This is a part of why I'm quite selective about what I post online. The major part is that I value my privacy and don't really want random people knowing everything about me. I don't want to be a public figure. I avoid Facebook and Twitter, too, so that really reduces my surface area for this type of attack.
This is a part of why I'm quite selective about what I post online. The major part is that I value my privacy and don't really want random people knowing everything about me. I don't want to be a public figure. I avoid Facebook and Twitter, too, so that really reduces my surface area for this type of attack.
From the op:
So complaining about harassment isn't just whining by sheltered nerds. The more visible and outspoken you are online, the higher the chance that a whirlwind will land on the heads of you and those you love. There is no chance of this changing in the foreseeable future. This is serious business. I am scared. Everything I do online is weighed against the risk of harassment.
So the nerds won against the schoolyard bullies. But as a result we created another kind of public space which has bullying mobs. Unthinking bullying mobs that are in denial of their own bullying and label their activities as something noble or socially/intellectually worthy.
Just about every thoughtful person I know feels effectively censored. There are certain group-minds online you can't risk angering, for fear of the consequences. These often exist as binary pairs in opposition which feed off of one another, gaining more members by mutual creation of outrage.
These phenomena need to be recognized by society. An intellectually vibrant society should shun such stultifying phenomena. However, our culturally dominant means of communication are precisely where such phenomena live, and are the places they effectively police. This ability makes them much more insidious than "hate groups" of the civil rights era.
The nerds created the new bullies, and the new bullies now shape and control the new discourse.
Facebook is honestly not that bad on this because your "friends" circle makes it harder for a post to go completely viral. Twitter on the other hand is really dangerous because you can just make a tweet which pisses off some random celebrity and face a huge backlash, this is really scary.
That's exactly why I'm afraid to tweet. If I tweeted every stupid thought that flit across my mind, then ever became famous or in the public eye, people could dig up every dumb thing I've ever said and broadcast it out of context. No thanks.
Agreed. Each tweet is like a 'sound byte' and we've seen how they can be used to twist anything by taking them out of context. 'Twitter context' is really an oxymoron.
It depends on the social groups. In some ways Facebook can be worse, because the circle it goes viral in are the people you know in real life and interact with day-to-day. I have seen people make up rumours and publish them on Facebook, with the deliberate intention of hurting and destroying the life of someone they know, just because they felt slighted. Having anonymous crazies from around the world threatening you must be scary - but I can't imagine how it would feel to have friends and the people you turn to for support stop talking to you because of an accusation they read online.
When I release a game or write something visible to the whole world, even a tiny something (Warning: Twitter counts!), I am acting as a public figure. A teeny tiny one, but a public figure nonetheless. Public figures have always received hate mail, abuse, threats, and messages from the unhinged, and they always will. Alas, the internet makes them much easier to deliver.
Very true. Years ago I sent a "letter to the editor" to the local newspaper. Nothing too controversial, just an opinion about some local politics. I received several unsigned letter in the mail over the following days, no return address, etc. and that was just from a small town community.
> ...opinion about some local politics. ... small town community.
Well, right there is actually the reason. The smaller the pond you're in, the smaller the fish you need to be to make waves. If everybody knows who you are, you can bet a couple people are going to speak up.
I'd like to point out that one's public persona can be different from ones private persona. Lots of public people use that approach, and for good reason.
There's a simple solution: Don't use real names online. That eliminates meatspace threats, if done properly. And then compartmentalize. For risky stuff, create new personas. In worst case, just burn them down.
That's not how public figures work. Influential public figures are influential largely because they are credible. Credibility requires history. Anonymity precludes history.
Take Jeff for example. Jeff has a history. Jeff is a credible game developer with an impressive development history. He's a known factor in the creative community. He's got credibility out the wazoo. As such, we give his words extra weight because of that. In an alternate universe where this article was written by internet-man-of-mystery Bleff Blogel, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion, because he would have no history to back up his points. It just wouldn't have the same impact.
A prominent example is the mastermind behind DotA, Icefrog. The public has no idea who he is despite the fact that he has been quite famous for several years.
