Show HN: Engineering Schizophrenia: Trusting Yourself Through Byzantine Faults

My name’s Robert Escriva. I got my PhD from Cornell’s Computer Science department back in 2017. And three years ago I had a psychotic episode that irreversibly shook up my world.

Since then I’ve been applying a skill I learned in grad school—namely, debugging distributed and complex systems—to my own mind.

What I’ve found I’ve put into a [book (pdf)](https://rescrv.net/engineering-schizophrenia.pdf) on engineering, my particular schizophrenic delusions, and how people who suffer as I once did can find a way through the fog to the other side.

This is not a healing memoir; it is a guide and a warning for all those who never stopped to ask,
“What happens if my brain begins to fail me?”

I am writing because what I’ve found is not a destination, but a process. It is an ongoing process for me and for people like me. I also believe it is automate-able using the same techniques we apply to machine-based systems.

I am looking for others who recognize the stakes of the human mind to engage in discussion on the
topic.

Happy hacking,
Robert