March 6th, 2020
- Whipped up some thoughts on learning & finite & infinite games
- (and variants on the game Werewolf)
3 linked references
psychopaths
- Too-pithy summary of my perspective. Written March 6th, 2020
- Most cases of non-empathic behavior among humans is not performed by people who lack the capacity for empathy. It is caused by people not being in touch with their empathy, for various reasons. Often this is caused by scarcity & fear, and peoples' meaning-making thereof.
- People learn non-empathic coping mechanisms to deal with a Game A world, at a young age, and then Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings so they persist these dynamics even in contexts where they aren't needed.
- Much of this is on a small scale & self-limited by various internal mechanisms that include Game A mechanisms like guilt but also just like... that people do still have empathy and their empathy still doesn't want to hurt people.
- Even for psychopaths who are completely selfish*, the state of the world at present is such that there is still a shared purpose between psychopaths and everyone else. They can thus join the amorphous distributed team comprised of everyone who understands that current modes of human thinking are a threat to everyone's well-being, via global catastrophic risks of various kinds. Whether psychopaths can join any particular working group will depend on many other factors particular to the situation.
- *it's not clear to me that "selfish" is quite the model to use
- Some cases of apparent clinical psychopathy may be just as curable as anything else stored in early childhood trauma / emotional schemas. Which is to say very, and with much difficulty, and only if the person has the will to do so.
- See Kaj Sotala's summary of Unlocking the Emotional Brain for "what are emotional schemas and how do they work?"
- This is unlikely to be 100%, given what research I've read. More like 20-80%.
- And again, may be extremely hard and not feasible with current psychotechnologies.
- I'm not suggesting more marginal effort go towards this at this phase, nor am I suggesting people be naive to the damage that anyone's schemas can cause in the meantime, whether "psychopathic" or otherwise.
- Existing Game A societies are places where psychopathic behavior is incentivized in everyone, not just psychopaths. This is true in any context that uses blame, essentially, because of either/or scarcity-based thinking that's inherent to blame.
- For more on how blame is a confusion, read Reality is alive: don't carve it
- Game B societies will:
- not actively incentivize psychopathic behavior among anyone
- actively incentivize prosocial behavior among everyone, including psychopaths
- Since one core feature to psychopathy is not caring particularly much about punishment, only about reward, we can observe that to the extent psychopaths damage systems (on whatever scale) by playing win-lose games, it is because the incentive systems we have are simply failing to make win-win games more winful on those scales. It seems possible, at least in principle, to do so, including for people who lack empathy and thus care only about their own well-being.
- Moreover, many of the aspects of culture that allow people (psychopaths or anyone) to effectively "win" win-lose games rely on certain underpinnings like feelings of scarcity, lack of self-trust, and people not speaking openly about what is happening due to shame or other threats. All of these factors can be adjusted, and will be in any Game B culture, which is an elaboration on how Game B will not actively incentivize psychopathic behavior among anyone
- My understanding that psychopaths exploit this sort of thing came largely from reading Too Late for the Pebbles to Vote, a series of 3 articles, about a sociopath who was a leader in an open source community
- Also, perspective-taking, when understood in terms of systems thinking, is an orthogonal axis from emotional empathy.
- Learning perspective-taking in this sense is high-priority for everyone, regardless of sociopathy, as it yields people being able to make decisions that care better for the larger systems they are participants within and rely on for their survival & thrival.
- Thus: My current perspective seems to be that, given a workable solution to the initial challenge of getting Game B dynamics working with non-psychopaths, solving the psychopaths edgecase is actually a relatively easy problem. The reason for this page is to explore my thinking about why this appears so.
coronavirus resources
- Mostly last-updated March 6th, 2020 ish. Things may be out of date. Everybody stay home if you can now, & encourage things to be cancelled.