Most people are terrible at OPSEC. If your online persona is used long enough and garners enough attention your real identity will almost certainly become known (extreme example: Ross Ubricht).
This is compounded by the fact that people tend to say things they wouldn't otherwise say if they knew they weren't anonymous.
The other issue is it's harder to capitalize on the reputation of online personas in the real world, if you care about that sort of thing.
If you don't care about reputation online or offline then just generating new identities on a regular basis could work well.
He initially used his real name for a StackExchange account, which was later linked to DPR and SR.
But you're right about downsides. If you want online personas and real world identity to be unlinked, you can't capitalize in ways that link them. But you can still capitalize in parallel. In the real world, I have no interest in privacy etc. Here, I don't draw on my real world reputation. It is sad, though, that I don't get to meet online friends, attend meetings, etc. So it goes.
> The other issue is it's harder to capitalize on the reputation of online personas in the real world, if you care about that sort of thing.
That's the trade-off, and it's why I don't sympathize too much with people who go online to get publicity, then complain about the negative attention that comes along with it.
Yeah, this is how we told to use the internet in the olden days. Don't give out personal information online, don't tell every random person your name or what you look like, realise that no one is who they seem on the internet.
Unfortunately, this means that:
Your credibility might take a hit, since people tend to be suspicious of anonymous or pseudononymous sources.
Personally? meatspace threats aren't the problem for me. Which is important, because I think that in a lot of contexts, your "real name" conveys a lot of credibility. I mean, sure, _why could write a technical book and have it be accepted without a real name, but I'm not nearly that good. I also, uh, I really like bragging about the technical book in real life, so compartmentalization would remove some of the reward I get. It would probably make me a less irritating person, too, but hey, I'm talking about me here.
The part of the article that really struck home for me:
> They all have something in common. It never fails to amaze me, but a single mean email or bad review can send them into a spiral. Like, they'll still be obsessing over it days later. I think, "Wow. After all these years, they still won't let this stuff roll off of them?" And then it happens to me.
It's largely an emotional issue... but when I create, and I think when most people create, it is for largely emotional reasons, too.
Of course, it's also, uh, well, I feel kind of embarrassed for admitting that anonymous words can make me feel anything. And it's not like I want to silence thoughtful criticism, even if it's hurtful. (I think there's a line in there somewhere; part of that line is content... how well thought-out is the meanness, and part of it is repetition.)
>Suppose someone gets angry at me for what I write. He gets a bunch of friends together and they give my games bad reviews on Steam and iTunes.
>This is really mean and genuinely harmful, and there is not a damn thing I can do about it. They will cost me earnings, and I have no recourse. They walked up, punched me in the nose, and strolled away, and I could do nothing.
which isn't something I've personally experienced, but is something I feel some fear of. Probably not as much as a real creator would feel, just because creating, for me, is almost entirely social; my living expenses come from elsewhere.
I mean, yes, I think that there is a place for a nom de plume, especially if you are working in two different areas with two different or conflicting generally accepted social mores, That helps, I think, mostly by setting expectations with your readers; It's not so much that your pen name is especially secret, but that it gives the reader an idea what to expect, and if they don't like the sort of thing you do under one particular name, well, there's a convenient way to avoid it. Ian Banks and Ian M Banks are a particularly not-secret example of this; choose the former if you like literary fiction, the later if you like science fiction, and it's pretty obvious that if you just enjoy the man's writing more than you care about genre, you can pick both.
More commonly, you see writers penning erotica under an assumed name, and then later, after they have made it with regular novels, their real name is revealed, like Anne Rice/ Anne Rampling
But... the point here is that if I'm creating for public consumption, and a big part of the return is the public reputation, then compartmentalizing, sure, can make the loss of one persona less catastrophic, but it's still a pretty big deal, and for a lot of people, changes the equation to the point where it doesn't make sense to have a public persona at all.
I notice newly famous or semi famous people ignore all of Jeff Vogel's rules. They jump in and defend themselves in every argument. Happens often in the Magic community. Guy wins tournament, guy starts writing Magic articles, guy gets upset when criticized, and guy goes crazy.
