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A "sociopath" is not an alternative label for [someone I don't like.] I am not sure what a concise explanation for the sociopath symptom cluster is, but it might be someone who has trouble modeling other agents as "player characters", for whatever reason. A monster, basically. I think it's a bad habit to go around calling people monsters.
I know; I know; I know. This is exactly what makes this topic so frustratingly difficult to explain, and so convenient to ignore.
The thing I am trying to say is that if a real monster would come to this community, sufficiently intelligent and saying the right keywords, we would spend all our energy inventing alternative explanations. That although in far mode we admit that the prior probability of a monster is nonzero (I think the base rate is somewhere around 1-4%), in near mode we would always treat it like zero, and any evidence would be explained away.... (read more)