Sheep Logic

The screenwriter for American Sniper injected portions of Dave Grossman’s On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs into the movie in an early scene where Chris Kyle’s father sits in judgement of Chris’s schoolyard brawl. Michael and Eric Cummings may have known about Grossman’s essay/speech before, but took its eruption into popular culture to cue them to fisk it on Slate, and then, ad nauseam, on their own site.

Some mutants are born and some are made. Grossman casts the transformation from sheep to sheepdog as an act of will. Sheepishness is transcended, in part, by awakening from a state of denial regarding the existence of evil. While he pays lip-service to the qualities of sheep, it is clear that he sees becoming a sheepdog as an evolutionary event. The sheepdog is not just different, it is better. The sheepdog isn’t properly appreciated by the sheep. To some degree it is feared. It will suffer with quiet nobility. Grossman may be suffering from Superior Mutant Disorder. Which doesn’t mean he’s wrong. He’s just an asshole.

Sheep don’t live in denial. As herd animals, they work off an actuarial logic. As the herd gets larger, the odds of predation go down for a given individual sheep. It becomes pragmatic to focus on the other challenges of life: grazing, rutting, and staying warm and healthy. Failing to do these things will doom the individual and the herd. Wolves have a finite appetite. Entropy does not. So the sheep doesn’t deny that wolves exist. If she’s at the edge of the herd, she’s alert for external threats. Deep in the herd, she’s concentrating on non-speculative challenges. Our urban and suburban middle classes enjoy the privileges of living in the middle of the herd. They recognize this and allocate their energies accordingly. Predation is a Black Swan Event for them. You can argue the benefits of fortifying against Black Swans. You can even make moral arguments for such preparation. Those efforts have opportunity costs associated with them. Time spent at the dojo is not spent in the dating scene. Practicing gun-fu at the range does little to improve cardiovascular health. The Cummings Brothers, and their sympathetic Slate audience, don’t see themselves deluded sheep. They see themselves as rational people, informed by statistics and microeconomics, pursuing sane utility functions.

What gets under their skin is that for Grossman, and those who share his warrior ethos, pursuing sane utility functions is subordinated to duty, honor, and heroism. Economic Man sees these values as atavistic and hopelessly entangled with bellicosity, racism, and all the rest of the toxic stew of our bloody past. He is haunted by a culture that still holds them in some esteem. A rebuke, implied or inferred, that a sheep is shirking duty, lacking honor, or unsuited for heroism, carries with it the scorn of legends.

Both sides here are talking past each other. Grossman is talking as a sheepdog to an audience of sheepdogs. He is constructing a reassuring metaphor for their place in the world. It’s a bonus if he recruits a few more sheepdogs. He doesn’t care what the Cummings or Slate’s readers think about On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs. The Cummings response is a shotgun blast or ad hominem, guilt by association, and various non sequiturs designed to give their readers something, anything, to rationalize absolution from the moral challenge formed by the intersection of On Sheep and historical culture.

Sitting here in my dinghy between them as they exchange broadsides, I feel vulnerable.

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Given the heavy investment Grossman makes in pastoral metaphor, it is interesting to note what he left out. His pastoral metaphor left out the pastor. Nowhere is the shepherd for whom the sheep are the product and the sheepdogs a means to that end.  Sheepdogs can be divided into two types: herding dogs and livestock guardian dogs. Grossman is referring to the latter in On Sheep. Many sheepdogs are herders. They are used by the shepherd to control the sheep population via modified predatory behavior. Small numbers of herders can control large numbers of sheep very effectively. If computer controlled drones can replace the sheepdogs in either or both roles, where will the “capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens” go?

The Mensch/Asshole Matrix

Most of our opinions are shoddy rubbish. We throw them together quickly from fragments of information selected via confirmation bias and glued together with logical fallacies. We throw them out into the world, untested, in cheap bids for reputation capital via virtue signaling. We feel obligated to have them because other people have them.

