6 ms·

Reading through her site and the like I see a lot of conspiracy - it's a theme - that things are far bigger than can be controlled - there is a secret and I am

Reading through her site and the like I see a lot of conspiracy - it's a theme - that things are far bigger than can be controlled - there is a secret and I am revealing it. It's interesting how common that thread is in troubled people. Were there signs that could have been seen? Not many people saw her videos or site and if they did she was probably just skipped over as "the weirdo" and if someone suggested she seek help she might have seen it as part of the bigger conspiracy. Not really going anywhere with this comment to be honest, it's just scary and I don't see any real easy solutions to this kind of situation. There are thousands of people with similar sites, similar youtube channels that will continue. They probably wont do anything horrible but maybe they will. They might seek help, they might not. It's kind of scary to me.

nerfhammer 9y ago
been thinking lately, we might have a bias towards fear because it's better to mistake a stick for a snake than the reverse, some people's genes go too far with this and get anxiety disorders. maybe we also have a bias toward detecting betrayal, reciprocity being a big thing for mammals. humans needed to constantly track who was allied with whom in order to predict their behavior. so maybe some people's genes go too far detecting betrayal and they end up paranoid.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
blacksmith_tb 9y ago
Those symptoms are classic paranoid schizophrenia[1] (which is not uncommon, but many 'troubled people' have other problems). 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid_schizophrenia#Symptoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid_schizophrenia#Symptom...
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  I don't think it's a good idea to do psychiatric diagnoses on the basis of a comment about an article about her website.
portofcall 9y ago
It’s a warning sign for delusional and paranoid ideation, which can be the result of a pretty startling number of issues. Drugs can cause delusions/paranoia, schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, mania, and so on can all present in that way. It’s important to remember that it’s quite rare for that kind of person to be a threat to anyone other than themselves though. Most poled who think like her, or think they’re being “gang stalked” or any of a myriad of strange-to-delusional beliefs are just miserable, exhausted people, not a threat. However it’s also true that of the small number of mentally ill people who on to harm others, people with paranoid ideation are one of the two groups who are more likely to be violent. The other group are people who are psychotic, and may harm people under the instructions of “voices” or in extreme cases, just not have any idea what they’re doing. Again however, those “likely” groups are still seriously unlikely to be violent against anyone other than themselves, in general.
grandmczeb 9y ago
> It's interesting how common that thread is in troubled people. Probably because it sounds like a symptom of schizophrenia.
- canadianwriter 9y ago
  It certainly is a symptom but when you have massive subreddits dedicated to conspiracy just saying having those kind of thoughts means you should seek help probably wont help much...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
kristianc 9y ago
> They probably wont do anything horrible but maybe they will. They might seek help, they might not. It's kind of scary to me. It also goes without saying that there are many other more prosaic dangers to you than a vegan scizophrenic conspiracy theorist with a grudge against YouTube. But if it bleeds, it leads, I guess.
paradite 9y ago
To be honest I find the content on her website pretty normal according to my standards. Only the paranoid about the dictator part can be called conspiracy but that's just a very broad idea and nothing specific. Other contents are just rants and strong opinions on issues on demonetization or animal abuse. There are far more incomprehensible and scarier content on the Internet if you know how to find them.
pmarreck 9y ago
We should all learn about the conspiracy fallacy: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/74/Conspiracy_Theory https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla... (Which doesn't claim that no conspiracies exist, only disputing the claim that the conspirators are hiding the evidence against them as evidence itself) I also see an external locus of control worldview. "Things are done to me" instead of "I star in my own show". That is associated with depression and possibly other psychological disorders. http://www.kellevision.com/kellevision/2009/06/depression-helplessness-hopelessness-and-external-locus-of-control.html http://www.kellevision.com/kellevision/2009/06/depression-he...
- deadmetheny 9y ago
  >We should all learn about the conspiracy fallacy I'm not sure where you're going with this. Conspiracy fallacy is trivially observed by outsiders, and mentally ill people aren't going to suddenly back down from their arguments just because you pointed out their logic is fallacious.
  - pmarreck 9y ago
    > and mentally ill people aren't going to suddenly back down from their arguments just because you pointed out their logic is fallacious This assertion is tantamount to saying the entire field of psychology and psychotherapy is bullshit. That is literally all they do, talk you out of your erroneous beliefs about yourself and erroneous worldviews or habitually negative thoughts.
    - Zeta_Function 9y ago
      No it isn’t, and one of the tenants of dealing with delusional people is that you don’t engage with their delusions, don’t try to refute them. That would be like trying to help treat someone’s cold by preventing them from sneezing.
    - nugi 9y ago
      Well, the notion of fixing people by telling them whats wrong with them is bullshit. Lucky for us, most of psychology has moved beyond this antiquidated fruedian thinking.
mattnewport 9y ago
There were certainly signs that could have been and were seen. Her father warned police: http://www.businessinsider.com/nasim-aghdam-youtube-shooter-father-told-police-she-was-angry-2018-4?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/nasim-aghdam-youtube-shooter-...
drawkbox 9y ago
