Arya interview video link and Elsa interview invitation

Here is the link to the interview with Arya.

For Elsa, on the advice of a listener, we're going to try to have a more structured audience participation. So come prepared! Or feel free to lurk as always. But we're going to be discussing this Slate article from an American lawyer who specializes in Chinese law.

M.E. Thomas is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Elsa and Arya
Time: May 17, 2020 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/71244896244

Meeting ID: 712 4489 6244
Password: 5mhHH0

Tweets referenced:

Everybody can make a right choice no matter what they’ve done in the past. It doesn’t diminish the rightness of a choice that you’ve made terrible mistakes before. You can start over in a moment. This man was right to hand over the child, for all we know he may no longer be scum. https://t.co/gLsxu7tJd3

— M.E. (@sociopathworld) May 13, 2020

Adam Slater stabbed his wife and took his one year old. He then got into a wreck when fleeing the scene with his one year old. A bystander tried to save his one year old out of the wrecked car and Adam stabbed him. Adam then threw his one year old off a cliff to die. Evil exists. pic.twitter.com/RkCm3YpRaR

— Overheard On Duty (@OverheardOnDuty) May 13, 2020

Never Home School a Sociopath

From a reader (and let's play a game where we guess what gender the sociopathic reader is then I tell you at the end):

M.E.,

First, I do want to express my sincere appreciation for your having written your book.  There are so many expressions of your perspective that absolutely take my breath away with their accuracy.  I really thought I was the only one who thought the same things.

Let me start by saying that I am a miserably bad sociopath.  I have all the intellect, the lack of emotion, the ruthlessness, the egoism and swagger, the charm, the wit, the lack of absolute moral code, etc.  I rate fairly high but not the highest on every sociopath "test" I've taken so far, mostly because many tests unfairly include causing harm to others a requisite.  However, I often fail when it comes to using these advantages in the workplace or in my personal life.  When I do succeed (and I definitely have), it's often due more to raw talent and intelligence than any utilization of my skill set.

You see, for a long time, I was (and still am in some ways) completely and unfairly crippled by the fact that I was home schooled from 4th through 7th grade.  Being thrown into the lion's den of junior high school with no context or social capabilities would be bad enough for an empath, but is obviously a nightmare for someone like me.  To have those years back and be able to observe and participate in the most essential social development years would be invaluable to me.

As a result of this, I stumbled my way through my teen years, always a few degrees off kilter from everyone else and unable to understand that they most decidedly did not think or feel like me.  In fact, not even knowing there was any other way to think or feel.  I would often enter social situations and groups, dazzling them with the native charm but fairly quickly become the most hated member of the circle without ever knowing why.  They just knew somehow that I was not like them, that I didn't relate to anything they were saying or feeling.

This background has turned me into a different sort of sociopath, I think.  I have developed an abhorrence for harming others; you see, everyone I could harm during my social development years was someone essential to my survival or personal enjoyment.  This left me completely defenseless when dumped unceremoniously into the public world.  Also as a result of this, I've probably also suffered more harm than they typical sociopath might, as i developed an extreme hesitation to strike back and have typically been utterly naive to possible threats to my person.

I could go on, but you're no stranger to the aspects of wearing this strange mantle.  Suffice it to say that, although it's rather late, I'm glad to finally feel free to know and be who I am. 

Female.

Ethics

I was talking to a sociology professor acquaintance of mine, who also has been diagnosed with Asperger's (interesting combination). She was discussing the process of getting an experiment approved by her institution. I am always interested to hear different iterations of ethical codes, so I started asking her about the sociological approach to ethics, which is apparently very different from the psychological approach and is abhorrent to anthropologists. She told me that sociologists have a bad reputation from studies like Tuskegee syphilis experiment (arguably not even a sociological experiment) and the Milgram experiment.

To me the Milgram experiment is just good science. Get some ordinary person via a classified ad, put them in a room, instruct them to torture a third person, and see how far they are willing to go, based solely on the "authority" of the person conducting the experiment.

