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Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

schneier.com

31–40 of 73 posts

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#31
post #9

I really doubt sociopaths would use facebook at all anyway

Perhaps you’re thinking of people who are antisocial? I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the Facebook members who are most active and have the most ‘friends’ are sociopaths.

"antisocial" and "sociopathy" are roughly the same thing. Perhaps you're thinking of people who are non-social?

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#32
post #29
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This issue has nothing to do with the efficacy of the tests. In a perfect world having a list where 25% of the names are potential trouble-makers (for various definitions of trouble-maker) would be an enormous benefit and allow resources to be targeted more efficiently. The real problem is what happens in the imperfect world where law enforcement, government, self-imposed officers of authority get lazy or down-right…

The best outcome would be for these kind of traits to be passively detected and for the community to provide help and support as an emergent property of that community. In a way this already happens on sites like Reddit where suicide prevention emerged organically based on the dynamics of the community. This is in stark contrast to the "real world". The internet is well known as a negative influence on certain people…

Yes, but what happens when your community find out that you no longer believe in God or that you think the Earth actually revolves around the Sun. It's not when things go right but when things go wrong that matter. The points of failure for this type of system are innumerable.

The real goal is building social/political systems that are robust and have checks and balances so that they cannot be perverted by special interests and are accessible to those who need them (child abuse support lines are a good example). Anything where a group intervenes on behalf of an individual is prone to disaster.

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#33
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty bad example to illustrate the fallacy because a 25% confidence is actually extremely good. I don't know what good a test for sociopathy is, but if we had a test this good at identifying terrorists, it would be incredibly useful. If signals intelligence could produce a list of people and guarantee that a quarter of the people on that list are terrorists, it would absolutely revolutionize law enforceme…

This issue has nothing to do with the efficacy of the tests. In a perfect world having a list where 25% of the names are potential trouble-makers (for various definitions of trouble-maker) would be an enormous benefit and allow resources to be targeted more efficiently. The real problem is what happens in the imperfect world where law enforcement, government, self-imposed officers of authority get lazy or down-right…

> In a perfect world having a list where 25% of the names are potential trouble-makers [...]

... would be pointless, as a perfect world would have no concept of "trouble".

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#34
I'm expecting social networks to be used 'voluntarily' for insurance soon. Likely the no social network quote will be higher, because it's higher risk because it's based on less information.

So you get a quote through their app, which uses your likes, your social network, and maybe some NLP on your posts to decide if you qualify for a lower quote.

Insurance people in the UK tell me this would be very useful, but probably isn't possible from a legal perspective, but there will be other countries where it is.

An effect of this would be to penalize people who don't use social networks.

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#35
post #13

The "fallacy" described here is a non-issue. Medical tests have the same characteristics but are still incredibly useful. HIV testing is roughly 99% accurate, but given the large number of tests performed, a very large percentage of people will end up with the wrong result. And yet this test is vital. Even wildly inaccurate tests can be useful. Imagine that driving drunk will result in a accident 10% of the time. 90%…

I once tested positive for HIV with the basic antibody test you mention - a pretty stunning result in view of my lifestyle. A followup Western blot test with higher accuracy confirmed I was not positive. The basic test is fast and cheap but if there are no more accurate tests to detect false positives, it's a dangerous thing to rely on.

Same logic applies in other situations.

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#36
What happens if the "terrorist" is a normal person who loves his family and his country, and believes his sacrifice is honorable?

"Even bad men love their mommas." - Ben Wade (Russell Crowe), 3:10 to Yuma.

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#37
post #16
post #13

The "fallacy" described here is a non-issue. Medical tests have the same characteristics but are still incredibly useful. HIV testing is roughly 99% accurate, but given the large number of tests performed, a very large percentage of people will end up with the wrong result. And yet this test is vital. Even wildly inaccurate tests can be useful. Imagine that driving drunk will result in a accident 10% of the time. 90%…

I tend to agree with you, except it is not a non issue. Look at the numbers of people getting very serious medical treatment because they, and their clinicians, have not understood the numbers. If doctor (well educated intelligent person) cannot get this right I'm scared that labelling someone as "POTENTIAL TERRORIST" on the basis of a 1 in X possibility is going to have disastrous consequences.

