psychopaths disproportionately have utilitarian intuitions, so we should expect communities with a lot of utilitarians to have a disproportionate number of psychopaths relative to the rest of the population.
From psychopaths disproportionately having utilitarian intuitions, it doesn’t follow that utilitarians disproportionately have psychopathic tendencies. We might slightly increase our credence that they do, but probably not enough to meaningfully outweigh the experience of hanging out with utilitarians and learning first hand of their typical personality traits.
I think it does follow, other things being equal. If the prevalence of psychopaths in the wider population is 2%, but psychopaths are twice as likely to be utilitarians, then other things equal, we should expect 4% of utilitarian communities to be psychopaths. Unless you think psychopathy is correlated with other things that make one less likely to actually get involved in active utilitarian communities, that must be true.
There’s any number of possible reasons why psychopaths might not want to get involved with utilitarian communities. For example, their IQ tends to be slightly lower than average, whereas utilitarians tend to have higher than average IQs, so they might not fit in intellectually whether their intentions were benign or malign. Relatedly, you would expect communities with higher IQs better at policing themselves against malign actors.
I think there would be countless confounding factors like this that would dominate a single survey based on a couple of hundred (presumably WEIRD) students.
In my other comment, I didn’t just link to a single study, I linked to a google scholar search with lots of articles about the connection between psychopathy and utilitarianism. The effect size found in the single study I did link to is also pretty large:
The average difference in IQ found in the study you link to finds a very small effect size—a cohen’s d of −0.12. And violent psychopaths have slightly higher IQ than average.
For the reasons I gave elsewhere in my comments, I would expect EAs to be worse at policing bad actors than average because EAs are so disproportionately on the autism spectrum.
Yes, these would be WEIRD people, but this is moot since EA is made up of WEIRD people as well.
Fair enough. I am still sceptical that this would translate into a commensurate increase in psychopaths in utilitarian communities*, but this seems enough to give us reason for concern.
*Also violent psychopaths don’t seem to be our problem, so their greater intelligence would mean the average IQ of the kind of emotional manipulator we’re concerned about would be slightly lower.
From psychopaths disproportionately having utilitarian intuitions, it doesn’t follow that utilitarians disproportionately have psychopathic tendencies. We might slightly increase our credence that they do, but probably not enough to meaningfully outweigh the experience of hanging out with utilitarians and learning first hand of their typical personality traits.
I think it does follow, other things being equal. If the prevalence of psychopaths in the wider population is 2%, but psychopaths are twice as likely to be utilitarians, then other things equal, we should expect 4% of utilitarian communities to be psychopaths. Unless you think psychopathy is correlated with other things that make one less likely to actually get involved in active utilitarian communities, that must be true.
There’s any number of possible reasons why psychopaths might not want to get involved with utilitarian communities. For example, their IQ tends to be slightly lower than average, whereas utilitarians tend to have higher than average IQs, so they might not fit in intellectually whether their intentions were benign or malign. Relatedly, you would expect communities with higher IQs better at policing themselves against malign actors.
I think there would be countless confounding factors like this that would dominate a single survey based on a couple of hundred (presumably WEIRD) students.
In my other comment, I didn’t just link to a single study, I linked to a google scholar search with lots of articles about the connection between psychopathy and utilitarianism. The effect size found in the single study I did link to is also pretty large:
The average difference in IQ found in the study you link to finds a very small effect size—a cohen’s d of −0.12. And violent psychopaths have slightly higher IQ than average.
For the reasons I gave elsewhere in my comments, I would expect EAs to be worse at policing bad actors than average because EAs are so disproportionately on the autism spectrum.
Yes, these would be WEIRD people, but this is moot since EA is made up of WEIRD people as well.
Fair enough. I am still sceptical that this would translate into a commensurate increase in psychopaths in utilitarian communities*, but this seems enough to give us reason for concern.
*Also violent psychopaths don’t seem to be our problem, so their greater intelligence would mean the average IQ of the kind of emotional manipulator we’re concerned about would be slightly lower.