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Could Testing Block Psychopaths From Senior Management?
Freshly Exhumed writes "Dr. Clive Boddy believes that increasingly fluid corporate career paths have helped psychopaths conceal their disruptive workplace behavior and ascend to previously unattainable levels of authority. Boddy points out psychopaths are primarily attracted to money, status and power, currently found in unparalleled abundance in the global banking sector. As if to prove the point, many of the world's money traders self identify as the "masters of the universe." Solution? Screening with psychological tests. Who would pay for it? The insurance industry." The tech world has plenty of company heads who've been called psychopaths, too — but would you want to actually change that?
Would be great to see such a test for forum or internet users. Imagine how useful youtube comments would be if the psychopaths couldn't register.
Picked them up from the printer's yesterday. That's Bone. Lettering is something called Cillian rail.
Just note the current administration. When we are losing our countrymen to a bunch of crazy radicals, they go off campaigning in Las Vegas. Then when people ask them about it, they duck and cover and say they are conducting their own investigation. So much for "the most transparent administration in history...."
it should probably pick less karma-whore targets for it. First of all, investment banks and insurance companies are indistinguishable. They are essentially in the same business. But to answer the actual question, why wouldn't you want a banker to be attracted to money? Not everyone should be socially conscious as a job requirement. Only if it is in fact part of the job. I mean I wouldn't want a nurse or doctor who were sociopaths. But a banker? Why not? If it makes them better bankers, then more power to them.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Or in a less knee-jerk way: have we verified that this is actually a problem? What issues arise from psychopaths being in these positions of authority? Is there a way we can mitigate those negative effects while still playing to the strengths of the psychopath?
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Damn straight we want to change it. If companies are getting so big that they become "too big to fail" and governments would rather throw money at them then watch them collapse, then some other mechanism must be found to mitigate the destructive behaviour of higher-ups. I wouldn't care, if not for the fact that their screw ups can wreak massive amounts of havoc against innocent people.
Of course, this all depends on if the tests are actually reliable.
This. Could it not be considered medical discrimination?
To some extent, perhaps, though a lot of what went on in Wall Street leading up to the crash could only be considered success providing the insanely hideous effects on 99.9% of the population were discounted. The difference between a sociopath and a normal person is that a normal person possesses empathy, and empathy means that they will at least make a small effort to weigh personal benefit against benefit to their fellowman (including, but not limited to investors), whereas a sociopath/psychopath is in it for the thrills and power, and will happily drive the institution they're in charge of into a brick wall if there is immediate short term benefit to themselves.
There's no denying there is a place for insane risk takers, but as Captains of Industry (or whatever they're called these days), not so much.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Hell yes, this is a problem. Watch The Corporation. It basically shows that most corporations are psychopathic, and I believe that most governments are too. This is fundamentally at odds with our basic notion that people in charge should have some sort of human decency. If the majority of us have empathy but are ruled by psychopaths without empathy, this is a very very serious problem...especially when many people will go ahead and assume that the people in authority have empathy.
Basically the people who have the most say on how this world operates (including whether to wage war, take people's money, pollute the environment or not) are often (or mostly, depending on your point of view) behaving like psychopaths. This is nuts and it really goes a long way towards explaining the current state of affairs.
There have been studies posted about on Slashdot that state a ridiculously high percentage of all CEOs have significant mental problems. I think it was close to 50%. They're definitely more driven than clock punchers with no real motivation. They better watch their ass for business owners like me though. I operate lean and mean in a customer centric way and are super motivated to take out my competition by simply doing better instead of just running the company with my balls as a status symbol and building a $50,000 fountain out front with my face on it, lol.
I've worked with enough people who are nuts to think that if we're going to test the leaders, we should test everyone and put the psychopaths out of the workplace entirely.
One bad person on a team can not only make life miserable, but ruin the work output of the team, drive away anyone competent and damage everyone else's careers when they're associated with the failed team's product.
Futurist Traditionalism
Or in a less knee-jerk way: have we verified that this is actually a problem? What issues arise from psychopaths being in these positions of authority? Is there a way we can mitigate those negative effects while still playing to the strengths of the psychopath?
The characteristic lack of remorse or shame leads psychopaths to a fervent belief that "rules are for other people".
This results in catastrophes like the recent Banking/Finance issues in the US and the recent "rogue trader" excesses (UBS, and others).
"It's only against the law if you get caught" is a prime Directive of psychopaths.
And yet somehow you think there's ANY reason we want these people running anything?
Seriously folks, their behaviour is classed as antisocial for a reason, read the words - ANTI SOCIAL.
By Definition BAD FOR THE ENTIRE SOCIETY.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Cue the A.D.A.
(Got karma to burn today, so I feel ok with posting this little nugget of flame-bait :-) )
Ian Ameline
... if it works of course.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
many of the world's money traders self identify as the "masters of the universe." Solution?
I would guess that 90% of these people became psychopaths because of cocaine abuse. A simple urine test would be much cheaper, and quite efficient...
But good luck getting the head honcho to agree to put himself on the chopping block.
Many social solutions require cooperation from the same people they seek to oust.
Wrong, it's a science, we are the pseudo-subjects.
I'm a type 1 diabetic, which prohibits me from flying aircraft. Same thing for someone who is color blind. Is it because we're bad people? No, but it's been judged unsafe to others that we do these things. Psychopaths running corporations could also be deemed unsafe to others.
The problem is in the system, not in the individuals, however the system gives incentives for psychopathic behavior
...they go off campaigning in Las Vegas. Then when people ask them about it, they duck and cover and say they are conducting their own investigation. So much for "the most transparent administration in history...."
Well you saw through them didn't you?
Screen politicians with psychological tests
Yes indeed. The fundamental problem is that these firms are themselves essentially sociopathic. It's little wonder they attract psychopaths.
Frankly, I think the best cure is one "man in black" in an isolated, sound proof cubicle with a direct line to the SEC in one hand and a machine gun in the other. When the call comes in, there goes the firm, psychopaths and all.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't know why there is this perception that psychopaths, or more properly sociopaths, are some kind of aliens among us. Why does anyone think that perfectly normal people can't behave in a similar fashion? After all, power corrupts.
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Well, depends if you are talking about criminal activity. Yes, traders can earn their money by front trading and other dirty tricks, but generally, they are very well monitored and are NOT allowed to invest any personal money. Instead, they are given very good bonuses dependent on... guess what... how much money they have earned for their clients !
Reward and benefit of the clients is very closely coupled here - if you make profit, you get paid more, your clients gain more. There is no conflict of interests here.
Now, you have to differentiate between clients and clients. Or actually, 'our guys' and 'losers'. If you are stockholder of my company, you are 'our guy'. If you give you money for us to invest, you are also our guy. If you are person coming from the street looking to buy structured product, you are loser. Yes, officially you are our 'client', but thats just the name - you are the victim which will give the money to real clients.
I suppose that a lot of confusion comes from that. Think about it as a auction house. People putting antiques in auction house are clients. Auction house tries to sell antiques for maximum money, without worrying if they are worth that much, as long as anybody is willing to buy. People buying antiques are not clients - they are targets.
And there is a big difference between investment banking and insurance business - in insurance, EVERYBODY is a target to cheat at any cost.
Just come up with a 'reasonable accomodation' that will allow a sociopath to exercise a position of power and discretion without dangerous fuckups, and we'll talk...
Isn't it generally illegal, under the ADA, to discriminate on the basis of mental illness, unless it can be shown said illness directly hinders job performance? It seems to me that being a psychopath not only doesn't hinder job performance if you're a banker, it might make you better at it, in the same way being somewhat Asperger's tends to make you better at jobs in the technical field?
Indeed it is terrifying - it's clear that their spelling is already invading Canada. We already seem to have lost our centre, we'll soon be colourless and before you know it Thanksgiving will be in November.
This. Could it not be considered medical discrimination?
First we need to decide whether or not they fit a socially acceptable* definition of "human".
*Socially acceptable as in does not harm the rest of society.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
What issues arise from psychopaths being in these positions of authority?
I watched one completely destroy the IT department I worked at a few jobs ago.
Dude was the passive-aggressive kind of putz. His first act as head of IT was to dig up (and in some cases invent) things to formally write-up everyone that he perceived as a threat to his authority. His next step was to rip out carefully-laid and in-progress projects and start re-wiring them to align with his goals (goals which, curiously enough, we were never really informed of aside from a bunch of acronyms. That said, we were already doing such things as ITIL and PCI compliance, among others... apparently he had other plans). The worst part is, he tried to pretend that he had the same skills... in spite of periodically destroying his laptop (malware aplenty) and once turning an Oracle DB testbed into mush, then blaming the DBA for it (VM snapshots are beautiful things...) I won't even begin to describe how much money this guy blew off into the ether on unneeded and unnecessary consultants, equipment, and worse.
Most of us began quitting in droves as better opportunities arose - myself included. Out of the original crew, only one stayed behind, and I think she only stayed to finish off the tuition reimbursement program that the company once had.
They eventually pushed him out (according to his LinkedIn profile, he's been "exploring opportunities" since earlier this year.) Too late though, I think... the company has been suffering pretty hard due to cost overruns and the increasing amount of bork-ups in its manufacturing automation (guess why...) I'm not really sure if they'll survive due to a market sector that's going to crap plus a rotten economy overall. We're talking about fuck-ups that will likely push 1500 people in the local area to the unemployment line if they collapse.
