9 ms·

Finding Sociopaths on Facebook

145 points by anu_gupta 13y ago

michaelfeathers 13y ago
Bruce has a great point about how people overreact due to the base rate fallacy, but I'm afraid that it will forever be too subtle for legislators and judges. My immediate thought is that if the base rate fallacy were part of their education, society would be better off, but legislators still have to play to their constituents and it's hard to have hope in that sphere.
androidb 13y ago
There's nothing wrong with being a sociopath as long as you follow Harry's code.
jokoon 13y ago
I really doubt sociopaths would use facebook at all anyway
- Samuel_Michon 13y ago
  Perhaps you’re thinking of people who are antisocial? I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the Facebook members who are most active and have the most ‘friends’ are sociopaths.
  - jokoon 13y ago
    I have no real idea. I was just saying this, as in, I don't think criminal hang around facebook. If that'd be the case, would facebook just be some sort of crime catching tool ? I wonder though, is sociopathy a crime, or some trait that will turn people into criminal ? > I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the Facebook members who are most active and have the most ‘friends’ are sociopaths. I doubt the people you are talking about can be criminal. Crime and psychology, sigh
    - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
      I’m not talking about crime. Most sociopaths never commit any crimes and it’s not illegal to be a sociopath. That would be silly, like jailing someone for having red hair. Also, it’s quite possible that there are more sociopaths than there are people with red hair – estimates range from 1% to 4% of the population. > I don't think criminal hang around facebook. Are you sure about that?
      - jokoon 13y ago
        I just don't see where the correlation between sociopathy and crime comes from.
        Samuel_Michon 13y ago
        There’s a correlation, but one can’t say ‘All sociopaths are criminals’, just as one can’t say ‘All drug addicts are thieves’.
    - qznc 13y ago
      Criminals do use Facebook: http://www.neowin.net/news/thief-caught-after-stopping-to-check-facebook http://www.neowin.net/news/thief-caught-after-stopping-to-ch... However, the common burglar is probably not a sociopath, but rather a poor drug addict or something.
  - acheron 13y ago
    "antisocial" and "sociopathy" are roughly the same thing. Perhaps you're thinking of people who are non-social?
    - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
      > "antisocial" and "sociopathy" are roughly the same thing. When you look them up in the DSM (the big book of psychological disorders), it will seem that way. However, you can be antisocial or possess sociopathic traits without having a disorder. In general dictionaries, ’antisocial’ is synonymous to ’unsociable’. That’s how it’s most often used and that’s how I meant it. > Perhaps you're thinking of people who are non-social? I had never heard of that word. After Duckducking it, it seems to me that no one uses it. If I were to use another word, I’d probably go for ’asocial’.
- UK-AL 13y ago
  Think of some the most successful people you know, have lots of friends, charming and charasmatic. Seems to do no work but gets to the top anyway? Always in press releases, and newspapers but the rest of the team gets no reconigtion? Good chance they're a sociopath. Sociopaths also tend to be good at getting funding for start ups ;) They are lifes hackers.
DanBC 13y ago
An excellent post by Schneier. > The problem isn't just that such a system is wrong, it's that the mathematics of testing makes this sort of thing pretty ineffective in practice. It's called the "base rate fallacy." Suppose you have a test that's 90% accurate in identifying both sociopaths and non-sociopaths. If you assume that 4% of people are sociopaths, then the chance of someone who tests positive actually being a sociopath is 26%. (For every thousand people tested, 90% of the 40 sociopaths will test positive, but so will 10% of the 960 non-sociopaths.) You have postulate a test with an amazing 99% accuracy -- only a 1% false positive rate -- even to have an 80% chance of someone testing positive actually being a sociopath. Interestingly here he uses percentages to describe base rates and risk. Gerd Gigerenzer has a nice book, Reckoning with Risk, where he explains with many examples the problems of this approach. Gerd asks people to use real numbers instead, which are much easier to understand for most people. Thus, Schneier's example becomes: > Out of 1,000 people about 40 of will be sociopaths. You have a test that will tell you if someone is, or is not, a sociopath. The test will be correct 9 times out of 10. Bob has taken the test, and has been identified as a possible sociopath. The chance that Bob is actually a sociopath are actually about 1 in 4. This is because the test will tell you that 36 of the 40 sociopaths are sociopaths, but it will also incorrectly tell you that 96 non-sociopaths are sociopaths. My writing is lousy, and other people will be able to clean this up, but even with my poor writing style it's easier for most people to follow and understand than the percentages. This is alarmingly important when you're making a health decision - "Should I remove my breasts to reduce my risk of breast cancer?" for example. (http://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-Risk-Learning-Live-Uncertainty/dp/0140297863 http://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-Risk-Learning-Live-Uncertain...) EDIT: I use "sociopath" because it's in the source article. I agree with NNQ that it's very troubling to bandy around diagnostic labels like this, and deem people to be dangerous, just because of a tentative probabilistic diagnosis.
