Put concentric circles around a person indicating how much concern they have for other people: your close friends and family in the inner circle, acquaintances in the next level, etc, until a circle that's just marked "the rest of humanity".
I've always enjoyed thinking about things this way, except it doesn't have to be circles (it can be hyperspheres!) and why should it be limited to humans. Seems to parsimoniously explain a lot of things.
Anyhow, there was a New Yorker article years ago describing evidence that really rich people are just genuinely not as good at thinking about others as other people (in largely oblivious rather than malicious ways), but I can't seem to dig it up right now.
rich people are just genuinely not as good at thinking about others as other people (in largely oblivious rather than malicious ways),
Sounds like someone's feeling a little sour grapes about all those delightful Recession 101 billboards.
Anyhow, looking at the paywall'd doohickey, paragraphs like this:
Psychopaths are people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry, especially in the areas of the amygdala and orbital/ventrolateral frontal cortex (Blair et al., 2005, 2006; Kiehl et al., 2001, 2004, 2006) lack a con- science, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people. The area of the brain known as the amygdala has been described as the seat of emotion and fear and is reported to be important in processing socially relevant information and it is therefore theorized that disruption of its functions could lead to cold and socially inappropriate behaviour (Wernke and Huss, 2008). This abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry of psychopaths makes them extraordi- narily cold, much more calculating and ruthless towards others than most people are and therefore a
menace to the companies they work for and to society
Make me think it's cute but largely not to be taken seriously.
Bob Hare, who designed the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, has said that if he weren't able to study psychopaths in the Vancouver prisons, he would have chosen to study them in the Vancouver stock market.
He specifically thinks that psychopaths are drawn to white collar crime because they are such effective liars. Because they don't experience shame, they do not even flinch when caught in a lie. They just switch to another lie.
Hare's own work is at least as accessible as that Psychopath Test book, I don't know why the more derivative book gets more press.
It might be as accessible, but Jon Ronson is a blast to read.
Because they don't experience shame, they do not even flinch when caught in a lie. They just switch to another lie.
That's it? Shit, you can re-create that in the lab any time you want by giving the subject a lot of meth.
I saw something about a guy who studied psychopaths and noticed certain characteristics about their brains during scans which differed from non-psychopaths. Then he scanned his own brain, and it turned out that he had a psychopath's brain.
I really prefer to try to keep a distinction between sociopaths and psychopaths. To me , the paragraph in the OP describes a sociopath; the paragraph in #3 describes the psychopath.
... Most people put the "rest of humanity" circle somewhat close, ...
I think this is empirically wrong. For most people the outer circle is "miles away".
*Except here on unfogged, where no one seems to be able to keep humanity at bay. Maybe we're pathologically empathetic.
You all are weird but in general you all don't seem all that empathetic to people who belong to groups you don't like.
Republicans are in the circle beyond "rest of humanity".
The corporations themselves are psychopaths. The puny humans who speak on their behalf, maybe, maybe not.
You all are weird but in general you all don't seem all that empathetic to people who belong to groups you don't like.
This is false. What's true is that we're not empathetic to people who want to do things that (intentionally or unintentionally) hurt people we do like. And, again, we've got the "rest of humanity" circle somewhat close.
I agree with Shearer that people are kidding themselves if they think they actually care about the rest of humanity in any kind of active way that isn't about self-flattery.
The real difference, I have come to think, is what you designate as ethically human. What are the rights, wishes, hopes, etc., that you would have for those you consider fully ethically human--schooling? food? shelter? less than 18 hours a day of labor? sexual freedom?--and then, what groups do you apply those rights to in your mind? What groups do you have different standards for?
I ask this question of pretty much all my classes, and I tend to find that young people answer the first question incredibly optimistically--every human deserves meaningful work, an education that will prepare them for college study if they choose it, nutritious and pleasing food, total intellectual and sexual freedom, dignified clothing, etc. I'm like, fucking *really*? For every human being? On the planet? And that's where they admit that, OK, well, maybe that's not so much important for Those People (in poorer countries, people with mental disabilities, old people, children, um, OK, most people).
It's not that they're hateful. I think that they don't quite realize how much their privilege and optimism is built on the backs of those who are not afforded the same rights they are. And the reason we don't afford everyone those rights is that it might hinder our enjoyment of capitalist excesses.
I'm curious how one could make an organization psychopath-proof. The Bloomberg article touches on this a couple of times:
"Anyone who makes decisions that affect significant numbers of other people, concerning issues of corporate social responsibility or toxic waste, for example, or concerning mass financial markets or mass employment, should be screened to make sure that they are, at the very least, not psychopaths and at most are actually people who care about others," he wrote.
Until the last third of the 20th century, he writes, companies were mostly stable and slow to change. Lifetime employment was a reasonable expectation and people rose through the ranks.
This stable environment meant corporate psychopaths "would be noticeable and identifiable as undesirable managers because of their selfish egotistical personalities and other ethical defects."
The first seems unconvincing, since I've never seen a personality test that couldn't be easily gamed, and I would think a clever psychopath would be pretty good at this. The second is interesting. Would they eventually out themselves? And, once outed, could they be reliably disposed of?
What groups do you have different standards for?
Drummers.
And that's where they admit that, OK, well, maybe that's not so much important for Those People (in poorer countries, people with mental disabilities, old people, children, um, OK, most people).
Guilty, tee-hee!
I'm like, fucking *really*? For every human being? On the planet?
I'm not quite sure I understand what the stumbling block to answering this with a simple "yes, really" would be.
