Sociopath Community

"Question: Why do so many articles out there have a subject line starting with "Top Ten", only to not include a list of any sort?"

You mean like this post?

by Wisp

Online research, as anyone who attended college has been told a million times, is not the most trustworthy source of information, and there is a lot of inconsistent information about sociopaths. Some say the words "sociopath" and "psychopath" are inter-changeable. Some say sociopath is the new term for psychopath. Some say psychopaths are more about being insane and randomly killing things, while sociopaths simply have a social disorder (or advantage, depending on your view).
This is annoying, especially because so much of what I find consists of the copying and pasting of top ten lists of some sort. "Top ten reasons your boyfriend might be a sociopath." Top eleven signs of a sociopath." Etc. These articles are all relative clones of each other and there are a TON.
However, none of it really addresses what a sociopath is. It just gives hollow instructions on how to recognize one, followed with the advice of "run."

Those top ten reasons usually do focus on identifying common sociopathic behavior because it's those commonalities among the majority of sociopaths that you're more likely to run into at some point than the minority, who don't fit all of that criteria.

On that same note, I hear that many sociopaths can become very productive and useful people in society, even having happy families and kids. What about that? What if they aren't all trying to ruin everyone's lives? What if there is an actual use for sociopaths in society?

If they're productive and useful in society, with a happy, stable family, then how can you be certain they're even sociopathic at all?

While I'm aware there are sociopaths/psychopaths who have successful careers, unless you're one of them, you can't be certain they're successful in other aspects of their life as well. They could be great at their profession, yet suck at being a husband/wife or father/mother due to the lack of emotional connection that they're family requires from them.

How many sociopaths do you know actually have a happy, stable family life? And if you know for a fact they do, what proof do you have that they're even sociopathic?