No, no no no no. No you would not. Not unless you mean it like "I'd like to meet a serial killer, just for the experience." Maybe it'd be interesting to get their point of view, sure, but you are far better off without them in your life. And certainly without having any form of relationship with them.
One of the main reasons this guy wrote this letter was probably self-aggrandization. The very fact that you find him more interesting is exactly what he wanted. That's not inherently a bad thing.
What's inherently a bad thing is that when human remorse and guilt have been genetically disabled, those people will do things to you which are fucked up. I have experienced the blunt, raw force of their emotional carpet bombing firsthand from a certain family member.
Everyone needs to remember that these people are hardwired to be deliberately manipulative, because they feel good only when you're giving them attention. Then they feel good only when you're doing things they've conned you into believing you want to do; sometimes things you'll feel shitty about for the rest of your life, once you snap out of it and realize you've been a puppet.
> What's inherently a bad thing is that when human remorse and guilt has been genetically disabled, those people will do things to you which are fucked up.
Honestly, did you read the entire letter? Because he clearly address that point:
Its true that I do not 'feel' guilt or remorse, except to the extent
that it affects me directly, but I do feel other emotions, which do not
have adequate words of description, but nevertheless cause me to derive
satisfacton in developing interpersonal relationships, contributing to
society, and being gentle as well as assertive.
Isn't it possible the person who is genetically predisposed to being manipulative is manipulating your feelings here?
Yes, what he wrote is interesting, and I read all of it. No, I don't believe he feels "satisfaction in contributing to society." I believe he feels satisfaction in contributing to himself and his own self-image, even unblinkingly at the expense of others.
I'm of course biased in this, having been the target of one of these manipulators, so maybe it's better to ignore me. But man, be grateful you weren't the target, because it had pretty dramatic effects on my life, and took a long time to get over.
"Isn't it possible the person who is genetically predisposed to being manipulative is manipulating your feelings here?"
Absolutely yes, but I also can't help but notice the argument as you are making it is a bit too powerful; no matter what he says or does, there's no way for him to overcome the argument. We're only a short step away from simply labeling someone a psychopath, then declaring you can't trust anything they say.
We can't really know his internal mental and emotional state here, and that's not unique to psychopaths, that's true of everybody. You may very well still be correct. For all I know, the whole story is made up from whole cloth. But it's at least possibly true, too.
When the tiger tells you that he's overcome his taste for human flesh he could be quite sincere, or he could be lying. Even if sincere, he could be wrong.
I wish the fellow the best of luck, and I hope one day we can build a society where we can safely accommodate all the people like him. When I go to the zoo, I feel compassion for the tigers in their cages. But if they're loose, padding around the halls, I'd hope that I'd have the sense not to try to snuggle up to them, no matter how tame they seemed.
You say this like manipulation is inherently bad. If he's manipulated me into feeling sympathy or got attention from HN, good for him. I won't be putting any more energy into his work than writing this response and finish reading comments. I've known many that would score high as being a psychopath, but kept their manipulations to mainly be beneficial to both sides (I fix you/your problem so I don't have to deal with it anymore).
I've also had bad experiences, but that has made me learn to see how the manipulations are affecting me in the long run, rather than thinking manipulations are bad as a whole.
Love is the kindest and most valuable thing we can spread in this world and your reply offered none to this individual. He is no less deserving than any other. We all have the same life sentence.
We're all trying to do our thing, he, you and I included.
This is actually the central reason I was so torn up over my experience, and one of the reasons the whole thing sometimes still haunts me. Because the only possible way out of my situation was to completely cut ties, and shut off the love. I'm a loving person and it absolutely tore me up for a long time. Eventually I came to terms with the fact that if I wanted to lead a life without torment, it was a necessary evil. These people will stop at nothing until you're twisted around their pinkie finger, and they will prey on your forgiving nature.
It's why I'm trying to call attention to how dangerous they are. But words aren't adequate to convey the breadth and magnitude of their ability to carve out chunks of your life for their own purposes. They'll take all your love and steamroll you in return.
"You're personalty can't handle a psychopath mine can.”
You actually come off like someone who claims that they had grown up around airplane pilots and therefore can handle gravity. It’s actually unlikely you can.
Actually, that's a pretty common, normal line of thinking, often summarized as "those things happen to the other people". Even the declared love of psychology is quite usual, as is the dismissal of "normal".
Sweet/loving/sensitive type dismissal shows a huge disconnect. People hurt that way include soldiers, astronauts, public performers, politicians, enterpreneurs and many others. You're not really looking into people, you're romanticizing the diseases they have, and that really comes off as patronizing in most cases, and in this case as reckless and patronizing.
I try to practice compassion for all sentient beings, so I get your point. But not all sentient beings are capable of responding to love, so I think we social animals need to be careful in projecting. Indeed, I suspect there are mechanisms in predators that actively suppress the response to love. However much the cow loves the farmer, the cow will still get slaughtered and eaten.
Being "nice" or "compassionate" to others does not require martyrdom to those who don't (or physiologically/neurologically cannot) respect boundaries and don't return the same kindness.
> Love is the kindest and most valuable thing we can spread in this world and your reply offered none to this individual. He is no less deserving than any other. We all have the same life sentence.
Not referring to the OP here, but some people are wholly toxic and cannot have a meaningful relationship with you that doesn't involve the erosion of your own person and physical/mental health. These people may be toxic for a long time, even for your whole life. While people should be treated kindly, don't confuse being kind with being an emotional dumping ground for someone that doesn't respect your boundaries.
Sometimes the best love you can offer is benign neglect.
Timothy Treadwell was very loving/caring toward bears. Then he got eaten by one. Some people will do the same to you. Keeping a respectful safe distance is not hateful.
I was in a relationship with a psychopath. Love does not matter to these people. Your emotions do not matter to these people. Your intentions do not matter to these people. The only thing that matters to a psychopath is their own ego and self-aggrandizement. You're taking an incredibly naive view that will likely leave you completely taken advantage of and hurt. It doesn't matter how much love you show a psychopath, it won't ever be enough. They will try to manipulate you to make you feel like you're not doing enough for them. They will be the victim when it suits them and helps their argument, or they will be the victor when it suits them.
Love does not matter to a psychopath. I gave her every ounce of love I had available to me, every ounce of understanding and care. It might as well have not happened. She still thinks (I'm not sure if she genuinely believes this, or is just trying to be manipulative) that I was a horrible boyfriend who was too selfish to give her what she needed (I paid for her to live in my apartment, I paid for about 95% of her food, I helped her find her first job, I helped her move cities).
Love does not matter to a psychopath. The only way to win that game is not to play.
So what? Even if it doesn't matter to them, it can still matter to you. Making yourself a better person isn't less worthwhile because someone else tells you you're being taken advantage of in the process.
That's what I tell people - you can't take advantage of me, I give freely of myself. Nothing I do is without my consent, so you can't "win". There is no contest.
This is over cautious, and you use your own experiences as too much of an example of "this is what will always happen."
If you think of people like psychopaths and serial killers as fire, and your experience of getting burned (whether it was in your control or not), you might acknowledge that circumstances could be set up where a meeting with a psychopath could happen in a safe and protected way.
People who are very different from you (even dangerous) probably share traits with you that are much more exaggerated in themselves. Their experiences have analogs to yours, and even though they are fundamentally different from you they can still teach you a lot about yourself.
I would relish the opportunity to meet a serial killer. Would I meet him in a dark ally with no law enforcement or witnesses? Of course not, if I had any control I would avoid that scenario. If I had the opportunity to let a psychopath become an integral part of my family, I would reject that as well (not everybody has the luxury, I understand). But if we are meeting for coffee in a reasonably populated restaurant, I think the conversation could be very beneficial to myself.
These are justifications for not attempting to understand and thereby humanize him. These same sort of broad brush strokes have been used against any group of people that are deemed unworthy of being truly seen.
After 50 years of research, that is the understanding of a psychopath. Pathological lying, lack of remorse or guilt, manipulativeness, superficial charm are what make a psychopath a psychopath.
You wouldn't pass any of the dozens of psychopath tests available if you lacked these traits, and you certainly wouldn't call yourself a psychopath.
We have no predictive power to show who will become a psychopath. There are loose associations, and a jumble of character traits that are shared with any number of other syndromes and illnesses. Any personality trait can be made or unmade.
Some of the test questions I've seen aren't really questions. They're scenario based statements designed to uncover the subject's true way of thinking.
I'm sure these tests can be defeated though.
Please keep in mind I'm not a psychologist or expert on the subject.
And why are those arguments so convincing? Why does painting people as monsters work so well?
One possible answer is that it's a counter-adaptation to psychopathy. If some people are naturally monsters, being naturally afraid of monsters might be a good adaptation.
That's not to say we shouldn't treat him with compassion, or that we should treat him as a monster. But people who haven't seen the damage a predator can cause are often too glib; they literally can't imagine how dangerous another human can be.
I have a friend who's a pathological lier and I've never seen any indication he's a psychopath. I've seen him go out of his way to help people many times and have never seen him try to manipulate others. Just because you have one condition doesn't mean you have the other.
Those are indications, not definite diagnosis. Think about it the way you think about symptoms of many other illnesses. They often start with „tiredness, lack of concentration, bad mood, weight change…”
So being a pathological lier means there’s something wrong. It might be psychopathy. It might be some consequence of anxiety. Or something else entirely.
Honestly? This is a question on hacker news? There are millions of ways to access a site via another site. W3C validator comes to mind. Or textmirror.net. Or browsershots.org. Or the Google cache. Or or or...
years of psy-op torture have made me a psychopath. I'm proud of it. I don't give a shit at the store, I just want my fucken soda. I don't stress over why someone acted angry at the store -- fuck-em, I got my soda.
psychopath is just a personality trait and lots of CEOs are psycopaths.
