Thanks. The whole age/experience/time dynamic needs better nutting out.
Also I reckon (suggest as lead) that values are outcomes, more than causes. Not saying you're investigating them that way, but using them as like animistic tree spirits… might be they are just saplings or grandees of the forest using outcomes as handy labels, but that's not how they got there.
And another thing, any control for narcissism/psychopathy per se, if they are actual parasites rather than part of the rich diversity of life, is there an argument to control for their capture of that part of the spectrum. ????? maybe???? Sure it's a spectrum, sure things average out with age but.
I say this because I have seen covert and grandiose narcissists espouse all sorts of positions and values depending on the audience (i.e. otherwise incoherent positions) and what is seen (in the moment) as a good way to manipulate them. And I don't just mean standout mountebanks like the Petersen or Sam Bankman-Fried (Yuuuup, effective altruism). I've come across them in all groups, in all parts of the spectrum, where maintaining their membership to any group/view is more based on their tactical familiarity with their targets for generating supply/control/cash who happen to be in group/view X.
I can agree that values are outcomes in that they are an interaction between the individual genes and social environment. But my understanding is that values and attitudes are not as far down in the causal chain as it may seem:
"personality traits do not cause people to develop political attitudes; rather, the correlation between the two is a function of an innate common underlying genetic factor."
I will say that I do have a sense of people with Narcissistic tendencies to speak in a soulless, valueless way, espousing beliefs to make an impression the way other people try on clothes.
But I don't think I really understood much of what you were driving at. Could you try to be more clear?
When we find a link, or fail to, it may be that this link is contingent on "a function"' 's ability to operate in context X. Such that the correlation appears (& can be found significant) in some circumstance and not others. Researching the underlying genetic factor will be confounded by context, (in this case the capriciousness of fashion choices in self-reporting surveys). Values can be worn as accessories, for some that is all they are. (Darwin in the Descent of Man on "a taste for beauty" and its outcomes might help here? That's where I got capriciousness from). I'm not arguing it is not there mind. Just that sometimes it might be outcomes all the way down until we find the correct framework.
I guess I am also saying I admire your pluck. Not sure if we can get there from here.
I'm nearly 60 and have experienced a number of narcissists, but only lately have had the vocabulary to talk about them. How might N1 & N2 answer you survey?
N1 is a extravert, larger than life, pushing boundaries and FUN. Who cares if her verbal blackface, or sexual innuendo, were all about maintaining her presence as the centre of attention all the while making sure no one got too close, let alone inside that bubble. Shouldn't women be encouraged to be less demure?
Less fun conversations were all about ally building through denigration of both individuals and groups.
"You don't understand women, meika," she said to me, "let me tell you about what they are really like... [goes into a description of what basically narcissists do---]" [It didn't wash with me as I had read my Germaine Greer at 15 and Mary Daly at 19, Andrea Dworkin at 21.]
The denigration was an active process for a covert narcissist involving methodologies like boundary riding, error hunting, basically looking for intrusions and misdemeanours she could ramp up into a campaign, or at least a snide remark (no sealioning though). I eventually realised that if you were not in the room with her then you were likely to be denigrated in other fora. Constant. The denigration controlled the conversation, sought allies and made others look bad. Somehow she made it fun and not dour.
Q. Based on this what would her politics be? What would her kinks be?
[Agreeableness was near zero but this was camouflaged by high intensity FUN. She was open to new things if it allowed her to use it to probe people for discomfort (putting people on the back foot is a type of boundary riding, she was also quite large and would quite deliberately interpose herself if she felt she need to exclude you from a conversation, forcing you to do the physical negotiation (hmmmh, maybe she did physical sealioning...).]
A. She posed as a green earth mother, pro-feminist (co-victim ally-building opportunity)(discarded if talking to men) with sciencey SF leanings. Pro-vaxxer (anti-vaxxers could be boundary ridden out of town). She loved uniforms mind.
Women and men both refused to be left alone with her due her nastiness never apparent to her superiors, that is, once she had triangulated your "buttons" and were perceived as weak.