Long story short? Be damned careful who you pick to sling around the expensive and important parts of your company. A more competent and less ass-hatted IT leader would have kept costs lower, kept an eye on what's truly important, listened to the warnings and rational dissent from his reports, and not driven away the critical staff that built and knew the damned thing in the first place.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
and I believe that most governments are too.
Actually one of the main properties of the welfare state a la Europe is that is not sociopathic,
Nuff said.
Seriously folks, their behaviour is classed as antisocial for a reason, read the words - ANTI SOCIAL.
By Definition BAD FOR THE ENTIRE SOCIETY.
That is NOT the defintion of antisocial. It is not necessarily bad for society. There was an article in the Economist that describes a study that found that people with cold emotional detachment are exactly who should be running things.
This is especially apparent in military leaders. In the American Civil war, leaders like McClellan and Meade were known for their compassion and concern for the welfare of their troops. But hundreds of thousands died unnecessarily because they failed to push for a decisive victory early in the war. More emotionally detached generals like Grant and Stonewall Jackson were far more effective.
How many allied troops died in Normandy due to Monty's dithering? Meanwhile "blood and guts" Patton was encircling 40,000 Nazi troops at Falaise.
"rules are for other people".
"It's only against the law if you get caught"
I fear for the mental health of the Slashdot poster!
In tissue-thin disguise, you can hear these same sentiments being expressed in many a post about a geek's encounter with the law.
"If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with"
Even psychopaths (more correctly, sociopaths, as noted below. They have no 'organic' cause for their 'disease') might be empathic. As an individual, surrounded by 'normal' people, they also may seem to be normal and share the same feeling as the group. But with the 'wrong crowd', watch out. Group think, peer pressure, whatever you want to call it, is very powerful. Authoritarians are professional chameleons in this respect. Good parents are very watchful of the kind of company their children keep. It starts there.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
They test for psychopaths when selecting managers. How else would we get the psychopath managers we have now?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Actually, I would say that a society ruled by "empathy" would quickly collapse, as the people in charge would be unable to make decisions based on an objective cost/benefit analysis, but instead would be paralyzed by emotional concerns. It's a common cliche that "you can't put a price on human life", but every modern society does, constantly, and if a society's leaders can't do this, the society will fail.
To use a highly oversimplified example: Let's assume that we can prevent 50% of automobile related deaths by imposing a regulation that increases the cost of a car by $1.00. Most people would say that would be worthwhile. To prevent 50% of the remaining deaths, we can increase the cost of a car by $100.00. To prevent 50% of the remaining deaths (this report was commissioned by Zeno, by the way), the cost increases by $1000.00. And so on. There is a point where someone must say, "Yeah, the harm done by increasing costs that much outweighs the value of the lives saved." An "empathic" person would be unable to draw that line, as he'd be unable to say "Some known percentage of people will die in accidents, people who COULD have been saved if we'd spent more money." This carries across many different fields and areas of human activity, from drug trials to engineering. There's a point where some level of risk must be deemed "acceptable". The more empathic someone is, the more difficult it will be for them to consciously allow a certain number of probable deaths or injuries.
Emotions are easy to manipulate. I show you (generic you, not you personally) a bunch of pictures, along with heart-wrenching stories, of Palestinean children killed by Israeli bombs. "How can we support such murderers?", you ask. Then I show you heart-wrenching stories of Israeli children killed by Palestinean bombs. "We have to protect these people!", you cry. If your decision is based on how much you CARE, you can't make a decision. You have to step back and evaluate which side, if either, is more useful to support for reasons totally irrelevant to how many children are getting killed. You have to reduce people to numbers and statistics -- or you can't decide, and meanwhile, even more people die while you waffle.
More abstractly, there will always be more problems than there are resources to solve them. Someone has to decide whose suffering to alleviate, and whose to ignore. People who are too empathic can't; at best, they'll make decisions based on whichever crisis is most heart-touching to them (usually determined by which one has the best propaganda), not on other considerations.
Most of our society, at all levels, can only function if we set aside our feelings and focus on facts. An umpire shouldn't make calls based on which team he wants to win, even if his motivation is sympathy for the feelings of the team that keeps losing all the time. A boss shouldn't fire or hire people based on who he likes more, but on job performance. We disdain those who show favoritism to friends and relatives, but it is psychologically normal to be more sympathetic to those closest to you. It is psychologically *abnormal* to make decisions without regard to your emotional connections to people -- but people in power are expected, even required by law, to do precisely that, to decide things without consulting their feelings.
Thus, it is inevitable that those with the least empathy will rise to positions of power, because those with the most can't do the job.
(I've run into a depressing number of people who are convinced this is not the way the world is; that if only we all CARED enough, there'd never be a need for hard decisions, because everyone would just do the right thing, all the time.)
The difference between a sociopath and a normal person is that a normal person possesses empathy, and empathy means that they will at least make a small effort to weigh personal benefit against benefit to their fellowman.
What about those with Aspergers? One of the original diagnostic criteria for Aspergers is a lack of empathy. Same goes for Autism too. Shall we ban these people from management?
Or perhaps we should just accept that individual choices can allow people to overcome any lack of anything? Empathy or not, everyone has a chance to be a good human being. We're getting dangerously close to labelling people here not based on actions or life choices but simply a pre-determined judgement that can be made at a young age.
There was this housing bubble thingy popping and a bunch of people foreclosed on, perhaps you heard about it.
Then there was that time they spilled all the oil in the Gulf. I think that got a mention or two.
Going back a way, there was that whole Wall Street love affair with 'chainsaw Al' until they realized that he was just as willing to cook the books to make his bonus as he was to fire half a company and collect their pay as his personal bonus.
Would this even be legal? Psychopathy is a recognized disease/disability if you test for it and use it to restrict caree path would that not be against the ADA?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Management requires empathy for others and an ability to be responsible to others, thus a psychopath cannot do the job.
Complexity Happens
Let me guess ... the submitter works in tech, not in banking?
Why is it OK for tech companies to be run by psychopaths, but not banking?
The Wall Street meltdown or the Silicon Valley bubble were not created by psychopaths and antisocials but by the herd mentality. As all bubbles are. People who work for psychopaths leave and fast. Especially true of smart people who can find work anywhere. Both Wall Street and Sillicon Valley are filled with smart people and no dearth of opportunities. What even smart people aren't immune to is peer pressure. Once the herd starts running in one direction however smart you may be it has an effect.
"Testing" is not for senior management. Like "austerity" and "cost-cutting" and "right-to-work", such things are meant for the less important, less productive members of our society (aka "the 47%" as described by a member of the senior management set not long ago). We can't expect the job creators to submit to something as demeaning as testing. It's just not done, and we run the risk of them deciding to deprive those of us who are the takers, the mooches, the leeches of their singular talents by "going Galt".
Plus if they started screening CEOs for psychopathy who would we get to run the engine of our wonderful and beneficent economic system. which is based entirely on merit and hard work?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The expected behaviour for any corporation is to maximise profits at the expense of nearly anything else. Certainly corporations are not expected to show empathy or compassion (except as PR exercises in the service of greater profit). In a person such complete narcissism and lack of empathy would be indicative of tendendcies towards sociopathic personality disorder.
Is it any wonder then, that psychopaths are drawn to, and probably well suited to, senior positions in corporations, where their natural tendencies towards such behavior are rewarded rather than punished.
It's somehow indicative of our complete lack of self-awareness as a society that we create these psychopathic institutions, and are then suprised and appalled when psycopaths end up running them. The problem isn't individual psycopaths as such, it goes far deeper than that, and testing managers for psychopathic tendencies will change nothing.
That sounds more like some miscellaneous psychosis than psychopathy. Maybe a bit of narcissism. Psychopaths more generally use others for their own advancement without empathy, and usually appear to be both friendly and technically competent.
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Such tests would be used to *ensure* that psychopaths are chosen for senior management, so that no one unsuitable (i.e. non-psycho) slipped through by accident. As other posters have noted, just take a lot at senior management of large corps if you don't think this is true.
Although they are highly capable leaders, Masterminds are not at all eager to take command, preferring to stay in the background until others demonstrate their inability to lead. Once they take charge, however, they are thoroughgoing pragmatists. Masterminds are certain that efficiency is indispensable in a well-run organization, and if they encounter inefficiency -- any waste of human and material resources -- they are quick to realign operations and reassign personnel. Masterminds do not feel bound by established rules and procedures, and traditional authority does not impress them, nor do slogans or catchwords. Only ideas that make sense to them are adopted; those that don't, aren't, no matter who thought of them. Remember, their aim is always maximum efficiency.
By definition, INTJs do not want power. They want results and efficiency. If they take power, they try to get out from under it as soon as they can. But do you really want to replace the psychopaths with masterminds? The only group whose personality type is usually preceded by the adjective "evil?" Doesn't sound like a good plan to me.
The phrase is "at the conn" not com. It's a nautical term.
Because the people giving and scoring the tests are in Corporate HR and they are hands down the worst of the bunch.