It's sort of like what happens to people who win the lottery; they have less experience as millionaires, so they make a ton of big purchases and questionable spending decisions. People who were born/grew up/made it rich more slowly tend to have more experience managing their finances and hence tend to go broke a lot less quickly/often.
The same thing tends to happen to the newly famous. They think they're invincible, get a quickly overinflated ego, respond poorly to criticism and end up under a ton of psychological pressure as a result. You can see it with people who make it big off talent shows or reality tv.
I agree that the games industry has a problem, but I think it's because they're independent developers selling a consumer product. This creates a direct sense of accountability among a large group of end users who know how to get into contact with you.
Maybe it's simply not good business to be a dev who's both acting as the face of a product and writing divisive op-eds. This practice seems unique to the games industry.
I see this article as a sign that we are slowly realising how shit some parts of the internet have become for the people who use them everyday.
There were some recent articles in big news sites about how their comments attract the worse kind of trolling and what they plan to do, or are doing, about it. Maybe a few years from now we'll have found some sort of resolution to all this but currently, we have a problem.
I would describe all people described as crazy as mentally ill, unless we're talking about "gay doesn't mean homosexual, it just means dumb", which is also bad.
I have bipolar II and definitely see it as a slur.
See, I go into hypomanic states and do things that are what you'd typically see from a "crazy" person. Buzzing my head, getting into bad financial situations, intense obsession, etc. When I do those things, I'm usually aware that what I'm doing isn't 'normal', but since the rationalizations flow pretty thick, the corrections are nearly impossible to act on. Medication helps, but everything I've tried has significant side effects that are almost as bad as the illness itself. Being called crazy, or receiving comments or looks that imply craziness rather than applying basic empathy skills... fucking sucks.
"Hah, what are you, schitzophrenic?"
"That guy's nuts"
"Why would you do that, are you insane?"
"Noise sensitivity? That's fucking weird.."
"I'm quitting because people are calling me crazy my back. It's just childish.." "What? Grow a thicker skin!"
It's out of our control and we do the best that we can to avoid the problems we have, so being called "crazy" is just another slap in the face. It effects our daily lives, our job prospects and, well, every aspect in our life. It's similar to issues of race, regligion, etc, but since it's an enormous aspect of our thought process, it's just.. different, so the social stigmas are almost incomparable. Not to mention that it has a near identical stigma to a homeless person screaming on a train. It fucking sucks.
Utterly unpersuasive. The reasoning in that Quora response means that "harasser" and "wrong" are also slurs, because the Quora response equates denigration with "slur territory".
As an ongoing fact in my life, I've noticed that (a) I use words like "crazy" in broad and insulting ways, and that (b) some people seem to complain about it. And I'm open to being persuaded that I ought to change my ways. But I haven't yet heard an argument that persuades me.
It seems to me that the whole notion of "craziness" or of "mental instability" or even "mental health issue" etc is the notion of socially-atypical behaviour that the speaker judges to be harmful or undesirable (as contrasted with "eccentric", etc). If I hear someone say "that's crazy", I assume they mean "that's weird and I disapprove". (I haven't quite nailed it down. There's a bit more nuance here, in that if someone says "that's crazy", and then someone else says "it's not crazy, it's evil", then you can imagine the first persona conceding the point... so clearly "crazy" sometimes implies a certain degree of helplessness in the bad-weirdness.)
Do you think "crazy" means something fundamentally different from this? Do you actually think it makes sense for people to stop observing that behaviours or people are atypical, or stop observing that they disapprove of particular instances of weirdness?
At this risk of going on a tangent, here's a tangent. Sometimes advocates for people with mental health issues note that it does not make sense to fear folks with mental issues, because such people are more likely to be the target of violence than the perpetrator. What a hilarious fail. I assume that it's true that such people are more likely to be the target than the perpetrator, but I don't care. I care about whether they're more likely to endanger me than an apparently-not-sane person is to endanger me. It's not some kind of zero sum game where being crazy makes a person more endangered and thereby makes them less dangerous to others than they would be if non-crazy.
