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by gnode 2580 days ago
I don't doubt that there may be a trend, but to me it sounds very unfair to allow people's immutable biological characteristics to enter into an adversarial debate about how they might act.

Also, the mechanics of how macro-scale neurology affects a person's psychology and sociology is still poorly understood, which makes the data especially easy to abuse. More than anything, I think the researcher's findings highlight this point; he was a counterexample to the theory that a diminished prefrontal cortex implies anti-social behaviour, showing the phenomenon to be more nuanced.

1 comments

How is that unfair?
Because it is prejudicial, which is unfair because it fails to take into account the person's individuality. Such traits do not simply equate to behaviour, the relationship is complex, incomplete and the mechanics not understood. A person's membership of a class which they neither chose to be in, nor can choose to remove themselves from (in this case a genetic brain anomaly), can not infer a fact about their mind or behaviour.
I don't doubt that while some "psychopaths" will be detectable ahead of time, and maybe mitigated (whether or not that's ethical), there may be many with "correct" views read as possibly psychopathic that will get strawmanned into oblivion due to their diagnosis.