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Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

(www.freyaindia.co.uk)
540 points drankl | 1 comments | 06 Jul 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.219s | source
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parpfish ◴[07 Jul 25 01:05 UTC] No.44485690[source]▶
Decades ago in my first abnormal psych course, the prof warned us that there was an almost iron-clad law that students will immediately start self diagnosing themselves with “weak” versions of every disorder we learn about. In my years since then, it has absolutely held true and now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses.

But there are a few things we can learn from this:

- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it.

- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it.

- most mental disorders are an issue of degree and not something qualitatively different from a typical experience. People should use this to gain greater empathy for those who struggle.

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Aurornis ◴[07 Jul 25 01:52 UTC] No.44485973[source]▶
> - if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it.

This one is widespread among the young people I’ve worked with recently. It’s remarkable how I can identify the current TikTok self diagnosis trends without ever watching TikTok.

There’s a widespread belief that once you put a label on a problem, other people are not allowed to criticize you for it. Many young people lean into this and label everything as a defensive tactic.

A while ago, one of the trends was “time blindness”. People who were chronically late, missed meetings, or failed to manage their time would see TikToks about “time blindness” as if it was a medical condition, and self-diagnose as having that.

It was bizarre to suddenly have people missing scheduled events and then casually informing me that they had time blindness, as if that made it okay. Once they had a label for a condition, they felt like they had a license to escape accountability.

The most frustrating part was that the people who self-diagnosed as having “time blindness” universally got worse at being on time. Once they had transformed the personal problem into a labeled condition, they didn’t feel as obligated to do anything about it.

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dsubburam ◴[07 Jul 25 03:18 UTC] No.44486436[source]▶
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 morrow is determined through my struggle. There is this significance in my mental effort, that it is deciding the event." [1]

i.e., he is a "compatibilist", thinking that you can believe in free will and determinism too.

If you find Hobart persuasive, time-blindness or no, it does make sense to reproach someone for being habitually unpunctual.

[1] https://philarchive.org/archive/HOBFWA

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1. jancsika ◴[07 Jul 25 05:16 UTC] No.44486984[source]▶
> 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?

I've been thinking about an escape hatch here:

Imagine that all philosophical notions of free will were incoherent. In that case non-philosophers' use of "free will" would either be a) inherited from this philosophical incoherence, or b) pretentious/ambiguous nomenclature that reduces to a more practical, well-defined term-- e.g., self-determination, freedom from tyranny, etc.

In reality, it seems like in the vast majority of non-philosophers mean "free will" as a short-hand for one of the more practical, workaday terms. The only edge case I can think of is the use of "free will" in the history of Christian theology, but I very rarely see that come up in non-academic situations.

If my supposition is right, then we can practically swap out nearly all instances of "free will" for the relevant non-philosophical, well-specified lay terms. And the continue to hold people responsible for their actions based on the centuries of case-law, common law, social history and medical knowledge that led up to our modern era. Perhaps more importantly, we can incrementally level up our understanding of responsibility/justice based on modern research into human behavior, while completely avoid digressions into philosophical determinism.

In fact, I'd speculate that college philosophy "free will 101" classes are a kind of unwitting bait and switch. I bet if you did a survey, most prospective students would be expecting a class that sharpens their teeth on one of the workaday synonyms, most often something like "self-actualization." But that has about as much to do with "free will" that as "coffee bean calligraphy" has to do with Javascript. (Alternatively: it would be a fun prank to do a "free will 101" class that teaches students to stand up for what they believe in, resist tyranny, etc. :)

Edit: clarification