They'll then cry discrimination and sue, gaining money and power through the courts.
Just come up with a 'reasonable accomodation' that will allow a sociopath to exercise a position of power and discretion without dangerous fuckups, and we'll talk...
Yes, put them in the Collections Department. You need to be absent of a soul to do that.
Sigs are for losers
Has it occurred to you that war itself is an antisocial activity, which may be why sociopaths do so well for the military during times of war?
Actually, you over-simplified. You presume someone cannot be empathetic AND be able to do a cost/benefit analysis and make a decision. In the military, you do both frequently...PFC Johnny has had his mother go into hospital for cancer. She may not make it. SGT Dave works to ensure PFC Johnny gets home to see Mom before she passes. 12 months later, SGT Dave has no issue sending PFC Johnny through the door first as part of the sweep team as he is the best person for the job. If PFC Johnny gets killed as part of the sweep, SGT Dave will be sad as he has lost a team member and (if he is a good NCO) a protege, but he will move on and scream to his leadership for a replacement for the now dead PFC Johnny while also shedding a tear at the memorial service for PFC Johnny.
The two conditions are mutually exclusive in most people.
No, the easier it will be for them to "feel for" ALL affected. This includes the positively affected. If a decision saves the lives of 1000 while killing 1, empathy doesn't mean "feel for the 1, ignore the 1000".
Also, how is selfishness more rational? How would a sociopath do ANY calculation other than "does it give me what I want, fuck everyone else" --- ?
Bullshit. There's plenty of strong people who just happen to have empathy, too. You just don't know em. Just like there's plenty of weak-ass sociopaths. You just don't recognize em. How does that quote go? "Gentleness can only be expected from the strong."? I think you have it exactly upside down, and good luck with that.
Non-psychopaths should not be placed in positions that require them to make important decisions because they are easily influenced by their emotions.
As with the first point of your argument, this is where some sociopathic (but still logical) thinking comes in. By being detached from the nationalistic and religious arguments (I think both from both sides are laughable) it's relatively easy to make a decision. First, inform everybody that this will happen, and give the innocent a chance to clear out. Secondly, when either side attacks the other a NATO jet (air force chosen by lottery each time) will bomb a randomly selected infrastructure target on both sides. A power station, a railway bridge, whatever. Something that is useful to the country as a whole but which should minimise civilian casualties (maybe even give them a few minutes warning). Eventually we either run out of targets (leaving the country at the stage where they're using slingshots...) or the only people left in the area are those who really want to fight the others, and the international community doesn't have any real moral problems with combatants killing each other in a war.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
In middle management
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Not at all. Normal people can make hard decisions. If what you said is so, we'd never be able to raise children right. They'd all be spoiled rotten.
You show confusion typical of the thinking on this subject. I've taught classes. I wished everyone would do all the work, get it all right, and not cheat. Then I could hand out all A's. It never happened of course. But I felt that not being a fair judge was the greater disservice to the students. Telling them that they did fine when in fact they did not I saw as not doing them any real favor. They learned the material, or they flunked. Some did respond to early bad news with greater effort, and were able to pass. I didn't like seeing anyone fail, but it was no strain for me to hand out the appropriate grade. This is not being sociopathic.
One of the best lines that sums up the confusion is "greed is good". No. By definition, greed cannot be good. If it is good, then it's not greed. If it is greed, then it cannot be good. Negotiating for more pay may or may not be greedy.
The sociopaths are the people who will choose to take $100 more even knowing that will cost 1000 people $10 more in expenses to deal with the problems their act causes. In other words, they don't care that their gain is a net loss to society. They can't see that what hurts society hurts them too. That kind of enlightened thinking is too abstract for them. I'm not talking about the desperate sort of petty thief who will smash a car window worth $100s for less than $1 in loose change, or will tear up $1000s worth of equipment for $2 worth of copper at the scrap metal recycler. They could be driven to that kind of behavior out of desperation, or anger at a society that has sidelined them. I'm taking about the sort of person who does appear to fit in and who doesn't need the extra $100, but takes it anyway.
There's also the famous Stanford prison experiment. That shows that what seem to be decent people can be tempted into becoming monsters. Or in other words, power corrupts.
It's not easy keeping the wrong sorts of people away from power, but we could definitely do better. If testing can help, we ought to do it.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I'd be happy if we can block them from moderating /. Is there a test for that? :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
That disassociation causes a lot of problems for soldiers after the fact.
Survivor guilt, PTSD, that sort of thing. Empathetic and ruthless objectivity happens but it's not necessarily healthy. Granted, soldiers are the wrong sort of people to face this problem in the first place because you're imposing inherently contradictory goals on someone who lacks years of experience at life trying to grapple with these things already. Have empathy for your own side but no empathy for the other, or the people you're going to get killed.
That was why dehumanizing the other guys was somewhat easier, they weren't real people you killed, they weren't good people or the like, so you don't need to have empathy for them. Officers didn't associate with 'the men' because they might become to attached, and leadership is from the upper, good class not lower, parasite classes because getting them killed was no problem, the existed to serve. As we've moved away from those attitudes as a society it becomes harder and more conflicting to be off killing each other on the whims of leadership.
The post you were replying to is a bit over extreme I agree. Everyone is somewhere on a spectrum of empathy and apathy to antipathy (hating everyone). You definitely don't want the latter in charge, sort of self evidently, you don't want people who think bankrupting customers is good for them. But the other two, it's not like you want people who have absolutely no empathy, they need to appreciate what the numbers actually mean to deal with them. But you still need to make decisions based on the numbers. Sometimes more apparently empathetic behaviour emerges because two objectively behaving sides collide, both look at the data for their problem and behave in the optimal way for them. Corporations aim to maximize return to shareholders, governments aim to improve lives of the maximum number of people and the two orbit around each other a bit. The US is troubling because the government seems to have shifted too far in the direction of aiming to improve the corporate bottom line rather than the average bottom line of its citizens, it is a spectrum, but you can be too far one way or the other.
Has it occurred to you that war itself is an antisocial activity, which may be why sociopaths do so well for the military during times of war?
Sure. Sociopathic military leaders push for a quick victory, thus producing better outcomes for both their soldiers and the nations they serve. But perhaps the same is true for corporate CEOs. If they push for profits and are unconcerned for the welfare of their employees and customers, they will still likely produce better results for those employees and customers because profitable companies are able to grow and invest, while unprofitable companies die.
Your argument is completely ridiculous. I've had this very discussion about the price of life with people who are not psychopaths. While we might not agree on what the exact "price of life" should be, we all realized that there are no endless resources for dealing with these situations and people need to get real about it. The reason nothing happens with this is simply politics and religion.
You obviously have never studied psychopathy at all. You really should before making such arguments because I can assure you that you would not like their solution to this problem. There are a few books written for they layman that do a very nice job of explaining how these people work. One thing you will learn is that you don't want these people in charge of anything that matters at all.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
I daresay it could, but probably not. At anyrate I'm more frightened by sharks.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
If you knew anything about psychopathy, you would know that it's simply not possible for normal people to think like a psychopath. For example, it's simply not possible for them to feel remorse. The wiring just doesn't exist in their brain. While normal people can occasionally do bad things, they are hardly the same people.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Psychopaths / Sociopaths run at about 2% of the community. The thing that makes them psychopaths (as opposed to other criminal and anti-social behaviour) is that they have no problem fitting in and seeming like normal poeple.
Psychopaths / Sociopaths are very good chamelions and know what to say and when. You can be sure however that when they make a decision, it will be in their interest and the rest of the world be dammed.
Anyway, this leads to a significant over-representation in positions of power.
By "Masters of the Universe", do they mean that they're cheap, plastic people only taken seriously by 8-year-old boys, 30 years out of date and the subject of cheesy nostalgia nowadays?
I think I saw one of those guys on YouTube covering that Four Non-Blondes song...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Third article in as many days. Gattaca! Gattaca! Gattaca!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
under such circumstances is to point out that a) most successful CEOs of large companies exhibit behavior often associated with psychotic conditions, so it rather obviously isn't interfering with the job, and b) it's a recognized medical condition, and the company itself has acted on the assumption that the diagnosis is correct.
He would point all this out to his attorney, who would then file a massive Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuit, and he'd be given the CEO's job to make it go away.
People who are directly empathic tend to be worse at evaluating indirect harm. They may be able to weigh up one death against ten, but it's harder for them to weigh up one death against some minor savings to the cost of production of a million cars, which allow the buyers of those cars to work slightly shorter hours, which make them slightly less tired when driving, which leads to, on average, ten fewer deaths on the road.
Making this sort of decision in a correct, utilitarian fashion requires putting a dollar value on human life (or disability-adjusted life years), which is *hard* to do when you're faced with real human suffering, especially if you're strongly empathic. Look at all the skilled people who volunteer at soup kitchens, when they could do more good by working the same time at their regular job and donating the money to charity. Look at the people who donate to a charity which targets the support to individual children, when it would provide a greater benefit if it was used to support the community as a whole. They want to *feel* that they're making a difference.