One of our favorite tools for slapping an opinion together is knee-jerk Manichaeism. The universe is a conflict between light and darkness, good and evil. You’re either for us or against us. We hastily identify one side of the conflict as virtuous or evil and it follows that the other side must be the opposite. We’ve shaved 50% off the production time of our opinion, which was little enough already. This is a great gain of efficiency and not to be dismissed lightly. But that’s just what I’m going to do.

We all like our good and evil narratives. Drama is conflict. Heroes and villains. Everybody’s a critic. I won’t ask you give up assigning roles in the stories and issues you pass judgement on. What I’m suggesting here is that your opinions will be incrementally better if you don’t assume that the adversary of your favorite is a villain. Alternately, sure, that one guy is an asshole. That doesn’t mean the other guy is a mensch. Even if, for the sake of simplicity, we divide the world between mensches and assholes, we should acknowledge that there are fights among good people and that sometimes none of the combatants are worth rooting for.

Towards that end, I offer the Mensch/Asshole Matrix. Evaluate each party in the conflict independently. Is he a Mensch or an Asshole. You can then quickly form an opinion on the outcome of a conflict by cross referencing the victor and the vanquished.

Tragedy – Circumstances or miscommunication pits mensch against mensch. This is sad.

Justice – Good prevails over evil. This is good.

Atrocity – Evil prevails over good. This is bad.

Karma – Evil fights evil and the hidden variables of karma decide the outcome. This is acceptable.

In the super-efficient Manichaean opinion-building system described above, all conflicts are good vs. evil, so all outcomes are either Justice or Atrocity. If we take the time to evaluate both combatants, then we allow for mensch vs. mensch and asshole vs. asshole outcomes. Our process is still based on a gross oversimplification, but, hey, at least we aren’t making up half the inputs.

Case Study: Michael Brown and Darren Wilson

Don’t pretend you didn’t rush to judgement on this one. Yes, yes you did. You identified with one side or the other, if not in the actual lethal encounter, then in the rapidly-ensuing political conflict, and dumped the other side in the evil bucket. You didn’t want to be the last one to weigh in on black vs. blue lives mattering. Facebook doesn’t lie.

The political narratives were Atrocity or Justice. No one advances or defends their cause with Tragedy or Karma.

In theory, mensch-ness and assholery are not visible through Justice’s blindfold. Just because you’re an asshole doesn’t mean you’re guilty. Being a mensch doesn’t absolve you from breaking the law. The Grand Jury was asked if the shooting of Michael Brown was evidently an Atrocity or Karma (murder) or a Tragedy (manslaughter). The testimony ranged from Wilson describing Justice to Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson account of an Atrocity. Other evidence and testimony splattered the M/A Matrix in various ways. In the end, a jury of 12 arbitrary mensches and assholes couldn’t say with confidence that it was Tragedy, Atrocity, or Karma. Similarly, the Justice Department investigation did not conclude that Darren Wilson was enough of an asshole to indict on civil rights charges. What it did conclude was that there was a high level of institutional assholery. It remains to be determined if this is karma for a population that skews towards assholes.

Your opinion, which felt so righteous and got you all those Likes, was probably wrong.

Cult of Rork

For most of my adult life, I have wanted my own cult. A community dedicated to a Rork-centric view of the universe. An army of zealots who will kill and die at my command. Vast numbers of concubines eager to satisfy my desires and bear my demigod offspring. All would rise in the morning and ask themselves, “What can I do today to please Rork? How can I make him wealthier?”

In Freudian terms, this monstrous id-eation is held in check by the recognition that life surrounded by people crazy enough to be in the Cult of Rork would be a nightmare. And wrong, oh so wrong on more levels than I want to count.  A little bit of superego goes a long way towards stopping you from going full L. Ron Hubbard. Never go full L. Ron Hubbard.

But there are opportunities to be seized while stopping short of that. Northern California in the 1970s and 1980s had numerous examples of cultishness being packaged and sold to the Long Tail for a tidy profit. If you moderate the tone and expectations, it doesn’t have to devolve into drug abuse and murder. It might, but there’s a chance you can just retire and collect royalty checks.

