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Research Suggests Politicians Are More Likely to Be Psychopaths
- energist 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mgarfias 3y ago[flagged]
- acover 3y agoWhen does it make more sense to just select a random person from millions of competent/trustworthy people and run them?
- readyplayernull 3y agoWhat!? Who wants a real democracy? > In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
- lr4444lr 3y agoThe legal requirements and cultural qualifications to become a fully enfranchised Athenian citizen were already pretty self-selecting for what that society wanted in a more consensus driven way than most modern countries have.
- defrost 3y agoWell, sure, provided that by "consensus" you mean the opinions of adult, free, male citizens who probably constituted no more than 30 percent of the total adult population. Athens was a literal minority patriacharcy of landlords, and I don't say that to be contentious or a social justice warrior, etc. just to blandly point out a dull truth.
- wfleming 3y agoThe US started out that way too.
- kej 3y agoAlso interesting is the machine they used for the random selections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion
- tiahura 3y agoOr a la Asimov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story)
- wudangmonk 3y agoThis has always seemed to be like the best aproach. You never want people that gravitate towards positions of authority to be in such positions. For positions that require some degree of competence you have to settle with what you get, but what qualifications do politicians actually have?. Its not like we have the modern equivalent of the ancient chinese civil servant exam so that civil servants at least have some basic level of competency. Picking at random cannot possibly be any worse than what we have, it would reduce corruption and would create the incentive to invest more in the education of the general public.
- matthewdgreen 3y agoThe problem isn’t just that psychopaths want to be in control, it’s that millions of people want psychopaths to be in control. It’s almost as though there’s a gene for self-destructiveness and about half the population has it.
- joshspankit 3y agoWhat are your citations?
- fithisux 3y agoWhat are your citations for the sunrise and sunset?
- joshspankit 3y ago- Herman, J. R. "The response of stratospheric constituents to a solar eclipse, sunrise, and sunset." Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 84.C7 (1979): 3701-3710. - Sparavigna, Amelia Carolina. "Roman towns oriented to sunrise and sunset on solstices." Available at SSRN 2777118 (2016). - Woolf, Harold M. On the computation of solar elevation angles and the determination of sunrise and sunset times. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1968. - Teets, Donald A. "Predicting sunrise and sunset times." The College Mathematics Journal 34.4 (2003): 317-321. - Greenwood, Margaret Stautberg. "Using rotation matrices to calculate the locations of sunrise and sunset, the hours of daylight, observed path of the Sun, and its elevation angle for any latitude." American Journal of Physics 91.7 (2023): 519-519. - Muheim, Rachel, Susanne Åkesson, and John B. Phillips. "Magnetic compass of migratory Savannah sparrows is calibrated by skylight polarization at sunrise and sunset." Journal of Ornithology 148 (2007): 485-494. - Verhulst, Tobias GW, and Stanimir M. Stankov. "Height-dependent sunrise and sunset: Effects and implications of the varying times of occurrence for local ionospheric processes and modelling." Advances in space research 60.8 (2017): 1797-1806.
- krapp 3y agoWhy should we assume any random person to be either more competent or trustworthy than a politician?
- brink 3y agoBecause a random person is likely to be a regular person.
- thsksbd 3y agoTrustworthy - because politics selects for power trippers
- krapp 3y agoMany people become power trippers once power is suddenly thrust upon them.
- thsksbd 3y agoOf course, but with random selection you will also get people who aren't latent psychos. Politics, and the our modern. electoral processes in particular, selects for psychopathy since, all else being equal, the charming psycho candidate is more likely to win and level up (to a more prominent election contest). If there are five election levels (school board -> state house -> house -> senate/governor/president) each with a small bias, by the time a candidate reaches the top he's been fairly well selected for total PoS.
- gremlinsinc 3y agoI think the supreme Court should be like jury duty. Judges and lawyers with ten years experience get called up for one court case only. All random peers who've passed the bar and met basic requirements. all other political appointments should be ranked choice or like that parliament system where if x party gets 30 percent of vote they get to appoint 30 percent of the positions. It would beat the part
- krapp 3y agoThe Supreme Court requires an expertise in Constitutional law that a random judge or lawyer isn't going to have.
