Saturday, August 13, 2011

Facebook espionage

This was an interesting NY Times article about how the U.S. government is looking to expand it's intelligence and counterterrorism groups into social networking:
As social media play increasingly large roles in fomenting unrest in countries like Egypt and Iran, the military wants systems to be able to detect and track the spread of ideas both quickly and on a broad scale. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is soliciting innovative proposals to help build what would be, at its most basic level, an Internet meme tracker.

It would be useful to know, for instance, whether signs of widespread rebellion were authentic or whether they were being created by a fringe group with little real support. Among the tools the successful seeker of government funding might choose to employ: linguistic cues, patterns of information flow, topic trend analysis, sentiment detection and opinion mining.
It's an ambitious goal, but I wonder if this type of thing is more art than science. If someone could accurately predict future trends with a $42 million piece of software (the amount the U.S. government is putting up to sponsor research in this area), then I'm sure that someone would be putting the software to a more lucrative, business or stock related use. The only people who seem likely to volunteer to do such an ill-fated project are the ones who either (1) know that they'll never come up with the software anyway, but don't mind getting paid to spin their wheels or (2) double agents who know that they'll come up with the software and will sell the U.S. government out. But that's the problem with big government is that the bigger it gets, the harder it is to tell what's going on -- right libertarians?

A better use of funds might be to hire young sociopaths to monitor social networking sites and push people into doing one thing or the other. Of course, they could always go "bad" and engage in behavior counter to official policy. Easy solution! Just hire sociopaths to monitor those ones, and so on.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Reality TV casting call

I was asked to post this:
I am working with a major production company and TV network for a show about people who are living a double or secret life and need help getting their life back on track. We are very serious about finding the right people and we will handle all applicants with the utmost respect and sensitivity.

As your blog deals with lying and deception I was wondering if you would mind sharing this message with your network. For more information about the project please go here: http://www.doublelifecasting.com

Please feel free to respond with any questions.

DOUBLE LIFE
Do you feel like you’re living a lie? Are you keeping a secret from
your family and friends that is causing your life to spiral out of
control?

Do you want to make a change and are you ready? We can
help. From the Executive Producer of the acclaimed documentary
series, “Intervention” comes a new series about people who are living
double lives.

We are searching for people who are tired of keeping their secret
from their family, friends, and loved ones. We are only looking for
people who are genuinely interested in finding healing in their lives.

The goal of this transformational series is to help people rebuild
and heal fractured lives. This is a documentary series that is non-
exploitive and will treat each participant with extreme sensitivity.
Participants will be offered the choice to consult with a therapist
during production.

*If you are interested in applying, please send us an email at
doublelifecasting1@gmail.com or if you are unable to email call us at
818.728.4147. Please briefly tell us about yourself, the nature of
the double life you are leading, who you are keeping this secret
from, how it has affected your life, and why you want to stop
living this lie now.

Please include your phone number, as well as the city & state
where you live. Please attach 2 jpegs of yourself.

We look forward to hearing from you. Many thanks!

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Changing it up

From a socio reader:
I really like to change up. I change up constantly and when I do, I change everything. The funny thing is the people closest to me see it sometimes (I like to stay at the person I was when they first met me so I seem consistent). A good friend of mine that I put in charge of my well-being told me that when I speak to people I change personalities almost to every person I talk to. Sounds like I'm a fake person. So be it. I guess that's why i like to talk to people on a individual basis instead in large groups. Sometimes I think i dont know who i really am. I do know though. I'm a game that's constantly running.

Have you ever been passionate about what you hold to be true? Have you ever developed your own ideals that you value so much that the people around you start to believe in them and adopt them for themselves?

My close friends I put through a lot of shit. When they first hung out with me I would mirror who they needed me to be so they saw me as a leadership figure then I would start hammering in my value system that's helped me survive out here in the struggle. It's not a morality system but more of the dos and don'ts of the game.

People say I'm very black and white and they are right. I want things done and I want them done my way. I will go pretty far to get my way.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Handling sociopaths

The same guy from last post also suggested some ways to deal with sociopaths. Things that don't seem to work are"Insight-oriented, emotion-based therapy should not be provided for offenders. Making punishment more severe, or trying to "scare 'em straight" are also ineffective." Things that seem to work better are: "Effective programs [which] teach offenders something useful -- academic, vocational, social or personal management skills. Effective programs are firm but fair." He also mentions the possibility of pharmaceutical solutions in the future, including possibly lithium for violent offenders. His main suggestions, though, are for people that deal with sociopaths:
If they knew how to recognize psychopaths, and how psychopaths operate, people might better protect themselves and reduce the harm psychopaths cause.

