But it was tested time and time again. How vain do you think musicians are? Or rather, do you believe that the idea of early musical education didn't occur to anyone except Mozart's dad? It's very widespread. But most children don't even have manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination to start out so early, "talent" aside.
The fact of the matter remains, that no secret educational approach has ever been verified; that the rate of extraordinary geniuses appearing in history wasn't affected by the attempts to replicate the conditions of their manifestation; and that most of said geniuses had abnormally talented parents – some of whom deliberately tried to raise an even better successor and some did not.
Starting an individual business is (normally) not an attempt to improve matters at the system level, unless by matters you mean the ratio of happy/unhappy workers and not the stucture of market incentives. It is a folly and he's absolutely correct.
You're going too far generalizing from your experience. They can imagine just fine, as their cognition is unimpaired. But humans are learning and planning largely on emotional basis. Their amygdala is less functional, so their imagination is decoupled from negative emotion: when they imagine some bad outcome, they process it in the detached way most people process heat death of the Universe or hunger in Africa, i.e. something that is maybe significant but has little bearing on actual choices. It doesn't generate aversion. What does generate it, though, is deprivation of positive stimulus, so when "bad outcome" means "being put in a small concrete cage with no entertainment and bland food", they'll strategize rationally and do their best to avoid being caught. When it means merely being shunned, reviled, disowned, demoted, physically hurt, it doesn't affect the strategy very much. They don't want being hurt in the present moment, theoretically, but they can't feel enough to factor this into their planning.
It's kind of like how overeating people struggle to curb their craving now with thoughts of seeing their weight increase later. Some succeed, and some can't do it at all. They'll feel negative emotions when they look at the scales, not when they get the ice cream and imagine the numbers. Except psychopaths don't even want to fight this tendency of theirs.
To be fair, positive reinforcement works for them about as well as for others.
I have a similar hypothesis (which I don't believe, but still). Suppose there are no psychopaths. As is well known, people's choices of leaders are heavily influenced by biological biases such as height, social dominance and other "alpha male" traits. If there is no need to suspect malice, communities could suffer a runaway effect of increasingly biological selection of leadership, the same way it seems to happen in most herd/pack animals (where a smaller male basically can never become a leader, even though the correlation of size and intelligence is less than 1). But psychopaths can "supersignal" beyond even the most impressive neurotypicals. With some bad apples, we feel the need to check if signals correspond at all to the substance, and correct for personal behavior and long-term ability to deliver on promises.
This is of course only my conjecture, seeing as they are undetected unless caught red-handed on some officially recognized crime. However, consider this: violent psychopaths don't differ from this gal in lack of empathy, fearlessness or in deceitfulness. They only have poor impulse control, so they fail at maintaining long-term "masks". You can read basically as much right in the article. Would you like a proverbial serial killer to be your boss? Now, do you really believe that impulsive violence can deal more damage than cool-headed, planned immorality? And there's something like 1% of them in the general population, and they are over-represented in positions of influence that allow to harm people (not because they're exactly good at anything aside from manipulation). It'd be awfully convenient if the invisible hand of the market took care of it all and their natural tendencies became an innocuous tool for generating profit.
How often do we rely on other people just not being terrible for petty reasons? Not grossly abusing their position whenever they can get away with it? Surprisingly a lot of our society runs on trust. And wherever it doesn't, expenses and efforts are necessary to disincentivize transgressors. So even 1% is enough to drive up the costs. People in small, homogenous villages can leave the keys outside their homes, because it's harder to get away with burglary there and they trust neighbors. In cities people need better doors and better locks and security cameras and strong police and a fair bit of paranoia to keep up with rural areas. It's because it's easier to stay anonymous in the community of millions. But even under perfect guarantee of anonymity, I wouldn't break into people's homes and rob them. Most other people of regular upbringing wouldn't as well. A psychopath, by definition, would, irrespective of upbringing. Same goes for black hat activities. How much does IT security cost?
Also, there's a lot of articles dedicated to psychopaths like this one. I don't remember people like her "significant other", or her oblivious parents, or her colleagues ever being given voice. Somehow we are to take them on their word, even though they say (because there's no point denying already) that they see no utility in being honest or reciprocal.
