The Dark Core of Personality (2018)

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-dark-core-of-personality/

by cscurmudgeon • 6 years ago

126 80 6 years ago

blogs.scientificamerican.com

roenxi• 6 years ago

Looking at a relation between one human and another, I would argue that we can classify it as either exploitative (they have resources, I could take them) or creative (if I make sure they have the tools, maybe they'll make me a house).

In my little world it is hard to place someone on that spectrum without implying some elements of Machiavellianism/Moral Disengagement/etc/etc or lack thereof. I can't claim this result is obvious, but it is easy to rationalise. It isn't so much people being inherently good or not, it just happens there is a very fundamental choice to make about how to approach resource acquisition.

0823498723498729• 6 years ago

Compare Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class or Jacobs, Systems of Survival.

Although the former pretty much makes the exploitative/industrial distinction you have, the latter argues more subtly that the "guardian syndrome" can be good (one wants government regulators who are disciplined and punish transgressors) and that the "commercial syndrome" can be good (axiomatic on HN) but that organisations which combine the two (the mafia, policemen on the take, "Cocaine Import Agency", etc.) are usually bad.

(for the recent apparent popularity of manichean politics in our world, consider 1984's emphasis on the explanatory power of sadism: "Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?" vs. Brave New World's emphasis on the explanatory power of masochism: "But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.")

0823498723498729• 6 years ago

I like to think of the cardinal virtues as providing opposite tensions, keeping one in the mean.

So fortitude gives us the courage to pursue the things we could do, but temperance gives us the decline in marginal utility to question when they are things we should do.

Similarly, prudence gives us the ability to discern actions that are to our own advantage, but justice gives us the ability to eschew using externalities to others' disadvantage.

If a D-factor exists, would ancient greeks have diagnosed it as an excess of prudence and deficit of justice?

krick• 6 years ago

Personally I'm sure this article is an utter bullshit and doesn't deserve any attention whatsoever, but, accidentally I think I can answer your last question. At least if your definition of "ancient greeks" includes Homer, reading Odyssey would leave no doubt that the correct definition for them would be "an excess of prudence" which is, staggeringly, perceived as a very noble trait.

throwaway13337• 6 years ago

An interesting angle here is on interpretation of one's self.

An individual? A family? A community? All humans?

Depending on how a person intrinsically feels here could change their measure of altruistic behavior for an outside observer.

Maybe none is altruism but rather different interpretation of self.

arauhala• 6 years ago

Isn't this the same as the inverted honesty/humility personality trait from the HEXACO personality model?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honesty-humility_factor_of_t...

0823498723498729• 6 years ago

Looks similar to me, but the same group has published on HEXACO and honesty/humility, so they may make a distinction.

https://www.uni-ulm.de/en/in/psy-pfm/research/publications/

from researchgate:

"In theory, D ... is distinct from the low pole of Agreeableness or Honesty-Humility ... in several defining features, especially the representation of sadistic and spiteful tendencies and the broad inclusion of justifying beliefs (see Moshagen et al., 2018). ..."

playpause2• 6 years ago

“I honestly feel I'm just more deserving than others.”

Surely it’s common for people to avoid admitting to agreeing with statements like this whether or not they really do, because they don’t want people to think they’re an asshole.

Can with more knowledge of this field tell me how psychologists address this kind of problem when designing diagnostic Q&A tests?

chadcmulligan7• 6 years ago

Well, apparently not, narcissists for example quite happily agree that they are narcissists - any other way to be seems dumb to them:

https://psychcentral.com/news/2014/08/06/it-takes-just-one-q...

playpause2• 6 years ago

I’m sure that phenomenon exists but I doubt it’s universal. It seems obvious that many narcissists, in wanting to be loved, have learned to avoid making statements that make a majority of people dislike them.

rukuu001• 6 years ago

Check out 'covert maladaptive narcissism' (googling yields many articles on this), which is not at all like what people usually think of when they think 'narcissism'

codeulike2• 6 years ago

In some personality tests they try to build Validity Scales into the questions and make it part of the scoring algorithm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Validity_scale

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Multiphasic_Personal...