We have evolved to be born with lots of things balanced in slightly different way, one stronger, one smarter, one sweeter, one more decisive.
Every now and then someone is born with one of their balances in an extreme position. The genes that express the balance either missing or just heavily surpressed.
It is not necessary for every kind of gene expression to be beneficial to mankind in general, as long as the average range of gene expressions are beneficial to our survival.
tl;dr: A certain amount of variation in genes is beneficial to survival of our species, extreme variation (like psychopathy) is less relevant (unless a psychopath wipes out all of us, which is a commonly known weakness of evolution in general)
Purely as a matter of opinion, the way to think about this is not as an advantage for an individual, but for as a gene pool.
Mostly a human gene pool's survival and prosperity is best served by community co-operation, mutual support and self sacrifice for the good of loved ones and other community members. Sometimes though, the group as a whole has had it and the route to the survival of any of the gene pool is for one or a few to sacrifice the rest and make an all-out bid for personal survival. E.g. a terrible winter in which there is insufficient food and everyone is starving to death.
Another situation where psychopathy could be useful is warfare. Sometimes having a cold blooded killer with no remorse on your side isn't such a bad thing.
Ultimately, it's a matter of variety. You never know what challenges your community is going to face, and what range of behaviors are going to be optimal. Having a full range of behavior types available in your community gives it flexibility in it's response, especially to to existential challenges.
I'm not going to rule out that psychopathy can have been a good thing in some society roles, but they do look more like shirking parasites? (An evolved strategy that is turned on sometimes, depending on environment.)
[Edit: Afaik, psychopathy is not turned on after someone reaches adulthood. An evolved strategy for catastrophes would be turned on at e.g. hunger or stress.]
I especially wonder if warfare is a good example? Most of the time when humans evolved we were in a clan society. Clan warriors aren't generally known for live and let live-attitudes to people from outside their clan anyway; a psychopath would probably not stand out much in blood thirst. (And if you are in a war party, you really really need to trust the members in the party. Manipulative people would not last long when they were caught at it.)
Historically, soldiers have generally been reluctant to use their weapons. During WWII, around 20% of soldiers actually fired their weapons in combat. Even fewer shot to kill often aiming over the heads of the enemy. This is a form of posturing both to the enemy and their comrades. Through extensive use of conditioning, that rate and lethality of fire was raised during Vietnam and subsequent wars.
Even among tribal societies, warfare is highly ritualized in a manner that does not optimize for maximum lethality. Richard Gabriel, in studies on tribal societies in New Guinea have noted that hunts occurred with accurate feathered. Tellingly, tribal warfare employed featherless arrows. Similarly "counting coup" among American Indians involves touching rather than killing the enemy.
Cold blooded killers have their uses for society, especially in warfare. An excellent book on this subject is On Killing.
The point was, with the attitude to strangers in clan warfare (not modern post-clan societies), psychopaths have nothing to add regarding ruthlessness. See old Scandinavia.
For stylized cattle raids (e.g. historical Ireland, before the vikings) among old neighbors, there will of course be agreed levels below extermination (or the neighbours will be gone long before western contact).
It's different than the normal HN fare, but worth a read. We may be a society of killer apes, but we're not as eager to kill in warfare as you might think. Especially when the other guy was compelled at gunpoint by his government to join the military (that is, drafted) just like you were.
Cold blooded killers aren't synonymous with psychopaths. It turns out that many of the Nazis weren't psychopaths, but rather psychologically unremarkable people whose institutions and culture allowed them to collectively perform acts of evil over and above what any of them could have done individually. This is called the "banality of evil", and it became widely understood after the Milgram experiment and the Eichmann trial.
Groups of people have always been more ruthless than individuals. Psychopaths are remarkable not in their ruthlessness but in their ability to achieve it all by themselves.
Well, communities have subgroups. Even if someone is a net drag on the larger community, they could contribute to a subgroup.
For example, a leader might be good for their country at the expense of the international community. Or a senator might be good for their state but bad for their country. Or an activist might be good for his community but bad for society at large.
Such a person probably wouldn't be popularly seen as a shirking parasite. The subgroup that benefits would probably say they were doing a super job.
I was discussing the period when we humans evolved. Not so large groups then. Evolutionary pressure creating psychopaths from a group evolutionary basis seems unlikely (these generally need quite specific circumstances to work).
(Your argument also miss that psychopaths manipulate and damage the direct environment around them most.)
Perhaps psychopathy is like being bald - no real advantages, perhaps a small disadvantage, but it doesn't disadvantage you enough to stop you having a few kids so the genes get passed on anyway.
Indeed, if psychopathy is a combination of traits ('feels no empathy' and 'good at faking empathy') perhaps the survivors had a combination of traits that helped them to survive, while those with one or the other failed to survive.
There are large effects on behavior of psychopathy, people that are affected by a psychopath will mostly -- at a minimum -- make a point of warning everyone else they know. That is very detrimental for the psychopath. (Note that how we communicate really applies evolutionary pressure. Just check the number of muscles in a human face compared to most anything else. This is not a small effect.)
Also, psychopathy seems to be partly environmental and partly from genetics. And exist in most populations.
All this suggests an evolved behavioral strategy.
Researchers need to check for your hypothesis (the large different effects almost cancels each others out in many types of historic societies(!), so it is just a random genetic drift) since afaik it is a standard hypothesis, but it does seem very unlikely.
You're looking at it the wrong way I think. Human culture (yes, even including warfare) only works with instincts towards cooperation. But once that culture exists, individual actors can succeed by essentially hacking those instincts to their own benefit. Evolution doesn't work to the collective benefit of entire gene pools--it works to the benefit of an individual's own genes. Within a population, divergent strategies can both be successful.
Based on this account, I imagine that being a psychopath confers some advantage for just about our entire history as creatures that can form and execute plans.
Being a sincere participant in social groups has probably provided an advantage for just as long, if not longer.
Don't necessarily think in term of advantage, but rather in term of probability it will stay in the gene pool.
If psychopathy is genetically linked to say, a better resistance to cold or hunger, then it might stay even with the disadvantage of psychopathy, just because people with it will survive better.
Ability to easily identify weaknesses is huge advantage at all times. Inability to feel guilt and remorse is huge advantage in hostile environment. This came into disadvantage just recently, when world started to live mostly in peace.
There is a lot of variety in humans at all times, and not all of the traits that comprise this variety have been at a large enough advantage to become the norm. Since psychopaths are not the norm (as far as we know) it probably means there has not been a point in our evolution in which this trait was an advantage enough to propagate.
At one point in our evolution was there some advantage that being a psychopath conferred?
Yes, and there still is. Evolutionary survival is not about living long; it's about passing on genes.
Psychopaths are great at reading people and exploiting emotional weaknesses. Humans are not naturally monogamous, and psychopaths are perfectly equipped for high-frequency sexuality. They've had Game for millions of years.
Absolutely. Not only this, but in many of our power structures (ones where human potential is not a metric) there are obvious benefits to being a psychopath, thereby maximizing exposure and potential gene transmission.
robert sapolsky has some very interesting things to say, regarding the societal benefits of conditions like schizophrenia and ocd.
this video of one of his lectures is quite fascinating:
When you have a lot of sheep around, evolution is bound to come up with a sheep that feeds on other sheep. For such mutants, having 'social camouflage' is a critical trait, because otherwise they would be losing to normal sheep due to their tit-for-tatting.
As for the advantage, it seems pretty clear to me: higher chances at being the alpha-male(female?), plus the resource advantage due to not having the ability for reciprocal altruism (and the ability to get away with that).
All few human psychopaths I have personally met were natural-born leaders. One is now occupying a high-level position within a successful company that produces manupulative F2P games. Another was a woman who, despite her being deaf-mute, was able to organize a successful remote web studio (before it fell apart due to her politicking and other members, including me, bailing out).
Also, quoting Wikipedia: "In Mongolia alone as many as 200,000 of the country's 2 million people could be [Genghis] Khan descendants".
Edit: if I remember correctly, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene discussed cheaters (that is, individuals who didn't reciprocate) as being a viable evolutionary strategy, as long as they are in a minority.
Keep in mind that natural selection does not select for traits, it selects against them. The first question you need to ask is not, "is there some advantage?" but rather, "what are the disadvantages?" Not all traits exist because they are advantageous; many may persist because they are not particularly disadvantageous.
The second thing to keep in mind is that many traits form a spectrum (particularly psychological traits). While the endpoints of the spectrum will likely be very problematic, there may one or more areas in the middle of the spectrum which are advantageous. Furthermore, it may be advantageous to have a variety of the trait in a population.
Behaving in ones best interest to the detriments of society could be quite rewarding for the individual in a number of circumstances- consider competition for food, resources, and mates.
Think of it this way: You use your favorite social site, interact with friends, colleagues, acquaintances, or family members through it, and to a large extent it determines what interactions happen between you. Somebody saw how people previously interacted and how (or where) they wanted them to interact, came up with this system, and promoted it until it became popular. Things we've taken for granted at various points in history--moral systems, religions, monarchy, democracy, the nuclear family--were invented in the same way, by people who saw the system as an object to be manipulated, rather than reality itself.
They fucken extort me every couple weeks. I used to care but now I just worry about God. in 1985 I tried to get a dog to lick my dick. I masterbaited once fantasizing about my niece. The only policy for extortion is shoot the hostages and laugh at them being punished by God.
BBC calls me nigger, now I call people nigger.
CIA tortured me with Job. Never gonna hava an employeer or employee.
Fucken made me impotant, never gonna have a lover.
I just care about God. I am invincable and they're fucked.
>It is also the case that, being 'normal' takes a degree of energy and conscious thought that is instinctive for most, but to me is a significant expenditure of energy. I think it analogous to speaking a second language.