- 6ren 13y ago
  I found his version clearer because "%" distinguishes proportions from quantities.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    Yes, but imagine you're taking the test. Suppose you have a test that's 90% accurate in identifying both people with X and people without X. If you assume that 4% of people are people with X and you're told that you test positive for someone who has X. Do you really find it easy to arrive at your actual chance (26%) of having X? Let's not forget that most people on HN are at the smarter end of the bell curve. It'd be interesting to see the results of a large scale study about answers to questions like this.
nnq 13y ago
Being "positive on a sociopathic personality test" does now equal being "a potentially dangerous pathological sociopath"! Even if you get a system good enough to overcome the base rate problem, you'll only end up labeling a bunch of mostly harmless people. Think a about a hypothetical uber-villain that would want to recruit children or teenagers, brainwash them and turn them into assassins or other kind of agents. He may find out that people with some sociopathic traits are better candidates for this, so he will target them. Now think the uber-villain is, uhm... (working for) your government :) ...not to mention the mislabeling of people with atypical social interaction patterns, like ones with mild/pseudo aspies which combined with the base rate fallacy brings serious mislabeling. I'm sure this kind of electronic-psycho-profiling is already in use, and I even think it may have interesting side-benefits, like cool work being done in AI research for use in this (no better way to start "humanizing" and AI than to have it model human personalities and predict their actions), but there's tons of things that can go south with it for lots of innocent people that just happen to be "different" (like most people who end up making breakthrough discoveries or world changing inventions, you know...).
- hrktb 13y ago
  Agreed. And perhaps the notion of "dangerous sociopath" can be revised altogether. I'm no expert but in my understanding sociopathy is more about non empathic social behavior. It can be felt as creepy and depicted as violent in fiction, but that's doesn't make it a dangerous behavior in itself, and can actually be socially rewarded. It can be argued that the lack of empathy can lead to a more violent behavior, but violent acts comming from deep personal relationship are plenty a dozen as well, who knows.
  - jbondeson 13y ago
    The problem here is that people are using a term that has a long and colorful history in a very imprecise manner. Sociopath hasn't been in the literature for years, but people still seem to use it interchangeably to speak of antisocial behavior and/or psychopathic traits which are not at all interchangeable. The DSM doesn't even list psychopathy as a diagnosis any more, only antisocial personality disorder which requires a history of, and we might as well just quote the DSM "... a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others..." So yes, a diagnosis of ASPD does generally indicate someone who could be considered dangerous to others. Now if we're talking about someone with psychopathic traits that scores high on a Hare, then no it does not necessarily indicate dangerous behavior. However, a Hare is still important when dealing with criminals as you do not want to give a psychopath treatment as it simply makes them better criminals.
codex 13y ago
The "fallacy" described here is a non-issue. Medical tests have the same characteristics but are still incredibly useful. HIV testing is roughly 99% accurate, but given the large number of tests performed, a very large percentage of people will end up with the wrong result. And yet this test is vital. Even wildly inaccurate tests can be useful. Imagine that driving drunk will result in a accident 10% of the time. 90% of the time, however, a driver will make it home safely. This is a wildly inaccurate predictor, but it still critical to know someone's blood alcohol level before giving them their keys. One must simply be aware of the uncertainty involved in any test, and treat test results as probabilistic signal, not as proof.
- michaelfeathers 13y ago
  The issue is that civil rights are supposed to be immune to probabilistic signal. In practice, it won't turn out that way. Look at racial profiling.
- DanBC 13y ago
  I tend to agree with you, except it is not a non issue. Look at the numbers of people getting very serious medical treatment because they, and their clinicians, have not understood the numbers. If doctor (well educated intelligent person) cannot get this right I'm scared that labelling someone as "POTENTIAL TERRORIST" on the basis of a 1 in X possibility is going to have disastrous consequences.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    Yes, this is an active area of debate in evidence-based medicine (EBM). If you aggregate outcomes, administering some tests actually appears to worsen prognosis, in the sense that if you take two groups of people with identical distributions of (unknown) conditions, and test one group while not testing the other, the tested group has worse overall outcomes. For example, in some cases people have surgery for a condition that, absent the test, would have remained asymptomatic and benignly ignored. With certain kinds of conditions, negative outcomes from retrospectively unnecessary treatment are frequent enough to outweigh the cases where discovery and treatment improves outcomes, if we're talking about aggregate outcomes. Of course, discovery does not require treatment, so you could test, find a positive, and not do anything. But EBM people tend to view idealized responses with suspicion, and some argue that taken in real-world conditions, not administering certain tests, or administering them in more restricted situations, or at least not recommending them as the default, would improve aggregate outcomes (and the data seems to support that). They would then restrict the tests to cases where testing statistically improves outcomes.