Towards that end, and in that era, my friend K and I sketched out the Multiple Lives theory and how we could turn it into a self-help cash cow.

Multiple Lives builds on the Jungian collective unconscious and adds intermediate levels of commonality between the primordial undermind and the individual. Arising from the core collective unconscious are limbs of unconscious awareness. These limbs branch and branch again until we reach the individuals, where it meets conscious awareness.

Connectedness of these branches transcends barriers of nationality, culture, and age. Your other selves (or branchmates) could be anywhere in the world, living any life, and share it with you at an unconscious level. Your dreams combine archetypes inherited from the trunk with memories, emotions and experiences of your branchmates. Your inexplicable mood swings are emotions from one or more of your other selves. You experience déjà vu because someone in your branch did already have that experience. Clairvoyance and telepathy are the conscious mind reaching through to another self. Psychosis is real trauma from a brachmate surfacing in your life.

Once you accept Multiple Lives as a model, you’re free to rationalize all manner of things. Your moods aren’t entirely your own, so you don’t have to own them. You’re self-medicating to help one or more of your other selves. You’re navel-gazing for the benefit of many, not just yourself. Your dark passions are those of another self. Come to our seminar and we’ll teach you how to control the flow of energy within your branch. You’ll be able to protect yourself from negative energies from your other selves. You’ll learn how to project healing energies into your branch. Help yourself by helping your other selves. Kick back and enjoy your complimentary plate of shrimp.

Some combination of superego and laziness prevented K and I from putting this mad scheme into operation. This is likely for the best.

Let’s say that you’re a greedier and more vigorous individual. You pick up the ball K and I dropped and run with it. If you look at it from a game theoretical perspective, the likelihood of a good outcome isn’t great.

Note: The links in this table may contain spoilers.

Outcome	Implications
It fails to catch on.	You wasted your time on your own bullshit.
It succeeds in the way that you intended.	Your cynical worldview is validated.
It succeeds in a way other than what you intended.	You are trapped in a world of crazy and you might not escape.
People actually benefit from it.	The moral ambiguity of your life becomes hard to endure. Do you carry on or come clean?
People are hurt by it.	Your moral turpitude is confirmed. You are a certifiably bad person.

So in the end, conscience, inertia, and rational apprehension have kept me from pursuing my dreams of godhood. Your mileage may vary.

Big Daddy, Big Mommy, and Leviathan

Our political culture, as embodied by the Democratic and Republican parties, have serious mommy and daddy issues, respectively. Each claims to support limits on government and offer nods to the Lockean separation of powers in the Constitution, but the interference pattern of their differing priorities gives rise to a bureaucratic sovereign as absolute and self-justifying as Hobbes’s Leviathan.

Big Daddy

Big Daddy is proud of what he has made. He demands the respect that he’s certain he has earned. He favors children who embrace and extend his legacy. He has little use for those who fail or who reject his values. The kids can pursue new interests, but only if they reflect well on him. Don’t do anything that will embarrass him in front of his business partners or members of his club. He expects the house to be clean and orderly when he’s home, but doesn’t really understand or respect the work that mom puts into making that happen.

Big Mommy

Big Mommy will never be finished protecting or nurturing her children. She expects the love she’s certain she has earned.  She will make a child-safe planet. She hates it when the kids fight. The right solution is to redistribute contested toys or remove them from play. She’ll excuse almost anything if doing so will keep you living at home. She has very strong ideas what you should be eating, but she’ll keep fixing your favorites if it will keep you at her table. She won’t let you fly, but she might let you sing. She expects the fruits of work outside the house, but doesn’t really understand or respect the work that dad puts into making that happen.

Under One Roof

It would be bad enough to have one or the other running our lives, but we’re under one roof with both. At their worst, the Republicans are reactionary Big Daddies and the Democrats are smothering Big Mommies. Their worst is what we tend to get because both parties ingest talent from their long tails of ideological commitment. The volunteers on the ground and lofty donor class are the ones most likely to embrace the parental styles of government.

