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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

#91

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.

Welcome to Hacker News.

You're not wrong. I thought it was a good read and some awesome honesty if not also leaving some things unmentioned or undescribed. Sometimes the details matter a lot.

Let's imagine another, non-existing, person so as to clearly differentiate from the author. Said imaginary person gets violent due to socialization and a anger issues. How should the company handle an episode that leaves another employee with a broken nose and bruises? Disclosure doesn't defend a company from it's duty to protect the bodily health of that person's coworkers does it?

Most people have some mental unwellness or at least experiences they struggle to navigate or understand. Their experiences can make the problem worse and some conditions lead to behaviors that add processing load and tax their capacity to remain well. At times that exceeds a capacity to navigate and injury occurs. While invisible that injury has impact and costs. Employees have a right to not be harmed by their coworkers and a right to demand employers protect that right. I'm making that argument on a basis of common decency but there are legal liabilities to consider as well. All of this sort of thing is a distraction from the work the employer needs done.

Our world is better off to the extent we help everyone be productive and contribute at their maximal capacity. While some of the affects we have on one another are very positive, today we are struggling with how to balance the negative hard affects.

I can report leaving a really wonderful job after being socially attacked by a coworker that lost reality and falsely convinced my team that I had harmed them. Despite sharing evidence from the third party involved that it was a departure from reality, my boss decided not to help correct the problem. This has very negative impacts on my mental health, finances, marriage, and it derailed my career for a while. I probably had good standing to sue for damages. I certainly was damaged. There had been many poor behaviors from that person prior.

It is complicated and messy. As much as I appreciated it, the essay reads to me as though it minimizes the negatives. Without discounting it and while being understanding and inclusive we still need to manage impacts and the distractions those negatives create.

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

#92
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…

Youre right its not just feeling sad but relative to the extreme symptoms of Psychosis, delression is very mild by comparison

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

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind AI polishing any more than I mind somebody using a spellchecker. The article overwhelmingly reads like a (painfully) honest and personal account of what he's going through, it's not AI slop.

It's definitely not slop, but there's something kind of sad about a very personal and emotional account needing to be fed through the corpo speak grammar checker? At least in my opinion. It feels like if a friend wanted to vent to me on discord but didn't trust me enough to do it without editing their post for hours, or something.

Hah. Indeed and also this person was posting to the, on average, uncharitable Internet.

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

#94
people in states of psychosis often behave in frightening ways out of their control, and do and say hurtful things to those around them. if someone hurts you or does something very frightening, fear and anger are natural emotions.

but it’s not morally wrong to experience psychosis. so how could it be right for me to feel fear and anger towards that person when they haven’t done anything wrong? it is a tough contradiction.

you can resolve the contradiction by just deciding to hate and fear anyone who shows signs of psychosis, treat them as if it is a morally bad trait, which many people do, see discourse about homeless people in NYC.

or you can just try to pretend that psychosis doesn’t exist, which a lot of people do, like when some public figure shows obvious psychotic symptoms but people act like it’s rational behavior.

or you can disavow the fear and anger, but if a person does actually frighten and hurt you, the resulting negative feelings often tend to be expressed in weird and unfair ways. i suspect this author’s employers and doctors probably do a lot of this.

personally I think the least bad solution is to acknowledge that anger towards a person can be justified even if they’ve done nothing morally wrong, just feel anger, and express it only in controlled ways. but this is philosophically confusing, easy to state, hard to really believe deep down.

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

#95
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. If you write concise but with some panache, people will think you LLMed it. I've had the accusation leveled at me with rising frequency since ~2023. It really sucks. In a similar vein, before LLMs my friends always used to call me "the walking…

I do also get that pretty often. Also because I've always liked using hyphens and emdashes, so I get that as well. I don't know if I'd call it "vile" to notice a common pattern like the above though. But it does have a certain code smell sometimes, I often get it on Reddit posts as well.

Ah, I should have perhaps formulated it better. What I meant with vile is the sensation of having put effort in to write pleasantly only to then have the effort misattributed to a machine and to be seen like a hack.

It's as if you reaped a field by hand for the skill of it and to then have everyone's first remark be "well, you certainly know how to operate a combine. Now show me some real effort!"

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

#96
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do also get that pretty often. Also because I've always liked using hyphens and emdashes, so I get that as well. I don't know if I'd call it "vile" to notice a common pattern like the above though. But it does have a certain code smell sometimes, I often get it on Reddit posts as well.

Ah, I should have perhaps formulated it better. What I meant with vile is the sensation of having put effort in to write pleasantly only to then have the effort misattributed to a machine and to be seen like a hack. It's as if you reaped a field by hand for the skill of it and to then have everyone's first remark be "well, you certainly know how to operate a combine. Now show me some real effort!"

Ah, yeah, I understand that feeling, the sensation is very unfortunate. I feel the same!

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

#97
Many people are crazy, few are honest. Most people say they want diversity but they really don’t. But mentally ill people will trust what people say because they can’t trust their own instincts and this makes them prone to being victimized and othered, often by the systems and people that are supposed to help.

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

#98
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.

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

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. emdashes have been pretty popular among net native folks for the last 20+ years, e.g. if you were to look back at the most popular Kuro5hin stories from ~2001 - 2005, you'd see them everywhere. People just aren't used to the average person being able to write well, so it looks weird to them.

Out of curiosity, why em dashes and not en dashes? Is one easier to type in a particular keyboard layout or the default in some editor?

em dashes are for denoting emphasis, whereas en dashes are for connecting compound words or phrases.

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

#100
I have schizoaffective disorder and work in the tech industry and have not noticed any of the things this author talks about. While I am medicated, even if I inform bosses, coworkers or HR that I have this dangerous mental illness, I am treated completely normal. It is only when I have an episode of psychosis that things get difficult, and rightfully so for the people around you, because it is extremely difficult for someone to have any sort of normal relationship with someone who is psychotic and delusional. Psychosis happens when there is a failure in the healthcare. Psychosis does ruin relationships, but I don't blame other people for this. As a patient, while still in my right mind, I must insist that my healthcare needs are adequately addressed. This includes retaining a qualified doctor, setting up a medical power of attorney, reminding myself that I must take medications that work, despite the side effects, and possibly asking for reduced hours or responsibilities. It is neither everyone else's fault for the difficulties I face, nor my fault, it just is the way it, and pointing the finger at everyone else is not helpful. I am grateful for the consideration and forgiveness people do offer considering the objective circumstance.
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