I’m aware many people who believe this don’t literally think of it in terms of the soul - if only because they don’t think about it all—but I think it’s a good shorthand for the ideas involved.
How do you know that most bad consequences don’t involve sociopaths or their influence?
Observing simple incompetence in the environment.
Franz Stangl [...] Wagner
I should probably note I’m not familiar with these individuals, although the names do ring a faint bell.
Franz Stangl said he felt “weak in the knees” when he was pushing gas chamber doors shut on a group of women and kids. …But he did it anyway.
Seems like evidence for my previous statements. No?
Wagner gleefully killed women and kids.
These are Nazis, yes? I wouldn’t be that surprised if some of them were “gleeful” even if they had literally no psychopaths among their ranks—unlikely from a purely statistical standpoint.
Yet, we also rightfully call Stangl an evil person, and rightfully punish him, even though he was “Just following orders.”
While my contrarian tendencies are screaming at me to argue this was, in fact, completely unjust … I can see some neat arguments for that …
We punished Nazis who were “just obeying orders”—and now nobody can use that excuse. Seems like a pretty classic example of punishment setting an example for others. No “they’re monsters and must suffer” required.
In hindsight, even his claims that the democide of over 6 million Jews and 10 million German dissidents and dissenters was solely for theft and without racist motivations, doesn’t make me want to punish him less.
I’m probably more practiced at empathising with racists, and specifically Nazis—just based on your being drawn from our culture—but surely racist beliefs is a more sympathetic motivation than greed?
(At least, if we ignore the idea of bias possibly leading to racist beliefs that justify benefiting ourselves at their expense, which you are, right?)
In fact, there is a blind spot in most people’s realities that’s filled by their evolutionarily-determined blindness to sociopaths. This makes them easy prey for sociopaths, especially intelligent, extreme sociopaths (total sociopathy, lack of mirror neurons, total lack of empathy, as described by Robert Hare in “without conscience”) with modern technology and a support network of other sociopaths.
In fact, virtually everyone who hasn’t read Stanley Milgram’s book about it, and put in a lot of thought about its implications is in this category. I’m not suggesting that you or anyone else in this conversation is “bad” or “ignorant,” but just that you might not be referencing an accurate picture of political thought, political reality, political networks.
The world still doesn’t have much of a problem with the “initiation of force” or “aggression.” (Minus a minority of enlightened libertarian dissenters.) …Especially not when it’s labeled as “majoritarian government.” ie: “Legitimized by a vote.” However, a large and growing number of people who see reality accurately (small-L libertarians) consistently denounce the initiated use of force as grossly sub-optimal, immoral, and wrong. It is immoral because it causes suffering to innocent people.
Stangl could have recognized that the murder of women and children was “too wrong to tolerate.” In fact, he did recognize this, by his comment that he felt “weak in the knees” while pushing women and children into the gas chamber. That he chose to follow “the path of compliance” “the path of obedience” and “the path of nonresistance” (all those prior paths are different ways of saying the same thing, with different emphasis on personal onus, and on the extent to which fear plays a defensible part in his decision-making).
The reason I still judge the Nazis (and their modern equivalents) harshly is because they faced significant opposition, but it was almost as wrong as they were. The levellers innovated proper jury trials in the 1600s, and restored them by the 1670, in the trial of William Penn. It wasn’t as if Austria was without its “Golden Bull” either. Instead, they chose a mindless interpretation of “the will to power.”
The rest of the world viewed Hitler as a raving madman. There were plenty of criticisms of Nazism in existence at the time of Hitler’s rise to power. Adam Smith had written “The Wealth of Nations” over a century earlier. The Federalist and Anti-Federalists were right in incredible detail again, over a century earlier.
So, is this trolling? You cite the Milgram experiment, in which the authorities did not pretend to represent the government. The prevalence and importance of non-governmental authority in real life is one of the main objections to libertarianism, especially the version you seem to promote here (right-wing libertarianism as moral principle).
I’m on a mobile device right now—I’ll go over your arguments, links, and videos in more detail later, so here are my immediate responses, nothing more.
In fact, there is a blind spot in most people’s realities that’s filled by their evolutionarily-determined blindness to sociopaths.
Wait, why would evolution make us vulnerable to sociopaths? Wouldn’t patching such a weakness be an evolutionary advantage?
