JargonFile/entries/Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality.txt

Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality

withdrawn, relationally incompetent, sexually frustrated, and desperately
unhappy when not submerged in his or her craft. Fortunately, this extreme is
far less common than mainstream folklore paints it  but almost all hackers
will recognize something of themselves in the unflattering paragraphs above.
Hackers are often monumentally disorganized and sloppy about dealing with
the physical world. Bills don't get paid on time, clutter piles up to
incredible heights in homes and offices, and minor maintenance tasks get
deferred indefinitely. 1994-95's fad behavioral disease was a syndrome
called Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), supposedly characterized by (among
other things) a combination of short attention span with an ability to
hyperfocus imaginatively on interesting tasks. In 1998-1999 another syndrome
that is said to overlap with many hacker traits entered popular awareness:
Asperger's syndrome (AS). This disorder is also sometimes called
high-function autism, though researchers are divided on whether AS is in
fact a mild form of autism or a distinct syndrome with a different etiology.
AS patients exhibit mild to severe deficits in interpreting facial and
body-language cues and in modeling or empathizing with others' emotions.
Though some AS patients exhibit mild retardation, others compensate for
their deficits with high intelligence and analytical ability, and frequently
seek out technical fields where problem-solving abilities are at a premium
and people skills are relatively unimportant. Both syndromes are thought to
relate to abnormalities in neurotransmitter chemistry, especially the
brain's processing of serotonin. Many hackers have noticed that mainstream
culture has shown a tendency to pathologize and medicalize normal variations
in personality, especially those variations that make life more complicated
for authority figures and conformists. Thus, hackers aware of the issue tend
to be among those questioning whether ADD and AS actually exist; and if so
whether they are really diseases rather than extremes of a normal genetic
variation like having freckles or being able to taste DPT. In either case,
they have a sneaking tendency to wonder if these syndromes are
over-diagnosed and over-treated. After all, people in authority will always
be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly,
intelligent individualists  thus, any social system that depends on
authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and
drug such abnormal people until they are properly docile and stupid and
well-socialized. So hackers tend to believe they have good reason for
skepticism about clinical explanations of the hacker personality. That being
said, most would also concede that some hacker traits coincide with
indicators for non-hyperactive ADD and AS  the status of caffeine as a
hacker beverage of choice may be connected to the fact that it bonds to the
same neural receptors as Ritalin, the drug most commonly prescribed for ADD.
It is probably true that boosters of both would find a rather higher rate of
clinical ADD among hackers than the supposedly mainstream-normal 3-5% (AS is
rarer at 0.4-0.5%).