That was fun. Been doing a bit of reading myself and come across many such leaps of rhetoric. Scientific research these days may not even distinguish between rhetoric and empirical method.
I had intended the question to be for Robert Mack who used the term 'these days' about leaps of rhetoric in science papers. I must have clicked the wrong Reply button.
Being left handed, I definitely had to come read for a laugh 😂
Just the excerpts were ridiculous enough that I have to wonder how you got through reading that article before tuning it out and tossing it in the bin.
Left handedness... growing up in the late 70's/80's I encountered a teacher in 1st grade that refused to let me write with my left hand. Every time I would switch back to my left, she would scold me, take the pencil out of my left hand, and put it in my right. She caused me so much frustration that I ended up being held back a grade. In the end, I did become ambidextrous in many ways, so possibly a win? I've been told on several occasions about the rarity of left handedness and the fact that supposedly more than 50% of prison populations tend to be left handed is suspicion to deviancy. I have to wonder if their data comes from morons like the one who wrote that article.
Sure they are, but so in non-inprisoned society. If there is no correlation, the ratio should be the same in both prison and outside prison. Those 10% seem like it, 30% would be above and there is question of how correct that information is, but there could be one more thing to skew the results. Left-handedness correlates with combat succes due to unusuality. Right-handed people are used to fighting right-handed people. Left people are also used to fighting right-handed people mostly. Right-handed people meet far less left-handed than lefthanded meet righthanded so they are less used to fighting left-handed people and that throws them off both in sport and actual combat. Lefties in prisons could very well be those that survived a deadly fight against righties and if both survived, or none, ratio in prison would be just thesame as ratio outside prison.
By the way it seems that the idea of people being either left hemisphere or right hemisphere dominant and being either logical or creative is actually a myth. Instead there is lateralization - hemispheres splitting tasks and there is quite a variety both among lefties and righties as to where this or that skill is placed in the brain, but lefties do not usually have automatically reversed all functions.
The 'powers at be' target emotions when trying to push a worldview on the masses. If amongst us, there's people that feel none (or are completely detached from them), better portray them as the most vile creatures in existence, lest people become healthily curious about them and learn a thing or two.
That's interesting. Indeed, humans do seem to do this with forbidden knowledge. They make it unpalatable for others to take an interest in, and make the tribe turn against those that do not listen to the instructions of the elite.
You can see the same thing happening with psychosis at the other end. Whenever someone commits say a mass shooting, he-she was crazy, he was mentally ill. While criminality rates for psychotics are roughly the same as the 'sane', there seems to be an active effort to associate psychosis with evil too .
The narrative is this: cold and calculated (serial killer): psychopathic. Wild, out in the open, one sole act/outburst of great and unusual damage: psychotic, crazy
Yet the man who dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, was neither psychotic nor psychopathic , he was just following orders. The problem is not violence , it's about maintaining a monopoly on violence.
This also appears to me to be about distancing society from the things that create this mindset in mass shooters. Society changed quickly, and much of it trespasses against human inherent wiring, and because there is no ability for that wiring to change as rapidly, those that cannot adjust will have problems that manifest out into the society that have left them behind and without concern. If society accepts that this is not only not something to pathologize, but rather study, but is also quite predictable, they have to accept that the very world that they live in and accept as normal is the very same thing that creates what they consider a monstrosity.
I think it's about society deciding what qualifies as monstrosity and pathological and what doesn't in the first place. Is the CEO of a food company who chooses to use very toxic and aggressive pesticides to increase profits, which cause millions of public health issues including cancer etc, a monster? Is he a pathological, maladjusted member of society? I think it boils down to hedonism and social status. The CEO got rich, he's enjoying it. The psychopath can't enjoy what he's doing (at least not like neurotypicals do), so why did he do it? *Cue dark music.
What about the psychotic who murdered his best friend in public? He doesn't see reality the way we do, why did he do it? *Cue X-Files intro music.
People have no problem in finding out of others inflicting suffering, they have a problem when they can't relate to their motivation, the 'why'
That's the most important, runner up is: was there physical violence, was there an explosion , a big crash? That's popcorn worth-it. Did it happen under the table? Did the suffering arise progressively (an illness, a chronic poisoning, or lives that were indirectly affected by an action)? Not so interesting.