Yes, this is an active area of debate in evidence-based medicine (EBM). If you aggregate outcomes, administering some tests actually appears to worsen prognosis, in the sense that if you take two groups of people with identical distributions of (unknown) conditions, and test one group while not testing the other, the tested group has worse overall outcomes. For example, in some cases people have surgery for a condition that, absent the test, would have remained asymptomatic and benignly ignored. With certain kinds of conditions, negative outcomes from retrospectively unnecessary treatment are frequent enough to outweigh the cases where discovery and treatment improves outcomes, if we're talking about aggregate outcomes.

Of course, discovery does not require treatment, so you could test, find a positive, and not do anything. But EBM people tend to view idealized responses with suspicion, and some argue that taken in real-world conditions, not administering certain tests, or administering them in more restricted situations, or at least not recommending them as the default, would improve aggregate outcomes (and the data seems to support that). They would then restrict the tests to cases where testing statistically improves outcomes.

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#38
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you’re thinking of people who are antisocial? I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the Facebook members who are most active and have the most ‘friends’ are sociopaths.

I have no real idea. I was just saying this, as in, I don't think criminal hang around facebook. If that'd be the case, would facebook just be some sort of crime catching tool ? I wonder though, is sociopathy a crime, or some trait that will turn people into criminal ? > I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the Facebook members who are most active and have the most ‘friends’ are sociopaths. I doubt the people you are t…

Criminals do use Facebook: http://www.neowin.net/news/thief-caught-after-stopping-to-ch...

However, the common burglar is probably not a sociopath, but rather a poor drug addict or something.

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#39
post #13

The "fallacy" described here is a non-issue. Medical tests have the same characteristics but are still incredibly useful. HIV testing is roughly 99% accurate, but given the large number of tests performed, a very large percentage of people will end up with the wrong result. And yet this test is vital. Even wildly inaccurate tests can be useful. Imagine that driving drunk will result in a accident 10% of the time. 90%…

HIV testing is largely a fraud, though, as it's conclusions are based on unscientific claims that HIV and AIDS are the same thing or even scientifically proven correlated.

The field is laughable, really. It's sad that people making important decisions in the medical and pharmaceutical fields cannot correctly interpret a confusion matrix, or if they can they are corrupt and decide to ignore it anyway.

You really don't want to apply the same standards to law enforcement, as they are appalling.

EDIT: to the downvoters, I'd suggest doing some reading. In particular, check on the existence of any verifiable testing that proves any semblance of correlation between HIV and AIDS. The standard is appalling for any scientist who's willing to check on the numbers. In general, the standard in medical science is rather low compared to say physics, but in this case it's astonishingly low considering the accolades Montagnier got for his research. I understand it's easy to dismiss this as conspiranoia but it really is not. There are dubious claims passed as truths with very specific interests behind. Not making an assertion either way on the HIVAIDS relationship, just pointing out that the standard of the research is shocking and the statistics skills of the people involved are incredibly poor, if not intentionally corrupt.

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#40
post #29
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This issue has nothing to do with the efficacy of the tests. In a perfect world having a list where 25% of the names are potential trouble-makers (for various definitions of trouble-maker) would be an enormous benefit and allow resources to be targeted more efficiently. The real problem is what happens in the imperfect world where law enforcement, government, self-imposed officers of authority get lazy or down-right…

The best outcome would be for these kind of traits to be passively detected and for the community to provide help and support as an emergent property of that community. In a way this already happens on sites like Reddit where suicide prevention emerged organically based on the dynamics of the community. This is in stark contrast to the "real world". The internet is well known as a negative influence on certain people…

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