Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath

So has the general medical profession.

Since several of the comments here revolve around what we know now and could possibly know now about brain differences related to behavior, I'll link to a book, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience,[1] that examines for a popular audience how much science is behind the latest "neuroscience" and how much of it is just hype. Just because brain scans are involved doesn't mean the explanation is any more valid. I think you will find this book interesting and helpful for understanding yourself and understanding the world.

I heard about the NIMH director's letter on research priorities[2] first from behavior-genetics-informed research and clinical psychologists whom I meet in a "journal club" weekly during the school year. The DSM framework involves a lot of log-rolling among various kinds of psychologists and psychiatrists, several of whom depend for their living on being known as "experts" on "disorders" that may not have any real existence. That said, there is an active research program all over the world based on a variety of different paradigms, with very widely followed journals, trying better to understand healthy human behavior and debilitating human behavior that results from brain abnormalities, diseases, psychological stress, and other causes. Straight-up psychology still has a lot to contribute to this study. The psychologists I know best are very aware of critiques of their own discipline[3] through the readings we discuss in the journal club, and more generally aware of the general critique of the current conduct of science,[4] so they redouble their efforts to do their science better, and to check their methodology as they try to tease out the complex web of causes of human behavior.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Brainwashed-Seductive-Appeal-Mindless-...

[2] http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

[3] http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/

[4] https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/john-ioannidis?tab=publica...

I think this one's a repost.

Sometime in the recent past people have started substituting a reasonable skepticism about what is known and knowable for a kind of blatant dismissal of everything that is not rendered absolutely elementary and deterministic. This is especially true of the cognitive sciences and the double standard becomes especially clear when the field is contrasted with, say, physics, the most sciencey of all sciences. For instance, go ahead and take a quarter out of our your pocket, flip it into the air and see how it lands on the floor. It's pretty easy to predict whether it comes up heads or tails, right? Except no, it isn't, not outside of a cleanroom with a known atmosphere and a robot flipping the coin.

In my experience it's usually the people who know the least about psychology or cognitive science claiming that the least can be known about psychology and cognitive science. The people who know the most about psychology and cognitive science will also tell you how little we currently know, but the context is very different, sort of like when you're at a party and get cornered by a Shakespeare scholar who for the next three hours tells you in explicit detail how little is known about Shakespeare.

Of course the brain is complicated, and of course we're a long way from understanding it, and yet I could look at a scan that showed hypometablism in your anterior temporal lobes and be able to tell you with great specificity about the symptoms I would expect you to manifest, a diagnosis which would be drawn from a mountain of data that is often, admittedly, observational; and yet using a confluence of imaging methods and single cell recordings and anatomical studies and animal homologies, which collectively have given rise to theoretical models, the predictions are as scientific as those that arise in any other kinds of science. Doesn't mean they're always right, but there's rigorous and principled methodology at work, results shift belief in the explanatory power of this model or that, and the field moves forward.

So yeah, there are bad practitioners and bad papers and overbroad explanations, but that doesn't mean that nobody knows anything.