view I was referring to from the rest of the sentence. I thought it would be clear that I wasn’t quoting you since the comment I responded too was so short.

Re: I would like closure, but I'll take honesty

#97

Post by xondono »

chrsig wrote: post #74
beebmam wrote: post #27

Certainly I'd like to think there's a special place in hell for those who accuse innocent people of sexual abuse; there's not much worse that one can be accused of. Mental illness or not, there's no excuse for these kinds of false accusations. It's certainly understandable given Freddie's condition. But us understanding why it happened doesn't ethically justify their actions, and it also doesn't relieve the perpetrat…

I sincerely hope that you never find yourself having harmed someone as a result of a mental illness. > What I'd like is to simply not hear from this person in public again You're perfectly free to wear headphones in public, and stop reading anything authored by them. >Get a job, like most of the rest of us Nice ableism. Do you understand that severe mental illness can be a disability? Would you tell a person without…

While I’d not put it like GP, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to not want him to have a big platform like the NYT.

We don’t let people with severe mental disorders work with guns because they’re a risk to others. While I would not agree with having the law involved here, if he is really sorry, one would expect him to not place himself in a position where he can cause severe distress to others would he fail again to manage his illness.

> Nice ableism. Do you understand that severe mental illness can be a disability?

We are still talking about someone writing for the NYT, he is probably well able to write professionally in other fields like marketing.

Re: I would like closure, but I'll take honesty

#98

Post by pdonis »

tptacek wrote: post #48
spadros wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody in a family with bipolar I have to disagree. Someone's schizophrenic episodes should be taken into account in judging their actions, just as one's manic episodes should be as well. This in no way excuses their behavior. Whether or not you want to continue associating with that person is a different matter.

He's entitled to share his mitigating context. It may well be persuasively exculpatory for a lot of reasonable people. He goes far beyond that in this argument, suggesting that he would find dishonest any description of his misconduct that doesn't capture his full state of mind; for instance, any claim that he attempted to "cancel" Malcolm Harris.

Since a claim that he attempted to cancel Harris is a pretty strong claim about his state of mind, it would seem that omitting relevant information about his state of mind would indeed be dishonest with regard to that particular claim. Claiming that he attempted to cancel Harris is a stronger claim than just claiming that he falsely accused Harris; the latter claim does not carry any implications about his state of mind. It's even a stronger claim than claiming that he knew the accusations were false at the time he made them; that's a claim about his state of mind, yes, but it's a state of mind he's admitted to, as you point out. He has not only not admitted to attempting to cancel Harris, he has explicitly denied it and explained why that wasn't his state of mind at the time.

Re: I would like closure, but I'll take honesty

#99

Post by phkahler »

tptacek wrote: post #11

It is not, in fact, "unambiguously a lie" to relate to others deBoer's grave (and admitted, and unambiguously real) misconduct without the full context of his mental illness. People are entitled to form their own opinions about deBoer's credibility, and he is not entitled to set conditions on how they do that.

>> It is not, in fact, "unambiguously a lie" to relate to others deBoer's grave (and admitted, and unambiguously real) misconduct without the full context of his mental illness.

Coincidentally I've been discussing this very issue the past week. I asked the question "when is it lying to say something that is true?"

The example I gave someone was this: You sleep in and arrive late to work. When asked "why are you late" you respond with "traffic was terrible, there was a crash and a backup" which is actually true on that day. The statement is true, but it may in fact be a lie. If you overslept so much that you would have been late regardless of traffic then what you've said is "I'm late because of traffic" which is a lie because you would have been late regardless of traffic. Excuses are often this kind of lie. Sometimes a true statement is a partial truth, but not the larger one that is being concealed while saying it.

Another example: A friend is a therapist and someone in his office died and they're sending all the deceased clients (patients) to others in the office. They've been instructed to tell the patients that their therapist no longer works there as a reason for the change. Is that a lie? I think so even though it's technically true. They fear some people will be too upset at the truth. But IMHO therapists lie too much already and when this "lie" comes to light the clients will be even more devastated than just telling them the truth. My recommendation of course is not to follow those instructions - have some integrity.

TLDR: When is it a lie to say something that is true?

Re: I would like closure, but I'll take honesty

#100

Post by ineptech »

tptacek wrote: post #11

It is not, in fact, "unambiguously a lie" to relate to others deBoer's grave (and admitted, and unambiguously real) misconduct without the full context of his mental illness. People are entitled to form their own opinions about deBoer's credibility, and he is not entitled to set conditions on how they do that.

> People are entitled

All of them? Every single one? Wow, harsh.

I kid, of course; my point in taking your words of context is to say that context always matters. People may be "entitled" to form a negative opinion of you based on my misleading out-of-context quotation of your words, but it seems pretty unambiguous that they'd be wrong to do so.

That said, it would be nice if Freddie had been responding to a specific person, whom he quoted, so that we could tell whether he was taking them out of context.

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