
The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007) - llambda
http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm?
======
tikhonj
Hah, I can't help feeling that this describes me pretty well (not brilliant,
maybe, but everything else :)). I should be worried about it, of course, but
somehow I'm not--perhaps it's because I have limited ambition. Or maybe it's
just the job market right now.

I used to really like Lisp. I still do, even. But now I've gotten caught up in
Haskell which--despite being a _completely_ different language to Lisp--is
actually more of the same. If I replace Lisp with Haskell in the article, then
it fits even more. Eerie, really.

Now that I'm relatively depressed about my future "on a soda fountain or doing
yard work" I can go do something useful and enjoy my break.

------
loceng
"Often this kind of student never makes it to the end. He flunks himself by
dropping out. He ends on a soda fountain or doing yard work, but all the time
reading and studying because a good mind is always hungry.

Now one of the things about Lisp, and I've seen it before, is that Lisp is a
real magnet for this kind of mind. Once you understand that, and see that it
is this kind of mind that has contributed a lot to the culture of Lisp, you
begin to see why Lisp is, like many of its proponents, a brilliant failure. It
shares the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of the brilliant bipolar mind
(BBM).

Why is this? Well, its partly to do with vision. The 'vision thing' as George
Bush Snr. once described it, is really one of the strengths of the BBM. He can
see far; further than in fact his strength allows him to travel. He conceives
of brilliant ambitious projects requiring great resources, and he embarks on
them only to run out of steam. It's not that he's lazy; its just that his
resources are insufficient."

~~~
_delirium
I can't seem to find where it originates, but there's a frequently mentioned
saying to the effect of: the optimally productive person is really smart but
not _so_ smart that they see too much of the big picture, because that's
paralyzing, unless perhaps you manage to get yourself a job as a McLuhan-style
public intellectual, or a novelist. Someone in an HN thread somewhere
hypothesized that that might be related to the "Ballmer peak" in productivity
after a beer or two, because alcohol sort of dulls the insight a little.

~~~
Jach
I think there's three groups. There's "smart enough", which is your fairly
high-output productive person who gets shit done and may be somewhat dulled to
the fact that the world is insane. (I wouldn't call them optimal but they're
very handy to have around.) Then there's "too smart for your own good" which
is as you and the article describe, seeing all the BS everywhere and feeling
paralyzed and recognizing your own limitations (whether for how much BS you
can put up with or even sharp intelligence barriers--it's not always too-big-
an-increase in difficulty per se that kills a Lisper in college, but a
dramatic increase in the amount of required BS to plow through to get anything
done or get an acceptable grade). I don't think the monetary future for that
kind of person is necessarily bleak, though, at least in the present times.
There are so many startups you can join if you're smart enough to do even a
little Lisp programming on the side, or you can start your own, you can also
"float around" pretty easily and if you're lucky you'll get caught with a
winner.

But then there's "John von Neumann" smart. I'd even lump the modest-in-
comparison John Carmack in that distribution (not at the top end of course but
I think he's earned a spot there), Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy too, along
with a bunch of other relatively modern figures like Linus. These mythical
people are worth at least 20 of the first group, and maybe 5-10 of the second
group on the second group's good days. This third group can make the second
group's lives even more depressing, since someone in the second group is smart
enough to see and understand what they might have been if they had only
slightly better brains.

------
torokun
I wrote a *nix kernel and shell for my OS class in 1997 in three nights. I
also failed Intro to Philosophy, and got an A in 3D calc after sleeping thru
the final.

I am still struggling with these issues to this day. We should try to figure
out how to help ourselves and others like us manage these issues.

It's not 'bipolar disorder', specifically... It's not anything specific in
terms of psychological disorders, so far as I have been able to determine.
It's what is described in this article, to a tee.

~~~
nandemo
> It's not 'bipolar disorder', specifically.

Indee it's not about actual bipolar disorder (a.k.a. maniac-depression) at
all. It's just a figure of speech. It's describing more a combination of
cronic procrastination, unwillingness to do "boring" things even when it
arguably goes against their self-interest (e.g. failing Intro to Philosophy),
etc.

(I wish I could make myself clearer but I have no time for that now, as that
would be procrastination).

------
Havoc
Follow-up (sort of):

[http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Lisp/comp.lang.lisp/2006...](http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Lisp/comp.lang.lisp/2006-05/msg00080.html)

(Pulled from past submission comments. Credit goes to HN poster "ced" over
here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20140> )

~~~
digitailor
I'm bipolar. The usenet post referenced contains advice that would literally
be considered medical malpractice if a doctor uttered it: _Try to avoid
medication if possible_.

