Stop diagnosing people on the internet especially with a complex sickness like bipolar. I am bipolar and your reasoning shows that you only have coffee table knowledge.
Counterpoint from someone better informed about bipolar would be interesting and valuable. That said, it’s a discussion of an article asking “why is this guy like this?” One potential partial explanation is a mental health condition. Certainly it crosses my mind any time there’s a consistent and self-destructive pattern of behavior that it’s not clear the person involved can control.
I don’t know what’s served by pretending otherwise. If mental health challenges are real and important, and they are, then they’ll have observable effects outside a doctor’s office, and we should be able to talk about that.
In general i think it's always better to have people express their opinions (may it be a wrong diagnosis) and be corrected. Especially on the internet, so people can learn.
What we're talking about here is someone confidently giving an armchair psychiatric diagnosis. It's made of holes, speculations, assertions, and based entirely on a single print media article. In general, that's always bad.
I don't even diagnose my friends who I know well with ADD. The notion that it is "better" - or even remotely acceptable - to make claims about far more sensitive conditions, of a total stranger, based on a newspaper article, is unhinged.
Not to mention the fact that the NYT famously doesn't vet its writers any more, and seems comfortable with articles that make lurid explosive claims based on near-zero actual evidence; even failing to retract stories when key quotes are found to have been fabricated...
But that is beside the point. The casual armchair psychiatry demonstrated above is very much not ok, and really quite uncool.
Edit: HN really is going to shit.