Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

Being "positive on a sociopathic personality test" does now equal being "a potentially dangerous pathological sociopath"!

Even if you get a system good enough to overcome the base rate problem, you'll only end up labeling a bunch of mostly harmless people. Think a about a hypothetical uber-villain that would want to recruit children or teenagers, brainwash them and turn them into assassins or other kind of agents. He may find out that people with some sociopathic traits are better candidates for this, so he will target them. Now think the uber-villain is, uhm... (working for) your government :)

...not to mention the mislabeling of people with atypical social interaction patterns, like ones with mild/pseudo aspies which combined with the base rate fallacy brings serious mislabeling.

I'm sure this kind of electronic-psycho-profiling is already in use, and I even think it may have interesting side-benefits, like cool work being done in AI research for use in this (no better way to start "humanizing" and AI than to have it model human personalities and predict their actions), but there's tons of things that can go south with it for lots of innocent people that just happen to be "different" (like most people who end up making breakthrough discoveries or world changing inventions, you know...).

Agreed. And perhaps the notion of "dangerous sociopath" can be revised altogether. I'm no expert but in my understanding sociopathy is more about non empathic social behavior. It can be felt as creepy and depicted as violent in fiction, but that's doesn't make it a dangerous behavior in itself, and can actually be socially rewarded.

It can be argued that the lack of empathy can lead to a more violent behavior, but violent acts comming from deep personal relationship are plenty a dozen as well, who knows.

The problem here is that people are using a term that has a long and colorful history in a very imprecise manner. Sociopath hasn't been in the literature for years, but people still seem to use it interchangeably to speak of antisocial behavior and/or psychopathic traits which are not at all interchangeable.

The DSM doesn't even list psychopathy as a diagnosis any more, only antisocial personality disorder which requires a history of, and we might as well just quote the DSM "... a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others..." So yes, a diagnosis of ASPD does generally indicate someone who could be considered dangerous to others.

Now if we're talking about someone with psychopathic traits that scores high on a Hare, then no it does not necessarily indicate dangerous behavior. However, a Hare is still important when dealing with criminals as you do not want to give a psychopath treatment as it simply makes them better criminals.

> you do not want to give a psychopath treatment as it simply makes them better criminals.

What do you mean by "treatment" in this context? I thought that caught psychopathic criminals can end up in criminally insane facilities and such in most developed countries and somehow treated or at least attempt to do so.

There is a large base of research on this problem for the US military (and CCCP etc). i.e. How to discern effective killers within troops, how to shape them and how to 'uplift' the usual grunts to effectively kill.

I suggest you research "natural killers" from 1946 onwards (famous paper starts the ball rolling there - Combat Neuroses / Fatigue is a tip). Their percentage increase in producing effective killers is impressive. I won't link to specific papers, since it's outside the remit of H.N., however a lot of hard science & tech has been brought to bear on the issue.

The flip-side of this, the mirror to a sociopath (let's call it "the empathetically linked / driven") makes just as an effective killer for the record. If not better.

Tl;dr

You're about 70 years too late to pioneer this field. However, in looking @ the current trend to map Autism onto AI networks as a model, I'd suggest you'd probably have more joy looking at the empathetically linked individuals to see how their strong network connections / protective instincts are harnessed if I were to build a neural Map (weak) AI.

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