I have little understanding of Putin’s personality. This is why I thought SBF was a better example, because we have more detailed understanding of him—for instance, we have his diary entries! He says it’s likely that all his emotions and empathy are fake! I understand that Putin has probably committed heinous acts, but I am not as aware of evidence he is biologically as impaired emotionally/psychologically as SBF is.
there’s still a huge difference between the ones where your main concern is only large-scale fraud, vs the ones where the concern is unnecessary wars, genocide, and torture camps
Mm, I am not convinced that if SBF wasn’t made the leader of Russia he would not do much more evil than Putin. My impression is that SBF is morally shameless, more competent, and quite unusually ideologically committed to “the ends justify the means”.
Actually, I chatted with an LLM for a bit, and I changed my mind, I no longer think SBF is an especially good/central example of a psychopath. (link to my chat with chatgpt)
“He says it’s likely that all his emotions and empathy are fake!”
I don’t get why you think that’s such a big deal. A lot of people are like that. My guess is something like 5%. A lot of people who are like that don’t admit it. Surely dictators are like 50% likely to be like that just on priors, and then you can add KGB history for Putin.
I feel like you’re overupdating based on SBF admitting something, while not inferring things about Putin (or other dictators) based on past behavior and based on the demands of their role (and getting there).
I mean I understand not knowing much about Putin specifically; if I’m honest, I also don’t know much/couldn’t give you detailed examples, but I’m actually somewhat familiar with KGB history due to an interest in Cold War spy stories, and it’s been said that Putin was an exemplary KGB specimen or whatever, so, we can probably infer with 99.9% confidence that he thinks “ends justify the means” too, because imagine being in the KGB and voicing deontological objections to your superiors, do you think you’re going to rise up through the ranks?
BTW my model of that sort of personality is that when someone says the things that SBF wrote about himself, it’s still compatible with them having genuine feelings of fondness (though somewhat faint rather than all-consuming) for a person (or animal) or two in their lives. And maybe that’s why habryka thinks these personality traits are overpainted/demonized. I even agree that some people might be too categorically negative about the idea that some people on the sociopathy/psychopathy spectrum may actually be alright at least if you’re able to contain some of their bad patterns (like lying). But for the most part, I’d say it still makes for bad leadership and stewardship of others when someone is like that even in the more benign expressions, and we haven’t even gotten into the topic of extreme sadism and tails generally yet, which by the looks of it (my comment here being disagree-voted and the lack of logic in “it’s a spectrum” arguments also pointed out by Steven Byrnes, and surrounding discussion there generally) some people here seem to be in denial about. I don’t understand what’s going on.
Edit: I looked into figures a bit and I think it’s more like 3% for all population, but 5% for men specifically feels like the right estimate to me. And this is assuming “blunted emotionality” rather than “literally has no emotions ever”.
and we haven’t even gotten into the topic of extreme sadism and tails generally yet, which by the looks of it (my comment here being disagree-voted and the lack of logic in “it’s a spectrum” arguments also pointed out by Steven Byrnes, and surrounding discussion there generally) some people here seem to be in denial about. I don’t understand what’s going on.
I disagree-voted it, mostly because my strong guess (based on having done that for a bunch of other crimes like this) is that the actual drivers of the crime you are talking here about won’t actually be well-characterized as the kind of sadism you are talking about. It would require digging into the details, and it didn’t seem worth it to me to do that, so just a disagreement-vote seemed most appropriate.
If you end up looking into it (e.g., you could talk to Claude starting with a prompt and our recent comments here) and change your mind (or not), please let me know. I suggest doing so on a day where you’re not necessarily planning to get a lot of work done, because reading about this stuff really weighs you down. Unfortunately the sadism component is on-the-nose.
I agree with you that it’s often the case that the media paints people as evil where other stuff is going on rather than just “evil personality full stop” (like the intense hatred towards mothers who harm their children when they suffer from extreme postnatal depression, or have mental problems that generate Munchausen by proxy expressions). But sometimes people really like torturing others for fun and there’s ample documentation of that sort of personality not just in the sextortion cases I alluded to, but throughout history when you read about places that used torture (not even just the victims saying that the torturers seemed to enjoy it, sometimes the torturers write about it themselves).