Would they eventually out themselves? And, once outed, could they be reliably disposed of promoted quickly?
Fixed that for you. Per CN's 11, it is a psychopathic entity that "makes" that decision.
I mean, okay, I'm not sure I understand what it would mean for children to have "total sexual freedom," but I'm probably against it. Same with "dignified clothing". But, otherwise: sure? Why not?
Please, urple. Disabled people?
Disabled people?
Please. That's an oxymoron.
I do tend to think that my friends are people who have thought this question out a little more fully than my 19-year-old students, who, no, are not ready to fight for the spread of radical freedoms across the globe if it means undermining their own comfort and privilege.
17: Not sure if this is what AWB had in mind, but perhaps because the resource disparities between people who live in the US (and other countries with a comparable degree of economic development) and people who suffer actual poverty on a global level are so great that if you admit any ethical obligation whatsoever to help people merely because (1) they are human, (2) they are suffering great deprivation, and (3) you could alleviate that deprivation by making sacrifices that subject you to a degree of deprivation that is comparatively insignificant, you are very quickly committed to extraordinary measures that very few people actually undertake, such as donating the majority of your personal income to famine relief, or similar causes. (In fact, if not directly engaged in the provision of aid, you would arguably be committed to pursuing a higher-income job precisely in order to have more income to donate.)
For those not actually prepared to make those types of sacrifices, the only real ways around this are denying that any such obligation exists at all, and some degree of hypocrisy. Of those two, generally I'd rather be a hypocrite. Which doesn't mean I don't give to charity at all, just that I don't think I could defend on any principled basis the amount I or my family spend on personal consumption expenditures.
You can also argue that the obligation exists but only on a collective level and therefore can be met through political action, but I've never found that line particularly persuasive. And in any event it would probably commit you to a full-time job as a revolutionary.
24: Yeah, and the effective difference between bigotry and laziness is not large. Sitting around wishing ponies and candy bars for every child around the world doesn't cost a thing.
The argument in 24 strikes me as roughly parallel to the argument that if you think tax revenues are too low and there are too many unfair loopholes in the tax code, then you should voluntarily not use those loopholes and should contribute more than you owe to the treasury. Which I find fairly unpersuasive. On problems of this scale, collective policy just completely swamps individual action.
I keep my "rest of humanity" circle at roughly the "collective action" distance from me.
I keep my "rest of humanity" circle at roughly the "collective action" distance from me.
1) The psychopath blocks his emotions; the sociopath blocks his conscience.
1a) For Freudians: Emotions - id; conscience - superego
2) The rationalist, the Kantian of practical reason is on the psychopath scale. The Nietzschean individualist Ubermensch is on the sociopath scale
3) Interesting the way these overlap and get merged and mixed.
Is the universalist who uses reason to overcome her emotional ties to her local traditionalist community mores a psychopath or sociopath? Changing our empathic affects is in itself probably sociopathic. We due this according to the dictates of pure reason, it is logical to attach to this new group abandoning our old? Right.
Psychopathic and sociopathic are ways of thinking, the "excessive bad forms" we use to justify our more moderate tendencies in those directions.
"It is actually a good thing not to abandon mother and wife for disinterested cariitas, as Jesus commanded, because that is an empathy too far. Those unmarried priests are crazy."
26: I don't think the two cases are comparable. The marginal contribution of any individual to financing the federal budget really is pretty insignificant and would not have an impact on any particular recipient's life. But a marginal donation to a foreign aid project would foreseeably have an impact on a particular recipient or set of recipients. You might not know who they are, but you know they exist. (And the intuition that you have less of an obligation to them because you can't put names or faces to them is really nothing more than an argument that they're outside the relevant circle of concern.)
12 is just "loyalty" Haidt. It is no more "rational" than any other "loyalty" Shearer is more correct than Urple.
We dissociate from our old groups and attach to new or larger groups and in so doing accept new different but no more rational rules for loyalty and purity than we had before.
We flatter ourselves by saying the exercise of freedom in dis-attaching and re-attaching is in itself a rational or empathetic act. Our act of abandonment is science and love.
Caritas or whatever Buddhist word, disinterested love without any social attachment...isn't this sociopathic? Do Nietzsche and Jesus hug in hell?
Also, if the relevant obligation is collective, I think you still need to have some answer to the question: what, exactly, should each individual be doing in light of that collective obligation? Presumably organizing, yes? Persuading others to join in a movement that will embody the collective will? But AWB's students are not in fact generally headed out to organize. (I'm certainly not myself.)
7: James Fallon is the guy you are thinking about.
Fair warning: The link above may lead to a chain reaction of video watching that will destroy productivity for the rest of the day.
The marginal contribution of any individual to financing the federal budget really is pretty insignificant and would not have an impact on any particular recipient's life. But a marginal donation to a foreign aid project would foreseeably have an impact on a particular recipient or set of recipients.
But a marginal donation to a foreign aid project would not have any meangingful impact on the global resource disparities between people who live in the US (and other countries with a comparable degree of economic development) and people who suffer actual poverty.
I think you guys might be asking too much of 'empathy.' It's not self-abnegation, or sainthood. I feel pretty strongly that each and every resident of Texas has the right to move away, and live a life surrounded by people not Texans. I'm not prepared to do anything to advance this goal -- not buy bus tickets for 100 randomly chosen Texans, not host a family of four for a month, etc -- yet I would certainly deplore whatever circumstances (including actions of corporations!) prevented people from leaving Texas. Which is enough for empathy.
I really do care about the world, and I basically do nothing. I don't see why those two statements can't coexist.