This means that management should be unempathic, but not necessarily psychopathic. Ideally you want someone who cares about humanity in the abstract, but not in individual cases - and, particularly unlike the standard psychopath, has no great love for themself.
if you had some, it might.
rewriting history since 2109
Actually one of the main properties of the welfare state a la Europe is that is not sociopathic,
In the short term.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I think you mean Silian
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The problem with your entire statement is a psychopath will often make a decision not out of a lack of empathy, but because they understand and reject it completely.
The might look at the ability to prevent 50% of automobile related deaths for $1 a car and decide they can save $1 a car at the cost of a 25% increase in automobile related deaths, and choose that option. Sociopaths may make similar decisions, but out of more understandable motives - which is generally pure greed.
All of us have these tendencies to a greater or lesser extent. You see it in the way they drive, the way they vote, and the way they shop. Many people speed on the roads because they feel their time is more important than the safety of the people around them. They make risk decisions for other people based out of their personal desire. Many people buy cheap even if they know the cost in human suffering is high, because it saves them money.
Similarly, schadenfreude is not in decline; especially on the internet. People will take actions just to cause other people to react. They might be forum trolls, hate bloggers or even just a MMO player who goes out of their way to ruin the game for as many people as possible. Similarly we see practical jokes, bullying, and other "tom foolery" in workplaces and schools.
These are less extreme versions of the same problem, and most of us have performed these actions. We are capable of seeing both sides of an argument and understand the impacts.
A psychopath or a sociopath doesn't make these distinctions, and we should stop rewarding them for behavior which outside of management would be criminal.
See "The Psychopath Test," by Jon Ronson.
Good luck "detecting" these rats.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
You single out the "super conservatives" as the radicals?
There are so many nutjobs to choose from. I guess we can tell where you come from.
No mainstream politician has any interest in reducing the national debt. Reagan was the first president to raise the national debt after WW II, close to tripled it. Clinton actually started it down the road to lessening it, then Bush II also came close to tripling it, although Obama's own contribution could also be said to nearly triple it, but Bush II and Obama are so intertwined in the debt department that it's hard to tell how to divvy that up.
Of course neither party is even willing to admit that we are spending too much. The Republican plan, if you can call it that, was to balance the budget in 2061 or so; Obama hasn't even submitted a budget for three years, and his talking points grudgingly accept the possibility of maybe trimming growth by $1T over ten years, when that isn't even the full deficit from a single year's budget. Cheney must have been speaking for both parties when he said deficits don't matter.
Then the left refuses to accept the science of GMOs and refuses to admit there's any uncertainty in the degree of global warming, let alone how much man causes, while the right plugs their ears when anyone mentions evolution or any human contribution to global warming. Both have tons of nuts (Obama and Rubio being the latest) who won't even cop to the simple scientific fact that the earth is 4.5B years old.
Republican platform was to actually increase military spending, while Democrats merely howled that any decrease would be a disaster. We could cut the military budget in half and still be spending as much as 10 years ago in inflation adjusted dollars.
Civil rights? Oh yeah, they've heard of them. Both parties are racing to be the most Orwellian government in our history. Obama thinks it's just great that he can pick people to kill with drones, without any judicial inquiry, even if the targets are American citizens in countries where we are not at war. Yet they had so little foresight that eben wile being scared of Romney winning, they never considered how he would have handled the secret kill authority.
And you pick "super conservatives" out of all that as the radicals? It's the moderates in charge who are doing what was unthinkable just a few years ago.
Infuriate left and right
You're confusing psychopaths with sociopaths.
No I think in good leaders, this goes hand in hand. If you aren't suffering from some equivalent of PTSD after doing a job like what he described, you aren't qualified to lead humans. Most of us simply don't have to deal with stakes quite that high, but should still be doing a cost/benefit analysis while also trying to empathize.
So you're moving the goal posts; can you at least clearly say what you're moving them to? What is "directly empathic"? I assume it's somehow magically different from what we were previously talking about, "having empathy" (which is simply an additional "thing" to have, like sight or hearing). But before I can engage you in this new, fascinating subject, please define what "directly empathic" means. Thanks :P
Are you confusing empathy with lack of intelligence, or with being emotional?
You know what, that reminds me so much of something I read just a few pages a ago in a book from Erich Fromm that I'm going to try to find and translate it. IIRC, it was something about those who believe "in humanity" (or as you put it, who "care in the abstract"), but not in humans.
In the meantime I'll just have to disagree. Having empathy makes some things require and induce more personal growth, sure, and that growth is often enough accompanied by pain, of course; but that's the whole fucking point of living basically, to grow.* All those "number decisions" you cite ultimately (should) serve to enable actual individual people to live their actual individual lives, with their actual individual thoughts and deeds. We eat to live, we don't live to eat, and there is no abstract humanity. There's just you and me, the people next door, the people all over the world. That doesn't mean statistics or math aren't useful, or that hard decisions don't have to be made; which brings us back to empathy and rationality/intelligence not being mutually exclusive... but if you mistake your mental, simplified models with the actual thing they're supposed to represent, then you're drifting not into the realm of increased efficiency, you're simply loosing the plot.
* So no, you don't really want the ones who don't ever bat an eyelid to make those "hard" (one might say "non-trivial") decisions; they learn nothing from them, and in gamer-speak you'd basically be wasting XP points on units who can't level up. Instead, let the others level up, and after some initial insecurity they'll outperform the "detached" people in more ways than not. I know that's hardly how to construct a good argument, but I like that comparison anyway. Haha.
I hate to be a pain, but I also disagree on this one. I think respect of others without self-respect is a lie, a delusion. Selfishness no, but self-love.. of course! Don't trust anyone too proud or too humble...
That would work with normal people. The problem with psychopaths is that they are not afraid and not deterred by the punishment. From wikipedia (emphasis mine):
Well, you recognized it.
It's really too bad that you have no understanding whatsoever about the link you referenced and my argument. Hint: they are not the same thing. It will require you to have an IQ above 100 to understand so good luck.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
In the short term.
Nor in the long term. So far no advanced European economy has turned sociopathic. In fact, the main example of a welfare state, namely Sweden, is doing very well socially and economically.
I worked with a genuine psychopath; no hyperbole; a true psychopath. This guy could charm the pants off anyone. If you met him you loved him; that simple. But after around 6 months you wanted him dead. After a while I learned some key skills to working with him. One was to nail everything down in an email and I mean everything. If you didn't have everything nailed down he would change the past. If you said you could have something done by the 30th and didn't put it in an email then around the 20th he would announce at a meeting that you were going to be late with your promise to have it done by the 25th like he told the client and put in the contract, a contract he would swear on a stack of bibles that you had looked over. The key here was that you probably did look over a contract that said the 30th and he had an email from you saying that it looked fine. So as I said, everything must go in an email so the trick was if he handed you some paper you scanned it and attached it to the email replying that you had read the contract.
Most people were unwilling to go to such lengths and thus would be screwed over and over until they quit. The key to understanding this guy was that he simply had zero empathy. Not little but zero. So if he hurt you for some tiny gain of his own so be it. But this is different from someone who is say mean as in a bully, for them being mean is the goal. For my psychopathic co-worker you had to understand that he had his own desires and that was it. He didn't weigh pro and cons in any normal fashion. If you quit then you could be replaced with a fool who might be easier to screw.
I long ago left working with him but in the years since I have encountered really nice person after person who clench their fists and say horrible things about this guy. They all say the exact same basic thing; wow charisma coming out his ass until he sets you on fire to warm his hands.
On a superficial basis a company might justify that having someone like this around is useful for the moment that you need to charm some upset client. This might work in theory but what you forget is that the moment it is advantageous for this type of person to screw you they will screw you. Your company might say, "they wouldn't do something so stupid as this industry is too small" but keep in mind that there are two incomprehensible factors at play. This is a person who does not give the tiniest of craps what anyone really thinks as long as they can't actually do anything. The other factor is that they will be able to charm themselves out of almost any situation. So if you say that they will never work in this industry again you are wrong. You will make a solid case to other people you know really well who also respect you and your opinion but the psychopath will meet them and turn their opinion 180 degrees and land on their feet.
This might seem a bit long winded but after dealing with a true psychopath it is hard to believably explain the functioning of someone who simply is incapable of sympathy and has 100% confidence that normal consequences don't apply to them. Take any situation where a normal person might say ooh this might blow up in my face, or I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy and remember that a psychopath will do it and would do it to their mother if there was even a tiny chance of them somehow benefiting.
So when I see the whole banking crisis and people are suggesting that these guys inadvertently destroyed trillions of dollars of the wealth in the US along with their own companies and I just remember my psychopath and think that if he was getting low on gas and could push a button that refilled his tank but destroyed a company all he would think is "cool Free gas" while the rest of us would frown about what kind of dick would even create such a button.
There are people with empathy that can still make the hard decisions, as opposed to the psychopaths in TFA that consider only themselves. Not all people with empathy are blubbering idiots.
And mostly this part. Moody's didn't know what they were rating. Literally had no information about the component parts of the derivative. Are 20% of these loans bad? 80%? Don't know, but someone will buy them if they're rated right, so we'd better rate them just to stay relevant.
