
The monster inside my son - rms
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2009/03/26/bauer_autism/print.html
======
axod
_please_ :( We can all find the front page of reddit.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/87y7f/the_monste...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/87y7f/the_monster_inside_my_son/)

I'm not usually one to moan ;), but we have an article about marriage, an
article on autism, an article on a board game, and "Ex-IMF Official: the U.S.
is coming to resemble Argentina, Russia" at the _top_ of _hacker_ news.

As this trend continues, the front page becomes less and less useful (In my
opinion) as it starts to overlap more and more with reddit, digg, etc etc.

I don't know the answer, but the trend really does seem to be accelerating
fast now.

Just look at the hacker news front page from January 2008.
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080109085729/http://news.ycombi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080109085729/http://news.ycombinator.com/)

The difference between that front page, and the current front page is pretty
marked IMHO.

~~~
rms
Comment threads like this are off-topic and toxic. If you think Hacker News is
ruined by all of these horribly interesting articles and something drastic
most be done, make a new post.

>Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate
for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can
flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link.

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

~~~
axod
"make a new post."

Or perhaps a new site for just 'hacker news' without the rest ;)

Flagging only works if the moderators + pg agree it's off topic (Enough people
flagged the Marriage article and it was killed, but then was apparently
brought back to life anyway) :/

Appealing to the community to stop upvoting non hacker news and checking the
[new] articles for more relevant articles seems like it may have more effect
on keeping the magic alive here.

If the community decide they want to read the same sort of articles you find
on the front page of Reddit/Digg etc, then so be it, but I personally think
it'd be a shame. There's plenty of interesting hacker stories in the [new]
section that aren't getting on the front page.

~~~
jellicle
The "upmod only" strategy of this site is now getting tested... What that
means is that the old guard have no power to enforce social orthodoxy upon any
new visitors, so norms like "a site called hacker news should be about hacker
news" cannot be enforced, and therefore disappear. Nor do the moderators seem
to care to enforce the rules, so...

I would guess that in a year or so, the front page of news.ycombinator.com
won't contain even one programming story most of the time. Paul Graham's essay
says he thinks there's nothing wrong as of February 2009:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>

so I suppose no official action is being taken or contemplated. Unfortunately,
the character of a community is a lot easier and faster to destroy than one
would think, and can never be restored, and so I suspect that by the time any
action might be contemplated, it will already be too late.

~~~
triplefox
It's already too late. It's gotten worse every day for the last month, I
think.

------
DanielBMarkham
Good article by a mother who is obviously in distress. I liked this because it
reminds me of some of the really tough lessons people learn growing up.

You can reach a high level of anxiety when you believe two things at the same
time that do not co-exist. In this case, the mother believed she should be
supportive of her son no matter what and she also believed that her son was a
monster and might be a monster. One does not support monsters. Yet one
supports one's son no matter what.

The answer, of course, is that your parental duties require you to be a
disinterested observer at times. Tough love is real love. But just saying that
doesn't mean people can learn it. Information is not the same as the
knowledge.

And then there is the romanticizing of disease. My wife used to work with kids
with Down's Syndrome. This was for very young children. Usually the nurses and
doctors would have a good idea of what was happening and it was a matter of
confirming it and educating the parents. What she found was that _the average
parent, when confronted with somebody with a chronic disease, had a hopelessly
romantic view due to Hollywood and "feel good" press about that disease_.

That's not saying that you shouldn't hope, or that you should be cynical. But
most kids with Down's have a very limited life. Most families with a Down's
kid have to work very hard. It's a labor of love, sure, but it's not a movie.
Most times it's a lifetime endeavor. Not everybody is made for doing it.
There's nothing wrong with admitting that your personality type is not good
for taking intensive care of a kid for your entire life. The distance between
feel-good stories about things and the actual things themselves is huge.

It's easy to get in a cognitive bind like this mom. I hope that writing the
essay helped her come to grips with the fact that her son is a monster. And
there's nothing wrong with admitting it.

~~~
tokenadult
_The answer, of course, is that your parental duties require you to be a
disinterested observer at times. Tough love is real love._

This is very good advice for all the young hackers here who will grow up to be
parents. If you'd like your children to be able to cope with running a start
up business (as I do), then you sometimes have to stop being mom or dad and be
someone looking at what they do as a would-be partner or customer would.

------
jeroen
The article reminded me of this one:

[http://www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/article1152846.ece/Hoogl...](http://www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/article1152846.ece/Hoogleraar_Doofblindheid_vaak_onontdekt)

It's in Dutch, so I'll translate the most important part:

 _Sarah Janssen (53) was recently appointed as the first Professor of Deaf
Blindness in the world.

According to the Groningen professor doctors and ortho educators often are
unaware that children and deaf and blind. Thus they are often seen as autistic
or mentally disabled, while mentally sometimes there is nothing wrong._

There is no immediate relationship with the article, but to me it shows that
there is still much to learn in this area.

------
zupatol
I just read the fifth child by Doris Lessing, a novel about a family destroyed
by a child who is a 'throwback', a kind of neanderthal, or troll. On amazon,
there is a comment from a woman who claims to have lived through that, which
made me really wonder. Real life trolls?

And now in this article an autist is described as a warty monster from a Grimm
fairy tale, and I suddenly understand what this novel is about. I am a little
shocked to see an autist portrayed as a troll in a horror story.

------
rms
This is a follow-up to an earlier article; you could read that one first if
you would like.
[http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/05/18/autism_misdiagno...](http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/05/18/autism_misdiagnosis/index.html)

------
babo
Just finished reading, I'm speechless.