N2. Low affect, a "meh" psychopath most likely. Complete opposite to FUN. Charisma by-pass unless he is actively love bombing. Mostly flew under the radar. Quiet and quite controlling. Much younger wife with English as a second language. Works in marketing. Nothing to see here unless you have something he wants. Begins sealioning process to rattle cages, in order to ramp up minor conflict into legalistic saber rattling. The error hunting is manic, rage builds slowly until the volcano spits should you not give him, say, go-away money for "compensation".
Q. What were his politics? Kinks?
A. Woke. Soulless.
I think they should some how be excluded/ controlled for in all psychological surveys. Their values were what they were, because they moved in those circles. It should be a partisan process to rally against them. Regardless of their politics they behave in similar ways. They are much more dangerous than any set of values and their accessories.
Those do make of an interesting pair of character sketches! But answers on a survey are unlikely to reflect a desire to manipulate listeners, and the extent to which people answer capriciously, or hold values arbitrarily, they'll just add noise to the data. The signal comes clear all the same - it always does.
It may also be that I take much of what you're saying as given, and that therefore, I'm not really even using this research to look at what you're interested in. There is *plenty* of research out there on negative outcomes arising from low H and low A, whether it's abusive partnerships, delinquency, counterproductive work behaviors, or nine flavors of personality disorder.
Just on this last subject, a Five Factor meta analysis has "the most prominent and consistent personality dimensions underlying a large number of the personality disorders are positive associations with Neuroticism and negative associations with Agreeableness." (See Saulsman, L. M., & Page, A. C. (2004)) This is five factor, not HEXACO research, but neurotic disagreeableness is where the low H, low A people live their lives.
So absolutely, bad people are bad regardless of age, gender, values, country of origin, or color shoes. I probably sympathize 400% with your desire to rally against them. Making a better world definitely involves identifying, improving, de-fanging, working around, coping with, sequestering, or flat out getting rid of bad people.
But something you may find less comprehensible is that I also think that sometimes *good* is bad. (Hyolobrika might be getting at this sometimes, or may just be generally enigmatic - I can't tell.) Worse, effective solutions to rally against bad people are *hopelessly* political. You might understand me clearly enough when I admit that at any given time or place, the bad people are drawn to one religious or political program or another, so that excising them becomes entangled in opposition to the organization they're in (e.g. Martin Luther vs. a corrupt Church). But that's not even the half of it.
What interests me more in this day and age are the so very, very good people who will desperately destroy the world in their efforts to make it better - oh, and in the meantime, wreck my life, and the lives of my family. There's a reason you know me not by my name, but as "Apple Pie."
Agree with what you've said entirely, strengths are also weaknesses, and all moves are politically entangled hopelessly, but we hope anyway. That's how we world.
The ones in my life who better/break the world by breaking/bettering it, tend to be world-building according to some hard rule (result of trauma perhaps) or structuralism (result of castles in the air perhaps) that they apply to life as an animism, not to explain, but to suit themselves, not realising the world is a negotiated place. They can even be right but the worlding is bad. I don't tend to meet the gnostic version of these in the circles I work and play with, though we have some evangelical bakers with conspiracy feelings across the road. The pleasure they feel when I see them talking to customers about it… is that a kink? Am I kink-shaming now? Pronoun struggle— is that just a kink I do not share? Because of my androgynous 70s childhood?
I don't doubt the numbers and correlations in the research. It's just when studying worlding/worldbuilding/hoping we should exclude those who cannot do it. Or at least factor it in when we attempt to describe the outcomes of those activities humans engage in when maintaining the extended phenotype. I think they confound it all. I am trying to find a simpler model I guess. Despite the entanglements. I don't doubt the numbers, what else is going on tho?
If we are trying to explain the world, why include those who cannot do it. I.E. those for whom self=world. Values are the world's molecules, if the world were just an ungrounded atmosphere.