fredBuddemeyer 13y ago
moralism is irrelevant in the face of producing simple intelligence. bet on it, prohibition is futile. it can serve good as well.
fortepianissimo 13y ago
I'm sorry, but 36/(36+96) = 27.27%.
- EliRivers 13y ago
  Well, at least you're sorry about it. Try not to do it again :)
hownottowrite 13y ago
On Facebook, you don't find sociopaths -- sociopaths find you!
shubb 13y ago
I'm expecting social networks to be used 'voluntarily' for insurance soon. Likely the no social network quote will be higher, because it's higher risk because it's based on less information. So you get a quote through their app, which uses your likes, your social network, and maybe some NLP on your posts to decide if you qualify for a lower quote. Insurance people in the UK tell me this would be very useful, but probably isn't possible from a legal perspective, but there will be other countries where it is. An effect of this would be to penalize people who don't use social networks.
swamp40 13y ago
What happens if the "terrorist" is a normal person who loves his family and his country, and believes his sacrifice is honorable? "Even bad men love their mommas." - Ben Wade (Russell Crowe), 3:10 to Yuma.
- honzzz 13y ago
  I doubt that 'normal people' would be able to commit terrorist attacks because normal people experience empathy which would prevent them from hurting people voluntarily (even soldiers who act under strict orders in a war that is perceived as just are often traumatized by hurting/killing an enemy combatant... and this would be much more severe if victims were known to include innocent people or even children). The problem is that there is always enough people who are not normal (there is a great book about it by Erich Fromm: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness) and it's possible to 'make' people into something not normal in psychological sense - i.e. suppress their empathy for certain group of people by some war trauma or conditioning/brainwashing. BTW, I think that it's a myth that even bad men love their mommas. It depends how you define love. From what I remember based on one psychopath that I know really well he claims that he loves his mother and maybe he even thinks he feels something like that but he acts in such a way that his mother often gets hurt by his actions and he acts with complete disregard of that. Not love in my book.
fortepianissimo 13y ago
Accuracy is known to be a unreliable metric to measure the quality of a test (classifier). One paradox is that tests of higher accuracy might have less predictive power than the one with lower accuracy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_paradox
gundy 13y ago
In other news psychiatry is bullshit and I would say psychology is not far behind. The whole point of society is that we don't assume people are a certain way until they harm someone. If we no longer do that we're no different from any of the other totalitarian regimes and religions that prescribe their own flawed dogma about what constitutes a flawed person deserving to be punished. Any such civilization should be overthrown because it runs counter to all ideals of the enlightenment. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/05/04/psychiatry-in-crisis-mental-health-director-rejects-psychiatric-bible-and-replaces-with-nothing/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/05/04/p...
trimbo 13y ago
If you are interested in this subject, check out "The Sociopath Next Door". It changed my perspective quite a bit.
ColinDabritz 13y ago
Unfortunately the standard isn't even a lackluster 80%. We've learned that the 'go to' standard is 51%.
MaxScheiber 13y ago
Two words: Bayes' theorem. I think I learned this in the fourth or fifth week of my first probability course. Thought it was a bit more commonly known.
msg 13y ago
Here's the real problem: suppose you have a bunch of data on people and are convinced that somewhere in the data exists the spectrum from sociopath to non-sociopath. Who is going to label the data with ground truth? Clinicians who "know it when they see it"? What is the ground truth that the classifier is going to train on? If you're going to do an unsupervised classifier (eg clustering) who is going to label the clusters? What is going to keep the data from turning into uncorrelated mush?
squozzer 13y ago
I think the word "sociopath", like "nihilist" and to a lesser extent "traitor", never had much meaning outside of "someone whose characteristics or actions I do not like". So I question the basis on which Mr. Adams -- whose works some might consider a sociopathic attack on American business practices, and by extension, capitalism -- thinks content analysis is a good idea.
isaacb 13y ago
I hate that the author is using terrorist and sociopath interchangeably

