I’ve thought about this topic a lot, ever since I had a boss who I believe was both sociopathic and sadistic. The sociopathy made him remarkably effective at re

I’ve thought about this topic a lot, ever since I had a boss who I believe was both sociopathic and sadistic. The sociopathy made him remarkably effective at recruitment and strategy. The sadism was more self-destructive since, well, developers have employment options. Maybe sociopathy and sadism together are a more precise way of describing evil. But that implies other possibilities. For instance, Vinay Gupta describes himself as an ethical sociopath. He thinks that being freed from emotional empathy gives him an edge when thinking about topics like disaster planning. Similarly, I’ve heard it’s common for surgeons to have a bit less empathy than normal. Not full sociopaths. But enough to look on a bloody, twisted body pulled from a motorcycle accident, and operate a bone saw. In the imaginary future where we can precisely test for qualities like sociopathy, it might be sufficient to have candidates for positions of power publicly disclose the ways in which their minds deviate from the norm. Sociopathy might have some functions in human society, and maybe it’s been preserved by evolution for a reason. (Or maybe there’s some game theory thing happening where there’s a stable equilibrium of cooperators and defectors). The real problem is when the rest of us are deceived into getting into a relationship with a sociopath, where we have to rely on their conscience.