As someone who's called "crazy" because of mental health issues, I use "crazy" all the time to describe things that are colloquially "out of this world". That said, I would never, ever use that word to describe another person. It's a very, very harsh word that I, and others, unfortunately hear very often. Like I said in a previous comment, it fucking sucks to hear. Usually it's from a third party telling me after the fact, which for some reason, makes it sound even worse - probably because it took a lot to get that person to even bring it up.
Sorry for the double post, I just wanted to comment on your last point.
Holy shit. Just because someone has a mental health issue doesn't mean they're violent. Everyone I know who has mental health issues are the friendliest people I know. This is the exact sort of attitude that makes issues with HR incredibly difficult. And trust me, it is unbearably difficult. I can't explain how many times and how frustrating it is to explain this to so many people. We're mostly sincerely good people, albeit, 'off'. Sorry for my brain, yo.
I don't mind the double-post, but I'll reply to both of them at once.
I have mental health issues. Nearly everyone I care about has mental health issues. Some of those issues are moderately serious problems, some are minor annoyances. It sucks having problems. I'm sad you have problems. I'm sad I have problems. I hope your problems resolve themselves, and/or you learn better coping strategies, and that life is as nice to you as possible.
But none of that changes my perspective that it's reasonable for me to characterize the world around me. And I have a limited cognitive budget. There's a whole bunch I don't know about the world, including mental illness, so I by no means assume that my model is terrific, but I still need to make choices. Y'know, I don't know if it will rain today, but I still need to decide what jacket to wear. Identifying other human behaviour as extreme is useful. Identifying other human behaviour as harmful is useful. Identifying other human behaviour as extreme-and-alarming-in-ways-that-seem-like-maybe-they're-mental-illness is useful. Knowing more would be better, but I've got a whole bunch of shit to learn, and this is seriously not my top priority. Based on all of the above, it seems to me that the only sane thing to do is sometimes identify other people's behaviour as crazy. And since I live in a city, with millions of people, most of the people I meet get an instant shallow analysis, because otherwise I wouldn't get anything done. So for my limited-cognitive-budget purposes, some people are "that crazy person". I don't know if I've never called a person "a crazy", but I don't see a problem with doing so.
To your point in this comment, I never for a moment said that "just because someone has a mental health issue, they're violent". I encourage you to read more carefully. I said that arguing about their probability of victimhood is a logical fail that does not help address fears that such-and-such a person is a threat. It has no predictive value, and will not persuade most people that have the concern in the first place.
> Based on all of the above, it seems to me that the only sane thing to do is sometimes identify other people's behaviour as crazy.
> I encourage you to read more carefully.
You should take your own advice.
Again most people in this thread have said: describing behaviours as crazy isn't the problem. Describing people as crazy is.
> but I don't see a problem with doing so
It makes you sound stupid. It makes you sound like that embarrassing racist grandparent.
It creates a culture where it's acceptable to shoot and kill people with mental illness (about half the people killed by US police each year have mental illness). It creates a culture where people with mental illness are discriminated against in the workplace. It makes it harder for people with mental illness to seek treatment.
You can call/describe People whatever personally but people will judge you on a personal level about that too.
If you are writing a piece to be published then more appropriate terminology should be used, or you get judged on more professional level along with personal level.
First about violence: You're wrong. Mental illness does not predict violent behaviour. Someone with a mental illness is not more likely to hurt you than someone without a mental illness. This is very clear from all the statistics we have. You not knowing this is a concrete example of your ignorance of mental illness.
The fact that you don't care that vulnerable people are frequently the victims of violent crime (and partly because they've been dehumanised by people calling them crazies) says more about you than it does about predicting violence.
> If I hear someone say "that's crazy", I assume they mean "that's weird and I disapprove". (I haven't quite nailed it down. There's a bit more nuance here, in that if someone says "that's crazy", and then someone else says "it's not crazy, it's evil", then you can imagine the first persona conceding the point... so clearly "crazy" sometimes implies a certain degree of helplessness in the bad-weirdness.)
But in this thread someone isn't saying "these behaviours are crazy", they're saying "these people are crazies".
