81–90 of 203 posts
I thought this fad of building identity on labels was dying down ? I have no idea if her diagnosis is right - doesn't sound pathological/needing a diagnosis. Reading trough the article I don't feel I've gained any practical insights - just reads like someone trying to sound interesting by putting a label on themselves and explaining how it fits them.
Fascinating article. I wonder what made her do the steps in finding what's "different" with her, and most of all, why the need to fix it arose. Is it to "fit in", understandably? It somehow felt alien to me, and this shows my ignorance on the topic, that people lacking in empathy department would attempt to understand the reasons and act "good" towards others even if this feeling is only understood intellectually.
"do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is good advice and a rational strategy without emotion or empathy. The practical problem is figuring out that "others would have" something different than you would like, because they're emotional and irrational (as far as you can tell).
So when you say "good advice" I say, "it depends"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The best fit in a healthy society, I think, is doing things that others can’t, like extreme sport type of stuff, or astronaut, brain surgeon Reminds me of the Bill Burr bit on Lance Armstrong[1] > The guy was a sociopath on a bicycle. As far as I'm concerned we got off easy. If that guy was working for a corporation he would have been pouring stuff in the water supply, doing god knows what. Just keep him on the bik…
> He's not hurting anybody. Well he did insist that other members of his team also take EPO, HGH, blood transfusions (occasionally with bad blood), etc. We don't know what the long term affects of that will be but he certainly wasn't thinking of health of his staff. He also destroyed Greg LeMond's career for exposing him.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How could he be 'very rational' and also 'threaten people to become his friends'?
Hypothetically if this was rephrased as "he was very rational and threatened other children to play with him and treat him like a friend" does that make sense to you?
I thought this fad of building identity on labels was dying down ? I have no idea if her diagnosis is right - doesn't sound pathological/needing a diagnosis. Reading trough the article I don't feel I've gained any practical insights - just reads like someone trying to sound interesting by putting a label on themselves and explaining how it fits them.
I agree. We really need pop-identity-politics to die. It's like a race to find the most obscure and irrelevant form of oppression made to distract us from actual oppression.
No you're not, I am!
We all are ... unique snowflakes.
Or at least snowflakes.
Super interesting. I can recognize this behavior with people playing multiplayer games. When there are no stakes, and everything is a game, people mess around – especially when they’re bored. If it’s just a game, who cares? People with extremely low “emotional reactivity” appear unlikely to share with others (why would they, most of us share stuff for empathy - and they may not see the point - or lose out socially).…
Reading this reminds me of someone I was friends with in high school who quickly turned out to be absolutely insufferable to play any sort of cooperative game with. They would take absolutely _everything_ that could be shared, and calmly and with complete conviction explain it was better off with them. They were blind to the bigger picture of quickly having nobody who would ever play with them. Magic the Gathering at…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s easy enough to explain. I’m asexual and don’t feel sexual attraction. In fact I’m completely blind to it. I definitely noticed something was wrong with me once I started school. Since then, I am constantly reminded of that by everyone around me. They have something I’m expected to have. Just imagine if you were the weird one because you were the only person with emotions. You can’t escape it. You can’t f…
Wrong !== Different. This is by design. I can imagine all the birds in the dinosaur times felt wrong because they weren't t-rexes. Well, that's what saved them in the end. One would never know.
It's not about birds in dinosaur times though - as an analogy I mean.
It's more about a particular bird being different from others of its species of bird.
This could be an advantage to their life and acceptance (e.g. they might be too pretty or stronger) or usually a big detriment to their life and the acceptance they get from their peers.
And given that "wrong" is basically socially defined as "the opposite on the majority is like and agrees to", being different in that sense is as good as being wrong.
I’m really worried that there’s a trend to normalize narcissistic and sociopathic behavior simply because “they are self aware” There are a few ASPD, NPD or narcissist Instagram pages which are clearly sociopaths getting their attention fix by acknowledging and describing these behaviors - this isn’t the same as recovery groups or serious interventions because ASPD has been seen as impossible to treat (though that’s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what is your proposed solution? I'd rather have a sociopath that is upfront about being one to me than figuring that fact out by myself. Shunning those people from society seems like not an option to me, they are people after all. I think normalizing sociopathic behaviour is something to be worried about, but I personally don't see that happening anywhere so I am unsure what your point is.
Let's genetically profile for it, and if there's a link, screen for embryos that don't have it. This would require a bit more technological advancement of course. But imagine, a world without sociopaths! It would be the biggest generational improvement in the world in history.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
PostData: He got diagnosed as a 30 years old or so.
How could he be 'very rational' and also 'threaten people to become his friends'?
Something similar is common in victims of trauma as well. The trope is the woman with "daddy issues", which are more complex, who try to fill a void they have with sexual relationships. Instead of seeking an absent male relationship, they manipulate to get a "friendship", and are often very skilled at meticulously building this friendship, without the emotional connection that governs our behavior. They are seeking a means to an end - which may include just feeling something.
I had an acquaintance like this, who became a very scary individual as he became an older teen. I cut him out completely at 13 when I suspected he harmed a neighbor's cat.
As the author of the article stated, it doesn't make her evil. But she is dangerous, as her motivations are different her behavior is probably governed more by her executive control part of the brain, which is high labor and highly rational. "Rational" sounds great to engineers, but people make very disturbing rational decisions when they build a system of unusual assumptions.