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Vaniver comments on Rationality Quotes December 2013 - Less Wrong
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A patient who believes they are Samson inaccurately believes they have a weakness: their hair being cut. By cutting their hair, you trigger their imaginary weakness, which decreases the amount that they resist, and thus you do not have to pin them down with orderlies.
On the other hand, a patient who believes they are Samson may resist having their hair cut quite forcefully, at least if you do it while they're conscious. A non-superpowered individual struggling to prevent someone from wielding scissors about their head may be quite a bit more of a liability than a non-superpowered individual struggling against facilities built to contain crazy people.
And... problem solved! Whew, that was easy.
(Also, why scissors, and not an electric razor? Way safer for everyone involved.)
If I were going to cut the hair of a patient who believed they were Samson, I would definitely want to do it when they were sedated, but then, a patient who believed they were Samson who had their hair cut in their sleep might be highly aggrieved and become aggressive in response.
(Keep in mind that the biblical Samson physically destroyed the building in which he was being contained, at the cost of his own life, when he entreated God to return his strength for a final act of vengeance after he was betrayed and had his hair cut.)
Actually, his hair had regrown at that point- his captors thought that he was powerless because they had blinded him after Delilah delivered him to them, and apparently Delilah never told them the real secret to his strength.
His hair had regrown, but he still had to pray to God to restore his lost strength, because cutting it at all broke his vows as a Nazirite.