Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed? | Hacker News Reader

Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed?

psyche.co

222 pointsknown219 comments

> Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed?

I think these studies are all significantly flawed because successful people with dark personality traits learn to cover up their dark traits.

As a result, the cohort of people with "dark traits" in these observational studies will inevitably be skewed towards those who are less successful/intelligent/adaptable.

Possessing "dark traits" basically means you aren't limited by a moral compass. For any given decision, there's a universe of choices - some choices are moral and others are immoral. "Dark" people can choose from the entire universe of choices, while "light" people can only choose from the moral universe of choices.

It should be obvious, then, that people with "dark traits" are more likely to be successful iff they learn to cover up their dark traits. After all, having greater optionality in your actions is likely to lead to a more optimal path towards your goal.

From my experience working with people that run high in these "dark traits", it's not necessarily a bad thing as long as you put them in positions where their incentives are aligned with those around them.

If only HN had a gold star type thing, instead you'll have to settle for being included in my notes.

> having greater optionality in your actions is likely to lead to a more optimal path towards your goal.

One of the frequent issues I hit with other people is that they will "block off" a choice before actually evaluating it. They will, for instance, refuse to bring up that they have another job offer in a salary negotiation because they feel it's "unfair".

One case of this was a friend who doesn't want to leave a job where they're being made to work 12+ hour days because "they need me and the company might fail if I leave".

It feels they can't even dive into and tease apart these choices and really evaluate them ("Is it fair for me to bring up this other job offer in this negotiation?"), and they also struggle to consider what the other side is capable of (eg negotiating with multiple candidates at the same time).

Unfortunately it's not until these people get bitten a few times that they start to develop a stronger sense of being able to navigate these choice problems.

> "they need me and the company might fail if I leave" Isn't this also some kind of hero mentality that these people enjoy being part of? Eventually they realize it doesn't pay bills but while it does make them feel great and that's the temporary payoff. We all learn from our mistakes. It might also be genuine kinship with their coworkers and this is exactly where the leadership of the said company is extremely smart and evil at the same time: they know how to attract intelligent benevolent nerds to exploit and they know that they'll eventually smarten up and leave but the world is large, There's a sucker born every minute

All in all, the revolving door and the high churn rate won't make a big dent for the company.

What about nurses working 12 hour shifts, helping people survive covid-19 -- now they are needed, or people will die.

But I never heard about them getting any special extra compensation for working that much and also a bit risking their life. Also, nurses are often women. Are they light pattern people getting exploited? Why won't society raise their salaries, so more people will work as nurses or at least not resign -- so they won't need to work 12 h shifts

> it does make them feel great and that's the temporary payoff.

I think in the cases of nurses it can be the opposite: that they'd feel guilt if they quit

> I never heard about them getting any special extra compensation for working that much and also a bit risking their life

Nurse pay has increased quite a bit this year, now reaching $5k-$10k a week...

I’m astonished it’s that high. I’d be interested in seeing a source for your data point.

To be clear, i believe they deserve a high level of compensation it’s just that they’re usually treated badly compared to the societal benefit they provide.

Certainly in the uk the median annual salary is about £26k. The above figures would mean US nurses are earning ~12x more.

Wife is a nurse in the USA, the pay is much higher than Europe, $90k+ in California is common. Crisis nursing has also increased the pay in times of COVID. Additionally, there are specialities within nursing that pay even more, such as nurse practitioner.

That’s much better than Europe and at least a bit more like it. Nurse practitioner i think is about 50k at best in the uk.

I guess the rather different way that healthcare operates between the two regions has a lot to do with it.

Still not as optimistic as the lower bound stated on the parent post which was more like 240k (assuming 48 weeks).

>Are they light pattern people getting exploited? Why won't society raise their salaries, so more people will work as nurses or at least not resign

I would guess that most nurses get into the job because they want to help people, that seems like a really light pattern trait.

Society only very indirectly decides their salaries. At least in most countries right now it's a market mechanism that is ruthless. Of course there are other humans that may or may not have moral qualms. But as long as some people are ready to exploit others they have a pretty clear financial competitive edge (all else being equal).

If nurse salaries are low the economic answer is simple, it's because there are enough (or too many) nurses willing to take this job at that pay level.

The societal answer is not that simple. We actually want more nurses, because they are needed. We also don't want to pay more for healthcare, maybe we can't, America seems to be at the limit here, Western Europe is already close. So if you want more and better paid nurses without paying more, that only leaves shifting money from insurances, hospitals and pharmaceutical/medical equipment companies to nurses.

And to get to do that there has to be some market pressure or regulation.

I read there was a "$2.2 trillion dollar Coronavirus Aid Relief" -- 1% of that could have raised the nurses salaries fairly much, for one year? (In the US)

Edit: now i see in sibling comments to yours, that apparently nurses are getting paid more (in the US)

I'm in Europe actually and seems the decision makers with the money doesn't care that much about the nurses

I tell those kind of people that they are single handedly contributing to a (perceived or real) wage gap.

I coach women that are afraid of being perceived as too assertive in their own organization that their competition got kicked out of organizations for being too cocky until finally landing a high level position where they needed to “make the tough decisions”. The competition doesn't care about losing or being married to a single organization.

This all ties into the breadth of choices some people are willing to perceive and entertain.

> If only HN had a gold star type thing, instead you'll have to settle for being included in my notes.

HN has an often overlooked favourite feature, if that helps. It seems to only show for the comment at the top of the tree you're viewing.

>One of the frequent issues I hit with other people is that they will "block off" a choice before actually evaluating it.

I constantly experience it and don't understand it, personally. I'm not sure if it's a dark trait in and of itself to be able to think through many options though.

I'm sometimes quite frustrated when people will say "we can't do this" before even hearing the end of the sentence. I've always chalked it up to lack of fantasy, but maybe it's a very strong moral compass as you suggest.

I agree with you. Smart people with dark traits become really good at painting their objectives in moral, altruistic terms. They tend to limit the display of their "dark traits" through actions to infrequent events where they stand to gain significantly and will suffer the least blowback.

This is because they understand that most people build trust by observing small actions. So the smart+dark personality combos follow the script until they can make a move where it really counts. And when they do pounce, they're good at subsequently coloring what they did through a kinder lens.

These people would be nearly impossible to pick out in a survey, because they make it their business to be impossible to pick out.

> painting their objectives in moral, altruistic terms.

Makes me think of hamburger companies removing plastic straws, but not promoting vegan burgers. instead, continuing in effect chopping down the rain forest to grow farm animal food -- meaning, they've sensed what people want to hear (saving the world from plastics) but don't actually care

You're talking pattie makers/distributors there, and they don't give 2 cents about what people want directly. They care about what sellers are ordering.

The sellers care about what people want, but they either hear "Just the usual, Sam" or if they're picking up more interest in the veggie stuff, they might broach it, but until the suppliers/distributors get enough signal/investment to ramp up, they won't make a bold move, because sticker shock due to potentially competitive pressure and very low supply.

Businesses, done right, involve very little mustache twirling, and lots of spreadsheet jockeying and getting things acquired and staged where they need to be.

Gee, one could've almost mistaken one of these people for a regular nice person who has encountered bumps along the road (I say this with a deadpan face).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

Why can't those people with dark traits be open and honest in a setting where they are anonymous? Unless you are arguing they are so good at covering their tracks that they end up convincing themselves their moral compass is right.

What you're describing isn't a flaw in the research, though perhaps it is a gap. You can answer the question "Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed?" in the negative even if "successful people with dark personality traits learn to cover up their dark traits".

Sure, in some sense the ultimate "dark" person has more options and is strictly better off (or at least not worse off) for that reason. But concomitant with being dark may be a range of other attributes which lead to unhappiness, discontentment, or lack of success.

Morality is evolved. Humans are social animals, and we have evolved a set of rules to guide human communities by. We call this morality (there's an interesting discussion about biblical/religious morality vs atheist morality, but it's interesting because of how similar those moralities are).

If your goals never align with those of your community/organisation, and you don't need the community/organisation to help you succeed in them, then ignoring morality will help you succeed in your goals.

But if your goals are aligned with your community/organisation, then morality is actually a great guide as to "behaviour that has been proven to work well". This, I think, is what the article was talking about.

As a manager, my experience is that dark traits are always a negative for the organisation. The goals of the individual and the organisation soon diverge, and the goals of the individual take precedence for them. Managing them so their needs stay in line with the plan is an extra burden, and you never know when they're off planning something evil.

That assumes the community isnt evil

I don't think an actual evil community would last long, at least if the members were 'evil' to themselves to the point social cohesion dissolves.

>I think these studies are all significantly flawed because successful people with dark personality traits learn to cover up their dark traits.

If those people have to cover up their dark personality traits then that's a pretty good indication that the results of the study is correct, namely that dark traits are disadvantageous.

>is you aren't limited by a moral compass

Moral values don't limit you in a negative sense of the term, that's why we evolved to have them in the first place. If they were useless, you'd see a lot more psychopaths around. It sounds like you're thinking of morality in religious terms, as some sort of negative worldly thing that we ought to do despite of consequences. In reality moral decision making is a sort of game that produces rules which are mutually beneficial and create long term stable social relationships.

>After all, having greater optionality in your actions is likely to lead to a more optimal path towards your goal.

No, not in the long term. Absence of moral values is as risky as a society without a rule of law. 'Greater optionality' just leads to maladjustment which over time fires back both on society, and then on the individual in question, which is why people with dark personality traits are much more at risk to not hold a job, be drug dependent, in damaging relationships, or engage in crime.

Studying history will teach you this. The most successful leaders go around committing morally ambiguous but advatangeous acts that can be spun into a good story (or at least a story the general population at the time would've bought into). Sometimes just straight up atrocities if they can get away with it.

It is not much different today. The US has a department of Defense, which flies death robots around in impoverished areas. It's just optics and always has been.

If we had an actual Department of Defense, we wouldn't need Homeland Security. What we have is a relabeled War Department but that would have sounded silly after a war.

To wit, winning is all about framing the argument in the right way. Victors get to rewrite history not just because they won but because we want a world in which good guys do well.

> Victors get to rewrite history

Robert McNamara makes a great point about that in fantastic documentary The Fog of War.

You're assuming that at least some choices of the dark trait choices are better than non dark trait choices.

You're also assuming people are able to find those better choices when presented with more choices.

What are you trying to say? Aren't those assumptions reasonable?

Sounds clearly reasonable to me

Sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes presenting yourself as a "dark-traits" individual with no moral compass and no remorse is the correct action, even when you do have an internal moral compass that would stop you.

In the face of bullies, it's better to pretend to be unbridled like them, than be exploited by them. Deterrence and unpredictability are sometimes desirable traits. Sometimes pretending to have no moral boundaries will lead to less boundaries being tested.

Presenting red-lines and boundaries can be impossible for people whose moral code is known and predictable. Threatening with an immoral reaction is sometimes the most effective way to deal with bullies, and it's not really immoral as long as you don't do it.

Look at how Obama drew red lines in Syria that were trampled, and provoked to the edge of his reaction. It's all a result of his moral compass being an open book.

On the other hand, Trump doesn't even need to draw a red line. Being known as unpredictable was more deterring than any action Obama did.

> iff

I don't think that second f is justified from what you've said. The "only if" seems likely in the modern environment but not guaranteed.

Even the "if" half doesn't quite seem guaranteed, though. If it's always easy to know which choice maximizes utility, then having more options is clearly better. But I don't think that's the case often enough to be confident in it. If someone is skilled at pretending to be "good", but finds themselves with choice paralysis in situations where genuinely "good" agents would proceed with dispatch at only a slight penalty to the average quality of the ultimate choice, you might be less successful for having the "dark traits" despite covering them up. And even that is ignoring the cost of doing the covering.

