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540 points drankl | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.24s | source
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parpfish ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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. munksbeer ◴[] No.44489347[source]
I am interested in this topic, but I do sometimes find the compatiblism argument difficult to distill down to its essence without still leaving a sense of unfulfillment.

From my understanding, compatibilism boils down to accepting that everything may be pre-determined, but people are still free to make choices as long as they are uncoerced.

The argument from that quote above is a little bit subtler and aligns with my thinking. I don't believe we have free will in any sense, either everything is pre-determined, or it is random, and I can't even think of a definition of free will that would make sense (just like the compatiblism one does not to me). But clearly there is a feedback loop going on, and so it is inherently in the species best interest to hold people accountable for their actions, because the act of holding them accountable forms part of the inputs that lead people to make choices. Not doing this is not a great survivability trait overall. Doing so, we survive a bit more.

But I'm not sure that is strictly necessary to call oneself a compatibilist.