is SBF a sociopath, and should the community have a specific strategy for dealing with sociopaths?
(I think yes. Something like 1% of the population of sociopathic, and I think EA’s utilitarianism attracts sociopaths at a higher level than population baseline. Many sociopaths don’t inherently want to do evil, especially not those attracted to EA. If sociopaths could somehow receive integrity guidance and be excluded from powerful positions, this would limit risk from other sociopaths.)
If you’ve concluded that someone is a “sociopath,” wouldn’t it be better to show them the door? [in quotes because there is no commonly accepted definition of this term as far as I know]
I know that doesn’t protect the broader society from their risk, but it’s not clear to me that sociopath risk reduction makes sense as an EA cause area generally. (Ensuring that the EA community does not enable sociopathic behavior is distinct from that.)
Well, yes, but I was thinking about what to do with sociopaths that are already in the community. If your policy is “we kick out every sociopath we identify”, no sociopath is going to identify themselves to you. I’m not advocating for attracting new sociopaths.
Mind you, I’m assuming here that there are plenty of sociopaths that aren’t that bad, and want to do good, but suffer from the disability of not being able to care emotionally for others. I think it would be good if we could at least keep them out of powerful positions.
This was a pretty uninformed thought of how to deal with sociopaths, but it does feel like a problem worth someone thinking more deeply about.
Maybe some of this is coming from a definitional difference—sociopathy as a “disability of not being able to care emotionally for others” is different from it being akin to, if not an obsolete synonym for, antisocial personality disorder. I don’t think calling people who lack affective empathy, without more, sociopaths is likely to be helpful.
Here’s another question I have:
is SBF a sociopath, and should the community have a specific strategy for dealing with sociopaths?
(I think yes. Something like 1% of the population of sociopathic, and I think EA’s utilitarianism attracts sociopaths at a higher level than population baseline. Many sociopaths don’t inherently want to do evil, especially not those attracted to EA. If sociopaths could somehow receive integrity guidance and be excluded from powerful positions, this would limit risk from other sociopaths.)
If you’ve concluded that someone is a “sociopath,” wouldn’t it be better to show them the door? [in quotes because there is no commonly accepted definition of this term as far as I know]
I know that doesn’t protect the broader society from their risk, but it’s not clear to me that sociopath risk reduction makes sense as an EA cause area generally. (Ensuring that the EA community does not enable sociopathic behavior is distinct from that.)
Well, yes, but I was thinking about what to do with sociopaths that are already in the community. If your policy is “we kick out every sociopath we identify”, no sociopath is going to identify themselves to you. I’m not advocating for attracting new sociopaths.
Mind you, I’m assuming here that there are plenty of sociopaths that aren’t that bad, and want to do good, but suffer from the disability of not being able to care emotionally for others. I think it would be good if we could at least keep them out of powerful positions.
This was a pretty uninformed thought of how to deal with sociopaths, but it does feel like a problem worth someone thinking more deeply about.
Maybe some of this is coming from a definitional difference—sociopathy as a “disability of not being able to care emotionally for others” is different from it being akin to, if not an obsolete synonym for, antisocial personality disorder. I don’t think calling people who lack affective empathy, without more, sociopaths is likely to be helpful.
Ah, I wasn’t aware that that wasn’t the conventional definition. Thanks for the correction.
Still, I think it’s important to somehow manage both sets of people and we can probably do better, though my idea is quite random.