'Dark' people don't hide it as well as they'd like. When it becomes clear somebody wants to play the dark game, all the choices become restrictive. Someone who has gained a position of authority with those traits is usually not worth challenging because you have to play the influence game in the dark where the rules have likely been implicitly set up against you. Inspiring fear or exhaustion becomes easy.

Light people can choose to play this game, and they can choose to expand into a different space. There's somewhere else to shine your light and it's usually more saistfying to expand elsewhere joyously than influence in the dark with fear.

If 'dark' people display their traits and abilities, it's no longer dark. Immoral choices tend to reduce your options, not give you more.

> 'Dark' people don't hide it as well as they'd like

This is what I've observed. They tend to think they're smarter or more clever, and act as such, but really this makes their actions stand out as strange and often quite obvious. A gotcha, however, is that one has to be able to look past their charm, which can often be overpowering and is typically a shield of sorts.

> this makes their actions stand out as strange and often quite obvious.

And is there any bad consequence for them afterwards? Because if no, then it simply means they are good at hiding it while they have to, and don't bother hiding it when they no longer have to.

The consequences are detailed at length in the original post.

> 'Dark' people don't hide it as well as they'd like.

It sometimes works in reverse though. Sometimes people think I'm funny when I would have though I quite clearly meant the unpleasant truth I just blurted out!

Laughing can be as much a sign that they got it and are trying to diffuse the inner tension it created in them as it is a sign that the unpleasant truth was actually taken as a joke. Frankly, depending on the tone of the laughter I sometimes take it as a direct statement that I was understood.

An example? Of things you've said? Anonymized I suppose

"You really don't want to put anything in this public document that attests to those numbers, or implies that the company will commit to them. Yes, I know that everyone in the company has been swearing on them for months. I also know how they were calculated."

Thanks :-) made me ... Both smile a bit (i hope you don't mind) and I definitely wouldn't put any of those numbers in the document

So true, that "Mother Teresa" is a generic term for the epitome of saintly altruism, but the truth of the matter is that she was a fraudulent self promotor who glorified the suffering of others, claimed poverty and disease were gifts from God that build character, and who Christopher Hitchens described as "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud," and called "The Ghoul of Calcutta".

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

>In 2013, in a comprehensive review covering 96% of the literature on Mother Teresa, a group of Université de Montréal academics reinforced the foregoing criticism, detailing, among other issues, the missionary's practice of "caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it, ... her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce". Questioning the Vatican's motivations for ignoring the mass of criticism, the study concluded that Mother Teresa's "hallowed image – which does not stand up to analysis of the facts – was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media relations campaign" engineered by the Catholic convert and anti-abortion BBC journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. [...]

>She was sometimes accused by Hindus in her adopted country of trying to convert the poor to Catholicism by "stealth". Christopher Hitchens described Mother Teresa's organisation as a cult that promoted suffering and did not help those in need. He said that Mother Teresa's own words on poverty proved that her intention was not to help people, while he quoted her words at a 1981 press conference in which she was asked: "Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?" She replied: "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."

Christopher Hitchens - Mother Teresa: Hell's Angel [1994]

In 1994, three years before her death, journalist Christopher Hitchens made this documentary asking if Mother Teresa's reputation was deserved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76_qL6fiyDw&ab_channel=CaNAN...

Christopher Hitchens explains why he didn't like Mother Teresa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wckZo3ks1ro&ab_channel=moema...

Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa (2006)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZiKAeJ9mAU&ab_channel=Stipo...

Penn And Teller "Bullshit" episode: Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4nCaxHN-cY&ab_channel=Chris...

It's not shocking that as an anti-theist Hitchens was not a fan of Mother Teresa.

The reasons why he wasn't a fan of Mother Teresa are certainly shocking though. Do you contest the facts? Or do you think the facts should be ignored and she should be given a pass (and sainthood, literally) just because it's an anti-theist who dared to point those facts out?

And no, not all the criticism I cited (and the wiki page explains in great detail with many citations) was from Christopher Hitchens, or from anti-theists.

The truth is: She wasn’t a friend to the poor, she was a friend to poverty, who fetishized suffering.

If you will only believe the truth about Mother Teresa if it's spoken by a radically pro-theist Catholic, then here are Bill Donahue's own words, President of the Catholic League:

"Mother Teresa WANTED people to live in impoverished conditions, so she could identify with the poor, whom she's serving." -Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4nCaxHN-cY&t=8m18s&ab_chann...

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

I don't know whether the criticism is legit, but you're not making a great case here, tbh. So she was a conservative Catholic — is anyone surprised by that?

Are you saying most conservative Catholics fetishize poverty and suffering as much as Mother Teresa did? That's a harsh wide brush.

If you don't know if the criticism of Mother Teresa is legit, then you can easily find out for yourself by clicking on the link to the wikipedia page I gave you, reading it critically, and looking at the citations. No need to trust me, or ask me to prove to you what's already so well documented.

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

This might help you get started:

Les côtés ténébreux de Mère Teresa

Larivée, Serge; Carole Sénéchal; Geneviève Chénard (2013). "Les côtés ténébreux de Mère Teresa". Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses. 42 (3): 319–345. doi:10.1177/0008429812469894. S2CID 144593256.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/345087

Montreal - A study conducted by Canadian researchers questions Mother Teresa’s views on the poor’s suffering, the dubious management of money by the Missionaries of Charity, and contends the humanitarian image of Mother Teresa is a media-orchestrated "myth".

The paper published on-line on January 15, 2013, in the Journal "Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses" under the title "Les côtés ténébreux de Mère Teresa” (The dark side of Mother Teresa) is based on the analysis of 287 documents covering 96% of the literature on the life and work of Mother Teresa of Calcutta (born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu), the Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun, 1979 Nobel Peace Prize winner, and founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity (OMC). The report concludes that the nun’s sacred image and the events leading to her beatification were the result of a well-orchestrated and effective media campaign.

[...]

> Are you saying most conservative Catholics fetishize poverty and suffering as much as Mother Teresa did?

I doubt they meant that, but not many have any idea how terrible a person she was:

> “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion,” Mother Teresa said. “The world gains much from their suffering.”

https://allthatsinteresting.com/mother-teresa-saint/2

My point is that he must have meant that, for his argument to make any sense. I agree he probably didn't mean that, and that his argument is nonsense. He admits he didn't even bother researching and evaluating the evidence, then he jumps to an invalid conclusion, that there's nothing shocking about Mother Teresa's behavior, only Christopher Hitchens' criticism of it.

Why is enduring poverty not helping the world?

Poverty = less resources = less pollution/damage to environment.

There is only so much a poor person in Africa or Indian village can do to hurt the environment compared to a person in West probably producing 20x the greenhouse gases.

Reducing poverty helps the world, not enduring poverty. And fetishizing OTHER PEOPLE enduring poverty, instead of helping those people OUT of poverty, and working to REDUCE poverty, is a clear sign of an extremely dark personality, especially when you accept millions of dollars from terrible dictators to white-wash their reputations, to enrich yourself and your own reputation.

If Mother Teresa was so anti-poverty, and anti-greenhouse gasses, and anti-pollution, and anti-environmental damage (which she was not), then explain why she's also anti-birth control (which she was)? Isn't it much more effective to address those problems by controlling the population with condoms and birth control pills and vasectomies and even voluntary safe legal abortions, than to have so many poor sick people suffering and stressing the medical system and spreading diseases, forcing them to live in poverty (which Mother Teresa fetishized) to only slightly reduce all those environmental problems (that Mother Teresa didn't actually care about), while also causing many other problems, like all those decaying bodies floating in the Ganges and all that raw sewage?

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/1/14/dead-bodies-found-f...

https://www.planetcustodian.com/over-50-scary-images-depicti...

What's so chilling about you and Mother Teresa is that you're arguing that the poor should suffer to help the world and the environment, when they're not the ones flying around in private airplanes, like Mother Teresa was.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55229725

>Climate change: Global 'elite' will need to slash high-carbon lifestyles

>The world's wealthiest 1% account for more than twice the combined carbon emissions of the poorest 50%, according to the UN.

Mother Teresa even killed five innocent people (including two children) with her airplane and jet-set self-promoting high-carbon lifestyle!

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-10-12-mn-2986-s...

>DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — A small plane carrying Nobel laureate Mother Teresa skidded into the crowd seeing her off Saturday and killed five people, Radio Tanzania said. No one on the plane was hurt. [...]

>Sister Celina, speaking by telephone from the hospital at Dodoma, the nearest town, identified the dead as Sister Clarapia of India, two boys ages 12 and 14, and two men, one of whom ran a center for lepers at the Hombolo mission.

https://www.tzaffairs.org/1987/01/tanzania-in-the-internatio...

>Mother Teresa, aged 76, escaped unhurt when a light aircraft she was travelling in slewed off the rough airstrip at Hombolo near Dodoma on October 12th, 1986. Five people in the crowd lining the airstrip were killed. According to the Times, “The dead were two boys aged 8 and 12, sister Serena, an Indian missionary nun, the director of a leprosy centre, and another Tanzanian man. The pilot, Mr Rolf Klemenson, a Norwegian, said the plane slewed off the runway as it was gathering speed for take-off and he was unable to lift it over the crowd. Two were injured by the propellers of the plane and at least one of the dead was decapitated. Mother Theresa subsequently attended the funeral of sister Serena. She was deeply affected by the tragedy, saying: “My coming is behind this accident.” She at first said that she would abandon the rest of her tour, but later decided to continue and flew to Tabora, where she attended a ceremony at which seven members of her Missionary Sisters of Charity took their first vows.”

It's hard to pick a side when headstrong interpretations win out over likely truth. The jesus-like dream of truth died before I was born and now we're left with people choosing their own interpretations.

The article you linked under the shocking line 'Mother Teresa killed five with her plane', describes an incident where a plane was crowded around and unable to get airborn. Five people took the brunt of the propellers. No part of that is directly Mother Teresa's fault and you have to work hard to ignore the pilot's actions and everybody on the ground.

It isn't hard to find the truth for what it likely is, through research and a charitable view. Society has determined that using headstrong fear to ram your own interpretation through is better than the past and I weep everyday for what we have lost. This used to be a good planet, now every single marginally positive outcome must be torn from history and context to be presented as the evil "it is". Shame on you. I'm so tired of the politics du-jour shitting on 2k years of successful history. You can lie about the present, and the past won't go away.

Everybody who thinks they have a modicum of intelligence and still accepts balongia like these hellish recasts of the past deserves their inability to tell truth from fiction.

Mother Teresa chose to fly to Dar es Salaam not to help the poor, but to "attended the consecretion Monday of seven nuns of her Missionaries of Charity order".

https://apnews.com/article/56dc5fdab8fcf949ee6dc4a4f4e9947b

You are as quick to forgive her of any responsibility for her voluntary actions of self-promotion and religious indoctrination, as wolfretcrap was to condemn the poor for the responsibility of their mere existence on the environment.

https://apnews.com/article/56dc5fdab8fcf949ee6dc4a4f4e9947b

She even had the nerve to make the self-aggrandizing claim that it was a miracle of God that she survived (another notch in her campaign for sainthood), but failed to mention that God decided to kill those five people (horribly decapitating some of them with the propellers), including two children, while sparing her. Thanks, God!