It really had nothing to do with homeowners and everything to do with Wall Street. Banks don't just give out cash they're never going to get back, just for the hell of it. It's not like all the homeowners woke up one day and decided to lie about their credit ratings, or that the bank managers' union(??) collectively decided to try for higher sales targets. This was a top-down crisis, a crime of ineptitude and fraud. Wall Street decided it could turn shit into gold, and then did this as much as possible until the first wave of defaults broke.
The triple-A rating was all Wall Street needed in order to not do any research into what they were buying. The rating agencies didn't create the crisis, but they certainly enabled it.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
No.
The fact that they know they are being tested for psychopathic traits, and that they are a psychopath, is a catch-22. They can fake the test to appear as if they are not.
If they can't fake the test and pass it with flying colors, then they are not a true psychopath.
You can only catch the ones that have sympathy and empathy. That in and of itself negates psychopathic tendencies.
Problem with the idea of testing management for psychopathy is that they'll just deliberately HIRE the psychopaths they find as "more competitive". I recall hearing rumour that some financial companies have already started doing this, however that's pure anecdote. XD
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
Yes indeed. The fundamental problem is that these firms are themselves essentially sociopathic. It's little wonder they attract psychopaths.
Frankly, I think the best cure is one "man in black" in an isolated, sound proof cubicle with a direct line to the SEC in one hand and a machine gun in the other. When the call comes in, there goes the firm, psychopaths and all.
Sounds like an attractive job for psychopaths.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
On what grounds do you propose that "selfish" is the antonym of "empathetic"?
Yeah, it goes a long ways towards explaining the fact that we are wealthier, healthier, more free, and live longer than ever before in human history.
The same notions of responsibility to society that you think as "not sociopathic" were at work for bringing about socialism and fascism in Europe, because sociopaths manage to misuse them to get themselves into positions power. Looking at recent European leaders, I'd say that's still a problem.
To prevent 50% of the remaining deaths (this report was commissioned by Zeno, by the way), the cost increases by $1000.00. And so on. There is a point where someone must say, "Yeah, the harm done by increasing costs that much outweighs the value of the lives saved." An "empathic" person would be unable to draw that line, as he'd be unable to say "Some known percentage of people will die in accidents, people who COULD have been saved if we'd spent more money."
Being a psychopath isn't about being rational. If anything they're not. In this example, the psychopath cares neither about money being wasted nor people dying in car accidents. Instead they're going to find a way to simply steal the money.
many people will go ahead and assume that the people in authority have empathy.
Speaking about democracy, leaders job's is not to make empathetic decisions, but to seek the general interest. Many factor may trouble their judgement: their empathy, psycopathy, moral and religious opinions, personal experience... This is why nobody should be in charge alone, and this is why separation of powers is important.
Man, just listen to yourself. You sound like some Soviet-style or prisoner style party member: "They are REACTIONARY! They are COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY! They are UN-MUTUAL! They want to STEAL FROM THE WORKING CLASS! We need to root out these SUBVERSIVES! There is something MENTALLY WRONG WITH THEM! Send them to RE-EDUCATION CAMPS!"
Thanks, but I'll take my chances with "psychopathic" American-style capitalists over your kind of government administered test of ideological and societal conformance any day.
Where do the innocent go? There are plenty of Israelis whose ancestral lands are all over the Middle East - countries that won't even let them in as tourists. The Palestinians are such a miserable, terrorist-infested bunch that neither Jordan nor Egypt has volunteered to take over security in the West Bank or Gaza, respectively. Neither country offered citizenship to their Arab brothers. So the innocents there are stuck just as badly as the (mostly) Jews on the other side of the fence.
I can't imagine it would be that difficult to convince the psychopaths in management to institute mandatory testing that would find and remove psychopaths from management positions...
It's OK for guys who like a beer now and then to be taxi drivers or airline pilots. It's not OK for guys who have out-of-control alcohol problems. It's OK for guys attracted to money, status and power to run banks. It's definitely *not* OK for guys whose pursuit of those things eclipse every other human value, including *personal integrity*, which *ought* to be a job requirement for leading a bank, or indeed any other powerful institution.
It alls go back to Aristotle. Virtue is found in moderation. Bravery is the ideal midpoint between rashness and cowardice. Enterprise is the ideal midpoint between greed and sloth. The great capitalists of yore, the ones whom history remembers best, had both titanic personal ambition but also surprisingly public spirited facets to their personalities. Not just the Andrew Carnegies of the world, but the J P Morgans as well.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
They help clear the mines.
We masters of all we survey sit back and...survey.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Because they don't have to: when such people wreck companies, often the government steps in and bails everybody out. In addition, stock holders have an incentive to select ruthless executives because their risk and liability are limited no matter how much misconduct management is guilty of. And the ability to buy and sell shares at the drop of a hat means that corporations have a incentive to go for short term success.
We don't need rules for screening for psychopaths, we just need to change the incentive structure. Corporations and their management simply are doing what we incentivize them to do.
Interesting post in an otherwise duff discussion thread full of awful stereotyping. Yes, I believe in the brain's ability to rewire itself. Born without empathy? Some of them will discover that this is why their life sucks so badly, and train themselves empathy. And I mean genuine empathy, not learning how to fake it. It's probably not the easiest thing to do, going by testimonies of people forced to rewire part of their brain after an accident, but a lot can be done with perseverance. As a much more extreme case study, I give you the well-published story of Mary Bell: at very young age, a heinous archetypical psychopath - just reading about the things she did makes your hair stand up. Now, reportedly, a 55 years old grandmother who has an unremarkable life and carpingly raised a daughter who is now ~28 years old and has a child of her own that should be ~4 years old by now.
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/famous/bell/index_1.html (very long read but it's really worth it)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1110123/Child-killer-Mary-Bell-grandmother-51-But-I-left-grief-says-victims-mother.html
Granted, not all of them do change and those that don't should probably be kept away from positions of power. All I'm saying is that having a childhood diagnosis of Autism, Asperger's or Psychopathy does not necessarily doom these people to harm others and live at odds with society. This is also why I am against the dead sentence: the person you'd be executing today is not necessarily the same person you'd be releasing 12 years from now.
However, your argument fails because the ability to emotionally detach from a situation is not the same as the inability to form emotional attachments at all.
A psychopath cannot honestly take a loyalty oath, whether to enter a military service or uphold a fiduciary duty, because they are physically incapable of that loyalty. This problem is actually the stated crux of the last article linked in the summary.
The inmates are running the asylum.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Having worked for a company whose head of software was a psychopath (and yes, I am not using the word loosely), YES, it's a problem. Being absolutely sure you are right and not caring about or enjoying the suffering of others may allow you to get things done, but those things are often utterly destructive.
How many allied troops died in the Eastern front due to Stalin's ruthlessness? Or how many allied and axis troops and civilians died worldwide because of Hitler not giving two shits for human life?
but would you want to actually change that?
Uh... yes? I miss something, what is there to lose there?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
How many of them would do it again given the chance? Remorse happens in retrospect and is the thing that makes us better people in the future. Psychopaths lack that very important feedback mechanism. They will hurt people over and over again.
Emotional detachment is not the same as a psychopath. The psychopath has no empathy, so the suffering of others creates no emotion to be detached from.
If a psychopath kills a baby while stealing its lollipop, he literally feels nothing for the child or the parents. His one and only concern is to make sure no consequences land on him. He will feel no emotion for the poor sap he frames for the crime either. As long as he gets away with it, he will have no regrets at all. If he doesn't kill the baby, it is ONLY because bad things are too likely to happen to him if he does.
An emotionally detached person might kill one to save thousands, but because he still doesn't like the terrible feeling it causes, even at a distance, he will only do that if it is really the only way. He won't do it for personal gain.
But as soon as his options vest, he will burn the whole thing for one big quarter so he can cash out and deploy his golden parachute. He will make out like a bandit while the company crashes and burns.
For example, "chainsaw" Al Dunlap.
This is one of the most important ideas we'll see in our lifetimes, and one of the best.
Consider the effect on your career if the psychopath in the next cubicle is no longer making your life a living hell. Consider the amount of law enforcement resources society will save if the psychopaths are prevented from ascending the corporate hierarchy. Consider the personal destruction attributable to this 1-3% of the population and that it could be largely mitigated using this technology.
This kind of ability along with the ability to tell with 100% certainty when someone is lying by looking at their involuntary brain activity are a terrific force for making society a more humane place.
I just know /.'ers will bring up some idea like "psychopaths may be bad people but they make a great CEX. " Wrong. They make bad decisions at every level and what's more can't be trusted with anything especially the well being of a corporation. The CIA won't have them and screens heavily for them and this is based on their past experience. You can't trust them- full stop.
You may think that you're willing to put up with the careers and lives they ruin on their way to the top-because of the benefit the a psychopaths's "dynamic personality" and "leadership skills" bring to the table, but you'd be wrong. The collective LOSS of highly qualified candidates who would otherwise be contributing to the corporation FAR exceeds anything the psychopath is going to bring. Yes, that includes people like Steve Jobs. The truth about Jobs is he shameless stole everyone's ideas around him and claimed them as his own, often in within a minute of having heard the idea and in a room full of people who were sitting there watching him do it. Their own career trajectory constrained them from mentioning the obvious- "uh Steve, that's what Helen just said....".