Tangentially related: Lately I have been considering psychopathy from an evolutionary standpoint.
We know certain genetic traits will increase in frequency within a given population if they provide some sort of fitness advantage, which is generally answerable to the organism's environment. Genetic traits which place its carriers at a disadvantage will eventually be selected against and eliminated from the population. Genetic traits which do not influence survival one way or another are impervious to the cutting blade of natural selection.
We know psychopathy is "nature" and not "nurture" -- it is genetic. I do think one could probably make the case for it being a "neutral" trait, but to my knowledge it doesn't seem like there would be much of a compelling argument in that direction.
I think psychopathy is very clearly a fitness enhancer, but only up to a certain point. If every human were a psychopath, our species would be utterly dysfunctional. Individually, we are not very effective survivalists. Humanity's greatest trick is our (somewhat faulty, but adequate) ability to coordinate our efforts toward achieving some shared goal.
Still, one does not require much insight into the ancestral environment to realize why, on an individual level, psychopathy would be tremendously advantageous. It just so happens that the emotional bonds we form with one another, which allow us to perceive the deep personal stake we hold in each other's wellbeing without having to think about it, can also become very harmful to our survival individually. Grief, for example, is the natural consequence of bonding + loss. Grief is profoundly disorienting, and in the ancestral environment anything disorienting was a threat to survival. Therefore, humans and other social primates have developed cultural rituals to help us deal with the stress of grieving our losses. For psychopaths, this is unnecessary. The loss of in-group members does not trigger a stress response in the first place.
I think the evolutionary advantages of psychopathy become even clearer when we consider the phenomenon of human reproduction: it is massively inconvenient; children are basically worthless on their own merits to group survival and indeed were generally more of a liability in the ancestral environment (a screaming baby isn't going to hush simply because there's a hungry tiger nearby -- no, for the sake of group survival the mother under those circumstances would have been expected to hush the baby "by whatever means necessary"). Also, even today children are always, strictly speaking, a non-contributing resource drain and a significant "group investment" into its own future. Still, the prospects of the next generation probably would not have provided enough of an immediate incentive for humans to keep having babies, if not for the overwhelming power of our emotional bonds.
On the other hand, childbirth in the ancestral environment often killed the mother and the child both. For most of human history, if I remember correctly, the death rate for newborn infants hovered somewhere very close to 50%, and mothers fared far worse than they do today as well. In a subsistence culture where survival was already a daily struggle and every single in-group member played a direct role in sustaining the whole, the loss of a young, healthy adult woman of child bearing age (who had herself already cost the group significant resources to raise from childhood) could be devastating to the group in brutally practical terms, let alone emotional. Consequently, humans have long experimented with various forms of primitive birth control in order to "head off" the problem of an inconveniently timed birth. If nothing else, as a last resort, if the mother's energies or the group's resources simply could not be reasonably spared for the benefit of a single child, well...the child would simply have to go.
As I'm sure you can imagine, this reality was devastating to the mothers, who -- along with other, older women -- were generally the ones expected to "do away with" the problematic baby.
Interestingly, we sometimes see new mothers reporting, even today, a sense of detachment from their newborn infants. There are recorded cases throughout history of women who let their newborn babies die of starvation out of sheer disinterest in them.
Our culture punishes this sort of maternal negligence, but one does wonder if there is an evolutionary/survival component involved that would have made it useful in the ancestral environment.
In any case, clearly emotional detachment from others seems like a survival advantage at an individual level, especially in an environment where life was fairly cruel to humans in a non-negotiable way from beginning to end. But at the group level, I think it would be fatally harmful.
This is truly an excellent piece. It is well thought through and very logical.
I think that you are correct. It is very interesting when you consider it in terms of evolution. It makes absolute sense when you step back and look at things, but that is difficult for many people to do.
Psychopaths and neurotypicals are excellent complements to one another, but a society of just us would certainly struggle to evolve. There is safety in numbers, and that isn't a particularly strong signal in a psychopath's brain.
An interesting thought about mothers and some of them that show disinterest in their babies. Indeed, it makes you wonder about the evolutionary reason for it.
Interesting article. I had no idea that being left-handed was still taboo. I was ambidextrous as a child, but had an easier time writing with my left hand, so went with it. My cousin was not allowed to be left-handed, as my uncle had some superstitions about it.
