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Comment by planetguy | Hacker News Reader

And yet, I've never met anyone who claimed to be one. I've never read an article entitled "Here are what my experiences are like, as a psychopath". There has never been a reddit "IAMA psychopath, AMA".

If it's that common surely there should be more first-person accounts of it? Or at least interviews with psychopaths?

I remain unconvinced that "psychopath" is actually a real thing, rather than a label we stick on people who are really just plain ol' jerks.

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In the end, there are no bright shining lines in psychology. It is likely that psychopaths are on one end of a bell curve rather than being a distinct, binary pathology. Neveretheless, we are free to observe that there is such a dimension and discuss those on the extremes in certain ways using certain terms, just as we do with depression or OCD, both of which have the same characteristic of not having a "bright line", yet clearly existing.

One of the most powerful ways to understand psychology is to see its history, like math's history, as one long attempt to create and refine definitions that let us discuss the field. Except where math is using those definitions to create the field from scratch and the effort is to build up useful systems from the bottom, psychology is trying to understand an incomprehensibly complicated system from the top down and using those definitions to try to break things into comprehensible and consistent pieces in a landscape that is being aggressively fuzzy and resistant to classification.

I do find myself wondering if you have not encountered any apparent interviews or research on psychopaths not because it doesn't exist, but because you've never gone looking for it. There's quite a bit of it. There's still some professional skepticism on the topic of it being something distinct, but that's rather different than the skepticism you seem to be expressing. The phenomena aren't so much what the debate is about as what the best way to slice and dice it up with the definitions are. For them to professionally agree that psychopathy is a real thing carries additional implications beyond just what Merriam-Webster writes in their next dictionary edition, but it's easy for a layman to misread that as an argument about whether the phenomena described by the debated term exists.

So, of course it's a label. But it's used to describe something far more different-than-baseline than just being a plain ol' jerk. In fact, psychopaths are often not jerks at all. "Jerk" is usually used to describe someone openly abrasive and simply randomly hostile, and that's not what a psychopath is. At least, not as an adult. As the article says, they lack emotional empathy but develop a cognitive empathy, and generally learn by adulthood the thing that jerks never do, which is that open hostility really has no advantages to anybody. They learn far, far more subtle manipulation techniques than that. (We all learn how to manipulate; I'm not convinced they are "extra skilled" at that. They simply learn how to do it with one less constraint than most of us.)

http://www.reddit.com/search?q=iama+psychopath

Well, I guess I walked into that one.

Even reading those, though, I'm not convinced that being a psychopath is a real thing -- that is, a difference from normal human behaviour that is one of kind, not of degree.

If you consider the mind to be a series of complicated, inter-connected components, then one consequence of that is sometimes things get disconnected or incorrectly connected.

Sometimes that leads to people who see sound or taste colors, other times you get people that simply cannot empathize or feel zero remorse.

It's a real thing. Sometimes it's by degrees, the connections are weak or malfunctioning, but sometimes there's never been a connection or anything to connect with. They're damaged by definition compared to the "norm".

So what real thing does this kid have, then? Or what _degree_ is it?

He's a brat.

He's also a brat who has learned he can get more of a reaction out of adults by acting in a certain way that they find unsettling, thus reinforcing that behaviour. From the sounds of things, his bad behaviour has been getting reinforced by feelings of specialness ever since he got sent to a psychiatrist at the age of three for being a little more bratty than usual.

At this point, being a brat has got him all the way to being profiled in the New York Times, so I doubt there's much hope for him now. He's internalized "I am a kid who misbehaves, misbehavior makes me special".

You don't know much about children. I was a brat. I mean, I was the worst kid in every class, but I never destroyed toilet seats in uncontrollable day-long rages. The kid's a classic nutjob, and I'd give you 10-to-1 odds that he'll murder his first prostitute before he's 25.

And kids, like one who grew up on my block, who got their kicks dunking people's cats in gasoline and throwing fireworks at them? Was that just being a brat?

No, he was an asshole.

Now your dancing around the wording. This one boy got pleasure bullying the rest of us neighbor kids, and more disturbingly, killing and maiming animals for fun.

This was elementary school since he was shipped off to some special place by middle school. He had two really nice brothers who seemed as relieved as the rest of us when he was gone.

As already recommended in this thread, I urge a viewing of "We Need to Talk about Kevin"

Asshole, brat, jerk ... We all might fall in and out of these fugues as we mature. But, very few of us are evil. You do disservice to those trying to understand these conditions (whether biological or environmental) by minimizing them.

http://www.med.wisc.edu/news-events/news/psychopaths-brains-...

The study showed that psychopaths have reduced connections between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), the part of the brain responsible for sentiments such as empathy and guilt, and the amygdala, which mediates fear and anxiety.