C’mon, I’m not making the claim that talking about someone’s mental state is never helpful in every context. I’m just saying it’s basically totally unnecessary in this specific case when deciding whether or not Émile Torres is a good faith actor.
Are you saying that before the message above you were sitting there unsure about whether or not Torres is a good faith actor, and then Sabs comes along with a claim that they have a personality disorder, and that they’ve had problems with their ex-partner, and THEN you believe that Torres is acting in bad faith? Are you saying in a first message trying to convince other forum readers whether or not Torres is acting in good faith, the best points to bring up is a unsubstantiated claim about their mental illness and some problems they’ve had in their personal life?
But lets say I was making this claim. My guess is I would still lean far closer in that direction than you—I basically think any claims about someone’s mental health in a public, non-medical forum, is usually worse than just stating the pattern of actions they’ve taken, or your best guess for what they will do based on the pattern of behavior they have exhibited. Are you a psychiatrist? Are EA forum readers psychiatrists? Do you actually know what it means to have have borderline personality disorder? Do you know the difference between schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder and schizotypal personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and psychopathy? Do you know the diagnostic criteria for them? If you do, what’s your best guess at the % of forum readers who will take your stated “diagnosis” and actually understand what you mean? In any case, the OP didn’t even specify which personality disorder it is, so there’s some innuendo here that “anyone with a personality disorder is not worth engaging with”, which is pretty harmful.
FWIW, I’m not defending Émile Torres here, I find their work distasteful and intellectually dishonest. But that’s separate to what I’m talking about here.
(Edit: some of these points have already been raised by Aaron, didn’t see those replies when I was typing this)
C’mon, I’m not making the claim that talking about someone’s mental state is never helpful in every context. I’m just saying it’s ~totally unnecessary in this specific case when deciding whether or not Émile Torres is a good faith actor.
Just to be clear, I am genuinely uncertain what the right norms here are, and I did not intend this as harsh pushback on your comment. I do think the situation is less straightforward than you make it out to be, and there are pretty good arguments for allowing at least some level of talking and thinking and conversation about people’s motivations and underlying psychological factors, though as I said, man it does sure seem like a mess.
Are you saying that before the message above you were sitting there unsure about whether or not Torres is a good faith actor, and then Sabs comes along with a claim that they have a personality disorder, and that they’ve had problems with their ex-partner, and THEN you believe that Torres is acting in bad faith? Are you saying in a first message trying to convince other forum readers whether or not Torres is acting in good faith, the best points to bring up is a unsubstantiated claim about their mental illness and some problems they’ve had in their personal life?
At some point I did discover Torres’ Facebook profile as well as a number of other public pieces of documentation of their private life, and did discover a good chunk of the personal problems they have been going through, and yes, this did majorly change the way I relate to them. It was not this message from Sabs but a pretty similar message from someone on a private Slack that caused me to investigate this, and I think it was quite valuable for my model of this whole situation.
I agree that this would not be good as a “first message”, but like, most forum readers at this point have probably had multiple conversations about Torres, and on the margin, someone bringing up that they might have some mental problems doesn’t seem obviously bad to me (it also doesn’t seem obviously good to me, as I said, though I do think a very similar message a few months ago turned out to be pretty useful for my personal model of the situation).
Are you a psychiatrist? Are EA forum readers psychiatrists? Do you actually know what it means to have have borderline personality disorder? Do you know the difference between schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder and schizotypal personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and psychopathy?
I am not a psychiatrist, and also furthermore, I do not believe in gating the use of valuable concepts behind professional boundaries. I have indeed researched various aspects of personality disorders quite a bit, and my best guess is that I have an understanding comparable, or probably slightly better than many psychiatrists, at least along the dimensions that are most relevant to my life and the EA community (based on having talked to some people with a psychology background about this).
I do indeed also know the difference between all the disorders that you listed, though not like in excruciating detail (with the exception of the difference between schizoid and schizotypal personality disorder), but I did do a quite substantial amount of reading in this space as I kept running across people in the community that were causing harm and seemed to be reasonably well-described by some well-documented psychological patterns (though like, I am overall not a huge fan of the ontology that psychiatry uses here, and think it has a number of pretty huge problems, of which the tendency to put things into discrete categories and the tendency to reify clusters of symptoms by giving them names that are just a summary of their symptoms that then later on get used as semantic stopsigns are the two foremost ones).
