Lumifer comments on Selling Nonapples - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 November 2008 08:10PM

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Comment author: Lumifer 31 March 2015 04:40:54PM 1 point [-]

one claim by Paul Babiak that up to 1 in 25 business leaders may be psychopaths

Given that he says that "In fact, you could be living with or married to one for 20 years or more and not know that person is a psychopath" and "This makes it almost impossible to distinguish between a genuinely talented team leader and a psychopath" I have to ask what kind of a definition for a "psychopath" is he using.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 31 March 2015 07:32:35PM *  0 points [-]

I suppose that would be one that relies on complex tests administered by a professional.

Comment author: Nornagest 31 March 2015 08:29:13PM *  5 points [-]

The Guardian article commits the mortal sin of not naming the study or its year or coauthors, so I can't be sure about this, but when I search Google Scholar for Paul Babiak, I find this 2013 paper by Babiak et al. (Search its title for the full text; I can't get the link to behave.)

It seems primarily to be about methodology, and gives means and correlations on its own scale but doesn't venture a conversion to more conventional measures; but when you get right down to what it's doing, it's based on anonymous assessments of respondents' bosses collected through Amazon's Mechanical Turk, each consisting of 20 questions on a 5-point scale. If this is the method that the study behind the Guardian article is using, I'm very skeptical of its diagnostic validity. Among other things.