Slashdot Mirror
Interview with the Creator of BitTorrent
brokencomputer writes "There is an interesting interview with Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, on my site, WrongPlanet.net. Because there is already a plethora of information about BitTorrent, this interview takes a different approach and focuses entirely on Cohen's Asperger's Syndrome. In addition to being interesting to anyone interested in BitTorrent, Cohen's story is extremely inspirational to those of us who do have Asperger's, and will probably be so even to those without Asperger's Syndrome."
What about the many Slashdotters who only think they have Aspergers, and use it as an excuse to excuse their anti-social behavior?
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Learn? Who the hell wants to learn anymore? That's an old-fashioned way to look at it. Since your acceptance into college and, ultimately, your college degree amounts to your grade, why worry about what you learn? What? Doing your best? Being productive? I don't understand, what does that have to do with getting an A? That kind of thinking is last-century...who wants to be productive when you can just slide by your whole life? I mean, no matter what you make, the government's gonna pay you when you get old. What? The government fucked up Social Security?
At least not officially. It's curious how he went from joking that he was "autistic" and "had" asperger's to a self-diagnosis of "I probably have asperger's" to now, "i have asperger's".
Perhaps, Mr Cohen should actually go out and get diagnosed by someone competent before misrepresenting a legitimate illness.
PS: What's with people's fascination of collecting disorders? "I'm a cutter! No! Bipolar! No, schizophrenic!"
For the people that actually have these fad-ish disorders, it isn't some cool gee-whizz thing, it's a nightmare.
On Fake Diseases
When children behave in ways that schools or parents dislike, this behaviour is often characterised as an illness. Depending on the nuances of the behaviour concerned, a child might be deemed to have Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),
Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) or any one of a growing range of other illnesses.
However, there is something unusual about these diseases. First of all, they are defined entirely in terms of their symptoms, not in terms of some malfunction of the body. Why is this unusual? After all, before the underlying cause was known, diseases like AIDS and SARS, too, were recognised in terms of their symptoms. But that is different. It is perfectly meaningful to say: "that looks like SARS, but it might just be a bad cold, or the person might be deliberately exaggerating his symptoms". Hence also, with real diseases, it is possible to have an asymptomatic disease, like asymptomatic Hepatitis C. But it is not possible, even in principle, to have asymptomatic ADHD.
There is another unusual feature of diseases like ODD that should give us pause: they are typically treated without the patient's consent; and indeed the "treatments" are often physically identical to what would in a non-medical context be called punishments. This breach of human rights is casually justified as being "for their own good".
ADHD and its ilk really aren't diseases in the same sense as, say, Hepatitis C. They are metaphorical diseases, the names of which denote behaviours that are deemed to be morally unacceptable. In other words, the child has a certain opinion about what he ought to be doing and this opinion is different from his parents' opinion about what he ought to be doing.
Take ODD as an example, the diagnostic criteria are:
A pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior lasting at least 6 months, during which four (or more) of the following are present:
1. often loses temper
2. often argues with adults
3. often actively defies or refuses to comply with adults' requests or rules
4. often deliberately annoys people
5. often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior
6. is often touchy or easily annoyed by others
7. is often angry and resentful
8. is often spiteful or vindictive
Note the many moral judgements that are necessary to make any diagnosis according to this definition: "actively defies", "deliberately annoys" and so on. These are not deemed to be disease symptoms when a child does them to an intending kidnapper, or to the parents' political opponents at a demonstration, for example. These states of the child's brain become diseases only when a certain condition - disapproval - exists in the brain of another person - the parent or other authority. The treatment is also metaphorical and for ODD it consists of conversations and discipline. Again, this is very different from other diseases: bacteria are not great conversationalists, one cannot debate diabetes, but apparently ODD can be disposed of by talking to it.
The entire purpose of these diseases is, in fact, to give these vile "treatments" a gloss of medical and scientific respectability. Then no attention need be paid to whether the child is right to behave defiantly toward his parents in specific cases. No effort needs to be wasted on such fripperies as rational argument or considering that the child might have a point if they repeatedly refuse to obey their parents or say that they are bored in school. How very convenient for the force-users.
