I once saw a video on Instagram of a psychiatrist recommending to other psychiatrists that they purchase ear scopes to check out their patients’ ears, because: 1. Apparently it is very common for folks with severe mental health issues to imagine that there is something in their ear (e.g., a bug, a listening device) 2. Doctors usually just say “you are wrong, there’s nothing in your ear” without looking 3. This destroys trust, so he started doing cursory checks with an ear scope 4. Far more often than he expected (I forget exactly, but something like 10-20%ish), there actually was something in the person’s ear—usually just earwax buildup, but occasionally something else like a dead insect—that was indeed causing the sensation, and he gained a clinical pathway to addressing his patients’ discomfort that he had previously lacked
It’s pretty far from meeting dath ilan’s standard though; in fact an x-ray would be more than sufficient as anyone capable of putting something in someone’s ear would obviously vastly prefer to place it somewhere harder to check, whereas nobody would be capable of defeating an x-ray machine as metal parts are unavoidable.
This concern pops up in books on the Cold War (employees at every org and every company regularly suffer from mental illnesses at somewhere around their base rates, but things get complicated at intelligence agencies where paranoid/creative/adversarial people are rewarded and even influence R&D funding) and an x-ray machine cleanly resolved the matter every time.
I once saw a video on Instagram of a psychiatrist recommending to other psychiatrists that they purchase ear scopes to check out their patients’ ears, because:
1. Apparently it is very common for folks with severe mental health issues to imagine that there is something in their ear (e.g., a bug, a listening device)
2. Doctors usually just say “you are wrong, there’s nothing in your ear” without looking
3. This destroys trust, so he started doing cursory checks with an ear scope
4. Far more often than he expected (I forget exactly, but something like 10-20%ish), there actually was something in the person’s ear—usually just earwax buildup, but occasionally something else like a dead insect—that was indeed causing the sensation, and he gained a clinical pathway to addressing his patients’ discomfort that he had previously lacked
This reminds me of dath ilan’s hallucination diagnosis from page 38 of Yudkowsky and Alicorn’s glowfic But Hurting People Is Wrong.
It’s pretty far from meeting dath ilan’s standard though; in fact an x-ray would be more than sufficient as anyone capable of putting something in someone’s ear would obviously vastly prefer to place it somewhere harder to check, whereas nobody would be capable of defeating an x-ray machine as metal parts are unavoidable.
This concern pops up in books on the Cold War (employees at every org and every company regularly suffer from mental illnesses at somewhere around their base rates, but things get complicated at intelligence agencies where paranoid/creative/adversarial people are rewarded and even influence R&D funding) and an x-ray machine cleanly resolved the matter every time.