All this proves my point in this discussion that Mother Teresa is a textbook example of someone with an extremely dark personality, who was so good at and focused on self promotion, that she managed to conceal that fact that she's a sociopath, and fool people into thinking she was a saint, and literally bending the rules to grant her sainthood after her death.

The fact that she wasn't personally piloting the private plane she chartered (and that wouldn't have been there otherwise) which killed five people, or that one particular person like Christopher Hitchens who justifiably and correctly criticized her was an anti-theist, or alcoholic, or gay, or a jerk, doesn't detract from the uncontested proven facts, man.

God is an absolute, the source of all. The concept includes being responsible for the death of people in unfortunate circumstances. I don't see the idea that you are somehow above God because you identified that some people died in unfortunate circumstances.

I don't "forgive her". I say there is a truth you have thrown under a bus. She didn't self promote, she was serving a purpose under a larger story. People suffering and someone being unable to fix it, doesn't make them a sociopath for trying to give some meaning to inevitable deaths.

You and Hitchens are just grand-standing off the back of religion.

You haven't refuted even one of Hitchens' claims. All you're doing is trying to redirect and distract from them. Reciting a Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap label at me doesn't prove your point, it just shows you're irrational. And now you're making straw man arguments falsely accusing me of having the idea that I'm somehow above God. That's a non-sequitur. Where did you get that from??! Why do you have to just make shit up, instead of arguing the facts? Tell me what Hitchens said that isn't true, and prove it.

This is a discussion about psychopathic people being able to conceal it, and fool gullible people into literally believing they're saints. Of course she relentlessly self promoted and grandstanded -- that's what she was doing when she attended a nun consecration ceremony (which she didn't need to do, and didn't help the poor) and decapitated innocent people with the propellers of her private charter airplane, killing two children, and a man who ran a home for lepers, then she arrogantly claimed it was a Miracle from God that SHE survived. How narcissistic can you possibly get?

Do you or don't you agree that Mother Teresa is a psychopath, and if you disagree, how do you square it with the facts that Hitchens and others raise? (Without attacking the messenger, address the FACTS.)

The spectacle of you trying to defend her with mumbo-jumbo, without contesting any of the widely know and documented facts about her, simply proves my point that she fooled a lot of gullible people who refuse to be swayed by the facts, including you.

I don't know what to say. Your post doesn't make sense. She didn't fly the plane into people by her own hands. She didn't order her pilot to murder people in a failed bid to take-off.

You reject the very concept of the religion you criticize. If you have a problem with magic soap labels then I can agree, I don't believe magic soap labes matter too. That's not what religion is.

I fail to see how attending a religious appointment is a crime. Did she skip out on handing out food? Did she miss her chance to pass out medicine? What concrete thing could she have done to save her people?

Your post is way over the line of sanity. Being angry that religion exists in the face of suffering isn't a valid criticism of theresa. Criticize the lack of solutions to the problem, by the people who were responsible. The rest is insane bleatings.

You obviously haven't listened to any of Hitchens' or anyone else's criticisms of Mother Teresa, since you refuse to address or refute any of them. Funny how somebody who believes in invisible ghosts and resurrection and chants magic soap labels but doesn't believe in science or cause and effect will accuse somebody else who does of insanity. You're the deranged one arguing that the poor should suffer to help the world and the environment. That makes your personality very dark, indeed.

We're having a discussion about psychopaths with dark personality traits who deceive people into thinking they're saints, and Mother Teresa is the archetypical textbook example of that. Do you have any evidence to the contrary? Can you prove Christopher Hitchens' criticisms are wrong? All you've contributed so far is serving as an example of somebody who refuses to look at the evidence and was gullibly fooled into believing a terrible person is actually a saint. Which was my point. Thank you!

I've listened to hundreds of hours of Hitchens. I liked him. I asked you for concrete refutations, which are implicitly based in science.

Tilting at windmills here..

Yet again, you still haven't refuted anything Hitchens claimed, even though you claim to be familiar with it. Obviously you can't refute them, because if you could, you would have already, after I originally asked you to refute what he said that you don't agree with. Now you're asking me for a refutation (but of what??!), just like Trump incoherently projecting his own lies onto other people, after you refused to refute anything that Hitchens said, or even state what he said that you disagree with. So why should I answer your vague demand to refute some unspecified claim, after you failed to answer the specific question I asked first? You're the one who's denying reality and dodging questions. The ball's in your court to refute what Hitchens said, before demanding I refute some hypothetical claims you won't even identify.

1. What concrete and specific thing did Mother Theresa fail to do for the suffering people when she visited the nun convention?

2. What specific and concrete thing did Mother Theresa do, to be called a murderer in the plane crash?

Most of Hitchens arguments are against the character of god, how he's so totalitarian and capable of causing suffering. There is little to respond to because it isn't based on arguing concrete realities. The game is based on arguing interpretations of events in the most negative light and using that as a reason to distrust the character of god.

God is a necessary concept and arguing how terrible is his 'character', is beside the point. We can endlessly rework history with a nominalist historicism completely devoid of the context that god occupies, to show how terrible god's ethos is and how his adherents are evil, but it is a pointless game in the end.

God isn't going away and this endless attempt by UK atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins, et al to have all the benefits of 2k years of Christanity without the theism is a tiring waste of time.

Hitchens is a christian athiest. He is a product of his context and all the secular humanism and gaping at the awe of space won't save you from the fact that the past 2k years were successfully led by christians in the west.

He was in a limo with dawkins and once said even if he had the most complete and destructive argument against god, that would end all arguments about god, he wouldn't do it. He was man who built his career on arguing the endless topic, religion. In his own words he chose this topic because it doesn't run out.

So yeah, preach to me about magic soap labels, if you think that's what god is, then you are welcome to it. I won't join you in nominalist hell and I won't lift you out of a well.

Your comment seems more about Christopher Hitchens than about Mother Teresa. Are we supposed to be shocked that the poster boy for anti-theism disliked Mother Teresa?

As I said in my other response, no it's not about Christopher Hitchens, and why are you also trying to make it about being shocked by him, instead of being shocked by what Mother Teresa actually did? Why do you too try to deny the facts, while shifting the blame to one of her accusers, without providing any evidence that his accusations are inaccurate or unfair?

It's such a shame how people with dark personality traits always crawl out of the woodwork to baselessly defend and whitewash the actions of other "successful" self-aggrandizing people with even darker personality traits.

This is absolutely true in my experience. Early in life I would go on to avoid obviously manipulative people and that mostly worked.

As you get older you run into people who are more skilled manipulators. These people realize that in order to be good at it you need to be able to hide your intentions and seem like you’re doing the opposite. This fakery can get so elaborate that sometimes it can turn into a quasi genuine relationship. The contradiction only comes to the fore at crucial moments when you realize what’s truly going on.

The first thing skilled manipulators realize is the need to mask your true intentions. If you’re ambitious you need to seem like you’re the opposite. This means an insane amount of attention given to charm and appearances. An extremely charming and soft spoken manner can go a long way in concealing ambition / motives.

The next thing one can do is to use moralistic principles to stymie your rivals instead of open opposition. This can mean using arguments about morality, code quality, loyalty. The point is that it should seem like it comes from a concern for the greater good. Which it might be but people won’t notice how this is wielded selectively.

The best tell for such people is usually an obsession with power. They will usually spend a lot more time networking with the powerful than their peers. This is often done discreetly.

Another tell is how they treat their friends and family though it’s hard to find out.

The next thing that is often done is to find people who are emotionally vulnerable because of what’s going on in their life. Some people have a very good nose for this.

Dark and Light are just labels for the extremes of the spectrum.

In general be very careful in your dealings with people who are high up in the world / extremely popular. There’s a reason they’re there and it’s not just their aptitude for the job.

This is so on point with one person in particular I know that operates this way to the tee

+1 on your analysis & suggestion.

> I think these studies are all significantly flawed because successful people with dark personality traits learn to cover up their dark traits.

Disagree, people like Napoleon, Stalin, Steve Jobs, Bill Clinton, Putin,Zuckerberg,etc were highly succesful and very high in dark personality traits. If anything I find very difficult to find a highly succesful or powerful person who does not have them. I read once an article about Angela Merkel (A politician widely regarding as one of the good ones, a dove) it was eye opening, she is ruthless, she back-stabbed her long-time mentor and crushed her political enemies with no remorse.

This comment seems highly lauded, but it doesn't ring true to me. You can't really split people up into light and dark, can you? Like most people, I try to do the right thing, and usually succeed. In most cases where I got to know someone who had "dark traits", I eventually learned that they were doing the best they could within the framework of their own lives, and that she is those decisions made a lot more sense when you understood more context of their situations.

After all, the fundamental attribution error is the human tendency to assign agency over decisions to people instead of situations.

This is my exact perspective too.

Heidigger said it best. We have agency, but it is constrained by our path through life. So what's going on around us, and the "hole" in the social fabric we're currently occupying has as much an effect as what we apply ourselves to deciding.

It doesn't ring true to you but your truth differs from the science.

The idea that everyone has an equal and balanced amount of dark and light traits and is therefore impossible to classify is misguided.

There are many people who can fit into the category of dark and light and there are many people who are complex as you describe.

At the very far end of the spectrum are people with antisocial disorder or more commonly known as psychopathy. These are people who can plunge a knife into your face and feel nothing. These people fit our definition of "dark." These traits are actually physically measurable and the fact that these people exist proves your statement as only one part of a more complex story.

The science actually says that at the far end of the spectrum a psychopath tends to not be successful due to there inability to self control. Ordinarily your behavior is tempered by fear and empathy but a psychopath can only temper his impulses through raw logic overall leading to more problems.

I'm not saying they are equal parts light and dark. I do think it is dangerous and misguided to apply binary thinking to complex individuals. While there are psychopaths and sociopaths in this world, in the overwhelming majority of cases, your boss/coworker/rival of the moment is not one of them.

You don't have evidence for this. You are simply viewing others as a reflection of yourself.

If there are people at the tail end of the spectrum there must be people in between people who are centered and people who are extreme. Where and how these groups aggregate is hard to measure experimentally but it is clear that humans can lie and if they are not in the center of the spectrum and more evil than normal than likely they won't reveal it.

I like to think I have sufficient theory of mind that my self isn't the only evidence for my views. I'm able to admit that my thoughts are colored by myself and my experiences, just like yours.

Some people are not psychopathic but get labeled as if they are because of a lack of understanding. Others truly do have psychopathic tendencies. Even then, they are people first, and I'd wager they are a product of environment in more cases than not.

I agree with your comment, but think it's largely unrelated to my point.

My point isn't to cast judgment on people with dark traits. Rather, it's to provide an answer to the original question of whether people with dark personality traits are more likely to succeed. I think the answer is yes because the less attached you are to morality, the more choices you have at your disposal. And, the more choices you have at your disposal, the more likely you are to achieve your goals. The important caveat being that others don't catch on.

Note that this point isn't mutually exclusive with the idea that there's a spectrum of conscientiousness, and where you fall on that spectrum changes with age and experience.

I agree with your broader point. Dark and light come with connotations. What I've found in my life is that if things look black and white, you aren't close enough to see the shades of gray. By playing into the good and evil tropes, I think we run the danger of oversimplifying the situation.

People who understand the full breadth of options certainly have an advantage. That, to me, is orthogonal to whether or not people are moral. Just because you know that you can do things doesn't make you evil. In fact, from a philosophical standpoint, I'd argue there's more virtue in knowing the evil and choosing not to do it than there is in ignorance. And from a business standpoint, there are generally non moral reasons for acting in what look like moral ways.

