思考与写作twitlonger.com
一个精神病患者的来信
Letter From A Psychopath
2011 — 2013，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
这是一封自称精神病态者（psychopath）的人写给外界的自述信，描述其内心世界、思维方式以及与常人交往的方式，试图打破“连环杀手”或“冷血 CEO”的刻板印象。帖子在 2011 和 2013 年两度登上 Hacker News 首页，引发大量关于精神病态本质的讨论。
为什么经久不衰：第一人称视角剖析精神病态者的内心极为罕见，它让读者直面“缺乏共情的人如何生活”这一永恒话题，至今仍是理解人性阴暗面的入门材料。
HN 评论精选
以亲身经历和职业背景指出精神病态者并无神秘之处，警告读者远离他们。
我认为精神病态者是极其无聊、单维度的人，他们无休止地玩弄心智游戏，因为内心毫无深度——只有算计，没有真正有情感的人所拥有的深度与细腻。我有精神病态的父母，作为法医犯罪心理学博士也接触过许多连环杀手和骗子。他们为什么这么做？其实并不神秘：他们享受摧毁他人，从支配和破坏中获得快感。他们是可悲、无聊的人，专挑比自己弱小的目标下手。一旦看透他们，就很容易对他们的操纵把戏保持超然，甚至觉得厌烦。我的建议是：绝不要让这样的人进入你的家门或你的床。不要对他们产生情感依恋，趁早摆脱——他们会摧毁你的心智、精神和人生。
Pompky查看英文原文
I think psychopaths are incredibly boring, unidemensional people who hopelessly, endlessly intellectualize and play mind games because there is no depth to them. It is only mind machinations without the depth and nuance of a fully feeling and emotionally alive human being. I had psychopathic parents and studied psychopathy as a PhD criminal forensic psycholovist encountering many serial killers, cons and the like. Why do they do what they do? It is no great mystery as I used to think. They dismember people psychologically and physically for the simple reason that they enjoy it. They derive pleasure from the destruction of victims to their power dominance orientation. They are boring stupid people who ate not the least bit interesting. They are pathetic. They choose people smaller and weaker than them that they can pick them off out of the herd of humanity. They are sad expressions of the human genome and dont deserve near the hype and fascination they get. Once you figure them out, it is very easy to remain quite detached from their mental gyrations to seduce and ensnare. It becomes annoying actually. I for one am over it. I do recommend that you not allow one at your hearth or into your bed. You will pay dearly. One cannot allow emotional involvement or any attachment to such people as a regular person is want to do with other humann beings. Get rid of them, they will destroy your mind, spirit and your life. Take it from one who knows from a very young age.
指出 HN 用户 losethos 的评论本身可能就是精神病态思维的鲜活例证。
建议大家在设置里打开 showdead，看看 losethos 在这里的评论。精神病态很有意思，精神分裂也一样。让我费解的是，一个人怎么能一边写出如此语无伦次的胡言乱语，一边又从零开始编写一个 64 位操作系统。
kristofferR查看英文原文
Everybody should turn on showdead in the settings and check out losethos' comments here. Psychopathy is really interesting and fascinating, but so is schizophrenia. It boggles my mind how anyone can write such nonsensical rambling comments while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch.
推荐相关书籍，并指出传统疗法对精神病态无效甚至有害，但新研究带来希望。
如果你对这类人的生活感兴趣（或者怀疑自己就是），可以看看 M. E. Thomas 的《一个反社会者的自白》。另外据《纽约客》的报道，精神病态曾被认为无法治愈——谈话疗法不仅无效，多项研究还表明它反而让病情恶化，因为它给了精神病态者练习操纵技巧的机会。不过 2006 年一项针对少年犯的专门谈话治疗研究显示，至少在减少犯罪行为方面出现了转机。
jseliger查看英文原文
If you're interested in what life for such a person is like (or if you might be one!), check out M. E. Thomas's Confessions of a Sociopath. I wrote about it here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/summary-judgment-confessions-of-a-sociopath-m-e-thomas/ and Tyler Cowen wrote about it here: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/confessions-of-a-sociopath.html and elsewhere. FWIW, from what I've read (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/10/081110fa_fact_seabrook?currentPage=all) there were (at least) no therapies or treatments that reproducibly help psychopaths: The psychiatric profession wanted little to do with psychopathy, for several reasons. For one thing, it was thought to be incurable. Not only did the talking cure fail with psychopaths but several studies suggested that talk therapy made the condition worse, by enabling psychopaths to practice the art of manipulation. There were no valid instruments to measure the personality traits that were commonly associated with the condition; researchers could study only the psychopaths’ behavior, in most cases through their criminal records. And now there are, at least in the sense of reducing criminal behavior: In a landmark 2006 study of a specialized talk-therapy treatment program, conducted at a juvenile detention center in Wisconsin, involving a hundred and forty-one young offenders who scored high on the youth version of the checklist, Michael Caldwell, a psychologist at the treatment center and a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, reported that the youths that were treated were much more likely to stay out of trouble, once they were paroled, than the ones in the control group. But note that the linked article is from 2008. Perhaps things have changed since.
结合亲身交友经历印证原文：多数精神病态者并非恶魔，而是笨拙地试图融入社会却屡屡失败的人。
“我们既不是漫画式的邪恶连环杀手，也不是‘你的老板’那种唯利是图的 CEO——虽然两者都沾边，但那只是悲哀的漫画化。”我有过几个有明显反社会倾向的朋友，这话完全属实。他们大多也被训练得渴望融入社会，只是做得很糟糕。缺乏共情在行骗时是优势，但在建立长期关系时是严重障碍。看着他们对聪明、有自知之明的人施展社交把戏实在可悲——对方一眼就能识破。恶意的会被迅速踢出局，无害的融入尝试则只会让他们显得笨拙地爱操纵人。而由于缺乏共情，他们往往不明白自己为何被排斥。
ahi查看英文原文
"We are neither the cartoon evil serial killers, nor the 'its your boss' CEO's always chasing profit at the expense of everyone else. While we are both of those things, it is a sad caricature of itself." I have been friends with a couple people with clear sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies, and this is absolutely true. Most have been trained to seek social inclusion like the rest of us. They just suck at it. The lack of empathy is a strength while running a con or worse, but a serious handicap when trying to build long-term social relationships. It's downright pathetic to watch them attempt their social cons on people who are intelligent and self-aware. If you know your own weaknesses you know when someone is trying to attack them. When it's malicious the psychopath gets the boot fast. When it's a harmless attempt to fit in, it just puts the psychopath in the awkwardly manipulative category. The lack of empathy means they often don't know why they've been ostracized. FWIW, I have the opposite problem; a little too much empathy and guilt, but it gives me the same talent of seeing the weakness in people. Which is why I'm friends with them. They use my empathy for friendship, and I let them because it's absolutely fascinating watching them work.
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