In any case, the OP didn’t even specify which personality disorder it is, so there’s some innuendo here that “anyone with a personality disorder is not worth engaging with”, which is pretty harmful.
I agree this innuendo seems kinda bad to me, and I think attitudes of the type of “if you have any diagnosable mental problem you are not worth engaging with” are really bad and have all kinds of bad downstream effects on culture and people feeling safe, etc.
Yeah fair enough, I could have acknowledged that more, apologies.
The part where you go into detail about how much psychiatry you know strengthens the point that immediately follows:
If you do, what’s your best guess at the % of forum readers who will take your stated “diagnosis” and actually understand what you mean?
The point I am making is not just about whether or not it is appropriate for you to use psychiatric concepts, (and not at all about whether these concepts can only be used by psychiatrists), the point I am also making is that if we are to combine a complex set of behaviors into a 3 or 4 letter diagnosis, we better make sure the people you are talking to actually understand what you are talking about, and I think I probably have a very different model of common knowledge and how people interpret psychiatric diagnoses than you do, and I think in a smaller world where there’s good common knowledge and everyone trusts each other to be using these in good faith / without malice, it can be more appropriate. But I doubt this is the case on this forum, especially not right now.
The point I am making is not just about whether or not it is appropriate for you to use psychiatric concepts, (and not at all about whether these concepts can only be used by psychiatrists), the point I am also making is that if we are to combine a complex set of behaviors into a 3 or 4 letter diagnosis, we better make sure the people you are talking to actually understand what you are talking about, and I think I probably have a very different model of common knowledge and how people interpret psychiatric diagnoses than you do, and I think in a smaller world where there’s good common knowledge and everyone trusts each other to be using these in good faith / without malice, it can be more appropriate. But I doubt this is the case on this forum, especially not right now.
I both agree with you here that there is something particularly risky about using these kinds of concepts in public discussions, since people often have an actively wrong understanding of what different things actually mean, but I also feel like this is a pretty different standard than we apply in almost all other domains of discourse.
Like, if a bunch of people make posts that rely on advanced math or physics or chemistry knowledge, as many posts both here and on LW tend to do, I don’t think I would tell people to stop that because most of the audience wouldn’t understand what is going on. It seems indeed quite valuable for people with the relevant knowledge to say what they want to say, even if they can’t bridge the full inferential distance to others.
I understand that part of the reason for additional hesitation here is that these concepts then also often get used to attack people, and these concepts are more loaded with connotations than other concepts, and misunderstandings are more prevalent, but I still think it’s then important to at least recognize that we are losing some important communication here.
I personally try to avoid terms like “psychopath” as much as possible, because of a bunch of misunderstandings in the space, but other things like “bipolar” seem to have fewer misunderstandings and I think are pretty OK to use. “Autism” seems bad in some context, but I feel like is pretty okay to discuss in the forum context.
but I also feel like this is a pretty different standard than we apply in almost all other domains of discourse.
I agree it’s a different standard, but I don’t think it’s an unfairly different standard. I think the reason is that people won’t see complicated maths/physics knowledge and misinterpret the meaning of a complex topic they don’t understand.
For illustrative purposes (screenshot because the text version had some formatting issues not supported by the forum):
If someone stumbles across this and doesn’t understand what a Lipschitz constant is, they will likely know they don’t understand it, and search it up, or move on. There’s basically no common usage of the term “the Banach space”. There’s a much lower likelihood of harm done by the author wrongly assuming this gap in technical knowledge.
On the other hand, saying someone has a personality disorder, saying they are psychotic, saying they have mental illnesses is much more prone to people thinking, “oh, I know what it means to be a psychopath, I’ve seen American Psycho”. We should be much more careful about assuming knowledge in this space, given words like depression, borderline, psychotic, antisocial, paranoid, obsessive, autistic have meanings in the psychiatry world but also meanings in common parlance which mean pretty different things, the often-poor portrayal of mental disorders in the media, and the continued stigma around mental disorders. For these reasons, I’m less optimistic around the merits of using both bipolar and autistic when speculating about the actions of someone else on a public forum.
I still think it’s then important to at least recognize that we are losing some important communication here.
