"I don't know what you call this emotion, but it's what people look like just before you stab them."
I think he was trolling the shrink.
Teach me of this thing you humans call 'exsanguination'.
My thing is, why should people be rewarded just for a basic minimum of human behavior? Also, how exactly are these rewards to be extended through a psychopath's life? Candy isn't going to cut it at some point.
3: The latter seems problematic--hopefully they'll internalize it somehow?--but the answer to the former is that the alternative is worse.
Maybe everybody in America is getting candy for not throwing urine on others and that's why we have so much diabetes. Be careful standing next to skinny people, just in case.
I mean, I think they're just trying to make things better at later institutions that the individual is in and out of. In the article, the success story is still pretty grim.
I mean, paying off barbarians is a time-honored strategy, but at some point genocide is just more efficient.
That such a genocide might have caught me too is just a bonus, really.
Once you pay the pissgeld, you'll never get rid of the piss.
It's a kidney stone atop the national urethra.
6: That seems harsh; near the middle where they talk with the VIP club kid, they explicitly connect the dots between accumulating rewards in the program with how you accumulate rewards on the outside. The kid even spontaneously offers up a cook to waiter example of promotion on the outside.
3: I think the goal is to get them over the hump of acting on impulse while they're young and emotional. As they age, they'll buy into the system -- and there are lots of areas where a lack of empathy can be an advantage.
I suspect that the funeral home director from the article's end can put on a better, more focused service by treating it as a show than many of us could, with the life inextricable from the ceremony.
My thing is, why should people be rewarded just for a basic minimum of human behavior?
Like a paycheck every two weeks just for showing up at work? This is how the world works, largely.
3: I think the idea is to get them to be able to mimic the behavior of decent people so that they will be able to fit into society, grow and learn, and eventually be elected president.
Total abstinence from throwing urine is unrealistic for most people. They should just try to encourage them to only spray urine on people in the context of a loving relationship or commercial transaction.
13: That explains the wide ties and serial killing, obviously.
That Jon Ronson psychopath book had an interview with some CEO where the impression you were clearly were supposed to get was that he was definitely a psychopath but one where he'd clued into how to make the world give him rewards for interacting with it, and so hadn't ever ended up physically injuring people. But I was kind of unimpressed by the rigor of the book, so who knows.
12: Do lawyers get bonuses for not stabbing people? I don't.
How many people have you stabbed since they dropped the bonus?
I get paid contingent on not stabbing people, and I bet you do too. You don't think of it as part of your duties at work, because it's pretty easy (less so for lawyers, of course, because we have to work with other lawyers), but not stabbing/strangling/physically threatening people is an implicit but required part of most job descriptions.
If you lose you job for stabbing somebody, they still probably have to pay you for accumulated vacation days. That's probably why there are limits on how many you can accumulate. So you can't stab somebody and still have three months of salary coming to you.
And that contingency represents possibility of punishment, not reward. You don't get paid for being good. You get paid for doing your job, and get fired for stabbing people.
I'm torn. On the one hand, I understand the "get them used to mimicking normal behavior, and they'll be able to get by even though they're unable to feel empathy" idea.
On the other hand, that just means they'll grow up to republicans, so doesn't it make more sense to keep them institutionalized so they can do less harm?
Also, how exactly are these rewards to be extended through a psychopath's life? Candy isn't going to cut it at some point.
This seems to be the key question -- is this "treatment", or just palliative care that's going to stop. The article touches on this (maybe it does more, I didn't make it all the way through) when it talks about re-offending rates, but to a certain extent that would seem to conflate lack of offending and improved success at not getting caught.
I think the goal is to get them over the hump of acting on impulse while they're young and emotional. As they age, they'll buy into the system -- and there are lots of areas where a lack of empathy can be an advantage.
Is that an unalloyed good thing, though? I mean, I'm not 100% sure having psychopaths gainfully employed running mining companies with dodgy safety records and ponzi schemes is all that much better than having them locked up.
Genocide, AL. Everyone sees the light eventually.
Ginger is already with me, he just doesn't know it yet.
Also, how exactly are these rewards to be extended through a psychopath's life?
You could elect them President of the United States of America?
I had this whole 100th-comment reveal planned. The internet sucks because of people like you.
Some kids save rewards for soda pop; others, for gen pop.
99.999% of the time Anthony Weiner didn't send pictures of his penis to minors, but he gets punished for the .001% failure.
