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terrifyingstories · 1 year

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hanna loses connection with many of the people that matter to her most when she moves to new york. she becomes hard to reach even by the people closest in proximity to her - in fact, her relationships with people not in new york probably fare better. they aren't as close to her, and the distance gives her a greater control over the narrative, whereas people who see her more often are more likely to see how she's struggling. long distance relationships are easier to juggle, whereas her relationships with people living nearby suffer.

the greatest and most obvious deterioration is with caleb. hanna becomes consumed by work, clinging to it as hard as she possibly can, even at the expense of their relationship. where they used to communicate effortlessly, communication becomes hard and painful, and they co-exist without really meaningfully connecting for much longer than hanna realizes. eventually their relationship falls apart completely, and hanna's devastation only makes her dive into work more. hanna's relationship with one of her best friends, christian, also struggles significantly.

she didn't want another person telling her she wasn't over it. hanna is desperate for control over her life - desperate to start over, desperate to reinvent herself outside of the shadow of the dollhouse and all the other traumas they've experienced. work becomes a means of doing that; a distraction from all of the ways in which she's still immensely struggling from the things she's suffered. there aren't reminders of A at work in the way there are with caleb, who knows the stories of so many of her scars. no one at work will see through her the way christian will - she can continue to push everything that happened down and no one will ever be the wiser.

there's nothing beautiful or romantic about hanna's trauma. hanna's trauma makes her defensive, fearful, tense, stressed, impulsive, avoidant. it impacts every aspect of her life and her relationships. it makes her desperate for control even at the expense of the relationships with the people she cares about most; it makes her flaky and unreliable and at times difficult to be friends with. it makes her cancel plans and avoid people that love her. it makes her inconsistent and harms her self-awareness. it makes her lie to people that care about her and to herself. it makes her feel out of control and terrified, it makes her blind to things about herself and her relationships she would ordinarily see. it impacts her ability to be there for people she loves and regulate her emotions. it's messy and ugly and something she has to work to out-maneuver every single day.

#and i love her!!!!#she isn't always easy but she doesn't have to be! and i care very deeply about hanna's journey of learning that.#she can be messy and complicated and difficult and that doesn't make her less worthy of love #i must become a lion hearted girl.#meta: hanna.#meta.#i love my messy girl i love her flaws so much

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matt-eldritch · 8 months

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My family and I are currently rewatching Toy Story 2 and once the movie got to the part where Woody discovers that he was the star of a famous 1950s puppet show, I spent a lot of time wondering what happened to the series between the cancellation and the then-present time of the first two movies.

Was there ever an animated spinoff during the Dark Age of Animation? Hanna-Barbera, Filmation and DePatie-Freleng did make a lot of animated spin-offs of live action properties during those times (such as Gilligan's Isle, Tarzan, Batman '66 and Planet of the Apes) so it'd make a bit of sense if Woody's Roundup got similar treatment. Were there any attempts at making a big budget Hollywood movie in the 80s or 90s? The 90s were chock-full of adaptations of old TV shows from the 60s and 70s so again, it'd make sense if Woody's Roundup was optioned at one point. Maybe the movie never happened in that universe because it fell victim to Development Hell and some of the crew or cast jumped ship over to the 1995 Buzz Lightyear movie?

#toy story #toy story 2 #woody the cowboy #woody #woodys roundup #stinky pete #jessie toy story #pixar #disney pixar #hanna barbera #depatie freleng #filmation #film theory #film theories #lightyear 2022 #meta #metatext #show within a show

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acmeoop · 1 year

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Movies To-Day “Cruise Cat” (1952)

#50s #mgm #hanna barbera #tom and jerry #gif #cruise ship #theatre lounge #meta #title card

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rozahline · 1 year

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Every copy of The Funky Phantom is personalized

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lingeringscars · 15 days

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I wouldn't want to go back to the person that I was before. All I cared about was winning. And now I just really want to be happy.

#my baby my baby my baby #muse: spencer hastings #meta: spencer hastings #spencer right before this offering her field hockey shirt to hanna #Spencer dedicating her life to helping others #my baby

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thousand-page-dreams · 2 years

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Ultimately, I think it's great that the girls are able to form a stronger, healthier friend group without Alison. Nobody is the leader, and they all matter.

In the flashbacks, it's shown that Alison picks on and insults Hanna constantly. In some moments, Alison shows warmth to the other girls, or at least appears to be having fun with them.

But with Hanna...there's hardly any. Any "affection" from Alison is backhanded.

For example: "You'll find someone who loves you...just maybe later than the rest of us."

