Writing fictional sociopaths

This was an interesting New Yorker article about the difficulty of writing fiction with elderly characters, and how infrequently authors get it right and why not. About the problem of old people being depicted incorrectly:

But when I asked her about the ethical responsibility younger authors have to depict old age realistically, she responded, “As a writer, you have to think—am I capable of this quantum leap of the imagination? If the answer is dubious—then don’t do it. Stereotyping is a kind of fictional abuse.”

As for what she thinks she got wrong when she was creating elderly characters as a younger writer, she says she wasn’t quite able, back then, to imagine the less dramatic physical aspects of being old: the constant pain from various forms of arthritis, the slow impairment of sight and hearing, and a “kind of instability,” a loss of balance “that would be unnerving if it came on suddenly, but, because it is gradual, you adapt.” With the elderly protagonist Claudia, in “Moon Tiger” (written when Lively was in her early fifties), she says, “I ducked the problem … by making her a mind rather than a body—she is dying in hospital, but not much is made of that, what you know of her are her thoughts and her memories.” What she believes she got right, however, is that Claudia’s mindset in old age is much the same as when she was young; this, she says, has been true to her own experience of getting older.

I thought of all the fictional depictions of sociopaths, and how surprising it is when they actually get certain aspects right, and how that rightness is so hard to maintain consistently throughout a story or several seasons of a show (I'm looking at you Dexter). It reminded me of the post on the Dr. Who character who gets redeemed in a way that basically seems to just make her an empath convert. But I have gotten better in the past couple years about things like not manipulating people or objectifying them all of the time or being more in touch with my emotions, but I'm not suddenly just like an empath. And for some reason I keep thinking that if there is such thing as enlightenment, a heightened plane of existence, it's going to be something much more like meeting in the middle between empath and sociopath than all sociopaths, autistics, personality disordered, bipolar, etc. etc. etc. just all suddenly become like your average empath. Does that hurt your feelings, empaths? That I don't feel compelled to convert to your cause, despite no longer being 100% sold on the sociopathic lifestyle?