I want to exclude them. Without boundary riding somehow. This is the pivot, the janus faced life we live. How do we include this pivot and exclude those who do not pivot, but remained with one-side locked in orbit like the moon, only to themselves. The world is very inclusive.
(Hey, does that mean the earth always shows the same side to the moon? Hmms, probs not, the day and month would have to be the same length...)
We have an urge to world (you can call it hope too, but it is a negotiated extended phenotype, existing as a social & socialising umwelt with powers that can change the world) but often when we intensify this in our lives, then we go on to world-build, a double-down of worlding less consciously, more conscientiously, but where we still suit ourselves, and play to our strengths not recognising that strengths are weaknesses too. Life is a partial experience. I can work with these types as long as they are not masking narcissism. (I am a little bit immune to narcissists as they often do not have the skill set to deal with mildly-not-autistic peeps).
The rallying cries are more a reaction to the advice if you meet a psychopath you should run away. From psychologists. How does this work in the workplace? No wonder they rise to the top even if they were not desperately wanting to be there. Last man standing selection process. We focus on inclusion but who is driving the denigration bus to exclusion on a daily basis? Today we exclude by imaginary categories of race, tomorrow class, or something. The hot button issues change through time. Pronouns FFS. I feel excluded because I do not see more people who identify as prepositions on netflix. This is good for the struggle but not necessarily good for the world.
Woke up (if that is not too triggering) this morning thinking that values are like vowels, sure there is an underlying cause (breathing) but not all huffing & puffing is directed at prayers.
Currently in New Zealand a vowel shift is underway, where to Australian ears when they say Fish & Chips it sounds like Fush & Chups. Their other vowels are shifting around to cope. To other speakers of English it still sounds pretty close to AUS.
When I was young, anti-vaxxers were all greenie left of center, now not so much. Or at least not just to the vegan left of wellness. I mean Jehovah Witnesses were sus on the whole thing but they they do not believe in metaphysical souls (but bodily resurrection so no blood transfusions please because the omnipotent god would not know how to work that out, too confusing).
Good people (ones with empathy) need to learn how to world well. How do we teach that? Good people need to learn how to world- build more carefully and not just indulge their strengths, nor rashly throw demons and dogma into the gaps of our mis/understanding.
What the third order "to world-verb" verb here is I am not sure.
Also woke up thinking about my Oblivious Quotient thought experiment but that is enough for a comment. Came up with it before I understood much about narcs.
Consider anxiety as a trait. We might be able to control for environmental or biomic disruptors (which increase anxiety thresholds as a problem across the population) in psychological studies and still see that some % carrying predispositions to being neurotic (correlates with lower openness/novelty). But what is the impact on society as we world it (as opposed to how we embody it as individuals) with more people being anxious regardless of a genotypic disposition. (putting aside feedback loops like starvation in childhood leading to more aggression thus more war and thus more starvation of children und so weiter).
Thought experiment: If we removed grandiose psychopaths from the world, how would it look? Would it be perfect because our preferred ideology would be more easily implemented? Or (more likely if you ask me) the good becomes achievable because no matter which framework is preferred we all work on working it out together, competitively co-operating or whatever... if only because anxiously predisposed peeps might be less antsy.
Fortunately, anxiety is a very well-studied trait; it shows no correlation with the trait researchers call Openness. (Openness is really misnamed.)
Anxiety has also risen substantially over the last sixty years, evidently not because there were too many psychopaths, but because societal and familial stability dropped.
Speaking off the cuff, if we removed grandiose psychopaths from the world, I doubt that there would actually be a great overall difference. Low H is a problem, but a comparably minor one. Disease, anxiety, mental illness, stupidity, lack of motivation, cultural problems, existential threats, and everything else would remain. If I had to guess, I'd say these other issues are responsible for about 80-90% of the problems in the world.
Thanks. The whole age/experience/time dynamic needs better nutting out.
Also I reckon (suggest as lead) that values are outcomes, more than causes. Not saying you're investigating them that way, but using them as like animistic tree spirits… might be they are just saplings or grandees of the forest using outcomes as handy labels, but that's not how they got there.