26: I agree with you. If anything, the argument regarding the level of global poverty is even more clearly only addressable at the collective-action level.
Yeah, and the effective difference between bigotry and laziness is not large
I this is wrong and pernicious. The difference is very large. Not for any one actor, of course, since--as has already been opinted out--these are issues that can only be effectively addressed at the collective level. And at the collective level, the difference is huge. A lazy collective will happily support activists trying to address these issues. A bigoted collective will not.
The idea of the daimonic typically means quite a few things: from befitting a demon and fiendish, to motivated by a spiritual force or genius and inspired. As a psychological term, it has come to represent an elemental force which contains an irrepressible drive towards individuation. As a literary term, it can also mean the dynamic unrest that exists in us all that forces us into the unknown, leading to self-destruction and/or self-discovery.
I better go back to Japan or I'll start quoting Soren K again. Matsudaira Sadanobu, grant me lethe.
Yes, but I don't think the question is whether you have an individual obligation to change the global economic structure. The question is whether you endorse any personal obligation to help people you don't know and haven't ever met, simply on the basis of a shared humanity. The global economic structure merely provides the background against which endorsing such an obligation -- even at an extremely minimal level -- entails sacrifices that very few people are willing to make.
The question is whether you endorse any personal obligation to help people you don't know and haven't ever met, simply on the basis of a shared humanity.
You've shifted the question. No, I don't endorse any personal obligation to help people you don't know and haven't ever met, simply on the basis of a shared humanity. That doesn't mean I don't think every human deserves meaningful work, an education that will prepare them for college study if they choose it, nutritious and pleasing food, total intellectual and sexual freedom, dignified clothing, etc. Those are two separate issues.
I don't even think I have a personal obligation to help people I do know and have met.
The question is whether you endorse any personal obligation to help people you don't know and haven't ever met, simply on the basis of a shared humanity
If this is the question, the only two options are not extreme self-sacrifice or hypocrisy.
I think you guys might be asking too much of 'empathy.' It's not self-abnegation, or sainthood.
Qualitative of quantitative?
Is empathy on a scale, or a partially filled bucket? Is it exhaustible, damn, my empathy ran dry? What is its source?
Or is it a direction, a vector? Absolute, yet finite?
A field-affect?
I'm curious how one could make an organization psychopath-proof.
I don't think there's any institutional design that is psychopath proof. But we could do better (BTW I've heard that book called Don't Hire Steve Jobs).
As a first step I like the idea of organizations in which sub-units are self-managing and have their own chosen voice to higher levels just like higher levels choose a representative manager to for the unit. Holacracy. Here.
AWB is right on every count. I'm certainly guilty of a huge amount of not giving a fuck. How much? I don't know. It makes me uncomfortable to think about it.
In disputing widget's 24, urple in 26 wants to argue that I'm merely responding sensibly to a collective action problem, but that isn't so. I could give more and do more, and real people would benefit regardless of what the rest of the world does.
I think heebie's concentric circles are useful, but we all treat people in the outer circles with the indifference of psychopaths, (and are treated the same way by them). It seems a bit facile to draw a bright line between Boddy's psychopaths and, say, the President of the United States. Or, for that matter, between Boddy's psychopaths and you and me.
42: I'm pretty sure I was clear in 24.1 that I was talking about the consequences of admitting "any ethical obligation whatsoever to help people merely because (1) they are human, (2) they are suffering great deprivation, and (3) you could alleviate that deprivation by making sacrifices that subject you to a degree of deprivation that is comparatively insignificant."
And I think that's a fair -- if slightly sharpened -- reading of AWB's 13.1, which starts by asking whether "people . . . actually care about the rest of humanity in any kind of active way that isn't about self-flattery." Which, I take her to be saying, her students say that they do, until they think about the consequences.
I could give more and do more, and real people would benefit regardless of what the rest of the world does.
And our real tax revenue problem would be lessened if you gave more money to the Treasury, regardless of what the rest of the country does.
And our real tax revenue problem would be lessened if you gave more money to the Treasury, regardless of what the rest of the country does.
No it wouldn't. Not in any meaningful sense.
I mean, that's what makes the tax thing a collective action problem, while the charity thing isn't.
I would obviously agree that you can help a specific person (or maybe group) in need by giving them more. Does helping any specific person meaningfully contribute to remedying global resource disparities between the rich and the poor?
I mean, if you divide the federal budget deficit into 3 billion individual chunks, your contribution could make a meaningful difference in one of them. It's the same issue.
I disagree completely with 47.3. The 'corporate psychopaths' are not so named because they're not going out of their way to benefit some few individuals -- indeed, they probably are doing much more of this charity than nearly any individual. No, they're 'psychopaths' because the choices they make in running their organizations are actively causing harm to other people, and they don't care.
42, 43: I will also note that in 24.2 I expressly mentioned that if you deny such an obligation the problem doesn't arise. So I think a claim that I'm moving the goalposts is a little unfair here.
44: I'm curious as to what you have in mind. I'll concede preemptively that there are probably reasonable defenses to a charge of hypocrisy if you work into the underlying obligation to help the idea that the cost to bear should be reasonable from the donor's perspective. But there is a certain intuitive difficulty there if you imagine trying to explain to the recipient why it isn't reasonable for the donor to bear that cost. And perhaps you have something else in mind entirely.
I agree with widget's fork in 24: if all this stupid misery is a collective action problem, I need to be changing the system. My timidity and laziness are sharpened when I think about the people I know who are so dedicated; several of them are as happy as anyone I know, despite difficult goals and relative material deprivation. Possiby a happy temperament is a prerequisite for not burning out.
