I feel like people keep telling me that psychosis around me should be higher than what I hear about, which is irrelevant to my point: my point is the frequency in which I hear about psychosis in the rationalist community is like an order of magnitude higher than the frequency I hear about it elsewhere.
It doesn’t matter whether people hide psychosis among my social group; the observation to explain is why people don’t hide psychosis in the rationalist community to the same extent.
For example, you mention 2 separate example of Bay Area rationalists making the news for psychosis. I know of no people in my academic community who have made the news for psychosis. Assuming equal background rates, what is left to explain is why rationalists are more likely to make the news when they get psychosis.
Another example: there have now been 1-2 people who have admitted to psychosis in blog posts intended as public callouts. I know of no people in my academic community who have written public callout blog posts in which they say they’ve had psychosis. Is there an explanation for why rationalists who’ve had psychosis are more likely to write public callout blog posts?
Anyway, this discussion feels kind of moot now that I’ve read Scott Alexander’s update to his comment. He says that several people (who knew each other) all had psychosis around the same time in 2017. No reasonable person can think this is merely baseline; some kind of social contagion is surely involved (probably just people sharing drugs or drug recommendations).
I think part of it is that this isn’t related to your social network, but your news habits and how your news sources cover your social network.
You probably don’t read newspapers that are as certain to write about your neighbor having any kind of “psychosis”, but you read forums that tell you about Rationalists doing the same.
Them leaving out the exact details of what went on with their groups make the whole discussion sketchy. Maybe they just want to keep the conversation to themselves. If that’s the case, why are they posting on LW?
I feel like people keep telling me that psychosis around me should be higher than what I hear about, which is irrelevant to my point: my point is the frequency in which I hear about psychosis in the rationalist community is like an order of magnitude higher than the frequency I hear about it elsewhere.
It doesn’t matter whether people hide psychosis among my social group; the observation to explain is why people don’t hide psychosis in the rationalist community to the same extent.
For example, you mention 2 separate example of Bay Area rationalists making the news for psychosis. I know of no people in my academic community who have made the news for psychosis. Assuming equal background rates, what is left to explain is why rationalists are more likely to make the news when they get psychosis.
Another example: there have now been 1-2 people who have admitted to psychosis in blog posts intended as public callouts. I know of no people in my academic community who have written public callout blog posts in which they say they’ve had psychosis. Is there an explanation for why rationalists who’ve had psychosis are more likely to write public callout blog posts?
Anyway, this discussion feels kind of moot now that I’ve read Scott Alexander’s update to his comment. He says that several people (who knew each other) all had psychosis around the same time in 2017. No reasonable person can think this is merely baseline; some kind of social contagion is surely involved (probably just people sharing drugs or drug recommendations).
I think part of it is that this isn’t related to your social network, but your news habits and how your news sources cover your social network.
You probably don’t read newspapers that are as certain to write about your neighbor having any kind of “psychosis”, but you read forums that tell you about Rationalists doing the same.
Them leaving out the exact details of what went on with their groups make the whole discussion sketchy. Maybe they just want to keep the conversation to themselves. If that’s the case, why are they posting on LW?