Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels • Hacker News Board

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#431

Post by giingyui » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:48 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #424

giingyui wrote: post #303

It’s surprising that this article doesn’t mention LGBT or disabilities at all. The same effect extends to those two. And, in the same vein, it’s females “buying” it. “…between 19% and 22% of women aged 18 to 25 identify as bi.” https://nypost.com/2023/04/18/gen-z-women-identify-as-bisexu...

Why would it be unrealistic for 20% of women to like women too at least somewhat? It is not stigmatized anymore. And statistically, males are more more dangerous partly due to strength and partly due to ideologies they sign up for. So, a woman a little attracted to other woman has more motivation to admit it. The phenomenon of men having sex relationships with other men in male only environments (jail, army) existed…

What happens in prison and the army is not generally consensual.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#432

Post by vladms » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:52 PM UTC

rikroots wrote: post #354

vladms wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad it somehow worked out for you. I find it very sad though that you felt somehow "guilty" (based on "selfish malformations in my personality and social skills"), which I would see as a toxic society pressure. Not sure how, since as long as I can remember I thought all people are different, so it's just about finding some that you like and that can also accept you. I don't want to force my quirks and preferences on…

Developmental prosopagnosia wasn't recognised as a "thing" before the late 2000s. Before that, everybody assumed that being able to recognise someone was just something everyone, well, did. Failure to recognise a friend or relative in the street was seen as an affront, or a deliberate snub. Failure to recognise famous people in films or on the TV was something to be ridiculed. Prosopagnosiacs quickly learn coping str…

> It is amazing how upset even the most decent and understanding of people can get when they feel you've slighted them in some way.

I personally think that shows hidden issues in said people - at least that they take things too personally and do not have some emotion control. It can be horrible for the people they get upset on, but there are many reasons why this can happen even without considering prosopagnosia. Me personally I think 90% of the times I am the one noticing people I know on the street. I never got upset and just think that most people are absentminded or tired to check people (I lived mostly in medium/big cities so it gets tiring).

I definitely don't blame you or the condition, but the social construct that makes you wonder if you are not a reasonable person if you do something "different". I would hope in a civilized society, the instinct should be to wonder why something happens and try to understand (ofc there are always assholes, but hopefully not the majority). Screaming/blame/ridicule make me wonder if there is not some structural issue...

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#433

Post by Retric » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 4:10 PM UTC

pseudalopex wrote: post #428

Retric wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no clear line between depressed and not There’s a meaningful line in the sand for treatments with major side effects. CBT therapy may be “fine” for normal people, but the most effective treatment for depression is ECT which has major side effects. Including a ~1 in 50k chance of death. Saying something is a bell curve distribution is an approximation, it doesn’t mean there’s actually a continuous function o…

When to resort to ECT is a subjective decision of doctor and patient. It is clear it should come after other treatments failed. But there is no clear line.

Everything is subjective at the margins, but that’s ignoring the clear cut examples where it’s not going to be considered.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#434

Post by HK-NC » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

seethedeaduu wrote: post #371

EGreg wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word “disorder” is loaded, but it is interesting to also look through the lens of the Social Theory of Disability. For the rise in diagnoses for autism, ADD, gender dysphoria, eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia etc. Just as we now view the historical labeling of women as suffering from “hysteria” as a systemic failure, not a personal pathology, we should interrogate whether current diagnostic regi…

> Generations identifying as trans: Is this surprising? 20 years ago in many parts of the world the only way to survive as a trans person was through prostitution. You would be forced to live as an outcast, far away from "normal people". There were barely any legal protections, you could often not change your legal sex, finding any information about what this is or its treatments (not a fetish, something that million…

Why is this specific thing completely unquestionable for self diagnosis without any kind of test? It seems to be treated as if no child could possibly feel slightly less than the ideal representation of their sex and end up embracing the trans identity just like someone might embrace ADHD or autism because of some minor common personality trait. The difference being one annoyingly reminds people theyre ADHD every time they do something untoward, and the other could be rendered infertile due to hormones pr castration.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#435

Post by nradov » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #390

nradov wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheer up! For the average HN user, things are better now than they ever have been in human history.

Cheer up, the lake of shit you’re caged in is at its lowest level on record. Slightly more seriously, things will be on an upward trajectory until they aren’t. There are some decent reasons to think we might be nearing the peak.

That's a meaningless claim, devoid of any evidence. At most points in human history there were decent reasons to think we were near the peak. And yet with some occasional temporary valleys, average human living conditions continued to improve.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#436

Post by lordfrito » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 4:28 PM UTC

wahern wrote: post #320

dsubburam wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This parallels the debate about free will and determinism. If you were in the determinist camp, believing that all that one does was predetermined by prior environmental causes, could you still hold people responsible for their actions? Hobart makes a convincing argument that you can: "Fatalism says that my morrow is determined no matter how I struggle. This is of course a superstition. Determinism says that my morro…

Reminds me of this 1996 essay, "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died": http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/courses/psy115w/Fall02/TomWolf... TL;DR: It argues that what comes after "God is dead" (Nietzsche) is "the soul is dead" (or less poetically, "the self is dead"), i.e. we become convinced we have no agency, but mere biological and environmental automatons with the concomitant lack of moral accountability. (Credit to earljwa…

Thank you for the link. Amazing article, and 29 years old at that.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#437

Post by nradov » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 4:30 PM UTC

karohalik wrote: post #418

nradov wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're really missing the point. I'm trying to help by giving you practical, actionable advice which has worked well for other people. When it's time to leave, take the kid out the door even if that means carrying them out in the middle of a meltdown. This teaches children discipline and makes them understand that they can't get their own way by acting like spoiled brats.

Did this person ask for the advice? Also, treating children without empathy, like objects, is not the solution to the problem.

Demonstrating empathy is great but it's not a valid reason to tolerate misbehavior. And being on time for school is more important.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#438

Post by ViktorRay » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #416

imetatroll wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is simultaneously funny and sad. I wonder when alcoholism will get a front row seat during zoom meetings (or even IRL meetings). "Can't help it hick I'm an alcoholic". I think a lot of societal change these days can be summarized by the idea that self-labeling is seen as transforming something into "everyone else's problem".

Modern treatments do actually treat alcoholism like a disease. The one that cant be cured, but can be managed. It is trying to remove the shame from the equation, because it is not a productive emotion. It makes people postpone and avoid steps necessary for treatment.

Yes but the issue here is that treatments exist for alcohol use disorder and that one cannot use the simple presence of alcohol use disorder as an excuse to dodge accountability.

And yet people are using things like "time blindness" as excuses.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#439

Post by navane » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 4:46 PM UTC

jazzyjackson wrote: post #154

theusus wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely. I disagree! There was never a good support system at all. We used to just man up and live with it. Now that stress is reaching it's new heights. We can't cope with it.

I'm very curious as to how you come to the conclusion that 'stress' has increased. I don't suppose it's that the world is more stressful, WWII, cold war, a thousand famines throughout history, what makes us so stressed that we can't cope in some way that we used to be able to cope?

Most of our suffering is in our imagination (Seneca) and our imaginative lives have never been as big as today. The world we think we live in has never been as big. The lives we think we could live have never been as many. The bad things that could happen to us are so much more plentyful and destructive than the bad things that do.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#440

Post by DisruptiveDave » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 4:46 PM UTC

pseudalopex wrote: post #405

rf15 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those who see and believe that there's a label to parts of them can easily believe that they're "helpless", and "that's just the way I am"

Those who do not see or do not believe a label can easily believe that's just the way they are. Those who see and believe a label can easily use it to identify what they can do to help themselves.

the ol' "name and tame"