Nothing to lose

I was reading a NY Post feature on comedian Adam Carolla.  Some may have heard of it because he controversially alleged that women are not funny.  What I found more interesting (and relevant) was his discussion of his carefree early life of chaos, and how that has changed for him now that he has gotten successful:

Q: While working construction in LA, you once had to talk down a guy with a gun. What went through your mind?

A: If you don’t have that much to lose, you don’t really worry about that. Now that I have a nice house and some cars and a family, the notion of being in a situation like that is horrifying. But if you’re heading downtown to get some free government cheese, then going back to watch your black-and-white TV, and you’re an alcoholic, you don’t wanna get shot, but it’s almost a lateral move.

This idea of the inherent freedom in having nothing to lose reminded me of something that Hervey Cleckley said in his book Mask of Sanity:

By some incomprehensible and untempting piece of folly or buffoonery, he eventually cuts short any activity in which he is succeeding, no matter whether it is crime or honest endeavor. At the behest of trivial impulses he repeatedly addresses himself directly to folly. In the more seriously affected examples, it is impossible for wealthy, influential, and devoted relatives to place the psychopath in any position, however ingeniously it may be chosen,where he will not succeed eventually in failing with spectacular and bizarre splendor. Considering a longitudinal section of his life, his behavior gives such an impression of gratuitous folly and nonsensical activity in such massive accumulation that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that here is the product of true madness - of madness in a sense quite as real as that conveyed to the imaginative layman by the terrible word lunatic.With the further consideration that all this skein of apparent madness has been wovenby a person of (technically) unimpaired and superior intellectual powers and universally regarded as sane, the surmise intrudes that we are confronted by a serious and unusual type of genuine abnormality.

I started thinking, maybe this nothing-to-lose principle is one of the reasons that sociopaths traditionally self destruct after a certain degree of success, in addition to other more obvious things like need for stimulation. Maybe they don't like success because it means they have more to lose, and so less freedom in a way.  Interestingly, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has suggested that companies who have made it big on innovative technology typically fall behind because they are unwilling to take the same sorts of risks that characterized their initial successes.

Sociopaths in literature: Our lady of pain

This is quoted in Hervey Cleckley's "Mask of Sanity" (available in full here), in reference to a woman who manages to cause pain and destruction wherever she goes without ever seeming touched by it herself:


She hath wasted with fire thine high places,
She hath hidden and marred and made sad
The fair limbs of the Loves, the fair faces
Of gods that were goodly and glad.
She slays, and her hands are not bloody;
She moves as a moon in the wane,
White-robed, and thy raiment is ruddy,
Our Lady of Pain.

A. C. Swinburne
"Dolores"

Modeling the success of cheaters

It was hilarious to me reading some of the responses to the just world fallacy post.  A lot of people really struggled with the gross inaccuracy of the phrase "cheaters never win." I stumbled upon this Forbes article which concisely explains with mathematical modeling how it is that cheaters win:


I want to make sure I say that there is a more elemental reason why meritocracy produces a corrupt ruling class and it is this:

Cheaters may almost never win but, given equal opportunity and a large enough competition, the winners are almost always cheaters.

Why?

Well, no one cheats because they think if that even if they get away with it they will be worse off. No, they cheat because if they get away with it they will be better off. Cheaters are taking a gamble.

Even if the system is pretty good and the odds are stacked against the cheaters, if there are enough players then some of the cheaters will get away with it, nonetheless.

When they do they will gain an advantage. Now, imagine that life is a series of such competitions played over and over again. Each time some people will cheat and some will get away with it. Each time some will gain an advantage.

If the competition is immense, say it encompasses a country of 300 Million or a global population of 7 Billion, then by the Law of Large numbers some cheaters will be lucky enough to get away with it every single time. This means every single round they gain an advantage and slip ahead of the pack.

After enough rounds the front of the pack is completely dominated by cheaters.

That doesn't necessarily mean that cheating will always mean cheating will always pay off.  As the Forbes article concludes, "Lottery players almost always lose, but society’s biggest winners will almost always have made their money in the lottery."

