TheAncientGeek comments on Selling Nonapples - Less Wrong
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First you imply that the "actual frequency" is a feature of the territory -- I'm not sure about that at all (the underlying "feature" is likely to be a continuum with a semi-arbitrary threshold imposed by a map).
But the real question we're discussing is not what the absolute frequency is. The real question is whether sociopaths are more frequent in "business leaders" than in general population. I don't have any hard data, so I have to rely on priors. My prior would be that the frequency of sociopaths would be lower in "business leaders".
The reasoning for that goes as follows. Not all sociopaths are high-functioning -- some (a lot?) are just mean, grumpy, bitchy common people with not high IQ. Low-functioning sociopaths won't make it into business leaders -- they are much more likely to go e.g. into military forces and/or law enforcement.
High-functioning sociopaths are pretty rare, I think. For them the natural habit would be politics as that's where a power-hungry charming liar can get the biggest payoffs. Some will be business leaders -- Steve Jobs is the prime example -- but I don't think there will be many of those.
Don't forget that using psychiatric terms as derogatory labels is standard operating procedure :-) "Idiot" used to be a clinical diagnosis, so was "cretin", "imbecile", etc. etc.
But, historically, most of the data on sociopaths comes from the ones who end up in jail or therapy. Apart from the recent research, which you are rejecting on the grounds that it contradicts the older data, And your hunches, on which topic...
.....or 'handwaving" as it's unsympathetically known.