[VIDEO] Harm reduction, hacker psychology
Hackers As A High Risk Population—this is an hour-long video by Violet Blue, and it’s about what she’s been thinking about rather than something with definitive answers.
It starts with an overview of harm reduction—an approach to public health which begins by accepting that people are going to do the things they want to do, and continues by finding ways to make the things people want to do less dangerous. The most detail is about harm reduction for drug users, sexual minorities, and homeless people.
Violet Blue got interested in the risks to programmers when a start-up entrepreneur got some bad press and committed suicide, but shifted over to studying hackers—it turned out that the isolation, risk, long hours, and (in some cases?) responsibility led to psychological problems like those of spies and soldiers.
It turned out that hackers aren’t especially likely to have Asperger’s, but the intense world model might be appropriate. The idea is that people on the spectrum (?) do notice other people’s emotions, but get overwhelmed by them, and one way of dealing with the stress is to focus on intellectual details.
She thinks of hackers as people who are especially driven by curiosity, which is a virtue.
Just a sidenote: The speaker says she participated in organization which gives anonymous phone advice to people, and then she claims the organization has good results. Question: How does she know?
The same problems as with Alcoholics Anonymous should apply. Since AA does not store records it’s very hard for studies to analyze its effectiveness. This wikipedia page lists various studies which show (or don’t show) the effectiveness of AA. The effectiveness of AA is of high interest for anti-drug research. If it can’t be analyzed on AA-scale then it probably can’t be analyzed by a single individual working at a phone.
It’s probably better to just shrug it off as a personal opinion of the reporter and focus on the main point instead.
That’s a fair question. I don’t know that the lack of feedback means that such organizations shouldn’t exist, though.