Sounds about right. I thought it was pretty 'normal' to feel this way sometimes...
There’s an old psychiatric joke: there are no healthy people, they’re just not diagnosed yet.
I’m not a psychopath, but I have high levels of social anxiety and probably high functional Aspergers. Every situation I didn’t rehearse in my head is incredibly exhausting, and even then, if it gets too complex I feel the urge to withdraw — and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a jerk coworker being a jerk or someone I like dropping a compliment bomb on me, or even, if I’m not the best shape, a partner being affectionate.
I had a teacher who worked in a psych ward. She insisted that everyone has a trait of each mental issue you could name - you just don't get a diagnose until it's a big enough issue for the person.
Of course. The difference between "personality trait" and diagnosable illness is whether or not it causes you or others significant problems. There is no difference in kind, only in degree.
Interesting - my social anxieties exhibit themselves mostly in when I have time to think about it then I "psych" myself out.
If someone calls me on the phone then I can have a good conversation, palpations and sweating aside. However if I have to call someone then unless I do it immediately whilst suppressing the desire to think about what I'll say I go to complete mush and procrastinate my way to distraction. Mainly it's one-to-one I have a problem with.
The psychiatric profession wanted little to do with psychopathy, for several reasons. For one thing, it was thought to be incurable. Not only did the talking cure fail with psychopaths but several studies suggested that talk therapy made the condition worse, by enabling psychopaths to practice the art of manipulation. There were no valid instruments to measure the personality traits that were commonly associated with the condition; researchers could study only the psychopaths’ behavior, in most cases through their criminal records.
And now there are, at least in the sense of reducing criminal behavior:
In a landmark 2006 study of a specialized talk-therapy treatment program, conducted at a juvenile detention center in Wisconsin, involving a hundred and forty-one young offenders who scored high on the youth version of the checklist, Michael Caldwell, a psychologist at the treatment center and a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, reported that the youths that were treated were much more likely to stay out of trouble, once they were paroled, than the ones in the control group.
But note that the linked article is from 2008. Perhaps things have changed since.
I thought that the ME Thomas book read like a work of fiction. The drowning of the possum right at the start - cruelty to animals being one of the stereotypical psychopath behaviours - smelled strongly of a creative writing class to me
I think it's a side effect due to the lack of empathy. On the other hand, they do enjoy their domination over weaker beings, so this might be pleasurable to them.
I have read the book. The point of that anecdote is that the concept of "cruelty" does not apply to the authors' thinking. We say she was being cruel to the animal, but she does not see it as such.
To her, she had a problem: something was in her swimming pool, and it had to be removed from the pool so she could keep it clean. She tried to remove it, but it kept swimming away. So she drowned it, collected it, and cleaned the pool. The creature's pain never entered into the calculation for her.
The best analogy I can think of are open-world videogames. When you play Grand Theft Auto, are you being "cruel" to civilians? They aren't alive and don't have any feelings, so you may have no problem [1] doing seemingly cruel things to them to see how they react. You're not necessarily cruel, you're just curious how that world works.
Sociopaths see the world in a similar way that you see Grand Theft Auto.
[1] I'm empathetic enough that I feel empathy even for completely non-sentient characters in videogames. So I tend to be a goody-goody even in digital worlds.
The most interesting part is how unlike a typical disorder it is. Your typical disorder removes capability; psychopathy removes empathy, which can be seen as a capability- but it could also be seen as a natural (well-intentioned) limiter.
I don't think it is evolutionary stable. I think a society of sociopaths would fall apart. We evolved to live in groups; we are social animals. Social animals need empathy, otherwise they are unlikely to cooperate and live in mutually beneficial ways.
"Psychopath" could just be the degenerate form of the personality type that evolved to lead those groups. In other words, a leader is a psychopath with better impulse control.
Be warned though ME Thomas' book is not particularly well written, so unless you are specifically interested in this I'd stay clear. The style is similar to the letter from this thread.
>no therapies or treatments that reproducibly help psychopaths
This depends largely on one's idea of "help". Nobody is going to cure psychopaths any time soon, but I'd be surprised if one can't (reproducibly) help them channel their drive into something productive.
This explains - What makes a difference, if someone diverts their energy doing something Positive. As they say - It's not who you are, but what you do that defines you.
>Serial Killers & Ruthless CEOs exist - Voldemort does not.
The more i read about phychopaths is that they are normal guys/girls and it is the society's problem to 'treat' them (because they are too strong competitors and shall be neutralized) rater than their own.
If that were true, we'd all simply be psychopaths, the genes would have long since won. There are important reasons why humans are empathetic, have guilt, concern for others, etc. It is unlikely that psychopaths could ever form a civilization on their own, for instance; one could make a utilitarian argument in favor of behaving the proper way, but without the shortcut of having your brain simply wired to work that way it's going to be an uphill battle.
(Which goes back to one of my drums I beat here with some frequency, which is that while the rationality of humans is often overstated, so is their irrationality... many putatively irrational things like "guilt" or "empathy" in fact exist for reasons, or if you prefer, have significantly more positive effects when considered holistically than a naive analysis might indicate.)
(I'm not trying to be pejorative. It would be my job to prove that you're objectively wrong, and I can't.)
I think psychopathy, like all of these disorders, has a spectrum. But if it's a natural condition, it doesn't deserve the moral weight affixed to it. Not all (natural) psychopaths do bad things, and most people who do bad things are not psychopaths.
Everybody should turn on showdead in the settings and check out losethos' comments here. Psychopathy is really interesting and fascinating, but so is schizophrenia.
It boggles my mind how anyone can write such nonsensical rambling comments while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch.
It boggles my mind how anyone can write such nonsensical rambling comments while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch.
Like many other mental disorders, schizophrenics alternate between total detachment and relative sanity. Also, many schizophrenics maintain their full intellectual horsepower even when affected.
Schizophrenics can also go into remission late in life (after 50) and reach a point where, at least with medication, they're relatively unaffected. Spontaneous remission isn't common with SZ but it does happen.
Thing is, in their mind, they're not rambling. They believe they are saying something intelligible. They have thoughts, sometimes mixed up, and feelings, and try to express them - but something in the delivery smashes it to bits. So the interesting thing to me is how you can read these ramblings and actually extract feelings and intentions from them, even though they make no sense. Usually it's very sad and lonely.
Do you think schizophrenics know of their condition, or are they clueless that there's something biologically wrong with them?
To me, that seems to be the hallmark difference between hypomania and "real" mania, and what makes the latter more dangerous and scary-- the loss of insight into the condition, or that there even is anything amiss.
It differs from person to person. I've met people who know that they suffer from schizophrenia, some who are unaware, but know hearing voices is abnormal, and some who has no idea.
There's a big difference between the three. The first, the ones who know and care about it - you probably won't even notice he/she is suffering from it, unless they tell you. The others.. yeah.
Source: used to be a med student and a trained hospital sitter.
I had an accident on vacation once and was hospitalized. As a result, for a short period of time, whenever I would get drunk I would experience 'word salad' - some words I was trying to say would get changed into some other word when they came out of my mouth. But I had no idea it was happening - I heard myself saying one word, but my mouth emanated a completely different word. I only became aware of it when someone told me about it when I was sober. All my other faculties were totally fine, it was just the words got mixed up.
It hasn't reoccurred, but i'm now very aware that what I experience as reality is completely subjective to how my brain is functioning. Anything I experience right now could be a different version of reality. But at the same time, now that i'm aware it has happened, I can keep that in mind and consider it in the future. I have to believe that different forms of mental illness allow for the same kind of self-awareness, but it depends entirely on what parts of their brain are functioning (like if they can control their emotions and think clearly, which is hard enough for "sane" individuals already)
The clinical term for this is "anosognosia", which describes a specific physical, neurological inability to be aware of their illness. They literally have damage in their brain which prevents self-awareness. Something like 50% of cases of schizophrenia have some degree of anosognosia as well.
This is a big part of why schizophrenia is so hard to treat. With other disorders like OCD, patients generally do know they are unwell and are willing to accept treatment to improve it. With schizophrenia, patients are often rigidly convinced they are already healthy and refuse to be treated. They are incapable of understanding that they have an illness.
There is a fascinating internal logic underneath it all.
I had a schizophrenic guy send me regular e-mails for about two months. For reasons still unknown to me, he decided that I was the one person in the world that he could trust.
The first e-mail was very short and looked like spam. It was a brief note about how the death of some professional wrestler wasn't an accident. Then they got longer and longer, and finally he started writing his messages out by hand, scanning them, and e-mailing me the scans.
This revealed something really interesting. He was scanning these things at work. He had what appeared to be a regular 9-5 office job at a large company, and he managed to keep a lid on things enough to hold down that job while writing pages and pages of paranoia to me and scanning them on the office multifunction machine.
The most interesting/amusing/sad part of all of this was a single handwritten page sent a day or two after one of the multi-page manifestos. It said, paraphrased, "I screwed up when I sent you that last e-mail. After I scanned the note, I tore it up as I always do, but this time I wore my glasses. I believe they read it." Evidently, this fellow believed he was under such pervasive surveillance that they (whoever they were) could see things through his own glasses. The elaborate procedures he went through to send me notes were apparently worked out to circumvent this stuff, but they required good operational discipline which he couldn't always handle. Or something like that! It clearly made perfect sense to him.
After a couple of months, I tracked the guy down with the help of some friends and got in touch with the local police so they could check on the guy, as he was clearly getting worse and I didn't think he'd be safe. I didn't hear anything after that until a couple of months later when a brief e-mail arrived from a relative that basically said, "Sorry about him hassling you, he's back on his meds now."
So, a happy ending, I guess. And certainly one of the most interesting things that's happened to me online.
