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Update on My Situation

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Re: Update on My Situation

#131

Post by Viliam1234 »

glial wrote: post #105
mindfulhack wrote: post #60

> At this point I think maintaining anonymity is a losing battle. > I may start my own private practice, where I’m my own boss and where I can focus on medication management – and not the kinds of psychotherapy that I’m most worried are ethically incompatible with being a public figure. This is why privacy is important - to maintain boundaries between different parts of your life, like work and personal. We are all c…

I wish people downvoting you would explain why. Your comment seems eminently reasonable to me, but there are no replies to it.

I didn't vote (I don't even see the downvote button, not sure why), but the argument about "capitalism" is nonsense. The author obviously has no idea how people were treated in socialism. (Spoiler: exactly the same.)

The main reason we treat people as 1-dimensional is because we interact with many people, and can only deeply care about few. Dunbar's number, etc. The alternative is spending your entire life with only a few dozen people, like in a medieval village or something. This is why we have friends and relatives, who care about us in a complex way, and the rest of the world, which only perceives a selected part.

Yes, everyone needs a friend. No, everyone can't be everyone's friend. This is not about capitalism, it is about existentialism.

Re: Update on My Situation

#132

Post by BlueTemplar »

pas wrote: post #127
edbob wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If cancel culture is causing him problems, then Patreon is the last place he wants to be.

Why? He's not selling sex, and I haven't heard anything that they don't want to host.

Several Alt-righters have been kicked off Patreon.

Re: Update on My Situation

#133

Post by bjl »

acituan wrote: post #32

Good psychiatrists who can also do therapy are worth their weight in gold. I think this is a huge loss for anyone that made and could make use of his psychotherapy. It would have also been a loss for the rest of the world to not make use of his writing. Either way this made the world a worse place. Thus is the banality of evil.

Well, if I was black I'd probably like to know if my psychiatrist associated with HBD cranks. Or if I was a woman, I'd want to know if my psychiatrist wrote apologia for incels. And that's just two examples of the countless absurd hot takes hes had over the years.

Siskind dug his own grave here, and the NYT has done his patients a huge service.

Re: Update on My Situation

#134

Post by DanBC »

stevenwliao wrote: post #12

So the lesson for those who maintain anonymous or pseudo-anonymous identities online- As your pseudonym's popularity grows, chances increase that someone will be interested in unmasking your identity. The only solutions are to reduce your pseudonym's visibility or staying fully anonymous in the first place.

> The only solutions are to reduce your pseudonym's visibility or staying fully anonymous in the first place.

Or maybe don't use a super secret identity that includes most of your real name, and your job, and where you work?

Re: Update on My Situation

#135

Post by DanBC »

Barrin92 wrote: post #48
sillysaurusx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah. Thank you! That’s an entirely reasonable theory that fits the data. I didn’t realize he blogged about his patients. Do you happen to know of any examples of articles he published along those lines? Now I’m curious what he said...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/12/34/ here's one, I don't know if he put that preface on all of them, apparently he fictionalises them and mixes them up.

Just for clarity: In England that would be professional misconduct and something for his employer, and his professional regulator, to look at.

Re: Update on My Situation

#136

Post by dragonsngoblins »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #23
canjobear wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His new practice will be medication management, not psychotherapy.

When people go this route, do they still see or talk to another therapist? I always figured people's chemical imbalances were influenced by behavior. If you just treat the chemical imbalance without addressing the behavior, isn't that rather risky?

It is really a case by case thing. I have ADD but with chemical treatment I'm basically fine and don't need other intervention. I go in to see someone a few times a year to get another prescription but I didn't really need any cognitive psych stuff.

All the "behavioral" problems I may have had were largely caused by the underlying imbalance and just stopped once I was on it. Or at least, stopped enough that they are no longer a problem for me, and I think really once a behavior isn't causing issues in your life it is probably hard to classify it as a "problem"

Re: Update on My Situation

#137

Post by mindfulhack »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #131
glial wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people downvoting you would explain why. Your comment seems eminently reasonable to me, but there are no replies to it.

I didn't vote (I don't even see the downvote button, not sure why), but the argument about "capitalism" is nonsense. The author obviously has no idea how people were treated in socialism. (Spoiler: exactly the same.) The main reason we treat people as 1-dimensional is because we interact with many people, and can only deeply care about few. Dunbar's number, etc. The alternative is spending your entire life with only…

Thank you for replying.

It's a shame any airing of concerns about capitalism per se trigger people so much. We need to air our concerns about the world in order to discuss and hopefully solve them together.

Your reply helped do that. I'm immediately convinced. OF course, socialism is just as much a machine too. So it's not the system, the problem is scale and 'overpopulation' relative to our evolutionary adaptation. Something for me to think about.

I appreciate the correction.

Re: Update on My Situation

#138

Post by Viliam1234 »

mindfulhack wrote: post #137
Viliam1234 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't vote (I don't even see the downvote button, not sure why), but the argument about "capitalism" is nonsense. The author obviously has no idea how people were treated in socialism. (Spoiler: exactly the same.) The main reason we treat people as 1-dimensional is because we interact with many people, and can only deeply care about few. Dunbar's number, etc. The alternative is spending your entire life with only…

Thank you for replying. It's a shame any airing of concerns about capitalism per se trigger people so much. We need to air our concerns about the world in order to discuss and hopefully solve them together. Your reply helped do that. I'm immediately convinced. OF course, socialism is just as much a machine too. So it's not the system, the problem is scale and 'overpopulation' relative to our evolutionary adaptation.…

I am happy that you found my comment somehow useful. I actually agree with lot of criticism of "capitalism", except for using the word itself, because the problems are more general than that.

