Skip to content

Comment on 24 year old Ogilvy China employee dies from 'overwork'parent

Comments

This is not my opinion on the point you and Potatolicious are debating, but rather my opinion on the way you replied.

You present an idea (that it might benefit people for society to consider excessive cooperation a treatable mental illness). You posit the parent article as evidence for this idea.

Potatolicious replies, expressing his doubts. He presents an idea (that the system the man was working in caused his death, not an innate psychological condition). If valid, his idea eliminates the evidence for your idea, making it less credible and no longer relevant to the article.

What I see as a rational response to this is to either point out a flaw in Potatolicious's idea (if one exists) or to introduce information that would make it so that Potatolicious's idea doesn't invalidate yours.

Instead, you restate your initial point (albeit in greater detail), and introduce a kind of argument from continuum ("if people who are excessively oppositional are medicated, why shouldn't the other end be as well?"), which, although not invalid, doesn't do anything to refute Potatolicious's point about the relevance of your argument to the parent article. Furthermore, you introduce a new opinion, which is not related to your previous points or supported by evidence, and only serves to polarize people.

I'm trying to explain this in the hope that we as a community can move toward more directed and effective debates. I hope that helped.

I'm playing a cat and mouse with ideas a few layers deeper than your logic structures are outlining. (perhaps getting lost in the weeds and losing the main point as a result).

Potatolicious is right, that the system is partially responsible for his death. And if most of the responsibility ends up on the evil system, then it could be said his excessive compliance should be praised and admired. That compliance isn't an illness at all. He was just eaten by a larger critter than he, and used as fuel for ulterior motives.

But his claim does not invalidate mine because suppose this evil corporation is 100% guilty, and they used all the Jedi mind tricks to brainwash him into working himself to death for their own gain. He complied when he should have defied. They were offering him money, the lack of which may be as bad as death to the victim, but ultimately the source of the error was when an instruction which results in destruction was followed by the unit.

If the unit had said: "I would rather be unemployed than deal with this terrible situation", he may be alive now. He's removed from the gene pool anyway, so evolution agrees with me, whatever that subunit did, it is to be destroyed.

I'm suggesting we destroy the faulty subunits in his mind during school, by labeling "Cooperative compliance disorder" as a real thing that can remove you from the gene pool.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.