What sort of discussion on/about sociopathy are you imagining? You might find this post on ethical injunctions interesting.
I think a common view here (though this is n=2 based off of myself and Eliezer) is that sociopathy is like leprosy for your social life- it doesn’t actually cause parts of you to fall off, but by destroying nerves it makes it dramatically more likely that in the normal course of life you’ll do massive damage to yourself by not noticing what you’re doing.
I scored 9 of 12 on the test you linked, by the way.
Very good point about sociopathy (and I liked the link on ethical injunctions). Many sociopaths are extraordinarily prone to self-deception. I do think that a good awareness of happiness research is important (e.g. diminishing marginal utility of additional money/power/social status—there is a point where giving things to other people increases your own happiness more than keeping the rest of it to yourself), but much of the happiness research doesn’t even apply to sociopaths because their sources for happiness are different from that of others (and often in a way that makes their happiness more of a zero-sum with the happiness of others).
As for the sort of discussion on sociopathy that I’m imagining, I’m mostly imagining an open discussion. I think sociopathy is quite interesting for rationality because sociopaths have utility functions that have landscapes quite different from the utility function landscapes of neurotypicals. I’ve also often regarded sociopathy as a particular case where some sort of intervention may be justifiable (if we found genes predisposing people towards sociopathy), and I’ve often thought of what people would think of that (even though I’m very much skeptical of any intervention for genes that correlate with many other mental conditions like ADD/depression/Asperger’s, which often predispose people towards increased differential susceptibility)
What sort of discussion on/about sociopathy are you imagining? You might find this post on ethical injunctions interesting.
I think a common view here (though this is n=2 based off of myself and Eliezer) is that sociopathy is like leprosy for your social life- it doesn’t actually cause parts of you to fall off, but by destroying nerves it makes it dramatically more likely that in the normal course of life you’ll do massive damage to yourself by not noticing what you’re doing.
I scored 9 of 12 on the test you linked, by the way.
Very good point about sociopathy (and I liked the link on ethical injunctions). Many sociopaths are extraordinarily prone to self-deception. I do think that a good awareness of happiness research is important (e.g. diminishing marginal utility of additional money/power/social status—there is a point where giving things to other people increases your own happiness more than keeping the rest of it to yourself), but much of the happiness research doesn’t even apply to sociopaths because their sources for happiness are different from that of others (and often in a way that makes their happiness more of a zero-sum with the happiness of others).
As for the sort of discussion on sociopathy that I’m imagining, I’m mostly imagining an open discussion. I think sociopathy is quite interesting for rationality because sociopaths have utility functions that have landscapes quite different from the utility function landscapes of neurotypicals. I’ve also often regarded sociopathy as a particular case where some sort of intervention may be justifiable (if we found genes predisposing people towards sociopathy), and I’ve often thought of what people would think of that (even though I’m very much skeptical of any intervention for genes that correlate with many other mental conditions like ADD/depression/Asperger’s, which often predispose people towards increased differential susceptibility)