Humans are logical and rational, but can be illogical and irrational in the same breadth. Sometimes people are configured less trusting, some too trusting, everyone is trying to figure out the world. Many of the things you mention, that there is some bigger power and belief being bigger than the reality, could also be applied to religious people which can also be troubling in many extreme areas such as cults or killing people that don't believe. Terrorism is largely a religious side effect of some belief that is avenging against a conspiracy. Conspiracy in a way is a religion, but some conspiracies are true and most people have seen humans be devious in small groups even at their workplace or in business, so it goes back to trust/belief as some challenge authority, some trust too much. Conspiracy has ranges just like religion but they may come from the same place, people trying to simplify their world with many unknowns or to deal with emotional issues, standing in society, trust in authority or too much confirmation bias. All of this just goes back to the irrational side of humanity and the human condition where people are figuring out their world, anything that doesn't have a least a good hold in reality, solely based on belief over common trust and facts, can go off the rails.
nickysielicki 9y ago
Unless you're a complete bore, if you look at someone hard enough you can make the case that they're a mental invalid. It's a useless thing to talk about, because prior to her shooting anyone yesterday, the only thing that could have warned us were just warning signs. Just as easily as she walked up to that office and shot people, she could have changed her mind and gone about a normal day and done nothing wrong. Does our society now support the idea of precrime? I sure as hell don't. It bothers me when every time something like this happens, the question is always, "How could we have caught this?" or "how can we make sure she didn't get a gun?" or "how could we have institutionalized her?" It's much more useful to talk about how to come to terms with the absolute chaos in our world and structure your life around the principle that the world is a fragile and dangerous place. Anyone can drive their car across the centerline. Any two-bit dipshit can learn how to make aluminum powder bombs and terrorize an entire city. Some crazy incel can walk up to your office and fuck your whole life up as you're leaving for lunch. This will always be the case. I don't understand why people think it's reasonable to suggest that we can ever live in a world where your mortality isn't seriously exposed, or that it would be a world that would be nice to live in. Unless you're completely out of your fucking mind, most people are incapable of truly coming to terms with it and going about their day, willing to die at any time. Everyone else is afraid, and probably always will be. I think some people cope with the fear by deluding themselves into thinking security is just around the corner, if only we can just fix a few things like gun access and mental invalids. We just need to do a few things just a little bit better, and then it's all going to be great. These people live in a fantasy world. Others cope with the fear by isolating themselves and their families, avoiding cities and anyone unlike themselves, maintaining a small circle of trust, neanderthal style. This is antithetical to classical liberal values and thus is unappealing for most young and open-minded people. If you think you reject both of these approaches, I think you're probably just in denial.
- gebeeson 9y ago
  That is a great thought process that I agree with but haven't been able to put it in words. I ascribe it to 'hindsight being crystal clear'. Of course it is. There always seems to be dots that can be connected once 'something' happens - regardless of what that 'something' is. But until that 'something' happens, the dots are without meaning and who cares about connecting them.
anigbrowl 9y ago
I don't think that it's correct to pathologize this. Aghbad had a pretty clear radical vegan agenda to her output, and a history of campaigning in that space. She became angry that unilateral changes in YouTube policies wrecked her income stream and felt that Youtube and other firms engaged in non-transparent behavior to promote some content creators and suppress others. Not many people saw her videos or site Her site includes screenshots of videos with ~300k views/mo for which she received $0.10 in revenue. That's quite a respectable number for a fringe artist. I don't put out videos myself but I have to agree that $0.10 is a pretty crap payout for 300k views a monetizable video, and have long thought that YouTube's general lack of transparency about revenue is unfair to the people who use the platform. This is the basic problem of commercial platforms as described by our own patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/939907045985107968?lang=en https://twitter.com/patio11/status/939907045985107968?lang=e... If they did she was probably just skipped over as "the weirdo" It's weird to you but there's an audience for this style of art, which originates with a style called Vaporwave. It's deliberately lofi and DIY, and her web page points out that her (quite respectable) numbers of followers on various online platforms are organic rather than gained via SEO and so forth. Look, the tech industry's basic invitation to content creators is "if you find your passion and build organic followings our blog/video/music platform will help you to monetize that relationship." But the reality, and one I've been pointing out here for several years, is that online marketplaces tend to yield highly artificial bimodal income distributions rather than the approximate Pareto distributions that obtain in the natural world. We don't know how income is distributed on most platforms because the platform operators are not transparent about their pricing or revenue distribution, but it's not unreasonable to infer that different contributors are paid different rates for the same number of views depending upon their ability to drive ad growth, stickiness and other metrics. The problem for content creators is that the revenue is a black box, and so they're effectively playing a slot machine. Monetizing content is a topic that often comes up on HN, and a frequent argument is that people shouldn't rely on view revenue but monetize with a Patreon, or selling merch, or using crowdfunding to support each project whose output is then later distributed free and so on. The problem for content creators is that the revenue model keeps changing and anyone who becomes invested in a business model is constantly playing catch-up as platform operators continually move the goalposts for all but the most successful contributors who are popular enough to negotiate a payout rate. It shouldn't be a surprise that if you put people in a state of constant economic anxiety then some of them will eventually snap and get mad about it. The lack of transparency or agency in digital micropayments is a stressor that platform operators choose to impose. I want to be clear here that my argument is not that YouTube owed Aghbad an audience or popularity. Rather, she managed to cultivate an audience only to be told at some point that it was no longer eligible to be paid for and that her audience (~10k views a day) wasn't even worth the price of a sandwich.