145 points by anu_gupta 13y ago

Bruce has a great point about how people overreact due to the base rate fallacy, but I'm afraid that it will forever be too subtle for legislators and judges. My immediate thought is that if the base rate fallacy were part of their education, society would be better off, but legislators still have to play to their constituents and it's hard to have hope in that sphere.

androidb 13y ago

There's nothing wrong with being a sociopath as long as you follow Harry's code.

jokoon 13y ago

I really doubt sociopaths would use facebook at all anyway

Samuel_Michon 13y ago
Perhaps you’re thinking of people who are antisocial? I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the Facebook members who are most active and have the most ‘friends’ are sociopaths.
- jokoon 13y ago
  I have no real idea. I was just saying this, as in, I don't think criminal hang around facebook. If that'd be the case, would facebook just be some sort of crime catching tool ? I wonder though, is sociopathy a crime, or some trait that will turn people into criminal ? > I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the Facebook members who are most active and have the most ‘friends’ are sociopaths. I doubt the people you are talking about can be criminal. Crime and psychology, sigh
  - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
    I’m not talking about crime. Most sociopaths never commit any crimes and it’s not illegal to be a sociopath. That would be silly, like jailing someone for having red hair. Also, it’s quite possible that there are more sociopaths than there are people with red hair – estimates range from 1% to 4% of the population. > I don't think criminal hang around facebook. Are you sure about that?
    - jokoon 13y ago
      I just don't see where the correlation between sociopathy and crime comes from.
      - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
        There’s a correlation, but one can’t say ‘All sociopaths are criminals’, just as one can’t say ‘All drug addicts are thieves’.
  - qznc 13y ago
    Criminals do use Facebook: http://www.neowin.net/news/thief-caught-after-stopping-to-check-facebook http://www.neowin.net/news/thief-caught-after-stopping-to-ch... However, the common burglar is probably not a sociopath, but rather a poor drug addict or something.
- acheron 13y ago
  "antisocial" and "sociopathy" are roughly the same thing. Perhaps you're thinking of people who are non-social?
  - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
    > "antisocial" and "sociopathy" are roughly the same thing. When you look them up in the DSM (the big book of psychological disorders), it will seem that way. However, you can be antisocial or possess sociopathic traits without having a disorder. In general dictionaries, ’antisocial’ is synonymous to ’unsociable’. That’s how it’s most often used and that’s how I meant it. > Perhaps you're thinking of people who are non-social? I had never heard of that word. After Duckducking it, it seems to me that no one uses it. If I were to use another word, I’d probably go for ’asocial’.
UK-AL 13y ago
Think of some the most successful people you know, have lots of friends, charming and charasmatic. Seems to do no work but gets to the top anyway? Always in press releases, and newspapers but the rest of the team gets no reconigtion? Good chance they're a sociopath. Sociopaths also tend to be good at getting funding for start ups ;) They are lifes hackers.