I don't care what language you use. But you need to know, so that you can make an informed choice about the language that you use, that when you use words like "crazies" to describe groups of people it's the same to many people as someone who says things like "I got jewed on that deal", or "those uppity negros". You're on the wrong side of history, and it makes you sound like an ignorant bigot. If you don't care about that then go ahead, but if you do care what people think of you then you might want to use different language.
Another reason to stop: by describing people who do things you don't understand as "crazies" you're promoting stigma against mental illness. Since you want people with mental illness to get treatment it seems weird to create a culture that makes it harder for them to do so.
Another reason: Severe mental illness (bipolar, psychosis, borderline) affect about 5% of the population. This will include people you know, or their relatives. You're inadvertently insulting your friends. You probably don't want to accidentally offend people you know. One of the reasons they haven't told you that they (or their loved ones ) are medicated is because your views are stigmatising and discriminatory.
Wrong about what? What claim did I make that's wrong? Oh, wait, you're just assuming that I disagree with you, so that you can be mad. You assume that I assume that mental illness predicts mental behaviour, but I said nothing of the kind. I think? Right?
> Mental illness does not predict violent behaviour.
That's an interesting claim (interesting in the sense that I am interested, but not yet convinced). Two minutes of googling found mild disagreement with your claim, and was in general utterly consistent with my previous beliefs (e.g. [0]). Care to cite evidence in favour of your claim? If it turns out that you're correct about the facts, I'm interested in knowing more.
Note, btw, that while the summary at that link makes it look like you're right, when you read the actual findings, it says the opposite of what you claimed.
So, unlike when I wrote the previous comment, now I have started to believe that mental illness _does_, to a small degree, predict slightly increased violent behaviour, though not nearly as much as being young or male or substance-abusing, all of which are about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning.
> The fact that you don't care that vulnerable people are frequently the victims of violent crime
This sentence is you being an asshole. Please stop. Obviously I meant "when I am assessing whether or not I should consider mentally ill people dangerous, what I am concerned with is whether or not I should not consider mentally ill people dangerous, as opposed to some other issue which is unrelated for the purposes of my security". Obviously I did not mean "In general I care about no one but myself" or some other farcical interpretation which no one would admit to in public.
> But in this thread someone isn't saying "these behaviours are crazy", they're saying "these people are crazies".
That is not a correct description of this thread. My comment was a reply to a comment that contained a link, which talked entirely about whether or not it was okay to call people and behaviour crazy. Did you follow the link and read the argument? Your description of "this thread" is a correct description of the original word used in the title of TFA, but the conversation is at this point broader than that. I dunno if I personally have ever called anyone "a crazy", but maybe I have.
> by describing people who do things you don't understand as "crazies" you're promoting stigma against mental illness
I'm not at all convinced that that's true. I think it promotes stigma against the behaviour characterized as "crazy". And I think it's pretty clear that that's what is happening in TFA's title: online harassment is being implicitly characterized as so inappropriate that it brings into question the health of the brain that committed it. I'm in favour of that implicit characterization.
> Another reason: ..... You're inadvertently insulting your friends
I don't agree that I'm insulting the friends, and family, and loved ones, and self, that I know, with mental illness. (You're so cute in your assumption that I'm in the privileged group.) If we're all getting along fine, maybe the problem is you. Or maybe you're right, and I misunderstand everything, and the problem is me. But just stating your implausible claim over and over again is frustratingly unpersuasive.
Thank you, by the way, for not getting distracted by the claim about violence, and after making your comment about it, moving on to the more interesting main point.
Your link is from an advocacy group! But even that advocacy group suggests that people with a mental illness are not violent. If you're going to ignore their summary you probably need to have read the studies they link to. Being polite, you haven't had time to read the studies they link to. Some of those studies will include things that you find surprising, and that don't support your point about violence. For example, sometimes studies include self harm as an example of violent behaviour. Some of them include violence against objects. And some of them don't correct for multiple violent events committed by one person.
