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Obvious tag's missing.

/Kings and commoners ...
//Fiefs and serfs.

A person with psycopathic tendencies born into middle class will likely never leave their parents basement/fark.

/speaks of experience

Actually, I believe the studies showed that the typical big company CEO is a sociopath, not a psychopath.

Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. "The illusion of skill ... is deeply ingrained in their culture."

I grew up alongside some very rich people who inherited their wealth. After most of them were allowed to handle their own money after turning a certain age, they all quickly became very poor people.

Anyone remember the film The Corporation?

If a corporation is nothing more than a legal entity behind which individuals engage in collective decision-making, the mindset and mental state of those individuals will influence the outward behaviour of the entity. In other words, it is at least arguable that corporations are psychopathic because they reflect the state of their directors and executives, and because such behaviour is rewarded by those individuals. It's a self-propagating problem, a vicious cycle, and any effort to mitigate or disrupt that process will be resisted by those who benefit most from it - the very psychopaths and sociopaths trying to convince you that your effort is worth very little while their effort is worth 300-500 times what you're receiving as compensation.

As for how to deal with this problem... I'll get back to you when I have an answer, or at least a half-baked notion described well enough to be taken seriously. I guess "smash hierarchy" just won't cut it.

SharkTrager: Actually, I believe the studies showed that the typical big company CEO is a sociopath, not a psychopath.

They're the same thing. Different names...

This just in. Part of being rich and successful is the ability to give your offspring the best possible chances in life. Tom?

Yes yes, and it turns out that people with horrible decision making skills pass these traits along to their offspring. Back to you Peter.

Anyway, I DNRTFA, but I (unknowingly) had a relationship with a psychopath last summer, and it was very traumatic. Psychopaths are not really human, and I never say that about anybody. They should be cut into little bits and fed to hyenas. They have no redeeming qualities.

Many a large group activity annihilates the individual in order to meet the goals of the many.

Let's demonize them!

/CORPORASHUNS! DEY TOOK UR JERBS!

Who do dirtbag republicans look up to ?

In many cases they look up to these people in business.

It's not surprising that a group of dirtbags would admires another group of dirtbags.

Really fark for Shame should have been done in one!

SharkTrager: Actually, I believe the studies showed that the typical big company CEO is a sociopath, not a psychopath.

Yeah big difference. A psycopath would be more obvious, whereas a sociopaths are much better at hiding in plain sight.

You want a job, don't you?

Well I read that whole damn thing and fark if I'm not sick to my stomach.

"Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got."
Peter Drucker


At some point I realized bad management is a symptom of a much larger problem, company culture.

Obvious tag take a day off? I've worked in both financial services and industry and there's never a work day where I wasn't a stone's throw away from a cold-hearted asshole with no sense of integrity, empathy or remorse. Keep businesses around; they're plenty useful and even beneficial. But for god's sake don't ever, ever, EVER trust a business. Businesses don't; they don't even trust themselves! Most of any business' internal policies are rooted in mistrust. (Oh, but when they get political, they're all halos and baby-faced innocence. Dude, don't ever, ever, EVER fall for that.)

SharkTrager: Actually, I believe the studies showed that the typical big company CEO is a sociopath, not a psychopath.

From what I've read, the current leading school of thought is that there's no distinction between the two. I understand the point; if you pick apart the underlying causes it's very difficult to tell the two apart. Both are largely rooted in lack of empathy. The CEOs and psycho killers make the news, but the vast majority of psychopaths aren't intelligent, ambitious or even violent. Go to a non-hardcore psych ward and you really can't tell the sociopaths apart from the psychopaths. That said, I'm not so sure. . . the extreme behavior patterns are too distinct and divergent. It's not like Jeffrey Dahmer ran a hedge fund or Jeffrey Skilling had a pile of disemboweled bodies in his basement. I think the two words help to distinguish how they manifest -- the psychopath is the guy who makes a necklace out of your intestines; the sociopath is the guy who cons your grandparents out of their life savings.

Psychology tries to be a science, and to be fair is by far the most insightful and predictive when it tries to be. But the human brain is so ridiculously malleable and complex, and there are so many ethical issues with long-term experiments that it's difficult to manage the various factors even if there weren't hordes of the pseudoscientists and idiots polluting the discourse. . . which there are.

TFA: Is your boss possessed of judgment, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshiat and bullying?

Neither. It was tenure, actually, which is largely random. Unfortunately, I can't say we got lucky.

The point is the business community is one of the main groups in control of our country.

So we are in a very real sense a country run by evil people. One could make a convincing case that americas decline cannot be stopped because of the extreme level of corruption in the world of business.

eas81: Really fark for Shame should have been done in one!

[www.horroryearbook.com image 430x320][4.bp.blogspot.com image 496x638][cdn.thegloss.com image 460x300][cdn.thegloss.com image 600x400]

Came for this. Leaving happy.