The sociologist acquaintance of mine thought that the Milgram experiment is harmful to test subjects because people want to believe that they are a good person, not someone who is capable of doing horrific things, and the test deprives them of that belief. I told her that the experiment did society a favor by forcing at least some of its members to face hard facts, i.e. almost anyone is capable of the world's worst horrors, if only put in the right situation. My argument was that if we fail to understand our capabilities for evil as well as for good, than we are doomed to repeat the atrocities of yesteryear. We agreed to disagree about this point.

Later in the conversation, however, she began talking about how she uses her charisma and the structure of the class to get her students to realize that they are racist, that they have knee-jerk reactions unsupported by any evidence, and that the logical conclusions of their positions would be tenets that they would be unwilling to acknowledge as their own, despite being the root of their misinformed views. Of course I support her manipulating her students to the point of shaking the very foundations of their beliefs, but I did mention to her that I thought it was a little hypocritical that on the one hand she thought it was "unethical" to expose experiment subjects to the realization that they too could be torturers given the right circumstances, but she was willing to basically tell her students that their belief systems were completely flawed. People in her classes cry when they realize how small-minded they have been. How is this any different than the Milgram experiment, I asked? Because if it is different, it seems to only be a matter of degree of harm, not type.

When I finally got her to realize my point, she gave me a look as if she were going to cry too and started asking me if I believe in the "soul" and why would I be asking all of these questions. I felt bad for having let the mask slip (apparently, although I thought we were just having a reasonable discussion). I tried unsuccessfully to backtrack saying things like your students arguably impliedly consent to this treatment by signing up for your class (no they don't, the class is required, she is the only one who teaches it), or for going to university in the first place (can you really be said to consent to being the mental plaything of your professors by going to university?). I woke up the next day to a very long email (Asperger's) going into aspie detail with sentences like this "When we assess the consequences of policies or laws or teaching philosophies that are driven by normative and evaluative ideological considerations, the assessment can be shifted from 'right' or 'wrong' to 'functional' or 'dysfunctional'" and "And of course, one could argue that by making assessments on the basis of what is functional/dysfunctional for society (vs. individuals), we are also saying, as a normative/evaluative issue, that the well-being of society is more important than giving effect to the norms and values of sub-groups in society. This is especially (ethically) problematic in that what is functional for society may actually serve to further marginalize vulnerable minority groups (antithetical to certain democratic values), but if the society is not healthy, then the rest becomes moot (maybe)." And then she basically went on to say that society values critical thinking skills, so jacking with her student's minds is fine, ethically speaking.

I think this is illustrative of the true point of systems of ethics, which is -- let's agree on some random value system that we'll call "common" or "normal" and either enforce it past the point of bearing any resemblance to what it was meant to accomplish in the first place or ignore it whenever it is convenient. If the end is always going to justify the means, what is the point of even discussing the ethics of the process?

Educating children sociopaths

This was an interesting article about the delicacy between not wanting to diagnose sociopathy in children because it can be such a damning prognosis, but also wanting to do it to possibly put at-risk children in some sort of early intervention program. As researcher put it:

To me it seems a no-brainer,” says Essi Viding, professor of psychology at University College London. “Nobody’s going to get psychopathy as a present when they turn 18. Of course you’re going to see some precursors."

What might early intervention look like?

“If you’re labelling someone a psychopath, it does seem to assume that there’s nothing we can do for them, that they’re going to grow up to be a criminal, and that you might as well just lock them up,” Frick says. “But you can teach a child to recognise the effects of their behaviour.”

The lack of success in educating children sociopaths to recognise the effects of their behaviour may have more to do with using the wrong methods than it does a sociopath child's inability or unwillingness to learn:


“What [people who use social shaming as a method of punishment] assume is that children have the motivation to shift their behaviour. That their primary social motivator is the relationship,” says Warren.

She interviewed more than 1,000 children with behavioural problems, aged eight to 18. “I was beginning to see children who weren’t responsive to these interventions, who weren’t interested in what adults, parents, educators, think,” she says.

“If a child or group of children isn’t interested in pleasing someone, doesn’t care about sanctions, what they’re driven by is pleasure or reward. They will take the pain of the consequences but won’t change their behaviour.”

What does work?


