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Salemicus comments on Question about Sociopathy/Psychopathy/ASPD - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (36)
And I'm going to call fallacy of composition on that. Sure, some psychiatric disorders are fairly well understood. Sociopathy/Psycopathy/ASPD, however, are not well understood by anyone.
But that's not what we mean by a medical condition. All sorts of things are clusters in personality space - e.g. "nerd", "extrovert", and "workaholic." Generally speaking, if you aren't unhappy with something, and it doesn't inhibit your functioning in the world, it's not a medical condition. If Mr. X says "I wish I wasn't such an extrovert, please fix me doctor" then arguably Mr X. has a condition. But if Mr. Y says "I wish Mr. X wasn't such an extrovert," but Mr. X is fine with his personality, then it's much harder to argue that Mr. X has a condition. This is doubly so if there is no known working treatment. This works equally well if you substitute "sociopath" for "extrovert."
Typically, sociopaths do not believe they have a problem. Well, OK. If they break the law, they should be sanctioned/punished/etc. And to the extent that behavioural therapy/compulsory drugs/whatever can force them to behave more lawfully, then great. But we shouldn't pretend that we are treating them for any problem they have - we're training/forcing them to comply with our ethical norms, and that's all there is to it.
Here's a different way of putting it. I have no particular background in psychology. I have never taken a class on it. I have read, over the course of my life, a few books on topics in psychology that I found interesting. These were books intended for a lay audience, not for people who actually wanted to seriously study the field. I have never read a textbook. The extent of my knowledge of sociopathy/psychopathy/ASPD is from reading the wikipedia page on those topics, and TV shows/movies.
Now I have been in bookstores and I have seen books written about sociopathy. Books that looked to be a couple hundred pages long. And there were multiple books in this section. Unless every single one of those books is a word for word restatement of the wikipedia page, there is information about sociopathy which is known, and yet I do not know it. The little bit of information which I do know confuses me, and I do not know, at the moment, whether my confusion is a general confusion, which is shared by people working in the field, or if I would understand the specific questions I'm stuck on if I had only read those books. I posted this hoping that someone who had read those books, or maybe somebody with actual psychology training, could tell me what that was. Just because sociopathy is not fully understood by anyone doesn't mean that I personally understand everything that someone working in the field understands.
To be fair, I've read books hundreds of pages long which contained less information than a reasonably complete Wikipedia article. There's almost no limit to how much you can write about a limited data set if you're at all good at storytelling. This is truer than usual for pop science, and especially true for pop psychology.
That being said, and clusterfuck though it is, ASPD and related disorders are probably the most intensively studied cluster in personality-space -- the study of "criminal insanity" (from which there's a more or less direct line to the modern understanding of ASPD) considerably predates Freud. The DSM criteria are purely descriptive and probably don't describe a natural kind with any great precision, but volume of data is not going to be a problem here; can't say the same for interpretation, though.
Well now we're running into the same problem from the opposite direction. The volume of data possessed by humanity != the volume of data I possess.