Knowing the limits of our answers

I thought this was a very interesting Wired article about the limitations of the PCL-R.  The author begins with the anecdote of Alan Turing's attempt to answer the question of whether computers could think.  Realizing that the question framed that way was impossible to answer (what does it mean to think?), he reframed the question to be whether computers could pass as humans.  He set up an experiment where test subjects were asked to determine whether responses from an unidentified source came from another human or a computer.

Turing constructed the test in transparently trivial terms. If a computer could fool someone for five minutes 70 percent of the time, it was as good as intelligent. This is powerful not because of its implications for intelligence, but because of its insight into asking tough questions. When we don’t understand the underlying causes of a phenomenon, what scientists call its mechanism, we must resort to studying its effects. But it is crucial that we be aware of the limitations of this approach and remain humble in our inquiry.

He then goes on to compare the difficult misalignment between what we can test and what we hope to learn in terms of the PCL-R and other diagnostic tools for psychopathy:


In the next year, the American Psychological Association will put the finishing touches on the latest version of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, its compendium of psychiatric illnesses. Psychiatry is up against a problem similar to the one Turing faced. The illnesses are complex and their causes hard to discern. Without a clear mechanism, psychiatrists must rely on their patients’ subjective symptoms. It’s a process that’s always fraught, but it works when psychiatrists are realistic about the constraints of their tests.

Things become more troubling when the stakes are high and the diagnoses are tough to change. This is the case in prisons throughout the Western world, where inmates are subjected to the revised Psychopathy Checklist, or PCL-R.

Like the Turing Test, the PCL-R is about effects and symptoms, not causes.

The problems with the PCL-R:


The PCL-R, unlike the Turing Test, is inflexible by design. The Turing Test merely relies on the ability of the machine to be convincing in the present. It doesn’t take into account the machine’s past track record. It leaves open the possibility for change and improvement. The PCL-R is not so forgiving. If a person with a history of psychopathic behaviour were to get better, testers would likely interpret this as deception. After all, deception is a key feature of psychopathy. The PCL-R tries to have it both ways. It relies on observing a set of behaviors, but it resists assigning significance to a change in those behaviors.

Leaving open the possibility of change isn’t about setting serial killers free. But for crimes on the margin, the batteries and assaults and armed robberies, we have to decide whether to deny people who score high on the PCL-R the same opportunities we would give those who score low.

The take away:

The checklist demands that we confront our values. For the possibility of a little more security, are we willing to risk denying a person a second chance? We have to understand the tradeoff and the uncertainty of the reward.

With the Turing Test, it’s pretty straightforward. Five minutes and 70 percent can only tell us so much. How much can the PCL-R tell us?

Alan Turing taught us that when the question is hard, we must know the limits of our answers. At stake here is redemption, the possibility that the wretched can make good. It is an aspiration worth more than a guess. It deserves our humility.


I like this issue about knowing the limits of our answers.  I have recently dipped more into the empirical side of my profession and it has been fascinating and eye-opening to see some of the common mistakes people make in terms of believing that they are "proving" things or that some things are capable of being "known."  There really is a great deal of hubris, and particularly when these pieces of "knowledge" leave the academic area of origin and are used by other people who are unaware of the inherent uncertainty (courts, parole boards, trolls, etc.).  I can understand why people would want to believe things are knowable, particularly when it comes to something as scary as psychopaths, but they just aren't -- at least not currently.

Mask of Sanity: Anna

I was trying to look up something remembered in Hervey Cleckley's "Mask of Sanity" the other day and stumbled upon the hilarious account of the woman Anna.  I especially like his description of his first impressions of her:

There was nothing spectacular about her, but when she came into the office you felt that she merited the attention she at once obtained. She was, you could say without straining a point, rather good-looking, but she was not nearly so good-looking as most women would have to be to make a comparable impression. She spoke in the crisp, fluttery cadence of the British, consistently sounding her "r's" and "ing's" and regularly saying "been" as they do in London. For a girl born and raised in Georgia, such speaking could suggest affectation. Yet it was the very opposite of this quality that contributed a great deal to the pleasing effect she invariably produced on those who met her. Naive has so many inapplicable connotations it is hardly the word to use in reference to this urbane and gracious presence, yet it is difficult to think of our first meeting without that very word coming to mind, with its overtones of freshness, artlessness, and candor.

