Be a sociopath—or just act like one
economist.com
economist.com
Firstly: Yeah, you should be aware of what things cost and what benefit you get from them. Yeah, be prepared. And, yeah, think about the world in which you live and the other people you share it with. If you really want something, make a plan to get it. The words that describes these are "thoughtful" or "responsible," not "sociopathic." (Disrupting academic conferences and acting obnoxious on airplanes -- that's what we call "childish.")
What bothers me here, though, is that it feeds into this dipshit notion I keep running into that in order to be successful you have to be some kind of self-centered asshole. "Yeah, well Steve jobs would yell at people to their face when they said something he thought was stupid." Yeah, well for every asshole Steve Jobs, there are a million assholes no one wants to have anything to do with.
This woman, for example: she sounds awful. I'm sure she thinks she's some awesome-sauce lion-tamer of the universe, wielding her wiles and "remarkably beautiful breasts" like a ninja and slicing her way through life. The people who have to deal with her on a regular basis probably see right through her, roll their eyes, and try to leave her out of their lives as much as possible because whenever they invite her to a dinner party she makes a huge annoying scene and then steals a bunch of food from the fridge.
Another thing is that there is plenty of evidence that leadership through inspiration and good character, rather than coercion and sociopathic behavior, is effective. It was only yesterday that I ran across this pretty enthralling anecdote about how Elon Musk handled the second launch failure at SpaceX[0].
Your words echo my feelings about this trend of needing to be reckless and bloodthirsty (likely at the expense of others) in order to be successful. Perhaps many people these days are just too cynical to accept that compassion, persistence, and determination can yield success.
[0]http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-with-Elon-Musk
This is the first time I've visited Quora, though I've seen it mentioned here before. People actually use this abomination? Yikes.
I've met many people like this, and some of my friends date women like this. They can be fun and exciting at first. But their charm usually wears off very quickly, once their personal motivations (i.e., a singular focus on their personal gain) becomes clear, and it transforms into something quite repellent.
The sociopath usually doesn't care once you catch onto them. They're already working new people, or focusing their attention on those who are easiest to manipulate.
I find this distast understandable because it leads to two or more populations that have desperate definitions of sociopathy and the resultant definition based arguments and disagreements.
The state of the peer-reviewed literature on this topic is a pathetic shambles. At this point in time, there isn't a "true" sociopath.
I guess people like Steve Jobs don't accomplish their leadership through people liking to follow but through intimidation. Both things can work, in particular if you are as successful as Steve Jobs but the former probably works better most of the times.
1. Disregard unspoken rules, but not the small ones like not donating at the museum, think more rules like "you just can't enter this industry", "you can't just schedule a meeting with that CEO". Those can have an immense ROI, while the petty ones may get you a punch to the face.
2. You should also live in the best place possible for your budget - negotiate down to the last dollar, but not for some shi%%y apartment in some shi%%y ghetto.
3. Rule 3 seems accurate - if you can't do it on your own, take some drugs :-).
4. A few prepared anecdotes is short sighted - you should learn human psychology and the art of social manipulation for the best results.
5. Or get them from the inside - blend in, build up support, then announce your true intentions (aka the dictator way).
Not sure if this is a good example. I've unsuccessfully proposed meetings with someone above me from a different department. Maybe I should've created Outlook invitations? ;)
Also, since you've been rejected, why not start your own rejection therapy - http://www.entresting.com/blog/100-days-of-rejection-therapy...
> http://www.entresting.com/blog/100-days-of-rejection-therapy...
Yeah I know it, saw some Videos of it. Just awesome, one should really apply that stuff in Business life
To give an example, I personally don't say prepared anecdotes and eat extra food at parties. I have fun at parties and engage people in enjoyable conversations. When I meet new people I'm warm and friendly and I make an effort to form genuine connections. As a consequence, people like me and I have close friends who love me and enjoy my company. You can't look at all the fun and laughter and human warmth I have in my life and tell me I should trade it all in for some snack food and a more calculated image. That is completely stupid. Only someone who cannot enjoy human company should think like that, and those people should be pitied not admired.
Read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and "Never Eat Alone". This be selfish crap is both evil, and harmful to your social-standing, not to mention ineffective.
No one is an island, so reach out to people and give as much of yourself to others as you can. Give unconditionally and don't keep score. Empower and inform others, and seek out the same from people. Life is not a zero-sum game: whole of society is better for it when you help just one person.
Now _that_ is evil.
But Ayn Rand said that enforced altruism is the root of evil!