I think the basic technique is to ask similar but different questions in several different ways and then apply stats

0823498723498729• 6 years ago

I'm also interested in knowledgable information, but my speculation (having read how the Confederates viewed themselves how the Nazis viewed themselves, how the Juntas viewed themselves, etc.) is that people agree with the statement because they see it as intuitively obvious for specific others, who come readily to mind, and whether yet other others will think they're an asshole doesn't really cross their minds (unless they're very high on Machiavellianism?)

Some traditional others We are more deserving than:

    - They who are sinful
    - They who are from somewhere else
    - They who are genotypically XX

or, for the HN context:

    - They who have poor english skills
    - They who have poor technical skills
    - They who have an industry ripe for disruption

rmrfstar• 6 years ago

Also known as a "rogue actor" in corporate newspeak.

Take this stuff seriously.

zozbot234• 6 years ago

Rouge actors tend to be an issue in all large organizations. Because as an organization gets larger, its middle and top levels are increasingly dominated by zero-sum political games, as opposed to directly relevant outcomes. And if you're a rouge actor, that's precisely the setting you're most comfortable in.

jariel6• 6 years ago

If by 'rogue actor' you mean someone that actually has a mind of their own, their own ideas and whereupon the company can benefit tremendously from them?

The 'psychopath' in the company will generally not 'seem' like a Rogue Actor, more likely, they will be 'seen' as doing really well, acting in the companies best interest, but really they're purely acting for their own benefit.

0823498723498729• 6 years ago

With more nuance: "rogue actor" is a name for someone whose self interest until recently improved the company's bottom line, but has since been caught, and therefore needs to be thrown under the bus before anyone thinks to examine more closely the rogue actor's peers.

(today's cynicism may be due to having read TFA of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24290346 until the end.

"They conducted a perfunctory investigation ... and he was exonerated. How could such a busy man be expected to read every email he was copied in on?
... [He] then proceeded to raise a complaint against me for my handling of the investigation in Ashgabat. It was his revenge for having been dragged into the affair.")

chadcmulligan7• 6 years ago

The next thing I'd like to see is - are people born or made this way? and can they change?

Viliam1234• 6 years ago

As a first approximation, people don't change. If they do, it is usually because they must; because the situation changed in a way that makes their previous behavior impossible.

People don't change because you ask them nicely to. They also don't change just because the consequences of their behavior hurt other people. They might change if the consequences hurt them.

chadcmulligan7• 6 years ago

indeed, I was thinking more nature vs nurture - are these traits baked into people when they are born? do events shape them etc. an age old question I suppose, though a measure perhaps makes it easier to trace things through someones life.

Edit: I suppose we could measure the value of D over generations and see if it's heritable.

jariel6• 6 years ago

People definitely change as they are children though, which is the point.

I believe that entitlement, narcissism, selfish behaviours are 'conveyed' just as much as anything else.

I had a roommate in college, who would brag that his father, owner of several cab badges, would beat the smack out of drivers he thought was ripping him off. This is a perspective said roommate will probably carry on.

01343402• 6 years ago

I think if you take the view of modern genetics, admittedly I'm a layman on this topic, this is an often useless, antiquated (nature vs nurture) reductive trope. Despite what genetics may code for, our actions are a sum of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Genetics being one, epigenetics potentially another as well as upbringing, culture, diet and multitudes of other factors. Someone with psychopathy may produce positive societal results even to the benefit of himself sometimes if conditions favor such behavior although could very well go wrong given another upbringing. I think the implications of labeling these behaviors as "dark" can be a bit too reductionist and can turn into a literal witchhunt if we're not careful although they do provide some sort of utility in patterning human behavior.

Edit: Relevant talk by Richard Sapolsky, if interested, which I happily post when I can. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRYcSuyLiJk

codeulike2• 6 years ago

Linked from the article:

To take the self-assessment created by the researchers of the dark factor study, go to: http://qst.darkfactor.org .

sradman2• 6 years ago

2018 article and paper [1] suggesting that the Dark Triad [2] of personality traits, comprised of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, can be generalized into a D-factor similar to the g-factor in intelligence.

