“Dark” Personalities Are More Likely to Signal Victimhood
psychologytoday.com
psychologytoday.com
The current version of the internet having been commercialized and available everywhere creates a sort of machine learning feed back loop for narcissism just like it does with fake news.
We all became the evil queen from Snow White in varying forms. Except the mirror evolved and became halfway sentient and began controlling us.
If you look at the DSM-5 example of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) it describes the behaviors and outcomes that we have seen with increased social media addiction.
So the theory is that the internet is a dangerous addiction like any other, far more than people want to admit... Certainly more than the people who helped create it want to admit. All you have to do is look around society to see the impact.
Now it seems clear to me that dark personalities are a problem. My question is, aren't these personalities evolutionary adaptations? And if they're evolutionary adaptations isn't the bigger problem the fact that the environment rewards them? I'm seeing a lot of people bordering on sociopathy who are highly successful.
Why focus on the individual instead of the environment that rewards him
The more subjective and unfalsifiable the criteria (e.g. chronic pain, depression) the easier it's going to be for looters to fake their way into the system. Even if it was possible, effectively gerrymandering the definition to include all and only those in need is going to be exceptionally difficult and expensive. A little bit of fraud is part of operating costs.
The problem we have with social media is that volume is the only thing that seems to count. Tribes don't generally police their own because the small hit to the overall credibility (which can be explained away as agent provocateurs) is a small price to pay for the additional 'voice'.
My country may be higher-trust than yours, but my impression of how our social system works is that we've found it cheaper and easier to make social aid readily available, and pay a few people who double-check on recipients for possible fraud, than to pay many people to administer red-tape as a hurdle for social aid.
In any case, the immediate problem (at least going by the leaders of the UN security council permanent members), is not dark personalities claiming victimhood soaking the system, it's dark personalities claiming victimhood running the system.
[1] Mark Twain on punishment:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2986/old/mt5bg10.txt
> "Lord, there is one who needs to be punished, and has been overlooked. It is in the record. I have found it."
[2] I would claim that if dark personalities were not rare in one's society, one would have much bigger problems than "victimhood signalling."
> S. No, Lord. To him there is no difference of consequence. To him they are all microbes, all infinitely little and equally inconsequential.
> L. To me there is no difference of consequence between a man & a microbe. Man looks down upon the speck at his feet called a microbe from an altitude of a thousand miles, so to speak, and regards him with indifference; I look down upon the specks called a man and a microbe from an altitude of a billion leagues, so to speak, and to me they are of a size. To me both are inconsequential. Man kills the microbes when he can?
He uses the word infinite. If the Lord is infinite, mathematically infinity divided by a very large number is identical to infinity divided by a very small number. So the microbe should get the same amount of attention from the Lord as the galaxy etc.
The argument only works if the Lord is not infinite but merely very very big
> Why focus on the individual instead of the environment that rewards him
I agree that we shouldn't stop trying to help people just because there will always be fraud.
In that light this is just another instance of these kinds of people victimizing people by abusing the system to reap benefits that are meant for victims.
[0] https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2019/08/evolution-by-accident....
That many base pairs represents 4^160000 possible combinations. Brute forcing the genome to something better is clearly possible, but if you converted all of the matter in the visible universe into DNA and mutated every strand a trillion times a second for a trillion years, it's very possible you would never even encounter a viable strand of DNA for that organism.
How many reproductive events have occurred in the lifetime of this planet and how has that led to the vast genetic diversity that we see? You can upper bound it by taking some multiple of the biomass on earth times some percentage of that which is DNA by some average reproductive cycle duration, and you're going to find a shockingly paltry number in the face of what exists today.
edit - Look, wikipedia already did the work for us (no idea of the methodology): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)
>The total number of DNA base pairs on Earth, as a possible approximation of global biodiversity, is estimated at (5.3±3.6)×10^37, and weighs 50 billion tonnes.
So to box it in a bit, 5e37 base pairs is 5e37/160,000 or (rounded up) 4e32 Carsonella ruddii. If they reproduce every 4 minutes for 4.5 billion years you have ~6e14 generations for a total of 3e47 distinct instances of DNA as a terribly rough approximation for an upper bound of genetically distinct individuals.
That's almost enough to fully explore a section of DNA that's 80 base pairs long. Most genes are ~1000 base pairs. A butterfly has 100,000,000 base pairs in their DNA. Humans have ~3,000,000,000.
Randomness is clearly a factor, but it seems insufficient.
