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bogus comments on Notes on Psychopathy - Less Wrong
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Comments (98)
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.
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.
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.
'Winning' is not really the right word here - a rational decision procedure should Win by definition. Clearly, psychopaths have different goals compared to the rest of the population: for simplicity, let's suppose that, compared to neurotypicals, they lack a terminal goal of not inflicting direct costs on others. However, punishing people for lacking certain terminal goals is not quite kosher by modern political/ethical standards. We don't lock people up for not donating enough to developing-world charities, because we understand that the vast majority of interactions are positive sum regardless.
Whether a psychopath approximating TDT could cooperate with a neurotypical person following either TDT or some kind of informal morality - and vice versa - is an interesting question and one that probably does not have an easy answer. However, in theory, TDT-approximating psychopaths should readily cooperate with each other.
It may also be the case that psychopaths are less able to enter precommitments and abide by them due to their overall deficits, which would make them more similar to CDT agents. However, this would not make them "winners" either, in any real sense: far from it. They would stop "winning" as soon as their lack of commitment (and thus non-credibility) was perceived by other agents - which would be quite soon, especially in a more rational world with a higher sanity waterline.