[VIDEO] Harm reduction, hacker psychology

post by NancyLebovitz · 2013-02-27T15:50:12.390Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 3 comments

Contents

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Hackers As A High Risk Population-- this is an hour-long video by Violet Blue, and it's about what she's been thinking about rather than something with definitive answers.

It starts with an overview of harm reduction-- an approach to public health which begins by accepting that people are going to do the things they want to do, and continues by finding ways to make the things people want to do less dangerous. The most detail is about harm reduction for drug users, sexual minorities, and homeless people.

Violet Blue got interested in the risks to programmers when a start-up entrepreneur got some bad press and committed suicide, but shifted over to studying hackers-- it turned out that the isolation, risk, long hours, and (in some cases?) responsibility led to psychological problems like those of spies and soldiers.

It turned out that hackers aren't especially likely to have Asperger's, but the intense world model might be appropriate. The idea is that people on the spectrum (?) do notice other people's emotions, but get overwhelmed by them, and one way of dealing with the stress is to focus on intellectual details.

She thinks of hackers as people who are especially driven by curiosity, which is a virtue.

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