I need to be changing the system
We'd all love to see the plan.
I think the problem w/34 is that it's using a different scale on each side of the question. True, giving up an indulgence & sending the $ to SOIL doesn't significantly change the total of global misery, but neither does it significantly change the total of global happiness - I too am tiny.
24: Or you could recalibrate like I did, and decide that you're prepared to kill eight people so that you might have a couch, but not prepared to kill another eight for a second couch.
I'm working on increasing my level of concern for people far away, but so far I have only endured extremely trivial privations on their account. I expect to do more in the future, though.
CC, would that I had one. Thrift & charity are easy in comparison.
Have I praised _the Gone-Away World_ recently? Great take on how corporate psychopaths are formed.
57: No, it actually works, because other people's money is cheap.
Let's say you value your own utilons at par, and everyone else's at 0.1. Then giving up one utilon to give a poor person 2 utilons (since they have higher marginal utility for money) yields:
-1 + 2 * 0.1 = -0.8, a net loss in utility for you.
However, if you can coordinate with 99 people like yourself to effect similar transfers to 100 poor people. Then the transaction yields:
-1 + 99 -1 * 0.1 + 100 * 2 * 0.1 = 8.1, a net gain in utility for you. If each of your compatriots has the same utility function as you do, you have all gained in a way that none of you could have your done on your own.
So if you value others' utility at a discount, there are scale benefits to transfers that do in fact make them a collective action problem.
Matching donations are the free-market alternative to government spending, because both parties get to spend someone else's money on their favored cause.
When a 1:1 ratio isn't good enough, some people have tried collective matching (i.e. a group of people jointly commit to give $X each IFF everyone else in the group does so).
I'd rather we just took the money we were going to spend bombing Iran, and spent it on water purification infrastructure in Africa.
My counselor sister did the psychopath test on her husband and he qualified with flying colors. Not just her opinion or mine, but science. Except she says "sociopath".
Right, there's a big difference between a psychopath and a sociopath, and the fact that the OP seems to be talking about the latter while using the former term makes me doubt its credibility.
Bob is right in 29 and 31. There is nothing natural about the ability to act and make sacrifices in the name of abstract entities we don't know or have personal experience with. The vast majority of the world's population are such abstractions to us. Killing face to face, or confronting starvation directly, is difficult because even strangers are made less abstract by their physical presence, but even then it doesn't seem that difficult to train people to kill strangers in battle.
Aren't the concepts of "psychopath" and "sociopath" basically just pseudo-clinical protections against confronting the darkness in 'ordinary' human nature? Defining that capacity for evil as other and the property of a small minority? Ignoring the amount of work necessary to really civilize us? Children pass through a certain amount of natural psychopathology in the process of their upbringing.
All these ruminations on our global inadequacies are fine and large, but not really relevant to the problem of corporate psychopaths, which CC got right at 53.
Aren't the concepts of "psychopath" and "sociopath" basically just pseudo-clinical protections against confronting the darkness in 'ordinary' human nature?
If you're asking "could many more (most? all?) people have become sociopaths with (im-)proper upbringings?", I don't know but I very strongly suspect the answer is probably. But I'm not sure that's actually saying anything very interesting.
Catching up on the thread
Shit, you can re-create that in the lab any time you want by giving the subject a lot of meth.
There may be a lot of this on Wall Street as well, but with higher end pharmaceuticals.
There may be a lot of this on Wall Street as well, but with higher end pharmaceuticals.
That's been one of Emerson's theories, at least with antidepressants and the like. I wonder what even coffee has done to society.
I'm not sure that either "sociopath" or "psychopath" is very well defined in a scientific way, and there's a lot of overlap. Both terms seem to be at the intersection of psychology, criminology, journalism, and crime fiction. My intuitive understanding is that sociopaths are indifferent to others' suffering, whereas psychopaths enjoy others' suffering. I have no idea whether that has any validity.
68: I think the trigger to pathological behavior can be much milder than an abusive upbringing. Milgram experiment, anyone? Yes I think that's important. Maybe it's boring though.
71: whatever valid psychological concepts might lie behind those terms would certainly seem to have little to do with how they're being used in this thread (or in the linked article or the paywall'd academic article). Ronson might be better, or more careful, and the guy who developed the measure is probably relatively careful.
This was the first hit on google for"What is the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath?
http://www.onlineschools.org/what-is/what-is-the-difference-between-a-psychopath-and-a-sociopath/
I couldn't see any connection between what this says (supposedly from DSM-IV), and what people are saying here, but maybe I'm missing something.
71: My lay sense is that this description is pretty accurate.
I don't actually think that the harm done by disciplined hierarchal organizations can be explained by the traits of the individuals which form it. An organization of a certain type selects or trains the personalities it wants. A certain type rises within the organization. Large corporations are socio-pyschopathic because they're rational and devoted to a single goal, profit. Corporate conscience is an impediment to rational profitseeking if it's not just PR and is often associated with monopoly status.
I do think that some of the bad judgement seen during the bubble era might be explainable by a drug-and-ideology collective psychology of cornucopian euphoria shared by an entire professional culture, across different organizations.
"Psychopath" can be operationally defined in terms of the Hare Checklist. The checklist has two categories, one behavioral and one affective. The behavioral side basically boils down to a lifetime of destructive behavior. The affective side is actually more varied, including not just a lack of remorse and a lack of empathy, but also a glib, superficial demeanor, and personal gradiosity
The DSM has a category called "Antisocial personality disorder" which basically uses the behavioral half Hare's test and winds up with a very different demographic profile, including a much larger portion of the prison population.
