
Crazy at the wheel: psychopathic CEOs are rife in Silicon Valley - spking
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/15/silicon-valley-psychopath-ceo-sxsw-panel
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zitterbewegung
Clickbait article that attempts to use psychological terminology and
generalized this / performs mass diagnosis to make you feel better about your
job by demonizing your CEO.

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arcanus
Agreed. Came here to say this. Furthermore if psychology had any predictive
power at all, a charge such as this might under certain circumstances bear
some meaning. Instead, it is rife with 'stories' and tautologies. Numerous
mass murderers have been under psychiatric evaluation and were not flagged as
a danger. This is a catastrophic, first order failure.

The entire field makes economics look rigorous.

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zitterbewegung
I don't have an issue with psychology. I have an issue with people without
qualifications diagnosing people and demonization. It really hurts people with
psychological disorders by generating stigma and negative connotations .

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JoeAltmaier
I think its fair to demonize sociopaths. The stigma is deserved.

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NikolaeVarius
Why? I never understood the need to demonize sociopathy. They're not hurting
anyone by the sole fact that they are a sociopath.

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mixmastamyk
But they will and do, if put in a position of power.

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mrkurt
It's tough to read this article because it's trying to support a particular
point, and not really exploring an idea. Like all psychological diagnoses,
psychopathy is a set of traits/behaviors that are on a scale between "all
people some of the time" and "some people all of the time".

So if you skip the article's agenda, and explore the idea, it's kind of
interesting. Psycopathic traits are "persistent antisocial behavior, impaired
empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, egotistical traits." (thanks
wikipedia)

It isn't surprising at all that successful CEOs exhibit some of those traits
more than most people. I'm not sure you could fire people without "impaired
empathy and remorse", even if those feelings are temporary. Firing people is
terrible, and if _I_ felt the full weight of that horribleness while it was
happening I'd never be able to do it.

And yeah, "bold, disinhibited, egotistical" traits are almost required to run
a company at all.

What's more interesting than recognizing these, though, is the difference in
how they're applied. Execs who are decent people and execs who aren't apply
them differently (and decent people who aren't capable of being CEOs might not
apply them at all).

I've spent a lot of time worried about my own traits. Am I decent person if I
can fire people? Am I a decent person if I can't work for someone else? Am I a
decent person if I'm so worried about my own work-happiness that I risk my
family's well being by quitting objectively good jobs? Hopefully!

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drzaiusapelord
> I'm not sure you could fire people without "impaired empathy and remorse"

I have and I'm no sociopath. I think its easy to justify firings if you have a
mature and adult attitude towards work. People perform a fireable offense and
they're out the door. If you're experienced and honest with what it takes to
run a business, this stuff isn't that horrible to deal with. I make tough
decisions everyday. Heck, disciplining my kid is a lot tougher emotionally and
no one expects you to be some super tough person to do it, every parent has to
be able to pull it off.

>And yeah, "bold, disinhibited, egotistical" traits are almost required to run
a company at all.

Those are meaningless psych buzzwords. I want to run my own company and I'm
driven by certain ideas, goals, and ideals. I'm fairly low ego and not
horribly bold, like most introverted techies. The idea of holding up guys like
Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison as perfect CEOs because they act like sociopaths
is fairly ridiculous. You don't need to be a huge asshole to get ahead or to
be successful. I think the idea that we should praise sociopathy as leadership
skills is a fairly toxic attitude that reflects an internalized anti-worker
bias.

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mrkurt
> I have and I'm no sociopath. I think its easy to justify firings if you have
> a mature and adult attitude towards work. People perform a fireable offense
> and they're out the door. If you're experienced and honest with what it
> takes to run a business, this stuff isn't that horrible to deal with.

That's best case firing. Firing for performance is much harder, in my
experience. Justification for that is never 100% for me, because performance
failures are almost always my failure somewhere along the way (because I hired
badly, or set bad expectations, or didn't help someone enough).

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skewart
Think of it from the perspective of the other employees on your team. In most
cases the person being let go for performance reasons is a drag for them to
work with.

Plus, even for the employee being let go, it's usually better for that to
happen sooner rather than later so they can more quickly move on.

Not firing someone who isn't a good fit is just avoiding your own discomfort
(letting the person go) while forcing other people to suffer. It's actually
the less empathetic, more psychopathic thing to do.

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mrkurt
Oh I agree. I just don't think understanding that something is logically best
for a group of people is why I can do a hard thing. I'm fairly sure there's a
part of my brain that lets me act against my empathy for an individual at
times.

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psadauskas
You don't have to be a psychopath to be a CEO, but it does provide a
competitive advantage.

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ohitsdom
"Hancock has developed software to analyse the social media posts of public
figures to see how they rate on the psychopathy scale thanks to identifiers in
written language. 'There tends to be an emotion deficit, they tend to use few
words related to anxiety but a lot of hostile language,' he said, adding that
they write in a way that’s disfluent and difficult to understand."

I find it impossible to believe that this has any degree of accuracy.

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gmarx
Agreed but if they started posting results people would then believe in its
accuracy in proportion to the hatred they have of the public figures
identified.

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infodroid
I'm not sure why the story is picking on Silicon Valley in particular. Putting
aside the anecdotes from an SXSW discussion panel, the only study cited in the
article was more broadly covering "high-level executives in a corporate
environment". There was no explanation for why SV would have "weak HR
departments and investors" compared to other industries. Is this what passes
for journalism these days?

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brookside
This is what a pseudoscientist looks like (self-described forensic and
clinical psychologist quoted in article):
[http://www.kelownapsychologists.com/our-professionals/dr-
mic...](http://www.kelownapsychologists.com/our-professionals/dr-michael-
woodworth/)

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losteverything
This sounds like an "article" meant to shoe-horn into uber.

The ceos I knew were highly smart and extremely driven

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kyleblarson
I was returning videotapes.

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antidaily
Sure you were, Marcus.

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gremlinsinc
Read a theory or something once.. that Sociopath's are likely to do one of two
things -- go on a murdering spree, or become a CEO.

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wyldfire
Maybe becoming a CEO is the most productive/net positive role for someone with
such a disorder.

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JoeAltmaier
...or the place they can hide and do the most lifetime damage to society. E.g.
instead of going on a killing spree and being detected/arrested at a young
age, they can produce pollution for profit and injure millions over decades.

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amyjess
> ...or the place they can hide and do the most lifetime damage to society.

Most sociopaths aren't that calculating. They don't sit there and think "How
will I inflict structural damage to society tonight?". Sociopaths just want to
get their rocks off (not necessarily in a sexual way), and they don't care who
they have to hurt to do so. Your average sociopath is more impulsive than
anything else.

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JoeAltmaier
'Profit/bonus at any cost' is a reasonable sociopath goal. It can result in
decades of environmental trashing, coverups of carcinogenic product, abuse of
employees and customers for wholly profit-motivated reasons. We've seen all
this.

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9981298819
It is interesting that companies and their leaders are analyzed in this manner
while the government and civil servants aren't.

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TheOtherHobbes
I believe if you read the article again you'll see it mentions presidents as
well as CEOs.

As for civil servants - what evidence can offer to support the suggestion that
civil servants (and I presume you mean public employees of all kinds,
including those in agencies like NASA and NOAA) are more likely to be
sociopaths than ordinary people?

