I think we should have a reckoning as a society regarding the prevalence and predilections of sociopaths. Patric Gagne is a PsyD with diagnosed sociopathy (tech

I think we should have a reckoning as a society regarding the prevalence and predilections of sociopaths. Patric Gagne is a PsyD with diagnosed sociopathy (technically anti-social personality disorder, I think) who writes and speaks about her experience and she makes a number of good points. One is that we often can't conceive of sociopaths as anything but the stylized depictions we get in media where they are often portrayed as violent animal abusers or serial killers. Her next point is that reframing this image by identifying a disorder she proposes should be called "low affect disorder" will make it more apparent how people afflicted by it consider and navigate through the world to help us more readily address the potential harms associated with that kind of apathy. It would help us all to be able to recognize that kind of behavior to the point where we can box and name it, challenging its ability to cause harm undetected. One hopeful note is that the apathy goes both ways: harm is just a means to an end, and if we can offer alternative paths to those ends that don't incentivize harm then we'd all be better for it. This kind of company, as well as the activities of YC generally, is evidence that we have normalized a certain kind of harm through the development of our economic and government institutions. Those with low affect and who struggle in the empathy department are more than happy to live with ideologies that ignore suffering as long as it's separated by one or more layers of bureaucracy. This normalization is essentially sanity-washing for the profit motive. I don't see anything indicating this trend will reverse in the near future, there's a pathology in society that seems to prevent actual accountability these days.