DanBC 13y ago

An excellent post by Schneier. > The problem isn't just that such a system is wrong, it's that the mathematics of testing makes this sort of thing pretty ineffective in practice. It's called the "base rate fallacy." Suppose you have a test that's 90% accurate in identifying both sociopaths and non-sociopaths. If you assume that 4% of people are sociopaths, then the chance of someone who tests positive actually being a sociopath is 26%. (For every thousand people tested, 90% of the 40 sociopaths will test positive, but so will 10% of the 960 non-sociopaths.) You have postulate a test with an amazing 99% accuracy -- only a 1% false positive rate -- even to have an 80% chance of someone testing positive actually being a sociopath. Interestingly here he uses percentages to describe base rates and risk. Gerd Gigerenzer has a nice book, Reckoning with Risk, where he explains with many examples the problems of this approach. Gerd asks people to use real numbers instead, which are much easier to understand for most people. Thus, Schneier's example becomes: > Out of 1,000 people about 40 of will be sociopaths. You have a test that will tell you if someone is, or is not, a sociopath. The test will be correct 9 times out of 10. Bob has taken the test, and has been identified as a possible sociopath. The chance that Bob is actually a sociopath are actually about 1 in 4. This is because the test will tell you that 36 of the 40 sociopaths are sociopaths, but it will also incorrectly tell you that 96 non-sociopaths are sociopaths. My writing is lousy, and other people will be able to clean this up, but even with my poor writing style it's easier for most people to follow and understand than the percentages. This is alarmingly important when you're making a health decision - "Should I remove my breasts to reduce my risk of breast cancer?" for example. (http://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-Risk-Learning-Live-Uncertainty/dp/0140297863 http://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-Risk-Learning-Live-Uncertain...) EDIT: I use "sociopath" because it's in the source article. I agree with NNQ that it's very troubling to bandy around diagnostic labels like this, and deem people to be dangerous, just because of a tentative probabilistic diagnosis.

6ren 13y ago
I found his version clearer because "%" distinguishes proportions from quantities.
- DanBC 13y ago
  Yes, but imagine you're taking the test. Suppose you have a test that's 90% accurate in identifying both people with X and people without X. If you assume that 4% of people are people with X and you're told that you test positive for someone who has X. Do you really find it easy to arrive at your actual chance (26%) of having X? Let's not forget that most people on HN are at the smarter end of the bell curve. It'd be interesting to see the results of a large scale study about answers to questions like this.