Steve Jobs is the perfect example. Steve was a classic sociopath. He would show up to important meetings in jean shorts and prop his dirty, bare feet up on the table. He exploited a loophole in California law that allowed him to drive without license plates. He was regularly abusive to his employees, not out of malice, but to achieve his personal goals related to perfection and execution. It's perfectly justified to both revile and admire him.
'How to apply [rule #1] to your own life: Ignore "suggested donation" pleas at museums, always help yourself to more food and drinks at dinner parties and recline your seat all the way back when flying."'
I wish this article were meant as satire, but I don't think it is.
First, fully agree with the sentiment of the other commenters. I think the article glorifies and glamorizes behavior that shouldn't be encouraged and is, as someone put it, evolutionarily disadvantageous (game theory at play - see Dawkins / The Selfish Gene, etc. ;)
The best thing I got out of the article, though, is actually the behavior descriptions and character identification. We should be all be aware that there are sociopaths out there and be cognizant of the damage they can cause to our start-ups and personal lives.
I recently (and, thankfully briefly) dated a woman who fits the description and behavior patterns frighteningly to a T. Not a laywer, but a someone pretty deeply embedded in Silicon Valley. Charming, witty, but emotionless and hugely self-aggrandizing (among other of the noted behaviors...)
I'm sure people like that can be found in all parts of society, but part of me wonders whether there's a part of the tech / Silicon Valley culture that attracts sociopaths -- lots of awkward nerds susceptible to charm overload, easy access to a mouthpiece and validation feedback loop through Twitter ("I have 50k followers - I'm clearly a huge deal"), an entrepreneurial culture that gives leeway to potentially hand-wavey careers ("I'm starting a company"), etc.
So some questions - what do we do with with the "high functioning" sociopaths that we come across? What's their place? Are they to be shunned? Are they to be acknowledged & "noted" (i.e. as warning signs) but otherwise left in place? What if you find you've hired one? What if you find you're living with one? Etc.
Curious to hear thoughts and opinions...
So given that a sociapath is smart enough, and that your evolutionary argument is correct, "high functioning sociapaths" should effectively behave social. He just uses different brain regions to accomplish the same goal I guess.
She has no incentive not to lie (moral guilt) and all the incentive to embellish (profit).
The article could be rewritten with one sentence: "don't be naive".
Yes, on the ground that it has no objective definition. Anyone can be assigned the label based on the right choice of anecdotes.
It will be interesting to see how neuroscience deals with such labels, as more objective causes for human behavior are matched up with effects, over the coming decades as psychological interpretations are finally set aside.
It has a precise psychiatric definition, based on the results of a particular psychometric assessment (PCL-R). Whether this qualifies as "objective" to satisfy a CS/math practitioner, I'm not sure, but it does have a well defined set of criteria.
> It has a precise psychiatric definition ...
Surely you are aware that "psychiatric definition" is a contradiction in terms? That the DSM consists entirely of lists of symptoms, and no causes, which allows a great deal of latitude in diagnosis?
> Whether this qualifies as "objective", I'm not sure, but it does have a well defined set of criteria.
Perhaps you should read the controversy surrounding the just-released DSM-5, in which new conditions were added by -- clinical research? -- no, by people voting in secret. The outcome was so embarrassing that the director of the NIMH has reluctantly decided to abandon the DSM as a source for science (it will remain as a diagnostic guide).
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...
A quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity ... Patients with mental disorders deserve better."
Also, read the history of Asperger Syndrome -- once believed to be a rare condition, then its inclusion in DSM-IV resulted in an epidemic of false diagnoses, then reluctantly removed from DSM-5.
Your comments suggest that different qualified practitioners can use the DSM to arrive as the same diagnosis, given the same symptom set. But this has never been true and is not true now. Tom Widiger, who served as head of research for DSM-IV, says "There are lots of studies which show that clinicians diagnose most of their patients with one particular disorder and really don't systematically assess for other disorders. They have a bias in reference to the disorder that they are especially interested in treating and believe that most of their patients have."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist
There are definitely imperfections in the way psychiatric disorders are defined and diagnosed. Most of the difficulties happen in the edge cases. A person who scores a 0 or a "perfect 40" on the PCL is a pretty clear diagnosis.
Interestingly, the signature of sociopathy (aka psychopathy) appears to have an organic basis - it can be observed via functional MRI. See, for example, the article about Dr Kent Kiehl in the New Yorker.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/10/081110fa_fact_...
If psychology were a science, there would be precisely one catalog of mental conditions, not as many as there are people who care to publish their own list. And the catalog would list causes as well as effects, something famously absent in modern psychological practice.
