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Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

schneier.com

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Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#61

Post by jokoon »

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #21
jokoon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m not talking about crime. Most sociopaths never commit any crimes and it’s not illegal to be a sociopath. That would be silly, like jailing someone for having red hair. Also, it’s quite possible that there are more sociopaths than there are people with red hair – estimates range from 1% to 4% of the population. > I don't think criminal hang around facebook. Are you sure about that?

I just don't see where the correlation between sociopathy and crime comes from.

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#62

Post by roc »

7952 wrote: post #46
smackay wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The system you describe is exactly what we have in the world now. The financial system has numerous checks and balances and is notoriously prone to non-virtuous behavior. Aren't hacker news or stackexchange examples of creating virtuous behavior using an algorithm, and a strong community? It is self regulating because if you suddenly have a deep opposition to the ethos of a community you can just leave (slashdot -> d…

You can 'just leave' pseudonymous communities because their aggregated judgment doesn't follow you to the next one. But if one's real identity is flagged as "(likely) sociopath" on a Real Name service, how does one 'just leave' that determination behind?

Are search engines and archives going to all willingly 'forget' that data when you 'just leave' Facebook? Are they going to not aggregate and correlate it to any new service you join?

This is one of the huge points of criticism of Real-Name-required services: a person can never escape an unjust judgment of such communities, due the long memory of the internet.

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#63

Post by stephencanon »

coffeemug wrote: post #4
DanBC wrote: post #2

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…

I don’t pretend to know what the value of N ought to be[1], but 1/3 is ridiculously low.

[1] http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#64

Post by Helpful_Bunny »

nnq wrote: post #3

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…

There is a large base of research on this problem for the US military (and CCCP etc). i.e. How to discern effective killers within troops, how to shape them and how to 'uplift' the usual grunts to effectively kill.

I suggest you research "natural killers" from 1946 onwards (famous paper starts the ball rolling there - Combat Neuroses / Fatigue is a tip). Their percentage increase in producing effective killers is impressive. I won't link to specific papers, since it's outside the remit of H.N., however a lot of hard science & tech has been brought to bear on the issue.

The flip-side of this, the mirror to a sociopath (let's call it "the empathetically linked / driven") makes just as an effective killer for the record. If not better.

Tl;dr

You're about 70 years too late to pioneer this field. However, in looking @ the current trend to map Autism onto AI networks as a model, I'd suggest you'd probably have more joy looking at the empathetically linked individuals to see how their strong network connections / protective instincts are harnessed if I were to build a neural Map (weak) AI.

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#65

Post by squozzer »

I think the word "sociopath", like "nihilist" and to a lesser extent "traitor", never had much meaning outside of "someone whose characteristics or actions I do not like".

So I question the basis on which Mr. Adams -- whose works some might consider a sociopathic attack on American business practices, and by extension, capitalism -- thinks content analysis is a good idea.

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#66

Post by jlgreco »

DanBC wrote: post #7
jlgreco wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, with these numbers the percentages actually do a better job of giving me the impression that this test is worthless. 25% sounds much worse than 1 in 4.

Once you get to 25% that's true. But today try to ask a few people around you, and see what they say. > Suppose you have a test that's 90% accurate in identifying people who have a disease, and 90% accurate in identifying people who do not have the disease. Assume that 4% of people have this disease. Hypothetical_Bob is tested, and the test says that he has the disease. What are the chances that Bob actually does hav…

Ah yes, I see what you're saying. Real numbers are easier to reason with and get correct results than percentages.

I think my point is slightly orthogonal since I misunderstood you; if you tell someone that something is "10%" they will think "that is pretty bad" whereas "1 in 10" is more likely to get a "hey, that's not too shabby" response. Percentages sound "worse" than numbers, even when they are the same (at least to me). Perhaps because they are harder to reason with?

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#67

Post by fosap »

muyuu wrote: post #39
codex wrote: 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…

This is even more pathetic than creationism. This is on par with insisting that the earth is flat. Denial is a hell of a drug.

Using condoms ever killed anybody. Stay save. And if you personally refuse therapy, ok. But HIV does cause AIDS and has a one hundred percent lethality. In case you affected use the remaining time.

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#68

Post by jjs »

steve19 wrote: post #58
jjs wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

"in a perfect world" is an English phrase. It means, in this context, "if this worked perfectly". It is not a statement about the world in general.

You say idiom, I say chronic lack of imagination.

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#69

Post by muyuu »

fosap wrote: post #67
muyuu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is even more pathetic than creationism. This is on par with insisting that the earth is flat. Denial is a hell of a drug. Using condoms ever killed anybody. Stay save. And if you personally refuse therapy, ok. But HIV does cause AIDS and has a one hundred percent lethality. In case you affected use the remaining time.

You are making a series of stupid assumptions here. Like I'm denying that AIDS kills, or that STDs kill. It's clearly established. Which is why I've always been extremely cautious and I'm healthy as it gets.

The fact that AIDS is virus-induced, that remains unproven. However, it's pandered as such and a number of companies are cashing big on antivirals and antiretrovirals, in many cases worsening the patient's health. To claim something is proven without proof, that is pathetic.

And this is not the only scam induced by big pharma. There are many other perverse effects stemming directly from the fact that pharmaceuticals cash big on chronic illnesses, giving them an incentive to research not in cures, but in long lasting treatments.

Feel free to downvote away though. It's important and downvotes might actually get more people to read it.

Re: Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

#70

Post by bandushrew »

anigbrowl wrote: post #55
bandushrew wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waiting until someone actually commits a crime provides a list that is 100% accurate.

No, it doesn't. People commit crimes and get away with them al the time, in fact. I'm not proposing that we put people in jail for having criminal potential.

Nothing that is being proposed will stop people getting away with crimes.

Waiting until someone actually commits a crime will stop people being persecuted for a coincidental similarity of their behavior to that of a terrorist, sociopath or mime artist.

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