nnq 13y ago

Being "positive on a sociopathic personality test" does now equal being "a potentially dangerous pathological sociopath"! Even if you get a system good enough to overcome the base rate problem, you'll only end up labeling a bunch of mostly harmless people. Think a about a hypothetical uber-villain that would want to recruit children or teenagers, brainwash them and turn them into assassins or other kind of agents. He may find out that people with some sociopathic traits are better candidates for this, so he will target them. Now think the uber-villain is, uhm... (working for) your government :) ...not to mention the mislabeling of people with atypical social interaction patterns, like ones with mild/pseudo aspies which combined with the base rate fallacy brings serious mislabeling. I'm sure this kind of electronic-psycho-profiling is already in use, and I even think it may have interesting side-benefits, like cool work being done in AI research for use in this (no better way to start "humanizing" and AI than to have it model human personalities and predict their actions), but there's tons of things that can go south with it for lots of innocent people that just happen to be "different" (like most people who end up making breakthrough discoveries or world changing inventions, you know...).

hrktb 13y ago
Agreed. And perhaps the notion of "dangerous sociopath" can be revised altogether. I'm no expert but in my understanding sociopathy is more about non empathic social behavior. It can be felt as creepy and depicted as violent in fiction, but that's doesn't make it a dangerous behavior in itself, and can actually be socially rewarded. It can be argued that the lack of empathy can lead to a more violent behavior, but violent acts comming from deep personal relationship are plenty a dozen as well, who knows.
- jbondeson 13y ago
  The problem here is that people are using a term that has a long and colorful history in a very imprecise manner. Sociopath hasn't been in the literature for years, but people still seem to use it interchangeably to speak of antisocial behavior and/or psychopathic traits which are not at all interchangeable. The DSM doesn't even list psychopathy as a diagnosis any more, only antisocial personality disorder which requires a history of, and we might as well just quote the DSM "... a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others..." So yes, a diagnosis of ASPD does generally indicate someone who could be considered dangerous to others. Now if we're talking about someone with psychopathic traits that scores high on a Hare, then no it does not necessarily indicate dangerous behavior. However, a Hare is still important when dealing with criminals as you do not want to give a psychopath treatment as it simply makes them better criminals.

codex 13y ago

The "fallacy" described here is a non-issue. Medical tests have the same characteristics but are still incredibly useful. HIV testing is roughly 99% accurate, but given the large number of tests performed, a very large percentage of people will end up with the wrong result. And yet this test is vital. Even wildly inaccurate tests can be useful. Imagine that driving drunk will result in a accident 10% of the time. 90% of the time, however, a driver will make it home safely. This is a wildly inaccurate predictor, but it still critical to know someone's blood alcohol level before giving them their keys. One must simply be aware of the uncertainty involved in any test, and treat test results as probabilistic signal, not as proof.

michaelfeathers 13y ago
The issue is that civil rights are supposed to be immune to probabilistic signal. In practice, it won't turn out that way. Look at racial profiling.
DanBC 13y ago
I tend to agree with you, except it is not a non issue. Look at the numbers of people getting very serious medical treatment because they, and their clinicians, have not understood the numbers. If doctor (well educated intelligent person) cannot get this right I'm scared that labelling someone as "POTENTIAL TERRORIST" on the basis of a 1 in X possibility is going to have disastrous consequences.
- _delirium 13y ago
  Yes, this is an active area of debate in evidence-based medicine (EBM). If you aggregate outcomes, administering some tests actually appears to worsen prognosis, in the sense that if you take two groups of people with identical distributions of (unknown) conditions, and test one group while not testing the other, the tested group has worse overall outcomes. For example, in some cases people have surgery for a condition that, absent the test, would have remained asymptomatic and benignly ignored. With certain kinds of conditions, negative outcomes from retrospectively unnecessary treatment are frequent enough to outweigh the cases where discovery and treatment improves outcomes, if we're talking about aggregate outcomes. Of course, discovery does not require treatment, so you could test, find a positive, and not do anything. But EBM people tend to view idealized responses with suspicion, and some argue that taken in real-world conditions, not administering certain tests, or administering them in more restricted situations, or at least not recommending them as the default, would improve aggregate outcomes (and the data seems to support that). They would then restrict the tests to cases where testing statistically improves outcomes.

fredBuddemeyer 13y ago

moralism is irrelevant in the face of producing simple intelligence. bet on it, prohibition is futile. it can serve good as well.

fortepianissimo 13y ago

I'm sorry, but 36/(36+96) = 27.27%.