Pendulum

If you see yourself as independent adult, you may be tempted to console yourself that it’s like a pendulum. Power swings back and forth between these excesses, but the net result is a stable, balanced system.

If you embrace one parental style of government over the other, you experience these swings with alternating terror and exhilaration. You hope that the system is imbalanced in your favor and that the whole thing will lurch in your favored direction. You may even work to nudge it. There’s even that fantasy where the pendulum is a playground swing. At your favorite end of the arc, your beloved parent plucks you off. The cycle is over. Big Daddy puts you on his shoulders and takes you with him to work. Big Mommy hugs you to her breast and carries you home.

For a better picture, imagine Big Daddy and Big Mommy contesting for ownership of a two-man cross-cut saw. In rare moments of equipoise, the saw doesn’t move. The rest of the time it’s ripping through the Tree of Liberty in one direction or the other. It gets worse if you decide they’re working as a team.

Childhood’s End

If we see ourselves as an independent adults, then our liberty depends on us rejecting Big Daddy and Big Mommy’s sovereignty. In doing so, we must also let go of our sense of entitlement to Big Daddy’s legacy and to Big Mommy’s succor. What may be even harder is that the Golden Rule must be in play. We must credit everyone else with adulthood even as we demand they respect ours. We must channel our benign paternal and maternal impulses into social works of our own rather than ceding them to Big Daddy, Big Mommy, and Leviathan.

404.0 Superior Mutant Disorder

Diagnostic Features

The essential feature of Superior Mutant Disorder is an ongoing confusion of the concepts of different and better. The individual identifies traits that differentiate and alienate them from the broader society and concludes that these traits are signifiers of superior intellect or enlightenment. Conversely, the individual associates common behaviors and interests with inferior intelligence and benightedness. The individual may tend towards pedantry. They may disparage parenthood, ignoring the implications of their childlessness in the context of the Darwinian worldview they hold in high esteem.

Associated Features and Disorders

In some instances, Superior Mutant Disorder may appear as the premorbid antecedent of Otaku Disorder or Hipsterism. In extreme cases, Superior Mutant Disorder may be accompanied by Delusional Disorder of the Grandiose or Persecutory Type.

Specific Culture, Age, and Gender Features

Superior Mutant Disorder occurs more frequently in the sociocultural context of technologically advanced societies.

Superior Mutant Disorder may be first apparent in adolescence, with formation of insular peer groups, indifference to standards of grooming and dress, making hobbies out of idiosyncratic fantasies, and not bothering to go to the school dance. In anecdotal samples, this disorder appears to be more commonly diagnosed in males.

Prevalence

The prevalence of Superior Mutant Disorder Syndrome has been reported to be 3%-5% of the general population, 15%-20% of my peer group, and 100% of myself.

Course

Superior Mutant Disorder has a chronic course but may become less evident or remit as the individual grows older. Remission may be accompanied by acknowledging that intelligence manifests itself in a variety of ways. The individual may admit that their life on the long tail is a luxury that the dog of normalcy indulges. They may even understand that different is not better, it is just different.

Differential Diagnosis

Superior Mutant Syndrome is differentiated from common Elitism by its use of esoteric signifiers for superiority. Elitists use conventional social signifiers such as wealth, accreditation, and fame as the basis for their elevated self-image. Superior Mutants rely on self-identified signifiers and typically denigrate popular metrics of success.

Diagnostic criteria for 404.0 Superior Mutant Disorder

A. Non-ironic use of one or more of the following terms

1. Muggles
2. Sheeple
3. Mundanes
4. Vanilla People
5. Normals
6. Eloi
7. Breeders

B. Participation in one or more of the following subcultures

1. Science Fiction Fandom
2. Fantasy Fandom
3. Steampunk
4. Creative Anachronism
5. Computer-related online communities
6. Conservative politics
7. Progressive politics
8. Libertarian politics

C. Does not occur exclusively during the course of Schizophrenia, a Mood Disorder With Psychotic Features, or another Psychotic Disorder and is not due to the direct physiological effects of a general medical condition.

