tom.ritchford - the problem of the psychopath

Why we aren't doing far, far better? Why are we descending into madness again?

The problem of the Prisoner's Dilemma shows that in many cases an individual can do better at the expense of the group by "defecting" instead of "cooperating" but that if everyone defected then the group as a whole would take a large loss.

"Group selection" would therefore tend to favour the overwhelming majority of individuals mostly cooperating -- being naturally conditioned to cooperate within certain limits. Groups that cooperated better would naturally be able to overwhelm other more internally competitive groups.

However, as more people cooperate, the rewards for defecting become a lot higher. Consider the fate of the genetic material of Ghengis Khan.

And it turns out that 4% of the population are people who feel no need to cooperate. They're psychopaths -- call them X.

Consider the genetic story of sickle-cell anemia. It turns out it's a recessive trait -- if you have ONE copy of it, you have a higher resistance to malaria. Moreover the rate of occurance of the trait depends on the local incidence of malaria in the mathematical way you'd expect -- the rate of appearance of the trait is that which minimizes human mortality.

I still think this is one of the clearest and most brilliant proofs of natural selection imaginable.

It could be that in the same way, having "one part" of the X gene makes you "more competitive" which is actually a good thing for the species -- so this gives us a lot of ambitious, industrious people who have some asocial tendencies but are basically good humans (heh, like me) -- perhaps "better" than the average because we actively think through our moral decisions because we know we are somewhat poorly socialized.

Unfortunately, we then get a small but significant percent of true psychopaths -- full X.

I just finished reading "The Sociopath Next Door" by Martha Stout (Harvard prof) and it confirmed a lot about what I thought on psychopaths -- and told me a lot more. (She has 7 references for her "4%" number btw.)

The key element is that psychopaths have absolutely no conscience and absolutely no remorse. You or I might sometimes fantasize about doing awful things (I mean, who hasn't read about some sad crime and fantasized doing terrible things to the perpetrator?) but we know that in real life it'd be terribly hard to do and would haunt you forever. Not for X - an X can do anything they want.

X really don't care about other people except as tools. They are very good at faking emotions and will cry to avoid punishment for example but really don't care. They don't experience pleasure or joy as much as sensations.
I reiterate that nothing I saw is controversial in the field of psychology. That such people exist, that they make up some single-digit percent of the population, and that they are characterized by complete lack of conscience, empathy and remorse, these statements are more or less universally accepted.

X are also more likely to succeed, at least temporarily (they tend to fail in the long term because of their lack of desire to do the actual work and their need for ever-increasing amounts of stimulation). Most people are hampered by their innate honesty and lack of desire to hurt others. Not having these restrictions, even if you strategically have to hide that fact, is a tremendous advantage. In modern America, some claim that displaying X tendencies is not only accepted, but encouraged, which would further increase the advantages of an X.

Nothing I've written here is controversial to the field of psychology. That these people comprise a few percent of the population, that they are without conscience, empathy or remorse, that they are more successful, these claims are the general consensus.

However. However.

You are probably way ahead of me but the trouble is that a group of psychopaths have taken control of the US government, the most powerful organization in the world.

Here are some more ideas to keep you going until I get to write more...

Modern high-density, high-mobility society doesn't detect X nearly as well as hunter-gatherer-agrarian societies.

Distributed phenomena like "the witch hunt" are organized and run by individual Xs in an "emergent" fashion (each individual X sees the advantage of cooperating with the game for their own improvement and fun)

The "cult of individuality" and "worship of competitiveness" in US encourages X and X behaviour. (data strongly bears this out, rate of p in CJK is 1-2 orders of magnitude less)

Religion was invented by anti-X (people infused in love and cooperation with others) and subverted by X for their own ends.

The Republicans take the "witch hunt" phenomenon, X-based religion, and create a X-based political organization where a group of X paradoxically "cooperate" with each other in order to "defect" with the whole group.

In a science fiction novel, that last part would be the key to their undoing but I don't see it.

Because of the genetic argument, humanity cannot get rid of X or we'd turn into sheep.

There are two good solutions that can be pursued at the same time and would inevitably fix the problem if adopted, and they are prevention and detection.

Prevention means preventing X from harming the vast majority of non-X individuals. This involves restructuring society to make it more difficult for individuals to defect, through increased openness in public affairs, better laws to prevent systematic defections and to allow the people to actively pursue remedies against individuals who defect (for example, for groups of individuals to seek redress in the name of the people against corrupt public officials).

The fact that we do really quite well with such a high percentage of completely amoral individuals is a tribute to the fact that we have done a really good job of prevention already. Previous attempts to fix this include such ideas as "democracy" and "socialism."

Typically, "defecting" often involves some form of behaviour that's criminal even today - the issue is that these laws are not enforced in favour, but instead the emphasis is placed on the vice laws which generally do not involve X, quite likely because law enforcement attracts disproportionately many X and half-X. We could go a long way simply enforcing the letter and spirit of all the laws that are on the books today and repealing or lightening the penalties for crimes that do not represent psychopathic behaviour.

Detection involves proactively finding such individuals at an early age and looking out for them but more, looking out for the people around them. I believe it is the case that it is impossible to fully fix X people. They just don't hear the music of love, they will never be humans as far as I know it - if the percentage were much higher we'd have some terrible choices to make but as it is we could probably socialize most X people pretty well into a semblance of humanity. Please note that in other, more group-oriented cultures the observed incidence of X is far lower than in the West.

(* - I was going to call them "wolves" but wolves are actually highly cooperative animals who form close, intimate packs - I couldn't bring myself to so malign them.)