This makes them easy prey for sociopaths, especially intelligent, extreme sociopaths (total sociopathy, lack of mirror neurons...
Wouldn’t a total lack of mirror neurons make people much harder to predict, crippling social skills?
I’m not suggesting that you or anyone else in this conversation is “bad” or “ignorant,” but just that you might not be referencing an accurate picture of political thought, political reality, political networks.
“Ignorant” is not, and should not be, a synonym for “bad”. If you have valuable information for me, I’ll own up to it.
The world still doesn’t have much of a problem with the “initiation of force” or “aggression.”
Those strike me as near-meaningless terms, with connotations chosen specifically so people will have a problem with them despite their vagueness.
That he chose to follow “the path of compliance” “the path of obedience” and “the path of nonresistance” (all those prior paths are different ways of saying the same thing, with different emphasis on personal onus, and on the extent to which fear plays a defensible part in his decision-making).
Did you accidentally a word there? I don’t follow your point.
The reason I still judge the Nazis … they chose a mindless interpretation of “the will to power.” The rest of the world viewed Hitler as a raving madman. There were plenty of criticisms of Nazism in existence at the time of Hitler’s rise to power.
And clearly, they all deliberately chose the suboptimal choice, in full knowledge of their mistake.
Your statistical likelihood of being murdered by your own government, during peacetime, worldwide.
You’re joking, right?
Statistical likelihood of being murdered by your own government, during peacetime, worldwide.
i.e. not my statistical likelihood, i.e. nice try, but no-one is going going to have a visceral fear reaction and skip past their well-practiced justification (or much reaction at all, unless you can do better than that skeevy-looking graph.)
i.e. not my statistical likelihood, i.e. nice try, but no-one is going going to have a visceral fear reaction and skip past their well-practiced justification (or much reaction at all, unless you can do better than that skeevy-looking graph.)
I suggest asking yourself whether the math that created that graph was correctly calculated. A bias against badly illustrated truths may be pushing you toward the embrace of falsehood.
If sociopath-driven collectivism was easy for social systems to detect and neutralize, we probably wouldn’t give so much of our wealth to it. Yet, social systems repeatedly, and cyclically fail for this reason, just as the USA is now, once again, proceeding down this well-worn path (to the greatest extent allowed by the nation’s many “law students” who become “licensed lawyers.” What if all those law students had become STEM majors, and built better machines and technologies?) I dare say that that simple desire for an easier paycheck might be the cause of sociopathy on a grand scale. I have my own theories about this, but for a moment, nevermind _why.
If societies typically fall to over-parasitism, (too many looters, too few producers), we should ask ourselves what part we’re playing in that fall. If societies don’t fall entirely to over-parasitism, then what forces ameliorate parasitism?
And, how would you know how likely you are to be killed by a system in transition? You may be right: maybe the graph doesn’t take into account changes in the future that make societies less violent and more democratic. It just averages the past results over time.
But I think R. J. Rummel’s graph makes a good point: we should look at the potential harm caused by near-existential (extreme) threats, and ask ourselves if we’re not on the same course. Have we truly eliminated the variables of over-legislation, destruction or elimination of legal protections, and consolidation of political power? …Because those things have killed a lot of people in the past, and where those things have been prevented, a lot of wealth and relative peace has been generated.
But sure, the graph doesn’t mean anything if technology makes us smart enough to break free from past cycles. In that case, the warning didn’t need to be sounded as loudly as Rummel has sounded it.
...And I don’t care if the graph looks “skeevy.” That’s an ad-hominem attack that ignores the substance of the warning. I encourage you to familiarize yourself with his entire site. It contains a lot of valuable information. The more you rebel against the look and feel of the site, the more I encourage you to investigate it, and consider that you might be rebelling against the inconsequential and ignoring the substance.
Truth can come from a poorly-dressed source, and lies can (and often do) come in slick packages.
There are a lot of people who really don’t understand the structure of reality, or how prevalent and how destructive sociopaths (and the conformists that they influence) are.
You know, this raises an interesting question: what would actually motivate a clinical psychopath in a position of power? Well, self-interest, right? I can see how there might be a lot of environmental disasters, defective products, poor working conditions as a result … probably also a certain amount of skullduggery would be related to this as well.
