It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness
academic.oup.com
academic.oup.com
The article also provides an analysis of the current outbreak of Tourette's like syndrome in teenagers in Germany following the rise of a specific Youtuber.
1) mechanic-like workmen in the classic mold of the "blue collar" work ethic but don't pretend to be better/worse than others. Often produce better results that the "IQ" tests would suggest.
2) Usually competent but imposter syndrome people that sometimes lose focus due to lack of faith in training and ability. Capable of high achievement (probably better than #1) but often struggle with consistency in end results. Often undersell themselves, so it's hard to tell if they know what they are doing.
3) Status seekers that hide subpar ability or even downright incompetence with degrees and arrogance. Kind of a high functioning "Dunning-Kruger" subtype with conman/sociopathic /social abilities.
4) The frighteningly competent that case #3 pretend to be, #2 might be able to do, and are basically #1 combined with real talent.
Sounds like you ended up with #3.
Whenever I encounter an "expert" in a field, it comes down to diagnosing whether they are a 3 or a 4.
I'm a programmer and I'm an average #2.
#3s in programming are kind of different. Incompetents get weeded out quickly from true programming jobs and punted up to management likely where they become part of the Middle Management Machiavelli perpetual war.
#3s express themselves as moderate technical competence, a typical one would be someone that gets to declare greenfield to the specific stuff they have enough ability to do, gain sheen of competence, and then aggressively assume the role of "expert" based, since to management they "produced".
Next thing you know, some guy that could rapidly stand up a PHP site is in technical leadership and pushing for PHP to serve as a big data platform because it is (rolls another dice to determine buzzword) "agile".
Then they have as much or more organizational pull as a legit #4 and your organization is in TROUBLE.
Of course many of these indivudals are self diagnosed but that doesn't stop them from talking about it constantly and holding themselves up as a "suffering soul". Meanwhile those who legitimately struggle with issues like depression or anxiety now get either brushed off, or have people that "totally understand" when really they don't at all.
Also, the same mental illness could have 20 different causes, and a method which cures one of those causes is ineffective against others.
The people with mild illnesses need help too. The people with more serious issues need more serious help. But when someone says “I’m depressed” you don’t know if they’re a little upset or genuinely miserable. You don’t know if it’s because they’re life is boring right now, their dog died, or there’s a serious chemical imbalance. So in essence, saying “I’m depressed” no longer means much unless you state the symptoms.
I have/had Tourette's (like most, I grew out of the worst symptoms after adolescence) and the media portrayal of it is pretty awful. These symptoms align with the portrayal, not the reality. Tourette's should be diagnosed by a neurologist, not a GP, and this doesn't sound hard to distinguish.
Suicide is also a social contagion. So are eating disorders, depression, gender dysphoria, cutting. All documented occurring online and obviously occurred offline pre-internet, perhaps not as well documented offline.
These people are all suffering.
You can't not talk about it. You have to work out how to treat each disease correctly.
COVID-19 related increase in childhood tics and tic-like attacks - https://adc.bmj.com/content/106/5/420.abstract
Among boys, even pre-covid, we had Fortnite related spastic dancing tics.
> For the first time that I am aware of, we are seeing clusters of people seeking voluntary amputations of healthy limbs and performing amputations on themselves.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-w...
That was in 2000 and since then it's only increased in scale. Tumblr alone saw widespread suicidal ideation, depression, self-harm and a host of identity crises.
Now the question is, what's the solution?
I find it ironic that so much of what is “social” today was built by nerds who I assume had a difficult time socializing and everyone else that did not have a problem socializing for thousands of years are now using these weird social tools.
Addressing it head-on: Galatians 6:13.
Explicitly fighting it by redefinition (how pomo!): 1 Corinthians 3:18-19; Colossians 2:11.
Saying that it is beside the point: Galatians 5:6.
Dismissing the practice as exclusionary: Romans 3:1,28-31.
It shows up again and again.
Christianity deals with it thus: The old blood sacrifice is obsoleted by the new sacrifice -- the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, the Lamb of God.
Surely if we look in other faith traditions we will also find, in some of them, efforts to combat this sort of thing. It seems to crop up again and again with memes. They want to mark people.
"Moreover, they can be viewed as the 21th century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man."
And this paper stems from psychiatry.
Doing sociology is hard and physics is, in some ways, absurdly easy. As a physicist, you can generate an endless supply of particles. They are all identical, and so behave in the same way. They do whatever they do, regardless of the experimenters' expectations, social pressures, or the like. The results can be slotted into a formal mathematical framework, which also helps you design better experiments. The work of these experiments is often difficult (e.g., holding a detector just about 0K), but the concepts are often relatively clear.
None of this is true in 'softer' sciences. Every person (or animal) is different and you often can't even test the same subject twice because the very act of doing so changes them. People often don't know what they want or why they do something. When they do know, they sometimes lie about it, for myriad reasons. This makes designing, analyzing, and interpreting experiments conceptually hard, even if the actual work is pretty easy.
