> Johann Hari

A man whose professional experience is journalist and has no science, medical, public health, or psychotherapy background... and he’s trying to sell a book.

Is this too harsh a take? Is there a reason I should be taking his opinion seriously?

Also a known plagiarist[1] and someone who has had his book's presentation of mental health/healthcare challenged[2]. It's an interesting (albeit I think too sweeping) opinion, but using him as a source just makes me question it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari#Plagiarism

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2018/jan/...

I didn't know about the plagiarism or the editing of his critics' Wikipedia pages to portray them in a more negative light. I find the plagiarism to be concerning for trusting what he has done, and yet I think in this case, I would find fabrication worse than quoting someone from another conversation. About the Wiki edits, I see it as petty and yet not detracting too much from what I quoted, but again, maybe I'm just sticking to it because I like the argument he made, unwilling to dig deeper.

On the second point, I think it would be hard to find a book talking about mental health/healthcare that weren't challenged, but I could be wildly wrong on this. I just get the impression that there are many many takes on mental health, especially coming from a variety of fields—psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, social work, sociology, criminology, etc.—and that I personally believe we still have a lot to learn in this space.

I agree the opinion is probably too sweeping, as I like to qualify most of my statements and some people, especially authors and politicians, often exaggerate theirs.

> Your comment reminds me of an episode of Joe Rogan with Johann Hari [1], talking about what really causes addiction and the failures of the "war on drugs."

I guess I'm a bit confused at such pushback on Hari, but maybe by putting "really" in my statement, with such confidence in the statement, I invited such a challenge.

I mean, you don't have to take his opinion seriously, or more importantly, as a final answer to the issue of addiction.

I personally don't think that just because he's a journalist without those backgrounds, that he's not capable of learning and presenting truth in those spaces—I see a lot of value in journalistic skills of investigation and interdisciplinary exploration. That being said, it doesn't necessarily mean he's right or that he's not exaggerating or oversimplifying.

I found the podcast episode to be quite compelling to get me more interested in looking up other sources to see whether they agree with him, or if they differ, and in which ways. Even you posting this, questioning his credibility, inspired me to search a bit of what people with more experience in directly related scientific fields have said. Some have questioned whether the studies done with rats extrapolate to humans, some have questioned his seeming disapproval of antidepressants, and more.

I guess it just depends on who and what you trust to give you the truth about this issue. I found the interview illuminating, but that doesn't mean you would or should.

I don't know anything about him, but based on his wikipedia article, I wouldn't put any stock at all in his journalistic skills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari

That's OK. Admittedly, if I had read that before, I may have seen his work more skeptically but I would still probably have engaged. With a lot of journalists reporting on science, if I can, I try to dig deeper into the studies they quote and go to the primary sources. Other times I probably just judge what they're saying based on my gut and intuition, trying to take shortcuts and hoping it's right :-)

Thank you for bringing that up. I often forget to validate sources prior to looking at their viewpoint.

I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic (or ironic?), as I think about HN being a platform where we present our viewpoints with few of our identities able to be validated. However, I can see value in both.

Because it's a novel opinion, and novel opinions are what a good scientist needs to make major breakthroughs. I sure people were saying the same things about Galileo as there were of the women from Alexandria before him, etc.

I like this, as scientists need hypotheses to test and often those can come from non-scientists. I wonder how many of our scientific discoveries have come from suggestions (or bold statements) from people in other fields. Sure, many may prove to be false, but I like how you've framed it as a novel opinion that could spur further research into a topic.

What is science, if not a never-ending quest to learn more about the universe?

> I like this, as scientists need hypotheses to test and often those can come from non-scientists.

Bold claim, or tortured use of often.

> I wonder how many of our scientific discoveries have come from suggestions (or bold statements) from people in other fields.

A lot of academic fields are fairly siloed from others. One example is presentations at a conference from a subfield that is just slightly oblique from yours is hard to follow because they use different jargon than you. It is getting a little better with some emphasis on interdisciplinary research.

> Sure, many may prove to be false, but I like how you've framed it as a novel opinion that could spur further research into a topic.

From my experience with being blasted by spam ideas just because my contact information is in a university's physics directory, a lot of/most 'novel opinion' is noise.

> Bold claim, or tortured use of often.

Fair point, it may not be that often.

> A lot of academic fields are fairly siloed from others. One example is presentations at a conference from a subfield that is just slightly oblique from yours is hard to follow because they use different jargon than you. It is getting a little better with some emphasis on interdisciplinary research.

True, jargon and other aspects can draw divisions really fast. I left the electrical and computer engineering department at my university to pursue international studies because it was interdisciplinary and I could basically build my own major from economics, intl business, anthropology, political science, and other areas. So I'm probably biased towards interdisciplinary stuff and maybe see more of it than there may be.

> From my experience with being blasted by spam ideas just because my contact information is in a university's physics directory, a lot of/most 'novel opinion' is noise.

I can only imagine how many novel theories of the universe you receive and how few have relevance. I still think sometimes we can see patterns in the odd/wrong suggestions they provide and come to hypotheses about things, but maybe more so in some fields than others, and maybe much less directly than I had postulated.

Anyway, really appreciate the back and forth dialogue :-)

> novel opinions are what a good scientist needs to make major breakthroughs

I wonder how frequently those opinions come from journalists trying to hawk books on fairly facile premisses tho

Hard to know...partially because I feel a bit embarrassed to admit, but I don't feel 100% confident I understand what "facile premises" means.

What do you mean by it?

> How did this man get so numb to selling products that he knew were causing so much pain and suffering to others?

If I had to take a guess, his income as the vice president of sales probably helped with that.

Yeah, I can imagine he faced many money/moral tradeoffs in his career, as do many of us, and perhaps he became more and more numb over time as he kept choosing the money, the whole boiling frog theory (if I used that correctly).

I guess I still see it as an issue of how connected he felt to himself and other people. I know plenty of people right now, who, if they were offered his salary to do the same job, would never do it. And others who were probably in a field like that and quit because it was getting too much, or maybe even became whistleblowers.

Makes me also think about how some of us can become workaholics to avoid pain in our lives, or crave lots of money to cover up for fears of not having or being enough.

I very much appreciate the way you’ve discussed these topics in this thread. You definitely have a tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt and I don’t think that quality is inherently faulty. I do think we have to recognize that some actions may require a certain level of sociopathic behavior and that sociopathy is very real.

And I appreciate you saying this! I sometimes feel guilty for how I communicate on HN, being maybe a bit more emotional or colorful than other comments, but perhaps that's just me being self-conscious. So thank you.

I guess with sociopathy, even if they are behaviors that are very difficult or impossible for a person to change (something I strongly doubt in most cases), I'm still curious as to what brought a person to that stage.

This reminds me of one of the speeches that has touched my heart the most—"Love Your Enemies" by Martin Luther King, Jr.[1]—where he discusses how he strives to love a person, even if he doesn't like how they behave. I see sociopathy similarly—if the person can't change, I may remove myself as much as I can from their behaviors, but still wish them well. I don't know if it will help them change, but it sure helps me feel better :-)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=522wcqUlS0Y

edit added link

> How did he get so numb in life in general?

You laden them with paralysing amounts of debt in their late teens, force them into capitalistic servitude for the rest of the life. Make sure they earn only just enough to survive. Make sure they work until they are totally exhausted and you can’t squeeze another dollar of productivity out of them.

Make sure they think the only alternative to this is homelessness/total destitution.

Then don’t give them a legal or ethical option that shows them any future other than the above until they are dead, while their bosses boss gets rich.

Then wonder why they act unethically