/My God.
//A watermark...
\\\It's got a watermark.....

SharkTrager: Actually, I believe the studies showed that the typical big company CEO is a sociopath, not a psychopath.

Yeah, a "typical" company. If you want a great company, you'll want a full-on psychopath.

I'm not sure why this is at all surprising. The entire capitalist enterprise is perfect for psychopaths - fark everyone else, get yours.

The position calls for it.

I'm sorry to say this but you know that old cliche, the nice guys finish last. It's true.
You want someone that will put ethics ahead of profits? Would you buy stock in those companies?

Just like you need a heartless bastard commanding the army to win a war, you need the same from your captains of industry.

Force our guys to play nice and our countries will lose to those that don't. Nice guys finish last.

You do not become superwealthy by working hard. You become wealthy by working hard, but not superwealthy. You become superwealthy by participating in or even manipulating markets. Markets have never once created, on their own, a single penny of wealth. Ever.

EVER.

They can enable other people to create wealth. That is the whole underlying concept of investing, of course. They do not, on their own, create wealth. If you are making money solely on the market by shifting investments from place to place, it's because you are taking that money from someone who is losing it (as opposed to, say, dividends where you are taking part of a created wealth from that company, not from the market).

Most people do not have a problem with this on the surface, of course. If you enter the market expecting to become rich with no cognizance of what you can lose, you are a fool, and parting fools from their money is, of course, a tried and true method of becoming successful.

However, the superwealthy we have now don't just do that. They don't just invest. They bet on failure. They have a vested interest in failure because if they can create failure they can destroy one person's wealth and assume it for themselves. They manage failure by skirting the limits of the laws and regulations of the marketplace to, for example, package real estate failure as a legitimate investment. By doing so, they convince other people, by lying, to fail so they can take money from those people.

Normal people don't feel bad about winning when others fail if the rules are fair: you make your choices, your choices are your own, and you succeed or fail on their merit. If you fail, someone else may win as a result of their superior choices.

Psychopaths, the business leaders and the modern superwealthy, don't do that. They destroy people intentionally by manipulating or outright breaking the rules through bribes and lies and lobbyists. Where a poor psychopath destroys flesh and bone, a rich psychopath destroys families and success.

To be surprised by this you have to be pretty intentionally obtuse.

I disagree with the comparison of wealth adviser results to "chimpanzees flipping coins".

If you look at major league baseball teams' results over the course of a decade, they're pretty close to coin flips too, but this is due to competitive parity, not the "skill-less-ness" of baseball. You cannot take twenty-five random guys, put them on a team and coach them up a bit, and send them to the majors expecting to win about half their games.

It's intuitive to me that wealth adviser skills results are the same way, and that wealth advisers are in fact pretty damned skilled.

Doesn't mean the fiscal class should have all the money, of course. However, saying the results are not predictably better than a coin flip because there's no skill involved is a misunderstanding of high-level competition.

spicorama: The position calls for it.

I'm sorry to say this but you know that old cliche, the nice guys finish last. It's true.
You want someone that will put ethics ahead of profits? Would you buy stock in those companies?

Just like you need a heartless bastard commanding the army to win a war, you need the same from your captains of industry.

Force our guys to play nice and our countries will lose to those that don't. Nice guys finish last.

You are shilling for the game, and believing that the current game is the only game. You need to Google Francis Fukuyama because you are making the same logical fault he did when he pronounced the last man.

/Nietzsche, however, was and continues to be quite accurate in his depiction of the last man.

In a letter to William Kennedy ( Hunter ) Thompson confided that he was "coming to view the free enterprise system as the single greatest evil in the history of human savagry" - Thompsons wiki page

You were warned.

RockofAges: and believing that the current game is the only game.

A lot of this.

What we have now is just a gussied-up version of brutish men with sticks braining each other to take their meat. (Richard K. Morgan's Market Forces is a pretty good hyperbolic example).

I think we're capable of better, if we can actually put the aggregate good at the forefront.

steveGswine: I disagree with the comparison of wealth adviser results to "chimpanzees flipping coins".

If you look at major league baseball teams' results over the course of a decade, they're pretty close to coin flips too, but this is due to competitive parity, not the "skill-less-ness" of baseball. You cannot take twenty-five random guys, put them on a team and coach them up a bit, and send them to the majors expecting to win about half their games.

It's intuitive to me that wealth adviser skills results are the same way, and that wealth advisers are in fact pretty damned skilled.

Doesn't mean the fiscal class should have all the money, of course. However, saying the results are not predictably better than a coin flip because there's no skill involved is a misunderstanding of high-level competition.

Using a sports analogy to try and analyze market outcomes is just foolish. If they perform no better than a coinflip, why are they allowed to wager public money and claim private profit?