Does not surprise me, skilled practitioners of this dark art are sociopaths. If you have not, a great book to read " The Psychopath Test", where it talks about how a lot of CEOs mirror traits of psychopaths.

>Overall, individuals with dark traits engage in more counterproductive work behaviour, such as theft and abusive supervision. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they don’t end up with higher average incomes than their peers with light personalities.

>The key factor here seems to be empathy: the capacity to resonate with – and understand the perspective of – the emotional experiences of others. Individuals with light personality traits show a great deal of empathy for others, while those with dark personality traits tend to show very little. In our new research, we found that this seems to be what leads to a more satisfying life. Similarly, being prosocial – acting kindly, cooperatively and with compassion toward others – is also significantly linked with higher wellbeing.

Maybe the comparison between "dark traits" and "light personalities" yields this, but its been shown pretty consistently that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect on salary, primarily for women. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41343711?seq=1

Also, the framing of this article between essentially low agreeableness and high agreeableness as dark and light is awful. There are advantages and disadvantages to being high or low in this trait, and the framing that being high in it is what's more desirable makes me doubt how seriously whoever wrote this takes their work.

Does high agreeableness necessarily translate into more empathy, or vice versa?

I define empathy as "knowing your customer" (whoever it may be). You can be very attuned to this whether you are agreeable or disagreeable, no?

(Perhaps this is not a widely accepted definition of empathy, and that definition instead somehow indicates "being nice"? I don't think being nice/agreeable necessarily helps you know who you're speaking with.)

> You can be very attuned to this whether you are agreeable or disagreeable, no?

I would think so as well. In fact, along the way I've learned that sometimes it's the less agreeable ones who are acting in the interest of the customer's situation but there has been a communications breakdown that doesn't necessarily reflect on the character of either party.

A useful breakdown of each trait to me is this one https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5863998_Between_Fac.... Here agreeableness is divided into compassion and politeness. Compassion corresponds to your idea of what empathy means, and politeness corresponds to being generally nice and cooperative, respecting authority and so on. From these https://ipip.ori.org/newAB5CKey.htm, the primary ones for compassion are Warmth, Sympathy and Understanding, and the primary ones for politeness are Nurturance, Cooperation, Pleasantness.

>Does high agreeableness necessarily translate into more empathy

I think the difference is that the personality trait called "agreeableness" doesn't mean someone is a pushover. But I do agree with you in general, my biggest gripe with pop psych as of late is the way "empathy" is used interchangeably with being nice.

Has a quiet person failed to empathize if there is no change in their outward behavior? I'd say obviously no. So I've been trying to work out why we talk about empathy when we mean being nice.

I think people talk about empathy rather than niceness because it makes it easier to admonish others. If I tell someone that they should be nicer, they likely already understand the situation as one where they could be nicer, and chose not too. Maybe they even chose not to be nice fully aware that it violated established social protocol. I am simply making a demand that they behave to my standards, and well adjusted people know that I am not their father no matter how serious I try to make myself sound. Or I can tell someone they lack empathy, accusing them of failing at a basic part of humanity. Depending on their internal thought process I'm more likely at extracting the behavior I want out of them through this manipulation. It's rudimentary bullying. Make an accusation someone doesn't want to be true, and treat any attempt to refute it as proof the accusation is true.

> I've been trying to work out why we talk about empathy when we mean being nice.

Somewhat many people aren't "good" at feeling empathy, and some brains are 100% incapable -- and maybe they cannot see any difference between empathy and faked niceness.

"I define empathy as "knowing your customer" (whoever it may be). You can be very attuned to this whether you are agreeable or disagreeable, no?"

That is a very odd definition of empathy; it seems to imply that you are trying to sell them something, that you want something from them.

You could think of any interaction in the world as a trade of something. Best if it is a win win for both sides.

Best in life is to crush your enemies, see dem driven before you, and to hear da lamentations of da vemen.

Why would you have enemies?

Empathy is feeling what others feel. In other words, if I hurt you, I not only understand that you are hurt, I would be hurt myself.

Psychopaths are incapable of empathy, but it would make sense if lack of empathy were advantageous from an evolutionary perspective.

Isn't this sympathy?

Quoting Wikipedia:

The words sympathy and empathy are often used interchangeably, but the two terms now have fairly distinct meanings. [...] One popular and recent conception of the distinction is that sympathy represents "a feeling of care and concern for someone, often someone close, accompanied by a wish to see him better off or happier," while empathy represents "a person's ability to recognize and share the emotions of another person, fictional character, or sentient being."

Spotted the sociopathic dark personality.

The missing piece here is that 'empathizing with your customer' is an extremely different context than 'having empathy for others'. The former focuses on meeting your own needs through using 'the skill of empathy' to create a bond of kinship and be more likely to execute a sale. The latter focuses on understanding the needs of others, even if — especially if — doing so does not advance your own needs.

I am courteous to those around me on phone support calls and in businesses because I can understand — I can empathize — what they've been through with other people yelling at them, mistreating them, and gaslighting them. I may not be friendly, I may not be effusive, I may not be agreeable — I certainly am not known for being agreeable — but I will do my very best to keep it together, because I've been yelled at before, and I would consider that a grievous harm committed upon another.

I think one time I was grinding my teeth I was so angry that they could hear it on the phone, and my voice was flat, tense, and cold to the bone, and I made specifically sure — even amidst my rage at the harm committed by their employer — to thank them and say goodbye politely. It wasn't a warm goodbye, but it was definitely courtesy, and I don't think they expected it.

The comments up and down this post fail to distinguish these two definitions. In both cases, you're "understanding how the other person feels" — literally, empathizing — but it's how you use that information, and to whose benefit your use serves, that is causing such confusion in the replies.

If someone walks into your store purposefully and doesn't want to make eye contact, empathy suggests that you should let them be and keep an eye on them. This is a great example because they clearly don't want to be hassled by you, and you clearly shouldn't allow yourself to be shoplifted from.

If you use empathy to persuade people to buy things that they'll regret buying once they've left your store, that's generally considered a variation of 'evil' and is the subject of fables and fiction, not the least of which being an absolutely terrifying rated-R book called 'Needful Things' by Stephen King. People will leave some of the angriest Yelp reviews you've ever seen for a business that uses this tactic, not just because they feel taken advantage of themselves, but specifically to protect others from feeling that way. They literally empathize with your future customers and will do their best to warn them away.

So, when someone says "show a little empathy", they're telling you that you've prioritized your needs higher than those they think you're disregarding as irrelevant. They may or may not be right, but that's a very common context for negative comments about your skills at empathy.

It's also common for kindly people to have absolutely no clue what's going on in other people's minds. You'll see them hold the door for someone who's about to drop three bags of groceries — missing the forest for the trees, so to speak, but still genuinely making an effort to care at no benefit to themselves. They'll be confused and sad when you drop your groceries, because they would have helped if they'd realized.

To restate this all in dry terms for nerds like me — The default context for "show more empathy" is a request that you increase the priority of donating your energy and time to social support of others without expectation of reward to yourself. In specific contexts like Sales and Marketing, it means not only "listen more closely to the customer's needs" but also "understand that sometimes the customer's needs may prevent the sale". And you can flip this around, too — if someone says "you have to put up some shields", they're usually telling you that you're going too far with your concern for social support of others, and need to back it down a notch and worry a bit less and take care of your own self.

I hope this will help you and others align your definition and uses and contexts of the word "empathy" more closely with the world's.

I found this a very insightful distinction. Thanks for this.

I always found these kind of studies bullshit: the worse serial killers and pedophiles were sometimes described as "nice" and "charming" people.

I don't think it's accurate to make a clear line between "real sociopathy" and "normal people" based on your behavior. Everyone has personal goals, interests, (whether good or bad) and try to have what he think is the the optimal behavior (wether good or bad).

The real question is what are you real personal goal / interests, not how you behave.

Extreme outliers aren't useful indicators when trying to understand general trends.

It's only outliers if you think "most" sociopath "should" look like it. The truth is you don't know and I actually think most sociopath looks totally normal.

> I always found these kind of studies bullshit: the worse serial killers and pedophiles were sometimes described as "nice" and "charming" people.

That is at first sight. Psychopaths have a surface level charm but spending enough time with them and the illusion shatters.

A real agreable and nice person has that as a baseline, that’s a big facet of their personality.

> That is at first sight. Psychopaths have a surface level charm

If they participated in psychology studies, which category would they fall in?

I couldn’t answer that. There could be deceptive people whose intention is to subvert such studies but I doubt they’d make much of a difference. All I could sat is that the psychopath’s charm is always exerted with some goal in mind.

> but its been shown pretty consistently that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect

Be careful conflating agreeableness with empathy. In Big Five OCEAN, empathy is a sub-facet of agreeableness(A), but not the only one. Other sub-facets of agreeableness are conflict-avoidance, modesty, compliance, and naive trust in others.

Intuitively, it would seem to me those are more important contributor to success. In particular conflict-avoidance is a big contributor to being exploited by others. A person who scores moderately low on the aggregate agreableness(A) score could be both empathetic, but willing to stand up for themselves and make sure they're getting a fair deal.

Supporting this, the research has found that agreeable people do particularly bad in transactional, rather than transformative, leadership roles. When a team is working as a high-trust, high-cohesion unit, agreeableness is an asset. But when interacting and negotiating with third parties at arms length, it can be a major liability.

Sociopaths are great at empathy. Empathy is the ability to observe and understand others emotions without actually connecting. It’s absolutely essential to be a successful dark triad tape.

Sympathy is the “light” counterpart, where you actually emotionally resonate with the other person. Obviously this makes nasty behavior less attractive since you feel the emotional effects too.

And now you know why corporate psychobabble always goes on about user empathy.

source? seems like a rather twisted definition of empathy.

Twisted yes

However I'd think some sociopaths can be good at logically cognitive intelligence wise understanding how a different person feels.

But being unable to actually feel real empathy, I wonder if they might mistake their logical thinking for being empathy? Which they will instead never know what it is

The American Heritage Dictionary[1][2] and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary [3][4] are two that come to mind, but I'm sure that you can find others.

As usual m-w is much sloppier when it comes to making distinctions between similar words, due to their philosophy that common misuse redefines words[5], but even they make a pretty clear distinction between empathy and sympathy and it's clear that sympathy is the one where one actually emotes with the subject.

[1] https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=empathy

[2] https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=sympathy

[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empathy

[4] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sympathy

[5] And they aren't even entirely wrong, as anyone can literally tell you.

Understanding other’s feelings seems to be only part you’re focusing on, but it’s not enough to have empathy. The dictionaries you’ve linked to have each a list of skills and I don’t think each stands on its own. It’s a combinations of those. I’m sure AI already have, and cenrtainly will have it perfected in the future, an ability to “understand” feelings and emotions if I use the term “understanding” the way you do with sociopaths - the ability to analyze and act on. Certainly it can not be called empathetic.

I totally disagree. I’ve only read one book about the topic of the dark triad, sympathy, and empathy, called Social Intelligence. Basically I’ll simplify the definitions for brevity’s sake. Sympathy is that you feel bad for someone. Empathy is actually putting yourself in their shoes and feeling what they feel and adapting to their needs and understanding them as they are. So, maybe you have the terms backwards, or maybe I do? Have you ever heard the phrase, I don’t need your sympathy? What about, I don’t need your empathy? Empathy may be a less common term than sympathy but it is clearly the superior one in my book.

I'm pretty sure your understanding is the right one. It goes even further if you venture away from science and into psychics powers - "empaths" are the psychic subset that literally feel others' emotions.

