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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Some discussion here:

https://www.psychreg.org/executive-narcissism-inhibits-inter...

> Dr Liu offered two theories as to why narcissism stands in the way of knowledge transfer: One, narcissistic unit heads may strongly believe that they have a superior knowledge stock, compared to executives in other units, and understand their unit’s problems better – leading them to believe others’ knowledge is less valuable. The second theory is that these executives may believe that knowledge transfer may diminish their sense of superiority and uniqueness, leading them to decline to receive external knowledge in an attempt to preserve their image.

If you're worried you might have narcissitic tendencies, don't worry too much: a real narcissist would never entertain such a notion.

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If you're worried you might have narcissitic tendencies, don't worry too much: a real narcissist would never entertain such a notion.

this is literally not true, research indicates narcissists know they are narcissistic

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beautiful-minds/2011...

http://www.simine.com/docs/Carlson_et_al_JPSP_2011a.pdf

But they are not worried about it -- usually at least.

Narcissists are typically extremely worried, though they won't admit it, probably not to themselves. They are people who feel extremely vulnerable and insist that everything around them cannot threaten that vulnerability. Their kids, for example, have to make them feel like the perfect parent. Not a happy way to live, for them or the people around them.

One of the most fun things about psychology is that everything sounds intuitive and obvious, even if wrong.

There's an anecdote about a professor telling his students on the first day of a Psychology class, "some things about this field are obvious common sense — for instance, a baby won't recognize and prefer more attractive people as they're unaware of beauty standards."

The class all agrees, and the professor says "JK, babies actually do! Welcome to Psychology."

I think you just described the problem with rational arguments in general. Great until evidence points out otherwise.

Can an argument be rational if it is not founded on evidence? I don't think it is rational to adopt beliefs as a grounds for reasoning without any reasons for adopting them.

Gravity is not, in fact, the attraction of lesser mass to greater mass. Gravity is the repulsion of lesser mass by greater mass.

In the case of the Earth, this means you are repulsed toward the Earth by the weight of the column of space "above" you, and are only prevented from falling through the Earth by its density. The Earth is relatively equally displaced by the column surrounding it, meaning you do not notice this effect.

Gravity seems to come in waves because all things in the relevant column are moving, but the shifting of mass is almost unimportant to your perception because it is such a small value. The magnitude and frequency is such that it goes unnoticed to all but the most sensitive equipment.

.... completely no evidence available, but, it sounds kind of reasonable.

You actually cited evidence in your example:

>prevented from falling through the Earth

>Gravity seems to come in waves

>the shifting of mass is almost unimportant to your perception [...] unnoticed to all but the most sensitive equipment.

Point taken. With that in mind, yes, you're left with Shrodinger's cat.

Depends on who you ask – there's a certain school of economists that insists that a sufficiently "rational" argument is in fact preferable to evidence.

You can't find evidence for everything in the moment. If you're forced to act it makes sense to trust what seems most rational given limited knowledge.

It doesn't make sense when you don't need an answer at that time. If you can find evidence, you should.

If I heard that on the first day I would have left the classroom before the professor had time to correct the statement.

I almost did this in a literature class. I think it was the second day of the class, and we'd read James Joyce's "An Encounter". The prof read aloud sections of a published analysis of the story -- out of some big tome -- and asked us to discuss it. The analysis was so vacuous and absurd that I came inches from simply walking out, which would have been awkward because there were only like 8 students in the class. Mentally, I mapped out my path to the registrar so that I could drop the class and began checking out.

After a bit of classroom discussion, from which I abstained, the professor threw the book in the trash (clang! it was a metal trashcan) and gave a speech about how the analysis was gibberish, and how you can't just make up stuff about what a story says. He then walked us through how you might actually obtain useful insights about what the story means to say. It was apparent he gave that spiel every semester.

I'm glad I stayed; it was a good class.

Good Will Hunting?

Sounds more like Dead Poets Society with the tearing out of the introduction to the book of poems.

If only there were a saying about not jumping to conclusions based on a small amount of information that was somehow related to books!

Good god "deep thinkers" extrapolating ridiculous meaning from art/literature is a huge pet peeve of mine. Not too long ago I heard an art curator pull statements out of thin air about the political atmosphere of the time(400yrs ago) based on the angle the picture was drawn from. Incredible what a waste of time an art degree is.

The social effort required to leave into a 15 s statement is so high that you would not have done that. Why make grandiose claims about things you won't do? Like, you're telling me no one has ever said anything absurd to you and you've stayed? Bullshit.

Chill dude it’s Friday. Touch some grass

Can't. The only reason I'm so active on HN is that I can do two things:

- write code

- lie in bed from my motorcycle accident

And my code is currently compiling.

For your consideration: play through Red Dead 2, if you haven’t already.

Haha terrific tip. Thank you :)

Or play Factorio, except you won't want to get out of bed when healed. Or mod Factorio if you never want to get out of bed again.

Of course this relies on shaky definition of "attractive". Some looks are found ugly quite universally. And others are heavily socially influenced.

This. Babies aren't born loving ritual scarification or sideburns but they may be born preferring facial symmetry and an even skin tone.

That's some Willy Wonka somersault-level shit right there.

I'm pretty sure that was just an attempt at humor.

But your links are interesting nonetheless.

I think that was a joke and two - the only part they worry about, however, is their image. That's not the same as a person worrying about how they have potentially treated someone else.

The article also says "In reality, all of us are at least a little narcissistic. ", so make of that what you will. Me personally, I'm always cautious when research people claim to have found "truths" about human psychology - which is temporal, transient, highly mutable, highly context-dependent and extremely difficult to generalize.

Coming from a tech background which promotes algorithmic thinking, I have been more than humbled when trying to apply such conceptual frameworks to biological systems at my current job.

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