I'm seriously confused about what these mental disorders are, and how they work.
No-one really knows what these mental disorders are, or how they work. Worse, it's by no means clear that this is a mental disorder at all, at least in any meaningful sense of the word. Even by the standards of psychiatric medicine the definition of ASPD is vague and value-laden. To the extent there is a condition, it exists pretty much entirely in the fact that third parties are unhappy with their behaviour.
Are these people genuinely figuring out what humans care about by looking?
But sociopaths are humans too. They know what they care about. They just care about different things than you, or at least are willing to take different courses of action to achieve them.
What makes you think that sociopathy is in need of an explanation? In my view it's essentially the default, that we are all sociopaths when no-one's looking. Non-sociopathy is what needs an explanation.
No-one really knows what these mental disorders are, or how they work.
I'm going to call fallacy of grey on that. Yes, the human brain is a large mystery. But there's been an awful lot of work done in the field of psychology, and I have a very limited knowledge of psychology, relative to people who work in that field. And some of those people may be on less wrong.
...it's by no means clear that this is a mental disorder at all, at least in any meaningful sense of the word. Even by the standards of psychiatric medicine the definition of ASPD is vague and v
I have consistently, over the course of my life, heard people describe sociopathy and related mental illnesses as being caused by a lack of empathy. This, intuitively, seems wrong, since that seems like a massively important brain function, that really ought to have a major and extremely visible effect on your thinking. Now, obviously it does have a serious impact (amoral behavior, etc), but it seems rather unlikely to me that someone like this really shouldn't be able to mask themselves as normal. (I'm also not sure why lack of empathy would make you want to dissect squirrels, but that seems like a side issue).
The upshot is that I'm seriously confused about what these mental disorders are, and how they work. Do these individuals have the ability to empathize but not sympathize? I'm not sure how that would work, but I'm not at all an expert on cognitive science. Is the standard explanation for these disorders just wrong? Are these people genuinely figuring out what humans care about by looking?
(As a side note, if it's the last one, has anyone considered getting a sociopath to work on FAI? Bringing someone who can't be trusted into an enterprise is a risky move, but if there genuinely are people in the world who have spent their entire lives practicing working out human emotions without feeling them...)