Sure, intelligence can exist and people can function and be very successful psychopaths - disconnected from emotion, empathy and the like - disconnected from holistic understanding and having your logic to include how feelings should influence decisions. It's really a difference of understanding right and wrong vs. if you react to the feelings of right or wrong. If you're able to suppress/repress feelings, right and wrong and other, through use of control (usually formed as a coping mechanism of ego mind) then you'll be able to do what others would find more unethical than not; I suppose people will may do a risk/reward analysis. It's heavily why many people find Mark's facial expressions to be quite muted, robotic - giving birth to the Data from Star Trek meme. I don't think he's a lost cause, however he's certainly still controlling and calculating, I think he likely has deep healing that needs to happen, however his ego mind having full control got him this far and so he'll have a lot to process, self-forgiveness and such. This controlling thought and behaviour certainly floods into Facebook's ecosystem of a closed-system; I wrote blog post many years ago relating to controlled vs. managed ecosystems.

To be clear I don't think Mark Zuckerberg is sociopathic, and I don't think it's productive or fair to speculate about him like this. My comment about his technical and business capabilities was intended in good faith, not as a springboard to rehash a discussion of "psychopaths in suits."

I also think we (as in Hacker News) need to consider the extent to which useful discussion about Facebook's legitimate failings is getting drowned out by the noise of hyperbole and outrage.

I don't think anyone should have assumed that from your reply - I wasn't stating he is a psychopath either, simply wanted to tie into the idea that there are a lot of successful people in powerful positions ("psychopaths in suits") - they're intelligent yet because they don't factor in the people element, they make decisions that increase profits at the expense of others.

I haven't seen much hyperbole and outrage re: Facebook on here. The scale of Facebook and the issue, how Trump and others got elected into power because of what Cambridge Analytica did -- the gravity (hmm, how grave it is..) and scale, how serious this situation is, would be fairly hard to exaggerate - it should warrant strong anger as well, if looking at the holistic impact, even though individual users may not realize the malice through purposeful ignorance.