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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree with the main thrust of your point, but I think this is an incorrect and very problematic framing:

It's a real shame they were born with a bad brain that makes them incapable of not being a violent menace to society

People take many years to grow into adulthood. Studies show that every dollar invested in doing right by our children saves multiple dollars down the road on prison costs and the like.

America has a terrible track record for how it treats its children, especially for a wealthy, developed country. If we want to escape our current Prison-Industrial Complex with a side of violent and insane rampant homelessness, we would do well to start by developing more family-friendly policies in this country.

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Nothing that agentofoblivion wrote hinted at him not supporting "doing right by our children". And nothing you wrote touches on what you think should be done after the damage has been done.

Prevention is all to the good and should, of course, be pursued. But prevention of future problems does not solve the problem that exists NOW.

Suggesting people are simply born that way implicitly suggests that there is nothing whatsoever to do about it. "You lost in the genetic lottery. Sucks to be you."

I'm saying it's vastly more complicated than that and it's a serious problem to frame the problem that way because it leads to a mentality of "Just lock them up or ship them out for the good of other people." This tends to deepen the problem.

There are things that help. I know a lot about such things. I sometimes try to blog about such.

So basically the solution to violent homeless people is to fix the parenting of people who will likely(?) produce homeless people in the future...by some gov policy which will improve their parenting and childhood by providing them with more services?

A whole lot of parents could potentially fit into that category and only a few will have kids that both end up visibly homeless and violent. So that basically means improving services for low income people and other situations where a higher risk of mental issues can arise outside of lack of resources (plenty of homeless people come from middle class families due to things like domestic violence or mental illness by one of the parents or simply hereditary).

Then you'd still need a way to deal with the 5-6 generations of homeless people who are currently in adulthood as well which seems to be the pressing issue in Seattle. It's possible both could be correct.

Agreed, claiming mental illness is due to being born with a "bad brain" is dangerous pseudoscience. Psychiatry/psychology has zero proof that mental illness is due to "bad brains" or any such objective biological cause

As with most things it's part genetic, part environmental, but enough that we aren't slaves to our destinies.

Sounds like a failure of pschiatry. I don't accept the conclusion that faulty brains are 'unlikely to be the root-cause'.

This is like a systems engineer stating 'this issue is definitely not hardware-related'. Maybe you have zero proof that it's hardware-related; maybe you need to work harder at debugging.

In this case, the hardware gets altered over time due to throughputs in the energy generating system, so isolating system failures such than you can conclusively state "it's a defect in the hardware that originated in the design and manufacture" is quite tricky, especially given the long life and myriad use cases of the hardware in question.

The thing that distinguishes human brains from computers is that the software one runs (or is forced to run by circumstance) causes the hardware to change over time.

That systems engineer would be stupid to completely rule out software related root causes to a bug that is only evident on the application i/o level when they have no tangible reason to do so.

It's not only a failure of psychiatry, but also neuroscience. The scientific community is still very much in the dark in understanding how biology transcends into consciousness

I agree it’s not accurate to lump all mentally ill people into a category of having bad brains. And I also agree early intervention is probably the best means to prevention, although I don’t really have any evidence to base that on aside from observing life for 30+ years.

But, I think it’s also counterproductive to pretend that we currently have the knowledge and technology to turn all of these people into productive members of society. Some of them have indeed been dealt a bad genetic hand, and giving them a house isn’t going to fix it. The guy yelling nonsense at the sky and stabbing people needs more than I know how to give him, and it’s too late to make sure his parents feed him his green beans.

So, I’m definitely open to discussing medium and long term solutions, and investing tax money into helping this problem have reasonable outcomes for all the badness involved. But I’m not happy to wait a generation for these to take place, and just hope these violent maniacs don’t kill someone, or throw a five year old kid off the upper floor of a mall...oh wait, that already happened.

Stating that it's problematic to promote the idea that "People are simply born with broken brains. Done!" in no way suggests any of the policies you are inferring.

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