I got 8, ... The old lady, was 50-50? How could one know if she was one of the spaceship programmers but at old age? But now I realize, the photo looked old too, so then logically she couldn't have been one of them after all :-)
I like this because I like to flatter myself that I have a good intuition about people after seeing them, and this shows that I’m completely wrong about that—barely better than random.
It turns out with the trappings of how serial killers are presented in media (bad black and white photos from odd angles), everyone looks like a serial killer.
There's a security camera monitor displayed prominently in one store near where I live that makes everyone look dodgy — something about the frame rate and fuzzy image just looks like shoplifting footage you'd see on the news.
I see myself on the screen as I enter and think "yeah, that guy's going to hold up the shop or something".
surely in this case the very fact that it looks like a security camera feed is why? wouldn't most security cameras do that right? :) its an interesting thought, that the only place most people see stuff like that is recordings of incidents
I think it's because it looks like an _ancient_ security camera feed, which reminds me of watching security footage on television news as a child. Most modern systems I see don't have that kind of noisy distorted "bad analogue" look so I think they just don't trigger the same reaction in me.
Probably you are still right. Seeing a photograph is different from seeing a person in real animated life. I guess there are micro expressions, the way people laugh, and the exact point at which people laugh and such that some people are really good at reading, but it is hard to articulate what exactly the process of interpretation is.
Well, I think so, too. But only after seeing them in real and not just on some blurry, distorted picture.
But I also think, most people have the potential to become serial killers. Hunting and killing is deep in our genes after all and society can mess up people pretty bad, so some turn their animal instinct against society, while maintaining the facade on the outside.
In psychiatry, you reach the coveted status of Antisocial Personality Disorder (the remorseless manipulative sociopath with a charming personality, but no compassion) by starting out with Conduct Disorder (the kids that hurt animals, lie, cheat, and steal) and not snapping out of it by adulthood
Humans are social animals. If your animal instinct is hunting and killing, and you feel like you're just maintaining a facade... good! You don't choose the instincts you're born with, but please keep maintening the facade thank you! :)
Modern civilized society tries hard to negate and channel all violent impulses from early on and only unleash it in ritualistic scenarios like sports.
(Or after a 180 degree turn - for real in the military.)
And this is mostly successful, but push someone hard enough and violence will be the result. Otherwise there would not be so many murders and violent crimes.
Most people will just explode violently (and then regret) and the path of the silent serial killer is (luckily) rare.
But if you look at other (savage) societys where violence is still baked in, there simply are no pacifists there, so pacifism is not something we were born with, but a learned trait. And one that makes sense, to keep society stable, but I don't think it makes sense to fool ourself about what humans are capable of. Just look at Ukraine to see what ordinary civilized people are capable of, if put in a different environment.
That's fair, but I think there's a huge gap between that and being a serial killer.
We can point to war or to the Stanford prison experiment. People in unusual stressful situations have the potential to be abusive, or to follow abusive orders.
But there's a large gap between that and the kind of trouble that results in serial killers. Soldiers in a war are under terrible living conditions, and commit atrocities in the name of taking it out on the enemy.
But even the soldier does not stoop as low as torturing animals. The enemy, maybe, but not the innocent. Serial killers are completely indifferent to the pain of the innocent. Soldiers only hurt the outgroup, the enemy.
And I think you're being unfair to people living in more primitive societies. There's crime in every society, but you will not make friends anywhere by being antisocial. A small village doesn't survive by people turning against each other. It would simply cease to exist.
My claim is that most people do not have the violent impulses, and don't need to channel them. Some people do. And they benefit from channeling them, because bad outcomes happen much more often to those who don't.
Nature will beat the violence out of people, over generations. You simply survive less in aggregate with a harmful set of instincts. Most people have no need for hard to control violent impulses, and indeed tend to be born without them.
"That's fair, but I think there's a huge gap between that and being a serial killer."
Oh for sure. Otherwise we all would live in fortresses surrounded by minefields.
"My claim is that most people do not have the violent impulses, and don't need to channel them. "
My claim is most people do not have them anymore (or buried deep inside). But most if not all kids do - they just (hopefully) learned at some point it is not beneficial to use violence to get what you want. Humans are very adoptable.
My main point actually is to prevent new serial killers from emerging by not treating them as a different species(where you cannot really do anything), but as ordinary humans where many things have gone horrible wrong in their upbringing.