The girls stood by while Alison bullied their classmates. The show implies that their silence makes them complicit. Almost all of the girls try to make up for this by befriending Alison's targets after her dissappearance.

(It's interesting that Aria is the exception but that's for another post.)

Aria stands up for Hanna to Alison once in one of the flashbacks, so I'd like to think this happened more than once. We only see bits and pieces of the original friend group, after all. Aria is also the least featured in the flashbacks.

But Spencer and Emily say nothing. Spencer fights back against Alison multiple times, but not usually on behalf of other people.

Should Hanna have stood up for herself? Absolutely.

Were the rest of the group also mistreated by Alison? For Spencer and Emily, of course. I think it's more complicated in Aria's case, though.

However, the other girls never apologize or even acknowledge their complicity. A conversation about it would've been nice when they reunited.

Another way to show how different they are from Ali: accountability and open communication.

#pll #pretty little liars #pll meta #alison dilaurentis #hanna marin

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bobauthorman · 2 years

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After re-watching a few episodes of Laff-A-Lympics, I think the reason Shaggy kept running from Sadie Mae in Scooby-Doo Meets the Boo Brothers is because he was getting Daisy Mayhem flashbacks.

#Laff-A-Lympics #Scooby-Doo meets the boo brothers #Shaggy Scooby-Doo #Daisy Mayhem #meta #Sadie Mae Scroggins #cartoon #hanna-barbera

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chick-with-wifi · 8 months

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Meta: Root and Shaw flashbacks

Finch and Gen both assume something tragic must have happened to make Root and Shaw the way they are, which they both refute (Root with condescension, Shaw in a matter-of-fact way):

Finch: What happened to you?

Root: Me? You think I was damaged? Some childhood trauma? That is so sweet. (2x02)

Gen: What's wrong with you? I mean, why are you like this?

Shaw: You know that thing that made you flinch? I don't get that.

Gen: You don't get scared?

Shaw: Or sad. Or happy or lonely. I do angry okay, but that's about it.

Gen: Did something happen?

Shaw: Been this way as long as I can remember. I was, uh, about your age when I figured out I was different. (3x05)

The flashbacks in these episodes show that something tragic did happen to them (Hanna's disappearance, Shaw's dad's death) but it didn't make them who they are, instead it simply led them to realize how they had always been (Root doesn't care about people and can easily hurt them, Shaw doesn't experience emotions the way people expect her to) and that is an important distinction.

#Poi #Root x shaw #Root #Sameen shaw #Root poi #Poi root #Person of interest #Poi meta #My meta

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ao3feed-brucewayne · 2 months

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Batfam Meets The KKG

read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/TtuURel by smashakdsasdfbasd Events where the Batfam thinks the KKG are either aliens or metas They are right but there is only one alien And Events where the KKG are getting traumatized being in Gotham but no matter what the villains did, they can't get a scratch on them nor be killed The rogues just thinks they are either aliens or metas They are right but only one is an alien and others are humans They just can't get hurt because their main character has massive plot armor that protects his loved ones (ANYONE WHO READS THE COMICS PLS DONT EVEN GIVE ME A single HINT THAT ANYOEN COULD BE DYING PLS) Words: 103, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English Fandoms: BoBoiBoy (Cartoon), Batman - All Media Types Rating: General Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Characters: BoBoiBoy (BoBoiBoy), Bruce Wayne, Jason Todd, Dick Grayson, Damian Wayne, Tim Drake, Ying (BoBoiBoy), Fang (BoBoiBoy), Yaya Yah | Hanna, Gopal Kumar Relationships: Jason Todd & Everyone, BoBoiBoy & Kokotaim Gang (BoBoiBoy) Additional Tags: Crossover, Crack, Bruce Wayne is Batman, Kokotiam Gang Meets Batfamily read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/TtuURel

#IFTTT #bruce wayne #batman #the caped crusader #the dark knight #dcu #ao3 #ao3feed

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zebee-nyx · 5 months

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Hello! A pre-emptive Storytelling Saturday for next week: Describe your WIP in bullet points so my ADHD brain gets it quickly! 🥰🥰🥰

I live and breathe by bullet point notes (>v<) so easy to digest and organize.

So my current main WIP is Digitally Dead: Waywards:

Setting: post ecological apocalypse cyberpunk city called Neocago. It is essentially a hyper capitalist and anarchy city.