There is one last oddity to note. Professor Michael Fitzgerald of Dublin University has recently said that geniuses such as Socrates, Charles Darwin, and Andy Warhol may have had a mental disease called Asperger's syndrome characterised by not wanting to talk to people and having "restricted" interests with "abnormal" intensity. Now, suppose that having Asperger's syndrome for a while wo
I was diagnosed autistic at age five. The diagnosis was quickly withdrawn, since at the time a high IQ was a bar to a diagnosis of autism. In 1993, Asperger's Syndrome became an accepted diagnosis in the US, and it was pretty clear that it matched up with the behaviors seen when I was five. In 2000 I finally got around to talking to a psych about it. She gave me some excellent advice when it came to deciding whether or not I was autistic:
If the diagnosis helped me make sense of my life, if it gave me tools with which I could build a better life, then yes, I was autistic.
If the diagnosis turned into an excuse for self-destructive behavior, turned into a rationale for why I should be excused from the rules of civility, if it became a license for uncivil behavior, then no, I wasn't autistic.
In the end, she told me, it wasn't up to her to decide whether I was autistic. It was up to me.
It was the best psychiatric advice I've ever received. And, y'know what? I'm not going to tell you if I'm autistic or not. I don't care if you know. I don't wear a sign and advertise myself to the world one way or another.
I know if I'm autistic or not. That's enough.
So please show some courtesy to Bram Cohen. It's very possible he's received the exact same (excellent) psychiatric advice I've received.
I thought the same thing that you did, but then I thought again - what does diagnosing do for you? Putting a label on yourself like this would actually create Asperger's syndrome for you ... if you get what I mean. It obviously wasn't a problem for you until you read this, and I think that the many people here who think the same way as you and I should not worry about it.
You sure it wasn't a psychologist you saw? I find it hard to believe a psychiatrist would basically say "it's up to you whether or not you have a mental illness". That's like saying "it's up to you whether or not you have cancer". If any doctor said that to me I'd call em a quack and look elsewhere.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
My problem with this whole thing is that it just sounds like a classification more than anything else. You say it's a spectrum disorder, and people have varying degrees of symptoms. To me that sounds like someone has just pulled a bunch of descriptions of things people generally don't like, and turned it into a disease. People like explanations more so than truth.
Take any 6 symptoms, say you need 3 to have the disease, and a certain percentage of the populace will have it. Throw in a few famous dead people who "could have had the disease" (except no one even got to examine them, just idle speculation based on other often dead people's recollections) and you've got a nice, fuzzy, ill-defined disease. What I'm getting at is that this disease definition sounds so ellusive (widely varying symptoms, many of which are relatively common), that it doesn't seem to be anything more than a series of symptoms. Heart disease there's blockage. Hepatitis there's an actual virus. Hell, even depression you can measure lowered neuro-transmitters, treat it sucessfully with drugs, etc. But what use is this "diagnosis" of Aspergers Syndrome other than making people feel better because you've assigned it a name?
There's so many of these elusive "syndromes and disorders" these days that it calls into question much of medical science. Gulf War Syndrome, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which of these are actually real? Does every behaviour that's a bit out of the ordinary have to have a syndrome or disorder associated with it. Maybe I have Argumentative Skeptic Disorder.
Symptoms include
1. inability to accept well cherished beliefs as fact.
2. arguing against unproven beliefs whenever they're brought up as fact.
3. Use of sarcasm.
4. Not accepting the opinions of learned experts.
I'm really trying not to be a dick, but how is this diagnosis more than just a bunch of vague symptoms?
AccountKiller
That's exactly my point. The diagnosis itself is meaningless, but because society demands some sort of "excuse" to be who you are, it fills that spot nicely. It'd be nice if we didn't need it, but we do. It also is crucial in getting accomodations at school. Some schools will not take you seriously when trying to get an IEP/504 plan unless you have some sort of diagnosis. Try trying to get accomodations in a public school with "Oh, he's just a pain in the ass.". Ideally, we wouldn't have to make up conditions/disorders/diseases for these sort of things. But with the state of society, it's needed. People aren't willing to just accept someone with the sort of symptoms that Asperger's people generally have or allow them any kind of understanding without a nice label/box like that.