EliRivers 13y ago
Well, at least you're sorry about it. Try not to do it again :)

hownottowrite 13y ago

On Facebook, you don't find sociopaths -- sociopaths find you!

shubb 13y ago

I'm expecting social networks to be used 'voluntarily' for insurance soon. Likely the no social network quote will be higher, because it's higher risk because it's based on less information. So you get a quote through their app, which uses your likes, your social network, and maybe some NLP on your posts to decide if you qualify for a lower quote. Insurance people in the UK tell me this would be very useful, but probably isn't possible from a legal perspective, but there will be other countries where it is. An effect of this would be to penalize people who don't use social networks.

swamp40 13y ago

What happens if the "terrorist" is a normal person who loves his family and his country, and believes his sacrifice is honorable? "Even bad men love their mommas." - Ben Wade (Russell Crowe), 3:10 to Yuma.

honzzz 13y ago
I doubt that 'normal people' would be able to commit terrorist attacks because normal people experience empathy which would prevent them from hurting people voluntarily (even soldiers who act under strict orders in a war that is perceived as just are often traumatized by hurting/killing an enemy combatant... and this would be much more severe if victims were known to include innocent people or even children). The problem is that there is always enough people who are not normal (there is a great book about it by Erich Fromm: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness) and it's possible to 'make' people into something not normal in psychological sense - i.e. suppress their empathy for certain group of people by some war trauma or conditioning/brainwashing. BTW, I think that it's a myth that even bad men love their mommas. It depends how you define love. From what I remember based on one psychopath that I know really well he claims that he loves his mother and maybe he even thinks he feels something like that but he acts in such a way that his mother often gets hurt by his actions and he acts with complete disregard of that. Not love in my book.

fortepianissimo 13y ago

Accuracy is known to be a unreliable metric to measure the quality of a test (classifier). One paradox is that tests of higher accuracy might have less predictive power than the one with lower accuracy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_paradox

gundy 13y ago

In other news psychiatry is bullshit and I would say psychology is not far behind. The whole point of society is that we don't assume people are a certain way until they harm someone. If we no longer do that we're no different from any of the other totalitarian regimes and religions that prescribe their own flawed dogma about what constitutes a flawed person deserving to be punished. Any such civilization should be overthrown because it runs counter to all ideals of the enlightenment. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/05/04/psychiatry-in-crisis-mental-health-director-rejects-psychiatric-bible-and-replaces-with-nothing/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/05/04/p...

trimbo 13y ago

If you are interested in this subject, check out "The Sociopath Next Door". It changed my perspective quite a bit.

ColinDabritz 13y ago

Unfortunately the standard isn't even a lackluster 80%. We've learned that the 'go to' standard is 51%.

MaxScheiber 13y ago

Two words: Bayes' theorem. I think I learned this in the fourth or fifth week of my first probability course. Thought it was a bit more commonly known.

msg 13y ago

Here's the real problem: suppose you have a bunch of data on people and are convinced that somewhere in the data exists the spectrum from sociopath to non-sociopath. Who is going to label the data with ground truth? Clinicians who "know it when they see it"? What is the ground truth that the classifier is going to train on? If you're going to do an unsupervised classifier (eg clustering) who is going to label the clusters? What is going to keep the data from turning into uncorrelated mush?

squozzer 13y ago

I think the word "sociopath", like "nihilist" and to a lesser extent "traitor", never had much meaning outside of "someone whose characteristics or actions I do not like". So I question the basis on which Mr. Adams -- whose works some might consider a sociopathic attack on American business practices, and by extension, capitalism -- thinks content analysis is a good idea.

isaacb 13y ago

I hate that the author is using terrorist and sociopath interchangeably