Neocago=New Chicago

Neocago is mostly divided into three parts: Uppercity, Midcity, Undercity

Junkyards surround city

Wastes is basically everything that isn’t a city or a giant mound of hot garbage

Oh yeah, the sun is a deadly laser and society has turned more nocturnal

Shifting 3rd person perspective between four characters [will see how this goes, either going to work well or crash and burn… either way I’ll figure it out and pick up the pieces (‘>v<)]

The original idea was basically to let these crazies below loose in the world I had built and see what they’d do. Then I caught feelings for them and had to start making a proper story.

Character: Kori “Bandit” Cline, hyper and bouncy net-idol wannabe.

Character: Jiro “Jax Ripper” Kishi, professional ninja mafioso and family man.

Character: Hank Meadows, run away meta lab experiment with an expiry date.

Character: Hanna “Spider” Benita, a “lady in the chair” hacker who essentially lives in the dream-net. [also don’t know that I’m going to explicitly say it anywhere in story but she is trans]

Each character has an independent goal, but they need the others in some way to achieve it. Thus they shall eventually be working together.

Side Character: Doc is chill mentor/fixer/dad/literal-man-with-a-medical-degree who has a mysterious past.

Side Character: Nat is the driver/mechanic and will do things.

Biotechna=big corp doing big corp things and anything(one) in the way is gonna get stepped on. Yet unnamed boss man is important for the kinda obscured b-plot and otherwise is a general antagonistic force.

The Association=syndicate of many crime families/gangs and important to Jiro’s background and story.

Corps and their corporate ladder climbers, crime bois, and anyone with a fat enough wallet typically want sketchy stuff done on occasion so they hire mercs (main characters fit here) to do those things for them.

Thank you for the ask (^v^) it is always appreciated!

#writeblr #worldbuilding #cyberpunk #digitally dead

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terrifyingstories · 11 months

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how hanna needs things to be out in the Physical Realm for her to work through them. she needs to envision alison sitting in front of her to be able to articulate some of the damage this relationship did to her and find some degree of closure with it all. she has to go see mona in radley to try and make sense of what she did and move past it because the feelings are too large and too tangled for her to work out on her own. how she needs to redecorate her room after the dollhouse, how it isn't until she sees the place she and jordan met being torn down that she realizes their relationship is over, how she doesn't come to terms with how much she pushed down in new york and the consequences it had for some of the most important relationships in her life until she's back in rosewood. hanna and the physical. hanna and places. hanna and needing to engage her body and mind when on a quest for healing.

#i must become a lion hearted girl.#meta: hanna.#meta.

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elvesandlanterns · 1 year

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Ghost helpline part 14 New Meetings and New Beginings

Vlad knew three things about Bruce Wayne; he was a playboy, a philanthropist and loved kids. Oh and he was utterly ditzy, kind but dumb. As his kids would say a “himbo”. Vlad relaxed as he scuttled about the kitchen and platted them both up some lasagna.

He briefly wondered where Red, Jack he should get use to calling him Jack, had gone as he walked into the living room and saw the Wayne stare at the television. He had been in the middle of his latest k-drama when the door rang. The drunk looked inthralled with the show, turning to Vlad with a dopey smile. Vlad past him the plate of food before explaining where they were in the plot.

A part of him felt his scars itch as if to remind him of his mistakes. Don’t trust humans, don’t get too close. But as hard as it was to admit, he was lonely and even if they had hurt him he missed them.

Vlad wrapped his robe around him tight.

This was fine, Bruce Wayne was harmless anyways.

—- —- —-

Jack will admit to this not being his best idea, but the blob ghost had informed him that Violet was sick. Nothing major but … still. Jack wanted no needed to help.

He helped the family move in, using his speed as discreetly as possible. He hid in the kitchen and tested the Masters neighbors cookies for poison. There wasn’t any. He went to help but Violet wasn’t there.

But now he could help, there were vampires in Gotham. If he followed the direction to Bludhaven right he should come across a patch of flowers. A fever reducing potion should be easy to make from there.

There were vampires in Gotham so Jack really couldn’t be blamed for assuming he’d never run into a were wolf here.

- Aqualad patrolled Bludhaven as he waited for Nightwing, they had a case to work on. Nightwing is late but that isn’t anything new. He’s texting the acrobat about it when he spots her. It’s hard not to look, especially in a place a dreary as Bludhaven.

She has fine red hair cascading down her back. Her outfit is entirely pink. Like really pink, right down to the platform shoes. The mysterious girl is deathly pale clutching a bedazzled phone for dear life. It’s almost as if she is looking for something. Kaldur feels bad chances are she’s lost. The Atlantian turns around and heads off to meet the Nightwing anyway.

