Crazy People
Jan. 13th, 2011 12:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenReacting to this claim that's been doing the rounds and annoying me on Twitter:
"You can't predict how crazy people will react -- that's the definition of crazy."
Um... No, it isn't. That's random, which is an entirely different thing. I am not a psychiatrist, and there are several people on my f-list who are probably better qualified to comment on this, but my understanding is that mentally-ill people don't go around rolling a d100 to decide what they're going to do next.
People act according to their interests, beliefs, circumstances, and their modes of thought. In mental illness some of those modes of thought may be dysfunctional (which in turn can lead to strange beliefs) but this doesn't turn them into human dice. If anything, my impression is that it's more likely to do the reverse: severe mental illness can lock people into some very predictable (and harmful) patterns.
Of course, mentally-ill people are unpredictable (at the individual level) until you know those things about them. This is because people are unpredictable until you know those things about them. To cover that gap, we tend to make some default assumptions about what people want and how they think, but those assumptions are often wrong even for sane people. (Look at the figures for 'intimate partner' homicides and other domestic violence to see what I mean; it's hard to think of a bigger error of judgement than mistaking your future killer for a good partner.)
I think the main appeal of this fallacy is that it enables the Crazy Person Escape Clause: if you can pretend that causality stops as soon as a Crazy Person gets involved, that's your get-out-of-jail-free card. It means you don't have to think about the unpleasant possibility that something we did could have encouraged the Crazy Person to act that way, or wrestle with the difficult philosophical question of whether we're responsible for the consequences of our actions when they're mediated by a Crazy Person - neither of which are questions that can be settled in a glib little tweet.*
In short, it's lazy and sloppy, a position adopted because it leads to convenient answers rather than one based on evidence.
*And BTW, I don't say that the answers to either of those questions has to be "yes". Only that if you want to have an opinion on issues like this, you should at least put in the effort of THINKING about these things rather than leaping for an excuse not to.
"You can't predict how crazy people will react -- that's the definition of crazy."
Um... No, it isn't. That's random, which is an entirely different thing. I am not a psychiatrist, and there are several people on my f-list who are probably better qualified to comment on this, but my understanding is that mentally-ill people don't go around rolling a d100 to decide what they're going to do next.
People act according to their interests, beliefs, circumstances, and their modes of thought. In mental illness some of those modes of thought may be dysfunctional (which in turn can lead to strange beliefs) but this doesn't turn them into human dice. If anything, my impression is that it's more likely to do the reverse: severe mental illness can lock people into some very predictable (and harmful) patterns.
Of course, mentally-ill people are unpredictable (at the individual level) until you know those things about them. This is because people are unpredictable until you know those things about them. To cover that gap, we tend to make some default assumptions about what people want and how they think, but those assumptions are often wrong even for sane people. (Look at the figures for 'intimate partner' homicides and other domestic violence to see what I mean; it's hard to think of a bigger error of judgement than mistaking your future killer for a good partner.)
I think the main appeal of this fallacy is that it enables the Crazy Person Escape Clause: if you can pretend that causality stops as soon as a Crazy Person gets involved, that's your get-out-of-jail-free card. It means you don't have to think about the unpleasant possibility that something we did could have encouraged the Crazy Person to act that way, or wrestle with the difficult philosophical question of whether we're responsible for the consequences of our actions when they're mediated by a Crazy Person - neither of which are questions that can be settled in a glib little tweet.*
In short, it's lazy and sloppy, a position adopted because it leads to convenient answers rather than one based on evidence.
*And BTW, I don't say that the answers to either of those questions has to be "yes". Only that if you want to have an opinion on issues like this, you should at least put in the effort of THINKING about these things rather than leaping for an excuse not to.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 03:01 am (UTC)That's the problem. He's a brilliant lunatic,
you can't tell which way he'll jump
-- like his game he's impossible to analyse
-- you can't dissect him, predict him
-- which of course means he's not a lunatic at all.
From "The Russian and Molokov" from the musical Chess.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 03:12 am (UTC)People are trying to avoid criminals being able to explain causes for their actions because it might mean they don't get punished. People trace things back to find the cause until they find someone they don't like they can blame. Everything seems to be based around the single-cause premise.
Of course everything has multiple causes and so often punishment is not based on realitic assessment of culpability. For example if someone is commiting a crime and in consequence someone is hurt, they become guilty of the injury even if it was in no way predictable as a consequence of the crime being committed.
By the same token we need to avoid the problem of putting the entire responsability for a murder on the person who stole the murderers teddy-bear as a child.
We need to assess reasonable responsability, and more importantly assess reasonable responsible action.
It is my feeling that Palin's adverts were not reasonable or responsible, and that because of that she (and her campain controllers) bear some culpability for the events. On the other hand that doesn't lessen the culpability of the man who committed the attack, and to claim it does is a mechanism that seems to be much used to deflect responsibility.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 05:10 am (UTC)In both directions, at that. If you start with the notion that any murder has exactly one unit worth of blame to be allocated, then you can argue it either way: "X is responsible for his actions therefore Y is innocent" or "X is not responsible for his actions, therefore somebody else (probably Y) is guilty".
no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 06:44 am (UTC)People do not want to think.
my two cents Rose
They can get awfully violent when you tell them they should.
Be wary of the sane and the lazy, my friend.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-16 02:02 am (UTC)Not that psychiatry itself is immune from this kind of thinking - it's hard to see the ECT treatments of the Fifties in any other light.