41–50 of 73 posts
I really doubt sociopaths would use facebook at all anyway
They are lifes hackers.
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.
The problem is that there is always enough people who are not normal (there is a great book about it by Erich Fromm: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness) and it's possible to 'make' people into something not normal in psychological sense - i.e. suppress their empathy for certain group of people by some war trauma or conditioning/brainwashing.
BTW, I think that it's a myth that even bad men love their mommas. It depends how you define love. From what I remember based on one psychopath that I know really well he claims that he loves his mother and maybe he even thinks he feels something like that but he acts in such a way that his mother often gets hurt by his actions and he acts with complete disregard of that. Not love in my book.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found his version clearer because "%" distinguishes proportions from quantities.
Yes, but imagine you're taking the test. Suppose you have a test that's 90% accurate in identifying both people with X and people without X. If you assume that 4% of people are people with X and you're told that you test positive for someone who has X. Do you really find it easy to arrive at your actual chance (26%) of having X? Let's not forget that most people on HN are at the smarter end of the bell curve. It'd be…
When I said I found his version clearer, I meant between the two versions originally given. The one you've just added is of course less clear because unlike the other two, it doesn't point out the issue.
BTW: But maybe it is clearer, for calculation rather than understanding, because I get 27.(27)%, not 26%... https://www.google.com/search?q=%28.9*.04%29/%28.9*.04%2B.1*...
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.
"antisocial" and "sociopathy" are roughly the same thing. Perhaps you're thinking of people who are non-social?
When you look them up in the DSM (the big book of psychological disorders), it will seem that way. However, you can be antisocial or possess sociopathic traits without having a disorder. In general dictionaries, ’antisocial’ is synonymous to ’unsociable’. That’s how it’s most often used and that’s how I meant it.
> Perhaps you're thinking of people who are non-social?
I had never heard of that word. After Duckducking it, it seems to me that no one uses it. If I were to use another word, I’d probably go for ’asocial’.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 in…
I'm sorry, but 36/(36+96) = 27.27%.
An excellent post by Schneier. > The problem isn't just that such a system is wrong, it's that the mathematics of testing makes this sort of thing pretty ineffective in practice. It's called the "base rate fallacy." Suppose you have a test that's 90% accurate in identifying both sociopaths and non-sociopaths. If you assume that 4% of people are sociopaths, then the chance of someone who tests positive actually being…
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…
You're saying that you would be happy to join 74 other non-terrorists (i.e. law abiding citizens) plus 25 actual terrorists and be taken off to Guantanamo Bay indefinitely ?
You're really sure about that being a Good Thing for law enforcement ?
Being "positive on a sociopathic personality test" does now equal being "a potentially dangerous pathological sociopath"! Even if you get a system good enough to overcome the base rate problem, you'll only end up labeling a bunch of mostly harmless people. Think a about a hypothetical uber-villain that would want to recruit children or teenagers, brainwash them and turn them into assassins or other kind of agents. He…
Agreed. And perhaps the notion of "dangerous sociopath" can be revised altogether. I'm no expert but in my understanding sociopathy is more about non empathic social behavior. It can be felt as creepy and depicted as violent in fiction, but that's doesn't make it a dangerous behavior in itself, and can actually be socially rewarded. It can be argued that the lack of empathy can lead to a more violent behavior, but vi…
The DSM doesn't even list psychopathy as a diagnosis any more, only antisocial personality disorder which requires a history of, and we might as well just quote the DSM "... a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others..." So yes, a diagnosis of ASPD does generally indicate someone who could be considered dangerous to others.
Now if we're talking about someone with psychopathic traits that scores high on a Hare, then no it does not necessarily indicate dangerous behavior. However, a Hare is still important when dealing with criminals as you do not want to give a psychopath treatment as it simply makes them better criminals.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/05/04/p...