The programme, called Let’s Get Smart, replaces sanctions with rewards. Some teachers were uneasy. “Some teachers felt that punishment happens in the real world; if they misbehave in the real world they will still go to prison. Why are we setting them up for unrealistic expectations?” says Jones. “Our point is that it doesn’t work.”

By offering regular rewards, perhaps three times a day, controlled by the adult in authority, it aims to provide a rational, self-interested motivation for pleasing adults where that motive is emotionally absent. “The adult becomes the clear intermediary between the child and what the child wants,” Warren says. The rewards are tailored to each child’s interests.

These children often have a strong desire for control and teachers have to resist attempts to negotiate, because any concession just leads to more demands. “I teach parents and teachers to say, ‘It’s not open for discussion, go away.’ Adults don’t like to dismiss children,” Warren says.

All this is backed by role play and other exercises that are intended to build children’s capacity to pay attention to and respond appropriately to others’ emotions. Video playback helps the children to see their behaviour as others do, often to their surprise. (“I do swear a lot,” one girl told Warren.)

What sort of results can you expect?

“These kids are still having quite significant problems: they are not cured. But they are improving. Some have gone back to mainstream school, which is incredible,” she says.

Whether children ever really learn greater empathy or just learn to manage their behaviour is not clear. “My personal gut feeling is that you can modify behaviour perhaps more readily than you can improve the empathy response,” Viding says.



There are a couple of other interesting tidbits, like this one about "circle time" type emotional sharing activities:

“(In circle time) children say what makes them scared and children who have callous-unemotional traits think, ‘This is a useful piece of information to have’,” she says.

Hilarious.

Taming artificial intelligence

This was an interesting article by David Deutsch in Aeon Magazine about artificial general intelligence (AGI). There were a lot of things he touched upon that would seem relevant to this audience, like how little we know about how our brains work, the nature of self-awareness, our sense of self and sense of purpose and the origins of both, etc. One of the most interesting parts, though, was when he addresses some of the "scary" things about creating a machine with artificial general intelligence, particularly regarding some peoples' concerns about the AGI being more powerful than we are and how it would choose to use that power. He addressed it in a very open-minded and enlightened way:


Some people are wondering whether we should welcome our new robot overlords. Some hope to learn how we can rig their programming to make them constitutionally unable to harm humans (as in Isaac Asimov’s ‘laws of robotics’), or to prevent them from acquiring the theory that the universe should be converted into paper clips (as imagined by Nick Bostrom). None of these are the real problem. It has always been the case that a single exceptionally creative person can be thousands of times as productive — economically, intellectually or whatever — as most people; and that such a person could do enormous harm were he to turn his powers to evil instead of good.

These phenomena have nothing to do with AGIs. The battle between good and evil ideas is as old as our species and will continue regardless of the hardware on which it is running. The issue is: we want the intelligences with (morally) good ideas always to defeat the evil intelligences, biological and artificial; but we are fallible, and our own conception of ‘good’ needs continual improvement. How should society be organised so as to promote that improvement? ‘Enslave all intelligence’ would be a catastrophically wrong answer, and ‘enslave all intelligence that doesn’t look like us’ would not be much better.

The parallel is not exact between AGIs and sociopaths, and of course his solution is a non-solution. He doesn't even manage to really define what he means by evil, except with a quick parenthetical allusion to morality. Maybe the machines would have a more workable form of "morality"? But it's an interesting question: Is there anything so special about our morality that we would try to indoctrinate AGIs to it? Is there enough logic to human morality that they would accept it? If so, then we don't really need to use the word "morality," do we? We could just appeal to their logic. Same with sociopaths. If morality is really such a universal "good" (pardon all of the quotes), then can't we also appeal to a sociopath's logic? Or sense of self preservation? Or even the sociopaths self-interest regarding living in a relatively stable society in which most people are engaged in societal profitable endeavours that also benefit the sociopath in indirect ways? Civilization is vulnerable, but in a lot of ways it is robust. I behave in a civilized way because it works, it reaps rewards. (Not that AGIs would necessarily experience those side-effects as "rewards," which is I guess why people are so concerned.)

By the way, I have a friend who is an exceptionally creative person who is capable of being a thousand times more productive as most people. And that is a scary thought to me, that she had so much power, so I can empathize with people who fear sociopaths.