From my perspective, the Dark Triad seems to be an obsession with zero-sum interactions or possibly discounting positive-sum interactions (narcissism and Machiavellianism?) while simultaneously miscalculating/misunderstanding the cost of being socially ostracized in response (psychopathy?).

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Morten_Moshagen/publica...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad

specialist• 6 years ago

Great links, thanks.

re zero-sum vs positive-sum (nonzero)

What is Larry Ellison's game playing style called? Where it's not enough to win, but that others must also be crushed.

"negative-sum" somehow doesn't capture the obsessive, malignant part of Ellison's strategy.

I dimly recall von Clausewitz advocated something like total war and unconditional surrender. But my quick scan of his wiki entry doesn't help jar any further details.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz

Edit: Sorry for the updates. I'm struggling with how to phrase my question.

0823498723498729• 6 years ago

My recollection is that von Clausewitz didn't advocate total war and unconditional surrender, but used them in examples, as physicists use frictionless planes and spherical cows.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1946/1946-h/1946-h.htm

    BOOK VIII.    PLAN OF WAR
    CHAPTER I.    Introduction
    CHAPTER II.   Absolute and Real War
    CHAPTER III.  A. Interdependence of the Parts in a War
    CHAPTER III.  B. On the Magnitude of the Object of the War and the Efforts to be Made
    CHAPTER IV.   Ends in War More Precisely Defined—Overthrow of the Enemy
    CHAPTER V.    Ends in War More Precisely Defined (continued)—Limited Object
    CHAPTER VI.   A. Influence of the Political Object on the Military Object
    CHAPTER VI.   B. War as an Instrument of Policy
    CHAPTER VII.  Limited Object—Offensive War
    CHAPTER VIII. Limited Object—Defence
    CHAPTER IX.   Plan of War When the Destruction of the Enemy is the Object

> "As in war the want of sufficient exertion may result not only in failure but in positive harm, therefore, the two sides respectively seek to outstrip each other, which produces a reciprocal action.

This might lead to the utmost extremity of exertion, if it was possible to define such a point. But then regard for the amount of the political demands would be lost, the means would lose all relation to the end, and in most cases this aim at an extreme effort would be wrecked by the opposing weight of forces within itself.
In this manner, he who undertakes war is brought back again into a middle course, in which he acts to a certain extent upon the principle of only applying so much force and aiming at such an object in war as are just sufficient for the attainment of its political object. To make this principle practicable he must renounce every absolute necessity of a result, and throw out of the calculation remote contingencies."
"The aim of war in conception must always be the overthrow of the enemy; this is the fundamental idea from which we set out. Now, what is this overthrow? It does not always imply as necessary the complete conquest of the enemy’s country."
"In the preceding chapter we have said that, under the expression “overthrow of the enemy,” we understand the real absolute aim of the “act of war;” now we shall see what remains to be done when the conditions under which this object might be attained do not exist.
These conditions presuppose a great physical or moral superiority, or a great spirit of enterprise, an innate propensity to extreme hazards. Now where all this is not forthcoming, the aim in the act of war can only be of two kinds; either the conquest of some small or moderate portion of the enemy’s country, or the defence of our own until better times"

He even mentions deconfliction:

"If this influence of the political object is once permitted, as it then must be, there is no longer any limit, and we must be pleased to come down to such warfare as consists in a mere threatening of the enemy and in negotiating."
"This kind of idea would be indispensable even if war was perfect war, the perfectly unbridled element of hostility, for all the circumstances on which it rests, and which determine its leading features, viz., our own power, the enemy’s power, allies on both sides, the characteristics of the people and their Governments respectively, etc., as enumerated in the first chapter of the first book, are they not of a political nature, and are they not so intimately connected with the whole political intercourse that it is impossible to separate them? But this view is doubly indispensable if we reflect that real war is no such consistent effort tending to an extreme, as it should be according to the abstract idea, but a half and half thing, a contradiction in itself; that, as such, it cannot follow its own laws, but must be looked upon as a part of another whole, and this whole is policy."

sradman2• 6 years ago

Winning a negative-sum game is a pyrrhic victory [1]. Charitably I'd call Larry Ellison very competitive but the uncharitable description is cut-throat (i.e. Machiavellian). Enterprise software sales is a naturally zero-sum game and Ellison is a salesman as much as he is a technical/business strategist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory

2gwghiu• 6 years ago

g the statistical myth https://web.archive.org/web/20200624122604/https://bactra.or...

kstenerud5• 6 years ago

The wording of some of the questions is unfortunate.