If you're truly bipolar, you _need_ medication. This is not my opinion, this
is the current obligated medical treatment.

What I have seen from my bipolar friends who go off their meds has often been
horrifying. It's incredibly common, unfortunately, largely stemming from
beliefs like this post posits: it's just a discipline issue, it's a phase,
it's an attitude, etc.

As always, try to avoid medical advice from usenet posts. Your loved ones will
thank you.

~~~
Havoc
Yeah I don't quite buy the bipolar argument in this context, so I agree with
you that its questionable advice regarding the medication. Thankfully I'm not
bipolar, so N/A to me but its good that you pointed it out nonetheless.

------
WalterGR
Past submissions:
[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=bip...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=bipolar+lisp+programmer&sortby=create_ts+desc)

~~~
robdoherty2
Ah-- thanks for posting that. It is interesting to read the past comment
threads.

All the same I'm glad the article was reposted as I am relatively new to the
site.

------
Havoc
Thankfully I had a lecturer who recognized this & talked to me about it. He
pointed out 2 things:

1) From a purely practical perspective I needed to suck it up & pass this
course regardless of boredom.

2) Model solution driven marking (checkbox style) doesn't reward inspired
answers. So the aim is not to answer brilliantly, but rather to answer as the
other 120 people in the class would. (Its model solution driven because the
professional exam is set up that way, so the lecturer wasn't in a position to
stop the insanity)

Not exactly ground breaking insights, but I graduated a couple of weeks ago
(barely) and I think that was partly thanks to that talk.

~~~
_delirium
I've found #2 a pretty problematic part of education that I'm still sort of
trying to unlearn. Once you realize that's what's going on, the goal becomes
not to do things "for real", but instead to reverse-engineer the education
system: figure out why the question is being asked, what it's designed to
test, and what kind of answer it's designed to elicit, then answer
accordingly. This often greatly simplifies the problem space, because using
some heuristic meta-reasoning you can really narrow down what's "really"
likely being asked and what forms the solution is likely to take (or even what
methods the question is likely expecting you to use). But then that's a skill
not easily transferable to "the real world" when working on problems that
_aren't_ specifically posed to test a particular skill or with a specific
answer in mind. Though it's probably a good skill for job interviews.

~~~
Jach
I actually think #2 is more of a hacker symptom rather than limited to the
weird Lisp Programmers. Someone here put it fairly bluntly a while back in the
form of a "How to tell if you're a hacker" quick quiz. At the end the answer
was something like "If you intuitively tried to 'game' the test, you're
probably a hacker. If you don't even know what that means, you're probably not
one."

I think it's a useful skill to sharpen and definitely not limited to passing
tests. There are diminishing returns to worry about for how much you want to
try and game something, but having even a basic intuitive feel for it is
pretty useful in "the real world".

------
Daishiman
Brilliantly written piece. Though I never knew about LISP back then (and I
can't claim to be as brilliant as the guys he's describing), I do remember
very clearly when in my final High School project I did a web application with
Java and PHP and the bullshit of XML (back in the time when J2EE was the bee's
knees) and unsound engineering almost turned me off programming. Haskell and
Python got me back into it, though.

------
koenigdavidmj
There's a snippet of Neal Stephenson's `Cryptonomicon' which demonstrates this
mindset quite well.

[http://books.google.com/books?id=qYAmfUBPN-UC&lpg=PA26&#...</a>

~~~
arctangent
Your link didn't work for me. I assume this is the section you are referring
to:

<quote>

They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to
do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The
river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per
hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to
come back?

Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be
some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or
subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.

Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current
would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More
complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river.

Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using
certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the
problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper
with calculations.

Along the way, he realised that one of his assumptions, in combination with
the simplified Navier-Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a
particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he
knew it, he had proved a new theorem.

If that didn’t prove his intelligence, what would?

Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to
hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and
mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who
promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.

Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months
later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called
the U.S.S. Nevada.

The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the
glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was
not intelligent enough to do anything else.

</quote>

~~~
koenigdavidmj
Strange. Anyway, that is indeed the relevant passage.

------
dpkendal
I'm quite sure Dr. Tarver has been spying on me and reading my mind. This is
me, every sentence.