Dee Snarl: SharkTrager: Actually, I believe the studies showed that the typical big company CEO is a sociopath, not a psychopath.

They're the same thing. Different names...



Aw, repression...recession...it's all da same thing, man.

RockofAges: spicorama: The position calls for it.

I'm sorry to say this but you know that old cliche, the nice guys finish last. It's true.
You want someone that will put ethics ahead of profits? Would you buy stock in those companies?

Just like you need a heartless bastard commanding the army to win a war, you need the same from your captains of industry.

Force our guys to play nice and our countries will lose to those that don't. Nice guys finish last.

You are shilling for the game, and believing that the current game is the only game. You need to Google Francis Fukuyama because you are making the same logical fault he did when he pronounced the last man.

/Nietzsche, however, was and continues to be quite accurate in his depiction of the last man.

At some point you have to admit to the way things are. They havent changed for thousands of years. The idea that human nature is mostly benevolent shows a naivette that I envy.

Humans have been raping and pillaging since before we had language, its not going to stop anytime soon. If a particular groups decides they are NOT part of this reality and will force all their members to adhere to those principals, they will become victims.

RockofAges: Using a sports analogy to try and analyze market outcomes is just foolish.

What's more comparable than sports, or better analyzed? Competitive results are competitive results, regardless of the particular trophies taken home.

If they perform no better than a coinflip, why are they allowed to wager public money and claim private profit?

These issues are orthogonal. How predictable an individual's results are over time within a system is a different thing than how well the system as a whole meets a particular objective.

spicorama: RockofAges: spicorama: The position calls for it.

I'm sorry to say this but you know that old cliche, the nice guys finish last. It's true.
You want someone that will put ethics ahead of profits? Would you buy stock in those companies?

Just like you need a heartless bastard commanding the army to win a war, you need the same from your captains of industry.

Force our guys to play nice and our countries will lose to those that don't. Nice guys finish last.

You are shilling for the game, and believing that the current game is the only game. You need to Google Francis Fukuyama because you are making the same logical fault he did when he pronounced the last man.

/Nietzsche, however, was and continues to be quite accurate in his depiction of the last man.

At some point you have to admit to the way things are. They havent changed for thousands of years. The idea that human nature is mostly benevolent shows a naivette that I envy.

Humans have been raping and pillaging since before we had language, its not going to stop anytime soon. If a particular groups decides they are NOT part of this reality and will force all their members to adhere to those principals, they will become victims.

And there have been successive revolutions which have been the direct result of the body politic no longer wanting to support "raping and pillaging" of either themselves or another actor.

Soooo.... I guess what I'm saying is that your assertion that culture and society and human nature are static is a bit of a reductionist (not to mention flatly false) argument.

steveGswine: RockofAges: Using a sports analogy to try and analyze market outcomes is just foolish.

What's more comparable than sports, or better analyzed? Competitive results are competitive results, regardless of the particular trophies taken home.

If they perform no better than a coinflip, why are they allowed to wager public money and claim private profit?

These issues are orthogonal. How predictable an individual's results are over time within a system is a different thing than how well the system as a whole meets a particular objective.

When neither of these different things results in positive correlation to skill or merit, you can no longer say that the system is rational nor predictable in any sense other than the metrics indicated in the article, which would seem to bolster the assertions being made by the Nobel winner in economics therein.

eas81: Really fark for Shame should have been done in one!

It was

RockofAges: spicorama: RockofAges: spicorama: The position calls for it.

I'm sorry to say this but you know that old cliche, the nice guys finish last. It's true.
You want someone that will put ethics ahead of profits? Would you buy stock in those companies?

Just like you need a heartless bastard commanding the army to win a war, you need the same from your captains of industry.

Force our guys to play nice and our countries will lose to those that don't. Nice guys finish last.

You are shilling for the game, and believing that the current game is the only game. You need to Google Francis Fukuyama because you are making the same logical fault he did when he pronounced the last man.

/Nietzsche, however, was and continues to be quite accurate in his depiction of the last man.

At some point you have to admit to the way things are. They havent changed for thousands of years. The idea that human nature is mostly benevolent shows a naivette that I envy.

Humans have been raping and pillaging since before we had language, its not going to stop anytime soon. If a particular groups decides they are NOT part of this reality and will force all their members to adhere to those principals, they will become victims.

And there have been successive revolutions which have been the direct result of the body politic no longer wanting to support "raping and pillaging" of either themselves or another actor.

Soooo.... I guess what I'm saying is that your assertion that culture and society and human nature are static is a bit of a reductionist (not to mention flatly false) argument.

Don't waste your time on this idiot. He's just doing garden variety rationalization.

spicorama: I'm sorry to say this but you know that old cliche, the nice guys finish last. It's true. You want someone that will put ethics ahead of profits? Would you buy stock in those companies? Just like you need a heartless bastard commanding the army to win a war, you need the same from your captains of industry.

