Pieter Hintjens
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Thank you for the gifts
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
Podcasts/Interviews
Software Engineering Daily
Interview by Adam Dymitruk
Ruby Rogues #188, Community Building
Talks on video
"De afspraak", VRT, May 2016 (panel discussion)
RTL TV, May 2016 (panel discussion)
DomCode 2015, Nov 2015 (keynote)
Coding Serbia, Oct 2015 (keynote)
Euroscipy, Cambridge, Aug 2015 (keynote)
PyGrunn, Groningen, May 2015
Craft Conf, Budapest, Apr 2015
QCon London, Mar 2015
Code Mesh London, Nov 2014
Build Stuff, Vilnius 2014
Build Stuff, Vilnius, Nov 2014 (interview)
Coding Serbia, Nov 2014 (keynote)
Devnology, Leusden, Oct 2014 (keynote)
EuroPython, Berlin, Jul 2014 (keynote)
Build Stuff, Vilnius, Dec 2013 (interview)
Build Stuff, Vilnius, Dec 2013 (keynote)
Code Mesh London, Dec 2013
DevOps Days, London, Nov 2013
NDC Oslo, Jun 2013
CERN - Geneva, Jun 2013
Tech Mesh, London, Dec 2012
Strange Loop, St.Louis, Oct 2012
ZeroMQ@PDX part 2 - Portland, Feb 2012
ZeroMQ@PDX part 1 - Portland, Feb 2012
FLOSS Weekly, Petaliuma CA, Dec 2011
FOSDEM 2011, Brussels
Berlin Buzzwords 2010 (keynote)
FOSDEM 2009, Brussels
Hellenic FOSS Conference 2008, Athens part 1
Hellenic FOSS Conference 2008, Athens part 2
Email me at moc.snejtnih|reteip#moc.snejtnih|reteip if you'd like me to present at your event, or in your organization.
Comments
(sorry for stripping the http off the links here, just want to provide the info but the site's worried about spam)
It feels like you are approaching psychopathy from a neurodiversity standpoint, though you don't use that word that I noticed. If you haven't seen it en.wikipedia org/wiki/Neurodiversity has a short definition, but the general idea is that many of the traits we pathologize probably exist in the human genetic heritage for a reason, and that we should understand and value rather than try to eliminate diverse mental traits.
An interesting side-note is that many or even all of the common pathologized traits in the DSM disrupt social relations in some way; in fact that may be why they are pathologized. But distinctions arise in the how and why of said disruption.
For example, autism tends to involve a "facts vs. folks" dimension, or increased focus on nonsocial priorities; a longer discussion of that here:
intellectualizing net/2013/10/23/what-are-intellect-and-instinct/ and discussion of what "autism" actually means here:
intellectualizing net/2013/12/17/book-rethinking-autism-variation-and-complexity/
In autism you would see some of the surface differences you mention with psychopathy - such as strange laughs or sense of humor - but the reasons are entirely different. Some people describe "cognitive empathy" (understanding how others feel) vs. emotional/affective empathy (caring how they feel), and claim that autism would be a cognitive empathy impairment while psychopathy would be an emotional empathy impairment.
For other psychopathic traits you mention, you'd see the opposite with autism; for example, an autistic person will often be excellent at focusing on and completing projects.
Why does autism exist, evolution-wise? The kind that's inherited probably has something to do with the way social skill and social cohesion undermine our ability to focus on and accurately understand nonsocial reality. Look at a list of cognitive biases, and many of them are prosocial. Groupthink is well-known. Somebody has to march to the beat of facts rather than folks, and taking that to an extreme is labeled autism - autistics are our independent, systematic, reality-based thinkers. It's tough to have a trait in the gene pool without getting extreme forms of it.
Some forms of autism appear to be "de novo" mutations (spontaneous random changes that haven't been selected by evolution), and in those cases autism is more likely to be globally disabling in a way that includes but isn't limited to social disability. In these cases we can't say autism makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but we can of course still value the people with these mutations.
Interestingly, it is possible to be socially adept but also intellectually disabled, as in Williams syndrome, so that's another facet of neurodiversity.
Some have speculated that "schizotypy" is the opposite of autism; I don't know that it's been seriously researched. But the idea is that it can also be pathological to be too creative, too free-associating, too empathetic with others to the point that you're hearing their voices in your head, or so focused on "folks" that your ability to engage "facts" becomes a problem.
For a long time, autism was called "childhood schizophrenia" because schizophrenia also destroys people's ability to relate socially; schizophrenics lose too much of themselves and too much contact with reality. Current belief is that schizophrenia's social impairment has a fundamentally different character from autism.
Depression, as well, obviously interferes with social engagement, and it's often said that ADHD also does.
Social engagement has a lot to do with "acting normal," and any kind of deviation can be an issue.
Anyhow, it's interesting that our "psychopathy detection system" may cause us to also pathologize a lot of people who perhaps aren't selfish in the psychopathic way, but are simply strange and out of sync.
We also have to recognize that people can have more than one of these supposedly-discrete conditions. An autistic psychopath is an especially maladaptive combination… think of a narcissist or psychopath who's very bad at manipulating others - that's an angry person having a very hard time in life.
Folk psychology and moral systems are quite poor at dealing with neurodiversity, I've found. The usual sort of mental model is that we want to hold people blameless for behavior that's "baked in" or outside of their control; and a pathologizing label somehow "excuses" harmful, antisocial, or unusual behavior. In the United States this is actually encoded in school laws, for example a school cannot punish a child in the usual way if a behavior was "caused by their disability." This line of thinking is not really workable, I talked about it more here:
intellectualizing net/2014/11/05/autism-as-a-neurobiological-condition/
The moral idea that a diagnosed pathology "excuses" behavior falls apart much more clearly with psychopathy than with autism, even though it's a nonsense idea in both cases.
