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 av

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.