What It's Like to Be a Sociopath | Hacker News Reader

What It's Like to Be a Sociopath

nytimes.com

36 pointsmooreds41 comments

>I like that I don’t have guilt because I’m making my decisions based on logic, based on truth, as opposed to ought or should.

Not having guilt doesn't mean you're basing decisions on "logic" or "truth".

Interesting article

That's not how I read that. Absence of guilt removes the programmed automatic response enabling a person to make a decision based on logic or truth. It doesn't mean that they will, that depends on their motivations.

You can't make descisions based only on logic or truth, it's not possible, because they aren't normative.

How do you get absence of guilt removes programmed automated response? If I witness an idiot poorly leading or baiting a conversation my automated response is rage. The same rage I assume someone guilty would also exhibit. Broadly assuming someone is guilty because of an automated response is dangerous territory. People that are sensitive to the lexicon and well trained in communication arts will take great offense to word fuckery being used against them.

It's an "implies" arrow not a causal relationship.

https://archive.is/5A7sa

Not to start a “does anyone else feel like this??” thread, but I wonder how common these traits are in tech workers. It’s kind of a cliché that CS attracts antisocial nerds. If a serious study were made, how many of those would actually meet the criteria for antisocial personality disorder?

Although diagnosis seems to rely a lot on someone’s behavior: if you don’t cause trouble, then it’s not a disease, just a personality trait. That seems a bit unfair to the people who would identify with this, could use psychiatric help to make human connection easier, but aren’t unreasonable enough to warrant medical attention.

> "It’s kind of a cliché that CS attracts antisocial nerds."

Say what? CS attracts asocial nerds.

antisocial = commits crimes and harms society

asocial = introverted or unsociable

In my limited experience, both asocial and antisocial would match. People who don’t care about other people can also find it easier to harm them.

Failure to differentiate between any two words that are similar but completely different is part of the problem we face today.

But I did mean antisocial. Why do you think I can’t make the difference? I said that I believed there was some statistical overlap between the two.

I made no personal attack. See Genters comment above. Asocial people care deeply. Often too deeply about others. However from a statistical standpoint of external observance both could be investigated by the very people that exhaust asocial people daily.

Asocial people don’t have time to educate every single person with a grave misunderstanding about them that they encounter so they choose to keep their circles small and valuable.

Furthermore it is all on a spectrum as Aristotle told us ages ago but with an average life span under 90 (while deteriorating) we only merely approach true wisdom. Rarely obtaining it.

Asocial people care about other people, we just find it exhausting to interact with them.

I also fit that definition and wouldn't generalize. What I've observed is that the places that contain a lot of asocial people also have an above-average rate of sociopathic behaviors. This certainly fits my CS experience.

asocial doesn't necessarily mean lack of care for others.

Take something like autism, there is NOTHING that stops autistic people from caring about others and being extraverted, but repeated social rejection may eventually make them withdrawn. Or maybe social interaction is just overstimulating and unpleasant. Such a person may do empathetic things like volunteer and donate to charity.

asocial people also suffer from their inept self-promotion abilities often making their virtues go unnoticed and uncelebrated. So if you're relying on personal experience, you're running into inductive reasoning problems right away. Whereas people with antisocial personality disorder might happily tell you all about the great things they do for everybody, even if their claims are total lies.

Thank you so much for stating this distinction. It is important.

> antisocial = commits crimes and harms society

The GP conflates "tech workers" and "CS" but it's pretty clear that this is the target of the second paragraph: folks who are happy to do work that harms society without doing anything that rises to the level of mandatory treatment. That tendency has been a big part of the so-called "techlash" the last several years.

That said, I don't think this is unique to tech (cf. finance or politics).

What is the definition of “harms society”? Does it include a lifestyle which produces more carbon and other harmful emissions at a 50th percentile or greater level on the global scale?

It used to be back in the day. From the time web devs have come in they are the most social nerds with slick hair and bending over backwards to do leetcode group of folk.

Being antisocial doesn't mean antisocial personality disorder, many other mental health conditions can cause people to become antisocial. We're getting confused here really because antisocial can both mean "withdrawn" and "hostile" and those aren't really the same thing.

There are many things that can cause social deficits other than antisocial personality disorder, too many to bother listing.

Others may have different experiences than this author.

It likely exist on a spectrum as a set of character traits that can wax and wane depending on societal, environmental, and individual reasons.

The need to put everyone in a box and keep them there is the real sociopathic behavior and it is not the individual doing it. It’s the institutional.

Am I missing something, or did the woman claim sociopaths are only kept in check by the threat of violence? How are we supposed to trust sociopaths to do the right thing when times get tough?

Though, it does make a lot of sense given the behavior we commonly see from CEOs and politicians.