The term "acquired sociopathy" has been used recently for Phineas Gage type patients who prefrontal lobe damage and associated behavior problems. These people don't really seem much like Hare's psychopaths, though, because they have problems with all kinds of goal directed behavior, not just altruism.
Crazed genetic determinist David Lykken has promoted the use of "psychopath" for people whose problems are genetic and "sociopath" for those whose problems are environmental, but he is just interested in seeing the genetic determinism is true for as many people as possible.
Hare basically stands in opposition to the DSM definition of antisocial personality disorders, by the way, because they rely exclusively on behavioral history and traits, rather than on personality measures. The paywall'd article is specifically (if inexactly) talking about Hare's definition, or, that is, people who score highly on Hare's measure. That's what Ronson's book is about, too. Hare's measure is supposed to be pretty reliable, but to claim that the presumed prevalence of people who would score highly on that measure in positions of corporate authority would make predictions about corporate governance or macroeconomic events is extremely tenuous, and probably scientifically meaningless.
I was going to say, though, that the social science methodological principle of value-neutrality accommodates psycho-sociopathy quite well. In "Rationality and Freedom" Amartya Sen has written about how "economic rationality" as described in the economic literature is sociopathic.
this book has some very nice material on psychopathy. There are several articles on whether we can take away any lessons from psychopathy on the debate between Hume and Kant over whether reason alone can motivate moral action.
If there are several contending definitions of sociopathy and psychopathy and the difference between them, its not a very useful concept.
If anyone sees the missing word "have" from 78, please shoo it on home.
I propose we use the term "meanie' in the place of either.
84: expecting any Axis II disorder to be definitionally useful outside of a clinical setting is almost certainly too much to ask. Asking it to be useful outside of a research setting might well be too much to ask.
But a marginal donation to a foreign aid project would not have any meangingful impact on the global resource disparities between people who live in the US (and other countries with a comparable degree of economic development) and people who suffer actual poverty.
So what? This is the equivalent of "If we can't create complete world peace today, we may as well feed ourselves by selling guns." I guess it's pretty convenient that there are wealthy people we can label as psychopaths and blame for poverty; this allows us to pose as enlightened saints because we have marginally more "awareness" of poverty (not that we can be bothered to do fuckall about it).
Every part of 88 seems wrong (and tendentious), but I think I'm done arguing about it.
Well I guess if we were slaveowners in the early 19th century we could all be comforted in our knowledge that freeing any individual slave wouldn't do anything about all the other slaves that were out there.
No, we couldn't, but if we were abolitionist citizens in the North we could all be comforted in our knowledge that bankrupting ourselves to purchase the freedom of any individual slave wouldn't do anything about all the other slaves that were out there.
You seem to be implying there is no distinction between active participation and passive opposition.
77: I don't actually think that the harm done by disciplined hierarchal organizations can be explained by the traits of the individuals which form it.
JE gets this right. Absolutely possible for well-meaning nice guys to run a socio-pyschopathic corporation or other organization. There are some interesting connections, and a lot of reasons that individuals with those traits/behavior patterns can flourish in single goal-driven organizations, but they are not required.
Unfortunately I have some short-term socio-psychosis goals to meet this afternoon so will have to wait until later to provide specific examples from my personal experience.
91: who said anything about bankrupting yourself? What about spending 20% of your income? 50%? 70%? How many slave lives would your personal comfort be worth?
Seems pretty sociopathic to me.
Do people here even come close to doing 10% of their income to charity, the traditional church-approved percentage? I know I sure don't, even coming close to that feels "difficult" (aka worse quality steaks, cheaper restaurants, etc.). But that seems like a totally reasonable goal that would make a lot of people better off, while granting that huge structural problems need structural solutions.
I'm pretty close to 0%, if you don't count taking bags of clothes my kids have outgrown to Goodwill.
Hell, even if you do count it, I'm still pretty close to 0.
I think it's odd that people who would (correctly) criticize IQ measurements as being a hopeless factor analysis fishing expedition without any clear basis in a specific, defined neurological capability would give any scientific creedence to DSM personality measurements, which have all the flaws of IQ tests plus some more.
All structured projects of observation and categorization create some form of useful knowledge, psychology being no exception, and they can be used in social categorization (who gets free drugs, who gets parole, or maybe in the case of IQ who gets into some school). But when you analogize them to the truths of physical science you start hiding some whopping ideological assumptions and screwing up your observational capacities in all kinds of other ways.
The psychopath/sociopath metrics always need to have two parts -- one for the forms of ordinary psychopathology that are actually useful forms of adaptation to social life, and the other for the stuff that actually leads you to visit a therapist or makes other people want to put you in prison/the nuthouse. Lumping all that stuff together is the start of the confusion.
95: We give 10% of my net (post-tax) income to our church; I'm mathematical enough to recognize that it's not really "charity". We also give to charity on top of that.
I'm not going to lie and say that it's totally cheerful and not difficult and that I don't mentally tally, etc. when the end of the year "move money to IRAs, etc" comes. So you're not alone in that sense.
Surely smoking up your dealer counts, right?
I'd really like to be around 10% of gross, which (for basically religious reasons, I suppose) I think of as the amount I *should* be giving to charity, but I almost always fall far short. In reality I usually end up around to 10% of net.
(To clarify, I think of 10% as the minimum amount I should be giving to charity. But I'm still almost always short of that.)
I was doing well back when I made a lot more money. Diminishing marginal value and all that, I suppose.
