"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’."
I can't stand this "Hacker supremacy" bs, and I think that Eric Raymond who you post here is where that all started. Hackers are not better at psychology than psychologists. I don't understand why there are these hackers who think they are better at all things (except of course, sports, the uncivilised unintellectual entertainment). I find it extremely off-putting
Surely you can find supremacists in almost any professional environment as soon as it requires some praised/valued skills. I’m not sure Eric was "the start of it all", although he certainly was instrumental in broadcasting this self complaisant cultural bias – as well as many other things that could be labelled more positively.
Also, without casting any general discredit on psychologists, it’s important to keep in mind that they are also humans with their own biases. Positive critic by non-professional seems more balanced than blind acceptance. Of course systematic reassessment of things that point out your own weaknesses is an other matter.
"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’."
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/weaknesses.html