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Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

> The terms "psychopath" and "sociopath" are already bywords for "doesn't share my politics or worldview". You can see this clearly in the article and the comments. The article mentions "financiers and business people", and the first comment covers explicitly naming the opposing political party. In fact, how many articles from the last few years manage to bring up the subject without casually slipping in a reference to businessmen? I am guessing not many.

They've slipped in because that's where the research is pointing, after decades of anecdotes. One of the main instruments for diagnosing psychopathy is the HARE checklist, as in Robert D. Hare; guess what Hare's latest book is called? _Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work_. Yeah.

(I could finish by accusing you of baselessly accusing your opponents of twisting psychology to fit one's worldview, but I don't think most people would appreciate the irony.)

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It's easy to examine the situation by flipping it around.

Suppose the research centered on people who care too much. And the implicit assumption is that people who care too much cause problems, because they make suboptimal decisions for the group. Should we begin to stigmatize these people? Was Mother Theresa psychologically defective? Is your overly caring boss causing problems in the workplace because he won't fire the underperformer nobody likes? What should be done about this endemic problem of overly caring bosses? How can we begin to classify and nullify these people?

In both cases the behavior is nightmarish. Here in stark relief for one kind of bias.

I don't want to derail the topic, but Mother Teresa isn't exactly the best kind of example for your argument.

Yes she is.

You've clearly never read The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa In Theory And Practice, by Christopher Hitchens.

Mother Teresa was pure evil.

You should read up on how she intentionally tortured dying people by denying them basic pain killers. How she stipulated the use of dull needles. How she claimed pain was desirable because it was the kiss of Jesus. How she refused to properly treat people that were dying in agony, while her charity hoarded massive sums of money. The stories abound, Hitchens was kind enough to document it heavily, both in book and video documentary format.

I know about all of that. That's exactly why I don't think she's a good example of someone who had excessive empathy for others, because she didn't seem to have much empathy at all.

>Hitchens was kind enough to document it heavily //

You appear to think Hitchens didn't have a huge axe to grind ...? If you had to pick someone who would be least likely to make an unbiased report of Mother Theresa's actions then he's be pretty close to top of the list.

>How she stipulated the use of dull needles. //

This seems least likely to be possibly contextually twisted; do you have a reference to a corroborating report on such things from a, shall we say, less motivated party?

As the claim is she stipulated it I expect the reasoning is in her letters or the accounts of her workers?

If you think you can make a valid counterpoint via ad hominem instead of with facts you are mistaken.

Questioning someone's potential bias is not an "ad hominem" attack.

If requesting corroboration offends you then you need to ask yourself why.

I've searched the BMJ archive (http://www.bmj.com/archive) and can't find any reference to this particular claim; only a few retrospectives and passing references.

Also where it is mentioned in other literature, the claim is limited to reuse of hypodermics and there is no mention that she specified that hypodermics must be blunt, eg in order to increase the pain of patients - as adventureful appears to intimate.

Given the choice between not getting an innoculation or getting one from a used needle ... well that's a hard choice isn't it. As I can't find the article there is nothing to tell us what factors are at play, the seriousness of the diseases or the attempted mitigation (if there was any).

Dr Robin Fox wrote, in the Lancet, about her home in Calcutta. The Lancet and the BMJ covered her re-use of needles. The risk of infection is obvious, especially since there wasn't any differentiation between people with or without a terminal illness.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionaries_of_Charity#Controv...)

>The risk of infection is obvious, especially since there wasn't any differentiation between people with or without a terminal illness. //

What was the result. Were more people killed or were more people saved from the particular illness/disease the injections were treating?

Was there facilities to readily test for preexisting conditions. Were people already known to be diagnosed with [blood] communicative conditions allowed to pass those on?

Whilst the risk of infection may be obvious the action to serve the greater good doesn't appear to be obvious in the depth we have treated this situation so far.

Do you have a link for the Lancet article please?

(http://www.lancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(...)

Report from someone who used to work with her:

(http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/shields_18_1.html)

> Were more people killed or were more people saved from the particular illness/disease the injections were treating?

Many people died long slow painful deaths. The pain was deliberate, a function of her distorted thinking.

>Many people died long slow painful deaths. //

How many? Also do you know the answer to the question you cut and pasted ... presumably you've read both those links so you know if there's a quantitative treatment?

All I could find about Haiti wrt the Sisters of Mercy was that the SoM went there in 1991 (according to graphic here, http://www.mercyworld.org/mercy_network/network-map.cfm). Whilst Susan Shields left the order in 1989 after 9 years "living in the Bronx, Rome, and San Francisco" and apparently then published her story of the situation in Haiti that so shocked her another 9 years later in 1998 (http://secularhumanism.org/library/fi/index_18.html, http://www.texnews.com/1998/religion/morph0117.html).