It's to the point where I just take it as true until proven otherwise that people who aggressively agitate for the myth of the "sole genius inventor" and especially those who prop that myth up against the efforts of a dynamic collective of experts are themselves somewhat psychopathic and are basically looking to legitimize the fantasy narrative they would see applied to themselves. This is especially true of the whole Ayn Rand type myth of the "superman" or "master of the universe " or "job creator" or whatever name is being bandied around these days. Ayn Rand was as good an example of the psychopathic - sociopathic personality type as you're likely to find and her philosophy reads like the textbook definition of anti-social personality disorder.
I can't think of many (if any) people on the autistic spectrum who ARE in a senior management position. It's not a matter of discrimination, it's a matter of the likelihood of developing social skills sufficient for the job.
Meanwhile, as understanding has progressed, we came to understand that the problem is not a lack of empathy as such. Someone with Aspergers wants others to be happy just as much as anyone else. They will feel bad if they make others feel bad. If you are sad, your autistic friend may seem indifferent to it, but only because he doesn't realize that you are sad. If you tell him you are sad, or show it more overtly so he picks up on it, he will try to console you (with variable degrees of clumsiness).
Only if not hiring blind bus drivers is. As much as we might wish otherwise, medical disabilities DO render people unfit for some jobs. The ADA is about not passing disabled people over for jobs they are fit to do. For example, an employer may not prefer for someone to have a guide dog in the office, but there is no actual reason a blind person can't be a good telephone sales rep.
I don't believe in Freudian psychoanalysis, even though it might sometimes provide interesting insights, and neither do I believe in the modern notions that people throw around like "psychopath", "bipolar", "schizophrenic" or even "depressed". Of course all these notions capture some cluster of correlated symptoms, but that is all that they do. The moment we start believing that they are more than that, e.g. that people can literally be classified as being a psychopath or not, we have strayed far beyond the realm of science, and might as well believe in "qi" or magic spirits.
At the end of the day, some people are less empathetic than others, some surprisingly so, but that's all it is. And maybe its also context dependent, so that one person might become a "psychopath" in certain circumstances, even though they normally weren't.
As for the global financial crisis, if you believe this had anything to do with "greed" or "sociopathy" then you need to pick up a textbook on economics now. There were a lot of mistakes made, and even some immoral decisions, but mostly it was just a giant bubble, everyone thinking the future was brighter than it really was, and when it burst the financial system turned out to be more brittle than people had imagined.
If you knew anything about psychopathy, you would know that it's simply not possible for normal people to think like a psychopath. For example, it's simply not possible for them to feel remorse. The wiring just doesn't exist in their brain. While normal people can occasionally do bad things, they are hardly the same people.
The psychological studies are't science. It may become one some day -- going far beyond the scientific ground work developed by the likes of William James and others; until then, it's diluted with the politics of social engineering. There's too many sociopaths involved in this field using their position to advance their personal beliefs and professional careers -- by giving support to the group-think fashionable for the times. Once someone is accurately or inaccurately officially labeled anything by the psychological community, it'll be a problem for the rest of their life.
Richard Feyman's thoughts about psychiatrists and psychologists are classic examples of a definitive answer (imho) explaining what is wrong about their field of work and the standards they use to form conclusions.
That was from a published lecture series titled, "The Meaning of It All'. There's an unverified story members of the psychology department at the University of Washington in Seattle stood up in "solidarity" and walked out. He has elaborated about how psychology can be bad science on several ocassions, most notably in his discussions about Cargo Cult Science. Feyman was not one known for his diplomacy.
Yesterday's Weirdness is Tomorrow's Reason Why
A psychopath who couldn't get around a simple test isn't much of a psychopath.
At the intersection of computation and biology.
What a wonderful movie. The part about returning videos might be a little difficult to grasp for kids these days. Now get of my lawn
No.
One of psychopaths' defining characteristics is their inability to empathize with others. It creates motivation that is fundamentally incompatible with human society, except within highly dysfunctional (and by their nature, parasitic) entities such as some companies and organized crime.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
No, that's fear of death.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The purpose of our business environment is to turn selfish motives - greed - towards good ends.
Yes, it's a hack on one of the humans' shortcomings. Like most hacks, it worked for a while, and then was defeated, so now it just promotes and exacerbates those shortcomings.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
US has a wonderful framework of brutal oppression directed toward people who are psychologically incapable of fulfilling certain roles in society -- it's how it treats diagnosed pedophiles and people convicted of sex crimes. All that is necessary, is to apply it to the diagnosed psychopaths and people who exhibited psychopathic behavior while being in positions of control or authority.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I know that. The problem is as you said: "If it's easier for them to cheat or steal, they'll do that." Yes, many will. But, there are also many people who won't cheat and steal. Capitalism and democracy have been effective at harnessing selfishness for the good of all. Yet democracy in particular doesn't work if the majority of the people are selfish fools. We must have honest people for it all to work. Plus, education is crucial so that people aren't as foolish.
Think about how disasters like Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima happened. These were not math errors. Not engineering blunders. It'd be one thing if everything was done in good conscience. Then we'd be reviewing our engineering methods. Instead, upon inquiry we found that management tried to cut corners, cheat, and lie. These were cases in which people did know better, and there were many warnings. Management chose to ignore the warnings. They didn't believe the risks or consequences were as large as they were told. They minimized the dangers and treated the engineers who tried to warn them with disdain. Why did they do that? Because they were greedy sociopaths. They ended up killing a few people and costing the rest of us a great deal of money. So much for greed being good. No company can afford having fools like that in charge. If there's a way to screen them out, it will be used.
That's not the worst of it. Those disasters cost us plenty, but we'll live. We can afford a few of these object lessons as long as the harm is not too great. The worst is having those kind of people in control of world devastating power, such as nuclear weapons. That we can't afford. On a grave matter like global warming, these sociopaths will run civilization into the ground if we let them. They've already engaged in much propagandizing to confuse the public about the dangers, telling what they know are lies.
I regard a certain amount of anti-social behavior as a necessary evil. You are a more experienced and motivated freedom fighter after someone has screwed you over. Most especially, don't accept shoddy treatment from employers. I thought I could ignore all that and focus solely on engineering issues. But you can't. The moment someone tries to frame you for their screwup because they figure you for a doormat, you're involved in dirty office politics. Some of those people on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform paid for their diffidence with their lives. One of the things I regret the most about having worked for sociopathic bosses are the times I took the cowardly way out and decided not to stand up to them and risk my job. In hindsight, I'd rather have been fired. Better than what did happen a few months later, which is that we all lost our jobs anyway when management jettisoned everyone in a desperate attempt to save their own necks by blaming the peons for the lack of progress, and themselves lost their jobs when the customer wasn't fooled and canceled the contract. You don't have to quit, but you mustn't keep quiet. Let them fire you if they will. The mere act of staying around and quietly taking the abuse empowered them.
As it was with me at these jobs, so it is with us as a society. We are much too lenient with psychopathic businesses. For instance, why does anyone still bank at Bank of America and the rest of the big finance companies that crashed the economy? Why do we put up with the outrageous monopolistic behavior of telecoms companies? We don't have to whine for the government to do something, we are quite able to take matters into our own hands. A mass exodus of customers would bring these obnoxious businesses to heel very quickly. We could have destroyed BP simply by not doing business with them, no need for government sanctions. Exxon should be made to regret that they ever funded grossly biased propaganda thinly disguised as research in a transparent effort to discredit global warming. "Doubt is our product" is cause for termination of every high level manager who subscribes to i
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I am a asperger, and I do not lack empathy. What differs from me to "normal people" is that I show my empathy in a very different way, I are unable to pretend empathy as our society demands and therefore I only demonstrate when trully feel empathy for someone or something.
The psychopath is basically unable to put "the other" in the balance when he decides something, he always decides for personal gain even if it costs he lives of others and he is a master in deceiving others, while aspergers like me have serious difficulties to interact with people.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
What a moron. No, really.
"ancestral lands"? By that token do we all own part of Africa?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
The only thing that's missing from Standford to complete the picture is the reward incentive. There's a lot wrong with this pop-sci article, characterising a broad clinical array of disorders typically enough as being one looming shadowy monster, but at least it does show that corporate structures which encourage this behaviour are bad. I appreciate that the idea that any one of us is capable of having and keeping the same mindset makes some people uncomfortable, but such is life.
Generally I'm uncomfortable with many of the assertations of western popular culture that make people subhuman or different - you aren't a person, you're an ex-con. You aren't a person, you're a junkie. Once you're gay its impossible to 'turn' straight. All nonsense designed to elevate a subset of society in their own minds.
After that, the same rating agencies caused the European debt crisis to funnel gigantic amounts of tax payers money into the pockets of the financial industry. And this happened in spite of these agencies' ratings being complete unreliable shit.
How the financial industry managed to turn the 2008 crisis around to keep vacuuming money from the rest of the economy makes me baffled.
...no more managers then?
The tech world has plenty of company heads who've been called psychopaths, too — but would you want to actually change that?
YES.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
I'm all for the testing of psychopaths, but how do we test for them? Last time I checked, the psychopathy test is a secret test, and you need to be a psychologist in order to access it. This type of secrecy put some serious concerns on whether being a psychopath is really something that can be verified scientifically.
