Saturday, October 22, 2011

Top page Google

I mentioned a while ago that if the site got to the first page of google search results for the word "sociopath" then we should celebrate with a question and answer session. I noticed a couple days ago that I was trending around 7th-9th ranked on the first page, but it's not consistent and by the time you read this, it may already be back to page two. Regardless, I thought it would be fun to memorialize this joyous occasion because life is fleeting.

I never reply in comments, but for the next 16-24 hours or so, I will try to reply in a timely manner to anything people want to ask me. I should be reasonably available, but have to bathe, eat, and do a few other things, so be patient if I don't seem to be around--I will get around to responding.

Friday, October 21, 2011

Facebook stalker

As a public service announcement for people who use this site and have an online trail of personal details, this article discusses a new site that shows what it is like to be the victim of a violent Facebook stalker. Under the title Anti-Social Media: "'Take This Lollipop' Is Your Facebook Profile Through A Psychopath's Eyes":

After allowing the site access to your profile, users click on a blue lollipop which thrusts them into the familiar mise en scene of a horror movie. The camera floats languidly down a dank hallway to the static-punctured strains of a 1950s song about candy shops. In a room at the end of the hall, there’s a man in a sooty undershirt hunched over a computer. He looks like a malnourished Daniel Craig, and he doesn’t seem happy at all. As the mystery man’s dirty fingernails pound against the keys, it becomes clear what’s on the screen: a Facebook profile. Not just any profile, though; it’s the viewer’s very own.

The interactivity is seamless; the stalker’s reflection is clearly visible, glaring off the pictures on the screen. As the creepy erstwhile James Bond scrolls along, becoming increasingly agitated with what he sees, users will recognize their old status updates and messages from friends. The next reveal arrives with shrieking keyboard stabs--the stalker has found the user’s location and is now looking at driving instructions. Slowly he reaches up and starts caressing the profile picture displayed onscreen. As the soundtrack swells ever higher, he turns his head to face the viewer and a fiendish smile spreads across his face.

The stalker is suddenly inside a car, racing down the road. Hyper jump cuts show his tortured screams behind the wheel before cutting back to his intensely focused driving face. The project was directed by Jason Zada out of production company Tool of North America.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Tracking psychopath's language patterns online

The following is going to sound absurd to some of you, and very promising to others. Cornell professor Jeff Hancock University of Critish Columbia professors Michael T. Woodworth and Stephen Porter have come up with a text analysis system that they believe may be able to pick out sociopaths in something as short as a 140 character "tweet." As reported by the NY Daily news:

A New York professor who studied the tell-tale speech patterns of psycho killers is broadening his research to see if tweets, texts and emails reveal similar tendencies.

That could help detectives identify murder suspects through their social media and online postings - and develop strategies for grilling them in the interrogation room.

"I do think some of these tools will be used by law enforcement," Cornell's Jeffrey Hancock said at a briefing Monday about his research.

The core of the study involves interviews with 56 convicted killers in a maximum security Canadian prison - including 18 who were certified psychopaths.

Hancock and co-author Michael Woodworth of the University of British Columbia used linguistics analysis to parse the transcripts. They noticed several trends. The psychopaths used the past tense more often than the others, suggesting a higher degree of detachment from the crime - a hallmark of the disorder. They also peppered their speech with verbal stumbles like "uh" and "um," showing it was difficult for them to talk about an emotional event. The researchers knew that psychopaths often view their killings as a means to an end - not an emotional reaction - and that was borne out in their language. They used cause-and-effect words like "so" and "because" more often than non-psychopaths - and focused on material needs instead of social needs like love and family. "Psychopaths talked a lot about what they ate that day [of the murder]," Hancock said. "They talked about money more often."

As a followup, the profs are now having student volunteers submit their online communications and fill out a survey that measures their psychopathic tendencies. They hope the exercise will determine if the language patterns used in social media can show whether a person is a psychopath. That could be a valuable tool for investigators because much of language is unconscious - and less likely to be manipulated by psychopaths, who can be incredibly cunning. "You can spend two or three hours with a psychopath and come out of there feeling like you've been hypnotized," he said. "It's definitely time for a glass of wine and a shower."
Or from the Daily News:

Psychopaths also used more subordinating conjunctions like ‘because’ which is explained by their interest in cause and effect.

The report says: ‘This pattern suggested that psychopaths were more likely to view the crime as the logical outcome of a plan (something that 'had' to be done to achieve a goal)’.
Uh, that reminds me of last night when I spent so much money on dinner because I was starving and I was wearing coveralls, since I was worried about the blood.

18 certified psychopaths? Even if you took large language samples from each of these prisoners (emphasis on prisoner), I imagine that it would be very difficult to show that these similarities were actually correlated to the isolated variable "psychopath." Law of large numbers, anyone? Also, the language was taken from having people describe their crimes. Luckily I don't ever talk about mine on Twitter so I should be fine...

