I think the problem with trying to learn from psychopaths is the fact that they lie all the time. Their words have no relation to reality other than “does it seem that saying these specific words will help me get something I want?” (including amusement). Even in things that are easy to verify, if they believe that the expected damage from you catching them lying is negligible, or smaller that the expected benefit. Their words are literally “speech acts”, sequences of otherwise meaningless syllables emitted only to make you do something; not reflections of their actual model of the world.
So if you believe that Mao was a psychopath in the clinical sense of the word (I don’t know if he was, maybe yes, maybe no), then no matter how many books of his collected writings or speeches you would read, they contain almost zero evidence about what he actually believed. They will probably contradict themselves because why not.
The only source of information would be to examine their actions (while carefully ignoring their words, because those are designed to mislead you). But do you have a reliable source for that? How many things that other people say Mao did, was actually something Mao told them that he did? How many things no one dared to put in writing? Either because they were afraid of punishment, or because they realized that story would be unbelievable and they had no hard evidence to support it.
What I am trying to say is that learning from actual psychopaths seems so difficult to me that it’s practically impossible.
I think the problem with trying to learn from psychopaths is the fact that they lie all the time. Their words have no relation to reality other than “does it seem that saying these specific words will help me get something I want?” (including amusement). Even in things that are easy to verify, if they believe that the expected damage from you catching them lying is negligible, or smaller that the expected benefit. Their words are literally “speech acts”, sequences of otherwise meaningless syllables emitted only to make you do something; not reflections of their actual model of the world.
So if you believe that Mao was a psychopath in the clinical sense of the word (I don’t know if he was, maybe yes, maybe no), then no matter how many books of his collected writings or speeches you would read, they contain almost zero evidence about what he actually believed. They will probably contradict themselves because why not.
The only source of information would be to examine their actions (while carefully ignoring their words, because those are designed to mislead you). But do you have a reliable source for that? How many things that other people say Mao did, was actually something Mao told them that he did? How many things no one dared to put in writing? Either because they were afraid of punishment, or because they realized that story would be unbelievable and they had no hard evidence to support it.
What I am trying to say is that learning from actual psychopaths seems so difficult to me that it’s practically impossible.