[gwern]

What I like about it (the horrible meaningless title aside which gives you no idea of what it is about) is that:

1. it demonstrates human brains can break in very weird, specific, long-term ways. Same reason HN loves Oliver Sacks.

2. it provides an interesting case-study of a self-consistent worldview which could convince several people for decades and had explanations for all its anomalies, and yet is totally absolutely wrong. Like religion, but more novel and modern a delusion.

3. the way she rationally broke out of it is interesting: not by reading a book on the Mafia and realizing that they would never engage in a persecution like that (far too expensive, requires capabilities they've never had, huge distraction from their many more pressing problems, and goes wildly beyond anything they've actually done hunting the most harmful defectors), but by running a very simple experiment with a negative control. It would not be going too far to say that scientific methodology saved her life.