>Brute forcing the genome to something better is clearly possible, but if you converted all of the matter in the visible universe into DNA and mutated every strand a trillion times a second for a trillion years, it's very possible you would never even encounter a viable strand of DNA for that organism.
Yes, but consider the following. I just ran:
>>> np.random.random()
0.8867453976799686
What were the odds that I ended with this specific 18-digit float in the whole set of floats in [0.0, 1.0)? And yet, here we are.
The word you're looking for is contingency. Gould spoke much about "replaying life's tape" and how it would yield different results every time it was "replayed". Interestingly, people have actually attempted to put this thought experiment into practice at a very prosaic level [0] [1]. They find that although there are convergent patterns of adaptation, over the long term populations diverge considerably.
[0] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6415/eaam5979
[1] https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2019/09/contingency-selection-...
How does this explain different phenotypes in grouped populations? Let's say for instance that a species of ant is known to be more aggressive, why it was that way is probably generic drift. Why it stays that way is because of its environment, and it is selected for.
He asked why the environment is like that they rewards this behavior, some serial killers get screwed up in childhood. Did they all have dark personalities before?
Random fixation and/or founder effect, among a myriad of effects that don't involve natural selection.
>Let's say for instance that a species of ant is known to be more aggressive, why it was that way is probably generic drift. Why it stays that way is because of its environment, and it is selected for.
Or the different alleles for aggressiveness (whatever that means, and assuming they exist) got fixed due to drift? Who knows. The burden of proof is on the adaptationist to show that something other than contingency happened.
Serial killers sometimes change from childhood, or have the triad of problems ( fire setting, bed wetting being beaten for it and animal killing) and some people get molested and develop different personalities, splitting or bipolar. They had to have been predisposed to it, but yes you can get these traits from bad experiences.
The adaptation is natural. I mentioned serial killers to show failures of society, sociopath isn't always successful most are not like most people aren't. It's not a Willy Wonka ticket to success. If you can apply Machiavelli to stuff you can change too (unless it's always been in is, who knows).
The article is misleading to me as well
>Despite future long-term mating desires which are unlikely to be achieved with a narcissistic male and possession of substantial mate sampling experience, females view the narcissistic male as a suitable partner.
They say it as if the personality is the only thing that matters. These men are probably narcissistic because they're attractive, women aren't attracted to ugly narcissistic guys and narcissism isn't likely why they're more attractive. Men are also very attracted to these traits in women, I dated a girl like that and if she was ugly with that personality I'm sure nobody would have given her more than laughter. Imagine if Bundy looked like the elephant man, would he have gotten away? Replace narcism with attractiveness and you'll get a much more accurate statement
>People with dark triad traits will tailor their strategies to obtain these benefits, depending on their social environments.
Spoken as if normal people don't.
I'm sorry but the world is just that people like these combined charactistics. It's like being mad at the laws of physics. You also need to attractive to pull most of this shit off.
Reliability and validity are notoriously hard to pin down in psychology, and there is no stable model of mind or personality that all people share. In practically every study of psychology, one must critically consider not only the reliability and validity of each and every operational definition, but also be highly skeptical of every measurement and also of the statistical techniques applied to those measurements. We know so much about the physical science compared to so little about psychology because people are "messy" and unique.
Every person has intimate experience with their own mind, and therefore many people consider psychology to be accessible. Unfortunately, this is not true. People do a very poor job of understanding the true nature of themselves, especially with regards to how their minds operate. The hazard with pop psychology is that it encourages people to make judgements on others -- judgements that are not necessarily warranted -- and sometimes leads people to take actions that are not in their or others' best interests.
As an example in the Psychology Today article, the author wrote, "In their recently published paper, Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities, the authors suggest that Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy might be beneficial for obtaining resources." While Ok et al. collected interesting data, performed some interesting analyses, and generally contributed to the scholarly dialog on dark triad personality traits, I would not characterize the paper as "being a nasty person is good for getting resources." Such a statement completely ignores how dark triad personality traits can also contribute to poor outcomes in life.
Even worse, the original paper did not address anything at all about risk analysis for donating to people requesting resources. Yet, the Psychology Today article concludes with "Today, those with dark triad traits might find that the best way to extract rewards is by making a public spectacle of their victimhood and virtue." Is that advice for dark triad people? Is that a warning for altruistic people? Is is a statement about the Internet? Is it a recommendation against donating to people who claim to urgently need help? My point is that the Psychology Today article took a messy subject, left it messy, and suggests the reader walks away more knowledgable.
With the hard sciences it is much easier to home in on the differences between academic papers and what the popular press writes about them. For the soft sciences, it is much more important be critical of the topic of discussion.