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Comment by canadianwriter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

My thinking wasn't to "stop" this fully - but seeings signs of mental health and offering support can vastly lower the occurrences. Something we as a society are terrible at. There's always a chance of course no matter how good we get at lowering the harm but if we can lower the harm that's always somethign to strive for.

I'm just making a point. Of course there is a middle ground that we should strive for. I would just caution that hindsight is 20/20. There's plenty of stuff on /r/deepintoyoutube that is made by perfectly sane individuals that, if you were told it was made by this shooter, we'd call it a clear warning sign.

Mental illness doesn't predict violent behaviour.

Drug or alcohol addiction do; previous exposure to violence or previous violent behaviour does; but mental illness by itself is a poor predictor for violence.

Increasing the amount of mental health support available is a good thing to do, but it probably wont do much to stop gun crime.

While I mostly share your point of view - not every horrible event is necessarily preventable short of some extremely draconian measures - I don't think it's just a matter of throwing our hands up and acquiescing that "Anyone can drive their car across the centerline" for example (and indeed there are sometimes barriers or physical space between opposing traffic lanes).

So the question isn't, "how could we have prevented this particular tragedy from occurring, at any cost?", but more "can we reduce the likelihood of an event like this in the future, in a way we're comfortable with?"

For example, locking cockpit doors on airplanes is a pretty low-consequence action we now take as a result of 9/11. Not entirely without tradeoffs, sure, but a fairly effective action nonetheless.

Air travel in general is actually a pretty great example of making something relatively chaotic considerably safer over time.

I am partial to approach 2, although i live in the city and agree that it is rather backwards and impractical. I have a third approach that I use, I go on adventures. Whether its backpacking in the wilderness for a week, summiting a mountain or swimming down a river and riding rapids with friends, the point is to expose yoursef to the dangers of the world, to have to rely on yourself to not make mistakes and to be hardy enough to overcome. Coming into camp after dark, freezing, tired and wet, setting up camp and sleeping through the night only to wake up at dawn, put on cold wet shoes and pack it all up and get to walking puts in perspective, for me at least, how powerful of a driver the will to live is. Experiencing the raw primal power that a life-or-death situation has on you, when your life is in your own hands(vs driving a car which is a team effort and much more controlled) really puts in perspective how dangerous society isn't.

It’s true absolute security is impossible, but mass shooting is much more prevalent in the UD than anywhere else not at war, so there is likely a chance to provide much more security by figuring out what goes wrong in the US that is less so in other places.

There is something to what you say but in this case, as with the Parkland shooting, law enforcement received specific warnings from family members that were not followed through on sufficient to prevent the incidents. The police likely already have all the legal powers they would have needed in these two cases to prevent the shootings if they had acted and a specific warning from a family member is a long way from treating some odd Internet postings as thought crime. Indeed there have been cases where police over reacted to much lesser warning signs. The biggest question to me is how can law enforcement do a better job of acting appropriately on warnings and tips they receive?

http://www.businessinsider.com/nasim-aghdam-youtube-shooter-...

If none of having guns, being inclined to commit crime, or having guns while being inclined to commit crime are illegal, there is little police can do to intervene before those things combine to manifest in an actual attempt at violence.

If police are incapable of intervening to prevent a crime then citizens certainly need guns to protect themselves.

We should all learn about the conspiracy fallacy: 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-he...

>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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There were certainly signs that could have been and were seen. Her father warned police: http://www.businessinsider.com/nasim-aghdam-youtube-shooter-...

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#Symptom...

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.

> 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.

> It's interesting how common that thread is in troubled people.

Probably because it sounds like a symptom of schizophrenia.

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...

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=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.

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.

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