I can't say I've ever hit 10% of my pre-tax income in charitable donations. 5% some years, I think. Not this past year, though. We're buying a house.
10% has always struck me as a facially attractive figure for a reasonable sacrifice from the perspective of the donor, probably because of the traditional religious associations.
I don't think I've ever been close to 10% even post-tax.
The Internets say: Axis II disorders can seem untreatable and be difficult to pinpoint.
Sifu says: ....expecting any Axis II disorder to be definitionally useful outside of a clinical setting is almost certainly too much to ask. Asking it to be useful outside of a research setting might well be too much to ask.
What does this add up to? It strikes me that it's just proto-science, scientism, or something like that. The people who do these things (criminologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, researchers) have to say something about these people who are agreed to be defective and harmful, so this is what they end up saying. It doesn't seem much more useful than some kind of mushy commonsense concept like "evil" or "heartless" or "cruel".
106: See 86 for the more refined nomenclature.
Hugh MacLeod's cartoon is a pitch-perfect symbol of an unorthodox school of management based on the axiom that organizations don't suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs. Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological.
From a fascinating analysis of corporate hierarchy based on the TV show The Office.
95: Came close, post-taxes, one year, but probably not more than 7%.
Regarding the thread generally, do TFA contain any conversations in which we bitterly condemn one another for pathologizing and DSM-V-ing the characters of poor people?
It's a payday donkey! It's a payday donkey! Or, maybe it's just an old car.
I budget 10% of post-tax income now; it was 10% of pre-tax income when I was income-richer. I have to budget it beforehand and pretend it's gone because it really is enough to sting. It was much easier to start this because I went from unemployed and poor to rich so fast; I could remember how scary poor was, and rich was, hah, who *needs* that much steak? Fun writing checks that I can imagine doing a chunk of good, too.
I'm told Islamic law expects a percentage of one's *wealth* every year, which seems social-mobility-preserving. I would find that very hard to do.
60 is very handy -- I don't think I'd ever seen or worked that out before. Has it a name? I still don't think it counters 57, because I hear 34 from people who are not willing to openly admit that they count other people's suffering as less than their own. 60 explains a lot of fundraising techniques that baffle the hell out of me, though.
_The Gone-Away World_ is so, so good at charting the ratcheting filter conversion of clueless to sociopaths. Also, ninjas and mimes.
95: Depending on how I count my income, more than 5% and less than 10, varying from year to year. Before tax, of course, as it should be anywhere giving is tax deductible.
It helps that my employer has a match up to $X per year, which means that for every dollar I spend up to $X, a dollar of someone else's money gets spent too.
Because I am a sociopath and value others' utility less than my own.
I am gonna go out on a limb and suggest that the amounts suggested in 112 are way high (I'm not saying you're being dishonest, just that these percentages are very unusual). I know you know this, but 5% charity would require someone making $200,000/year pretax to give away $10,000 every year; 10% is $20,000.
That's a lot of money, even though I do have a gut feeling that 10% pretax is the right number.
I have to budget it beforehand and pretend it's gone because it really is enough to sting.
This. It's what we've always done, even when we were poor. It hurt a lot when we first moved to CA, but then it stopped hurting as much after I began pirating more movies and selling them as bnib on eBay.
I have to budget it beforehand and pretend it's gone because it really is enough to sting.
Yes.
Another thing that makes it tolerable is not habitually raising your standard of living when your income goes up, & being picky/lucky in your reference group.
"income £20, outgo £19s6; result, happiness..."
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OT: I bought a book today just because of the cover. I really don't need more books, I already have a stack waiting to be read (though this will probably be a gift).
But, really, that is a cover which sells a book.
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urple gets it wrong in 91.
82: In "Rationality and Freedom" Amartya Sen has written about how "economic rationality" as described in the economic literature is sociopathic.
Sounds like I should read that book, assuming it's accessible to a utter not-an-economist. Certainly so-called homo economicus is hard-pressed to defend itself.
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Since this is the thread for pause-purchase-play, and this is the blog for encouraging flights of footwear fancy, let me say that Mrs. K-sky and I got new Fluevogs today. Mine aren't on the website for some reason, but hers look like this.
Mine are wingtips in black, grey and lavender suede. Yum!
I also have two pairs of Angels, but from the 90's.
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I don't think psychopathy is to blame for the finance sector. I think a bigger factor is that we as a culture have accepted a lot of ideas and rationalizations that basically justify selfish behavior.
To be honest, I don't think empathy for the "rest of humanity" is worth very much either. Pretty much everyone I know has a decent amount of theoretical empathy. But for me (and for most people I know), this empathy doesn't do much when it runs up against the reality that the rest of humanity is pretty different from me in terms of culture, religion, national identity, personal experience, etc.
empathy doesn't do much when it runs up against the reality that the rest of humanity is pretty different from me
I think that's precisely what's being challenged: this is a poor sort of empathy.
There's something to be said for the notion that we as a culture have accepted and embraced norms that justify utterly selfish behavior. Indeed we have, and it's quite disgusting. That said, things in the first world have been set up in such a way that many people who should not really be worried about their state of well-being feel the need to protect it at all costs. It's a fucking rat race out there.
we as a culture have accepted and embraced norms that justify utterly selfish behavior
As opposed to which other cultures? Put another way, against which cultures, which models of generosity and empathy, are we being judged? Honestly, I'm not arguing with the basic premise that Americans are selfish. But I fear that, as someone noted above, the problem isn't national; it's a trait that's baked into the industrial- and post-industrial capitalist cake.
urple gets it wrong in 91.