Good grief, I had no idea. That left handedness was considered a problem only a generation ago is a huge embarrassment, but that anyone still thinks it's any kid of thing at all just beggars belief. You might be right about the research grants!
The thing I have been seeing more and more is psychopath being tossed around as a pejorative to insult political/cultural opponents. It's annoying to see some knob presenting their case that their enemies are teaching people to become psychopaths especially since a psychopath would be immune to the mind games that are being played.
There are plenty of mental contagions in the culture but psychopathy isn't one of them
We really need a better word to catch on in colloquial usage. There is a need to informally describe a particular combination of seeming abnormality with extreme wrongdoing, but I have no suggestions for a term. I do try to inform people, though, that there is a colloquial sense of the word that is different from the technical.
When it comes to politicians, it seems that there really doesn't need to be a more disparaging term. Of course I am joking... mostly. I agree, there needs to be something better to use. I use "toxic" for bad relationship partners, but I don't know that it makes a great deal of sense in a setting like politics.
Well there's 'crazy' which is too broad and vague and doesn't cover evil, or 'monster' which I think has lost its power. 'Wicked' now just means a rich dessert. There's 'barbaric' I suppose. 'Deranged' certainly applies sometimes. I agree that toxic best decribes close interpersonal relationships.
For the wider purpose, perhaps a new word is an order. Or, they can just take "psychopath" and rename psychopathy with something that makes more sense.
There are at least four sides of saying this is the reason of a behaviour of anything, the materialistic view (for psychical illness it's genetic), the school which says it boils down to construction principles, that school in which anything is more than the sums of it's parts and then there is the view assuming emercence to be the culprit.
That was fun. Been doing a bit of reading myself and come across many such leaps of rhetoric. Scientific research these days may not even distinguish between rhetoric and empirical method.
If you see anything absolutely ridiculous about psychopathy that you think needs a good debunking, send it my way and I will do so.
It sure looks that way sometimes. Do you think it has got worse rather than always having had such dodgy elements?
I'm not sure what you mean
I had intended the question to be for Robert Mack who used the term 'these days' about leaps of rhetoric in science papers. I must have clicked the wrong Reply button.
Being left handed, I definitely had to come read for a laugh 😂
Just the excerpts were ridiculous enough that I have to wonder how you got through reading that article before tuning it out and tossing it in the bin.
Left handedness... growing up in the late 70's/80's I encountered a teacher in 1st grade that refused to let me write with my left hand. Every time I would switch back to my left, she would scold me, take the pencil out of my left hand, and put it in my right. She caused me so much frustration that I ended up being held back a grade. In the end, I did become ambidextrous in many ways, so possibly a win? I've been told on several occasions about the rarity of left handedness and the fact that supposedly more than 50% of prison populations tend to be left handed is suspicion to deviancy. I have to wonder if their data comes from morons like the one who wrote that article.
Likely yes. I have seen estimates from anywhere to ten percent are, to thirty percent. Seems to me that either way more right handers are in prison.
Sure they are, but so in non-inprisoned society. If there is no correlation, the ratio should be the same in both prison and outside prison. Those 10% seem like it, 30% would be above and there is question of how correct that information is, but there could be one more thing to skew the results. Left-handedness correlates with combat succes due to unusuality. Right-handed people are used to fighting right-handed people. Left people are also used to fighting right-handed people mostly. Right-handed people meet far less left-handed than lefthanded meet righthanded so they are less used to fighting left-handed people and that throws them off both in sport and actual combat. Lefties in prisons could very well be those that survived a deadly fight against righties and if both survived, or none, ratio in prison would be just thesame as ratio outside prison.
By the way it seems that the idea of people being either left hemisphere or right hemisphere dominant and being either logical or creative is actually a myth. Instead there is lateralization - hemispheres splitting tasks and there is quite a variety both among lefties and righties as to where this or that skill is placed in the brain, but lefties do not usually have automatically reversed all functions.
The 'powers at be' target emotions when trying to push a worldview on the masses. If amongst us, there's people that feel none (or are completely detached from them), better portray them as the most vile creatures in existence, lest people become healthily curious about them and learn a thing or two.