> Snobbery about the conventional levels of significance (etc) is almost entirely beside the point.
It seems like entirely the point. Also, the difficulties you describe are reasons sociology can't be as scientific as physics, not reasons to pretend sociology is just as scientific.
The part you're missing here is where those hypotheses are tested. A field that consistently makes accurate predictions is more scientific than one which rarely does, regardless of how much effort is expended. A field being more scientific than another isn't a matter of researchers trying harder. The quality of their results, independent of the magnitude of their effort, is what really matters. If researchers dutifully follow the scientific method by the textbook and, due to the subject of their research, can only get slipshod results, their field is less scientific than one in which researchers easily get high quality results.
There is no rule that every science paper needs to do testing and cover the whole scientific method from start to finish. Some can just be building blocks; data, hypothesis, ect.
>A field that consistently makes accurate predictions is more scientific than one which rarely does
I couldn't disagree more. That just means the field is more predictable
Science is usually defined as a process of systematic exploration, rather than a set of results. One goal of that process is to make predictions, but it’s not the only one. Even if it were, I don’t see how you can aggregate the quality of predictions within and across fields.
Physics is a perfect example. It’s true that some phenomena have been measured with exquisite precision and can be used to make extremely accurate predictions (relativity, say). Other phenomena turn out to be immeasurable: chaotic systems are, by definition, virtually impossible to predict even though they are generated by simple rules. I find those rules more interesting than yet-another decimal place on the fine structure constant. Plus, it seems incoherent to argue that particle physics is more scientific than biology which is more scientific than atmospheric physics but…
Finally, even if science were defined by predictive accuracy and there were a sensible way of comparing them across fields…the alpha levels/confidence intervals from individual experiments certainly aren’t the right way to do it! They’re a mishmash of the intrinsic variability of the thing under study, then resources devoted to studying it, and the assumptions baked into your design. In 2011, OPERA reported a six-sigma detection of faster than light neutrinos. This was, of course, not really true: a loose cable that was not included in their model was responsible instead.
I think this is clear from the title of the paper: "Stop that! It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness"
I don't think that is inappropriate. Mass sociogenic illnesses are recognized and generally thought to be related to stress and psychological conditions. It makes sense that they would opine on what these stressors and conditions are, and back them up with a dozen references.
The thrust of the paper, which is that behaviours seem to be on some level 'contagious' is an absolutely important issue.
If these can be contagious, imagine what other 'in the range of normative' types of behaviours are equally contagious?
Anyone who's around small children knows how immediately and intimately they observe and learn behaviour, it's definitely something we don't think of enough.
I'm not sure if I agree with the thesis in that attention-seeking is a fundamental driver for most, I think it is for a very large cohort and is a 'relevant factor' for further study. Though it's a tough one to decompose no doubt.
I feel like this is similar, where one behavior is seen, then altered by someone else, etc. It’s like an in-group signifier that you understand it, and that you can modify it in a meaningful way.
Will Google turn off his monetization for this?
I think it is more similar to if a child watches a racing video, then steals the parents keys and gets in a crash, than an epileptic trigger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness
e.g., dancing plague
You can see he demonstrates these "random" tourette symptoms. The linked research states how experts looking at these videos have identified them as way beyond the normal tics of someone with Tourette's, and they change and have context across videos. They're not exactly calling the YouTuber a fake, but it's somewhat implied. The videos are cut and edited in a way that highlight the "tics" and the popular ones are even sold on merchandise like T-shirts.
If I'm reading the paper correctly, they've attempted to treat teens demonstrating these symptoms as if they were treating Tourette's and it didn't work. It's some type of illness related to identity and attention-seeking enforced by social media. So they're saying teens see these types of videos and start imitating the behavior as part of a mental illness.
> they can be viewed as the 21th century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man.
I mean, obviously we're not going to see a physical virus that enters as sensory information --
Wait. ... Are COVID and anti-masking part of the same replicator-complex? ... I see how anti-masking helps COVID. But how would COVID help anti-masking? I don't see how. ... Ok, probably not.
-- but that book's concerns seem incredibly prescient.
What disturbs me most is how L. Bob Rife, the bad guy, in his one and only monologue, in a TV recording (weird how he never appears in person), seems to... basically be correct.
Biomass.
I read Snow Crash about two years ago and the theme of virality increasing as dynamic systems get larger feels all too real right now.
>patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasable tasks because of their symptoms resulting in release from obligations at school and home, while symptoms temporarily completely remit while conducting favorite activities. Fourthly, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
Reminds me of Von Trier's The Idiots.
There's also a post on there linking to this paper - https://www.reddit.com/r/fakedisordercringe/comments/pb7p02/...
The attention seeking from having a disorder is fairly prevalent.
If you're rich and say you speak to God, you can run a church, funnel a ton of money into your pockets, and evade taxes.