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BPD comments on Open Thread April 16 - April 22, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Comments (190)
There are probably checklist to diagnose Borderline Personality Disorder that are much better than simply reading a Wikipedia article and thinking about whether it applies to you.
I found one, which doesn't look enormously reputable but is probably better than wikipedia.
People with borderline personality disorder generally lack "insight," i.e. they are typically unaware that they have BPD; will deny having it; and will get extremely defensive at the suggestion they have it.
One can contrast with, for example, obsessive/compulsive disorder sufferers who usually do have pretty good insight.
So a survey based on self-reporting is not going to be very helpful.
Anyway, I doubt that there are many people on this board with BPD. This is based on my interactions and observations.
Also, this discussion board doesn't seem like it would be very attractive to someone with BPD since it doesn't offer a steady stream of validation. For example, it's common on this board for other posters, even those who agree with you on a lot of stuff, to challenge, question, or downvote your posts. For someone with BPD, that would be pretty difficult to handle.
The main mental issue I sense on this board (possibly disproportionate to the general population) is Asperger's. There also seems to be a good deal of narcissism, though perhaps not to the point where it would qualify as a mental disorder.
So if a person with BPD would discover LW and decide they like the ideas, what would they most likely do?
My model says they would write a lot of comments on LW just to prove how much they love rationality, expecting a lot of love and admiration in return. At first they would express a lot of admiration towards people important in the rationalist community; they would try to make friends by open flattery (by giving what they want to get most). Later they would start suggesting how to do rationality even better (either writing a new sequence, or writing hundreds of comments repeating the same few key ideas), trying to make themselves another important person, possibly the most important one. But they would obviously keep missing the point. After the first negative reactions they would backpedal and claim to be misunderstood. Later they would accuse some people of persecuting them. After seeing that the community does not reward this strategy, they would accuse the whole LW of persecution, and try to split apart their own rationalist subcommunity centered around them.
I hate to point this out, but it is already easy enough to ridicule the proper spelling; its spelled Asperger.
Edit: Sorry tried to delete this comment, but that doesn't seem to possible for some reason.
Fixed. FWIW thanks.
According to the Wikipedia article: "People with BPD feel emotions more easily, more deeply and for longer than others do."
To me that doesn't seem like the LW crowd, what would make you think that there's an overrepresentation?
Because it's a group of people who are excited for years about a rule for calculating conditional probability?
Yeah, I'm not serious here, but I will use this to illustrate the problem with self-diagnosis based on a description. Without hard facts, or without being aware how exactly the distibution in the population looks like, it's like reading a horoscope.
Do I feel emotions? Uhm, yes. Easily? Uhm, sometimes. More deeply than others? Uhm, depends. For longer than others? I don't have good data, so, uhm, maybe. OMG, I'm a total psycho!!!
No, there are a lot of data points.
One example: At the community we had one session where having empathy was a point. The person who's on stage to explain the rest what empathy is talks about how it's having an accurate mental model of other people and not that empathy is about feeling emotions.
I don't want to say that having an accurate mental model of other people isn't useful, but it's not what people mean with the word empathy in a lot of other communities. Empathy usually refers to a process that's about feeling emotions.
I actually attributed this to a higher than normal base rate of Asperger Syndrome.
You are bound to 'find' that BPD is overrepresented here by surveying in this manner. (hint: medical student syndrome)
I could repeat this poll in a venue where the people are similarly prone to medical student syndrome, but not as prone to filling some kind of void with rationality or other epiphanies. That would provide a baseline for comparison. But I don't yet know where exactly I would find such a venue.
The five results so far go against that.
You can't detect whether a systematic bias in the sampling method exists by looking at the results.
If you have a prior, you can.
In a slightly more unrolled manner, if the results you are getting are inconsistent with your ideas of how the world works, one hypothesis that you should update is that your ideas about the world are wrong. But another hypothesis that you should also update is that your sampling method is wrong, e.g. by having a systematic bias.
Sure you can, in principle. When you have measured covariates, you can compare their sampled distribution to that of the population of interest. Find enough of a difference (modulo multiple comparisons, significance, researcher degrees of freedom, etc.) and you've detected bias. Ruling out systematic bias using your observations alone is much more difficult.
Even in this case, where we don't have covariates, there are some patterns in the ordinal data (the concept of ancillary statistics might be helpful in coming up with some of these) that would be extremely unlikely under unbiased sampling.
That means that you need more data. Having a standard against which to train your model means that you need more than just the results of your measurement.
I was just contesting your statement as a universal one. For this poll, I agree you can't really pursue the covariate strategy. However, I think you're overstating challenge of getting more data and figuring out what to do with it.
For example, measuring BPD status is difficult. You can do it by conducting a psychological examination of your subjects (costly but accurate), you can do it by asking subjects to self-report on a four-level Likert-ish scale (cheap but inaccurate), or you could do countless other things along this tradeoff surface. On the other hand, measuring things like sex, age, level of education, etc. is easy. And even better, we have baseline levels of these covariates for communities like LessWrong, the United States, etc. with respect to which we might want to see if our sample is biased.
You argued against a more general statement than the one I made. But I did choose my words in a way that focused on drawing conclusions from the results and not results + comparison data.
Leaving aside the sample size, a sample value of zero cannot be an overestimate.
There no reason to leave aside sample size. The value was zero by nature of low sampling size.
The observed reality that the first 5 people voted that BPD doens't apply to them provides nearly zero bayesian evidence against the idea of systematic bias by surveying in that manner.
While ignoring the sample size, I'd put a high probability on my comment having something to do with the intense response in the other direction. (I am not even sure how you can read all of it and not think that it is at least 'poorly descriptive', no matter who you are)
I had an impulse to answer "very descriptive," but I controlled it.
Clearly not :-D
Better: Alice had an impulse to answer "not at all descriptive" but she controlled it and said 'very descriptive'.
I seem to feel emotions less pronounced as average persons. Would have been interesting to add that as an option.