(Note that the UK part of that paper is not talking about mental illness in the general population, but is restricting itself to a tiny subset of that population. Not just inpatients (about 8% of the people under specialist care) but people in a forensic unit. Those people are there because of a criminal justice involvement in their care. Even in this group of violent people we see a small group of people are responsible for most violent events.
This narrowing of focus - not all people with mental illness, but smaller and smaller sub-groups is why saying "crazy people are dangerous" is just dumb. You have to (using the link you provided) say "crazy people, with this particular diagnosis, when they're not getting treatment, are a little bit more dangerous than the general population, but less dangerous than parents, and less dangerous than poor men, and less dangerous than people with a substance addiction."
And even then you've failed to distinguish between "people who are violent because they have mental illness", and "people who are violent and co-incidentally have mental illness".
The group at most risk of homicide is children under one, and the people doing the killing are parents or step-parents. Why aren't you calling all parents dangerous?
Focussing on mental illness and violence is sub-optimal because it focuses on a very small risk and it focuses on something which provides no predictive value. When you have someone in front of you and you want to know whether they're going to be violent or not knowing that they have a mental illness, even a severe and enduring illness, doesn't help you. Knowing that they are (various combinations of) male; poor; addicted; a (step)parent or (ex)partner; are all more useful to you.
But this ignorance about the minimal risks of violence from people with mental illness causes actual measurable harm. About half the people shot and killed by US police each year have a mental illness. (Although it's hard to get accurate numbers because the US doesn't collect this data).
Sorry for the long and complex report, but it's best quality evidence that the UK has about homicide by people with mental illness. Page 30 is homicide in England. Most homicide is committed by people without mental illness; most people with mental illness have no connection with violence. People with mental illness are not over-represented in the group of people convicted of homicide.
> I'm not at all convinced that that's true. I think it promotes stigma against the behaviour characterized as "crazy". And I think it's pretty clear that that's what is happening in TFA's title: online harassment is being implicitly characterized as so inappropriate that it brings into question the health of the brain that committed it. I'm in favour of that implicit characterization.
Well, this feels like a contradiction. You start by saying it's not promoting stigma; you end by saying crazy people do hateful things. Why use the word "crazy", why not use the word "asshole"? There are so many other words you could use it seems a shame to marginalise an already marginalised group.
(Also, it's against HN rules to call other people assholes. Your ignorant first post is you being an asshole, but I didn't call you an asshole. You should probably stop doing that.)
"Crazy" even when not strictly about mental health implies lack of self-control or good judgement, which will be insulting for people who pride themselves in self-control and good judgement.
"Weird" or "bizarre" is perhaps a little more neutral.
When someone is called crazy, they're making a parallel to a crazy person on a train screaming about how they didn't take their meds.
When someone who has legitimate mental health issues is called crazy, it makes light of a very serious issue that's incredibly difficult. It has next to nothing to do with being offended. We all accept that we have issues that we're mostly able to manage, but you're completely simplifying the problem in an incredibly brazen and unempathetic way.
If you want to see a sample of it, just check out /r/bipolar. When I was first diagnosed, I spent about a week there, but had to stop going because it was too intense.
I feel like I need to invest more in forming connections with people, learning to not feel so extremely uncomfortable around people, becoming interesting and fun to be around as a person, but I don't know how to find strength, energy, and time to do so.
> When someone is called crazy, they're making a parallel to a crazy person on a train screaming about how they didn't take their meds.
I do not agree that this is what is intended, or heard, by the overwhelming majority of speakers of English, when that word is used. It seems to me, with a great deal of (fallible) confidence, that people usually mean something much less extreme.
> When someone who has legitimate mental health issues is called crazy, it makes light of a very serious issue
I do not agree that it makes light of the issue. I don't understand what is light-making about it. I do think that it puts the problem in a tidy pigeonhole, which the actual problem probably doesn't fit into. But people do not have infinite cognitive resources, and so they oversimplify things when they think they can get away with it, and as far as I can tell, this is one of those cases. That's not "making light", it's just "not paying a ton of attention".
Perhaps I'm wrong about either of both of those things. That would be a powerful and relevant-to-my-interests case for you to make, and were to you be successful at updating my belief, I would be grateful.