—- —- —-

Boston left Zatanna and John to their bickering, he already knew where they would go to get information. A seedy pub, or illegal trading ring maybe they’d even go some fancy library but Boston knew where the real action was at.

He flew off to Fawcett City.

The door chimed as he walked into the store, the door reading “Mystic Hannas Hair Salon: We’ll change your look like Magic!” Ah it was good to be home.

—- —- —-

Harley is delivering Ivys latest stash of drugs to Penguin when she feels a shadow come from an alley. Which can’t be right. The bats know better than to get that close to a target. She bends down to scratch her new pets ear. (Pan had been getting creative lately.) Taking advantage of her spot on the ground she looked at the alley until something came out. Oh a girl. A girl with violet eyes… fuck what was a meta kid doing out here by herself? Looking closer she was covered in something too. Gross.

Violet stared at the blond woman from across the street. She had a cute little celery dog, it reminded the demon of Auntie Sam. It oozed the magic of the green, so that was probably a good sign right?

“Hey what are you waiting for an invitation get over here!”

Violet smiled, it would seem that she had passed whatever this lady’s test was. She had been stared at and not found lacking, that was a first. It felt nice.

Harley could not believe someone would just let their meta kid run around Gotham. Especially near the Ice Berge Lounge. Her little celery dog seemed to like her tho tugging on their leash to get closer, wagging its tail in glee as the girl trotted across the street like a new born foal. And that was concerning, a good sign that celery dog liked her, she was actually coming over here? Just because she’d asked? What the fuck? Did the kid want to get murdered? Because that’s how you get murdered in Gotham!

Harley squared her shoulders and opened the door to the empty pub, “Come on in, let me charge my phone so you can call someone to pick you up okay?” God Harley hoped she wasn’t a runaway. Well then looks like it was up to Auntie Harley to teach the new kid the rules of Gotham, it could be her good deed of the year she thought.

Celery Dog rubbed itself against the girls legs, “Well hello little one, aren’t you just marvelous.” Her voice was small and quiet. Celery Dog sprouted little flowers at the compliment, which wtf? Did celery even come from flowers? She was so going to have to tell Pammy about this. This kid was interesting.

—- —- —-

Dandelion “Dandy” Masters was pissed. What was meant to be a short trip to pick up his sister was slowly but surely becoming a disaster. They missed several turns, blew two tires, somehow ran out of gas and now, now they were lost!

Charles got out of the car and held his cellphone out looking for bars, “Oh snickerdoodles I got like no reception.”

Dandy sighed, “Hand me your mirror.” None of the clones, aside from Alcor, had shown any affinity for magic. Dandy hated using mirror phones the most, he considered it a waste of magic crystals.

Charles leaned over his brothers shoulder, “Dandy… why the fuck are we in Rhode Island?”

Dandelion zoomed out into the distance of the mirror, “Welcome to Happy Harbor”, he wasn’t entirely sure how but he knew this was all Klarions fault.

—- —- —-

Bruce sat him self on the man’s couch being served his own butlers pasta on a paper plate.

Paper plates, plastic forks, no cameras.

He scans the room as the TV plays a sappy romance show.

Pictures, pillows, art projects litter the area.

Vlad rewinds the show to read the subtitles, again. “The subtitles are wrong, what he actually said was ‘I won’t leave you’.”

The man’s eyes positively lit up at him, “You know Korean!”

“Yes I know multiple languages actually.”

Something about the way he said it must have come out wrong because shorter man shuffles back from him.

“Sorry I didn’t mean it like that, I’m just really tired of that being so surprising to people.” And it wasn’t a lie exactly he knew how important his Brucie person was but sometimes…

“Oh. Does that happen a lot?”

“Does it matter?”

Vlad shuffled away from him again. Bruce feels like an idiot.

“It does, did did that happen today? Butter biscuits is that why you came over drunk?”

Drunk ? He wasn’t, oh right. Bruce Wayne is a notorious party animal. A notorious party animal that just invited himself in to the man’s home. A man that is three inches shorter than him and probably weighs a hundred pounds less. Bruce feels like an absolute asshole.

Think! Bruce think! Say something!

“So tell me about your kids?”

Vlad’s responding smile takes the weight off the bats shoulders.

—- —- —-

Aqualad and Kightwing are investigating a potential Vampire Fog death when they hear a howl. The heroes looked at each other, wolves aren’t native to the area?

They are outside of the building as quick as possible immediately spotting a blur of pink. Dick almost assumed it had to be a speedster before it stopped suddenly. Her eyes connected to Aqualads, arm scratched bleeding red pupils blown wide. Kaldur saw their fangs last, bracing himself as the creature rushed forward!!