Nice guys don't finish last; nice guys don't play dick games to begin with. They are also frequently the most productive workers and leaders in a net sense. They don't steal from the company. They don't commit fraud. Their word can be trusted. And then can be quite competent CEOs as long as they're not gullible or soft.

Very little tends to get done in a room where no one trusts each other. I've been in such a meeting. It's ridiculous. I'll say something honest like "this part has a four-week lead time" and instantly everyone thinks I'm lying and it actually takes two weeks, so they demand two weeks because they think I'm one of them. Then someone else will say something and I can't trust that either, so I'm compelled to assign someone to check that detail. It's an almost comical exchange of zero information, and hideously unproductive. If the article is 100% right about anything, it's that psychopaths destroy wealth. They absolutely suck at creating.

Economies always do better when regulations are enforced to protect the honest and discourage the dishonest. And the dishonest will be the first to whine that they're burdened by regulations. And from their point of view of course they are; it's what keeps them from turning getting shiat done into a game of Calvinball.

Also, I get very creeped out by people who think companies are analogous to wars. There's a bit of a difference between trying to increase margins vs. pointing a rifle at someone's chest. But perhaps more aptly, the insistence that companies need to literally defeat each other like it's war implies there's an underlying belief that capitalism IS a zero-sum game, after all. It's not about producing; it's about taking.

steveGswine: It's intuitive to me that wealth adviser skills results are the same way, and that wealth advisers are in fact pretty damned skilled.

Again, this contradicts the notion that capitalism is not zero-sum. Baseball is zero-sum, for every winner there WILL be a loser. But in business, things are more complex. For example, many large OEMs don't like to stake their production on a single supplier; some work to keep multiple suppliers in business. In these situations, hiring a psychopath to run a supply company is counterproductive. The OEM is never going to let your competitor go out of business so all the soul-sucking backstabbing derp is just going to make everyone miserable going nowhere.

What TFA is talking about are companies that don't know when to say "enough". Classic case was Enron; it didn't have a sustainable growth model. Not only did the psychopaths demand constant growth, they demanded faster growth. It simply wasn't going to last.

The only way you can justify CEO psychopathy is to admit that the socialists are 100% correct.

spicorama

At some point you have to admit to the way things are. They havent changed for thousands of years. The idea that human nature is mostly benevolent shows a naivette that I envy.

Humans have been raping and pillaging since before we had language, its not going to stop anytime soon. If a particular groups decides they are NOT part of this reality and will force all their members to adhere to those principals, they will become victims.

Vote Republican

Marx also warned us more than 150 years ago.

RockofAges: When neither of these different things results in positive correlation to skill or merit, you can no longer say that the system is rational nor predictable in any sense other than the metrics indicated in the article, which would seem to bolster the assertions being made by the Nobel winner in economics therein.

The Nobel winner is asserting the wealth adviser results are as predictable as coinflips. This is borne out by the data.

The article writer is asserting that wealth advisers are therefore "chimpanzees flipping coins", which is borne out by nothing whatsoever. This assertion does not pass the giggle test for me. I can accept that wealth advisers at the highest level do a better job at spotting quality investments than I could, in much the same way I accept that baseball players at the highest level do a better job at hitting curveballs than I could.

Predicting markets and allocating capital is not an unskilled profession. Again, acknowledging this does not mean that those who do it should take home all the damned money.

I think the "difference" is that sociopaths aren't born bad and are "caused" by societal forces whereas psychopaths are wrong/mentally ill from the start...but fundamentally they are both evil & capable of atrocities

//could be wrong, it won't be the first time...or the last *lol*

Minimally Hairy Beer-Powered Simian: SharkTrager: Actually, I believe the studies showed that the typical big company CEO is a sociopath, not a psychopath.

Yeah big difference. A psycopath would be more obvious, whereas a sociopaths are much better at hiding in plain sight.

Assuming there is a meaningful difference, it's actually the opposite of what you said. Psychopaths are usually better at mimicking "normal" behavior and feelings. They know what they are, and are perfectly comfortable with it, so they remain calm and in control of themselves in almost any situation. Sociopaths, on the other hand, might actually feel a sense of guilt, which makes them nervous and agitated. They are more likely to act out spontaneously, with no regard for the consequences. They can form attachments, so they are more selective about who they are willing to harm.

But as others have said, they are both facets of the same disorder. Whether there is any real difference is debatable.

SuperTramp: Humans have been raping and pillaging since before we had language, its not going to stop anytime soon. If a particular groups decides they are NOT part of this reality and will force all their members to adhere to those principals, they will become victims.

Sounds like something a psychopath would say.....

/oblig

Yep.

Every scumbag knows that you can convince some people that you are not quite as scummy by repeating the lie that everybody is just as bad as you.