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The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

kennethreitz.org

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Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#111

Post by erikerikson »

zemvpferreira wrote: post #4

"Schizoaffective disorder is a mental health condition that is marked by a mix of schizophrenia symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, and mood disorder symptoms, such as depression, mania and a milder form of mania called hypomania. Hallucinations involve seeing things or hearing voices that others don't observe. Delusions involve believing things that are not real or not true." I'm not sure this is an empl…

> Businesses are competitive entities, not machines for inclusion.

I think this is less true than you're stating. It has been a drum beat of the business schools though. The rich, influential, and socially active people I know are far more free and diverse than any of the working people I know. A sizable contingent of them believe society should be run to maximize everyone's ability to be productive. It's part of why there are many laws mandating so.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#112

Post by morleytj »

bradstewart wrote: post #102
morleytj wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very common to see the particular syntactic structure of restating a point in the following general manner from Claude/ChatGPT in my experience and that of others: "It's not X -- it's Y." or "This isn't just X -- It's actually Y." Usually with an emdash there as well for the separation. As I said it's very plausibly becoming more common among people not using LLM-assisted writing too, just from seeing the stylis…

Interesting, thanks. I've always been a fairly "heavy" (vs other people) user of the emdash after a high school english teacher made us use one in every paper to learn how they worked (along with a colon), and I've been a fan ever sense. The "it's not ... it's" phrasing though definitely stands out as a bit odd when repeated.

Yeah, I also tend to have heavier usage of them. I'm not exactly sure why I do though, I don't have a particular incident like yours in high school. I think I just read too many blog posts as a teenager, haha.

It is a bit of an odd repetition, right? I wonder if anyone has done analysis on usage of that construction by year.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#113

Post by dpoloncsak »

tux3 wrote: post #77
dpoloncsak wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mate, theres another blog post about how the guy stole almost $30k of fundraised money. That's not mental illness, that's behavior that we should not be welcoming in any community.

>That's not mental illness, that's behavior that we should not be welcoming in any community. No, acceptance of mental illness doesn't work if you define away anything serious as not mental illness. That's precisely the trouble the author is having, when they have a mental illness that's not just the cute idealized Tiktok version. People with well-managed schizophrenia can lead relatively normal lives. Or they can wa…

I'm sorry, I have to disagree. Why should the python community still support someone who misappropriated funds?

Others trusted him, and he proved he cannot be trusted. It's that simple, as far as I'm concerned. He knew about his mental illness, and still put himself in the position of control there. All could have been avoided

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#114

Post by rbanffy »

34nabxgyF wrote: post #9

Regarding the Python Documentary, that is just the old boys boosting their personal brands and valuations again. If you aren't part of that club, you are nothing in the Python world. It does not matter what you have done, whether you just maintained an email module throughout Python-3 or had your broken code fixed and completely rewritten by people who came later: The only thing that matters is that you have been the…

Besides that, any documentary about something as vast as the Python ecosystem will leave some people out. It's not personal - it's the nature of any work with a finite and limited scope.

Feeling attacked in these situations is a relevant issue, and, if one struggles with mental health issues but can recognize the symptoms from within, this is one of those moments when you take a step back and try to deescalate your own response, not only for the benefit of others, but for yours as well.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#115

Post by freehorse »

nemomarx wrote: post #76
freehorse wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do it after, remove all commas and newlines. Make it all a huge continuous blob of text that is hard to read. Definitely not LLM written. A lot of this here imo is just llm paranoia. I do not think the style of the author is different than their pre-llm posts. One em dash is not proof of anything imo as long as the text in general does not smell as much like llm-generated. I could be wrong because I do not in…

It's more like 4 or 5 uses of it, and some of the phrasing choices also have that vibe. Everyone's threshold for the smell will be different, of course. It seems to me like it's more effort to write something and then have an llm clean it up instead of just posting it so I mostly don't understand the behavior to start with. Why are we going through this new effort?

Until around a year or so ago, I could see and experience that I give some text of mine to an LLM and instantly it may often (not always) feel more structured and well written. I would think that using LLMs for "improving" my style made my text better. I no longer think it actually does. For one, the feeling that everything has the same style is unnerving. And we are getting more sensitive in distinguishing this kind of style, and together with the parts of it that are not actually as nice, or they are too much like polite "corpo" speech, and these stand out much more.

Who would have thought that losing individual styles would make us feel so bored.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#116

Post by tux3 »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #113
tux3 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's not mental illness, that's behavior that we should not be welcoming in any community. No, acceptance of mental illness doesn't work if you define away anything serious as not mental illness. That's precisely the trouble the author is having, when they have a mental illness that's not just the cute idealized Tiktok version. People with well-managed schizophrenia can lead relatively normal lives. Or they can wa…

I'm sorry, I have to disagree. Why should the python community still support someone who misappropriated funds? Others trusted him, and he proved he cannot be trusted. It's that simple, as far as I'm concerned. He knew about his mental illness, and still put himself in the position of control there. All could have been avoided

They shouldn't. Just like you don't have to support when a psychotic person becomes violent.

But you also can't pretend it's not part of the package. It doesn't stop being mental illness when it becomes inconvenient.

You will sometimes see people write "mental illness doesn't cause people to do this, because I have it and I don't". The truth is that most mental illnesses are on a spectrum. That includes both people who have no problem in daily life, and people who have serious problems.

