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Thought experiment: If a virus spread through out the world and only killed psychopaths would the world be better, worse off, or about the same?

• jalapenos 4y ago
  Chesterton's fence. I say this purely to foment thought, but think about it, has anyone identified why we even have psychopathy among us? And why many of them are so successful? Until we do, we're being just as self-indulgent as they are when we get on our high horses with utterances like "psychopaths bad". Ok, so why do we keep voting them in?
  • thorncorona 4y ago
    I’d guess pragmatism is a desirable trait in games where death is inevitable.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Your making an assumption that this is a selected-for trait. I could just as easily substitute many hereditary disorders. As to why they are successful: cooperation is a more successful strategy than individualism, but cheating is a more successful strategy than cooperation if you can get away with it. Our societies have been largely shaped by cheaters for their benefit so they get away with it a lot, right up until the guillotine comes out.
• midoridensha 4y ago
  Hard to say. We'd probably get better national leaders, but we'd have a big shortage of surgeons so more people would die from medical problems requiring surgery.
• pmarreck 4y ago
  About the same. Many lawyers and doctors have dark-triad tendencies, which actually aid them. I mean, the original article is about the crippling emotional toll of what many would argue is a necessary evil. put it this way, the vast majority of people have difficulty reasoning about emotional topics; I bet psychopaths have no limitation of the sort. my question to you would be, what if we are in an equilibrium? Perhaps just enough psychopaths exist to “GSD“, but not enough to cause too many problems…
  • IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
    Why those professions have darkntried tendencies specifically? Has this been studied?