And another thing, any control for narcissism/psychopathy per se, if they are actual parasites rather than part of the rich diversity of life, is there an argument to control for their capture of that part of the spectrum. ????? maybe???? Sure it's a spectrum, sure things average out with age but.
I say this because I have seen covert and grandiose narcissists espouse all sorts of positions and values depending on the audience (i.e. otherwise incoherent positions) and what is seen (in the moment) as a good way to manipulate them. And I don't just mean standout mountebanks like the Petersen or Sam Bankman-Fried (Yuuuup, effective altruism). I've come across them in all groups, in all parts of the spectrum, where maintaining their membership to any group/view is more based on their tactical familiarity with their targets for generating supply/control/cash who happen to be in group/view X.
I can agree that values are outcomes in that they are an interaction between the individual genes and social environment. But my understanding is that values and attitudes are not as far down in the causal chain as it may seem:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809096/?mod=article_inline
"personality traits do not cause people to develop political attitudes; rather, the correlation between the two is a function of an innate common underlying genetic factor."
I will say that I do have a sense of people with Narcissistic tendencies to speak in a soulless, valueless way, espousing beliefs to make an impression the way other people try on clothes.
But I don't think I really understood much of what you were driving at. Could you try to be more clear?
When we find a link, or fail to, it may be that this link is contingent on "a function"' 's ability to operate in context X. Such that the correlation appears (& can be found significant) in some circumstance and not others. Researching the underlying genetic factor will be confounded by context, (in this case the capriciousness of fashion choices in self-reporting surveys). Values can be worn as accessories, for some that is all they are. (Darwin in the Descent of Man on "a taste for beauty" and its outcomes might help here? That's where I got capriciousness from). I'm not arguing it is not there mind. Just that sometimes it might be outcomes all the way down until we find the correct framework.
I guess I am also saying I admire your pluck. Not sure if we can get there from here.
I'm nearly 60 and have experienced a number of narcissists, but only lately have had the vocabulary to talk about them. How might N1 & N2 answer you survey?
N1 is a extravert, larger than life, pushing boundaries and FUN. Who cares if her verbal blackface, or sexual innuendo, were all about maintaining her presence as the centre of attention all the while making sure no one got too close, let alone inside that bubble. Shouldn't women be encouraged to be less demure?
Less fun conversations were all about ally building through denigration of both individuals and groups.
"You don't understand women, meika," she said to me, "let me tell you about what they are really like... [goes into a description of what basically narcissists do---]" [It didn't wash with me as I had read my Germaine Greer at 15 and Mary Daly at 19, Andrea Dworkin at 21.]
The denigration was an active process for a covert narcissist involving methodologies like boundary riding, error hunting, basically looking for intrusions and misdemeanours she could ramp up into a campaign, or at least a snide remark (no sealioning though). I eventually realised that if you were not in the room with her then you were likely to be denigrated in other fora. Constant. The denigration controlled the conversation, sought allies and made others look bad. Somehow she made it fun and not dour.
Q. Based on this what would her politics be? What would her kinks be?
[Agreeableness was near zero but this was camouflaged by high intensity FUN. She was open to new things if it allowed her to use it to probe people for discomfort (putting people on the back foot is a type of boundary riding, she was also quite large and would quite deliberately interpose herself if she felt she need to exclude you from a conversation, forcing you to do the physical negotiation (hmmmh, maybe she did physical sealioning...).]
A. She posed as a green earth mother, pro-feminist (co-victim ally-building opportunity)(discarded if talking to men) with sciencey SF leanings. Pro-vaxxer (anti-vaxxers could be boundary ridden out of town). She loved uniforms mind.
Women and men both refused to be left alone with her due her nastiness never apparent to her superiors, that is, once she had triangulated your "buttons" and were perceived as weak.