"1. It is hard to get ahead without cutting corners here and there."

This is actually (unfortunately) true. The powerful have the largest sway over the rules, and therefore the rules (and more importantly their enforcement) favour the powerful. You're left with the moral dilemma of being the nice guy and potentially a doormat, or engaging in varying degrees of rule breaking in order to protect your interests. Mind you, this can also be used as justification by those who are not actually at a disadvantage.

"8. I try to make sure others know about my successes."

This is a piece of advice that everyone would be well advised to follow. If nobody knows of your success, you won't get very far. Or even worse, people will only see your failures, because negative things tend to stick in the mind much easier than positive things.

throwanem2• 6 years ago

In fairness, that part of the article seems like it might be an invention of the author, who probably is not all that qualified to develop a psychological inventory. I'd expect an instrument based on the described paper to be considerably more extensive, and presumably able to control for distinctions like these.

That said, I realize this is psych research and, in light of the ongoing replication crisis, may deserve somewhat less benefit of the doubt than I am giving it in this comment.

tmoravec• 6 years ago

There's a disclaimer at the end of the article, right below the "test":

Note: The Dark Core Scale was adapted from the larger test battery. I selected the items on an ad-hoc basis for entertainment purposes, but I do not recommend using the scale to make any sort of diagnosis.

The author is a well respected psychology researcher, teaching at Penn, etc.

Nursie4• 6 years ago

Cutting corners isn't necesarily about rule breaking in a disruptive way. It can be about not doing a proper job, ignoring safety constraints etc

If nobody knows of your success, you won't get very far.

But you don't have to crow about it at family gatherings, social functions etc. The server at the diner doesn't need to know about your business win.

You're looking at it through a lens of work-related self-promotion there. And even there, there are limits.

kstenerud5• 6 years ago

I'm looking at it through the lens of semantic ambiguity, which is something that must be VERY carefully accounted for when building serious questionnaires for research purposes.

Improperly formulated questions can invalidate your results if a significant enough percentage of your respondents are answering a different question from what you intended. And the worst part is that you won't even know what your error rate is, which makes it even more important to make your questions as airtight as possible beforehand, to the point of even doing a study of peoples understanding of the semantic meaning of the questions in the questionnaire itself.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say you should have multiple versions of the questionnaire, and bin them for comparison to discover biases.

But, as another commenter mentioned, there's a disclaimer about the questions at the end of the article.

username902• 6 years ago

A person who don't believe that it is hard to get ahead without cutting corners is more trustworthy. It isn't about the validity of the claim but what it says about the person.

And in many fields it isn't hard to get ahead without cutting corners. In fact it is easier to get a job at Google or Facebook if you don't cut corners and learn your theory properly in school instead of just studying for the test or cheat.

Edit: Changed harder to easier. It is easier to get a good job if you don't cut corners during your education.

katzgrau• 6 years ago

My issue with the question is that "cutting corners" is kind of ambiguous.

If I leverage an existing relationship with an employee at a company in order to get an interview, is that corner cutting? It happens all the time. What if I did it specifically knowing I was probably going to jump to the front of the line?

Some of these things framed as dark traits can also be framed as strategically intelligent.

Kednicma3• 6 years ago

You seem to think that getting ahead in life is important; that is, you feel a need to be seen as superior to other people. Similarly, you seem to value other people having a high opinion of you.

Your code profile boasts of over two decades of experience. Your repositories include a "showcase of [your] best work" and "specifications for better computing". It certainly sounds like you believe that you won't get far if you don't boast about what you've done, and additionally like you're inclined to describe yourself as achievative rather than eudaemonic; as somebody who has done many great things rather than somebody who is continually growing and learning.

hliyan• 6 years ago

I believe the wording is deliberate. Perhaps it's crafted to differentiate between "justifying beliefs" associated with the D-factor and accepting that there are people who get ahead by doing bad things without taking that as a justification to join them. I do believe that "people who cut corners make life harder for everyone else", but I answered "strongly disagree" to 1.

