Re:WikiLeaks Volunteer Was a Paid Informant for the FBI
by lifeisstillgood on Thursday June 27, 2013 @11:53AM
(#5952926)
Thank you for a sensible dose of reality in this.
Re:WikiLeaks Volunteer Was a Paid Informant for the FBI
by abraininavat on Thursday June 27, 2013 @01:22PM
(#5953473)
This is a maybe-sensible dose of speculation. Be very skeptical of such speculative diagnoses.
Re:WikiLeaks Volunteer Was a Paid Informant for the FBI
by engtech on Thursday June 27, 2013 @01:54PM
(#5953680)
I'd trust gwern's speculation.
The content here varies from philosophy to poetry to programming to prosaic FAQ. It is everything I felt worth writing for the past few years that didn’t fit somewhere like Wikipedia or was already written - "…I realised that I wanted to read about them what I myself knew. More than this - what only I knew. Deprived of this possibility, I decided to write about them. Hence this book."2 I never expected to write so much, but I discovered that once I had a hammer, nails were everywhere, and that supply creates its own demand3. I believe that someone who has been well-educated will think of something worth writing at least once a week; to a surprising extent, this has been true. (I have added ~130 documents to this repository over the past 3 years.)
Re:WikiLeaks Volunteer Was a Paid Informant for the FBI
by gwern on Thursday June 27, 2013 @02:49PM
(#5954014)
More specifically than that:
You can find the Cleckley book in question online in various places like http://libgen.info/view.php?id=23550 ; even if you aren't that interested in psychopathy per se or judging how well the OP person fits Cleckley's characteristics, it's still a fascinating & worthwhile read, I think (my review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/373031205 ).
The reference for my claim about treatment being inefficacious: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85192141/2006-harris.pdf “Treatment of psychopathy: A review of empirical findings” Harris & Rice 2006
And you can find quotes on other topics from the academic literature in http://lesswrong.com/lw/fzy/notes_on_psychopathy/
I don't think there is any for what he might have. Specifically, I was struck reading the article and your list how perfectly this dude matches Cleckley's _Mask of Sanity_ profiles of psychopaths - no long-term plan, continuous lying and deception of others without any remorse, confabulated explanations, impulse-driven actions, big risks taken for trivial gains, grandiosity, self-inflicted financial problems... The problem being that for personality disorders, there are no cures or treatments (and for psychopathy there's some troubling results that attempts to treat it just made them more dangerous).
> The fact that Assange let this guy into his inner circle doesn't give one a lot of confidence in WikiLeaks.
If it's psychopathy, well, I would note that they are famous for fooling even people who have read detailed accounts of their personal history. Cleckley is not the only person writing on the topic who notes personal astonishment at how they were manipulated by a patient even after having read the patient's file. If forewarned is not forearmed, I cannot blame Assange or the other Wikileakers too much.