Not to go all libertarian here, but when you look at the people who actually do the locking up, and think about how the process for it would work for someone who's medically a psychopath but hasn't committed any serious crimes, I don't think you and I would like the outcomes if there was a system for that in the world as it is.
Applying strict constructionism to job descriptions would lead to some interesting outcomes. "No stabbing people? Whatever, Mr. penumbra and emanation."
32: If there's one thing I remember from various Batman movies and cartoons, it's that the "Arkham Asylum" concept just doesn't work for shit.
I'm trying to figure out how, or if, this article is reconciling its citing of research about psychopathy being ingrained from birth with its data about how many of the kids in the program have been severely abuse. I feel like even they were selected as worst-of-the-worst, that doesn't mean they're majority psychopaths, doesn't mean the program is specifically targeting psychopathy as opposed to the vicious cycles brought on by trauma and neglect.
An old friend of mine is actually a therapist at one of the institutions mentioned. His stories are super harrowing and prognoses are grim for the worst cases. They do seem to approach it exactly like the article mentions: these kids are missing a chunk of their brains, and we're going to lob every possible treatment and therapy available at them in hopes that something moves them towards being able to function in society.
Not that I'm taking this personally or anything since the only obvious irredeemably awful person in the family is my ex, but lots of kids are missing brain chunks. I do wonder sometimes if we're going to focus on easier cases like my children or harder ones like these. It's hard to believe there will be coverage for all of it, maybe not for any of it.
It's probably safer to assume all of it that doesn't go for tax cuts to the 1% will go for pharmaceutical treatment.
There's a huge problem in that interventions that ultimately save money somewhere don't necessarily get credit for it. That is, violent crime is terribly expensive. Police are expensive, courts are expensive, prison is expensive. So a whole lot of money spent on a budding psychopath is likely to be a financial profit if it keeps them from being a criminal in future, but there's no obvious way to track that profit or return it from the criminal justice system to the provision of mental health.
The whole concept of universal public education is going to have a similar problem.
I know 3 is trolling, but it is frightfully common. Depressing.
I've heard often that the key to being a high-functioning autistic person is to understand and perform the rituals (sociability, small-talk, paying close but not creepy attention) that neurotypical people do more or less automatically. Many people on the spectrum learn it on their own or are taught how to do it.
Of course, psychopaths who can do it are a different kettle of fish from someone on the autism spectrum, since autism != psychopathy. Essentially if you train psychopaths to act normal (and they actually aren't) you are producing Hannibal Lectors. Or, to switch genres, you create a Turing Machine that seems human but is planning to kill us all (and serve us up with fava beans).
Humans are odd; the prospect of being eaten doesn't bother them much, but that they would be served with fava beans horrifies them.
Fava fav is always cooked with a clock on top so you know when he's done.
Essentially if you train psychopaths to act normal (and they actually aren't) you are producing Hannibal Lectors
I always knew teaching them to read was a bad idea.
This reminds me that I read somewhere that a lot of psychopaths slow down and stop getting into trouble in their 40s, like it just took them a long time to work out that their horrible behaviour was the cause of their problems.
So they're like all children, just four times slower.
44: I'm for a cannibalism option on the organ donor form. Let people eat my dick when I'm gone. If it makes them happy I don't have a problem with it.
What if people like eating dicks so much that there isn't enough of a supply of donor dicks?
Do they let you eat the removed kidney after a transplant?
47 etc.: that's true of most people, though; very little crime is committed by people once they're out of their 30s, or so I recall from a class 15 years ago. Which is why one reason life sentences are so wasteful.
The problem is that not all dicks are compatible with all dick-eaters, and in particular, people often want to donate or eat the dicks of their immediate relatives. Complicated math is then required to optimize the dicks with the widest appeal and help provide dicks to the choosiest eaters, often involving a chain so that donors who are only moved to donate to a near relative can be convinced to participate in a chain such that their near relative receives a meal.
I used to comfort my crying children with the titular song in this post: "Psycho baby, qu'est-ce que c'est ..."
Also did Baby of Constant Sorrow.
Complicated math is then required to optimize the dicks with the widest appeal and help provide dicks to the choosiest eaters, often involving a chain so that donors who are only moved to donate to a near relative can be convinced to participate in a chain such that their near relative receives a meal.
Collectivist! Let the magic of the market liberate posthumous dick-eating.