Perhaps your answers to 1 and 8 just revealed a dark trait in you?

kqr• 6 years ago

That is definitely the case at least for me -- I scored low in general, but relatively high on moral disengagement, which I think that question is about.

It just blows my mind because I, like the person you're responding to, couldn't even imagine there being a different way to view it until I started thinking about why they put that question in there! ("It must be because with a different personality, the answer is not an obvious agreement." I just hadn't imagined someone might view the world like that. Love this type of thing.)

kstenerud5• 6 years ago

Perhaps your answers to 1 and 8 just revealed a dark trait in you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

tlb• 6 years ago

The real problem with this question is that there’s no standard for what “cutting corners” means. Alice might feel like she cut corners if she didn’t fully document a piece of code. Bob might feel like he cut corners if he hacked up a crypto exchange in PHP and never did any testing.

Alice’s threshold is lower. By an independent standard she cuts corners less, but feels equally bad about it and might self-report the same level of corner-cutting.

An interesting question to ask is to describe a time when someone cut corners. The magnitude of the cutting and how bad they felt gives some insight.

Rexxar• 6 years ago

"1. It is hard to get ahead without cutting corners here and there."

One can think that it's true and be proud to not to do it.

dorkwood2• 6 years ago

It is hard to get ahead without cutting corners here and there.

How can someone read a statement like this and immediately decide whether they agree with it or not? The meaning of this sentence is so ambiguous I need to break it down to decide what I actually think about it.

Firstly, what do we mean by "get ahead"? Presumably they're talking in the general sense of "getting ahead in life", which usually refers to career-related goals. In this case, it's probably easiest to assume they mean something along the lines of "out-performing your competitors". So we can reframe the question as "it is hard to out-perform your competitors without cutting corners". But what do they mean by "cutting corners"?

The term cutting corners itself is morally ambiguous. A shady mechanic who uses cheap, low-quality parts could be seen as cutting corners. But a developer who uses a library to take care of some task rather than writing custom code from scratch could also be seen to be cutting corners. In the context of the questionnaire, we should probably assume that they mean cutting corners in the negative sense. So the statement ultimately becomes something like "it is hard to out-perform your competitors without using shortcuts that cause some amount of harm to yourself or others". Notice that they used the word "hard", here; they're not asking whether I think it's possible, only whether I think it's difficult.

I think I would have to say, then, that I agree with the statement, since I often cause harm to myself by cutting corners (not organizing files correctly in the moment, for example) in the interest of saving time and out-pacing my competitors. Choosing not to cut corners would still be doable, but it would be harder.

I look forward to doing this for all the other questions so I can finally discover what a huge jerk I am.

Nursie4• 6 years ago

Firstly, what do we mean by "get ahead"? Presumably they're talking in the general sense of "getting ahead in life", which usually refers to career-related goals.

I think that there's a much wider sense to "get ahead" - social climbing and perceived status, as well as in your career.

Saying it's about "out-performing competitors" is also a little narrow, and is going to depend on how you measure out-performance. Do you measure it purely by the merits of what you do, or do you measure it purely by how much you get ahead of others, regardless of how that is achieved?

But a developer who uses a library to take care of some task rather than writing custom code from scratch could also be seen to be cutting corners.

In this modern world I'd say that knocking something up from scratch, when there's a perfectly good library right there, is the worse behaviour! And I definitely wouldn't consider that corner-cutting.

hammock• 6 years ago

A good question is, who built the corners? They might not be justified. You seem to get this as well.

TulliusCicero• 6 years ago

Looking at the nine traits, one of these is not like the others:

Egoism. The excessive concern with one's own pleasure or advantage at the expense of community well-being.
Machiavellianism. Manipulativeness, callous affect and strategic-calculating orientation.
Moral Disengagement. A generalized cognitive orientation to the world that differentiates individuals' thinking in a way that powerfully affects unethical behavior.
Narcissism. An all-consuming motive for ego reinforcement.
Psychological Entitlement. A stable and pervasive sense that one deserves more and is entitled to more than others.
Psychopathy. Deficits in affect, callousness, self-control and impulsivity.
Sadism. Intentionally inflicting physical, sexual or psychological pain or suffering on others in order to assert power and dominance or for pleasure and enjoyment.
Self-Interest. The pursuit of gains in socially valued domains, including material goods, social status, recognition, academic or occupational achievement and happiness.
Spitefulness. A preference that would harm another but that would also entail harm to oneself. This harm could be social, financial, physical or an inconvenience.

