There are plenty of people just as sociopathic as John, and just as dangerous as John but more so, who would not be considered insane or perceived as dangerous by society at large.
Most people in positions of power have strong sociopathic tendencies. It’s just that many of them conform sufficiently well with society’s expectations that they’re not recognized as threats.
A person’s revealed utility function is the utility function that seems to govern their actual decisions. If a person’s revealed utility function passes some threshold of wackiness or changes drastically enough at a high enough frequency, we call that person “insane”.
If a person’s cognitive experience is very significantly different from others without them having significantly lower intelligence, and this manifests itself in their behavior and harms their instrumental rationality, they can be considered insane.
“wackiness” should not be part of even a “stab” towards making something “well-defined”.
If a person’s cognitive experience is very significantly different from others without them having significantly lower intelligence, and this manifests itself in their behavior and harms their instrumental rationality, they can be considered insane.
This is why neurotypicality is considered a pathology by some.
Define a function’s wackiness is easy. If you don’t believe me, suffer through the following paragraph, in which I demonstrate my cleverness in a remarkably economist-like manner.
Let’s say a utility function goes from world-states to real numbers on the interval [-1, 1]. −1 is the worst thing you can imagine and 1 is the best. Your function periodically re-normalizes as the best or worst thing you can imagine changes. To compute two utility functions’ wackiness with respect to each other, compute the root-mean-squared differences between them across all world-states they are both defined on. Define a function A(world-state) which is defined on all world-states for which at least half of the human revealed utility functions are defined on and for which the standard deviation in the human revealed utility functions’ computed values is less than 0.2. Its value for any given world-state is the average of all humanity’s revealed utility functions’ values for that world state. Observing all humanity’s revealed utility functions’ wackiness with respect to A, we designate humans as “insane” if their revealed utility functions’ wackiness with respect to A is more than two standard deviations above the average.
In other words, insane people want really different things than other people.
That’s probably not a good definition though, because those people are more likely to be called weird than insane. Probably the fast-changing revealed utility function definition is a better one. For that you’d compute the wackiness of a person’s current revealed utility function with respect to the one they had five minutes ago over the last four days and add all the wackinesses together. If this result is more than four standard deviations above the average they can be considered insane.
For that you’d compute the wackiness of a person’s current revealed utility function with respect to the one they had five minutes ago over the last four days and add all the wackinesses together. If this result is more than four standard deviations above the average they can be considered insane.
I’m not sure that really captures most of what passes for ‘insane’.
Most people in positions of power have strong sociopathic tendencies. It’s just that many of them conform sufficiently well with society’s expectations that they’re not recognized as threats.
And when you do recognise a sociopath with power as a threat the smartest option is to stay the #@$@# away!
Use of the label ‘insane’, among other things, means “I have the social resources to call you insane and get away with it”.
“Sanity” is not well-defined, here.
There are plenty of people just as sociopathic as John, and just as dangerous as John but more so, who would not be considered insane or perceived as dangerous by society at large.
Most people in positions of power have strong sociopathic tendencies. It’s just that many of them conform sufficiently well with society’s expectations that they’re not recognized as threats.
A couple stabs:
A person’s revealed utility function is the utility function that seems to govern their actual decisions. If a person’s revealed utility function passes some threshold of wackiness or changes drastically enough at a high enough frequency, we call that person “insane”.
If a person’s cognitive experience is very significantly different from others without them having significantly lower intelligence, and this manifests itself in their behavior and harms their instrumental rationality, they can be considered insane.
“wackiness” should not be part of even a “stab” towards making something “well-defined”.
This is why neurotypicality is considered a pathology by some.
Define a function’s wackiness is easy. If you don’t believe me, suffer through the following paragraph, in which I demonstrate my cleverness in a remarkably economist-like manner.
Let’s say a utility function goes from world-states to real numbers on the interval [-1, 1]. −1 is the worst thing you can imagine and 1 is the best. Your function periodically re-normalizes as the best or worst thing you can imagine changes. To compute two utility functions’ wackiness with respect to each other, compute the root-mean-squared differences between them across all world-states they are both defined on. Define a function A(world-state) which is defined on all world-states for which at least half of the human revealed utility functions are defined on and for which the standard deviation in the human revealed utility functions’ computed values is less than 0.2. Its value for any given world-state is the average of all humanity’s revealed utility functions’ values for that world state. Observing all humanity’s revealed utility functions’ wackiness with respect to A, we designate humans as “insane” if their revealed utility functions’ wackiness with respect to A is more than two standard deviations above the average.
In other words, insane people want really different things than other people.
That’s probably not a good definition though, because those people are more likely to be called weird than insane. Probably the fast-changing revealed utility function definition is a better one. For that you’d compute the wackiness of a person’s current revealed utility function with respect to the one they had five minutes ago over the last four days and add all the wackinesses together. If this result is more than four standard deviations above the average they can be considered insane.
I’m not sure that really captures most of what passes for ‘insane’.
And when you do recognise a sociopath with power as a threat the smartest option is to stay the #@$@# away!
Use of the label ‘insane’, among other things, means “I have the social resources to call you insane and get away with it”.