People with other non-standard neurotypes tend to be quite open about their condition, as they prefer to get more understanding and have a better rapport. They are not as glorified by the media, they are not thought of as sexy and enigmatic, yet they come open. But this anonymous interviewee, as I already pointed out, "doesn't think people need to know" what she is to know what to expect from her. But this is obviously nonsensical, given that people (except maybe bankers) operate with some basic trust and information about her psychopathy would change a lot in possible relationships (even assuming that there's some use for their kind). Likewise, no surgeon or CEO has come out with "I'm a heartless bastard with no empathy or code or morals, see, I may be different but that makes me better in my field". Such inconsistencies illustrate that they don't really have any sort of ethical framework, it's all just vague noise to lull a pitiful myopic herbivore into sleep. That's really how they think of people.
All of this is unconvincing, I know. It's probably impossible for a neurotypical, well-meaning person to realize the magnitude of difference without being subjected to psychopathic treatment. Without seeing how the mask you've known for years crumbles in front of evidence and there's no distress behind, since it's cheaper to discard you along with the shards.
Attempts to humanize psychopaths disgust me. As do their clever attempts to derail the talk of their danger by bringing up serial killers. I don't care about serial killers. They're not a problem at all. Nobody should give a damn about serial killers. We're humans, not some pathetic herd animals who can feel placated knowing that there are no literal wolves around. It's the socially-adapted, nonviolent psychopaths like her that are the real problem.
One interesting yet rarely described trait of their kind is that, for all their glib talk, the transcript ends up vacuous and incoherent. There's nothing to be learned, because for them language is not a means of communication but a tool for manipulation and control; the effort to weigh the evidence and determine which parts correspond to physical reality is incommensurate with the yield.
>> When you meet new people, whether professionally or personally or whatever context, do you present them with the version of yourself that fits the situation?
> Absolutely. Why tell them anything that they don’t need to know? They just need to know what they can expect of me.
Well darling, what they need to know most is that you'll screw them over the instant it benefits you, so you're not convincing me here.
The same is true for any attempt of harnessing psychopathic behavior in some benign project. You have to ensure that at every moment, in every situation, they don't believe that they stand to gain a penny from backstabbing you or committing an atrocity; just as they always calculate the cost-benefit of doing so. There is no trust, no bond, not even any sort of a grace period; it's like pretending to have domesticated a crocodile. You run out of meat, you're it. Soldiers, surgeons, law professionals, CEOs, bankers. Everywhere psychopaths are a net loss and a liability, waiting for the rule enforcers to get distracted.
Worst of all, many of them are quite functional. Very much so, in fact. This is why there's no treatment; psychopathy is an alternative local optimum in human mental phenotype, rather than a disability. A parasitic one that probably evolved relatively recently with the transition from family groups and small tribes to big, partially anonymized societies, which allow for unnoticeable cheating.
Some say psychopathy is a scale. I claim it's just that psychometrics is not mature enough; "puerile", as Hannibal Lector would put it. There is a clear difference between a person who would not flush in a public toilet and a person who would, given reasonable guarantees of not being caught, momentarily borrow an careless "friend's" credit card and then burn through his savings. Who would cut costs diluting medication for one's patients and pocket the difference. Who would, as an attorney, conspire with the prosecution to put the client behind bars after swindling him of his money. A couples therapist who would facilitate a breakup to turn a client into a personal sex toy. All these are behaviors that stem directly from psychopathic traits. If you really, genuinely don't feel any concern at all for the well-being of other people, you'll be ready to commit crimes far greater than anyone who merely seeks to harm people for the thrill of it would. Though psychopaths like the thrill, as they get bored easily, and they do tend to amuse themselves with cruelty.
I pity her partner. Slavery for 19 years, and who knows how bad it'll get. The guy sure chose poorly.
Psychopathy, in my opinion, is the sole unobjectionable justification for negative eugenics, inasmuch at it's heritable. There's nothing else that's so purely devoid of excuses and detrimental for society.
You could combine these ideas, though, and have only a few cars that pull weights up/down the hill, with a crane to load it off. I'm not sure but it could probably allow for a far greater total storage and kWh/$.
