I had to get fingerprinted recently. The technician told me that although it is true that everyone's fingerprints are unique, making them a prime identification tool for law enforcement and otherwise keeping tabs on the general populace, a few people in the world have no fingerprints. These fingerprint-less people have a little bit of a rough time passing background checks for employment, etc., but other than that society leaves them alone -- this despite the fact that fingerprint-less people have every reason to exploit the weaknesses of the fingerprinted majority. Fingerprint-less people walk among us unnoticed, doing who knows what untold horrors. They are evil and they prey on the weak. They can't help themselves, it's just too tempting for them to wreak havoc when they have little to no incentive not to. If you ever are able to identify one of them, beware! Yhey will tell you whatever lies they think you want to hear. they pull the persecution card -- "different doesn't necessarily mean bad, bla bla bla." Don't listen to them! They can't be trusted! The fingerprint-less are god's mistake. Our only hope is to smoke these people out and lock them up, or better yet drown them at birth. Nothing else is keeping all those fingerprint-less babies from growing up and going on a stealth, murderous crime spree.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Nothing to lose
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.
Friday, June 29, 2012
Sociopaths in literature: Our lady of pain
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"
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Modeling the success of cheaters
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."
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Knowing the limits of our answers
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.
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