What the fuck? Maybe this is too much of an immediate response for me, but why the fuck would you contact the police? Do the police seem like they take care of people like him well? Shit I feel bad for him, the one guy he thought he could trust just snitched on him, even if he was crazy. Must have been hell to undergo that. Maybe you should have posted to a forum about how to help him first, as opposed to helping? Now the police thinks he is harassing random people and has a legal trail just in case they want to discriminate against him.
I was involved in this incident, as one of the friends who helped track him down. I believe contacting the police was a good move because his letters indicated that he was a danger to himself and to others.
The police conduct welfare checks on people who may need help. Despite the internet's fascination with police abuse, they can be quite helpful to people.
And maybe you shouldn't be so offhandedly judgmental. I actually called a suicide hotline in the area first (the only mental health service I could come up with) and, after I convinced them that I wasn't suicidal, it was their suggestion to contact the police.
But yes, I guess it was terrible that this poor guy got help and got his life back on track.
I find it sad rather than fascinating, wish I could hug the guy. I know this isn't the time or the place, and that I could probably not help anyway. But still, every time I see a post of him with that greyed out font saying "move along, nothing to see here" gets me right in the feels. When some sports star or programmer with family dies from stupid or natural causes or commits suicide, we are upset. When someone is obviously unhappy and unable to successfully interact with others, we are annoyed, instead of being happy they're at least still alive.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ramble. I have no criticism or suggestions to offer, just vague frustration and helplessness. But it does frustrate me, it's something that's been on my mind a lot of times, so thanks for the opportunity to say it, FWIW.
I think people are taking this the wrong way. A psychopath is not someone who is suffering a heavy mental disability who you should hug and comfort. Whether the personality type is a disorder or an innate talent/ability is up for debate.
A psychopath is a cold calculating personality type unburdened by empathy and certain emotions. These types of people are generally portrayed as super human by hollywood. Classic example: James Bond.
I'm not talking about psychopaths, I'm talking about the author of TempleOS and his posts here. And frankly, it was mostly a figure of speech. I wish the guy health and happiness, is all.
> Whether the personality type is a disorder or an innate talent/ability is up for debate.
Well, if it's the inability to feel empathy, remorse, and other things, shouldn't that be obvious? For me it's not a special talent of a dead person that they don't have to eat, or of Eliza that it's not really sentient. That lack in one area can lead to overcompensation in other areas still doesn't make it a special talent, it's just the expected result of practice. Everybody can be cold or calculating - to my understanding the the difference between that and a psychopath is the ability to NOT be cold and calculating. If being calculating is all that's on your palette, you get real good at it. This is my non-educated guess, anyway.
At any rate, you misread my comment, read it again, taking the post it's in reply to into account :)
It is (ironically, considering the topic at hand) one of the worst phychopathic tendencies of society. We care the most about the people who need care the least (celebrities), but we dislike the "annoying liabilities" who really needs care.
When people stop providing value and start requiring value instead, their perceived societal value drops dramatically. In a way it's completely logical, but it's also really heartless.
I've actually kept up with most of his comments throughout the years. I think he has a handful of other usernames. I know there is TempleOS. If you read between the lines of the crazy/racism/religion, rarely, he has very interesting points.
I've actually spotted him on other sites, usually commenting with a Facebook account. He actually gets some interest, some responses, some upvote-equivalents to his answers on other sites.
This is especially true when he is in racist mode, unfortunately.
You've noticed that too? Completely lexical followed by
C:\AMBIATE\INTRODUCTIO~1.TXT
This__-you__are__ will believe _- you __that_this_then_ if and only if _generated_text from _some_thing.
I watched a video demo of the OS, in which he shows how he generates the text. In all likelihood the parent I responded to was referring to parts of the comments that do not appear to be generated, just troubling.
IANA(Psychologist) but I always thought it might have something to do with memory consolidation, that normally happens during sleep, running wild. You can see some themes in the writing, and some semblance of recent news stories. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/200903/a...
Let's all prattle on about the guy as if he isn't an active member of this forum. The man can read you know, most developers can. I'm not trying to censor discussion but it just seems a little odd to publicly deconstruct this guy in every mental health thread like he's some type of lab specimen. It is indeed possible to read comments while hellbanned.
You can actually see his condition gradually getting worse over months and years. I wonder if he would have turned out differently had we embraced him - and helped him?
Is it our responsibility to help people who have down syndrome from hurting themselves? Is it our responsibility to help people with physical handicap? Is it our responsibility to help people suffering from depression?
I'm offended by the thought and the idea that we should just ignore our ill. What if the person suffering from the mental illness was your brother or sister? Think about if it was you, and no-one reached out to you - how would you feel?
"Responsibility" is one of those words that makes it really hard for people to talk to each other.
If a person does not go out of their way to do the things you listed, I do not consider that a moral failing on their part. Especially if the cost to them is more than the benefit to the other person.
If you keep jumping on bullets, sooner or later you run out of flesh.
In the past he has made reference to doctors and his parents. The impression that I get is that he is getting more help right now than HN can give him.
After the hellban several years ago all his submissions were automatically killed instantly after posting. So you can't blame the community for not responding, the system made it impossible to respond/upvote at all.
This is one of the reasons why hellbanning is such a bad idea, leaving the poster to believe that everybody is actively ignoring him instead of just not being able to see him/interact with him.
Making regular healthy people waste a lot of their time posting content and feeling totally ignored is bad enough, subjecting people with mental health issues to that is even more unethical.
Ah, damn, the fact that that post is dead is very sad. I know it's years old, but, losethos, do you still need advice? (I'll probably see your reply, as I have showdead on). We could probably get a thread going, if so.
The relationship between this community and losethos seems very strange to me. Perhaps because this is the first community i've been involved in where hellbanning was a feature. Any other site would have banned him outright for his own good but the hellban encourages him to continue posting. The result is almost as if he's treated like a mascot, or some brilliant but obstinate child being actively ignored at the adults table.
We know he's there, he surely knows he's hellbanned, and he knows we know he's there. He's both the best and worst argument about hellbanning as an effective form of moderation.
> It boggles my mind how anyone can write such nonsensical rambling comments while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch.
Comments like this show exactly how poorly our culture handles mental illness. Imagine if someone had said, "It boggles my mind how anyone can be deaf while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch."
He isn't stupid, he's schizophrenic. Aside from his disease, all of his other faculties are as fine as yours and mine.
That's not a fair example at all since hearing doesn't have an obvious relevance to coding, it's a mostly mental/visual activity (+ the physical activity of typing the code).
Schizoprenia on the other hand impacts the exact same faculty that is the most important one for programming, the brain. I don't think it's ignorant to be fascinated over how his illness so severly impacts his though processes while writing (and living), but apparently not while coding.
Jeez, that's the single most interesting, insightful, and well-written piece I've read on the internet in a long time. Imagine what things are capable when "being different" causes you - and enables you - to reflect deeply and thoughtfully on what being normal really means.
I'm generally viewed as a "nice guy" but once when I was younger met a psychopath who viewed my "niceness" as a weakness and took it upon himself to destroy me. I retreated from that battle, but from then on learned to identify such people and try to match wits with them. I'm very competitive and couldn't stand losing to them. I out-witted several of them over the course of my life and they would usually leave me alone when they knew I would fight back. Fortunately, there are not a lot of true psychopaths running around. However, I finally met my match recently later in life, in a former prison inmate who ran had run his cell block, who had intelligence, charisma, and a breath-taking ruthlessness. He had fooled everyone on his release that he was reformed and had obtained employment where I worked. I did battle with him and lost because I was not willing to go his lengths. Good does not always over Evil, as we all know. I had to get as far away from him as I could. The experience was traumatic in some ways, and I say all this to recommend you avoid psychopaths whenever possible. It's not worth it. A true psychopath is beyond redemption.
With regards to the last guy, it was an experience unlike any other in my life
I transferred into his location so I was new. He took it upon himself to be my friend and mentor. The first few months were fine. I go along with everyone and did a good job. This was his information gathering phase. I'm an open person so he learned a lot about me before the red flags went up.
He slowly began praising me, saying I was uniquely qualified for the job and the other guys weren't doing it right. He and I would show them how it was done. His charm and intelligence won me over and I was very flattered.
Simultaneously, he began turning everyone against me, making me dependent upon him. Feeling isolated, I found myself drawn closer into his orbit. I began suspecting him, but I found myself drawn like a moth to a flame to his charisma, praise and intelligence.
He had all the people in positions of authority fooled, so they trusted him. He began telling them without my knowledge that I wasn't very good at my job but he would look out for me.
If I deviated from what he wanted, no matter how small, his punishment was severe. I went to the authorities about this but they just shrugged their shoulders.
When I realized what was going on and being a computer person (this was when I was taking a break from a programming career), I managed to delve into the computer system and show with facts how he was cheating and how I was actually doing as well or better than the others. He responded by convincing them my computer skills were dangerous. They restricted my access to the database. He received a minor punishment because he was popular.
By cheating (and actually breaking the law in some cases) he managed to receive outstanding performance reviews. When the big bosses came to town he was recognized for his outstanding performance. He made sure to tell them I was a basket case that he was trying to bring along.
I began asking around about him. I found out he always wore long sleeve shirts to hide his prison tattoos. I foolishly thought I could fight him, so I found other ways to bring his cheating to light. This went no where because the other employees and management were afraid of him.
When he couldn't beat me outright, he enlisted a confederate to sabotage my work. With my guard up, I became very adept at justifying my work and proving I wasn't in the wrong.
I began noticing how he faked emotions. For example, he was essentially humorless, but he could fake a laugh that when you thought about it, was obviously fake and looked maniacal.
I became worn out, depressed and sick. I left the company. They all thought I was a "nice guy" and said they liked me and I believe they meant it, but thought it was to bad I wasn't up to the job. This was his end game, for the simple fact that he liked the company to be short handed so he could collect more over-time. I believe he actually liked me, but he liked the money more.