Of course, this is an example of society/economics leading a psychopath astray, rather than the other way around. Still, it might be worth pushing to have politicians etc. tested and found unfit if they’re psychopathic.
In fact, there is a blind spot in most people’s realities that’s filled by their evolutionarily-determined blindness to sociopaths.
I remain deeply suspicious of this sentence.
In fact, virtually everyone who hasn’t read Stanley Milgram’s book about it, and put in a lot of thought about its implications is in this category [...] you might not be referencing an accurate picture of political thought, political reality, political networks.
This seems reasonable, actually. I’m unclear why I should believe you know better, but we are on LessWrong.
The world still doesn’t have much of a problem with the “initiation of force” or “aggression.” (Minus a minority of enlightened libertarian dissenters.) …Especially not when it’s labeled as “majoritarian government.” ie: “Legitimized by a vote.” However, a large and growing number of people who see reality accurately (small-L libertarians) consistently denounce the initiated use of force as grossly sub-optimal, immoral, and wrong. It is immoral because it causes suffering to innocent people.
I … words fail me. I seriously cannot respond to this. Please, explain yourself, with actual reference to this supposed reality you perceive, and with the term “initiation of force” tabooed.
Talk about the prison industrial complex with anyone, and talk with someone who has family members imprisoned for a victimless crime offense.
And this is the result of … psychopaths? Human psychological blindspots evolved in response to psychopaths?
Talk with someone who knows Schaeffer Cox, (one of the many political prisoners in the USA).
Well, that’s … legitimately disturbing. Of course, it may be inaccurate, or even accurate but justified … still cause for concern.
Your statistical likelihood of being murdered by your own government, during peacetime, worldwide.
You know, my government could be taken down with a few month’s terrorism, and has been. There are actual murderers in power here, from the ahem glorious revolution. I actually think someone who faced this sort of thing here might have a real chance of winning that fight, if they were smart.
This contributes to my vague like of american-style maintenance-of-a-well-organized-militia gun ownership, despite the immediate downsides.
And, of course, no other government is operating such attacks in Ireland, to my knowledge. I think I have a lot more to fear from organized crime than organized law, and I have a lot more unpopular political opinions than money.
I suggest asking yourself whether the math that created that graph was correctly calculated. A bias against badly illustrated truths may be pushing you toward the embrace of falsehood.
The site appears to be explicitly talking about genocide etc. in third-world countries.
If sociopath-driven collectivism was easy for social systems to detect and neutralize, we probably wouldn’t give so much of our wealth to it. Yet, social systems repeatedly, and cyclically fail for this reason, just as the USA is now, once again, proceeding down this well-worn path [...] societies typically fall to over-parasitism, (too many looters, too few producers), we should ask ourselves what part we’re playing in that fall.
Citation very much needed, I’m afraid. You are skirting the edge of assuming your own conclusion, which suggests it’s a large part of your worldview; am I right?
What if all those law students had become STEM majors, and built better machines and technologies?
I’m going to say “surprisingly little”. Eh, it’s worth a shot in at least a state-level trial.
If societies don’t fall entirely to over-parasitism, then what forces ameliorate parasitism?
And, how would you know how likely you are to be killed by a system in transition? You may be right: maybe the graph doesn’t take into account changes in the future that make societies less violent and more democratic. It just averages the past results over time.
Assuming “past” and “future” here are metaphorically referring to more/less advanced societies, absolutely.
But I think R. J. Rummel’s graph makes a good point: we should look at the potential harm caused by near-existential (extreme) threats, and ask ourselves if we’re not on the same course.
This doesn’t seem likely to fall into even the same order of magnitude as X-risks. In fact, I think the main effect would be the possible impact on reducing existential threats.
Have we truly eliminated the variables of over-legislation, destruction or elimination of legal protections, and consolidation of political power? …Because those things have killed a lot of people in the past, and where those things have been prevented, a lot of wealth and relative peace has been generated.
And you blame these on … psychopaths?
Truth can come from a poorly-dressed source, and lies can (and often do) come in slick packages.
Hmm. Have you considered dressing better? Because those youtube documentaries are borderline unwatchable, and I am right only barely motivated enough to watch them because I would feel bad at potentially neglecting a source of info. (If they continue to consist of facts I already know and raw, unsupported declarations I will, in fact, stop watching them.)
