TrE comments on Notes on Psychopathy - Less Wrong

18 Post author: gwern 19 December 2012 04:02AM

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Comment author: Pentashagon 20 December 2012 05:55:03PM 2 points [-]

I do. At least as long as they behave. If you're intelligent enough to know (on an abstract level) why altruism and cooperation is good for humans within societies and have enough self-control to live by this principle, I don't know why empathy remains important. I mean, as a terminal value.

There's only an argument for altruism and cooperation if an agent is certain the other agents are running a decision theory that is as good as its own and their utility functions are similar enough to cooperate. TDT will cooperate with other TDTs, but a TDT without empathy will Win against decision theories like the ones human brains use. That's essentially the main argument for FAI. Self-control implies a terminal value with greater utility than doing whatever anti-social things one otherwise wants to do. I don't believe psychopaths have any greater-utility terminal values than getting what they want at the expense of others. That seems to be the entire problem, in fact.

Empathetic, slightly-less-intelligent people are okay but surely not more desirable than otherwise similarly empathetic intelligent people. Punishing less intelligent people just because of this appears to be just as useless and (w.r.t. my morality) immoral as punishing less empathetic people.

I'd prefer intelligent and non-psychopathic people over the others but I don't want to punish less intelligent people, I want to make them more intelligent. I don't want to punish psychopaths either. I want to make them less psychopathic. I can teach less intelligent people but apparently I can't (yet) teach empathy to psychopaths.

If there's a better approach to reducing murders by psychopaths than decreasing the number of psychopaths (by hindering them from reproducing), I'd opt for that.

Right now I don't know of any. Therapy appears to teach psychopaths better skills at manipulating people. One potential solution would be to prevent unintelligent people from being born and train everyone to recognize and counter the strategies that psychopaths use. That would put everyone on a level intellectual playing field and it's arguable that even psychopaths would recognize that fact and cooperate with everyone else.

Comment author: TrE 20 December 2012 06:44:00PM *  0 points [-]

There's only an argument for altruism and cooperation if an agent is certain the other agents are running a decision theory that is as good as its own and their utility functions are similar enough to cooperate.

It also works in society, with a government enforcing law and puts forth other fines and incentives. Furthermore, humans are messy. Our immediate desires, on a lower level, can be quite different from our long-term, reflected, higher goals. It's a matter of impulsiveness which of these wins how frequently.

I don't believe psychopaths have any greater-utility terminal values than getting what they want at the expense of others.

Why "at the expense of others"? That's a property of the world, not of them (which does not excuse what they do).

I don't want to punish psychopaths either. I want to make them less psychopathic.

I apopogize for misreading you. "We didn't eradicate malaria or polio with kinder, gentler methods. Don't leave anything for evolution to work with." sounds rather more... straightforward to me than you apparently meant it. I'm glad that we agree that psychopaths should be helped, whereever possible, to become productive parts of society.

Therapy appears to teach psychopaths better skills at manipulating people.

Then the current therapeutic methods are not well-suited for this task. If we want to go down the road of developing more effective means of psychopath crime prevention, therapy etc., I suggest we Hold Off On Proposing Solutions.