I disagree, I think the benefit of saying [concerning set of actions + behaviors and my best guess for what their behavior might be going forward and why] instead of saying I think this person has [diagnosis] is not (for the vast majority of relevant scenarios) that we are losing information that is important, but we are losing speed and concision in communication. But given the risks and potential harm, I think in the vast majority of cases, losing speed and concision is worth it.
I think this might be a crux, and I’d be interested in a hypothetical example that illustrates this. If you can find an example where we are losing important, decision relevant information without explicitly making a best guess at a psychiatric diagnosis (compared to say, a lengthier discussion around how you came to the impression of a suspected diagnosis in the first place), I’ll update accordingly-but otherwise I’m not really seeing how we are actually losing important communication. [1]
The hypothetical example has to be suitable for discussion on the forum, and can’t include a scenario where you think imminent harm was taking place and needed immediate action, and no one was responding to DMs or something.
C’mon, I’m not making the claim that talking about someone’s mental state is never helpful in every context. I’m just saying it’s basically totally unnecessary in this specific case when deciding whether or not Émile Torres is a good faith actor.
Are you saying that before the message above you were sitting there unsure about whether or not Torres is a good faith actor, and then Sabs comes along with a claim that they have a personality disorder, and that they’ve had problems with their ex-partner, and THEN you believe that Torres is acting in bad faith? Are you saying in a first message trying to convince other forum readers whether or not Torres is acting in good faith, the best points to bring up is a unsubstantiated claim about their mental illness and some problems they’ve had in their personal life?
But lets say I was making this claim. My guess is I would still lean far closer in that direction than you—I basically think any claims about someone’s mental health in a public, non-medical forum, is usually worse than just stating the pattern of actions they’ve taken, or your best guess for what they will do based on the pattern of behavior they have exhibited. Are you a psychiatrist? Are EA forum readers psychiatrists? Do you actually know what it means to have have borderline personality disorder? Do you know the difference between schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder and schizotypal personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and psychopathy? Do you know the diagnostic criteria for them? If you do, what’s your best guess at the % of forum readers who will take your stated “diagnosis” and actually understand what you mean? In any case, the OP didn’t even specify which personality disorder it is, so there’s some innuendo here that “anyone with a personality disorder is not worth engaging with”, which is pretty harmful.
FWIW, I’m not defending Émile Torres here, I find their work distasteful and intellectually dishonest. But that’s separate to what I’m talking about here.
(Edit: some of these points have already been raised by Aaron, didn’t see those replies when I was typing this)
Just to be clear, I am genuinely uncertain what the right norms here are, and I did not intend this as harsh pushback on your comment. I do think the situation is less straightforward than you make it out to be, and there are pretty good arguments for allowing at least some level of talking and thinking and conversation about people’s motivations and underlying psychological factors, though as I said, man it does sure seem like a mess.
At some point I did discover Torres’ Facebook profile as well as a number of other public pieces of documentation of their private life, and did discover a good chunk of the personal problems they have been going through, and yes, this did majorly change the way I relate to them. It was not this message from Sabs but a pretty similar message from someone on a private Slack that caused me to investigate this, and I think it was quite valuable for my model of this whole situation.
I agree that this would not be good as a “first message”, but like, most forum readers at this point have probably had multiple conversations about Torres, and on the margin, someone bringing up that they might have some mental problems doesn’t seem obviously bad to me (it also doesn’t seem obviously good to me, as I said, though I do think a very similar message a few months ago turned out to be pretty useful for my personal model of the situation).
I am not a psychiatrist, and also furthermore, I do not believe in gating the use of valuable concepts behind professional boundaries. I have indeed researched various aspects of personality disorders quite a bit, and my best guess is that I have an understanding comparable, or probably slightly better than many psychiatrists, at least along the dimensions that are most relevant to my life and the EA community (based on having talked to some people with a psychology background about this).
I do indeed also know the difference between all the disorders that you listed, though not like in excruciating detail (with the exception of the difference between schizoid and schizotypal personality disorder), but I did do a quite substantial amount of reading in this space as I kept running across people in the community that were causing harm and seemed to be reasonably well-described by some well-documented psychological patterns (though like, I am overall not a huge fan of the ontology that psychiatry uses here, and think it has a number of pretty huge problems, of which the tendency to put things into discrete categories and the tendency to reify clusters of symptoms by giving them names that are just a summary of their symptoms that then later on get used as semantic stopsigns are the two foremost ones).
