One of the patterns that interests me a lot is supernormal stimulus. An organism is evolved to deal with a stimulus in a certain range, and something comes along that is so far outside it that things break.

The classic example is Niko Tinbergen, who created models of fish that were rounder and redder than the real fish, who would ignore other real fish and focus on the models. The human ability to refine things produces a lot of good examples. Like how refined sugar influences us so much that it ends up in most processed foods. Or how refining the coca leaf produces addicts.

My theory with sociopaths is that giving no fucks what others think allows them to be unnaturally confident. Since we often evaluate others by how confident they are, we are easily taken in by people with supernormal confidence. That gives us the reality distortion field (as social primates, our main reality is social) and "drinking the kool-aid". Which is a metaphor Jobs used for how he wanted people to react to the Mac, but the metaphor is about a cult whose charismatic leaders led them to mass suicide. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown#Deaths_in_Jonestown

Wow. That is by far the most realistic and rational hypothesis for this phenomenon I've heard. It's simple, elegant, and seems testable. Thanks!

I think this may also offer some explanation for the appeal of the utterly absurd, like flat Earth or galactic emperor Xenu. Its supernormally ridiculous, which invokes a sense of fascination.

In any case if this is true I think this effect is being weaponized today to an unprecedented degree.

High profile sociopaths are extreme outliers, as most sociopaths burn through their social connections well before becoming competent enough at social manipulation and finding enough people that are well-off enough to maintain a parasitic life.

Also as a side note, within Scientology you don't actually learn about the Xenu shit until you're way too deep, financially and/or time commitment-wise, to pull out.

> Also as a side note, within Scientology you don't actually learn about the Xenu shit until you're way too deep, financially and/or time commitment-wise, to pull out.

It seems they’ve taken a page out of Masonry or mystery religions. Only higher level “initiates” receive the real wisdom.

The question is, are the high level initiates plain psychopaths?

Or are they just addicted to the free pussy (or dick), drugs, and money that comes with forcing others to join the cult?

Esoteric religion as an intellectual Ponzi scheme...

Nice. Although I am beginning to suspect that everything is to a greater or lesser degree a Ponzi Scheme in the long run due to thermodynamics. ;-)

Sometimes I wonder if it's better for a religion to have strange beliefs:

1a) It's a better show of commitment to the group if you are willing to stand up and say the absurd on behalf of the group. It's saying that membership in the group matters more to you than the potential loss of face. You could expect to be able to rely on such a person to be loyal to the group.

1b) It's also a better show of group commitment if someone is motivated enough to try to convince themselves of something very difficult to believe.

2) Groups espousing weird beliefs will face ostracism, and that will bind them more to each other. They will spend more time with each other away from outsiders, developing their belief system further with even less sanity checking from the outside.

Yeah. If I were to cast it into this framework, you could look at fundamentalist systems of thought as delivering a supernormal sense of understanding. Which causes supernormal confidence, making their views easier to spread.

An actual universe doesn't pack well into the 3 pounds of meat we use for thinking. A system of thought that lets us discard most natural ambiguity and nuance would be unnaturally comfortable. I think this is true both for obvious fundamentalism (e.g., Bible thumpers) and for single-explanation frameworks of thought. Freudianism, Marxism, and capitalism all have groups that are effectively fundamentalist adherents. And I think there's a species of Bitcoin fanatic that is also effectively fundamentalist.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this appears to be on the rise at the same time the Internet has brought us into contact with all the information and all the people.

> […] "drinking the kool-aid". Which is a metaphor Jobs used for how he wanted people to react to the Mac […]

Google is showing me nothing for this. Do you have a citation?

Quoted here: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/01/business/la-fi-tn-ho...

Original source is listed as this book from Baylor University Press: http://www.baylorpress.com/Book/382/Appletopia.html

I don't know about Holmes (other than having read Carreyrou's book) but I've been around pathological, charismatic narcissists enough to be as fascinated as you at their ability to lie to the face of very accomplished people and be completely believed. It's almost like executives need a training course in spotting and dealing with them.

But not the actual specialists.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/27/opinion/dont-blame-silico...

my outsiders view of management training is that they work so hard at cultivating confidence that they start thinking that confidence, not competence, is what they need to select for in roles outside of leadership.

As far as I can tell, "leader types" are far more vulnerable to confident people than the rest of us because of this.

I also think falling for this is implicit in the notion of the MBA. Previously, management was mainly company founders, founder families, and people who had come up through the ranks. That is, all people who spent years learning the specifics of the business. But the theory of the MBA is there's some universal set of "business skills" that makes actually understanding the business domain irrelevant.

In practice, I think this means falling back on a limited sort of finance understanding and some generic notions of top-down business process. There's not much there, so they make up for it by leaning hard into their human instincts and skills.

Unfortunately, that leads to many problems, including over-trusting people who present well and seem confident.

The MBA is the Western version of the Soviet "apparatchik." This term denoted a party functionary educated in party ideology who was promoted and transferred around to different posts where they would lead things they did not actually understand.

