I think the key question of the article is finally asked explicitly near the end:
> Why are we the way we are? Is Kenneth Eng a schizophrenic whose illness finds expression through florid racism? Or is he a racist asshole who is also schizophrenic?
In psychology there's the assumption that mood disorders and antisocial delusions can be distinguished from non-pathological "being an asshole." I'm not nearly well enough informed about psychiatry to say how this is done clinically, or how quantitative these methods are. But cases like Eng show that as a society we barely even try to make the distinction, or that our ability to do so is profoundly lacking.
There's thousands of homeless people who are on the streets because they're incapable of getting along socially or holding a real job. And a substantial portion of humanity is prepared to leave it at that; they didn't do anything to earn money or companionship, and they don't have what they didn't earn, so all is well. But when you can quite clearly see that one of these people is where they are because of an illness that, in better conditions, would be treated and leave them a productive and happy member of society, that rings hollow. The fact of the matter is that an amount of what we call "motivation," "agreeableness" or even "talent" come down to the functioning of relatively simple, purely mechanistic biochemical processes, which can be subject to incidental malfunction just as you can dislocate a joint or get an ingrown toenail. If you want to assign blame the individual for one and not the other, you have a lot of philosophical explaining to do.
>In psychology there's the assumption that mood disorders and antisocial delusions can be distinguished from non-pathological "being an asshole."
Any decent psychiatrist readily accepts that nearly all psychological diagnoses are based on quite arbitrary criteria. The problems you describe arise from how the rest of society engages with psychiatry.
Clinically, a diagnosis is a crude but useful shorthand for reasoning about how best to help someone who is experiencing distress or functional impairment. Socially, that same diagnosis is a credential - something that might entitle you to time off work, a welfare check or legal clemency. Moral decisions about who deserves compassion and support have been delegated to clinicians.
Or what do you do about the millions of “functioning” mentally ill like Kenneth Eng? He’s not so far gone that he needs to be restrained 24/7, but he has no realistic chance of meaningful “recovery”. He’s always going to be a delusional, borderline dangerous individual even with treatment. Do we as a society simply wait until this person explodes? At what point do we take action?
I don’t have the answers, but I have a feeling it’s just easier for everyone to ignore the situation.
> In psychology there's the assumption that mood disorders and antisocial delusions can be distinguished from non-pathological "being an asshole."
really? is this an explicit assumption or is it more of implicit fallacy kind of thing? I'd love to see a psychologist try to formally draw the line between some sort of moral failing where a person just acts like an asshole to people, and someone who has a mental condition that causes him to be an asshole to people.
I'm a big fan of Ken White (Popehat), his twitter feed is snarky and informative.
He has a new podcast on first amendment issues that is really well done.
I like him too. Just be cautious - he's a contributing editor at Reason, which is heavily funded by the Koches and tends to follow their agenda. I wish we had decent smart right-wing voices that weren't co-opted by money from billionaires, but they're pretty few and far between.
Ken White is close to that but the Reason and Fox connections taint him a bit.
Edit: after looking into it he's only got three articles at Reason and it looks like 'contributing editor' is an overblown title. Phew. I want to like him and think he's fair.
I'm a conventional statist liberal, find a lot of libertarian thought amoral, and don't like Reason at all. Your comment is dumb, and didn't add anything to the discussion. As Dan is constantly telling people here: please don't pull conversations into ideological tangents.
I have a physical copy of Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate. I was hoping for a bad-lit treasure, much like my physical copy of Sass Girls X by Imari Stevenson --
but aside from being written by the man who so desperately wanted to talk about "dragons that can wield metal" on Fox News, and the brilliant cover image of a dragon with Hanna-Barbera spaceman armor and weaponry fighting a fluffy monster dragon, the book, I am sad to say, is profoundly boring.
I guess you mean illness as opposed to malicious behaviour. But what human behaviour is not conditioned by biological and environmental factors? There's nobody we can point at and say "this person is evil, not sick, and should actually be held responsible for their behaviour".
As a dense primer on the subject, I'm reading Sapolsky's book "Behave". It was recommended by Gates and Mike Mouboussin as the best book they read in 2017.
It's obviously quite tricky to decide such things with complete accuracy, but -- reading Popehat's account -- it's not so much Eng's actual statements, but just the disconnectedness of thought that really leaps out. (See also the YT video someone posted.)
Robert Sapolsky also has an incredibly interesting couple of lectures on YT on schizophrenia. As it turns out it's actually recognizable in vastly different cultures, though not necessarily by concrete behaviors or mannerisms, but by persistent extremely erratic and destructive behavior. I can't recall the exact example at the moment, but I think it was something like "you killed the goat outside of the 'slaughering' season and covered yourself in its blood".
I think the most important thing is that if criticism and threats of punishment aren't going to change a person's behavior then you shouldn't use them.
... and shame on the network for actually airing it, but I suppose such is the way of "following the money" at all cost to morality. "BIG STORY"? What the fuck?
To the average media digestive system, a personality like Eng is like fast food on steroids. Most other celebrities go through a rather lengthy media life cycle of build-up and tear-down, but Eng was instantly destroyable and ready to be made fun of. Sadly, this kind of handling wasn't really surprising.
The host obviously knew the guy was messed up and was treating him more with kids gloves than actually challenging him. I'm guessing whoever booked him just thought he was a weirdo and not mentally ill(which, I guess, is the point of the article in OP)
The documentary "I am another you" (on Amazon, last I looked) is a great film about mental illness. The documentarian is attracted to the subject of her film based on his perceived freedom, which turns out to be an illusion.
"Where do people like Kenneth Eng come from, and where do they go after their virality pops like a soap bubble? Surely they differ. But Kenneth Eng came from mental illness, to which he returned. How many other people we gawk at are like him?"
Oh good. I've had conversations on the internet with Richard Eng and he seemed like a reasonable human being, even if we disagreed on software. The name of the subject of the article made me do a double-take.
For those here unaware, he's the schizophrenic author of TempleOS, a weird 64bit OS. He used to post on HN, though they were usually racist or religious rants, so that he eventually got banned (I think).
> Why are we the way we are? Is Kenneth Eng a schizophrenic whose illness finds expression through florid racism? Or is he a racist asshole who is also schizophrenic?
In psychology there's the assumption that mood disorders and antisocial delusions can be distinguished from non-pathological "being an asshole." I'm not nearly well enough informed about psychiatry to say how this is done clinically, or how quantitative these methods are. But cases like Eng show that as a society we barely even try to make the distinction, or that our ability to do so is profoundly lacking.
There's thousands of homeless people who are on the streets because they're incapable of getting along socially or holding a real job. And a substantial portion of humanity is prepared to leave it at that; they didn't do anything to earn money or companionship, and they don't have what they didn't earn, so all is well. But when you can quite clearly see that one of these people is where they are because of an illness that, in better conditions, would be treated and leave them a productive and happy member of society, that rings hollow. The fact of the matter is that an amount of what we call "motivation," "agreeableness" or even "talent" come down to the functioning of relatively simple, purely mechanistic biochemical processes, which can be subject to incidental malfunction just as you can dislocate a joint or get an ingrown toenail. If you want to assign blame the individual for one and not the other, you have a lot of philosophical explaining to do.