To answer your question: The psychopaths I've met are charming, intelligent, popular with people in authority. They get a free pass that others get punished for. You'll see how they cheat but never get in trouble for it and notice how other people are afraid of them. They have a way of working their way into control of any situation. They are very dominant, but in a charming way. They are usually what is called the 'alpha male.'
They aren't always charming and intelligent, sometimes they are repulsive and brutal.
I'd say the big warning signs are cruelty, a repulsion of weakness while also finding it irresistible, rapidly changing tactics (sometimes within seconds) that shift between dominance and attempting to garner empathy that begin to appear shallow after the first few salvos, highly manipulative to ends that don't really matter, and always "clever".
I agree, but I immediately avoid the one's that exhibit negative traits. The problematic ones for me are those that are charming and intelligent. I forgot about the rapidly changing tactics within seconds. That's really astonishing when you see it. I've never met a psychopathic woman. The couple crazy girlfriends I've had were borderline personalities, which I found even more difficult to deal with.
There are plenty of female psychopaths out there. The difference is that women are more socialized than men (hiding more obvious traits) and they seldom take the macho (sometimes violent) route to feed their egos.
Programmers (me included) are intrigued with psychopathy: we like the idea of pure thought, unencumbered by guilt, untainted by emotions, conventions and niceties. But paradoxically we overromanticise it in the process: I am pretty sure that living day-to-day with such condition kinda sucks, and that it seldom leads to notableness or notoriousness, let alone self-improvement or any kind of refinement. A serial offender petty criminal is probably more representative of the 'average' psychopath than the author of this post, I am afraid.
If I understand correctly, the IQ distribution in psychopaths is not different from the population as a whole.
So, the 130 IQ (+2 sigma) psychopaths are probably intelligent and self-aware enough to hold their "evil" tendencies in check and to succeed.
On the flip, the 70 IQ (-2 sigma) psychopaths probably do not have the self-insight to understand "why" they feel the way they do. Their impulse control will be much smaller, and they are much more likely to indifferently hurt people, commit crimes, and act on impulse.
Quoting from Wikipedia: 'Additionally, studies suggest inverse relationships between psychopathy and intelligence, including with regards to verbal IQ' (but later it's stated that such correlation is not unanimously accepted).
I think we mostly are in agreement; I think the impulsive and antisocial tendencies of the psychopath are often self defeating and only the very intelligent navigate life successfully. We end up having a selection bias because we are likely to cross paths only with the latter subtype, so we end up believing that all psychopaths are superintelligent and verbally dazzling, while probably the majority of them is badly dull.
I've listened to this audiobook and I was hooked very early in the story. Jon Ronson is a very good story teller and he narrates his book. He's quite funny and engaging. "A Journey Through the Madness Industry" is the subtitle, and "journey" is indeed a very adequate description of what you'll experience with this book. Jon wanders from place to place where he'll meet psychopaths and people who work in the "madness industry" and relates his experiences and thinking.
It's not a definitive treatise on psychopathy, just the adventures of the author as he dives into this fascinating world. Definitely worth getting it at this price.
Brilliantly articulated. I think this might be useful for everyone :
"The test of their self-superiority is their ability to rapidly find weaknesses in others, and to exploit it to its fullest potential.
But that is not to say that this aspect of a psychopaths world view cannot be modified. These days I see weaknesses and vulnerabilities as simple facts - a facet of the human condition and the frailties and imperfections inheritent in being human."
No, I'm laughing at all the people in this thread who think that this person in sincere (if they are actually a psychopath at all). People are a means to an end to a psychopath...
The entire article is an exercise in self aggrandizement. To me, it reads as if it were written by a 13 year old- the author basically has super powers, but only uses them for good of the world.
Sorry for not replying (I had noprocrast on!)..I think he's not only exploiting empathy (for power and justification), but is also using the article to bolster himself and make himself fantastic, when the characteristics he assigns to himself actually have no basis in reality. This is textbook psychopath behaviour.
As a "reformed" psychopath, the article is all about him, his abilities and how he should be treated. Further, he claims that he sees "weakness", as if everyone he has or could have manipulated and screwed over was "weak" (instead of being someone who trusted him, which could theoretically be the same, but in practice most people would consider different), and he has just learned to control himself and not exercise his superior strength.
In reality, a psychopath is indirect, delusional and self-centred, and they will lie, subvert, cheat, steal and abuse to get their way, but rarely ever seek out true weakness in themselves (unless you count covering emotional vulnerabilities artificially) or make a stand for anything. For being a "strong" person obsessed with finding "weakness", you can pop the bubble of a psychopath simply by showing his network of followers and clingers exactly what he is...psychopaths are a strange mix of selfishness and deluding and changing themselves to fit in. They preach to others, put others down and castigate the flaws in others, but the second you put irrefutable evidence of the psychopath's incompetence, weakness or maliciousness in the open, in a way that everyone believes, he will have a meltdown and flip out. It's kind of like people who hang out on Internet forums, rise to the top of the ranks by spewing mindless platitudes and bullshit, who pretend to be rational while criticizing others mercilessly, and then when someone outs them as incompetent, malicious or even maybe just wrong, they throw a big fit and implode.
Finally, he talks about how his psychopathy gives him superior "strategic" abilities, but in reality, psychopathy actually limits long-term thinking and planning. They actually tend to be very impulsive, and one of the key tenets of psychopathy is a short-term, parasitic lifestyle.
He used the piece as a selfish exercise to bolster himself, paint his actual or potential victims as weak, and did it all with absolutely nothing based on reality, hence, I do not believe his is sincere.
I think the interesting thing is how it is literally impossible to judge his sincerity.
For all we know, he could have given us a 100% spot-on description of psychopathy, or he could be lying through his teeth - without experiencing his life, we have no way of knowing the difference.
I suppose this is possible for /any/ self-description of the internal state of a human mind, but this particular condition obviously muddies the water to an extreme degree.
>psychopaths hate weakness they will attempt to conceal anything that might present as a vulnerability [...] ability to rapidly find weaknesses in others, and to exploit it
There seems to be confusion about what constitutes 'strength' and what constitutes 'weakness' in regard to human personalities (or 'hard' vs 'soft')
For example, compulsively manipulating other people is more properly regarded as a weakness, I think. Whereas getting up on a stage and being open and vulnerable in front of a crowd, that's strength. It can inspire people and produce lasting change.
People with heavy streaks of psychopathy, or narcissism, or whatnot, are on a different path to the rest of us. It's better to avoid them where possible, tempting though it is to hope they will eventually acknowledge their faults and apologise. However, not having access to various feelings is going to create straightforward problems in their lives which can in principle lead to private acknowledgement and progress being sought. So I refuse to regard them as incurable cases
>There seems to be confusion about what constitutes 'strength' and what constitutes 'weakness' in regard to human personalities (or 'hard' vs 'soft')
This here is the crux of the matter, and we only stand to lose if we go on with all the hyperbole and analogies around psychopathy. The value and consistency of what constitutes "weak" and "strong" depends to a large extent on the feedback we (and "they") get in everyday interaction (whether they live in a city or grow up around Baloo the bear). Burying psychopathy down to some exclusive and immutable genetic level is to ignore this (I'm not talking about causes here, but about behavior reinforcement and motivation).
Yes. Another reason I think we can call sociopathy a weakness is that, as with all evil, the actors are thoroughly deceived about their own motives. This makes them especially maddening to those who catch on and falsely assume that they could make a straightforward choice to behave differently
I have extensive experience w psychopaths. They have almost destroyed my life given my vulnerability to them because of a mother who is a psychopath and a father who had major
psychopathictraits. I had to seek nurturance from a snake and learn how to feed it and placate it while trying to stay alive.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] threadI would like to meet this person.
I find it very helpful to surround myself with people that have a different way of seeing the world.
No, no no no no. No you would not. Not unless you mean it like "I'd like to meet a serial killer, just for the experience." Maybe it'd be interesting to get their point of view, sure, but you are far better off without them in your life. And certainly without having any form of relationship with them.
One of the main reasons this guy wrote this letter was probably self-aggrandization. The very fact that you find him more interesting is exactly what he wanted. That's not inherently a bad thing.
What's inherently a bad thing is that when human remorse and guilt have been genetically disabled, those people will do things to you which are fucked up. I have experienced the blunt, raw force of their emotional carpet bombing firsthand from a certain family member.
Everyone needs to remember that these people are hardwired to be deliberately manipulative, because they feel good only when you're giving them attention. Then they feel good only when you're doing things they've conned you into believing you want to do; sometimes things you'll feel shitty about for the rest of your life, once you snap out of it and realize you've been a puppet.
Honestly, did you read the entire letter? Because he clearly address that point:
Yes, what he wrote is interesting, and I read all of it. No, I don't believe he feels "satisfaction in contributing to society." I believe he feels satisfaction in contributing to himself and his own self-image, even unblinkingly at the expense of others.
I'm of course biased in this, having been the target of one of these manipulators, so maybe it's better to ignore me. But man, be grateful you weren't the target, because it had pretty dramatic effects on my life, and took a long time to get over.
Absolutely yes, but I also can't help but notice the argument as you are making it is a bit too powerful; no matter what he says or does, there's no way for him to overcome the argument. We're only a short step away from simply labeling someone a psychopath, then declaring you can't trust anything they say.
We can't really know his internal mental and emotional state here, and that's not unique to psychopaths, that's true of everybody. You may very well still be correct. For all I know, the whole story is made up from whole cloth. But it's at least possibly true, too.
When the tiger tells you that he's overcome his taste for human flesh he could be quite sincere, or he could be lying. Even if sincere, he could be wrong.
I wish the fellow the best of luck, and I hope one day we can build a society where we can safely accommodate all the people like him. When I go to the zoo, I feel compassion for the tigers in their cages. But if they're loose, padding around the halls, I'd hope that I'd have the sense not to try to snuggle up to them, no matter how tame they seemed.
