Tag: Narcissism

  • Guest post: Getting the job versus doing the job

    Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on The narcissists won long ago.

    The thing that gets me with this research is it always looks at getting the job as an end unto itself.

    So you have narcissists are very good at becoming CEOs – but you don’t really have them being good at being CEOs.

    I mean if you look at Trump objectively so far his results are booming oil prices, North Korea making a fool of the US, war crimes on the border, increased tensions with Canada and Mexico stifling trade with both countries, and you have examples such as Harley Davidson opening factories elsewhere because his trade tariffs had the predicted result.

    If he continues, as I believe he will, in the vein of Jacob Zuma, you can expect at a point for there to be massive revelations around state capture. There are already Bell Pottinger style operations dedicated to running distraction tactics to claim the MSM are in a conspiracy to make him look bad.

    Sure he got the job, but how’s he actually done at doing it? How do any of these narcissists actually do and doing the job they so successfully got? Isn’t that kind important?

    Because if they’re very good at getting the job, but not very good at doing it, well that doesn’t sound to me like we should be encouraging narcissism, that sounds to me like we should be re-looking at how we pick people for those jobs.

  • Be careful with the self-portrait

    A new installment in a recurring series, What Not to Have in Your Twitter Profile.

    (Is that really a series? No, probably not. But it might be. It could be. I’m preparing for contingencies.)

     Everything I believe is evidence based. No exceptions.

    That. In fact forget Twitter profiles; don’t describe yourself that way and don’t think of yourself that way. Really, don’t; it’s a recipe for disaster. It might as well be the slogan of our dear friend Dunning Kruger.

    And even if it weren’t – it’s still gross. It’s also deeply ironic, since it’s only people who think careful thought is a good thing who describe themselves that way, yet if they actually were careful thinkers, they would never describe themselves that way. Yknow? Careful thinkers know better than that. Careful thinkers have taken some trouble to inform themselves about human cognition (because how could they be careful thinkers if they hadn’t?), and that means they’re aware that we’re all subject to biases and blind spots and implicit associations and answering the easier question instead of the question that was asked – and so on. They know we’re mistake-prone, to put it simply. Even experts in the ways we’re mistake prone are mistake-prone.

    So it’s just asinine, as well as conceited and boastful, to announce that you do Reason flawlessly. You don’t, because nobody does.