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoThe Supreme Court requires 51 senators to vote for you :) Expertise is definitely not a requirement.
- krapp 3y agoCall it a necessity, then. As much as I mistrust the current Court I still expect them to know more about Constitutional law than the ambulance chaser advertising on a billboard downtown.
- jschveibinz 3y agoI like it, but I have a better and more practical solution: limit the term of every politician to 1 term in any one office, and 3 terms in total. Make it a grass roots constitutional amendment campaign in the US. Then, the problem solves itself because the political career no longer becomes a viable power grab. And money interests can’t work fast enough to buy favors.
- dclowd9901 3y agoCurious how you’d evaluate competency or trustworthiness.
- acover 3y agoYou are right. There's no good way to efficiently measure that - even just excluding people with a history of criminal fraud is costly. A secretary problem setup would eliminate the worst candidates while removing the traditional political gauntlet that selects for lizard people. Purely random also works as there is still a general election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
- aperson_hello 3y ago[flagged]
- getravi 3y agoWater is wet.
- dang 3y agoOk, but could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- bb88 3y agoAnyone remember the Silicon Valley episode on "Ruinous Empathy?" I think that ep sums it up tidily, frankly. Empathy is important. Sure, too much of it, like anything else is bad. But not showing it at all is worse.
- sleepybrett 3y ago[flagged]
- gremlinsinc 3y ago[flagged]
- lr4444lr 3y agoI believe it. I once ran for office locally with no political experience on a wishful "average guy" ticket (I lost badly), and one of the hardest things about the process was taking criticism from people who didn't know me, who just wanted to vent their anger at the system or in some cases, trolling from the incumbent. It dawned on me pretty quickly during the race that the kind of person cut out to win and rise in this line of work has got to have skin as thick as rawhide, and a psychopath's inherent disregard for other people's opinions and grandiose sense of self would really fit the bill.
- rxhernandez 3y agoThe complete opposite is probably sufficient as well. It gets a lot easier to tolerate bullshit when you realize almost every stranger's asshole-ish behavior is a function of something wrong with themselves or their environments. I just look at those behaviors as huge billboards that broadcast what's wrong with that person (as long as it's a stranger; if they're not a stranger it's a completely different story)
- tiahura 3y agoTo play devil's advocate a bit, perhaps the challenge isn't to rid ourselves of psychos, but to find a mechanism for ensuring a healthy mix of personalities in power. It takes different strokes to move the world.
- over_bridge 3y agoThere's an argument that we've made the job of politician so undesirable that only the most unfeeling, cynical and power hungry would seek it. Lets make it into a normal job. 40 hrs per week, an expectation of privacy for those in the role and their families, and remove the cameras from the debating chambers so they can actually speak their minds instead of grandstanding for the home audience. Reduce the length of elections to 2 months max so that campaigning isn't a full time job in itself too
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- iosystem 3y agoI suppose the message is that it's possible for an individual to have a better outcome at work (maybe even a better life) as a psychopath than if they had not been born as one.
- behnamoh 3y agoWho funds this type of research? Isn't it obvious? And what do we do with the results?
- brink 3y agoPoint the finger at our opponents of course.
- swayvil 3y agoI've heard them called "seekers of power" and "climbers" and "lizard people". It's an inherent problem with a society I think. That it gives them something to climb, to get control of. It only makes sense that the ruling class will be full of lizards. And the most dedicated lizards will be on top. I guess this is a society-engineering problem. How to make a lizardproof society?
- eloop 3y agos/effective/defective/g
- atleastoptimal 3y agoI'm certain that psychopathy, along with narcissism, despite being labeled personality "disorders", are actually advantageous traits in the modern world. Given the percentage of high status, wealthy, powerful people with those traits, it's clearly a factor that aids in securing a powerful position and having no qualms about whoever you have to step over to get there.
- AnonC 3y agoThis is old and needs (2012) in the title. In over the decade after this was published, I think now the prerequisite to be in politics in most places is to be a psychopath. The “more likely” in this headline is sorta toning it down a bit too much.
- metaphor 3y ago2012. Title asserts "research suggests" yet neither cites nor mentions any actual research while quoting commentary from a social magazine article. This is low quality fodder for gossip.
- MagaMuffin 3y ago[dead]