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If naught else, psychopaths of the sort you mention are surely then those with all the more comprehensive control of themselves, through their ability to better
by tekacs 12y ago
If naught else, psychopaths of the sort you mention are surely then those with all the more comprehensive control of themselves, through their ability to better regulate their emotion? That sounds like a useful quality in stable figures of authority or indeed anyone who would prefer to limit their irrational judgement.
- gwern 12y ago> If naught else, psychopaths of the sort you mention are surely then those with all the more comprehensive control of themselves, through their ability to better regulate their emotion? Regular psychopaths are a poor example here because one of the features of the disorder is a lack of control; they are impulsive and unable to balance risk with reward in gambling tests, and can have difficulty classifying others' emotions. (See the _Handbook of Psychopathy_.) They are more 'broken' than 'empathy selectively turned off', so it's not clear what, if anything, you could learn from them.
- tekacs 12y agoMm absolutely - hence why 'removal of empathy' to result in the kind of aforementioned controlled psychopath sounds like it might result in the controlled individual, might it not? You're absolutely on-point about regular psychopaths of course (as you know better than I).