textor

You're going too far generalizing from your experience. They can imagine just fine, as their cognition is unimpaired. But humans are learning and planning largely on emotional basis. Their amygdala is less functional, so their imagination is decoupled from negative emotion: when they imagine some bad outcome, they process it in the detached way most people process heat death of the Universe or hunger in Africa, i.e. something that is maybe significant but has little bearing on actual choices. It doesn't generate aversion. What does generate it, though, is deprivation of positive stimulus, so when "bad outcome" means "being put in a small concrete cage with no entertainment and bland food", they'll strategize rationally and do their best to avoid being caught. When it means merely being shunned, reviled, disowned, demoted, physically hurt, it doesn't affect the strategy very much. They don't want being hurt in the present moment, theoretically, but they can't feel enough to factor this into their planning.

It's kind of like how overeating people struggle to curb their craving now with thoughts of seeing their weight increase later. Some succeed, and some can't do it at all. They'll feel negative emotions when they look at the scales, not when they get the ice cream and imagine the numbers. Except psychopaths don't even want to fight this tendency of theirs.

To be fair, positive reinforcement works for them about as well as for others.

The hell do you even know about typical psychopaths?

I have a similar hypothesis (which I don't believe, but still). Suppose there are no psychopaths. As is well known, people's choices of leaders are heavily influenced by biological biases such as height, social dominance and other "alpha male" traits. If there is no need to suspect malice, communities could suffer a runaway effect of increasingly biological selection of leadership, the same way it seems to happen in most herd/pack animals (where a smaller male basically can never become a leader, even though the correlation of size and intelligence is less than 1). But psychopaths can "supersignal" beyond even the most impressive neurotypicals. With some bad apples, we feel the need to check if signals correspond at all to the substance, and correct for personal behavior and long-term ability to deliver on promises.

This is of course only my conjecture, seeing as they are undetected unless caught red-handed on some officially recognized crime. However, consider this: violent psychopaths don't differ from this gal in lack of empathy, fearlessness or in deceitfulness. They only have poor impulse control, so they fail at maintaining long-term "masks". You can read basically as much right in the article. Would you like a proverbial serial killer to be your boss? Now, do you really believe that impulsive violence can deal more damage than cool-headed, planned immorality? And there's something like 1% of them in the general population, and they are over-represented in positions of influence that allow to harm people (not because they're exactly good at anything aside from manipulation). It'd be awfully convenient if the invisible hand of the market took care of it all and their natural tendencies became an innocuous tool for generating profit.

How often do we rely on other people just not being terrible for petty reasons? Not grossly abusing their position whenever they can get away with it? Surprisingly a lot of our society runs on trust. And wherever it doesn't, expenses and efforts are necessary to disincentivize transgressors. So even 1% is enough to drive up the costs. People in small, homogenous villages can leave the keys outside their homes, because it's harder to get away with burglary there and they trust neighbors. In cities people need better doors and better locks and security cameras and strong police and a fair bit of paranoia to keep up with rural areas. It's because it's easier to stay anonymous in the community of millions. But even under perfect guarantee of anonymity, I wouldn't break into people's homes and rob them. Most other people of regular upbringing wouldn't as well. A psychopath, by definition, would, irrespective of upbringing. Same goes for black hat activities. How much does IT security cost?

Also, there's a lot of articles dedicated to psychopaths like this one. I don't remember people like her "significant other", or her oblivious parents, or her colleagues ever being given voice. Somehow we are to take them on their word, even though they say (because there's no point denying already) that they see no utility in being honest or reciprocal.

People with other non-standard neurotypes tend to be quite open about their condition, as they prefer to get more understanding and have a better rapport. They are not as glorified by the media, they are not thought of as sexy and enigmatic, yet they come open. But this anonymous interviewee, as I already pointed out, "doesn't think people need to know" what she is to know what to expect from her. But this is obviously nonsensical, given that people (except maybe bankers) operate with some basic trust and information about her psychopathy would change a lot in possible relationships (even assuming that there's some use for their kind). Likewise, no surgeon or CEO has come out with "I'm a heartless bastard with no empathy or code or morals, see, I may be different but that makes me better in my field". Such inconsistencies illustrate that they don't really have any sort of ethical framework, it's all just vague noise to lull a pitiful myopic herbivore into sleep. That's really how they think of people.

All of this is unconvincing, I know. It's probably impossible for a neurotypical, well-meaning person to realize the magnitude of difference without being subjected to psychopathic treatment. Without seeing how the mask you've known for years crumbles in front of evidence and there's no distress behind, since it's cheaper to discard you along with the shards.

You could combine these ideas, though, and have only a few cars that pull weights up/down the hill, with a crane to load it off. I'm not sure but it could probably allow for a far greater total storage and kWh/$.

Another factor is initial variance. Russian foxes experiment uses some hundreds of animals, perhaps. Suppose we operate on the scale of millions of specimens, a significant portion of the entire species. There could be a many-sigma difference between the average and the smartest living crow in the world (not sure how to estimate this), but the former one would probably struggle to survive in the city while the latter would thrive. Urbanization, then, can be thought of as a bottleneck that promptly eradicates the left part of the extant distribution, changing the population average even in a single generation.

> Presumably illegal substances are illegal in part based on risk

The key word here is "presumably".