------
robdoherty2
Did the author read out of my college diary to write this piece? It sure felt
like he did...

------
danieldk
Question (as someone whose deepest depression was a 'bad day' at work ;)): the
article states that

 _But also it goes with realising that a lot of human activity is really
pretty pointless, and when you realise that and internalise it then you become
cynical and also a bit sad - because you yourself are caught up in this
machine and you have to play along if you want to get on. Teenagers are really
good at spotting this kind of phony nonsense. Its also the seed of an illness;
a melancholia that can deepen in later life into full blown depression._

I think that purely rational reasoning will easily lead to this conclusion,
but emotionally this does not feel true: we all want to avoid suffering and
live in happiness. So, the eventual goal becomes making yourself and other
people happy.

I seems to me that such reasoning can only get to you if there already is an
emotional imbalance (e.g. due to bipolar disorder or stress).

So, isn't it a trigger for illness, rather than a seed?

~~~
steve-howard
This article rings quite true with me. The pointlessness of school resulted in
me barely attending class at all this quarter; thankfully I did pretty okay
this quarter. The kind of thinking we're talking about is neither a symptom
nor a cause of depression. Rather, both are wrapped up in the personality of
the thinker.

When I'm depressed, my thinking is skewed. I admit it. And here's an important
point: if rational reasoning leads you to one conclusion and emotional
reasoning suggests something else, then doesn't that mean that your meaning of
life depends on how you feel in a given day? My emotions aren't predictable
enough for me to accept that.

~~~
danieldk
Sure, emotions are very temporal and frequently changing. But even if I am
angry, bored, or excited, I know that I also want to and am capable of being
happy. Evenmore, some other emotions are often strongly related to pleasant
emotions. E.g. if child gets angry because he/she has to go to bed, it's
usually because the child wants to play.

~~~
steve-howard
People with depression are not always able to experience happiness. And I
cannot explain why, but at the worst, I don't really want to be happy either.

~~~
Anderkent
Do you actively not want to be happy, or just not really care about attaining
happiness? This is personally interesting to me. I do not think I am
depressed, but I find I do not care much about being happy. I admit the
experience is pleasant, but it doesn't bother me that it is rare.

------
digitailor
I'm a bipolar Lisp programmer, and I relate to this article a lot.

If anyone else relates too and has not been diagnosed, I am here for any
questions at all.

Please, please reach out. It's estimated that 1 in 4 untreated bipolar people
commit suicide. This is a physiological disease that is no joke, not a
"mindset" or attitude.

~~~
meric
How do you know if you're bipolar?

~~~
digitailor
You get diagnosed, usually without you having any idea it's coming.

For me, I didn't get diagnosed until this year, and I'm 32. It gets worse as
you get older.

It took one hospitalization and a treatment center for me to get properly
treated.

Bipolar used to be called manic depression, because it is characterized by two
main phases:

 _Depression_ : Usually more severe than even Major Depressive Disorder in
bipolars. High risk of suicide. Suicidal ideation, inability to eat, complete
loss of functioning, etc.

 _Mania_ or _Hypomania_ : Periods of highly elevated mood. May exhibit
grandisoity, visions, hallucinations, increase in spending and sexual
activity. Increase in irritability.

There's mixed states too, like a wired depression that is _lethal_. They're
not as common.

The #1 symptom of all mood disorders is sleep disturbance.

~~~
camperman
Bipolar for 25 years here: mixed states get more common as you become more
tolerant to your medication - frighteningly so in fact. The euphoria that
comes with highs doesn't happen as before, leaving you wired and irritable but
with the energy to do stupid things to yourself and others.

I haven't ever been suicidal but this last year I've allowed myself to think
about it because of the complete pointlessness of just about everything I've
done (or more commonly, not done because it was pointless). Sigh.

~~~
digitailor
How long did it take you to get tolerant to your medication?

I went through a round of neurochemically-inspired regret for the things
undone this year too. It's not true; it's just a figment of our mood-states.
I've found it helpful to remind myself constantly that thoughts and feelings
are transient; actions are what really count. So no matter what I feel like, I
can still function in some capacity.

Besides, you're on HN, you must be doing something right.

~~~
camperman
True enough - thanks :)

I would guess fifteen years to get tolerant. Of course I might just be
mistaking medication effects for creeping age when it comes to lack of
programming accomplishments.

------
prtamil
Good god, I'm not alone.

~~~
stray
Not by a long shot.