nerfhammer 9y ago

been thinking lately, we might have a bias towards fear because it's better to mistake a stick for a snake than the reverse, some people's genes go too far with this and get anxiety disorders. maybe we also have a bias toward detecting betrayal, reciprocity being a big thing for mammals. humans needed to constantly track who was allied with whom in order to predict their behavior. so maybe some people's genes go too far detecting betrayal and they end up paranoid.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

blacksmith_tb 9y ago

Those symptoms are classic paranoid schizophrenia[1] (which is not uncommon, but many 'troubled people' have other problems). 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid_schizophrenia#Symptoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid_schizophrenia#Symptom...

anigbrowl 9y ago
I don't think it's a good idea to do psychiatric diagnoses on the basis of a comment about an article about her website.

portofcall 9y ago

It’s a warning sign for delusional and paranoid ideation, which can be the result of a pretty startling number of issues. Drugs can cause delusions/paranoia, schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, mania, and so on can all present in that way. It’s important to remember that it’s quite rare for that kind of person to be a threat to anyone other than themselves though. Most poled who think like her, or think they’re being “gang stalked” or any of a myriad of strange-to-delusional beliefs are just miserable, exhausted people, not a threat. However it’s also true that of the small number of mentally ill people who on to harm others, people with paranoid ideation are one of the two groups who are more likely to be violent. The other group are people who are psychotic, and may harm people under the instructions of “voices” or in extreme cases, just not have any idea what they’re doing. Again however, those “likely” groups are still seriously unlikely to be violent against anyone other than themselves, in general.

grandmczeb 9y ago

> It's interesting how common that thread is in troubled people. Probably because it sounds like a symptom of schizophrenia.