Also, narcissistsic sociopaths can have a high capacity for empathy in the sense of knowing what others feel and think while also ruthlessly manipulating, being two-faced based on who is present and the gaslighting others when these obvious differences are brought up (differences like switching the entire tone of voice and mannerisms at the flip of a switch, as if it was new person, just to suck up to or put down people depending on their goals).

Working with such people can be a nightmare because they appear so charming outward to powerful people in decision making positions, while being cruel and sadistic to others, leaving very little for these people to do because the higher ups love the individual and cannot imagine what is hidden from them.

> a nightmare because they appear so charming outward to powerful people in decision making positions, while being cruel and sadistic to others

I wouldn't conflate emotional intelligence - i.e. the ability to modulate behavior based on person specific interactions - with necessarily possessing negative, vindictive, malign or cruel personality traits. That's definitely a stereotype.

It is entirely possible to be charming, without secretly being cruel or vindictive. Yes, it can be more difficult to judge a disarming person's intentions, but that doesn't mean the person is inherently sadistic or ill willed. Perhaps they are just good at making other people feel comfortable.

I didn't imply that every charming person is suspicious for being cruel.

Just that when you are on the receiving end, it can be very frustrating to try and tell others about it. This is in fact one mechanism that keeps victims of sexual or other harassment and bullying silent. And I don't mean small misunderstandings and microagressions. There are people who will literally tell you "you can try telling about this to XY, they will never believe you." being absolutely conscious and intentional about the whole thing. The existence of such people is really hard to believe for many. There are truly evil people out there who know they are evil and probably cannot even help it very much.

They also often try to turn things around and blame you for the things that they do. We call it gaslighting. And in a meta way, they will even preemptively say you are gaslighting them! And it devolves into a "no u" kind of debate and some victims even end up believing it! It can literally make you go crazy!

Search YouTube for narcissist or psychopath, sociopath recordings. There are secret video and audio recordings of what these people will do to their subordinates, eg their children or employees. It is absolutely mind bending and life changing to see how predictable and consistent they are.

Now, this is of course a pathological extreme. But there are milder versions of it too.

All good points, thanks. Yes, being on the receiving end - especially when you rely on the other person's best intentions - can be traumatizing.

And yes, that's a particularly terrible form of manipulation.

The problem is especially bad when they get into a position to police other people's conduct and are supposedly there to serve justice.

The problem is that many well intentioned people cannot imagine that it's the case. This will have to be a big realization that the reasonable factions of the social justice movements will need to make. In the current climate this is just too far out to be a topic of rational discussion. Indeed I assume many people now discount everything I wrote due to mentioning this political angle.

But when you actually think about it, it would be surprising if such people didn't seek out some of these powerful positions to roam free.

Makes me wonder what you think about the former president

> seek out some of these powerful positions to roam free

I guess you mean Trump (still prez till Jan 20). He's a clown. I don't know if he's actually a cruel person who likes to psychologically torment people around him.

> Also, narcissistsic sociopaths can have a high capacity for empathy in the sense of knowing what others feel and think while also ruthlessly manipulating

I initially thought this wasn't considered empathy, but TIL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy#Classification:

> Empathy is generally divided into two major components: ...

> Affective empathy, also called emotional empathy: the capacity to respond with an appropriate emotion to another's mental states.... sympathy and compassion for others in response to their suffering.... self-centered feelings of discomfort and anxiety in response to another's suffering....

> Cognitive empathy: the capacity to understand another's perspective or mental state....

> Affective and cognitive empathy are also independent from one another; someone who strongly empathizes emotionally is not necessarily good in understanding another's perspective.

However, I think when most people use the term "empathy" they're almost exclusively referring to affective empathy.

I like Wikipedia's translation of the German term for empathy, Einfühlung, as "feeling into," which captures the meaning pretty well for me.

On the other hand, someone on the autism spectrum may be able to emotionally empathize if they find it clear what the other person feels, but may not be able to cognitively intuit complicated webs of unspoken social relations and resulting feelings of many layers of "I expected him/her to know that I think he ...."

Yes exactly, I feel this could actually be further split to 3 mostly disjoint concepts:

1. Can I understand why person X would feel emotion Y in situation Z? People probably vary the most on this one when they themselves would not feel emotion Y in situation Z, because it becomes about how well they can put themselves in the shoes of someone with different values/priors (from a more cerebral perspective). There's also a difference between retroactive explanation and prediction of course, but without extensive knowledge on person X prediction can be very hard in the "gray areas" mentioned.

2. If I know that person X feels emotion Y, do I feel emotion Y myself? Again, most people probably have this for their closest friends/family, but the degree to which one has this for people they casually encounter seems to vary widely. Probably due to both inherent personality trait differences, and varying circumstances over time - for example if you currently have some intense mood for personal reasons it may be harder to feel an opposing mood because of someone else (but easier when it's the same mood maybe?)

My understanding is 1 is cognitive empathy and 2 is affective empathy, but I'm not as sure whether 2 encompasses all of affective empathy, because there is also:

3. Given limited information about the situation, can one still figure out the emotion someone is feeling? This allows empathy #2 to be applied more readily, and in cases where your actions are relevant (coworkers, friends, etc.) to investigate further and possibly apply empathy #1.

I'm not sure whether 3 is itself considered part of empathy, but certainly it is very important in being able to "use" your empathy in daily life, so it functionally is part of empathy. And this is likely the trait most frequently impaired in individuals on the spectrum, as it requires recognizing subtle, often non-verbal, behavioral cues. I'm not super up to date on the literature but I don't believe 1 or 2 above are considered to be impaired in most cases of Autism, and there definitely are articles out there about how it's incorrect to say those on the spectrum have low empathy.

It's hard to rate oneself accurately, but personally I would say I am above average at 1, average at 2, and below average at 3 (solid at little linguistic hints but horrible at picking up on facial expressions, posture, tone of voice, etc.)

> Affective empathy, also called emotional empathy: the capacity to respond with an appropriate emotion to another's mental states.

This is what I meant by "emotional intelligence" in the comment below.

I think this is better described as superficial charm than any meaningful understanding of other's goals and feelings. It's easy to be outwardly charming when you have no real intention to follow up on whatever you're promising to others.

>> In our new research, we found that this seems to be what leads to a more satisfying life. Similarly, being prosocial – acting kindly, cooperatively and with compassion toward others – is also significantly linked with higher wellbeing.

> Maybe the comparison between "dark traits" and "light personalities" yields this, but its been shown pretty consistently that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect on salary, primarily for women.

You seem to be comparing apples and oranges: I do not think "higher wellbeing" is the same thing as "higher salary," and whatever correlation there is due to the stress of being poor (and thus is less and less signficant as salary progresses past a minimum threshold).

>Perhaps unsurprisingly, they don’t end up with higher average incomes than their peers with light personalities.

This is the relevant quote. The article explicitly says "light personalities" have no penalty compared to "dark traits". This may be true in their comparison, but overall higher agreeableness is related to lower salary.

>ts been shown pretty consistently that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect on salary, primarily for women

It's not just salary - it's every single negotiation you have in your life. Negotiation is the art of backing down carefully, not all at once, not being a pushover, not going-along-to-get-along. If you're an agreeable person, then you by definition don't push for your way instead of someone else's; and when you're in a financial negotiation, this is basically the worst trait you can possibly have, because your adversary probably does this more often and was specifically hired for being someone that is good at pushing for their way. The company wants to hire you for less money; the car salesperson wants to sell you the car for a higher price; and so forth.

There is no way of fixing this problem "systemically" across the board, because game-theoretically it will rarely be to anyone's advantage to take the first step in this direction.

> that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect on salary,

That seems plausible or even obvious. All things being equal, an empathetic person will value a happy work environment (relatively) more than a high salary. They'll avoid the sabotage-all-others big law firm and go into research (avoiding personal conflicts), become a public defender (empathy), judge, etc.

Research involves lots of personal conflict. You couldn't imagine how cutthroat the fight for funding, positions, paper authorships, citations etc can be. Lots of small minded machinators.

To some, that's part of the thrill.

I think the cultural aspect of this study must be taken into consideration.

Speaking as someone who can from a country with a relatively high population (India), we were taught that in a race to the top, its either eat or be eaten, and that machinations are a vital part of success as long as they do not tarnish the way you're perceived.

'If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: “Know thyself.” Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t. From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb. And correspondingly, from evil to good.'

--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

While it is true that we all have aspects of each in us and depending on time and place one or the other may be more prominent, there is large variation among people regarding temperament and personality.

It's just factually not true and dangerous to believe that everyone is the same in this regard.

At the same time, we must never think we are above judgment ourselves. All of us need to count with the possibility of being on the evil end sometimes.

I don’t believe in free will. It has been a much different experience than shedding my belief in God. When I was young I used to “sense” someone always watching me, to the point of feeling shame in natural situations like bathing. One day the feeling just faded, and it was a palpable change in my perception of life.

With the absence of free will, that intuition has been extremely difficult for me to hold onto. It is fleeting, even after hundreds of pages of books reiterating the fact. To approximate the intuition, when I see someone in a morally questionable situation or experiencing sheer bad luck, I try to remember to tell myself “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

> I used to “sense” someone always watching me,

How old were you then? And when that feeling disappeared?

I'm guessing one or both of your parents were religious?

> I don’t believe in free will

When you came to that conclusion, how did that affect how you look at life and maybe any meaning with life? Did it make you sadder or happier?

You believe the universe is deterministic somehow? Or possibly with some randomness

The article subtly flips the script at the end so much we might be missing the point if we look too much into the title of the article.

The "system" we've collectively developed forces blank slate souls to develop and play out our learned behavior in order to survive, or feel like we're surviving, in the world. But, as the article explains, we do not (typically) inherently hold, are not born with, nor do genetics code for, these "dark" or "light" traits. Therefore the emergence of "dark" or "light" tendencies is really more decided by the family, community, and economic systems. It is not that a "dark" or "light" trait necessarily allows a person more to succeed, but it suggests that some family, community, and economic systems require a person to develop what we would label "dark" or "light" traits from our perspective in order to survive. It appears the point of the article is: when we come across a person with "dark" traits, it is not entirely THEIR fault they have "dark" traits, it is more OUR fault we cannot shape our family, community, and economic systems to produce people with "light" traits.

We're not blank slates when we're born, and it's well established that it's ~50% genetics and ~50% environment.

Edit: furthermore it's compounded by the fact that the environment changes the expression of the genes (Gene × Environment interaction) and the genes influence the environment (gene-environment correlation rGE)

Interesting, I didn't know that had been shown. Do you know any good resources to learn more about the 50/50 split?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture

> are not born with, nor do genetics code for, these "dark" or "light" traits

How did you come to believe this?

(You read this somewhere, or it's your own idea, or someone told you, or something else?)

The test itself is very well done - they try to get people to respond precisely, but checking attention, and asking multiple times questions about the same concept.

However, the article has a very fundamental flaw:

> Unfortunately, most people with extreme levels of dark personality traits don’t want to change who they are. Despite not being particularly happy with their lives

The test doesn't deal with "happiness" at all, which is a key component of the argument.

If consider as example a person like Steve Jobs, who would fair very high on narcisissm and machiavellism, what would be his happiness?

While he could have been as much successful being a nice person (there are examples in history, my favorite being Carmack), what does represent happiness for him, from the perspective of other people, and from his own?

Probably, from his own perspective, he's a "happy" person - he craves attention and success, and he satisfies both.

