Insights into empath minds

I just don't understand them sometimes. I do things for (mainly) logical reasons, with a core emphasis in efficiency. As a libertarian, I'm always interested in the suppression of markets for moral reasons, so I found myself reading an article on the altruistic kidney donations of strangers and how (wait for it) the empath hordes shun them, considering them "freakish, inhuman, even repellent."

Most people find it uncomplicatedly admirable when a person risks his life to save a stranger from fire, or from drowning. What, then, is it about saving a stranger by giving a kidney, a far lesser risk, that people find so odd? Do they feel there is something aggressive about the act, as though the donor were implicitly rebuking them for not doing it, too? (There is no rebuke in saving a stranger from drowning -- you weren't there, you couldn't have done it. And you can always imagine that you would have if you had been.) Or perhaps it's that organ donation, unlike rescue, is conceived in cold blood, and cold-blooded altruism seems nearly as sinister as cold-blooded malevolence. Perhaps only the hot-blooded, unthinking sort can now escape altruism's tainted reputation, captured in the suspicious terms for what people are really engaging in when they think they're helping (sublimation, colonialism, group selection, potlatch, socialism, co-dependency -- the list goes on).

And this quote from one of the fascists supporting the UNOS (United Network for Organ Sharing) kidney breadline at the expense of donors taking the private option of self-selecting donor recipients:

Douglas Hanto, the chief of transplantation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, for instance, feels that the system should work the same way for everybody--that there should be just one line to stand in. He concedes that it's possible that MatchingDonors draws in people who wouldn't otherwise donate--people who need the tug of a human story to sway them--thus making everybody better off, but, as long as its dating-service model favors the photogenic, the eloquent, and the computerized, he is against it. "We are all going to die," he says. "We have to do everything we can for our patients, but within the boundaries of moral principles. As much as we want to save everybody, we just can't."

I think the label "altruistic" is misplaced. I don't think the people donating need the tug of a personal story. From what I read, most of the donors think that it is inefficient to not donate a kidney that they're not using to someone who needs one to live. For instance, this description of a young donor:

The petty selfishness of daily life drove her crazy and she wanted to fix it. She hated the way that, in the checkout line at Target, a person with a whole cartful of stuff would not let a person with only one or two things go ahead of him. She hated that, when she was driving and let a pedestrian cross the road, the driver behind her would honk in frustration. She always tried to do nice things for others. At work, she would often buy coffee for her co-workers without being asked, though mostly this just bewildered people.

I know how she feels, but as much as I'd like to say that empaths live in a horrible world of their own making, I think it's just that they think so differently. Maybe their world doesn't seem so ugly to them.

Sociopaths on Wall Street

From a New Yorker article about the collapse of Bear Stearns:

[Former Bear Stearns C.E.O. Jimmy] Cayne understood selling; he started out as a photocopier salesman, working the nine-hundred-mile stretch between Boise and Salt Lake City, and ended up among the highest-paid executives in banking. He was known as one of the savviest men on the Street, a master tactician, a brilliant gamesman. “Jimmy had it all,” Bill Bamber, a former Bear senior managing director, writes in “Bear Trap: The Fall of Bear Stearns and the Panic of 2008” (a book co-written by Andrew Spencer). “The ability to read an opponent. The ability to objectively analyze his own strengths and weaknesses. . . . He knew how to exploit others’ weaknesses—and their strengths, for that matter—as a way to further his own gain. He knew when to take his losses and live to fight another day.”

Although the most successful Wall Streeters are probably narcissists:

This is what social scientists mean when they say that human overconfidence can be an adaptive trait. “In conflicts involving mutual assessment, an exaggerated assessment of the probability of winning increases the probability of winning,” Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard, writes. “Selection therefore favors this form of overconfidence.” Winners know how to bluff. And who bluffs the best? The person who, instead of pretending to be stronger than he is, actually believes himself to be stronger than he is. According to Wrangham, self-deception reduces the chances of “behavioral leakage”; that is, of “inadvertently revealing the truth through an inappropriate behavior.” This much is in keeping with what some psychologists have been telling us for years—that it can be useful to be especially optimistic about how attractive our spouse is, or how marketable our new idea is. In the words of the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, humans have an “optimal margin of illusion.”

Sociopaths want to eat you or cheat you

A reader wrote (edited for length):

I noticed your interest in the origins of sociopathy. One sadly deceased researcher published a long paper called "Sociobiology of sociopathy" that was an attempt(probably one of the earliest) to put it in an evolutionary perspective. I'm not an expert in that sort of thing, but the case looked tight enough to me. To her, it looked like sociopathy is a biological adaptation to a cheating strategy at life. True sociopaths have a certain set of genes, and are from problem families. People of low intelligence with same backgrounds may appear to have some of these traits, but in them it's just the environment and so on.

http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/OldArchive/bbs.mealey.html

Another thing you may not have come across is Blindsight(novel, not syndrome). I don't know whether you like speculative fiction, but this one is very dark, very bleak, and very anti-neurotypical (compares ordinary humans to the equivalent of Oz marsupials..). It's mostly about mind, consciousness, utility of consciousness and how at some point in the future, homo sapiens will become somewhat obsolescent.

It was written by Peter Watts. One of the chief characters of Blindsight is a vampire (not the fantasy variety, sort of believable - an extinct sub-species of exclusively man-eating completely sociopathic* humans, brought to life again through modern science). The others are less weird, though. In other books, he loves having various non-standard characters, from serial killers, sexual sadists, wife-abusers, pedophiles.. ptsd sufferers, etc.. )


*obviously, if wolves empathized with sheep.. they'd go hungry.

I started reading the article. It's very good but long. I'm not surprised that vampires have once again been connected to sociopaths. I myself am hoping that this blog will ride the new vampire popularity and get picked up for a miniseries. Not true.

Sharks = psycho killers

According to this article sent in by a reader, scientists are using the known patterns of serial killers to explain the hunting patterns of sharks:

What do great white sharks have in common with serial killers? Refined hunting skills, according to a paper recently published in the Zoological Society of London’s Journal of Zoology. Researchers have found that sharks hunt in a highly focused fashion, just like serial criminals.

Predation is one of the most fundamental and fascinating interactions in nature, and sharks are some of the fiercest predators on Earth. However, their hunting pattern is difficult to study because it is rarely observed in the wild. As a result, shark predatory behavior has remained much of a mystery. Now, researchers from the United States and Canada are using geographic profiling -- a criminal investigation tool used to track a connected series of crimes and locate where serial criminals live -- to examine the hunting patterns of white sharks in South Africa.

I wonder if they can go they other way: use known behaviors of animal predators to explain the behavior of serial killers. But it brings up a good point: how many of the arguments for eradicating sociopaths could equally be applicable to sharks, tigers, lions, killer whales, and other man/animal predators? Maybe people are just scared because man has gotten used to thinking that he is at the top of the food chain. But most species have natural predators -- it's nature's way of keeping things in check. Is man an exception?

Song of the day: Psycho killer