It's not mental illness because we don't want to support it is not the right conclusion. It's completely backwards.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#117

Post by 0x3444ac53 »

kennethreitz wrote: post #104

FYI, I updated the post to acknowledge the public criticisms of my previous behavior: > I need to be clear about something. I'm not claiming innocence in every workplace conflict or community dispute. I've made mistakes, handled situations poorly, and there's been legitimate criticism of my behavior in some cases. The Requests 3 fundraising situation, in particular, was handled badly - I took on commitments I couldn'…

Hi Kenneth, I read through your post and the other one linked here and I want to take a moment to speak directly to you.

I also struggle with my mental health, and was diagnosed with PTSD and OCD a few years ago. Until I started treatment, and even some while in treatment, I managed to hurt a lot of people around me. I struggled to take accountability for my actions, and often felt I was being persecuted in one way or another. The world is awful, and we don't have the support systems or safety nets for those with mental health struggles that we should. Most of what I'm seeing in discussions about your actions, and what I'm getting from your post, is a lack of accountability. That said, I recognize that you're trying.

A lot of people, myself included, have struggled to learn how to take accountability for harm while still holding compassion for themselves, and that seems to be where you are. You are correct that workplaces often discriminates against people with mental illnesses, but true understanding and compassion means holding you accountable for your actions. You're more than your illness, but it's still a part of how you engage with the world and others, and is your responsibility. Obviously, I don't know why you've been let go so much, or if there was more to it then just being open about your struggles, but I wanted to give my two cents as someone who has often felt the way you speak about feeling.

Best of luck <3

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#118

Post by ModernMech »

squigz wrote: post #27
rlmcdonald wrote: post #20

All the comments here about how it's okay that he got excluded because he did the bad things fall right in line with what he's describing. Mental health awareness is easy when you just throw away all the people who make you uncomfortable! I thought it was a pretty good read and I'm not discounting it because it was written by someone struggling with mental illness.

I don't think anybody is dismissing it. But what are you suggesting? That a company should just ignore mental health issues that affect other members of the company, potentially in a very serious way?

No on is suggesting that, but at the same time, such companies offer zero ways for people experiencing a mental health crisis to heal. And maybe that's not their role, but more and more the government also is pushing people toward the private sector for their healthcare needs, so no one wants to deal with it. The choice is either hopping from job to job just to get healthcare, or homelessness. Which, if you look at who is on the streets, that's the choice many schizoaffective people are left with. It's very easy to end up on the streets when you are mentally ill; most people who are ill and manage to stay off the streets are fully supported by family.

Mentally ill people sometimes just need a good 7-8 months to get off a bad manic episode. It doesn't fit with corporate next-quarter hustle culture, and it doesn't fit with our "the private sector must monetize your misery" healthcare system. Which means they slip through the cracks, onto the streets, and everyone says "well what are we supposed to do, we've got a business to run here!"

Until of course you're stepping over them sleeping on the sidewalk your way to the office. Then it's time to send in the national guard to "clean up the streets". Which is a travesty a national failure.

What people are suggesting is there should be another option. Things don't have to be so dire.

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#119

Post by dpoloncsak »

morleytj wrote: post #112
bradstewart wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, thanks. I've always been a fairly "heavy" (vs other people) user of the emdash after a high school english teacher made us use one in every paper to learn how they worked (along with a colon), and I've been a fan ever sense. The "it's not ... it's" phrasing though definitely stands out as a bit odd when repeated.

Yeah, I also tend to have heavier usage of them. I'm not exactly sure why I do though, I don't have a particular incident like yours in high school. I think I just read too many blog posts as a teenager, haha. It is a bit of an odd repetition, right? I wonder if anyone has done analysis on usage of that construction by year.

>I wonder if anyone has done analysis on usage of that construction by year.

This just hit the front page of HN for like an hour or two today. Not that exact construction (It's not just x, -it's y) but this suggests that (English) speakers are starting to use 'AI Buzzwords' in speech. (Words like delve, intricate, etc.)

I think it's safe to extrapolate that the construction would also start to appear more often in human-written and spoken content as well, but I'm sure there's other factors at play.

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45045500 Relevant article: https://news.fsu.edu/news/education-society/2025/08/26/on-sc... Relevant paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00238

Re: The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

#120

Post by blazarquasar »

anaisbetts wrote: post #98
drcongo wrote: post #36

I was reading along with great sympathy until I got to this bit... Schizoaffective disorder carries stigma that depression and anxiety don't. People can relate to feeling sad or worried; they cannot relate to experiencing reality differently. Depression is not "feeling sad" and very much is experiencing reality differently. Flippantly calling something so horrifically painful "feeling sad" is exactly the kind of thin…

When he says "experiencing reality differently", that is meant in an extremely visceral sense - I could be extremely depressed and that is debilitating, but I will never literally see or hear other people that aren't physically there. The vast majority of people cannot relate to that experience. Most people have experienced depression or anxiety, at least at some level.

This is a very ignorant thing to say. I agree that most people cannot relate to the experience of psychotic episodes.

While prevalence IS higher for depression and anxiety, most people have not experienced depression or anxiety and will not in their life.

Lifetime prevalence of depression is 10-20% worldwide, depending on the studies. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-21243-x

Anxiety prevalence is a little higher but also not experienced by a majority. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.31887/DCNS.2015.17.3...

People that have not experienced anxiety and depression can not relate.

Depression and anxiety are not amplified version of emotions. They are not on the same spectrum.

Comparing the disorders makes no sense and only helps stigma.

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