I know back in my school were quite some canditates, but there was 0 official reaction towards doing something about it. As far as I know, none of them turned actually into a serial killer (yet), but I am quite sure with some it would not take much perceived injustice or merely boredom to take a dark path. But I actually have been through the limits of the legal system to get something to be done about someone who makes open violent threats. Largely unsuccesful.
Ah, I see what you mean. Trauma definitely doesn't help.
I think this might come down to a question about nature vs nurture if we keep digging too far, but I fear I'm not qualified to argue much further than this :)
I just chose "serial killer" for everyone. In my experience, when programming language inventors encounter all the comments and requests and criticisms from the users of their languages, there is a very thin line separating them from becoming serial killers...
I know it's a silly game, but I'm slightly uneasy with it.
If you remember a time when programming computers was considered nerdy, in a socially discouraged and mocked kind of way (until it became big money)... a game of guessing whether a photo is of a serial killer or a computer programming nerd... might seem a little abusive.
Another interpretation is that the portraits communicate essentially zero information about the subject. No information means no way to differentiate beyond the absolute basic facts: male, age such and such, seems to be wearing western clothes, things like that. No information means no way to shade probabilities. You might as well flip a coin.
Or this way: Serial killers look like random people, just as programming language inventors look like random people.
Facial asymmetry, testosterone (thick eyebrows, baldness), weight, piercings, tattoos, unnatural hair colors etc. surely have some correlation with being a serial killer?
> Shortly after, the court learned of a complication in the trial regarding a former friend of Hans Reiser named Sean Sturgeon. Sturgeon, who had previously dated Nina Reiser, was claiming to be responsible for eight murders and possibly a ninth.
The company you keep...
I haven't read up on Reiser since it went down-- it was the 2000s and I #believedallwomen so I wrote him off as a piece of shit. He absolutely did it, but in retrospect his late wife was a real piece of work herself:
> Nina was a Russian-born and -trained obstetrician and gynecologist[16] who was studying to become an American licensed OB/GYN.
> Hans' father, Ramon, became suspicious of his new daughter-in-law when she took the title of CFO at Namesys at that time [...] and claimed that Nina lied to him when he confronted her about inexplicably-fast-shrinking reserves of Namesys.
> Nina Reiser filed for divorce [...] citing irreconcilable differences and alleging that their children "hardly know their father" because he was out of the country on business for most of the year, according to court records. She was granted sole legal custody of the children and shared physical custody [...]
> Nina Reiser alleged in court filings that her husband had failed to pay 50 percent medical expenses and childcare expenses as ordered by a judge and was in arrears for more than $12,000.
> [...] on September 3, 2006, Nina Reiser dropped their two children off with Hans Reiser at his mother's house, where he was living at the time. The pair got into a heated argument over Nina Reiser taking the children to the doctor's, with Nina referencing that she had custody over the children, and so was free to do as she wished. [...] Hans Reiser alleged that Nina Reiser was fabricating illnesses in the children. In a fit of rage, Hans Reiser hit her in the face and strangled her to death.
> On July 2012, a jury awarded Reiser's children $60 million against their father for the death of Nina Reiser.[69] Reiser acted as his own attorney during the trial and tried to argue that he killed his wife to protect their children.
Having dealt with a custodial Munchausen/grifter parent myself since that played out, it's a fucking nightmare. Reiser was especially fucked with her having the credentials of a doctor; her word on medical decisions would always trump his. If the kid presents as sick in any way, you're a monster for not supporting medical intervention-- there is no support or framework for questioning whether such care is in fact iatrogenic. The most you can hope to do is stall for time and be as much of a nuisance is possible-- reimburse claims late, nitpick over accounting errors and contractual terms, question everything, invite yourself into medical discussions to challenge the narrative, etc. Someone with Hans' temper wouldn't stand a chance when it's an actual doctor colluding with colleagues to conduct these shenanigans.
And for the love of Christ, never accept these open-ended 50% clauses-- offer to pay more in support as a flat fee instead. Giving a bitter ex-spouse a blank checkbook with your name on it never ends well. And make sure this stuff has an end date in your divorce papers. It's 18/end-of-high school by default, but one trick I've seen (and been burned by) is the other party's attorney slipping verbiage in to make child support/medical payments extend to 21. It depends on the "illness" and whether they're also playing at disability fraud but when you're in a situation like this for real, you'll find the kids magically stop being sick all the time the day your support obligations end.
kind of agree - its the same "humour" which devolved TV like big bang theory into canned laughter shit-shows - poking fun of "virgin nerds" (which make bank).