… and hid behind him, “Sanctuary! Please sanctuary!” A not so girlish voice rang out at the same time a mammoth creature of hair and claws rounded the corner braking the edge of the building.

Jack closed his eyes, he knew the stories of the King of Atlantis. That he deeply cared for all his subjects, if any of them got hurt on land there would be hell to pay. On top of that all Atlantians were warriors, Jack was a home maker.

Jack wanted to see Violet again more than he cared to keep his pride. He kneeled behind the dark skinned, handsome ocean native and plead.

“Please Atlantian help me.”

Notes

In this Vlad is 6’ and 170lbs

Batman is 6’ 4 and 250 (internet said 210 I looked my self in the mirror and laughed so 🤷‍♀️ 259 it is)

Violet = Konstelacio

Red = Jack, yes he is a vampire.

Jack is a tall boy, he dresses very Kawaii and loves to cook and clean and take care of people. He can make potions and tinkers in mechanics.

Aqualad doesn’t mean to misgender Jack- to be fair he is wearing a dress. 🤷

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mariacallous · 1 year

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In the weeks following the release of OpenAI’s viral chatbot ChatGPT late last year, Google AI chief Jeff Dean expressed concern that deploying a conversational search engine too quickly might pose a reputational risk for Alphabet. But last week Google announced its own chatbot, Bard, which in its first demo made a factual error about the James Webb Space Telescope.

Also last week, Microsoft integrated ChatGPT-based technology into Bing search results. Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s head of responsible AI, acknowledged that the bot could still “hallucinate” untrue information but said the technology had been made more reliable. In the days that followed, Bing claimed that running was invented in the 1700s and tried to convince one user that the year is 2022.

Alex Hanna sees a familiar pattern in these events—financial incentives to rapidly commercialize AI outweighing concerns about safety or ethics. There isn’t much money in responsibility or safety, but there’s plenty in overhyping the technology, says Hanna, who previously worked on Google’s Ethical AI team and is now head of research at nonprofit Distributed AI Research.

The race to make large language models—AI systems trained on massive amounts of data from the web to work with text—and the movement to make ethics a core part of the AI design process began around the same time. In 2018, Google launched the language model BERT, and before long Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia had released similar projects based on the AI that is now part of Google search results. Also in 2018, Google adopted AI ethics principles said to limit future projects. Since then, researchers have warned that large language models carry heightened ethical risks and can spew or even intensify toxic, hateful speech. These models are also predisposed to making things up.

As startups and tech giants have attempted to build competitors to ChatGPT, some in the industry wonder whether the bot has shifted perceptions for when it’s acceptable or ethical to deploy AI powerful enough to generate realistic text and images.

OpenAI’s process for releasing models has changed in the past few years. Executives said the text generator GPT-2 was released in stages over months in 2019 due to fear of misuse and its impact on society (that strategy was criticized by some as a publicity stunt). In 2020, the training process for its more powerful successor, GPT-3, was well documented in public, but less than two months later OpenAI began commercializing the technology through an API for developers. By November 2022, the ChatGPT release process included no technical paper or research publication, only a blog post, a demo, and soon a subscription plan.

Irene Solaiman, policy director at open source AI startup Hugging Face, believes outside pressure can help hold AI systems like ChatGPT to account. She is working with people in academia and industry to create ways for nonexperts to perform tests on text and image generators to evaluate bias and other problems. If outsiders can probe AI systems, companies will no longer have an excuse to avoid testing for things like skewed outputs or climate impacts, says Solaiman, who previously worked at OpenAI on reducing the system’s toxicity.

Each evaluation is a window into an AI model, Solaiman says, not a perfect readout of how it will always perform. But she hopes to make it possible to identify and stop harms that AI can cause because alarming cases have already arisen, including players of the game AI Dungeon using GPT-3 to generate text describing sex scenes involving children. “That’s an extreme case of what we can’t afford to let happen,” Solaiman says.

Solaiman’s latest research at Hugging Face found that major tech companies have taken an increasingly closed approach to the generative models they released from 2018 to 2022. That trend accelerated with Alphabet’s AI teams at Google and DeepMind, and more widely across companies working on AI after the staged release of GPT-2. Companies that guard their breakthroughs as trade secrets can also make the forefront of AI less accessible for marginalized researchers with few resources, Solaiman says.

