If you’re talking about Brennan’s world, it’s already driven me a little insane, to the point of having suicidal thoughts. I’m getting better with that now as the rest of your writing is helpful medicine for bad thinking, If I weren’t already very receptive to psychiatric treatment and thankfully had a strong skeptical background, it might not have ended well and the thought that that sort of thing might be going on still bothers me greatly. This was the first time I read this particular post, and it helped me downshift the probability of that such a thing is happening now, but it’s dangerous stuff for certain people (people with high levels of dopamine have a higher tendency to make type one errors, perceiving patterns where there are none, according to Michael Shermer). I think you’re right that the typical person would be fine, but what you might not know is that if you dig deep enough in the conspiracy world there are suicide memes. I am very sure that the vast majority of your readers would be fine, and that for them your stories would be entertaining, even compelling for some, but my two cents is that the disutility is high enough to outweigh that benefit.
If you’re talking about Brennan’s world, it’s already driven me a little insane, to the point of having suicidal thoughts. I’m getting better with that now as the rest of your writing is helpful medicine for bad thinking, If I weren’t already very receptive to psychiatric treatment and thankfully had a strong skeptical background, it might not have ended well and the thought that that sort of thing might be going on still bothers me greatly. This was the first time I read this particular post, and it helped me downshift the probability of that such a thing is happening now, but it’s dangerous stuff for certain people (people with high levels of dopamine have a higher tendency to make type one errors, perceiving patterns where there are none, according to Michael Shermer). I think you’re right that the typical person would be fine, but what you might not know is that if you dig deep enough in the conspiracy world there are suicide memes. I am very sure that the vast majority of your readers would be fine, and that for them your stories would be entertaining, even compelling for some, but my two cents is that the disutility is high enough to outweigh that benefit.