And worse. When, say, GvR was a kid, it was normal in many schools for nerds to be bullied.
Imagine someone doing this game back then, in that context, passing it around school (before cyberbullying), and it'd be pretty nasty.
We can say "but computer programming is OK, now that it's a status career that rich kids have blessed as cool, and kids don't get bullied like that in school so much, so now it's funny in a non-bullying way", I guess.
Still feels like punching-down, to me, but not everyone knows the earlier context.
It sounds like you're the one doing the punching down by tacitly assuming that who write software are or were wimpy, creepy nerds. If that's not a stereotype, than I don't know what is.
And trust me, there are plenty of bullies in tech.
Don't worry. There's no one needing to be rescued here.
I agree with this sentiment, but I’ve always wondered about a person’s face or appearance and how that might correlate to other traits.
I think we could all agree that a person’s face might indicate ‘shiftiness’ or ‘meanness’ and that there is a decent probability that you’d be right in your assessment.
Has there ever been studies that correlate face types with personality traits?
It's an attractive idea that the surface of one's body can tell you something about its inner truth, but it's incorrect. The field is called physiognomy, which is a pseudoscience that's been the basis of scientific racism and eugenic programs.
Some names you can look up are Johann Lavater, as well as Alphonse Bertillon, inventor of the mugshot, and Francis Galton, inventor of composite portraiture.
I've heard of various bits of pseudoscience around that, including in eugenics and criminology.
One of the times, it escalated to genocide, and the people who committed that are widely known to history as the epitome of evil. They were trying to characterize and identify "lesser" people, and it turned out they themselves will be known forever as the worst of humanity.
There's some curious questions (e.g., why do so many overtly mean people we've seen look mean). But I suggest being careful with this space, and skeptical of people who are motivated to pursue it and those they attract.
Liveness data flow analysis is just a phase a compiler and JITs go through. They'll eventually cease murdering heap and stack values once they've decided to halt. Unfortunately, they use a disposable Erlang distribution Schrödinger cat box to make each decision. Not sure what they do with all the no-longer-cats or what sort of sensor detects ex-cats.
Schrödinger couldn't just invent a cyanide sensor. He was definitely a psychopathic serial killer in addition to being a serial pedophile (this bit is true).
I only got 3 of 10 right, substantially worse than random chance. Sorry, coders! Although I don't feel bad about thinking that the COBOL inventor was a serial killer.
Both know where they hid the bodies, but for the designers it's a metaphor for the parts of the language they wish had come out better whereas for the killers it's a source of glee that they outsmarted the police.
I got 2/10. And one of them only because I recognised Guido van Rossum. I'm honestly impressed that I did so much worse than chance. That must require some special kind of (inverse) skill.
I feel like I gamed this somehow. Instead of looking for serial killers, I looked for anyone who didn't look like a programming language inventor and got 10/10.
7/10, so a pass. But as others have pointed out, everything in the photographs (from lighting to the angle of the subject) tells nothing about the subject. Unless you've seen pictures before, you wouldn't know, and even then you wouldn't know. People don't matter. Your perception of them DOES matter and that can change from things such as a single photograph.
"I know you hired me to murder the competing gang, but I thought designing a new multi-paradigm type-safe VM-driven LISP-like automatically verifyable programming language would be much better use of the money".
I've got a make a living somehow, and keeping programmers out of the murder industry seems like the least I can do. If you let one in pretty soon the whole thing becomes automated and you'll just have AI-powered steamrollers turning the whole thing into an impersonal, generic experience.
For men, it appears that wearing glasses is a pretty good proxy for not being a serial killer, you'll get 6 out of 8 with that. Unfortunately, the correlation is reversed on the women, which makes it a mediocre 6 out 10.
In a previous version of this game on another site, Phil Wadler was one of the computer scientists and I was able to say "I've met that one! I hope he's not a serial killer..."
I guessed "programming language inventor" for all of the images I saw, and I would do so again if I had to replay this "game", because I don't think it's reasonable to assume someone is a serial killer, while guessing they've invented a programming language is harmless speculation.
…aka a “serial” killer.
Sorry.