Care to elaborate?
the problem isn't national; it's a trait that's baked into the industrial- and post-industrial capitalist cake.
I'd be willing to buy this. Aren't Sweden and Finland and Norway and other such places a little more human, though? We'd have to get into the weeds of just what sort of inhumanity and selfishness we're talking about.
90, 91: Then too, there's the more traditional Thoreauvian approach adopted by war tax resisters, who refuse to earn income above the federal tax threshold. Not an easy choice to make, obviously, and perhaps just as futile, except in terms of setting an example, as earning more and giving more, but it's certainly always held an appeal for me. Given the lack of a social safety net in the US, of course, putting yourself that far outside the bounds of respectable behavior is going to necessarily incur some pretty huge risks and costs.
I've been thinking a lot along these lines w/r/t my friends, the ones who lost their baby in 2010. They're still barely scraping by, and it's hard to know what the best way to support them is, given that I am not in a position to cut them a check for living expenses every month. In any decent social democratic welfare state they could live off student grants until completing degrees (they're both quite intelligent), but because of factors of race & class here, that's not currently possible. When people bum spare change off me on my way to work, I've been getting increasingly frustrated, as it seems like, by rights, I should be tithing as much as I am comfortable (at least) 100% to my friends. This whole maxed-out-healthcare-deductible situation with my recent illness changes things a bit of course. But if I had been more frugal, even given my relatively small current income, I could basically support them for at least 80% of their living expenses. It is a conundrum. They came and visited with the new baby while I was in the hospital. I felt very special and loved.
126: I took you to be saying in 91 and previous that action that helps another individual's life to one's own discomfort wasn't especially useful, since it wouldn't address the systemic problem, the entirety of persons in need in that particular realm. Was that not what you were saying?
Das ist sooooo cool!!
http://www.ignant.de/2011/08/30/terunobu-fujimori/
124: this is a poor sort of empathy.
That's what I'm disagreeing with. I think genuine empathy is harder than most people realize. When you're talking about empathy for the rest of humanity, well, that includes a lot of characters who are not going to be immediately sympathetic. For instance, I see this a lot when professors in the US interact with foreign grad students. Sure, everyone loves the ones who are smart and articulate and already speak fluent English. But for the ones who aren't so well-adjusted and are having problems, I've seen lots of professors basically fail to connect with them. I wouldn't say that anyone in that situation is abnormally lacking in empathy. Rather, I'd say that the amount of empathy that an average person has isn't enough to handle certain situations, and it would be better if organizations recognized this and tried to compensate for it.
I wouldn't say that anyone in that situation is abnormally lacking in empathy.
I think normal/abnormal is doing a lot of work here, and that's what's being interrogated.
I will say I'm not sure what 'organizations recognizing this and trying to compensate for it' means in practice.
Professor-grad student buddy system, like at YMCA camp.
Natilo's sense of humor is intact! Yay!
Didn't Carnegie's views basically boil down to, "if I can't via my cronies call out the Pinkerton's at Homestead, then I'd never be able to engage in so much charity"?
114: I've had an easy life so far. People with kids or student loans would probably find it significantly harder to give at that rate. (If anyone in my area with one of those constraints gives as much or more, it might be good for me to meet you in person so you can shame me into giving more.)
It also helps never to have gotten used to spending the whole thing; I'm only a few years out of college, and only had about a year on a salary before I started giving seriously.
I also expect my future self to have significantly more resources than my present self, and giving now is sort of a braking measure against the hedonic treadmill. The only reliable way to get your future self to give, is to give now.
BTW if anyone wants to start giving a lot but has genuine and material uncertainty about which charity is best (like, even order-of-magnitude uncertainty), don't let that stop you; set up a donor advised fund and pick the charity later. Assuming you're willing to restrict your choice to non-profits.
111
60 is very handy -- I don't think I'd ever seen or worked that out before. Has it a name? ...
I also thought 60 was interesting.
111: Glad you found it helpful. This comment to 142 too, if "interesting" was meant as praise...
I don't know what that argument is called, because I've never heard it made anywhere else in that form. I was just working out to my own satisfaction that you can have a collective action problem with continuous goods (where one defection only hurts the commons a tiny bit), as well as discrete ones.
I would be surprised if it weren't obvious to anyone who's studied decision or game theory, though.
It seemed obvious to me, but anyone who's done math for any significant length of time at an intermediate level has been burned several times by propositions that are "obvious" but false.
BTW I think I got the arithmetic wrong and the gain should have been 9.1.
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Via a not-interesting discussion of Hunger Games to this very interesting short book from Tiqqun
Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl
Very aphoristic and perhaps deliberately obscure to those short on theory, as TC and Tiqqun are wont
The Young-Girl is anyone that prefers to become a commodity him or herself, rather than simply suffering under tyranny.In love, like in the rest of this "society," no one is allowed to not know their own value anymore.
The Young-Girl is the place where the commodity and the human coexist in an apparently non-contradictory manner.
Perhaps I can play along:
In an Empire where "value*" has become entirely social, to be a Revolutionary is to become invaluable. Thus Occupy has no demands, no goals, no program or platform, is a poor Spectacle, is of no fucking good to or for anyone. No future.
*Marxist term of art
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I mean, can anyone understand that I determined years ago that to be an A-list blogger or a good commenter, to make a contribution, was in itself to be part of the problem and reproduce the Commodity Empire? It was intuitive, what can I say, Good Girls and Bad Guys arguing over Schiavo or Romney Cadillacs felt at a moment the opposite of useless, but useful to whom?