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Perspective

People don't understand how powerful their minds are. Our world is exactly as we want to see it, as we have trained ourselves or allowed ourselves to see it. And yet, it is very difficult for most people to be open minded. It reminds me of the story of one of the very earliest films from the Lumière brothers. From Wikipedia:

L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (translated from French into English as The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station) is an 1895 French short black-and-white silent documentary film directed and produced by Auguste and Louis Lumière.

This 50-second silent film shows the entry of a train pulled by a steam locomotive into a train station in the French coastal town of La Ciotat. Like most of the early Lumière films, L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat consists of a single, unedited view illustrating an aspect of everyday life. There is no apparent intentional camera movement, and the film consist of one continuous real-time shot.

The film is associated with an urban legend well-known in the world of cinema. The story goes that when the film was first shown, the audience was so overwhelmed by the moving image of a life-sized train coming directly at them that people screamed and ran to the back of the room. Hellmuth Karasek in the German magazine Der Spiegel wrote that the film "had a particularly lasting impact; yes, it caused fear, terror, even panic." However, some have doubted the veracity of this incident such as film scholar and historian Martin Loiperdinger in his essay, "Lumiere's Arrival of the Train: Cinema's Founding Myth". Whether or not it actually happened, the film undoubtedly astonished people in the audience who were unaccustomed to the amazingly realistic illusions created by moving pictures. The Lumière brothers clearly knew that the effect would be dramatic if they placed the camera on the platform very close to the arriving train.
What does this have to do with sociopathy? A lot maybe, or not a lot, but sociopaths seem unusually skilled at geting out of their own perspectives and see things from different angles. They also seem better than most at holding multiple perspectives at the same time. Has anyone noticed this? Sociopaths may have their own perspectives, perhaps one in which they are the best in the world and a more realistic perspective that allows them to function in real life aware of their potential weaknesses, and be able to live in both at once. I actually think the ability to shift perspectives is what makes them such skillful manipulators--they can see the perspectives of the people they regularly associate with and into their head to predict their every thought and movement. Sociopaths understand better than most that perception is everything.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Dealing with my Sociopath: Yes UKan, Yes UKan, yes UKan!

From UKan's wife:

My husband asked me to write my thoughts on how it is I put up with him as a sociopath, so after some thought I've decided to indulge him. I don't typically like to let him into this many of my thoughts, but I think it'll be an interesting post to the many on this site who've long been wondering about him. And I think it's a good thing to be open about, even if vicariously.

To start with a bit about myself, I am a rational personality type, so my underlying motive for my life is to understand things. In my past I have always dated people I was curious about. Curiosity is my idea of interest, or caring, if you will. Every man I dated was bizarre to say the least, and I will not choose here to go into that further.
My husband is no exception to strangeness, not because like some idiots on here think that he's complicated and so full of dimension, but because he is so simple. The tedious thing about exes is that though they all vary dramatically socially, and often think they're different, they tend to be simple, and the same fundamentally. Like Asians, they start to all look alike.
Just kidding.

But seriously, most people are too simple once you discover their issues of particularity. In some cases I'd try to help them grow up but their inherent blindness to themselves and their own simplicity is even more tedious. They're inherent undesire to change and fears of coping all begin to look alike, no matter how variable.

With my husband, his natural complexity is not in how he doesn't deal with some glaring issue, but in elusiveness and nonchalance about his glaring issues. It consistantly amuses me how he deflects others from who he is, and pulls their own glaring issues to a forefront. I don't get bored of my husband because he never ceases to amuse me with his naturalness and fundamental-ness. He has impulses and he follows them. No fronts.

I call him a Demon because it has a natural symbolic picture of who he is. He tries to convince me that he isn't, or tries to convince himself sometimes that he's human, but he just isn't. Everything for him all falls back onto a few inherent humanistic desires like sex, territoriality, amusement, procreation, vanity or pride etc. His lack of any social rounding amuses me and never ceases to feed my curiosity not because he's trying to be complicated, but because he's so fundamentally simple.
I hate when people try to add fluff to who they are; meaning, or reasoning to something that breaks down so simply. My husband just comes out as simple, and I don't tire of it.

I suppose that's a bit of a contradiction; not being bored of my husband because he's simple, but that's how I am.

So to advise the silly people who come on here with ideals about their sociopath being so complex, stop projecting your "Complications" on something so inherently uncomplicated and you'll begin to understand that just because you like to sugar coat things with your emotions, that doesn't mean the rest of the world does.

A sociopath is not a sensitive man with deep poetic complexities, but an animal seeking amusement. You are expendable, as you have the specialness of an ant. Unless you can see him for what he is, or get him to show you what he is.
My success with my husband is not that I idolically look up to him with blind batting lashes, but that I see that he's just an animal, and that I cope with the shallowness of reality, and can demand no more from him than he's capable of. I am satisfied by the reality of our relationship, and ask for no delusions. Though sometimes they feel nice, I'd rather have the cold reality.

Bad things happen for good reasons.
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