Eight seem to involve doing things at the expense of others, or feeling (inherently) superior to others, but not 'self-interest'. Wonder why that one was included.

throwanem2• 6 years ago

I would assume that "at the expense of others" is implicit in the article, but not on the paper on which it's based. It's very easy to take popular science reporting more seriously than the quality of the work really deserves.

0823498723498729• 6 years ago

The paper The dark core of personality (2018) discusses the inclusion of Self-Interest. (pp16-18) Apparently the traits were selected by generating candidates which were associated with "links to ethically, morally, and socially questionable" behaviour from a literature review of given journals over the twenty-first century, and seeing which candidates correlated well with the "dark triad" of Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy. (traits and measures appear to be technical terms)

Narcissism and Self-Interest were the traits which correlated least with their proposed D, and p.70 points out important nuances with Self-Interest:

"Self-Interest is defined as a rather mild form of individual utility maximization in terms of pursuing gains in “socially valued domains, including material goods, social status, recognition, academic or occupational achievement, and happiness” (Gerbasi & Prentice, 2013, p. 496). According to this definition, aiming for material goods and a higher status are the only aspects that immediately imply potential disutility for others (which is a defining feature of D). It is quite possible, for example, to strive for occupational achievement or happiness without inflicting negative consequences for others. Indeed, Gerbasi and Prentice (2013) even reported positive correlations between their Self-Interest construct and Other-Interest (“the motivation to act in another’s interest”, p. 495), between .20 and .35. Thus, quite contrary to D, high Self-Interest as defined by Gerbasi and Prentice (2013) and measured herein can be associated with benefits—rather than disutility—for others. This line of reasoning is further supported by our results of Study 3 testing the incremental validity of the specific dark traits (after controlling for D) for the diverse outcomes: whereas the residualized Self-Interest factor (which is independent from D) incrementally predicted values of Power over D, it showed positive (rather than negative) relations to Internalized Moral Identity, Perspective Taking, and Nurturance. Taken together, this suggests that those aspects comprised in Self-Interest that are associated with ethically, morally, or socially questionable behavior are indeed mainly due to D, but that Self-Interest additionally comprises aspects positively related to others’ interests–aspects, in turn, that cannot be reconciled with the very definition of D."

tl;dr: self-interest is not strongly correlated with D, but neither is it uncorrelated, due to the difficulty of gaining social status without someone else losing social status.

Der_Einzige• 6 years ago

Egoism and self-interest are the same thing. This definition of egoism presented here with the "at the expense of" language is so loaded and wrong smh...

01343402• 6 years ago

"There have been times when I was willing to suffer some small harm so that I could punish someone else who deserved it"

Is this really a dark trait? I admit to thinking this in the past but now I've learned to let things go and let someone else deal with it. I have sometimes thought about this and wonder if this is the darker version. I guess "correcting" someone is better but often these can be such obvious things that you'd think people would know anyway.

0823498723498729• 6 years ago

My translation of "willing to suffer some small harm so that I could punish" was "willing to play negative sum games."

(chess is like war in that the declared winner is the player who has lost the least.)

yyyk• 6 years ago

Think of the common experiment when people are offered an unfair but still beneficial exchange (they get $10 while the other side gets $1000), and still refuse. Is refusing that (which nearly everyone does) a dark trait?

The typical behavioural article would have linked this to sociability, and considered not doing it leading to a worse result in the long run.

Kednicma3• 6 years ago

Psychometrics is fascinating because it might be obvious and clear bullshit, but people are so insistent on classifying and measuring each other that they don't care. The g-factor might not exist, and similarly this new D-factor might not exist.