I think defining happiness in a more general sense requires a certain "wider" personality, which this type of people doesn't have - ultimately, they're very narrow.

Generalizing this example, the argument "Despite not being particularly happy with their lives" doesn't really hold - this type of ferociously and single-mindedly driven people are ultimately succeeding in their own, narrow, purpose.

I've found Daniel Khaneman's definition of happiness being useful here.

He divides happiness into two parts: a "experiential" happiness and a "reflecting" happiness.

For the sake of the discussion and acknowledging I have zero insight into his personality, someone like Steve Jobs could be low in "experiential" happiness (seemingly endlessly frustrated in the present moment) and high on the "reflecting" happiness ("look at all the great, transformational things I've brought to the world")

What is his evidence for "reflecting" happiness?

Essentially your memories after the moment has past.

I heard Steve Rinella talking about this as it relates to hunting. He spoke about how there's some trips where you're miserable in the moment (cold, bug-bitten) but when it's all over you have fond memories of the experience and consider it worthwhile.

If you mean specific to Jobs, I don't have any and was just trying to relate to the OP comment, which is why I couched it with the caveat that I have no insight into his psychology. Maybe he generally was happy during the moment and maybe he was actually miserable when reflecting on his life, I have no idea.

If happiness is the ultimate goal should we work on finding something like heroin, but without tolerance build up and withdrawals?

Maybe, but I don’t know that is a good assumption because that experiential happiness is, by definition, fleeting. That reflecting fulfilling memory lasts longer and I don’t that is maximized under that assumption

If you find a drug or way to alter a person's chemistry, you could maximize both.

Altering a person's chemistry is exactly what a drug does, so I may be missing what you're trying to illuminate here.

"Could" there be a drug that makes people both experientially more happy and more industrious to the point where they have more reflecting happiness? Sure, but there could also be drugs that cure cancer and make us smarter at the same time too, I just don't have any pragmatic reason to believe we'll see one anytime soon because I suspect they work on very different mechanisms

Using a throwaway for obvious reasons.

I've been diagnosed as having narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) by several doctors so maybe I can shed some light on this.

NPD is the inability to generate and/or experience internal validation. It is the lack of internal voice saying "good job". NPD is not self-aggrandizement although that is a common coping mechanism used to deal with the underlying disorder. I don't think I'm some sort of minor deity, but I'm also told by my doctors that I'm considerably more introspective than the typical narcissist (the irony of my docs being a source of praise is not lost on me).

Because I do not have an internal source of validation I seek out validation and praise from others to fill the void. Psychiatrists call these sources of validation "narcissistic supply". That supply is a finite resource, eventually I either exhaust or build up a tolerance to the individual / group supplying the validation which causes me to seek out new sources. Some people have compared it to an addict trying to find their fix, a metaphor I find distasteful since it does people suffering from addiction a disservice.

In this way I don't think I can be happy because I cannot remain satisfied. Sometimes I feel good, but I understand that no matter what I do, success I achieve, or people I help it will never be enough. I have a hard time staying still because I know that whatever source of supply I'm currently tapping will eventually run dry. It's a rather restless experience.

Thanks for sharing your experiences of being diagnosed with NPD.

I was wondering what made you get referred to the ‘several doctors’ in the first instance, and what treatments did they recommend to help manage your NPD?

I also use throwaways, but to give unpopular advice. I'd say that youre probably alright, but your state indicates an objective reality which is wasting time on things deemed pointless by your ego or soul, whatever you call it. Whenever we engage in such pointless activities, e.g. chasing money, our egos lose interest that feels as the unexplainable loss of life satisfaction. Activities that are deemed important by our egos are usually considered unimportant by our today's society's. The famous example is meditation: it seems meaningless, but for whatever reason it instantly brings the ego's attention and that feels as an unexplainable satisfaction in achieving something important, even though you can't explain whats being achieved. It's like lighting up an internal candle. Other activities are research of certain usually abstract topics, but also giving to others (not just money, but also time or knowledge). I'd recommend studying the bright side of occultism, and start with a short essay called "light on the path" (and to dodge the wrath of the orthodox HN community, I'm using a throwaway account). That essay has a few important references that will eventually lead you to less known books by Plato, Newton and many others. You'll laugh at the idea that Plato was just a philosopher. By that time you wont have lack of internal self validation.

I require external validation and I can't validate myself. Does it make me narcissistic too?

Most everyone react positively to positive feedback from peers.

Most of what I do in life is in order for me to be considered successful by others and I don't trust my own judgment of my success. How do I know if I'm delusional or not without feedback of others?

Taken to an extreme, yes, it’s possible you suffer from narcissism. There are also many other forms of the pattern, a common one is impostor syndrome. Speaking from experience, it can present a lot like narcissism (seeking external validation and even self-aggrandizement as a coping mechanism). But it can also subside when enough external validation is established to enable self-validation. If you need external validation for things that are unfamiliar or unproven, but you’re able to self-validate as your comfort level rises, it’s probably something more like that. If you continue to need external validation after you’ve reached enough comfort and certainty on the thing that bears validation, there may be more going on.

Personality traits that are not advantageous in some way are unlikely to be maintained over many generations of evolution.

Personality traits that are universally advantageous would not be discernible as traits, because they would become universal to everyone.

Therefore, all personality traits must also be disadvantageous in some way.

So-called "dark trait" behaviors obviously confer advantages at least in the short term. In the long run, we're all dead, but early success compounds, like interest.

Some of the luckiest psychopaths will end up at the very top, while some of the unluckiest will end up six feet under.

This is difficult to accurately capture in statistics, but the expected gain from "dark triad" traits across the whole population is probably zero.

Great comment! High risk, high reward behavior, almost by definition, doesn't often seem too appealing when looking at the averages. We aren't the only organism that loves to gamble though, and there's a reason for that.

Some personality traits haven't adapted to modern life as well as others and some have adapted extremely well. For instance most people have too much anxiety since you had to be way more careful throughout history. Now you have so much safety net everywhere so risk taking is a much more valuable trait as most people are biased against taking risks.

It is not true that traits that are not advantageous are unlikely to be maintained over many generations. For example, many genetic diseases have survived for many generations. This may happen because, for example, they correlate with some other more positive traits. Or, because of other indirect, external factors.

The dream of many a disgruntled intellectual teen is to have a dark personality, yet be so good at the hard skills that people put up with it.

The most unproductive form this can take is when dark personality traits are seen as a signal of brilliance... “Well if they’re such an asshole they must be good at their job or they would have been shown the door already”.

See also: the idolisation of Rick from Rick and Morty

This is also the axis, personified by the title character, around which the story arcs are bent in House. House is meant as a modern day reboot of Sherlock Holmes, who was written to a similarly extreme NPD template.

What's an NPD template?

I still secretly have this dream and I am almost 30.

The question I'd rather ask: Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed in systems set up by people with dark personality traits?

Traits only have meaning in an environment, a context. It's not clear how much we can control the traits. But we definitely can control the environment. The modern corporation only goes back to the age of railroads. Many of our governmental systems don't go back much farther. These are things we can change.

I think an even better, albeit harder, question would be "how can we set up systems such that even when they're gamed they result in positive outcomes?".

Any system with incentives can be gamed. Those that learn to game systems as a means to survival are always going to be adept at manipulating those systems.

I've always thought the answer to that question (which unfortunately is a very hard one) is the ideal form of government. Figure out what balance between personal and societal "positive outcomes" we can stomach and then set up rules that lead us there.

I think some of the oldest and most successful bits of governance are built on this principle, but there's a lot of laws out there that seem to just attempt to dictate a desired outcome without considering how the real world will only nominally comply.

It mentions those with "dark traits" tend to be seen as poor team players, but perhaps that's exactly why these types ascend to top leadership positions. Your "team play" ability only matters to the extent that you engage in peer-to-peer relationships, which can be relatively minimal in that position compared to, say, middle management. See, for instance, Steve Jobs. I've never heard him described as a "team player", exactly.

In the end, I'd say both types are important. Obviously we need team players, but sometimes you need an auteur or benevolent dictator. Measuring success for these different types should account for their respective strengths.

The problem is benevolent dictator too often becomes tyrant.

In my personal experience, the problem with individuals with narcissistic psychopathic features in management or executive positions is that there's almost always opportunity costs with regard to a different way that could have achieved more with less cost. That is, they are ruthless and destructive, and claim doing so was necessary, but it's only because there was a very very simple alternate approach (often requiring some modicum of social awareness) that could have yielded something even better at a fraction of the financial and personal cost. Their approach is often presented as "harsh but necessary" when it's anything but.

Also, they tend to deceptively take credit for progress, in the sense that things that would have occurred regardless, even without them in that position. Often things were already in progress before they attained their position, and often the people who were responsible for that are actually eliminated by them so as to remove threats to them getting credit. This is part of the problem: that they tend to manipulate others and the system for their own gain. In fact, I'm a bit suspicious of attributions of success associated with dark traits, even in a research context, because of this phenomenon. I wouldn't say I think the association isn't there, but I think it's a serious research design problem that isn't completely addressed (e.g., let's say you have a company whose profits are starting to increase with acceleration, and a psychopath who wants to gain from that. if they move up in a leadership position as they see it as profitable personally, are subsequent institutional gains due to them or the pre-existing conditions the psychopath appraised? It will look like the gains occurred after the psychopath entered the position, but in reality, the causal direction goes the other way around -- that the psychopath was attracted to the position because they saw it as something that would reflect well on them).

I think there's some kind of bias in play with these sorts of social-personality characteristics, where people tend to have a blind spot to the opportunity costs of this behavior (akin to survivorship bias but different). It probably has an established name, but I don't know what it is.

With the caveat that I have no ability whatsoever to diagnose psychopathy, I nevertheless found the book Snakes in Suits[1][2] (TLDR notes[3]) to be a fascinating and accessible read on the topic. At some point in each of our careers, particularly for readers of HN, we will likely encounter individuals that exhibit the traits described in the text. As the old maxim goes - 'forewarned is forearmed.'

[1] http://snakesinsuits.com/index.html

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

[3] https://thepowermoves.com/snakes-in-suits/

They are damaging, but nevertheless they are ascending to leadership positions. Look at middle management - it literally selects for people with lower EQ who are insensitive towards needs of people who dont have power. Or those with narcissistic psychopathic features.

Yes, they harm things. But their nice cooperating peers are less likely to "steal" other peoples achievements and progress less.

Plenty of anti-social individuals are masters of subtle manipulation and can min/max along social axis to reach their goals. It's dangerous to assume that individuals with narcissistic psychopathic features will always be "ruthless or destructive" because many (most?) will not.

I'd agree.

I'd further go on to say that 'unhappiness' is where there's a divergence of "Who you are", "Who you want to be" & "Where you are". Happy people tend to the ones who're really good at their job and a pleasure to work/spend time with.

I'd have thought the ideal would be you'd have your corporate structure/society, with all the varied positions filled and everybody happy in their roles.

Where it goes wrong is where the overall need doesn't map to the population - e.g. half of the people want to be benevolant dictators

>Your "team play" ability only matters to the extent that you engage in peer-to-peer relationships

It doesn't "only matter" in relationships that are horizontal on the org chart. They're just not the totality of the non-peer relationships. Understanding and communicating boundaries between teaming and exercising authority is key to efficiently moving everyone toward a target.

To torture the sports team metaphor more, the captains on a team are players but also an authority among the players. To the front office, a coach is a member of the gameday team.

The first and second books of Plato’s republic[0] touches on a similar idea; who gets the better of life: The just or the unjust man?

