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Yes, I'm surprised how celebrities and CEOs of big corporations live so long... In spite of the bodyguards. It's hard to appreciate the sheer number of people

Yes, I'm surprised how celebrities and CEOs of big corporations live so long... In spite of the bodyguards. It's hard to appreciate the sheer number of people that exist in the world... Surely there are enough crazy people to populate an entire city. Is it possible that intelligence is inversely correlated with insanity? I thought it was the opposite.

loceng 9y ago
Insanity is related to the ego mind. The more control the ego mind has then the less input and influence the heart has - the less empathy exists and the more willingness to cause harm as a valid survival mechanism. It's really quite a scary proposition to go against the wished upon status quo of people and organizations who are like this - who become comfortable with this. This behaviour seems only steered away through fear of getting caught. If there is little fear of being caught or of being prosecuted, then this behaviour will be as rampant as it can be without calling too much attention - or those like journalists who do call attention to it will also make the list to be assassinated/murdered in the most extreme cases. There are more covert things people could do to simply ruin someone's life by doing actions indirectly.
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
There's only about 8k people who are 1 in 1k crazy and 1 in 1k capable, assuming independent traits. If you restrict that to even 1 in 20 violent, then you're talking 400 people world wide. Factor out kids, elderly, etc and you're talking 200 really scary motherfuckers. Figure 75% are employed by governments, and you're talking 50 rogue badasses -- which seems vaguely in line with the number of really dangerous terrorists, paramilitaries, etc. My guess is that the number of people that are both interested and capable of the things you propose are busy making tons of cash on drugs, terrorist violence elsewhere, etc.
- sixsence 9y ago
  I got roughly 379 people, using current world population (http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/) and not including your last step of factoring out kids and elderly, because that should have been done in the (1 in 1k capable) step.
- zafka 9y ago
  Can you explain how you came up with these numbers? Intuitively I have always thought they were low, due to the small incidence of terrorist attacks, but I am curious to where you come up with your base numbers.
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    I made them up. But they're reasonable bounds -- the number of terrorists are very low, we know this for a fact. So we should suspect that the contributing traits are relatively rare. And if we want to talk about people who really scare us, then it should be people who are real outliers. An NFL player is a one in a few hundred thousand, and an NFL star is around one in a million. So if we're looking for the Tom Brady of terrorists, it would make sense that we don't want a fraction substantially higher than the number of Tom Brady's in football players. So I cut off a segment of the population that would have the traits required and estimated how large it was -- 99.9th percentile capable, 99.9th percentile crazy, 95th percentile violent. (Intuitively -- if the smartest and craziest kid in your high school were the same kid (1 in 1000 each trait), then you picked the most violent in 20 of those kids.) This turns out to be ~400 people, which seems ballpark right. I'd certainly expect the answer to be in the 120-1,200 person range. As long as your estimates aren't too far off and you aren't systemically wrong (eg, always rounding down), estimating is usually a reasonably accurate method to get a feel for the scale of something.

loceng 9y ago

Insanity is related to the ego mind. The more control the ego mind has then the less input and influence the heart has - the less empathy exists and the more willingness to cause harm as a valid survival mechanism. It's really quite a scary proposition to go against the wished upon status quo of people and organizations who are like this - who become comfortable with this. This behaviour seems only steered away through fear of getting caught. If there is little fear of being caught or of being prosecuted, then this behaviour will be as rampant as it can be without calling too much attention - or those like journalists who do call attention to it will also make the list to be assassinated/murdered in the most extreme cases. There are more covert things people could do to simply ruin someone's life by doing actions indirectly.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago

There's only about 8k people who are 1 in 1k crazy and 1 in 1k capable, assuming independent traits. If you restrict that to even 1 in 20 violent, then you're talking 400 people world wide. Factor out kids, elderly, etc and you're talking 200 really scary motherfuckers. Figure 75% are employed by governments, and you're talking 50 rogue badasses -- which seems vaguely in line with the number of really dangerous terrorists, paramilitaries, etc. My guess is that the number of people that are both interested and capable of the things you propose are busy making tons of cash on drugs, terrorist violence elsewhere, etc.

sixsence 9y ago
I got roughly 379 people, using current world population (http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/) and not including your last step of factoring out kids and elderly, because that should have been done in the (1 in 1k capable) step.
zafka 9y ago
Can you explain how you came up with these numbers? Intuitively I have always thought they were low, due to the small incidence of terrorist attacks, but I am curious to where you come up with your base numbers.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  I made them up. But they're reasonable bounds -- the number of terrorists are very low, we know this for a fact. So we should suspect that the contributing traits are relatively rare. And if we want to talk about people who really scare us, then it should be people who are real outliers. An NFL player is a one in a few hundred thousand, and an NFL star is around one in a million. So if we're looking for the Tom Brady of terrorists, it would make sense that we don't want a fraction substantially higher than the number of Tom Brady's in football players. So I cut off a segment of the population that would have the traits required and estimated how large it was -- 99.9th percentile capable, 99.9th percentile crazy, 95th percentile violent. (Intuitively -- if the smartest and craziest kid in your high school were the same kid (1 in 1000 each trait), then you picked the most violent in 20 of those kids.) This turns out to be ~400 people, which seems ballpark right. I'd certainly expect the answer to be in the 120-1,200 person range. As long as your estimates aren't too far off and you aren't systemically wrong (eg, always rounding down), estimating is usually a reasonably accurate method to get a feel for the scale of something.