> There are definitely imperfections in the way psychiatric disorders are defined and diagnosed
Imperfections? Psychiatrists and psychologists famously and consistently cannot agree on diagnoses, when confronted by the same subjects. The reason is that no one knows what causes these conditions, which makes psychological clinical practice an exercise in symptomatic relief.
> Most of the difficulties happen in the edge cases.
Asperger Syndrome was removed from DSM-5 because all the cases were edge cases -- the diagnosis had no objective validity whatsoever. This pattern is true for many similar conditions. Tom Widiger, who served as head of research for DSM-IV, says "There are lots of studies which show that clinicians diagnose most of their patients with one particular disorder and really don't systematically assess for other disorders. They have a bias in reference to the disorder that they are especially interested in treating and believe that most of their patients have."
> Interestingly, the signature of sociopathy (aka psychopathy) appears to have an organic basis - it can be observed via functional MRI.
If the work were more advanced (if it were anything more than a correlation), we might consider removing sociopathy from the domain of psychology and give it to neuroscience. But we won't get away with that -- psychologists are notoriously protective of their turf.
Also, the "signature" to which you refer is a correlation, not a cause-effect relationship, it isn't definitive and it doesn't identify a source for the condition.
And finally, present evidence suggests that all serious mental conditions are ultimately organic, so describing them as having an organic basis is sort of self-evident.
It has been extensively studied in part because it's such an insidious personality disorder that many high-functioning people have to varying degrees, and the depth of psychological research on the topic very quickly shows how wrong mjfl's comments are. There is definitely a flippant, pop-psych use of the word 'sociopath', but it doesn't really shed much light on the actual phenomenon.
The cause of that condition we informally call "sociopathy" won't be uncovered by psychiatry or psychology. For that, we need neuroscience. And to date neuroscience isn't ready to shoulder the load.
> There is definitely a flippant, pop-psych use of the word 'sociopath', but it doesn't really shed much light on the actual phenomenon.
The absence of science in psychiatry and psychology should prevent anyone from seriously arguing that any imaginable use of the word "sociopath" is morally or ethically wrong. This may change in the future, but at the moment, such terms have no objective definition.
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry @ http://www.amazon.ca/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-Industry/dp...
Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight @ http://www.amazon.ca/Confessions-Sociopath-Spent-Hiding-Plai...
I highly recommend both of these, since they are a very interesting read.
If this is taken to extreme, it's actually very bad. Leaders who don't care for their followers cause a lot of anguish. And how will polite society fare if nobody cares how anyone else feels? So if society needs 90% of people to be self conscious and follow norms, are they all the suckers?
Yes, this is called being a sociopath.
> How to apply [rule #1 ]to your own life: Ignore "suggested donation" pleas at museums, always help yourself to more food and drinks at dinner parties and recline your seat all the way back when flying."
I wish this article were meant as satire, but I don't think it is.
Hopefully we'll get some better diagnostic criteria in the future so that we can get away from these pop-culture articles that attribute "sociopathy" to everyone who just happens to be a dick.
Unfortunately the words "psycho" & "psychopath" are close to "psychotic", but very different forms of illness. Most people with psychotic illnesses pose little or no risk to others.
This happens a lot with psychiatric terms. Addiction and *aholic are often used for "really liking something"; schizophrenic is a really nice word for 'in two minds' and a lousy word for the illness; and many examples.
If she wants that label (which has become really popular over the past few years), she can shop around until she finds a psychologist willing to give her the diagnosis she wants. Of course she pays them for their time. (Not to mention, antisocial behavior + narcicissm = not a stretch.)
It's not like her publisher or news organizations are going to show any skepticism.
On one hand, you have to discount everything the author says as she makes it very clear that she is remorseless about lying to her own advantage. On the other hand, as an entrepreneur, I've done business with folks that I think could be similarly diagnosed. Anybody who isn't a sociopath needs to be aware that the business world encourages sociopaths. Knowing how they think and how they see the world can possibly help you avoid being manipulated by them.
Most of them are very, very prone to addictions and substance abuse and spend a lot of time getting money for that. They follow the path of least resistance often in a surprisingly logically and often lazy way. Their greatest skill is finding the weakest prey. They target very emotionally vulnerable people and manipulate them. Think of the oxycodone addict conning grandmothers or mooching after their "romantic" partners and basically living a parasitic lifestyle.
If the rules are not consistent, why so obsessively stand up for them?
"How to apply to your own life: When in need, seek sociopathic counsel," do you really think the author means that? sociopaths are known for their deceit and predatory nature.