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.
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.