That's interesting. Indeed, humans do seem to do this with forbidden knowledge. They make it unpalatable for others to take an interest in, and make the tribe turn against those that do not listen to the instructions of the elite.
Quite true
You can see the same thing happening with psychosis at the other end. Whenever someone commits say a mass shooting, he-she was crazy, he was mentally ill. While criminality rates for psychotics are roughly the same as the 'sane', there seems to be an active effort to associate psychosis with evil too .
The narrative is this: cold and calculated (serial killer): psychopathic. Wild, out in the open, one sole act/outburst of great and unusual damage: psychotic, crazy
Yet the man who dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, was neither psychotic nor psychopathic , he was just following orders. The problem is not violence , it's about maintaining a monopoly on violence.
This also appears to me to be about distancing society from the things that create this mindset in mass shooters. Society changed quickly, and much of it trespasses against human inherent wiring, and because there is no ability for that wiring to change as rapidly, those that cannot adjust will have problems that manifest out into the society that have left them behind and without concern. If society accepts that this is not only not something to pathologize, but rather study, but is also quite predictable, they have to accept that the very world that they live in and accept as normal is the very same thing that creates what they consider a monstrosity.
I think it's about society deciding what qualifies as monstrosity and pathological and what doesn't in the first place. Is the CEO of a food company who chooses to use very toxic and aggressive pesticides to increase profits, which cause millions of public health issues including cancer etc, a monster? Is he a pathological, maladjusted member of society? I think it boils down to hedonism and social status. The CEO got rich, he's enjoying it. The psychopath can't enjoy what he's doing (at least not like neurotypicals do), so why did he do it? *Cue dark music.
What about the psychotic who murdered his best friend in public? He doesn't see reality the way we do, why did he do it? *Cue X-Files intro music.
People have no problem in finding out of others inflicting suffering, they have a problem when they can't relate to their motivation, the 'why'
That's the most important, runner up is: was there physical violence, was there an explosion , a big crash? That's popcorn worth-it. Did it happen under the table? Did the suffering arise progressively (an illness, a chronic poisoning, or lives that were indirectly affected by an action)? Not so interesting.
Tangentially related: Lately I have been considering psychopathy from an evolutionary standpoint.
We know certain genetic traits will increase in frequency within a given population if they provide some sort of fitness advantage, which is generally answerable to the organism's environment. Genetic traits which place its carriers at a disadvantage will eventually be selected against and eliminated from the population. Genetic traits which do not influence survival one way or another are impervious to the cutting blade of natural selection.
We know psychopathy is "nature" and not "nurture" -- it is genetic. I do think one could probably make the case for it being a "neutral" trait, but to my knowledge it doesn't seem like there would be much of a compelling argument in that direction.
I think psychopathy is very clearly a fitness enhancer, but only up to a certain point. If every human were a psychopath, our species would be utterly dysfunctional. Individually, we are not very effective survivalists. Humanity's greatest trick is our (somewhat faulty, but adequate) ability to coordinate our efforts toward achieving some shared goal.
Still, one does not require much insight into the ancestral environment to realize why, on an individual level, psychopathy would be tremendously advantageous. It just so happens that the emotional bonds we form with one another, which allow us to perceive the deep personal stake we hold in each other's wellbeing without having to think about it, can also become very harmful to our survival individually. Grief, for example, is the natural consequence of bonding + loss. Grief is profoundly disorienting, and in the ancestral environment anything disorienting was a threat to survival. Therefore, humans and other social primates have developed cultural rituals to help us deal with the stress of grieving our losses. For psychopaths, this is unnecessary. The loss of in-group members does not trigger a stress response in the first place.
I think the evolutionary advantages of psychopathy become even clearer when we consider the phenomenon of human reproduction: it is massively inconvenient; children are basically worthless on their own merits to group survival and indeed were generally more of a liability in the ancestral environment (a screaming baby isn't going to hush simply because there's a hungry tiger nearby -- no, for the sake of group survival the mother under those circumstances would have been expected to hush the baby "by whatever means necessary"). Also, even today children are always, strictly speaking, a non-contributing resource drain and a significant "group investment" into its own future. Still, the prospects of the next generation probably would not have provided enough of an immediate incentive for humans to keep having babies, if not for the overwhelming power of our emotional bonds.