N2. Low affect, a "meh" psychopath most likely. Complete opposite to FUN. Charisma by-pass unless he is actively love bombing. Mostly flew under the radar. Quiet and quite controlling. Much younger wife with English as a second language. Works in marketing. Nothing to see here unless you have something he wants. Begins sealioning process to rattle cages, in order to ramp up minor conflict into legalistic saber rattling. The error hunting is manic, rage builds slowly until the volcano spits should you not give him, say, go-away money for "compensation".
Q. What were his politics? Kinks?
A. Woke. Soulless.
I think they should some how be excluded/ controlled for in all psychological surveys. Their values were what they were, because they moved in those circles. It should be a partisan process to rally against them. Regardless of their politics they behave in similar ways. They are much more dangerous than any set of values and their accessories.
They lack empathy, which makes the world.
Notes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
Those do make of an interesting pair of character sketches! But answers on a survey are unlikely to reflect a desire to manipulate listeners, and the extent to which people answer capriciously, or hold values arbitrarily, they'll just add noise to the data. The signal comes clear all the same - it always does.
It may also be that I take much of what you're saying as given, and that therefore, I'm not really even using this research to look at what you're interested in. There is *plenty* of research out there on negative outcomes arising from low H and low A, whether it's abusive partnerships, delinquency, counterproductive work behaviors, or nine flavors of personality disorder.
Just on this last subject, a Five Factor meta analysis has "the most prominent and consistent personality dimensions underlying a large number of the personality disorders are positive associations with Neuroticism and negative associations with Agreeableness." (See Saulsman, L. M., & Page, A. C. (2004)) This is five factor, not HEXACO research, but neurotic disagreeableness is where the low H, low A people live their lives.
So absolutely, bad people are bad regardless of age, gender, values, country of origin, or color shoes. I probably sympathize 400% with your desire to rally against them. Making a better world definitely involves identifying, improving, de-fanging, working around, coping with, sequestering, or flat out getting rid of bad people.
But something you may find less comprehensible is that I also think that sometimes *good* is bad. (Hyolobrika might be getting at this sometimes, or may just be generally enigmatic - I can't tell.) Worse, effective solutions to rally against bad people are *hopelessly* political. You might understand me clearly enough when I admit that at any given time or place, the bad people are drawn to one religious or political program or another, so that excising them becomes entangled in opposition to the organization they're in (e.g. Martin Luther vs. a corrupt Church). But that's not even the half of it.
What interests me more in this day and age are the so very, very good people who will desperately destroy the world in their efforts to make it better - oh, and in the meantime, wreck my life, and the lives of my family. There's a reason you know me not by my name, but as "Apple Pie."
Agree with what you've said entirely, strengths are also weaknesses, and all moves are politically entangled hopelessly, but we hope anyway. That's how we world.
The ones in my life who better/break the world by breaking/bettering it, tend to be world-building according to some hard rule (result of trauma perhaps) or structuralism (result of castles in the air perhaps) that they apply to life as an animism, not to explain, but to suit themselves, not realising the world is a negotiated place. They can even be right but the worlding is bad. I don't tend to meet the gnostic version of these in the circles I work and play with, though we have some evangelical bakers with conspiracy feelings across the road. The pleasure they feel when I see them talking to customers about it… is that a kink? Am I kink-shaming now? Pronoun struggle— is that just a kink I do not share? Because of my androgynous 70s childhood?
I don't doubt the numbers and correlations in the research. It's just when studying worlding/worldbuilding/hoping we should exclude those who cannot do it. Or at least factor it in when we attempt to describe the outcomes of those activities humans engage in when maintaining the extended phenotype. I think they confound it all. I am trying to find a simpler model I guess. Despite the entanglements. I don't doubt the numbers, what else is going on tho?
If we are trying to explain the world, why include those who cannot do it. I.E. those for whom self=world. Values are the world's molecules, if the world were just an ungrounded atmosphere.
I want to exclude them. Without boundary riding somehow. This is the pivot, the janus faced life we live. How do we include this pivot and exclude those who do not pivot, but remained with one-side locked in orbit like the moon, only to themselves. The world is very inclusive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZl11UemYeo
(Hey, does that mean the earth always shows the same side to the moon? Hmms, probs not, the day and month would have to be the same length...)