canadianwriter 9y ago
It certainly is a symptom but when you have massive subreddits dedicated to conspiracy just saying having those kind of thoughts means you should seek help probably wont help much...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

kristianc 9y ago

> They probably wont do anything horrible but maybe they will. They might seek help, they might not. It's kind of scary to me. It also goes without saying that there are many other more prosaic dangers to you than a vegan scizophrenic conspiracy theorist with a grudge against YouTube. But if it bleeds, it leads, I guess.

paradite 9y ago

To be honest I find the content on her website pretty normal according to my standards. Only the paranoid about the dictator part can be called conspiracy but that's just a very broad idea and nothing specific. Other contents are just rants and strong opinions on issues on demonetization or animal abuse. There are far more incomprehensible and scarier content on the Internet if you know how to find them.

pmarreck 9y ago

We should all learn about the conspiracy fallacy: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/74/Conspiracy_Theory https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla... (Which doesn't claim that no conspiracies exist, only disputing the claim that the conspirators are hiding the evidence against them as evidence itself) I also see an external locus of control worldview. "Things are done to me" instead of "I star in my own show". That is associated with depression and possibly other psychological disorders. http://www.kellevision.com/kellevision/2009/06/depression-helplessness-hopelessness-and-external-locus-of-control.html http://www.kellevision.com/kellevision/2009/06/depression-he...

deadmetheny 9y ago
>We should all learn about the conspiracy fallacy I'm not sure where you're going with this. Conspiracy fallacy is trivially observed by outsiders, and mentally ill people aren't going to suddenly back down from their arguments just because you pointed out their logic is fallacious.
- pmarreck 9y ago
  > and mentally ill people aren't going to suddenly back down from their arguments just because you pointed out their logic is fallacious This assertion is tantamount to saying the entire field of psychology and psychotherapy is bullshit. That is literally all they do, talk you out of your erroneous beliefs about yourself and erroneous worldviews or habitually negative thoughts.
  - Zeta_Function 9y ago
    No it isn’t, and one of the tenants of dealing with delusional people is that you don’t engage with their delusions, don’t try to refute them. That would be like trying to help treat someone’s cold by preventing them from sneezing.
  - nugi 9y ago
    Well, the notion of fixing people by telling them whats wrong with them is bullshit. Lucky for us, most of psychology has moved beyond this antiquidated fruedian thinking.

mattnewport 9y ago

There were certainly signs that could have been and were seen. Her father warned police: http://www.businessinsider.com/nasim-aghdam-youtube-shooter-father-told-police-she-was-angry-2018-4?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/nasim-aghdam-youtube-shooter-...

drawkbox 9y ago

Humans are logical and rational, but can be illogical and irrational in the same breadth. Sometimes people are configured less trusting, some too trusting, everyone is trying to figure out the world. Many of the things you mention, that there is some bigger power and belief being bigger than the reality, could also be applied to religious people which can also be troubling in many extreme areas such as cults or killing people that don't believe. Terrorism is largely a religious side effect of some belief that is avenging against a conspiracy. Conspiracy in a way is a religion, but some conspiracies are true and most people have seen humans be devious in small groups even at their workplace or in business, so it goes back to trust/belief as some challenge authority, some trust too much. Conspiracy has ranges just like religion but they may come from the same place, people trying to simplify their world with many unknowns or to deal with emotional issues, standing in society, trust in authority or too much confirmation bias. All of this just goes back to the irrational side of humanity and the human condition where people are figuring out their world, anything that doesn't have a least a good hold in reality, solely based on belief over common trust and facts, can go off the rails.

