Liv—I agree that this is something to be very cautious about.
I have psychology colleagues who study psychopathy, sociopathy, and ‘Dark Triad’ personality traits. The people with these dangerous traits tend to selectively target smallish, naive, high-trust, do-gooding communities, such as fundamentalist Christian churches, non-profits, idealistic start-ups, etc. -- and maybe EA. The people in these groups tend to be idealistic, forgiving, trusting, tribal, mutually supportive, and inexperienced with bad actors. This makes them highly exploitable—financially, sexually, socially, legally, etc.
Psych professor Essi Viding has a nice ‘Very Short Introduction’ to psychopathy here, which I recommend.
The best way to guard against such people is to learn about their traits and their typical social strategies and tactics, and then to, well, keep up one’s guard.
(I’m not implying that SBF is a psychopath; it’s not feasible or responsible to make a diagnosis of this sort without knowing someone personally.)
Thanks for the comments! I also wanted to clarify one thing—I’m not talking only about super serious cases—i.e. criminals or abusers. I think that a much more common system failure would be to over-trust “small” grifters who live from one grant to another, people who don’t keep secrets including professional secrets, those who are permanently incompetent and unwilling to change that etc. I think that those people, if not “caught” early enough can also cause a lot of trouble and minimize impact of even the best initiative. Also, you know, it’s absolutely great to have a feeling that you can trust all people in the room you are in. I think there’s a huge value in creating such environment. But I have no idea how to do that in case of EA—it seems to big, to rich, and growing to fast. I guess in this case some super effective system would be needed, but again, I don’t know. Maybe, sadly but very possibly, it’s impossible in case of such an environment—if yes, we need to adjust our assumptions and behavior, and probably we should do it fast.
As someone who’s worked in the mental health field, the other interesting thing I’ve read about ASPD/psychopathy is that they heavily rely on cognitive empathy over affective empathy, which … is actually a very EA trait in my opinion.
So even without nefarious intentions, I think people with ASPD would be drawn to/overrepresented within EA.
I felt a bit stressed when I saw that the discussion turned into talk about ASPD, and now I realized why.
Firstly, we should hold accountable all people who display unwanted behavior, doesn’t matter their diagnosis. I’m afraid that the focus on ASPD will shift our attention from “all abusive/offensive/deceitful behaviors shouldn’t be accepted” to “let’s be careful if somebody has ASPD”. I think that focusing on (especially repeating) behaviors and consequences is a much better strategy here.
Secondly, it’s hard to diagnose somebody, and doing so in a non-clinical setting is unethical and very hard, so if we start worrying about letting people with ASPD “into EA” we have no way to actually prove or disprove our point. But some people may end up trying, and home-made psychoanalysis is well, not good.
So, to summarize—I personally just think that shifting the focus from “how to trace overall unwanted behavior” to “if EA may attract people with ASPD” may yield worse results.
Yeah, I agree. The only reason I even engaged is because a psych I saw noted down that I show signs of it, and I roll my eyes whenever psychopathy pops up in a discussion cause people just use it as a synonym for malicious.
Reading on ASPD, it’s kinda weird how people read “15% of CEOs and criminals have ASPD” and think “ASPD is the criminality and corruption disease” instead of “85% of people we should watch out for are totally capable of abuse with a perfectly normal brain, so our processes should work regardless of the offender’s brain”.
IDK, just really weird scapegoating. The original point was pretty much just about “malicious bad-faith actors” and nothing to do with ASPD.
Most fraudulent activities were done by normal people that rationalized their way when opportunities or gaps presented to them and they happen to need the financial gain.
Interesting. I would have said the opposite—that many EAs are what Simon Baron-Cohen calls ‘high systematizers’ (which overlaps somewhat with the Aspergers/autism spectrum), who tend to be pretty strong on affective empathy (e.g. easily imaging how horrible it would be to be a factory-farmed chicken, a starving child, or a future AGI), but who are often somewhat weaker on cognitive empathy (i.e. using Theory of Mind to understand other people’s specific beliefs and desires accurately, follow social norms, communicate effectively with others who have different values and assumptions, manipulate and influence other people, etc).
I agree that psychopaths rely much more on cognitive empathy than on affective empathy. But in my reckoning, this Aspergers-vs-psychopaths dimensions implies that EA includes relatively few psychopaths, and relatively many Aspy people (like me).
(FWIW, I’d recommend the recent Simon Baron-Cohen book ‘The pattern seekers’, about the evolutionary origins and technological benefits of high systematizing.)
But people in EA think a lot about how to reduce the suffering of other people, and give a great importance to morality and doing the right thing, which is the exact opposite of sociopathy. I think that this is more important than if people are heavily “cognitive” in the community, and people with ASPD should be underrepresented. Moreover, a lot of people seem to be motivated by affective empathy, even though they try to use cognitive empathy to then think about what is best.
Liv—I agree that this is something to be very cautious about.