Honestly, I can't believe that I have to use phrasing like "might" and "might not". The burden of proof for psychometrists is still on them to show that the g-factor is not simply measuring socioeconomic and situational effects. Is there perhaps some correlation between the D-factor and wealth?

This is quite important to the philosophy of law and order. Are people all roughly equivalent in their capacity for crime, evil, and damage to society? Or are some people especially dangerous from birth? Our society needs to assume the former in order to have reasonable carriage of justice, so if it's in fact the latter, then we're operating society in a very wrong way. This is why it's so important for these claims to come with more evidence than just statistical correlation.

Mostly I just want to see an end to psychiatrist-measured thoughtcrime.

m3kw9• 6 years ago

Define an asshole: “ the basic tendency to maximize one's own utility at the expense of others, accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications for one's malevolent behaviors“

jariel6• 6 years ago

The paradox missing from this equation, is that without an incredibly degree of self belief - nothing would ever get done. This self belief conflates with all these ostensible D-traits.

Literally YC teaches the standard mantra of 'you have to do believe in something when everyone else thinks it's dumb'.

You have to have a kind of outsized ego to reject the common assumption of the world around you and to consistently throw your vision up against it.

Every great leader has to have a number of narcissist traits, there's simply no avoiding it - otherwise, their vision would have been trounced long before they become popular.

And FYI leaders that 'seem' humble are actually just curating the image of being that. Their actions dictate humility, not their personal propaganda. You can see this with 'empathetic' political leaders who play on people's emotional sympathies, while at the same time, do some very Machiavellian things.

It's a hard thing to do, to have an incredible degree of self belief, to maintain one's own vision, but then to not let that cloud one's own ability to be self aware, to recognise one's own faults, to not recgonize how one's actions might hurt others - even actions that are possibly beneficial to others.

An amazing case study is this 'WE Charity' in Canada.

I think there is truly a great deal of goodwill on the part of these guys, and that they have 'done good'. At the same time, they've fallen into a trap of making 'good work' highly superficial, and their own actions and defences have been very ... self centred, egoist, glib lacking in awareness, arrogant etc. - a lot of the D traits on display.

Kednicma3• 6 years ago

YC deliberately cultivates these "leadership" traits in order to ensure that the abuses built into corporate hierarchies are perpetuated. It's all part of the system.

In your example, YC deliberately advises conflating stubborness, or the ability to resist peer pressure, with self-confidence. The idea is to encourage a me-vs-the-world mindset.

"Every great leader", huh? This sounds like the sort of situation where if I name anybody who's not obviously a narcissist, then you'll quibble that they're not truly great or truly a leader. Certainly I'd agree that it's common, but even just in the USA, there are examples like Eisenhower or Carter where they manifested not just a modicum of humility, but genuine altruism and empathy above and beyond the typical American sentiment. I will agree that nobody gains ambit without ambition, but even a society with no leaders can still be lead by somebody unready.

You also need to keep in mind that no leader leads without a following, and leaders are never alone in silent rooms. The actions of a government or a business are rarely due to a single person. No single man has ever carried out a genocide on his own.

At some point, you'll need to confront the difference between business ethics and ethical business: When do you choose not to do things, even when they're both good for business and legal? And YC doesn't have answers for you there other than to be extremely self-confident and take the Zapp Brannigan path.

jariel6• 6 years ago

No, YC is absolutely not trying to carry narcissistic behaviour into the corporate world.

I'll be that on the whole, YC companies probably have better, more self aware leaders.

That you can name 2 presidents of many with more legit humility than ego actually makes my point for me: the rest are mostly egoists to a greater or lesser degree.

Also - those leaders worked in the field of public service wherein the ostensible motivation is inherently public oriented, it's a little easier there to be 'clean' because the opportunity for fraud and graft doesn't really present itself very often while wearing an Army uniform, for example.

