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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

We spend so much time, energy and resource trying to deal with a tiny percentage of people who are absolutely terrible if not downright evil. They are a minority, and a tiny one at that, but they cause so much damage that it's unfathomable. So we design systems that attempt to catch them, prevent their actions or treat their underlying issue in the hope that they might finally provide value or at the very least not subtract any more.

I have no solution, other than trying to spot them at childhood, and then maybe be able to turn them around, or take them out behind the barn.

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The TSA is the living embodiment of your statement.

There is now an entire generation of kids growing up thinking it is completely normal to spend 2 hours on queue to be bombarded by xrays (or touched near your genital areas), in order to get on a plane

It would be an understatement for me to claim that I'm not an expert in forensic psychology ... but I suspect that spotting the potentially dangerous people is relatively easy but that the really difficult part would be circulating that information in a way that won't be used maliciously, both by people discriminating unnecessarily against people who are a bit strange and by people deliberately wrecking (or threatening to wreck) other people's lives with false reports.

I think the idea that you could so easily ruin an innocent person's life proves it's not "relatively easy" to detect these psychopaths as children. The outliers, sure, but there are plenty of evil people who seem completely normal their entire lives.

> ... but I suspect that spotting the potentially dangerous people is relatively easy but that the really difficult part would be ...

You have probably met several sociopaths and psychopaths in your life and never knew. It is even difficult for a well trained psychologist or psychiatrist to make a definitive conclusion. Sociopaths and psychopaths are good at hiding it. They know what to say to make them appear empathetic.

It is not easy and it would be a disaster all around.

Of course I agree it's not easy: I was pointing out some of the difficulties. There's probably no point in arguing about whether the diagnosis or the data protection side is, in general, harder. They're both very hard problems in any case.

There are, of course, clever psychopaths who are good at hiding it. But there are also psychopaths that you/I know about but there's still almost nothing you/I can do with that information to warn other potential victims. You're probably right that I've met several sociopaths without knowing it. But I've also met several people whose socipathy became rather obvious to me, yet I never had the opportunity to warn anyone else about them. (Even a rather dimwitted sociopath will realise when I've identified them as such and will then avoid dealing with my close acquaintances whom I might have warned.)

It’s funny that no one dares examine the true root cause. In my opinion it will never go away until we face the hard facts and recognize what was going on in this man’s head. It’s very convenient and easy to dismiss him as pure evil, or a psychopath, or the like. And attempt to try to see him as anything other than that is met with shock and horror and is generally just unacceptable as it gives the impression of sympathizing with him.

Do we honestly think he’s pure evil and relishes in seeing his victim’s pain and suffering? Does he completely lack any form of empathy or caring and is he totally numb to the effects of his crimes? Is he a sociopath? A psychopath?

I highly doubt it.

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