I have psychology colleagues who study psychopathy, sociopathy, and ‘Dark Triad’ personality traits. The people with these dangerous traits tend to selectively target smallish, naive, high-trust, do-gooding communities, such as fundamentalist Christian churches, non-profits, idealistic start-ups, etc. -- and maybe EA. The people in these groups tend to be idealistic, forgiving, trusting, tribal, mutually supportive, and inexperienced with bad actors. This makes them highly exploitable—financially, sexually, socially, legally, etc.
Psych professor Essi Viding has a nice ‘Very Short Introduction’ to psychopathy here, which I recommend.
The best way to guard against such people is to learn about their traits and their typical social strategies and tactics, and then to, well, keep up one’s guard.
(I’m not implying that SBF is a psychopath; it’s not feasible or responsible to make a diagnosis of this sort without knowing someone personally.)
Thanks for the comments! I also wanted to clarify one thing—I’m not talking only about super serious cases—i.e. criminals or abusers. I think that a much more common system failure would be to over-trust “small” grifters who live from one grant to another, people who don’t keep secrets including professional secrets, those who are permanently incompetent and unwilling to change that etc. I think that those people, if not “caught” early enough can also cause a lot of trouble and minimize impact of even the best initiative.
Also, you know, it’s absolutely great to have a feeling that you can trust all people in the room you are in. I think there’s a huge value in creating such environment. But I have no idea how to do that in case of EA—it seems to big, to rich, and growing to fast. I guess in this case some super effective system would be needed, but again, I don’t know. Maybe, sadly but very possibly, it’s impossible in case of such an environment—if yes, we need to adjust our assumptions and behavior, and probably we should do it fast.
I don’t have much to add but I found this exchange super interesting, thanks for that.
As someone who’s worked in the mental health field, the other interesting thing I’ve read about ASPD/psychopathy is that they heavily rely on cognitive empathy over affective empathy, which … is actually a very EA trait in my opinion.
So even without nefarious intentions, I think people with ASPD would be drawn to/overrepresented within EA.
I felt a bit stressed when I saw that the discussion turned into talk about ASPD, and now I realized why.
Firstly, we should hold accountable all people who display unwanted behavior, doesn’t matter their diagnosis. I’m afraid that the focus on ASPD will shift our attention from “all abusive/offensive/deceitful behaviors shouldn’t be accepted” to “let’s be careful if somebody has ASPD”. I think that focusing on (especially repeating) behaviors and consequences is a much better strategy here.
Secondly, it’s hard to diagnose somebody, and doing so in a non-clinical setting is unethical and very hard, so if we start worrying about letting people with ASPD “into EA” we have no way to actually prove or disprove our point. But some people may end up trying, and home-made psychoanalysis is well, not good.
So, to summarize—I personally just think that shifting the focus from “how to trace overall unwanted behavior” to “if EA may attract people with ASPD” may yield worse results.
Yeah, I agree. The only reason I even engaged is because a psych I saw noted down that I show signs of it, and I roll my eyes whenever psychopathy pops up in a discussion cause people just use it as a synonym for malicious.
Reading on ASPD, it’s kinda weird how people read “15% of CEOs and criminals have ASPD” and think “ASPD is the criminality and corruption disease” instead of “85% of people we should watch out for are totally capable of abuse with a perfectly normal brain, so our processes should work regardless of the offender’s brain”.
IDK, just really weird scapegoating. The original point was pretty much just about “malicious bad-faith actors” and nothing to do with ASPD.
Most fraudulent activities were done by normal people that rationalized their way when opportunities or gaps presented to them and they happen to need the financial gain.
Interesting. I would have said the opposite—that many EAs are what Simon Baron-Cohen calls ‘high systematizers’ (which overlaps somewhat with the Aspergers/autism spectrum), who tend to be pretty strong on affective empathy (e.g. easily imaging how horrible it would be to be a factory-farmed chicken, a starving child, or a future AGI), but who are often somewhat weaker on cognitive empathy (i.e. using Theory of Mind to understand other people’s specific beliefs and desires accurately, follow social norms, communicate effectively with others who have different values and assumptions, manipulate and influence other people, etc).
I agree that psychopaths rely much more on cognitive empathy than on affective empathy. But in my reckoning, this Aspergers-vs-psychopaths dimensions implies that EA includes relatively few psychopaths, and relatively many Aspy people (like me).
(FWIW, I’d recommend the recent Simon Baron-Cohen book ‘The pattern seekers’, about the evolutionary origins and technological benefits of high systematizing.)
But people in EA think a lot about how to reduce the suffering of other people, and give a great importance to morality and doing the right thing, which is the exact opposite of sociopathy. I think that this is more important than if people are heavily “cognitive” in the community, and people with ASPD should be underrepresented. Moreover, a lot of people seem to be motivated by affective empathy, even though they try to use cognitive empathy to then think about what is best.