She had passed her fortieth birthday some months before. Neither her face nor her figure had lost anything worth mentioning. Despite her composure, she gave a distinct impression of energy and playful spontaneity, an impression of vivid youth. In response to ordinary questions about her activities and interests she spoke of tennis, riding, and reading. More specific inquiry brought out opinions on Hamlet's essential conflict, comparison between the music of Brahms and the music of Shostakovitch, an impressive criticism of Schopenhauer's views on women, and several pertinent references to The Brothers Karamazov. She expressed opinions on current affairs that seemed to make excellent sense and talked with wit about the cyclic changes in feminine clothes and the implications of atomic physics for the future. What she had to say was particularly interesting and she said it in just the opposite of all those many ways of talking that people call "making conversation."

As discussion progressed, the picture of a rather remarkable woman became more and more distinct. Here was evidence of high intelligence and of considerable learning without discernible bookishness or consciousness of being "an intellectual." Her manner suggested wide interest, fresh and contagious enthusiasms, and a taste for living that reached out toward all healthy experience. Having a cup of coffee with her or weeding a garden would somehow take on a special quality of fun and delightfulness. Something about her over and beyond her looks prompted the estimate that she would be very likely to elicit romantic impulses, strong sensual inclinations, from most men who encountered her. Here, it seemed, was natural taste without a shadow of posed estheticism, urbanity without blunting of response to the simplest of joys, integrity and good ethical sense with the very opposite of everything that could be called priggish or smug. She showed nothing to suggest she meant to give such an impression or that she had any thought as to how she seemed.

I've never read Mask of Sanity all the way through, only read snippets, but I have actually been enjoying it more recently.  I probably like it best out of all of the books about sociopath.  It is glaringly anecdotal, biased, and suffers from a pretty clear lack of objective, systematic research, but so is this blog, and there is something about his writing style that I enjoy. I like the Anna story because you can tell that he was taken in by her, and I think it is sometimes much better to see source material of people who are taken in rather than hear the same old "superficially charming."  I like the description of her idiosyncrasies: the accent, her artlessness, her eternal youthfulness, her attractiveness that seems to be something more than mere beauty, her intelligence, her charm, even a reference to the Brothers Karamazov (interestingly, later it discusses how she does not have the high brow tastes or prejudices of the typical "intellectual" of her education and breeding, but treats gossip magazines with the same interest as the music of Russian composers).  Later in the chapter on Anna, Cleckley tells how she quite sincerely taught Sunday School, volunteered for the Red Cross, and engaged in haphazard same sex liaisons, one time with a nurse after being universally adored during a hospital stay ("Once while hospitalized for a week or ten days, she left the almost universal impression of being a delightful patient. Courteous, composed, undemanding, and cheerful, she took discomforts and minor pains in a way that elicited admiration.").  It reminded me of my own nearly identical experience charming all hospital staff without meaning to  while stuck there for a week after an appendectomy -- I was a crowd favorite, was called very "brave" and had random nurses ask me to keep in touch.

About this season every year I have a period of introspection and self doubt.  Sometimes I wonder if I believing I am a sociopath is a self-fulfilling prophecy, or distorts the way I see me in the world.  Recently I've been questioning again what I am doing writing this blog or believing that I am a sociopath, whatever that means.  I watch myself interact with others and think, is this what a sociopath would do?  Have I been living a lie these past few years?  It just seems like such a bizarre thing to believe this about oneself, bizarre even to believe that sociopaths exist and aren't just some random assortment of personality traits that occur together solely by chance.  I am sure I never will stop asking myself these questions, but when I read stories like Anna's and see all of the incredible parallels to my own life, including small details or other things I couldn't have known or whose existence in my life predate any awareness of what the term "sociopath" meant, I am just floored.  It's not necessarily the life I would have chosen for myself given an infinite number of options and I sometimes wonder at the improbability of who I am, who I turned out to be, but I really am ok with it.  More than ok, I'm happy.