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.
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.