Why is citation needed? This is from raw, personal experience that's shared amongst the mentally ill who I've talked to and who I've read from online and other medium. If you want citation, just go to any forum dedicated to mental health.
And please don't declare this as selection bias. This doesn't need to be academic. I'm just offering my experiences that are simply shared with many others. Requesting citation for pervasive issues like this is just an easy way to not address or discuss a complex and complicated issue.
> Why is citation needed? This is from raw, personal experience
You don't label it as such (as subjective), and I think this is required more when contradicting a previous opinion, with a hint of accusation (i.e. it would imply people using the term would be guilty of something offensive). The comment previous includes the words "not strictly"; meaning "This isn't always what this means, but it can also mean this".
> Requesting citation for pervasive issues like this is just an easy way to not address or discuss a complex and complicated issue
How is shunning "academic" evidence addressing the issue? If it's complicated, there is a need more more precision, not less.
I won't declare this to be selection bias, but I won't assume it's not either. Testimony is a weak form of evidence. Maybe strong or persuasive evidence isn't what you intended to communicate in your comment, but I feel you need to provide something like that in a personally accusatory post ("No, stop that line of thinking. Please."), because it makes someone look bad without strong justification.
Dude, this is a forum about startups. I'm not going to be academically precise in my arguments for a huge list of number of reasons.
I'm not suggesting that this isn't a complicated issue, but that there are many ways to go about looking at it and a significant amount start with simply listening to those who have issues and go from there. The other steps include treatment and low level understanding, but the step that's almost never addressed are the societal issues and it needs to be done, sooner than later.
I'm not talking about these issues to convince anybody on any sort of academic level. All I'm doing is expressing my thoughts that MANY others share and live through. It's literally painful that so many people push back on this since it's something that strongly affects me, and many others, so strongly. I talk about it on forums like YC because I want to help others build an understanding of an issue that is never, ever black and white and whose gradients are wide and scattered. By writing, I'm just trying to help others, even if it might be small. The small things add up, though. Demanding that I treat this as academic where my intentions were a discussion and to hope to push others to search for information themselves is just obstructive. I'd hope that if you're so academically interested in this subject, you'd do a simple google search yourself.
But fine, if you want precision, here, have a google scholar search that took 10 seconds to run. Five of those seconds were after forgetting a !scholar in my ddg search, so if you choose to run one, it'll probably take even less time. Woo. These are a good place to start if you want good information.
Just to backtrack - the issue here is whether the word 'crazy' is necessarily insulting or not, regardless of context; I never opened for a discussion about anything else.
> I'm not going to be academically precise in my arguments
You're the one who mentioned academia. A citation needn't be "academic", it just needs to be anything that demonstrates what you are saying is true. When I put "citation needed" in quotes, I only meant this. And here's why I think you should do that:
> When someone is called crazy, they're making a parallel to a crazy person...
I don't think this is true, And a since it's clear that people in this thread use the word in a way they believe to be benign, I think it's fairly accusatory.
As such, Without backing this up, you're just throwing around an unsubstantiated insult to anyone with the word 'crazy' in their regular vocabulary. If you want people to stop using the word, why not explain why they should, instead of accusing them as "simplifying the problem in an incredibly brazen and unempathetic way".
As I mentioned in another post, I'm perfectly fine with the word "crazy" in its use similar to "out of this world". I use it myself all the time since it's a crazy good word to describe a large class of stuff. I think the misunderstanding here is that I assumed you read that post.
false dichotomy. The context of this thread is not the authors harassment; and your example is not a benign usage, but that does not contradict the statement "people in this thread use the word in a way they believe to be benign".
The "not strictly" only adds to the insult. You have group A, people who would be judged clinically insane (or borderline, which is more of an emotional issue). Let's call them true crazy. True crazy is bad. You have group B, much larger, people with inappropriate behavior that probably isn't going to lead to a psychiatric diagnosis, perhaps rather they just have a lack of self-control or good judgement. Let's call them false crazy. False crazy is a slur because of what it says, that your behavior is bad, bad like true crazy. And so the thing is, every time you use it, what you're also saying is that true crazy is worse than this.