Here's a useful post on the essentially-false view of the world created by medical labeling of dimensional mental traits:
deevybee.blogspot com/2010/12/whats-in-name.html
Psychopathy is different from autism and most other pathologized conditions in that it directly and seriously harms other people, more so than the pathologized person. Autism, depression, ADHD, etc. place most of the harm on the pathologized person, who may be working hard not to be a burden on others and even feeling guilty or ashamed.
Thanks for this interesting material. I like the neurodiversity theme, particularly for the predatory traits like psychopathy, narcissism, histrionism, and borderline. Before I'd decoded this particular story behind psychopathy, my best guess was that such traits were successful in some contexts.
I've not had enough experience with other traits to see any patterns. It does seem plausible that autism is the scientific mind taken to extremes.
Portfolio
Your discussion of DSM and context relates to the academic field of disability studies (which I'm far from deeply knowledgeable about). In disability studies, many place an emphasis on the contextual nature of disability; a personal trait can be a disability or not depending on context and available accommodations. While the medical model (as in the DSM) wants to locate disability as an innate property of an individual.
A concrete case where we see this play out is in US schools, where there's a legal framework around the idea of an Individualized Education Program. In this framework, schools are one-size-fits-all by default, but if you go through a process of being labeled with some disability (dyslexia, autism, ADHD, etc.) you are able to get individualized changes to an education program, large or small. A very large number of students are therefore labeled with some disability (roughly 10-15% depending on the state).
One way to understand what's happening here is that schools are inappropriate for 10-15% of students, due to their inflexible one-size-fits-all nature, but the "blame" or explanation for that inappropriateness gets transferred to individual student traits, as if it were an immutable property of those students.
We could, alternatively, point the finger at the school as an institution - for designing an educational context that doesn't work for so many children. And indeed many of these kids thrive in private schools or home school settings. US public schools are extremely rigid about what is learned on what schedule, and have a very specific kind of environment (age-segregated, large groups, direct instruction, reading-and-math-above-all) that doesn't fit everyone. Even those students who muddle through in the environment may not thrive (the environment may not emphasize or develop their primary strengths).
This institutional force (public schools) has in turn greatly affected diagnostic patterns for categories such as autism and ADHD. Some oversimplify by calling this "overdiagnosis," but the issues identified are in fact clinically significant (causing distress, etc) … but often ONLY in the context of public schools, rather than other possible contexts.
It's complicated…
Your writing resonated with me all day (in a good way :-) ). One thought / question that kept on coming back is about the relation between psychopathy and postpartum depression. Do women with more psychpath genes undergo more postpartum depression than women who are eusocial ? maybe the contrast of not being able to care for others with the social pressure of "you must care for your newborn" is too tough for psychopathic moms?
Psychopaths never, in my experience, get depressed. They are expert at shifting costs such as childcare onto others.
Depression comes in my experience from loss of freedoms, and arguably the small baby or child is modeling a psychopath in their ability to control and feed off their mother. (It's the other way around, the psychopathic mind retains childlike behavior, of course.)
Psychopathic mothers may provide a very convincing imitation of depression. This would be observable: if the depression peaks when other people are around, then it may be fabricated to manipulate those people into helping out.
Portfolio
A very insightful analysis. One part I especially find interesting is your hypothesis that there could be some sort of optimal level of full-blown psychopathy in the population.
Another thing I find interesting is to consider how this falls in line with people's decision to move their lives online… it seems that the Internet is not an area in which we have have highly developed evolutionary protocols against manipulation. Perhaps some rudimentary forms of such messaging might be properly placed emoticons in emails, or the now ubiquitous 'CAPTCHA' progams, i.e., "Are you human?" ;)
Looking forward to the next article, thanks for writing.
Thanks for the comments.
I'd not thought about the optimum level of active psychopathy, yet that seems obvious now that you say it.
I'll have to think about how the Internet affects our communication patterns and thus the arms race. Certainly it lets psychopaths trawl far wider nets, and lie much more easily. At the same time, it strips off the emotional layer so that manipulation is much harder.
My cat is blue, I love you, I hate you: these barely cause ripples. To make a real impact we still need to meet face to face. And the Internet makes possible exchanges like this article. So I suspect the overall effect is to accelerate the arms race. This may even become visible in historical terms. For instance there has been a consistent rise in measured intelligence over the last decades, correlating with the growth of cheaper communications.
As for captchas, it should be possible to make an online empathy detector, which shows half a story and asks the viewer to fill in the blanks. One would need a large source of material, so that the viewer could not learn the "right" answers.
Portfolio
Ha, I like your idea. A "Judgement of Solomon" generator would truly be a killer app (sorry, I can't resist a pun).
You are a talented writer, Culture and Empire has definitely been added to my reading list.
:)
Interesting and thought provoking - thank you! As for an empathy captcha, something like "you see a turtle on its back…" possibly? :)
It's a tricky one… clearly reading people and their emotions is a basic psychopath talent, indeed they can appear to read minds, so well they decode tiny inflections in voice and face.
This would need experimentation. Perhaps something like,"When other people see this image, and pretend to care, do you suspect they secretly feel (a) sad, (b) irritated, (c) bored, or (d) amused"?
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