nickysielicki 9y ago

Unless you're a complete bore, if you look at someone hard enough you can make the case that they're a mental invalid. It's a useless thing to talk about, because prior to her shooting anyone yesterday, the only thing that could have warned us were just warning signs. Just as easily as she walked up to that office and shot people, she could have changed her mind and gone about a normal day and done nothing wrong. Does our society now support the idea of precrime? I sure as hell don't. It bothers me when every time something like this happens, the question is always, "How could we have caught this?" or "how can we make sure she didn't get a gun?" or "how could we have institutionalized her?" It's much more useful to talk about how to come to terms with the absolute chaos in our world and structure your life around the principle that the world is a fragile and dangerous place. Anyone can drive their car across the centerline. Any two-bit dipshit can learn how to make aluminum powder bombs and terrorize an entire city. Some crazy incel can walk up to your office and fuck your whole life up as you're leaving for lunch. This will always be the case. I don't understand why people think it's reasonable to suggest that we can ever live in a world where your mortality isn't seriously exposed, or that it would be a world that would be nice to live in. Unless you're completely out of your fucking mind, most people are incapable of truly coming to terms with it and going about their day, willing to die at any time. Everyone else is afraid, and probably always will be. I think some people cope with the fear by deluding themselves into thinking security is just around the corner, if only we can just fix a few things like gun access and mental invalids. We just need to do a few things just a little bit better, and then it's all going to be great. These people live in a fantasy world. Others cope with the fear by isolating themselves and their families, avoiding cities and anyone unlike themselves, maintaining a small circle of trust, neanderthal style. This is antithetical to classical liberal values and thus is unappealing for most young and open-minded people. If you think you reject both of these approaches, I think you're probably just in denial.

gebeeson 9y ago
That is a great thought process that I agree with but haven't been able to put it in words. I ascribe it to 'hindsight being crystal clear'. Of course it is. There always seems to be dots that can be connected once 'something' happens - regardless of what that 'something' is. But until that 'something' happens, the dots are without meaning and who cares about connecting them.

anigbrowl 9y ago

I don't think that it's correct to pathologize this. Aghbad had a pretty clear radical vegan agenda to her output, and a history of campaigning in that space. She became angry that unilateral changes in YouTube policies wrecked her income stream and felt that Youtube and other firms engaged in non-transparent behavior to promote some content creators and suppress others. Not many people saw her videos or site Her site includes screenshots of videos with ~300k views/mo for which she received $0.10 in revenue. That's quite a respectable number for a fringe artist. I don't put out videos myself but I have to agree that $0.10 is a pretty crap payout for 300k views a monetizable video, and have long thought that YouTube's general lack of transparency about revenue is unfair to the people who use the platform. This is the basic problem of commercial platforms as described by our own patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/939907045985107968?lang=en https://twitter.com/patio11/status/939907045985107968?lang=e... If they did she was probably just skipped over as "the weirdo" It's weird to you but there's an audience for this style of art, which originates with a style called Vaporwave. It's deliberately lofi and DIY, and her web page points out that her (quite respectable) numbers of followers on various online platforms are organic rather than gained via SEO and so forth. Look, the tech industry's basic invitation to content creators is "if you find your passion and build organic followings our blog/video/music platform will help you to monetize that relationship." But the reality, and one I've been pointing out here for several years, is that online marketplaces tend to yield highly artificial bimodal income distributions rather than the approximate Pareto distributions that obtain in the natural world. We don't know how income is distributed on most platforms because the platform operators are not transparent about their pricing or revenue distribution, but it's not unreasonable to infer that different contributors are paid different rates for the same number of views depending upon their ability to drive ad growth, stickiness and other metrics. The problem for content creators is that the revenue is a black box, and so they're effectively playing a slot machine. Monetizing content is a topic that often comes up on HN, and a frequent argument is that people shouldn't rely on view revenue but monetize with a Patreon, or selling merch, or using crowdfunding to support each project whose output is then later distributed free and so on. The problem for content creators is that the revenue model keeps changing and anyone who becomes invested in a business model is constantly playing catch-up as platform operators continually move the goalposts for all but the most successful contributors who are popular enough to negotiate a payout rate. It shouldn't be a surprise that if you put people in a state of constant economic anxiety then some of them will eventually snap and get mad about it. The lack of transparency or agency in digital micropayments is a stressor that platform operators choose to impose. I want to be clear here that my argument is not that YouTube owed Aghbad an audience or popularity. Rather, she managed to cultivate an audience only to be told at some point that it was no longer eligible to be paid for and that her audience (~10k views a day) wasn't even worth the price of a sandwich.