This.
I think it's important to emphasize that those "good explanations" are usually lies, as lies are at the foundation of all the harm that psychopaths cause.
Normal people avoid lying if possible, psychopaths on the other hand are master liars and they make use of lies just whenever a lie serves them better than the truth.
The manipulation tactics that psychopaths use to reach their goals are also just based on lies. You can't be manipulated if you don't believe the lies. Of course psychopaths will primarily serve you lies that you want to believe but that doesn't make them more truthful.
Bottom line, if you want to stay safe from psychopaths, keep it like Reagan: "Trust but verify". And at the first sign of things not adding up, end the relationship and any contact.
It still throws me off, you have to basically vet or ignore any factual statement they make because it might either not have any correlation with reality at all or, if it is a statement about their intentions and feelings, they will not remember what they said in the future anyway and say they always had the new opinion.
This also happens with personality-disordered people (particularly, Narcissists, and especially the Borderline PD people I know . . . they SEEM manipulative, and they technically are, but they're manipulating for a reason that's usually ego-defensive).
Psychopaths, on the other hand, will lie for no damn reason at all that makes any sense to a sane person.
How about 'at the first proof of things not adding up'? Verification works both ways. If an isolated incident smells funny but checks out on investigation then maybe it was just a misinterpretation.
Psychopathy is neither an umbrella disorder nor a specific disorder. Psychopathy is, like "insanity," a term used by laypeople. The reason why we use antisocial personality disorder, or unspecified personality disorder, or other similar clinical terms to refer to some of the qualities on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist is exactly because of the (correct) point you're making here:
> It's frustrating how so many people redefine "psychopath" just to make a stronger statement about someone they don't like. When everyone is a "psychopath", no one is. If the word is supposed to mean something, it needs a narrower definition.
Unfortunately, you're right, this nonsense precluded Hare's term from ever being useful, much like the term "heart attack" is not actually a useful medical diagnosis because it's been co-opted by the public. Which brings me to my next points:
> In real life, I met 2 people I would bet are psychopaths, in the clinical meaning of the word.
There is no clinical meaning of the word, because it's not a clinical term. Further, this description, while occupying a place in the popular zeitgeist of psychopathy, is incorrect:
> A real psychopath is something like a spider in a human skin, with very good human-role-playing abilities. Your first experience is most likely going to be "this is a charming person". Only after longer interaction you will unconsciously start noticing patterns that feel somehow weird. But when you express doubt, there is always a good explanation and you will feel guilty for doubting afterwards. Only when they attack you, you will find yourself in a conflict with a non-human intelligence. And then you know that if you try to explain to someone who didn't have the same experience, they will never understand.
Let's suppose you're referring to someone with a diagnosable disorder, such as antisocial personality disorder. The literature does not show that any such disorder uniformly presents with exceptional charisma, nor any of the other exciting qualities usually lumped in with psychopathy, like high intelligence. Popular depiction in the media and outright confirmation bias have encouraged this description, but it doesn't match with how most people meeting the bar for the diagnosable disorders closest to Hare's "psychopathy" actually are.
> Psychopaths seem like masters of manipulation, so it makes sense to ask why this doesn't translate into a huge evolutionary advantage: why they don't already make 100% of the population. But it seems like an important part of their charm is being unknown. When you meet your first psychopath, they can manipulate you as they wish, because you have no idea what you are interacting with. Meet the second or the third one, however, and you have a chance to recognize the pattern. So when they exceed some fraction of the population, normies probably learn to recognize them and start killing them. But when they become rare again, they again get the advantage of being unknown.
Again, none of this has a basis in clinical literature. Sometimes they are exceptionally good at manipulation, but in many cases their criminal behavior enjoys prolonged success because of chance circumstances, like bureaucratic incompetence in local law enforcement (e.g. not following up on reports of unsettling behavior by several neighbors).
Here's the overarching point: trying to rigorously define sociopathy or psychopathy in the clinical context is doomed to failure. It's even more doomed if you use descriptions like "a spider in a human's skin." There are two problems here:
1. Trying to formalize colloquial terminology with clinical definitions when they have been so overloaded by popular representation has the side effect of allowing ad hominem attacks that arbitrarily use the word to be somewhat legitimized, and
2. It does a disservice to people with actual diagnosable disorders people associate with sociopathy, who do not universally present with the qualities you have listed here. It also demonizes them, especially if they are socially inept and nonviolent.
I guess I am fortunate that I only met one. Hope I never meet another one.
There are many mental disorders. Psychopathy is just one of them. Not every crazy person is a psychopath; not everyone who harms others is a psychopath. Psychopathy is a specific type of a disorder, not an umbrella term for "everything I dislike".
The best book I found on this topic is "The Psychopath Code" by Pieter Hintjens.
In real life, I met 2 people I would bet are psychopaths, in the clinical meaning of the word. I won't try to provide a short description, because short descriptions are not good enough to explain; if you didn't have the same kind of experience, you would probably just round the words to something else you are already familiar with.
A real psychopath is something like a spider in a human skin, with very good human-role-playing abilities. Your first experience is most likely going to be "this is a charming person". Only after longer interaction you will unconsciously start noticing patterns that feel somehow weird. But when you express doubt, there is always a good explanation and you will feel guilty for doubting afterwards. Only when they attack you, you will find yourself in a conflict with a non-human intelligence. And then you know that if you try to explain to someone who didn't have the same experience, they will never understand.
Psychopaths seem like masters of manipulation, so it makes sense to ask why this doesn't translate into a huge evolutionary advantage: why they don't already make 100% of the population. But it seems like an important part of their charm is being unknown. When you meet your first psychopath, they can manipulate you as they wish, because you have no idea what you are interacting with. Meet the second or the third one, however, and you have a chance to recognize the pattern. So when they exceed some fraction of the population, normies probably learn to recognize them and start killing them. But when they become rare again, they again get the advantage of being unknown.
A psychopath is simply a person who only has a certain subset of human emotions. That doesn't define what they will do; just like being a neurotypical humans does not define how one behaves. It just makes certain predatory behaviors more likely, because it removes some reasons not to do them (such as empathy) and adds some skills, such as being a better liar (humans are usually quite bad at lying, because they unconsciously display little signs of their emotions; but this does not happen when you simply do not have that kind of emotion).