On the other hand, childbirth in the ancestral environment often killed the mother and the child both. For most of human history, if I remember correctly, the death rate for newborn infants hovered somewhere very close to 50%, and mothers fared far worse than they do today as well. In a subsistence culture where survival was already a daily struggle and every single in-group member played a direct role in sustaining the whole, the loss of a young, healthy adult woman of child bearing age (who had herself already cost the group significant resources to raise from childhood) could be devastating to the group in brutally practical terms, let alone emotional. Consequently, humans have long experimented with various forms of primitive birth control in order to "head off" the problem of an inconveniently timed birth. If nothing else, as a last resort, if the mother's energies or the group's resources simply could not be reasonably spared for the benefit of a single child, well...the child would simply have to go.
As I'm sure you can imagine, this reality was devastating to the mothers, who -- along with other, older women -- were generally the ones expected to "do away with" the problematic baby.
Interestingly, we sometimes see new mothers reporting, even today, a sense of detachment from their newborn infants. There are recorded cases throughout history of women who let their newborn babies die of starvation out of sheer disinterest in them.
Our culture punishes this sort of maternal negligence, but one does wonder if there is an evolutionary/survival component involved that would have made it useful in the ancestral environment.
In any case, clearly emotional detachment from others seems like a survival advantage at an individual level, especially in an environment where life was fairly cruel to humans in a non-negotiable way from beginning to end. But at the group level, I think it would be fatally harmful.
This is truly an excellent piece. It is well thought through and very logical.
I think that you are correct. It is very interesting when you consider it in terms of evolution. It makes absolute sense when you step back and look at things, but that is difficult for many people to do.
Psychopaths and neurotypicals are excellent complements to one another, but a society of just us would certainly struggle to evolve. There is safety in numbers, and that isn't a particularly strong signal in a psychopath's brain.
An interesting thought about mothers and some of them that show disinterest in their babies. Indeed, it makes you wonder about the evolutionary reason for it.
Wowie zowie, thanks for writing this.
Interesting article. I had no idea that being left-handed was still taboo. I was ambidextrous as a child, but had an easier time writing with my left hand, so went with it. My cousin was not allowed to be left-handed, as my uncle had some superstitions about it.
Yes, I thought it was a thing of the past as well. This "study" really surprised me.
Good grief, I had no idea. That left handedness was considered a problem only a generation ago is a huge embarrassment, but that anyone still thinks it's any kid of thing at all just beggars belief. You might be right about the research grants!
It amazes me what people get funding for.
The thing I have been seeing more and more is psychopath being tossed around as a pejorative to insult political/cultural opponents. It's annoying to see some knob presenting their case that their enemies are teaching people to become psychopaths especially since a psychopath would be immune to the mind games that are being played.
There are plenty of mental contagions in the culture but psychopathy isn't one of them
Yes, I agree. Even people that I enjoy listening to will use the word incorrectly. It's quite annoying.
We really need a better word to catch on in colloquial usage. There is a need to informally describe a particular combination of seeming abnormality with extreme wrongdoing, but I have no suggestions for a term. I do try to inform people, though, that there is a colloquial sense of the word that is different from the technical.
When it comes to politicians, it seems that there really doesn't need to be a more disparaging term. Of course I am joking... mostly. I agree, there needs to be something better to use. I use "toxic" for bad relationship partners, but I don't know that it makes a great deal of sense in a setting like politics.
Well there's 'crazy' which is too broad and vague and doesn't cover evil, or 'monster' which I think has lost its power. 'Wicked' now just means a rich dessert. There's 'barbaric' I suppose. 'Deranged' certainly applies sometimes. I agree that toxic best decribes close interpersonal relationships.
For the wider purpose, perhaps a new word is an order. Or, they can just take "psychopath" and rename psychopathy with something that makes more sense.
You are right. Leave the public term where it is, and find a new clinical one. Genetic emotional-affective neurodivergence? Hell, I dunno.
My brother is left handed and he is what you call neurotypical.
Well being genetic is also said about my illnes shizophrenia.
There are at least four sides of saying this is the reason of a behaviour of anything, the materialistic view (for psychical illness it's genetic), the school which says it boils down to construction principles, that school in which anything is more than the sums of it's parts and then there is the view assuming emercence to be the culprit.