Friday, January 23, 2015

Insight

There's been a ongoing debate on insight and sociopathy. I remember making a television appearance and being told recently that sociopaths lack insight, and so if a sociopath had insight he wouldn't actually be a sociopath. I've also heard that if sociopaths don't have empathy, they can't experience insight. And maybe it's true that sociopaths lack definition, particularly if we use Merriam Webster's first definition which is "understanding or awareness of one's mental or emotional condition; especially : recognition that one is mentally ill". Because many (most?) sociopaths are not self aware and few would classify themselves as mentally ill even though they may clinically qualify.

But if we think of insight as the ability to understand or at least predict particular traits of a person on a deep level, then sociopaths do it and approximately the same way as this data analytics tool presumes to do so. From an Engadget articles on how your Facebook likes can predict all sorts of other personal attributes:

[Researchers at Cambridge and Stanford] created a computer program that sifted through the Facebook likes of over 85,000 users to see if a person's preferences could rat out their true persona. The team used certain associations that seem fairly obvious; for instance, liking tattoos means you're more likely to drink alcohol. Others were more bizarre: apparently, people who like curly fries tend to be intelligent. Who knew?

The researchers made the subjects take a MyPersonality survey to create a baseline, then asked friends and relatives to judge them with a similar survey. The results were surprising -- the computer model could judge someone better than a friend or roommate by analyzing just 70 likes, and do better than a parent or sibling with 150 likes. The average number of likes per user in the study was 227, enough for the computer to evaluate someone better than almost anyone, with one exception: their spouses.

You can try the program here, but you need to be a very active Facebook user for it to have enough data to crunch. But you can imagine that if a computer is able to learn so much about you based on your Facebook likes, and if Sherlock Holmes is able to learn so much about you based on the mustard stains on your shirt, it should be very possible for a sociopath to have similar levels of insight about you and based on approximately the same techniques.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Tearing things apart

I got a question on Twitter about what might be so beautiful about seeing another person torn down. I thought this comment from a not so recent post explored that question in an interesting way.

As a comment on the idea of all being aspects of a whole:
This makes sense. The human brain has a distinct base form, but naturally it has evolved to produce all shades of expression- from the person who cares deeply and personally for another, to the person who is categorically non-empathetic- and each acts according to his nature, most of the time without conscious consideration of the essence of his activities.

As for tearing down vs. building up:
I think on a basic level the human species has a need to find patterns. It was advantageous to survival in primitive times, and continues to be so. Generally we don't think about it much, instead it is a natural, maybe even inescapable tendency. (When was the last time you looked at a cloud and didn't see some kind of shape?) We also have both a supportive and a destructive instinct; consider the predatory animal, which rips apart prey and then brings the best part to her cubs before cuddling with them and playing with them gently. These instincts enforce social bonds, or take down dangerous others. M.E.'s love of ruining others could come from destructive social energy- as a highly successful woman she has few real threats. Or it could come from destructive predatory energy- people nowadays have no need to take down animals with claw and tooth, and often this innate drive is redirected into more socially acceptable outlets, such as football, or law. There's an element of empowerment involved as well- again, the chosen pursuit of many a primitive human. It could be her logic- she's good at ferreting out inconsistencies, recognizing masks and lies for what they are. Perhaps it feels good to rip apart that holey pattern to reveal the form underneath. (Ever take apart a theory, remove the bits that don't make sense, and come through with something more elegant? Elegance of articulation is categorically rewarding, I find.) Or, it could refer back to that basic pattern-solving mind- what's more fun than figuring out how something works, taking it apart, and experimenting with what you can make it do?

I say not that M.E. is primitive or base, save in that sense we all are. We are all the animal, shoved through the sieve of the social model, and this must be taken into account when attempting to understand the human mind.

-D 

I wonder a little at people's expressed inability of seeing the beauty in seeing things torn down. I feel like 90% of popular film, literature, television, etc. are based on people's desire to be thrilled in this way, so it can't really be an unpopular phenomenon? You wonder what made a television show like Breaking Bad popular, one where arguably this is what was happening to every character almost at all times. Whether schadenfraude or an aesthetic and even intellectual appreciation for seeing these disassembled and deconstructed, the pleasure or satisfaction or excitement that people get in seeing things torn apart seems so common to me that I wonder why some people claim to not feel it at all and to not understand it. 

Monday, January 19, 2015

Mad bad or sad

This was an interesting video from Professor Glenn Wilson about the hazy boundaries of labeling someone with apparent mental problems are merely mad, bad, or sad.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Zen Buddism and Military

From a reader:

The military is making soldiers do zen meditation (mindfulness meditation). This is similar to what happened with the samurai - they did zen practice (sitting meditation).

