One experience my attention has lingered on, re: what’s up with the bay area rationality community and psychosis:
In ~2018, as I mentioned in the original thread, a person had a psychotic episode at or shortly after attending a CFAR thing. I met his mom some weeks later. She was Catholic, and from a more rural or small-town-y area where she and most people she knew had stable worldviews and social fabrics, in a way that seemed to me like the opposite of the bay area.
She… was pleased to hear I was married, asked with trepidation whether she could ask if I was monogamous, was pleased to hear I was, and asked with trepidation whether my husband and I had kids (and was less-heartened to hear I didn’t). I think she was trying to figure out whether it was possible for a person to have a normal, healthy, wholesome life while being part of this community.
She visibly had a great deal of reflective distance from her choices of actions—she had the ability “not to believe everything she thought”, as Eliezer would put it, and also not to act out every impulse she had, or to blurt out every thought. I came away believing that that sort of [stable ego and cohesive self and reflective distance from one’s impulses—don’t have a great conceptualization here] was the opposite of being a “crazy person”. And that somehow most people I knew in the bay area were half-way to crazy, from her POV—we weren’t literally walking down the street talking to ourselves and getting flagged by police as crazy, but there was something in common.
One experience my attention has lingered on, re: what’s up with the bay area rationality community and psychosis:
In ~2018, as I mentioned in the original thread, a person had a psychotic episode at or shortly after attending a CFAR thing. I met his mom some weeks later. She was Catholic, and from a more rural or small-town-y area where she and most people she knew had stable worldviews and social fabrics, in a way that seemed to me like the opposite of the bay area.
She… was pleased to hear I was married, asked with trepidation whether she could ask if I was monogamous, was pleased to hear I was, and asked with trepidation whether my husband and I had kids (and was less-heartened to hear I didn’t). I think she was trying to figure out whether it was possible for a person to have a normal, healthy, wholesome life while being part of this community.
She visibly had a great deal of reflective distance from her choices of actions—she had the ability “not to believe everything she thought”, as Eliezer would put it, and also not to act out every impulse she had, or to blurt out every thought. I came away believing that that sort of [stable ego and cohesive self and reflective distance from one’s impulses—don’t have a great conceptualization here] was the opposite of being a “crazy person”. And that somehow most people I knew in the bay area were half-way to crazy, from her POV—we weren’t literally walking down the street talking to ourselves and getting flagged by police as crazy, but there was something in common.
Am I making any sense here?