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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

He says 1/25 people in the general population are sociopaths.

It would be interesting to know whether that ratio changes as power increases. Maybe execs are closer to 1/10th because sociopaths would both be attracted to control and their lack of scruples is a great advantage.

Of course, if a lot of people in power are sociopaths, than that's a huge drag on any social system assuming positive intent.

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Sociopaths are violent, the coloquial use is actually reversed from the clinical use. Psychopaths are what most people who use "sociopath" mean. Sociopath != social psychopath. Sociopaths are 100% always violent and zero empathy. Terrifying people. Stab you for your cell phone scary, not politically outmanuever you or work in sales as a profession scary. Psychopathy is the spectrum in question, and it does increase as you get higher power jobs. The recipe for psychopathy would be high cognitive empathy, low emotional empathy, high need to control environment. A low IQ person with those characteristics might be violent or not, and probably adapts to those traits pretty poorly socially speaking. A high IQ person with those characteristics would figure out how to use them to their advantage. It isn't that you have to be a genius psychopath to be successful, it is just that being a genius and removing the constraint of caring about harm to others certainly helps.

Interesting, in the colloquial use, I kind of thought it was exactly the reverse, maybe it's the colloqiual 'psycho' in 'psychopath.' I think most people use this colloquially in the reverse, thinking the 'psychopaths' are the dangerous ones.

Hmm, this article suggests that neither one is a technical DSM term _and_ that it's the reverse of what you say, psychopath is "worse".

http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/sociopath-psycho...

Interesting. Doesn't seem that way from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Sociopathy

You might enjoy reading the Gervais Principle [0], which discusses the social strata in many organizations. One might not agree with it, but it's still interesting reading.

0: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

It's worth warning though that the labels (losers, clueless, psychopaths) of Gervais principle do not correspond to normal usage of those labels. They are just a metaphor of class within the organization.

Not to mention that the analysis ignores selection and self-selection biases in all organizations. Nor the fact that you might be driven but not have the means. Also mixing up short term with long term in "economic liberty".

Yes, the ratio changes. In this book are some statistics:

https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/psychopathcode/details

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