Necessary Beauty

On a recent Alaska Airlines flight I found myself near the rear of a Boeing 737-900 with three seats to myself. My assigned seat was on the aisle, which is my preference, but on this flight I was free to shuffle around, so at sunset I moved to the window. The sunset colors were nice, as was the broad, smooth deck of clouds below. What really caught my eye was the wing, specifically the winglets at its end. The smooth transition from the wing. The way both winglets drew to sharp, trailing points. And all the subtle, supple curves in between. They would be at home among the lines of an exotic sports car, crafted to create an exhilarating sense of motion, even when still.

The thing is, they were not made to be beautiful. These are the Split Scimitar winglets. As pretty as they are, they are have this shape because the harsh gods of airline economics demanded more fuel efficiency of the 737 and the gods of aerodynamics allowed this shape to improve that efficiency by 5.5% over an unadorned wing. The grace of the Split Scimitar arises from science and engineering, not art. The artist came later and followed-up with the paint scheme. It’s not beautiful because someone wanted it to be that way. It’s beautiful and it needs to be that way. Its beauty is more akin to that of an arctic tern than a Pininfarina Ferrari.

I felt lucky to be in a world, and with a brain, that can pull beauty out of necessity.

 

Vector Intelligence

We have a rather narrow definition of intelligence in our culture. It focuses on academic achievement, which in turn emphasizes written and mathematical performance and values successful accumulation of related knowledge. If someone has a great deal of knowledge at their fingertips, we tend to think of them as smart.

Let’s deal with that latter point first. Knowing lots of relevant facts is a useful resource for an intelligent person, but it is not a measure intelligence. Knowledge is acquired through intelligence, intelligence is not a result of knowledge. The availability of knowledge depends on circumstances. Stephen Hawking is not smarter than Isaac Newton because he knows about the experimental verifications of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. If accumulated data was the hallmark of intelligence, Google’s search engine would be a godlike artificial intelligence. It’s not that. It’s a cleverly organized index of the results of multitudes actual intelligent beings adding facts and fantasies to the Internet.

It’s important to remember that the SAT, and all the various grades, exams, and degrees are not really intended to measure intelligence. (Not that some people won’t try.) They are designed measure progress and predict potential in an academic setting. Similarly, the ASVAB attempts to measure preparation and potential for success in the various military occupations. Both results are used within their institutions as a proxy for IQ. And to the extent a person’s intellect and preparation overlap with the needs of the institution, they’re useful proxies. But holding the SAT or a related degree as the gold standard of intellect does a disservice to your worldview.

People who studied intelligence in the 20th Century came up with some elaborate theories to deconstruct smartness and quantify it. To their credit, they have tried to reach an understanding that is broader than what an admissions board needs to select freshman students.  IQ, the intelligence quotient, dates back 1912 and has been reworked  in various forms until the present day. Its kindred general factor (g) also dates back to the early 1900s. If you click the links, you can see that even the abridged Wikipedia versions of the underlying models are rather complex, so it’s not surprising that there are many different approaches to testing and applying these theories. By the time you get to the Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory, things get rather baroque, and you have to be pretty deep into psychometrics to have any hope of applying the concepts.

So the SAT is too narrow and CHC, at the very least, is too technical, to be useful daily-drivers when it comes to thinking about intelligence. Let’s look for something that acknowledges a greater range of human brilliance than the SAT and can be expressed in more familiar terms than CHC’s multitude of broad and narrow abilities.

When we’re talking about measured intelligence by way of total SAT, IQ, or g factor, we are talking about the magnitude of a vector. (Go ahead and click that link if you’re rusty on that concept. Everyone should strive for at least basic numeracy. Euclidean vectors are part of the numeracy you should have before you leave high school.) The basis vectors for the SAT are academic literacy and numeracy. IQ and g factor have enough independent and entangled components to make a string theorist’s head spin. These intelligence metrics don’t use Pythagorean Theorem to compute their intelligence value from its component parts. The SAT justs adds the scores together. The rules for combining the various components of IQ into the final number are not something Pythagoras would recognize. Then the numbers get stuffed under Bell curve and Bob’s your uncle. Once again, this is all rather much to be useful for most of us.