Another factor is initial variance. Russian foxes experiment uses some hundreds of animals, perhaps. Suppose we operate on the scale of millions of specimens, a significant portion of the entire species. There could be a many-sigma difference between the average and the smartest living crow in the world (not sure how to estimate this), but the former one would probably struggle to survive in the city while the latter would thrive. Urbanization, then, can be thought of as a bottleneck that promptly eradicates the left part of the extant distribution, changing the population average even in a single generation.
You're being petty, rude and irrational. I expect there to be more issues than biotinidase deficiency with you. Do you have any data about the prevalence of this disease? Quick search points to something below 1 in 100 thousand. This means there's about 3000 sufferers like you in the entire country. Statistically speaking, it's utterly absurd for you to throw accusations or demand some special attention from the author of a paper that reports robust positive effects of exercise based on 1.2 million subjects. Take your biotin or something and pipe down.
While this is fascinating, I wonder if we could produce the scaffolding itself de novo, and if not, then why? It's not a living thing, just a porous biocompatible structure. At worst, we could grow a lot of skin and process it into scaffolding of arbitrary shape. Or is there some crucial trick, such as remaining chemical signals that guide the development of new cells?
There's no technology-in-general that "the Luddites" fight againtst, nor are there Luddites-in-general. It's risk-benefit calculation in every case, with different parties and different interests. You don't need luck to profit off lobbying against the development of your undoers, this is the norm, not the exception.
> Okay, how does the other party get richer? It usually isn't because they fight against more efficient technologies.
What is an "efficient technology" and what is an "unapproved and criminal enterprise" can be decided by lobbying. Luddite is the one who loses, because he gets labeled Luddite by the victor; the loss itself had little to do with vague attitudes towards technological progress. You're just stubbornly missing the point.
> I think if Luddites really did understand technology, they would have realized that they can't stop it by destroying things, and they can't stop it by attempting to ban it either.
Well that's totally unreasonable. Of course you can stop technology by violence and prohibition, it's just that the other party is generally much better at those things by virtue of being richer. Look at how well gatekeeping works in drug production. Look at how tax preparation companies can lobby against the IRS destroying their pointless business. Certainly this may not hold forever, and sure some things slip through. But you can improve your and your children's life by stifling progress where it benefits you.
> There is a widespread belief in contemporary computer dominated societies, that regular people are not allowed any say in the discussions around the types of technologies that radically reshape their lives. And the way that the term Luddite is commonly used functions to reify this belief by making people believe that they cannot push back against technology. Of course, as the above history demonstrated, the irony is that what the Luddites prove is that you actually can push back, you can build up a mass movement around it, and you can in fact be so successful that the government is forced to deploy soldiers and pass harsh legislation in order to squash you.
> Need a more recent example? How about Google Glass. When Google unveiled that wearable high-tech headset it was framed as “inevitable,” those who raised worries were dismissed as “Luddites,” and Google seemed hellbent on pushing forward regardless. Google Glass was going to be the next thing, not because regular people wanted it to be, but because Google insisted that it would be. But a funny thing happened: people said no, and Google’s “world changing” product was shelved. There’s certainly a difference between the public rejecting a piece of consumer technology and workers pushing back against mechanization – but the common thread that connects them is that you do not have to let a tech company screaming “technological progress” in your face turn you into a paragon of passivity. And what’s more you don’t have to accept a false dichotomy wherein saying no to one kind of technology means that you are rejecting all technology.
While I appreciate your even-handed and careful defense of the point I was making, it's probably necessary to note that I didn't consider the merits of adoption at all. I have no idea what sort of policy to support on this issue. Indeed, the only thing I was objecting to was the idea of the company of biological parents being preferable by default. Given the evidence, I think that options rank like this: good parents > good foster parents > single parent > no parents > violent antisocial parent(s). Maybe it's wrong, but I don't immediately see how and believe we shouldn't assume that any position pro "ripping families apart", whatever the circumstances, is indefensible. If anything, the only policy I can responsibly advocate for, and not just voice general agreement with, is more rigorous and unbiased research into life outcomes.