As more money gets shoveled into large language models, closed releases are reversing the trend seen throughout the history of the field of natural language processing. Researchers have traditionally shared details about training data sets, parameter weights, and code to promote reproducibility of results. “We have increasingly little knowledge about what database systems were trained on or how they were evaluated, especially for the most powerful systems being released as products,” says Alex Tamkin, a Stanford University PhD student whose work focuses on large language models.

He credits people in the field of AI ethics with raising public consciousness about why it’s dangerous to move fast and break things when technology is deployed to billions of people. Without that work in recent years, things could be a lot worse.

In fall 2020, Tamkin co-led a symposium with OpenAI’s policy director, Miles Brundage, about the societal impact of large language models. The interdisciplinary group emphasized the need for industry leaders to set ethical standards and take steps like running bias evaluations before deployment and avoiding certain use cases.

Tamkin believes external AI auditing services need to grow alongside the companies building on AI because internal evaluations tend to fall short. He believes participatory methods of evaluation that include community members and other stakeholders have great potential to increase democratic participation in the creation of AI models.

Merve Hickok, who is a research director at an AI ethics and policy center at the University of Michigan, says trying to get companies to put aside or puncture AI hype, regulate themselves, and adopt ethics principles isn’t enough. Protecting human rights means moving past conversations about what’s ethical and into conversations about what’s legal, she says.

Hickok and Hanna of DAIR are both watching the European Union finalize its AI Act this year to see how it treats models that generate text and imagery. Hickok said she’s especially interested in seeing how European lawmakers treat liability for harm involving models created by companies like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

“Some things need to be mandated because we have seen over and over again that if not mandated, these companies continue to break things and continue to push for profit over rights, and profit over communities,” Hickok says.

While policy gets hashed out in Brussels, the stakes remain high. A day after the Bard demo mistake, a drop in Alphabet’s stock price shaved about $100 billion in market cap. “It’s the first time I’ve seen this destruction of wealth because of a large language model error on that scale,” says Hanna. She is not optimistic this will convince the company to slow its rush to launch, however. “My guess is that it’s not really going to be a cautionary tale.”

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cornyonmains · 2 years

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I am an idiot with 200 followers and no real functional clue what they're doing on this website. Mine is a stream of consciousness blog of horny posting, flowers, and dated pop art references that, by all rights, should be generated limited to no interest in the goings on of my daily life. You know who isn't going to get my dated references to irresponsible dog ownership in the Hanna Barbera canon? Everyone. And the post I just made on that subject has the engagement to prove it.

So I think it stands as a real testament to the unquenchable thirst of the KinnPorsche fandom that I've gotten over 400 notifications from hoes all up in meta I posted weeks ago. If any fandom can horny-post its way to a season 2, I believe it is this one.

#kinnporsche #vegaspete #kimchay #thai bl #kinnporsche the series

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onecornerface · 1 year

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My reply to Scott Alexander’s comment thread (on philosophy of mental disorder)

My comment in response to Scott Alexander’s post “You Don't Want A Purely Biological, Apolitical Taxonomy Of Mental Disorders“

I largely like and agree with this post. I think the post’s comparison of pedophilia and homosexuality is debatable, but plausible, and certainly not unreasonable, and I won’t comment further on it. But I am bothered by the comments—not because many of them advocate ideas that are false, unreasonable, and harmful (though many of them *do*), but rather because they are mostly repeating debates that have already happened at a MUCH higher quality elsewhere, and it sure looks like nobody has mentioned this fact in over 1,000 comments.

VERY well-developed versions of these same debates have already been taking place for DECADES—in fields such as philosophy of medicine, philosophy of psychiatry, and sociology. I’ve skimmed hundreds of comments in this thread, and only a few people have mentioned any of the relevant literature. A few people have mentioned Szasz (though not so much his critics, who are possibly even more important!), and a grand total of one (1) person (singular!) has mentioned Jerome Wakefield, and not much else has been brought up.

I hate people who dismiss everyone else’s ideas by saying “Read the literature!” because this sort of comment is generally condescending and unhelpful. But I’m going to do it. Please read the literature. At least a little bit of it. Or at least become aware that it exists. For starters, I recommend glancing over the following SEP articles—

Mental Disorder (Illness): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-disorder/

Philosophy of Psychiatry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychiatry/

These articles provide decent overviews of, and extensive sources for, many of the debates being brought up again and again in the comments here. For one thing, look at the section 8 “Values and Mental Disorder” in the “Mental Disorder (Illness)” article. And for more generic discussion that I think can help reduce diseased thinking about disease, there’s also the following—

Concepts of Health and Disease: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/health-disease/

I don’t mean to endorse all the literature cited in these articles, or the articles themselves, in their entirety. They’re summary overviews with their own biases in what they cover and how they cover it. My point is more that they illustrate how these topics have been discussed extensively and for a long time, and at a high level of complexity—covering a great many topics discussed here, and doing so in a thoughtful and well-developed way. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel alone here. There is a cumulative tradition and set of communities and epistemic practices—resources of arguments, paradigms, theories, and criticisms, for copious object-level and meta-level issues here! There are specialist discourses on these topics that are worth engaging with, replete with useful conceptual distinctions and theoretical arguments which can be examined, adopted, rejected, criticized, and modified, for purposes of enriching the inquiry.