YeGoblynQueenne• 6 years ago

A gentle reminder that g is a measure of correlation without any causative explanatory power (factor analysis aims to identify correlations between observed and hypothesissed, hidden variables). The idea was subject to criticsm, though not directly from inside the field of psychometrics itself (which is usually a big red flag):

Other criticisms

Perhaps the most famous critique of the construct of g is that of the paleontologist and biologist Stephen Jay Gould, presented in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man. He argued that psychometricians have fallaciously reified the g factor as a physical thing in the brain, even though it is simply the product of statistical calculations (i.e., factor analysis). He further noted that it is possible to produce factor solutions of cognitive test data that do not contain a g factor yet explain the same amount of information as solutions that yield a g. According to Gould, there is no rationale for preferring one factor solution to another, and factor analysis therefore does not lend support to the existence of an entity like g. More generally, Gould criticized the g theory for abstracting intelligence as a single entity and for ranking people "in a single series of worthiness", arguing that such rankings are used to justify the oppression of disadvantaged groups.[61][176]

Many researchers have criticized Gould's arguments. For example, they have rejected the accusation of reification, maintaining that the use of extracted factors such as g as potential causal variables whose reality can be supported or rejected by further investigations constitutes a normal scientific practice that in no way distinguishes psychometrics from other sciences. Critics have also suggested that Gould did not understand the purpose of factor analysis, and that he was ignorant of relevant methodological advances in the field. While different factor solutions may be mathematically equivalent in their ability to account for intercorrelations among tests, solutions that yield a g factor are psychologically preferable for several reasons extrinsic to factor analysis, including the phenomenon of the positive manifold, the fact that the same g can emerge from quite different test batteries, the widespread practical validity of g, and the linkage of g to many biological variables.[61][62][177]

John Horn and John McArdle have argued that the modern g theory, as espoused by, for example, Arthur Jensen, is unfalsifiable, because the existence of a common factor like g follows tautologically from positive correlations among tests. They contrasted the modern hierarchical theory of g with Spearman's original two-factor theory which was readily falsifiable (and indeed was falsified).[30]

Joseph Graves Jr. and Amanda Johnson have argued that g "...is to the psychometricians what Huygens' ether was to early physicists: a nonentity taken as an article of faith instead of one in need of verification by real data."[178]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)#Other...

Note in particular: "solutions that yield a g factor are psychologically preferable for several reasons extrinsic to factor analysis".

mellosouls2• 6 years ago

One important thing that doesn't appear to be noted in the article is another important reason that these unpleasant traits persist (in men) - they are often attractive to women (perhaps because they bring social success?).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...

haltingproblem• 6 years ago

In other words these are Evolutionarily advantageous and women being the sex which selects during mating have honed in on it and chosen men who have these traits. Studying Evolutionary psychology for the first time allowed me to reconcile women's behavior (revealed preferences) vs. their stated preferences. Women do truly prefer sensitive, considerate, balanced and intelligent men but their evolutionary sense overrides in picking those with dark traits and other advantageous traits. Again, I am sure same is true for men and I just have not studied it.

The present social debate around masculinity is weird because it posits this dichotomy between sex behaviors while being blissfully ignorant that is the two sexes who have selected this in each other over the past millions of years. Once folks realize this we can all calm down and maybe go back to thoughtfully working on overriding them.

Diana Fleischman's Evo Psych intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb8fH9wouYI

klyrs• 6 years ago

I've met 3 year-old boys and girls who display these traits. Why are you focused on what women find attractive? Under that line of reasoning, if men didn't find these traits attractive, (a) women wouldn't display these traits, and/or (b) these traits wouldn't be common in male-dominated C-levels of organizations around the world. On an evolutionary timescale, I hardly think it's fair to characterize this as a result of women's sexual preferences, as pregnancy/marriage following rape (a consequence of entitlement, callousness, sadism, shortcutting, etc) was bracingly common until quite recently (not that it isn't still happening) and abortion of such offspring is still nowhere near 100%.

As a thought experiment, I propose a dark corollary to Popper's paradox: should we eradicate people who display these traits? Well, that's a catch-22; the only people liable to agree with that are the very ones bound for the chopping block.

mellosouls2• 6 years ago

I've met 3 year-old boys and girls who display these traits. Why are you focused on what women find attractive?

I'm not "focused" on what women find attractive; if you have a link to a study that backs up your anecdote that attraction to dark triad attributes is evenly distributed between the sexes, please post it.

dang• 6 years ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685733

The Dark Core of Personality (2018)

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