Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Presidential psychopath

This is an ok Time Magazine article about a study looking at psychopathic traits in U.S. presidents, paritcularly fearless dominance, which, not surprisingly, can either be seen as courage or folly depending on the situation:


“An easy way to think about it is as a combination of physical and social fearlessness,” says Scott Lilienfeld, lead author of the study and professor of psychology at Emory University. “People high in boldness don’t have a lot of apprehension about either physical or social things that would scare the rest of us.”

He adds, “It’s often a kind of resilience because you don’t show lot of anxiety or frustration in the face of everyday life challenges.” While that sounds like a necessity for dealing with the daily crises that face the White House, from hurricanes to threats from rogue nuclear nations, the same trait in psychopaths is also associated with callousness, indifference to negative consequences and impulsive antisocial behavior.


It talks a lot about how presidents are not actually likely to be psychopaths because they have to delay gratification so much. But perhaps the most interesting part of the article was this:

“My mentor, David Lykken, argued that psychopaths and heroes are ‘twigs off of the same branch.’ It may be that the fearless dominance or boldness that sometimes gives rise to psychopathy might also sometimes give rise to heroism,” says Lilienfeld.

Monday, October 15, 2012

Educating children sociopaths

This was an interesting article about the delicacy between not wanting to diagnose sociopathy in children because it can be such a damning prognosis, but also wanting to do it to possibly put at-risk children in some sort of early intervention program. As researcher put it:

To me it seems a no-brainer,” says Essi Viding, professor of psychology at University College London. “Nobody’s going to get psychopathy as a present when they turn 18. Of course you’re going to see some precursors."

What might early intervention look like?

“If you’re labelling someone a psychopath, it does seem to assume that there’s nothing we can do for them, that they’re going to grow up to be a criminal, and that you might as well just lock them up,” Frick says. “But you can teach a child to recognise the effects of their behaviour.”

The lack of success in educating children sociopaths to recognise the effects of their behaviour may have more to do with using the wrong methods than it does a sociopath child's inability or unwillingness to learn:


“What [people who use social shaming as a method of punishment] assume is that children have the motivation to shift their behaviour. That their primary social motivator is the relationship,” says Warren.

She interviewed more than 1,000 children with behavioural problems, aged eight to 18. “I was beginning to see children who weren’t responsive to these interventions, who weren’t interested in what adults, parents, educators, think,” she says.

“If a child or group of children isn’t interested in pleasing someone, doesn’t care about sanctions, what they’re driven by is pleasure or reward. They will take the pain of the consequences but won’t change their behaviour.”

What does work?


The programme, called Let’s Get Smart, replaces sanctions with rewards. Some teachers were uneasy. “Some teachers felt that punishment happens in the real world; if they misbehave in the real world they will still go to prison. Why are we setting them up for unrealistic expectations?” says Jones. “Our point is that it doesn’t work.”

By offering regular rewards, perhaps three times a day, controlled by the adult in authority, it aims to provide a rational, self-interested motivation for pleasing adults where that motive is emotionally absent. “The adult becomes the clear intermediary between the child and what the child wants,” Warren says. The rewards are tailored to each child’s interests.

These children often have a strong desire for control and teachers have to resist attempts to negotiate, because any concession just leads to more demands. “I teach parents and teachers to say, ‘It’s not open for discussion, go away.’ Adults don’t like to dismiss children,” Warren says.

All this is backed by role play and other exercises that are intended to build children’s capacity to pay attention to and respond appropriately to others’ emotions. Video playback helps the children to see their behaviour as others do, often to their surprise. (“I do swear a lot,” one girl told Warren.)

What sort of results can you expect?

“These kids are still having quite significant problems: they are not cured. But they are improving. Some have gone back to mainstream school, which is incredible,” she says.

Whether children ever really learn greater empathy or just learn to manage their behaviour is not clear. “My personal gut feeling is that you can modify behaviour perhaps more readily than you can improve the empathy response,” Viding says.



There are a couple of other interesting tidbits, like this one about "circle time" type emotional sharing activities:

“(In circle time) children say what makes them scared and children who have callous-unemotional traits think, ‘This is a useful piece of information to have’,” she says.

Hilarious.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Quote: Temptation

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.