Not that a troll adds value or makes a contribution or forwards the debate, even in dialectical disruption. God forbid.
(How's that for Sophism? But I'm deadly serious. Badadum. Ratatat)
OT, except that a thread titled "corporate psychopaths" seems like a perfect place to post this:
Jobseekers forced to clean private homes and offices for nothingWelcome to the new feudalism!
Unpaid jobseekers have been forced to clean private homes and offices for more than a month at a time under government employment schemes...The unpaid work involves cleaning houses and flats in the Sussex area as well as offices. When asked if they were job shadowing, she replied that "they are actually doing" cleaning.... "We find it the best way to see how people work when on jobs," she said. "Most of them, you find that they are eager to get back into the workplace. They are really trying to get back into a job.And how's this for post-satire:
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has previously stated that all mandatory schemes must be for "community benefit". However, under government rules, this can be defined as increasing the profit of organisations where the unemployed are sent to work without pay.Makes sense to me. What's good for GM is good for America, after all.
(This is from the UK, not America, of course. But it's all the same proud Anglo-Saxon tradition.)
Oops, I forgot to quote the basic description of what's going on here:
The Guardian has now discovered through a freedom of information request that a major government contractor, Avanta, has compelled jobseekers to work as unpaid cleaners in houses, flats, offices and council premises under the work programme.
146: well, at least 10% of 0 isn't very burdensome.
60: Did a little bit of generalization of your formula as follows, let:
E=your empathy factor--the utilons multiplier for other people (.1 in the example)
u=the extra* utilons a disadvantaged person derives from a unit of money compared to you (1 in the example),
n=number of people donating and helping (including youreself).
Formula is then
unE - (1-E),
which is basically the total extra utilons derived from the exchange minus your personal empathy "gap". Assuming you can pool enough people, this will be positive when both u and E > 0. And done iteratively would in the limit bring the relative wealth of the givers and getters to the same value (assumes that u gets smaller as the wealth difference decreases).
A slight modification would be to include the fact that organizing and transacting the exchange incurs overhead**---not sure it scales linearly with n, but is probably at least a monotonic increasing function of n, so call it o(n).
So then we have:
unE - o(n) - (1-E).
And for large n (so we can ignore the 1-E personal empathy gap) it will iteratively narrow the gap as long as:
uE > o(n)/n.
*It might seem more natural to do it as a ratio but I did it this way for a potentially clever but actually really stupid reason.
**Overhead costs in running a charity for instance, or government tax collection and program administration expenses.
And, for course, for psychopaths with E
And leaving model world for the real world, for getting any traction in discussions like this it should definitely be considered harmful to start with trying to suss out what is due to brain function, or socialization or what-have-you and instead just look at the observable behavior.
Stormcrow you radical behaviorist, you.
151: [Obligatory Irvine Welsh joke.]
Oops, 151 had a less than sign. Meant to point out that for psychopath with E ≤ 0 no exchange in that direction pays off.
153: Note to start with. Sure, at some point you need to get there (for instance in devising certain kinds of remedies).
But I don't actually think you were serious (but if I had access to your inner state description, I might be more confident in that assertion).
153: And don't worry Tweety, you'll always be a white box to me.
152 is more or less what I would say to 111:
I still don't think it counters 57, because I hear 34 from people who are not willing to openly admit that they count other people's suffering as less than their own.
Basically those people are lying and you have to look at their revealed preferences.
The detailed version is that the mechanism by which people care less about others, is that people think less about others, especially distant others. The more mentally available the suffering of others is, the more you feel you have to do about it. That's why people try not to engage with beggars, and pretend not to notice them; it's not unfeeling neglect until you notice them.
The extreme utilitarian case of caring equally for all 7 billion humans is pretty fanciful.
One thing that always gets lost in these discussions (in the US anyway, and among liberals) is that many people think that various classes of people suffer because they deserve to suffer. It's not indifference but active dislike, hatred, or vengefulness. Many also think that the world is a war of each against all and are definite about the idea that they are only concerned about their own welfare. Some such people also have a group that they feel empathetic with, such as family friends neighbors, coreligionists, etc. But some don't.
My sociopath brother in law, as far as I knew, effectively cares only about himself, but to him his heirs are part of himself in some sense. Nonetheless, he's been harmful to his two children just out of the need to dominate. He's very impulsive and does nice things occasionally when he's in the mood, but mostly when he thinks it will make him look good.
The detailed version is that the mechanism by which people care less about others, is that people think less about others, especially distant others. The more mentally available the suffering of others is, the more you feel you have to do about it. That's why people try not to engage with beggars, and pretend not to notice them; it's not unfeeling neglect until you notice them.
This is nonsense. I ignore public begging because in a modern western country, begging is a public nuisance, and something I think should be discouraged. Nobody, in New Zealand, needs to beg for food. People who are begging publicly are almost certainly mental ill. Giving them money is not going to solve the problem them have, and it will make everyone else's day worse when they (almost certainly) go and buy a bottle of alcohol and get trashed and start being abusive.
In general revealed preferences arguments are pretty daft, and the global poverty version of it that reduces everything to money transfers between well-meaning liberals and the poor is particularly bad. It makes charity, a cold unfeeling thing at best, into the only thing that matters. It is neo-liberalism gone crazy. In particular, it removes the concept of solidarity entirely, and the poor lose all agency.
Nobody, in New Zealand, needs to beg for food
I wouldn't say this is true in the U.S., for what it's worth.
163:I meant ignoring as a strategy for refusing. It's not hard to understand why people refuse to give money to strangers.
