Actually it's more likely that it's the people peddling lunatic fodder that make the money. Those lunatics who believe it tend to be in the lower income bracket. But there is a thriving market for all this stuff, fuelled a lot of the time by professional activists that prey upon and encourage, peoples beliefs that all governments lie to their people and that there is a world cover up going on about this that and the other etc.
The media encourage it all because it sells copy and viewer time, and the advertisers are happy to support it. The rest of us get a good giggle along the way, and the military are happy to encourage UFO lore to mask their real life secret testing of the latest technology.
So taking a helicopter view, it is all self perpetuating and self financed, a mini industry trundling along under it's own renewable power, where everyone is happy.
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
Yup, human nutters come in all flavours. So by comparison I don't know why people are worried about aliens taking over the planet. Here's a worry :
- about 0.6% of us are identified as true psychopaths ( demonstrated as prone to violence, no conscience, regret only being caught etc ). You see them in jails alot. Society's fault et al.
- psychometric testing estimates about 2.5 % of the general population ( or, to be exact, those who agree to testing ) have much in common with a certain category of convicted criminals as above.
- so we probably haven't identified around seven out of every ten psychopaths.
- I know a guy who knows a guy that thinks he has found a reliable gene marker. His population frequency estimate is around 3 to 4 % depending on sampling assumptions and other statistical guff.
- I kid you not, but sadly I'll mention him only anonymously. After all if you discovered that, would you risk 1 per 30 people being unhappy with you about that discovery .....
- time will tell of course. So far all that is definite is an extremely strong association. There are many reasons for suspecting that gene prescribed neurochemistry could determine behaviour in this context. It certainly does for, say, mood disorders and certain forms of paranoid psychosis ( which is not the same as psychopathy ).
My explanation for why that is true - if it is - is pretty straight forward but Darwinian alas ( for some ). For about the last five thousand years H.Sapiens has moved away from being predated upon. Mostly anyway. So the selection pressure has been for those who are good at doing the other guy down. The greatest competitor for all requirements of a H.Sapiens successfully breeding is another H.Sapiens, not the crow flying overhead or the gazelle hoofing past us. We trash other species more or less as a side effect of trashing each other. Of course the psychopaths know that others will respond negatively to discovering one is a psychopath ..... hence the non-discovery of most of them and their disappointment when caught out. My only surprise is why the alleged incidence isn't higher, at least yet.
So lock your doors at night. Except if you live with a psychopath, or are one, in which case leave it open. :-))))
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Now where do you get those numbers from Mike? 0.6% sounds like a whole lot.
More then 1 in 200, meaning we all would know one or more true psychopaths. Of course in some social circles they tend to be over represented and in others near absent, but still, more then 1 in 200 is a whole lot.
Hi Mike, a committed Darwinian here :-) I studied the Galapagos finches with the Open University, so no going back now!
It would be interesting to know the estimated percentages of psychopaths and a sociopaths. and the total of both in the population. Figures suggest that up to 1 in 4 people will have some sort of mental problem at some time in their life, that is a tad worrying.
A key difference between a psychopath and a sociopath is whether they have a conscience, the little voice inside that lets us know when we’re doing something wrong, says L. Michael Tompkins, EdD. He's a psychologist at the Sacramento County Mental Health Treatment Center.
A psychopath doesn’t have a conscience. If they lie to you so they can steal your money, they won’t feel any moral qualms, though they may pretend to. They may observe others and then act the way they do so they are not “found out,” Tompkins says.
A sociopath typically has a conscience, but it’s weak. They may know that taking your money is wrong, and they might feel some guilt or remorse, but that won’t stop their behaviour.
I do shut my doors at night, as I don't want the local tea leaf to help himself, or foxes to come in, but I don't check for reds under the bed any more. I mean, if you can't trust that nice Mr Putin who can you trust these days?
10am again next week Doc?
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
You may need to check my maths here, but the UK population is 65 million, of which 58 million are adults. The prison population is 86,000. I make that 0.1% of the population in prison for whatever reason.
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
Now where do you get those numbers from Mike? 0.6% sounds like a whole lot.
Police & criminology studies largely. They see them alot. I must apologise for not having an exact reference to hand. But it's a worry though. A village of 1000 people will have approx half a dozen. Mostly that will be referenced as say domestic violence, sexual abuse, or paedophilia and not necessarily as grievous bodily harm etc. Indeed that is their trick really : to disguise one's psychopathy within a home setting or asymmetric institutions like schools and churches, especially by manipulating potential informants. FWIW the figure fits my experience as a local doctor for 3+ decades.
@Chris : even if caught they don't always go to prison, and even then not necessarily for long. But there are many assumptions in these figures of merit. Naturally the perps don't cooperate with the count. Of course they do tend to congregate in gangs etc, but these are vicious & vaguely cooperative.
It may help to compare with a better determined figure. What is the rate of paranoid schizophrenia in the population ? You may be upset to know it is culture independent and the worldwide average is 0.8% ......
If you like, sanity is rarer than you think. People of all sorts are real good at hiding their true nature. Humans have finely honed deception skills.
Cheers, Mike.
( edit ) You may be curious as to why paranoid schizophrenia is a 'better determined figure'. It's the nature of the diagnosis. Psychosis is a loss of contact with reality, especially social signals and interactions. They are really crap at hiding it, certainly in the longer term. Psychopaths are so much more sophisticated/successful at remaining hidden.
( edit ) If you're reading this : it's probably not a good night for watching Fargo ..... :-)))
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
I'm going off to Probus monthly lunch I'll look in later. In the meantime is there an official medical definition of "normal" as applied across the board. There are various fun type quizzes around, but nobody takes them seriously of course. I mean you could say that typing away on a keyboard to people you've never met and are unlikely to is in itself a bit quirky. How many % of the words population do what we do?
