Comment by andrekandre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrekandre | Hacker News Reader

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  > Capitalism's greatest success is as a sociopath-containment vessel.

i used to think this as well, but as time has gone on, i wonder more deeply about this... like what are the conditions that create sociopaths in the first place? what causes these people to act in such ways?

  > Capitalism has managed to convince them that the path to world domination is making stuff and providing services for everybody else.

but in the end, don't we still end up with sociopaths in charge?

You always will since they're strongly favored in short term outcomes. Think of it as a harm reduction strategy, of the viable options it's generally the least disfavorable.

It's probably genetic - the heritability of psychopathy is about as big as intelligence or height [1]. And it's propagated because somebody who kills all the menfolk, takes all the spoils, and rapes all the women manages to pass on their genes to an awful lot of offspring.

Whether you end up with sociopaths in charge depends on whether you view profits as controlling the CEO or CEOs as controlling the profits. IMHO the former view is more accurate: you can reliably predict a psychopathic CEOs actions as that which will increase profits, while if they were actually in charge, their actions should be unpredictable.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-019-0488-z

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