I’ve personally met a number of schizophrenics who are… astoundingly good at doing things in code, that work, but are extremely divergent from conventional ways of doing things.
It seems like every software developing company should keep a department of schizophrenics, doing crazy coding, just to see what they come up with. Sooner or later, like a bunch of monkeys with typewriters, they’ll come up with something cool.
Although most of it was probably his schizophrenia talking. I figure somebody who made an entire OS because he though God told him to, can’t be held 100% responsible for his actions…
He was severely mentally ill and homeless by the end of his life, iirc doing youtube interviews for a big mac. He was a brilliant person who was failed by society and while i definitely don’t condone his actions or rhetoric, its my understanding that he wasn’t a bigot before his mental health declined. Im sure he had his biases that led to his bigotry later on, but that could be said about almost anyone.
If you’ve known any schizophrenics… well, a part of their whole thing is persistent delusions.
Things you cannot get them to change their mind about, to try and comprehend in a different way, realize are false or are incoherent.
Bigotry is subset of that, and, while certainly not all, some of the schizophrenics I’ve known have had one form or another of bigotry as one of those things they basically can’t abandon, a mode or element of their thinking that never goes away.
The whole conceptual ‘problem’ is… with a schizophrenic… how do you know what parts of them are ‘the schizophrenia talking’, and which aren’t?
You can’t really.
Its a whole different way a mind can work, its a kind of neurodivergence.
Like, I’m autistic, a different kind of neurodivergent, and I attempted to autistically understand the thought processes of the schizophrenics I knew, trying to map out categories and flow charts and triggers and conditions.
… this didn’t work.
They often don’t understand their own thought processes, or will tell you two obviously logically mutually exclusive things are both true at the same time, and this will not bother them and they will just emphatically tell you its not inconsistent, with further logic that is also fairly obviously inconsistent.
But what kinds of thinking are ‘disordered’, and what kinds of thinking … are logically consistent?
I could find no overall pattern to that with the schizophrenics I knew, nor even really any rhyme or reason that could stably describe a single one of them.
But, sometimes, the flipside of that, will be them explaining a way of thinking about something… that actually is valid, and is basically fucking wild, revolutionary, but it actually does logically check out when you work through it.
And then sometimes its a mix of both.
The best way that I have of understanding schizophrenia is basically that the pattern recognition and thus decision making framework within such a mind is radically different than ‘the norm’ (again I’m autistic so that’s also reliant on my understanding of ‘the norm’), and I can’t really describe it in any more detail than that.
Terry Davis was an insane bigot, but goddamn, could that dude code.
Beyond that uh, I wash my hands of this.
May he find solace in the eternal embrace of the noodly one.
Al’dente 🙏
Ramen! 🙏
Schizophrenia isn’t a handicap programming. It may even be helpful, which is disturbing. RIP crazy bastard.
Should look into madness studies. It’s an entire college-level course on the cultural value of people with mental health disorders.
Entirely seriously, I agree.
I’ve personally met a number of schizophrenics who are… astoundingly good at doing things in code, that work, but are extremely divergent from conventional ways of doing things.
It seems like every software developing company should keep a department of schizophrenics, doing crazy coding, just to see what they come up with. Sooner or later, like a bunch of monkeys with typewriters, they’ll come up with something cool.
So basically a bizarre combination of the RCA research labs and a mental institution?
He was a bigot?
He certainly liked the N word.
Although most of it was probably his schizophrenia talking. I figure somebody who made an entire OS because he though God told him to, can’t be held 100% responsible for his actions…
He was severely mentally ill and homeless by the end of his life, iirc doing youtube interviews for a big mac. He was a brilliant person who was failed by society and while i definitely don’t condone his actions or rhetoric, its my understanding that he wasn’t a bigot before his mental health declined. Im sure he had his biases that led to his bigotry later on, but that could be said about almost anyone.
Yeah.
If you’ve known any schizophrenics… well, a part of their whole thing is persistent delusions.
Things you cannot get them to change their mind about, to try and comprehend in a different way, realize are false or are incoherent.
Bigotry is subset of that, and, while certainly not all, some of the schizophrenics I’ve known have had one form or another of bigotry as one of those things they basically can’t abandon, a mode or element of their thinking that never goes away.
The whole conceptual ‘problem’ is… with a schizophrenic… how do you know what parts of them are ‘the schizophrenia talking’, and which aren’t?
You can’t really.
Its a whole different way a mind can work, its a kind of neurodivergence.
Like, I’m autistic, a different kind of neurodivergent, and I attempted to autistically understand the thought processes of the schizophrenics I knew, trying to map out categories and flow charts and triggers and conditions.
… this didn’t work.
They often don’t understand their own thought processes, or will tell you two obviously logically mutually exclusive things are both true at the same time, and this will not bother them and they will just emphatically tell you its not inconsistent, with further logic that is also fairly obviously inconsistent.
But what kinds of thinking are ‘disordered’, and what kinds of thinking … are logically consistent?
I could find no overall pattern to that with the schizophrenics I knew, nor even really any rhyme or reason that could stably describe a single one of them.
But, sometimes, the flipside of that, will be them explaining a way of thinking about something… that actually is valid, and is basically fucking wild, revolutionary, but it actually does logically check out when you work through it.
And then sometimes its a mix of both.
The best way that I have of understanding schizophrenia is basically that the pattern recognition and thus decision making framework within such a mind is radically different than ‘the norm’ (again I’m autistic so that’s also reliant on my understanding of ‘the norm’), and I can’t really describe it in any more detail than that.