I personally think the MBA system is a big step up from just choosing leaders based on how closely related to a powerful person they are. (I mean, I understand there is a lot of overlap between the two... I'm just saying that the MBA system is a step forward, not that it's good)

Unfortunately I think the MBA enables a power-and-politics system. If people have to work their way up and learn an industry, competence and a long-term focus are more rewarded than if a credential makes you a supposedly universal expert.

The old quote “The hardest thing to fake is sincerity”.

Or - the easiest person to fool is yourself.

A lot of communication is non-verbal. A person evaluating a statement in context and expecting to find some physical and culturally-instilled signs of self-doubt in their interlocutor may unconsciously be strongly pushed to conclude that the person is telling the truth when not finding those signs, even if the reason that those aspects of communication are absent is because the person is incapable of producing them.

Psychopaths are parasites - one could make the argument that most of human culture, including our marriage traditions, religions, moral codes of conduct, sense of humor, and even fashion, are evolutionary attempts to thwart them.

How would that argument go? Is it just that setting up social rules makes it easy to spot when people don’t follow them?

Yeah, exactly. Psychopaths don't empathize, so they don't understand why social conventions exist, so they sometimes get it wrong and something seems "off". When someone seems "off" you don't trust them.

Unfortunately, what you described applies to people on the spectrum too.

But I think the key is the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths. Sociopaths are usually really good at using their charisma to move up:

>Psychopaths are dangerous. They’re violent and cruel, and oftentimes downright sinister. They show no remorse for their actions, usually because of a lesion on a part of their brain responsible for fear and judgment, known as the amygdala. Psychopaths commit crimes in cold blood. They crave control and impulsivity, possess a predatory instinct, and attack proactively rather than as a reaction to confrontation: A 2002 study found that 93.3 percent of the psychopathic homicides were instrumental in nature (meaning they were more or less planned), compared with 48.4 percent of the homicides by people who weren’t psychopaths.

>Sociopaths are a different breed. They, too, may suffer from their mental illness as a result of lesioned brain regions. Upbringing may also play a larger role in a child becoming a sociopath versus those that are diagnosed as psychopaths, or the slide into dementia on the other end of the spectrum. Sociopathic behavior is manifested as conniving and deceitful, despite an outward appearance of trustworthiness or sincerity. Sociopaths are often pathological liars. They are manipulative and lack the ability to judge the morality of a situation, but not because they lack a moral compass; rather, their existing moral compass is greatly (yet not always dangerously) skewed. Pemment, for one, says this could point to both a social and neurological component.

source:reddit

AFIAK sociopathy is now more or less regarded as just non violent psychopathy. Most psychopaths are not violent.

People with autism also sometimes seem "off" though.

Yeah, and that's a big part of why (high functioning)autism is such a serious disability in the first place. I'm really glad that society is starting to recognize and be aware of it so that autistic individuals can get a pass in this area.

Problem is that also ensnares sincere people on the autistic spectrum, recent immigrants, and anyone else different for any reason.

Yeah, and it's very much a moving target. It's a tough thing.

Yes. And using a community to contain them or alert you.

You make an interesting observation. I wonder if there are any doomsday stories of an AI that conquers humanity via psychopathic persuasion rather than conventional weapons.

This is by far the most likely scenario.

I remember reading that a lot of CEOs and generally people in leadership positions have psychopathic traits. This probably is an asset if it's balanced by other traits.

I'd take those articles with a huge grain of salt. How could you distinguish a CEO with the courage to make an unpopular choice (e.g. layoff 1/3 of the workforce to save the company) -vs- a psychopath who does it to inflict suffering on others or to just establish dominance? How do you even measure psychopathic traits without defining exactly what "psychopathy" means and a rational ethic by which to judge the non-psychopaths (i.e. the "control group" or standard of normal)? Moreover, motive is not irrelevant to the question and not only is it not measurable by researchers, most people don't even know their own subconscious motives.

I'd bet if you dug into the research what you'd find is the research really shows that psychologists who study such things do not have the character/psychology of those who become CEOs, not that they are psychopaths.

Huh? You just give the ceos a psychopath exam.

No. I reject the methodology of the psychologists who do these types of studies.

Why?

Because you can't define pathology (deviation from a norm) without defining the norm. Modern psychologists dodge this question and implicitly assume various generally accepted moral standards and tenents (a form of circular reasoning) by which they condemn those who don't follow it. It is not science and to make it a science the psychologists should be seeking a rational basis to define ethics. Nobody has done this and until they do psychology will remain a pre-science like alchemy.

In addition, it would also be supremely discriminating if the "Psychopath exam" would, for example, consistently score Asians lower.

That is, a psychological or culturally acquired trait should not be used against an individual without a proof that it actually affects his behavior. You are in essence denying that the person has any agency and it's utterly incapable of learning and acting on society's moral code, which I bet is false for the vast majority of people with sociopathic tendencies.