There is also, of course, a lot of meta-level debate over whether physical disorders are basically the same kind of thing as mental disorders, and/or whether we should engage in classification similarly or differently in these two areas.

The most notorious philosopher of mental illness might be Thomas Szasz, who advocates an extreme skepticism about mental disorders altogether. I’m pretty sure Scott is very much an anti-Szaszian. Szasz’s arguments probably don’t successfully apply to some more recent theories of mental disorders, so a lot of his ideas have been superseded. Hanna Pickard (a philosopher and psychotherapist) has defended a neo-Szaszian view in her book-chapter “Mental Illness is Indeed a Myth,” but she still shows that Szasz’s particular arguments and version of his theory were incorrect.

In the rest of this comment, I’ll discuss two anti-Szaszian theories of mental disorder (or disease more broadly, which is related) which I’ll discuss because I’m familiar with them and consider them fruitful to explore to improve the discourse. The first is a unified theory (Jerome Wakefield) which is realist and attempts to track the commonsense concept of disease or disorder. The second is a pluralist and pragmatist theory (Quill Kukla)—which I actually think closely resembles Scott’s revisionary pragmatist account given in “Diseased Thinking: Dissolving Questions about Disease.”

One major theorist is Jerome Wakefield (no relation to the anti-vax guy), known for his “Harmful Dysfunction” Analysis of mental disorder (HDA). (I’m pretty sure Wakefield also thinks the HDA is true of physical disorder, but he focuses mainly on mental disorder.) The HDA attempts to combine the need for a “biological” component (“dysfunction,” here a neutral term for, roughly, a failure of some bodily or mental element to perform its adapted evolutionary function) and a “normative” component (“harm”).

The HDA is supposed to apply to both physical and mental disorders. Wakefield has also compellingly argued that not all mental disorders are identical to, nor caused by, physical disorders. There can be mental disorder without (say) brain disorder. Nevertheless, this does not commit him to any kind of mind-body dualism. It is rather similar to how there can be software malfunctions even in the absence of hardware malfunctions, yet without any metaphysically dubious dualism that would say the software is a soul or anything like that. On this, see Wakefield’s article “Addiction and the Concept of Disorder, Part 2: Is every Mental Disorder a Brain Disorder?”

Not all harmful conditions are medical disorders at all, so something like a “dysfunction” component seems needed. But not all failures to perform evolutionary functions are bad, and (arguably!) it is misleading to call something a mental disorder if it is not at all bad—so something like a “harm” component seems needed. These statements are, of course, controversial.

Still, the HDA, or some variant of it, clearly has the ability to clarify a lot of the confusions that are messing up people’s thinking in some of the comments below Scott’s post—at the very least, by providing a body of empirically informed & logically rigorous argumentation and theory that can provide the basis for further discourse and debate! I think it should also disillusion some people of some beliefs they are highly confident in.

For example, some people in the thread have claimed it is “obvious” that homosexuality is a mental disorder, and that sheer political correctness is the only thing that prevents experts from admitting this fact. But really it is far from obvious that homosexuality is (or isn’t) a mental disorder—insofar as [1] it is far from obvious whether Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction account is correct or incorrect, and [2] it is unclear whether the HDA would imply that homosexuality is a disorder, because [2A] it is unclear whether homosexuality is a “dysfunction” in the right kind of evolutionary way; and [2B] the harm associated with homosexuality is caused by homophobia rather than homosexuality itself, and it is not entirely clear whether Wakefield’s analysis allows or disallows such extrinsically-caused harm to count as the right kind of harm to make a “dysfunction” qualify as a “disorder”.

Of course, the HDA has problems, and there is a lot of debate over it, and many theorists disagree with it. For an extensive recent anthology of chapters by Wakefield and fellow scholars who disagree with various aspects of his theory, see “Defining Mental Disorder: Wakefield and His Critics.” I haven't read much of it yet, beyond the intro chapter, but it looks fantastic and seems to be entirely open-access.

