I naturally have pretty low empathy, and mild narcissistic, manipulative, and impulsive tendencies. But I recognised in my teens that those traits were going to do me more harm than good if I let them get away from me, so I sought to change myself and open up more. Now even though there might be a cold core to my personality, it’s surrounded by a deep layer of warmth that I’ve cultivated over time because I just <i>want</i> to, maybe because I have a loving and supportive family.<p>Am I a psychopath? Nah, but probably somewhere on the “spectrum” if you like. It could be undiagnosed ASD or adult ADD or any number of other things. But I don’t think that’s even necessarily the right question. All that matters is the reality of living with the mind you’ve got; being labelled with a “condition” just gives you some finer instruments like therapy and medication to help accomplish that.
I'm not sure a having a brain scan that shows you're chronically underutilizing your empathy centre makes you a psychopath. I'm sure Elon Musk's brain scan would look similar to the writer's. If we are going to continue use the word as a synonym for "human to avoid at all costs", it's about being an unrepentant predator of other humans.<p>To conflate psychopath with hardcore -NTJ is to demonize hardcore -NTJ's, which can actually be a very valuable flavor of human for society. We should judge people by their impact crater, not by the perculiarities of their brain scans.<p>If you look at the psychopathy questionnaires, they have a heavy focus on the unrepentant predator side of things (e.g. <a href="https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/LSRP.php" rel="nofollow">https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/LSRP.php</a>). The author does not sound like an unrepentant predator, so I think without the benefit of seeing his brain scan, few psychologists/psychiatrists would diagnose him as a psychopath.
Whenever I try to research this subject, I just give up for the vagueness, lack of consensus, and general lack of solid information. I'm sure there's some out there - I just can't find it on the Internet. In particular, I'm always frustrated about 'psychopaths' (empathy-lacking, narcissistic, manipulative) being wholly lumped in with violent predators (serial killers, who seem to get visceral gratification from hunting and physically destroying other humans).
Previous discussion on HN about this article:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7166207" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7166207</a>
(The late, great) Pieter Hintjens wrote a short book about psychopaths, which I found fascinating. It's available for free on his site: <a href="http://hintjens.com/blog:_psychopaths" rel="nofollow">http://hintjens.com/blog:_psychopaths</a>
I was at a dinner recently where a grandmother was discussing her granddaughter. The grandmother was discussing her because it is something they worry about. She's beautiful, smart, and a sociopath. They try to find alternative schooling for her but she keeps on getting kicked out.<p>Some anecdotes:<p>When the granddaughter injured her foot and was unable to do the balance beam at the gymnastics gym, her grandmother saw her work out on the pull up bar and do <i>thirty</i> pull-ups in a row.<p>The grandmother came downstairs one afternoon when the granddaughter and her brother and her parents were staying in their home. Right near, one of the outlets there was a fresh hole kicked in the drywall. The granddaughter said "Yes, I kicked the wall but I don't know where that hole came from".<p>The granddaughter was in the car with her parents and said something shocking that made everyone upset (it wasn't specified). She then got out of the car and started pummeling the hood.
> I happened to have a series of genetic alleles, "warrior genes," that had to do with serotonin and were thought to be at risk for aggression, violence, and low emotional and interpersonal empathy-if you're raised in an abusive environment.<p>I worry that violence breeds violence, literally. What will happen to kids growing up in Syria today, where effectively mass abuse takes place (unless different kinds of abuse have different effects)? What will happen to kids growing up in the U.S. and Europe today, where they experience the constant bombardment of hate, either by observation, participation, or as victims of it?<p>EDIT: How many extra abusers are we creating in the next generation, who can pass it down to their kids, etc. ... On the hopeful side, violence has decreased in the world over time; we can make make progress if we want to.
Just because you say you're a psychopath doesn't mean you are one. You'd expect a neuroscientist to be aware of the limitations of your ability to self-diagnose. My personal opinion is that he loves the attention he gets. He gets to play tough and loves it. He feels dangerous and special. It's an escape mechanism. He might even act like a sociopath on purpose, but he doesn't seem like one. He might be a narcissist. Or he might be just self-delusional. It's a sad situation regardless.
How have the neuroanatomical assumptions behind this article stood up under the focus on replicability which has evolved since its publication? Is there still good reason to believe that those scans imply psychopathy?
This article lurches into a rambling story about the biology of psychopathy without defining what psychopathy is, and the font keeps changing size for no apparent reason.
Wow, i think the story hear is:<p>Psychopaths can be easily diagnosed thorough a brain scan.<p>Or a more likely narrative: A person compared pictures and interpreted them wrong.
Could it be the diagnosis is simply wrong, i.e. brain scans are interpreted incorrectly? We know that brain is quite elastic and after an injury another part of the brain can take the functionality of non-working part. Maybe his brain routed around damage from pre-natal stage?
> It means, for example, that if you have to go to war, and sometimes you probably have to go to war—I'm not talking about a belligerent country starting war or fomenting discord, but if you have to go to war and to engage infantry—you do not send 18-year-olds into it, because their brains aren't set.<p>Unless the enemy infantry and fire-support are utterly incompetent or horribly outnumbered, the vast majority of such 18-year-olds will be killed in action. (And in the outnumbering case, the younger infantry are likely to be lower-rank and therefore could be easily selected for the more dangerous tasks.)<p>What consequences remain, then, of using 18-year-olds instead of 25-year-olds? Is the author actually implying that 18-year-olds' emotional deficiencies make them less competent as infantry?