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Do you honestly think that Steve Jobs (the person, not the businessman) has no feeling of empathy for others? Psychopath != narcissistic asshole

by po 17y ago

gwern 17y ago
You're right that a lot of the Jobs anecdotes can be spun both ways (for example, when he told Knuth he read all the books; or how exactly he got his new organ); and it's hard to know the empathy bit without getting close to him. So let's look on the grander scale. Philanthropy is hardly unknown to the Silicon Valley; there's Bill Gates giving away scores of billions, or the Google guys, or Steve Wozniak's past decades of work. So Jobs is certainly aware that his peers consider charity a good use of their billions. And Jobs is rich - WP tells me 5.5 billion & increasing, and any plausible financial management plan has him having sold off a fair bit of stock (just to reduce risk if nothing else). And Jobs has the personal motivation: he is, I am surprised to learn, a Buddhist. Is there any global religion which in general puts as much emphasis on good works & not possessing billions as Buddhism? Yet, Jobs apparently does not significantly give to charity: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070620152256AAtA8WX http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070620152256AA... Keep in mind that even your basic tithe of 10%* would mean dozens or hundreds of millions a year being given away to someone. A narcissistic asshole, one might well expect, would give money away like a drunken sailor to show how awesome and munificent and successful he is, and immortalize his name on foundations and buildings and scholarships etc. A psycho/sociopath... not so much. * I realize that I can't simply take 5.5 billion and divide by 10 years, but with numbers as big as these, whether we go by net worth or income doesn't matter so much.
- wtallis 17y ago
  I'm not sure that the smartest investment strategy for Jobs would be to sell lots of stock in order to reduce his risk, given that the most likely reason for Apple's stock price to experience a significant and long-term drop is the death of Steve Jobs. As long as Jobs is running Apple, the market will trust their ability to make a great comeback (and with good reason).
  - gwern 17y ago
    > given that the most likely reason for Apple's stock price to experience a significant and long-term drop is the death of Steve Jobs. Isn't that an argument he should sell now, while he is sure he is alive? How does Jobs benefit from holding onto $5b of stock while he's alive until he dies at which point his estate sells it off for $1b or whatever? Jobs's risk of dying is not insignificant; besides the fact that it intrinsically goes up each and every year, he has had health issues, shall we say? I won't run the numbers, but he plausibly doesn't have too much longer (he's 55) and the drop in value would be significant (by half or more?); combine that with the usual discounting of future expenditures (2-8%), and if we believed he was holding onto his wealth solely to grow it for future charitable spending, then we must also believe that Jobs expects massive growth in the future.
- philwelch 17y ago
  A lot of people donate to charity anonymously, and I don't see why a psychopath wouldn't give money to charity anyway. This is quite frankly the kind of witchhunt discussion that's worth avoiding at all costs.
  - gwern 17y ago
    > A lot of people donate to charity anonymously And there may be a teapot in orbit around Mercury. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If our priors say psychopaths are less likely to give to charity - and it's a tough row to hoe if you want to say they give as much or more as the average - and we observe even weak evidence that a person doesn't, then our likelihood of the person being a psychopath must go up. > I don't see why a psychopath wouldn't give money to charity anyway. You don't? I was reading the blog linked elsewhere about raising a RAD kid, and lack of empathy & altruism & charity is one of the diagnostic criteria for sociopathy. I can see why a psychopath wouldn't... > This is quite frankly the kind of witchhunt discussion that's worth avoiding at all costs. Death to all extremists, eh... If we accept the basic statistics in the article, then there's a 1% likelihood of Jobs being a psychopath in general, and the likelihood rises the more evidence we adduce, like all the anecdotes of Jobs cheating people or brazenly lying (the Knuth story I mentioned is a good case). That's enough for it to be worth discussing, and it brings out interesting distinctions between narcissism and psychopathy - like the charity criterion I've used here. And being interesting is the chief and only virtue of discussions like these.
    - philwelch 17y ago
      "If our priors say psychopaths are less likely to give to charity - and it's a tough row to hoe if you want to say they give as much or more as the average - and we observe even weak evidence that a person doesn't, then our likelihood of the person being a psychopath must go up." In that case, I think you're a psychopath, since you've given me absolutely no evidence that you donate to charity. ;) (Don't try telling me that you donate to charity without evidence, either! That's exactly what a psychopath would do, assuming he didn't want to be exposed as a psychopath!) "Death to all extremists, eh...That's enough for it to be worth discussing, and it brings out interesting distinctions between narcissism and psychopathy - like the charity criterion I've used here. And being interesting is the chief and only virtue of discussions like these." Interesting. You have absolutely no emotional distaste to discussing (without sufficient evidence) whether or not some of our particular fellow human beings are psychopaths, as long as you can continue to amuse yourself. That demonstrates a serious lack of empathy. Very concerning. Seriously though, I don't think a psychopath would have as much interest in changing the world as a young Steve Jobs did, nor would a psychopath name something after his daughter or adopt her into his family. I'm not saying there's no similarity between what we've all read about Jobs and the psychopath archetype, but there's enough differences that it doesn't quite fit.
orblivion 17y ago
Well there's a (possibly) distinct personality classification known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disord... These guys are a bit different, they have more of a weak spot and are less cold and calculating, but they are also thought to have zero empathy. EDIT: Also, how are we to know whether Steve Jobs has any empathy? The whole thing with sociopaths is that they're good at faking it.