Getting maths right is useless when youmhave got concpets wrong. Your graph throws
Liberal democracies in with authoritarian and totalitarianism regimes. From which you derive that mugasofer is AA likely to be killed by Michael Higgins as he is by Pol Pot.
Your first link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgGyvxqYSbE) both appears to be, and is, a farly typical YouTube conspiracy theory documentary that merely happens to focus on psychopaths. It was so bad I seriously considered giving up on reviewing your stuff. I strongly recommend that, whatever you do, you cease using this as your introductory point.
“The Psychology of Evil” was mildly interesting; although it didn’t contain much in the way of new data for me, it contained much that is relatively obscure. I did notice, however, that he appears to be not only anthropomorphizing but demonizingformless things. Not only are most bad things accomplished by large social forces, most things period are. It is easier for a “freethinker” to do damage than good, although obviously, considering we are on LW, I consider this a relatively minor point.
I find the identification of “people who see reality accurately” with “small-l libertarians” extremely dubious, especially when it goes completely unsupported, as if this were a background feature of reality barely worth remarking on.
Prison industrial complex link is meh; this, on the other hand, is excellent, and I may use it myself.
Schaeffer Cox is a fraud, although I can’t blame him for trying and I remain concerned about the general problem even if he is not an instance of it.
The chart remains utterly unrelated to anything you mentioned or seem particularly concerned about here.
One paper examining a sizable sample of business folk found that percentage of sociopaths in the corporate world is 3.5 times higher than in the general population. Another study of 346 white-collar workers found that the percentage of corporate sociopaths increased as you go up the corporate ladder. That’s consistent with the reasons why politicians tend to be sociopaths: corporate leaders have lots of power over others and arguably even less need for empathy and conscience than politicians.
In before this is downvoted to the point where discussion is curtailed.
And yet here you are arguing for Evil Mutants.
I’m aware many people who believe this don’t literally think of it in terms of the soul - if only because they don’t think about it all—but I think it’s a good shorthand for the ideas involved.
Observing simple incompetence in the environment.
I should probably note I’m not familiar with these individuals, although the names do ring a faint bell.
Seems like evidence for my previous statements. No?
These are Nazis, yes? I wouldn’t be that surprised if some of them were “gleeful” even if they had literally no psychopaths among their ranks—unlikely from a purely statistical standpoint.
While my contrarian tendencies are screaming at me to argue this was, in fact, completely unjust … I can see some neat arguments for that …
We punished Nazis who were “just obeying orders”—and now nobody can use that excuse. Seems like a pretty classic example of punishment setting an example for others. No “they’re monsters and must suffer” required.
I’m probably more practiced at empathising with racists, and specifically Nazis—just based on your being drawn from our culture—but surely racist beliefs is a more sympathetic motivation than greed?
(At least, if we ignore the idea of bias possibly leading to racist beliefs that justify benefiting ourselves at their expense, which you are, right?)
There are a lot of people who really don’t understand the structure of reality, or how prevalent and how destructive sociopaths (and the conformists that they influence) are.
In fact, there is a blind spot in most people’s realities that’s filled by their evolutionarily-determined blindness to sociopaths. This makes them easy prey for sociopaths, especially intelligent, extreme sociopaths (total sociopathy, lack of mirror neurons, total lack of empathy, as described by Robert Hare in “without conscience”) with modern technology and a support network of other sociopaths.
In fact, virtually everyone who hasn’t read Stanley Milgram’s book about it, and put in a lot of thought about its implications is in this category. I’m not suggesting that you or anyone else in this conversation is “bad” or “ignorant,” but just that you might not be referencing an accurate picture of political thought, political reality, political networks.
The world still doesn’t have much of a problem with the “initiation of force” or “aggression.” (Minus a minority of enlightened libertarian dissenters.) …Especially not when it’s labeled as “majoritarian government.” ie: “Legitimized by a vote.” However, a large and growing number of people who see reality accurately (small-L libertarians) consistently denounce the initiated use of force as grossly sub-optimal, immoral, and wrong. It is immoral because it causes suffering to innocent people.