We have an urge to world (you can call it hope too, but it is a negotiated extended phenotype, existing as a social & socialising umwelt with powers that can change the world) but often when we intensify this in our lives, then we go on to world-build, a double-down of worlding less consciously, more conscientiously, but where we still suit ourselves, and play to our strengths not recognising that strengths are weaknesses too. Life is a partial experience. I can work with these types as long as they are not masking narcissism. (I am a little bit immune to narcissists as they often do not have the skill set to deal with mildly-not-autistic peeps).
The rallying cries are more a reaction to the advice if you meet a psychopath you should run away. From psychologists. How does this work in the workplace? No wonder they rise to the top even if they were not desperately wanting to be there. Last man standing selection process. We focus on inclusion but who is driving the denigration bus to exclusion on a daily basis? Today we exclude by imaginary categories of race, tomorrow class, or something. The hot button issues change through time. Pronouns FFS. I feel excluded because I do not see more people who identify as prepositions on netflix. This is good for the struggle but not necessarily good for the world.
Woke up (if that is not too triggering) this morning thinking that values are like vowels, sure there is an underlying cause (breathing) but not all huffing & puffing is directed at prayers.
https://medium.com/@celine.y.lee/the-vowel-trapezoid-aa06537259f2
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Clusters-of-vowels-using-PC1-and-PC2-Each-dot-represents-a-20ms-long-segment-and-the_fig5_261243154
Currently in New Zealand a vowel shift is underway, where to Australian ears when they say Fish & Chips it sounds like Fush & Chups. Their other vowels are shifting around to cope. To other speakers of English it still sounds pretty close to AUS.
When I was young, anti-vaxxers were all greenie left of center, now not so much. Or at least not just to the vegan left of wellness. I mean Jehovah Witnesses were sus on the whole thing but they they do not believe in metaphysical souls (but bodily resurrection so no blood transfusions please because the omnipotent god would not know how to work that out, too confusing).
BTW Great essay on values and change and context at https://aeon.co/essays/how-swiss-stone-putting-shows-traditions-can-be-progressive
Good people (ones with empathy) need to learn how to world well. How do we teach that? Good people need to learn how to world- build more carefully and not just indulge their strengths, nor rashly throw demons and dogma into the gaps of our mis/understanding.
What the third order "to world-verb" verb here is I am not sure.
Also woke up thinking about my Oblivious Quotient thought experiment but that is enough for a comment. Came up with it before I understood much about narcs.
https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/bacterial-xanax
Consider anxiety as a trait. We might be able to control for environmental or biomic disruptors (which increase anxiety thresholds as a problem across the population) in psychological studies and still see that some % carrying predispositions to being neurotic (correlates with lower openness/novelty). But what is the impact on society as we world it (as opposed to how we embody it as individuals) with more people being anxious regardless of a genotypic disposition. (putting aside feedback loops like starvation in childhood leading to more aggression thus more war and thus more starvation of children und so weiter).
Thought experiment: If we removed grandiose psychopaths from the world, how would it look? Would it be perfect because our preferred ideology would be more easily implemented? Or (more likely if you ask me) the good becomes achievable because no matter which framework is preferred we all work on working it out together, competitively co-operating or whatever... if only because anxiously predisposed peeps might be less antsy.
Fortunately, anxiety is a very well-studied trait; it shows no correlation with the trait researchers call Openness. (Openness is really misnamed.)
Anxiety has also risen substantially over the last sixty years, evidently not because there were too many psychopaths, but because societal and familial stability dropped.
Speaking off the cuff, if we removed grandiose psychopaths from the world, I doubt that there would actually be a great overall difference. Low H is a problem, but a comparably minor one. Disease, anxiety, mental illness, stupidity, lack of motivation, cultural problems, existential threats, and everything else would remain. If I had to guess, I'd say these other issues are responsible for about 80-90% of the problems in the world.