We're all trying to do our thing, he, you and I included.
More love, less hate. Please.
It's why I'm trying to call attention to how dangerous they are. But words aren't adequate to convey the breadth and magnitude of their ability to carve out chunks of your life for their own purposes. They'll take all your love and steamroll you in return.
I'm not loving nor forgiving and although I do poses empathy and remorse can contentiously suppers it.
Everything has to be earned with me.
This applies to everybody including my own parents.
I grew up around manipulative people i know how to deal with them. I actually instinctively distance myself from them.
I'm not saying I would be his friend but i find his point of view valuable as long as he doesn't try it with me. I would notice if he did.
You actually come off like someone who claims that they had grown up around airplane pilots and therefore can handle gravity. It’s actually unlikely you can.
"I would notice if he did.”
I’m just going to call that posturing.
The only thing i meant by that is that he/she is the sweet, loving, sensitive type nothing wrong with that but may not be well suited for some things.
I on the other hand am fascinated by psychology and love surrounding myself with different types of people even psychopaths.
Everybody has to offer a unique way of looking at things.
Some may consider that crazy, maybe it is.
I don't fall under any definition of normal that's for sure but normal is boring anyway.
Sweet/loving/sensitive type dismissal shows a huge disconnect. People hurt that way include soldiers, astronauts, public performers, politicians, enterpreneurs and many others. You're not really looking into people, you're romanticizing the diseases they have, and that really comes off as patronizing in most cases, and in this case as reckless and patronizing.
;)
Being "nice" or "compassionate" to others does not require martyrdom to those who don't (or physiologically/neurologically cannot) respect boundaries and don't return the same kindness.
Not referring to the OP here, but some people are wholly toxic and cannot have a meaningful relationship with you that doesn't involve the erosion of your own person and physical/mental health. These people may be toxic for a long time, even for your whole life. While people should be treated kindly, don't confuse being kind with being an emotional dumping ground for someone that doesn't respect your boundaries.
Timothy Treadwell was very loving/caring toward bears. Then he got eaten by one. Some people will do the same to you. Keeping a respectful safe distance is not hateful.
I was in a relationship with a psychopath. Love does not matter to these people. Your emotions do not matter to these people. Your intentions do not matter to these people. The only thing that matters to a psychopath is their own ego and self-aggrandizement. You're taking an incredibly naive view that will likely leave you completely taken advantage of and hurt. It doesn't matter how much love you show a psychopath, it won't ever be enough. They will try to manipulate you to make you feel like you're not doing enough for them. They will be the victim when it suits them and helps their argument, or they will be the victor when it suits them.
Love does not matter to a psychopath. I gave her every ounce of love I had available to me, every ounce of understanding and care. It might as well have not happened. She still thinks (I'm not sure if she genuinely believes this, or is just trying to be manipulative) that I was a horrible boyfriend who was too selfish to give her what she needed (I paid for her to live in my apartment, I paid for about 95% of her food, I helped her find her first job, I helped her move cities).
Love does not matter to a psychopath. The only way to win that game is not to play.
If you think of people like psychopaths and serial killers as fire, and your experience of getting burned (whether it was in your control or not), you might acknowledge that circumstances could be set up where a meeting with a psychopath could happen in a safe and protected way.
People who are very different from you (even dangerous) probably share traits with you that are much more exaggerated in themselves. Their experiences have analogs to yours, and even though they are fundamentally different from you they can still teach you a lot about yourself.
I would relish the opportunity to meet a serial killer. Would I meet him in a dark ally with no law enforcement or witnesses? Of course not, if I had any control I would avoid that scenario. If I had the opportunity to let a psychopath become an integral part of my family, I would reject that as well (not everybody has the luxury, I understand). But if we are meeting for coffee in a reasonably populated restaurant, I think the conversation could be very beneficial to myself.
Dangerous does not guarantee disastrous.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist
You wouldn't pass any of the dozens of psychopath tests available if you lacked these traits, and you certainly wouldn't call yourself a psychopath.
I'm sure these tests can be defeated though.
Please keep in mind I'm not a psychologist or expert on the subject.
One possible answer is that it's a counter-adaptation to psychopathy. If some people are naturally monsters, being naturally afraid of monsters might be a good adaptation.
That's not to say we shouldn't treat him with compassion, or that we should treat him as a monster. But people who haven't seen the damage a predator can cause are often too glib; they literally can't imagine how dangerous another human can be.
So being a pathological lier means there’s something wrong. It might be psychopathy. It might be some consequence of anxiety. Or something else entirely.
psychopath is just a personality trait and lots of CEOs are psycopaths.
God is perfectly just, how stray can you get?
God says... after_a_break homo test_pilot cracks_me_up soap_opera never_happy Hasta obviously crazy do_you_want_another hooah rose_colored_glasses cursing na_na cosmetics I'm_beginning_to_wonder can_you_hear_me_now so_let_it_be_written Dudly_Doright ahh you're_out_of_your_mind you're_in_big_trouble little_fish not_a_chance_in_hell conservative little_buddy naughty persistence envy how_goes_it Varoom on_occassion dude_such_a_scoffer well_I_never dance whale California uh_huh charged not_in_kansas_anymore choose_one now_you_tell_me relax you're_out_of_your_mind That's_my_favorite how_bout_it I_can't_believe_it how_goes_it home oh_no atrocious dignity angel I'll_ask_nicely my_precious thats_right it's_hopeless gross duck_the_shoe gosh arent_you_clever I'll_think_about_it are_you_feeling_lucky I_can't_believe_it guppy why_didn'_you_tell_me car take_your_pick you_shouldn't_have grumble where's_the_love funny youre_welcome cowardice rich mine when_hell_freezes_over imports angel hello class__class__shutup Church in_other_words joy I'm_good_you_good just_lovely I_made_it_that_way lift
Every now and then someone is born with one of their balances in an extreme position. The genes that express the balance either missing or just heavily surpressed.
It is not necessary for every kind of gene expression to be beneficial to mankind in general, as long as the average range of gene expressions are beneficial to our survival.
tl;dr: A certain amount of variation in genes is beneficial to survival of our species, extreme variation (like psychopathy) is less relevant (unless a psychopath wipes out all of us, which is a commonly known weakness of evolution in general)
Mostly a human gene pool's survival and prosperity is best served by community co-operation, mutual support and self sacrifice for the good of loved ones and other community members. Sometimes though, the group as a whole has had it and the route to the survival of any of the gene pool is for one or a few to sacrifice the rest and make an all-out bid for personal survival. E.g. a terrible winter in which there is insufficient food and everyone is starving to death.
Another situation where psychopathy could be useful is warfare. Sometimes having a cold blooded killer with no remorse on your side isn't such a bad thing.
Ultimately, it's a matter of variety. You never know what challenges your community is going to face, and what range of behaviors are going to be optimal. Having a full range of behavior types available in your community gives it flexibility in it's response, especially to to existential challenges.
[Edit: Afaik, psychopathy is not turned on after someone reaches adulthood. An evolved strategy for catastrophes would be turned on at e.g. hunger or stress.]
I especially wonder if warfare is a good example? Most of the time when humans evolved we were in a clan society. Clan warriors aren't generally known for live and let live-attitudes to people from outside their clan anyway; a psychopath would probably not stand out much in blood thirst. (And if you are in a war party, you really really need to trust the members in the party. Manipulative people would not last long when they were caught at it.)
Even among tribal societies, warfare is highly ritualized in a manner that does not optimize for maximum lethality. Richard Gabriel, in studies on tribal societies in New Guinea have noted that hunts occurred with accurate feathered. Tellingly, tribal warfare employed featherless arrows. Similarly "counting coup" among American Indians involves touching rather than killing the enemy.
Cold blooded killers have their uses for society, especially in warfare. An excellent book on this subject is On Killing.
For stylized cattle raids (e.g. historical Ireland, before the vikings) among old neighbors, there will of course be agreed levels below extermination (or the neighbours will be gone long before western contact).
Detachment is pretty clearly a (potentially) useful trait for a leader. Same thing for stuff like charisma.
It's different than the normal HN fare, but worth a read. We may be a society of killer apes, but we're not as eager to kill in warfare as you might think. Especially when the other guy was compelled at gunpoint by his government to join the military (that is, drafted) just like you were.
Groups of people have always been more ruthless than individuals. Psychopaths are remarkable not in their ruthlessness but in their ability to achieve it all by themselves.
For example, a leader might be good for their country at the expense of the international community. Or a senator might be good for their state but bad for their country. Or an activist might be good for his community but bad for society at large.
Such a person probably wouldn't be popularly seen as a shirking parasite. The subgroup that benefits would probably say they were doing a super job.
(Your argument also miss that psychopaths manipulate and damage the direct environment around them most.)
Indeed, if psychopathy is a combination of traits ('feels no empathy' and 'good at faking empathy') perhaps the survivors had a combination of traits that helped them to survive, while those with one or the other failed to survive.
There are large effects on behavior of psychopathy, people that are affected by a psychopath will mostly -- at a minimum -- make a point of warning everyone else they know. That is very detrimental for the psychopath. (Note that how we communicate really applies evolutionary pressure. Just check the number of muscles in a human face compared to most anything else. This is not a small effect.)
Also, psychopathy seems to be partly environmental and partly from genetics. And exist in most populations.
All this suggests an evolved behavioral strategy.
Researchers need to check for your hypothesis (the large different effects almost cancels each others out in many types of historic societies(!), so it is just a random genetic drift) since afaik it is a standard hypothesis, but it does seem very unlikely.
Being a sincere participant in social groups has probably provided an advantage for just as long, if not longer.
