Sociopathy/Psycopathy/ASPD, however, are not well understood by anyone.
Here's a different way of putting it. I have no particular background in psychology. I have never taken a class on it. I have read, over the course of my life, a few books on topics in psychology that I found interesting. These were books intended for a lay audience, not for people who actually wanted to seriously study the field. I have never read a textbook. The extent of my knowledge of sociopathy/psychopathy/ASPD is from reading the wikipedia page on those topics, and TV shows/movies.
Now I have been in bookstores and I have seen books written about sociopathy. Books that looked to be a couple hundred pages long. And there were multiple books in this section. Unless every single one of those books is a word for word restatement of the wikipedia page, there is information about sociopathy which is known, and yet I do not know it. The little bit of information which I do know confuses me, and I do not know, at the moment, whether my confusion is a general confusion, which is shared by people working in the field, or if I would understand the specific questions I'm stuck on if I had only read those books. I posted this hoping that someone who had read those books, or maybe somebody with actual psychology training, could tell me what that was. Just because sociopathy is not fully understood by anyone doesn't mean that I personally understand everything that someone working in the field understands.
Unless every single one of those books is a word for word restatement of the wikipedia page, there is information about sociopathy which is known, and yet I do not know it.
To be fair, I've read books hundreds of pages long which contained less information than a reasonably complete Wikipedia article. There's almost no limit to how much you can write about a limited data set if you're at all good at storytelling. This is truer than usual for pop science, and especially true for pop psychology.
That being said, and clusterfuck though it is, ASPD and rela...
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...)