Marx made a lot of criticism of capitalism, and a lot of it is valid. (He underestimated the possibility of huge technological progress, but let's ignore this for the moment.) The problem was not with criticism, but with the proposed solution; the entire plan could be simply summarized as "1: socialist revolution; 2: ???; 3: all problems gone".

And it turned out, you can organize a successful socialist revolution, but the problems will stay, and often get worse. Now you don't have a capitalist competing against a capitalist, but a politician competing against a politician. The workers are no longer exploited by private factories, they are exploited by state-owned factories instead. You are no longer afraid of losing your job and starving to death; you are afraid of men in dark coats knocking on your door after midnight. Your kids don't go to university not because they can't afford to pay tuition, but because they said a politically incorrect joke and someone reported them. (Not all things are the same: you probably get universal healthcare and free education, which is nice, but also universal censorship and ban on everything that was not approved by your political superiors, which sucks.) But this is even more general than politics.

The best text I know written about this problem is: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

The second best is the first noble truth of Buddhism: "It sucks to be born, it sucks to become old, it sucks to get sick, it sucks to die; it sucks to not get what you want, it sucks to get what you don't want; briefly, everything you see sucks." (You can make some people applaud if you add "...in capitalism" after each clause, but that just offers a fake hope.)

To really improve the world requires solving ten thousand independent problems. That is a lot of hard work. If only it was so simple that you merely need to abolish "capitalism" and then live happily ever after...

Re: Update on My Situation

#139

Post by bargl »

joshuamorton wrote: post #68
bargl wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK I said I wasn't going to lurk, but I have a problem. Blacklisting isn't cancel culture, I don't understand how it equates at all. I think, we're talking past each-other a bit here just because cancel culture can be hard to define. It's defined by some as boycotting like "cancel Netflix". It'd defined by others as canceling an individual like "this person tweeted about XYZ when they were 17 fire them." It can also…

Can you give examples of what you consider cancellation and not? For examples is Scott Alexander, a well known blogger, having is full name (which is only sort of a secret) posted "cancellation" in your eyes? I think the issue may be that you're defining cancel culture in a way that's very different than what most people in general, and in this thread, do. That's not wholly your fault, but it does mean that the conve…

>I think the issue may be that you're defining cancel culture in a way that's very different than what most people in general, and in this thread, do. That's not wholly your fault, but it does mean that the conversation probably won't be fruitful.

Just to be clear, I'm using a definition that I did not come up with on my own. Cancel culture doesn't have one definition. I linked a video where T1J kinda covers this. He's not a definitive source, but at least two people are confused by this definition.

Examples => I've got to google it. The best example I can think of was the lady who got on the flight and when she landed she didn't have a job. Her tweet was taken out of context, and while made in poor taste still.... kinda lame.

Other examples would be the google memo guy (kind of a reverse order firing iirc), the maga hat kid, the lady from brookfield zoo, and the manager at Chipotle off the top of my head.

Google some examples of this. Should you post stupid things to Facebook/Twitter? No you shouldn't. Should you get fired for it? I'd lean to the no side more than most people I'd guess. I think free speech is important, but companies have the right to fire people.

Is it the end of the world? In most mild cases, not so much. But there are some more extreme cases where there are much more long lasting effects to people. We don't typically hear about it unless the cancellation is something that was taken out of context and some people feel bad for the person being canceled. A lot of times it's just someone getting fired.

Re: Update on My Situation

#140

Post by joshuamorton »

bargl wrote: post #139
joshuamorton wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give examples of what you consider cancellation and not? For examples is Scott Alexander, a well known blogger, having is full name (which is only sort of a secret) posted "cancellation" in your eyes? I think the issue may be that you're defining cancel culture in a way that's very different than what most people in general, and in this thread, do. That's not wholly your fault, but it does mean that the conve…

>I think the issue may be that you're defining cancel culture in a way that's very different than what most people in general, and in this thread, do. That's not wholly your fault, but it does mean that the conversation probably won't be fruitful. Just to be clear, I'm using a definition that I did not come up with on my own. Cancel culture doesn't have one definition. I linked a video where T1J kinda covers this. He…

> The best example I can think of was the lady who got on the flight and when she landed she didn't have a job.

That's Justine Sacco.

> Other examples would be the google memo guy (kind of a reverse order firing iirc)

I (as a firsthand account) argue that Damore had ample opportunity to contextualize his comments, so I'd disagree that this meets your definition, although there's been so much misleading information since that it's an easy mistake to make.

> the maga hat kid

Sure. Although there's an argument that he was able to control the narrative eventually. At this point in time the prevailing narrative is that he was libeled by the media, even though legally speaking, that's probably false.

> lady from brookfield zoo

I honestly can't figure out what you mean. There's a 2019 story about an old lady who crashed her car and may have lost her license? I can't find enough information on this to see why it would be an instance of cancellation.

> manager at Chipotle

Ok, sort of. I mean she was able to recontextualize the situation and was offered her job back the same week.

This is sort of why the sky is falling concerns about cancellation don't resonate with me. The definition you picked is, I'd argue one that frames cancellation as an objectively unfair thing. And one that is concerning even when it ultimately makes the right choice.

But the examples you gave don't really meet that objectively bad definition.

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