I wonder if maybe there’s a selection effect where the media kind of stops reporting on things that get too shocking, meaning where extreme sadism is involved, so if you just go by shocking media examples, it’s possible to miss the tails. But it’s different with history where historians often go to great lengths highlighting how bad the atrocities were in some times and places.
I have little understanding of Putin’s personality. This is why I thought SBF was a better example, because we have more detailed understanding of him—for instance, we have his diary entries! He says it’s likely that all his emotions and empathy are fake! I understand that Putin has probably committed heinous acts, but I am not as aware of evidence he is biologically as impaired emotionally/psychologically as SBF is.
Mm, I am not convinced that if SBF wasn’t made the leader of Russia he would not do much more evil than Putin. My impression is that SBF is morally shameless, more competent, and quite unusually ideologically committed to “the ends justify the means”.
Actually, I chatted with an LLM for a bit, and I changed my mind, I no longer think SBF is an especially good/central example of a psychopath. (link to my chat with chatgpt)
“He says it’s likely that all his emotions and empathy are fake!”
I don’t get why you think that’s such a big deal. A lot of people are like that. My guess is something like 5%. A lot of people who are like that don’t admit it. Surely dictators are like 50% likely to be like that just on priors, and then you can add KGB history for Putin.
I feel like you’re overupdating based on SBF admitting something, while not inferring things about Putin (or other dictators) based on past behavior and based on the demands of their role (and getting there).
I mean I understand not knowing much about Putin specifically; if I’m honest, I also don’t know much/couldn’t give you detailed examples, but I’m actually somewhat familiar with KGB history due to an interest in Cold War spy stories, and it’s been said that Putin was an exemplary KGB specimen or whatever, so, we can probably infer with 99.9% confidence that he thinks “ends justify the means” too, because imagine being in the KGB and voicing deontological objections to your superiors, do you think you’re going to rise up through the ranks?
BTW my model of that sort of personality is that when someone says the things that SBF wrote about himself, it’s still compatible with them having genuine feelings of fondness (though somewhat faint rather than all-consuming) for a person (or animal) or two in their lives. And maybe that’s why habryka thinks these personality traits are overpainted/demonized. I even agree that some people might be too categorically negative about the idea that some people on the sociopathy/psychopathy spectrum may actually be alright at least if you’re able to contain some of their bad patterns (like lying). But for the most part, I’d say it still makes for bad leadership and stewardship of others when someone is like that even in the more benign expressions, and we haven’t even gotten into the topic of extreme sadism and tails generally yet, which by the looks of it (my comment here being disagree-voted and the lack of logic in “it’s a spectrum” arguments also pointed out by Steven Byrnes, and surrounding discussion there generally) some people here seem to be in denial about. I don’t understand what’s going on.
Edit: I looked into figures a bit and I think it’s more like 3% for all population, but 5% for men specifically feels like the right estimate to me. And this is assuming “blunted emotionality” rather than “literally has no emotions ever”.
I disagree-voted it, mostly because my strong guess (based on having done that for a bunch of other crimes like this) is that the actual drivers of the crime you are talking here about won’t actually be well-characterized as the kind of sadism you are talking about. It would require digging into the details, and it didn’t seem worth it to me to do that, so just a disagreement-vote seemed most appropriate.
If you end up looking into it (e.g., you could talk to Claude starting with a prompt and our recent comments here) and change your mind (or not), please let me know. I suggest doing so on a day where you’re not necessarily planning to get a lot of work done, because reading about this stuff really weighs you down. Unfortunately the sadism component is on-the-nose.
I agree with you that it’s often the case that the media paints people as evil where other stuff is going on rather than just “evil personality full stop” (like the intense hatred towards mothers who harm their children when they suffer from extreme postnatal depression, or have mental problems that generate Munchausen by proxy expressions). But sometimes people really like torturing others for fun and there’s ample documentation of that sort of personality not just in the sextortion cases I alluded to, but throughout history when you read about places that used torture (not even just the victims saying that the torturers seemed to enjoy it, sometimes the torturers write about it themselves).
I wonder if maybe there’s a selection effect where the media kind of stops reporting on things that get too shocking, meaning where extreme sadism is involved, so if you just go by shocking media examples, it’s possible to miss the tails. But it’s different with history where historians often go to great lengths highlighting how bad the atrocities were in some times and places.