Stangl could have recognized that the murder of women and children was “too wrong to tolerate.” In fact, he did recognize this, by his comment that he felt “weak in the knees” while pushing women and children into the gas chamber. That he chose to follow “the path of compliance” “the path of obedience” and “the path of nonresistance” (all those prior paths are different ways of saying the same thing, with different emphasis on personal onus, and on the extent to which fear plays a defensible part in his decision-making).
The reason I still judge the Nazis (and their modern equivalents) harshly is because they faced significant opposition, but it was almost as wrong as they were. The levellers innovated proper jury trials in the 1600s, and restored them by the 1670, in the trial of William Penn. It wasn’t as if Austria was without its “Golden Bull” either. Instead, they chose a mindless interpretation of “the will to power.”
The rest of the world viewed Hitler as a raving madman. There were plenty of criticisms of Nazism in existence at the time of Hitler’s rise to power. Adam Smith had written “The Wealth of Nations” over a century earlier. The Federalist and Anti-Federalists were right in incredible detail again, over a century earlier.
Talk about the prison industrial complex with anyone, and talk with someone who has family members imprisoned for a victimless crime offense. Talk with someone who knows Schaeffer Cox, (one of the many political prisoners in the USA). Most people will choose not to talk to these people (to remain ignorant) because knowledge imparts onus to act morally, and stop supporting immoral systems. To meet the Jews is to activate your mirror neurons, is to empathize with them, …a dangerous thing to do when you’re meeting them standing outside of a cattle car. Your statistical likelihood of being murdered by your own government, during peacetime, worldwide.
So, is this trolling? You cite the Milgram experiment, in which the authorities did not pretend to represent the government. The prevalence and importance of non-governmental authority in real life is one of the main objections to libertarianism, especially the version you seem to promote here (right-wing libertarianism as moral principle).
I’m on a mobile device right now—I’ll go over your arguments, links, and videos in more detail later, so here are my immediate responses, nothing more.
Wait, why would evolution make us vulnerable to sociopaths? Wouldn’t patching such a weakness be an evolutionary advantage?
Wouldn’t a total lack of mirror neurons make people much harder to predict, crippling social skills?
“Ignorant” is not, and should not be, a synonym for “bad”. If you have valuable information for me, I’ll own up to it.
Those strike me as near-meaningless terms, with connotations chosen specifically so people will have a problem with them despite their vagueness.
Did you accidentally a word there? I don’t follow your point.
And clearly, they all deliberately chose the suboptimal choice, in full knowledge of their mistake.
You’re joking, right?
Statistical likelihood of being murdered by your own government, during peacetime, worldwide.
i.e. not my statistical likelihood, i.e. nice try, but no-one is going going to have a visceral fear reaction and skip past their well-practiced justification (or much reaction at all, unless you can do better than that skeevy-looking graph.)
I suggest asking yourself whether the math that created that graph was correctly calculated. A bias against badly illustrated truths may be pushing you toward the embrace of falsehood.
If sociopath-driven collectivism was easy for social systems to detect and neutralize, we probably wouldn’t give so much of our wealth to it. Yet, social systems repeatedly, and cyclically fail for this reason, just as the USA is now, once again, proceeding down this well-worn path (to the greatest extent allowed by the nation’s many “law students” who become “licensed lawyers.” What if all those law students had become STEM majors, and built better machines and technologies?) I dare say that that simple desire for an easier paycheck might be the cause of sociopathy on a grand scale. I have my own theories about this, but for a moment, nevermind _why.
If societies typically fall to over-parasitism, (too many looters, too few producers), we should ask ourselves what part we’re playing in that fall. If societies don’t fall entirely to over-parasitism, then what forces ameliorate parasitism?
And, how would you know how likely you are to be killed by a system in transition? You may be right: maybe the graph doesn’t take into account changes in the future that make societies less violent and more democratic. It just averages the past results over time.
But I think R. J. Rummel’s graph makes a good point: we should look at the potential harm caused by near-existential (extreme) threats, and ask ourselves if we’re not on the same course. Have we truly eliminated the variables of over-legislation, destruction or elimination of legal protections, and consolidation of political power? …Because those things have killed a lot of people in the past, and where those things have been prevented, a lot of wealth and relative peace has been generated.
But sure, the graph doesn’t mean anything if technology makes us smart enough to break free from past cycles. In that case, the warning didn’t need to be sounded as loudly as Rummel has sounded it.