Just so there is not misunderstanding: I do not doubt the existence of psychopaths. I just wonder whether we have a better test for it than what amounts to a secret procedure that is only known to people *who have a stake in having these tests done* in the first place.
Most probably all the F500 managers will make sure that the screening process does not screen them out, so it will probably only detect people who are either in such a sorry state that they where in no shape to get the credential necessary to get the job, or people who are just marginally weird but who would actually do a good job, and maybe even help to alleviate somewhat the uselessness of the psychopaths who adorn our industries...
The main issue being that all people have a certain level of available time and energy, and if you allocate it to progressing in your chosen profession you can either:
a) be a good guy and try to provide more value to your clients/colleagues/society/etc... by innovating, good management, etc...
or
b) be a psychopath and try to finesse the office politics to get up the corporate ladder.
Obviously the most efficient way to progress toward success and power is option "b", and the people who are the most liable to execute this correctly are the ones who are not hindered by pesky issues like, empathy, morals, common decency nor slowed down by intellectual curiosity or creative insights...
your autistic friend may seem indifferent to it, but only because he doesn't realize that you are sad. If you tell him you are sad, or show it more overtly so he picks up on it, he will try to console
Exact. Remember when speaking with an "aspie" (like myself) that the famous "body language" and "you should know that no one speak," do not work. The best thing you do is be direct, say what you really think or feel rather than wait for the aspie try to guess what you're really trying to say.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Not unless your ancestors emigrated from Africa less than a hundred years ago. And even then, it's a visa, not a free house.
The market has had plenty of time to work. Why do you still believe gov. sanctions are not necessary?
Cheap storage VM.
The consumers of course, with higher costs of goods. And workers, with their jobs, who while can perform the job perfectly fine are unfairly black listed due some silly test that doesn't relate to job performance at all..
if you think 'the insurance company' ( or some other arbitrary disliked group of the day ) is going to pay, you have a lot to learn about economics.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you haven't read about this fascinating personality disorder I recommend the following books:
Dr. Hare is an expert on psychopathy and Dr. Babiak an Industrial Psychologist. Dr. Stout is a clinical psychologist.
Perhaps psychologists and technologists together will be able to develop a test like the one used in "Blade Runner" to expose a replicant.
E Proelio Veritas.
When I worked at Cabela's, the IS/IT team I was on got a new manager, the first thing he did was call us all into his office and say "Your job here is to make me look good!". It all went down hill from there! This guy went out of his way to screw over his own people for his own gain - in fact he would work in conjunction with another manager in IS/IT to screw his people over. He would act like he wanted to be your best friend and then stab you in the back as soon as he saw an opening. One of the people on his team was working on their bachelor's degree. This guy actually offered to let him "borrow" any of the papers he wrote for his degree to use. Thankfully that individual was smart enough to know A) that was plagiarism B) The manager would "out him" and screw him over quickly - and the individual nicely told him "no thanks". Our team had a higher turnover rate than the Call Center - which is an amazing feat in itself. When I left all that was left were the H1B's and a couple "old timers" with the company. All the -real- talent left and went onto bigger and better things - including myself.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Actually, I would say that a society ruled by "empathy" would quickly collapse, as the people in charge would be unable to make decisions based on an objective cost/benefit analysis, but instead would be paralyzed by emotional concerns.
Good thing that's not the ONLY characteristic of psychologically normal people then.
Organisational Psychopaths destroy lives.
Whilst I am not qualified to say whether my experience was with a true OP I got my hands on reading material written by a specialist in the field who's job as a consultant was to assist organisations, at a management level, diagnose and identify OPs and eject them from the company. OP do not care for the welfare of the company or it's employees and will drive a business to bankruptcy and then move on.
The two areas I remember were the skilful lying, identified in the book, which made you question if you had a sincere grip on reality. How people around you were manipulated to work against each other and see the OP as the true source of the "truth". I directly witnessed an OP deliberately hide the completed work of a team to invoke the penalty clauses of a corporate contract to position himself in better control of the team, much to the bewilderment of the team.
The final straw, for me, was when the OP described to me how, as a child, he tortured peoples pets in the most gruesome way, and whilst on the inside I wanted to run away and never return, I somehow realised that if I showed any sense of abhorrence towards his behaviour he would target me even more. I planned to get away as quickly as possible.
There is no doubt that these people are talented, but in a way that is completely destructive. If you are unfortunate to encounter an OP and come to understand what I mean you will recognise them immediately and steer well clear. One of the most telling things in the book was how psychopaths were able to identify sexual abuse victims just from the way they walked. An OP is as adept at finding their victims, highly talented individuals with solid sense of self and morals. Computer geeks are a prime target for these type of predator.
So yeah a method to limit the damage they do to an organisation is very wise.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
This means that management should be unempathic, but not necessarily psychopathic. Ideally you want someone who cares about humanity in the abstract, but not in individual cases - and, particularly unlike the standard psychopath, has no great love for themself.
No, it means that management should not play up empathic concerns but should exclude people who lack all (or sufficient) empathy. In the example of life-saving improvements to cars, there is a balance to be found. If you put in too many expensive improvements, you will make the cars no fun to drive and so expensive that nobody will buy them. No lives will be saved. If you include none of them, no lives will be saved. If you include the most cost effective ones, many lives will be saved. There's an optimum at which you get the safest cars you can into the hands of as many consumers as you can maximizing the benefit to society. This probably does not coincide with the point of greatest profit. But you can move those two balance points closer together by advertising your safety features.
Now, shifting to a subject that's nearer and dearer to Slashdot's heart, let's consider government policy as regards internet privacy. Law enforcement wants access to your communications and files because they are trying to fight crime. In part, they are driven by a desire to prevent harm to potential victims of fraud, child porn, harassment and intimidation. On the other hand, we recognize that the steps necessary to completely protect us from such threats would dramatically reduce our rights to free expresssion and the general usefulness of the internet. There's a balance to be struck between our individual desires for privacy and our desire to make the internet safe. You can't have both in unlimited degree. Decisions about where that balance should be struck shouldn't be made by people who lack empathy and identification with either side of the balance.
Where do the innocent go? There are plenty of Israelis whose ancestral lands are all over the Middle East - countries that won't even let them in as tourists. The Palestinians are such a miserable, terrorist-infested bunch that neither Jordan nor Egypt has volunteered to take over security in the West Bank or Gaza, respectively. Neither country offered citizenship to their Arab brothers. So the innocents there are stuck just as badly as the (mostly) Jews on the other side of the fence.
No, the innocents in the Palestinian territories are stuck in a MUCH worse situation than the Israelis. (Which doesn't mean the Israelis' situation isn't also bad.) They're crammed into tiny territories where it's literally impossible to get out of range of bombs targeted at the militants running the show. They're also affected by effective collective punishments such as the blockade of Gaza and the consequent lack of paying jobs -- not a problem in Israel, which has control of its own coast and airspace.
Unfortunately a real solution to the problem won't be countenanced by either side. The Israelis and the Palestinians need reconciliation and to become one people in one country that does not discriminate based on ancestry and religion. The people who have been dispossessed of land need to be somehow compensated and invested in the new regime. And they need to lock up or expel anybody who won't play along.
It's not easy keeping the wrong sorts of people away from power, but we could definitely do better. If testing can help, we ought to do it.
Given the sort of people that corporations tend to employ at their top levels, I don't think psychopathy tests would be used the way you would hope. I think they'd be used to identify people who "have upper management written all over them." That is, borderline psychopaths. Not so horrible that you can't trust them even under your supervision, but definitely the kind ready to take ruthless advantage of their subordinates and customers.
One of the best lines that sums up the confusion is "greed is good". No. By definition, greed cannot be good.
That's an unjustified assertion, and one that shows that you misunderstood the meaning behind that line.
The purpose of our business environment is to turn selfish motives - greed - towards good ends. The simplest way it accomplishes that is by facilitating trade. If I am greedy, and want hookers and cocaine, I need to get money. To get people to give me money, I work hard to produce and sell goods or services that they want.
That's not how greed works in the real world. In the real world, greed motivates people to cheat their employers and their customers and ultimately works to the failure of the organization.
I just wanted to +1 this because I don't have mod points. Sociopaths very much do have no empathic response to others. My ex wife was diagnosed as a sociopath after our divorce... this wasn't exactly news to me but was a bitter pill to swallow. Since it came on late in life, it seems most likely that it was actually caused by physical damage in her case (which we can likely trace back to a car accident she had in 2003 where she did suffer minor brain damage). She literally feels no empathy toward others... in a sense I had to accept that for half a decade before the divorce she actually didn't really love me. There is also the chance that she never felt empathic... that she was always a sociopath.... but that's something we'll never know for sure.
She still lies, manipulates and cheats. She is also extremely good at pretending to be empathic and giving the outward appearance of normality... it's only when you are around her a lot that you start to see that her responses are manufactured. Quite often her responses seem almost too perfect and tend to echo similar emotional responses she has recently observed in movies and TV... which can make her seem quite emotionally volatile because her emotional responses change so much over time.
I think GP has never actually encountered a sociopath... I envy him.