They've already got data showing that this practice makes the soldiers stress resilient:
http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=52782

This is their website: http://www.mind-fitness-training.org/training.html

There's plenty of sociopaths in the military. I know one at West Point. For him, doing MMFT is going to help him to distinguish himself and get ahead, so you can bet that he'll do it.

Is anyone familiar with this? It's almost like they trying to train soldiers to have some of the more useful sociopathic traits?

And related comments from another, older, Buddhism post:

why is it that so many empaths expect the sociopath to unfailingly feel things the way they do, no matter how much effort is required, yet are unwilling to put the same amount of effort into managing their own emotions? 

And

how are buddhists wishy washy Carlos?

to me compassion feels expansive, like a feeling of connectedness where no one is better or worse than you, a feeling where we're all in it together... just like a drug high but without the drugs. compassion makes me want to paint or write, create art. or freely give you money as if i'm giving it to myself. and that's cool 'cause we're one. : )

empathy feels tight and urgent, like a toothache. it's personal, in its own tight little space, and more about filling my needs even though i'm actively filling yours. i may be feeling with you, but not WHAT you're feeling. and the whole point is to calm my own feelings. if i give you money, it's because things aren't okay and i'm hoping the money will change that. empathy that has no outlet just makes me want to get drunk. 

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Sherlock sociopaths INTJs

A reader writes on the relationship between sociopathy and the Myers-Briggs personality type, INTJ:

In short, I think a lot of people take MBTI too far. They base huge decisions about life direction on a general tendency to think in a specific way and use their psychological reserves in a particular direction. It isn't a horoscope, the MBTI is supposed to be used to branch out into other styles and become a well-rounded person. No one is a pure type, and INTJs can be arrogant about their perceived purity of rationality, which, ironically, isn't what a rational person would think. The website LessWrong is a pretty good breakdown of the kind of self-regulation a high-minded personality type requires. I type as INTJ myself and can't help but facepalm over the self-appointed geniuses who never created a damn thing in their entire lives. It's a potential, not a promise.

Personality typing is complicated when you bring in certain disorders. INTJs, being a hermitic type, are often judged for that literal and mental distance. The two common slurs are Aspie and Sociopath. What do these have in common? Blunted affect. Or so it seems.

There's very little written on the connection between certain personality values and mental abnormalities (I mean that in the mathematical sense of rarity). It's largely speculation and from what I studied at Uni, it's imprecise. Like throwing at a dartboard and hitting the same place twice it may happen, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything. 

The similarities I can see between sociopathy and INTJs are best described as coping mechanisms. Both types of person deal with copious amounts of information on a daily basis and some form of filtration is required to thrive. Both types tend to live in their heads and this can fairly freak normal people out. The pressure release valve of INTJs is easily upset by undue amounts of stress in a short period of time, causing them to lash out. On the surface, this might appear a sociopathic 0-60 in temper. 

Neither is automatically trusting and these belief systems about testing the world, changing things and treating the world like a gigantic experiment can appear manipulative in a damaging way, as many people are socially-oriented before ideas. The dark sense of humour in expression make it sound worse than it is. "I wanted to see what you'd do."

INTJs and sociopaths value truth above socially-proscribed norms and among the common herd this can make them enemies. I agree with those who type BBC's Sherlock as INTJ because his deep, alarmingly sharp processing of information screams INTJ to me. 
http://sherlockcharacterconfessions.tumblr.com/sherlockholmesprofile 
That isn't to say the guy is without faults. He's full of inconsistencies, being the product of many writers, and one outright declared he isn't a sociopath although "he wishes he was." With all due respect, that guy is full of shit. If we place the INTJ typing aside, the Sherlock they wrote behaves in a sociopathic way. Whether it's for dramatic effect and whether he intends to are irrelevant. SEASON 3 SPOILER ALERT: A person with no sociopathic bent could never shoot a guy in the head at point-blank range in cold blood. On a practical level, their fight/flight response would make it impossible. What annoys me about the character's recent outings are the typical attempt to make him cuddlier and in the process lose the veracity of the Sherlock Holmes brand. 

Those personality traits don't need to be fixed, they're valuable to society. However, sometimes the person who embodies them needs to branch out for personal reasons and that is to be encouraged. 
If a pure INTJ met a pure sociopath, the latter would be irritated because the former would see them as a big puzzle and the latter would see somebody with a good theoretical brain being wasted on impractical goals. They overlap where they think: yeah, I know the social rules, I just don't care.
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