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
And another it seems. NASA
)
And another it seems.
NASA denies
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
yep there's plenty of
)
yep there's plenty of lunatics around. But then, if you get to earn yourself a decent salary by being a lunatic, then is it actually that crazy?
Actually it's more likely
)
Actually it's more likely that it's the people peddling lunatic fodder that make the money. Those lunatics who believe it tend to be in the lower income bracket. But there is a thriving market for all this stuff, fuelled a lot of the time by professional activists that prey upon and encourage, peoples beliefs that all governments lie to their people and that there is a world cover up going on about this that and the other etc.
The media encourage it all because it sells copy and viewer time, and the advertisers are happy to support it. The rest of us get a good giggle along the way, and the military are happy to encourage UFO lore to mask their real life secret testing of the latest technology.
So taking a helicopter view, it is all self perpetuating and self financed, a mini industry trundling along under it's own renewable power, where everyone is happy.
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
Yup, human nutters come in
)
Yup, human nutters come in all flavours. So by comparison I don't know why people are worried about aliens taking over the planet. Here's a worry :
- about 0.6% of us are identified as true psychopaths ( demonstrated as prone to violence, no conscience, regret only being caught etc ). You see them in jails alot. Society's fault et al.
- psychometric testing estimates about 2.5 % of the general population ( or, to be exact, those who agree to testing ) have much in common with a certain category of convicted criminals as above.
- so we probably haven't identified around seven out of every ten psychopaths.
- I know a guy who knows a guy that thinks he has found a reliable gene marker. His population frequency estimate is around 3 to 4 % depending on sampling assumptions and other statistical guff.
- I kid you not, but sadly I'll mention him only anonymously. After all if you discovered that, would you risk 1 per 30 people being unhappy with you about that discovery .....
- time will tell of course. So far all that is definite is an extremely strong association. There are many reasons for suspecting that gene prescribed neurochemistry could determine behaviour in this context. It certainly does for, say, mood disorders and certain forms of paranoid psychosis ( which is not the same as psychopathy ).
My explanation for why that is true - if it is - is pretty straight forward but Darwinian alas ( for some ). For about the last five thousand years H.Sapiens has moved away from being predated upon. Mostly anyway. So the selection pressure has been for those who are good at doing the other guy down. The greatest competitor for all requirements of a H.Sapiens successfully breeding is another H.Sapiens, not the crow flying overhead or the gazelle hoofing past us. We trash other species more or less as a side effect of trashing each other. Of course the psychopaths know that others will respond negatively to discovering one is a psychopath ..... hence the non-discovery of most of them and their disappointment when caught out. My only surprise is why the alleged incidence isn't higher, at least yet.
So lock your doors at night. Except if you live with a psychopath, or are one, in which case leave it open. :-))))
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Now where do you get those
)
Now where do you get those numbers from Mike? 0.6% sounds like a whole lot.
More then 1 in 200, meaning we all would know one or more true psychopaths. Of course in some social circles they tend to be over represented and in others near absent, but still, more then 1 in 200 is a whole lot.
Hi Mike, a committed
)
Hi Mike, a committed Darwinian here :-) I studied the Galapagos finches with the Open University, so no going back now!
It would be interesting to know the estimated percentages of psychopaths and a sociopaths. and the total of both in the population. Figures suggest that up to 1 in 4 people will have some sort of mental problem at some time in their life, that is a tad worrying.
I do shut my doors at night, as I don't want the local tea leaf to help himself, or foxes to come in, but I don't check for reds under the bed any more. I mean, if you can't trust that nice Mr Putin who can you trust these days?
10am again next week Doc?
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
You may need to check my
)
You may need to check my maths here, but the UK population is 65 million, of which 58 million are adults. The prison population is 86,000. I make that 0.1% of the population in prison for whatever reason.
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
Jonathan_76 wrote:Now where
)
Police & criminology studies largely. They see them alot. I must apologise for not having an exact reference to hand. But it's a worry though. A village of 1000 people will have approx half a dozen. Mostly that will be referenced as say domestic violence, sexual abuse, or paedophilia and not necessarily as grievous bodily harm etc. Indeed that is their trick really : to disguise one's psychopathy within a home setting or asymmetric institutions like schools and churches, especially by manipulating potential informants. FWIW the figure fits my experience as a local doctor for 3+ decades.
@Chris : even if caught they don't always go to prison, and even then not necessarily for long. But there are many assumptions in these figures of merit. Naturally the perps don't cooperate with the count. Of course they do tend to congregate in gangs etc, but these are vicious & vaguely cooperative.
It may help to compare with a better determined figure. What is the rate of paranoid schizophrenia in the population ? You may be upset to know it is culture independent and the worldwide average is 0.8% ......
If you like, sanity is rarer than you think. People of all sorts are real good at hiding their true nature. Humans have finely honed deception skills.
Cheers, Mike.
( edit ) You may be curious as to why paranoid schizophrenia is a 'better determined figure'. It's the nature of the diagnosis. Psychosis is a loss of contact with reality, especially social signals and interactions. They are really crap at hiding it, certainly in the longer term. Psychopaths are so much more sophisticated/successful at remaining hidden.
( edit ) If you're reading this : it's probably not a good night for watching Fargo ..... :-)))
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
I'm going off to Probus
)
I'm going off to Probus monthly lunch I'll look in later. In the meantime is there an official medical definition of "normal" as applied across the board. There are various fun type quizzes around, but nobody takes them seriously of course. I mean you could say that typing away on a keyboard to people you've never met and are unlikely to is in itself a bit quirky. How many % of the words population do what we do?
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
Then the next question would
)
Then the next question would be, do you know if you are yourself.
Where is that line that should not be crossed and would you know if you have?