Friday, August 19, 2005
Just a little something I posted to slashdot. It was an article about a quiz, the Hare test, that measures sociopathy, with scores high among prisoners and CEOs. No tortoise test yet.
Re:Don't be so quick to judge (Score:5, Insightful)
by arbitraryaardvark (845916) <`gtbear' `at' `gmail.com'> on Friday August 19, @01:34PM (#13356461)
(http://vark.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday February 17, @08:49PM)
That was a thoughtful and passionate response, and there's some element of truth to it, but I'm mostly going to argue the other side.
Governments, whether democratic or dictatorships, tend to be hierarchical structures in which people compete for dominance. Sociopaths seem to have advantages in that struggle, especially where there is information scarcity and they can cover up bad behavior.
I've observed three sets of populations where high sociopathic scores seem to confer an advantage:
a) law school b) the US presidency c) the ghetto.
I got interested in Robert Caro's biography of LBJ, and have been reading dozens of books about who gets to be president and how. It looks like LBJ was a sociopath, as were Joe Kennedy and Bill Clinton. I haven't read enough on FDR to say, but he's also worth looking into. So that this doesn't look partisan, I would also say that the Bush dynasty - Prescot, George I, W, would score high. See also Nixon.
Law school rewarded people who were smart, hard working, and completely lacking in a conscience. That seemed to be a deliberate part of the training - people would come in full of idealism and leave as hired guns. I now how to deal with these people as lawyers for the state, who put winning above doing the right thing or obeying their oath of office. They could use this quiz instead of the bar exam, and get similar results.
I am a poor but honest lawyer, so I live in the hood. A lot of my neighbors are crackheads or alcoholics. Substance abuse seems to turn people into sociopaths, ready to lie or cheat or steal to get a quick fix, with little thought to the long term damage to their reputations.
The solution, if there is one, to dealing with sociopaths, is information management. Their strategy of ruthlessless has short term payoffs,
at the cost of long term damage to their reputations, if and when the truth comes out.
'Wuffie' is cory doctorow's term for reputation capital. In http://www.craphoud.com/down [craphoud.com] Down and out in the Magic Kingdom, he outlines a future economy based on post-scarcity, open source, and reputation capital.
Applying that to the now, open a dossier on your boss, or local tyrants, if you see sociopathic tendencies. Collect information, be ready to make it public anonymously once a critcal mass is reached. Sooner or later, these types tend to shoot themselves in the foot.
update saturday: and here's another.
Re:Government vs. Spaceship N (Score:5, Insightful)
by arbitraryaardvark (845916) <`gtbear' `at' `gmail.com'> on Saturday August 20, @12:01AM (#13360143)
(http://vark.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday February 17, @08:49PM)
The purpose of the space program was to take federal dollars and spread them around the texas hill country. Johnson was a New Deal bureaucrat who got himself elected to congress. The first thing he did was use federal dollars to bring in electric power to his district. The next thing he did was to get federal money to build a dam, which went to a company which is now known as Halliburton. A chunk of this money went back into Johnson's pocket so he could buy his way into the senate, where he chaired the space subcommittee and gathered power to run for president.
As president, he used tax dollars to build high tech infrastructure in texas, again funneled through Halliburton. Putting a man on the moon was misdirection and PR. Halliburton also was the main contractor for nuke plants and vietnam.
The purpose of a government run space program is to spend as much money as possible. A private sector project to do the same thing has a very different set of incentives.
I tend to favor market economies and be wary of the sort of public private partnerships pioneered by mussolini and lbj. But I have to give the guy some credit for bringing the Texas hill country out of the stone age into the space age.
Re:Don't be so quick to judge (Score:5, Insightful)
by arbitraryaardvark (845916) <`gtbear' `at' `gmail.com'> on Friday August 19, @01:34PM (#13356461)
(http://vark.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday February 17, @08:49PM)
That was a thoughtful and passionate response, and there's some element of truth to it, but I'm mostly going to argue the other side.
Governments, whether democratic or dictatorships, tend to be hierarchical structures in which people compete for dominance. Sociopaths seem to have advantages in that struggle, especially where there is information scarcity and they can cover up bad behavior.
I've observed three sets of populations where high sociopathic scores seem to confer an advantage:
a) law school b) the US presidency c) the ghetto.
I got interested in Robert Caro's biography of LBJ, and have been reading dozens of books about who gets to be president and how. It looks like LBJ was a sociopath, as were Joe Kennedy and Bill Clinton. I haven't read enough on FDR to say, but he's also worth looking into. So that this doesn't look partisan, I would also say that the Bush dynasty - Prescot, George I, W, would score high. See also Nixon.
Law school rewarded people who were smart, hard working, and completely lacking in a conscience. That seemed to be a deliberate part of the training - people would come in full of idealism and leave as hired guns. I now how to deal with these people as lawyers for the state, who put winning above doing the right thing or obeying their oath of office. They could use this quiz instead of the bar exam, and get similar results.
I am a poor but honest lawyer, so I live in the hood. A lot of my neighbors are crackheads or alcoholics. Substance abuse seems to turn people into sociopaths, ready to lie or cheat or steal to get a quick fix, with little thought to the long term damage to their reputations.
The solution, if there is one, to dealing with sociopaths, is information management. Their strategy of ruthlessless has short term payoffs,
at the cost of long term damage to their reputations, if and when the truth comes out.
'Wuffie' is cory doctorow's term for reputation capital. In http://www.craphoud.com/down [craphoud.com] Down and out in the Magic Kingdom, he outlines a future economy based on post-scarcity, open source, and reputation capital.
Applying that to the now, open a dossier on your boss, or local tyrants, if you see sociopathic tendencies. Collect information, be ready to make it public anonymously once a critcal mass is reached. Sooner or later, these types tend to shoot themselves in the foot.
update saturday: and here's another.
Re:Government vs. Spaceship N (Score:5, Insightful)
by arbitraryaardvark (845916) <`gtbear' `at' `gmail.com'> on Saturday August 20, @12:01AM (#13360143)
(http://vark.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday February 17, @08:49PM)
The purpose of the space program was to take federal dollars and spread them around the texas hill country. Johnson was a New Deal bureaucrat who got himself elected to congress. The first thing he did was use federal dollars to bring in electric power to his district. The next thing he did was to get federal money to build a dam, which went to a company which is now known as Halliburton. A chunk of this money went back into Johnson's pocket so he could buy his way into the senate, where he chaired the space subcommittee and gathered power to run for president.
As president, he used tax dollars to build high tech infrastructure in texas, again funneled through Halliburton. Putting a man on the moon was misdirection and PR. Halliburton also was the main contractor for nuke plants and vietnam.
The purpose of a government run space program is to spend as much money as possible. A private sector project to do the same thing has a very different set of incentives.
I tend to favor market economies and be wary of the sort of public private partnerships pioneered by mussolini and lbj. But I have to give the guy some credit for bringing the Texas hill country out of the stone age into the space age.
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