Comment by threepipeproblm
8 years ago
Psychopaths sometimes have trouble recognizing stuff that is supposed to make them ashamed, i.e. stuff that would reveal their character were it exposed publicly.
Maybe that seems like an over the top comment, and on any individual case, who knows? But I think it explains a good number of these sorts of scandals. Sometimes, the people who get on top are not "ambitious"... sometimes they are actual monsters.
Please don't do the internet psychiatric diagnosis trope on HN. Casually invoking a category like 'psychopath' significantly lowers the signal/noise ratio in a thread, and even if you don't direct it at a specific person, someone else will. Moreover the frame of this article means your comment is insinuating something about someone whether you mean it to or not, and that's beyond gross and into hideous.
Internet threads are like tag-team wrestling: the first guy drags a metal chair into the ring and then the second guy bashes a third guy over the head with it. Keep the chair out of the ring.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14837253 and marked it off-topic.
So by daring to say that this behavior might be caused by someone who is characterized by the worst kind of lack of ethics, I'm in the wrong?
This is a phenomenon that studies show occurs at something like 2-3% in the population at large... but more common among CEO's. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7841742 I'll just, you know, stop using it and monitor the potential security hole for the rest of my life.
I really don't think it takes being a psychopath at all. All it takes is convincing yourself that the company's mission is inherently noble, instead of just a way to generate profit. I've seen this many times, where nice, reasonable people convince themselves of the morality of some business decision, without really questioning that all these "moral" decisions also just happen to be the ones that make the most profit.
Studies have shown that psychopaths are, on average, more successful as CEOs than non-psychopaths. This certainly seems like a good example of that (his reaction and behavior with the reporter were perfect!).
In my experience they have meteoric careers that then suddenly crash and burn spectacularly. Unfortunately after a big crash they're usually able to find more fools and repeat the pattern. You'll often see someone whose career looks like a sawtooth wave.
There is a book called Political Ponerology, with a fascinating provenance, which basically claims society at large (macro scale) goes on sawtooth pattern like this. The argument is that during the good times, people stop taking the steps needed to keep these people from attaining high positions... they remain in denial and make excuses for pyscho behavior. Then people finally take action only when it's just blatantly obviously necessary again. Which, if you think about it, is also the basic story of good & evil presented in Harry Potter :)
IIRC the book was written by the scientific wing of the Polish Resistance movement during authoritarian occupations of the 20th Century. Apparently, many of the people involved in sourcing the data (and, oh yeah, who had secretly diagnosed many of the Nazi/Communist leaders as psychopaths) were killed, when the first edition of the book was discovered in progress. And that first manuscript was destroyed, but the lead author wrote it again -- not once, but two more times -- and ultimately, had to wait for the fall of Communism in order to get it out of Poland. It was finally translated and published during the Bush administration, by New York liberals.
That is a very underrated comment. There is clearly a direct link between psychotic thinking and actions among those who are at the top. The system totally and utterly incentivizes psychotic behavior even just because there are never serious consequences for anything and only rewards. Just take Amazon or Facebook for example; not only are their CEO's becoming insanely wealthy by consolidating the whole economy and becoming what is essentially a tech-talitarian regime that controls our governments at all levels even at this point, but between Amazon sending its tentacles into everything and Zuckerberg saying he wants to and is totally replacing the internet with Facebook we are seeing the emerging of psychopaths that should have been stopped a long time ago.
Here's your chance at "killing Hitler", yet we sit by and cheer Facebook, Google, Amazon, Uber, Tesla, etc destroying and consolidating the economy under what is a de facto emerging totalitarian regim. They're even controlling speech and propagandizing society with control over what you see and when you see it.