My purpose here isn’t to propose new way to quantify intelligence. What I hope you come away from this with is a greater willingness to credit people with different forms of intelligence. I didn’t even try to do this when I was younger. It took stepping out of my tech nerd academic comfort zone to recognize that there were dimensions to intelligence in which I was really weak. It wasn’t just lack of trying that limited my abilities in certain fields, it was that I wasn’t as smart in those ways. I was compelled to accept that my  total intelligence wasn’t so much greater than others, rather its vector was aligned with the interests of the institutions that have the biggest public claim on measuring it.

Because I’ve found vectors useful elsewhere, I like the concept of an intelligence vector. After realizing that I was using too few reference axes for intelligence, I tried to identify flavors of intelligence that could do a better (not complete, not perfect) job of reflecting the space of human brilliance. What I came up with on my own is similar to Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, a variation of which looks something like this:

Embarrassingly similar to something you’d see in a corporate training PowerPoint

I make some substitutions and don’t pretend what I’m working with is any sort of science. It’s a heuristic that allows me to better appreciate and respect my fellow human beings. My own intelligence lies mostly in the lower right quadrant. Most fair and considerate people will credit others with strengths in the other quadrants. But we’re still prone to thinking that music critic who applied their verbal-linguistic intelligence to writing a harsh review in Rolling Stone is smarter than the artist who applied her musical and kinesthetic intelligence to creating a song enjoyed by millions.

My friend M’s education stopped with high school. His speech is vernacular. He makes his living driving  a delivery truck. He teaches himself skills the he finds necessary or interesting faster, better, and more frequently than I, with my lower-right-quadrant bachelor’s degree can possibly manage. He grew up landlocked and now takes his own boat fishing on the Pacific. He taught himself to pay the guitar. He decided to remodel his house and learned the skills he was missing by watching YouTube videos. The results are beautiful. The list goes on and on. It’s not that he just downloads these abilities like a character in The Matrix, he works at it. His brainpower rocks in these domains. I can’t think of myself as more intelligent when I struggle in his domains like he struggles in mine.

 

If you must judge someone’s intelligence, take the time to consider how they perform in ways that that aren’t rewarded with academic or financial success. You may find that people are smarter than you had thought.

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I wrote the following early in the post. It kept getting pushed down and I eventually cut it for length considerations. I was also concerned that I had watched Rivers and Tides so long ago, that I might not be remembering how well Goldsworthy could talk about his work. As I reviewed the film, his struggles didn’t seem as severe as I remembered them. At the end he does comment on the difficulty he has talking about his work, so I think the point is still valid.

In the documentary Rivers and Tides, Andy Goldsworthy struggles to explain his work. He can articulate the principles and interests that inform it, but if he could just say what he means, he wouldn’t need to crouch on frigid beach connecting those fragments of icicle just so.  I don’t know Goldsworthy, it’s possible that he could expound at length on each piece. He could be choosing to hold back his thoughts, allowing us freedom to experience the art without his input. Or, he could have extraordinary nonverbal intelligence that allows him to visualize and execute artworks that are far beyond his abilities to rationalize.

There’s a point in the story where he’s working with a crew of dry-stone wallers at the Storm King Art Center. He talks about their respective roles in a way that supports the theme of this post.

Mad Scientists in the Big Numbers World

The Mad Scientist is a trope that goes back at least as far as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The Mad Scientist pushes beyond the bounds of morality and wisdom in a quest of knowledge and power. The feelings and safety of others are, at best, irrelevant to his pursuit. If he’s out for revenge, then the destruction of human life may even be the goal of his work. He is amoral, if not evil.

We see this character again and again. He’s clichéd and frequently comic. We accept the trope as part of our willing suspension of disbelief. We don’t really think such characters are loose in the real world. But should we?