It’s a dialogue between Socrates and a few others (in turn). Really neat read and relevant to the conversation.

The article also mentions machiavelli’s The Prince[1], which is a shorter read and more tactical.

[0] http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.2.i.html

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm

People who have a desire for power, are often the ones who end up getting it. I hope societies can think of methods that allow calm and reasonable people to be elected.

What pains me the most is that (in my country) you can go to police-profiled school at 15 years old.

Who the heck is capable to make this choice at 15? What traits is this going to amplify in a public force?

I hope so too, and promoted at the workplace

Be careful extrapolating to the individual from studies such as these, as the study environments control for context while the real world does not.

For example, I worked with an developer who I’d consider low on agreeableness. She functioned extremely well in a seed stage startup as 1 of 2 engineers. She was willing to fight for the right decision no matter what and didn’t care how people felt about that.

As the startup scaled, however, her disregard for the feelings of others hampered her effectiveness. Her engineering team became one of the lower performing in the organization.

Did her personality help or hinder the organization? Did it contribute or detract from her individual goals and overall happiness?

Yes.

Succeed at what, making things people want, or operating in a bureaucracy? The latter, absolutely, bureaucracy is the pupal nursery for psychopathy, but when you actually have to help people, these traits don't work well.

Notice how these two things are divided based on different criteria: one is about aspiration/stated intent (“making things people want”) while the other just plainly describes a person’s role in a wider context. Sounds like a setup for falling for Fundamental Attribution Error.

My worry isn't addressed by this study: Some portion of people with dark personality traits start from a privileged position.

If someone's parent is the head of a company, or even well-connected, "achiev[ing] less and [being] considered poor team players" are much less of an impediment. If someone can effectively skip or get more slack in passing through the career levels for which dark traits are a disadvantage, they'll likely do quite well once they're at the top.

Exactly. A vague and general population study just tells is that dark traits are on average not helpful, it doesn’t tell us anything about outliers.

Someone with dark traits and significantly above average intelligence, or inherited wealth, may be able to avoid the pitfalls that otherwise prevent such people advancing.

Even if such people are very rare, e.g. 1 in 10,000, they would have an outsized influence, so we should be as interested in the outliers as the general population.

I think the whole thing is flawed.

Why?

Because criminals and other people who do overall negative things to society as a whole are obviously going to skew averages of dark personality traits down, decrease their average "success/happiness" score.

This means that there might exist productive people with "dark personalities" who might very well be much more productive than "light personalities", but this won't come out since average will be skewed.

You can have dark view of humanity/people and use people for your means, but still do great things for society. You could also use other people on an individual level to do great things for society in general. Also you don't have to be happy while doing it, and I would consider being influence on the world to be a definition of success. And arguably you would be able to have more influence if you were willing to use some "dark personality traits".

Essentially to understand whether "dark traits" can be more productive and achieve more you would have to exclude from results anyone who is fine with doing activities that generally harm society.

Take Bill Gates for example. He obviously has "dark traits", but as he got older he got better at hiding them and now look, what kind of positive influence he has had over the world. And arguably there aren't many people out there that are more successful than him. Same with Elon Musk, yadayadayada.

What are some of Gates dark traits that comes to your mind? (What did he do?)

There are a lot of those dark traits out there, and we have to segment them. Just from my exp, I see more dark traits on successful people, albeit it doesn't necessarily mean that people with dark traits are more likely to succeed. Can't say if it's universal though.

I'd also argue that dark traits linked to social success are more or less born, or heavily influenced by childhood exp (which is essentially "born"), so it's kind of difficult to "pick" it up after reaching adulthood.

There's different groups of people with dark traits. There are straight up criminals who are going to skew the averages, but most successful people do have dark traits, so to me at least it's obvious that dark traits can make you more successful, you just can't do this whole study from the angle they are doing to understand anything meaningful except to have some "holier than thou" results produced.

The idea that people with darker personalities will succeed may also be a perception bias.

According to this article we are talking about 20% of people with some degree of "dark traits".

Of course a group this large will intersect with the most successful portion of the population.

And, successful people with bad traits are likely to stand out in peoples perceptions.

I can kind of feel this articles point. Due to some life-changing events and a bipolar disorder I have developed quite some of these dark traits. But they do tend to come and go. I am not proud of them but they did help me establish myself professionally on some levels while dragging me down on others.o My soft side would usually be very sorry and forgiving while the darker side would push my ego.

I had one episode where the darker side took over. I felt like a king, not respecting others opinions on me. For the first time I had this self-esteem which my soft side was lacking. I did actually double my salary with that dark side but ever since I feel completely lonely.

'Success' and 'Happiness' may be conflated, depending on how Success is defined.

I think it's interesting to focus on Success, and then consider two types: a) Success for personal benefit, b) success achieving a higher purpose.

(Intentionally referencing film characters)

Success for personal benefit may be illustrated by Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street. He succeeded in becoming, for a while, the type of wealthy person he imagined as a young man that he wanted to become.

Success achieving a higher purpose may be illustrated by Terence Fletcher from Whiplash. He succeeded in turning musicians with talent into accomplished performers.

Both personalities could be considered 'dark'. One succeeded by being a charming pathological liar. The other by dismissing any sense of empathy and driving others with severe, manipulative criticism.

But in the end, it was type a) that eventually flamed out and type b) that had an enduring impact on his profession.

I think the notion of 'how to get the most out of people' actually depends on the people you are trying to get the most out of. Many musicians quit under Terence because the achievement was not worth the suffering along the way. Others were motivated to excellence by his style, and he didn't care that they hated him for it.

They're certainly more likely to steal your stuff and try to resell it, in my experience.

Most importantly, they're likely to see a contract in terms of "What can I get away with" rather than "I gave my word in writing".

> dark traits ... leads to limited success in work or politics

I definitely wouldn't say so. Instead, such people control most large countries, as presidents or dictators, incl the US until recently

Dark traits are helpful once you are actually in the position of power. This article thought dark traits might help get you there, but this is not the case. The economic system rewards leaders who are cut throat and rewards subordinates who are kind, it makes a lot of sense when you frame it that way really.

If you are a CEO the system will reward you for paying people less wages so you can beat out competition.

If you are a worker the system will reward you for kissing the CEO's ass (by not punishing you).

Depends on your definition of success, but psychopaths do exist.

http://hintjens.com/blog:_psychopaths

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

―Primo Levi

I would take this article with a grain of salt. It gets a lot wrong and a lot of it is questionable.

For example, notice something about the stats it gives throughout the article? It's whole numbers, and with large variations: 10-20 per cent of individuals, 30-50 per cent of people, and so on. That variation and the whole numbers should be a read flag. When performing a study very precise numbers pop up. This isn't a confidence interval they're calculating, it's made up numbers. (The real numbers btw are between 8 and 9% of the US population.)

Let's look at the premise:

>For 15 years, research into dark personality traits (including narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism) has been rapidly expanding.

Straight from the get go it uses fuzzy or vague terminology. Furthermore, it does not attempt to explain its chosen initial terminology.

The actual terminology is:

- ASPD for something close to the Hollywood psychopathy/sociopathy stereotype, there is no official psychopath in the DSM.

- Narcissism is NPD, and NPD is quite different from what people typically call a narcissist looking at themselves in the mirror, so the audience is going to misunderstand without explanation.

- Machiavellianism. It explains how countries slowly take over land of other countries. It explains how to maintain power on a national level once you have it, and so on. I admit I don't even know what the machiavellianism stereotype is. Maybe Game of Thrones and people backstabbing each other? That is not Machiavellian.

Using vague terminology is a way to get people to believe things without questioning them. It gets the audience to think they know the topic on a deep level, but instead their understanding is reduced. A lot of conspiracy theory websites do this, and even political websites as of late. Sadly, at times, vague terminology can be used as a technique to manipulate people. Fuzzy terminology is a red flag when validating a source.

I could keep going and critique this article all the way through, but it would be quite a long post. (eg, they say these characteristics are more common in men, but there are more female narcissists than there are males, which is the largest group.) In short, a healthy dose of skepticism is helpful. The article aims to solidify a stereotype, that makes it easier for actual bad actors to not be identified. Sadly, reality is darker than these stereotypes.

> We immediately know this is a fluff piece because it uses pop psychology terminology, instead of the actual terminology.

Using the actual terminology in a popular article is what turns that terminology into pop psychology terminology. You can ask for popular articles to use the current terms, or you can ask for psychology terms to retain their precise clinical meaning, but you can't have both.

You can explain what you mean, link to sources that explain, and so on.

No, you can have both. It's as simple as the author explaining what they mean. But this also requires the author to actually know what they're talking about, and popsci article authors very often don't.

I read somewhere that bullies are more successful on average than the rest of the population. So they not only do better than their victims, but everyone.

If one defines success as true happiness that lasts, no.

If you want caregivers and to be around people who like you and actually care while you are aging and then old, I would say strongly that it is better to practice treating others the way you would want to be treated, with honesty and kindness. Or if you want to be around that kind of people (I hope everyone would, upon reflection). Or if you believe in God (for which I have many reasons that I find compelling, even "proof" sufficient to my personal satisfaction), or if one wants to play the safe side of Pascal's wager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager).

Money is a poor companion compared to trustworthy, unselfish, kind people who know that you in turn can be trusted. (And my experiences with social security and medicare, as well as everything I have read or studied in years, including the outcomes of communisms, family travel and degrees, language study, etc etc, strongly bear this out--we don't want to rely just on institutions to care for us if we can have people who know us and who care, and whom we have trained by our example over a long time to be caring and have a service-oriented mindset of actual considerate love for others. For example, close and extended family, neighbors, and strangers. There is no real substitute.

Stalin, for one example, had "success" in terms of power, prestige, and something like adoration of the masses. But if what I read, as I recall, is correct, he died neglected and miserable in a pool of his own waste, surrounded by false friends who cared only when fear required it. And either way, I think the concept could be obvious.

If one just wants pleasure, power, and attention during your years of best health, and to fade & die after you can't maintain it, and thinks life is just the law of the jungle (dominate until you are dominated, rule or ruin?), then maybe you would consider that honesty and kindness don't matter. I strongly recommend honesty and kindness, treating others the way you would want to be treated, and a clear conscience for a truly happy life. Much more could be said. :)

Edit: s/surrounded by/near/ (4th para. re Stalin)

How do psychologists measure personality traits to classify people in these kinds of categories (dark/light)?

There’s a great book that goes over this by Wharton Professor Adam Grant called Give and Take

Depends on how you define 'succeed'.

back in the day, they were just called bad people as we wondered why they were still around.

There is also the question of which personality does the most good for a company. I'll hope you will all forgive me if I quote myself here. At the end of my book "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps" I concluded with this thought:

----------------------------------------

If you read much of the business press, you're aware that there are two competing theories about what makes a great business leader. One theory says the leaders should be extremely aggressive psychopaths who crush all their competition. For an example of this theory, you can read almost any biography about Steve Jobs. The second theory says that humble, egoless leaders build the most successful companies, because they do the best job facilitating cooperation and communication. James Collins, in his book Good to Great, makes this case about several leaders, including Darwin E. Smith of the paper company Kimberly-Clark.

Nonetheless, we can find examples of both types of leaders succeeding. Steve Jobs was successful. So was Darwin E. Smith. Is there any way to reconcile the conflicting theories? I believe there is: simply assume that the most important quality any business leader can have is the willingness to quickly fire weak players. Therefore ruthless psychopaths damage their businesses with their pathology, but then make up for it by firing people quickly. And humble, egoless leaders help their companies with their healthy attitudes, but then undermine the business by being too slow to fire weak players.