The "acceptable use" that you're claiming is basically the same as calling someone or something gay, or someone a fggt (sorry, HN probably bans comments for using that word), even though the person and/or behavior in question has nothing to do with homosexuality. I hope this clarifies things a bit.
But the distinctions between "true" and "false" crazy are ones you just made up yourself; I have no reason to believe this is what the word "says" at all.
The term "true crazy" implies that there is a formal link with the word to clinical mental illness, as opposed to just a euphemism for it.
Caution, Thought Police patrol this area. Please stop thinking. Freedom Of Thought is not allowed.
I'll think whatever I like, thank you very much. I reserve the right to have opinions that differ from yours. I respect the idea that my opinions ought not impinge on your freedoms. I don't have to like a thing to see the sense in it. Yes, we shouldn't go around calling each other names, it might affect a person in a negative way.
I certainly don't have a habit of going around labeling people ... well, actually, I guess I do: we all make internal judgments about people and things we experience. What I mean to say is I tend not to go around calling people words, because who knows how that might affect the other.
Relating to that quote you provided from r/bipolar, what I really want to see is us crazies, I say 'us', because that quote fits me well too. I want to see us crazies "come out"! I'm crazy and I'm proud! We could have a bumper sticker too: I have Mental Health Issues and I vote.
And anyway, to be well-adjusted to an insane society is no measure of health.
In 2014, there were an estimated 43.6 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States with AMI (Any Mental Illness) in the past year. This number represented 18.1% of all U.S. adults.[1]
One in five of the adult population of the US with AMI. Mental Illness is the new normal. I think there's more to this than "illness". In a similar way to how homosexuality used to be labelled an illness, I look forward to a future where we are no longer labelled "ill" but where society acknowledges that we have some pretty serious issues going on on this planet and our individual and collecting stress-coping mechanisms aren't coping. We are a sick society that has been doing a darn good job of wrecking the biosphere, and through profit-driven motives been working to isolate people so they'll buy more. How anyone can think that isn't going to affect our mental health is beyond me.
I believe a lot of the lower-grade chronic mental illness people suffer is a symptom, like a blocked nose is a symptom of a cold virus, mental health issues are a symptom of failing stress-coping systems. And the stressors are real. Modern life is stressful, it's alienating, it's under slept, over worked, it's underpaid, it's in too much debt.
We're overdue for a societal colonic. Nothing like a good shit to help clear the mind.
Yes, I fully agree with you that a lot of the symptoms of mental health issues are often symptoms of larger issues. I see this in myself, and I see it in others. Often times, all that's needed is to take vitamin D, less caffeine, stricter diet, environmental changes, etc.
That said, the propensity for those with mental illnesses to resort to drugs, false rationalizations and misinformation to assist in understanding their problems makes these issues very, very difficult and complex for everyone involved. For those with mental health issues, removing those soft and hard dependencies is incredibly difficult, since they're so easy to fall to, on top of their prior problems. You're simplifying an issue without realizing that mental health problems are often only the catalyst that's furthered by forced isolationism. For example, although my own mental health issues seem to have been around since birth, they were only pushed farther, possibly permanently, after being put on amphetamines to aid with the bipolar and its comorbid's symptoms.
And quit the bullshit about thought police. I'm just asking for an attempt at empathy with an attempt to not resort to the usual SJW rhetoric.
You know, I used to be really arrogant, but then I started listening to people that try to tell me things, and now I just wish I'd started doing that sooner, because I regret spending so much of my life as a bigot.
> I assume that it's true that such people are more likely to be the target than the perpetrator, but I don't care. I care about whether they're more likely to endanger me ...
nice, man. The combination of your egoism and [lack of] empathy reminds about that rant of an SF techie against those homeless people because their presence affects his enjoying of life.
not only he slurs here, he just stereotypes some group of people this way from the start. It is kind of divisive and an efficient way to initiate combativeness. (Not that i let go waste any good chance to stereotype and to get divisive/combative myself, yet i don't whine about harassment toward me after that. You reap what you sow.)