I agree this innuendo seems kinda bad to me, and I think attitudes of the type of “if you have any diagnosable mental problem you are not worth engaging with” are really bad and have all kinds of bad downstream effects on culture and people feeling safe, etc.
Yeah fair enough, I could have acknowledged that more, apologies.
The part where you go into detail about how much psychiatry you know strengthens the point that immediately follows:
The point I am making is not just about whether or not it is appropriate for you to use psychiatric concepts, (and not at all about whether these concepts can only be used by psychiatrists), the point I am also making is that if we are to combine a complex set of behaviors into a 3 or 4 letter diagnosis, we better make sure the people you are talking to actually understand what you are talking about, and I think I probably have a very different model of common knowledge and how people interpret psychiatric diagnoses than you do, and I think in a smaller world where there’s good common knowledge and everyone trusts each other to be using these in good faith / without malice, it can be more appropriate. But I doubt this is the case on this forum, especially not right now.
I both agree with you here that there is something particularly risky about using these kinds of concepts in public discussions, since people often have an actively wrong understanding of what different things actually mean, but I also feel like this is a pretty different standard than we apply in almost all other domains of discourse.
Like, if a bunch of people make posts that rely on advanced math or physics or chemistry knowledge, as many posts both here and on LW tend to do, I don’t think I would tell people to stop that because most of the audience wouldn’t understand what is going on. It seems indeed quite valuable for people with the relevant knowledge to say what they want to say, even if they can’t bridge the full inferential distance to others.
I understand that part of the reason for additional hesitation here is that these concepts then also often get used to attack people, and these concepts are more loaded with connotations than other concepts, and misunderstandings are more prevalent, but I still think it’s then important to at least recognize that we are losing some important communication here.
I personally try to avoid terms like “psychopath” as much as possible, because of a bunch of misunderstandings in the space, but other things like “bipolar” seem to have fewer misunderstandings and I think are pretty OK to use. “Autism” seems bad in some context, but I feel like is pretty okay to discuss in the forum context.
I agree it’s a different standard, but I don’t think it’s an unfairly different standard. I think the reason is that people won’t see complicated maths/physics knowledge and misinterpret the meaning of a complex topic they don’t understand.
For illustrative purposes (screenshot because the text version had some formatting issues not supported by the forum):
If someone stumbles across this and doesn’t understand what a Lipschitz constant is, they will likely know they don’t understand it, and search it up, or move on. There’s basically no common usage of the term “the Banach space”. There’s a much lower likelihood of harm done by the author wrongly assuming this gap in technical knowledge.
On the other hand, saying someone has a personality disorder, saying they are psychotic, saying they have mental illnesses is much more prone to people thinking, “oh, I know what it means to be a psychopath, I’ve seen American Psycho”. We should be much more careful about assuming knowledge in this space, given words like depression, borderline, psychotic, antisocial, paranoid, obsessive, autistic have meanings in the psychiatry world but also meanings in common parlance which mean pretty different things, the often-poor portrayal of mental disorders in the media, and the continued stigma around mental disorders. For these reasons, I’m less optimistic around the merits of using both bipolar and autistic when speculating about the actions of someone else on a public forum.
I disagree, I think the benefit of saying [concerning set of actions + behaviors and my best guess for what their behavior might be going forward and why] instead of saying I think this person has [diagnosis] is not (for the vast majority of relevant scenarios) that we are losing information that is important, but we are losing speed and concision in communication. But given the risks and potential harm, I think in the vast majority of cases, losing speed and concision is worth it.
I think this might be a crux, and I’d be interested in a hypothetical example that illustrates this. If you can find an example where we are losing important, decision relevant information without explicitly making a best guess at a psychiatric diagnosis (compared to say, a lengthier discussion around how you came to the impression of a suspected diagnosis in the first place), I’ll update accordingly-but otherwise I’m not really seeing how we are actually losing important communication. [1]
The hypothetical example has to be suitable for discussion on the forum, and can’t include a scenario where you think imminent harm was taking place and needed immediate action, and no one was responding to DMs or something.