One of the decidedly eerier parts of this story as you keep reading are all the gaps between what people are saying about Altman, and what they clearly want to say about Altman but can't.

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devmor 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Throughout my life, what colleagues/friends are unwilling to remark plainly on has been the most telling factor of someone’s character to me.

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dugidugout 5 hours ago | parent [-]

This can be true I suppose, but equally I have a few friends who practically play characters as if they've resigned themselves to a role in a sitcom. For instance: one of my friends is late to just about everything and treats everyone as if we are on-call. We plainly note this repeatedly, the friend is, I hope, equally frustrated and embarrassed by it, and in spite of this nothing changes. This is obviously a critical element to their broader character.

Perhaps you mean to distinguish social groups without much intimacy? To which I'm sure we could provide some convincing cases, but this seems like a silly heuristic generally.

	▲	rincebrain 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I have been in or next to a number of social circles with such missing stairs, where for various reasons people in the groups have decided to not directly acknowledge certain Facts that are known about some members, because it would involve them confronting their hypocrisy. Someone cheating regularly on their partner, flagrant substance use problems, controlling people who ostracize anyone who doesn't agree with their sometimes insane perspectives... People will go along with quite a lot to avoid friction, especially as they get older and picking up new social circles becomes higher cost. It's possibly the most telling thing, when you see what people say is a hard line versus how they actually respond to it.
	▲	satvikpendem 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Maybe they have ADHD because the symptoms fit, if they really do acknowledge the problem yet cannot fix it.