Seems to me that to a significant degree the psychopaths are successful because people around them have problems communicating. Information about what the specific psychopath did to whom are usually not shared. If they were easily accessible to people before interacting with the psychopath, a lot of their power would be lost.
Despite being introverted by nature, these days my heuristics for dealing with problematic people is to establish good communication lines among the non-problematic people. Then people often realize that what seemed like their specific problem is in fact almost everyone’s problem with the same person, following the same pattern. When a former mystery becomes an obvious algorithm, it is easier to think about a counter-strategy.
Sometimes the mentally different person beats you not by using a strategy so complex you wouldn’t understand it, but by using a relatively simple strategy that is so weird to you that you just don’t notice it in the hypothesis space (and instead you imagine something more complex and powerful). But once you have enough data to understand the strategy, sometimes you can find and exploit its flaws.
A specific example of a powerful yet vulnerable strategy is lying strategically to everyone around you and establishing yourself as the only channel of information between different groups of people. Then you can make the group A believe the group B are idiots and vice versa, and make both groups see you as their secret ally. Your strategy can be stable for a long time, because when the groups believe each other to be idiots, they naturally avoid communicating with each other; and when they do, they realize the other side has completely wrong information, which they attribute to the other side’s stupidity, not your strategic lying. -- Yet, if there is a person at each side that becomes suspicious of the manipulator, and if these two people can trust each other enough to meet and share their info (what each of them heard about the other side, and what actually happened), and if they make the result known to their respective groups, then… well, I don’t actually know what happens, because right now I am exactly at this point in my specific undisclosed project… but I hope it can seriously backfire to the manipulator.
Of course, this is just a speculation. If we made communication among non-psychopaths more easy, the psychopaths would also make their next move in the arms race—they could misuse the channels for more powerful attacks, or make people provide incorrect information about them by manipulation or threats. So it’s not obvious that better communication would mean less power for psychopaths. But it seems to me that a lack of communication is always helpful for them, so more communication should generally be helpful. Even having the concept of a psychopath is helpful, although it can be abused. Investigating the specific weaknesses of psychopaths and making them widely known (just like the weaknesses of average people are generally known) could also reduce their advantage.
However, I imagine that the values of psychopaths are not so different from values of average people. They are probably a subset, and the missing parts (such as empathy) are those that cause problems. Let’s say they give extreme priority to feeling superior and watching their enemies crushed and pretty much ignore everything else (a huge simplification). There is a chance their values are so different they could be satisfied in a manner we would consider unfriendly, but they wouldn’t—for example if reality is not valuable for them, why not give them an illusion of maximum superiority, and a happy life to everyone else, so everyone will have their utility function maximized? Maybe they would agree with this solution even if they had perfect intelligence and knowledge.
Seems to me that to a significant degree the psychopaths are successful because people around them have problems communicating. Information about what the specific psychopath did to whom are usually not shared. If they were easily accessible to people before interacting with the psychopath, a lot of their power would be lost.
Despite being introverted by nature, these days my heuristics for dealing with problematic people is to establish good communication lines among the non-problematic people. Then people often realize that what seemed like their specific problem is in fact almost everyone’s problem with the same person, following the same pattern. When a former mystery becomes an obvious algorithm, it is easier to think about a counter-strategy.
Sometimes the mentally different person beats you not by using a strategy so complex you wouldn’t understand it, but by using a relatively simple strategy that is so weird to you that you just don’t notice it in the hypothesis space (and instead you imagine something more complex and powerful). But once you have enough data to understand the strategy, sometimes you can find and exploit its flaws.
A specific example of a powerful yet vulnerable strategy is lying strategically to everyone around you and establishing yourself as the only channel of information between different groups of people. Then you can make the group A believe the group B are idiots and vice versa, and make both groups see you as their secret ally. Your strategy can be stable for a long time, because when the groups believe each other to be idiots, they naturally avoid communicating with each other; and when they do, they realize the other side has completely wrong information, which they attribute to the other side’s stupidity, not your strategic lying. -- Yet, if there is a person at each side that becomes suspicious of the manipulator, and if these two people can trust each other enough to meet and share their info (what each of them heard about the other side, and what actually happened), and if they make the result known to their respective groups, then… well, I don’t actually know what happens, because right now I am exactly at this point in my specific undisclosed project… but I hope it can seriously backfire to the manipulator.
Of course, this is just a speculation. If we made communication among non-psychopaths more easy, the psychopaths would also make their next move in the arms race—they could misuse the channels for more powerful attacks, or make people provide incorrect information about them by manipulation or threats. So it’s not obvious that better communication would mean less power for psychopaths. But it seems to me that a lack of communication is always helpful for them, so more communication should generally be helpful. Even having the concept of a psychopath is helpful, although it can be abused. Investigating the specific weaknesses of psychopaths and making them widely known (just like the weaknesses of average people are generally known) could also reduce their advantage.
However, I imagine that the values of psychopaths are not so different from values of average people. They are probably a subset, and the missing parts (such as empathy) are those that cause problems. Let’s say they give extreme priority to feeling superior and watching their enemies crushed and pretty much ignore everything else (a huge simplification). There is a chance their values are so different they could be satisfied in a manner we would consider unfriendly, but they wouldn’t—for example if reality is not valuable for them, why not give them an illusion of maximum superiority, and a happy life to everyone else, so everyone will have their utility function maximized? Maybe they would agree with this solution even if they had perfect intelligence and knowledge.
The wirehead solution applies to a lot more than psychopaths. Why would you consider it unfriendly?