Do you honestly think that Steve Jobs (the person, not the businessman) has no feeling of empathy for others? Psychopath != narcissistic asshole

by po 17y ago

Do you honestly think that Steve Jobs (the person, not the businessman) has no feeling of empathy for others? Psychopath != narcissistic asshole

gwern 17y ago

You're right that a lot of the Jobs anecdotes can be spun both ways (for example, when he told Knuth he read all the books; or how exactly he got his new organ); and it's hard to know the empathy bit without getting close to him. So let's look on the grander scale. Philanthropy is hardly unknown to the Silicon Valley; there's Bill Gates giving away scores of billions, or the Google guys, or Steve Wozniak's past decades of work. So Jobs is certainly aware that his peers consider charity a good use of their billions. And Jobs is rich - WP tells me 5.5 billion & increasing, and any plausible financial management plan has him having sold off a fair bit of stock (just to reduce risk if nothing else). And Jobs has the personal motivation: he is, I am surprised to learn, a Buddhist. Is there any global religion which in general puts as much emphasis on good works & not possessing billions as Buddhism? Yet, Jobs apparently does not significantly give to charity: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070620152256AAtA8WX http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070620152256AA... Keep in mind that even your basic tithe of 10%* would mean dozens or hundreds of millions a year being given away to someone. A narcissistic asshole, one might well expect, would give money away like a drunken sailor to show how awesome and munificent and successful he is, and immortalize his name on foundations and buildings and scholarships etc. A psycho/sociopath... not so much. * I realize that I can't simply take 5.5 billion and divide by 10 years, but with numbers as big as these, whether we go by net worth or income doesn't matter so much.

wtallis 17y ago
I'm not sure that the smartest investment strategy for Jobs would be to sell lots of stock in order to reduce his risk, given that the most likely reason for Apple's stock price to experience a significant and long-term drop is the death of Steve Jobs. As long as Jobs is running Apple, the market will trust their ability to make a great comeback (and with good reason).
- gwern 17y ago
  > given that the most likely reason for Apple's stock price to experience a significant and long-term drop is the death of Steve Jobs. Isn't that an argument he should sell now, while he is sure he is alive? How does Jobs benefit from holding onto $5b of stock while he's alive until he dies at which point his estate sells it off for $1b or whatever? Jobs's risk of dying is not insignificant; besides the fact that it intrinsically goes up each and every year, he has had health issues, shall we say? I won't run the numbers, but he plausibly doesn't have too much longer (he's 55) and the drop in value would be significant (by half or more?); combine that with the usual discounting of future expenditures (2-8%), and if we believed he was holding onto his wealth solely to grow it for future charitable spending, then we must also believe that Jobs expects massive growth in the future.
philwelch 17y ago
A lot of people donate to charity anonymously, and I don't see why a psychopath wouldn't give money to charity anyway. This is quite frankly the kind of witchhunt discussion that's worth avoiding at all costs.
- gwern 17y ago
  > A lot of people donate to charity anonymously And there may be a teapot in orbit around Mercury. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If our priors say psychopaths are less likely to give to charity - and it's a tough row to hoe if you want to say they give as much or more as the average - and we observe even weak evidence that a person doesn't, then our likelihood of the person being a psychopath must go up. > I don't see why a psychopath wouldn't give money to charity anyway. You don't? I was reading the blog linked elsewhere about raising a RAD kid, and lack of empathy & altruism & charity is one of the diagnostic criteria for sociopathy. I can see why a psychopath wouldn't... > This is quite frankly the kind of witchhunt discussion that's worth avoiding at all costs. Death to all extremists, eh... If we accept the basic statistics in the article, then there's a 1% likelihood of Jobs being a psychopath in general, and the likelihood rises the more evidence we adduce, like all the anecdotes of Jobs cheating people or brazenly lying (the Knuth story I mentioned is a good case). That's enough for it to be worth discussing, and it brings out interesting distinctions between narcissism and psychopathy - like the charity criterion I've used here. And being interesting is the chief and only virtue of discussions like these.
  - philwelch 17y ago
    "If our priors say psychopaths are less likely to give to charity - and it's a tough row to hoe if you want to say they give as much or more as the average - and we observe even weak evidence that a person doesn't, then our likelihood of the person being a psychopath must go up." In that case, I think you're a psychopath, since you've given me absolutely no evidence that you donate to charity. ;) (Don't try telling me that you donate to charity without evidence, either! That's exactly what a psychopath would do, assuming he didn't want to be exposed as a psychopath!) "Death to all extremists, eh...That's enough for it to be worth discussing, and it brings out interesting distinctions between narcissism and psychopathy - like the charity criterion I've used here. And being interesting is the chief and only virtue of discussions like these." Interesting. You have absolutely no emotional distaste to discussing (without sufficient evidence) whether or not some of our particular fellow human beings are psychopaths, as long as you can continue to amuse yourself. That demonstrates a serious lack of empathy. Very concerning. Seriously though, I don't think a psychopath would have as much interest in changing the world as a young Steve Jobs did, nor would a psychopath name something after his daughter or adopt her into his family. I'm not saying there's no similarity between what we've all read about Jobs and the psychopath archetype, but there's enough differences that it doesn't quite fit.

orblivion 17y ago

Well there's a (possibly) distinct personality classification known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disord... These guys are a bit different, they have more of a weak spot and are less cold and calculating, but they are also thought to have zero empathy. EDIT: Also, how are we to know whether Steve Jobs has any empathy? The whole thing with sociopaths is that they're good at faking it.