...And I don’t care if the graph looks “skeevy.” That’s an ad-hominem attack that ignores the substance of the warning. I encourage you to familiarize yourself with his entire site. It contains a lot of valuable information. The more you rebel against the look and feel of the site, the more I encourage you to investigate it, and consider that you might be rebelling against the inconsequential and ignoring the substance.
Truth can come from a poorly-dressed source, and lies can (and often do) come in slick packages.
You know, this raises an interesting question: what would actually motivate a clinical psychopath in a position of power? Well, self-interest, right? I can see how there might be a lot of environmental disasters, defective products, poor working conditions as a result … probably also a certain amount of skullduggery would be related to this as well.
Of course, this is an example of society/economics leading a psychopath astray, rather than the other way around. Still, it might be worth pushing to have politicians etc. tested and found unfit if they’re psychopathic.
I remain deeply suspicious of this sentence.
This seems reasonable, actually. I’m unclear why I should believe you know better, but we are on LessWrong.
I … words fail me. I seriously cannot respond to this. Please, explain yourself, with actual reference to this supposed reality you perceive, and with the term “initiation of force” tabooed.
And this is the result of … psychopaths? Human psychological blindspots evolved in response to psychopaths?
Well, that’s … legitimately disturbing. Of course, it may be inaccurate, or even accurate but justified … still cause for concern.
You know, my government could be taken down with a few month’s terrorism, and has been. There are actual murderers in power here, from the ahem glorious revolution. I actually think someone who faced this sort of thing here might have a real chance of winning that fight, if they were smart.
This contributes to my vague like of american-style maintenance-of-a-well-organized-militia gun ownership, despite the immediate downsides.
And, of course, no other government is operating such attacks in Ireland, to my knowledge. I think I have a lot more to fear from organized crime than organized law, and I have a lot more unpopular political opinions than money.
The site appears to be explicitly talking about genocide etc. in third-world countries.
Citation very much needed, I’m afraid. You are skirting the edge of assuming your own conclusion, which suggests it’s a large part of your worldview; am I right?
I’m going to say “surprisingly little”. Eh, it’s worth a shot in at least a state-level trial.
Assuming “past” and “future” here are metaphorically referring to more/less advanced societies, absolutely.
This doesn’t seem likely to fall into even the same order of magnitude as X-risks. In fact, I think the main effect would be the possible impact on reducing existential threats.
And you blame these on … psychopaths?
Hmm. Have you considered dressing better? Because those youtube documentaries are borderline unwatchable, and I am right only barely motivated enough to watch them because I would feel bad at potentially neglecting a source of info. (If they continue to consist of facts I already know and raw, unsupported declarations I will, in fact, stop watching them.)
Getting maths right is useless when youmhave got concpets wrong. Your graph throws Liberal democracies in with authoritarian and totalitarianism regimes. From which you derive that mugasofer is AA likely to be killed by Michael Higgins as he is by Pol Pot.
You’re making lots of typos these days; is there something wrong with your keyboard or something?
Having reviewed your links:
Your first link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgGyvxqYSbE) both appears to be, and is, a farly typical YouTube conspiracy theory documentary that merely happens to focus on psychopaths. It was so bad I seriously considered giving up on reviewing your stuff. I strongly recommend that, whatever you do, you cease using this as your introductory point.
“The Psychology of Evil” was mildly interesting; although it didn’t contain much in the way of new data for me, it contained much that is relatively obscure. I did notice, however, that he appears to be not only anthropomorphizing but demonizing formless things. Not only are most bad things accomplished by large social forces, most things period are. It is easier for a “freethinker” to do damage than good, although obviously, considering we are on LW, I consider this a relatively minor point.
I find the identification of “people who see reality accurately” with “small-l libertarians” extremely dubious, especially when it goes completely unsupported, as if this were a background feature of reality barely worth remarking on.
Prison industrial complex link is meh; this, on the other hand, is excellent, and I may use it myself.
Schaeffer Cox is a fraud, although I can’t blame him for trying and I remain concerned about the general problem even if he is not an instance of it.
The chart remains utterly unrelated to anything you mentioned or seem particularly concerned about here.
The non aggression principle is horribly broken
Concern about sociopaths applies to both business and government:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/01/09/3140081/bridge-sociopathy/