Defining Mental Disorder: Wakefield and His Critics: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5015/Defining-Mental-DisorderJerome-Wakefield-and-His

Whether correct or incorrect (or some combination of both), the HDA is the kind of nuanced way of thinking about mental disorder that stands a chance of pushing the conversation forward. The discourse around the HDA is, to some extent, a better version of the discourse people in this comment thread are attempting to engage in. For a 20-page overview of the sorts of issues discussed in the anthology, see its introductory chapter here: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5015/chapter/2812043/Introduction

The DSM itself, and organizations such as the APA, also have various discussions on these topics, and there’s overlap and cross-pollination between these discussions and the literatures I’ve mentioned. Some of this is also discussed in the Wakefield anthology.

More broadly, in the related academic literatures, there have already been myriad debates on topics such as (1) what is even the point of having a category of “mental disorder,” and (2) what criteria (if any) for “mental disorder” classification would avoid both over-inclusiveness and under-inclusiveness? Many (and perhaps all) proposed criteria seem to either [A] include things that shouldn’t be included, or [B] fail to include things that should be included, as instances of mental disorder.

Also relatedly, there’s a debate over whether [A] we should define “disorder” such that a disorder is always bad (in at least some way) by definition, or if instead [B] we should define “disorder” neutrally such that there can be disorders that are not bad at all. Perhaps a mental disorder is usually bad but not necessarily. There are pros and cons to each one. If a “disorder” must be bad by definition, then this may make it a less scientifically objective classification than people believe it is—and admitting it isn't scientifically objective may be problematically revisionary. On the other hand, if a “disorder” can be neutral or good, then this may clash with the commonsense concept of “disorder,” so it may also be problematically revisionary. I personally think commonsense thinking about “disorder” is fundamentally confused on many levels—so, as a result, I suspect *any* plausible account of “disorder” (if we should even keep the concept, which is also debatable) will be revisionary and counterintuitive to at least some degree.

As I interpret him, the view Scott defends in “Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease” is, roughly, X is a mental disorder *because* it responds well to “medical” treatment (which, in mental disorder, I assume means something like “medication and/or counseling”). Or rather, we should call it a “disease” on the grounds that by doing so, we will assist the appropriate response of medical treatment. The appropriateness of treatment is in turn determined at least partly by the presence or absence of the various contributory qualities given in the post’s node diagram, which are connected to the ‘hidden inferences’ encouraged by the use of the “disease” concept. Pardon me if this isn't quite a faithful summary.

I think something like this is a plausible analysis, and one which is an interesting rival to the Wakefield view. (Scott also connects his analysis of disease to something like hard determinism and an instrumentalist or consequentialist account of warranted blame, but I don’t think these further notions are necessary for the core of his analysis.) Notably, Scott’s view is revisionary, I think, because it looks like the reverse of the commonsense view. I think the commonsense view is basically that X responds well to medical treatment because it is a disorder. By contrast, Scott seems to think X is (something we should define as) a mental disorder because it responds well to medical treatment. This isn't necessarily a problem though, since again I think *any* plausible account will be revisionary, since commonsense is kind of busted on this topic.

Finally, I will also note there are some analyses similar to Scott’s analysis in the literature as well, such as Quill Kukla’s account of “disease” (which is at least similar to “disorder”).

Kukla’s account, and Scott’s account, are both broadly pragmatist—they both say we (morally) should define “disease” in a manner that is sensitive to the humanitarian consequences of making such a classification. Kukla’s version helpfully addresses the diverse and contradictory rationales for why people are interested in “disease” concepts. As a result, Kukla’s analysis is explicitly pluralistic, claiming (I think correctly) that some conditions will be properly categorized as diseases only in some contexts and not in other contexts. But I think this position accords well with the spirit of Scott’s other work in conceptual analysis, such as in his post “The Categories were Made for Man, not Man for the Categories.”

Kukla’s article “What Counts as a Disease, and Why Does It Matter?” (free download): https://www.pdcnet.org/jpd/content/jpd_2022_0002_0130_0156

As a final note, I’ll also mention that there’s debate over the constellation of similar terms here, such as “disorder,” “disease,” “health condition,” “pathology,” and “illness,” among other similar or related terms such as “disability” (which is associated with yet more layers of controversy). And there is a variety of practices on whether some these are identical or distinct categories (some of which I think is arbitrary semantics, and some of which I think is substantive). Kukla alludes to this in a footnote.

Anyway, that’s about all I have to day on this for now. I highly recommend people interested in these topics check out some of these sources, and the broader tradition of scholarship surrounding them.

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