The narcissism, grandiosity, and cruel indifference of the Mad Scientist are all indicators that he’s a psychopath. Psychopaths are real people, accounting for an estimated 1.2% of the population. Scientists are real people, accounting for about 1,300,000 people, or 1% of the American workforce. And we know of at least one scientist, James Fallon, who self-identifies as a (non-violent) psychopath. So the intersection of the scientists and psychopaths is not an empty set. But how big is it?

Let’s play with math to come up with an estimate.

For starters, let’s combine the numbers we have on hand:

1,300,000 scientists * 1.2% psychopaths = 15,600 psychopathic scientists

That’s a lot of Mad Scientists in the USA. To be fair, psychopathy probably finds better expression via careers in violent crime and corporate leadership than in research and development. Let’s say scientists are much less likely to be psychopaths than the general population. By a factor of 10. So instead of 1.2%, we are only talking about 0.12%. That’s still 1,560 Mad Scientists. But that’s only in the United States.

Assuming a similar fraction of the population are Mad Scientists in other developed countries, how many are we talking about? Let’s add in Europe (including Russia) and Japan to see what we get.

Per capita Mad Scientists in the USA = 1,560 / 322,000,000 = 4.84e-6

Which seems like a very small number. And it is. The trouble comes when you combine it with a big numbers, like the populations of Europe and Japan.

742,000,000 (Europe) + 126,000,000 (Japan) = 868,000,000

868,000,000 people * 4.84e-6 Mad Scientists per capita = 4201 Mad Scientists

So we left out some countries in the “Developed World” and we still have 5,761 Mad Scientists on the loose. Even if the rest of the world, including heavyweights like China, India, and the Arabic-speaking nations, can only match that number, we have a global Mad Scientist population of over 10,000. Yikes! Why aren’t we overrun by armies of killer robots, seeking shelter from death rays, running from artificial tsunamis, or succumbing to zombie viruses on a daily basis?

We aren’t. Yet. Maybe.

Science is a social endeavor. It’s rare that technologies are created by a person working in isolation. Many of our Mad Scientists are embedded in non-psychopathic institutions. Their peers won’t help them spawn an army of giant, walking Venus flytraps that feast on human flesh. Their corporate masters are more interested in extracting natural gas than actually shattering tectonic plates. There just isn’t anything in the budget to support building a geoharmonic oscillator big enough to rule the world. The bulk of the Mad Scientists are hopelessly trapped among fools who lack the Vision required for Greatness. These Mad Scientists must content themselves with whatever psychopathic pleasures they can slip through the System and the mundane misbehaviors that amuse office psychopaths.

Even in cases where the System is amenable to psychopaths, the goals of the component psychopaths must align for Mad Science to wreak havoc. The Crazed Dictator’s idea of a doomsday weapon has to match the mad passion and abilities of the available Mad Scientists. Or the Mad Scientist must successful deploy is skills of manipulation to bring his evil plan to the Crazed Dictator’s attention. This will likely require navigating multiple levels of (psychopathic) hierarchy.

Some mad scientists may be pursuing what turn out to be impossible goals. Super-viruses that can wipe out humanity may be beyond our ability to engineer. You have to defeat billions of years of evolution and the cleverness of all the sane scientists. Given that we don’t understand natural intelligence, we’re a long ways from creating a superhuman artificial intelligence, let alone a malevolent one. It’s possible that conquering or destroying the world just isn’t feasible.

So we have reasons to feel safe from the threat of Mad Scientists. Don’t celebrate yet. There are scenarios where they can work their Mad Schemes. Consider: Early in the Psychopathy Checklist, you get points for being cunning/manipulative. Using his high intelligence, cunning, and skills at manipulation, a Mad Scientist could twist an otherwise sane organization into supporting what is actually a Mad Scheme. The Scheme could appear beneficial, or desperately necessary, to the sane people, only to have consequences that were unintended by them but which were the Mad Scientist’s ultimate evil goal.

You can probably think of technologies that raise questions regarding their maker’s sanity and morals. Maybe some of those aren’t just a perfect storm of bad decisions by good people. Maybe they are the work of a Mad Scientist, who is now one step closer to ruling the world!