Sequences
Psychopathy
An introduction to why it's so opaque to talk about “psychopathy,” the different dimensions of the confusion, and my taxonomy in short.
Genetics and neuroscience – what we know about the biological foundations of psychopathy, and how to think about primary versus secondary presentations.
Environment and development – how different types of adversity lead to different outcomes, and why the same genetic loading can produce a functional person or a criminal depending on context.
Psychodynamic structures – the different ways the psychopathic self can be organized, including the autonomy dimension and the relationship between psychopathy and narcissism (what I’ve called sovereignism).
How empathy fails – a detailed breakdown of the different ways empathy can break down, from perceptual failures to simulation failures to affective inversion. (This connects to my earlier work on the sadism spectrum.)
Archetypal clusters – common profiles that tend to co-occur, with recognizable presentations that readers may identify with.
Recovery, if you want it – an honest assessment of what recovery means for different presentations and the trade-offs involved.
Pathological Narcissism
What are the factors that make the fortress of the false self stand strong or crumble to dust?
Pathological narcissism is a fortress built against unbearable pain. Some fortresses are sculpted from glass, some hewn from granite. My six-tier spectrum elucidates these architectures.
Are narcissism and echoism opposites? Where does sovereignism (“malignant narcissism lite”) come in? I argue they are kin, just as the primal terrors of being worthless, useless, and helpless are kin.
Welfare Biology and AI
Are you Quiverfull, pro-life, or pro-choice – but for nematodes? A quiz to find your place on the welfare ecology map.
There are 57 billion nematodes per human. Boreal forests pack 7× more per square meter than cropland. The numbers, the mechanisms, and why pesticides might make things worse.
From soil-welfare research to the New World Screwworm: a practical portfolio for wild-invertebrate welfare.
Pain without a sufferer: a speculative model of invertebrate experience, drawn from no-self psychopathy and Buddhist phenomenology, and what it predicts about welfare ranges.