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withdrawn, relationally incompetent, sexually frustrated, and desperately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