entities that are out to get you will target those who signal suffering less.
I see the intuition here. I see it in someone calling in sick, in disability tax credits, in DEI (where “privilege” is something like the inverse of suffering), in draft evasion, in Kanye’s apology.
But it’s not always true: consider the depressed psychiatric ward inpatient who wants to get out due to the crushing lack of slack. Signalling suffering to the psychiatrist would be counterproductive here.
Psych wards are horrible Kafkaesque nightmares, but I don’t think they are Out to Get You in the way Zvi describes. Things that are Out to Get You feed on your slack. For example, social media apps consume your attention. Casinos consume your money. They are incentivized to go after those who have a lot of slack to lose (“whales”), and those who have few defenses against their techniques (see Tsvi’s comment about desperation.
Psych wards are, to a first approximation, prisons: one of their primary functions is to destroy your slack so that you cannot use it to do something that society at large dislikes. In the prison case: committing crimes; in the psych ward case (for depression): killing yourself. They destroy your slack because they don’t want you to have it. Things that Get You consume your slack because they want it for themselves.
This is interesting.
I do want to push back a little on:
I see the intuition here. I see it in someone calling in sick, in disability tax credits, in DEI (where “privilege” is something like the inverse of suffering), in draft evasion, in Kanye’s apology.
But it’s not always true: consider the depressed psychiatric ward inpatient who wants to get out due to the crushing lack of slack. Signalling suffering to the psychiatrist would be counterproductive here.
Where is the fault line?
Psych wards are horrible Kafkaesque nightmares, but I don’t think they are Out to Get You in the way Zvi describes. Things that are Out to Get You feed on your slack. For example, social media apps consume your attention. Casinos consume your money. They are incentivized to go after those who have a lot of slack to lose (“whales”), and those who have few defenses against their techniques (see Tsvi’s comment about desperation.
Psych wards are, to a first approximation, prisons: one of their primary functions is to destroy your slack so that you cannot use it to do something that society at large dislikes. In the prison case: committing crimes; in the psych ward case (for depression): killing yourself. They destroy your slack because they don’t want you to have it. Things that Get You consume your slack because they want it for themselves.