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> Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed? I think these studies are all significantly flawed because successful people with dark person

> 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.

vorpalhex 6y ago
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.
- grugagag 6y ago
  > "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.
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    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
    - floydnoel 6y ago
      > 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...
      - virtual_void 6y ago
        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.
mediaman 6y ago
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.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  > 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
  - salawat 6y ago
    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.
- not_knuth 6y ago
  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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
mrtranscendence 6y ago
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.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
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.
- dfilppi 6y ago
  That assumes the community isnt evil
  - pixl97 6y ago
    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.
Barrin92 6y ago
>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.
dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
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.
- dweekly 6y ago
  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.
  - dan_hawkins 6y ago
    > Victors get to rewrite history Robert McNamara makes a great point about that in fantastic documentary The Fog of War.
haecceity 6y ago
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.
- mewpmewp2 6y ago
  What are you trying to say? Aren't those assumptions reasonable?
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    Sounds clearly reasonable to me
bronzeage 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dllthomas 6y ago
> 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.
friendlybus 6y ago
'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.
- sibeliuss 6y ago
  > '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.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    > 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.
    - sibeliuss 6y ago
      The consequences are detailed at length in the original post.
- dspillett 6y ago
  > '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!
DonHopkins 6y ago
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 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=CaNANDian 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=moeman1984 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=Stipoon 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=ChristopherHitchslap https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4nCaxHN-cY&ab_channel=Chris...
thewarrior 6y ago
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.
- Maven911 6y ago
  This is so on point with one person in particular I know that operates this way to the tee
- the_arun 6y ago
  +1 on your analysis & suggestion.
umtacos728 6y ago
Reminds me of working at Boring Company where when a client came into our office magically we all had masks on but then when they left masks were back off (sociopathic)
cambalache 6y ago
> 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.
darkerside 6y ago
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.
- thomasfromcdnjs 6y ago
  This is my exact perspective too.
- salawat 6y ago
  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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Geminidog 6y ago
  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.
sharadov 6y ago
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.

vorpalhex 6y ago

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.

grugagag 6y ago
> "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.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  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
  - floydnoel 6y ago
    > 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...
    - virtual_void 6y ago
      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.

mediaman 6y ago

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.

cutemonster 6y ago
> 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
- salawat 6y ago
  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.
not_knuth 6y ago
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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

mrtranscendence 6y ago

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.

marcus_holmes 6y ago

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.

dfilppi 6y ago
That assumes the community isnt evil
- pixl97 6y ago
  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.

Barrin92 6y ago

>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.

dj_mc_merlin 6y ago

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.

dweekly 6y ago
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.
- dan_hawkins 6y ago
  > Victors get to rewrite history Robert McNamara makes a great point about that in fantastic documentary The Fog of War.

haecceity 6y ago

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.

mewpmewp2 6y ago
What are you trying to say? Aren't those assumptions reasonable?
- cutemonster 6y ago
  Sounds clearly reasonable to me

bronzeage 6y ago

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.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dllthomas 6y ago

> 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.

friendlybus 6y ago

'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.

sibeliuss 6y ago
> '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.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  > 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.
  - sibeliuss 6y ago
    The consequences are detailed at length in the original post.
dspillett 6y ago
> '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!

DonHopkins 6y ago

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 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=CaNANDian 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=moeman1984 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=Stipoon 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=ChristopherHitchslap https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4nCaxHN-cY&ab_channel=Chris...

thewarrior 6y ago

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.

Maven911 6y ago
This is so on point with one person in particular I know that operates this way to the tee
the_arun 6y ago
+1 on your analysis & suggestion.

umtacos728 6y ago

Reminds me of working at Boring Company where when a client came into our office magically we all had masks on but then when they left masks were back off (sociopathic)

cambalache 6y ago

> 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.

darkerside 6y ago

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.

thomasfromcdnjs 6y ago
This is my exact perspective too.
salawat 6y ago
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.
deleted 6y ago
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Geminidog 6y ago
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.

sharadov 6y ago

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.