It’s a war of pathologies. We’ve got BPD and narcissism battling it out with OCD. They are kinda the yin and yang of personalities. People with BPD are impulsive and rage prone, and become aggressive at others when irked (they externalize their emotions). Narcissists are are also sensitive, in particular to criticism, and like to attack other people. Where they differ is in the motivation: narcissist seek to control and dominate, while BPD seek to sooth an emotion. OCD is about understanding and controlling the environment to maximize good outcomes. This creates a lack of empathy – not because they can’t empathize, but because they understand how others create their own problems and simply can’t find it in their hearts to feel sorry for someone who creates their own problems from thin air.
You can see that in this thread. We’ve detailed a systematic methodology for profiling and identifying hackers, and counter strategies for dealing with them, as well as systematic solutions for dealing with anti social and BPD traits. Meanwhile the people here can’t stop crying about the length of posts, which they willingly read. Translation, maximal emotional control vs zero emotional control – the ability to talk about and dissect sensitive topics, vs unable to see someone else smile without exploding in a fit of rage.
That actually happened to me, by the way. A big name caster has developed a grudge against me because I beat him with lurker nydus and sent him a smilley face. Those are the kinds of people we are dealing with here. They are impulsive, sensitive, unaware of themselves and their surroundings, unable to control their own emotions which they externalize onto random things (like smiley faces or the length of posts), and who verbally assault anyone for the great crime of smiling (or using social media to … drumroll please … socialize).
I cracked the joke awhile back that SC2 clearly attracts people with severe mental health issues, and that this creates a monetization problem for the game, and that maybe SC2 should be monetized by using it to advertise mental health counseling services directly to the people who need it most. It’s a joke, but at the heart of every joke is a kernel of truth. Maybe, just maybe, the internet needs to be reformed to find these people IRL & get them the help they desperately need. It will make their lives better and it will make the internet better. That would be a benefit of real ID laws. If you logged into the internet with your real ID and started verbally assaulting other people, they’d call the cops on you the same as if you’d done it in a public park. The cops would then recommend you to some counsel ling services.
The issue is that the internet allows people with severe mental health struggles to avoid their problems. This happens though the anonymity factor. Their actions are what identify the problem to those capable of noticing there is a problem, but you can’t ever trace it back to them because the internet is anonymous.
Understanding that the internet is dominated by BPD & NPD is critical in understanding the mechanisms of the system as a whole, as well as your own experience within that system. People over react when I talk about “difficult” subjects like maphacking and balance because they are emotionally unstable and externalize those feelings rather than taking responsibility for them. The use of facts, rather than the embracement of feelings, is jarring to their emotions. They become embittered with the truth because they associate it with their negative feelings, and even blame it. The use of tongue and cheek humor causes those feelings to explode. Criticizing and dissecting them then prevents the externalizing of the blame, forcing them to realize they cause their own problems. This is why they’ve always hated my posts. The old forums used to give me -40 votes on every post I made. I literally didn’t care, meanwhile they cared so much they would follow me from thread to thread and systematically harass me with downvotes and mod reports.
We can use this psycho analysis to understand larger internet systems, like Reddit, by the way. If the internet is dominated by mental illness, then we’d expect to find these behaviors in aggregate. Head on over to /r/politics and people are having a melt down because Elon Musk placed his hand on his chest and then extended his arm outward. They are having a melt down that DRUMPF is a dictator because he said he will run for a third term, even though it’s obviously just DRUMPF cracking a joke.
Understanding how internet systems work is important in understanding how other systems, like civics and politics, will evolve into the future, because the internet is probably the single biggest factor in affecting those other systems. That’s why it’s important to discuss and understand how the internet works. If we don’t solve issues on the internet, those issues will have a ripple-effect into the rest of society.
Computer science is fundamentally the study of absurdly complex systems. It’s the study of millions and billions of transistors, and the software that can be built by changing the configuration of those transistors. As a computer scientist myself, you can really see my obsession with systems because I apply that mode of thinking to understanding all sorts of things, including these forums and the people on them. It’s exactly that mode of thinking that triggers BPD & NPD to the absolute maximum and creates their extreme hatred for me.
You can think of each individual on these forums as a transistor in a circuit that is programmed to compute an output. Based on how these “transistors” behave, what will the system compute. That’s easy. The system will have a perpetual melt down over Serral. Any mentally sane person, who jumps on social media to tap the brakes on this insanity, is harassed until it’s only the lunatics online. This skews developer feedback, which skews game design decisions. Play this out for several years and it transforms SC2 from the greatest video game ever made to a meme of spamming APM faster than the other guy. Why? Because strategy was deleted from the game since losing games in jarring manners caused the lunatics to have melt downs on social media. This means developers deleted strategy from the game, which guaranteed to a long macro game regardless of how you played – every decision is meaningless, because all decisions map to a macro game. This pleased the BPD & NPD personalities because the experience of getting fungalled and losing the game was too jarring for them. The problem is that most gamers aren’t crazy – they actually enjoy having fun and fungalling stuff and getting fungalled. Deleting game ending moments made the game so boring that it killed the game. Nobody wants to play a game that was designed to soothe the insensitivities of internet lunatics. It’s extremely boring. The computational output of this social system is a video game designed to soothe the emotional insecurities of bipolar people by making the game as bland as possible. It’s that simple.