I don't have access to the text in the Lancet (which turns out to be a letter to the editor, and so not reviewed) - do you have a link to an open access version?

I realise we're way OT, but I'm keen to investigate this.

that's where the research is pointing

Are you defending the claim that businessmen and Republicans are psychopaths? I'm sorry, but that's generally untrue, and no amount of valid research will ever prove it.

About one in one hundred people are probably psychopath in the general population. When you look at some sub-populations you find higher representations of psychopaths, or of tendencies associated with pyschopathy. One clear example given in the article is in the prison population. Other examples include high-level businessmen and politicians. Obviously saying "there's an over-representation of psychopaths among politicians" is not the same as a simplistic "all politicians are psychopaths".

Better quality research is needed, and pop-psychology books are pretty frustrating.

Is there any evidence that high-level businessmen and politicians are more likely to be psychopaths than the general population?

For business at least, there seems to be: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20422644

If a group advocates more self-reliance and less organised help for the less fortunate then it's not unreasonable to accuse them of having less empathy.

I completely disagree. You can't enjoy life on the dole. The nanny state is a form of cruelty. I truly believe these things. I could go on at length, but what's the point.

Fiscal conservativism != less empathy.

You added the word "dole" and thereby changed the content of what you claimed to reply to.

I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't edit my post, if that's what you mean by "added."

I took the reference to Republican advocacy for "more self-reliance" as synonomous with Republican advocacy for less welfare. welfare == dole.

Although in actuality, almost all Republicans are RINOs (Republicans In Name Only), because almost all of them are altruists that advocate expanding the government/nanny state, just at a less rapid rate than Democrats. So "Republican" in this discussion may be a misnomer.

</rant>

Are you sure it's "less organized help" they are advocating for, or is it "not forced help"? I find it to be the latter in almost all cases. People tend not to argue against charity, but rather "forced charity" (which is not something I would consider charity at all).

I think GP is using "organized" to mean the same thing you're using "forced" to mean - given by a governing body from its tax revenue. Funny how we tend to choose the adjective that puts our personal views in the best possible light. :P

Research I've seen reported seems quite dubious. For instance, a CEO may take decisions that 'harm' hundreds of employees and not appear to feel anything like 'remorse.' That could be because he's a psychopath... but a more likely explanation is that he is confident that his decision was ethical and justified.

A justified decision may be appropriate to be painful. Do you think the person who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima should feel good about it, even if it were universally agreed to be the lesser evil?

It's hard enough to trust any research than can simply be turned around and used as a political weapon. Research that supports a blanket tarring of some group's political enemies is very suspect.

I don't think it does support blanket tarring if interpreted reasonably.

I don't see it as a positive thing when science gets suppressed because it's conclusions are considered politically incorrect or unfortunate -- either by the left or the right.

We should have a heightened watchfulness for political bias from the researchers in these cases, sure, but usually it's not the researchers who are misinterpreting or over-interpreting or drawing heavily political conclusions from their work.

Science does get suppressed when its conclusions are considered politically incorrect or unfortunate. That's exactly why politically convienent and fortunate research is so suspicious--any dissenting research is automatically disqualified, so it has the appearance of truth when really it's just systemically one-sided.

No it doesn't. As far as I know, the opposite thing happens: politically motivated research that doesn't deserve to be called scientific gets published over and over again. I'm specifically thinking about a few "scientific" articles sponsored by oil companies that happen to explain away global climate change, for instance. Or the many papers in which the Cato foundation, earnestly and with the best of intentions no doubt, tries to establish the inferiority of public healthcare. Or the Genesis Foundation defense of creationism.

There's no suppression. Just bullshit addition.

If you take a step back, one man's convenient is another man's inconvenient. And don't think for a minute that science limits itself to pissing off rightwingers. Nature has a way of pissing all over all sorts of ideological preferences. There's nothing about the laws of the universe that force, say, human biology to work in a way that suits a given political agenda. One day it might seem to be on your side, another day not so much.

Ultimately when politically sensitive research is allowed to happen, independently confirmed (or disconfirmed), and slowly digested in a mature fashion on all sides of the political spectrum (no "ha I told you so!" and systematic over-interpretation, no knee-jerk "the only explanation is political bias and the research must stop"), society surely stands to benefit from a more realistic and nuanced worldview in which to decide on policy. Not easy to achieve of course, but it makes me sad when people fail at the first hurdle.

Please can you cite the research that supports a blanket tarring of some group's political enemies?

When people talk about some politicians being psychopaths they are i: careful to limit it to "some", not "all" or "most" and ii: not limiting it to some particular party. It's as possible for someone in $PARTY_X to be psychopathic as someone in $PARTY_Y.

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