About 3% of humans are born psychpaths (roughly: they have no empathy hence only care about themselves).
One would naivelly expect that only caring about yourself would be a winning strategy from a genetics point of view and hence over time the whole of Manking would have become psychopaths as the ones with such a natural advantage were more successful at surviving and reproducing than the others, yet that’s not at all the case and only a small fraction of people are born psychopaths.
My personal explanation for that is that psychopathic behaviour is only a genetic advantage if most people around are not that - or, transposed to to economic terms, being a rent-seeker only works if most people are producers and doens’t at all work when most people are rent-seekers.
I expect that in our evolutionary past, whenever a tribe/group had too many psychopaths without some kind of mechanism to kick them out or force them into cooperative mode, it eventually collapsed and ended up removed from the genetic pool hence why in millions of years of evolution the supposed superior behaviour of caring only about yourself didn’t end up dominating the human genetic pool - the “threading of the needle” for the survival psychopathy as a behavioural trait in the gene pool was a balance between that behaviour expressing itself often enough to reproduce and remain in the gene pool and not so much that there were too many such individuals in a group causing it to collapse.
Right. First, indeed it’s not a scientific theory, just an idea. The bit were I wrote “my personal explanation” and the context being a News community should’ve been a strong enough hint that it was to be taken as a bit of a ramble and I hoped (apparently wrongly so) it would make it obvious that’s “chewing gum for the brain” rather than “nourishment”.
Second: unless you’re disputing the Biology side of how behavioural traits that provide reproductive advantages result in the spreading of the genes that define those to a whole population (aka Theory of Evolution), or your understanding of Statistics is outside generally accepted Mathematics, the mere presence of that part means its not made up from “random guesses”, no matter which random distribution you’re thinking of. Ditto for the Economics side of it - i.e. rent-seeking does not create wealth and if the proportion of that kind economic activity exceeds a certain proportion of the whole then actual production won’t keep up with natural consumption and natural attritional losses.
Third: Absolutelly, even if the Biology and Economics are not, the Psychology part is mainly coming from ignorance, so if that’s wrong then the whole of it is wrong.
What is the bit in there that is that is so deeply insulting to your domain expertise that you felt that in response to this ramble of mine here in the News forum you just had to post a comment were you pointed out your qualifications in Psychology and then proceede to describe the entirety of my post with the mathematically inaccurate expression “random guesses” without actually providing an explanation?
(PS: I’m not asking this to dispute your knowledge on Psychology as I accept I’m pretty ignorant in the domain. I’m mainly curious if it’s on the nature-vs-nurture in psychopathy side, if it’s on my assumptions of the behaviour of people high in the psychopathy spectrum when it comes to “not caring about others” being “bollocks” - say hyper-simpistic or way off - or if I’m using the wrong terminology)
About 3% of humans are born psychpaths (roughly: they have no empathy hence only care about themselves).
One would naivelly expect that only caring about yourself would be a winning strategy from a genetics point of view and hence over time the whole of Manking would have become psychopaths as the ones with such a natural advantage were more successful at surviving and reproducing than the others, yet that’s not at all the case and only a small fraction of people are born psychopaths.
My personal explanation for that is that psychopathic behaviour is only a genetic advantage if most people around are not that - or, transposed to to economic terms, being a rent-seeker only works if most people are producers and doens’t at all work when most people are rent-seekers.
I expect that in our evolutionary past, whenever a tribe/group had too many psychopaths without some kind of mechanism to kick them out or force them into cooperative mode, it eventually collapsed and ended up removed from the genetic pool hence why in millions of years of evolution the supposed superior behaviour of caring only about yourself didn’t end up dominating the human genetic pool - the “threading of the needle” for the survival psychopathy as a behavioural trait in the gene pool was a balance between that behaviour expressing itself often enough to reproduce and remain in the gene pool and not so much that there were too many such individuals in a group causing it to collapse.
I have a degree in psych, and regret to inform you that you have no idea what you just rambled on about
You’re just making random guesses
Right. First, indeed it’s not a scientific theory, just an idea. The bit were I wrote “my personal explanation” and the context being a News community should’ve been a strong enough hint that it was to be taken as a bit of a ramble and I hoped (apparently wrongly so) it would make it obvious that’s “chewing gum for the brain” rather than “nourishment”.
Second: unless you’re disputing the Biology side of how behavioural traits that provide reproductive advantages result in the spreading of the genes that define those to a whole population (aka Theory of Evolution), or your understanding of Statistics is outside generally accepted Mathematics, the mere presence of that part means its not made up from “random guesses”, no matter which random distribution you’re thinking of. Ditto for the Economics side of it - i.e. rent-seeking does not create wealth and if the proportion of that kind economic activity exceeds a certain proportion of the whole then actual production won’t keep up with natural consumption and natural attritional losses.
Third: Absolutelly, even if the Biology and Economics are not, the Psychology part is mainly coming from ignorance, so if that’s wrong then the whole of it is wrong.
What is the bit in there that is that is so deeply insulting to your domain expertise that you felt that in response to this ramble of mine here in the News forum you just had to post a comment were you pointed out your qualifications in Psychology and then proceede to describe the entirety of my post with the mathematically inaccurate expression “random guesses” without actually providing an explanation?
(PS: I’m not asking this to dispute your knowledge on Psychology as I accept I’m pretty ignorant in the domain. I’m mainly curious if it’s on the nature-vs-nurture in psychopathy side, if it’s on my assumptions of the behaviour of people high in the psychopathy spectrum when it comes to “not caring about others” being “bollocks” - say hyper-simpistic or way off - or if I’m using the wrong terminology)