I think people are confusing psychopaths with sociopaths. While the share some of the same traits (http://voices.yahoo.com/sociopath-vs-psychopath-there-difference-1906224.html), I have found more sociopaths in upper management than psychopaths. Unfortunately sociopaths are EXACTLY what upper management is looking for and often rise to positions of authority in organizations. Their ability to manipulate people and to lay blame for every problem at other's feet is rewarded. They are actually often VERY good at getting people to do what they want.
Actually, I would say that a society ruled by "empathy" would quickly collapse, as the people in charge would be unable to make decisions based on an objective cost/benefit analysis, but instead would be paralyzed by emotional concerns.
Wrong. Exactly precisely 180 degrees wrong. It;s people who earnestly care about the outcomes for OTHER people that assiduously work through cost-benefit analysis and campaign for whatever result that analysis shows them is the best outcome.
What you're describing is someone with no analytic capacity at all, no ability to go where the data leads because they're so besotted with emotion they can't think straight.
Juxtaposing that imaginary personality against a psychopath and presenting that juxtaposition as some kind of forced choice between two alternatives is bunk. Both are defective personality types. The real difference is, the psychopath actually exists, the weepy-hearted paralysis case is so far as I know just a hypothetical construct aka strawman.
When a cost-benefit analysis is done, it's important to consider what COUNTS as the benefit- is the benefit being reckoned as the aggregate well being of other humans or YOUR paycheck. What we have no in US health care- since you brought up putting a dollar value to human life- is corporations doing a cost benefit analysis which counts their executive's paychecks as the benefit to be maximized and other people's health as a cost to be minimized.
In fact it was the Tea Party who whined and moaned about some imaginary government agency deciding whether or not to give treatment based on cost effectiveness. So there are your achy-breaky hearts and it's the EU cost-benefit analysis health care system who has better outcomes for diseases amenable to treatment:
Well... congratulations, that was my original point. :) I first asked the "what problems do psychopaths cause" question a few posts up, hoping to discuss ideas for protecting society from their downsides while still allowing them to function productively. I was thinking that perhaps a caretaker who is present in the psychopath's work environment might do the trick, especially if there was some way to compel the individual to think it was in their own best interest to speak with the caretaker truthfully, e.g. to convince the individual that absolutely any action which disregards or abuses empathy may have powerful negative consequences for them later. It seemed like an interesting brain teaser, at least.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
"Could Testing Block Psychopaths From Senior Management?"
No, as while few in number, the professional psychopath is too good at masking his true nature. Can usually be found hiding out in one of the professions. as psychiatrist, psychiatric nurse, prison guard, policeman or cub scout leader. Can only be detected by the inexplicable amount of mishaps that occurs to those in their immediate vicinity.
AccountKiller
"One bad person on a team can not only make life miserable, but ruin the work output of the team, drive away anyone competent and damage everyone else's careers when they're associated with the failed team's product."
..
And then get promoted to management, as they're the only only left of the original team
AccountKiller
So, if someone has severe anterograde amnesia, you would be uncomfortable with me assuming they are likely to forget my name as soon as I leave the room, just like they did the last 99 times?
A junkie can recover and become a productive member of society, but shouldn't be left unsupervised in a pharmacy for any length of time (and a jrecovered junkie would generally not want to be for the same reason). As far as I know, gay is hard-wired. Those things are not in themselves judgements of a person's value.
People do use those things as an excuse to judge themselves somehow superior, but they will do that with any distinguishing trait that comes to hand.
Only if not hiring blind bus drivers is.
Vision is a bona fide prerequisite for driving a bus. Not being a psychopath isn't a bona fide prerequisite for pretty much anything.
As much as we might wish otherwise, medical disabilities DO render people unfit for some jobs.
You're confusing "unfit" with "personally undesirable." There's a very real difference.
It's common knowledge that aspies have a conscience whereas sociopaths do not. Sociopaths can fake their empathy way more convincingly than aspies. And for longer periods of time.
Actually, psychopath IS incomparable with any position of authority. It NEVER goes well and ALWAYS leads to the misery of others. At the very least, it will create a hostile work environment (or do you consider that to be just fine?). The psychopath manager will run over anyone who gets in their way just as surely as the blind bus driver.
Actually, he had quite a bit of those traits. I neglected to mention where he took credit for pretty much anything positive that happened, including building the entire IT infrastructure (except that it was 80% completed when he was hired).
You are right in that he wasn't a psychopath in the classic sense. OTOH, he had enough of the traits to put him in that portion of the Venn diagram. :)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I think government sanctions are necessary. We have the power to discipline these companies, but for a great variety of reasons, we seem unable to do it. One reason is the sheer overwhelming amount of corruption. Where do you start? Also, don't want to lynch a company that really wasn't in the wrong. Could lose a valuable service by being careless and mistaken that way.
At the least, a respected authority can serve as a focus. Pick out the very worst, make sure they are deserving of extreme censure, shine a bright light on them and their actions. Move on to the next once justice is done. A righteous conviction from our justice system is a strong blow to any company. Many current Bank of America customers would quickly drop the bank if they were indicted and the penalty was severe enough to cast their future in doubt. And there are other actions. Like, suppose the FDIC announced they would no longer insure BoA's deposits because the company is too reckless with the money? As in, BoA is investing this FDIC insured money in the stock market, which is a big no-no. Just like that, BoA would look like what they are: a bunch of lying, cheating losers you can't trust with your money. People would abandon them in droves.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
A true-blue nutcase will always think of themselves first, and so they will always cover their own asses or make their own errors appear as successes.
Thus, often management will look from above or look at metrics and conclude that the psychopath is the most competent team member.
Have seen this happen a few times too...
Futurist Traditionalism
I honestly can't see how a physicist's opinion on psychology is relevant. To my knowledge, he has never even studied it. But his argument is laughable because he's basically saying that by virtue of being human you cannot objectively study human behavior. I can just as easily say that by virtue of being human you cannot objectively study anything...and I'd be right. Keep in mind that he was pissed off that they said his IQ was only 125.
That aside, my original argument wasn't a psychological one. They've done brain scans on psychopaths that show their brains have developed differently than normal people. Google it. There's more research to be done on this subject but if them having a different brain isn't scientific enough, then I have nothing more to say on the matter.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
I completely agree. You are a moron. Don't feel too bad though. I blame the school system for your lack of critical thinking skills.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Who couldn't learn to fake it? Isn't that what the article is claiming that psychopaths do? In addition, the majority of dishonest behavior in every institution is performed by perfectly ordinary people. Milgram and Zimbardo and many others in 1000s of studies have shown that most people take their cues from superiors and peers. We evolved, after all, in groups of 20 -- 200 where everyone knew everyone else's capabilities, decisions were mostly out in the open, group concensus was generally pretty 'right', and go along to get along thus was a good strategy for survival. Which is why it is so very easy to corrupt any institution, and why any dishonesty in a CEO is rapidly copied throughout their organization. Further, I don't think that psychopaths can get to the top in organizations that value honesty : people compare notes and rapidly detect dishonesty. Psychopaths depend on dishonesty, so if you want to protect an organization against them, a culture of bend-over-backwards, open-kimono honesty is better than garlic on vampires (or whatever creature garlic works against, I am a bit weak on that technology.)
Meanwhile "blood and guts" Patton was encircling 40,000 Nazi troops at Falaise
Or as Thor said, was it not for Hymir I would have killed Jörmungandr
Please test this out in Washington DC first. No shortage of ambitious psychopathic executive types there.
Organization? You must be joking..
As a former employee of HP? FUCK YES.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
You've got it exactly backwards.
It's not so difficult for a normal person to think like a psychopath.
It is impossible for a psychopath to think like a normal person.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Let me get this straight--what's good for General Motors *and* General Patton is good for America, is this what you're saying?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
No, I didn't. Normal people can act in psychopathic ways but they can never actually be truly psychopathic. True psychopaths have no conscience. They couldn't have one even if they wanted one (and they don't want one). A normal person may do bad things but they will have to deal with the emotional turmoil that results.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Blame the sheep, not the shepherd?
I don't think so.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Re:
The might look at the ability to prevent 50% of automobile related deaths for $1 a car and decide they can save $1 a car at the cost of a 25% increase in automobile related deaths, and choose that option.
.
That's why the automobile industry has regulations imposed upon it in the USA at the governmental level: if there were not regulations requiring the placement of seat-belts and airbags in cars/trucks, the auto industry would be quick to save the $1-$2 per vehicle by leaving those safety devices out. That's why corporations can be thought of as greedy sociopathic individuals: the primary goal of corporations is to maximize profit. If there is not a check or balance on that with laws that regulate this type of greedy sociopathic behaviour on the part of the corporations, then they would continue to act that way.
.
It's also the same with costs: if you can get your costs shuttled off to a different division or a different heading / column on the ledger where it's no longer counted as a "negative" in your sum, then you've done well regardless of where the cost was shifted to. The blame can be shifted there along with the cost. That's the same for taxes being relabeled as use-fees, or taxes at one level being turned into taxes at a different level. You can say "we've reduced X" while simultaenously shuffling the balls around and playing keep-away with the increase that occured in Y hoping that no-one notices.
Just get rid of everyone who has what it takes to manage millions of dollars worth of assets and other people's lives, and replace them with spineless politically correct morons. That will make the company work just great.