Oscar Wilde

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Taming artificial intelligence

This was an interesting article by David Deutsch in Aeon Magazine about artificial general intelligence (AGI). There were a lot of things he touched upon that would seem relevant to this audience, like how little we know about how our brains work, the nature of self-awareness, our sense of self and sense of purpose and the origins of both, etc. One of the most interesting parts, though, was when he addresses some of the "scary" things about creating a machine with artificial general intelligence, particularly regarding some peoples' concerns about the AGI being more powerful than we are and how it would choose to use that power. He addressed it in a very open-minded and enlightened way:


Some people are wondering whether we should welcome our new robot overlords. Some hope to learn how we can rig their programming to make them constitutionally unable to harm humans (as in Isaac Asimov’s ‘laws of robotics’), or to prevent them from acquiring the theory that the universe should be converted into paper clips (as imagined by Nick Bostrom). None of these are the real problem. It has always been the case that a single exceptionally creative person can be thousands of times as productive — economically, intellectually or whatever — as most people; and that such a person could do enormous harm were he to turn his powers to evil instead of good.

These phenomena have nothing to do with AGIs. The battle between good and evil ideas is as old as our species and will continue regardless of the hardware on which it is running. The issue is: we want the intelligences with (morally) good ideas always to defeat the evil intelligences, biological and artificial; but we are fallible, and our own conception of ‘good’ needs continual improvement. How should society be organised so as to promote that improvement? ‘Enslave all intelligence’ would be a catastrophically wrong answer, and ‘enslave all intelligence that doesn’t look like us’ would not be much better.

The parallel is not exact between AGIs and sociopaths, and of course his solution is a non-solution. He doesn't even manage to really define what he means by evil, except with a quick parenthetical allusion to morality. Maybe the machines would have a more workable form of "morality"? But it's an interesting question: Is there anything so special about our morality that we would try to indoctrinate AGIs to it? Is there enough logic to human morality that they would accept it? If so, then we don't really need to use the word "morality," do we? We could just appeal to their logic. Same with sociopaths. If morality is really such a universal "good" (pardon all of the quotes), then can't we also appeal to a sociopath's logic? Or sense of self preservation? Or even the sociopaths self-interest regarding living in a relatively stable society in which most people are engaged in societal profitable endeavours that also benefit the sociopath in indirect ways? Civilization is vulnerable, but in a lot of ways it is robust. I behave in a civilized way because it works, it reaps rewards. (Not that AGIs would necessarily experience those side-effects as "rewards," which is I guess why people are so concerned.)

By the way, I have a friend who is an exceptionally creative person who is capable of being a thousand times more productive as most people. And that is a scary thought to me, that she had so much power, so I can empathize with people who fear sociopaths.

Friday, October 12, 2012

Guest post: The Psychopath Test review


“The Psychopath Test” by Jon Ronson (reviewed by Mindless Pleasures)

“The Psychopath Test” is a non-fiction whirligig of a book from the sometime Guardian journalist/documentary filmmaker and author of “The Men Who Stare at Goats”.

Not unlike the aforementioned book, which was about men who stare at goats, ‘The Psychopath Test’ is about psychopaths and a test that can determine how to identify them. If anything, you couldn’t accuse Ronson of ambiguous or misleading book titles.

Disturbingly however, Ronson’s book claims that psychopaths – or to use the more subtle yet interchangeable terminology – sociopaths – are more prevalent amongst us than we may think, and invariably most of us would have had some experience with them in our lives whether we realised it or not.

Certainly, having read the book and cross-referenced the, ‘now-famous twenty-point [Dr. Bob] Hare PCL-R Checklist’ [Psychopathy Checklist – Revised], I can attest that I have experienced knowing one – and I’m not talking facetiously about an ex-girlfriend either.

But perhaps what is more disconcerting, and possibly the most salient point in the book, is that many of these sociopathic attributes are almost indistinguishable from what characterises a successful business person.

Or to paraphrase the devilishly eldritch line from Bret Easton Ellis’ fictional protagonist Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho” when asked in a crowded restaurant what he does for a living replies glibly, “murders and assassinations” upon which the person evidently mishearing the response acknowledges, “Oh, mergers and acquisitions”.

The prerequisite characteristics to ‘excel’ (for want of a better word) in said activities are apparently not dissimilar.

Of course, the book is not implying that all successful business persons are potential sociopaths. However, the major thesis of “The Psychopath Test” could be distilled down to the premise that the actions and consequences of a minority of these extremely dangerous and formidable individuals affect the lives of the majority. Whether they be calculating serial killers, cold-hearted mercenaries or ruthless captains of industry.

In fact, I would argue that the book provides a significant psychological piece of the puzzle, if not a corner piece, of what is inherently wrong with so much of modern society today. However, incongruous to its serious subject matter “The Psychopath Test” is written in Jon Ronson’s customary witty, dry as gin, self-deprecating style – perhaps for the one reason that if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.

Unless of course you’re a psychopath, in which case you’re probably emotionally incapable of doing either.
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