Humble, egoless leadership, ready to fire fast — that is a rare combination. I would say that Andy Grove of Intel had that combination of traits. And of course, there is Ray Kroc of McDonald's. Due to some people's aversion to the food sold at McDonald's, the sheer brilliance of Kroc's entrepreneurship often goes unsung. But he was willing to take a risk on complete unknowns, most notably on June Martino, one of the all-time great hires in the history of USA business. At the same time, Kroc was willing to fire anyone who didn’t work out. That combination of willingness to take risks on unknowns and quickly fire any mistakes is something to which all business leaders should aspire.

How to spread awareness of what is needed in the leadership of startups?

Recently, I exchanged some email with my friend Colin Steele (currently CTO of TypeZero and formerly CTO of RoomKey.com). We discussed another startup that had failed, and he wrote:

"It's sad and disheartening. I think few people understand how amazingly difficult it is to start a new business, and run it successfully. Drama, people, and personalities, seem to have an outsized role in how these things crash and burn. There needs to be some codification of best internal practices for creating startups, like Steve Blank's book “4 Steps To The Epiphany,” but for the culture; a co-routine that runs alongside "customer development" – call it "culture development" or something."

https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo...

The term dark personalities refer to a set of socially aversive traits (such as spitefulness, greed, sadism, narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) in the subclinical range. And thus, according yo this article, those with dark personality traits are slightly more likely to emerge as leaders and are seen as charismatic but, when it comes to getting the job done, they tend to achieve less and are considered poor team players.

To which one can ask, what are the consequences of not getting the job done or not being a team player?

I don't see much, but I'm a cynic.

Consequences. Maybe they get more spare time, if they work less, and can pursue other interests?

And they can order light pattern people stay in the office and work late to cover up for them?

Also see my siblings reply (sibling to your reply)

It also notes the low life satisfaction and a desire to never change and instead aquire more power over people.

They seem to be confident in themselves but unable to self analyze.

Looks like putting these people in positions of power is terrible as they will lead to an overall worse performance for your company.

> emerge as leaders and are seen as charismatic but, when it comes to getting the job done, they tend to achieve less

That's a bit funny -- achieve less, according to who?

They might be satisfied with having gotten promoted, and higher salaries, status -- whilst looking at getting the actual work done, as off topic.

They've achieved success, from their perspective, but not from the researchers perspective?

Why would the researchers opinions matter more

The book Blueprint talks about this.

Society can't function with only "dark personalities". When only dark personalities are in the room, everyone loses.

When it's a mixture, the dark personalities get more.

You can quickly see how this can impact evolution if someone swindles their way to wealth and has multiple wives/partners.

Highly intelligent people are highly adaptable. If the incentives set by the system favor certain traits deemed as dark there will be a non zero percentage of people developing these traits. Especially in highly competitive fields. For example is it a dark trait to work at the minimum required level in a company while spending the time gained to sharpen my skills so I get a 50% salary increase changing jobs instead of a possible 5% increase for performance?

this might be a reflection of dark traits if you're blatantly harming your coworkers, say, by doing this. But otherwise I'd say no, it's not evidence of a dark trait to work at the minimum required level. You don't owe a corporate entity more than that.

I never look to harm other people, but according to this quiz I got quite "dark" results. So it doesn't seem like they are specifically considering harming others as the definition of dark traits.

I got most highest result in Narcissism or Entitled Self Importance. This just means that I'm ambitious and it's important for me to succeed and others to see that I am successful. It doesn't mean I'm harming others. Most of my motivations in life are for people to consider me to be intelligent for instance, but I don't see how it specifically harms anyone. I don't want them to consider me intelligent on flawed premises.

To start, I'll define what I view "dark traits" to mean personally to me. They mean having an internal moral system where it is acceptable to harm others in some ways.

The more harm a person is willing to do, the more we generally label those people with the personality traits that we say are "dark".

There is some measure of psychology that would indicate that many such people who we label that way have neuro-atypical thought patterns. They may even simply feel differently about things.

I personally view freewill / personal decision as the primary factor in harming/not-harming others though.

A single person can be all of the following simultaneously: 1. Empathetic ( able to understand what others feel and also feel those emotions themselves ) 2. Willing to harm others ( disregarding how they feel ) 3. Successful. 4. Appear to be neurotypical ( for the most part ) 5. Be "team players" 6. Be narcissistic 7. Be manipulative 8. Be happy

The false conclusion made by most is that harming others is incompatible with the other modes of thinking. That is unreasonable as it is relying on "holistic stability of the mind". There is no guarantee that the thought process or emotions of a human being are internally consistent.

There is also no guarantee that the observable actions of an individual reveal their internal processes.

Since this is a throwaway, I'll take this a step further. I'm okay with actively harming others, either for my own amusement or my own gain.

I can understand how those I would harm feel about it, and understand how terrible that feeling is. It doesn't prevent me from causing this feeling in others. I simply choose to do so. I may occasionally become overly fixated on the emotion, but I am capable of dismissing it.

I am very successful and command a high salary. I am well liked by my peers. I am commended regularly for my work. I am considered a "team player" and am regularly asked to mentor others ( and do so as well ).

Those around me believe and say that they think I am neurotypical even when I have confronted a select few that I am not.

I morally believe that taking advantage of others is "wrong", but I still am capable of doing it, and I do.

I'm happy about who I am. While I do occasionally ponder the morality of my actions, and feel what you might call "guilt" over them, I choose to actively dismiss these emotions and carry on anyway.

I don't think I'm the only person who is this way. In fact, I'd wager that the majority of people are capable of harming others for their own gains, and able to dismiss guilt over it given a bit of effort.

I do agree that I am atypical in the amount of harm I could do and easily dismiss it... but I don't think any of these studies are able to easily "detect" me.

Put simply: if there exist light/dark people, I'm definitely on the dark side, and it absolutely enables me to succeed in ways those on the light side could not.

I will though meter this statement a bit by saying that being on the dark side also can be constraining. There is less mental effort needed to simply choose a solid moral base and stick to it. Most of the atrocities in history have come from highly religious groups with strict principles. Blinding believing in some set of morals is very enabling.

So it is inaccurate to say that being dark/light will cause success either way. There is simply too much variance and complexity with the ways a human can approach life.

> doesn't prevent me from causing this feeling in others

Can I ask for an example? If can be presented anonymously

> I don't think any of these studies are able to easily "detect" me

I agree. Is it a bit weird that the researchers didn't add any notes about this

(Or if they did i didn't see that)

Well I don't outright physically harm others ( such as with my fists, fights, weapons, etc )

I don't though seem to have a problem urging others to engage in dangerous behavior that could cause them physical harm.

This is essentially a throwaway account but I've decided to continue to use it till it gets banned into oblivion.

Ycombinator themselves still have the IP address though, and I'm not bothering with Tor and VPNs for its usage, so I could be held accountable should I admit to anything illegal.

There is nothing I am doing that I know of that is outright illegal, but I do believe that some of the things I am involved with do in turn cause probable harm to others. ( of their own accord )

I unfortunately can't give the concrete examples that cause me to believe what I've said, as it would both lead to telling more about myself than I wish, and also expose me to even greater criticism.

I'll give one example that I think is fairly common: I have no issue verbally abusing others, especially in a workplace scenario. I was, in fact, encouraged to do so during my time at Amazon. Anything for the results.

Cussing someone out to their face in front of others, berating them very strongly telling them that their work is absolute garbage is something I have done on occasion and feel almost zero guilt about. I feel they deserve it.

The trouble is that I feel this notion of "other people deserve to suffer" for the majority of humans. I personally dislike crushing bugs... but the idea of a human being harmed somewhat pleases me because intellectually I think humans deserve mostly to suffer.

I have seen personality studies that have detection for people attempting to fool the study in the following ways:

1. Answering too extreme to any particular known "psychological profile" will throw flags. Unless you are trying to manipulate your answers, generally you won't perfectly match any particular profile. I do though account for this when I answer psych tests by diversifying my answers and not being perfect in my manipulation of the test.

2. The same question is asked in multiple ways to see if a person will answer it different ways when asked from a different perspective. This is an attempt to detect the person "spinning" their answer based on the way it is asked. It is pretty easy to spot these questions though, at least within a single session of questions, so I usually notice these and attempt not to answer them in a conflicting way.

3. Questions are asked that are overly personal or probe to traumatic areas. I've had shrinks attempt to goad me into overly emotion reactions when I am carefully answering questions in the way I want to present myself. The best way to combat this is to intentionally believe in a particular set of emotional responses and to not attempt to hide any emotions. One cannot completely suppress whatever emotions you have, therefore you can only really be deceptive well about things you don't feel emotional about. Fortunately, over time one will tend to believe and experience the feelings that you act like you have. Eg: If you feign love for someone, it isn't that hard for it to appear entirely real, and you do feel it to some degree even if you know it "isn't real". The trouble here is feigning too intense reactions in an attempt to live up to the "real portrayal" of the emotion. Example: The person you love is belittled by someone and you react angrily defending the person you "love". Those faking will tend to go overboard with the reaction.

We wish to cast humans into profiles, sort of like applying stereotypes to people. This will seem to work and make some statistical sense out of how people act, but it fails terribly at the corner cases.

People are internally as complex as we can possibly imagine.

The tests and analyses given tend to work for specific debilitation. They do not work for intentional malfeasance. If you are "healthy" for a general psychological perspective, you can simply choose to be a dark person for no particularly good reason other than deciding to be.

I'll admit that one typically chooses to be dark due to the experiences you have in life. Do you, though, know all of the traumatic experiences a person has had that you meet? How could you possibly? Supposing you knew, must we assume automatically that many traumatic experiences absolutely cause continuing problems in life?

This reminds me of a question I had early in life on a test to work in a retail sales position. The question was "would you steal or borrow $5 from the register", followed by "$1", then "10 cents". I of course dutifully answered "I would never steal or borrow any amount".

The trouble with my answer is that it is not a human answer. Most normal humans beings, if we answer such a question truthfully, would not care at all about borrowing 10 cents. Depending on the job and the amount of money, $1 also would be meaningless.

The amount that it becomes acceptable to "fudge" increases as you deal with larger amounts of goods and money. You begin to realize that small amounts really are irrelevant and not worth thinking about too hard. This is normal healthy behavior.

A person who is a stickler and insists that no amount of money can ever be borrowed/stolen... watch out. Such a person is dangerous.

> personality studies that have detection for people attempting to fool the study

Interesting to hear about that, and what you've found.

What you write, makes me think about the feelings part of the brain, and that those parts are really old, like, from the dinosaur age. And they're a bit stupid and predictable, I think.

The emotional intelligence tests try to "measure" those old and silly and predictable parts of the brain -- but maybe the new and fancy cerebral cortex logical thinking parts of an intelligent person's brain, can always learn and understand how the feelings parts of the brain, would react in different situations.

Maybe it's impossible to create accurate EQ tests (that cannot be gamed by a bright person with some life experience), because the EQ parts of the brain are too simple to understand how they work, for the thinking and reasoning parts of the brain.

> you can simply choose to be a dark person for no particularly good reason other than deciding to be.

Apparently you can -- I cannot though. The long term effects of my decisions, needs to be friendly to others (or have no effect), otherwise my brain produces strong unpleasant feelings.

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Interesting to read about the $5 from the register question. I'd never think about that way at looking at the answers.

Instead I'd thought that never never taking $1 would have been a bit too rigid, inflexible, a trait that I d guessed could cause other types of problems (but what do I know).

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