Sociopathy like near anything else exists on a spectrum. Don't make sweeping generalizations from this woman's words.

That said, fear of consequence is an extremely strong deterrent to most people, sociopath or not. We have laws and consequences for those laws because society doesn't function well without them.

I’m pretty sure that a lot of people would have antisocial behavior if it weren’t for the fear or inconvenience of consequences. You don’t have to match a DSM definition to be a bad person.

Hopefully by the time sociopaths are able to cause severe damage, they have experienced some kind of negative consequence that caused them to pause but only for the consequences and not for emotions or feelings.

Trusting a sociopath may be the leap you do not want to take. Most of the post caught prison interviews are somewhat like “no one stopped me” or “no one caught me”. I think for each task given that someone will not take there is a long line of people who will. Some groups can choose to sort these people in.

“the extent to which a lot of behaviors that people do could be considered sociopathic, and we just don’t understand them that way. >>> Plenty of us do things that we know are bad because the transgressions feel good. It feels good […] because it feels free. […] The consequences — be it internal guilt or getting thrown in jail — happen after. In this moment, I’m going to do this because it feels [expletive] great to just not care. That is what the sociopath experience is almost all the time. One piece of advice I would give to anyone who sees themselves in my description is to find an external philosophy that works for you. I liked karma. It seemed clean. It seemed organized. Find that philosophy for yourself, because you’re not going to get to rely on internal checks and balances.”

Anyone else find the article footnotes to be really.. moralizing? It's like the author had to keep injecting that they are a non-sociopathic, responsible member of society with good thoughts as opposed to the interviewee.

Two choices… keep typing on the internet while further cornering oneself into a purely contextual analysis bucket of doom or stop typing and watch the house of cards fall silently. The boundaries between public, private, and secret lives are dissolving. One day we may have a population of truly authentic people. Until then we have a parlay of persona and signals.

I think I've only met 1-2 people who seemed to be sociopaths. One of them, oddly enough, was a little girl around ~10 years old.

Does anybody here have personal experiences with folks suspected of sociopathy?

I was in a relationship with someone that had all of the “dark triad” traits for a long time. I don’ didn’t realize it, because the reality is so different from the cultural and media stereotypes.

In reality, the lack of empathy was mostly just a disability that harms their ability to relate to people. An inability to form deep emotional connections with people, and doing things that others felt were aggressive or cruel without even realizing it.

If I may ask, did these traits make the relationship unviable, or did it end for other reasons? Do you think treatment (CBT, etc.) would have helped?

I suppose treatment could have helped, but she would not have accepted any kind of therapy or intervention where she had to do anything differently. I had my own issues that mirrored hers (read about codependents and narcissists), but I eventually came to be conscious of the dynamic, and worked on fixing my side of it, which immediately made the relationship impossible.

Thanks for sharing.

That must've been hard -- sorry to hear that.

I hear "lack of empathy" both applied to people with autistic-spectrum traits and sociopathic traits.

I tend to categorize this difference as "inability to understand" vs. "inability to care". Is there a difference?

There is a huge difference in the persons internal experience, but they might look similar to other people.

Knew a guy who I clocked as a textbook case before he even told me that he used to knock over liquor stores as a kid (for some reason liquor stores draw them like moths to a flame). Very charismatic so he quickly made friends (particularly with women) but no real long-term relationships of any kind. He was never violent and basically law abiding, but couldn’t seem to maintain a job because he’d get cross with employers (often do to fraternizing with the ladies at work). Never has had a problem finding another job.

He was the most interesting one I’ve met, the others are all just run-of-the-mill executives at large companies.

Edit: just remembered he liked to start bar fights so I guess was violent. I mostly meant not violent to people who didn’t want to participate in it; I’m led to believe he also mostly lost the fights so I’m not sure what it was about.

The guy I knew was extremely charismatic. He could talk to anyone for 5 minutes and you'd be convinced he was your best friend and would do anything for you. He also wouldn't hesitate to use you to his advantage, leaving you in the dust. Friendship meant nothing to him. He actually spent time in prison for participating in a scam where he'd call older people, form a friendship with them, then scam them out of their money. I'm sure he was absolutely brilliant at it.

Was he Saul Goodman?

Yes. All higher IQ. Most recognized it early on. It's a feature and if unchecked a bug.

Really? I feel like I've met quite a few people who were consistently immoral shitheads. Unless I'm misunderstand the technical definition, it seems to be fairly common, especially among dysfunctional people. It also seems like something that people may grow out of. Psychopathy on the other hand appears extremely rare and pretty much a lifelong condition.

I don’t believe it. I don’t think a true sociopath has any motivation whatsoever to disclose the fact that they are a sociopath.

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