If psychopathy is genetically linked to say, a better resistance to cold or hunger, then it might stay even with the disadvantage of psychopathy, just because people with it will survive better.
Yes, and there still is. Evolutionary survival is not about living long; it's about passing on genes.
Psychopaths are great at reading people and exploiting emotional weaknesses. Humans are not naturally monogamous, and psychopaths are perfectly equipped for high-frequency sexuality. They've had Game for millions of years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEnklxGAmak
As for the advantage, it seems pretty clear to me: higher chances at being the alpha-male(female?), plus the resource advantage due to not having the ability for reciprocal altruism (and the ability to get away with that).
All few human psychopaths I have personally met were natural-born leaders. One is now occupying a high-level position within a successful company that produces manupulative F2P games. Another was a woman who, despite her being deaf-mute, was able to organize a successful remote web studio (before it fell apart due to her politicking and other members, including me, bailing out).
Also, quoting Wikipedia: "In Mongolia alone as many as 200,000 of the country's 2 million people could be [Genghis] Khan descendants".
Edit: if I remember correctly, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene discussed cheaters (that is, individuals who didn't reciprocate) as being a viable evolutionary strategy, as long as they are in a minority.
The second thing to keep in mind is that many traits form a spectrum (particularly psychological traits). While the endpoints of the spectrum will likely be very problematic, there may one or more areas in the middle of the spectrum which are advantageous. Furthermore, it may be advantageous to have a variety of the trait in a population.
BBC calls me nigger, now I call people nigger.
CIA tortured me with Job. Never gonna hava an employeer or employee.
Fucken made me impotant, never gonna have a lover.
I just care about God. I am invincable and they're fucked.
God says... hard_working don't_worry Bam let's_see news_to_me smart vermin nevada sky atheist Ramsay wazz_up_with_that gross WooHoo Burp recipe you're_out_of_your_mind God do_not_disturb vengeful on_the_otherhand conservative spunky astronomical poor pardon_the_french experts small_talk Bam good off_the_record where's_the_love prosperity I_see_nothing take_the_day_off phasors_on_stun nasty birds joke I_am_not_amused horrendous
I'm fuckin invincible -- a psychopath. A psy-ops worst nightmare.
Birds of a feather?
Sounds about right. I thought it was pretty 'normal' to feel this way sometimes...
I’m not a psychopath, but I have high levels of social anxiety and probably high functional Aspergers. Every situation I didn’t rehearse in my head is incredibly exhausting, and even then, if it gets too complex I feel the urge to withdraw — and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a jerk coworker being a jerk or someone I like dropping a compliment bomb on me, or even, if I’m not the best shape, a partner being affectionate.
We override our deficiencies, but it’s tiring.
If someone calls me on the phone then I can have a good conversation, palpations and sweating aside. However if I have to call someone then unless I do it immediately whilst suppressing the desire to think about what I'll say I go to complete mush and procrastinate my way to distraction. Mainly it's one-to-one I have a problem with.
I'm guessing you're an introvert, right? It seems to me that most introverts experience social situations as "draining".
FWIW, from what I've read (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/10/081110fa_fact_...) there were (at least) no therapies or treatments that reproducibly help psychopaths:
The psychiatric profession wanted little to do with psychopathy, for several reasons. For one thing, it was thought to be incurable. Not only did the talking cure fail with psychopaths but several studies suggested that talk therapy made the condition worse, by enabling psychopaths to practice the art of manipulation. There were no valid instruments to measure the personality traits that were commonly associated with the condition; researchers could study only the psychopaths’ behavior, in most cases through their criminal records.
And now there are, at least in the sense of reducing criminal behavior:
In a landmark 2006 study of a specialized talk-therapy treatment program, conducted at a juvenile detention center in Wisconsin, involving a hundred and forty-one young offenders who scored high on the youth version of the checklist, Michael Caldwell, a psychologist at the treatment center and a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, reported that the youths that were treated were much more likely to stay out of trouble, once they were paroled, than the ones in the control group.
But note that the linked article is from 2008. Perhaps things have changed since.
To her, she had a problem: something was in her swimming pool, and it had to be removed from the pool so she could keep it clean. She tried to remove it, but it kept swimming away. So she drowned it, collected it, and cleaned the pool. The creature's pain never entered into the calculation for her.
The best analogy I can think of are open-world videogames. When you play Grand Theft Auto, are you being "cruel" to civilians? They aren't alive and don't have any feelings, so you may have no problem [1] doing seemingly cruel things to them to see how they react. You're not necessarily cruel, you're just curious how that world works.
Sociopaths see the world in a similar way that you see Grand Theft Auto.
[1] I'm empathetic enough that I feel empathy even for completely non-sentient characters in videogames. So I tend to be a goody-goody even in digital worlds.
researchers could study only the psychopaths’ behavior, in most cases through their criminal records
It's a fascinating disorder, really, in that the most severe cases are difficult to detect so long as they do not make mistakes.
This depends largely on one's idea of "help". Nobody is going to cure psychopaths any time soon, but I'd be surprised if one can't (reproducibly) help them channel their drive into something productive.
This explains - What makes a difference, if someone diverts their energy doing something Positive. As they say - It's not who you are, but what you do that defines you.
>Serial Killers & Ruthless CEOs exist - Voldemort does not.
Excellent ending to a great article.
(Which goes back to one of my drums I beat here with some frequency, which is that while the rationality of humans is often overstated, so is their irrationality... many putatively irrational things like "guilt" or "empathy" in fact exist for reasons, or if you prefer, have significantly more positive effects when considered holistically than a naive analysis might indicate.)
(I'm not trying to be pejorative. It would be my job to prove that you're objectively wrong, and I can't.)
I think psychopathy, like all of these disorders, has a spectrum. But if it's a natural condition, it doesn't deserve the moral weight affixed to it. Not all (natural) psychopaths do bad things, and most people who do bad things are not psychopaths.
A lot of nice things in society depend on cooperating actors not taking advantage of each other. Psychopathy is defecting on society.
It boggles my mind how anyone can write such nonsensical rambling comments while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch.
Like many other mental disorders, schizophrenics alternate between total detachment and relative sanity. Also, many schizophrenics maintain their full intellectual horsepower even when affected.
Schizophrenics can also go into remission late in life (after 50) and reach a point where, at least with medication, they're relatively unaffected. Spontaneous remission isn't common with SZ but it does happen.
To me, that seems to be the hallmark difference between hypomania and "real" mania, and what makes the latter more dangerous and scary-- the loss of insight into the condition, or that there even is anything amiss.
There's a big difference between the three. The first, the ones who know and care about it - you probably won't even notice he/she is suffering from it, unless they tell you. The others.. yeah.
Source: used to be a med student and a trained hospital sitter.
It hasn't reoccurred, but i'm now very aware that what I experience as reality is completely subjective to how my brain is functioning. Anything I experience right now could be a different version of reality. But at the same time, now that i'm aware it has happened, I can keep that in mind and consider it in the future. I have to believe that different forms of mental illness allow for the same kind of self-awareness, but it depends entirely on what parts of their brain are functioning (like if they can control their emotions and think clearly, which is hard enough for "sane" individuals already)
This is a big part of why schizophrenia is so hard to treat. With other disorders like OCD, patients generally do know they are unwell and are willing to accept treatment to improve it. With schizophrenia, patients are often rigidly convinced they are already healthy and refuse to be treated. They are incapable of understanding that they have an illness.
I had a schizophrenic guy send me regular e-mails for about two months. For reasons still unknown to me, he decided that I was the one person in the world that he could trust.
The first e-mail was very short and looked like spam. It was a brief note about how the death of some professional wrestler wasn't an accident. Then they got longer and longer, and finally he started writing his messages out by hand, scanning them, and e-mailing me the scans.
This revealed something really interesting. He was scanning these things at work. He had what appeared to be a regular 9-5 office job at a large company, and he managed to keep a lid on things enough to hold down that job while writing pages and pages of paranoia to me and scanning them on the office multifunction machine.
The most interesting/amusing/sad part of all of this was a single handwritten page sent a day or two after one of the multi-page manifestos. It said, paraphrased, "I screwed up when I sent you that last e-mail. After I scanned the note, I tore it up as I always do, but this time I wore my glasses. I believe they read it." Evidently, this fellow believed he was under such pervasive surveillance that they (whoever they were) could see things through his own glasses. The elaborate procedures he went through to send me notes were apparently worked out to circumvent this stuff, but they required good operational discipline which he couldn't always handle. Or something like that! It clearly made perfect sense to him.
After a couple of months, I tracked the guy down with the help of some friends and got in touch with the local police so they could check on the guy, as he was clearly getting worse and I didn't think he'd be safe. I didn't hear anything after that until a couple of months later when a brief e-mail arrived from a relative that basically said, "Sorry about him hassling you, he's back on his meds now."
So, a happy ending, I guess. And certainly one of the most interesting things that's happened to me online.
This story makes me think of the portrayal of John Nash in a beautiful mind.
And maybe you shouldn't be so offhandedly judgmental. I actually called a suicide hotline in the area first (the only mental health service I could come up with) and, after I convinced them that I wasn't suicidal, it was their suggestion to contact the police.
But yes, I guess it was terrible that this poor guy got help and got his life back on track.
>"Sorry about him hassling you, he's back on his meds now."
and not
>"Sorry about me hassling you, I'm back on my meds now."
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ramble. I have no criticism or suggestions to offer, just vague frustration and helplessness. But it does frustrate me, it's something that's been on my mind a lot of times, so thanks for the opportunity to say it, FWIW.
read it.
I think people are taking this the wrong way. A psychopath is not someone who is suffering a heavy mental disability who you should hug and comfort. Whether the personality type is a disorder or an innate talent/ability is up for debate.
A psychopath is a cold calculating personality type unburdened by empathy and certain emotions. These types of people are generally portrayed as super human by hollywood. Classic example: James Bond.
