Hacker News Reader

Comment by champagnois | Hacker News Reader

No not at all. Every single parent choosing to breed sociopaths can lead to an unstable society that eats itself. There are many ways such ideas can end in total catastrophe.

Being a sociopath is not an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Prisons have many violent sociopaths. Studies on this are pretty clear.

There is, however, the weird outliers. There are those people with similar brain patterns that are not of the violent variety. They seem to succeed in business, for example.

I wouldn't be surprised if, for example, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Linus Torvalds (essentially the tech greats) were all sociopathic in some way.

FWIW, I am not a trained psychiatrist and am only speaking from the sort of popular psychology news articles and documentaries and TED talks I have seen on this particular topic.

If everyone was a sociopath it would fall apart pretty quickly. You can read up on evolutionarily stable strategies.

> If everyone was a sociopath it would fall apart pretty quickly

What if 1% of the population were sociopaths?

Well the suggestion here is that everyone uses eugenics to turn everyone into sociopaths. It’s cooperation that keeps the world going with periodic oscillations around it.

> I do think you will be on the wrong side of history on this.

Is he or she on the wrong side of history in claiming that the value of human life does not lie in intelligence, or in saying that it would be better to weed out sociopaths? Because you haven't addressed either of those (which seem pretty self-evident to me, but YMMV).

Applied genetics will be the future of the species if there is one, and it is a bit wrong to take a hostile stance that "advocates for AG are <insert demeaning term>." which is how I took the comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com