An important part of such education would emphasize that people should not trust their intuitions and impressions of strangers, and should rely instead on reputations earned over time. The more that people did that, the harder it would be for psychopaths to exploit others. Theoretically, at least, young women comprise the group that would benefit most from such "anti-psychopath" training.

The idea that psychopathy is not a disorder but is instead an adaptation leads to this notion of "anti-psychopath" training which is a way of reducing the environmental niche for psychopathy. What else would make that niche smaller? Theoretically, psychopaths should thrive when resources are scarce and when there is a lot of social instability so that people frequently have to deal with strangers.

Thus, a typical North American urban environment may be just the place to foster psychopathy not because that environment causes psychopathy directly, but because such an environment provides a large niche for its expression.

Conversely, social policies that increase social and economic equity, and enhance family and community cohesiveness, while decreasing social isolation and anonymity might be exactly those that make it difficult for psychopaths to prosper. Over generations such policies might actually reduce the incidence of psychopathy.
This sounds like an argument for conservatism to me. Anyone else?

More on "America's hidden infection":

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Psychopath = adaptation, not disorder

A reader sent me this discussion of psychopathy as an adaptation:
A disorder, by definition, is the failure of some physical or mental feature to do its natural, evolved function.
***
Research on psychopaths shows big differences in the ways they act (impulsive especially in the presence of rewards), process information (unaffected by emotionally powerful information), and learn from experience (resistant to punishment). These have been thought of as defects, but it is just as possible they are adaptations that underlie a life long aggressive, cheating, and manipulating strategy.
What is the new scientific evidence that suggests that psychopathy is an adaptation and not a disorder?
[O]ther researchers have discovered that violent people have high rates of particular types of medical problems in their histories -- obstetrical problems (toxaemia, Rh factor, maternal substance abuse, etc.), and perinatal difficulties (e.g., prematurity, low birth weight, severe fetal distress). Such problems are also associated with schizophrenia. These findings suggest that violence can be the result of problems in very early physical development, and that schizophrenia is a true disorder of neurological development. (It is interesting that people with schizophrenia are not especially violent, however.)

What does our adaptation theory say should be found in the prevalence of these medical problems among psychopaths? Because the theory says that psychopathy is not a disorder of neurological development, psychopaths should have fewer of these problems than other violent offenders. And that is what we found. If psychopathy were an extreme disorder (and knowing that these problems are associated with violence), one would predict that psychopaths would have high rates of these problems, but we found the opposite.

We also tested our theory with another measure of developmental stability -- fluctuating bilateral asymmetry. That is a polysyllabic way of saying, the degree to which the left side of the body is exactly the same size as the right side. In all species, the two sides of the body are genetically programmed to be the same size -- symmetrical. The amount of difference between the two sides, asymmetry, is a measure of the instability in a person's development. Again, violent individuals have been reported to be asymmetrical as have persons with schizophrenia. What about psychopaths? Our research showed that violent offenders who were also psychopaths were more symmetrical than those who were not psychopaths.

Again, although psychopaths are the most dangerous offenders, they do not have signs that their neurological development has been disrupted. From a medical point of view, they appear to have had healthy development compared to persons with schizophrenia or mental retardation.

Of course, our theory definitely says that the nervous systems of psychopaths must be different somehow. But that difference should not, according to the theory, look like damage. In fact, attempts by other researchers to find signs of damage in psychopaths using neuropsychological tests or fancy imaging methods (CT, PET, MRI scans, etc.) have not panned out.

So far at least, it does not look as though psychopaths have damaged brains, even though it does appear that their brains are different.
Interestingly, the author of this article (Grant Harris) was one of the researchers of the famed failed Social Therapy Unit at Oak Ridge from the 1960s-70s, through which we learned that having psychopaths sit around and talk about their feelings actually seems to make them worse, not better. Even then Dr. Harris acknowledged that psychopath doesn't seem much like your typical disorder: "Unlike virtually every other mental disorder, however, where the existence of the problem is inferred from difficulties experienced by the patient, psychopathy is a disorder whose negative effects accrue more to those who come into contact with the psychopath than to the patient him or herself."

Ha.
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