> Whether the personality type is a disorder or an innate talent/ability is up for debate.
Well, if it's the inability to feel empathy, remorse, and other things, shouldn't that be obvious? For me it's not a special talent of a dead person that they don't have to eat, or of Eliza that it's not really sentient. That lack in one area can lead to overcompensation in other areas still doesn't make it a special talent, it's just the expected result of practice. Everybody can be cold or calculating - to my understanding the the difference between that and a psychopath is the ability to NOT be cold and calculating. If being calculating is all that's on your palette, you get real good at it. This is my non-educated guess, anyway.
At any rate, you misread my comment, read it again, taking the post it's in reply to into account :)
When people stop providing value and start requiring value instead, their perceived societal value drops dramatically. In a way it's completely logical, but it's also really heartless.
This is especially true when he is in racist mode, unfortunately.
I hope there is some way he can get help.
AFAIK some of his comments are auto-generated. Markov chains from the bible.
Long, but worth the read.
Actually just go through the his submission history and randomly click a few links: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=losethos
You can actually see his condition gradually getting worse over months and years. I wonder if he would have turned out differently had we embraced him - and helped him?
I'm offended by the thought and the idea that we should just ignore our ill. What if the person suffering from the mental illness was your brother or sister? Think about if it was you, and no-one reached out to you - how would you feel?
If a person does not go out of their way to do the things you listed, I do not consider that a moral failing on their part. Especially if the cost to them is more than the benefit to the other person.
If you keep jumping on bullets, sooner or later you run out of flesh.
It should be blatantly obvious that, were the situation different, I'd feel differently.
Not everything is a moral crusade, Internet warrior.
This is one of the reasons why hellbanning is such a bad idea, leaving the poster to believe that everybody is actively ignoring him instead of just not being able to see him/interact with him.
Making regular healthy people waste a lot of their time posting content and feeling totally ignored is bad enough, subjecting people with mental health issues to that is even more unethical.
We know he's there, he surely knows he's hellbanned, and he knows we know he's there. He's both the best and worst argument about hellbanning as an effective form of moderation.
Comments like this show exactly how poorly our culture handles mental illness. Imagine if someone had said, "It boggles my mind how anyone can be deaf while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch."
He isn't stupid, he's schizophrenic. Aside from his disease, all of his other faculties are as fine as yours and mine.
Schizoprenia on the other hand impacts the exact same faculty that is the most important one for programming, the brain. I don't think it's ignorant to be fascinated over how his illness so severly impacts his though processes while writing (and living), but apparently not while coding.
I transferred into his location so I was new. He took it upon himself to be my friend and mentor. The first few months were fine. I go along with everyone and did a good job. This was his information gathering phase. I'm an open person so he learned a lot about me before the red flags went up.
He slowly began praising me, saying I was uniquely qualified for the job and the other guys weren't doing it right. He and I would show them how it was done. His charm and intelligence won me over and I was very flattered.
Simultaneously, he began turning everyone against me, making me dependent upon him. Feeling isolated, I found myself drawn closer into his orbit. I began suspecting him, but I found myself drawn like a moth to a flame to his charisma, praise and intelligence.
He had all the people in positions of authority fooled, so they trusted him. He began telling them without my knowledge that I wasn't very good at my job but he would look out for me.
If I deviated from what he wanted, no matter how small, his punishment was severe. I went to the authorities about this but they just shrugged their shoulders.
When I realized what was going on and being a computer person (this was when I was taking a break from a programming career), I managed to delve into the computer system and show with facts how he was cheating and how I was actually doing as well or better than the others. He responded by convincing them my computer skills were dangerous. They restricted my access to the database. He received a minor punishment because he was popular.
By cheating (and actually breaking the law in some cases) he managed to receive outstanding performance reviews. When the big bosses came to town he was recognized for his outstanding performance. He made sure to tell them I was a basket case that he was trying to bring along.
I began asking around about him. I found out he always wore long sleeve shirts to hide his prison tattoos. I foolishly thought I could fight him, so I found other ways to bring his cheating to light. This went no where because the other employees and management were afraid of him.
When he couldn't beat me outright, he enlisted a confederate to sabotage my work. With my guard up, I became very adept at justifying my work and proving I wasn't in the wrong.
I began noticing how he faked emotions. For example, he was essentially humorless, but he could fake a laugh that when you thought about it, was obviously fake and looked maniacal.
I became worn out, depressed and sick. I left the company. They all thought I was a "nice guy" and said they liked me and I believe they meant it, but thought it was to bad I wasn't up to the job. This was his end game, for the simple fact that he liked the company to be short handed so he could collect more over-time. I believe he actually liked me, but he liked the money more.
To answer your question: The psychopaths I've met are charming, intelligent, popular with people in authority. They get a free pass that others get punished for. You'll see how they cheat but never get in trouble for it and notice how other people are afraid of them. They have a way of working their way into control of any situation. They are very dominant, but in a charming way. They are usually what is called the 'alpha male.'
I'd say the big warning signs are cruelty, a repulsion of weakness while also finding it irresistible, rapidly changing tactics (sometimes within seconds) that shift between dominance and attempting to garner empathy that begin to appear shallow after the first few salvos, highly manipulative to ends that don't really matter, and always "clever".
So, the 130 IQ (+2 sigma) psychopaths are probably intelligent and self-aware enough to hold their "evil" tendencies in check and to succeed.
On the flip, the 70 IQ (-2 sigma) psychopaths probably do not have the self-insight to understand "why" they feel the way they do. Their impulse control will be much smaller, and they are much more likely to indifferently hurt people, commit crimes, and act on impulse.
I think we mostly are in agreement; I think the impulsive and antisocial tendencies of the psychopath are often self defeating and only the very intelligent navigate life successfully. We end up having a selection bias because we are likely to cross paths only with the latter subtype, so we end up believing that all psychopaths are superintelligent and verbally dazzling, while probably the majority of them is badly dull.
It's not a definitive treatise on psychopathy, just the adventures of the author as he dives into this fascinating world. Definitely worth getting it at this price.
"The test of their self-superiority is their ability to rapidly find weaknesses in others, and to exploit it to its fullest potential.
But that is not to say that this aspect of a psychopaths world view cannot be modified. These days I see weaknesses and vulnerabilities as simple facts - a facet of the human condition and the frailties and imperfections inheritent in being human."
As a "reformed" psychopath, the article is all about him, his abilities and how he should be treated. Further, he claims that he sees "weakness", as if everyone he has or could have manipulated and screwed over was "weak" (instead of being someone who trusted him, which could theoretically be the same, but in practice most people would consider different), and he has just learned to control himself and not exercise his superior strength.
In reality, a psychopath is indirect, delusional and self-centred, and they will lie, subvert, cheat, steal and abuse to get their way, but rarely ever seek out true weakness in themselves (unless you count covering emotional vulnerabilities artificially) or make a stand for anything. For being a "strong" person obsessed with finding "weakness", you can pop the bubble of a psychopath simply by showing his network of followers and clingers exactly what he is...psychopaths are a strange mix of selfishness and deluding and changing themselves to fit in. They preach to others, put others down and castigate the flaws in others, but the second you put irrefutable evidence of the psychopath's incompetence, weakness or maliciousness in the open, in a way that everyone believes, he will have a meltdown and flip out. It's kind of like people who hang out on Internet forums, rise to the top of the ranks by spewing mindless platitudes and bullshit, who pretend to be rational while criticizing others mercilessly, and then when someone outs them as incompetent, malicious or even maybe just wrong, they throw a big fit and implode.
Finally, he talks about how his psychopathy gives him superior "strategic" abilities, but in reality, psychopathy actually limits long-term thinking and planning. They actually tend to be very impulsive, and one of the key tenets of psychopathy is a short-term, parasitic lifestyle.
He used the piece as a selfish exercise to bolster himself, paint his actual or potential victims as weak, and did it all with absolutely nothing based on reality, hence, I do not believe his is sincere.
For all we know, he could have given us a 100% spot-on description of psychopathy, or he could be lying through his teeth - without experiencing his life, we have no way of knowing the difference.
I suppose this is possible for /any/ self-description of the internal state of a human mind, but this particular condition obviously muddies the water to an extreme degree.
Think about the similarities. A good entrepreneur/venture capitalist should be:
-Ruthless, selfish, unsympathetic
-Capable of manipulating, good at acting, great at selling a concept and convincing others to drink the kool-aid
-Unfazed by negative outcomes
-Unaware of (or at least, unfazed by) social norms and the status quo
-Creative, capable of thinking radically differently than everyone else
I've seen this comparison a few times, and now I can't seem to find any of the articles that I have read.
In my mind, everyone who is devious is creative, but not the other way around.
There seems to be confusion about what constitutes 'strength' and what constitutes 'weakness' in regard to human personalities (or 'hard' vs 'soft')
For example, compulsively manipulating other people is more properly regarded as a weakness, I think. Whereas getting up on a stage and being open and vulnerable in front of a crowd, that's strength. It can inspire people and produce lasting change.
People with heavy streaks of psychopathy, or narcissism, or whatnot, are on a different path to the rest of us. It's better to avoid them where possible, tempting though it is to hope they will eventually acknowledge their faults and apologise. However, not having access to various feelings is going to create straightforward problems in their lives which can in principle lead to private acknowledgement and progress being sought. So I refuse to regard them as incurable cases
This here is the crux of the matter, and we only stand to lose if we go on with all the hyperbole and analogies around psychopathy. The value and consistency of what constitutes "weak" and "strong" depends to a large extent on the feedback we (and "they") get in everyday interaction (whether they live in a city or grow up around Baloo the bear). Burying psychopathy down to some exclusive and immutable genetic level is to ignore this (I'm not talking about causes here, but about behavior reinforcement and motivation).